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Poker at the Penalty Spot
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Games are microcosms of life. They involve struggle, camaraderie, disappointment, and ecstasy. As such, games offer the inquisitive spectator a chance to reflect on social behaviour from afar. As both an aficionado of poker — a deeply strategic game — and a soccer fanatic, I’ve noticed a way in which wisdom from the former game can benefit the latter.
Soccer’s World Cup, the paramount event of Earth’s most popular sport, is the biggest game of all. The knockout stage of the tournament introduces the penalty shootout, a tie-breaking procedure in which players are given a free shot on goal from twelve yards, with only the goalkeeper to beat.
Penalties, as they’re known colloquially, are supposed to be advantageous for the shooter, who has a large goal to aim at. A well-taken penalty is nearly impossible to save — a keeper who does so becomes an instant hero — and around 3 in 4 penalties are scored, on average. The price of that advantage, however, is added pressure. The shooter is expected to score.
Reach for the sky (unless there’s a snake in your soccer boot)
The Economist magazine analyzed World Cup penalties spanning a forty-year period in search of patterns that might suggest an optimal strategy.
Figure 1. Photo credit: economist.com
Based on those data, it turns out that
Goalkeepers find high balls the hardest to deal with — just 3% of penalties aimed halfway up the goal or more are saved. Yet there is a tendency for these shots to miss the target: 18% of high shots do so, as opposed to 5% of low shots. Overall, though, allowing for misses and saves, high shots are successful 79% of the time compared with 72% for low shots.
High shots are more likely to score, yet Figure 1 shows that most penalties were aimed at the lower half of the goal. What explains the paradox?
One answer is that unlike rebounds from penalties taken during shootouts, which are immediately dead, rebounds from penalties attempted during regulation play are live balls. This means that someone taking a penalty kick during regulation play might shoot low to increase the chance of tapping in the rebound if the keeper saves the original attempt.
That explanation doesn’t apply to penalty shootouts, though, which account for the bulk of penalties taken over the years. There’s another reason for the discrepancy, and it gives insight into how people make decisions when the stakes are high. It concerns the fact that we human beings are emotional creatures who, for the most part, care about others’ opinions of us. ‘Ego bias’ affects our decision-making.
To spare your blushes
If scoring from the penalty spot is ostensibly simple, merely hitting the target should be even easier. Knowing this, nothing is more humbling for a penalty-taker than shooting high or wide. Even having your penalty saved is a better outcome, psychologically, than missing altogether. Shooters thus have some incentive to be more conservative in where they aim, because low shots are less likely to miss their mark.
Of course, that line of reasoning makes for a poor strategy. A penalty-taking robot would pay no mind to emotional considerations of potential humiliation. Focused purely on maximizing the probability of scoring, it would aim for the top corner every time. The benefit gained by straining the goalkeeper easily compensates for the increased chance of blasting the ball over the bar — the data show this strategy is nearly 10 percent more successful. A missed shot and a saved shot count the same on the scoreboard, after all. The only difference is in the shooter’s head.
Yet that difference makes all the difference, because soccer is played by humans whose emotions affect their physiology. Pressure weighs even on the best players, who miss the odd penalty despite scoring goals ruthlessly, in far more difficult situations, during open play. (Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have each missed a penalty kick in this World Cup.)
You can often tell if a player is going to miss a penalty by watching their approach to the ball. A fast run-up immediately after the referee’s whistle — see Asamoah Gyan’s penalty in the 2010 World Cup quarterfinals (with the weight of a billion Africans’ hopes squarely on his shoulders) — suggests a subconscious desire to get the stressful situation over with. That player lacks composure.
A good penalty-taker decides where to aim first, takes a moment to visualize where the ball is going to go, then focuses all the way through the shooting motion to make sure the foot strikes the ball properly. As with any activity performed at a high level, even aspects as straightforward as an unencumbered shot at goal demand serious forethought and practice. The higher the stakes, the more nerves become a factor.
It’s all in your head
The laws of nature forbid us from living through any single moment more than once. We’re not allowed to rewind and see what could have been. This reality predisposes us to hindsight bias, where we overvalue outcomes and undervalue the actions that preceded the result.
Counterfactuals are instructive for allowing us to contemplate superior alternatives. It’s a common exercise among skilled poker players, who understand that the decision-making process is more important than any one outcome, which is subject to factors out of one’s control such as statistical variance.
Most people have a natural aversion to risk because risk sometimes leads to loss, which can be embarrassing. But losing doesn’t necessarily mean you made the wrong decision. You might have just gotten unlucky. Moreover, shame is a function of pride; it’s nothing more than a state of mind. A fear of shame discourages you from taking worthwhile risks, and it’s a bias that leads to poor decision-making. Conquering that inhibition removes a major obstacle from the road to victory.
Instead, think like a poker player. Remember that over the long run, if you factor in what you could have gained, a missed opportunity to win is the same as an equivalent loss. Discard your pride, and make the best decision. You’ll thank yourself later.
Most penalty-takers in soccer focus too much on their dread of missing the net, and think too little of the reward that awaits them, more often than not, by aiming at the top corner anyway. Taking intelligent risks in other parts of life is the same. We are always forced to live out our actual misfortunes, but we’re never confronted by the successes we forsook. If we were, we wouldn’t overlook them as often as we do, and we’d be bolder and better off for it. Those missed successes exist only in some parallel universe where a more logical and courageous version of us lives. Luckily, we each have the opportunity to make choices anew every single day. All it takes is determination. As the Tottenham Hotspurs’ motto goes, “To dare is to do.”
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https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/poker-at-the-penalty-spot-af3a2a2f9359
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['Brad Stollery']
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2018-07-06 16:07:55.766000+00:00
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['Motivation', 'Poker', 'World Cup', 'Economics', 'Soccer']
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Title Poker Penalty SpotContent Games microcosm life involve struggle camaraderie disappointment ecstasy game offer inquisitive spectator chance reflect social behaviour afar aficionado poker — deeply strategic game — soccer fanatic I’ve noticed way wisdom former game benefit latter Soccer’s World Cup paramount event Earth’s popular sport biggest game knockout stage tournament introduces penalty shootout tiebreaking procedure player given free shot goal twelve yard goalkeeper beat Penalties they’re known colloquially supposed advantageous shooter large goal aim welltaken penalty nearly impossible save — keeper becomes instant hero — around 3 4 penalty scored average price advantage however added pressure shooter expected score Reach sky unless there’s snake soccer boot Economist magazine analyzed World Cup penalty spanning fortyyear period search pattern might suggest optimal strategy Figure 1 Photo credit economistcom Based data turn Goalkeepers find high ball hardest deal — 3 penalty aimed halfway goal saved Yet tendency shot miss target 18 high shot opposed 5 low shot Overall though allowing miss save high shot successful 79 time compared 72 low shot High shot likely score yet Figure 1 show penalty aimed lower half goal explains paradox One answer unlike rebound penalty taken shootout immediately dead rebound penalty attempted regulation play live ball mean someone taking penalty kick regulation play might shoot low increase chance tapping rebound keeper save original attempt explanation doesn’t apply penalty shootout though account bulk penalty taken year There’s another reason discrepancy give insight people make decision stake high concern fact human being emotional creature part care others’ opinion u ‘Ego bias’ affect decisionmaking spare blush scoring penalty spot ostensibly simple merely hitting target even easier Knowing nothing humbling penaltytaker shooting high wide Even penalty saved better outcome psychologically missing altogether Shooters thus incentive conservative aim low shot le likely miss mark course line reasoning make poor strategy penaltytaking robot would pay mind emotional consideration potential humiliation Focused purely maximizing probability scoring would aim top corner every time benefit gained straining goalkeeper easily compensates increased chance blasting ball bar — data show strategy nearly 10 percent successful missed shot saved shot count scoreboard difference shooter’s head Yet difference make difference soccer played human whose emotion affect physiology Pressure weighs even best player miss odd penalty despite scoring goal ruthlessly far difficult situation open play Lionel Messi Cristiano Ronaldo missed penalty kick World Cup often tell player going miss penalty watching approach ball fast runup immediately referee’s whistle — see Asamoah Gyan’s penalty 2010 World Cup quarterfinal weight billion Africans’ hope squarely shoulder — suggests subconscious desire get stressful situation player lack composure good penaltytaker decides aim first take moment visualize ball going go focus way shooting motion make sure foot strike ball properly activity performed high level even aspect straightforward unencumbered shot goal demand serious forethought practice higher stake nerve become factor It’s head law nature forbid u living single moment We’re allowed rewind see could reality predisposes u hindsight bias overvalue outcome undervalue action preceded result Counterfactuals instructive allowing u contemplate superior alternative It’s common exercise among skilled poker player understand decisionmaking process important one outcome subject factor one’s control statistical variance people natural aversion risk risk sometimes lead loss embarrassing losing doesn’t necessarily mean made wrong decision might gotten unlucky Moreover shame function pride it’s nothing state mind fear shame discourages taking worthwhile risk it’s bias lead poor decisionmaking Conquering inhibition remove major obstacle road victory Instead think like poker player Remember long run factor could gained missed opportunity win equivalent loss Discard pride make best decision You’ll thank later penaltytakers soccer focus much dread missing net think little reward awaits often aiming top corner anyway Taking intelligent risk part life always forced live actual misfortune we’re never confronted success forsook wouldn’t overlook often we’d bolder better missed success exist parallel universe logical courageous version u life Luckily opportunity make choice anew every single day take determination Tottenham Hotspurs’ motto go “To dare do”Tags Motivation Poker World Cup Economics Soccer
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4,601 |
MVC in Flutter
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The MVC design pattern in Flutter
In late October, back in 2018, I offered the package, mvc_pattern, to supply an MVC design pattern approach to your next Flutter app. It was a hit.
Like with many things in life, it’s only gotten better with age. It’s been improved by further integrating into and even mirroring Flutter but still retaining the spirit that is the MVC design pattern. Of course, the code is open-source for all to see. Eventually, a framework package called, mvc_application, was published that assists in the development of Flutter apps using the package, mvc_pattern, as it's core.
As time went on, twelve free articles on the subject have been published on medium.com. They and more are all presented here now for your convenience. Also, because this article serves as a supplementary resource for yet another article, Your Next MVC Flutter Project. All the articles are collected in one place for readers to ‘get up to speed’ with MVC return to ‘mainstream.’
Model-View-Controller
The articles are in the order I would read them, but the ‘World’s Your Oyster!’, read whatever catches your eye. Do realize as with any software, a lot has changed in the code and some of the older articles listed at the end are beginning to show their age, but the concepts they convey still hold up.
Live Streaming Now Available
→ Other Stories by Greg Perry
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https://medium.com/follow-flutter/mvc-in-flutter-1d26b86328ea
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['Greg Perry']
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2020-11-09 22:44:16.205000+00:00
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['Programming', 'Flutter', 'Android App Development', 'Mobile App Development', 'iOS App Development']
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Title MVC FlutterContent MVC design pattern Flutter late October back 2018 offered package mvcpattern supply MVC design pattern approach next Flutter app hit Like many thing life it’s gotten better age It’s improved integrating even mirroring Flutter still retaining spirit MVC design pattern course code opensource see Eventually framework package called mvcapplication published assist development Flutter apps using package mvcpattern core time went twelve free article subject published mediumcom presented convenience Also article serf supplementary resource yet another article Next MVC Flutter Project article collected one place reader ‘get speed’ MVC return ‘mainstream’ ModelViewController article order would read ‘World’s Oyster’ read whatever catch eye realize software lot changed code older article listed end beginning show age concept convey still hold Live Streaming Available → Stories Greg PerryTags Programming Flutter Android App Development Mobile App Development iOS App Development
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4,602 |
The Technology Fighting Coronavirus
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As I’m sure many of you are aware, the global pandemic, COVID-19, known as the Coronavirus, has spread rapidly and many of you are probably at home in quarantine reading this now. Initially I chose not to prepare a response, given how this issue has taken over every media outlet, YouTube channel, and Facebook page. However, after a little research, it became clear that technology is being used as a very good tool. I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to recognize the men, women, and technology that is working to solve this health crisis.
Like I’ve said, technology is a tool and its use as a very good tool couldn’t be made more clear in regard to fighting this virus.
Like I’ve said, technology is a tool and its use as a very good tool couldn’t be made more clear in regard to fighting this virus. There are three primary objectives in this fight:
We must prevent the spread of the virus to those who are healthy. We must treat those who are ill. We must develop a cure for all who may contract this virus.
Technology is being used within all three objectives.
Let’s start with preventing the virus. The first step to preventing the spread of a virus is to limit individual contact. This is of course where social distancing and quarantines are used. Technology is helping us make these efforts much more effective. To more effectively limit social contact technology is helping officials learn where cases are arising. A Boston-based start-up, BioBot Analytics, is installing technology in sewer systems. These systems are working to detect the virus, and using data analysis, determine where, how many, and how cases of COVID-19 are spreading (Perry, “Startups Unveil…”).
On a slightly more pleasant topic away from the sewage, researchers at the University of Southern California are working to develop an app that could determine who needs to stay home and who is probably safe to go to work or shop (Polakovic, “USC experts..”). The researchers are attempting to find a balance between preventing the spread of the virus and the economic impact we’re already seeing. The app uses anonymous data from positive COVID-19 tests to determine if an individual has been exposed to the Coronavirus and then alerts them with a suggestion to stay home and quarantine.
Of course, a review of the technology being used to prevent the spread wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the countless video platforms that allow us to connect with work, family, friends, churches, and schools. In many ways, although we are stuck in isolation, these technologies have allowed us to remain as connected as ever.
But technology can also be used to treat those who are ill.
But technology can also be used to treat those who are ill. The first step is diagnosis. In order to prevent further contamination, telemedicine is growing in popularity and developers are working to increase the accuracy of and the level of care teledocs provide. An Israeli company is working to develop apps and programs that can detect heart rate, heart rate variability, respiration, and oxygen saturation using only the cameras on a smartphone (Perry, “Startups Unveil…”). Another company is using simple audio recordings to detect the sounds within the lungs, a vital indicador of possible infection (Perry, “Startups Unveil…”).
Unfortunately, as of yet, there is no known cure for COVID-19 and therefore there is little healthcare professionals can do once a diagnosis is made. In the most severe cases, ventilators can however mean the difference between life and death. But as cases rise, equipment is further limited. Companies around the world are quickly building up factories to build more ventilators, but this may not be enough. Some individuals have discovered that 3D printers can make vital pieces for ventilators. Hobby groups with at-home 3D printers in Spain have even produced a ventilator prototype that is being tested by healthcare professionals and the scientific community. If their prototype succeeds, 3D printers across the world can print important components using online templates.
Of course, through this entire crisis, a cure is being developed. Researchers haven’t yet found it, but they are using technology to speed their progress. Doctors and scientists are producing virtual simulations of the virus and possible treatments. The simulations are being run through supercomputers 100 times faster than those used 10 years ago. They are testing current drugs and treatments against the virus, virtually. Big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are providing more capabilities to scientists than ever before (Polakovic, “USC experts..”). Also, these computers can work 24/7. A team of researchers has reported that artificial intelligence has helped them find 500 possible antibodies that could fight the Coronavirus (“Technology against…”).
Now, I’ve only scratched the surface of the uses and power of technology in the fight against COVID-19. For more information, please see the resources referenced in the Works Cited section below.
It’s clear that technology is an extremely important and powerful tool in this endeavor.
It’s clear that technology is an extremely important and powerful tool in this endeavor. As so many experts have reported, we will win this fight, it only takes time. When we do conquer this virus it will be by the tool of technology, well, that and washing your hands.
So stay confident, stay inside, and stay connected via the technology at your fingertips.
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https://medium.com/tech-is-a-tool/the-technology-fighting-coronavirus-baa0b968625
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['Benjamin Rhodes']
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2020-04-23 13:42:49.580000+00:00
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['Covid 19', 'Virus', 'Quarantine', 'Technology', 'Coronavirus']
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Title Technology Fighting CoronavirusContent I’m sure many aware global pandemic COVID19 known Coronavirus spread rapidly many probably home quarantine reading Initially chose prepare response given issue taken every medium outlet YouTube channel Facebook page However little research became clear technology used good tool couldn’t pas opportunity recognize men woman technology working solve health crisis Like I’ve said technology tool use good tool couldn’t made clear regard fighting virus Like I’ve said technology tool use good tool couldn’t made clear regard fighting virus three primary objective fight must prevent spread virus healthy must treat ill must develop cure may contract virus Technology used within three objective Let’s start preventing virus first step preventing spread virus limit individual contact course social distancing quarantine used Technology helping u make effort much effective effectively limit social contact technology helping official learn case arising Bostonbased startup BioBot Analytics installing technology sewer system system working detect virus using data analysis determine many case COVID19 spreading Perry “Startups Unveil…” slightly pleasant topic away sewage researcher University Southern California working develop app could determine need stay home probably safe go work shop Polakovic “USC experts” researcher attempting find balance preventing spread virus economic impact we’re already seeing app us anonymous data positive COVID19 test determine individual exposed Coronavirus alert suggestion stay home quarantine course review technology used prevent spread wouldn’t complete without mentioning countless video platform allow u connect work family friend church school many way although stuck isolation technology allowed u remain connected ever technology also used treat ill technology also used treat ill first step diagnosis order prevent contamination telemedicine growing popularity developer working increase accuracy level care teledocs provide Israeli company working develop apps program detect heart rate heart rate variability respiration oxygen saturation using camera smartphone Perry “Startups Unveil…” Another company using simple audio recording detect sound within lung vital indicador possible infection Perry “Startups Unveil…” Unfortunately yet known cure COVID19 therefore little healthcare professional diagnosis made severe case ventilator however mean difference life death case rise equipment limited Companies around world quickly building factory build ventilator may enough individual discovered 3D printer make vital piece ventilator Hobby group athome 3D printer Spain even produced ventilator prototype tested healthcare professional scientific community prototype succeeds 3D printer across world print important component using online template course entire crisis cure developed Researchers haven’t yet found using technology speed progress Doctors scientist producing virtual simulation virus possible treatment simulation run supercomputer 100 time faster used 10 year ago testing current drug treatment virus virtually Big data artificial intelligence machine learning providing capability scientist ever Polakovic “USC experts” Also computer work 247 team researcher reported artificial intelligence helped find 500 possible antibody could fight Coronavirus “Technology against…” I’ve scratched surface us power technology fight COVID19 information please see resource referenced Works Cited section It’s clear technology extremely important powerful tool endeavor It’s clear technology extremely important powerful tool endeavor many expert reported win fight take time conquer virus tool technology well washing hand stay confident stay inside stay connected via technology fingertipsTags Covid 19 Virus Quarantine Technology Coronavirus
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4,603 |
Your Ultimate Data Mining & Machine Learning Cheat Sheet
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Feature Importance
Feature Importance is the process of finding the most important feature to a target. Through PCA, the feature that contains the most information can be found, but feature importance concerns a feature’s impact on the target. A change in an ‘important’ feature will have a large effect on the y-variable, whereas a change in an ‘unimportant’ feature will have little to no effect on the y-variable.
Permutation Importance is a method to evaluate how important a feature is. Several models are trained, each missing one column. The corresponding decrease in model accuracy as a result of the lack of data represents how important the column is to a model’s predictive power. The eli5 library is used for Permutation Importance.
import eli5
from eli5.sklearn import PermutationImportance
model = PermutationImportance(model)
model.fit(X,y)
eli5.show_weights(model, feature_names = X.columns.tolist())
In the data that this Permutation Importance model was trained on, the column lat has the largest impact on the target variable (in this case the house price). Permutation Importance is the best feature to use when deciding which to remove (correlated or redundant features which actually confuse the model, marked by negative permutation importance values) in models for best predictive performance.
SHAP is another method of evaluating feature importance, borrowing from game theory principles in Blackjack to estimate how much value a player can contribute. Unlike permutation importance, SHapley Addative ExPlanations use a more formulaic and calculation-based method towards evaluating feature importance. SHAP requires a tree-based model (Decision Tree, Random Forest) and accommodates both regression and classification.
import shap
explainer = shap.TreeExplainer(model)
shap_values = explainer.shap_values(X)
shap.summary_plot(shap_values, X, plot_type="bar")
PD(P) Plots, or partial dependence plots, are a staple in data mining and analysis, showing how certain values of one feature influence a change in the target variable. Imports required include pdpbox for the dependence plots and matplotlib to display the plots.
from pdpbox import pdp, info_plots
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
Isolated PDPs: the following code displays the partial dependence plot, where feat_name is the feature within X who will be isolated and compared to the target variable. The second line of code saves the data, whereas the third constructs the canvas to display the plot.
feat_name = 'sqft_living'
pdp_dist = pdp.pdp_isolate(model=model,
dataset=X,
model_features=X.columns,
feature=feat_name)
pdp.pdp_plot(pdp_dist, feat_name)
plt.show()
The partial dependence plot shows the effect of certain values and changes in the number of square feet of living space on the price of a house. Shaded areas represent confidence intervals.
Contour PDPs: Partial dependence plots can also take the form of contour plots, which compare not one isolated variable but the relationship between two isolated variables. The two features that are to be compared are stored in a variable compared_features .
compared_features = ['sqft_living', 'grade'] inter = pdp.pdp_interact(model=model,
dataset=X,
model_features=X.columns,
features=compared_features)
pdp.pdp_interact_plot(pdp_interact_out=inter,
feature_names=compared_features),
plot_type='contour')
plt.show()
The relationship between the two features shows the corresponding price when only considering these two features. Partial dependence plots are chock-full of data analysis and findings, but be conscious of large confidence intervals.
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https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/your-ultimate-data-mining-machine-learning-cheat-sheet-9fce3fa16
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['Andre Ye']
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2020-06-20 15:38:50.032000+00:00
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['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'AI', 'Data Analysis', 'Statistics']
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Title Ultimate Data Mining Machine Learning Cheat SheetContent Feature Importance Feature Importance process finding important feature target PCA feature contains information found feature importance concern feature’s impact target change ‘important’ feature large effect yvariable whereas change ‘unimportant’ feature little effect yvariable Permutation Importance method evaluate important feature Several model trained missing one column corresponding decrease model accuracy result lack data represents important column model’s predictive power eli5 library used Permutation Importance import eli5 eli5sklearn import PermutationImportance model PermutationImportancemodel modelfitXy eli5showweightsmodel featurenames Xcolumnstolist data Permutation Importance model trained column lat largest impact target variable case house price Permutation Importance best feature use deciding remove correlated redundant feature actually confuse model marked negative permutation importance value model best predictive performance SHAP another method evaluating feature importance borrowing game theory principle Blackjack estimate much value player contribute Unlike permutation importance SHapley Addative ExPlanations use formulaic calculationbased method towards evaluating feature importance SHAP requires treebased model Decision Tree Random Forest accommodates regression classification import shap explainer shapTreeExplainermodel shapvalues explainershapvaluesX shapsummaryplotshapvalues X plottypebar PDP Plots partial dependence plot staple data mining analysis showing certain value one feature influence change target variable Imports required include pdpbox dependence plot matplotlib display plot pdpbox import pdp infoplots import matplotlibpyplot plt Isolated PDPs following code display partial dependence plot featname feature within X isolated compared target variable second line code save data whereas third construct canvas display plot featname sqftliving pdpdist pdppdpisolatemodelmodel datasetX modelfeaturesXcolumns featurefeatname pdppdpplotpdpdist featname pltshow partial dependence plot show effect certain value change number square foot living space price house Shaded area represent confidence interval Contour PDPs Partial dependence plot also take form contour plot compare one isolated variable relationship two isolated variable two feature compared stored variable comparedfeatures comparedfeatures sqftliving grade inter pdppdpinteractmodelmodel datasetX modelfeaturesXcolumns featurescomparedfeatures pdppdpinteractplotpdpinteractoutinter featurenamescomparedfeatures plottypecontour pltshow relationship two feature show corresponding price considering two feature Partial dependence plot chockfull data analysis finding conscious large confidence intervalsTags Machine Learning Data Science AI Data Analysis Statistics
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4,604 |
Some musings on cryptocurrencies, ICO and blockchain
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I have been thinking a lot about cryptocurrencies, ICO and blockchain these few weeks. It’s a bit hard not to when the prices of bitcoins, ether and the top few cryptocurrencies have taken the market on a really wild ride. It’s also a bit hard not to do so after I received 2 different requests for help to launch ICO for 2 startups in 2 wildly different industries.
But first, my thoughts about the crazy price fluctuations of the more popular cryptocurrencies.
Mrs Watanabe is also into bitcoins!
I was first introduced to the world of cryptocurrencies by the co-founders of TenX more than 2 years ago when they first arrived in Singapore. The way they explained it to me, cryptocurrencies represent one of the fastest, cheapest and safest way to move money around. And with the wallet they are building, users will be able to use their cryptocurrencies in the real world at any credit-card accepting stores. The cryptocurrencies in their TenX wallets will only be converted to fiat (real-world) currencies when they make a purchase with their TenX wallets. From that point on, I was hooked. Eventually, I ended up being an early investor of TenX and have stayed on as their advisor since that first meeting. In these past 2 years, the learning curve for me, a non-crypto luddite, has been steep. But the lessons learnt from observing the TenX team working has convinced me that cryptocurrency is REAL. It’s not all hype. And it’s definitely not a fraud as some bankers would like us to believe.
The true value of cryptocurrencies is really in the ease of using it to move money around. I can now send a cryptocurrency across national (and fiat currency) borders to anyone without incurring FX costs or worrying about whether the person receiving my cryptocurrency can actually use it where he/she is living. In that sense, cryptocurrency is very similar to normal fiat currencies that we are familiar with. I have SGD which I can use in Singapore. Or I can change it to another currency if I need to use my SGD, say, in Japan. One of the most important value of the SGD is that it allows some kind of value to be transferred from me to another person (or company). The rate of exchange of SGD against some other currencies really depend on the demand for SGD versus a particular currency. The demand generally results from how much SGD is being used to purchase for foreign goods and services versus how much foreigners need to get their hands on SGD to purchase Singapore goods and services. If the demand for such exchanges are down (like during an economic recession worldwide, or Singapore’s goods and services are no longer attractive), SGD value goes down.
So, it’s kind of mind-boggling for me to see the wild price fluctuations of bitcoins, ethers, XRPs and a whole bunch of cryptocurrencies. Sure, thanks to the crazy run-up of their prices, the total market capitalisation of all the cryptocurrencies are now around USD500–700 billion. I personally think this number is totally meaningless. More important for me is how much is these cryptocurrencies actually being USED as a method of money transfer, as payments? If they are just sitting around in the exchanges, wallets or some digital vaults, their utilities are not being optimised.
The true value of cryptocurrencies really arises from their usage. Trading in them is just one of the usage. Moving them around as a way to pay or be paid, is a, IMHO, much more useful usage. If there are not that many cryptocurrencies in circulation, it just means the real demand to use them is not really that high yet. The demand is only to own them as way to generate returns on your investments. I believe in time, more use cases will be found for cryptocurrencies. But for now, we are still at the early days of cryptocurrencies. Massive and wide-spread adoption is still a couple of years away at least. Until then, the current valuation is not just speculative, it is totally insane. And if Mrs. Watanabe is also buying bitcoins, you should be afraid. Be very afraid.
But maybe there is already a good use case!?
That brings me to my second musing. Being involved with TenX from the beginning has forced me to bone up on cryptocurrency, blockchain and everything crypto. Then, in the beginning of 2017, the founders came to me with something which is even more radical, “How about we do an ICO?” I looked back at them blankly and went, “Huh?”
Needless to say, they taught me aplenty and I have to researched a whole lot more on my own to catch up on Initial Coin Offering or ICO. Personally, I don’t really like the terminology as it brings to mind IPO or Initial Public Offering which is when companies issue shares to the public. IPO is a regulated process for companies to raise funds from the public. In return for the public handing over their money, companies issues shares in their companies to the public. I also don’t really like the “Coin” in ICO as there is this notion you are somehow issuing a currency, which needless to say, freaks out a lot of central bankers and financial regulators. I prefer to call them Initial Token Offering. But, that’s just me the lawyer speaking. Anyhow, we will just refer to them as ICO for this post.
A token offered by a company during an ICO, in plain English, is like a computer game credit or a token you use in a game park. You can also draw parallels to loyalty rewards points you get from airlines, hotels, credit cards or even the credits you chalk up from using ride-sharing, home-sharing or food delivery apps which you can exchange for more of their services and products. These ICO tokens generally give you access to a product or service which the company has launched or is planning to launch in due course according to the plans they have published in their “White Paper” (more about white paper later). The tokens do not confer in its holder any equities in or any other claims on the company. Nor does it represent a form of debt the company owes to the token holder. The token, in other words, is no more than just an advance right to use the product or service the company will at some point offer. To make it more attractive at the ICO to buy these tokens, they are usually offered with a discount on the eventual pricing of the launched product or service. And to make sure buyers of tokens will actually use the tokens rather than just hold on to them for purely speculative reasons, token holders are given a small incentive (like 0.1% of every transaction they make with their tokens) when they actually used the token to buy or sell something.
Two other characteristics make them slightly different from, say a token for a game arcade or credits from using a ride-sharing app:
there is usually a reward (in the form of more tokens) which will be distributed to token holders based on a certain percentage of the total tokens used in the system for a particular period of time. E.g. the reward given out by TenX to its token holders is 0.5% of the entire payment volume on the TenX system on a monthly basis.
the tokens are usually denominated against an established cryptocurrency, like ether or bitcoin, and comply with the more established protocols so that they are easily traded on cryptocurrency exchanges. Thus giving them a secondary market for the tokens. And for some of the tokens that have been issued, their secondary value has gone up quite a bit together with bitcoins and ether.
There are people who have compared White Papers to prospectus published by companies doing IPOs. Again, I don’t really think it is a like-for-like comparison as a prospectus for an IPO is subject to a lot more regulatory oversight and restrictions. The statements made in a prospectus also carry with them certain legal responsibilities. The White Paper carries with it a lot less legal responsibilities. It merely lays out the company’s product or services, the team behind it, their advisors, the market size, how the tokens will be used, how much of the money paid for the tokens at the ICO will be used to fund the development of the product, etc. More often than not, there will be plenty of disclaimers and waivers in the White Paper to warn readers that they are not making any warranties or representations of any kind. Nor does it confer any rights in the companies, etc., etc. In other words, they are saying, WE ARE NOT GUARANTEEING ANYTHING HERE! Just giving you a chance for an advance booking of our products or services.
If that’s the case, why are startup teams still so keen on ICO? And why are there still so many people lining up to buy tokens at the next hot ICO? For me, thanks to my involvement as an advisor for TenX’s ICO (I am listed as an advisor on the last page — https://www.tenx.tech/whitepaper/tenx_whitepaper_final.pdf), I have been given a front row seat to watch the drama unfold in the ICO world.
Interestingly for me, over the last few weeks, I have been getting calls to advise on other ICOs. One of the more recent ones has been most interesting as the startup is in the hardware manufacturing and distribution business. There have been plenty of ICOs last year, but there were only a couple of hardware-related ICO. And they were for hardware used for mining cryptocurrency or some business related to the crypto-world. But this particular startup team that approached me for help has nothing to do with the crypto world. My initial thoughts are that there is really nothing stopping us from tokenising the usage of the hardware. So, let’s say, 10 tokens will allow the holder to use the hardware for a fixed period of time. We issue the tokens now, you buy them and when the hardware hits the market, you can use your tokens to pay for a fixed time usage of the hardware. Your token does not entitle you to any ownership of the hardware (it’s quite expensive, so we don’t think people would really want to pay for the hardware upfront and a time-share model is better).
Which brings me to my earlier point that maybe this is the use case we have been looking for. With more than USD600 billion of cryptocurrencies held in millions of crypto-wallets or with cryptocurrencies exchanges, that’s a whole lot of venture capital that can be deployed to fund a whole lot of innovative startups. In the case of TenX, they managed to raise USD80 million during their ICO. Buyers of the PAY tokens can only pay for them with other cryptocurrencies like bitcoins and ether. There are already a few cryptocurrencies that are offering “ICO-in-a-Box” for startups and “ICO pre-sale” for their exchange users. So, rather than just have your cryptocurrencies sitting in a digital vault and praying that they don’t go on a roller-coaster ride any time soon, cryptocurrencies holders now have a new avenue to continue their investments forays by simply turning in their cryptocurrencies in exchange for a new utility token for some product or services. They will not only buy into a new product or service, they will be buying into the growth of a new startup by getting an incentive reward if more people use the new product or service. ICO is in a way radically changing the way startups get funded these days. ICO is also a great way for more investors to get on the startup investing game.
Looking at the many ICOs successfully completed in 2017, we can be sure there will be plenty of exciting new apps, online services, games, contents and even hardware (if the hardware startup manages to pull off their ICO) that can be exchanged with new tokens in 2018 and beyond.
Yes, there will be scams aplenty too. There have been plenty of research showing that only a very small percentage of tokens issued via ICOs in 2017 are actually in use. Most of the startups still do not have a product despite raising tens of millions of dollars from their ICOs. But that is really part and parcel of being an early adopter. It is risky. But if you are already holding onto some cryptocurrencies, you probably have a pretty healthy risk appetite.
When (not if) it all blows up, what’s left?
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett said on CNBC on Jan 10, 2018,
“In terms of cryptocurrencies, generally, I can say with almost certainty that they will come to a bad ending…” (https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/10/buffett-says-cyrptocurrencies-will-almost-certainly-end-badly.html)
The man is right. Like I said at the beginning of my post, I think the current valuation of cryptocurrencies is insane. ICO aside and as funding source for a handful of crypto-wallets (e.g. TenX), there is simply not enough use cases out there. No use cases, no real demand. So, it’s just all hype. Take away the hype, then we will see the true value of a cryptocurrency.
The Managing Director of Monetary Authority of Singapore, Ravi Menon, made a very interesting comment recently,
“I do hope when the fever has gone away, when the crash has happened, it will not undermine the much deeper, and more meaningful technology associated with digital currencies and blockchain,” (https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/mas-chief-ravi-menon-hopes-cryptocurrency-tech-will-survive-9861844)
Now, Ravi is no crypto-evangelist. Nor is he your typical conservative central banker that tries to ban every new innovation in fintech. This is a man who has single-handedly put Singapore on the global fintech map. He is also a well-respected central banker who has just been named Central Banker of the Year for the Asia Pacific region by The Banker magazine https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/mas-managing-director-ravi-menon-named-asia-pacific-central-9834302. This is as good a prediction on the direction that cryptocurrencies prices will go in the near future. But more interestingly, it is a great stamp of approval for the underlying technologies of cryptocurrencies and blockchain. In fact, the MAS, under Mr. Menon’s leadership, has gone so far to conduct their own blockchain research and published a white paper on it http://www.mas.gov.sg/~/media/ProjectUbin/Project%20Ubin%20%20SGD%20on%20Distributed%20Ledger.pdf.
So, it has been a crazy few months for those of us watching the roller coaster rides of bitcoins, ether, XRP and a whole bunch of publicly traded cryptocurrencies. And all the headlines are about their crazy price fluctuations and who are the latest bitcoin billionaires. But the insanity we are witnessing now is no different from 2000 when the dotcom bubble burst. For those of use who lived through it, we have seen this kind of insanity before. We should be able to to cut through the b.s. and focus on the real technology. Remember, even after the excesses of 2000, a few tech startups did survive and thrive. My previous employer, eBay, is one of them. The company is still doing well as they got the fundamentals down right. There was a real business built by good people using awesome technology. I would argue that blockchain and other forms of distributed ledgers, which bitcoin, etherum, Ripple even TenX are build on is a sound technology breakthrough.
Payments is only one of the most obvious use case for the blockchain technology. But there are so many other use cases out there, like settlements of trade, execution of contracts, even cracking the toughest online challenge, proving you are who you claim you are, digital identity. With the backlash against Facebook and its monopoly on our attention and I think, more insidiously, its hold on our digital identity, maybe a distributed ledger system is the way for new technologies to be built for our individual identity that we own, control and can take along with us across different applications and platforms. Instead of having one single company owning our identity online (which is what has already happened), no one but ourselves will own that identity and we can verify that identity and anything we do with that identity across many millions of ledgers out there with no fear of a centralised control by one person or one company or one government.
This next generation of innovations with blockchain will hopefully take us beyond cryptocurrencies and bring back the glory days of the early Internet where everything is open-source.
Time will tell.
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https://medium.com/swlh/some-musings-on-cryptocurrencies-ico-and-blockchain-db6b632fd337
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['Steven Liew']
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2018-02-10 13:44:40.545000+00:00
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['ICO', 'Bitcoin', 'Blockchain', 'Startup', 'Cryptocurrency']
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Title musing cryptocurrencies ICO blockchainContent thinking lot cryptocurrencies ICO blockchain week It’s bit hard price bitcoins ether top cryptocurrencies taken market really wild ride It’s also bit hard received 2 different request help launch ICO 2 startup 2 wildly different industry first thought crazy price fluctuation popular cryptocurrencies Mrs Watanabe also bitcoins first introduced world cryptocurrencies cofounder TenX 2 year ago first arrived Singapore way explained cryptocurrencies represent one fastest cheapest safest way move money around wallet building user able use cryptocurrencies real world creditcard accepting store cryptocurrencies TenX wallet converted fiat realworld currency make purchase TenX wallet point hooked Eventually ended early investor TenX stayed advisor since first meeting past 2 year learning curve noncrypto luddite steep lesson learnt observing TenX team working convinced cryptocurrency REAL It’s hype it’s definitely fraud banker would like u believe true value cryptocurrencies really ease using move money around send cryptocurrency across national fiat currency border anyone without incurring FX cost worrying whether person receiving cryptocurrency actually use heshe living sense cryptocurrency similar normal fiat currency familiar SGD use Singapore change another currency need use SGD say Japan One important value SGD allows kind value transferred another person company rate exchange SGD currency really depend demand SGD versus particular currency demand generally result much SGD used purchase foreign good service versus much foreigner need get hand SGD purchase Singapore good service demand exchange like economic recession worldwide Singapore’s good service longer attractive SGD value go it’s kind mindboggling see wild price fluctuation bitcoins ether XRPs whole bunch cryptocurrencies Sure thanks crazy runup price total market capitalisation cryptocurrencies around USD500–700 billion personally think number totally meaningless important much cryptocurrencies actually USED method money transfer payment sitting around exchange wallet digital vault utility optimised true value cryptocurrencies really arises usage Trading one usage Moving around way pay paid IMHO much useful usage many cryptocurrencies circulation mean real demand use really high yet demand way generate return investment believe time use case found cryptocurrencies still early day cryptocurrencies Massive widespread adoption still couple year away least current valuation speculative totally insane Mrs Watanabe also buying bitcoins afraid afraid maybe already good use case brings second musing involved TenX beginning forced bone cryptocurrency blockchain everything crypto beginning 2017 founder came something even radical “How ICO” looked back blankly went “Huh” Needless say taught aplenty researched whole lot catch Initial Coin Offering ICO Personally don’t really like terminology brings mind IPO Initial Public Offering company issue share public IPO regulated process company raise fund public return public handing money company issue share company public also don’t really like “Coin” ICO notion somehow issuing currency needle say freak lot central banker financial regulator prefer call Initial Token Offering that’s lawyer speaking Anyhow refer ICO post token offered company ICO plain English like computer game credit token use game park also draw parallel loyalty reward point get airline hotel credit card even credit chalk using ridesharing homesharing food delivery apps exchange service product ICO token generally give access product service company launched planning launch due course according plan published “White Paper” white paper later token confer holder equity claim company represent form debt company owes token holder token word advance right use product service company point offer make attractive ICO buy token usually offered discount eventual pricing launched product service make sure buyer token actually use token rather hold purely speculative reason token holder given small incentive like 01 every transaction make token actually used token buy sell something Two characteristic make slightly different say token game arcade credit using ridesharing app usually reward form token distributed token holder based certain percentage total token used system particular period time Eg reward given TenX token holder 05 entire payment volume TenX system monthly basis token usually denominated established cryptocurrency like ether bitcoin comply established protocol easily traded cryptocurrency exchange Thus giving secondary market token token issued secondary value gone quite bit together bitcoins ether people compared White Papers prospectus published company IPOs don’t really think likeforlike comparison prospectus IPO subject lot regulatory oversight restriction statement made prospectus also carry certain legal responsibility White Paper carry lot le legal responsibility merely lay company’s product service team behind advisor market size token used much money paid token ICO used fund development product etc often plenty disclaimer waiver White Paper warn reader making warranty representation kind confer right company etc etc word saying GUARANTEEING ANYTHING giving chance advance booking product service that’s case startup team still keen ICO still many people lining buy token next hot ICO thanks involvement advisor TenX’s ICO listed advisor last page — httpswwwtenxtechwhitepapertenxwhitepaperfinalpdf given front row seat watch drama unfold ICO world Interestingly last week getting call advise ICOs One recent one interesting startup hardware manufacturing distribution business plenty ICOs last year couple hardwarerelated ICO hardware used mining cryptocurrency business related cryptoworld particular startup team approached help nothing crypto world initial thought really nothing stopping u tokenising usage hardware let’s say 10 token allow holder use hardware fixed period time issue token buy hardware hit market use token pay fixed time usage hardware token entitle ownership hardware it’s quite expensive don’t think people would really want pay hardware upfront timeshare model better brings earlier point maybe use case looking USD600 billion cryptocurrencies held million cryptowallets cryptocurrencies exchange that’s whole lot venture capital deployed fund whole lot innovative startup case TenX managed raise USD80 million ICO Buyers PAY token pay cryptocurrencies like bitcoins ether already cryptocurrencies offering “ICOinaBox” startup “ICO presale” exchange user rather cryptocurrencies sitting digital vault praying don’t go rollercoaster ride time soon cryptocurrencies holder new avenue continue investment foray simply turning cryptocurrencies exchange new utility token product service buy new product service buying growth new startup getting incentive reward people use new product service ICO way radically changing way startup get funded day ICO also great way investor get startup investing game Looking many ICOs successfully completed 2017 sure plenty exciting new apps online service game content even hardware hardware startup manages pull ICO exchanged new token 2018 beyond Yes scam aplenty plenty research showing small percentage token issued via ICOs 2017 actually use startup still product despite raising ten million dollar ICOs really part parcel early adopter risky already holding onto cryptocurrencies probably pretty healthy risk appetite blow what’s left Billionaire investor Warren Buffett said CNBC Jan 10 2018 “In term cryptocurrencies generally say almost certainty come bad ending…” httpswwwcnbccom20180110buffettsayscyrptocurrencieswillalmostcertainlyendbadlyhtml man right Like said beginning post think current valuation cryptocurrencies insane ICO aside funding source handful cryptowallets eg TenX simply enough use case use case real demand it’s hype Take away hype see true value cryptocurrency Managing Director Monetary Authority Singapore Ravi Menon made interesting comment recently “I hope fever gone away crash happened undermine much deeper meaningful technology associated digital currency blockchain” httpswwwchannelnewsasiacomnewssingaporemaschiefravimenonhopescryptocurrencytechwillsurvive9861844 Ravi cryptoevangelist typical conservative central banker try ban every new innovation fintech man singlehandedly put Singapore global fintech map also wellrespected central banker named Central Banker Year Asia Pacific region Banker magazine httpswwwchannelnewsasiacomnewssingaporemasmanagingdirectorravimenonnamedasiapacificcentral9834302 good prediction direction cryptocurrencies price go near future interestingly great stamp approval underlying technology cryptocurrencies blockchain fact MAS Mr Menon’s leadership gone far conduct blockchain research published white paper httpwwwmasgovsgmediaProjectUbinProject20Ubin2020SGD20on20Distributed20Ledgerpdf crazy month u watching roller coaster ride bitcoins ether XRP whole bunch publicly traded cryptocurrencies headline crazy price fluctuation latest bitcoin billionaire insanity witnessing different 2000 dotcom bubble burst use lived seen kind insanity able cut b focus real technology Remember even excess 2000 tech startup survive thrive previous employer eBay one company still well got fundamental right real business built good people using awesome technology would argue blockchain form distributed ledger bitcoin etherum Ripple even TenX build sound technology breakthrough Payments one obvious use case blockchain technology many use case like settlement trade execution contract even cracking toughest online challenge proving claim digital identity backlash Facebook monopoly attention think insidiously hold digital identity maybe distributed ledger system way new technology built individual identity control take along u across different application platform Instead one single company owning identity online already happened one identity verify identity anything identity across many million ledger fear centralised control one person one company one government next generation innovation blockchain hopefully take u beyond cryptocurrencies bring back glory day early Internet everything opensource Time tellTags ICO Bitcoin Blockchain Startup Cryptocurrency
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4,605 |
Why Read? Some Reasons to Love it Again
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Why Read? Some Reasons to Love it Again
5 lessons from a life-long passion for reading
Photo by Johnny McClung on Unsplash
Pick up a book. Read.
Such a simple act, reading. Since childhood, we were taught to turn the page, voice the words, scan the story, predict the end. In primary school, we delighted in tales told and retold: picture books, Saturday morning Coyote and Roadrunner adventures, family stories, saints’ lives, Sunday comics, Dr. Seuss and Silverstein. Those words sprang to Technicolor life as we opened our eyes and read.
In those days, life and fiction blurred. I woke in my quilted bed, conversed long and meaningfully with my dolls and animals, frightened my little sister with the three-horned demon who lurked beneath the stairwell, scanned the a.m. comics in my dad’s discarded Tribune, ran to play Escape in the Woods with my best friend, returned for goulash and my mother’s dark German songs of love, listened to bedtime books, and read by flashlight until sleep overtook my dreaming eyes.
And then I grew. Life intruded more and more. I tried to hide in books. Books offered a world I understood and longed for, a land where characters were certain and plots began and ended in tidy loops. An open book swung open a door to a waiting universe — one that multiplied my world from one to a multiplicity of many.
I dove in.
While I read, I longed. I longed for joy, adventure, victory, and love. I dreamed of justice, journeys, and jealous abandon. I think I sensed, quite early, that life was one long spell of longing, that I would always be seeking, that humanity was on one continual hunt for something outside of itself, and always would be. I began to understand Dostoyevsky’s words: “The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.” Purpose, however, eluded me.
And so I read. It stilted my hunger. It calmed my nerves. It gnawed against my adolescent angst.
In those years, I summoned worlds. Paper lives leapt into reality. Characters breathed and sighed in flesh and sin and sainthood. I felt grime beneath my fingernails while planning sweet vengeance with the Count of Monte Christo. I ached with Heathcliff as his bitterly sweet Catherine slipped seductively away. I rolled and rumpled the grass blades as Whitman sharpened his single pencil. When Anna K let her body drop beneath the black engine, I felt the steel wheels carve trenches on my back.
There was so much to know. The Great Unknown stretched before me as I read. It was despairing to note that the more I read, the more I sensed the stretch of Unknowing unravel like a growing gulch of Ignorance.
“The fundamental problem of life,” psychologist Jordan Peterson said, “is the overwhelming complexity of being.” (“Three Forms of Meaning and the Management of Complexity” published in The Psychology of Meaning)
Good books addressed this existential issue. Great books asked questions that left life’s complexity unresolved.
A chronology of reading
When I consider my reading life, I find the underlying doubt and fear and love that engulfs and entwines us all.
As a child, I read for the joy a vivid scene could evoke, for the touch of my mother’s arm against me as she read aloud, for the castles that imagination built.
As a teen, I read to escape the gray world that confused my black and white soul, to find a love I felt I lacked, to discover galaxies that sprawled outside my reach.
As a college student, I sought out data, dove into clear pools of new-to-me information; I gathered knowledge like hoarding stray kittens.
As a young mother, I discovered developmental theories and expert reassurance. I measured maternal impulses against social and scientific norms. I attempted to reconcile my role as reader with that of parent and guide.
As a grad student, I became an academic. I learned to judge with critical eye and disdainful glance, to pepper my understanding with objective control, and to scan research like an addict.
This compilation of readerly tricks and turns is my own, yet reflects the ubiquitous universality of the reading realms we all enter when we open a book, read a page, collect our thoughts, and indulge in our very human need to read.
We all were readers, once. Perhaps we should pick up and read again.
Lessons from the love of reading
1. Reading opens other worlds
Reading is an act of faith, and a sticky web of treachery. Words create and destroy, build up and tear down. Language lifts us to the pinnacle of bright hope, and dashes us down to the bleakness of Hell. Books enlighten and damage, sometimes on the same page.
In his book, In Bed with the Word: Reading, Spirituality, and Cultural Politics, author Daniel Coleman points out the potential for books to inflict doubt, uncertainty, and pain; reading that restructures the mind, heart and soul, that challenges what we thought we knew, that reveals the elegance and ugliness of the Other, that forces us to see with eyes unknown, these are books that allow us to acknowledge: “You are changed.”
2. Reading changes us as we ourselves change
Books change us, but we also change books. With every lived experience, we alter our lives as readers. With every conversation, every action, every moment of love and betrayal, each connection and relationship, we bring a new grain to our storehouse of reading. I was one reader when I first opened Where the Sidewalk Ends at the age of eight; four children, one divorce, several academic degrees and 40 years later, I am a different reader of Silverstein’s “I Cannot Go To School Today” (said little Peggy Ann McKay). Do I mean better reader? Sometimes, though not necessarily.
Reading is colored by life’s indelible Sharpies: age, time, children, career, academia, heartbreak, loss, faith, death. What I did not know in grade 3, I now have some knowledge of. The ways of the world have changed my perception — for both good and bad.
3. Reading forces us to face ambiguity
We all inhabit a world of uncertainty. Like all of us, I struggle with it all: discomfort, confusion, life’s unrelenting ambiguities. Like Alexander Pope’s hierarchy of humanity, I am ever caught betwixt the angels and the unspeaking stones. I wish to soar in lofty realms, yet I sink toward the rocky earth. I remain indelibly mid-comprehension. Lumps of rocks do not sprout wings.
I am steeped in literary esoterica. Like all readers everywhere who attain a certain measure of mastery (in the U.S., probably anyone who reads a book beyond grade 12), I have read my way through dense, obscure, and obsolete literatures, some on purpose, some by accident. Because I can passably read German, I periodically torture myself with that as well. (Echoes of Herr Professor Heine boomingly narrating Das Niebelungenlied in Middle High German in contrapoint to my faltering German-major portrayal of Kriemhild remain embedded in my dark subconscious to this very hour: “I intend to remain a virgin: I will not let my life be ruined through love of a man!”) Like the unfortunate classmate who carried a copy of Mein Kampf to German 301 one day, we all suffer from errors of judgment — though some more forgivable than others.
A young man — tall, strident, authoritative — pushed a copy of William Burrough’s Naked Lunch into my hands one early fall afternoon on the quad.
“It’s pure genius,” he emphasized. I demurred until I opened the book and tried to read the damn thing. Incomprehensible could be construed a compliment; profane may be a better choice. Some things I still just don’t get.
I felt the same attractive repugnance for “Howl,” and Eliot’s Prufrock — as well as Lady Chatterly’s unmannerly lover. I didn’t think much of Hamlet the Ambivalent, or that vicious, gap-toothed Wife of Bath.
And what the hell was Emma Bovary thinking? I asked myself before becoming pregnant my senior year of college and marrying my own mistake.
4. Reading transforms itself and us
Reading is more action than presence, more verb than noun. Once acquired, it remains. Reading improves, decreases, waxes and wanes. It follows close behind, a lone moon trailing our life.
Like Optimus Prime, reading transforms itself. It morphs and moves. Chimeric, it shifts from blue to green, camouflaging and concealing, and bursting forth in a rainbow of intent. Reading is muted and demure, huddling in a cavern of pillows with a cup of hot, honeyed tea. It is raging and red, burning with consumptive fire. It falls asleep curled in your arms, only to awaken, yowling with hunger. Feed me, it demands.
Reading is much like the sea: a roiling, shadowed, submersive pool that yanks us under then spits us out. We ride its moods like careful boatmen wary of the storm. Giant whales surge beneath. Overhead, an ancient albatross haunts the sky with somber song.
That albatross never abandons nor deserts. It remains close by, in pleasure and pain, in busyness and boredom. Enraged, we may strike or shoot it, hang it from the sail or about our neck. Unerring phoenix: it rises from the grave, a befeathered Lazarus. Her song haunts: she has seen both the living and the dead.
5. Reading shadows our growth — and encourages it
Like a child, reading grows. It ages as I do. I grant it the gift of my finite time, feed it my attention, grant it periodic consideration, and it becomes my playmate, my companion, and finally, my peer.
“[Reading] matters,” Harold Bloom firmly stated in How to Read and Why, “if individuals are to retain any capacity to form their own judgments and opinions, that they continue to read for themselves.”
Why Read?
Bloom asks the fundamental question: why read? This query is answered by the self and soul.
I read to squander time, and to hoard it. I read because I want to know, or am driven to find out. I read to immerse myself in the world of ideas, and to unearth how they are chained together, “each to each” (Eliot). I want to familiarize myself with the Unfamiliar, an action that unhides the Other. I read to open doors, and to discover great and feeble notions. I read to unearth both conversations and love affairs. I seek answers for my questions, and questions for my half-baked answers. I read to dive into the lake of language — those waters where we swim together in time, thought, ideas, and death.
I read to touch immortality’s hem.
I read to laugh and weep, to stumble and fall. I read to find and lose myself. I read to enter a discussion that began millennia before my birth and that will continue its whispers and howls long after my demise. I read out of urgency and laziness. I read hungry and sated, half-asleep and wide awake. I read because I am.
Daniel Coleman links reading to spirituality, and that bond seems honest and firm: “Spirituality assumes that I have something to learn and that I can learn it from many things around me that draw me out of myself.” Curiosity draws us to the larger God. It provides that deep pondering that results in immutable prayer.
Conversely, curiosity can also lead us directly away from Light (see Faust, among others). It can deceive us into illusions of the knowledge’s power — and learning’s purpose. Such are the risks of reading.
Wisdom is not located on one specific page. It is not found in the Koran, Talmud, or Bible, though glimpses can be found there. Though the words and ideas 10,000 years are collected in 10,000 texts, yet wisdom is not written above, below, or between their lines. It remains elusive, a moth nibbling at the parchment’s edge.
Proverbs states: “Hold on to instruction, do not let it go; guard it well, for it is your life.” Individually, we read and learn. Uniquely, we walk through life’s foibles and failings. Ubiquitously, we falter and flail. Those intent on the smallest sliver of wisdom will rise once more, re-open the book, and read the next page.
In the end, reading is a verb
Reading is action. It is a choice we make to open both mind and heart. Reading is presence — terrible or beautiful, mindful or redundant. Opening a book teaches something new. It gives voice to an unknown world. Its beauty can hold the soul.
Reading is passion. It is immersion and sin. It is prayer and redemption. It calms ambiguity and carves deep dissonance. It is life empowering and time depriving. It is magic and metaphor, word and wing.
How to read? Pick up the novel. Lift the magazine. Heft the Sunday New York Times. Turn the page. Begin.
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https://medium.com/illumination-curated/why-read-some-reasons-to-love-it-again-1026940c8ee0
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['Dr. Audrey']
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2020-12-13 06:24:51.344000+00:00
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['Love', 'Life Lessons', 'Self', 'Education', 'Books']
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Title Read Reasons Love AgainContent Read Reasons Love 5 lesson lifelong passion reading Photo Johnny McClung Unsplash Pick book Read simple act reading Since childhood taught turn page voice word scan story predict end primary school delighted tale told retold picture book Saturday morning Coyote Roadrunner adventure family story saints’ life Sunday comic Dr Seuss Silverstein word sprang Technicolor life opened eye read day life fiction blurred woke quilted bed conversed long meaningfully doll animal frightened little sister threehorned demon lurked beneath stairwell scanned comic dad’s discarded Tribune ran play Escape Woods best friend returned goulash mother’s dark German song love listened bedtime book read flashlight sleep overtook dreaming eye grew Life intruded tried hide book Books offered world understood longed land character certain plot began ended tidy loop open book swung open door waiting universe — one multiplied world one multiplicity many dove read longed longed joy adventure victory love dreamed justice journey jealous abandon think sensed quite early life one long spell longing would always seeking humanity one continual hunt something outside always would began understand Dostoyevsky’s word “The mystery human existence lie staying alive finding something live for” Purpose however eluded read stilted hunger calmed nerve gnawed adolescent angst year summoned world Paper life leapt reality Characters breathed sighed flesh sin sainthood felt grime beneath fingernail planning sweet vengeance Count Monte Christo ached Heathcliff bitterly sweet Catherine slipped seductively away rolled rumpled grass blade Whitman sharpened single pencil Anna K let body drop beneath black engine felt steel wheel carve trench back much know Great Unknown stretched read despairing note read sensed stretch Unknowing unravel like growing gulch Ignorance “The fundamental problem life” psychologist Jordan Peterson said “is overwhelming complexity being” “Three Forms Meaning Management Complexity” published Psychology Meaning Good book addressed existential issue Great book asked question left life’s complexity unresolved chronology reading consider reading life find underlying doubt fear love engulfs entwines u child read joy vivid scene could evoke touch mother’s arm read aloud castle imagination built teen read escape gray world confused black white soul find love felt lacked discover galaxy sprawled outside reach college student sought data dove clear pool newtome information gathered knowledge like hoarding stray kitten young mother discovered developmental theory expert reassurance measured maternal impulse social scientific norm attempted reconcile role reader parent guide grad student became academic learned judge critical eye disdainful glance pepper understanding objective control scan research like addict compilation readerly trick turn yet reflects ubiquitous universality reading realm enter open book read page collect thought indulge human need read reader Perhaps pick read Lessons love reading 1 Reading open world Reading act faith sticky web treachery Words create destroy build tear Language lift u pinnacle bright hope dash u bleakness Hell Books enlighten damage sometimes page book Bed Word Reading Spirituality Cultural Politics author Daniel Coleman point potential book inflict doubt uncertainty pain reading restructures mind heart soul challenge thought knew reveals elegance ugliness force u see eye unknown book allow u acknowledge “You changed” 2 Reading change u change Books change u also change book every lived experience alter life reader every conversation every action every moment love betrayal connection relationship bring new grain storehouse reading one reader first opened Sidewalk Ends age eight four child one divorce several academic degree 40 year later different reader Silverstein’s “I Cannot Go School Today” said little Peggy Ann McKay mean better reader Sometimes though necessarily Reading colored life’s indelible Sharpies age time child career academia heartbreak loss faith death know grade 3 knowledge way world changed perception — good bad 3 Reading force u face ambiguity inhabit world uncertainty Like u struggle discomfort confusion life’s unrelenting ambiguity Like Alexander Pope’s hierarchy humanity ever caught betwixt angel unspeaking stone wish soar lofty realm yet sink toward rocky earth remain indelibly midcomprehension Lumps rock sprout wing steeped literary esoterica Like reader everywhere attain certain measure mastery US probably anyone read book beyond grade 12 read way dense obscure obsolete literature purpose accident passably read German periodically torture well Echoes Herr Professor Heine boomingly narrating Das Niebelungenlied Middle High German contrapoint faltering Germanmajor portrayal Kriemhild remain embedded dark subconscious hour “I intend remain virgin let life ruined love man” Like unfortunate classmate carried copy Mein Kampf German 301 one day suffer error judgment — though forgivable others young man — tall strident authoritative — pushed copy William Burrough’s Naked Lunch hand one early fall afternoon quad “It’s pure genius” emphasized demurred opened book tried read damn thing Incomprehensible could construed compliment profane may better choice thing still don’t get felt attractive repugnance “Howl” Eliot’s Prufrock — well Lady Chatterly’s unmannerly lover didn’t think much Hamlet Ambivalent vicious gaptoothed Wife Bath hell Emma Bovary thinking asked becoming pregnant senior year college marrying mistake 4 Reading transforms u Reading action presence verb noun acquired remains Reading improves decrease wax wane follows close behind lone moon trailing life Like Optimus Prime reading transforms morphs move Chimeric shift blue green camouflaging concealing bursting forth rainbow intent Reading muted demure huddling cavern pillow cup hot honeyed tea raging red burning consumptive fire fall asleep curled arm awaken yowling hunger Feed demand Reading much like sea roiling shadowed submersive pool yank u spit u ride mood like careful boatman wary storm Giant whale surge beneath Overhead ancient albatross haunt sky somber song albatross never abandon desert remains close pleasure pain busyness boredom Enraged may strike shoot hang sail neck Unerring phoenix rise grave befeathered Lazarus song haunt seen living dead 5 Reading shadow growth — encourages Like child reading grows age grant gift finite time feed attention grant periodic consideration becomes playmate companion finally peer “Reading matters” Harold Bloom firmly stated Read “if individual retain capacity form judgment opinion continue read themselves” Read Bloom asks fundamental question read query answered self soul read squander time hoard read want know driven find read immerse world idea unearth chained together “each each” Eliot want familiarize Unfamiliar action unhides read open door discover great feeble notion read unearth conversation love affair seek answer question question halfbaked answer read dive lake language — water swim together time thought idea death read touch immortality’s hem read laugh weep stumble fall read find lose read enter discussion began millennium birth continue whisper howl long demise read urgency laziness read hungry sated halfasleep wide awake read Daniel Coleman link reading spirituality bond seems honest firm “Spirituality assumes something learn learn many thing around draw myself” Curiosity draw u larger God provides deep pondering result immutable prayer Conversely curiosity also lead u directly away Light see Faust among others deceive u illusion knowledge’s power — learning’s purpose risk reading Wisdom located one specific page found Koran Talmud Bible though glimpse found Though word idea 10000 year collected 10000 text yet wisdom written line remains elusive moth nibbling parchment’s edge Proverbs state “Hold instruction let go guard well life” Individually read learn Uniquely walk life’s foible failing Ubiquitously falter flail intent smallest sliver wisdom rise reopen book read next page end reading verb Reading action choice make open mind heart Reading presence — terrible beautiful mindful redundant Opening book teach something new give voice unknown world beauty hold soul Reading passion immersion sin prayer redemption calm ambiguity carves deep dissonance life empowering time depriving magic metaphor word wing read Pick novel Lift magazine Heft Sunday New York Times Turn page BeginTags Love Life Lessons Self Education Books
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10 Best Data Science Reads for Students
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10 Best Data Science Reads for Students
Top 10 ML and stats articles for learning data concepts
It’s time for some Best Of compilations! Here are my 10 best articles for students. If you find yourself having fun with the writing, try following the links in the articles — they’re almost always from the same blog. I try to keep things unboring for your amusement.
Enjoy!
#1 Understanding Data
#2 Explaining supervised learning to a kid (or your boss)
#3 Unsupervised learning demystified
#4 A brief history of data science
#5 Machine learning — Is the emperor wearing clothes?
#6 Statistical inference in one sentence
#7 TensorFlow is dead, long live TensorFlow!
#8 Statistician proves that statistics are boring
#9 Explaining p-values with puppies
#10 What is Decision Intelligence?
Bonus: Snarky Statistics YouTube course
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https://towardsdatascience.com/10-best-data-science-reads-for-students-3bae97d9bb23
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['Cassie Kozyrkov']
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2019-08-17 18:04:24.019000+00:00
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['Machine Learning', 'Statistics', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Data Science', 'Towards Data Science']
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Title 10 Best Data Science Reads StudentsContent 10 Best Data Science Reads Students Top 10 ML stats article learning data concept It’s time Best compilation 10 best article student find fun writing try following link article — they’re almost always blog try keep thing unboring amusement Enjoy 1 Understanding Data 2 Explaining supervised learning kid bos 3 Unsupervised learning demystified 4 brief history data science 5 Machine learning — emperor wearing clothes 6 Statistical inference one sentence 7 TensorFlow dead long live TensorFlow 8 Statistician prof statistic boring 9 Explaining pvalues puppy 10 Decision Intelligence Bonus Snarky Statistics YouTube courseTags Machine Learning Statistics Artificial Intelligence Data Science Towards Data Science
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4,607 |
How To Make Your Apartment a Place You Actually Want To Be
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How To Make Your Apartment a Place You Actually Want To Be
For the times when, you know, you have to stay home
I used to hate being at home.
I lived in a really expensive one-bedroom apartment with barely enough room for myself, let alone my child, my belongings, and her belongings. I dreaded nights and weekends because it was cramped, uncomfortable, and there wasn’t a single spot without clutter.
After making a few changes, I’m much more comfortable being at home.
So comfortable, in fact, that I don’t mind if I have to stay home for the foreseeable future.
Here’s how you can do the same — regardless of where you live.
Get rid of things you don’t need.
This is a basic one, but it’s probably the hardest one to do. The thing is… you just have to do it. Start with the piles. You know which piles I’m talking about.
Photo by Samantha Gades on Unsplash
If something doesn’t have a home, give it a home — whether that home is on a shelf, in a closet, or in a donation bin. You’ll feel a lot better when you don’t have piles of things all over the place.
Yes, you can sell things — but if you’re trying to be expeditious and if we’re not talking about big-ticket items, just give things away or donate them. If something is literally garbage, just throw it away.
Hang things on the walls.
Nothing says “This is a home!” nearly as much as a little decoration. Can’t put nails in the wall? Get yourself some command strips and stick some decorations on the walls. A painting, a photograph, a tapestry — whatever. Just get something up on those walls so they don’t look so lifeless and barren.
Command strips can hold up to 16 pounds.
Not into traditional decorations? There are some heavy-duty hooks that stick right on the wall and can hold all of your frying pans and kitchenware. Turn your clutter into something pleasing to the eye by hanging things up.
Each hook can hold up to 13 pounds.
Spice up your lighting.
Who says you have to have plain white lights? You’re an adult. You can do what you want. You can make your bathroom lighting blue if you feel like it.
Get some LED strip lights and put them under your bed, or swap out a regular lightbulb for one that can change colors. If you want to go all out, you can get 32 feet of smart LED lighting for around $45. Then, you can just be like, “Alexa, make my living room purple,” and cuddle up in front of the TV.
Get some plants.
Look, I get it. I’ve killed a few plants in my day. I tried my best, but sometimes, fruit-bearing trees just don’t want to live indoors.
Get succulent plants that don’t require much water. They look great and they won’t die unless you REALLY mess up. Or get an AeroGarden and grow fresh herbs in your kitchen. Or, if you can manage to take care of a whole garden of plants without killing them, go crazy. You can even get one of those pink plant lights and combine “get some plants” with “spice up your lighting”.
Good luck killing THESE plants.
Move furniture.
It will feel like a new home if you move things around. Sometimes, you just need to trick yourself. Move your couch, move your bed, move your dresser, move your hamper… move whatever you can move.
Paint something.
Paint a wall if you’re allowed to. Accent walls look nice. Can’t paint a wall? Paint a desk. Paint a chair. Paint a picture and hang it on the wall. Instead of spending an exorbitant amount of money on paint, get paint samples for a few dollars. There’s more than enough paint in those little cans to do something cool.
Photo by Emily Wang on Unsplash
Use furniture for unintended purposes.
Bookshelf? You mean blanket storage. Put a picture frame on top and call it a day. Cube storage? You mean TV stand. Look around for things that can be repurposed, and repurpose them.
Organize stuff.
Not only does organizing things make it more pleasant to be at home… it’s also a great activity to do when you’re stuck indoors for awhile.
These hanging shelves were $5 at Five Below.
Being home doesn’t have to be miserable.
Make a few changes. Order whatever you need online. Some things arrive the same day with Amazon Fresh (yes, they sell more than just groceries).
Worst case scenario: you’ll enjoy the results.
Best case scenario: you’ll enjoy the process.
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https://kerisavoca.medium.com/how-to-make-your-apartment-a-place-you-actually-want-to-be-2400f0fe9550
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['Keri Savoca']
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2020-03-17 14:31:00.646000+00:00
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['Culture', 'Life', 'Family', 'Cities', 'Productivity']
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Title Make Apartment Place Actually Want BeContent Make Apartment Place Actually Want time know stay home used hate home lived really expensive onebedroom apartment barely enough room let alone child belonging belonging dreaded night weekend cramped uncomfortable wasn’t single spot without clutter making change I’m much comfortable home comfortable fact don’t mind stay home foreseeable future Here’s — regardless live Get rid thing don’t need basic one it’s probably hardest one thing is… Start pile know pile I’m talking Photo Samantha Gades Unsplash something doesn’t home give home — whether home shelf closet donation bin You’ll feel lot better don’t pile thing place Yes sell thing — you’re trying expeditious we’re talking bigticket item give thing away donate something literally garbage throw away Hang thing wall Nothing say “This home” nearly much little decoration Can’t put nail wall Get command strip stick decoration wall painting photograph tapestry — whatever get something wall don’t look lifeless barren Command strip hold 16 pound traditional decoration heavyduty hook stick right wall hold frying pan kitchenware Turn clutter something pleasing eye hanging thing hook hold 13 pound Spice lighting say plain white light You’re adult want make bathroom lighting blue feel like Get LED strip light put bed swap regular lightbulb one change color want go get 32 foot smart LED lighting around 45 like “Alexa make living room purple” cuddle front TV Get plant Look get I’ve killed plant day tried best sometimes fruitbearing tree don’t want live indoors Get succulent plant don’t require much water look great won’t die unless REALLY mess get AeroGarden grow fresh herb kitchen manage take care whole garden plant without killing go crazy even get one pink plant light combine “get plants” “spice lighting” Good luck killing plant Move furniture feel like new home move thing around Sometimes need trick Move couch move bed move dresser move hamper… move whatever move Paint something Paint wall you’re allowed Accent wall look nice Can’t paint wall Paint desk Paint chair Paint picture hang wall Instead spending exorbitant amount money paint get paint sample dollar There’s enough paint little can something cool Photo Emily Wang Unsplash Use furniture unintended purpose Bookshelf mean blanket storage Put picture frame top call day Cube storage mean TV stand Look around thing repurposed repurpose Organize stuff organizing thing make pleasant home… it’s also great activity you’re stuck indoors awhile hanging shelf 5 Five home doesn’t miserable Make change Order whatever need online thing arrive day Amazon Fresh yes sell grocery Worst case scenario you’ll enjoy result Best case scenario you’ll enjoy processTags Culture Life Family Cities Productivity
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4,608 |
How Typography Impacts Your Business Outlook — A Primer
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How Typography Impacts Your Business Outlook — A Primer
For any up and coming business, establishing a proper mode of communication with users is mission critical to their success.
Online Businesses
If the business is online, text would be considered as the most basic yet highly effective way to reach their target audience.
Designers
For designers, typography has real potential to make or break a business. This is a particular area of interest for UI/UX design studios— to build brand identity organically, establish effective communication and streamline content delivery on different platforms through well-thought out typefaces.
As implied, text is a medium used to inform, discuss, emphasize and encourage new visitors to interact and communicate with the company. However, the way they present themselves through their content creates a long-lasting first impression among users, which could be their last.
But where does the term typography, fit into this whole dynamic?
Typography is basically how text is presented, in the most literal sense. With each letter stylized in a peculiar way, the design pattern remains the same across the rest of the letters.
Typography is represented by a typeface or more popularly as a ‘font-family’ showcased through titles, headings and paragraphs across a web-page. If the company is professional consulting service, a healthcare provider or an educational platform — the choice and style of words can make a big difference.
This write up aims at informing businesses and startups about how typography is a game changer when it comes to first or last impression.
Note: All images included in this piece are my own design. They serve the purpose of explaining a particular concept in each section.
1.0 Minimize The Number of Font-Families Being Used
Never aimlessly add fonts just because they look nice or if its adding some flavor to your web app. It is better to keep the number of font-families at a minimum; such as 2 or max 3. Going beyond 3 will make your web app seem busy and disorganized, almost to the point that it looks amateurish.
Fig 1: Using more than 3 fonts can give the impression of an unprofessional website
2.0 What Audience Are You Trying To Reach?
When choosing a set of typefaces for a web app, companies need to carry out research on their audiences. This would ideally involve specifying the following:
Age bracket
Demographic
Cultural Affiliation
Ethnicity
Gender
Looking into each factor allows companies to identify the exact pain-points faced by users and consequently formulate their goal and objectives based on the researched user persona.
Assuming a scenario, you are to design an educational app or a game targeting children between 4–12, chances are you will be using a font which is playful, glittery or maybe has decoration around letters.
Fig 2a shows one example of a font-family and includes colors on the even numbered letter. The point is to excite children on looking at the sentence and games utilize this technique to make playful learning experiences.
Fig 2a: Font-Family: AR Carter
However, when designing an online mobile-based app for a maturer crowd that may also include senior folk, the font needs to be legible, bold and of relative bigger size as seen in fig 2b.
Fig 2b: We need to design content for different age groups, both young and old.
Terminologies
In Design Thinking terminologies, to design an app which is wholly customer-centric, a very fundamental practice is to empathize with the users themselves, by listening to them and mapping out a complete flow from point A to B when addressing the problem.
If businesses open themselves to the customer’s sentiments and woes, they can make the ‘right’ additions or modifications to their existing line of products. Showing empathy tells customers that you care which goes a long way to building brand loyalty.
3.0 Complement Your Selected Font-families, Smartly
Lets say your business is a news group or blog channel that prioritizes content over other elements, your designers should choose font-families that favors easy readability.
By rule of thumb: text should be non-intrusive for the reader and should flow smoothly; hence, we do not want the selected fonts to be seen in juxtaposition to each other. Instead, complementing font-families goes towards improving the reading experience of users.
For instance, I experimented with a few known Google Fonts, creating combinations of typefaces that made sense and promoted smooth readability in-line.
In fig 3a: I used the Montserrat font as my choice for the heading and Merriweather for the paragraph section. The combo can fit well in an online publishing web and mobile site. The mixture of serif and sans-serif font does well in finding the intersection between traditional and contemporary design.
Fig 3a: Heading Font — Montserrat & Paragraph Font — Merriweather
When considering the section in Fig 3b, we observe the minimalist and straightforward nature of the text. I used Fjalla One for the heading text and Noto Sans for the paragraph. Most modern web designs are employing clean format for text and this typeface pair perfectly reflects the trend we see on most landing pages today.
Fig 3b: Heading Font — Fjalla One & Paragraph Font — Noto Sans
4.0 Stick With One Typeface, Attain Mastery Before Moving On
If your business is just starting out and have novice designer, it is best practice to stick with one typeface before experimenting with others. Modern typefaces are available with different font weights, which can be helpful in certain situations, like in a button, label or a bold heading on the landing page.
Fig 4: Various font weights of the Roboto Typeface
There is no universal standard for weights but category names have been devised as seen in Fig 4 with words that progress from Thin, Light, Regular to Medium, Bold and Black to imply the proportional thickness of the font.
You also have the option of using Italics and underlined text but those should only be utilized when absolutely necessary.
5.0 Pay Attention to Contextual Sizing of Text
Once the designer is done with typeface selection, we proceed on to sizing the text. There are a number of ways and scientific tools to determine the perfect size for typefaces.
For instance, the Modular Scale system gets input in the form of base font-size and ratio, allowing the tool to scale the text to the appropriate sizes by multiplying the two input values. This is just one tool among many to create size guidelines.
The scaled sizes of the typefaces are then mapped onto the text list that includes different headings, a body text and caption text, as seen in fig 5.
Fig 5: Scaled sizes (factor = 1.33) of text in Roboto Font
However, there are a number of factors that should be considered when applying the sizes on the text:
Text that is too small can cause stress to a user’s eyes, especially when reading it from a mobile device. It is important that text size is legible enough that users can read it comfortably.
Text that is too large can be problematic as well. Big sized text can distract users while they perform a task and it calls attention to itself instead of other graphical elements.
6.0 Avoid Using Fonts With Cursive/Handwritten Scripts
When presenting your online business, it is ideal to use fonts that are clean, simple and most importantly legible. Fonts that involve calligraphy or ones that are fundamentally cursive scripts; although are beautiful to the naked eye, but at times are insanely difficult to read or make sense of. Such scripts break the flow while scanning through the text.
Fig 6: Hard or easy to read?
7.0 Create a Design Guideline for Your Typography
In order to standardize design across your brand which includes your website, product line and social media campaign assets, it is imperative to set up a design guideline. One of the important components of this guideline includes typography.
In this phase, designers can modify attributes of the text such as color palette, effect, weight and size. I used Figma to draft a quick typography guideline in fig 7.
However, there are other popular tools as well such as Adobe’s Creative Cloud or Sketch (For Apple) that can be used to construct a similar looking guideline like this one.
|
https://medium.com/startup-grind/how-typography-impacts-your-business-outlook-a-primer-3f092261d294
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['Hamza Mahmood']
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2020-08-30 05:06:32.938000+00:00
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['Business Tips', 'Design', 'Web Design', 'Typography', 'UX']
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Title Typography Impacts Business Outlook — PrimerContent Typography Impacts Business Outlook — Primer coming business establishing proper mode communication user mission critical success Online Businesses business online text would considered basic yet highly effective way reach target audience Designers designer typography real potential make break business particular area interest UIUX design studios— build brand identity organically establish effective communication streamline content delivery different platform wellthought typeface implied text medium used inform discus emphasize encourage new visitor interact communicate company However way present content creates longlasting first impression among user could last term typography fit whole dynamic Typography basically text presented literal sense letter stylized peculiar way design pattern remains across rest letter Typography represented typeface popularly ‘fontfamily’ showcased title heading paragraph across webpage company professional consulting service healthcare provider educational platform — choice style word make big difference write aim informing business startup typography game changer come first last impression Note image included piece design serve purpose explaining particular concept section 10 Minimize Number FontFamilies Used Never aimlessly add font look nice adding flavor web app better keep number fontfamilies minimum 2 max 3 Going beyond 3 make web app seem busy disorganized almost point look amateurish Fig 1 Using 3 font give impression unprofessional website 20 Audience Trying Reach choosing set typeface web app company need carry research audience would ideally involve specifying following Age bracket Demographic Cultural Affiliation Ethnicity Gender Looking factor allows company identify exact painpoints faced user consequently formulate goal objective based researched user persona Assuming scenario design educational app game targeting child 4–12 chance using font playful glittery maybe decoration around letter Fig 2a show one example fontfamily includes color even numbered letter point excite child looking sentence game utilize technique make playful learning experience Fig 2a FontFamily AR Carter However designing online mobilebased app maturer crowd may also include senior folk font need legible bold relative bigger size seen fig 2b Fig 2b need design content different age group young old Terminologies Design Thinking terminology design app wholly customercentric fundamental practice empathize user listening mapping complete flow point B addressing problem business open customer’s sentiment woe make ‘right’ addition modification existing line product Showing empathy tell customer care go long way building brand loyalty 30 Complement Selected Fontfamilies Smartly Lets say business news group blog channel prioritizes content element designer choose fontfamilies favor easy readability rule thumb text nonintrusive reader flow smoothly hence want selected font seen juxtaposition Instead complementing fontfamilies go towards improving reading experience user instance experimented known Google Fonts creating combination typeface made sense promoted smooth readability inline fig 3a used Montserrat font choice heading Merriweather paragraph section combo fit well online publishing web mobile site mixture serif sansserif font well finding intersection traditional contemporary design Fig 3a Heading Font — Montserrat Paragraph Font — Merriweather considering section Fig 3b observe minimalist straightforward nature text used Fjalla One heading text Noto Sans paragraph modern web design employing clean format text typeface pair perfectly reflects trend see landing page today Fig 3b Heading Font — Fjalla One Paragraph Font — Noto Sans 40 Stick One Typeface Attain Mastery Moving business starting novice designer best practice stick one typeface experimenting others Modern typeface available different font weight helpful certain situation like button label bold heading landing page Fig 4 Various font weight Roboto Typeface universal standard weight category name devised seen Fig 4 word progress Thin Light Regular Medium Bold Black imply proportional thickness font also option using Italics underlined text utilized absolutely necessary 50 Pay Attention Contextual Sizing Text designer done typeface selection proceed sizing text number way scientific tool determine perfect size typeface instance Modular Scale system get input form base fontsize ratio allowing tool scale text appropriate size multiplying two input value one tool among many create size guideline scaled size typeface mapped onto text list includes different heading body text caption text seen fig 5 Fig 5 Scaled size factor 133 text Roboto Font However number factor considered applying size text Text small cause stress user’s eye especially reading mobile device important text size legible enough user read comfortably Text large problematic well Big sized text distract user perform task call attention instead graphical element 60 Avoid Using Fonts CursiveHandwritten Scripts presenting online business ideal use font clean simple importantly legible Fonts involve calligraphy one fundamentally cursive script although beautiful naked eye time insanely difficult read make sense script break flow scanning text Fig 6 Hard easy read 70 Create Design Guideline Typography order standardize design across brand includes website product line social medium campaign asset imperative set design guideline One important component guideline includes typography phase designer modify attribute text color palette effect weight size used Figma draft quick typography guideline fig 7 However popular tool well Adobe’s Creative Cloud Sketch Apple used construct similar looking guideline like oneTags Business Tips Design Web Design Typography UX
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4,609 |
Token Basket Generator Toolkit
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Crypto token enthusiasts and investors are often unsure about where to invest.
They try to figure out the best tokens to invest in, considering the amount of money they have in hand for crypto investment.
Token selection for investment can be done manually by analyzing market trends for various crypto tokens in the market, but it is cumbersome to come to logical conclusions with limited information that we are able to gather due to our human condition.
New and old traders often find themselves in a flux about choosing from a myriad of token options available in the market.
Even if one knows what tokens to buy, it gets complicated to decide how much of each token to purchase.
To solve this conundrum, Token AI has launched the Token Basket Generator.
Token Basket Generator is Token AI’s flagship toolkit which helps users develop a crypto token basket for investment from scratch.
We are familiar with Mutual Funds, which are baskets of stocks curated by experts with certain parameters in mind.
In a similar manner, Token Basket Generator is powered by Juliet, Token AI’s propriety AI-based program that analyzes historical and current trends and sentiments in the crypto market to recommend a basket of tokens to be purchased.
The Token Basket Generator Toolkit enables users to define their crypto investment preferences. Upon which, Token Basket Generator toolkit suggests customized investment baskets to users.
It empowers investors with useful information to help them derive maximum value from their crypto trades.
1. Token Universe
With so many old and new Crypto tokens in the market, it gets tricky to recognize the ones that are reliable.
Juliet creates a universe of about 500 valuable tokens. The number 500 is fluid and may increase or decrease, depending upon the availability of valuable liquid tokens.
This universe is comprised of tokens that are above a defined minimum threshold. This threshold consists of market capitalization, availability on Bittrex, Poloniex, Cryptopia, and Binance exchanges, and have desired trading volumes at desired prices.
This ensures that Token AI users invest only in liquid and valuable tokens.
2. Basket Define
To make crypto choices easy for traders, Token AI Basket Generator lets a user define what he/she wants in simple terms.
The user can define parameters like the desired number of different tokens in their basket, crypto exchange(s) he/she wants Juliet to perform analysis in, and the desired principal amount to invest in that basket.
The user also selects a trading frequency preference.
After this, the user just has to click on ‘Recommend’ to get AI-based token basket suggestions.
3. Basket Process
After the user has defined investment preferences, Juliet does what it does best — use its AI based algorithms to analyze the Token Universe.
It runs the analysis in user-selected exchange(s), as per the parameters defined by the user, to recognize and suggest the best investment basket.
It does all its analysis in moments, which would probably take months to carry out by an average crypto trader.
4. Basket Recommend
After its AI-based analysis of historical and current trends and sentiments surrounding the tokens that match the basket parameters defined by the user, Juliet recommends a weighted basket of liquid tokens to be purchased.
With its proprietary tools, Token AI Basket Generator simplifies token basket selection for crypto enthusiasts and traders.
For a full video demonstrating the Token Basket Generator click here or head over to www.tokenai.io to learn more.
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https://medium.com/tokenai-blog/token-basket-generator-toolkit-508fad7350f6
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['Denver Cutrim']
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2018-08-30 05:05:12.652000+00:00
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['Blockchain', 'Bitcoin', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Technology']
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Title Token Basket Generator ToolkitContent Crypto token enthusiast investor often unsure invest try figure best token invest considering amount money hand crypto investment Token selection investment done manually analyzing market trend various crypto token market cumbersome come logical conclusion limited information able gather due human condition New old trader often find flux choosing myriad token option available market Even one know token buy get complicated decide much token purchase solve conundrum Token AI launched Token Basket Generator Token Basket Generator Token AI’s flagship toolkit help user develop crypto token basket investment scratch familiar Mutual Funds basket stock curated expert certain parameter mind similar manner Token Basket Generator powered Juliet Token AI’s propriety AIbased program analyzes historical current trend sentiment crypto market recommend basket token purchased Token Basket Generator Toolkit enables user define crypto investment preference Upon Token Basket Generator toolkit suggests customized investment basket user empowers investor useful information help derive maximum value crypto trade 1 Token Universe many old new Crypto token market get tricky recognize one reliable Juliet creates universe 500 valuable token number 500 fluid may increase decrease depending upon availability valuable liquid token universe comprised token defined minimum threshold threshold consists market capitalization availability Bittrex Poloniex Cryptopia Binance exchange desired trading volume desired price ensures Token AI user invest liquid valuable token 2 Basket Define make crypto choice easy trader Token AI Basket Generator let user define heshe want simple term user define parameter like desired number different token basket crypto exchange heshe want Juliet perform analysis desired principal amount invest basket user also selects trading frequency preference user click ‘Recommend’ get AIbased token basket suggestion 3 Basket Process user defined investment preference Juliet best — use AI based algorithm analyze Token Universe run analysis userselected exchange per parameter defined user recognize suggest best investment basket analysis moment would probably take month carry average crypto trader 4 Basket Recommend AIbased analysis historical current trend sentiment surrounding token match basket parameter defined user Juliet recommends weighted basket liquid token purchased proprietary tool Token AI Basket Generator simplifies token basket selection crypto enthusiast trader full video demonstrating Token Basket Generator click head wwwtokenaiio learn moreTags Blockchain Bitcoin Artificial Intelligence Cryptocurrency Technology
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4,610 |
How to survive the democratization of content creation in 2018 and beyond
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Marketing has changed.
It’s an idea that initially seems too obvious to have much impact. You’re probably thinking, “Of course marketing has changed. Marketing is always changing. There are always new channels emerging, new tools to try, and new ways to share our message with an audience.”
Let me explain what I mean.
In marketing, as in every discipline, there are micro changes and macro changes. Micro changes are small, frequent, and don’t drastically change the day-to-day work marketers do.
By contrast, macro changes happen far less often but have the potential to completely flip a discipline or industry on its head and make non-adopters obsolete.
Macro changes can happen as a result of new technology (e.g. the printing press or the internet) or of the accumulation of many micro changes over time (e.g. increasing consumer adoption of social media or gradual tweaks to Google’s search algorithm).
There’s a macro change that is currently flipping marketing on its head. I call it the democratization of content creation. (I know, it has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?)
Here’s what that means and how it will impact you as a marketer — whether you like it or not.
What is the “democratization of content creation”?
Since the beginning of marketing time, a few select, trained experts in each company have controlled all the marketing collateral — all the marketing “stuff,” from print to television and everything in between. This has been due mostly to the reliance on mass marketing to a mass audience. (Ever seen Mad Men?)
All this “stuff” has been well thought-out to represent your organization in just the right way to help build your brand.
Today, however, more and more employees, partners, vendors, salespeople (the list goes on) create content that represents your brand whether you like it or not. (For example: the increase in employees blogging, sharing content on social media, etc.)
Not only that, but these “new marketers” are creating content across many channels and mediums for an increasingly fragmented audience. Customers don’t want mass marketing. They expect personalized messaging that is relevant to them at that time wherever they are.
Want to do a quick thought exercise? Think how much more content (i.e. marketing & sales collateral, web content, social media, print, etc.) your company created this year compared to last year. Now think of how many more people at your organization created that content compared to last year. Scary, right? That’s evidence of the democratization of content creation in action.
The problem is, not everyone knows how to create content that is on-brand.
Why does brand consistency matter?
As more people participate in the content creation process for your brand, consistent marketing really becomes a problem. No longer is all the marketing “stuff” created by a few well-trained brand experts. As a result, old logos are used, images are stretched, colors are off-hue, and horrific clip art is inserted into marketing collateral which damages your brand.
But… does an inconsistent brand really hurt your business in a tangible way?
The short answer: Yes.
A few months ago, I conducted a research study with a company called Demand Metric about the impact brand consistency can have on a business. We surveyed over 200 senior marketing leaders across a variety of company sizes and industries.
Among some of the most impactful findings were the following:
90% of study participants experience some level of inconsistent branding in the marketing & sales materials their company creates.
in the marketing & sales materials their company creates. Study participants estimated a 23% increase in revenue if they could always ensure marketing & sales materials were on-brand.
if they could always ensure marketing & sales materials were on-brand. Organizations that focus on maintaining brand consistency (and do it well) attribute 14% of their growth to doing so.
In summary, maintaining consistency in your marketing is a big challenge that most organizations face — one that, when overcome, can increase your revenue and fuel your growth.
What does this change mean for marketers?
As with every major change, the democratization of content creation will bring about both winners and losers.
The losers will be the complacent organizations that create a “wild west” mentality by allowing rogue (off-brand) content creation to continue.
Even worse is those who think the answer to brand & content consistency is to create a “brand prison” where content creation is restricted to the central marketing & design teams.
In contrast, imagine a world where employees, partners, vendors & salespeople are empowered to create customized, relevant sales & marketing materials (that are always on-brand) on their own.
Where central marketing teams can spend more time on the large, impactful projects that actually move the needle and less time drowning in an endless backlog of requests from across the organization.
And where brand managers can spend more time brand-building and less time on policing rogue content.
The winners of this change will be those organizations that recognize and embrace this change and empower employees, partners, vendors & salespeople with the tools and processes needed to create consistent, on-brand content.
There’s a better way to create on-brand content
Lucidpress is an intuitive design & brand management platform that empowers even the least design-savvy to quickly create on-brand marketing collateral through web-based, lockable templates.
Here’s how it works:
More relevant, brand-compliant content? Check.
Improved team efficiency? Check.
Stronger brand and bigger business? Check and check.
The democratization of content creation is already upon us. If you’re ready to embrace the change, Lucidpress can help. Find out how today by signing up for a free, no-obligation demo.
About Garrett Jestice
Garrett Jestice is the Product Marketing Manager for Lucidpress. When he’s not thinking about new ways to grow the Lucidpress business, he enjoys watching sports, playing Uno, and showing off his mad barbecuing skills. Follow him on Twitter @gjestice or connect with him on LinkedIn.
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https://medium.com/lucidpress/how-to-survive-the-democratization-of-content-creation-in-2018-and-beyond-3aef216a46df
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[]
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2018-12-31 00:00:00
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['Branding', 'Content Marketing', 'Marketing', 'Digital Marketing', 'Graphic Design']
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Title survive democratization content creation 2018 beyondContent Marketing changed It’s idea initially seems obvious much impact You’re probably thinking “Of course marketing changed Marketing always changing always new channel emerging new tool try new way share message audience” Let explain mean marketing every discipline micro change macro change Micro change small frequent don’t drastically change daytoday work marketer contrast macro change happen far le often potential completely flip discipline industry head make nonadopters obsolete Macro change happen result new technology eg printing press internet accumulation many micro change time eg increasing consumer adoption social medium gradual tweak Google’s search algorithm There’s macro change currently flipping marketing head call democratization content creation know nice ring doesn’t Here’s mean impact marketer — whether like “democratization content creation” Since beginning marketing time select trained expert company controlled marketing collateral — marketing “stuff” print television everything due mostly reliance mass marketing mass audience Ever seen Mad Men “stuff” well thoughtout represent organization right way help build brand Today however employee partner vendor salesperson list go create content represents brand whether like example increase employee blogging sharing content social medium etc “new marketers” creating content across many channel medium increasingly fragmented audience Customers don’t want mass marketing expect personalized messaging relevant time wherever Want quick thought exercise Think much content ie marketing sale collateral web content social medium print etc company created year compared last year think many people organization created content compared last year Scary right That’s evidence democratization content creation action problem everyone know create content onbrand brand consistency matter people participate content creation process brand consistent marketing really becomes problem longer marketing “stuff” created welltrained brand expert result old logo used image stretched color offhue horrific clip art inserted marketing collateral damage brand But… inconsistent brand really hurt business tangible way short answer Yes month ago conducted research study company called Demand Metric impact brand consistency business surveyed 200 senior marketing leader across variety company size industry Among impactful finding following 90 study participant experience level inconsistent branding marketing sale material company creates marketing sale material company creates Study participant estimated 23 increase revenue could always ensure marketing sale material onbrand could always ensure marketing sale material onbrand Organizations focus maintaining brand consistency well attribute 14 growth summary maintaining consistency marketing big challenge organization face — one overcome increase revenue fuel growth change mean marketer every major change democratization content creation bring winner loser loser complacent organization create “wild west” mentality allowing rogue offbrand content creation continue Even worse think answer brand content consistency create “brand prison” content creation restricted central marketing design team contrast imagine world employee partner vendor salesperson empowered create customized relevant sale marketing material always onbrand central marketing team spend time large impactful project actually move needle le time drowning endless backlog request across organization brand manager spend time brandbuilding le time policing rogue content winner change organization recognize embrace change empower employee partner vendor salesperson tool process needed create consistent onbrand content There’s better way create onbrand content Lucidpress intuitive design brand management platform empowers even least designsavvy quickly create onbrand marketing collateral webbased lockable template Here’s work relevant brandcompliant content Check Improved team efficiency Check Stronger brand bigger business Check check democratization content creation already upon u you’re ready embrace change Lucidpress help Find today signing free noobligation demo Garrett Jestice Garrett Jestice Product Marketing Manager Lucidpress he’s thinking new way grow Lucidpress business enjoys watching sport playing Uno showing mad barbecuing skill Follow Twitter gjestice connect LinkedInTags Branding Content Marketing Marketing Digital Marketing Graphic Design
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The Wonder of Getting Lost in a Bookshop
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The Wonder of Getting Lost in a Bookshop
And why we should fight to keep them
Do you love visiting bookshops as much as I do? I love it! But, I don’t do it enough. There’s something so alluring about the convenience of online shopping, right? You think about something one minute, search for and buy it the next and voila…more often than not it’s on your doorstep the very next day. But, the thing about visiting a bookshop is that it’s a much better experience. Here’s why:
You open yourself to serendipity
One of the best things about bookshops is that you’ll pick up titles that you didn’t even know existed. You might even find a new subject of interest, surface an unknown author, or find an obscure title. It’s harder to do that online. Most of the time, when you’re online shopping it’s purpose-driven! You search for exactly what you want, conduct your business and badda-bing badda-boom you’re done.
However, in doing that you miss the opportunity to accidentally discover new things. You don’t broaden your horizons as much and you never know what you might be missing.
The romanticism of bookshops
What’s more inspiring to you? Finding a 500 square foot bookshop that has 1000s of titles crammed into every nook and cranny or imaging someone racing through a warehouse so big that they stopped measuring in square foot and started measuring in acres.
I know what floats my boat more. To me, there’s nothing better than discovering a bookshop. Every time I’m traveling I almost always visit a bookshop — just to see what’s going on. I love it and I could while away the hours quite easily. And, here’s a top tip…buying a book on your travels is a much better souvenir than an overpriced fridge magnet.
You have the opportunity to support your local economy
Support local, independent retailers where you can. In these shops nine times out of 10 you’ll find people who love books. Also, they usually love talking about books. This is where you can have a discussion about your recent favourite read or find out what you’ve missed in your chosen genre. They’re a wealth of information. And, what’s better is that you’re supporting the local economy and small retailers. What could feel more satisfying than that?
However, even if you visit a Barnes & Noble or a Waterstones they’re staffed by local people. They’re staffed by people who know books. They’re not staffed by people who don’t care if they’re picking a pack of dishwasher tablets, car windscreen wipers, or the latest Stephen King Novel.
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https://medium.com/1-one-infinity/the-wonder-of-getting-lost-in-a-bookshop-ad29bb82154f
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['Jonny Mccormick']
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2019-09-15 21:29:58.162000+00:00
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['Retail', 'Local Business', 'Reading', 'Bookshops', 'Books']
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Title Wonder Getting Lost BookshopContent Wonder Getting Lost Bookshop fight keep love visiting bookshop much love don’t enough There’s something alluring convenience online shopping right think something one minute search buy next voila…more often it’s doorstep next day thing visiting bookshop it’s much better experience Here’s open serendipity One best thing bookshop you’ll pick title didn’t even know existed might even find new subject interest surface unknown author find obscure title It’s harder online time you’re online shopping it’s purposedriven search exactly want conduct business baddabing baddaboom you’re done However miss opportunity accidentally discover new thing don’t broaden horizon much never know might missing romanticism bookshop What’s inspiring Finding 500 square foot bookshop 1000 title crammed every nook cranny imaging someone racing warehouse big stopped measuring square foot started measuring acre know float boat there’s nothing better discovering bookshop Every time I’m traveling almost always visit bookshop — see what’s going love could away hour quite easily here’s top tip…buying book travel much better souvenir overpriced fridge magnet opportunity support local economy Support local independent retailer shop nine time 10 you’ll find people love book Also usually love talking book discussion recent favourite read find you’ve missed chosen genre They’re wealth information what’s better you’re supporting local economy small retailer could feel satisfying However even visit Barnes Noble Waterstones they’re staffed local people They’re staffed people know book They’re staffed people don’t care they’re picking pack dishwasher tablet car windscreen wiper latest Stephen King NovelTags Retail Local Business Reading Bookshops Books
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4,612 |
Complexities in building a custom In-App Voice Assistants
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Custom In-App Voice Assistants
Complexities in building a custom In-App Voice Assistants
Want to build a custom Voice Assistant for your app? Do NOT build one from scratch. It's harder than it looks
Voice as an interface is becoming more mainstream. Most likely the reader has experienced Voice interfaces when interacting with general-purpose Assistants like Alexa or Google Assistant or Siri. More and more brands are also adding custom In-App Voice Assistants to their mobile and web apps to enable their users to access their services faster and a lot easier. But building a custom In-App Voice Assistant is deceptively complex and requires multiple people working with different skill sets, working together for many months. Flipkart took 2 years to build its In-App Voice Assistant, even after acquiring a specialist Voice company, Liv.ai. ConfirmTkt took almost 18 man-months to get their In-App Voice Assistant built for the ticketing app.
Flipkart took 2 years to build its In-App Voice Assistant, even after acquiring a specialist Voice company, Liv.ai
Why does it take so long? What are the various things that one should consider when building their own custom In-App Voice Assistant? This blog tries to dissect the process of building one and argues why the world needs Voice Assistants to be delivered as a service rather than everyone needing to build out their own from scratch.
In the beginning, there were 4
At the core of any In-App Voice Assistants are 4 fundamental technology components.
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
The speech to text service converts the speech captured via the microphone on the device to text in the language spoken by the user. Google is the pioneer in this service and provides both platform-specific (Android APIs) and a more powerful cloud-based service as part of its GCP offerings.
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
This service takes as input the text representing the user’s speech, classifies it based on the intent, and also extracts data from it. E.g. when the user says
“Book a ticket from Bangalore to Chennai for tomorrow” or “Cancel my ticket”
the app needs to understand the action that it should trigger to fulfill the user request. The NLP system, if configured correctly, can help determine this. The alternative is to perform a simplistic string pattern matching inside the app itself, but that is very fragile and very hard to maintain. Google’s Dialogflow, Amazon’s Lex, Facebook’s wit.ai, and the open-source project Rasa are some of the services that can be used for this purpose.
Translation
If the app wants to support multi-lingual input, it typically does in one of two ways. The NLP system itself can be configured for every language or the app can employ translation to get this right. If you are using translation, there are 3rd party services like Google Translate services, that do a decent job.
Text to Speech (TTS)
A Voice Assistant should ideally be a duplex system. That is, it should not just allow users to talk to the app, but also the Assistant should be able to speak back to the user at the appropriate times. One can use the platform native APIs for doing this or a 3rd party service like Amazon Polly.
Training needs
Once you have identified the providers of the 4 key components, the next thing that is needed is to ensure that you can use them in a way that is suited for your app.
ASR Domain Optimization
Typically, the service can be used out of the box with no configurations as it would come with its own pre-trained models. But it may not be good enough for your app or domain. For E.g. if you are a car company app, and if your user says “corolla”, the ASR might potentially recognize it as “gorilla”, as it has no explicit context about your app. It is using a probabilistic model and based on how it recognizes the speech patterns, it might potentially pick a word that it thinks is the best globally. Some ASR engines allow you to augment the language model used by the ASR to be “biased” towards words or phrases that are more relevant to you.
NLP Intents and Slots/Entities Configurations and utterance training
As mentioned above, an NLP system needs to be configured and trained well for it to work efficiently. This normally one of the hardest things to do and requires a specialist conversational designer to configure and train it correctly.
Intents and Entities (or Slots as they are called by some) are the basic building blocks here. Intents are used to classify the actual utterances that the user speaks (is he or she trying to book a ticket or cancel it?). And the Entities (or Slots) are used to identify/extract the data/parameters/entity inside that utterance (e.g. extracting the source, destination, and travel date when the user says “book a ticket from Bangalore to Chennai for tomorrow”)
Translation Optimizations
Again this mostly would work out of the box, until it doesn't :). The translations that the generic 3rd party services provide are optimized for the common case and might not be applicable to your needs. Here are some common examples of failures that are not optimized say for a grocery search
“Narasus Coffee” is a popular coffee brand in Tamil Nadu
“aamchur” means “dry mango”. But with a colloquial spelling, the translation might go wrong
TTS Prompts and Statements configuration
There are fundamentally 4 reasons why Voice Assistants need to speak out.
Speak out a greeting message (“Welcome to Big Basket”) Clarify something if it's not able to understand (“Sorry I did not understand what you are saying”). Ask a question (“Which is the travel date?”) Convey some information (“Your balance is 200 Rs”)
In a typical application, there could be hundreds of such sentences that need to be spoken out by the Assistant, and these need to be configured, with the ability to be changeable dynamically at runtime.
Conversation Design
This is usually the most involved part: How should the application react to the various Intents that are recognized and unrecognized? What happens when some entities are recognized and some are not? After one intent is recognized, how do you trigger the next user-journey? This, more often than not, is coded explicitly inside the app in most cases and leads to a lot of complex “if/else” and complex programming logic.
Simple code that handles a travel-related search (source, destination, and travel date)
I am glossing over this concept, even though it's the hardest. But this is roughly equivalent to handling various UI events in Android and Web apps, after having designed the various page layouts and rendered them on-screen, and then connecting them with the business logic which triggers the actual functionality. Just that, here, instead of UI events, you deal with intents and entities as your inputs. But unlike UI events which are definitive in nature (you can only click on things that you can see on the current screen), voice is unconstrained and the user can refer to things that are outside the scope of the current screen too.
User Interface
The next big puzzle is the Visual experience that has to go along with the Assistant. Think of it like the Google Assistant or Siri like UI elements that you need to add to your app to get the feel of having a Voice Assistant. While this is slightly more straightforward than the previous points, it has a bunch of nuance to it. Since most developers are less familiar with this part of the Assistant building, I will get a bit more specific for this section.
Invocation Trigger
This is the first step of the puzzle. How will the user initiate the interaction with the Assistant? The Assistant should have a “single” point of entry (unlike traditional UI elements where different functionalities have different UI elements). This is done in one of two ways (or both in some cases) —
A microphone button is placed strategically on the screen that users can click to start the interaction. This is again kept in one of three places —
At the bottom of the screen, which is easier for the thumb to get to At the top of the screen, typically inside the nav/action bar Right next to the functionality that has voice-enabled, if voice enablement is very localized
A hotword that triggers the Assistant. For E.g when using Alexa inside the Amazon app, you can start it by just speaking “Alexa”. This is a double-edged sword in my view. While it might seem quite convenient, hotwords are ideal for far-field interactions (like with an Echo device or talking to Siri or Google Assistant when the phone is kept away from you). But as we have seen with those devices, it can have a lot of false positives and also is a potential battery drain and a security loophole.
Assistant Interaction Surface
Once the Assistant has been invoked, it needs its own surface where it can interact with the user. There are two ways in which apps have implemented this —
A full-screen “conversational screen” that overlays on top of the traditional app interface.
A full-screen VA interface — Erica from Bank of America
A partial screen (normally at the bottom) that allows the user to interact with both the traditional app interface or with the Assistant simultaneously
User Training
When a user is interacting with the Voice Assistant, it's quite natural for him or her to not know what exactly to say, even after they have invoked the Assistant. Because Voice is so open-ended, it puts a cognitive overhead on the user. We have all been through this. That’s why it's important for the Assistant to be able to educate the user on what are the various things they can say that an Assistant can reliably understand. Over time, the user becomes more accustomed to the system that they wouldn't need it, but this is important initially.
This can be done by one of two means.
Showing contextual hints when the Assistant is active. Contextual hints give clues to the user about possible answers when the Assistant is prompting them to speak. This helps train the user about the correct way to speak back to the Assistant.
Showing contextual coach-marks to inform the user when is a good time to use the Assistant. For Eg when the user tries to do a textual search and if Voice Search is enabled in that app, the app can inform the user that they can use the Voice Assistant to do the same immediately after the search results have been shown. This contextual help message is more useful than showing them a coachmark at the beginning and we have seen higher conversions happening because of this.
Assistant UX
A key aspect of Assistant design is setting the amount of time it should wait for the user to speak before timing out. Wait too long and it would feel like the system is too slow. Timeout quickly and you would end up missing out on the user’s thoughts. The Assistant needs to have two different timeouts —
Initial wait timeout — This is the time the Assistant will wait for the user to begin speaking. This should be higher and in the range of at least 5 to 10 seconds.
End of speech timeout — This should not have a fixed time but rather be dynamic. When speaking a short sentence and the user pauses, it can timeout quickly. But when the user is speaking for longer initially, it's better to keep waiting for him to gather his or her thoughts. For Eg. if the user spoke something that is lesser than 10 characters and there was a 1-second pause, it probably means he is done. It was most likely a short answer (eg: “help” or “done” etc). But if the user spoke a bigger sentence, it might be okay to wait for a bit more (say 2-second pause).
Tying up the UI and the Conversational Design
The next challenge is making sure that the UI elements and the conversational design elements and the business logic are all well connected.
For example:
When the trigger is shown, the surface should not be visible at the same time.
When the user has finished speaking and the app is trying to determine the intent behind the speech, the UI should indicate it’s processing
After the user’s intent is understood and if the screen changes, the Assistant surface should inform the user about the outcome and get out of the way for the user to be ready to interact with the app
When the Assistant is asking the user for an input and if the same can be provided by just clicking on the UI, the Assistant should react to this multi-modal input and move to the next steps, instead of forcing the user to give input only by voice.
There are lots of nuances of connecting the visual experience and the conversational experience when building the In-App Assistant. This is what makes the experience smooth and pleasing to the user.
Platform Nuances
Next up. Platform specificity. Every platform has its own nuances, especially when it comes to getting access to the microphone and also access to the speaker.
For instance, in browsers and specifically in multi-page apps (like non-React apps), when you move from one page to another, the app cannot, without any user input, automatically speak out something. Also, the way to get the microphone permission is not very intuitive.
Similarly for Android and iOS. The app has to make sure every time that the permission for the microphone is available and, if not, prompt for it at the right time and in a very tactful way.
Have human-like characteristics but still don't try to be one
When a user interacts via voice, since it's a very unique human experience (even animals can potentially use a touch interface), we intuitively have a higher level of expectation. While the most common thing that people assume here is that it should be “intelligent” enough to understand what is being spoken, what we have seen in our experience is that users understand that finally they are talking to a machine and it has some predefined constructs. As long as there is some flexibility there, most users are fine to use almost similar sounding commands.
But what they cannot tolerate is a lack of responsiveness. If you say something and if the system takes a long time to respond back or even tell you it got what you spoke, it is very off-putting. It's equivalent to having a touch interface where you touched something on the screen and it does not even give you an indication of response. So a Voice Assistant has to be -
Responsive. It should show on the screen what the user spoke, as soon as they spoke it out, so that they feel reassured that the system got their input
Quick. And after the Assistant determines the user speech has ended, it should strive to respond back (do some UI transitions) typically within a second. This sub-second response time is what made Alexa so loved by everyone. It felt so natural when it responded back within a second. The bar is now high for users when it comes to performance.
Dynamic and contextual. The Assistant should not feel too monotonous in its interactions. When it comes to visual outputs, it's fine if the same sequence gets played out every time and in fact, we want that. But when it comes to voice responses, humans tend to get bored if the response from the Assistant is very repetitive. So it's important that the Assistant is dynamic. And also it should be contextual. Depending on which screen the user is interacting with the Assistant, it should change the way it drives the conversation with the user
Oh my. That sounds like a lot of work
Building a good custom In-App Assistant has typically needed a lot of investment, both in terms of the number, kind of people needed, and also the time it would take to get it right. That is why it has taken many of the brands quite a bit of time and investment to roll out their own custom Assistants.
Mobile and Web apps are the dominant channels for businesses today and they will continue to be. But if it takes a lot of effort and time for brands to embrace this technology, it's going to be a big deterrent to many of them to embrace this technology.
But this does not have to be like this. There has to be a better way if we are to democratize this notion of Voice interfaces.
Voice Assistant as a Service
The time has now come for this technology to be made available to brands as a simple service that they can connect to and embed inside their apps. It’s time for Voice Assistants to become a service.
In our next blog, we will talk about how Slang is doing exactly that via its unique Voice Assistant as a Service (VAaaS) platform.
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https://medium.com/slanglabs/complexities-in-building-a-custom-in-app-voice-assistants-606d803528b3
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['Kumar Rangarajan']
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2020-12-23 11:15:50.409000+00:00
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['Voice Assistant', 'Alexa', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Google Assistant', 'Technology']
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Title Complexities building custom InApp Voice AssistantsContent Custom InApp Voice Assistants Complexities building custom InApp Voice Assistants Want build custom Voice Assistant app build one scratch harder look Voice interface becoming mainstream likely reader experienced Voice interface interacting generalpurpose Assistants like Alexa Google Assistant Siri brand also adding custom InApp Voice Assistants mobile web apps enable user access service faster lot easier building custom InApp Voice Assistant deceptively complex requires multiple people working different skill set working together many month Flipkart took 2 year build InApp Voice Assistant even acquiring specialist Voice company Livai ConfirmTkt took almost 18 manmonths get InApp Voice Assistant built ticketing app Flipkart took 2 year build InApp Voice Assistant even acquiring specialist Voice company Livai take long various thing one consider building custom InApp Voice Assistant blog try dissect process building one argues world need Voice Assistants delivered service rather everyone needing build scratch beginning 4 core InApp Voice Assistants 4 fundamental technology component Automatic Speech Recognition ASR speech text service convert speech captured via microphone device text language spoken user Google pioneer service provides platformspecific Android APIs powerful cloudbased service part GCP offering Natural Language Processing NLP service take input text representing user’s speech classifies based intent also extract data Eg user say “Book ticket Bangalore Chennai tomorrow” “Cancel ticket” app need understand action trigger fulfill user request NLP system configured correctly help determine alternative perform simplistic string pattern matching inside app fragile hard maintain Google’s Dialogflow Amazon’s Lex Facebook’s witai opensource project Rasa service used purpose Translation app want support multilingual input typically one two way NLP system configured every language app employ translation get right using translation 3rd party service like Google Translate service decent job Text Speech TTS Voice Assistant ideally duplex system allow user talk app also Assistant able speak back user appropriate time One use platform native APIs 3rd party service like Amazon Polly Training need identified provider 4 key component next thing needed ensure use way suited app ASR Domain Optimization Typically service used box configuration would come pretrained model may good enough app domain Eg car company app user say “corolla” ASR might potentially recognize “gorilla” explicit context app using probabilistic model based recognizes speech pattern might potentially pick word think best globally ASR engine allow augment language model used ASR “biased” towards word phrase relevant NLP Intents SlotsEntities Configurations utterance training mentioned NLP system need configured trained well work efficiently normally one hardest thing requires specialist conversational designer configure train correctly Intents Entities Slots called basic building block Intents used classify actual utterance user speaks trying book ticket cancel Entities Slots used identifyextract dataparametersentity inside utterance eg extracting source destination travel date user say “book ticket Bangalore Chennai tomorrow” Translation Optimizations mostly would work box doesnt translation generic 3rd party service provide optimized common case might applicable need common example failure optimized say grocery search “Narasus Coffee” popular coffee brand Tamil Nadu “aamchur” mean “dry mango” colloquial spelling translation might go wrong TTS Prompts Statements configuration fundamentally 4 reason Voice Assistants need speak Speak greeting message “Welcome Big Basket” Clarify something able understand “Sorry understand saying” Ask question “Which travel date” Convey information “Your balance 200 Rs” typical application could hundred sentence need spoken Assistant need configured ability changeable dynamically runtime Conversation Design usually involved part application react various Intents recognized unrecognized happens entity recognized one intent recognized trigger next userjourney often coded explicitly inside app case lead lot complex “ifelse” complex programming logic Simple code handle travelrelated search source destination travel date glossing concept even though hardest roughly equivalent handling various UI event Android Web apps designed various page layout rendered onscreen connecting business logic trigger actual functionality instead UI event deal intent entity input unlike UI event definitive nature click thing see current screen voice unconstrained user refer thing outside scope current screen User Interface next big puzzle Visual experience go along Assistant Think like Google Assistant Siri like UI element need add app get feel Voice Assistant slightly straightforward previous point bunch nuance Since developer le familiar part Assistant building get bit specific section Invocation Trigger first step puzzle user initiate interaction Assistant Assistant “single” point entry unlike traditional UI element different functionality different UI element done one two way case — microphone button placed strategically screen user click start interaction kept one three place — bottom screen easier thumb get top screen typically inside navaction bar Right next functionality voiceenabled voice enablement localized hotword trigger Assistant Eg using Alexa inside Amazon app start speaking “Alexa” doubleedged sword view might seem quite convenient hotwords ideal farfield interaction like Echo device talking Siri Google Assistant phone kept away seen device lot false positive also potential battery drain security loophole Assistant Interaction Surface Assistant invoked need surface interact user two way apps implemented — fullscreen “conversational screen” overlay top traditional app interface fullscreen VA interface — Erica Bank America partial screen normally bottom allows user interact traditional app interface Assistant simultaneously User Training user interacting Voice Assistant quite natural know exactly say even invoked Assistant Voice openended put cognitive overhead user That’s important Assistant able educate user various thing say Assistant reliably understand time user becomes accustomed system wouldnt need important initially done one two mean Showing contextual hint Assistant active Contextual hint give clue user possible answer Assistant prompting speak help train user correct way speak back Assistant Showing contextual coachmarks inform user good time use Assistant Eg user try textual search Voice Search enabled app app inform user use Voice Assistant immediately search result shown contextual help message useful showing coachmark beginning seen higher conversion happening Assistant UX key aspect Assistant design setting amount time wait user speak timing Wait long would feel like system slow Timeout quickly would end missing user’s thought Assistant need two different timeouts — Initial wait timeout — time Assistant wait user begin speaking higher range least 5 10 second End speech timeout — fixed time rather dynamic speaking short sentence user pause timeout quickly user speaking longer initially better keep waiting gather thought Eg user spoke something lesser 10 character 1second pause probably mean done likely short answer eg “help” “done” etc user spoke bigger sentence might okay wait bit say 2second pause Tying UI Conversational Design next challenge making sure UI element conversational design element business logic well connected example trigger shown surface visible time user finished speaking app trying determine intent behind speech UI indicate it’s processing user’s intent understood screen change Assistant surface inform user outcome get way user ready interact app Assistant asking user input provided clicking UI Assistant react multimodal input move next step instead forcing user give input voice lot nuance connecting visual experience conversational experience building InApp Assistant make experience smooth pleasing user Platform Nuances Next Platform specificity Every platform nuance especially come getting access microphone also access speaker instance browser specifically multipage apps like nonReact apps move one page another app cannot without user input automatically speak something Also way get microphone permission intuitive Similarly Android iOS app make sure every time permission microphone available prompt right time tactful way humanlike characteristic still dont try one user interacts via voice since unique human experience even animal potentially use touch interface intuitively higher level expectation common thing people assume “intelligent” enough understand spoken seen experience user understand finally talking machine predefined construct long flexibility user fine use almost similar sounding command cannot tolerate lack responsiveness say something system take long time respond back even tell got spoke offputting equivalent touch interface touched something screen even give indication response Voice Assistant Responsive show screen user spoke soon spoke feel reassured system got input Quick Assistant determines user speech ended strive respond back UI transition typically within second subsecond response time made Alexa loved everyone felt natural responded back within second bar high user come performance Dynamic contextual Assistant feel monotonous interaction come visual output fine sequence get played every time fact want come voice response human tend get bored response Assistant repetitive important Assistant dynamic also contextual Depending screen user interacting Assistant change way drive conversation user Oh sound like lot work Building good custom InApp Assistant typically needed lot investment term number kind people needed also time would take get right taken many brand quite bit time investment roll custom Assistants Mobile Web apps dominant channel business today continue take lot effort time brand embrace technology going big deterrent many embrace technology like better way democratize notion Voice interface Voice Assistant Service time come technology made available brand simple service connect embed inside apps It’s time Voice Assistants become service next blog talk Slang exactly via unique Voice Assistant Service VAaaS platformTags Voice Assistant Alexa Artificial Intelligence Google Assistant Technology
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4,613 |
Free SSL Certificates With Let’s Encrypt for Grafana & Prometheus-Operator Helm Charts
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Now we will install the Grafana or Prometheus-Operator Helm Chart. This example will install the Prometheus-Operator Helm Chart, but the values.yml file for both the Grafana portions are the same.
Again the first step is to create a Kubernetes namespace for deploying the prometheus-operator Helm Chart:
kubectl create namespace prom
Now we need to configure the ingress values for Grafana in the Helm Chart’s values.yml . The complete configuration options are available on the prometheus-operator Helm Chart GitHub repository.
For the annotations, we want to specify that nginx is used for the ingress and that letsencrypt-prod is used for the cluster-issuer . Then we want to specify the host to use for the ingress and the tls host (SSL certificate common name), in most cases they will be the same. Below is an example of the grafana portion of my values.yml for the prometheus-operator Helm Chart:
## Using default values from https://github.com/helm/charts/blob/master/stable/grafana/values.yaml
##
grafana:
enabled: true
ingress:
enabled: true
annotations:
kubernetes.io/ingress.class: nginx
cert-manager.io/cluster-issuer: "letsencrypt-prod"
hosts:
- grafana.example.com
tls:
- hosts:
- grafana.example.com
secretName: grafana-tls
We can install the prometheus-operator Helm Chart once the values.yml file has been configured:
helm install prom stable/prometheus-operator -f values.yaml --namespace prom
Verify the prom-grafana pod is running (it make take a few minutes to get running):
$ kubectl -n prom get po
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
prom-grafana-798b7b89bf-rnbpt 2/2 Running 0 10s
prom-kube-state-metrics-568dc84666-z5vm6 1/1 Running 0 10s
prom-prometheus-node-exporter-88h4k 1/1 Running 0 10s
prom-prometheus-operator-operator-67d764bff6-j99jm 2/2 Running 0 56s
prometheus-prom-prometheus-operator-prometheus-0 3/3 Running 0 56s
Finally, you can view the status of the grafana-tls certificate. The ca.crt will be 0 bytes, but the tls.crt and tls.key should be greater than 0 bytes. If there is an error, the error message should show up here:
$ kubectl -n prom describe secret grafana-tls
Name: grafana-tls
Namespace: prom
Labels: <none>
Annotations: cert-manager.io/alt-names: grafana.example.com
cert-manager.io/certificate-name: grafana-tls
cert-manager.io/common-name: grafana.example.com
cert-manager.io/ip-sans:
cert-manager.io/issuer-kind: ClusterIssuer
cert-manager.io/issuer-name: letsencrypt-prod
cert-manager.io/uri-sans: Type: kubernetes.io/tls Data
====
ca.crt: 0 bytes
tls.crt: 3574 bytes
tls.key: 1671 bytes
Now you can go to https://grafana.example.com and it should be secured by a free valid SSL certficiate. That is it. As long as the cert-manager is running you don’t have to do anything, ever! cert-manager should automatically renew Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates without any user interaction every month.
|
https://medium.com/swlh/free-ssl-certs-with-lets-encrypt-for-grafana-prometheus-operator-helm-charts-b3b629e84ba1
|
['Kevin Coakley']
|
2020-07-20 22:25:05.905000+00:00
|
['Ingress', 'Kubernetes', 'Lets Encrypt', 'Grafana', 'Helm']
|
Title Free SSL Certificates Let’s Encrypt Grafana PrometheusOperator Helm ChartsContent install Grafana PrometheusOperator Helm Chart example install PrometheusOperator Helm Chart valuesyml file Grafana portion first step create Kubernetes namespace deploying prometheusoperator Helm Chart kubectl create namespace prom need configure ingres value Grafana Helm Chart’s valuesyml complete configuration option available prometheusoperator Helm Chart GitHub repository annotation want specify nginx used ingres letsencryptprod used clusterissuer want specify host use ingres tl host SSL certificate common name case example grafana portion valuesyml prometheusoperator Helm Chart Using default value httpsgithubcomhelmchartsblobmasterstablegrafanavaluesyaml grafana enabled true ingres enabled true annotation kubernetesioingressclass nginx certmanagerioclusterissuer letsencryptprod host grafanaexamplecom tl host grafanaexamplecom secretName grafanatls install prometheusoperator Helm Chart valuesyml file configured helm install prom stableprometheusoperator f valuesyaml namespace prom Verify promgrafana pod running make take minute get running kubectl n prom get po NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE promgrafana798b7b89bfrnbpt 22 Running 0 10 promkubestatemetrics568dc84666z5vm6 11 Running 0 10 promprometheusnodeexporter88h4k 11 Running 0 10 promprometheusoperatoroperator67d764bff6j99jm 22 Running 0 56s prometheuspromprometheusoperatorprometheus0 33 Running 0 56s Finally view status grafanatls certificate cacrt 0 byte tlscrt tlskey greater 0 byte error error message show kubectl n prom describe secret grafanatls Name grafanatls Namespace prom Labels none Annotations certmanagerioaltnames grafanaexamplecom certmanageriocertificatename grafanatls certmanageriocommonname grafanaexamplecom certmanagerioipsans certmanagerioissuerkind ClusterIssuer certmanagerioissuername letsencryptprod certmanageriourisans Type kubernetesiotls Data cacrt 0 byte tlscrt 3574 byte tlskey 1671 byte go httpsgrafanaexamplecom secured free valid SSL certficiate long certmanager running don’t anything ever certmanager automatically renew Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate without user interaction every monthTags Ingress Kubernetes Lets Encrypt Grafana Helm
|
4,614 |
The Garbage Truck
|
is a cartoonist in Vermont. Her book is RX: A Graphic Memoir and her comic strip is Rachel Lives Here Now. www.rachellivesherenow.com
Follow
|
https://medium.com/spiralbound/the-garbage-truck-15edf8f65480
|
['Rachel Lindsay']
|
2019-01-07 14:01:00.995000+00:00
|
['Graphic Memoir', 'Mental Health', 'Rachel Lindsay', 'Comics', 'Bipolar Disorder']
|
Title Garbage TruckContent cartoonist Vermont book RX Graphic Memoir comic strip Rachel Lives wwwrachellivesherenowcom FollowTags Graphic Memoir Mental Health Rachel Lindsay Comics Bipolar Disorder
|
4,615 |
Evolving MySQL Compression — Part 1
|
Robert Wultsch | Pinterest engineer, SRE
Pinterest Infrastructure engineers are the caretakers of more than 75 billion Pins–dynamic objects in an ever-growing database of people’s interests, ideas and intentions. A Pin is stored as a 1.2 KB JSON blob in sharded MySQL databases. A few years back, as we were growing quickly, we were running out of space on our sharded MySQL databases and had to make a change. One option was to scale up hardware (and our spend). The other option–which we chose–was using MySQL InnoDB page compression. This cost a bit of latency but saved disk space. However, we thought we could do better. As a result, we created a new form of MySQL compression which is now available to users of Percona MySQL Server 5.6.
JSON is efficient for developers, not machines
As a small start-up, Pinterest built and scaled its MySQL environment to tens of millions of Pinners without having an engineer who specialized in the care and feeding of MySQL. This was a testament to MySQL’s ease of use, but it also meant non-trivial changes were not practical. In particular, adding columns to MySQL tables was impossible without knowledge of specialized tools such as the online schema change scripts from Percona, GitHub, or (my favorite because I helped build it) Facebook.
Storing almost all Pin data in a JSON blob worked around the inability to add columns to MySQL tables. This flexibility came at the cost of storage efficiency. For example, we store a field called “uploaded_to_s3” as a boolean. If we had stored this as a boolean in MySQL, the field would have only used 1 byte. With the JSON representation below, we wrote 24 bytes to disk, largely as a result of the field name being stored in the JSON blob. About 20 percent of a Pin’s size comes from field names.
How the boolean uploaded_to_s3 is stored in JSON
, ‘"uploaded_to_s3": true
InnoDB page compression
As it’s normally configured, InnoDB “thinks” in 16KB pages and will attempt to compress a user-defined number of pages and push them into the space of a single page. (For a deep dive on how InnoDB page compression works, I suggest reading these fine docs.)
However, we found several significant downsides to InnoDB page compression:
InnoDB’s buffer pool, its in-memory cache, stores both the compressed and uncompressed pages. This is helpful if data from a page is read repeatedly in relatively quick succession since the data doesn’t need to be decompressed multiple times, but it isn’t memory-efficient. In our case, we have a significant caching layer (managed by Mcrouter) in front of MySQL, so repeated reads are somewhat rare.
The fundamental unit of work is still a 16KB page. This means that if a set of pages to be compressed don’t fit into 16KB or less, the compression fails and no savings are realized. It also means that if the table is configured for a compression ratio of 2:1, but the pages happen to compress extremely well (perhaps even all the way down to a single byte, for purposes of our thought experiment), the on-disk size is still 16KB. In other words, the compression ratio is effectively still only 2:1.
In general, latency is higher for tables that use InnoDB compression, especially those under high concurrency workloads. Stress testing against our production workload showed significant increases in latency and a corresponding drop in throughput with more than 32 active concurrent connections. Since we had a lot of excess capacity, so this wasn’t a major concern.
Alternatives
We considered using a method other companies have tried, where the client compresses the JSON before sending data to MySQL. While this reduces load on the databases by moving it to the client, the cost of retrofitting middleware, particularly at the expense of new features, was too high in our case. We needed a solution that didn’t require any changes to the database clients.
We discussed at length modifying MySQL in order to allow compression at the column level. This approach would have different benefits and some tradeoffs:
We’d realize the maximum disk space savings from compression.
For pages containing compressed data, we’d only store one copy in memory, so RAM would be used more efficiently than it is with both uncompressed and page-compressed InnoDB.
For every read we’d need to decompress data, and every write would require a compression operation. This would be especially harmful if we needed to do large sequential scans with many decompression operations.
We were fortunate that Weixiang Zhai from Alibaba had posted a patch for inclusion in Percona Server that implemented this feature. We patched, compiled and tested MySQL using our production workload. The result was similar compression savings to InnoDB page compression (~50%) but with a better performance profile for our workload. This was helpful, but we had another improvement in mind.
Improving column compression
Zlib is the compression library used by InnoDB page compression and the column compression patch from Alibaba. Zlib achieves savings in part by implementing LZ77 and works by replacing occurrences of repeated strings with references to the earlier occurrences. The ability to look back at previous string occurrences would be very useful for page compression but less so for column compression since it’s unlikely field names (among other strings) would occur repeatedly in the same column in a given row.
Zlib version 1.2.7.1 was released in early 2013 and added the ability to use a predefined “dictionary” to prefill the lookback window for LZ77. This seemed promising since we could “warm up” the lookback window with field names and other common strings. We ran a few tests using the Python Zlib library with a naive predefined dictionary consisting of an arbitrary Pin JSON blob. The compression savings increased from ~50% to ~66% at what appeared to be relatively little cost.
We worked with Percona to create a specification for column compression with an optional predefined dictionary and then contracted with Percona to build the feature.
Initial testing and a road forward
Once an alpha version of column compression was ready, we benchmarked the change and found it produced the expected space savings and doubled throughput at high concurrency. The only downside was large scans (mysqldump, ETL, etc.) took a small performance hit. We presented our findings earlier this year at Percona Live. Below is a graph from our presentation which showed a read-only version of our production workload at concurrency of 256, 128, 32, 16, 8, 4 and 1 clients. TokuDB is in yellow, InnoDB page compression is in red and the other lines are column compression with a variety of dictionaries. Overall, column compression peaked at around twice the throughput on highly concurrent workloads.
In our next post, we’ll discuss how we increased the compression savings using a much less naive compression dictionary.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Nick Taylor for suggesting the use of predefined dictionary from Zlib, Ernie Souhrada for benchmarking, Weixiang Zhai for writing the original patch and posting it to the Percona mailing list, and Percona for adding in the predefined dictionary feature and being willing to include it in their distribution.
|
https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/evolving-mysql-compression-part-1-7f8b09666589
|
['Pinterest Engineering']
|
2017-02-21 20:24:21.839000+00:00
|
['Programming', 'Big Data', 'MySQL', 'Compression', 'Open Source']
|
Title Evolving MySQL Compression — Part 1Content Robert Wultsch Pinterest engineer SRE Pinterest Infrastructure engineer caretaker 75 billion Pins–dynamic object evergrowing database people’s interest idea intention Pin stored 12 KB JSON blob sharded MySQL database year back growing quickly running space sharded MySQL database make change One option scale hardware spend option–which chose–was using MySQL InnoDB page compression cost bit latency saved disk space However thought could better result created new form MySQL compression available user Percona MySQL Server 56 JSON efficient developer machine small startup Pinterest built scaled MySQL environment ten million Pinners without engineer specialized care feeding MySQL testament MySQL’s ease use also meant nontrivial change practical particular adding column MySQL table impossible without knowledge specialized tool online schema change script Percona GitHub favorite helped build Facebook Storing almost Pin data JSON blob worked around inability add column MySQL table flexibility came cost storage efficiency example store field called “uploadedtos3” boolean stored boolean MySQL field would used 1 byte JSON representation wrote 24 byte disk largely result field name stored JSON blob 20 percent Pin’s size come field name boolean uploadedtos3 stored JSON ‘uploadedtos3 true InnoDB page compression it’s normally configured InnoDB “thinks” 16KB page attempt compress userdefined number page push space single page deep dive InnoDB page compression work suggest reading fine doc However found several significant downside InnoDB page compression InnoDB’s buffer pool inmemory cache store compressed uncompressed page helpful data page read repeatedly relatively quick succession since data doesn’t need decompressed multiple time isn’t memoryefficient case significant caching layer managed Mcrouter front MySQL repeated read somewhat rare fundamental unit work still 16KB page mean set page compressed don’t fit 16KB le compression fails saving realized also mean table configured compression ratio 21 page happen compress extremely well perhaps even way single byte purpose thought experiment ondisk size still 16KB word compression ratio effectively still 21 general latency higher table use InnoDB compression especially high concurrency workload Stress testing production workload showed significant increase latency corresponding drop throughput 32 active concurrent connection Since lot excess capacity wasn’t major concern Alternatives considered using method company tried client compress JSON sending data MySQL reduces load database moving client cost retrofitting middleware particularly expense new feature high case needed solution didn’t require change database client discussed length modifying MySQL order allow compression column level approach would different benefit tradeoff We’d realize maximum disk space saving compression page containing compressed data we’d store one copy memory RAM would used efficiently uncompressed pagecompressed InnoDB every read we’d need decompress data every write would require compression operation would especially harmful needed large sequential scan many decompression operation fortunate Weixiang Zhai Alibaba posted patch inclusion Percona Server implemented feature patched compiled tested MySQL using production workload result similar compression saving InnoDB page compression 50 better performance profile workload helpful another improvement mind Improving column compression Zlib compression library used InnoDB page compression column compression patch Alibaba Zlib achieves saving part implementing LZ77 work replacing occurrence repeated string reference earlier occurrence ability look back previous string occurrence would useful page compression le column compression since it’s unlikely field name among string would occur repeatedly column given row Zlib version 1271 released early 2013 added ability use predefined “dictionary” prefill lookback window LZ77 seemed promising since could “warm up” lookback window field name common string ran test using Python Zlib library naive predefined dictionary consisting arbitrary Pin JSON blob compression saving increased 50 66 appeared relatively little cost worked Percona create specification column compression optional predefined dictionary contracted Percona build feature Initial testing road forward alpha version column compression ready benchmarked change found produced expected space saving doubled throughput high concurrency downside large scan mysqldump ETL etc took small performance hit presented finding earlier year Percona Live graph presentation showed readonly version production workload concurrency 256 128 32 16 8 4 1 client TokuDB yellow InnoDB page compression red line column compression variety dictionary Overall column compression peaked around twice throughput highly concurrent workload next post we’ll discus increased compression saving using much le naive compression dictionary Acknowledgements Thanks Nick Taylor suggesting use predefined dictionary Zlib Ernie Souhrada benchmarking Weixiang Zhai writing original patch posting Percona mailing list Percona adding predefined dictionary feature willing include distributionTags Programming Big Data MySQL Compression Open Source
|
4,616 |
Getting Unstuck in the Middle of NaNoWriMo
|
Dear November Novelists,
It’s after 2pm and I’ve done everything but add to my novel’s word count. I did my morning pages, made a lavish breakfast, talked to friends, walked my dog, cleaned the kitchen, watched Netflix (I’m watching Episodes with Matt LeBlanc, you?), walked the dog again…all the while guilt accumulated with each word I didn’t add to my novel.
As seen on my dog walk. Do fairies and sprites live here?
I forgot that in middle of NaNoWriMo, my motivation and creativity usually diminish to the equivalent of a wrung-out kitchen sponge.
Then I read Grant Faulkner’s post on this well-known phenomenon. A nightlight in the hallway of my imagination ignited, casting a faint glow on possibility.
Do I need to write 1,667 words today? Not really. It’s not like the world will stop spinning. Except I made a promise to myself. It’s the same promise I’ve made every November for the past 9. This month, writing comes first.
I’ll argue the promises we make to ourselves are the most ones to keep. So when I finish penning this newsletter and share some of the fantastic posts this week, I’ll start typing.
|
https://medium.com/nanowrimo/getting-unstuck-in-the-middle-of-nanowrimo-8e391a1c4f73
|
['Julie Russell']
|
2020-11-15 16:40:52.804000+00:00
|
['Fiction', 'NaNoWriMo', 'Nonprofit', 'Writing']
|
Title Getting Unstuck Middle NaNoWriMoContent Dear November Novelists It’s 2pm I’ve done everything add novel’s word count morning page made lavish breakfast talked friend walked dog cleaned kitchen watched Netflix I’m watching Episodes Matt LeBlanc walked dog again…all guilt accumulated word didn’t add novel seen dog walk fairy sprite live forgot middle NaNoWriMo motivation creativity usually diminish equivalent wrungout kitchen sponge read Grant Faulkner’s post wellknown phenomenon nightlight hallway imagination ignited casting faint glow possibility need write 1667 word today really It’s like world stop spinning Except made promise It’s promise I’ve made every November past 9 month writing come first I’ll argue promise make one keep finish penning newsletter share fantastic post week I’ll start typingTags Fiction NaNoWriMo Nonprofit Writing
|
4,617 |
Fundamentals of MapReduce with MapReduce Example
|
MapReduce Tutorial - Edureka
In this MapReduce Tutorial blog, I am going to introduce you to MapReduce, which is one of the core building blocks of processing in the Hadoop framework. Before moving ahead, I would suggest you get familiar with HDFS concepts which I have covered in my previous HDFS tutorial blog. This will help you to understand the MapReduce concepts quickly and easily.
Google released a paper on MapReduce technology in December 2004. This became the genesis of the Hadoop Processing Model. So, MapReduce is a programming model that allows us to perform parallel and distributed processing on huge datasets. The topics that I have covered in this MapReduce tutorial blog are as follows:
Traditional Way for parallel and distributed processing
What is MapReduce?
MapReduce Example
MapReduce Advantages
MapReduce Program
MapReduce Program Explained
Traditional Way
Traditional Way - MapReduce Tutorial
Let us understand, when the MapReduce framework was not there, how parallel and distributed processing used to happen in a traditional way. So, let us take an example where I have a weather log containing the daily average temperature of the years from 2000 to 2015. Here, I want to calculate the day having the highest temperature each year.
So, just like in the traditional way, I will split the data into smaller parts or blocks and store them in different machines. Then, I will find the highest temperature in each part stored in the corresponding machine. At last, I will combine the results received from each of the machines to have the final output. Let us look at the challenges associated with this traditional approach:
Critical path problem: It is the amount of time taken to finish the job without delaying the next milestone or actual completion date. So, if, any of the machines delay the job, the whole work gets delayed. Reliability problem: What if, any of the machines which are working with a part of data fails? The management of this failover becomes a challenge. Equal split issue: How will I divide the data into smaller chunks so that each machine gets even part of data to work with. In other words, how to equally divide the data such that no individual machine is overloaded or underutilized. Single split may fail: If any of the machines fail to provide the output, I will not be able to calculate the result. So, there should be a mechanism to ensure this fault tolerance capability of the system. Aggregation of the result: There should be a mechanism to aggregate the result generated by each of the machines to produce the final output.
These are the issues which I will have to take care individually while performing parallel processing of huge datasets when using traditional approaches.
To overcome these issues, we have the MapReduce framework which allows us to perform such parallel computations without bothering about the issues like reliability, fault tolerance etc. Therefore, MapReduce gives you the flexibility to write code logic without caring about the design issues of the system.
What is MapReduce?
What is MapReduce - MapReduce Tutorial
MapReduce is a programming framework that allows us to perform distributed and parallel processing on large data sets in a distributed environment.
MapReduce consists of two distinct tasks — Map and Reduce.
As the name MapReduce suggests, reducer phase takes place after the mapper phase has been completed.
So, the first is the map job, where a block of data is read and processed to produce key-value pairs as intermediate outputs.
The output of a Mapper or map job (key-value pairs) is input to the Reducer.
The reducer receives the key-value pair from multiple map jobs.
Then, the reducer aggregates those intermediate data tuples (intermediate key-value pair) into a smaller set of tuples or key-value pairs which is the final output.
A Word Count Example of MapReduce
Let us understand, how a MapReduce works by taking an example where I have a text file called example.txt whose contents are as follows:
Dear, Bear, River, Car, Car, River, Deer, Car and Bear
Now, suppose, we have to perform a word count on the sample.txt using MapReduce. So, we will be finding unique words and the number of occurrences of those unique words.
MapReduce Example - MapReduce Tutorial
First, we divide the input into three splits as shown in the figure. This will distribute the work among all the map nodes.
Then, we tokenize the words in each of the mappers and give a hardcoded value (1) to each of the tokens or words. The rationale behind giving a hardcoded value equal to 1 is that every word, in itself, will occur once.
Now, a list of key-value pair will be created where the key is nothing but the individual words and value is one. So, for the first line (Dear Bear River) we have 3 key-value pairs — Dear, 1; Bear, 1; River, 1. The mapping process remains the same on all the nodes.
After the mapper phase, a partition process takes place where sorting and shuffling happen so that all the tuples with the same key are sent to the corresponding reducer.
So, after the sorting and shuffling phase, each reducer will have a unique key and a list of values corresponding to that very key. For example, Bear, [1,1]; Car, [1,1,1].., etc.
Now, each Reducer counts the values which are present in that list of values. As shown in the figure, reducer gets a list of values which is [1,1] for the key Bear. Then, it counts the number of ones in the very list and gives the final output as — Bear, 2.
Finally, all the output key/value pairs are then collected and written in the output file.
Advantages of MapReduce
The two biggest advantages of MapReduce are:
1. Parallel Processing:
In MapReduce, we are dividing the job among multiple nodes and each node works with a part of the job simultaneously. So, MapReduce is based on Divide and Conquer paradigm which helps us to process the data using different machines. As the data is processed by multiple machines instead of a single machine in parallel, the time taken to process the data gets reduced by a tremendous amount as shown in the figure below (2).
Traditional Way Vs. MapReduce Way - MapReduce Tutorial
2. Data Locality:
Instead of moving data to the processing unit, we are moving the processing unit to the data in the MapReduce Framework. In the traditional system, we used to bring data to the processing unit and process it. But, as the data grew and became very huge, bringing this huge amount of data to the processing unit posed the following issues:
Moving huge data to processing is costly and deteriorates the network performance.
Processing takes time as the data is processed by a single unit which becomes the bottleneck.
Master node can get over-burdened and may fail.
Now, MapReduce allows us to overcome the above issues by bringing the processing unit to the data. So, as you can see in the above image that the data is distributed among multiple nodes where each node processes the part of the data residing on it. This allows us to have the following advantages:
It is very cost effective to move the processing unit to the data.
The processing time is reduced as all the nodes are working with their part of the data in parallel.
Every node gets a part of the data to process and therefore, there is no chance of a node getting overburdened.
MapReduce Example Program
Before jumping into the details, let us have a glance at a MapReduce example program to have a basic idea about how things work in a MapReduce environment practically. I have taken the same word count example where I have to find out the number of occurrences of each word. And Don’t worry guys, if you don’t understand the code when you look at it for the first time, just bear with me while I walk you through each part of the MapReduce code.
Source code:
package co.edureka.mapreduce;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.StringTokenizer;
import org.apache.hadoop.io.IntWritable;
import org.apache.hadoop.io.LongWritable;
import org.apache.hadoop.io.Text;
import org.apache.hadoop.mapreduce.Mapper;
import org.apache.hadoop.mapreduce.Reducer;
import org.apache.hadoop.conf.Configuration;
import org.apache.hadoop.mapreduce.Job;
import org.apache.hadoop.mapreduce.lib.input.TextInputFormat;
import org.apache.hadoop.mapreduce.lib.output.TextOutputFormat;
import org.apache.hadoop.mapreduce.lib.input.FileInputFormat;
import org.apache.hadoop.mapreduce.lib.output.FileOutputFormat;
import org.apache.hadoop.fs.Path;
public class WordCount
{
public static class Map extends Mapper<LongWritable,Text,Text,IntWritable> {
public void map(LongWritable key, Text value,Context context) throws IOException,InterruptedException{
String line = value.toString();
StringTokenizer tokenizer = new StringTokenizer(line);
while (tokenizer.hasMoreTokens()) {
value.set(tokenizer.nextToken());
context.write(value, new IntWritable(1));
}
}
}
public static class Reduce extends Reducer<Text,IntWritable,Text,IntWritable> {
public void reduce(Text key, Iterable<IntWritable> values,Context context) throws IOException,InterruptedException {
int sum=0;
for(IntWritable x: values)
{
sum+=x.get();
}
context.write(key, new IntWritable(sum));
}
}
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
Configuration conf= new Configuration();
Job job = new Job(conf,"My Word Count Program");
job.setJarByClass(WordCount.class);
job.setMapperClass(Map.class);
job.setReducerClass(Reduce.class);
job.setOutputKeyClass(Text.class);
job.setOutputValueClass(IntWritable.class);
job.setInputFormatClass(TextInputFormat.class);
job.setOutputFormatClass(TextOutputFormat.class);
Path outputPath = new Path(args[1]);
//Configuring the input/output path from the filesystem into the job
FileInputFormat.addInputPath(job, new Path(args[0]));
FileOutputFormat.setOutputPath(job, new Path(args[1]));
//deleting the output path automatically from hdfs so that we don't have to delete it explicitly
outputPath.getFileSystem(conf).delete(outputPath);
//exiting the job only if the flag value becomes false
System.exit(job.waitForCompletion(true) ? 0 : 1);
}
}
Explanation of MapReduce Program
The entire MapReduce program can be fundamentally divided into three parts:
Mapper Phase Code
Reducer Phase Code
Driver Code
We will understand the code for each of these three parts sequentially.
Mapper code:
public static class Map extends Mapper<LongWritable,Text,Text,IntWritable> {
public void map(LongWritable key, Text value, Context context) throws IOException,InterruptedException {
String line = value.toString();
StringTokenizer tokenizer = new StringTokenizer(line);
while (tokenizer.hasMoreTokens()) {
value.set(tokenizer.nextToken());
context.write(value, new IntWritable(1));
}
We have created a class Map that extends the class Mapper which is already defined in the MapReduce Framework.
We define the data types of input and output key/value pair after the class declaration using angle brackets.
Both the input and output of the Mapper is a key/value pair.
Input:
The key is nothing but the offset of each line in the text file: LongWritable The value is each individual line (as shown in the figure at the right): Text
Output:
The key is the tokenized words: Text We have the hardcoded value in our case which is 1: IntWritable Example — Dear 1, Bear 1, etc.
We have written a java code where we have tokenized each word and assigned them a hardcoded value equal to 1.
Reducer Code:
public static class Reduce extends Reducer<Text,IntWritable,Text,IntWritable> {
public void reduce(Text key, Iterable<IntWritable> values,Context context)
throws IOException,InterruptedException {
int sum=0;
for(IntWritable x: values)
{
sum+=x.get();
}
context.write(key, new IntWritable(sum));
}
}
We have created a class Reduce which extends class Reducer like that of Mapper.
We define the data types of input and output key/value pair after the class declaration using angle brackets as done for Mapper.
Both the input and the output of the Reducer is a key-value pair.
Input:
The key nothing but those unique words which have been generated after the sorting and shuffling phase: Text The value is a list of integers corresponding to each key: IntWritable Example — Bear, [1, 1], etc.
Output:
The key is all the unique words present in the input text file: Text The value is the number of occurrences of each of the unique words: IntWritable Example — Bear, 2; Car, 3, etc.
We have aggregated the values present in each of the list corresponding to each key and produced the final answer.
In general, a single reducer is created for each of the unique words, but, you can specify the number of reducer in mapred-site.xml.
Driver Code:
Configuration conf= new Configuration();
Job job = new Job(conf,"My Word Count Program");
job.setJarByClass(WordCount.class);
job.setMapperClass(Map.class);
job.setReducerClass(Reduce.class);
job.setOutputKeyClass(Text.class);
job.setOutputValueClass(IntWritable.class);
job.setInputFormatClass(TextInputFormat.class);
job.setOutputFormatClass(TextOutputFormat.class);
Path outputPath = new Path(args[1]);
//Configuring the input/output path from the filesystem into the job
FileInputFormat.addInputPath(job, new Path(args[0]));
FileOutputFormat.setOutputPath(job, new Path(args[1]));
In the driver class, we set the configuration of our MapReduce job to run in Hadoop.
We specify the name of the job, the data type of input/output of the mapper and reducer.
We also specify the names of the mapper and reducer classes.
The path of the input and output folder is also specified.
The method setInputFormatClass () is used for specifying that how a Mapper will read the input data or what will be the unit of work. Here, we have chosen TextInputFormat so that single line is read by the mapper at a time from the input text file.
The main () method is the entry point for the driver. In this method, we instantiate a new Configuration object for the job.
Run the MapReduce code:
The command for running a MapReduce code is:
hadoop jar hadoop-mapreduce-example.jar WordCount /sample/input /sample/output
Now, you guys have a basic understanding of the MapReduce framework. You would have realized how the MapReduce framework facilitates us to write code to process huge data present in the HDFS.
If you wish to check out more articles on the market’s most trending technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Python, Ethical Hacking, then you can refer to Edureka’s official site.
Do look out for other articles in this series which will explain the various other aspects of Big data.
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https://medium.com/edureka/mapreduce-tutorial-3d9535ddbe7c
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['Shubham Sinha']
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2020-09-10 09:46:51.670000+00:00
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['Big Data', 'Mapreduce', 'Hadoop', 'Hdfs', 'Hadoop Training']
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Title Fundamentals MapReduce MapReduce ExampleContent MapReduce Tutorial Edureka MapReduce Tutorial blog going introduce MapReduce one core building block processing Hadoop framework moving ahead would suggest get familiar HDFS concept covered previous HDFS tutorial blog help understand MapReduce concept quickly easily Google released paper MapReduce technology December 2004 became genesis Hadoop Processing Model MapReduce programming model allows u perform parallel distributed processing huge datasets topic covered MapReduce tutorial blog follows Traditional Way parallel distributed processing MapReduce MapReduce Example MapReduce Advantages MapReduce Program MapReduce Program Explained Traditional Way Traditional Way MapReduce Tutorial Let u understand MapReduce framework parallel distributed processing used happen traditional way let u take example weather log containing daily average temperature year 2000 2015 want calculate day highest temperature year like traditional way split data smaller part block store different machine find highest temperature part stored corresponding machine last combine result received machine final output Let u look challenge associated traditional approach Critical path problem amount time taken finish job without delaying next milestone actual completion date machine delay job whole work get delayed Reliability problem machine working part data fails management failover becomes challenge Equal split issue divide data smaller chunk machine get even part data work word equally divide data individual machine overloaded underutilized Single split may fail machine fail provide output able calculate result mechanism ensure fault tolerance capability system Aggregation result mechanism aggregate result generated machine produce final output issue take care individually performing parallel processing huge datasets using traditional approach overcome issue MapReduce framework allows u perform parallel computation without bothering issue like reliability fault tolerance etc Therefore MapReduce give flexibility write code logic without caring design issue system MapReduce MapReduce MapReduce Tutorial MapReduce programming framework allows u perform distributed parallel processing large data set distributed environment MapReduce consists two distinct task — Map Reduce name MapReduce suggests reducer phase take place mapper phase completed first map job block data read processed produce keyvalue pair intermediate output output Mapper map job keyvalue pair input Reducer reducer receives keyvalue pair multiple map job reducer aggregate intermediate data tuples intermediate keyvalue pair smaller set tuples keyvalue pair final output Word Count Example MapReduce Let u understand MapReduce work taking example text file called exampletxt whose content follows Dear Bear River Car Car River Deer Car Bear suppose perform word count sampletxt using MapReduce finding unique word number occurrence unique word MapReduce Example MapReduce Tutorial First divide input three split shown figure distribute work among map node tokenize word mapper give hardcoded value 1 token word rationale behind giving hardcoded value equal 1 every word occur list keyvalue pair created key nothing individual word value one first line Dear Bear River 3 keyvalue pair — Dear 1 Bear 1 River 1 mapping process remains node mapper phase partition process take place sorting shuffling happen tuples key sent corresponding reducer sorting shuffling phase reducer unique key list value corresponding key example Bear 11 Car 111 etc Reducer count value present list value shown figure reducer get list value 11 key Bear count number one list give final output — Bear 2 Finally output keyvalue pair collected written output file Advantages MapReduce two biggest advantage MapReduce 1 Parallel Processing MapReduce dividing job among multiple node node work part job simultaneously MapReduce based Divide Conquer paradigm help u process data using different machine data processed multiple machine instead single machine parallel time taken process data get reduced tremendous amount shown figure 2 Traditional Way Vs MapReduce Way MapReduce Tutorial 2 Data Locality Instead moving data processing unit moving processing unit data MapReduce Framework traditional system used bring data processing unit process data grew became huge bringing huge amount data processing unit posed following issue Moving huge data processing costly deteriorates network performance Processing take time data processed single unit becomes bottleneck Master node get overburdened may fail MapReduce allows u overcome issue bringing processing unit data see image data distributed among multiple node node process part data residing allows u following advantage cost effective move processing unit data processing time reduced node working part data parallel Every node get part data process therefore chance node getting overburdened MapReduce Example Program jumping detail let u glance MapReduce example program basic idea thing work MapReduce environment practically taken word count example find number occurrence word Don’t worry guy don’t understand code look first time bear walk part MapReduce code Source code package coedurekamapreduce import javaioIOException import javautilStringTokenizer import orgapachehadoopioIntWritable import orgapachehadoopioLongWritable import orgapachehadoopioText import orgapachehadoopmapreduceMapper import orgapachehadoopmapreduceReducer import orgapachehadoopconfConfiguration import orgapachehadoopmapreduceJob import orgapachehadoopmapreducelibinputTextInputFormat import orgapachehadoopmapreduceliboutputTextOutputFormat import orgapachehadoopmapreducelibinputFileInputFormat import orgapachehadoopmapreduceliboutputFileOutputFormat import orgapachehadoopfsPath public class WordCount public static class Map extends MapperLongWritableTextTextIntWritable public void mapLongWritable key Text valueContext context throw IOExceptionInterruptedException String line valuetoString StringTokenizer tokenizer new StringTokenizerline tokenizerhasMoreTokens valuesettokenizernextToken contextwritevalue new IntWritable1 public static class Reduce extends ReducerTextIntWritableTextIntWritable public void reduceText key IterableIntWritable valuesContext context throw IOExceptionInterruptedException int sum0 forIntWritable x value sumxget contextwritekey new IntWritablesum public static void mainString args throw Exception Configuration conf new Configuration Job job new JobconfMy Word Count Program jobsetJarByClassWordCountclass jobsetMapperClassMapclass jobsetReducerClassReduceclass jobsetOutputKeyClassTextclass jobsetOutputValueClassIntWritableclass jobsetInputFormatClassTextInputFormatclass jobsetOutputFormatClassTextOutputFormatclass Path outputPath new Pathargs1 Configuring inputoutput path filesystem job FileInputFormataddInputPathjob new Pathargs0 FileOutputFormatsetOutputPathjob new Pathargs1 deleting output path automatically hdfs dont delete explicitly outputPathgetFileSystemconfdeleteoutputPath exiting job flag value becomes false SystemexitjobwaitForCompletiontrue 0 1 Explanation MapReduce Program entire MapReduce program fundamentally divided three part Mapper Phase Code Reducer Phase Code Driver Code understand code three part sequentially Mapper code public static class Map extends MapperLongWritableTextTextIntWritable public void mapLongWritable key Text value Context context throw IOExceptionInterruptedException String line valuetoString StringTokenizer tokenizer new StringTokenizerline tokenizerhasMoreTokens valuesettokenizernextToken contextwritevalue new IntWritable1 created class Map extends class Mapper already defined MapReduce Framework define data type input output keyvalue pair class declaration using angle bracket input output Mapper keyvalue pair Input key nothing offset line text file LongWritable value individual line shown figure right Text Output key tokenized word Text hardcoded value case 1 IntWritable Example — Dear 1 Bear 1 etc written java code tokenized word assigned hardcoded value equal 1 Reducer Code public static class Reduce extends ReducerTextIntWritableTextIntWritable public void reduceText key IterableIntWritable valuesContext context throw IOExceptionInterruptedException int sum0 forIntWritable x value sumxget contextwritekey new IntWritablesum created class Reduce extends class Reducer like Mapper define data type input output keyvalue pair class declaration using angle bracket done Mapper input output Reducer keyvalue pair Input key nothing unique word generated sorting shuffling phase Text value list integer corresponding key IntWritable Example — Bear 1 1 etc Output key unique word present input text file Text value number occurrence unique word IntWritable Example — Bear 2 Car 3 etc aggregated value present list corresponding key produced final answer general single reducer created unique word specify number reducer mapredsitexml Driver Code Configuration conf new Configuration Job job new JobconfMy Word Count Program jobsetJarByClassWordCountclass jobsetMapperClassMapclass jobsetReducerClassReduceclass jobsetOutputKeyClassTextclass jobsetOutputValueClassIntWritableclass jobsetInputFormatClassTextInputFormatclass jobsetOutputFormatClassTextOutputFormatclass Path outputPath new Pathargs1 Configuring inputoutput path filesystem job FileInputFormataddInputPathjob new Pathargs0 FileOutputFormatsetOutputPathjob new Pathargs1 driver class set configuration MapReduce job run Hadoop specify name job data type inputoutput mapper reducer also specify name mapper reducer class path input output folder also specified method setInputFormatClass used specifying Mapper read input data unit work chosen TextInputFormat single line read mapper time input text file main method entry point driver method instantiate new Configuration object job Run MapReduce code command running MapReduce code hadoop jar hadoopmapreduceexamplejar WordCount sampleinput sampleoutput guy basic understanding MapReduce framework would realized MapReduce framework facilitates u write code process huge data present HDFS wish check article market’s trending technology like Artificial Intelligence Python Ethical Hacking refer Edureka’s official site look article series explain various aspect Big dataTags Big Data Mapreduce Hadoop Hdfs Hadoop Training
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4,618 |
Deus Absconditus et Otiosa — Atheism, Modernism, Mormonism
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“People readily swallow the untested claims of this, that, or the other. It’s drowning all your old rationalism and scepticism, it’s coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition. It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense and can’t see things as they are. Anything that anybody talks about, and says there’s a good deal in it, extends itself indefinitely like a vista in a nightmare. And a dog is an omen, and a cat is a mystery, and a pig is a mascot, and a beetle is a scarab, calling up all the menagerie of polytheism from Egypt and old India; Dog Anubis and great green-eyed Pasht and all the holy howling Bulls of Bashan; reeling back to the bestial gods of the beginning, escaping into elephants and snakes and crocodiles; and all because you are frightened of four words: He was made Man.” — G. K. Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown Stories (Wordsworth Editions, 2006), 394–395
Before proceeding, it is most important to define one’s terms: in this case, modernism and atheism.
In The True Life, Alain Badiou describes modernity’s dramatic evaporation of the social structures which gave order to the life of the West. The two respective events, according to Badiou, which transitioned boys to men and girls to women were military conscription for males and marriage and childbearing for women. This system held for centuries, if not longer, with obvious strains and flaws: for instance, a woman who had a child out of wedlock had no place in the symbolic order of her society and was thus either exiled, abused, or otherwise disregarded. Conscientious objectors may be something of an equivalent among men. The fact that these individuals were seen as anomalies or threats to the stability of society only serves to emphasize how strongly these institutions were rooted in the cultural soil of the West.
These structures have, by and large, since evaporated, with strange results, according to Badiou. The military and marriage were tantamount to initiation or coming-of-age rituals, signaling to not only society at large but to the participating individual that the latter had transitioned from childhood to adulthood and should thus be treated as such. Thus with the dissolution of these structures comes an odd dissolution of any concrete moment in which a boy may become a man or a girl may become a woman in secular society. Considering this neither a negative nor a positive, Badiou only observes that with the blurring of a previously defined society comes the contemporary sense of being adrift — modernism’s lack of identity, belonging, or purpose. According to Badiou, males are no longer required to enter the military, meaning there is no moment in which they are granted the status of manhood by their culture, leading to a kind of Lost Boys-like perpetual youth; likewise, for females, with the rise of sexual liberation and the decline in frequency of traditional monogamy, girls are seen as always already women, always conferred womanhood and thus never experiencing childhood. Even if one denies Badiou’s division of results among males and females, one cannot deny the modernist experience: the structures of traditional pre-modern societies have mostly collapsed, to the point that they are largely no longer viewed as mandatory, opening up a space of freedom. But not only freedom, but a freedom so absolute that it leads to a kind of existential vertigo. “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” writes Søren Kierkegaard; in more modern terms, you can be absolutely anything, and thus all options are equally relevant or desirable, and thus, paralyzed by options and unable to choose, you become nothing really.
Friedrich Nietzsche described a similar phenomenon in The Gay Science, wherein a madman rushes into the city and cries out:
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” — Section 125, trans. Walter Kaufmann
The crowd laughs at the fool, until he runs into a church to pray; afterward, the crowd continues their business. Often the most focus is given to the madman who cries “God is dead,” yet little attention is given to his additional point that “we [ourselves] have killed him,” and almost no attention is paid to his conclusion that “we ourselves [must] become gods simply to appear worthy of it.” The point is not simply that traditional religion or theism has mostly died out and that some people simply cannot accept its end, but that the symbolic order which rendered the cosmos itself intelligible and thus manageable for believers has collapsed. Moderns, according to Nietzsche, have generally responded to this collapse in one of two ways: the first is that of the madman, hopeless nostalgic who can only weep at the grave of God; the second, however, is that of the crowd, who meander through the streets with no destination or purpose.
This is Nietzsche’s atheism, properly defined. Rather than to simply say “there is no God,” as if such a phrase were at all self-explanatory, atheism is pure negation — a-theism, the negation or rejection of theism, or normative religion. Atheism need not foreclose on the mythological, or even the supernatural per se, but is instead a negation of the traditional religions that have structured Western societies for the past millennium or more. This is what Nietzsche means when he insists that the world has slipped into nihilism: not that the world has simply sloughed off old superstitions, but that it has broken out of its previous pre-defined patterns of thought and behavior into a dizzying openness; and in that open void, there is no alternative structure waiting to replace the former failed system. Because atheism is simply negation, it has no positive descriptors to add; subtracting theism, it does not then become a religion of its own, but the mere absence thereof. This absence thus begs the question: what, if anything, may come after the death of God?
Modernism and atheism, far from tragedy or triumph, are purely neutral events — perhaps much like the passage from childhood to adulthood — yet that is not to say that they mean nothing. Rather, together, they are the guardians at the gate who open for twenty-first century societies and individuals a world of inexhaustible inexplicability and absolute freedom — which may be two ways of saying the same thing.
Mormonism, too, has not escaped this seismic transition. According to Jana Riess’ The Next Mormons, though the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or LDS Church) has maintained a relatively higher retention rate among its youth relative to other American denominations, youths (gen-X, millennials, gen-Z) are still disaffiliating from the LDS Church at a progressively increasing rate. Opinions also continue to shift from older to younger generations within Mormon culture concerning sex, gender, and sexuality; reliance upon organized religion, authority figures, and hierarchy; certainty concerning doctrines and traditional practices — among other things.
Furthermore, similar shifts into this realm of inexplicability and freedom punctuate Mormon history. After the assassination of Joseph Smith, Mormonism’s founder, Mormonism as a whole threatened to disintegrate as Smith’s followers broke into a number of factions in the greatest succession crisis the Mormon movement has since experienced. Contrary to the views of devout members of any Mormon denomination, and though most surviving Mormons followed Brigham Young to Utah (in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), the initial succession crisis which led to this fragmentation was not simply brought on by the opportunism or narcissism of a few of Smith’s surviving contemporaries. Smith’s sudden murder — foreseen (if at all) by only perhaps a few days, maybe weeks — left no opportunity for him to put into place a definite apparatus to determine who would succeed him. The event of Smith’s death led the Mormons into an undefined space, from which they emerged with a number of contradictory arrangements. This same experience has reoccurred within various Mormon denominations, such as when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ceased plural marriage, when the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now Community of Christ) transitioned to leaders not directly descended from the Smith family, or when the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints witnessed Warren Jeffs’ arrest and imprisonment. Each moment was the dissolution of a previous organizing principle, leading to an open space of possibility, from which emerged not simply one triumphant progression but numerous varying developments.
The least controversial statement one could make about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon denomination with which I identify) is that the majority of its American members err on the side of a general conservatism — politically, socially, economically, etc. Though this is by no means universal among American Mormons, and of course says nothing of the non-American majority of Latter-day Saints, this datum may nonetheless indicate how many modern Mormons have responded to the advent of modernism and atheism: opting for the role of the madman weeping at God’s grave rather than that of the aimless drifters in the streets. Among Latter-day Saints of this persuasion, much of the non-Mormon world and even Mormon culture (especially the elements which contradict or conflict with traditional Mormonism) are usually experienced as the “wickedness of the world” and the “influence of the Adversary” — a broadly conservative perspective with obvious theological effects. However, given that this general conservatism is more of a persona — or even a caricature — of the genuine diversity of Latter-day Saints, within and beyond the LDS Church, one wonders if Mormon culture might have other options in considering how to respond to the questions of modernism and atheism. More pointedly, what would come of Latter-day Saints leaning into this inexplicability and freedom rather than resisting it? What may come of a plural marriage of atheism, modernism, and Mormonism?
One may begin by stating that all human discourse and understanding is ultimately bound by perspective: one experiences nothing that is not mediated through their own nervous system, complied and interpreted by their own brain — experience is most fundamentally subjective. With this in mind, anything one may say, even theologically, will run the risk of being a superficial reification of their own internal lives, a projection of their psychological state onto the universe. For this reason, perhaps one may attempt to reverse the causal flow; rather than speaking theologically about the universe, one may attempt to speak theologically about oneself and their own subjective experience. In this sense, to speak theologically, even in a particularly Mormon context, would be to describe back to oneself and others their present modernist, atheist experience — the experience of feeling the structures which once provided them with order, identity, purpose, and belonging whittle away against the flint wheel of impermanent reality. What is it like to be a Mormon who is, whether they may realize it, already a modernist and an atheist?
In The Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel describes this subjectivity, positing that “everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject” (trans. A. V. Miller). For Hegel, subjective experience — one’s conscious experience as an individual person — was central and paramount to his philosophy. However, nearly since its publication in 1807, Hegel’s Phenomenology has been — according to some of his latest interpreters — woefully misread.
To understand this misreading, one must turn to Immanuel Kant. Kant’s contribution to Western philosophy was his distinction between a “thing-as-appearance” and a “thing-in-itself”; in other words, Kant described the human subject’s inherent inability to grasp reality in itself, and therefore their reliance upon the limited representations their mind can produce of this or that narrow selection of reality. Ultimately, Kant’s distinction between these two categories is a distinction between two forms of knowing: to believe one possesses the “thing-in-itself” is to deceive oneself into believing one has perceived objective reality, that one’s knowledge is certain and unquestionable; and to understand that one possesses only a “thing-as-appearance,” or a diluted representation of the thing itself, is to recognize the limitations of one’s perceptions, and to scrutinize one’s understanding. The former naively assumes they simply see the world “as it is,” while the latter recognizes that they see the world only “as they are,” mediated by the narrow filter of their senses and mental faculties.
Arthur Schopenhauer, a passionate student of Kant, articulated this view further in The World as Will and Representation. Schopenhauer recognized that the human nervous system can only absorb so much sensory data from the world around it, which the brain then compiles into a working simulation (a virtual reality, if you will) in which the subject lives, moves, and has their very being, so to speak. In other words, Schopenhauer recognized some of the consequences of the fact that the human subject only experiences the “thing-as-appearance” (Vorstellung), never truly accessing the “thing-in-itself” (Wille). He was also a sharp critic of Hegel, the former believing the latter had either misunderstood or outright rejected Kant, describing Hegel’s work as a “pseudo-philosophy” audaciously attempting “to comprehend the history of the world as a planned whole” (Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, trans. E. F. J. Payne [Dover, 1966], 442). According to Schopenhauer, in describing “grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject,” Hegel was subscribing to the very epistemological certainty — the naïve belief in access to the “thing-in-itself” — which Kant had critiqued. Worse yet, he claimed, Hegel had made not only an epistemological statement, but an ontological one: the human subject could perceive any and all things, even things not directly present, as in the pre-Kantian metaphysics of Reason, which could deduce the mysteries of the universe from a contemplative distance alone. And thus for the following two centuries, most commentators read a kind of “amputated” Hegel, to use Todd McGowan’s term: attempting to rescue Hegel from his own apparently embarrassing ontology, numerous commentators reduced him to a philosopher of epistemology or anthropology merely. For nearly 200 years Hegel has been read as a commentator on subjectivity alone, his statements on Being itself having been subtracted.
However, as recently as 1989, with the English publication of The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Zizek has begun a bold re-reading of Hegel — or, perhaps more accurately, a more faithful interpretation of Hegel’s original intent. According to Zizek, Hegel’s equivocation of subjectivity and substance is not a rejection of Kant, but a faithful tracing out of the consequences of Kant’s work. As Kant and Schopenhauer proposed, and as Zizek insists Hegel believed, one never experiences reality-in-itself, only narrow representations thereof; like Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, the subject, a field of consciousness, is a polished surface reflecting back (in warped fashion) its immediate surroundings. In Hegel, subjectivity is experienced as a kind of contradiction between oneself and the external world. Similar to Schopenhauer, Hegel recognizes that the human mind can only represent a narrow portion of its external world back to itself and others. One may compare this limited subjectivity or consciousness to cartography: one explores a given terrain, then distills that experience into a map. The map and the terrain are not the same, and sometimes they can even contradict one another. In this sense, a conscious subject in the world is like a map of the United States hanging on a wall somewhere in the United States. And because consciousness and reality, like a map and its terrain, can be disjointed and out of sync with one another, subjectivity possesses an inherent division or internal fracture — a contradiction. Hegel’s contribution, according to Zizek, was thus not to reject Kant’s epistemology, but to tease out its consequences: if a subject or being arises from and is a part of Being, and if this subject experiences this inherent contradiction within themselves, then something about Being itself must also possess this internal contradiction. What Hegel rejects is not Kantian epistemology but Cartesian dualism, which insists that the human mind is a foreign object in the world. Rather, Hegel proposes, the subject grows out of the world — a being from Being — like a wave from the sea, not inventing this divisive contradiction in its own subjectivity, but bringing with it the division which always already pervades Being itself all the way down. Reality at its most fundamental is fragmented, a contradiction reeling against itself as it continually unfolds into countless different beings and things.
One may read this Hegelian division theologically, as well. In Godhead and the Nothing, Thomas J.J. Altizer proposes that this is in fact the central message of the Christian epic: at the beginning of time, Being — or Godhead, as opposed to God, to use Altizer’s terms — rips itself to pieces in a “primordial sacrifice,” dividing itself in a way which creates not only good but evil, life and death, contentment and horror. Between all things, Altizer states, is an infinite abyss or nihil, the Nothing of Godhead itself, which separates all things: people from themselves, one another, the world — everything. Uniquely, this division is also transposed into God, who also becomes a fragment of the larger Godhead constantly tearing itself to pieces in creation. This primordial sacrifice, eternally ongoing, is recapitulated in various ways by human beings, notably in rituals of division and sacrifice, sometimes even involving the shedding of blood; and ultimately in their own deaths, when they themselves are “ripped to pieces” and cast to the four winds of the world which survives them. In a sense, this is a quasi-Gnostic interpretation of the human condition: while normative Judaism, Christianity, and Islam see Creation and Fall as two distinct events occurring in succession, Gnostic variants of these traditions often describe Creation and Fall as the same event. To be created is to always already be fallen, as, in order to create, Godhead must divide itself from itself.
In the closing chapter of The Puppet and the Dwarf, Zizek describes how deeply this primordial sacrifice or Hegelian contradiction goes by analyzing the narrative of Job, specifically the theological friends who come to “console” him. According to Zizek, Job’s friends represent the typical human response to this fundamental division in themselves and Being itself, and the violence and ignorance (such as their blindness to Job’s profound suffering) which result therefrom. To cope with the chaos of Being, humans construct ideologies through which to interpret the unintelligibility of life: in Job’s case, his friends approach with tightly-defined theological explanations for precisely why he is suffering, and even what he can do to change that; but when Job rejects their explanations, ostensibly “threatening” their existential security, the friends recoil and become enemies, turning on Job. According to Job’s friends, they have simply sought to make sense of the world; in reality, they have sought to explain away the world.
In the end, after Job’s steadfast rejection of his friends’ attempts to explain his suffering by fitting him neatly into their various ideologies, God descends and rejects the explanations offered by Job’s friends, instead endorsing Job himself (cf. Job 42:7). Curiously, however, Job has offered no explanation of his suffering which might compete with the explanations offered by his friends — he has simply rejected any attempt to integrate his experience into their fantasies, ideological or otherwise. However, for Zizek, the question which follows is not so much “how do we cut through fantasy to reality?” but “how does reality produce fantasy at all?”
Following Zizek’s example, one may utilize the three-part psychological structure pioneered by Jacques Lacan of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real. Imagine a universe entirely devoid of conscious beings, no one to analyze or evaluate any of its contents — this is the Real. Now plant one conscious human on a desert island in the middle of nowhere, entirely alone, and grant them the discursive thinking natural to a conscious person. They can sense external reality, represent it back to themselves (perception, memory), and respond to those representations (plans) — this is the Imaginary. Add two or three more humans, or a thousand, and together they leverage the Imaginary to create a society and culture with social norms and a status quo, so much so that these collective imaginative structures seem almost as if to take on a life of their own — this is the Symbolic. The Real precedes consciousness and its contents, while the Imaginary is a necessary and involuntary byproduct of consciousness, but the Symbolic is the active principle of consciousness, its attempt to not only perceive but alter its environment — including other conscious subjects who may enter its field of awareness.
In a manner of speaking, while the Real and Imaginary are in themselves natural, the Symbolic is a kind of recoil in response to them, an attempt to beat them back, as it were. The Symbolic is a collective attempt at holding back the trauma of the Real and the Imaginary, whether tragic circumstances or unwanted thoughts and feelings. The Symbolic is the realm of ideology — political, religious, or otherwise — a series of potentially utilitarian fantasies operating by and large unconsciously within the subjects themselves. While the Symbolic is objectively an emergent principle of the Real, the subject typically experiences things the other way around: they believe the Symbolic is an organizing principle around which the Real arranges itself, rather than something the Real itself has produced.
Taking many forms — God, State, Father, Mother; the Big Other guaranteeing meaning and intelligibility — the Symbolic is that element which has largely broken down for the West in the advent of modernity. More precisely, the Symbolic has fractured: once a mostly universal means of structuring one’s experience of the Real, the Symbolic has formed fault lines, delineating nearly irreducible competing factions. These competing factions can be cultural, political, philosophical — any interpretive system, or ideology (to retain Zizek’s term), which creates meaning, order, and manageability in one’s subjective experience. Ideology, unconscious fantasy, is the levee one erects to hold back the traumatic floodwaters of the Real — reality as such. The Symbolic is the theology of Job’s friends, who cannot see the suffering Job for the fact that they are too busy “explaining” him — and one can see myriad correlates throughout the history of Western theism and the institutions of normative religion. Or, to return to Badiou’s examples, one may consider the previously unquestioned and unquestionable customs of military conscription, monogamy, and childbearing, once unconditionally expected of Western society generally. These ideologies are the “God” whose death the madman announces in a panic and which the crowd awkwardly shrugs off. The dreadful point is that the crowd forgets that the Symbolic serves a purpose, while the madman naively presumes the Symbolic is contingent upon something which precedes it — both refuse to face the Real.
For Altizer and Zizek, this tension is illustrated in Jesus Christ, particularly his destitute cry from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34, New Revised Standard Version). In this climax of the crucifixion, God withdrawing from Jesus, one may see modernity itself: the absence of a Big Other to guarantee meaning in one’s suffering, let alone their existence, leaving them in what Zizek calls “the desert of the Real.”
G.K. Chesterton describes this event well:
“When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.” — G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Ignatius, 1995), 145
According to Altizer and Zizek, in proper Hegelian fashion, Christianity extends the contradiction within the subject to God, wherein God becomes alienated from God as any other subject alienated from themselves. In The Monstrosity of Christ, Zizek explains:
“[I]n Freudian-Lacanian terms: Christ is God’s ‘partial object,’ an autonomized organ without a body, as if God picked his eye out of his head and turned it on himself from the outside. We can guess, now, why Hegel insisted on the monstrosity of Christ. “It is therefore crucial to note how the Christian modality of ‘God seeing himself’ has nothing whatsoever to do with the harmonious closed loop of ‘seeing myself seeing,’ of an eye seeing itself and enjoying the sight in this perfect self-mirroring: the turn of the eye toward ‘its’ body presupposes the separation of the eye from the body, and what I see through my externalized/autonomized eye is a perspectival, anamorphically distorted image of myself: Christ is an anamorphosis of God.” — Zizek, Monstrosity of Christ, 82
In this divine absence, or self-division, bereft of a Big Other to guarantee a meaning to his experience (which would ultimately only dissociate him from it), Jesus enters the space of absolute freedom and chooses to lean into the inconvenient and fatal Real. With no Symbolic order gazing over his shoulder, insisting upon or even compelling him to do anything in particular, Jesus may produce an action that is entirely authentically his own — he may receive reality as it is, even in its “antagonism,” and choose for himself how to respond.
Elsewhere in The Monstrosity of Christ, Zizek articulates the ramifications of the crucifixion of Jesus:
“[W]hen people imagine all kinds of deeper meanings [to their experiences] … what really frightens them is that they will lose the transcendent God guaranteeing the meaning of the universe, God as the hidden Master pulling the strings — instead of this, we get a God who abandons this transcendent position and throws himself into his own creation, fully engaging himself in it up to dying, so that we, humans, are left with no higher Power watching over us, just with the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility for the fate of divine creation, and thus of God himself. Are we not still too frightened today to assume all these consequences of the four words [of Chesterton, ‘He was made Man’]? Do those who call themselves ‘Christians’ not prefer to stay with the comfortable image of God sitting up there, benevolently watching over our lives, sending us his son as a token of his love, or, even more comfortably, just with some depersonalized Higher Force? … “Hegel’s underlying premise is that what dies on the Cross is not only God’s earthly representative-incarnation, but the God of beyond itself … “That is to say: what dies on the Cross is precisely the ‘private’ God, the God of our ‘way of life,’ the God who grounds a particular community.” — Zizek, Monstrosity, 25, 29, 295
In a literary vein, this interpretation of the crucifixion of Jesus — of God the Symbolic — may be most clearly seen in Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ, namely the novel’s portrayal of the execution of Jesus. Having spent his prophetic career in a wrestle between his own desires and the call of God, Jesus wishes for nothing more than domestication, to settle down with a woman and raise a family. Upon the cross, he passes out, dreaming that an angel of God has come down, helping him off the cross, telling him that God has seen his devotion and decided not to force Jesus to go through with crucifixion after all. The angel takes Jesus to Mary, the sister of Lazarus, whom he marries and with whom he fathers children; he even marries her sister Martha, expanding their family. Jesus receives everything he ever wanted. However, after a charged encounter with Paul, who preaches a Messiah who was killed for his and all others’ sake, Jesus realizes he has not had his desires fulfilled at all, but that he is only in a dream, and thus still upon the cross, unconscious. Jesus then chooses of his own volition to wake up, to return to consciousness while hanging from the cross, where he cries out in relief — where he surrenders himself to the Real — “into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46, NRSV) — a moment Kazantzakis describes in the closing passage of The Last Temptation:
“Jesus rotated his eyes with anguish, and looked. He was alone. The yard and house, the trees, the village doors, the village itself [where he lived with a family in his dream]— all had disappeared. Nothing remained but stones beneath his feet, stones covered with blood; and lower, farther away, a crowd: thousands of heads in the darkness. “He tried with all his might to discover where he was, who he was and why he felt pain. He wanted to complete his cry, to shout LAMA SABACTHANI. . . . He attempted to move his lips but could not. He grew dizzy and was ready to faint. He seemed to be hurling downward and perishing. “But suddenly, while he was falling and perishing, someone down on the ground must have pitied him, for a reed was held out in front of him, and he felt a sponge soaked in vinegar rest against his lips and nostrils. He breathed in deeply the bitter smell, revived, swelled his breast, looked at the heavens and uttered a heart-rending cry: LAMA SABACTHANI! “Then he immediately inclined his head, exhausted. “He felt terrible pains in his hands, feet and heart. His sight cleared, he saw the crown of thorns, the blood, the cross. Two golden earrings and two rows of sharp, brilliantly white teeth flashed in the darkened sun. He heard a cool, mocking laugh, and rings and teeth vanished. Jesus remained hanging in the air, alone. “His head quivered. Suddenly he remembered where he was, who he was and why he felt pain. A wild, indomitable joy took possession of him. No, no, he was not a coward, a deserter, a traitor. No, he was nailed to the cross. He had stood his ground honorably to the very end; he had kept his word. The moment he cried ELI ELI and fainted, Temptation had captured him for a split second and led him astray. The joys, marriages and children were lies; the decrepit, degraded old men who shouted coward, deserter, traitor at him were lies. All — all were illusions sent by the Devil. His disciples were alive and thriving. They had gone over sea and land and were proclaiming the Good News. Everything had turned out as it should, glory be to God! “He uttered a triumphant cry: IT IS ACCOMPLISHED! “And it was as though he had said: Everything has begun.”
Interpreting Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of Kazantzakis’ novel, Zizek focuses on Jesus’ cry of abandonment to the Big Other who has failed to make sense of his outstanding failure and horrific execution. According to Lacan, God is the Big Other of the Hebrew Bible, the great che vuoi? or “what do you want?” making traumatic yet gripping demands of the people. In Jesus’ destitution, however, he realizes that this Big Other is not the ground of Being but an emergent property of Being, arising from his own mind; not an externality which he asks che vuoi? but something internal to himself. And thus he returns to the Real. In either case, novel or film, one finds not necessarily the historical Jesus upon the cross, but certainly the literary Jesus of Gethsemane who prays “not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke 22:42, King James Version; cf. Matthew 26:39, Mark 14:36, John 6:38) — a Jesus who surrenders himself willingly to that which exceeds his control, that which is most real.
This mytheme of the self-sacrificing Jesus parallels Hegel’s own notion of reconciliation. Summarizing Zizek’s own reading of Hegel, Todd McGowan expresses this messianic-Hegelian reconciliation well:
“Hegel doesn’t stop with uncovering contradiction in being that corresponds to contradiction in thought. Instead, he contends that the contradiction in being is even more intractable than the contradiction in thought. Most philosophers view knowledge as a movement from thought to being: thought aspires to the knowledge of being. But Hegel reverses this relationship. Thought has a higher status than being and thus can tell us about the nature of being. Though being has a chronological priority — obviously being is a necessary condition for the emergence of thought — thought has a logical priority because it has a capacity for enduring and reconciling itself with contradiction that being lacks. Being simply succumbs to contradiction without gaining any purchase on it. “Reconciliation is the great achievement of thought. Through the act of reconciliation, thought adopts a different relationship to contradiction than being does. It doesn’t overcome contradiction but grasps its necessity. As Zizek puts it in Less Than Nothing, ‘what Hegel calls “reconciliation” is, at its most basic, a reconciliation with the antagonism.’ [Pg. 951.] Even though antagonism or contradiction acts as a limit or obstacle to thought, thought nonetheless has the ability to grasp this limit as what defines it rather than as what it must surmount in order to realize itself. Spirit is, for Hegel, thought’s capacity to recognize contradiction not simply as an obstacle to overcome but as i[t]s own innermost condition of possibility. Reconciliation marks a triumph through the embrace of the necessity of failure.” — McGowan, “The Insubstantiality of Substance, Or, Why We Should Read Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature,” International Journal of Žižek Studies 8:1 (2014), 13
Finally, with this Hegelian background fully formed, one may propose a radical reinterpretation of Mormonism itself, utilizing the narrative structure of the temple rituals practiced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — the initiatory and the endowment:
In the temple, one begins in the time of “pre-existence,” time before time, where they are given a unique name they are not to share with any other — an identity so fundamentally their own that it cannot be expressed to another. In parallel to this antechamber to time, one may read the Mormon narrative of a war in heaven, a primordial fragmentation of the divine family, a war “before the foundation of the world” between not opposing principles but siblings, both children like any other of a God who can only watch as the cosmos begins to fray and fragment. This God, too, joins in the disintegration: in Mormonism, God is a person, composed of “flesh and bones as tangible as” anyone’s (D&C 130:22); God knows the “pains and sicknesses” of finitude on a visceral, physical level, intellectually and experientially (Alma 7:11–13); God is not exempt from the suffering of existence, nor is God aloof from the human condition —even God can weep (Moses 7:48).
From this primeval time before time, one proceeds in the temple’s ritual narrative to the creation of the world, where they encounter a trinity substantially different than that of normative Christianity: rather than Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one encounters Elohim (a plural noun in Hebrew), Jehovah (Christ), and Michael or Adam (humanity). Rather than a tight priesthood hierarchy organized by genealogy, one may instead read these three figures in terms of set theory: the proper class Elohim or the Real — the plurality of Godhead or nature tearing itself to pieces — from which emerge, among numerous other sets, Michael the human Imaginary and Jehovah the human Symbolic. Thereafter, Michael-as-Adam is cut off from Elohim and Jehovah in forgetfulness; he is cut off from himself in the division of male and female through sleep; they are cut off from the immortality of changelessness through eating the fruits of finitude and becoming mortal and bearing children distinct from themselves. Ultimately, they find themselves in the “lone and dreary world” of the human condition — the world of Hegelian contradiction all the way down, subject and substance.
Then begins the process of reconciliation, returning to the Elohim from which Adam has become inherently alienated. This is signified through ritual acts such as perfectly unified prayer with others, against whom one must hold no resentment; and an embrace with the Lord through the very veil which separates the Real from even itself — the dividing contradiction running all the way down; Altizer’s nihil ensuring the gaps between beings and things, Zizek’s less than nothing in excess of something and nothing — all while Adam carries the name they received before time began, the name uniquely their own and no other’s.
Additional rituals are then performed: the previously performed rituals, repeated this time in remembrance of the participant’s deceased family and loved ones — by name, with attendant birth and death dates, places of residence, all particular details to testify to this person’s irreducible individuality. Beyond this are sealings, wherein spouses, siblings, children and parents, friends and loved ones, ancestors and descendants, come together in eternal relationships — a Hegelian reconciliation which does not dissolve the differences of each person involved, but honors those differences, even in their “antagonism.”
Finally, every week, Latter-day Saints gather to renew these rituals through one central ceremony — sacrament — wherein bread is ripped to pieces, water is meted into thimble-sized cups, and each person eats and drinks in remembrance of both contradiction and reconciliation. And thus, in narrative and ritual, the fragmented universe holds itself together even in its division, a stained-glass cosmos of multicolor pieces, woven together by the wrought-iron less than nothing.
— — — — — — — — — —
Recommended Reading
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https://medium.com/interfaith-now/deus-absconditus-et-otiosa-atheism-modernism-mormonism-5b7a9565a3cf
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['Nathan Smith']
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2019-12-08 08:40:45.992000+00:00
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['Atheism', 'Christianity', 'Philosophy', 'Religion', 'Psychology']
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Title Deus Absconditus et Otiosa — Atheism Modernism MormonismContent “People readily swallow untested claim It’s drowning old rationalism scepticism it’s coming like sea name superstition It’s first effect believing God lose common sense can’t see thing Anything anybody talk say there’s good deal extends indefinitely like vista nightmare dog omen cat mystery pig mascot beetle scarab calling menagerie polytheism Egypt old India Dog Anubis great greeneyed Pasht holy howling Bulls Bashan reeling back bestial god beginning escaping elephant snake crocodile frightened four word made Man” — G K Chesterton Complete Father Brown Stories Wordsworth Editions 2006 394–395 proceeding important define one’s term case modernism atheism True Life Alain Badiou describes modernity’s dramatic evaporation social structure gave order life West two respective event according Badiou transitioned boy men girl woman military conscription male marriage childbearing woman system held century longer obvious strain flaw instance woman child wedlock place symbolic order society thus either exiled abused otherwise disregarded Conscientious objector may something equivalent among men fact individual seen anomaly threat stability society serf emphasize strongly institution rooted cultural soil West structure large since evaporated strange result according Badiou military marriage tantamount initiation comingofage ritual signaling society large participating individual latter transitioned childhood adulthood thus treated Thus dissolution structure come odd dissolution concrete moment boy may become man girl may become woman secular society Considering neither negative positive Badiou observes blurring previously defined society come contemporary sense adrift — modernism’s lack identity belonging purpose According Badiou male longer required enter military meaning moment granted status manhood culture leading kind Lost Boyslike perpetual youth likewise female rise sexual liberation decline frequency traditional monogamy girl seen always already woman always conferred womanhood thus never experiencing childhood Even one denies Badiou’s division result among male female one cannot deny modernist experience structure traditional premodern society mostly collapsed point largely longer viewed mandatory opening space freedom freedom freedom absolute lead kind existential vertigo “Anxiety dizziness freedom” writes Søren Kierkegaard modern term absolutely anything thus option equally relevant desirable thus paralyzed option unable choose become nothing really Friedrich Nietzsche described similar phenomenon Gay Science wherein madman rush city cry “God dead God remains dead killed shall comfort murderer murderer holiest mightiest world yet owned bled death knife wipe blood u water u clean festival atonement sacred game shall invent greatness deed great u Must become god simply appear worthy it” — Section 125 trans Walter Kaufmann crowd laugh fool run church pray afterward crowd continues business Often focus given madman cry “God dead” yet little attention given additional point “we killed him” almost attention paid conclusion “we must become god simply appear worthy it” point simply traditional religion theism mostly died people simply cannot accept end symbolic order rendered cosmos intelligible thus manageable believer collapsed Moderns according Nietzsche generally responded collapse one two way first madman hopeless nostalgic weep grave God second however crowd meander street destination purpose Nietzsche’s atheism properly defined Rather simply say “there God” phrase selfexplanatory atheism pure negation — atheism negation rejection theism normative religion Atheism need foreclose mythological even supernatural per se instead negation traditional religion structured Western society past millennium Nietzsche mean insists world slipped nihilism world simply sloughed old superstition broken previous predefined pattern thought behavior dizzying openness open void alternative structure waiting replace former failed system atheism simply negation positive descriptor add subtracting theism become religion mere absence thereof absence thus begs question anything may come death God Modernism atheism far tragedy triumph purely neutral event — perhaps much like passage childhood adulthood — yet say mean nothing Rather together guardian gate open twentyfirst century society individual world inexhaustible inexplicability absolute freedom — may two way saying thing Mormonism escaped seismic transition According Jana Riess’ Next Mormons though Church Jesus Christ Latterday Saints LDS Church maintained relatively higher retention rate among youth relative American denomination youth genX millennials genZ still disaffiliating LDS Church progressively increasing rate Opinions also continue shift older younger generation within Mormon culture concerning sex gender sexuality reliance upon organized religion authority figure hierarchy certainty concerning doctrine traditional practice — among thing Furthermore similar shift realm inexplicability freedom punctuate Mormon history assassination Joseph Smith Mormonism’s founder Mormonism whole threatened disintegrate Smith’s follower broke number faction greatest succession crisis Mormon movement since experienced Contrary view devout member Mormon denomination though surviving Mormons followed Brigham Young Utah Church Jesus Christ Latterday Saints initial succession crisis led fragmentation simply brought opportunism narcissism Smith’s surviving contemporary Smith’s sudden murder — foreseen perhaps day maybe week — left opportunity put place definite apparatus determine would succeed event Smith’s death led Mormons undefined space emerged number contradictory arrangement experience reoccurred within various Mormon denomination Church Jesus Christ Latterday Saints ceased plural marriage Reorganized Church Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints Community Christ transitioned leader directly descended Smith family Fundamentalist Church Jesus Christ LatterDay Saints witnessed Warren Jeffs’ arrest imprisonment moment dissolution previous organizing principle leading open space possibility emerged simply one triumphant progression numerous varying development least controversial statement one could make Church Jesus Christ Latterday Saints Mormon denomination identify majority American member err side general conservatism — politically socially economically etc Though mean universal among American Mormons course say nothing nonAmerican majority Latterday Saints datum may nonetheless indicate many modern Mormons responded advent modernism atheism opting role madman weeping God’s grave rather aimless drifter street Among Latterday Saints persuasion much nonMormon world even Mormon culture especially element contradict conflict traditional Mormonism usually experienced “wickedness world” “influence Adversary” — broadly conservative perspective obvious theological effect However given general conservatism persona — even caricature — genuine diversity Latterday Saints within beyond LDS Church one wonder Mormon culture might option considering respond question modernism atheism pointedly would come Latterday Saints leaning inexplicability freedom rather resisting may come plural marriage atheism modernism Mormonism One may begin stating human discourse understanding ultimately bound perspective one experience nothing mediated nervous system complied interpreted brain — experience fundamentally subjective mind anything one may say even theologically run risk superficial reification internal life projection psychological state onto universe reason perhaps one may attempt reverse causal flow rather speaking theologically universe one may attempt speak theologically oneself subjective experience sense speak theologically even particularly Mormon context would describe back oneself others present modernist atheist experience — experience feeling structure provided order identity purpose belonging whittle away flint wheel impermanent reality like Mormon whether may realize already modernist atheist Phenomenology Spirit GWF Hegel describes subjectivity positing “everything turn grasping expressing True Substance equally Subject” trans V Miller Hegel subjective experience — one’s conscious experience individual person — central paramount philosophy However nearly since publication 1807 Hegel’s Phenomenology — according latest interpreter — woefully misread understand misreading one must turn Immanuel Kant Kant’s contribution Western philosophy distinction “thingasappearance” “thinginitself” word Kant described human subject’s inherent inability grasp reality therefore reliance upon limited representation mind produce narrow selection reality Ultimately Kant’s distinction two category distinction two form knowing believe one posse “thinginitself” deceive oneself believing one perceived objective reality one’s knowledge certain unquestionable understand one posse “thingasappearance” diluted representation thing recognize limitation one’s perception scrutinize one’s understanding former naively assumes simply see world “as is” latter recognizes see world “as are” mediated narrow filter sens mental faculty Arthur Schopenhauer passionate student Kant articulated view World Representation Schopenhauer recognized human nervous system absorb much sensory data world around brain compiles working simulation virtual reality subject life move speak word Schopenhauer recognized consequence fact human subject experience “thingasappearance” Vorstellung never truly accessing “thinginitself” Wille also sharp critic Hegel former believing latter either misunderstood outright rejected Kant describing Hegel’s work “pseudophilosophy” audaciously attempting “to comprehend history world planned whole” Schopenhauer World Representation vol 2 trans E F J Payne Dover 1966 442 According Schopenhauer describing “grasping expressing True Substance equally Subject” Hegel subscribing epistemological certainty — naïve belief access “thinginitself” — Kant critiqued Worse yet claimed Hegel made epistemological statement ontological one human subject could perceive thing even thing directly present preKantian metaphysics Reason could deduce mystery universe contemplative distance alone thus following two century commentator read kind “amputated” Hegel use Todd McGowan’s term attempting rescue Hegel apparently embarrassing ontology numerous commentator reduced philosopher epistemology anthropology merely nearly 200 year Hegel read commentator subjectivity alone statement subtracted However recently 1989 English publication Sublime Object Ideology Slavoj Zizek begun bold rereading Hegel — perhaps accurately faithful interpretation Hegel’s original intent According Zizek Hegel’s equivocation subjectivity substance rejection Kant faithful tracing consequence Kant’s work Kant Schopenhauer proposed Zizek insists Hegel believed one never experience realityinitself narrow representation thereof like Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate subject field consciousness polished surface reflecting back warped fashion immediate surroundings Hegel subjectivity experienced kind contradiction oneself external world Similar Schopenhauer Hegel recognizes human mind represent narrow portion external world back others One may compare limited subjectivity consciousness cartography one explores given terrain distills experience map map terrain sometimes even contradict one another sense conscious subject world like map United States hanging wall somewhere United States consciousness reality like map terrain disjointed sync one another subjectivity posse inherent division internal fracture — contradiction Hegel’s contribution according Zizek thus reject Kant’s epistemology tease consequence subject arises part subject experience inherent contradiction within something must also posse internal contradiction Hegel reject Kantian epistemology Cartesian dualism insists human mind foreign object world Rather Hegel proposes subject grows world — — like wave sea inventing divisive contradiction subjectivity bringing division always already pervades way Reality fundamental fragmented contradiction reeling continually unfolds countless different being thing One may read Hegelian division theologically well Godhead Nothing Thomas JJ Altizer proposes fact central message Christian epic beginning time — Godhead opposed God use Altizer’s term — rip piece “primordial sacrifice” dividing way creates good evil life death contentment horror thing Altizer state infinite abyss nihil Nothing Godhead separate thing people one another world — everything Uniquely division also transposed God also becomes fragment larger Godhead constantly tearing piece creation primordial sacrifice eternally ongoing recapitulated various way human being notably ritual division sacrifice sometimes even involving shedding blood ultimately death “ripped pieces” cast four wind world survives sense quasiGnostic interpretation human condition normative Judaism Christianity Islam see Creation Fall two distinct event occurring succession Gnostic variant tradition often describe Creation Fall event created always already fallen order create Godhead must divide closing chapter Puppet Dwarf Zizek describes deeply primordial sacrifice Hegelian contradiction go analyzing narrative Job specifically theological friend come “console” According Zizek Job’s friend represent typical human response fundamental division violence ignorance blindness Job’s profound suffering result therefrom cope chaos human construct ideology interpret unintelligibility life Job’s case friend approach tightlydefined theological explanation precisely suffering even change Job reject explanation ostensibly “threatening” existential security friend recoil become enemy turning Job According Job’s friend simply sought make sense world reality sought explain away world end Job’s steadfast rejection friends’ attempt explain suffering fitting neatly various ideology God descends reject explanation offered Job’s friend instead endorsing Job cf Job 427 Curiously however Job offered explanation suffering might compete explanation offered friend — simply rejected attempt integrate experience fantasy ideological otherwise However Zizek question follows much “how cut fantasy reality” “how reality produce fantasy all” Following Zizek’s example one may utilize threepart psychological structure pioneered Jacques Lacan Symbolic Imaginary Real Imagine universe entirely devoid conscious being one analyze evaluate content — Real plant one conscious human desert island middle nowhere entirely alone grant discursive thinking natural conscious person sense external reality represent back perception memory respond representation plan — Imaginary Add two three human thousand together leverage Imaginary create society culture social norm status quo much collective imaginative structure seem almost take life — Symbolic Real precedes consciousness content Imaginary necessary involuntary byproduct consciousness Symbolic active principle consciousness attempt perceive alter environment — including conscious subject may enter field awareness manner speaking Real Imaginary natural Symbolic kind recoil response attempt beat back Symbolic collective attempt holding back trauma Real Imaginary whether tragic circumstance unwanted thought feeling Symbolic realm ideology — political religious otherwise — series potentially utilitarian fantasy operating large unconsciously within subject Symbolic objectively emergent principle Real subject typically experience thing way around believe Symbolic organizing principle around Real arranges rather something Real produced Taking many form — God State Father Mother Big guaranteeing meaning intelligibility — Symbolic element largely broken West advent modernity precisely Symbolic fractured mostly universal mean structuring one’s experience Real Symbolic formed fault line delineating nearly irreducible competing faction competing faction cultural political philosophical — interpretive system ideology retain Zizek’s term creates meaning order manageability one’s subjective experience Ideology unconscious fantasy levee one erects hold back traumatic floodwaters Real — reality Symbolic theology Job’s friend cannot see suffering Job fact busy “explaining” — one see myriad correlate throughout history Western theism institution normative religion return Badiou’s example one may consider previously unquestioned unquestionable custom military conscription monogamy childbearing unconditionally expected Western society generally ideology “God” whose death madman announces panic crowd awkwardly shrug dreadful point crowd forgets Symbolic serf purpose madman naively presumes Symbolic contingent upon something precedes — refuse face Real Altizer Zizek tension illustrated Jesus Christ particularly destitute cry cross “My God God forsaken me” Mark 1534 New Revised Standard Version climax crucifixion God withdrawing Jesus one may see modernity absence Big guarantee meaning one’s suffering let alone existence leaving Zizek call “the desert Real” GK Chesterton describes event well “When world shook sun wiped heaven crucifixion cry cross cry confessed God forsaken God let revolutionist choose creed creed god god world carefully weighing god inevitable recurrence unalterable power find another god revolt Nay matter grows difficult human speech let atheist choose god find one divinity ever uttered isolation one religion God seemed instant atheist” — G K Chesterton Orthodoxy Ignatius 1995 145 According Altizer Zizek proper Hegelian fashion Christianity extends contradiction within subject God wherein God becomes alienated God subject alienated Monstrosity Christ Zizek explains “In FreudianLacanian term Christ God’s ‘partial object’ autonomized organ without body God picked eye head turned outside guess Hegel insisted monstrosity Christ “It therefore crucial note Christian modality ‘God seeing himself’ nothing whatsoever harmonious closed loop ‘seeing seeing’ eye seeing enjoying sight perfect selfmirroring turn eye toward ‘its’ body presupposes separation eye body see externalizedautonomized eye perspectival anamorphically distorted image Christ anamorphosis God” — Zizek Monstrosity Christ 82 divine absence selfdivision bereft Big guarantee meaning experience would ultimately dissociate Jesus enters space absolute freedom chooses lean inconvenient fatal Real Symbolic order gazing shoulder insisting upon even compelling anything particular Jesus may produce action entirely authentically — may receive reality even “antagonism” choose respond Elsewhere Monstrosity Christ Zizek articulates ramification crucifixion Jesus “When people imagine kind deeper meaning experience … really frightens lose transcendent God guaranteeing meaning universe God hidden Master pulling string — instead get God abandon transcendent position throw creation fully engaging dying human left higher Power watching u terrible burden freedom responsibility fate divine creation thus God still frightened today assume consequence four word Chesterton ‘He made Man’ call ‘Christians’ prefer stay comfortable image God sitting benevolently watching life sending u son token love even comfortably depersonalized Higher Force … “Hegel’s underlying premise dy Cross God’s earthly representativeincarnation God beyond … “That say dy Cross precisely ‘private’ God God ‘way life’ God ground particular community” — Zizek Monstrosity 25 29 295 literary vein interpretation crucifixion Jesus — God Symbolic — may clearly seen Nikos Kazantzakis’ Last Temptation Christ namely novel’s portrayal execution Jesus spent prophetic career wrestle desire call God Jesus wish nothing domestication settle woman raise family Upon cross pass dreaming angel God come helping cross telling God seen devotion decided force Jesus go crucifixion angel take Jesus Mary sister Lazarus marries father child even marries sister Martha expanding family Jesus receives everything ever wanted However charged encounter Paul preaches Messiah killed others’ sake Jesus realizes desire fulfilled dream thus still upon cross unconscious Jesus chooses volition wake return consciousness hanging cross cry relief — surrender Real — “into hand commend spirit” Luke 2346 NRSV — moment Kazantzakis describes closing passage Last Temptation “Jesus rotated eye anguish looked alone yard house tree village door village lived family dream— disappeared Nothing remained stone beneath foot stone covered blood lower farther away crowd thousand head darkness “He tried might discover felt pain wanted complete cry shout LAMA SABACTHANI attempted move lip could grew dizzy ready faint seemed hurling downward perishing “But suddenly falling perishing someone ground must pitied reed held front felt sponge soaked vinegar rest lip nostril breathed deeply bitter smell revived swelled breast looked heaven uttered heartrending cry LAMA SABACTHANI “Then immediately inclined head exhausted “He felt terrible pain hand foot heart sight cleared saw crown thorn blood cross Two golden earring two row sharp brilliantly white teeth flashed darkened sun heard cool mocking laugh ring teeth vanished Jesus remained hanging air alone “His head quivered Suddenly remembered felt pain wild indomitable joy took possession coward deserter traitor nailed cross stood ground honorably end kept word moment cried ELI ELI fainted Temptation captured split second led astray joy marriage child lie decrepit degraded old men shouted coward deserter traitor lie — illusion sent Devil disciple alive thriving gone sea land proclaiming Good News Everything turned glory God “He uttered triumphant cry ACCOMPLISHED “And though said Everything begun” Interpreting Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation Kazantzakis’ novel Zizek focus Jesus’ cry abandonment Big failed make sense outstanding failure horrific execution According Lacan God Big Hebrew Bible great che vuoi “what want” making traumatic yet gripping demand people Jesus’ destitution however realizes Big ground emergent property arising mind externality asks che vuoi something internal thus return Real either case novel film one find necessarily historical Jesus upon cross certainly literary Jesus Gethsemane prays “not thine done” Luke 2242 King James Version cf Matthew 2639 Mark 1436 John 638 — Jesus surrender willingly exceeds control real mytheme selfsacrificing Jesus parallel Hegel’s notion reconciliation Summarizing Zizek’s reading Hegel Todd McGowan express messianicHegelian reconciliation well “Hegel doesn’t stop uncovering contradiction corresponds contradiction thought Instead contends contradiction even intractable contradiction thought philosopher view knowledge movement thought thought aspires knowledge Hegel revers relationship Thought higher status thus tell u nature Though chronological priority — obviously necessary condition emergence thought — thought logical priority capacity enduring reconciling contradiction lack simply succumbs contradiction without gaining purchase “Reconciliation great achievement thought act reconciliation thought adopts different relationship contradiction doesn’t overcome contradiction grasp necessity Zizek put Less Nothing ‘what Hegel call “reconciliation” basic reconciliation antagonism’ Pg 951 Even though antagonism contradiction act limit obstacle thought thought nonetheless ability grasp limit defines rather must surmount order realize Spirit Hegel thought’s capacity recognize contradiction simply obstacle overcome innermost condition possibility Reconciliation mark triumph embrace necessity failure” — McGowan “The Insubstantiality Substance Read Hegel’s Philosophy Nature” International Journal Žižek Studies 81 2014 13 Finally Hegelian background fully formed one may propose radical reinterpretation Mormonism utilizing narrative structure temple ritual practiced Church Jesus Christ Latterday Saints — initiatory endowment temple one begin time “preexistence” time time given unique name share — identity fundamentally cannot expressed another parallel antechamber time one may read Mormon narrative war heaven primordial fragmentation divine family war “before foundation world” opposing principle sibling child like God watch cosmos begin fray fragment God join disintegration Mormonism God person composed “flesh bone tangible as” anyone’s DC 13022 God know “pains sicknesses” finitude visceral physical level intellectually experientially Alma 711–13 God exempt suffering existence God aloof human condition —even God weep Moses 748 primeval time time one proceeds temple’s ritual narrative creation world encounter trinity substantially different normative Christianity rather Father Son Holy Spirit one encounter Elohim plural noun Hebrew Jehovah Christ Michael Adam humanity Rather tight priesthood hierarchy organized genealogy one may instead read three figure term set theory proper class Elohim Real — plurality Godhead nature tearing piece — emerge among numerous set Michael human Imaginary Jehovah human Symbolic Thereafter MichaelasAdam cut Elohim Jehovah forgetfulness cut division male female sleep cut immortality changelessness eating fruit finitude becoming mortal bearing child distinct Ultimately find “lone dreary world” human condition — world Hegelian contradiction way subject substance begin process reconciliation returning Elohim Adam become inherently alienated signified ritual act perfectly unified prayer others one must hold resentment embrace Lord veil separate Real even — dividing contradiction running way Altizer’s nihil ensuring gap being thing Zizek’s le nothing excess something nothing — Adam carry name received time began name uniquely other’s Additional ritual performed previously performed ritual repeated time remembrance participant’s deceased family loved one — name attendant birth death date place residence particular detail testify person’s irreducible individuality Beyond sealing wherein spouse sibling child parent friend loved one ancestor descendant come together eternal relationship — Hegelian reconciliation dissolve difference person involved honor difference even “antagonism” Finally every week Latterday Saints gather renew ritual one central ceremony — sacrament — wherein bread ripped piece water meted thimblesized cup person eats drink remembrance contradiction reconciliation thus narrative ritual fragmented universe hold together even division stainedglass cosmos multicolor piece woven together wroughtiron le nothing — — — — — — — — — — Recommended ReadingTags Atheism Christianity Philosophy Religion Psychology
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The Halt of a Breath
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Photo by Christopher Campbell on Unsplash
The Halt of a Breath
Inhale, exhale, lungs fill, lungs deplete, hold, release, live, die
“When holding your breath, you can learn to change your brain activity (frequency of electrical impulses) and go into a state of flow. In flow the notion of time disappears and you become what you do.”
— Stig Severinsen
In flow, the notion of time disappears and you become what you do.
The notion of *time disappears*
and you become what you do.
I only repeat what’s so radically divine and almost incomprehensible. Might you feel the same? When you hold your breath, you literally are altering the body’s response to: oxygen consumption, heart rate, blood pressure, muscle tension, breath allowance, thoughts and imagery. Instead of wondering if you need to tackle on the question of fight or flight based on rapid breathing due to the so-called emergency response, your body wills itself to calm until it’s reached the point of stillness — entering the parasympathetic response — when slowing your breaths and then, halting them altogether by holding them whilst your lungs are full.
But of course, our bodies aren’t always responding to emergencies, and sometimes our bodies are even confused as to what dictates the call for the emergency response. An example? Back before we had grocery stores and the ease of shopping around for food, us humans had to fend for ourselves, whether we were farming or hunting or even, gathering. What if a bear were to intercede on man’s hunt? Well, fight or flight response kicked in, and he was forced to make a decision and fast! But now… now, we have it quite easy in terms of food. We go to the store, walk the aisles, try to avoid contact with other humans — lest we get the newly spread coronavirus — and try to decide which brand of oats to get. Not only which brand, but what type: rolled, steel-cut, organic, quick, whole, chopped? The options are nearly endless, and too many choices can seriously stress the body, even if it is just deciding which fucking oatmeal to buy. In either situation (a bear, or too many choices of oatmeal) though, our bodies begin to enter panic-mode, forcing our breaths to become more rapid, our heart beats to quicken pace, our sweat to exude from our pores profusely, our oxygen supply to limit itself.
Most humans don’t know how to react to such involuntary (I say involuntary, because in times of emergency, our bodies respond as if on auto-pilot — sometimes at a level in which we aren’t even aware) responses, so they allow their breaths to become shallow and rapid, exposing them to the life-threatening force we like to call stress.
But have no fear, nor stress for that matter, because there is an answer, and it’s quite simple:
hold your breath when panic ensues, consuming your every thought, action, reaction, movement, response.
Holding your breath not only negates the body’s response to emergencies, but it also reverses the body’s response to that once critical question of fight or flight. We alone have the power to calm our bodies to the point of tranquility, as if we are floating in water, devoid of thoughts, senses, emotions, awareness. But the ironic thing is… we aren’t devoid of any of those things in actuality; instead, we are more cognizant of our thoughts, senses, emotions, awareness. We more properly understand our situation at hand when we simply hold in our breaths, but not just in times of crises. We can also train our bodies to better handle emergencies, albeit most emergencies these days aren’t actually emergencies, when they arise by developing breathing techniques into our routine of life.
Before learning to properly hold your breath, it’s crucial to first learn to properly inhale and then, exhale, according to your body’s physical and even mental capacity. To learn more about the art of breath-holding, please visit Nicklas Johansson’s page as a reference and guide.
Holding the breath alters our perception of time because it opens our awareness to that of a yogi. Rather than focusing on our past, our future, our courses of action that we can no longer change, our upcoming scheduled events that are noted on the calendar, we instead focus on the now, completely wrapped up in the moment at hand, serenely soaking up all of our surroundings and experiences and thoughts and thus, perceptions of the current situation. We are no longer anything but ourselves, following the path of the words: I am. No more words to follow I am.
It’s not: I’m stressed, because you aren’t stress. It’s: I am, because you are.
No more: I’m busy.
No more: I’m in an emergency.
No more: I’m worried.
No more: I’m overwhelmed.
No more: I’m my job.
Now, it’s I am.
So we inhale, filling our lungs and holding our breaths, as we live.
Then we exhale, depleting our lungs and releasing our breaths, until we die…
until life as we know it, has stopped completely, and we no longer are.
We alter our perception of time as we hold our breaths, re-gaining control of our inner calmness that would otherwise be suppressed, buried to the point of almost no return, until we resuscitate our desire to live, urging us to find the awareness of the moments passing by us like the hands on the clock — never stopping, always flowing. It’s when we enter that flow state that all else seems to stop, muted in the background of our momentous now, giving us free reign over the remarkable present, to which we are attentive, appreciative, aware. We become what we’ve always been: ourselves.
And much like the human bodies that can hold their breaths to fulfill that yearning of wanting to feel utter bliss, the universe too, can learn to hold its breath and then, stop life altogether, stopping us.
“And then, our universe will be in a state of absolute equilibrium. All life and thought will cease, and with them, time itself.”
— Ted Chiang
According to Ted Chiang, the universe’s breath allowed us humans to be alive, having full range over our thoughts and even, time. But like the constant flow of air in our bodies maintaining our livelihood, the universe too must eventually allow its flow of breath to stop, ceasing the existence of humans, thoughts, and thus time.
Inhale, exhale, lungs fill, lungs deplete, hold, release, live, die.
This is the cycle of flow, of time, of perception, of experiences, of life itself.
So live fully and learn to halt your breath once in a while, because the moment we have right now is all we have. And the breaths we allow to enter our body and then, leave us, allow us the honorable awareness to appreciate time and what it has to offer us now, as we breathe in and breathe out and laugh and cry and jump and lie and play and rest and live and then, die.
The universe too, must eventually die, and with it us. But we’re alive now, and that’s quite possibly the only thing that matters in this weird time-space continuum in which we all live.
Remember: I am, because we are.
And you alone control your notion of time, and I, mine.
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https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/the-halt-of-a-breath-34221f187bb2
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['Natalie Jeanne Maddy']
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2020-05-25 11:46:21.131000+00:00
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['Self-awareness', 'Time', 'Life', 'Energy', 'Breathing']
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Title Halt BreathContent Photo Christopher Campbell Unsplash Halt Breath Inhale exhale lung fill lung deplete hold release live die “When holding breath learn change brain activity frequency electrical impulse go state flow flow notion time disappears become do” — Stig Severinsen flow notion time disappears become notion time disappears become repeat what’s radically divine almost incomprehensible Might feel hold breath literally altering body’s response oxygen consumption heart rate blood pressure muscle tension breath allowance thought imagery Instead wondering need tackle question fight flight based rapid breathing due socalled emergency response body will calm it’s reached point stillness — entering parasympathetic response — slowing breath halting altogether holding whilst lung full course body aren’t always responding emergency sometimes body even confused dictate call emergency response example Back grocery store ease shopping around food u human fend whether farming hunting even gathering bear intercede man’s hunt Well fight flight response kicked forced make decision fast now… quite easy term food go store walk aisle try avoid contact human — lest get newly spread coronavirus — try decide brand oat get brand type rolled steelcut organic quick whole chopped option nearly endless many choice seriously stress body even deciding fucking oatmeal buy either situation bear many choice oatmeal though body begin enter panicmode forcing breath become rapid heart beat quicken pace sweat exude pore profusely oxygen supply limit human don’t know react involuntary say involuntary time emergency body respond autopilot — sometimes level aren’t even aware response allow breath become shallow rapid exposing lifethreatening force like call stress fear stress matter answer it’s quite simple hold breath panic ensues consuming every thought action reaction movement response Holding breath negates body’s response emergency also revers body’s response critical question fight flight alone power calm body point tranquility floating water devoid thought sens emotion awareness ironic thing is… aren’t devoid thing actuality instead cognizant thought sens emotion awareness properly understand situation hand simply hold breath time crisis also train body better handle emergency albeit emergency day aren’t actually emergency arise developing breathing technique routine life learning properly hold breath it’s crucial first learn properly inhale exhale according body’s physical even mental capacity learn art breathholding please visit Nicklas Johansson’s page reference guide Holding breath alters perception time open awareness yogi Rather focusing past future course action longer change upcoming scheduled event noted calendar instead focus completely wrapped moment hand serenely soaking surroundings experience thought thus perception current situation longer anything following path word word follow It’s I’m stressed aren’t stress It’s I’m busy I’m emergency I’m worried I’m overwhelmed I’m job it’s inhale filling lung holding breath live exhale depleting lung releasing breath die… life know stopped completely longer alter perception time hold breath regaining control inner calmness would otherwise suppressed buried point almost return resuscitate desire live urging u find awareness moment passing u like hand clock — never stopping always flowing It’s enter flow state else seems stop muted background momentous giving u free reign remarkable present attentive appreciative aware become we’ve always much like human body hold breath fulfill yearning wanting feel utter bliss universe learn hold breath stop life altogether stopping u “And universe state absolute equilibrium life thought cease time itself” — Ted Chiang According Ted Chiang universe’s breath allowed u human alive full range thought even time like constant flow air body maintaining livelihood universe must eventually allow flow breath stop ceasing existence human thought thus time Inhale exhale lung fill lung deplete hold release live die cycle flow time perception experience life live fully learn halt breath moment right breath allow enter body leave u allow u honorable awareness appreciate time offer u breathe breathe laugh cry jump lie play rest live die universe must eventually die u we’re alive that’s quite possibly thing matter weird timespace continuum live Remember alone control notion time mineTags Selfawareness Time Life Energy Breathing
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4,620 |
8 Skills that meetings can help you get better at!
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Meetings are fun and productive — keep your ears and eyes open!
Meetings are perfect grounds for learning, if used well! When you start looking at meetings as learning opportunities, you can definitely notice the array of skills that meetings will help you hone.
Punctuality:
start and end meetings on time, stick to topics and time limits. Folks will have a lot to say, but eyes on the clock please!
Planning:
every meeting is to be planned. Right from who will attend, who will take notes, the discussion points to take up, the actions to remind and the decisions to be made — everything has to be done in the time frame allotted.
Note-taking:
Taking notes is an art. Summarising a 60 minute meeting into a minute’s read is an art. You would have to cover all the major points, the nuances, the actions and the decision clearly. One of my customer bosses in the UK taught me to make notes and I have been an expert minutes taker ever since! We make the mistake of delegating this to the youngest one in the room — big mistake! The minutes guy is the most powerful one in the room!
Memory:
you will be forced to remember the precedents and the various conversations. Context recollections and following up on action items are fun activities, especially when you are leading huge programs.
Meetings aren’t an alternative to work as it is largely made out. Rather, it is fundamental to getting people together and ensuring they work well together!
Listening skills:
immerse yourself in the multiple conversations that happen, yet keep a track of the individual threads that happen. Understand the tone used, gauge the language used and watch for any escalations or scenarios that might need intervention!
Assertiveness:
from guiding the meeting well, to enforcing meeting rules, you got to be assertive in the room. People have to have an update on their actions, timelines have to be respected and there shouldn’t be any domination in the room. Everyone should be free to speak their mind and at the same time, disciplined to not stray!
Network:
in bigger projects, especially, you will be meeting and guiding many senior individuals across the organization. You will be required to introduce people, make sure they understand the context well, are able to contribute their bits and most importantly understand their role in the bigger scheme of things.
Coordination:
you can be the person who brings it all together. From individuals to projects, you will be the one with the bigger picture finely sorted and will assist everyone to have the same level of clarity.
I love making my meetings count — get real work done in meetings! All the best!
|
https://medium.com/growth-catalyst/8-skills-that-meetings-can-help-you-get-better-at-681aa73a0d5a
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['Bharath Kumar Balasubramanian']
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2019-12-26 18:27:14.540000+00:00
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['Work', 'Management', 'Meetings', 'Productivity']
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Title 8 Skills meeting help get better atContent Meetings fun productive — keep ear eye open Meetings perfect ground learning used well start looking meeting learning opportunity definitely notice array skill meeting help hone Punctuality start end meeting time stick topic time limit Folks lot say eye clock please Planning every meeting planned Right attend take note discussion point take action remind decision made — everything done time frame allotted Notetaking Taking note art Summarising 60 minute meeting minute’s read art would cover major point nuance action decision clearly One customer boss UK taught make note expert minute taker ever since make mistake delegating youngest one room — big mistake minute guy powerful one room Memory forced remember precedent various conversation Context recollection following action item fun activity especially leading huge program Meetings aren’t alternative work largely made Rather fundamental getting people together ensuring work well together Listening skill immerse multiple conversation happen yet keep track individual thread happen Understand tone used gauge language used watch escalation scenario might need intervention Assertiveness guiding meeting well enforcing meeting rule got assertive room People update action timeline respected shouldn’t domination room Everyone free speak mind time disciplined stray Network bigger project especially meeting guiding many senior individual across organization required introduce people make sure understand context well able contribute bit importantly understand role bigger scheme thing Coordination person brings together individual project one bigger picture finely sorted assist everyone level clarity love making meeting count — get real work done meeting bestTags Work Management Meetings Productivity
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4,621 |
Holiday Gifts from Prism & Pen
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by Artemis Shishir
Happy holidays!
This year has been nightmarish, but with it almost over maybe we can all relax with some stories and a hot cup of tea or coffee. Unless you prefer something stronger! Whether you like fiction or non, we’ve got great gifts for you.
Liam Heitmann-Ryce offers both fiction and memoir about his travels in Germany. theoaknotes (I’m trans nonbinary, mixed black and white, queer, the child of two moms, a Gen Z, a K-pop fan, a practicing minimalist, a college student, a dancer, a reader, a philosopher, and an expert cuddler) gives us some of their their favorite queer quotes of the year.
And James Finn tells a story about Grandma Finn and how she taught him that religion must never excuse bigotry — all while exposing bigotry in a supposedly charming southern events center.
There’s so much to get into this week! So, let’s get started with our Editor’s Picks!
Editor’s Picks —
Creative Nonfiction
I’ll Have Just One of Those Brownies
Ever been curious to try marijuana? Loren A Olson MD writes about how some untimely experimentation almost cost him his marriage, military career and profession. Don’t expect an anti-drug piece, but DO expect to be entertained!
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https://medium.com/prismnpen/holiday-gifts-from-prism-pen-14eabe7df6ab
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['James Finn']
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2020-12-27 22:04:57.641000+00:00
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['LGBTQ', 'Storytelling', 'Fiction', 'Poetry', 'Creative Non Fiction']
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Title Holiday Gifts Prism PenContent Artemis Shishir Happy holiday year nightmarish almost maybe relax story hot cup tea coffee Unless prefer something stronger Whether like fiction non we’ve got great gift Liam HeitmannRyce offer fiction memoir travel Germany theoaknotes I’m trans nonbinary mixed black white queer child two mom Gen Z Kpop fan practicing minimalist college student dancer reader philosopher expert cuddler give u favorite queer quote year James Finn tell story Grandma Finn taught religion must never excuse bigotry — exposing bigotry supposedly charming southern event center There’s much get week let’s get started Editor’s Picks Editor’s Picks — Creative Nonfiction I’ll One Brownies Ever curious try marijuana Loren Olson MD writes untimely experimentation almost cost marriage military career profession Don’t expect antidrug piece expect entertainedTags LGBTQ Storytelling Fiction Poetry Creative Non Fiction
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4,622 |
An Institution Plagiarized My Stories — Here Is How I Removed Them From Their Website
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I often google search my popular content to know if there are any plagiarized stories on the web. Until last month, there were none, but when an institution plagiarized one of my recently published Better Marketing posts, I was clueless. Previously in the Facebook group, I had heard writers talking about their content plagiarized by many external websites, but very few explained how to solve such issues.
The website had published my article with no modifications and no credit to me. What is worse, that particular pirated post had a higher rank on google search than the original content. I informed Medium support of the issue and also the Better Marketing editors. The reply I got from Medium was:
Hi Suraj, Sorry you are experiencing that. Unfortunately, there isn’t anything Medium can do to prevent people from copy and pasting, and in essence, “stealing”, the text from the Medium post page. We are actively working to identify and stop these sites right now. As good citizens of the internet, Medium completely honors the DMCA and all takedowns we receive. So when we are alerted to copyright infringement that occurs on Medium, we remove it until the matter can be resolved legally. We offer a public form to initiate this process. This site that has taken your work does not appear to have that in place, nor any contact information even, and embrace anonymity above all else. That’s troubling. So what can you do? As the copyright owner, you need to make a claim against them for copying your work. As there is no contact information on the site, you can do a Whois lookup to find any other information on the site: https://www.whois.com and https://hostingchecker.com/ You may need to start higher up the food chain, possibly by contacting their DNS registrar, as copyright violation should be against their terms. Again, we are working to identify and stop this behavior. However, you, as the copyright owner, have much more power than us as an interested third-party, but non-copyright holder.
I received a follow up from the editors of Better Marketing too, but there was nothing that they could do. I thought it is only one article, and I can wait for editors to take the steps. In essence, I ignored it.
I got restless when one of my friends informed me about another instance of plagiarism. The same institution had copied my other post within an hour of publishing, and there were a handful of other posts also, all from Better Marketing. I knew that if I ignored the issue, they would continue to plagiarize my work.
My friend suggested that I contact the server host, so I took multiple steps without delay. As a result, the institution removed all Better Marketing plagiarized content within twenty-four hours of my intensive complaints. I’m not sure what exactly made it happen, but it worked. Let me explain to you my steps so that you can repeat the same if you ever encounter such problems.
Online support with the host-server
There was no email address to contact the institution. So, I got the host server's name, searched them on google, browsed their site, and waited for online support. I then explained my concern to their representative through chat. Although they had asked me to email my issues, I told them I have no time to follow up on their progress report. They registered my complaints and promised to resolve them.
Complain through email
To leave no stones unturned, I also emailed the host-server. Emailing them serves as proof. They responded to my email, saying they would contact the institution as soon as possible.
Reaching the institution’s guardian through social media
The only clues I had to reach the institution were a few officers mentioned on their website. So, I contacted the head of the institution on Twitter and Linkedin. I know it was a harsh and bold step, but I believed they were also responsible if their organization is doing such illegal activities. They needed to know about the issue, and they should be the ones to make sure it wouldn’t ever happen again. I expressed my discomfort through both Linkedin posts and tweets.
|
https://medium.com/better-marketing/an-institution-plagiarized-my-stories-here-is-how-i-removed-them-from-their-website-ca31c92254f4
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['Suraj Ghimire']
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2020-10-27 14:31:29.640000+00:00
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['Writing', 'Marketing Strategies', 'Blogging', 'This Happened To Me', 'Plagiarism']
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Title Institution Plagiarized Stories — Removed WebsiteContent often google search popular content know plagiarized story web last month none institution plagiarized one recently published Better Marketing post clueless Previously Facebook group heard writer talking content plagiarized many external website explained solve issue website published article modification credit worse particular pirated post higher rank google search original content informed Medium support issue also Better Marketing editor reply got Medium Hi Suraj Sorry experiencing Unfortunately isn’t anything Medium prevent people copy pasting essence “stealing” text Medium post page actively working identify stop site right good citizen internet Medium completely honor DMCA takedown receive alerted copyright infringement occurs Medium remove matter resolved legally offer public form initiate process site taken work appear place contact information even embrace anonymity else That’s troubling copyright owner need make claim copying work contact information site Whois lookup find information site httpswwwwhoiscom httpshostingcheckercom may need start higher food chain possibly contacting DNS registrar copyright violation term working identify stop behavior However copyright owner much power u interested thirdparty noncopyright holder received follow editor Better Marketing nothing could thought one article wait editor take step essence ignored got restless one friend informed another instance plagiarism institution copied post within hour publishing handful post also Better Marketing knew ignored issue would continue plagiarize work friend suggested contact server host took multiple step without delay result institution removed Better Marketing plagiarized content within twentyfour hour intensive complaint I’m sure exactly made happen worked Let explain step repeat ever encounter problem Online support hostserver email address contact institution got host server name searched google browsed site waited online support explained concern representative chat Although asked email issue told time follow progress report registered complaint promised resolve Complain email leave stone unturned also emailed hostserver Emailing serf proof responded email saying would contact institution soon possible Reaching institution’s guardian social medium clue reach institution officer mentioned website contacted head institution Twitter Linkedin know harsh bold step believed also responsible organization illegal activity needed know issue one make sure wouldn’t ever happen expressed discomfort Linkedin post tweetsTags Writing Marketing Strategies Blogging Happened Plagiarism
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4,623 |
Not Acknowledging Your Pain Might Be Hurting You More
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The Indicator of Discomfort
As Medical News Today states, physical pain is an unpleasant sensation and emotional experience that links to tissue damage. It allows the body to react and prevent further damage.
Pain on a psychological level can be a similar indicator of emotional anguish. If you are feeling consistently low, maybe it’s an indication that something’s wrong with your surroundings — a way for your subconscious to rebel against your current situation and prompt you to get out of it.
If you turn away from it and only focus on the positive, how would you know there’s something wrong? Ignoring the symptoms and sweeping uncomfortable realizations under the carpet would only mean forcing yourself to adjust to the distress you’re in. If you don’t acknowledge the pain and try to get to the root cause, how can you reach a viable solution?
Here are some ways I’ve adopted to identify the root cause. You can adopt the same to embrace growth:
Don’t fill your head with external stimuli all the time
In other words: don't check your phone each time you’re bored. Sure, podcasts and audiobooks are a great way to improve your productivity, but they snatch away the opportunity to spend time with your thoughts.
There was a time I used to run away from being alone because I was terrified of what demons I’d have to deal with. But in 2020, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: self-awareness comes with a price, but it’s the best (and probably the only) tool for growth.
Yes, it’s hard to listen to your thoughts, but you’ve got to do it to learn what kind of person you are. Without this, no amount of self-help content will help. Silence offers opportunities for self-reflection and daydreaming, which activates multiple parts of the brain. It gives us time to turn down the inner noise and increase awareness of what matters most.
Write what you feel and be honest with yourself
It’s difficult for me to be completely transparent during conversations with people. However, my journal is the friend I turn to for solace. It’s where I write all my thoughts out and am unabashedly honest with myself.
Journaling has cleared my head of a ton of clutter and helped me acknowledge my innermost feelings and desires. You might find some emotions too hard to acknowledge, but remember that it’s your journal. No one else is going to read it. Be as honest and open with yourself as possible. Reflective journaling can be a great tool for self-awareness and personal growth. It can help you prioritize problems and track any symptoms so you can recognize triggers and learn ways to better control them.
Allow yourself to just be
There’ve been times when something triggered me, my immediate instinct was to start binge-watching a show or lose myself in a book. But several sessions with my therapist have helped me understand that such acts will only cure the symptoms, not the root cause.
Instead, my therapist advised me to embrace the sadness. She said it was okay to wallow in self-pity for as long as I needed, but then pull myself back together and move on.
You don’t have to be happy all the time, as long as you don’t let the sadness overcome and take control. A book that helped me come to terms with this is How to Be a Movie Star by TJ Klune. The novel carries such an accurate representation of mental health, the narrative took my breath away. One of the quotes that gave me strength was:
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https://medium.com/mind-cafe/not-acknowledging-your-pain-might-be-hurting-you-more-50b7ac70ad9d
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['Anangsha Alammyan']
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2020-12-27 19:32:49.457000+00:00
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['Self Improvement', 'Psychology', 'Advice', 'Ideas', 'Inspiration']
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Title Acknowledging Pain Might Hurting MoreContent Indicator Discomfort Medical News Today state physical pain unpleasant sensation emotional experience link tissue damage allows body react prevent damage Pain psychological level similar indicator emotional anguish feeling consistently low maybe it’s indication something’s wrong surroundings — way subconscious rebel current situation prompt get turn away focus positive would know there’s something wrong Ignoring symptom sweeping uncomfortable realization carpet would mean forcing adjust distress you’re don’t acknowledge pain try get root cause reach viable solution way I’ve adopted identify root cause adopt embrace growth Don’t fill head external stimulus time word dont check phone time you’re bored Sure podcasts audiobooks great way improve productivity snatch away opportunity spend time thought time used run away alone terrified demon I’d deal 2020 there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s selfawareness come price it’s best probably tool growth Yes it’s hard listen thought you’ve got learn kind person Without amount selfhelp content help Silence offer opportunity selfreflection daydreaming activates multiple part brain give u time turn inner noise increase awareness matter Write feel honest It’s difficult completely transparent conversation people However journal friend turn solace It’s write thought unabashedly honest Journaling cleared head ton clutter helped acknowledge innermost feeling desire might find emotion hard acknowledge remember it’s journal one else going read honest open possible Reflective journaling great tool selfawareness personal growth help prioritize problem track symptom recognize trigger learn way better control Allow There’ve time something triggered immediate instinct start bingewatching show lose book several session therapist helped understand act cure symptom root cause Instead therapist advised embrace sadness said okay wallow selfpity long needed pull back together move don’t happy time long don’t let sadness overcome take control book helped come term Movie Star TJ Klune novel carry accurate representation mental health narrative took breath away One quote gave strength wasTags Self Improvement Psychology Advice Ideas Inspiration
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4,624 |
Quorum Founder Jackie DeJesse on Using Empathy as a Product Manager & Entrepreneur
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Quorum Founder Jackie DeJesse on Using Empathy as a Product Manager & Entrepreneur Carlee Murray Follow Nov 9 · 6 min read
If you look at Jackie DeJesse’s CV, you’ll see someone at the top of her game. She’s held product roles at several successful tech companies and is currently serving as a product manager for Google. On top of that, she recently started a side venture, Quorum (more on that later!).
Below, we explain how Jackie fell into product management and break down her thoughts on empathy, female role models, and the power of shared experiences.
On discovering product management
Jackie left college like many of us did, “I graduated without really knowing what I was going to do.” Armed with an entrepreneurial spirit and a degree in photography and biological sciences from the University of Southern California, she launched her own business as a photographer working with several startups in Silicon Valley.
Eventually, one of her freelance gigs turned into a full-time job. “This one company was on a mission to create a visual search engine for food.” Think: an Instagram specifically for foodies and restaurateurs. “I began working for them as a photographer, helping them develop their brand and their visual guides and was eventually hired on full time,” she says.
As the director of photography, Jackie had a unique perspective: She, like the users, was interacting with the platform every day. “It was through my work as a photographer with them that I realized, OK, these tools they’re giving to their photographers aren’t working.” Naturally, she went into problem-solving mode. “I just started brainstorming different user flows, asking ‘How can we improve this, how can we make this easier?’”
Having a bad user interface wasn’t just making life more difficult for the photographers, “it was also costing us money,” Jackie explains. “The more time the photographers had to spend navigating our content management system, the higher our costs were per shoot. It just wasn’t going to be scalable.” Working in tandem with the company’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), they developed a solution that decreased the amount of time it took for photographers to manage their content on the platform by hours.
It wasn’t until the CTO approached her about joining his team as a product manager that Jackie ever considered going into a product role. “When I was at USC, I didn’t even know what product management was. It wasn’t something that was taught or even thought of when I went to the career office for guidance.”
Jackie began reading books on product management, going to meetups in the Bay Area, and getting exposure to the product side of business. “Because I was working at a very small startup, I had the opportunity to try things out. That’s really where I got my feet wet.” After moving to New York, her career as a product manager took off.
“The easier it is for you to connect with people, I think the more successful you can be as a PM.”
According to Jackie, the soft skills she had going into product management are a large part of what made the role such a good fit. “It’s the same set of questions regardless of whether your user is an elderly parent or a child — It’s all in understanding how folks operate and what motivates them.” But how do you crack that code? Empathy. “Something that has worked well for me is being able to empathize and build those human connections,” Jackie says. “The easier it is for you to connect with people, I think the more successful you can be as a PM.”
On strong women, being raised by them, and becoming one
Jackie believes her success is a result of having strong female role models. “I grew up surrounded by very, very strong women, who have seen many challenges throughout their personal and professional lives.” She continues, “I always felt that I could trust them to be there — they have enabled me to come into my own and feel confident in myself as an individual while being mindful of maintaining some sense of vulnerability.” Jackie has been particularly influenced by her grandmother, Consuelo.
Jackie DeJesse and her grandmother, Águila Consuelo Vargas de Menendez Crosby
Consuelo was raised by a single mother in Peru in the 1920s. As the eldest daughter, she took on a maternal role at a young age. As Jackie explains, “She was the right-hand woman to my great-grandmother, whether it was helping with the accounting of the shop that she ran or making sure her siblings were okay.”
Throughout her life, Consuelo continued to make sure her family was taken care of. “Before moving to the United States with my grandfather, she saved up enough money from her work at the British Consulate to build a house for her family in Peru so that they would never be homeless.” Eventually, Consuelo was able to reunite with her mother and siblings in the U.S., standing by them through the struggles of immigration.
Coneulo (far right) with her mother María Luisa (middle), her sister Candelaria (far left), and her youngest sister Elvira (front) fully reunited after helping her family come to the US from Peru
As Jackie grew up, she learned more about her grandmother’s life. “She wanted to open a tea shop and a Parillada, but she dedicated so much time to running my grandfather’s business and raising her family, her dream never came to fruition.” However, Consuelo selflessness was not in vain. “Her love and stability to her family enabled us to become independent women and go after our own dreams.”
On starting Quorum and embracing shared experiences
Jackie started her latest business venture, Quorum, a candle company, as an ode to her grandmother. “Each of these candles has a theme that groups together a bunch of different stories from women that are meant to be shared,” she says.
“With women as 51 percent of the U.S. population, and 50 percent of the entire world, we have quorum, we have the power to collectively change the way our societies are run.”
“Quorum means the representation necessary to make a decision,” Jackie explains. She wanted a name that reflected the company’s underlying mission: “At the heart of Quorum is this desire and this need to reclaim power. With women as 51 percent of the U.S. population, and 50 percent of the entire world, we have quorum, we have the power to collectively change the way our societies are run.”
Quorum’s candles, which are currently in the testing phase, will be phthalate and paraben-free and made with scented coconut soy wax. While the candles are not yet in full production, Jackie says they will feature artwork from female artists.
Quorum Candle Test Lab, featuring hand-poured coconut soy wax test candles
Jackie put a lot of thought into choosing candles as her product. “I wanted something physical that people could hold onto.” These aren’t your usual pastel-colored candles either. “Design-wise, these candles are loud, they’re making their presence known,” she explains. “It all ties back to Quorum’s mission that these are things to talk about. By having that physical object in the room, I hope it will inspire conversation.”
While Quorum is starting by highlighting women’s stories, Jackie thinks its mission is universal. “Quorum, I think, has the potential to be something that can support anyone who is underrepresented.” When explaining who these candles are made for, she continues, “You don’t have to be a woman; you can identify in a lot of different ways — there are a lot of people who are disenfranchised with our current power structure.”
There is power in numbers. “We all have these stories. We all have these experiences,” she says. “The more that we can share, the more that we can get validation from one another, the more we can reclaim that power.”
Want to share your story or nominate a friend to be featured? Reach out on Instagram to @burnquorum, email [email protected], or submit your story directly at burnquorum.com.
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https://medium.com/herproductlab/quorum-founder-jackie-dejesse-on-using-empathy-to-connect-with-others-as-a-product-manager-69a01c706bdc
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['Carlee Murray']
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2020-11-10 00:50:25.574000+00:00
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['Women In Tech', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Empowerment', 'Female Founders', 'Product Management']
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Title Quorum Founder Jackie DeJesse Using Empathy Product Manager EntrepreneurContent Quorum Founder Jackie DeJesse Using Empathy Product Manager Entrepreneur Carlee Murray Follow Nov 9 · 6 min read look Jackie DeJesse’s CV you’ll see someone top game She’s held product role several successful tech company currently serving product manager Google top recently started side venture Quorum later explain Jackie fell product management break thought empathy female role model power shared experience discovering product management Jackie left college like many u “I graduated without really knowing going do” Armed entrepreneurial spirit degree photography biological science University Southern California launched business photographer working several startup Silicon Valley Eventually one freelance gig turned fulltime job “This one company mission create visual search engine food” Think Instagram specifically foodie restaurateur “I began working photographer helping develop brand visual guide eventually hired full time” say director photography Jackie unique perspective like user interacting platform every day “It work photographer realized OK tool they’re giving photographer aren’t working” Naturally went problemsolving mode “I started brainstorming different user flow asking ‘How improve make easier’” bad user interface wasn’t making life difficult photographer “it also costing u money” Jackie explains “The time photographer spend navigating content management system higher cost per shoot wasn’t going scalable” Working tandem company’s Chief Technology Officer CTO developed solution decreased amount time took photographer manage content platform hour wasn’t CTO approached joining team product manager Jackie ever considered going product role “When USC didn’t even know product management wasn’t something taught even thought went career office guidance” Jackie began reading book product management going meetups Bay Area getting exposure product side business “Because working small startup opportunity try thing That’s really got foot wet” moving New York career product manager took “The easier connect people think successful PM” According Jackie soft skill going product management large part made role good fit “It’s set question regardless whether user elderly parent child — It’s understanding folk operate motivates them” crack code Empathy “Something worked well able empathize build human connections” Jackie say “The easier connect people think successful PM” strong woman raised becoming one Jackie belief success result strong female role model “I grew surrounded strong woman seen many challenge throughout personal professional lives” continues “I always felt could trust — enabled come feel confident individual mindful maintaining sense vulnerability” Jackie particularly influenced grandmother Consuelo Jackie DeJesse grandmother Águila Consuelo Vargas de Menendez Crosby Consuelo raised single mother Peru 1920s eldest daughter took maternal role young age Jackie explains “She righthand woman greatgrandmother whether helping accounting shop ran making sure sibling okay” Throughout life Consuelo continued make sure family taken care “Before moving United States grandfather saved enough money work British Consulate build house family Peru would never homeless” Eventually Consuelo able reunite mother sibling US standing struggle immigration Coneulo far right mother María Luisa middle sister Candelaria far left youngest sister Elvira front fully reunited helping family come US Peru Jackie grew learned grandmother’s life “She wanted open tea shop Parillada dedicated much time running grandfather’s business raising family dream never came fruition” However Consuelo selflessness vain “Her love stability family enabled u become independent woman go dreams” starting Quorum embracing shared experience Jackie started latest business venture Quorum candle company ode grandmother “Each candle theme group together bunch different story woman meant shared” say “With woman 51 percent US population 50 percent entire world quorum power collectively change way society run” “Quorum mean representation necessary make decision” Jackie explains wanted name reflected company’s underlying mission “At heart Quorum desire need reclaim power woman 51 percent US population 50 percent entire world quorum power collectively change way society run” Quorum’s candle currently testing phase phthalate parabenfree made scented coconut soy wax candle yet full production Jackie say feature artwork female artist Quorum Candle Test Lab featuring handpoured coconut soy wax test candle Jackie put lot thought choosing candle product “I wanted something physical people could hold onto” aren’t usual pastelcolored candle either “Designwise candle loud they’re making presence known” explains “It tie back Quorum’s mission thing talk physical object room hope inspire conversation” Quorum starting highlighting women’s story Jackie think mission universal “Quorum think potential something support anyone underrepresented” explaining candle made continues “You don’t woman identify lot different way — lot people disenfranchised current power structure” power number “We story experiences” say “The share get validation one another reclaim power” Want share story nominate friend featured Reach Instagram burnquorum email helloburnquorumcom submit story directly burnquorumcomTags Women Tech Entrepreneurship Empowerment Female Founders Product Management
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4,625 |
Big data and Hadoop
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Big Data is generally considered to be very huge amount of data for storing and processing. Data in huge volume and different varieties can be considered as Big Data. Data is changing our world and the way we live at an unprecedented rate. Big data is the new science of analyzing and predicting human and machine behavior by processing very huge amount of related data. Big data refers to speedy growth in the volume of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. It is estimated to generate 50,000 GB data per second in year 2019. Today’s enterprises are generating massive amount of Data, Which essentially has 3 attributes :
Volume : — The size of the data, we are talking about GB and TBs here
Velocity : — The rate at which the data is being generated
Variety :- Data from Multiple sources and multiple kinds
This added complexity can not be handled with traditional frameworks hence Hadoop ( not the only solution ) Hadoop is a parallel processing programming framework which work in MapReduce. Apache Hadoop is one of the tool to work on Big Data. It is open source, software framework that runs on a commodity hardware.
Why we are talking about Hadoop?
We are talking because, On a hadoop framework we can store any type of data weather it is a Structured, Semi Structured and Unstructured in Hadoop Distributed File System [HDFS] layer.
Apache hadoop is open source, it means you don’t need to pay for license while using commercially.
Apache Hadoop runs on commodity hardware, it means you don’t need to stick to a single vendor. You can choose any vendor, who offers infrastructure at low cost.
Consider a problem where you need to count the number of words in a 5 pound book. would be very difficult for one person but if you tear the pages and distribute it to hundreds of people. Each will count the words in their “page” and then you can simply total that count from each person you shall have to total word count in no time.
Why Hadoop with an real time example ?
Suppose you have a very big file (50 gb log file for an example) and you want to parse it , do some filtering on it and see the result. What are the options?
1. If you have a computer with ram more that 64 gb ( assuming the additional 16 gb will be used for os and other processes) you can write some code to get it done. Still it will be super slow. And if the file is even larger (in petabyte scale) it wont be even feasible. Rams on petabye scale is not available yet
2. Parse the file in smaller files (may be 10000 files , each in the scale of megabytes) and read them sequentially
3. Using approach 2 but using multiple threads , each thread reading a smaller file and finally merge the threads and compute the result
Hadoop is just step 3 only with a distributed computing touch to it. You have bunch of computers. One of the computer is master node and the rest are slave nodes.All these nodes form a cluster. This is hdfs or hadoop distributed file system. You upload a huge file to the cluster. This huge file gets divided in small file chunks of some size ( each X megabyte for an example). These chunks are replicated throughout the cluster following a replication factor. Then using a programming framework called mapreduce , you do operations on the content of the file chunks and get the desired result.
Hadoop Ecosystem:
It comprises of various tools that are required to perform different tasks in Hadoop.
These tools provide you a number of Hadoop services which can help you handle big data more efficiently.
There are the popular tools that are part of the Hadoop Ecosystem:
HDFS: It stands for Hadoop Distributed File System and it is the storage unit of Hadoop. Have a detailed explanation on HDFS and how the data is read and write into hdfs.
YARN: It stand for Yet Another Resource Negotiator. It handles the cluster resource management. Allocates RAM, memory and other resources to different applications.
MapReduce: MapReduce processes large volumes of data in a parallelly distributed manner.
HBase: It is a column-oriented non-relational database management system that runs on top of Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). HBase provides a fault-tolerant way of storing sparse data sets, which are common in many big data use cases. It is well suited for real-time data processing or random read/write access to large volumes of data.
Sqoop and Flume for data collection and ingestion: Sqoop is used to transfer data between Hadoop and external datastores such as relational databases and enterprise data warehouses.
Flume is distributed service for collecting, aggregating and moving large amounts of log data.
Pig: Pig is used to analyze data in Hadoop. It provides a high level data processing language to perform numerous operations on the data.
Hive: Hive facilitates reading, writing and managing large datasets residing in the distributed storage using SQL (Hive Query Language).
Spark: Spark is an open-source distributed computing engine for processing and analyzing huge volumes of real time data.
Mahout: Mahout is used to create scalable and distributed machine learning algorithms. It has a library that contains in-built algorithms for collaborative filtering, classification and clustering.
Ambari: Ambari is an open-source tool responsible for keeping track of running applications and their statuses.
Kafka: Kafka is a distributed streaming platform to store and process streams of records. It builds real-time streaming data pipelines that reliably get data between applications.
Storm: Storm is a processing engine that processes real-time streaming data at a very high speed. It has the ability to process over a million jobs in a fraction of seconds on a node.
Oozie: Oozie is a workflow scheduler system to manage Hadoop jobs. It has 2 parts: Work engine and Coordinator engine.
|
https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/big-data-and-hadoop-918f8a13f3f0
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['M S Dilli']
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2020-03-27 13:23:51.712000+00:00
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['Hadoop Training', 'Big Data', 'Hadoop', 'Big Data Analytics']
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Title Big data HadoopContent Big Data generally considered huge amount data storing processing Data huge volume different variety considered Big Data Data changing world way live unprecedented rate Big data new science analyzing predicting human machine behavior processing huge amount related data Big data refers speedy growth volume structured semistructured unstructured data estimated generate 50000 GB data per second year 2019 Today’s enterprise generating massive amount Data essentially 3 attribute Volume — size data talking GB TBs Velocity — rate data generated Variety Data Multiple source multiple kind added complexity handled traditional framework hence Hadoop solution Hadoop parallel processing programming framework work MapReduce Apache Hadoop one tool work Big Data open source software framework run commodity hardware talking Hadoop talking hadoop framework store type data weather Structured Semi Structured Unstructured Hadoop Distributed File System HDFS layer Apache hadoop open source mean don’t need pay license using commercially Apache Hadoop run commodity hardware mean don’t need stick single vendor choose vendor offer infrastructure low cost Consider problem need count number word 5 pound book would difficult one person tear page distribute hundred people count word “page” simply total count person shall total word count time Hadoop real time example Suppose big file 50 gb log file example want parse filtering see result option 1 computer ram 64 gb assuming additional 16 gb used o process write code get done Still super slow file even larger petabyte scale wont even feasible Rams petabye scale available yet 2 Parse file smaller file may 10000 file scale megabyte read sequentially 3 Using approach 2 using multiple thread thread reading smaller file finally merge thread compute result Hadoop step 3 distributed computing touch bunch computer One computer master node rest slave nodesAll node form cluster hdfs hadoop distributed file system upload huge file cluster huge file get divided small file chunk size X megabyte example chunk replicated throughout cluster following replication factor using programming framework called mapreduce operation content file chunk get desired result Hadoop Ecosystem comprises various tool required perform different task Hadoop tool provide number Hadoop service help handle big data efficiently popular tool part Hadoop Ecosystem HDFS stand Hadoop Distributed File System storage unit Hadoop detailed explanation HDFS data read write hdfs YARN stand Yet Another Resource Negotiator handle cluster resource management Allocates RAM memory resource different application MapReduce MapReduce process large volume data parallelly distributed manner HBase columnoriented nonrelational database management system run top Hadoop Distributed File System HDFS HBase provides faulttolerant way storing sparse data set common many big data use case well suited realtime data processing random readwrite access large volume data Sqoop Flume data collection ingestion Sqoop used transfer data Hadoop external datastores relational database enterprise data warehouse Flume distributed service collecting aggregating moving large amount log data Pig Pig used analyze data Hadoop provides high level data processing language perform numerous operation data Hive Hive facilitates reading writing managing large datasets residing distributed storage using SQL Hive Query Language Spark Spark opensource distributed computing engine processing analyzing huge volume real time data Mahout Mahout used create scalable distributed machine learning algorithm library contains inbuilt algorithm collaborative filtering classification clustering Ambari Ambari opensource tool responsible keeping track running application status Kafka Kafka distributed streaming platform store process stream record build realtime streaming data pipeline reliably get data application Storm Storm processing engine process realtime streaming data high speed ability process million job fraction second node Oozie Oozie workflow scheduler system manage Hadoop job 2 part Work engine Coordinator engineTags Hadoop Training Big Data Hadoop Big Data Analytics
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4,626 |
Plotly Python: Scatter Plots
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We start by using marker=dict() which then takes all the parameters that we use to style our markers (data points). There is an additional dict within marker that corresponds to the style options for the marker border.
Note how we color the markers themselves using an RGB value, whereas we color the marker outline with a CSS color code.
Both are perfectly acceptable — you can even use RGBA to set the alpha.
The marker size is adjusted via the marker_size attribute. I created a new dataframe column ‘ratio’ where I did a scaled value of the positive_ratings / negative_ratings.
A larger bubble means the game had a higher ratio of positive to negative ratings; we expect these games to generally have a higher average playtime.
Right now when we hover over the points, we only see the x and y values which isn’t exactly useful. However, it’s easy to add proper hover text to our points, so we can see the name of the game that we’re looking at.
By including the below code in our Figure object we can take the above hover data and turn it into something much better!
hovertext=steamdf['name'],
hoverlabel=dict(namelength=0),
hovertemplate='%{hovertext}<br>Price: %{x} <br>Avg. Playtime: %{y}'
It may look a little overwhelming, but lets break it down:
- hovertext is a variable we are defining for use in our template
- hoverlabel is mainly aesthetic in purpose. If you keep it in you may see the trace number off to the side of the tooltip box. I don’t like it, so this code will remove it.
- hovertemplate allows you to create a template string to render whatever information you want to appear on the hoverbox.
Variables are added using the %{variable} format and you can make use of HTML tags such as <br>, <i>, <b>, etc.
|
https://towardsdatascience.com/plotly-python-scatter-plots-2ea1b4885c90
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['Bryan White']
|
2020-01-13 01:16:38.860000+00:00
|
['Python', 'Data Visualization', 'Data Science', 'Data', 'Programming']
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Title Plotly Python Scatter PlotsContent start using markerdict take parameter use style marker data point additional dict within marker corresponds style option marker border Note color marker using RGB value whereas color marker outline CSS color code perfectly acceptable — even use RGBA set alpha marker size adjusted via markersize attribute created new dataframe column ‘ratio’ scaled value positiveratings negativeratings larger bubble mean game higher ratio positive negative rating expect game generally higher average playtime Right hover point see x value isn’t exactly useful However it’s easy add proper hover text point see name game we’re looking including code Figure object take hover data turn something much better hovertextsteamdfname hoverlabeldictnamelength0 hovertemplatehovertextbrPrice x brAvg Playtime may look little overwhelming let break hovertext variable defining use template hoverlabel mainly aesthetic purpose keep may see trace number side tooltip box don’t like code remove hovertemplate allows create template string render whatever information want appear hoverbox Variables added using variable format make use HTML tag br b etcTags Python Data Visualization Data Science Data Programming
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4,627 |
My Father Was Arrested for Living in an Airport Terminal
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I remember how excited I was as a little girl when I got to ride in a taxi with my grandparents instead of taking the subway. It always felt rewarding with a dash of thrill as if it were a holiday or special occasion.
I didn’t know then that my parents couldn’t afford to take a taxi. I just assumed it was something wealthy people did and my grandparents had been blessed with wealth.
As I grew into my teen years I would spend the summers in Brooklyn with my grandparents. That’s when I began to put the pieces together. They had things we didn’t have at home such as a TV, food and more than one bedroom. What was normal for them was a dream come true for me.
By my seventeenth birthday I had the pattern of my parent’s irresponsible failure down to a science. It came in waves and the waves would crash and thrash harder each storm. There was never any money and once I started working they felt entitled to my measly $6 an hour part time paycheck.
I knew if I continued to live with them I would never have a future. I lived by this imaginary impression the cycle of poverty could be broken. My siblings and I packed our backpacks and set off never to return again. We were all under the age of eighteen.
The last time I saw my father he’d been arrested for stealing a car. I went to visit him in jail. He asked my siblings and I to bail him out. We did. He skipped out on his bail. He ran. We lost our $1400.
My father had his own form of logic. If he didn’t pay the rent and we were evicted he’d claim if the landlord can afford to send his kid to college then he didn’t need the money. If we ate that morning than why did we need to eat that night? We’d be fine. He’d never keep a job because all of his bosses were assholes. I can’t even count how many asshole bosses existed during my childhood.
When we asked him why he stole the car he told us the people he took it from had more cars than they needed. It was never about the stupid, humiliating and selfish things he did. His actions were merely a reaction to other people.
More than a decade had gone by since the car theft when I received a call from the Miami- Dade Police Department. My father was homeless and living in the Miami International Airport terminal where he was arrested by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
They informed me he claimed there was no one else for him to call and requested I come pick him up. It wasn’t worth it to me to travel from Arizona to Florida to bail him out. Instead, I requested he call me.
When he called I was nervous. I didn’t want to speak to him but I was curious how he got to this place in life. I had so many questions. What was he thinking? This is who he turned out to be? How did he end up homeless? Why the airport? Why did he ask them to call me? Why did he not get the help he so desperately needed? How could he not see he needed help?
I cringed at the sound of his voice. The more he spoke the more my stomach churned. I said little in response. There wasn’t much for me to say.
He was living in his mini van for a few years. It eventually died and he abandoned it. It had been towed and he had lost what little possessions he had left to his name.
The airport was a master suite to him. He was able to shower in sinks, sleep on couches, eat unwanted food out of garbage cans. It was a resolution to his homelessness situation. It was months before TSA caught on. He referred to it as if he were living in a resort. A part of me was filled with anger and humiliation. The other part of me felt compassion and devastation. He experienced mental illness and he most likely lived up to his level of function.
He asked if I would allow him to come live with me. I thought back to the memories I had growing up. I now had my own children and I needed to protect them. I had once wished someone would have protected me. I was already raising my children. I didn’t want the burden of raising my father.
My belief in breaking the cycle of poverty when I was a teenager became a reality in adulthood. It’s a reality I’ve held onto so tightly.
When I hung up the phone that day it was the last time I spoke with him. I have no knowledge of whether he’s alive or if he’s passed away. I have no closure of what may have happened to him. Was I right to choose myself over his needs?
I used to carry his stories around as if he were baggage. A burden of horrid memories I could never free myself from. I realize now that I should be grateful, because of him I’ve worked hard not to be who he was.
|
https://erikasauter.medium.com/my-father-was-arrested-for-living-in-an-airport-terminal-3fea41d66fe3
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['Erika Sauter']
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2018-07-20 18:38:26.230000+00:00
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['This Happened To Me', 'Life Lessons', 'Mental Health', 'Life', 'Family']
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Title Father Arrested Living Airport TerminalContent remember excited little girl got ride taxi grandparent instead taking subway always felt rewarding dash thrill holiday special occasion didn’t know parent couldn’t afford take taxi assumed something wealthy people grandparent blessed wealth grew teen year would spend summer Brooklyn grandparent That’s began put piece together thing didn’t home TV food one bedroom normal dream come true seventeenth birthday pattern parent’s irresponsible failure science came wave wave would crash thrash harder storm never money started working felt entitled measly 6 hour part time paycheck knew continued live would never future lived imaginary impression cycle poverty could broken sibling packed backpack set never return age eighteen last time saw father he’d arrested stealing car went visit jail asked sibling bail skipped bail ran lost 1400 father form logic didn’t pay rent evicted he’d claim landlord afford send kid college didn’t need money ate morning need eat night We’d fine He’d never keep job boss asshole can’t even count many asshole boss existed childhood asked stole car told u people took car needed never stupid humiliating selfish thing action merely reaction people decade gone since car theft received call Miami Dade Police Department father homeless living Miami International Airport terminal arrested Transportation Security Administration TSA informed claimed one else call requested come pick wasn’t worth travel Arizona Florida bail Instead requested call called nervous didn’t want speak curious got place life many question thinking turned end homeless airport ask call get help desperately needed could see needed help cringed sound voice spoke stomach churned said little response wasn’t much say living mini van year eventually died abandoned towed lost little possession left name airport master suite able shower sink sleep couch eat unwanted food garbage can resolution homelessness situation month TSA caught referred living resort part filled anger humiliation part felt compassion devastation experienced mental illness likely lived level function asked would allow come live thought back memory growing child needed protect wished someone would protected already raising child didn’t want burden raising father belief breaking cycle poverty teenager became reality adulthood It’s reality I’ve held onto tightly hung phone day last time spoke knowledge whether he’s alive he’s passed away closure may happened right choose need used carry story around baggage burden horrid memory could never free realize grateful I’ve worked hard wasTags Happened Life Lessons Mental Health Life Family
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4,628 |
Do High Frequency Gravitational Waves Explain Li & Podkletnov’s Experimental Results?
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Scientists like Dr. Ning Li & Eugene Podkletnov have claimed to see anomalous gravitational effects for decades. Could High-Frequency Gravitational Waves provide an explanation? We join Dr. Robert Baker, Jr. to discuss international HFGW research and hypothesize about what might be causing these strange experimental effects…
Robert, I understand that there are literally dozens of physicists & engineers doing research on High Frequency Gravitational Waves, and the 2003 Mitre HFGW conference was a pivotal first event in terms of bringing them together as a community. Can you describe this for me a bit?
Dr. Robert Baker, Jr — view his bio here.
The MITRE conference was a crucial first step in bringing scientists together to discuss HFGWs from both the perspectives of theoretical physicists and practical engineers and included scientists from all over the world.
Interestingly though, scientists from China who were not able to attend the event became some of the biggest proponents of HFGW research and use the MITRE papers as background for their research.
The community that took shape at the MITRE Conference later evolved into STAIF Section-F, and this was due entirely to the tireless efforts of Paul Murad and Tony Robertson. STAIF proved to be an excellent forum for the presentation and discussion of new concepts in gravitational science.
I’ve been following a few of them recently — such as Dr. Ning Li. The last I’d heard from her was a very brief message in which she claimed to have achieved an 11 kilowatt experimental result for gravitational wave production. She calls this “AC gravity”, which is poorly understood by myself and many others.
Well, at the 2003 MITRE conference, we had participants from about nine countries and about 25 papers, indicating quite a bit of interest — particularly in Russia and China.
Ling Li presented a paper there, which was theoretical in nature and perhaps not easily understood by laymen, and in it she did indicate a theoretical output of 11 kilowatts from her system. In her mind, “AC gravity” is simply alternating current — the rest of us refer to it as high frequency gravitational waves. So we’re really talking about the same thing — with frequencies on the order of a hundred kilocycles and on up to the gigacycle range and beyond.
As I understand things, Ning Li’s research uses rotating superconductors, and is similar to the experiments that Eugene Podkletnov claimed results for in the early ’90s. The biggest difference is that she’s working on a theoretical model for her experiments, right?
Well, she worked with Douglas Torr while they were at the University of Alabama and came up with a very significant paper back in 1992 which indicated that these gravitational waves could be refracted.
Essentially, she theorized that there’s an index of refraction, which means you could make a gravitational wave lens out of a superconducting material. It this idea pans out, it would lead to all kinds of optics and a lot of future innovation — it would be quite an amazing feature of her studies.
Dr. Ning Li, demonstrating the superconductor she claims to have generated “AC Gravity”.
The superconductors that both Li & Podkletnov have been experimenting with are quite large — much larger than what NASA used during their experimental replication. Does that play a role in their results?
Yes, they’re both using discs up to almost 10 inches, I think. I’m not quite sure, but certainly 10 centimeters at the least. They’re quite large.
My thesis has been that high frequency gravitational waves are the basis for the effects Li & Podkletnov have claimed. In other words, the rotating disc, fields, high frequencies, harmonics and so on could be producing HFGWs that are perhaps about below the limits of detection at the magnitudes they work at, but may be influencing the local gravitational field, perhaps through self-rectification or something along those lines.
That makes sense. She’s been rather quiet lately — I haven’t heard from her in some time, but did see a recent funding request that appears to have been fulfilled by the Department of Defense, so it seems they may be financing part of her research?
Well, they did, and I was a part of the oversight committee. It was done by the U S Army and the Redstone Arsenal there in Huntsville. They did indeed have her do some research, and I was on the panel that was taking a look at that research for the Army.
There was a problem, though: we couldn’t get a final report out of Ning. You know, we had to get something. She is a brilliant scientist, but like so many brilliant scientists, sometimes they’re a little less than practical.
It’s not that she was hiding it or anything nefarious. In fact, I was on the panel that was talking to Ning, and I said, “well, where’s the final report?” Well, she just didn’t quite get around to it, you know, and that’s a problem. I‘ve talked with her since then, however, and she would play a role in the efforts that I’m trying to promote.
Back in the 1990's, Podkletnov claimed a 3% loss in weight in a rotating superconductor, which is similar to Ning Li’s experiments. However, in the early 2000’s he co-authored a paper with Dr. Giovanni Modanese claiming that a spark discharge onto a superconductor was generating over 20 pounds of force. Are you familiar with this second paper?
Podkletnov’s rotating superconductor was claimed to produce a 3% loss in weight.
Well that’s interesting, and I would love to see a replication of it. Some of their work I have seen, and it had interesting correlation with frequency. In other words, the higher the frequency, the greater the effect, or rather with the square of the frequency.
That caught my attention, because high frequency gravitational wave influence also increases with the square of its frequency, so again I can’t help but wonder if there’s an HFGW effect that might explain their claims.
Please keep in mind, however, that I’m an engineer — not a theoretician. In this particular case, you’d want to follow up the experimental work with a detailed theoretical analysis.
That’s not always the case. Often you have a theory and then develop an experiment to you know, to test it, but since they already claim to have experimental results I think they should work it the other way around.
The Podkletnov & Modanese claims are significant, as is this 11 kilowatt effect that Ning Li claimed to generate — how is that measured? What kind of force could we anticipate from future experimental devices?
Well it’s hard to tell. I mentioned Landau and Lifshitz, but they do not give any particular specifications. Now another scientist that you might get in touch with is Professor Giorgio Fontana over in Italy.
Fontana has come to some of the HFGW meetings and presented papers on gravitational wave beams, interactions and so forth. He’s one of several researchers in Italy looking at gravitational wave beams — what happens when they intersect, and how they might change the gravitational field.
I think Giorgio’s work is good, and he’d be a good person to talk with, but I really don’t think anybody’s theoretically come up with the magnitude.
Do you have any ideas on how conservation of energy is preserved in these experimental claims? I ask because these are claims for pretty substantial results, and I wonder how input power might be coupled to output effect.
I’m not sure and I don’t think anybody’s quite sure. Again, that’s why an experiment is valuable. I’ve not seen any of these purported gravitational change experiments myself, of the people who are reporting claims, none of them have reported any kind of permanent effect or easily replicable effects that would allow for detailed measurements coupling measurements.
In some of the work that I’m doing with the Chinese, you can get up to 10²⁰ watts per square meter for a small area, and that might really open things up. After all, when Marconi developed his ship to shore radio telegraphy, I don’t think he ever thought about microwave oven applications for his work. So we just won’t know until we actually do more experimental research.
Podkletnov’s “impulse generator” was claimed to generate up to 20 lbs of force.
A lot of that research is currently being done in China, from what I understand. Can you tell us a bit about their efforts, and how many people have become involved in their research projects?
Yes, the Chinese sponsored me on a month-long lecture tour of Universities and Institutes in China on the subject of HFGWs. Right now there are probably more scientists in China working on HFGW research than in the whole of the rest of the world.
I’m also working on a project with professor Fangyu Li at Chongqing University in China on an experiment attempting to emulate the gravitational waves produced by a double star system. Fangu Li has a detector that would be well suited to detecting these gravitational waves, and we’re excited to see what kind of results we can produce & detect.
What is the anticipated timeframe before we can anticipate seeing scientific applications for High Frequency Gravitation Wave research?
It’s like anything, it really boils down to money. If the A-bomb project during World War II had proceeded at a normal pace, it probably would have taken 50 years to develop — but when the Manhattan project funded it & removed all the stop, then it happened very rapidly. You could make the same case for the rapid development of computer processors.
Basically as I see it, there’s a tipping point in terms of experimental results, and once that’s been reached then mainstream “big science” gets involved and further research will move rapidly. The question is how fast we’ll reach that tipping point — it could be a couple of years, or it may be a decade. It’s difficult to say.
|
https://medium.com/discourse/do-high-frequence-gravitational-waves-explain-li-podkletnovs-experimental-results-5d9f9560e1a6
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['Tim Ventura']
|
2019-12-24 01:00:21.732000+00:00
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['Physics', 'Futurism', 'Science', 'Technology', 'Gravity']
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Title High Frequency Gravitational Waves Explain Li Podkletnov’s Experimental ResultsContent Scientists like Dr Ning Li Eugene Podkletnov claimed see anomalous gravitational effect decade Could HighFrequency Gravitational Waves provide explanation join Dr Robert Baker Jr discus international HFGW research hypothesize might causing strange experimental effects… Robert understand literally dozen physicist engineer research High Frequency Gravitational Waves 2003 Mitre HFGW conference pivotal first event term bringing together community describe bit Dr Robert Baker Jr — view bio MITRE conference crucial first step bringing scientist together discus HFGWs perspective theoretical physicist practical engineer included scientist world Interestingly though scientist China able attend event became biggest proponent HFGW research use MITRE paper background research community took shape MITRE Conference later evolved STAIF SectionF due entirely tireless effort Paul Murad Tony Robertson STAIF proved excellent forum presentation discussion new concept gravitational science I’ve following recently — Dr Ning Li last I’d heard brief message claimed achieved 11 kilowatt experimental result gravitational wave production call “AC gravity” poorly understood many others Well 2003 MITRE conference participant nine country 25 paper indicating quite bit interest — particularly Russia China Ling Li presented paper theoretical nature perhaps easily understood layman indicate theoretical output 11 kilowatt system mind “AC gravity” simply alternating current — rest u refer high frequency gravitational wave we’re really talking thing — frequency order hundred kilocycle gigacycle range beyond understand thing Ning Li’s research us rotating superconductors similar experiment Eugene Podkletnov claimed result early ’90s biggest difference she’s working theoretical model experiment right Well worked Douglas Torr University Alabama came significant paper back 1992 indicated gravitational wave could refracted Essentially theorized there’s index refraction mean could make gravitational wave lens superconducting material idea pan would lead kind optic lot future innovation — would quite amazing feature study Dr Ning Li demonstrating superconductor claim generated “AC Gravity” superconductors Li Podkletnov experimenting quite large — much larger NASA used experimental replication play role result Yes they’re using disc almost 10 inch think I’m quite sure certainly 10 centimeter least They’re quite large thesis high frequency gravitational wave basis effect Li Podkletnov claimed word rotating disc field high frequency harmonic could producing HFGWs perhaps limit detection magnitude work may influencing local gravitational field perhaps selfrectification something along line make sense She’s rather quiet lately — haven’t heard time see recent funding request appears fulfilled Department Defense seems may financing part research Well part oversight committee done U Army Redstone Arsenal Huntsville indeed research panel taking look research Army problem though couldn’t get final report Ning know get something brilliant scientist like many brilliant scientist sometimes they’re little le practical It’s hiding anything nefarious fact panel talking Ning said “well where’s final report” Well didn’t quite get around know that’s problem I‘ve talked since however would play role effort I’m trying promote Back 1990s Podkletnov claimed 3 loss weight rotating superconductor similar Ning Li’s experiment However early 2000’s coauthored paper Dr Giovanni Modanese claiming spark discharge onto superconductor generating 20 pound force familiar second paper Podkletnov’s rotating superconductor claimed produce 3 loss weight Well that’s interesting would love see replication work seen interesting correlation frequency word higher frequency greater effect rather square frequency caught attention high frequency gravitational wave influence also increase square frequency can’t help wonder there’s HFGW effect might explain claim Please keep mind however I’m engineer — theoretician particular case you’d want follow experimental work detailed theoretical analysis That’s always case Often theory develop experiment know test since already claim experimental result think work way around Podkletnov Modanese claim significant 11 kilowatt effect Ning Li claimed generate — measured kind force could anticipate future experimental device Well it’s hard tell mentioned Landau Lifshitz give particular specification another scientist might get touch Professor Giorgio Fontana Italy Fontana come HFGW meeting presented paper gravitational wave beam interaction forth He’s one several researcher Italy looking gravitational wave beam — happens intersect might change gravitational field think Giorgio’s work good he’d good person talk really don’t think anybody’s theoretically come magnitude idea conservation energy preserved experimental claim ask claim pretty substantial result wonder input power might coupled output effect I’m sure don’t think anybody’s quite sure that’s experiment valuable I’ve seen purported gravitational change experiment people reporting claim none reported kind permanent effect easily replicable effect would allow detailed measurement coupling measurement work I’m Chinese get 10²⁰ watt per square meter small area might really open thing Marconi developed ship shore radio telegraphy don’t think ever thought microwave oven application work won’t know actually experimental research Podkletnov’s “impulse generator” claimed generate 20 lb force lot research currently done China understand tell u bit effort many people become involved research project Yes Chinese sponsored monthlong lecture tour Universities Institutes China subject HFGWs Right probably scientist China working HFGW research whole rest world I’m also working project professor Fangyu Li Chongqing University China experiment attempting emulate gravitational wave produced double star system Fangu Li detector would well suited detecting gravitational wave we’re excited see kind result produce detect anticipated timeframe anticipate seeing scientific application High Frequency Gravitation Wave research It’s like anything really boil money Abomb project World War II proceeded normal pace probably would taken 50 year develop — Manhattan project funded removed stop happened rapidly could make case rapid development computer processor Basically see there’s tipping point term experimental result that’s reached mainstream “big science” get involved research move rapidly question fast we’ll reach tipping point — could couple year may decade It’s difficult sayTags Physics Futurism Science Technology Gravity
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4,629 |
Simplifying Sentiment Analysis using VADER in Python (on Social Media Text)
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What is Sentiment Analysis?
Sentiment Analysis, or Opinion Mining, is a sub-field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) that tries to identify and extract opinions within a given text. The aim of sentiment analysis is to gauge the attitude, sentiments, evaluations, attitudes and emotions of a speaker/writer based on the computational treatment of subjectivity in a text .
Why is sentiment analysis so important?
Businesses today are heavily dependent on data. Majority of this data however, is unstructured text coming from sources like emails, chats, social media, surveys, articles, and documents. The micro-blogging content coming from Twitter and Facebook poses serious challenges, not only because of the amount of data involved, but also because of the kind of language used in them to express sentiments, i.e., short forms, memes and emoticons.
Sifting through huge volumes of this text data is difficult as well as time-consuming. Also, it requires a great deal of expertise and resources to analyze all of that. Not an easy task, in short.
Sentiment Analysis is also useful for practitioners and researchers, especially in fields like sociology, marketing, advertising, psychology, economics, and political science, which rely a lot on human-computer interaction data.
Sentiment Analysis enables companies to make sense out of data by being able to automate this entire process! Thus they are able to elicit vital insights from a vast unstructured dataset without having to manually indulge with it.
Why is Sentiment Analysis a Hard to perform Task?
Though it may seem easy on paper, Sentiment Analysis is actually a tricky subject. There are various reasons for that:
Understanding emotions through text are not always easy. Sometimes even humans can get misled, so expecting a 100% accuracy from a computer is like asking for the Moon!
A text may contain multiple sentiments all at once. For instance,
“The intent behind the movie was great, but it could have been better”.
The above sentence consists of two polarities, i.e., Positive as well as Negative. So how do we conclude whether the review was Positive or Negative?
Computers aren’t too comfortable in comprehending Figurative Speech. Figurative language uses words in a way that deviates from their conventionally accepted definitions in order to convey a more complicated meaning or heightened effect. Use of similes, metaphors, hyperboles etc qualify for a figurative speech. Let us understand it better with an example.
“The best I can say about the movie is that it was interesting.”
Here, the word ’interesting’ does not necessarily convey positive sentiment and can be confusing for algorithms.
Heavy use of emoticons and slangs with sentiment values in social media texts like that of Twitter and Facebook also makes text analysis difficult. For example a “ :)” denotes a smiley and generally refers to positive sentiment while “:(” denotes a negative sentiment on the other hand. Also, acronyms like “LOL“, ”OMG” and commonly used slangs like “Nah”, “meh”, ”giggly” etc are also strong indicators of some sort of sentiment in a sentence.
These are few of the problems encountered not only with sentiment analysis but with NLP as a whole. In fact, these are some of the Open-ended problems of the Natural Language Processing field.
VADER Sentiment Analysis
VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner) is a lexicon and rule-based sentiment analysis tool that is specifically attuned to sentiments expressed in social media. VADER uses a combination of A sentiment lexicon is a list of lexical features (e.g., words) which are generally labelled according to their semantic orientation as either positive or negative.
VADER has been found to be quite successful when dealing with social media texts, NY Times editorials, movie reviews, and product reviews. This is because VADER not only tells about the Positivity and Negativity score but also tells us about how positive or negative a sentiment is.
It is fully open-sourced under the MIT License. The developers of VADER have used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to get most of their ratings, You can find complete details on their Github Page.
Advantages of using VADER
VADER has a lot of advantages over traditional methods of Sentiment Analysis, including:
It works exceedingly well on social media type text, yet readily generalizes to multiple domains
It doesn’t require any training data but is constructed from a generalizable, valence-based, human-curated gold standard sentiment lexicon
but is constructed from a generalizable, valence-based, human-curated gold standard sentiment lexicon It is fast enough to be used online with streaming data, and
It does not severely suffer from a speed-performance tradeoff.
The source of this article is a very easy to read paper published by the creaters of VADER library.You can read the paper here.
Enough of talking. Let us now see practically how does VADER analysis work for which we will have install the library first.
Installation
The simplest way is to use the command line to do an installation from [PyPI] using pip. Check their Github repository for the detailed explanation.
> pip install vaderSentiment
Once VADER is installed let us call the SentimentIntensityAnalyser object,
from vaderSentiment.vaderSentiment import SentimentIntensityAnalyzer analyser = SentimentIntensityAnalyzer()
Working & Scoring
Let us test our first sentiment using VADER now. We will use the polarity_scores() method to obtain the polarity indices for the given sentence.
def sentiment_analyzer_scores(sentence):
score = analyser.polarity_scores(sentence)
print("{:-<40} {}".format(sentence, str(score)))
Let us check how VADER performs on a given review:
sentiment_analyzer_scores("The phone is super cool.") The phone is super cool----------------- {'neg': 0.0, 'neu': 0.326, 'pos': 0.674, 'compound': 0.7351}
Putting in a Tabular form:
The Positive, Negative and Neutral scores represent the proportion of text that falls in these categories. This means our sentence was rated as 67% Positive, 33% Neutral and 0% Negative. Hence all these should add up to 1.
The Compound score is a metric that calculates the sum of all the lexicon ratings which have been normalized between -1(most extreme negative) and +1 (most extreme positive). In the case above, lexicon ratings for and supercool are 2.9 and respectively 1.3 . The compound score turns out to be 0.75 , denoting a very high positive sentiment.
compound score metric
read here for more details on VADER scoring methodology.
VADER analyses sentiments primarily based on certain key points:
Punctuation: The use of an exclamation mark(!), increases the magnitude of the intensity without modifying the semantic orientation. For example, “The food here is good!” is more intense than “The food here is good.” and an increase in the number of (!), increases the magnitude accordingly.
See how the overall compound score is increasing with the increase in exclamation marks.
Capitalization: Using upper case letters to emphasize a sentiment-relevant word in the presence of other non-capitalized words, increases the magnitude of the sentiment intensity. For example, “The food here is GREAT!” conveys more intensity than “The food here is great!”
Degree modifiers: Also called intensifiers, they impact the sentiment intensity by either increasing or decreasing the intensity. For example, “The service here is extremely good” is more intense than “The service here is good”, whereas “The service here is marginally good” reduces the intensity.
Conjunctions: Use of conjunctions like “but” signals a shift in sentiment polarity, with the sentiment of the text following the conjunction being dominant. “The food here is great, but the service is horrible” has mixed sentiment, with the latter half dictating the overall rating.
Preceding Tri-gram: By examining the tri-gram preceding a sentiment-laden lexical feature, we catch nearly 90% of cases where negation flips the polarity of the text. A negated sentence would be “The food here isn’t really all that great”.
Handling Emojis, Slangs, and Emoticons.
VADER performs very well with emojis, slangs, and acronyms in sentences. Let us see each with an example.
Emojis
print(sentiment_analyzer_scores('I am 😄 today'))
print(sentiment_analyzer_scores('😊'))
print(sentiment_analyzer_scores('😥'))
print(sentiment_analyzer_scores('☹️')) #Output I am 😄 today---------------------------- {'neg': 0.0, 'neu': 0.476, 'pos': 0.524, 'compound': 0.6705} 😊--------------------------------------- {'neg': 0.0, 'neu': 0.333, 'pos': 0.667, 'compound': 0.7184} 😥--------------------------------------- {'neg': 0.275, 'neu': 0.268, 'pos': 0.456, 'compound': 0.3291} ☹️-------------------------------------- {'neg': 0.706, 'neu': 0.294, 'pos': 0.0, 'compound': -0.34} 💘--------------------------------------- {'neg': 0.0, 'neu': 1.0, 'pos': 0.0, 'compound': 0.0}
Slangs
print(sentiment_analyzer_scores("Today SUX!"))
print(sentiment_analyzer_scores("Today only kinda sux! But I'll get by, lol")) #output Today SUX!------------------------------ {'neg': 0.779, 'neu': 0.221, 'pos': 0.0, 'compound': -0.5461} Today only kinda sux! But I'll get by, lol {'neg': 0.127, 'neu': 0.556, 'pos': 0.317, 'compound': 0.5249}
Emoticons
print(sentiment_analyzer_scores("Make sure you :) or :D today!")) Make sure you :) or :D today!----------- {'neg': 0.0, 'neu': 0.294, 'pos': 0.706, 'compound': 0.8633}
We saw how VADER can easily detect sentiment from emojis and slangs which form an important component of the social media environment.
Conclusion
The results of VADER analysis are not only remarkable but also very encouraging. The outcomes highlight the tremendous benefits that can be attained by the use of VADER in cases of micro-blogging sites wherein the text data is a complex mix of a variety of text.
|
https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/simplifying-social-media-sentiment-analysis-using-vader-in-python-f9e6ec6fc52f
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['Parul Pandey']
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2019-11-08 14:49:39.076000+00:00
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['Sentiment Analysis', 'NLP', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Data Science', 'Machine Learning']
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Title Simplifying Sentiment Analysis using VADER Python Social Media TextContent Sentiment Analysis Sentiment Analysis Opinion Mining subfield Natural Language Processing NLP try identify extract opinion within given text aim sentiment analysis gauge attitude sentiment evaluation attitude emotion speakerwriter based computational treatment subjectivity text sentiment analysis important Businesses today heavily dependent data Majority data however unstructured text coming source like email chat social medium survey article document microblogging content coming Twitter Facebook pose serious challenge amount data involved also kind language used express sentiment ie short form meme emoticon Sifting huge volume text data difficult well timeconsuming Also requires great deal expertise resource analyze easy task short Sentiment Analysis also useful practitioner researcher especially field like sociology marketing advertising psychology economics political science rely lot humancomputer interaction data Sentiment Analysis enables company make sense data able automate entire process Thus able elicit vital insight vast unstructured dataset without manually indulge Sentiment Analysis Hard perform Task Though may seem easy paper Sentiment Analysis actually tricky subject various reason Understanding emotion text always easy Sometimes even human get misled expecting 100 accuracy computer like asking Moon text may contain multiple sentiment instance “The intent behind movie great could better” sentence consists two polarity ie Positive well Negative conclude whether review Positive Negative Computers aren’t comfortable comprehending Figurative Speech Figurative language us word way deviate conventionally accepted definition order convey complicated meaning heightened effect Use simile metaphor hyperbole etc qualify figurative speech Let u understand better example “The best say movie interesting” word ’interesting’ necessarily convey positive sentiment confusing algorithm Heavy use emoticon slang sentiment value social medium text like Twitter Facebook also make text analysis difficult example “ ” denotes smiley generally refers positive sentiment “” denotes negative sentiment hand Also acronym like “LOL“ ”OMG” commonly used slang like “Nah” “meh” ”giggly” etc also strong indicator sort sentiment sentence problem encountered sentiment analysis NLP whole fact Openended problem Natural Language Processing field VADER Sentiment Analysis VADER Valence Aware Dictionary sEntiment Reasoner lexicon rulebased sentiment analysis tool specifically attuned sentiment expressed social medium VADER us combination sentiment lexicon list lexical feature eg word generally labelled according semantic orientation either positive negative VADER found quite successful dealing social medium text NY Times editorial movie review product review VADER tell Positivity Negativity score also tell u positive negative sentiment fully opensourced MIT License developer VADER used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk get rating find complete detail Github Page Advantages using VADER VADER lot advantage traditional method Sentiment Analysis including work exceedingly well social medium type text yet readily generalizes multiple domain doesn’t require training data constructed generalizable valencebased humancurated gold standard sentiment lexicon constructed generalizable valencebased humancurated gold standard sentiment lexicon fast enough used online streaming data severely suffer speedperformance tradeoff source article easy read paper published creaters VADER libraryYou read paper Enough talking Let u see practically VADER analysis work install library first Installation simplest way use command line installation PyPI using pip Check Github repository detailed explanation pip install vaderSentiment VADER installed let u call SentimentIntensityAnalyser object vaderSentimentvaderSentiment import SentimentIntensityAnalyzer analyser SentimentIntensityAnalyzer Working Scoring Let u test first sentiment using VADER use polarityscores method obtain polarity index given sentence def sentimentanalyzerscoressentence score analyserpolarityscoressentence print40 formatsentence strscore Let u check VADER performs given review sentimentanalyzerscoresThe phone super cool phone super cool neg 00 neu 0326 po 0674 compound 07351 Putting Tabular form Positive Negative Neutral score represent proportion text fall category mean sentence rated 67 Positive 33 Neutral 0 Negative Hence add 1 Compound score metric calculates sum lexicon rating normalized 1most extreme negative 1 extreme positive case lexicon rating supercool 29 respectively 13 compound score turn 075 denoting high positive sentiment compound score metric read detail VADER scoring methodology VADER analysis sentiment primarily based certain key point Punctuation use exclamation mark increase magnitude intensity without modifying semantic orientation example “The food good” intense “The food good” increase number increase magnitude accordingly See overall compound score increasing increase exclamation mark Capitalization Using upper case letter emphasize sentimentrelevant word presence noncapitalized word increase magnitude sentiment intensity example “The food GREAT” conveys intensity “The food great” Degree modifier Also called intensifier impact sentiment intensity either increasing decreasing intensity example “The service extremely good” intense “The service good” whereas “The service marginally good” reduces intensity Conjunctions Use conjunction like “but” signal shift sentiment polarity sentiment text following conjunction dominant “The food great service horrible” mixed sentiment latter half dictating overall rating Preceding Trigram examining trigram preceding sentimentladen lexical feature catch nearly 90 case negation flip polarity text negated sentence would “The food isn’t really great” Handling Emojis Slangs Emoticons VADER performs well emojis slang acronym sentence Let u see example Emojis printsentimentanalyzerscoresI 😄 today printsentimentanalyzerscores😊 printsentimentanalyzerscores😥 printsentimentanalyzerscores☹️ Output 😄 today neg 00 neu 0476 po 0524 compound 06705 😊 neg 00 neu 0333 po 0667 compound 07184 😥 neg 0275 neu 0268 po 0456 compound 03291 ☹️ neg 0706 neu 0294 po 00 compound 034 💘 neg 00 neu 10 po 00 compound 00 Slangs printsentimentanalyzerscoresToday SUX printsentimentanalyzerscoresToday kinda sux Ill get lol output Today SUX neg 0779 neu 0221 po 00 compound 05461 Today kinda sux Ill get lol neg 0127 neu 0556 po 0317 compound 05249 Emoticons printsentimentanalyzerscoresMake sure today Make sure today neg 00 neu 0294 po 0706 compound 08633 saw VADER easily detect sentiment emojis slang form important component social medium environment Conclusion result VADER analysis remarkable also encouraging outcome highlight tremendous benefit attained use VADER case microblogging site wherein text data complex mix variety textTags Sentiment Analysis NLP Artificial Intelligence Data Science Machine Learning
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4,630 |
Two Significant Enhancements Were Made To IBM Watson Assistant
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Different Date Entries Normalized
You need to manually enable the new system entities to take advantage of improvements that were made to the number-based system entities provided by IBM.
The list of supported languages can be found here.
The new system entities can recognize more nuanced mentions in user input. For example, system date can calculate the date of a national holiday when it is mentioned by name. This is obviously very country specific.
System date can also recognize when a year is specified as part of a date mentioned in the user's input. The improvements also make it easier for your assistant to distinguish among the many number-based system entities.
For example, a date mention, such as April 15, that is recognized to be System Date is not also identified as a System Number mention.
Day of Interest Recognized and Normalized To Date
This example shows how Christmas day is translated or normalized to the year, month and day.
This significantly simplify the process of date normalization from various natural language formats.
Two: Automatic Irrelevance detection
Conversational Interfaces, also known as chatbots are usually used to address a very narrow domain. But then a lot of time needs to be spend on handling conversations which is irrelevant to the domain of implementation.
Irrelevance detection helps the chatbot to recognize when a user touches topics which it is not designed to answer, and with confidence earlier in the development process.
This feature helps your chatbot to recognize subjects which you did not designed and developed for, even if you haven’t explicitly taught it about what to ignore, by marking specific user utterances as irrelevant.
The algorithmic models that help your chatbot understand what the users say are built from two key pieces of information:
Domains you want your chatbot to address. For example, queries about deliveries to a chatbot designed to take payments.
You train your chatbot on these subjects by defining intents and providing lots of example user utterances that articulate the intents so your chatbot can recognize them.
Then you need to present counterexamples and often there are false positives where an utterance is erroneously assigned to an entity.
Irrelevance detection is designed in order to navigate any vulnerability there might be in counterexample data as you start your chatbot development.
When you enable it enabled, an alternative method for evaluating the relevance of a newly submitted utterance is triggered in addition to the standard method.
Irrelevance Detection Enabled
From the Skills page, open your skill. From the skill menu, click Options. On the Irrelevance detection page, choose Enhanced.
The supplemental method examines the structure of the new utterance and compares it to the structure of the user example utterances in your training data.
This alternate approach helps chatbots that have few or no counterexamples, recognize irrelevant utterances.
Marking User Input as Irrelevant To Build a Counterexample Model
Note that the new method relies on structural information that is based on data from outside your skill. So, while the new method can be useful as you are starting out, to build a chatbot that provides a more customized experience, you want it to use information from data that is derived from within the application’s domain.
The way to ensure that your assistant does so is by adding your own counterexamples. If only a few.
In the chatobt development process, you provide example user utterances or sentences which are grouped into distinct topics that someone might ask the assistant about — these are called “intents.”
Utterances Are Detected As Irrelevant with No False Intent Assignments
The bad news…users do not stick to the script. The chatbot usually gets a variety of unexpected questions that the person building the assistant didn’t plan for it to handle initially.
In these cases an escalation to a human is triggered, or a knowledge base search is triggered. Bot not the most effective response. How about the chatbot saying, I cannot help you with that.
Negate False Intent Assignment
Often, instead of stating the intent is out of scope, in a desperate attempt to field the utterance, the chatbot assigns the best fit option to the user; often wrong.
Or the chatbot continues to inform the user it does not understand; and having the user continuously rephrasing the input. Instead of the chatbot merely stating the question is not part of its domain.
The traditional approaches are:
Many “out-of-scope” examples are dreamed up and entered
The NLU model automatically select a set of irrelevant examples different to the training data
We could easily build a very accurate irrelevant-question-detector by tagging most of the questions from assistant users as irrelevant… but this would be a pretty bad experience because the assistant would have low coverage on in-domain questions. Since none of these approaches are perfect, especially when an assistant is new and doesn’t have a lot of training data, we decided to come up with an approach that is more human-like.
If we want to know if an utterance from a user is irrelevant, IBM Watson Assistant initially check if it is similar to the set of relevant examples, and if not, it is tagged.
IBM combine this with another algorithm which gauges the dissimilarity of the incoming question from concepts that are not close to the assistant’s domain.
In Conclusion
It is very encouraging to see an environment develop and grow in functionality. The IBM Watson Assistant team has been effective in augmenting the building out the Watson Assistant environment with tools and functionality which make a huge difference.
|
https://cobusgreyling.medium.com/two-significant-enhancements-were-made-to-ibm-watson-assistant-7d4461dedced
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['Cobus Greyling']
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2019-12-04 11:49:34.891000+00:00
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['NLP', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Chatbots', 'Nlu', 'Machine Learning']
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Title Two Significant Enhancements Made IBM Watson AssistantContent Different Date Entries Normalized need manually enable new system entity take advantage improvement made numberbased system entity provided IBM list supported language found new system entity recognize nuanced mention user input example system date calculate date national holiday mentioned name obviously country specific System date also recognize year specified part date mentioned user input improvement also make easier assistant distinguish among many numberbased system entity example date mention April 15 recognized System Date also identified System Number mention Day Interest Recognized Normalized Date example show Christmas day translated normalized year month day significantly simplify process date normalization various natural language format Two Automatic Irrelevance detection Conversational Interfaces also known chatbots usually used address narrow domain lot time need spend handling conversation irrelevant domain implementation Irrelevance detection help chatbot recognize user touch topic designed answer confidence earlier development process feature help chatbot recognize subject designed developed even haven’t explicitly taught ignore marking specific user utterance irrelevant algorithmic model help chatbot understand user say built two key piece information Domains want chatbot address example query delivery chatbot designed take payment train chatbot subject defining intent providing lot example user utterance articulate intent chatbot recognize need present counterexample often false positive utterance erroneously assigned entity Irrelevance detection designed order navigate vulnerability might counterexample data start chatbot development enable enabled alternative method evaluating relevance newly submitted utterance triggered addition standard method Irrelevance Detection Enabled Skills page open skill skill menu click Options Irrelevance detection page choose Enhanced supplemental method examines structure new utterance compare structure user example utterance training data alternate approach help chatbots counterexample recognize irrelevant utterance Marking User Input Irrelevant Build Counterexample Model Note new method relies structural information based data outside skill new method useful starting build chatbot provides customized experience want use information data derived within application’s domain way ensure assistant adding counterexample chatobt development process provide example user utterance sentence grouped distinct topic someone might ask assistant — called “intents” Utterances Detected Irrelevant False Intent Assignments bad news…users stick script chatbot usually get variety unexpected question person building assistant didn’t plan handle initially case escalation human triggered knowledge base search triggered Bot effective response chatbot saying cannot help Negate False Intent Assignment Often instead stating intent scope desperate attempt field utterance chatbot assigns best fit option user often wrong chatbot continues inform user understand user continuously rephrasing input Instead chatbot merely stating question part domain traditional approach Many “outofscope” example dreamed entered NLU model automatically select set irrelevant example different training data could easily build accurate irrelevantquestiondetector tagging question assistant user irrelevant… would pretty bad experience assistant would low coverage indomain question Since none approach perfect especially assistant new doesn’t lot training data decided come approach humanlike want know utterance user irrelevant IBM Watson Assistant initially check similar set relevant example tagged IBM combine another algorithm gauge dissimilarity incoming question concept close assistant’s domain Conclusion encouraging see environment develop grow functionality IBM Watson Assistant team effective augmenting building Watson Assistant environment tool functionality make huge differenceTags NLP Artificial Intelligence Chatbots Nlu Machine Learning
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4,631 |
Next Time I Brush My Hair
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Photo by 42 North on Unsplash
Next time I brush my hair,
wrapping the strands around my fingers,
I will walk to the backyard apple tree
and drape among its battered branches
threads of silver, soft yet strong
much-sought for by robins and wrens;
a perfect carpet, safe and warm
for the bellies of naked nestlings.
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https://medium.com/crows-feet/next-time-i-brush-my-hair-90eda8ad6b76
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['Deborah Barchi']
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2020-07-28 23:56:05.719000+00:00
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['Self-awareness', 'Nature', 'Life', 'Poetry', 'Mindfulness']
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Title Next Time Brush HairContent Photo 42 North Unsplash Next time brush hair wrapping strand around finger walk backyard apple tree drape among battered branch thread silver soft yet strong muchsought robin wren perfect carpet safe warm belly naked nestlingsTags Selfawareness Nature Life Poetry Mindfulness
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4,632 |
Finding The Right Leader: A Primer On ‘A-P’ Leadership Framework
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Having spent a large portion of my career helping, running or building small to medium sized businesses, I have often had to develop simplistic tools to problem solve or coach management teams on various topics. One among them that has surfaced most frequently is the topic of leadership. I was reminded of this yet again when Adam, a CEO of a digital printing company and a close friend, recently reached out to me for a coffee meeting to get counsel on accelerating the growth of his business.
After problem solving for a bit, it was clear that Adam was in serious need of managerial talent. I asked him whether he needed an “A” or “P” type leader for his business. Looking at his “what the dickens” expression, I realized I was speaking in code, even for a software guy, and needed to expand.
As an investor, and consistent with my previous operating and advisory roles, I fundamentally believe that while mathematically we underwrite markets, products or a business model, inherently we are also underwriting the current or future team’s ability to deliver against those growth and return goals. Over the years, having made both bad and good investing decisions, one thing is clear to me that agnostic of what my math says, putting the right leaders throughout the organization, be it at executive, functional or even at project level, significantly improves the probability of getting outsized returns.
Hence, whether it’s value, growth or turnaround type investment, I evaluate the type of leadership needed within an organization and then pair it with one of two leadership styles, “A” or “P,” based on my A-P Leadership framework. Let’s break the two styles down further.
An “A” type leader gives their teams significant Autonomy allowing the use of their own methods to get the job done. This kind of leader gets energized by investing time and energy in coaching their employees driving a sense of Appreciation within their teams. Employees will find these leaders Approachable. In return for the above attributes, “A” type leaders expect a high degree of Accountability providing loads of clarity on consequences of key actions or inactions.
“P” type leaders are energized by a well-defined repeatable Process to keep their teams focused and sticking to the plan. They enjoy a high level of Predictability in their organization’s end-product and are driven by consistent and repeatable results. To that effect, they will outline a Prescriptive approach detailing tactical steps to minimize sources of ambiguity. They love using first Principles to solve problems ensuring the deliverables are always rooted in fundamentals.
Here is a deeper look at each attribute for both leadership types.
Autonomy: These leaders don’t micromanage but rather align on the end goals and are comfortable letting their teams stray from pre-defined processes to foster individual ownership and creativity to finish a job. For example, the leader of your new product innovations team probably needs this trait to be comfortable with ambiguity and to promote unconstrained creative thinking within their team.
Appreciation: Teams working for “A” leaders enjoy a high level of professional appreciation from their bosses. These leaders exhibit appreciation both in the form of commendations but also through proactive and impromptu coaching of employees on their developmental needs. Another way they show appreciation is by seeking advice from others, including junior members of their team.
Approachability: “A” type leaders try to create an environment where teams feel comfortable approaching their boss for problem solving or seeking advice without feeling judged or afraid. Given high degrees of autonomy allowed by these leaders, this attribute helps develop a self-regulated counterbalance system for their employees to seek advice as needed. This style is particularly helpful in companies with rapid growth or when you have a young team, like in a startup.
Accountability: In return for the above, “A” leaders expect a high level of accountability from their teams and use it as a key instrument to motivate and to calibrate strengths or gaps in their teams. They leave little ambiguity on the consequences of delivering or failing against set goals.
For a “P” leadership style, the attributes translate as the following:
Process: They are extremely process oriented and like to stick to tried-and-tested approaches to completing tasks. Often precise about each step, they want to ensure repeatability in the approach and outcomes. Think about a large software implementation; in that situation, you want your leader to be a process maniac to ensure timely success.
Predictability: “P” leaders enjoy having a high level of predictability and accuracy in their team’s output. They wish to avoid gray zones and work hard to minimize variances. For example, when hiring a production manager, you want a “P” leader so accurate throughputs can be achieved consistently.
Prescriptive: These folks can be extremely prescriptive and prefer to spell out each step in the process as well as the expected outcomes. If good at communicating, they leave little doubt on what, how and when their teams should deliver results. This style is essential in heads of functions such compliance or safety.
Principles: Reliance on first principles for problem solving is a key attribute of “P” leaders. It is also a way for them to measure the skills of younger or newer employees and to ensure the work product is grounded in fundamentals. For example, the head of engineering design or head of the legal team should have this trait in abundance to avoid any missteps.
When I explained all this to my friend, he still had a few questions regarding whether one style is better than the other, whether a leader can be a blend of both styles and whether he should be assessing his company’s needs for now or the future.
The above is just a framework. But I believe both styles are useful in an organization. For most people, one style is at their core; however, with tenure or changing roles and responsibilities, they may need to demonstrate traits of the other type. It is like while introverts can exhibit extroverted behaviors when needed and extroverts may need their own time and space to think, at the core, people are either introverted or extroverted. Similarly, people are primarily “A” or “P” type leaders, but with practice and awareness, some, but not all, can bounce in and out of the other as needed. Feel free to check out related articles on “A-P Leadership Framework” as part of my series on Forbes.com. This series merely begins to touch the surface of this topic and deserves more content and discussions through various channels.
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https://medium.com/swlh/finding-the-right-leader-a-primer-on-a-p-leadership-framework-3d50b2611e77
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['Rohit Bassi']
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2019-08-21 07:56:10.413000+00:00
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['Business', 'People', 'Finance', 'Leadership', 'Money']
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Title Finding Right Leader Primer ‘AP’ Leadership FrameworkContent spent large portion career helping running building small medium sized business often develop simplistic tool problem solve coach management team various topic One among surfaced frequently topic leadership reminded yet Adam CEO digital printing company close friend recently reached coffee meeting get counsel accelerating growth business problem solving bit clear Adam serious need managerial talent asked whether needed “A” “P” type leader business Looking “what dickens” expression realized speaking code even software guy needed expand investor consistent previous operating advisory role fundamentally believe mathematically underwrite market product business model inherently also underwriting current future team’s ability deliver growth return goal year made bad good investing decision one thing clear agnostic math say putting right leader throughout organization executive functional even project level significantly improves probability getting outsized return Hence whether it’s value growth turnaround type investment evaluate type leadership needed within organization pair one two leadership style “A” “P” based AP Leadership framework Let’s break two style “A” type leader give team significant Autonomy allowing use method get job done kind leader get energized investing time energy coaching employee driving sense Appreciation within team Employees find leader Approachable return attribute “A” type leader expect high degree Accountability providing load clarity consequence key action inaction “P” type leader energized welldefined repeatable Process keep team focused sticking plan enjoy high level Predictability organization’s endproduct driven consistent repeatable result effect outline Prescriptive approach detailing tactical step minimize source ambiguity love using first Principles solve problem ensuring deliverable always rooted fundamental deeper look attribute leadership type Autonomy leader don’t micromanage rather align end goal comfortable letting team stray predefined process foster individual ownership creativity finish job example leader new product innovation team probably need trait comfortable ambiguity promote unconstrained creative thinking within team Appreciation Teams working “A” leader enjoy high level professional appreciation boss leader exhibit appreciation form commendation also proactive impromptu coaching employee developmental need Another way show appreciation seeking advice others including junior member team Approachability “A” type leader try create environment team feel comfortable approaching bos problem solving seeking advice without feeling judged afraid Given high degree autonomy allowed leader attribute help develop selfregulated counterbalance system employee seek advice needed style particularly helpful company rapid growth young team like startup Accountability return “A” leader expect high level accountability team use key instrument motivate calibrate strength gap team leave little ambiguity consequence delivering failing set goal “P” leadership style attribute translate following Process extremely process oriented like stick triedandtested approach completing task Often precise step want ensure repeatability approach outcome Think large software implementation situation want leader process maniac ensure timely success Predictability “P” leader enjoy high level predictability accuracy team’s output wish avoid gray zone work hard minimize variance example hiring production manager want “P” leader accurate throughput achieved consistently Prescriptive folk extremely prescriptive prefer spell step process well expected outcome good communicating leave little doubt team deliver result style essential head function compliance safety Principles Reliance first principle problem solving key attribute “P” leader also way measure skill younger newer employee ensure work product grounded fundamental example head engineering design head legal team trait abundance avoid misstep explained friend still question regarding whether one style better whether leader blend style whether assessing company’s need future framework believe style useful organization people one style core however tenure changing role responsibility may need demonstrate trait type like introvert exhibit extroverted behavior needed extrovert may need time space think core people either introverted extroverted Similarly people primarily “A” “P” type leader practice awareness bounce needed Feel free check related article “AP Leadership Framework” part series Forbescom series merely begin touch surface topic deserves content discussion various channelsTags Business People Finance Leadership Money
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4,633 |
Day Twenty-Nine: My Journey to Zen
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Day Twenty-Nine: My Journey to Zen
Slowly, slowly…
Photo by Daria Tumanova on Unsplash
Haste makes waste is an ancient cliché. Some say that it goes back more than two thousand years. Big surprise. I am not go to digress to research its origin. I do remember reading a while back that it is that old and since I am writing about the concept rather than the history of the phrase, the origin is not pertinent at the moment.
My 30 day journey is almost over and there is something I must say. Thirty days of being mindful and examining the way I live is a good start. This is not some sort of quick fix. It is not like a crash diet, which is fairly certain of being a failure.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance has been attributed to Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, John Philpot Curran — to name a few. Again, I am not going to digress into researching these words. I am going to apply them to changing your life, your habits, your way of being.
Whatever you want to manifest in your life requires a focus on what will bring about the necessary changes. Making that habit a part of your life has a price…the price of eternal vigilance.
You cannot lose 100 pounds in a week, prepare to run a marathon in a week, become a millionaire in a week (unless you win a lottery), or entrench any of these big changes in a week.
Every day is a new day in the journey and being mindful is at the core of building and using your new habit. If you are tired, worried, angry, frustrated, trapped, stressed, or any of these negative things, being mindful is going to be difficult.
Take it slow. Take your biggest impediment and spend a few minutes with it. When did this start? What is the source? If it were your best friend’s problem, what advice would you give her?
Don’t expect the answer to suddenly burst out of the sky. Be patient. Go slow. Examine the issue thoroughly and list the possible solutions. List the potential things you could let go that might alleviate that negative impact on your life.
Be prepared for some tough moments as you come to terms with the situation. But do not let your past hold you captive and don’t wait for some miracle solution to arrive. This is your life and you can learn how to live it in a much more fulfilling manner.
For me it was a matter of stepping back from drinks with negative friends where we would sit and gripe about how unfair life was to us. A couple of hours of a pity party fueled by alcohol a few times a week did not solve much for me.
In truth, it made matters worse. It allowed me label myself as a victim. Hah! That’s not an energizing label. It painted big black clouds in the sunshine of my days. It also used money that would have been better spent elsewhere and added extra calories to my already laden day.
When I walked away from these frequent grumble sessions, the odd thing is that not one of my gripe buddies missed me. We faded out of each other’s lives without a ripple.
When you make a change, often you find yourself feeling off kilter. You are out of your comfort zone. Take it easy. Think about yourself and your life and what you might like to do with the newly discovered time in your life.
Haste does make waste. There is no need to hurry. You cannot recover lost time. You start where you are and move forward.
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https://medium.com/narrative/day-twenty-nine-my-journey-to-zen-a0d68a3ea22f
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['Joanne Reid']
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2020-08-24 11:27:16.890000+00:00
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['Self-awareness', 'Change', 'Mindset', 'Mindfulness', 'Mindset Shift']
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Title Day TwentyNine Journey ZenContent Day TwentyNine Journey Zen Slowly slowly… Photo Daria Tumanova Unsplash Haste make waste ancient cliché say go back two thousand year Big surprise go digress research origin remember reading back old since writing concept rather history phrase origin pertinent moment 30 day journey almost something must say Thirty day mindful examining way live good start sort quick fix like crash diet fairly certain failure price freedom eternal vigilance attributed Thomas Jefferson Thomas Paine Abraham Lincoln John Philpot Curran — name going digress researching word going apply changing life habit way Whatever want manifest life requires focus bring necessary change Making habit part life price…the price eternal vigilance cannot lose 100 pound week prepare run marathon week become millionaire week unless win lottery entrench big change week Every day new day journey mindful core building using new habit tired worried angry frustrated trapped stressed negative thing mindful going difficult Take slow Take biggest impediment spend minute start source best friend’s problem advice would give Don’t expect answer suddenly burst sky patient Go slow Examine issue thoroughly list possible solution List potential thing could let go might alleviate negative impact life prepared tough moment come term situation let past hold captive don’t wait miracle solution arrive life learn live much fulfilling manner matter stepping back drink negative friend would sit gripe unfair life u couple hour pity party fueled alcohol time week solve much truth made matter worse allowed label victim Hah That’s energizing label painted big black cloud sunshine day also used money would better spent elsewhere added extra calorie already laden day walked away frequent grumble session odd thing one gripe buddy missed faded other’s life without ripple make change often find feeling kilter comfort zone Take easy Think life might like newly discovered time life Haste make waste need hurry cannot recover lost time start move forwardTags Selfawareness Change Mindset Mindfulness Mindset Shift
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4,634 |
Sad Dragon, Postmodernism, and Chubby Mary
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But you can find not just old buildings in Tegel — it also houses the oldest tree in Berlin, so-called Chubby Mary (Dicke Marie). This is a natural monument, although the tree didn’t look quite healthy at first glance.
Dicke Marie
It’s believed this English oak was born from a seed in 1107, which means it’s over 900 years old — older than the city of Berlin! Sadly, there are some clues to its roughly twice exaggerated age. There are not many 9–8-century old trees in Germany, and all of them are way thicker and have darker bark. But even if it started growing in the middle of the 17th century, it’s a respectable old oak anyway.
Dicke Marie
The tree received its name, Chubby Marie, after the cook of brothers Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt. They spent their youth not far from this site, in a grand white manor, Tegel Castle. Another famous guy, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, visited the tree during his travels in 1778 and was relaxing in its shade. I’m a bit skeptical about such facts. Not a single huge tree can exist without someone famous to have visited it.
Already tired of history? I’ve got a dose of relaxation. On the square with cannons, Kanonenplatz, you can enjoy lying on a wooden sunbed and gaze at numerous water birds: ducks, geese, and swans.
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https://medium.com/5-a-m/alt-tegel-82324680a803
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['Slava Shestopalov']
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2020-12-19 12:14:16.609000+00:00
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['Berlin', 'Architecture', 'Design', 'Travel', 'Photography']
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Title Sad Dragon Postmodernism Chubby MaryContent find old building Tegel — also house oldest tree Berlin socalled Chubby Mary Dicke Marie natural monument although tree didn’t look quite healthy first glance Dicke Marie It’s believed English oak born seed 1107 mean it’s 900 year old — older city Berlin Sadly clue roughly twice exaggerated age many 9–8century old tree Germany way thicker darker bark even started growing middle 17th century it’s respectable old oak anyway Dicke Marie tree received name Chubby Marie cook brother Alexander Wilhelm von Humboldt spent youth far site grand white manor Tegel Castle Another famous guy Johann Wolfgang von Goethe visited tree travel 1778 relaxing shade I’m bit skeptical fact single huge tree exist without someone famous visited Already tired history I’ve got dose relaxation square cannon Kanonenplatz enjoy lying wooden sunbed gaze numerous water bird duck goose swansTags Berlin Architecture Design Travel Photography
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4,635 |
Java vs Kotlin
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Now Let’s discuss the Basic Differences
1. Intro & Release
•Java was developed by Sun Microsystems (now the property of Oracle) in 1995.
•It supports almost all types of machines, and OS X be it Android, Windows or Linux.
•Kotlin was introduced by JetBrains in 2011, open-sourced in 2012, officially supported in Google I/O (annual event of Google developers) in 2017.
•Google claimed that 70% of the top 1,000 Android apps are written in Kotlin now.
•Some apps are under construction in Kotlin from Java, for instance, The Google Home app isn’t completely written in Kotlin yet,
•but as of June, 2020 about 30% of the code base was rewritten in Kotlin from the legacy Java code.
•Other popular Kotlin apps examples from Google include Maps, Play, Drive.
•There are plenty of android apps by other companies written in Kotlin now.
•In nutshell, Android development is now backed by “Kotlin-first” policy. It is similar to IOS apps development which shifted from Objective-C to Swift.
2. Version
•As on November 2020, Kotlin version is v1.4.0
•while Java 15 has now released, but java 8 (aka 1.8) is still most popular.
3. Speed
•Java does beat Kotlin by 12–15% for clean builds. That means, Kotlin compiles a little slower than Java for full builds
•However, for partial builds with incremental compilation enabled i.e. only building with small changes, Kotlin compiles as fast or slightly faster than Java.
4. Lines of code
•Code written in Kotlin is much smaller compared to Java.
There is nearly 30–40% less code in Kotlin. So Apps have potential to lose 1/3rd weight.
•Java is detailed while Kotlin is concise and modern.
5. Market share
•Kotlin developers are 1/5th of Java developers as per surveys.
•7.8% Kotlin developers against more than 40% developers using Java, but also these surveys suggest that Kotlin is more loved than Java and expanding fast.
•References -
https://www.statista.com/statistics/793628/worldwide-developer-survey-most-used-languages/
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#most-popular-technologies
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted
6. Null Safety
•Kotlin is safe against NullPointerException. This type of error is the largest cause of app crashes on Google Play.
•Java lets developers assign a null value to any variable.
•Unlike Java, all types are non-nullable in Kotlin by default. Assigning or returning a null will give compile time error.
•In order to assign a null value to a variable in Kotlin, it is required to explicitly mark that variable as nullable.
val number: Int? = null //Nullable type val name: String = null //Error because not possible to assign a null value
Nullable types are used with safe call operator.
name?.getLength()
So even name becomes null, whole expression is equivalent to null without NullPointerException
7. Hybrid apps
•Kotlin can be used to write native code of Android and IOS apps
•Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile (KMM) works on both Android and iOS.
•Java is not used for IOS app development till now.
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https://amir-ansari.medium.com/java-vs-kotlin-1a119beb43b8
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['Amir Ansari']
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2020-11-06 06:31:22.030000+00:00
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['Kotlin', 'Comparison', 'Java']
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Title Java v KotlinContent Let’s discus Basic Differences 1 Intro Release •Java developed Sun Microsystems property Oracle 1995 •It support almost type machine OS X Android Windows Linux •Kotlin introduced JetBrains 2011 opensourced 2012 officially supported Google IO annual event Google developer 2017 •Google claimed 70 top 1000 Android apps written Kotlin •Some apps construction Kotlin Java instance Google Home app isn’t completely written Kotlin yet •but June 2020 30 code base rewritten Kotlin legacy Java code •Other popular Kotlin apps example Google include Maps Play Drive •There plenty android apps company written Kotlin •In nutshell Android development backed “Kotlinfirst” policy similar IOS apps development shifted ObjectiveC Swift 2 Version •As November 2020 Kotlin version v140 •while Java 15 released java 8 aka 18 still popular 3 Speed •Java beat Kotlin 12–15 clean build mean Kotlin compiles little slower Java full build •However partial build incremental compilation enabled ie building small change Kotlin compiles fast slightly faster Java 4 Lines code •Code written Kotlin much smaller compared Java nearly 30–40 le code Kotlin Apps potential lose 13rd weight •Java detailed Kotlin concise modern 5 Market share •Kotlin developer 15th Java developer per survey •78 Kotlin developer 40 developer using Java also survey suggest Kotlin loved Java expanding fast •References httpswwwstatistacomstatistics793628worldwidedevelopersurveymostusedlanguages httpsinsightsstackoverflowcomsurvey2020mostpopulartechnologies httpsinsightsstackoverflowcomsurvey2020mostloveddreadedandwanted 6 Null Safety •Kotlin safe NullPointerException type error largest cause app crash Google Play •Java let developer assign null value variable •Unlike Java type nonnullable Kotlin default Assigning returning null give compile time error •In order assign null value variable Kotlin required explicitly mark variable nullable val number Int null Nullable type val name String null Error possible assign null value Nullable type used safe call operator namegetLength even name becomes null whole expression equivalent null without NullPointerException 7 Hybrid apps •Kotlin used write native code Android IOS apps •Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile KMM work Android iOS •Java used IOS app development till nowTags Kotlin Comparison Java
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4,636 |
Christmas
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Christmas
Wish
Photo by loly galina on Unsplash
One of my fondest memories was when my mother would decorate for Christmas. She would buy a can of snow, and we would spray it on the window and make a shape of a mountain on half of the windowpane. Then we would take the Christmas stencils and fill them in with glass wax on the rest of the window. My mother loved decorating for the holidays.
I distinctly remember the silver Christmas tree with the silver palm fronds at the end of each branch. The Christmas lights we placed on the tree glistened in multi-colors. Watching the lights made my body tingle. It was the happiest time of my childhood that I could remember.
I would walk to Steinway Street with my mom and look at the dolls in the small toy store window. We both admired the beautiful ice-skating doll, which was dressed in a red velvet ice skating dress and a red velvet hood with white fur around her perfect face. She also wore white ice-skating boots. I wanted to magically touch her through the glass store window. She was so beautiful, and my eyes instantly filled with adoration — wishing I could have her.
When Christmas came that year, she was wrapped in a gaily-decorated box under my Christmas tree — with a beautiful faux fur coat for her from my older brother, Frankie. I received only two Christmas gifts, but to me it was more than enough. How far we have come from those simple days.
It was a time when I had my family all together before death came upon them. Because of my innocence, there was no thought that I would be the only one left behind on planet Earth from my immediate family.
But if I had only one wish, I would like to take a dream ride back in time as the movie. It’s a Wonderful Life. And have Christmas with my family that once lived. To be able to kiss my mother and father and my two brothers once more. That would be Christmas.
In response to the Spiritual Secrets Weekly Prompt: “Christmas” by Darshak Rana
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https://medium.com/spiritual-secrets/christmas-2b69275955ec
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['Bernadette Decarlo']
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2020-12-26 23:57:28.662000+00:00
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['Christmas', 'Nonfiction', 'Family', 'Spiritual Secrets', 'Weekly Prompts']
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Title ChristmasContent Christmas Wish Photo loly galina Unsplash One fondest memory mother would decorate Christmas would buy snow would spray window make shape mountain half windowpane would take Christmas stencil fill glass wax rest window mother loved decorating holiday distinctly remember silver Christmas tree silver palm frond end branch Christmas light placed tree glistened multicolors Watching light made body tingle happiest time childhood could remember would walk Steinway Street mom look doll small toy store window admired beautiful iceskating doll dressed red velvet ice skating dress red velvet hood white fur around perfect face also wore white iceskating boot wanted magically touch glass store window beautiful eye instantly filled adoration — wishing could Christmas came year wrapped gailydecorated box Christmas tree — beautiful faux fur coat older brother Frankie received two Christmas gift enough far come simple day time family together death came upon innocence thought would one left behind planet Earth immediate family one wish would like take dream ride back time movie It’s Wonderful Life Christmas family lived able kiss mother father two brother would Christmas response Spiritual Secrets Weekly Prompt “Christmas” Darshak RanaTags Christmas Nonfiction Family Spiritual Secrets Weekly Prompts
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4,637 |
#5: A Dot Com Crash
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Featuring Usman Majeed
Listen Now
Show Notes
In today’s conversation with Usman Majeed we compare and contrast the dot com bubble of then and the valuations of cryptocurrencies.
He may have missed the boat with bitcoin, but he didn’t make that same mistake with ethereum and it’s landed him in great position, recently launching Mutual Coin Fund.
Reach this weeks guest:
Transcript
Coming Soon.
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https://medium.com/coloringcrypto/episode-5-how-crypto-looks-when-you-never-experienced-the-dot-com-crash-78d385a51ae5
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['Kelly Mcquade-W.']
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2018-06-28 22:40:01.908000+00:00
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['Startup']
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Title 5 Dot Com CrashContent Featuring Usman Majeed Listen Show Notes today’s conversation Usman Majeed compare contrast dot com bubble valuation cryptocurrencies may missed boat bitcoin didn’t make mistake ethereum it’s landed great position recently launching Mutual Coin Fund Reach week guest Transcript Coming SoonTags Startup
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4,638 |
Bringing Core Values to Life: A Look at "Stay Curious"
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In today’s professional landscape, 51% of workers are actively looking to leave their current jobsand 73% are open to hearing about new opportunities, which means it’s more important than ever to engage your workforce if you want to win the talent war — and that includes keeping the talent already within the walls of your organization.
A key element to engaging your workforce is ensuring strength of culture through your company core values. Today’s workforce wants to work somewhere with strong moral fiber. They want to be filled with a sense of purpose beyond their projects and daily tasks. In the current talent landscape, candidates consider core values when vetting organizations. They want to know if they exist, what they are, how they are encouraged, shared, and promoted, and ultimately if they are truly part of your company’s DNA. If you do core values well, you’re guaranteed a more engaged and productive workforce.
80% of employees feel more engaged when their work is consistent with the core values and mission of their organization (IBM).
93% of workers at companies with recognition programs tied to core values agree the work they do has meaning and purpose (Globoforce).
Needless to say, core values are important. But you can’t just have them, you have to live them.
First Things First, Identify Your Core Values
At Element Three, our core values serve as the fundamental beliefs that guide our behaviors and decisions as an organization. Each core value was intentionally crafted to serve a unique purpose based on pivotal learning moments from the early days of Element Three. The history behind our core values makes them individually authentic and collectively powerful. Despite the evolution of the agency, our values have remained static and relevant since their inception because the decisions we make as a company are grounded in our core values.
E3 Core Values
Awesome Comes Standard
Business First
Emotional Intelligence
Stay Curious
Transparency
Creative Swagger
Own Selflessly
Defining core values is another lesson for another day. But assuming you’ve identified them for your own organization, the question becomes, “how do I create space within my organization to recognize, promote, and encourage said values?”
Living Your Core Values: Stay Curious
While I could go on and on about all of our core values, I’m going to dive deep into one in particular — Stay Curious — and elaborate on how this value is lived out within the walls of Element Three every day.
Stay Curious: Ask why. Search more. Participate. Create. Don’t ever rest in the belief that you have it all figured out — always be looking forward to what is next.
Questions are powerful, and if you don’t believe me, Forbes thinks so too. In an article titled The Power of Questions, Forbes contributor Jeff Boss writes, “Nothing has such power to cause a complete mental turnaround as that of a question. Questions spark curiosity, curiosity creates ideas and ideas (well, good ones) lead to innovation and dollar signs — ideally.”
At Element Three, employees at every level are encouraged to stay curious. We want folks to challenge the status quo, get to the root cause of an issue, and push others to think differently and dig deeper, all through the power of curiosity and questions.
So how do we ensure our employees embody “Stay Curious?” We infuse it into seemingly small but extremely important parts of our business — onboarding and peer-to-peer recognition.
Onboarding
As part of our employee onboarding, each new member of the Herd must learn and share the core values with someone in the office during their third week of work. And by the following week, they must recite the values by heart. It is a seemingly simple ask of new employees, but it is something we take seriously. Within your first month at Element Three you need to know our values, because you will only encounter them more and more as you move through the organization.
So, are you bringing your core values into your onboarding experience? Or are you simply listing them out, without any specific action to take?
Another part of our onboarding is to schedule meetings with other E3ers to get to know them better. You’d better believe they’re asking questions or that gets really awkward really fast. And finally, every new E3er has to ask Tiffany — the president of our agency — a question.
To live out your core values, you can’t just list them — you need to find clever or creative ways to have your people practice them. And what better time than when someone is fresh to the organization?
Peer-to-peer Recognition
Another place that lends itself to your core values is any peer-to-peer recognition program you might have in place.
At E3, we have a peer-to-peer recognition program in place that is meant to educate, encourage, recognize, and reward behaviors that go above and beyond in representing our core values specifically. It provides a simple platform for peers and supervisors to recognize the positive contributions of the E3 Herd. We’re at about 75 full-time employees currently, and roughly 100 Awesome Blocks (the program name) are awarded each month.
Not only does this keep core values front of mind for employees who honor their peers, but if you can make it visible, others begin to see real examples of the core values lived out in real life (some of which I’ve conveniently included below).
It could be a longtime Creative Director who “is always asking and figuring out how to lead the team and push our clients further and it’s never lost on me how much he cares. I’m doing my best to learn from his leadership style so I can hopefully be a version of how calm, yet powerful he is.”
Or it might be a relatively new employee who stepped into a project management role and “has shown mass amounts of curiosity in her first month at E3 — she is constantly seeking to understand the ‘why’ behind everything we do.”
Or maybe it’s a Senior Digital Marketing Manager who jumped into a project late in the game to provide some subject matter expertise: “His ability to question how and why previous programs were built, and then improve upon those things has been huge for our team.”
Allow a Safe Space for Employees to Practice Core Values
If your core value is to “Think Big” or “Take Risks,” you’d better make sure your team members know it’s okay to fail every once in a while. And if your core value is to “Stay Curious” (like ours), you’d better give your employees a safe space to ask hard questions.
Here’s what it looks like for us: every month our organization gets together for a Business Review meeting. One component of the meeting includes a Q&A session — anyone from the organization can submit a question, and it will be addressed by the appropriate leader. Questions are all across the board, ranging from “What is the meaning of life?” to “Which service areas are we pushing right now?” Seriously.
If your employees fear practicing your core values, they’ll never truly embody them. And as a leader in the organization, you want to help them get there, not scare them away.
Live Your Core Values in All That You Do
In the end, the most simple (and potentially most effective) way to really get buy-in for your core values is to truly live up to them, every day. After all, great leaders don’t just lead with words, they lead by their actions. Show your team what living your core values looks like, and they’re more likely to follow you. Think about your core values when you make decisions, and practice what you preach. Because if you don’t, it’s unlikely anyone else is going to.
Perspective from Maggie Campbell, Organizational Development Strategist at Element Three
|
https://medium.com/element-three/bringing-core-values-to-life-a-look-at-stay-curious-b89a4018b027
|
['Element Three']
|
2018-06-15 14:49:58.433000+00:00
|
['Culture', 'Core Values', 'Startup', 'Employer Branding', 'Agencylife']
|
Title Bringing Core Values Life Look Stay CuriousContent today’s professional landscape 51 worker actively looking leave current jobsand 73 open hearing new opportunity mean it’s important ever engage workforce want win talent war — includes keeping talent already within wall organization key element engaging workforce ensuring strength culture company core value Today’s workforce want work somewhere strong moral fiber want filled sense purpose beyond project daily task current talent landscape candidate consider core value vetting organization want know exist encouraged shared promoted ultimately truly part company’s DNA core value well you’re guaranteed engaged productive workforce 80 employee feel engaged work consistent core value mission organization IBM 93 worker company recognition program tied core value agree work meaning purpose Globoforce Needless say core value important can’t live First Things First Identify Core Values Element Three core value serve fundamental belief guide behavior decision organization core value intentionally crafted serve unique purpose based pivotal learning moment early day Element Three history behind core value make individually authentic collectively powerful Despite evolution agency value remained static relevant since inception decision make company grounded core value E3 Core Values Awesome Comes Standard Business First Emotional Intelligence Stay Curious Transparency Creative Swagger Selflessly Defining core value another lesson another day assuming you’ve identified organization question becomes “how create space within organization recognize promote encourage said values” Living Core Values Stay Curious could go core value I’m going dive deep one particular — Stay Curious — elaborate value lived within wall Element Three every day Stay Curious Ask Search Participate Create Don’t ever rest belief figured — always looking forward next Questions powerful don’t believe Forbes think article titled Power Questions Forbes contributor Jeff Boss writes “Nothing power cause complete mental turnaround question Questions spark curiosity curiosity creates idea idea well good one lead innovation dollar sign — ideally” Element Three employee every level encouraged stay curious want folk challenge status quo get root cause issue push others think differently dig deeper power curiosity question ensure employee embody “Stay Curious” infuse seemingly small extremely important part business — onboarding peertopeer recognition Onboarding part employee onboarding new member Herd must learn share core value someone office third week work following week must recite value heart seemingly simple ask new employee something take seriously Within first month Element Three need know value encounter move organization bringing core value onboarding experience simply listing without specific action take Another part onboarding schedule meeting E3ers get know better You’d better believe they’re asking question get really awkward really fast finally every new E3er ask Tiffany — president agency — question live core value can’t list — need find clever creative way people practice better time someone fresh organization Peertopeer Recognition Another place lends core value peertopeer recognition program might place E3 peertopeer recognition program place meant educate encourage recognize reward behavior go beyond representing core value specifically provides simple platform peer supervisor recognize positive contribution E3 Herd We’re 75 fulltime employee currently roughly 100 Awesome Blocks program name awarded month keep core value front mind employee honor peer make visible others begin see real example core value lived real life I’ve conveniently included could longtime Creative Director “is always asking figuring lead team push client it’s never lost much care I’m best learn leadership style hopefully version calm yet powerful is” might relatively new employee stepped project management role “has shown mass amount curiosity first month E3 — constantly seeking understand ‘why’ behind everything do” maybe it’s Senior Digital Marketing Manager jumped project late game provide subject matter expertise “His ability question previous program built improve upon thing huge team” Allow Safe Space Employees Practice Core Values core value “Think Big” “Take Risks” you’d better make sure team member know it’s okay fail every core value “Stay Curious” like you’d better give employee safe space ask hard question Here’s look like u every month organization get together Business Review meeting One component meeting includes QA session — anyone organization submit question addressed appropriate leader Questions across board ranging “What meaning life” “Which service area pushing right now” Seriously employee fear practicing core value they’ll never truly embody leader organization want help get scare away Live Core Values end simple potentially effective way really get buyin core value truly live every day great leader don’t lead word lead action Show team living core value look like they’re likely follow Think core value make decision practice preach don’t it’s unlikely anyone else going Perspective Maggie Campbell Organizational Development Strategist Element ThreeTags Culture Core Values Startup Employer Branding Agencylife
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4,639 |
Drum Patterns from Latent Space
|
Drum Patterns from Latent Space
Percussion Beats And Where To Find Them
TL;DR: I collected a large dataset of drum patterns, then used a neural network approach to map them into a latent explorable space with some recognizable genre areas. Try the interactive exploration tool or download several thousand of unique generated beats.
Context Overview
In the recent years there have been many projects dedicated to the neural network-generated music (including drum patterns). Some of such project use an explicit construction of a latent space in which each point corresponds to a melody. This space can then be used both to study and classify musical structures, as well as to generate new melodies with specified characteristics. Some others used less complex techniques, such as “language model” approaches. However, I was unable to find an overall representation of typical beat patterns mapped to 2D space, so I decided to create one myself.
Below, I listed relevant projects that I managed to found and analyze before I started working on my own:
LSTMetallica — author used a language model approach to predict the next step in a beat.
neuralbeats — another language model project, very similar to LSTMetallica.
Magenta VAE— Google’s Magenta is a great source of interesting models and projects on music generation and augmentation. Particularly, in 2016 they released the drum_rnn model, and in March 2018 they published the music_vae model. Since then a lot of projects used these models.
model, and in March 2018 they published the model. Since then a lot of projects used these models. For example, last year Tero Parviainen created a really great online drum beat generator based on drum_rnn+Magenta.js+TensorFlow.js+Tone.js.
Beat Blender was another Magenta-based project (first presented at the NIPS 2017). It’s quite similar to what I wanted to do, however, the authors hadn’t built the overview map of different genres, but only an interpolation space between pairs of patterns.
Last but not least, there was my other project, Neural Network RaspberryPi Music box, which used the VAE space to generate an endless stream of piano-like music.
Dataset Building
Most of the projects I found used small datasets of manually selected and cleaned beat patterns, e.g. GrooveMonkee free loop pack, free drum loops collection or aq-Hip-Hop-Beats-60–110-bpm.
It wasn’t enough for my goals so I decided to automatically extract beat patterns from huge MIDI collections available online. In total I’ve collected ~200K MIDI files, then kept only those with a nontrivial 9th channel (percussion channel according to the MIDI standard) so there were approximately 90K tracks left. Next, I did some additional filtering basically in the same fashion as implemeted in the neuralbeats and LSTMetallica projects (I used a 4/4 time signature, and applied quantization and simplification to the subset of instruments).
Then I split tracks into separate chunks based on long pauses, and searched for patterns of length 32 steps that were repeated at least 3 times in a row — in order to speed up the process I used hashing and a few simple greedy heuristics. Finally, I discarded trivial patterns with too low entropy and checked the uniqueness of each pattern in all possible phase shifts. Ultimately, I ended up with 33K unique patterns in my collection.
some examples of distilled patterns
I used a simple scheme to encode each pattern: a pattern has 32 time ticks and there are 14 possible percussion instruments (after simplification), so each pattern could be described by 32 integers in the range from 0 to 16383.
You can download the dataset here in TSV format:
First column holds the pattern code (32 comma-separated integers).
Second column is the point of this pattern in the latent 4D space (4 comma-separated float values), see details below.
Third column is the t-SNE mapping from the latent space into 2D projection (2 comma-separated float values), see details below.
Neural Network
I used the pytorch framework to build a network with a 3-layered FCN encoder mapping the beat matrix (32*14 bits) into 4D latent space, and a decoder with the same size as the encoder. The first hidden layer has 64 neurons, the second one has — 32. I used ReLU between the layers and a sigmoid to map the decoder output back into the bit mask.
|
https://towardsdatascience.com/drum-patterns-from-latent-space-23d59dd9d827
|
['Aleksey Tikhonov']
|
2019-03-10 20:51:55.469000+00:00
|
['Drums', 'Neural Networks', 'Visualization', 'Percussion', 'Machine Learning']
|
Title Drum Patterns Latent SpaceContent Drum Patterns Latent Space Percussion Beats Find TLDR collected large dataset drum pattern used neural network approach map latent explorable space recognizable genre area Try interactive exploration tool download several thousand unique generated beat Context Overview recent year many project dedicated neural networkgenerated music including drum pattern project use explicit construction latent space point corresponds melody space used study classify musical structure well generate new melody specified characteristic others used le complex technique “language model” approach However unable find overall representation typical beat pattern mapped 2D space decided create one listed relevant project managed found analyze started working LSTMetallica — author used language model approach predict next step beat neuralbeats — another language model project similar LSTMetallica Magenta VAE— Google’s Magenta great source interesting model project music generation augmentation Particularly 2016 released drumrnn model March 2018 published musicvae model Since lot project used model model March 2018 published model Since lot project used model example last year Tero Parviainen created really great online drum beat generator based drumrnnMagentajsTensorFlowjsTonejs Beat Blender another Magentabased project first presented NIPS 2017 It’s quite similar wanted however author hadn’t built overview map different genre interpolation space pair pattern Last least project Neural Network RaspberryPi Music box used VAE space generate endless stream pianolike music Dataset Building project found used small datasets manually selected cleaned beat pattern eg GrooveMonkee free loop pack free drum loop collection aqHipHopBeats60–110bpm wasn’t enough goal decided automatically extract beat pattern huge MIDI collection available online total I’ve collected 200K MIDI file kept nontrivial 9th channel percussion channel according MIDI standard approximately 90K track left Next additional filtering basically fashion implemeted neuralbeats LSTMetallica project used 44 time signature applied quantization simplification subset instrument split track separate chunk based long pause searched pattern length 32 step repeated least 3 time row — order speed process used hashing simple greedy heuristic Finally discarded trivial pattern low entropy checked uniqueness pattern possible phase shift Ultimately ended 33K unique pattern collection example distilled pattern used simple scheme encode pattern pattern 32 time tick 14 possible percussion instrument simplification pattern could described 32 integer range 0 16383 download dataset TSV format First column hold pattern code 32 commaseparated integer Second column point pattern latent 4D space 4 commaseparated float value see detail Third column tSNE mapping latent space 2D projection 2 commaseparated float value see detail Neural Network used pytorch framework build network 3layered FCN encoder mapping beat matrix 3214 bit 4D latent space decoder size encoder first hidden layer 64 neuron second one — 32 used ReLU layer sigmoid map decoder output back bit maskTags Drums Neural Networks Visualization Percussion Machine Learning
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4,640 |
How Ingress Works in Kubernetes
|
Setting Up Ingress With minikube
For this example, we are going to go through the process of setting up Ingress, using the Ingress Controller type. The implementation of the Ingress Controller is going to be nginx, but it is just as straightforward to use other ingress controllers, such as Traefik.
First of all, make sure minikube is started and working.
➜ minikube start
😄 minikube v1.14.2 on Darwin 10.15.7
✨ Using the hyperkit driver based on existing profile
👍 Starting control plane node minikube in cluster minikube
🔄 Restarting existing hyperkit VM for "minikube" ...
🐳 Preparing Kubernetes v1.19.2 on Docker 19.03.12 ...
🔎 Verifying Kubernetes components...
🌟 Enabled addons: storage-provisioner, default-storageclass
🏄 Done! kubectl is now configured to use "minikube" by default
We also need to enable ingress support for minikube, which can be done with the following command
➜ minikube addons enable ingress
🔎 Verifying ingress addon...
🌟 The 'ingress' addon is enabled
If this does not work, delete your minikube instance and run using this command.
minikube delete && minikube start --vm=true
We are going to create a namespace, as its good practice to logically separate things from each other.
➜ cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: v1
kind: Namespace
metadata:
name: minikube-example
labels:
name: minikube-example
EOF
namespace/minikube-example created
This will create a namespace called minikube-example .
➜ kubectl get namespaces
NAME STATUS AGE
default Active 7m29s
kube-node-lease Active 7m30s
kube-public Active 7m30s
kube-system Active 7m31s
minikube-example Active 39s
Now we should deploy a pod that contains a web application. One I use a lot for testing is one of the Google samples, Hello App.
➜ cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -n minikube-example -f -
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: test-app
labels:
app: test-app
spec:
replicas: 3
selector:
matchLabels:
app: test-app
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: test-app
spec:
containers:
- name: test-app
image: gcr.io/google-samples/hello-app:1.0
ports:
- containerPort: 8080
EOF
deployment.apps/test-app created
I can see the pods running now (I use k9s, which is an awesome tool for managing your k8s cluster: https://github.com/derailed/k9s).
Viewing the cluster in k9s
Hitting the web app after using a port forward
I manually added a port-forwarding rule to check the app works as expected.
Underneath it seems to set up a Node Port for the duration of time that k9s is open, but if you wanted to do this manually, it is possible by running a command like this:
➜ cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -n minikube-example -f -
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: test-app
labels:
name: test-app
spec:
type: NodePort
ports:
- port: 8080
name: http
selector:
app: test-app
EOF service/test-app created
🏃 Starting tunnel for service test-app.
|------------------|----------|-------------|------------------------|
| NAMESPACE | NAME | TARGET PORT | URL |
|------------------|----------|-------------|------------------------|
| minikube-example | test-app | |
|------------------|----------|-------------|------------------------|
http://127.0.0.1:53732
❗ Because you are using a Docker driver on darwin, the terminal needs to be open to run it. ➜ minikube service --url test-app -n minikube-example🏃 Starting tunnel for service test-app.|------------------|----------|-------------|------------------------|| NAMESPACE | NAME | TARGET PORT | URL ||------------------|----------|-------------|------------------------|| minikube-example | test-app | | http://127.0.0.1:53732 |------------------|----------|-------------|------------------------|❗ Because you are using a Docker driver on darwin, the terminal needs to be open to run it.
Hello, world!
Version: 1.0.0
Hostname: test-app-df4854fbc-z9zq9 ➜ curl http://127.0.0.1: 53732 / Hello, world!Version: 1.0.0Hostname: test-app-df4854fbc-z9zq9
(Note that the selector uses the label rather than the name since the deployment will create a name with a unique identifier postfixed. Also remember to delete the service afterward, as we are going to use Ingress Controller instead).
Ok cool, so now the deployment and pods exist, we can focus on the Ingress Controller.
➜ cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -n minikube-example -f -
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: test-app
labels:
name: test-app
spec:
type: NodePort
ports:
- port: 8080
name: http
selector:
app: test-app
---
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
name: minikube-example-ingress
annotations:
nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/rewrite-target: /$1
spec:
rules:
- host: minikube-example.com
http:
paths:
- path: /
pathType: Prefix
backend:
service:
name: test-app
port:
number: 8080
EOF
service/test-app created
ingress.networking.k8s.io/minikube-example-ingress created
What this will do is create an ingress pod, which will proxy all content with the host header minikube-example.com to the service with name test-app.
To check this is working as expected, run the following command. (It could take a couple of minutes for the IP to appear.)
➜ kubectl get ingress -n minikube-example
NAME CLASS HOSTS ADDRESS PORTS AGE
minikube-example-ingress <none> minikube-example.com 192.168.64.4 80 56s
You should then pass this IP into the host's file, like so:
➜ echo '192.168.64.4 minikube-example.com' | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts
Now, time to try it out!
➜ curl minikube-example.com
Hello, world!
Version: 1.0.0
Hostname: test-app-df4854fbc-6mjnw
The ingress controller hits each pod in turn
The ingress controller hits each pod in turn
The ingress controller hits each pod in turn
You now have the nginx ingress controller, running on minikube!
To change this up and test some things out, we are going to try two back ends and update the Ingress to include them both.
The easiest way to get rid of what we have done so far is to delete minikube and start it back up again, or use a different namespace.
➜ minikube delete && minikube start --vm=true && minikube addons enable ingress 🔥 Deleting "minikube" in hyperkit ...
💀 Removed all traces of the "minikube" cluster.
😄 minikube v1.14.2 on Darwin 10.15.7
✨ Automatically selected the hyperkit driver
👍 Starting control plane node minikube in cluster minikube
🔥 Creating hyperkit VM (CPUs=2, Memory=4000MB, Disk=20000MB) ...
🐳 Preparing Kubernetes v1.19.2 on Docker 19.03.12 ...
🔎 Verifying Kubernetes components...
🌟 Enabled addons: default-storageclass, storage-provisioner
🏄 Done! kubectl is now configured to use "minikube" by default
🔎 Verifying ingress addon...
🌟 The 'ingress' addon is enabled
And then run in a config, similar to this:
➜ cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -n minikube-example -f -
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Namespace
metadata:
name: minikube-example
labels:
name: minikube-example
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: hello-app
labels:
app: hello-app
spec:
replicas: 3
selector:
matchLabels:
app: hello-app
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: hello-app
spec:
containers:
- name: hello-app
image: gcr.io/google-samples/hello-app:1.0
ports:
- containerPort: 8080
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: insights-app
labels:
app: insights-app
spec:
replicas: 3
selector:
matchLabels:
app: insights-app
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: insights-app
spec:
containers:
- name: insights-app
image: yeasy/simple-web:latest
ports:
- containerPort: 80
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: hello-app
labels:
name: hello-app
spec:
type: NodePort
ports:
- port: 8080
name: http
selector:
app: hello-app
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: insights-app
labels:
name: insights-app
spec:
type: NodePort
ports:
- port: 80
name: http
selector:
app: insights-app
---
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
name: minikube-example-ingress
annotations:
nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/rewrite-target: /$1
spec:
rules:
- host: minikube-example.com
http:
paths:
- path: /hello
pathType: Prefix
backend:
service:
name: hello-app
port:
number: 8080
- path: /insights
pathType: Prefix
backend:
service:
name: insights-app
port:
number: 80
EOF namespace/minikube-example created
deployment.apps/hello-app created
deployment.apps/insights-app created
service/hello-app created
service/insights-app created
ingress.networking.k8s.io/minikube-example-ingress created
Now wait for the pods to enter a running state.
Viewing the cluster in k9s
Wait for the ingress controller to become ready.
➜ kubectl get ingress -n minikube-example
NAME CLASS HOSTS ADDRESS PORTS AGE
minikube-example-ingress <none> minikube-example.com 192.168.64.7 80 51s
And update the host's file to reflect it.
sudo vim /etc/hosts
Now check that both paths can be reached from Ingress.
➜ curl minikube-example.com/hello
Hello, world!
Version: 1.0.0
Hostname: hello-app-5b844b975f-ddrxc
➜ curl minikube-example.com/insights
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <body><center><h1><font color="blue" face="Georgia, Arial" size=8><em>Real</em></font> Visit Results</h1></center><p style="font-size:150%" >#2020-11-11 12:38:29: <font color="red">1</font> requests from <<font color="blue">LOCAL: 172-17-0-2.ingress-nginx-controller-admission.kube-system.svc.cluster.local</font>> to WebServer <<font color="blue">172.17.0.6</font>></p></body> </html>
Awesome, now we have the Ingress controller routing two different paths to two different back ends.
|
https://medium.com/better-programming/how-ingress-works-in-kubernetes-and-how-to-set-it-up-in-minikube-bb23d9086b1c
|
['Craig Godden-Payne']
|
2020-11-16 20:31:29.977000+00:00
|
['Programming', 'Minikube', 'Kubernetes', 'Docker', 'Containers']
|
Title Ingress Works KubernetesContent Setting Ingress minikube example going go process setting Ingress using Ingress Controller type implementation Ingress Controller going nginx straightforward use ingres controller Traefik First make sure minikube started working ➜ minikube start 😄 minikube v1142 Darwin 10157 ✨ Using hyperkit driver based existing profile 👍 Starting control plane node minikube cluster minikube 🔄 Restarting existing hyperkit VM minikube 🐳 Preparing Kubernetes v1192 Docker 190312 🔎 Verifying Kubernetes component 🌟 Enabled addons storageprovisioner defaultstorageclass 🏄 Done kubectl configured use minikube default also need enable ingres support minikube done following command ➜ minikube addons enable ingres 🔎 Verifying ingres addon 🌟 ingres addon enabled work delete minikube instance run using command minikube delete minikube start vmtrue going create namespace good practice logically separate thing ➜ cat EOF kubectl apply f apiVersion v1 kind Namespace metadata name minikubeexample label name minikubeexample EOF namespaceminikubeexample created create namespace called minikubeexample ➜ kubectl get namespaces NAME STATUS AGE default Active 7m29s kubenodelease Active 7m30s kubepublic Active 7m30s kubesystem Active 7m31s minikubeexample Active 39s deploy pod contains web application One use lot testing one Google sample Hello App ➜ cat EOF kubectl apply n minikubeexample f apiVersion appsv1 kind Deployment metadata name testapp label app testapp spec replica 3 selector matchLabels app testapp template metadata label app testapp spec container name testapp image gcriogooglesampleshelloapp10 port containerPort 8080 EOF deploymentappstestapp created see pod running use k9s awesome tool managing k8s cluster httpsgithubcomderailedk9s Viewing cluster k9s Hitting web app using port forward manually added portforwarding rule check app work expected Underneath seems set Node Port duration time k9s open wanted manually possible running command like ➜ cat EOF kubectl apply n minikubeexample f apiVersion v1 kind Service metadata name testapp label name testapp spec type NodePort port port 8080 name http selector app testapp EOF servicetestapp created 🏃 Starting tunnel service testapp NAMESPACE NAME TARGET PORT URL minikubeexample testapp http12700153732 ❗ using Docker driver darwin terminal need open run ➜ minikube service url testapp n minikubeexample🏃 Starting tunnel service testapp NAMESPACE NAME TARGET PORT URL minikubeexample testapp http12700153732 ❗ using Docker driver darwin terminal need open run Hello world Version 100 Hostname testappdf4854fbcz9zq9 ➜ curl http127001 53732 Hello worldVersion 100Hostname testappdf4854fbcz9zq9 Note selector us label rather name since deployment create name unique identifier postfixed Also remember delete service afterward going use Ingress Controller instead Ok cool deployment pod exist focus Ingress Controller ➜ cat EOF kubectl apply n minikubeexample f apiVersion v1 kind Service metadata name testapp label name testapp spec type NodePort port port 8080 name http selector app testapp apiVersion networkingk8siov1 kind Ingress metadata name minikubeexampleingress annotation nginxingresskubernetesiorewritetarget 1 spec rule host minikubeexamplecom http path path pathType Prefix backend service name testapp port number 8080 EOF servicetestapp created ingressnetworkingk8siominikubeexampleingress created create ingres pod proxy content host header minikubeexamplecom service name testapp check working expected run following command could take couple minute IP appear ➜ kubectl get ingres n minikubeexample NAME CLASS HOSTS ADDRESS PORTS AGE minikubeexampleingress none minikubeexamplecom 192168644 80 56s pas IP host file like ➜ echo 192168644 minikubeexamplecom sudo tee etchosts time try ➜ curl minikubeexamplecom Hello world Version 100 Hostname testappdf4854fbc6mjnw ingres controller hit pod turn ingres controller hit pod turn ingres controller hit pod turn nginx ingres controller running minikube change test thing going try two back end update Ingress include easiest way get rid done far delete minikube start back use different namespace ➜ minikube delete minikube start vmtrue minikube addons enable ingres 🔥 Deleting minikube hyperkit 💀 Removed trace minikube cluster 😄 minikube v1142 Darwin 10157 ✨ Automatically selected hyperkit driver 👍 Starting control plane node minikube cluster minikube 🔥 Creating hyperkit VM CPUs2 Memory4000MB Disk20000MB 🐳 Preparing Kubernetes v1192 Docker 190312 🔎 Verifying Kubernetes component 🌟 Enabled addons defaultstorageclass storageprovisioner 🏄 Done kubectl configured use minikube default 🔎 Verifying ingres addon 🌟 ingres addon enabled run config similar ➜ cat EOF kubectl apply n minikubeexample f apiVersion v1 kind Namespace metadata name minikubeexample label name minikubeexample apiVersion appsv1 kind Deployment metadata name helloapp label app helloapp spec replica 3 selector matchLabels app helloapp template metadata label app helloapp spec container name helloapp image gcriogooglesampleshelloapp10 port containerPort 8080 apiVersion appsv1 kind Deployment metadata name insightsapp label app insightsapp spec replica 3 selector matchLabels app insightsapp template metadata label app insightsapp spec container name insightsapp image yeasysimpleweblatest port containerPort 80 apiVersion v1 kind Service metadata name helloapp label name helloapp spec type NodePort port port 8080 name http selector app helloapp apiVersion v1 kind Service metadata name insightsapp label name insightsapp spec type NodePort port port 80 name http selector app insightsapp apiVersion networkingk8siov1 kind Ingress metadata name minikubeexampleingress annotation nginxingresskubernetesiorewritetarget 1 spec rule host minikubeexamplecom http path path hello pathType Prefix backend service name helloapp port number 8080 path insight pathType Prefix backend service name insightsapp port number 80 EOF namespaceminikubeexample created deploymentappshelloapp created deploymentappsinsightsapp created servicehelloapp created serviceinsightsapp created ingressnetworkingk8siominikubeexampleingress created wait pod enter running state Viewing cluster k9s Wait ingres controller become ready ➜ kubectl get ingres n minikubeexample NAME CLASS HOSTS ADDRESS PORTS AGE minikubeexampleingress none minikubeexamplecom 192168647 80 51s update host file reflect sudo vim etchosts check path reached Ingress ➜ curl minikubeexamplecomhello Hello world Version 100 Hostname helloapp5b844b975fddrxc ➜ curl minikubeexamplecominsights DOCTYPE html html bodycenterh1font colorblue faceGeorgia Arial size8emRealemfont Visit Resultsh1centerp stylefontsize150 20201111 123829 font colorred1font request font colorblueLOCAL 1721702ingressnginxcontrolleradmissionkubesystemsvcclusterlocalfont WebServer font colorblue1721706fontpbody html Awesome Ingress controller routing two different path two different back endsTags Programming Minikube Kubernetes Docker Containers
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4,641 |
How name-calling alienates supporters
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How name-calling alienates supporters
I wrote this story just before Covid-19 took our attention from climate change and other topics. It discusses how the use of language can alienate supporters of social movements and how avoiding such language makes for inclusive movements.
This is the story of how cliches and names can alienate people. It is about the contemporary use of gender or ageist wording and how this has the opposite effect to that intended, how it turns away supporters.
When right-wing adults and media shock-jocks made ad hominem attacks on the age, character, gender and politics of Norwegian climate activist, Greta Thunberg, an illustrator produced a work calling them and the economic elite at the head of the oil and gas industry who oppose moves to ameliorate the warming climate, ‘white dudes’.
We should be clear that most of the prominent critics of Greta Thunberg are white, are of a middle or older age bracket and are ‘dudes’ when that term is understood to refer to males. Some are media commentators and so have more speaking rights than other people. Together, the most vocal are a political and economic elite.
Well intentioned but self-defeating
The illustrator’s allegation was right. That is not the point of this story. The overuse of terms which highlight ethnicity, gender and other characteristics is. The point is important to people working in, or vocally supportive, of progressive social movements.
‘White dudes’, one of those terms, is similar to other Americanisms creeping into our Australian vocabulary. Terms like ‘old white males’, ‘middle-aged white guys’ and ‘fragile white dudes’ have been adopted mainly by Australians who view things through an ethnocultural, a gender or an ageist lens and who often share some form of vaguely-leftist political attitude.
Although their descriptions may be true, the unfortunate thing in using them is to stigmatise the types of people they describe — old, white, male and so on. ‘Feminist’ is used in similar ways as a putdown to catagorise people, mainly by the right wing. Bounced around the social media echo chambers of like-thinking groups and out to a wider demographic, people read the posts and assume that, somehow, all who are old, white, male or whatever the accusation is, are guilty. Unnuanced use of such terms ascribes universal guilt, whether that is the intention or not. It is obvious that this is an injustice.
When people stigmatise, deliberately or unintentionally, through the use of such terms without saying that there are a great many exceptions, they come across as arrogant and morally superior. They also alienate supporters who may be old, white, male, feminist or whatever the chosen putdown might be. This comes at a cost to social movements because, tired of being lumped with the guilty when they might have worked for decades towards making things better, they walk.
We have probably seen this happen on social media. How many insults does a person have to endure before they have had enough? And what do we see when this happens? More putdown terms like describing the accused as ‘fragile white males’ or similar. It should be obvious that using these terms is a tactical blunder.
Terms of the culture wars
White, old, male, feminist, politically correct. When combined, these word strings imply a particular meaning. They are the terms of the culture wars.
They are also cliches. Like other cliches there is an element of truth to them, however that is diluted through the loose use of the terms and because they are overused. Meaning and impact leach form overused terms until they become largely meaningless, what have been called ‘throwaway’ words. They sometimes become terms of reverse-pride in which a person adopts the term to describe themselves. This dilutes their impact.
How language is weaponised
The use of words of accusation are relevant to a book I read years ago by the educator in thinking strategies, Edward de Bono. He said naming is a powerful tool. Naming gives meaning. By naming something you imply something about it. Naming can be used to support or disparage.
‘White dudes’, ‘old white men’, ‘fragile white males’, ‘feminist’ and similar idioms are good examples when used in an accusing manner to single out some individual or group. When it comes to the culture wars, naming weaponises language. Both the left and right make use of it.
The illustrator I mention is well respected, and deservedly so. When I saw the comment I understood it was not meant to apply to all white males. But that implied exclusion was not made clear. That’s the danger with assumptions, such as males will realise that not all of them were meant to be targets. They are assumptions to the person making them but not necessarily to anyone else.
Social media readers did not understand the terms applied only to the particular the subset of older, white males attacking Greta Thunberg. They took offence and responded in the comments on the facebook group.
“I’m a supporter of Greta Thunberg and her ilk; it’s offensive how you’re lumping ‘white dudes’ together as being opposed to her and her message. I can understand that it may appear to be a ‘white dude’ thing when you have people like ScoMo, Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt all effectively on the same side, but in making such gross generalisations you’re falling into the same trap as this other ‘side’ when they make generalisations about ‘young people’ or ‘African gangs’ too”.
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“Many climate change deniers throughout the world would not be white, and many would not be male”.
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“If you’re going to generalise at all here, I think the generational aspect of this is more relevant — but, again, people like David Attenborough remind us that we can only generalise so far in this regard too”.
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“‘White men’ are not a homogenous group — some are poor, some are rich; some have power, some are powerless. Some are part of the problem; others are part of the solution”.
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“Most of the world’s climate scientists, who have worked diligently to bring climate change to the attention of the world, are white males”.
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“Yes, many white males are denying climate change and supporting vested power groups; but many others are supporting and creating change”.
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“I read the comments carefully, and the post, despite some later qualification, gives the impression of lumping white males together, with no qualification in the main text box”.
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“If all white males were to band together, conspiracy-style, and sue (the illustrator), I’m confident that the argument that (the person) is not defaming us would fail to hold up in court”.
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“And (the illustrator) seems to label anyone who takes issue with her argument to be a ‘troll’. We can’t win, apparently!”.
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“Tired of the skin tone/gender bias… Totally pollutes the message.”, wrote another, a non-Anglo.
Kick-back
Here we see people kicking back against the assumption that they would realise the comment was not aimed at them. In defence of the illustrator, some commentators to the social media post said as much. However, the point is that those whom the item was not directed at were left to realise that for themselves.
The incident is not the only example of this. White people, males, the old and young have taken offence at similar comments with racial, gender or ageist wording that puts them in the same bag as the guilty fitting those descriptions.
It is the way the terms are used as generalisations. The responses show how it comes across as accusing all older white men of being guilty of some transgression. Predictably, that triggers a hostile reaction. In the example we are looking at, hostile reactions make gender, ethnicity and the illustrator the main thing, taking the focus away from the illustrator’s intention.
There are always exceptions
The point about not generalising on the basis of gender, sexuality or age is important to citizen journalists. There are always exceptions to generalisations and people will point that out. They will be compelled to defend themselves. That is why journalists sometimes make the precaution of starting a sentence with ‘generally,…’ when they make a generalisation.
When the portion of exceptions is likely to be large it might be better to make our point without generalising and by being more specific.
Let’s not alienate supporters
For influential people in social movements and citizen journalists working with them or writing about them, using inclusive language is important because numbers are important to the impact of the movements. It is best not to alienate even when tempted to use gender or age-related terms. Avoidance of accusations around gender, age and ethnicity is a good tactic.
Viewing any issue through ethnicity and skin colour, gender or an ageist lens is potentially divisive of social movements and potentially alienates supporters who fit that description. Supportive people are turned away. Language based around those single issues, important that they are, exclude people.
Using the language of gender, age and ethnicity risks fracturing movements. This is not to say that issues around those characteristics are not important, however wrongful use of those terms can turn people away.
Better to focus on what people have in common and build the movement on that.
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https://medium.com/citizen-journalism/how-name-calling-alienates-supporters-8f3a011d1246
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['Russ Grayson']
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2020-08-10 00:50:35.286000+00:00
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['Social Movements', 'Language', 'Citizen Journalism', 'Citizen Journalist', 'Journalism']
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Title namecalling alienates supportersContent namecalling alienates supporter wrote story Covid19 took attention climate change topic discus use language alienate supporter social movement avoiding language make inclusive movement story cliche name alienate people contemporary use gender ageist wording opposite effect intended turn away supporter rightwing adult medium shockjocks made ad hominem attack age character gender politics Norwegian climate activist Greta Thunberg illustrator produced work calling economic elite head oil gas industry oppose move ameliorate warming climate ‘white dudes’ clear prominent critic Greta Thunberg white middle older age bracket ‘dudes’ term understood refer male medium commentator speaking right people Together vocal political economic elite Well intentioned selfdefeating illustrator’s allegation right point story overuse term highlight ethnicity gender characteristic point important people working vocally supportive progressive social movement ‘White dudes’ one term similar Americanisms creeping Australian vocabulary Terms like ‘old white males’ ‘middleaged white guys’ ‘fragile white dudes’ adopted mainly Australians view thing ethnocultural gender ageist lens often share form vaguelyleftist political attitude Although description may true unfortunate thing using stigmatise type people describe — old white male ‘Feminist’ used similar way putdown catagorise people mainly right wing Bounced around social medium echo chamber likethinking group wider demographic people read post assume somehow old white male whatever accusation guilty Unnuanced use term ascribes universal guilt whether intention obvious injustice people stigmatise deliberately unintentionally use term without saying great many exception come across arrogant morally superior also alienate supporter may old white male feminist whatever chosen putdown might come cost social movement tired lumped guilty might worked decade towards making thing better walk probably seen happen social medium many insult person endure enough see happens putdown term like describing accused ‘fragile white males’ similar obvious using term tactical blunder Terms culture war White old male feminist politically correct combined word string imply particular meaning term culture war also cliche Like cliche element truth however diluted loose use term overused Meaning impact leach form overused term become largely meaningless called ‘throwaway’ word sometimes become term reversepride person adopts term describe dilutes impact language weaponised use word accusation relevant book read year ago educator thinking strategy Edward de Bono said naming powerful tool Naming give meaning naming something imply something Naming used support disparage ‘White dudes’ ‘old white men’ ‘fragile white males’ ‘feminist’ similar idiom good example used accusing manner single individual group come culture war naming weaponises language left right make use illustrator mention well respected deservedly saw comment understood meant apply white male implied exclusion made clear That’s danger assumption male realise meant target assumption person making necessarily anyone else Social medium reader understand term applied particular subset older white male attacking Greta Thunberg took offence responded comment facebook group “I’m supporter Greta Thunberg ilk it’s offensive you’re lumping ‘white dudes’ together opposed message understand may appear ‘white dude’ thing people like ScoMo Alan Jones Andrew Bolt effectively side making gross generalisation you’re falling trap ‘side’ make generalisation ‘young people’ ‘African gangs’ too” … “Many climate change denier throughout world would white many would male” … “If you’re going generalise think generational aspect relevant — people like David Attenborough remind u generalise far regard too” … “‘White men’ homogenous group — poor rich power powerless part problem others part solution” … “Most world’s climate scientist worked diligently bring climate change attention world white males” … “Yes many white male denying climate change supporting vested power group many others supporting creating change” … “I read comment carefully post despite later qualification give impression lumping white male together qualification main text box” … “If white male band together conspiracystyle sue illustrator I’m confident argument person defaming u would fail hold court” … “And illustrator seems label anyone take issue argument ‘troll’ can’t win apparently” … “Tired skin tonegender bias… Totally pollutes message” wrote another nonAnglo Kickback see people kicking back assumption would realise comment aimed defence illustrator commentator social medium post said much However point item directed left realise incident example White people male old young taken offence similar comment racial gender ageist wording put bag guilty fitting description way term used generalisation response show come across accusing older white men guilty transgression Predictably trigger hostile reaction example looking hostile reaction make gender ethnicity illustrator main thing taking focus away illustrator’s intention always exception point generalising basis gender sexuality age important citizen journalist always exception generalisation people point compelled defend journalist sometimes make precaution starting sentence ‘generally…’ make generalisation portion exception likely large might better make point without generalising specific Let’s alienate supporter influential people social movement citizen journalist working writing using inclusive language important number important impact movement best alienate even tempted use gender agerelated term Avoidance accusation around gender age ethnicity good tactic Viewing issue ethnicity skin colour gender ageist lens potentially divisive social movement potentially alienates supporter fit description Supportive people turned away Language based around single issue important exclude people Using language gender age ethnicity risk fracturing movement say issue around characteristic important however wrongful use term turn people away Better focus people common build movement thatTags Social Movements Language Citizen Journalism Citizen Journalist Journalism
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The Future Vision of Microsoft 365
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Productivity is personal.
Who we are as human beings deeply influences productivity as both a process and an outcome. Our values and beliefs, the needs of our families, our personalities and preferences, how energized or deflated we feel when seeing our Calendars or To Dos — these are key facets of productivity.
And because nobody knows your external circumstances or inner emotional state better than you, achievement needs to happen on your terms to be sustainable. This is perhaps truer than ever because, for many, 2020 swallowed whole the proverbial work/life divide. Understanding this propels us to craft Microsoft 365 experiences that support our lives in all their unique complexity.
We’re also crafting experiences that acknowledge the broader ecosystem that Microsoft 365 lives within. As the world wakes up to racial injustice, the economic gap between “essential” and “non-essential” workers, and the long-term cost of a digital learning divide, we’re intentionally and ethically designing digital spaces to support a diversity of lived experiences.
As product makers, we go where human need takes us and strive to navigate the nexus of timeless needs and current realities. Three years ago, we launched Microsoft 365 and began holistically rethinking how our products could work together as an intelligent and connected suite of services. We implemented flexible designs and over time evolved our ecosystem to facilitate not just modern work, but modern life.
That ecosystem increasingly decouples app capabilities from the apps themselves, leaving you free to use functionality whenever, however, and wherever you need it. New generations’ embrace of mobile devices for their ease, simplicity, and joy has inspired us to create cross-platform Microsoft 365 experiences that scale gracefully and feel natural to whatever device you choose.
Today, the future of Microsoft 365 blends our planned trajectory with real-time changes based on the remarkable complexities that 2020 dropped at the world’s feet. We center our efforts around four key experience pillars, and the work that you’ll read about below is itself a hybrid. While some of these changes will roll out within a year or two, others are still very much exploratory.
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https://medium.com/microsoft-design/m365future-815cf30a8be
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['Jon Friedman']
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2020-07-21 17:43:13.178000+00:00
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['Microsoft', 'Design', 'User Experience', 'UX', 'Future Of Work']
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Title Future Vision Microsoft 365Content Productivity personal human being deeply influence productivity process outcome value belief need family personality preference energized deflated feel seeing Calendars Dos — key facet productivity nobody know external circumstance inner emotional state better achievement need happen term sustainable perhaps truer ever many 2020 swallowed whole proverbial worklife divide Understanding propels u craft Microsoft 365 experience support life unique complexity We’re also crafting experience acknowledge broader ecosystem Microsoft 365 life within world wake racial injustice economic gap “essential” “nonessential” worker longterm cost digital learning divide we’re intentionally ethically designing digital space support diversity lived experience product maker go human need take u strive navigate nexus timeless need current reality Three year ago launched Microsoft 365 began holistically rethinking product could work together intelligent connected suite service implemented flexible design time evolved ecosystem facilitate modern work modern life ecosystem increasingly decouples app capability apps leaving free use functionality whenever however wherever need New generations’ embrace mobile device ease simplicity joy inspired u create crossplatform Microsoft 365 experience scale gracefully feel natural whatever device choose Today future Microsoft 365 blend planned trajectory realtime change based remarkable complexity 2020 dropped world’s foot center effort around four key experience pillar work you’ll read hybrid change roll within year two others still much exploratoryTags Microsoft Design User Experience UX Future Work
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4,643 |
Caviar: A Usability Case Study. It’s arguable whether a good meal is a…
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Caviar is a popular app that offers food delivery from local restaurants.
Disclaimer: I do not work for Caviar. This case study was purely used as a tool for learning and making me a better designer.
I conducted a 2-week case study to challenge myself to improve Caviar’s iOS ordering flow. Being an ardent food lover, Caviar is one of the apps that I use a lot, if not the most. Through research, I was able to identify a few pain points that users were experiencing. I then prototyped some solutions and validated them with user data.
Research
To begin my research, I started to look at a few competitors or similar platforms, analyzing UI, UX, User flow, key features and reviews to identify the common problems.
While many restaurants certainly offer their own pickup and delivery services, and there are a handful of smaller players in the marketplace, there are currently four other main competitors with Caviar Delivery: Uber Eats, Postmates, Grubhub, and DoorDash.
User reviews
There are nearly 9,000 combined reviews between iTunes and Google Play, the Caviar app held an average rating of about 4.4 stars. I identified potential trends from users reviews which have not highlighted relevant issues about usability or functionalities. I’ve categorized the complaints in 4 categories:
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https://medium.com/tradecraft-traction/caviar-usability-case-study-5c0f61a11956
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['Sayali Shah']
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2019-05-30 18:52:47.462000+00:00
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['Product Design', 'Usability', 'Design', 'Case Study', 'UX']
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Title Caviar Usability Case Study It’s arguable whether good meal a…Content Caviar popular app offer food delivery local restaurant Disclaimer work Caviar case study purely used tool learning making better designer conducted 2week case study challenge improve Caviar’s iOS ordering flow ardent food lover Caviar one apps use lot research able identify pain point user experiencing prototyped solution validated user data Research begin research started look competitor similar platform analyzing UI UX User flow key feature review identify common problem many restaurant certainly offer pickup delivery service handful smaller player marketplace currently four main competitor Caviar Delivery Uber Eats Postmates Grubhub DoorDash User review nearly 9000 combined review iTunes Google Play Caviar app held average rating 44 star identified potential trend user review highlighted relevant issue usability functionality I’ve categorized complaint 4 categoriesTags Product Design Usability Design Case Study UX
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4,644 |
Tabular view + filters
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Every project starts simple, with few models and not so many records to take into consideration. But either by necessity or simply by adding more content through time, having a grasp of every piece of content created should be easy to access and in a fast way.
To reach this accessibility goal, DatoCMS has two important features that work perfectly together, the tabular view and the filters.
Why Tabular view?
Tabular view is the perfect solution for complex projects.
If you want to make a project for an e-commerce, you’ll have a model for a product with many different fields.
A product could have even more fields than this
As your project grows and more records are added to your product model, it becomes hard to keep track of every single record when you have to edit them.
The Compact view seems to be unfit to manage this kind of complexity, you can’t sort your products and it’s very hard to search for them.
Now let’s see instead how the Tabular view shows a collection of many records.
With different columns it’s much way easier to discern your records
Tabular view allows editors to configure(add, remove, reorder and resize), columns related to the field will inherit its name making them highly customizable too.
Each editor can manage its preferences, adding or moving columns according to its needs, then merge different filters to create a powerful search experience through many records.
With Tabular view you’ll be able to put some logic in the visualization of your list of records.
The columns selection with default values and customized fields
How to use it
By default the visualization for your models is now set on tabular view, let’s see exactly where it is located in your model settings.
In your DatoCMS dashboard choose a project and then go to its settings and select “Models”, under “STRUCTURE” in the left sidebar, and then click on the “SETTINGS” of the model you want to edit.
The settings for the model are next to its name on the right
Once you clicked this will open the settings modal, select the “Additional settings” tab.
This is where you can set your records visualization mode to tabular view
With Tabular view DatoCMS allows you to select what columns you want to see and then arrange them as you like.
Select and remove the columns and then move them the way you like
Tabular view + Filters, a match made in heaven
So it’s a given that tabular view for your model is awesome but it would be an empty shell without a proper way to search for your content.
Enter the new filters, with them you can search any of the values of the columns and if you don’t remember the name of a record you can narrow it down to time.
you can use more than one filter for a detailed search
Evolving
Tabular views and filters are a couple of features designed to improve content management for anyone using DatoCMS.
DatoCMS has many other new features incoming and it’s constantly evolving thanks to the suggestions and feedbacks of who’s using it.
Moving forward is the only way for DatoCMS.
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https://medium.com/datocms/tabular-view-filters-a0193be2dd8a
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['Francesco Falchi']
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2018-10-05 15:08:59.828000+00:00
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['Headless Cms', 'Features', 'Visualization', 'Organization', 'Web Development']
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Title Tabular view filtersContent Every project start simple model many record take consideration either necessity simply adding content time grasp every piece content created easy access fast way reach accessibility goal DatoCMS two important feature work perfectly together tabular view filter Tabular view Tabular view perfect solution complex project want make project ecommerce you’ll model product many different field product could even field project grows record added product model becomes hard keep track every single record edit Compact view seems unfit manage kind complexity can’t sort product it’s hard search let’s see instead Tabular view show collection many record different column it’s much way easier discern record Tabular view allows editor configureadd remove reorder resize column related field inherit name making highly customizable editor manage preference adding moving column according need merge different filter create powerful search experience many record Tabular view you’ll able put logic visualization list record column selection default value customized field use default visualization model set tabular view let’s see exactly located model setting DatoCMS dashboard choose project go setting select “Models” “STRUCTURE” left sidebar click “SETTINGS” model want edit setting model next name right clicked open setting modal select “Additional settings” tab set record visualization mode tabular view Tabular view DatoCMS allows select column want see arrange like Select remove column move way like Tabular view Filters match made heaven it’s given tabular view model awesome would empty shell without proper way search content Enter new filter search value column don’t remember name record narrow time use one filter detailed search Evolving Tabular view filter couple feature designed improve content management anyone using DatoCMS DatoCMS many new feature incoming it’s constantly evolving thanks suggestion feedback who’s using Moving forward way DatoCMSTags Headless Cms Features Visualization Organization Web Development
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Talk less… Do more… Let your actions show what you’re against and what you’re for…
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“What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are all familiar with the old saying “actions speak louder than words” and I am certain we all know people that are consistent in saying one thing, and then doing another. Without a doubt we have all been guilty in doing this ourselves at times because it can be challenging to live a life of 100% alignment and consistency with our stated words and values.
Why do we say anything at all? Why do we create a disconnect between our words and our actions? Is it because we are desperate to be heard? Is it because words are so very easy to say and we believe by simply saying them we might have done enough?
As I write this I keep hearing the life from Hamilton when Aaron Burr when he advises Alexander Hamilton to; “Talk less… Smile more… Don’t let them know what you’re against or what you’re for…” What if we flipped this and lived by a credo that said “Talk less… Do more… Let your actions show what you’re against and what you’re for…”
This isn’t new perspective by any means. James wrote about the need to let your works be the representation of your faith in one of my favorite books of the bible. ‘What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.’ James 2:14–17
If you choose to put the effort and energy into your actions instead of your words, then you won’t have to worry about your the things you do overpowering the things you say…
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https://medium.com/the-innovation/talk-less-do-more-let-your-actions-show-what-youre-against-and-what-you-re-for-aac5102a7da5
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['Dusty Holcomb']
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2020-07-24 05:10:08.283000+00:00
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['Leadership', 'Inspiration', 'Self Leadership', 'Motivation', 'Quote Of The Day']
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Title Talk less… more… Let action show you’re you’re for…Content “What speaks loudly cannot hear say” Ralph Waldo Emerson familiar old saying “actions speak louder words” certain know people consistent saying one thing another Without doubt guilty time challenging live life 100 alignment consistency stated word value say anything create disconnect word action desperate heard word easy say believe simply saying might done enough write keep hearing life Hamilton Aaron Burr advises Alexander Hamilton “Talk less… Smile more… Don’t let know you’re you’re for…” flipped lived credo said “Talk less… more… Let action show you’re you’re for…” isn’t new perspective mean James wrote need let work representation faith one favorite book bible ‘What good brother someone say faith work faith save brother sister poorly clothed lacking daily food one say “Go peace warmed filled” without giving thing needed body good also faith work dead’ James 214–17 choose put effort energy action instead word won’t worry thing overpowering thing say…Tags Leadership Inspiration Self Leadership Motivation Quote Day
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4,646 |
Recognizing Burnout & How to Beat It
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In this fast-paced world, we’re all busy bodies with our own work and study commitments, relationships to uphold, a controlling conscience, and many more. The accumulation of these tasks can be overwhelming and lead to stress, which when unaddressed, can lead to burnout.
Burnout essentially is the accumulation of prolonged stress, which is ultimately emotionally, physically, and mentally draining. Because we can easily tire ourselves, both mentally and physically, with work and unhealthy thoughts, it is inevitable that we reach the point of burnout from time to time.
In many cases, burnout can lead to unfavorable physical changes. It can lead us to withdraw from work, relationships, and neglect self-care. On top of that, burnout oftentimes manifests as a physical ailment as well, such as headaches, muscle pains, or a weakened immune system. Such physicalities go on to show the interconnectedness of the mind and the body– when we put in our all, we often forget about ourselves. And when we forget about ourselves, we withdraw from the world around us.
Now although you may typically associate productivity marathons with burnout, it turns out there is a lot more behind it than you think and it’s important to explore the various signs and symptoms. Thus, when you begin to find yourself being overwhelmed and/or demoralized, consider these following tips to recognize, deal with, and prevent burnout.
Recognizing Burnout
There are three types of burnout, each with distinctive causes:
Overload Burnout
Overload Burnout is the form of burnout that most commonly comes to mind as it is associated with working excessively and frantically. Such dedication to completing tasks and securing accomplishments is oftentimes done with little regard for your own health.
Having an unmanageable workload and high expectations from either oneself, or a superior, frequently initiates an intense, yet simultaneously draining race towards completion. While we embark on our tiresome endeavors towards success and satisfaction, we oftentimes neglect ourselves during this surge of energy and productivity.
Thus, with our eyes glued to our work, we oftentimes disregard the passing of the day, we skip meals in exchange for productivity, and continue to type away at our computers– all the cost of some quality time with friends, family, and ourselves.
Under-Challenged Burnout
Another subtype of burnout is called “Under-Challenged Burnout.” Under-challenged burnout refers to the disengagement of individuals who find that their job does not spark motivation or excitement.
According to performance coach Melody Wilding, “Because under-challenged people find no passion or enjoyment in their work, they cope by distancing themselves from their job. This indifference leads to cynicism, avoidance of responsibility, and overall disengagement with their work.”
As humans, we thrive off of stimulation and excitement– even in the most temporary of things. But without the flame of passion, the more prolonged version of excitement, it’s no wonder that we may end up feeling drained and detached.
In fact, those experiencing under-challenged burnout oftentimes gage the significance and satisfaction they’ll get from getting the work done. If something is deemed engaging, the task will be done with ease, but if it’s not, it will likely be put off to the side– but before you know it, there will be a hefty pile of things to do.
Neglect Burnout
The last form of burnout is Neglect– feeling helpless and incompetent– which can lead to reduced performance.
Neglect in itself can be attributed to a cynical mindset. Those of us who suffer from neglect burnout are oftentimes held back by imposter syndrome and the related believe that our “incompetence” renders us useless. Many of us believe that our effort is not good enough and thus it is not worth it to try at all. As a result, individuals experiencing neglect burnout oftentimes refrain from carrying out tasks out of the fear of failure, thus contributing to passivity and lack of motivation.
While neglect burnout may appear to be the polar opposite of overload burnout, you can especially see the mental and emotional fatigue that arises in neglect burnout. In the case of neglect burnout, t’s the tiresome thoughts of incompetence and fears of failure that tempt us to withdraw, rather than trying.
Dealing with Burnout
The first step to dealing with burnout is to recenter your attention from all the stressors and distractions in your life and funnel it towards yourself. After identifying the type of burnout that you are experiencing, ask yourself ‘What do I need right now?’ and consider the fixes suggested below:
With overload burnout, it is extremely important to know your limits and that you set up your work routine around that. Rather than trying to maintain peak, obsessive productivity at the cost of the progressive decline of your mental health, try to develop a consistent work schedule instead that integrates breaks and self-care into your daily routine.
“Burnout is the result of too much energy output and not enough energy self-invested. In other words, it’s burning too much fuel than you’ve put in your tank.” — Melissa Steginus
Take into consideration these quick and simple self-care activities that can be easily integrated into any busy lifestyle:
Go for a walk → Helps give your mind a break from the heavy workload.
→ Helps give your mind a break from the heavy workload. Talk to someone for personal enjoyment → Just because you’re a busy person does not mean it should cost you your social life.
→ Just because you’re a busy person does not mean it should cost you your social life. Take a power nap → Allows you to re-energize for enhanced productivity and gives your brain the chance to process new ideas.
→ Allows you to re-energize for enhanced productivity and gives your brain the chance to process new ideas. Treat yourself to a snack → Reward yourself with something small while making sure you get the energy and nutrients you need to keep working.
Because under-challenged burnout stems from one’s attitude towards their work and studies, it is highly recommended that individuals self-reflect and consider what truly sparks their interest. To alleviate oneself from the cynical mindset associated with under-challenged burnout, try exploring opportunities that spark your interest. Since seeking out a job change may not be the most feasible option for many, try to find ways to tailor your current occupation around your interests and skills through job crafting.
Thus, if you feel “bored” with whatever tasks are at hand, make it fun for yourself. See how you can integrate your own interests into your duties so that you can tackle your responsibilities with much more zeal and enthusiasm than before.
For those dealing with neglect burnout, it is essential that you address the underlying fears and emotions that deter you from getting work done. If you’re worried about incompetence, remind yourself of your past accomplishments and that there’s always the chance to grow.
Mistakes are the little hills that we must climb over in order to get to the finish line– they’re embedded in the rocky terrain of life. Just because we see a daunting mountain ahead of us does not mean we should throw in the towel and turn back. Instead, we should try to trudge forward and focus on the endless possibilities in mind. With little steps at a time, we can eventually see what great things await at the top of the mountain– but we must first put ourselves out there and take that first step.
“When we commit to action, to actually doing something rather than feeling trapped by events, the stress in our life becomes manageable.” — Greg Anderson
While it is very easy to fall into this negative thought cycle, catch yourself when you begin thinking this way and remember– things are better done than not done at all, but of course it is important to recognize your limits as well.
Preventing Burnout
Now that you know the types of burnout and ways to deal with them, make sure you stay in tune with your emotions so that you can catch yourself before you burn out.
If you find yourself working tirelessly without time for yourself, or neglecting your responsibilities out of fear of boredom, take a step back. Always take the time to check up on your mental state and your needs. With that being said, never deny yourself of a well-deserved break and take every chance you can get to evaluate your work ethics and your emotions.
Even when you’re not feeling burnt out, it’s still important to remember to take breaks for self-care, do the things you love, and develop a sense of confidence in what you do.
Remember, burnout is a common occurrence that can happen to virtually anyone– students and adults alike. All this marathon running we do in life is tiring, but we must always take the time to recharge– never let your battery completely run out. Take this advice and use it wisely to ensure that you develop a healthy and resilient lifestyle as a busy individual, and finish that marathon with a greater sense of mental, emotional, and physical ease.
|
https://medium.com/joincurio/recognizing-burnout-how-to-beat-it-43c2003dff44
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['Madison Estrella']
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2020-07-24 18:31:01.173000+00:00
|
['Stress', 'Mental Health', 'Mental Wellbeing', 'Stress Management', 'Burnout']
|
Title Recognizing Burnout Beat ItContent fastpaced world we’re busy body work study commitment relationship uphold controlling conscience many accumulation task overwhelming lead stress unaddressed lead burnout Burnout essentially accumulation prolonged stress ultimately emotionally physically mentally draining easily tire mentally physically work unhealthy thought inevitable reach point burnout time time many case burnout lead unfavorable physical change lead u withdraw work relationship neglect selfcare top burnout oftentimes manifest physical ailment well headache muscle pain weakened immune system physicality go show interconnectedness mind body– put often forget forget withdraw world around u although may typically associate productivity marathon burnout turn lot behind think it’s important explore various sign symptom Thus begin find overwhelmed andor demoralized consider following tip recognize deal prevent burnout Recognizing Burnout three type burnout distinctive cause Overload Burnout Overload Burnout form burnout commonly come mind associated working excessively frantically dedication completing task securing accomplishment oftentimes done little regard health unmanageable workload high expectation either oneself superior frequently initiate intense yet simultaneously draining race towards completion embark tiresome endeavor towards success satisfaction oftentimes neglect surge energy productivity Thus eye glued work oftentimes disregard passing day skip meal exchange productivity continue type away computers– cost quality time friend family UnderChallenged Burnout Another subtype burnout called “UnderChallenged Burnout” Underchallenged burnout refers disengagement individual find job spark motivation excitement According performance coach Melody Wilding “Because underchallenged people find passion enjoyment work cope distancing job indifference lead cynicism avoidance responsibility overall disengagement work” human thrive stimulation excitement– even temporary thing without flame passion prolonged version excitement it’s wonder may end feeling drained detached fact experiencing underchallenged burnout oftentimes gage significance satisfaction they’ll get getting work done something deemed engaging task done ease it’s likely put side– know hefty pile thing Neglect Burnout last form burnout Neglect– feeling helpless incompetent– lead reduced performance Neglect attributed cynical mindset u suffer neglect burnout oftentimes held back imposter syndrome related believe “incompetence” render u useless Many u believe effort good enough thus worth try result individual experiencing neglect burnout oftentimes refrain carrying task fear failure thus contributing passivity lack motivation neglect burnout may appear polar opposite overload burnout especially see mental emotional fatigue arises neglect burnout case neglect burnout t’s tiresome thought incompetence fear failure tempt u withdraw rather trying Dealing Burnout first step dealing burnout recenter attention stressor distraction life funnel towards identifying type burnout experiencing ask ‘What need right now’ consider fix suggested overload burnout extremely important know limit set work routine around Rather trying maintain peak obsessive productivity cost progressive decline mental health try develop consistent work schedule instead integrates break selfcare daily routine “Burnout result much energy output enough energy selfinvested word it’s burning much fuel you’ve put tank” — Melissa Steginus Take consideration quick simple selfcare activity easily integrated busy lifestyle Go walk → Helps give mind break heavy workload → Helps give mind break heavy workload Talk someone personal enjoyment → you’re busy person mean cost social life → you’re busy person mean cost social life Take power nap → Allows reenergize enhanced productivity give brain chance process new idea → Allows reenergize enhanced productivity give brain chance process new idea Treat snack → Reward something small making sure get energy nutrient need keep working underchallenged burnout stem one’s attitude towards work study highly recommended individual selfreflect consider truly spark interest alleviate oneself cynical mindset associated underchallenged burnout try exploring opportunity spark interest Since seeking job change may feasible option many try find way tailor current occupation around interest skill job crafting Thus feel “bored” whatever task hand make fun See integrate interest duty tackle responsibility much zeal enthusiasm dealing neglect burnout essential address underlying fear emotion deter getting work done you’re worried incompetence remind past accomplishment there’s always chance grow Mistakes little hill must climb order get finish line– they’re embedded rocky terrain life see daunting mountain ahead u mean throw towel turn back Instead try trudge forward focus endless possibility mind little step time eventually see great thing await top mountain– must first put take first step “When commit action actually something rather feeling trapped event stress life becomes manageable” — Greg Anderson easy fall negative thought cycle catch begin thinking way remember– thing better done done course important recognize limit well Preventing Burnout know type burnout way deal make sure stay tune emotion catch burn find working tirelessly without time neglecting responsibility fear boredom take step back Always take time check mental state need said never deny welldeserved break take every chance get evaluate work ethic emotion Even you’re feeling burnt it’s still important remember take break selfcare thing love develop sense confidence Remember burnout common occurrence happen virtually anyone– student adult alike marathon running life tiring must always take time recharge– never let battery completely run Take advice use wisely ensure develop healthy resilient lifestyle busy individual finish marathon greater sense mental emotional physical easeTags Stress Mental Health Mental Wellbeing Stress Management Burnout
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4,647 |
Computational Creativity: The Role of the Transformer
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Over the years, computers have become increasingly sophisticated in their ability to identify more and more complex patterns. The field of computational creativity, a multidisciplinary endeavour to build software that can assist humans in a variety of tasks in the arts, science and the humanities, has seen much progress since the early days of computers where instructions had to be explicitly programmed.
In this article, we will attempt to unravel some of the recent developments in generative modelling that have shown significant improvements in computers’ ability to generate useful patterns that appeal to human observers. In particular, one type of neural network architecture, the Transformer, will be discussed in detail with regard to its ability to capture longer-term dependencies in text, music and images. Some future directions that this technology could lead to are also discussed.
What is creativity, anyway?
In her illuminating essay, Margaret Boden describes that creativity is “the ability to come up with ideas or artifacts that are new, surprising, and valuable”. Historically, this has been viewed as a unique aspect of human intelligence. As described by Boden, for something to be deemed creative, it must deliver both novelty and value.
A common criticism about modelling creativity is that machines (including the most recent deep learning methods) just use “brute-force pattern matching” to achieve an end goal — if the machine is simply identifying existing patterns in the data that it was trained on, then what “novelty” is it truly adding? In addition, “values” are known to be highly variable, and “any arguments about creativity are rooted in disagreements about value”.
While it may be true that computers might “just be pattern-matching” on a large-scale, it is important to realize that even great scientists and mathematicians are in essence, using their finely tuned pattern-matching abilities (albeit in a highly sophisticated form) to discover patterns in reality that nobody else thought of before. In the below sections, we will look at how transformers could help address both the issues of novelty and value, and how they might combine with other tools to aid humans in combinatorial creativity.
The Transformer
The 2017 Google AI paper “Attention is All You Need” first introduced the concept of the transformer neural network architecture. In essence, a transformer is a stack of encoders that can process a sequence of arbitrary length, which connects to a stack of decoders that outputs another sequence. Below is an example of such a structure used for machine translation.
Image source: Illustrated Transformer by Jay Alammar
In recent times, there have been a number of extensions and modifications made to the vanilla transformer that allow it to generalize to other tasks by using encoder-only stacks (BERT), or decoder-only stacks (OpenAI GPT), resulting in large-scale improvements to downstream language modelling tasks.
A deep technical description of the transformer is out of the scope of this article — however there are excellent visual explanations (Illustrated Transformer) and line-by-line descriptions of the implementation (Annotated Transformer) that supplement the original paper.
Self-Attention
At the core of the transformer is its self-attention mechanism — i.e. the ability to model relationships between parts of a sequence (for example, words in a sentence), regardless of their respective positions in the sequence.
Image source: Google AI blog post on transformers
The above image shows two examples where the meaning of the word “it” could be ambiguous to a machine— in the example on the left, “it” refers to the word “animal”, whereas on the right, “it” refers to “street”. The term self-attention used in this context means that the encoder, while inspecting its input sequence, is able to focus on different parts of the input in relation to itself, allowing it to “attend” to the right representation based on observed patterns in the training data.
Self-attention is incorporated into an encoder/decoder structure as follows.
Image source: Illustrated Transformer by Jay Alammar
Via this design, the encoder’s input tokens first flow through the self-attention layer, which allows it to focus on different parts of the sequence in relation to itself. The output of the self-attention layer is then passed to a feed-forward neural network, through which the model “learns” the representation of each word.
Multiple Attention Heads
The transformer expands on the idea of self-attention by incorporating multiple “attention heads”, i.e. instances of self-attention applied to different parts of the sequence simultaneously. In Google AI’s transformer, there are eight attention heads focusing on different positions at the same time step, applied to each encoder.
Image source: Illustrated Transformer by Jay Alammar
In essence, having multiple attention heads (eight, in the above image) makes parallelizing the computation relatively trivial, since each head can identify the relationships between words independently of the other. This greatly reduces the amount of training effort, allowing the transformer to scale efficiently to very large training sets, unlike more sequential architectures like Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs).
Over each training epoch, the individual attention heads update their vector representations, with the final representation being calculated as the weighted average of attentions.
Image source: Self-Attention for Generative Models, By Ashish Vaswani and Anna Huang
The decoder side works in a much similar way, and the final output vector representation is fed through a linear layer (which projects the vector output to a much larger “vocabulary space”), followed by a softmax layer (which converts the float representation of the word into a probability distribution for each word in the complete vocabulary).
|
https://medium.com/sfu-cspmp/computational-creativity-the-role-of-the-transformer-c3fa20da9c5f
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['Prashanth Rao']
|
2019-03-07 06:11:06.678000+00:00
|
['Machine Learning', 'Deep Learning', 'Generative Art', 'Neural Networks', 'Artificial Intelligence']
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Title Computational Creativity Role TransformerContent year computer become increasingly sophisticated ability identify complex pattern field computational creativity multidisciplinary endeavour build software assist human variety task art science humanity seen much progress since early day computer instruction explicitly programmed article attempt unravel recent development generative modelling shown significant improvement computers’ ability generate useful pattern appeal human observer particular one type neural network architecture Transformer discussed detail regard ability capture longerterm dependency text music image future direction technology could lead also discussed creativity anyway illuminating essay Margaret Boden describes creativity “the ability come idea artifact new surprising valuable” Historically viewed unique aspect human intelligence described Boden something deemed creative must deliver novelty value common criticism modelling creativity machine including recent deep learning method use “bruteforce pattern matching” achieve end goal — machine simply identifying existing pattern data trained “novelty” truly adding addition “values” known highly variable “any argument creativity rooted disagreement value” may true computer might “just patternmatching” largescale important realize even great scientist mathematician essence using finely tuned patternmatching ability albeit highly sophisticated form discover pattern reality nobody else thought section look transformer could help address issue novelty value might combine tool aid human combinatorial creativity Transformer 2017 Google AI paper “Attention Need” first introduced concept transformer neural network architecture essence transformer stack encoders process sequence arbitrary length connects stack decoder output another sequence example structure used machine translation Image source Illustrated Transformer Jay Alammar recent time number extension modification made vanilla transformer allow generalize task using encoderonly stack BERT decoderonly stack OpenAI GPT resulting largescale improvement downstream language modelling task deep technical description transformer scope article — however excellent visual explanation Illustrated Transformer linebyline description implementation Annotated Transformer supplement original paper SelfAttention core transformer selfattention mechanism — ie ability model relationship part sequence example word sentence regardless respective position sequence Image source Google AI blog post transformer image show two example meaning word “it” could ambiguous machine— example left “it” refers word “animal” whereas right “it” refers “street” term selfattention used context mean encoder inspecting input sequence able focus different part input relation allowing “attend” right representation based observed pattern training data Selfattention incorporated encoderdecoder structure follows Image source Illustrated Transformer Jay Alammar Via design encoder’s input token first flow selfattention layer allows focus different part sequence relation output selfattention layer passed feedforward neural network model “learns” representation word Multiple Attention Heads transformer expands idea selfattention incorporating multiple “attention heads” ie instance selfattention applied different part sequence simultaneously Google AI’s transformer eight attention head focusing different position time step applied encoder Image source Illustrated Transformer Jay Alammar essence multiple attention head eight image make parallelizing computation relatively trivial since head identify relationship word independently greatly reduces amount training effort allowing transformer scale efficiently large training set unlike sequential architecture like Recurrent Neural Networks RNNs training epoch individual attention head update vector representation final representation calculated weighted average attention Image source SelfAttention Generative Models Ashish Vaswani Anna Huang decoder side work much similar way final output vector representation fed linear layer project vector output much larger “vocabulary space” followed softmax layer convert float representation word probability distribution word complete vocabularyTags Machine Learning Deep Learning Generative Art Neural Networks Artificial Intelligence
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4,648 |
How Venture Works: Term Sheets and Napkins.
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I remember when I started my first company, I really didn’t understand how financings worked, and why they were the way they were. Over the last 7 years and 300 deals I have done, I have some concept of why venture works the way it does, and some concept of why. I’m not going to claim to understand everything. However, I figured every few weeks, I could take a concept that is generally accepted in Venture Capital and actually break down what it means. I might even have a story behind it.
My Dad is a VC (Tim Draper) and my Grandfather is a VC (Bill Draper) and his Dad was a VC (William H. Draper II). I’m not sure how many VCs can actually claim that they are 4th generation, this outlook influences my understanding of the industry.
I remember when I was a teenager, sitting in my Dad’s office as he would look through term sheets — he would point at terms in contracts that were supposed to mean something to me: Prorata, Preference, Board Seats… He would point and explain each point to me, I would nod along and repeat the terms back to him as he cited them. Teenagers are so good at short term memorization.
To this day, my dad’s teachings stick in my head. However, I didn’t have context. I didn’t understand what constitutes a deal. I didn’t understand what a good exit felt like, or really what made a great partnership. What I truly did not understand was why it was so complicated. Why do investors try to protect themselves from entrepreneurs with such intense terms?
Venture capital was founded on napkins. My grandfather is the most charming man anyone could ever meet, always dressed immaculately. He’s 90 now and still sharper than everyone. He was around for the beginning of Venture Capital, and he has some amazing knowledge bombs to drop on people.
He used to have to cruise up and down “The Orchards” of Silicon Valley trying to find a building that said “technology” on it. He would go inside and explain to the founders what Venture Capital was, and then describe the value add:
“Well, you put in the blood sweat and tears, and I’m putting up the money, so why don’t we go 50/50?”
This is what a term sheet used to be. It used to be written on the back of a napkin, in ink, forged by the investor and founder in blood. Well not blood, but you can imagine it being a Huckleberry Finn type contract. Now we have 3x preferences, prorata, the annexation of Puerto Rico (Watch the Little Giants to understand the reference) and board seats. The industry got more competitive, and decided to create more standards and protections. It became about protection rather than parallel partnership.
The “Light Bulb” moment for me came a couple years ago when Henry Ward, the founder of Carta came to speak at Boost VC with a presentation. His goal was to give the founders the knowledge around early stage contracts, so they at least understood what was worth negotiating for.
I think it was during his 3rd slide it was a line graph, and he said,
“In the case of early stage investing, you are negotiating for an ‘ok’ exit.” (Paraphrase) Basically for the 5 years, 2–4x exit.
If the exit is $0, none of the terms matter. Because everyone gets zero.
If the exit is $10B, no one cares as long as they own their number of shares.
At the end of the day, it’s about control and protections and it’s about an average outcome. In an industry truly driven by power law though, investors shouldn’t care as much about complex terms created by lawyers to continue to be relevant. They should care about aligning incentives with founders for the long term.
This is a macro level thought. So it’s important to understand that our lawyer is important to the Boost VC process. Our term sheets are not written on napkins and we have had experiences where we learned to need a specific term. But at the end of the day, the returns of the Boost VC will be driven by 10000x wins, and whether their shares were common, preferred, or alien, they will end up making the investors money.
|
https://medium.com/boost-vc/how-venture-works-term-sheets-and-napkins-b7b12377022a
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[]
|
2018-10-10 15:17:43.339000+00:00
|
['Startup', 'Venture Capital', 'Fundraising']
|
Title Venture Works Term Sheets NapkinsContent remember started first company really didn’t understand financing worked way last 7 year 300 deal done concept venture work way concept I’m going claim understand everything However figured every week could take concept generally accepted Venture Capital actually break mean might even story behind Dad VC Tim Draper Grandfather VC Bill Draper Dad VC William H Draper II I’m sure many VCs actually claim 4th generation outlook influence understanding industry remember teenager sitting Dad’s office would look term sheet — would point term contract supposed mean something Prorata Preference Board Seats… would point explain point would nod along repeat term back cited Teenagers good short term memorization day dad’s teaching stick head However didn’t context didn’t understand constitutes deal didn’t understand good exit felt like really made great partnership truly understand complicated investor try protect entrepreneur intense term Venture capital founded napkin grandfather charming man anyone could ever meet always dressed immaculately He’s 90 still sharper everyone around beginning Venture Capital amazing knowledge bomb drop people used cruise “The Orchards” Silicon Valley trying find building said “technology” would go inside explain founder Venture Capital describe value add “Well put blood sweat tear I’m putting money don’t go 5050” term sheet used used written back napkin ink forged investor founder blood Well blood imagine Huckleberry Finn type contract 3x preference prorata annexation Puerto Rico Watch Little Giants understand reference board seat industry got competitive decided create standard protection became protection rather parallel partnership “Light Bulb” moment came couple year ago Henry Ward founder Carta came speak Boost VC presentation goal give founder knowledge around early stage contract least understood worth negotiating think 3rd slide line graph said “In case early stage investing negotiating ‘ok’ exit” Paraphrase Basically 5 year 2–4x exit exit 0 none term matter everyone get zero exit 10B one care long number share end day it’s control protection it’s average outcome industry truly driven power law though investor shouldn’t care much complex term created lawyer continue relevant care aligning incentive founder long term macro level thought it’s important understand lawyer important Boost VC process term sheet written napkin experience learned need specific term end day return Boost VC driven 10000x win whether share common preferred alien end making investor moneyTags Startup Venture Capital Fundraising
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4,649 |
Influence Live Recap: The influencers in fashion are no longer the writers in Vogue
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By: Jared Augustine
Last Wednesday, we held the first event of our Influence Live series in partnership with The Drum. I had the pleasure of chatting about the world of influencer marketing with Kyle O’Brien of The Drum, Amy Tunick of Grey New York, Ian Schafer of Deep Focus, and Shan Lui of Superfly.
For insights of the event, check out the recap article on The Drum by Lisa Lacy or the highlight video below.
|
https://medium.com/juliusworks/influence-live-recap-the-influencers-in-fashion-are-no-longer-the-writers-in-vogue-c71057514270
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[]
|
2017-02-15 16:28:43.461000+00:00
|
['Advertising', 'Marketing', 'Influencer Marketing', 'Digital Marketing', 'Social Media']
|
Title Influence Live Recap influencers fashion longer writer VogueContent Jared Augustine Last Wednesday held first event Influence Live series partnership Drum pleasure chatting world influencer marketing Kyle O’Brien Drum Amy Tunick Grey New York Ian Schafer Deep Focus Lui Superfly insight event check recap article Drum Lisa Lacy highlight video belowTags Advertising Marketing Influencer Marketing Digital Marketing Social Media
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4,650 |
Supporting Dynamic Type at Airbnb
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Background
Since iOS 7, Dynamic Type has allowed users to choose a prefered font size for their phone. At Airbnb, we try to build an app that our entire community can use — since Dynamic Type is a critical accessibility feature, we knew supporting it would make more people able to effectively use our app, some of them probably for the first time. To validate the importance of this feature, we examined the data and saw as much as 30% of people using our app had a preferred font size that was not the default. This usage is not skewed towards particular sizes, but evenly spread across larger and smaller than default.
30% of people using the app had a preferred font size that was not the default.
It turns out, supporting this preference creates a consistent experience across the OS that users will notice. Experimenting with Dynamic Type on individual features in the Airbnb app resulted in a significant increase in engagement, helping move our bottom line metrics. If you spend the time to support Dynamic Type in your app too, users will surely thank you for it!
Font size selection in iOS
Why is it important?
Going beyond the metrics, supporting Dynamic Type holds your UI components to a higher level of quality. Layout will need to be robust enough to handle a wide range of preferences, similar to variations created by localization and device screen size. Since much of our development time is spent on single devices and languages, bugs only reproducible in certain configurations will too often slip through. Fortunately, many of these are now being caught during Dynamic Type testing. If you already support varying screen sizes through UITraitCollection and translations with various length strings, there’s a good chance you’ve done most of the work to support Dynamic Type.
Design
The majority of bugs we encountered when large font sizes were used had to do with text not fitting their containers. To resolve these, we created a few design recommendations. First, widths and heights became flexible, allowing text to expand to multiple lines. In many cases this should have already been done since some languages can be much longer than the English words we include in design mocks.
Second, we had to make sure fonts scale the correct amount. This is done by assigning every text a corresponding UIFont.TextStyle. Using a larger TextStyle indicates your font is already big, so it doesn’t need to increase in size as much.
Third, we had to fix some labels that were changing size even though they shouldn’t be eligible to scale. Our recommendation is everything part of the scrollable area on the screen should scale, and everything else should be left static. However, anyone with large Dynamic Type enabled still needs a way to view text in smaller containers such as tab bars. If you use all standard UIKit elements this is handled by the Large Content Viewer:
We filed a bug report with Apple, requesting a new API for presenting these popups from custom views. This capability has since been included in the iOS 13 beta, so you’ll be able to see it in the Airbnb app soon.
Engineering
iOS provides mostly automatic Dynamic Type APIs for system fonts, but the Airbnb app uses a custom typeface, Cereal. To support Dynamic Type, we rely on UIFontMetrics. This class handles scaling our font size, line height, and tracking.
Each of these attributes exist in two forms:
The unscaled units which are shown to users with the default font size, and are the values we set when creating font attributes. The scaled units which fit the preferredContentSizeCategory and are what we read at runtime.
Internally, features will request a font using attributes expressed as unscaled units, and will receive an object containing various functions we use to display text which always returns values in scaled units. This ensures any calculation, such as bounding box of text, will use the scaled units. Some of the most common bugs we saw were caused by using unscaled units for layout calculations instead of scaled units.
There are two ways to use UIFontMetrics to convert from unscaled to scaled units.
Method #1:
func scaledFont(for font: UIFont, compatibleWith traitCollection: UITraitCollection?) -> UIFont
Method #2:
func scaledValue(for value: CGFloat, compatibleWith traitCollection: UITraitCollection?) -> CGFloat
There are subtle differences in these approaches. Consider the following examples, each using a different UIFontMetrics method:
Depending on the device you run on, we observed results like this:
The results aren’t quite consistent, but since we customize line height with NSParagraphStyle we need to use the CGFloat scale function. The UIFont with unscaled point size is scaled directly to get an adjusted UIFont. Here’s a full example to scale an NSAttributedString:
The last step to fully supporting Dynamic Type is to encourage validation across all features, including ones in development. We know developer time is limited, so we automated support for Dynamic Type as much as possible. Happo, the tool we use for UI regression detection, already snapshots existing components. We added an additional step to render with the accessibilityExtraExtraExtraLarge size.
There are no APIs available to programmatically change the simulator’s Dynamic Type settings, so avoid using UIApplication.shared.preferredContentSize . A more testable approach is to query the trait collection of a UIView. In the UIWindow for our Happo Tests, the traitCollection is configured to include a custom content size. The end result is snapshots like these:
Default (large) preferred content size
AccessibilityExtraExtraExtraLarge preferredContentSize
With snapshots generated on every code change to the iOS app, developers have a hassle-free way to know new features support Dynamic Type, and easily detect regressions.
Thanks to Amie Kweon, Dylan Harris, Bryn Bodayle, Tyler Hedrick, and Kieraj Mumick for their support on this project!
|
https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/supporting-dynamic-type-at-airbnb-b47c68b0c998
|
['Noah Martin']
|
2019-07-25 06:35:13.475000+00:00
|
['Dynamic Type', 'Design', 'Airbnb', 'iOS', 'Mobile']
|
Title Supporting Dynamic Type AirbnbContent Background Since iOS 7 Dynamic Type allowed user choose prefered font size phone Airbnb try build app entire community use — since Dynamic Type critical accessibility feature knew supporting would make people able effectively use app probably first time validate importance feature examined data saw much 30 people using app preferred font size default usage skewed towards particular size evenly spread across larger smaller default 30 people using app preferred font size default turn supporting preference creates consistent experience across OS user notice Experimenting Dynamic Type individual feature Airbnb app resulted significant increase engagement helping move bottom line metric spend time support Dynamic Type app user surely thank Font size selection iOS important Going beyond metric supporting Dynamic Type hold UI component higher level quality Layout need robust enough handle wide range preference similar variation created localization device screen size Since much development time spent single device language bug reproducible certain configuration often slip Fortunately many caught Dynamic Type testing already support varying screen size UITraitCollection translation various length string there’s good chance you’ve done work support Dynamic Type Design majority bug encountered large font size used text fitting container resolve created design recommendation First width height became flexible allowing text expand multiple line many case already done since language much longer English word include design mock Second make sure font scale correct amount done assigning every text corresponding UIFontTextStyle Using larger TextStyle indicates font already big doesn’t need increase size much Third fix label changing size even though shouldn’t eligible scale recommendation everything part scrollable area screen scale everything else left static However anyone large Dynamic Type enabled still need way view text smaller container tab bar use standard UIKit element handled Large Content Viewer filed bug report Apple requesting new API presenting popups custom view capability since included iOS 13 beta you’ll able see Airbnb app soon Engineering iOS provides mostly automatic Dynamic Type APIs system font Airbnb app us custom typeface Cereal support Dynamic Type rely UIFontMetrics class handle scaling font size line height tracking attribute exist two form unscaled unit shown user default font size value set creating font attribute scaled unit fit preferredContentSizeCategory read runtime Internally feature request font using attribute expressed unscaled unit receive object containing various function use display text always return value scaled unit ensures calculation bounding box text use scaled unit common bug saw caused using unscaled unit layout calculation instead scaled unit two way use UIFontMetrics convert unscaled scaled unit Method 1 func scaledFontfor font UIFont compatibleWith traitCollection UITraitCollection UIFont Method 2 func scaledValuefor value CGFloat compatibleWith traitCollection UITraitCollection CGFloat subtle difference approach Consider following example using different UIFontMetrics method Depending device run observed result like result aren’t quite consistent since customize line height NSParagraphStyle need use CGFloat scale function UIFont unscaled point size scaled directly get adjusted UIFont Here’s full example scale NSAttributedString last step fully supporting Dynamic Type encourage validation across feature including one development know developer time limited automated support Dynamic Type much possible Happo tool use UI regression detection already snapshot existing component added additional step render accessibilityExtraExtraExtraLarge size APIs available programmatically change simulator’s Dynamic Type setting avoid using UIApplicationsharedpreferredContentSize testable approach query trait collection UIView UIWindow Happo Tests traitCollection configured include custom content size end result snapshot like Default large preferred content size AccessibilityExtraExtraExtraLarge preferredContentSize snapshot generated every code change iOS app developer hasslefree way know new feature support Dynamic Type easily detect regression Thanks Amie Kweon Dylan Harris Bryn Bodayle Tyler Hedrick Kieraj Mumick support projectTags Dynamic Type Design Airbnb iOS Mobile
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4,651 |
Jobs 2.0: Troubleshooting the Adoption of Jobs to be Done
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When I first started helping companies deploy Jobs to be Done within their organizations, people were largely unfamiliar with the concept. Maybe a few people — likely the project sponsors — had read an article about Jobs or seen the famous milkshake video in which the late Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen describes the theory. But not a single company I worked with had a detailed understanding of the theory and a framework for turning the theory into product ideas, service offerings, or business model innovations.
If you fast forward to today, Jobs to be Done is far more widespread. Hiring managers seek applicants who have experience conducting Jobs research. Companies as diverse as Clorox, Home Depot, and Facebook are giving talks on the theory at conferences. The question I get from companies is no longer “What is Jobs to be Done?” but rather “How can we improve the way we’re using Jobs to be Done?” Those who are farthest along in the journey are wondering how they can take the concept to new levels, such as using Jobs to be Done to size markets and compare vastly different ideas. Others, however, have encountered hurdles as their organizations begin using Jobs to be Done for the first time. For those in the latter group, I’ve gathered five of the most common challenges that companies have when they adopt Jobs to be Done, as well as some solutions for avoiding those struggles.
Issue 1: “We say we’re applying Jobs to be Done, but really we’re just paying it lip service.”
At a recent innovation conference, someone who works at a large fast food company explained to me that although her organization uses Jobs language, they simply apply it to problems they want to solve rather than problems articulated by customers. She told me, for example, about a colleague who wanted to work on a job that was essentially “having a burger I can handle easily with one hand coming out of the drive-thru.” An opportunity for innovation, perhaps, but hardly a customer’s job to be done.
This kind of problem occurs for a few reasons. First, organizations that introduce the idea of Jobs to be Done typically do so in a theoretical way, and they often fail to address the other parts of the framework. Having only learned about jobs, people try to force fit other elements such as “pain points” and “success criteria” into the form of a job to be done. Second, because the training is theoretical, it tends to get tied to ideas and pet projects already floating around the organization. Jobs insights need to be derived from real customer research, and the jobs that come out of that research should be solution agnostic.
People who are getting used to Jobs to be Done need to be exposed to it regularly, not just as a one-and-done training. A large tech company that I work with achieved this by orienting the strategies of each of its business units around a small number of jobs. Projects within each business always focus on one of those core jobs. New initiatives are consistently being led by those who have built up some expertise in applying Jobs to be Done, and their work — which uses Jobs terminology correctly — is shared company-wide via short presentations and podcasts to get everyone familiar with using Jobs the right way.
Issue 2: “Our research uncovered too many jobs, and we don’t know how to prioritize dozens or hundreds of jobs to be done.”
Another issue that many companies have shared with me is that their first attempt to roll out Jobs to be Done resulted in the organization uncovering more jobs than they knew what to do with. They interviewed dozens of customers, only to realize that the more interviews they did, the more jobs they uncovered. More importantly, there was nothing to explain which jobs were the most important to the customer, or which jobs the organization should focus on in developing new solutions.
When doing qualitative Jobs to be Done research, it’s important to ask questions that go beyond uncovering jobs. Your discussions need to dig deeper to understand how jobs relate to one another and how particular customers prioritize one job as compared to another. Ultimately, this allows you to build hierarchies of jobs that ladder into a relatively small number of North Star jobs that a team or organization is better equipped to focus on. Those lower-level jobs may be important as you get into the details of new product design, but they’re rarely a good focal point for beginning your ideation and prioritization efforts.
A healthcare organization I once worked with had developed a marketing campaign — based on primary research — around the idea of giving patients adequate attention during office visits. While patients had certainly mentioned the need for attention, it was a lower level job. Other North Star jobs were shared by larger numbers of patients and were more top-of-mind. In particular, one higher-level job was that they wanted to be sure their doctors had the collective expertise necessary to treat complex ailments. Given the organization’s breadth of specialists, focusing on that higher-level job allowed the organization to develop a marketing plan that leveraged one of its biggest assets, create marketing collateral that was more differentiated than broad promises about how its physicians really cared, and craft messaging about something that was far more important to patients.
While asking the right questions in a qualitative research interview is important, there are times when qualitative research may not be enough. Quantitative surveys are a good way to understand which jobs are most important, as well as which ones customers struggle most to get done with the solutions currently available to them. Moreover, quantitative research allows you to segment customers, make determinations about which segments the company is best suited to serve, and identify the jobs that are particularly relevant to the segments you’ll be focusing on.
Issue 3: “I don’t know how Jobs to be Done should fit in with Design Thinking and the other methodologies we use.”
People often ask me how Jobs to be Done differs from Design Thinking. The reason many people ask is that companies have a habit of providing regular trainings without giving much thought to how new skills fit with those that are already being deployed. It’s often unclear whether a particular methodology replaces another or complements it. Employees struggle to figure out the contexts in which they use one tool versus another. The investments in past trainings seem wasted as everyone rushes to use the new tool in every situation they encounter.
One of the most important pieces of advice that I give clients is never to do Jobs to be Done training simply for the sake of learning about a new framework. Jobs to be Done training needs to be tied to real business objectives and real projects that the organization plans on carrying out. That gives me an opportunity to understand what approaches teams are currently taking, where they struggle, and where Jobs to be Done has a place. It lets me guide the teams on when to choose Jobs to be Done, as well as when they already have a good solution in place. It’s not a substitute for Design Thinking, but rather a component of it. The Jobs to be Done framework lets teams understand why customers make the decisions they make, ensuring that you ask the right questions and fully understand the decision-making process. It’s also a common language for discussing customer insights and a prompt for ideation sessions. But it’s simply one piece of the toolkit, and there’s value in determining how it best fits with the other innovation tools and processes that may already be in place.
Issue 4: “We understand Jobs to be Done, but we fall back on our traditional ways of thinking when it comes time for a real project.”
One thing that’s particularly appealing about Jobs to be Done is that it’s easy to understand. While it may be a different way of thinking about challenges, the logic behind it is pretty intuitive. That’s also a challenge. Because people catch on quickly, they don’t spend a lot of time digging into the nuances and understanding how it applies in real situations. Then, when time is short and an idea is needed, people fall back on their typical ways of gathering insights and innovating.
For market researchers, I encourage those getting used to Jobs to be Done to color-code their discussion guides. By matching each question to an element of the Jobs to be Done framework, you can ensure that you’re covering all the important elements of how customers make decisions. This also safeguards against scope creep, making sure you’re not asking questions that aren’t tied to your project’s research objectives.
On the innovation side, ideation sessions need structure. Rather than just generating ideas that respond to a problem or sound like they’d be good, it’s important to keep the focus on the jobs that are being addressed. I make teams identify the job to be done that their idea responds to, and I also force them to think about the customer types the idea is targeted at and the success criteria that those customers use to determine whether they’re getting the job done.
Issue 5: “We understand our customers’ jobs, but we don’t know how to translate insights into products.”
Companies don’t generally do research for the sake of doing research. Not successful ones anyway. While there are a lot of best practices out there on customer-centric product development, I’ll focus on three lessons that address areas where I often see companies get it wrong. First, I encourage teams to do a diagnostic to determine how their existing products and their competitors’ products address the Jobs to be Done they’ve uncovered with their research. This does two things. It highlights where there may be gaps in the market, based on the customer’s perspective. It also forces people to start thinking about how features relate to jobs, hopefully minimizing the temptation to simply mimic or upgrade features they’re already familiar with.
Second, I urge those responsible for innovation to get early buy-in from those who will be responsible for commercialization. That may be a Product team or a particular business unit. A senior leader at a large financial services company once shared a story with me about how its innovation team had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of work in generating a truly customer-centric solution only to find out that it wasn’t going to be a priority for the business that would have to sell the solution.
Third, teams often benefit from frameworks and templates that ensure they’re covering all the key elements of product development. The Jobs Atlas I use, for example, ensures that I think not just about customers’ jobs, but also about how customers view the competition and what obstacles will stand in the way of them adopting and using new solutions. Further, Jobs to be Done helps you understand the desirability component of a new solution. Other resources may still be necessary for thinking about whether it’s feasible for the company to offer a new solution and whether there’s a financially viable business model that supports the solution.
Jobs to be Done is a valuable tool for ensuring that innovation responds to the needs of your customers. While it’s an easy concept to understand, it can take some time to make sure your organization is using it correctly. Hopefully, the struggles of early adopters provide some guidance on how others can ensure they’re getting the best experience. And if you have encountered other difficulties in adopting Jobs to be Done, I’d love to hear about them.
Dave Farber is a strategy and innovation consultant at New Markets Advisors. He helps companies understand customer needs, build innovation capabilities, and develop plans for growth. He is a co-author of the award-winning book Jobs to be Done: A Roadmap for Customer-Centered Innovation.
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https://medium.com/new-markets-insights/jobs-2-0-troubleshooting-the-adoption-of-jobs-to-be-done-47cb9f163168
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['Dave Farber']
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2020-07-23 16:38:02.407000+00:00
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['Innovation', 'Jobs To Be Done', 'Market Research', 'Marketing', 'Strategy']
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Title Jobs 20 Troubleshooting Adoption Jobs DoneContent first started helping company deploy Jobs Done within organization people largely unfamiliar concept Maybe people — likely project sponsor — read article Jobs seen famous milkshake video late Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen describes theory single company worked detailed understanding theory framework turning theory product idea service offering business model innovation fast forward today Jobs Done far widespread Hiring manager seek applicant experience conducting Jobs research Companies diverse Clorox Home Depot Facebook giving talk theory conference question get company longer “What Jobs Done” rather “How improve way we’re using Jobs Done” farthest along journey wondering take concept new level using Jobs Done size market compare vastly different idea Others however encountered hurdle organization begin using Jobs Done first time latter group I’ve gathered five common challenge company adopt Jobs Done well solution avoiding struggle Issue 1 “We say we’re applying Jobs Done really we’re paying lip service” recent innovation conference someone work large fast food company explained although organization us Jobs language simply apply problem want solve rather problem articulated customer told example colleague wanted work job essentially “having burger handle easily one hand coming drivethru” opportunity innovation perhaps hardly customer’s job done kind problem occurs reason First organization introduce idea Jobs Done typically theoretical way often fail address part framework learned job people try force fit element “pain points” “success criteria” form job done Second training theoretical tends get tied idea pet project already floating around organization Jobs insight need derived real customer research job come research solution agnostic People getting used Jobs Done need exposed regularly oneanddone training large tech company work achieved orienting strategy business unit around small number job Projects within business always focus one core job New initiative consistently led built expertise applying Jobs Done work — us Jobs terminology correctly — shared companywide via short presentation podcasts get everyone familiar using Jobs right way Issue 2 “Our research uncovered many job don’t know prioritize dozen hundred job done” Another issue many company shared first attempt roll Jobs Done resulted organization uncovering job knew interviewed dozen customer realize interview job uncovered importantly nothing explain job important customer job organization focus developing new solution qualitative Jobs Done research it’s important ask question go beyond uncovering job discussion need dig deeper understand job relate one another particular customer prioritize one job compared another Ultimately allows build hierarchy job ladder relatively small number North Star job team organization better equipped focus lowerlevel job may important get detail new product design they’re rarely good focal point beginning ideation prioritization effort healthcare organization worked developed marketing campaign — based primary research — around idea giving patient adequate attention office visit patient certainly mentioned need attention lower level job North Star job shared larger number patient topofmind particular one higherlevel job wanted sure doctor collective expertise necessary treat complex ailment Given organization’s breadth specialist focusing higherlevel job allowed organization develop marketing plan leveraged one biggest asset create marketing collateral differentiated broad promise physician really cared craft messaging something far important patient asking right question qualitative research interview important time qualitative research may enough Quantitative survey good way understand job important well one customer struggle get done solution currently available Moreover quantitative research allows segment customer make determination segment company best suited serve identify job particularly relevant segment you’ll focusing Issue 3 “I don’t know Jobs Done fit Design Thinking methodology use” People often ask Jobs Done differs Design Thinking reason many people ask company habit providing regular training without giving much thought new skill fit already deployed It’s often unclear whether particular methodology replaces another complement Employees struggle figure context use one tool versus another investment past training seem wasted everyone rush use new tool every situation encounter One important piece advice give client never Jobs Done training simply sake learning new framework Jobs Done training need tied real business objective real project organization plan carrying give opportunity understand approach team currently taking struggle Jobs Done place let guide team choose Jobs Done well already good solution place It’s substitute Design Thinking rather component Jobs Done framework let team understand customer make decision make ensuring ask right question fully understand decisionmaking process It’s also common language discussing customer insight prompt ideation session it’s simply one piece toolkit there’s value determining best fit innovation tool process may already place Issue 4 “We understand Jobs Done fall back traditional way thinking come time real project” One thing that’s particularly appealing Jobs Done it’s easy understand may different way thinking challenge logic behind pretty intuitive That’s also challenge people catch quickly don’t spend lot time digging nuance understanding applies real situation time short idea needed people fall back typical way gathering insight innovating market researcher encourage getting used Jobs Done colorcode discussion guide matching question element Jobs Done framework ensure you’re covering important element customer make decision also safeguard scope creep making sure you’re asking question aren’t tied project’s research objective innovation side ideation session need structure Rather generating idea respond problem sound like they’d good it’s important keep focus job addressed make team identify job done idea responds also force think customer type idea targeted success criterion customer use determine whether they’re getting job done Issue 5 “We understand customers’ job don’t know translate insight products” Companies don’t generally research sake research successful one anyway lot best practice customercentric product development I’ll focus three lesson address area often see company get wrong First encourage team diagnostic determine existing product competitors’ product address Jobs Done they’ve uncovered research two thing highlight may gap market based customer’s perspective also force people start thinking feature relate job hopefully minimizing temptation simply mimic upgrade feature they’re already familiar Second urge responsible innovation get early buyin responsible commercialization may Product team particular business unit senior leader large financial service company shared story innovation team invested hundred thousand dollar month work generating truly customercentric solution find wasn’t going priority business would sell solution Third team often benefit framework template ensure they’re covering key element product development Jobs Atlas use example ensures think customers’ job also customer view competition obstacle stand way adopting using new solution Jobs Done help understand desirability component new solution resource may still necessary thinking whether it’s feasible company offer new solution whether there’s financially viable business model support solution Jobs Done valuable tool ensuring innovation responds need customer it’s easy concept understand take time make sure organization using correctly Hopefully struggle early adopter provide guidance others ensure they’re getting best experience encountered difficulty adopting Jobs Done I’d love hear Dave Farber strategy innovation consultant New Markets Advisors help company understand customer need build innovation capability develop plan growth coauthor awardwinning book Jobs Done Roadmap CustomerCentered InnovationTags Innovation Jobs Done Market Research Marketing Strategy
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4,652 |
Automatically Find & Re-post Popular Instagram Content with Python
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What it does?
This takes a keyword as an input from the user and using it as a hashtag, retrieves public Instagram posts. It then sorts those posts based on the number of likes. The post with the most likes is then downloaded to be reposted later. It then pulls any hashtags from the caption, finds other hashtags being used with these hashtags on twitter and Instagram and use them in the caption, along with credit to the original poster of the selected post. The script then opens Instagram, logs into the user’s account and uploads the picture along with the caption.
Importing required libraries and set up the variables:
import requests
import urllib.request
import urllib.parse
import urllib.error
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import ssl
import json
from IPython.display import Image
import re
import time
import autoit
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import *
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
import operator import tweepy as tw
import bs4
import requests consumer_key= ‘your-consumer-key’
consumer_secret= ‘your-consumer-secret’
access_token= ‘your-access-token’
access_token_secret= ‘your-access-token-secret’
auth = tw.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret)
api = tw.API(auth, wait_on_rate_limit=True)
Get input from user:
Here we will ask the user for the key word. This key word will be used as a hashtag to find relevant Instagram posts.
key_word = input('Please enter your key word:')
Finding the Instagram photo for re-posting and then download it:
The following function with use the Instagram explore option and retrieve posts using the key word provided by the user.
url= '
html = urllib.request.urlopen(url).read() def get_posts(key_word):url= ' https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/'+key_word+'/' html = urllib.request.urlopen(url).read() soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')
script = soup.find('script', text=lambda t: \
t.startswith('window._sharedData'))
page_json = script.text.split(' = ', 1)[1].rstrip(';') posts=json.loads(page_json)
b=posts['entry_data']['TagPage'][0]['graphql']['hashtag']['edge_hashtag_to_top_posts']['edges']
return b
The following function will use the above function to get a list of Instagram posts, and then find the one with the most likes to return.
def get_top_post(key_word):
posts= get_posts(key_word)
l=[]
for item in posts:
d={}
d['likes']=item['node']['edge_liked_by']['count']
d['url']=item['node']['display_url']
d['urlcode']=item['node']['shortcode']
d['owner']=item['node']['owner']['id'] d['caption']=item['node']['edge_media_to_caption']['edges'][0]['node']['text']
l.append(d)
l.sort(key=operator.itemgetter('likes'), reverse=True)
return l[0]
This function returns a dictionary containing attributes of the top post.
Download the photo:
We write a function that takes a URL and downloads the photo at that URL and saves it as downloaded.jpg.
def download_image(url):
f = open('download.jpg','wb')
f.write(requests.get(url).content)
f.close()
The URL for this function will come from the dictionary containing attributes of the top post.
Building the caption:
What I want to do is to credit the original uploader, therefore I want to get the username of the original uploader. Our post dictionary contains ‘URL code’. The following function takes that URL code and returns the username of the original uploader.
url= '
html = urllib.request.urlopen(url).read() def get_owner(shortcode):url= ' https://www.instagram.com/p/'+shortcode+'/' html = urllib.request.urlopen(url).read() soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')
script = soup.find('script', text=lambda t: \
t.startswith('window._sharedData'))
page_json = script.text.split(' = ', 1)[1].rstrip(';') post=json.loads(page_json)
return post['entry_data']['PostPage'][0]['graphql']['shortcode_media']['owner']['username']
Another thing we want to add to our caption is relevant hashtags. Following are the functions to do that. I have written detailed tutorials on how this code works (Part 1, Part 2).
def return_all_hashtags(tweets, key_word):
all_hashtags = []
for tweet in tweets:
for word in tweet.split():
if word.startswith('#') and word.lower() != '#' + key_word.lower():
all_hashtags.append(word.lower())
return all_hashtags def extract_shared_data(doc):
for script_tag in doc.find_all("script"):
if script_tag.text.startswith("window._sharedData ="):
shared_data = re.sub("^window\._sharedData = ", "", script_tag.text)
shared_data = re.sub(";$", "", shared_data)
shared_data = json.loads(shared_data)
return shared_data def get_hashtags(key_word):
tweets = tw.Cursor(api.search,
q='#' + key_word,
lang="en").items(200)
tweets_list = []
for tweet in tweets:
tweets_list.append(tweet.text) url_string = "https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/%s/" % key_word
response = bs4.BeautifulSoup(requests.get(url_string).text, "html.parser") shared_data = extract_shared_data(response)
media = shared_data['entry_data']['TagPage'][0]['graphql']['hashtag']['edge_hashtag_to_media']['edges'] captions = []
for post in media:
if post['node']['edge_media_to_caption']['edges'] != []:
captions.append(post['node']['edge_media_to_caption']['edges'][0]['node']['text']) all_tags = return_all_hashtags(tweets_list + captions, key_word)
frequency = {}
for item in set(all_tags):
frequency[item] = all_tags.count(item)
return {k: v for k, v in sorted(frequency.items(), key=lambda item: item[1], reverse=True)}
Binding it all in one function:
Now that we have written all the helper functions, we can write one function to make a post using all out helper functions. This function will find the top post, download the image, build the caption which will include credit to the original uploader and then relevant hashtags and return the caption.
def make_post(key_word):
tag = clean_input(key_word)
top_post = get_top_post(tag)
download_image(top_post['url'])
caption = 'Repost from @'+get_owner(top_post['urlcode']) + '
' + ', '.join(list(get_hashtags(tag).keys())[:10])
return caption
Now that we have downloaded the picture that we want to re-post and have built a caption, we need the script/code to upload it to Instagram.
Autogram:
The Autogram class contains all the code required for automatically loading Instagram, logging in and then uploading the picture. The Autogram class code can be found here. I did not write this code therefore decided not to go over it. However the whole code is available here as mentioned above.
The following code opens a new chrome window and logs into Instagram.
ig = Autogram('your-instagram-username', 'your-instagram-password')
ig.open_instagram()
ig.login()
ig.popup_close_save_login_info()
ig.popup_close_turn_on_notifications()
ig.popup_close_add_to_home_screen()
I usually like to watch it load and log in. Instagram can be unpredictable in giving you pop-ups on logging in. Therefore the script might miss an unexpected pop-up and you might have to make one or two clicks manually.
Once it is logged in, you can execute the following script to upload the picture.
ig.upload_image(os.path.normpath(r'full-path-to-folder\download.jpg'), description=make_post(key_word)
ig.popup_close_turn_on_notifications()
Improvements:
Definitely there’s a lot that can be improved with this script. The first thing I can think of, right now, we are using a fixed path and name to the file that is downloaded and then uploaded (download.jpg), however, to make it more universal, the path can be programmatically extracted and then re-used during upload.
Another improvement would be completely automating selenium driver and close app the pop ups that Instagram throws at you. If that can be achieved, then the whole script can run “headless” meaning you will not see the chrome window loading Instagram and everything will happen in the background, however, I do enjoy watching chrome go on it’s own.
|
https://medium.com/the-innovation/automatically-find-and-re-post-popular-instagram-content-a3a27d28b72b
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['K. Nawab']
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2020-11-17 04:35:13.288000+00:00
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['Instagram Marketing', 'Instagram', 'Automation', 'Python', 'Social Media']
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Title Automatically Find Repost Popular Instagram Content PythonContent take keyword input user using hashtag retrieves public Instagram post sort post based number like post like downloaded reposted later pull hashtags caption find hashtags used hashtags twitter Instagram use caption along credit original poster selected post script open Instagram log user’s account uploads picture along caption Importing required library set variable import request import urllibrequest import urllibparse import urlliberror bs4 import BeautifulSoup import ssl import json IPythondisplay import Image import import time import autoit selenium import webdriver seleniumwebdriverchromeoptions import seleniumwebdrivercommonkeys import Keys import operator import tweepy tw import bs4 import request consumerkey ‘yourconsumerkey’ consumersecret ‘yourconsumersecret’ accesstoken ‘youraccesstoken’ accesstokensecret ‘youraccesstokensecret’ auth twOAuthHandlerconsumerkey consumersecret authsetaccesstokenaccesstoken accesstokensecret api twAPIauth waitonratelimitTrue Get input user ask user key word key word used hashtag find relevant Instagram post keyword inputPlease enter key word Finding Instagram photo reposting download following function use Instagram explore option retrieve post using key word provided user url html urllibrequesturlopenurlread def getpostskeywordurl httpswwwinstagramcomexploretagskeyword html urllibrequesturlopenurlread soup BeautifulSouphtml htmlparser script soupfindscript textlambda tstartswithwindowsharedData pagejson scripttextsplit 11rstrip postsjsonloadspagejson bpostsentrydataTagPage0graphqlhashtagedgehashtagtotoppostsedges return b following function use function get list Instagram post find one like return def gettoppostkeyword post getpostskeyword l item post dlikesitemnodeedgelikedbycount durlitemnodedisplayurl durlcodeitemnodeshortcode downeritemnodeownerid dcaptionitemnodeedgemediatocaptionedges0nodetext lappendd lsortkeyoperatoritemgetterlikes reverseTrue return l0 function return dictionary containing attribute top post Download photo write function take URL downloads photo URL save downloadedjpg def downloadimageurl f opendownloadjpgwb fwriterequestsgeturlcontent fclose URL function come dictionary containing attribute top post Building caption want credit original uploader therefore want get username original uploader post dictionary contains ‘URL code’ following function take URL code return username original uploader url html urllibrequesturlopenurlread def getownershortcodeurl httpswwwinstagramcompshortcode html urllibrequesturlopenurlread soup BeautifulSouphtml htmlparser script soupfindscript textlambda tstartswithwindowsharedData pagejson scripttextsplit 11rstrip postjsonloadspagejson return postentrydataPostPage0graphqlshortcodemediaownerusername Another thing want add caption relevant hashtags Following function written detailed tutorial code work Part 1 Part 2 def returnallhashtagstweets keyword allhashtags tweet tweet word tweetsplit wordstartswith wordlower keywordlower allhashtagsappendwordlower return allhashtags def extractshareddatadoc scripttag docfindallscript scripttagtextstartswithwindowsharedData shareddata resubwindowsharedData scripttagtext shareddata resub shareddata shareddata jsonloadsshareddata return shareddata def gethashtagskeyword tweet twCursorapisearch q keyword langenitems200 tweetslist tweet tweet tweetslistappendtweettext urlstring httpswwwinstagramcomexploretagss keyword response bs4BeautifulSouprequestsgeturlstringtext htmlparser shareddata extractshareddataresponse medium shareddataentrydataTagPage0graphqlhashtagedgehashtagtomediaedges caption post medium postnodeedgemediatocaptionedges captionsappendpostnodeedgemediatocaptionedges0nodetext alltags returnallhashtagstweetslist caption keyword frequency item setalltags frequencyitem alltagscountitem return k v k v sortedfrequencyitems keylambda item item1 reverseTrue Binding one function written helper function write one function make post using helper function function find top post download image build caption include credit original uploader relevant hashtags return caption def makepostkeyword tag cleaninputkeyword toppost gettopposttag downloadimagetopposturl caption Repost getownertopposturlcode joinlistgethashtagstagkeys10 return caption downloaded picture want repost built caption need scriptcode upload Instagram Autogram Autogram class contains code required automatically loading Instagram logging uploading picture Autogram class code found write code therefore decided go However whole code available mentioned following code open new chrome window log Instagram ig Autogramyourinstagramusername yourinstagrampassword igopeninstagram iglogin igpopupclosesavelogininfo igpopupcloseturnonnotifications igpopupcloseaddtohomescreen usually like watch load log Instagram unpredictable giving popups logging Therefore script might miss unexpected popup might make one two click manually logged execute following script upload picture iguploadimageospathnormpathrfullpathtofolderdownloadjpg descriptionmakepostkeyword igpopupcloseturnonnotifications Improvements Definitely there’s lot improved script first thing think right using fixed path name file downloaded uploaded downloadjpg however make universal path programmatically extracted reused upload Another improvement would completely automating selenium driver close app pop ups Instagram throw achieved whole script run “headless” meaning see chrome window loading Instagram everything happen background however enjoy watching chrome go it’s ownTags Instagram Marketing Instagram Automation Python Social Media
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4,653 |
Independence And Happiness. Independence Or Happiness — Choice Is Yours, Stakes Are High!
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Independence And Happiness. Independence Or Happiness — Choice Is Yours, Stakes Are High!
Real independence is more about peace of mind than happiness.
Image from Quotemaster
This comes from a writing prompt titled, ‘’Gather Your Strength’’ by Samantha Lazar. The theme is Susan. B. Anthony’s quote, ‘’Independence is happiness.’’.
It makes me think that what has independence got to do with strength, especially if independence is happiness.
Then it dawns upon me that perhaps both have everything to do with each other. The equation is simple. You are happy when you are free. Being free stems from being strong. So, happiness and strength are directly proportional to each other.
Or are they?
And is the equation that simple?
I am not talking of the independence which comes with travel backpacks and earning your own money. I am talking about the independence you trade off for a non-controversial existence when you don’t write about what you really want to shout aloud or when you don’t unfriend people who have walked out of your heart long ago. I said heart, so I am talking only about the ones who once were there in it.
The clutches all this keeps you tied in are daunting. What if tomorrow your dream-like life comes true? How will you justify that revealing patch created by your words of yesterday, written in an emotional outburst? Those friends without friendship stand on the very rope which tie you to many other precious relationships. How can you drop them and risk breaking the rope?You will then subject yourself to mockery or embarrassment. Loneliness and blames won’t be far away.
There, my friend, the real strength comes in. Sneaking in a quiet, timid and unsure demeanor. Whispering in your ears that it’s enough now. Half of your lifetime has already passed, let the story play out and let the rope break, if it must. Then see what remains. May be nothing. May be a lot. But either way, all of what you have now is also not all yours, anyway.
Happiness is a state of mind. Easier said than experienced. Eventually you will find happiness anyhow — that is the survival instinct less talked about. But peace of mind is what you earn. By giving up some relationships, some unrealistic goals and some deep rooted self-images. Also, there’s a whole package with a ‘’items cannot be sold individually’’ tag. You get some angst and heartbreaks for free.
Come, let’s talk of the freedom equation again. If you have read till now, I will take the liberty to say that the real equation is a little different from the one above.
Once you earn your peace of mind, it’s then that you get free in actuality. But to earn peace of mind, you have to gather strength. Remember the timid, unsure but consistent voice within? You always knew what was right and wrong for you. What really holds value to you and what would actually put you off worries. You just could not figure out if it’s worth putting something out to bring that in.
But hey, in all this, what happened to happiness. ‘’The popular Happiness’’, you know. Don’t we find it in the small joys of everyday life? In all honesty, isn’t it something you know can originate from within you anytime? Because it is just a state of mind.
Neither of the above seem to be mutually exclusive though.
So, at least from where I see, being free or independence is actually more about peace of mind than happiness. Especially as you age and learn to create happiness but struggle to find peace of mind amidst pretending to have it all together.
Concluding with this:
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https://medium.com/sky-collection/independence-and-happiness-independence-or-happiness-choice-is-yours-stakes-are-high-88b61634aa75
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['Payal Khare Bhatnagar']
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2020-08-26 22:17:49.255000+00:00
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['Happiness', 'Nonfiction', 'Strength', 'Freedom', 'Peace Of Mind']
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Title Independence Happiness Independence Happiness — Choice Stakes HighContent Independence Happiness Independence Happiness — Choice Stakes High Real independence peace mind happiness Image Quotemaster come writing prompt titled ‘’Gather Strength’’ Samantha Lazar theme Susan B Anthony’s quote ‘’Independence happiness’’ make think independence got strength especially independence happiness dawn upon perhaps everything equation simple happy free free stem strong happiness strength directly proportional equation simple talking independence come travel backpack earning money talking independence trade noncontroversial existence don’t write really want shout aloud don’t unfriend people walked heart long ago said heart talking one clutch keep tied daunting tomorrow dreamlike life come true justify revealing patch created word yesterday written emotional outburst friend without friendship stand rope tie many precious relationship drop risk breaking ropeYou subject mockery embarrassment Loneliness blame won’t far away friend real strength come Sneaking quiet timid unsure demeanor Whispering ear it’s enough Half lifetime already passed let story play let rope break must see remains May nothing May lot either way also anyway Happiness state mind Easier said experienced Eventually find happiness anyhow — survival instinct le talked peace mind earn giving relationship unrealistic goal deep rooted selfimages Also there’s whole package ‘’items cannot sold individually’’ tag get angst heartbreak free Come let’s talk freedom equation read till take liberty say real equation little different one earn peace mind it’s get free actuality earn peace mind gather strength Remember timid unsure consistent voice within always knew right wrong really hold value would actually put worry could figure it’s worth putting something bring hey happened happiness ‘’The popular Happiness’’ know Don’t find small joy everyday life honesty isn’t something know originate within anytime state mind Neither seem mutually exclusive though least see free independence actually peace mind happiness Especially age learn create happiness struggle find peace mind amidst pretending together Concluding thisTags Happiness Nonfiction Strength Freedom Peace Mind
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4,654 |
5 Really Subtle Signs That Tell You a Lot About a Person
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You don’t have to be a psychological expert in reading people’s behavior. We all have that inner power to discern that can tell us a lot about people’s personalities.
If not, we can always develop that skill.
As a child, I was always intrigued by people’s dual-faced behavior. Sometimes their actions and words did not match. I didn’t get it.
Though humans had developed a science of communicating thoughts, expressions, and feelings through speech, they often used body language to display their aversions, love, liking, hate, etc. And I wanted to learn that subtle language.
An American novelist Carol Plum-Ucci once quoted in her interviews:
“If you can understand human behavior, it can’t hurt you nearly as much.”
This quote stuck in my head forever. And being a voracious reader by nature, I started reading books about human behavior when I became a teenager. The more I read, the better understanding I began to gain.
I realized that if I could master the art of reading body language, I could know everything about a person in and out. In short, I desired to become a live lie-detecting machine.
Besides learning about these subtle signs from books and videos, I became more conscious of my public behavior.
Did you know that hunched shoulders, crossing arms, touching our face and neck, etc... are the signs of low self-confidence?
And people can perceive these signs as our weaknesses to use against you?
So, by learning this skill of reading human behavior, we can feel confident about trusting others. Not everyone is trustworthy material in this world, so we can find the right people of great character to work with by staying aware of these subtle signs.
Hence, this knowledge can help us find genuine people to work with and improve our public image.
So, let's get started.
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https://medium.com/the-innovation/5-really-subtle-signs-that-tell-you-a-lot-about-a-person-5dc173f2608e
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['Darshak Rana']
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2020-11-13 21:32:27.877000+00:00
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['Advice', 'Spirituality', 'Self Improvement', 'Psychology', 'Integrity']
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Title 5 Really Subtle Signs Tell Lot PersonContent don’t psychological expert reading people’s behavior inner power discern tell u lot people’s personality always develop skill child always intrigued people’s dualfaced behavior Sometimes action word match didn’t get Though human developed science communicating thought expression feeling speech often used body language display aversion love liking hate etc wanted learn subtle language American novelist Carol PlumUcci quoted interview “If understand human behavior can’t hurt nearly much” quote stuck head forever voracious reader nature started reading book human behavior became teenager read better understanding began gain realized could master art reading body language could know everything person short desired become live liedetecting machine Besides learning subtle sign book video became conscious public behavior know hunched shoulder crossing arm touching face neck etc sign low selfconfidence people perceive sign weakness use learning skill reading human behavior feel confident trusting others everyone trustworthy material world find right people great character work staying aware subtle sign Hence knowledge help u find genuine people work improve public image let get startedTags Advice Spirituality Self Improvement Psychology Integrity
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4,655 |
It’s The End Of The Year As We Know It!
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By RYAN PERSAUD,
Director of IT and Innovation at International School of Curitiba
I have had the privilege of walking into many many schools over my career, all over the world, and in a variety of capacities. If there is one constant that I know to be true is the end of the year burnout and the overwhelming feeling that educators experience. No matter what the role, I have heard educators say “I am feeling so tired” when it comes to the last few weeks. From moving up ceremonies, to celebrations, to graduations, to summatives, to grading, to reports, just writing this is enough to send me burying in my shell. I will admit, I am no expert myself at pacing. I often come in the start of the year firing on all cylinders, and by the end am barely puttering across the finish line. I recently asked a teacher from our school who is retiring for some advice around this, and she commented to me that in over 30 years in education, she did not have a magic solution, and always felt tired at this time of year. So upon reflection, I have come to determine that yes, we may always have the feeling of being tired at this time of year, but there are definitely ways to make the end of year a positive and rewarding experience. Here are some of my tips:
Relationships, Relationships, Relationships
Many great writers on education and leadership speak to relationships. George Couros dedicates an entire chapter to this in his book The Innovator’s Mindset. Even though he is a huge proponent of technology and innovation, he knows that it all starts with relationships. Another leadership guru that I admire is Simon Senek, who states: “We need to build more organizations that prioritize the care of human beings. As leaders, it is our sole responsibility to protect our people and, in turn, our people will protect each other and advance the organization together.” As we start to feel tired and lose focus, it is really important to reach out to others. We may feel that we don’t have time, or they are too busy as well. But taking just a small moment for a five minute conversation, can re-energize and refocus our efforts in ways we did not imagine. I love what Brene Brown says about connection:
Connection is such a deep part of relationships. Being able to feel heard and valued is so important when we are feeling exhausted, and just want someone to truly empathize with us, not just listen. Relationships drive everything in schools, especially at this time of year.
Move!
We all know that exercise is good for us. At this time of year, we probably don’t feel like getting up for a run, or going to the gym, or heading to yoga class. But exercising can be one of the best things for us to do, in order to alleviate stress and actually give us more energy to make it through. If you need convincing, here is a short article from the Mayo Clinic on Exercise and Stress Management. If you read this and are still having a hard time getting there, why not invite someone to exercise with? You can work on your relationship with that person and exercise! And keep in mind, it doesn’t have to be long. Even a short walk everyday is great for the body, mind, and spirit.
Accept Responsibility
This is the tough love part of the blog post. So there are certain responsibilities that we all have and must be completed before year end. As I mentioned above, these may include report cards, comments, grading, attending certain year end events, and others. When I say accept responsibility, I mean just that. Get yourself a prioritized list and get yourself organized. This can go a long way in terms of accomplishing all of your tasks. There are lots of great apps out there to help you keep focused and organized. Here are some of my favorites: yes, I am a Google fanboy, so I encourage you to use your Google Calendar or Google Keep to keep organized. Another couple of tools that I have found useful when working in teams are Trello and Slack. Trello is like using digital boards, cards, and lists, and can really help with personal or team organization. I personally use it with my team, to keep us on track with projects. Slack is great for collaboration and can act as a hub for projects and tasks. Slack integrates well with Google too. I recently used it for a team project with group members spread around the world.
Teamwork Makes The Dreamwork
So we used to say this in elementary school right? Well it still applies. What are you responsible for or working on at the end of the year that you can collaborate on? We teach our students to be good collaborators and teammates and we should do the same. Not only does this reduce our workload, but it gives us an opportunity to work on relationships. In case you still don’t believe me, here is a great article from the Washington Post entitled Why Collaboration is Vital to Creating Effective Schools. This article cites some solid research, and I love the way it connects teamwork, trust, and relationships.
Remember Why You Are Here
It is easy to forget when we are run down and stressed why we are in the building in the first place, especially for those of us that are not in classrooms! Remember the kids! Take a moment, stop, and breathe. If you must check emails, do it on the playground, and absorb the sounds of the kids. Read to an elementary class for 10 minutes, see them, hear them, remember, we are there for them. Have a conversation with some high schoolers about a summative they are working on, or just chat with some awkward middle schoolers!
Think Creatively About Your Events
This one might seem like a no-brainer, but when you are in the midst of it all, it is sometimes difficult to take the balcony view. Move from the actual work, and step back and think about what is really going on. Here is a great article from the Harvard Business Review, speaking about this concept, entitled, A Survival Guide for Leaders. We know you are going to have moving up ceremonies, can you place them on the same day, at different times, so parents with multiple children only have to come once? Are there multiple musical showcases that you can combine? Are there any events that can be pushed to the beginning of the following year?
Consider how you can use technology to engage parents at this time of year. Like you, they are tired and overwhelmed too. What are the ways we can leverage technology to support those who just can’t get to school for an event. Consider social media accounts that your school may have and the ways events could be posted and shown there. Student blogs that showcase learning can be broadcast out, or videos highlighting student work. If your school’s social media presence isn’t quite where it should be, here are five tips to increase your school’s social media presence;
Automate your posts Be real Make it interesting Be aware and spontaneous Don’t forget your brand
Social media can be a powerful tool if utilized correctly. It can increase your brand, engage parents, and act as a storytelling device.
This in itself may all feel overwhelming to enact. So why not choose one idea, as an area for improvement, as we head into these last few weeks. For me, my goal is to make the last few weeks the best weeks that I have had this school year. I would love to hear from others as to how you deal with the feeling of being overwhelmed at this time of year.
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All rights reserved. CWI is a non-profit educational organization dedicated to engaging students and teachers with their local communities through integrated learning projects. We work with educators and schools across the U.S. and internationally.
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CONTENT USE POLICY All materials contained in this web site remain the sole and exclusive property of CWI, or the author as designated by arrangement. We strongly encourage re-publication, but we do ask that you properly credit, and then share your re-publication link with us directly. contact us
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https://medium.com/communityworksjournal/its-the-end-of-the-year-as-we-know-it-c1353d342b44
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['Joe Brooks']
|
2019-06-08 23:54:39.760000+00:00
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['Schools', 'Teaching', 'Wellness', 'Learning', 'Education']
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Title It’s End Year Know ItContent RYAN PERSAUD Director Innovation International School Curitiba privilege walking many many school career world variety capacity one constant know true end year burnout overwhelming feeling educator experience matter role heard educator say “I feeling tired” come last week moving ceremony celebration graduation summatives grading report writing enough send burying shell admit expert pacing often come start year firing cylinder end barely puttering across finish line recently asked teacher school retiring advice around commented 30 year education magic solution always felt tired time year upon reflection come determine yes may always feeling tired time year definitely way make end year positive rewarding experience tip Relationships Relationships Relationships Many great writer education leadership speak relationship George Couros dedicates entire chapter book Innovator’s Mindset Even though huge proponent technology innovation know start relationship Another leadership guru admire Simon Senek state “We need build organization prioritize care human being leader sole responsibility protect people turn people protect advance organization together” start feel tired lose focus really important reach others may feel don’t time busy well taking small moment five minute conversation reenergize refocus effort way imagine love Brene Brown say connection Connection deep part relationship able feel heard valued important feeling exhausted want someone truly empathize u listen Relationships drive everything school especially time year Move know exercise good u time year probably don’t feel like getting run going gym heading yoga class exercising one best thing u order alleviate stress actually give u energy make need convincing short article Mayo Clinic Exercise Stress Management read still hard time getting invite someone exercise work relationship person exercise keep mind doesn’t long Even short walk everyday great body mind spirit Accept Responsibility tough love part blog post certain responsibility must completed year end mentioned may include report card comment grading attending certain year end event others say accept responsibility mean Get prioritized list get organized go long way term accomplishing task lot great apps help keep focused organized favorite yes Google fanboy encourage use Google Calendar Google Keep keep organized Another couple tool found useful working team Trello Slack Trello like using digital board card list really help personal team organization personally use team keep u track project Slack great collaboration act hub project task Slack integrates well Google recently used team project group member spread around world Teamwork Makes Dreamwork used say elementary school right Well still applies responsible working end year collaborate teach student good collaborator teammate reduce workload give u opportunity work relationship case still don’t believe great article Washington Post entitled Collaboration Vital Creating Effective Schools article cite solid research love way connects teamwork trust relationship Remember easy forget run stressed building first place especially u classroom Remember kid Take moment stop breathe must check email playground absorb sound kid Read elementary class 10 minute see hear remember conversation high schoolers summative working chat awkward middle schoolers Think Creatively Events one might seem like nobrainer midst sometimes difficult take balcony view Move actual work step back think really going great article Harvard Business Review speaking concept entitled Survival Guide Leaders know going moving ceremony place day different time parent multiple child come multiple musical showcase combine event pushed beginning following year Consider use technology engage parent time year Like tired overwhelmed way leverage technology support can’t get school event Consider social medium account school may way event could posted shown Student blog showcase learning broadcast video highlighting student work school’s social medium presence isn’t quite five tip increase school’s social medium presence Automate post real Make interesting aware spontaneous Don’t forget brand Social medium powerful tool utilized correctly increase brand engage parent act storytelling device may feel overwhelming enact choose one idea area improvement head last week goal make last week best week school year would love hear others deal feeling overwhelmed time year CWI Institutes Transformative Professional Development learn © copyright 1995–2019 Community Works Institute CWI right reserved CWI nonprofit educational organization dedicated engaging student teacher local community integrated learning project work educator school across US internationally email u supporting school organization CONTENT USE POLICY material contained web site remain sole exclusive property CWI author designated arrangement strongly encourage republication ask properly credit share republication link u directly contact usTags Schools Teaching Wellness Learning Education
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4,656 |
The Literally Literary Weekly Update #7
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Wounded Mother by Cassius Corbin (Poetry)
“Earth’s children going back
to be held by The Mother
then running back home
at the first sign of thunder”
All Passages by Water Lead Home by Jerry Windley-Daoust (Fiction)
“ It was as forlorn as a desert, except that the upside-down part of this watery desert harbored a whole world of strange living things, and unexplored mountains and plains, and the shipwrecks of people who hadn’t made it to the other end of the ocean.”
How Democracies Die by Dale Biron (Poetry)
“When middle-class dreams shatter,
rarely do the jagged shards fall upward,”
The Lessons from the Sea Mist by Sylvia Clare MSc. Psychol (Poetry)
“Can we learn
there is always a mist around us,
even when it is unseen?”
Do you remember? by Taiwo Adesina (Fiction)
“Do you remember on your wedding day, when I promised to write you every month? How you smiled and looked away? Did you even get the other letters?”
A Cruel and Swift Instrument of Nature by Edward Punales (Fiction)
“Every world is a collection of many worlds, each one conceived, used up, and excreted by nature to make room for the next.”
What’s the Role of Fiction in Social Change? by Aline Müller (Society)
“We don’t create things from nowhere, we imagine them first and then we work on it. Fiction is a rich pot of concrete technological developments and images to take inspiration from.”
|
https://medium.com/literally-literary/the-literally-literary-weekly-update-7-e607d389ac8d
|
['Jonathan Greene']
|
2020-02-05 14:30:40.291000+00:00
|
['Fiction', 'Nonfiction', 'Ll Letters', 'Essay', 'Poetry']
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Title Literally Literary Weekly Update 7Content Wounded Mother Cassius Corbin Poetry “Earth’s child going back held Mother running back home first sign thunder” Passages Water Lead Home Jerry WindleyDaoust Fiction “ forlorn desert except upsidedown part watery desert harbored whole world strange living thing unexplored mountain plain shipwreck people hadn’t made end ocean” Democracies Die Dale Biron Poetry “When middleclass dream shatter rarely jagged shard fall upward” Lessons Sea Mist Sylvia Clare MSc Psychol Poetry “Can learn always mist around u even unseen” remember Taiwo Adesina Fiction “Do remember wedding day promised write every month smiled looked away even get letters” Cruel Swift Instrument Nature Edward Punales Fiction “Every world collection many world one conceived used excreted nature make room next” What’s Role Fiction Social Change Aline Müller Society “We don’t create thing nowhere imagine first work Fiction rich pot concrete technological development image take inspiration from”Tags Fiction Nonfiction Letters Essay Poetry
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4,657 |
The 5-Bullet-Log: A Note-Taking System to Increase Self-Awareness and Learn More From Life
|
I choose to keep my log in my journal because handwriting helps retain information, because I can create my own symbols and layouts, and because that’s where I keep almost everything else.
But if you prefer, you can also use digital apps such as Evernote, which allow you to move things around and organize thoughts by tags.
You can also keep it analog but use separate cards instead of a notebook, or use a calendar — or whatever feels best for you. You will notice that your log will keep changing with time, and this is a reflection of your own ever-changing nature as a human being.
You’re the one who’s going to be using the log, so adapt it to your own personality and preferences. No matter which format you choose, just make sure it’s easy and fun to use; otherwise, you won’t stick with the habit.
Before You Start…
Here’s a little secret I realized after using this system for a while: it’s not actually my future self who benefits the most from this practice — it’s me, right now.
Of course, it’s useful to have access to all this data. But it’s even more useful to have a mental framework that helps me think, consolidate, and summarize information.
Because I know that in the evening I will have to fill out the log, I live my days in a different way. I am constantly on the lookout for signs and opportunities to improve. I recognize good ideas when they surface, and I memorize them. I ask more questions. I am aware of things I had never seen before.
Sometimes the evening comes and I feel that I have nothing really important to write down on my log. Nevertheless, I include whatever comes to mind — even if the most relevant things I can come up with that day are about grocery shopping or house cleaning.
Don’t worry if at first, it seems like you have nothing to write about, or if you have so much in your head that it’s hard to choose what to keep in your log. It’s all a part of the process, and your practice will change with time, as will your approach to life, memory, and note-taking.
For me, the benefits of keeping a log are invaluable, and I keep observing new ones as time goes by. Here are some of them:
I base my goal-setting methodologies on solid data, and they are more effective.
Every week I set weekly and monthly goals. Before, I used to base it solely on feelings, thoughts, or other people’s approaches to goal setting. Now, I base it on real evidence.
I can’t escape from my own problems.
And that’s great. A while ago I noticed that every day I was writing in my log that I was not reading enough, not learning enough, not making time for studying. I became so frustrated with writing the same thing every day on my log that I eventually created a morning slot for studying, and the problem was solved. The same happened with emotional eating and improving my communication skills.
I am quicker at coming back from emotional lows.
Looking back through my achievements and lessons makes me see how much I have actually accomplished. It shows me that everything is temporary, and it reminds me of the skills and lessons I need to overcome any problem.
I am more consistent.
At its very core, the 5-Bullet-Log is a daily practice that requires consistency. Once I created this routine and made it non-negotiable, I started becoming more consistent with other habits as well, such as taking notes after conversations and events, habit tracking, and journaling in general.
But most of all, it helps me separate the wheat from the chaff. I have plenty of ideas and observations, but having to choose the most important ones every day tells me a lot about what I value in life, what my current focus is, and what I need to let go of.
|
https://medium.com/better-humans/the-5-bullet-log-a-note-taking-system-to-increase-self-awareness-and-learn-more-from-life-8150b8d2b322
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['Sílvia Bastos']
|
2019-05-06 16:55:08.076000+00:00
|
['Quantified Self', 'Writing', 'Self Improvement', 'Self', 'Journaling']
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Title 5BulletLog NoteTaking System Increase SelfAwareness Learn LifeContent choose keep log journal handwriting help retain information create symbol layout that’s keep almost everything else prefer also use digital apps Evernote allow move thing around organize thought tag also keep analog use separate card instead notebook use calendar — whatever feel best notice log keep changing time reflection everchanging nature human You’re one who’s going using log adapt personality preference matter format choose make sure it’s easy fun use otherwise won’t stick habit Start… Here’s little secret realized using system it’s actually future self benefit practice — it’s right course it’s useful access data it’s even useful mental framework help think consolidate summarize information know evening fill log live day different way constantly lookout sign opportunity improve recognize good idea surface memorize ask question aware thing never seen Sometimes evening come feel nothing really important write log Nevertheless include whatever come mind — even relevant thing come day grocery shopping house cleaning Don’t worry first seems like nothing write much head it’s hard choose keep log It’s part process practice change time approach life memory notetaking benefit keeping log invaluable keep observing new one time go base goalsetting methodology solid data effective Every week set weekly monthly goal used base solely feeling thought people’s approach goal setting base real evidence can’t escape problem that’s great ago noticed every day writing log reading enough learning enough making time studying became frustrated writing thing every day log eventually created morning slot studying problem solved happened emotional eating improving communication skill quicker coming back emotional low Looking back achievement lesson make see much actually accomplished show everything temporary reminds skill lesson need overcome problem consistent core 5BulletLog daily practice requires consistency created routine made nonnegotiable started becoming consistent habit well taking note conversation event habit tracking journaling general help separate wheat chaff plenty idea observation choose important one every day tell lot value life current focus need let go ofTags Quantified Self Writing Self Improvement Self Journaling
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4,658 |
It’s Much Easier Than You Think to Live the Life You Want
|
Maybe not “easy”, but entirely possible.
I recently listened to an episode of The World Wanderers Podcast where the host discussed working at a cafe in a great city that a lot of people would love to live in. She mentioned how, had she not moved to this cool, exciting city, the job she had would have made her feel like a loser. In your hometown working retail after getting an expensive degree seems pretty lame. Up and moving to a destination city and working retail to support the lifestyle seems kind of adventurous.
Back home, she would have dreaded seeing an old friend come in. “Oh, so you’re working here?” In the new city when someone she knew came in the question was more like, “Wow, so you’re living here?”
Just a few days ago I talked to a guy who’s biking across the country and loving it. He spent several months in beautiful Missoula, Montana waiting for the weather to improve so he could continue his journey. He worked at a grocery store while there and it provided everything he needed to live the lifestyle he wanted and get back on the road in time. What would his resume look like when, several years out of college, he had “Grocery bagger” listed? Not great, except when put in the context of, “Spent two years biking across the U.S., paying my way through with odd jobs and blogging about the adventure.”
I thought about this phenomenon more in Mompiche, Ecuador a few weeks ago. We found a little place with a sign for American-style pancakes. A welcome breakfast after days of fruit and cereal. The breakfast nook was run by a twentysomething woman from the Ukraine. She fried up pancakes on a small griddle and served them with coffee for breakfast and lunch in the tiny Bohemian surfing village. She lived in a neat little house right above the pancake joint and spent the rest of the day as she pleased.
Imagine this ambitious young woman back home responding to the common, “So, what do you do?” with, “I make pancakes for a living.” Likely her friends and family would be a little worried and ashamed and think something wrong with her.
Contrast that with the same answer to the same question but with a change in geography. “I moved across the world to a tropical surfing village in Ecuador where I opened my own business.” Wow. What an enviable life, right?
There’s something weird about staying in your hometown. It severely limits the definitions you accept for what makes you successful. Oddly, most of the hometown definitions of success have nothing to do with happiness. They have to do with becoming what everyone in your past expects or desires given who you used to be. It’s a sort of tether to a past self that no longer exists.
When the expectations of back home no longer apply you can ask better questions and make clearer connections. What kind of person do you want to be (vs. what job title do you want)? What kind of people and surroundings do you want to be immersed in (vs. where do you want to work or live)?
Many people would probably love to be the master of their own schedule, be in a beautiful outdoor setting with interesting people from around the world, seriously pursue a hobby with lots of their time, and be challenged in new ways daily. Yet most of those same people would be horrified at the idea of playing guitar on the street for money, flipping pancakes, or doing freelance odd-jobs online, any of which might be the very means to achieve the life described.
Most people have this idea that you have to work a boring job in a boring house in a boring city for a few decades, and then if you play your cards right and all kinds of things totally out of your control (like the stock market or real estate prices) do the right thing, you can have some kind of two week vacation cruise or retire in a place where you enjoy good weather and leisure. The weird thing is, all those “someday” goals are available right now with relatively little difficulty. You can afford to live in a cool bamboo house in a beach town just by making pancakes for lunch and breakfast. You can (as was one guy I met) travel the length of South America living entirely off the cash you make playing guitar outside of restaurants.
I’m not claiming this kind of life is for everyone. Not at all. There is nothing wrong with a 9–5 job and life in the suburbs if that’s what really resonates with you. There’s nothing inherently noble about traveling or working some low wage odd job. The point is that it’s too easy to choose things based on an artificially limited option set. It’s too easy to define your life by stupid things like college majors or giant industry labels or titles that will make Aunt Bessie proud at the family reunion or salary levels.
The last one is especially dangerous.
It’s a weird habit to measure your success in life only by the revenue side of the equation. Who cares if you bring in $100k a year if it only buys you a crappy apartment that you hate in a city that stresses you out with friends that don’t inspire you and a daily existence you mostly daydream about escaping from? Your costs exceed your revenues and you’re actually going backward. You very well could get twice the lifestyle you desire at half the annual income. Like any business, the health of your personal life should be measured using both revenues and costs. On the personal level, neither are just monetary.
Only you can know what kind of life you want. But getting off the conveyor belt of the education system, getting out of the home town expectations trap, and opening your mind to measures of progress beyond salary will give you a much better chance of crafting a life you love.
If you want others to see this, please hit the ❤!
Isaac Morehouse is the founder and CEO of Praxis, a year-long entrepreneurial apprenticeship program for young people who want more than college. His company’s mission and his life mission is to help people awaken their dreams and live free.
Here are a few other articles to chew on:
Why You Should Move Away from Your Home Town
Why You Should Get Off the Conveyor Belt
Why “Escapism” Isn’t a Bad Thing
Why It’s So Hard to Exit a Bad Situation
Do You Need to Do Work You Love to Be Happy?
Stop Doing Stuff You Hate
Focus on What You Don’t Want
Do What You Love, or Have it Easy?
|
https://medium.com/the-mission/it-s-much-easier-than-you-think-to-live-the-life-you-want-41e8356660bc
|
['Isaac Morehouse']
|
2019-09-24 13:05:06.328000+00:00
|
['Travel', 'Education', 'Entrepreneurship']
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Title It’s Much Easier Think Live Life WantContent Maybe “easy” entirely possible recently listened episode World Wanderers Podcast host discussed working cafe great city lot people would love live mentioned moved cool exciting city job would made feel like loser hometown working retail getting expensive degree seems pretty lame moving destination city working retail support lifestyle seems kind adventurous Back home would dreaded seeing old friend come “Oh you’re working here” new city someone knew came question like “Wow you’re living here” day ago talked guy who’s biking across country loving spent several month beautiful Missoula Montana waiting weather improve could continue journey worked grocery store provided everything needed live lifestyle wanted get back road time would resume look like several year college “Grocery bagger” listed great except put context “Spent two year biking across US paying way odd job blogging adventure” thought phenomenon Mompiche Ecuador week ago found little place sign Americanstyle pancake welcome breakfast day fruit cereal breakfast nook run twentysomething woman Ukraine fried pancake small griddle served coffee breakfast lunch tiny Bohemian surfing village lived neat little house right pancake joint spent rest day pleased Imagine ambitious young woman back home responding common “So do” “I make pancake living” Likely friend family would little worried ashamed think something wrong Contrast answer question change geography “I moved across world tropical surfing village Ecuador opened business” Wow enviable life right There’s something weird staying hometown severely limit definition accept make successful Oddly hometown definition success nothing happiness becoming everyone past expects desire given used It’s sort tether past self longer exists expectation back home longer apply ask better question make clearer connection kind person want v job title want kind people surroundings want immersed v want work live Many people would probably love master schedule beautiful outdoor setting interesting people around world seriously pursue hobby lot time challenged new way daily Yet people would horrified idea playing guitar street money flipping pancake freelance oddjobs online might mean achieve life described people idea work boring job boring house boring city decade play card right kind thing totally control like stock market real estate price right thing kind two week vacation cruise retire place enjoy good weather leisure weird thing “someday” goal available right relatively little difficulty afford live cool bamboo house beach town making pancake lunch breakfast one guy met travel length South America living entirely cash make playing guitar outside restaurant I’m claiming kind life everyone nothing wrong 9–5 job life suburb that’s really resonates There’s nothing inherently noble traveling working low wage odd job point it’s easy choose thing based artificially limited option set It’s easy define life stupid thing like college major giant industry label title make Aunt Bessie proud family reunion salary level last one especially dangerous It’s weird habit measure success life revenue side equation care bring 100k year buy crappy apartment hate city stress friend don’t inspire daily existence mostly daydream escaping cost exceed revenue you’re actually going backward well could get twice lifestyle desire half annual income Like business health personal life measured using revenue cost personal level neither monetary know kind life want getting conveyor belt education system getting home town expectation trap opening mind measure progress beyond salary give much better chance crafting life love want others see please hit ❤ Isaac Morehouse founder CEO Praxis yearlong entrepreneurial apprenticeship program young people want college company’s mission life mission help people awaken dream live free article chew Move Away Home Town Get Conveyor Belt “Escapism” Isn’t Bad Thing It’s Hard Exit Bad Situation Need Work Love Happy Stop Stuff Hate Focus Don’t Want Love EasyTags Travel Education Entrepreneurship
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Potential
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Potential
Email Refrigerator :: 25
Hey friend!
What Will Become of Us?
“Hello, Elmo” Golda says politely as she tosses her red plush friend on top of her doll, already-buckled into the tiny stroller. My daughter keeps adding her toys one by one. An oversized plastic butterfly sits on the table. She picks that up, too. “Come here, Par-par!” which she recently learned means butterfly in Hebrew. And finally, the bath toys. “Alimango!” (Tagalog for crab).
Ok. I’m sharing this story partially to brag about my daughter. I mean, she’s barely two. 3 languages? She’s brilliant, right? Some child prodigy genius.
But I’m also bringing it up because it’s revealing something to me about me. Assuming she’s a genius raises my expectations of her, projecting visions of tutors and extra-curricular classes. College opportunities and career achievements ahead for her. And then I can’t help but match those expectations with how I treat her and guide her learning.
But we do that for anything with potential. A promising stock investment, a job offer at a startup, the fixer-upper house, an up-and-coming neighborhood, an exciting new relationship that could be “the one.” We mentally assign expectations and behave differently in order to guide each one, hoping it lives up to those expectations.
Is that normal? Is that healthy? Is there another way?
So I’m thinking a lot about potential this month. How does projecting these expectations on people and ideas in our lives affect how we treat them, and what is to come of them?
Let’s step up to the plate and see what happens.
“Bags and Boxes” by Ellen Porteus
Falling Short
About 15 years ago, I interned at an ad agency–my first real job out of college. After a particular meeting, one of the senior creative guys told me “someday we’ll work for you.” At the time, he meant it as a compliment. And I took it that way for almost a decade.
I used that vision to motivate me and my career trajectory. But over time, that compliment became unnecessary pressure. I was carrying this potential and it was weighing me down. The compliment was turning into a curse, like I had to somehow pay back this gift I’d been given and meet everyone’s expectations of me.
Potential can be paralyzing.
It’s one of the challenges of making things. Doesn’t really matter what, just the idea of being creative. A song, painting, homemade cookies, starting a new company, a pasta dinner.
In the process of making that thing, one of the earliest and most exciting steps is envisioning what it could be. Imagining the crowd cheering, that first bite right out of the oven, framing and hanging the masterpiece we just started, standing on a TED stage.
We can imagine perfection but because we are human we are incapable of making it. It will always be better in our head than what it is when it comes out.
And then we finish. And inevitably, it falls short.
When so much is expected of us and the work we make, it becomes nearly impossible to meet those expectations. So why should we continue to pursue audacious career goals, have kids, or make ambitious work, knowing they’re likely going to fall short of what we can imagine them to be?
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https://medium.com/email-refrigerator/potential-f88a77e10673
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['Jake Kahana']
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2020-12-28 03:23:30.044000+00:00
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['Self-awareness', 'Life Advice', 'Expectations', 'Worldviews', 'Potential']
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Title PotentialContent Potential Email Refrigerator 25 Hey friend Become Us “Hello Elmo” Golda say politely toss red plush friend top doll alreadybuckled tiny stroller daughter keep adding toy one one oversized plastic butterfly sits table pick “Come Parpar” recently learned mean butterfly Hebrew finally bath toy “Alimango” Tagalog crab Ok I’m sharing story partially brag daughter mean she’s barely two 3 language She’s brilliant right child prodigy genius I’m also bringing it’s revealing something Assuming she’s genius raise expectation projecting vision tutor extracurricular class College opportunity career achievement ahead can’t help match expectation treat guide learning anything potential promising stock investment job offer startup fixerupper house upandcoming neighborhood exciting new relationship could “the one” mentally assign expectation behave differently order guide one hoping life expectation normal healthy another way I’m thinking lot potential month projecting expectation people idea life affect treat come Let’s step plate see happens “Bags Boxes” Ellen Porteus Falling Short 15 year ago interned ad agency–my first real job college particular meeting one senior creative guy told “someday we’ll work you” time meant compliment took way almost decade used vision motivate career trajectory time compliment became unnecessary pressure carrying potential weighing compliment turning curse like somehow pay back gift I’d given meet everyone’s expectation Potential paralyzing It’s one challenge making thing Doesn’t really matter idea creative song painting homemade cooky starting new company pasta dinner process making thing one earliest exciting step envisioning could Imagining crowd cheering first bite right oven framing hanging masterpiece started standing TED stage imagine perfection human incapable making always better head come finish inevitably fall short much expected u work make becomes nearly impossible meet expectation continue pursue audacious career goal kid make ambitious work knowing they’re likely going fall short imagine beTags Selfawareness Life Advice Expectations Worldviews Potential
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4,660 |
How to become a Hadoop Developer?- Job Trends and Salary
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Hadoop Developer is the most aspired and highly-paid role in current IT Industry. This High-Caliber profile takes superior skillset to tackle with gigantic volumes of data with remarkable accuracy. In this article, we will understand the job description of a Hadoop Developer.
Who is a Hadoop Developer?
How to become a Hadoop Developer?
Skills Required by a Hadoop Developer
Salary Trends
Job Trends
Top Companies Hiring
Future of a Hadoop Developer
Roles and Responsibilities
Who is a Hadoop Developer?
Hadoop Developer is a professional programmer, with sophisticated knowledge of Hadoop components and tools. A Hadoop Developer, basically designs, develops and deploys Hadoop applications with strong documentation skills.
How to become a Hadoop Developer?
To become a Hadoop Developer, you have to go through the road map described.
A strong grip on the SQL basics and Distributed systems is mandatory.
and is mandatory. Strong Programming skills in languages such as Java, Python, JavaScript, NodeJS
Build your own Hadoop Projects in order to understand the terminology of Hadoop
Being comfortable with Java is a must. Because Hadoop was developed using Java
is a must. Because Hadoop was developed using Java A Bachelors or a Masters Degree in Computer Science
Skills Required by a Hadoop Developer
Hadoop Development involves multiple technologies and programming languages. The important skills to become a successful Hadoop Developer are enlisted below.
Basic knowledge of Hadoop and its Eco-System
and its Able to work with Linux and execute dome of the basic commands
and execute dome of the basic commands Hands-on Experience with Hadoop Core components
Experience with Hadoop technologies like MapReduce, Pig, Hive, HBase.
Ability to handle Multi-Threading and Concurrency in the Eco-System
and Concurrency in the The familiarity of ETL tools and Data Loading tools like Flume and Sqoop
and Data Loading tools like and Should be able to work with Back-End Programming.
Programming. Experienced with Scripting Languages like PigLatin
Good Knowledge of Query Languages like HiveQL
Salary Trends
Hadoop Developer is one of the most highly rewarded profiles in the world of IT Industry. Salary estimations based on the most recent updates provided in the social media say the average salary of Hadoop Developer is more than any other professional.
Let us now discuss the salary trends for a Hadoop Developer in different countries based on the experience. Firstly, let us consider the United States of America. Based On Experience, the big data professionals working in the domains are offered with respective salaries as described below.
The entry-level salaries starting at 75,000 US$ to 80,000 US$ and on the other hand, the candidates with 20 plus years of experience are being offered 125,000 US$ to 150,000 US$ per annul.
Followed by the United States of America, we will now discuss the salary trends for Hadoop Developers in the United Kingdom.
The Salary trends for a Hadoop Developer in the United Kingdom for an entry-level developer starts at 25,000 Pounds to 30,000 Pounds and on the other hand, for an experienced candidate, the salary offered is 80,000 Pounds to 90,000 Pounds.
Followed by the United Kingdom, we will now discuss the Hadoop Developer Salary Trends in India.
The Salary trends for a Hadoop Developer in India for an entry-level developer starts at 400,00 INR to 500,000 INR and on the other hand, for an experienced candidate, the salary offered is 4,500,000 INR to 5,000,000 INR.
Job Trends
The number of Hadoop jobs has increased at a sharp rate from 2014 to 2019.
to It has risen to almost double between April 2016 to April 2019.
to 50,000 vacancies related to Big data are currently available in business sectors of India.
vacancies related to Big data are currently available in business sectors of India. India contributes to 12% of Hadoop Developer jobs in the worldwide market.
in the worldwide market. The number of offshore jobs in India is likely to increase at a rapid pace due to outsourcing.
due to outsourcing. Almost all big MNCs in India are offering handsome salaries for Hadoop Developers in India.
in India are offering for Hadoop Developers in India. 80% of market employers are looking for Big Data experts from engineering and management domains.
Top Companies Hiring
The Top ten Companies hiring Hadoop Developers are,
Facebook
Twitter
Linkedin
Yahoo
eBay
Medium
Adobe
Infosys
Cognizant
Accenture
Future of a Hadoop Developer
Hadoop is a technology that the future relies on. Major large-scale enterprises need Hadoop for storing, processing and analysing their big data. The amount of data is increasing exponentially and so is the need for this software.
In the year 2018, the Global Big Data and Business Analytics Market were standing at US$ 169 billion and by 2022, it is predicted to grow to US$ 274 billion. However, a PwC report predicts that by 2020, there will be around 2.7 million job postings in Data Science and Analytics in the US alone.
If you are thinking to learn Hadoop, Then it’s the perfect time
Roles and Responsibilities
Different companies have different issues with their data, so, the roles and responsibilities of the developers need a varied skill set to capable enough to handle multiple situations with instantaneous solutions. Some of the major and general roles and responsibilities of the Hadoop Developer are.
Developing Hadoop and implementing it with optimum Performance
Ability to Load data from different data sources
from different Design, build, install, configure and support Hadoop system
and Hadoop system Ability to translate complex technical requirements in detailed a design.
Analyse vast data storages and uncover insights.
vast data storages and uncover insights. Maintain security and data privacy.
and Design scalable and high-performance web services for data tracking.
and web services for data tracking. High-speed data querying.
data querying. Loading, deploying and managing data in HBase.
and data in Defining job flows using schedulers like Zookeeper
Cluster Coordination services through Zookeeper
With this, we come to an end of this article. I hope I have thrown some light on to your knowledge on a Hadoop Developer along with skills required, roles and responsibilities, job trends and Salary trends.
If you wish to check out more articles on the market’s most trending technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Python, Ethical Hacking, then you can refer to Edureka’s official site.
Do look out for other articles in this series which will explain the various other aspects of Big data.
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https://medium.com/edureka/hadoop-developer-cc3afc54962c
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['Shubham Sinha']
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2020-09-11 06:23:19.072000+00:00
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['Big Data', 'Hadoop', 'Hadoop Developer', 'Big Data Analytics', 'Hadoop Training']
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Title become Hadoop Developer Job Trends SalaryContent Hadoop Developer aspired highlypaid role current Industry HighCaliber profile take superior skillset tackle gigantic volume data remarkable accuracy article understand job description Hadoop Developer Hadoop Developer become Hadoop Developer Skills Required Hadoop Developer Salary Trends Job Trends Top Companies Hiring Future Hadoop Developer Roles Responsibilities Hadoop Developer Hadoop Developer professional programmer sophisticated knowledge Hadoop component tool Hadoop Developer basically design develops deploys Hadoop application strong documentation skill become Hadoop Developer become Hadoop Developer go road map described strong grip SQL basic Distributed system mandatory mandatory Strong Programming skill language Java Python JavaScript NodeJS Build Hadoop Projects order understand terminology Hadoop comfortable Java must Hadoop developed using Java must Hadoop developed using Java Bachelors Masters Degree Computer Science Skills Required Hadoop Developer Hadoop Development involves multiple technology programming language important skill become successful Hadoop Developer enlisted Basic knowledge Hadoop EcoSystem Able work Linux execute dome basic command execute dome basic command Handson Experience Hadoop Core component Experience Hadoop technology like MapReduce Pig Hive HBase Ability handle MultiThreading Concurrency EcoSystem Concurrency familiarity ETL tool Data Loading tool like Flume Sqoop Data Loading tool like able work BackEnd Programming Programming Experienced Scripting Languages like PigLatin Good Knowledge Query Languages like HiveQL Salary Trends Hadoop Developer one highly rewarded profile world Industry Salary estimation based recent update provided social medium say average salary Hadoop Developer professional Let u discus salary trend Hadoop Developer different country based experience Firstly let u consider United States America Based Experience big data professional working domain offered respective salary described entrylevel salary starting 75000 US 80000 US hand candidate 20 plus year experience offered 125000 US 150000 US per annul Followed United States America discus salary trend Hadoop Developers United Kingdom Salary trend Hadoop Developer United Kingdom entrylevel developer start 25000 Pounds 30000 Pounds hand experienced candidate salary offered 80000 Pounds 90000 Pounds Followed United Kingdom discus Hadoop Developer Salary Trends India Salary trend Hadoop Developer India entrylevel developer start 40000 INR 500000 INR hand experienced candidate salary offered 4500000 INR 5000000 INR Job Trends number Hadoop job increased sharp rate 2014 2019 risen almost double April 2016 April 2019 50000 vacancy related Big data currently available business sector India vacancy related Big data currently available business sector India India contributes 12 Hadoop Developer job worldwide market worldwide market number offshore job India likely increase rapid pace due outsourcing due outsourcing Almost big MNCs India offering handsome salary Hadoop Developers India India offering Hadoop Developers India 80 market employer looking Big Data expert engineering management domain Top Companies Hiring Top ten Companies hiring Hadoop Developers Facebook Twitter Linkedin Yahoo eBay Medium Adobe Infosys Cognizant Accenture Future Hadoop Developer Hadoop technology future relies Major largescale enterprise need Hadoop storing processing analysing big data amount data increasing exponentially need software year 2018 Global Big Data Business Analytics Market standing US 169 billion 2022 predicted grow US 274 billion However PwC report predicts 2020 around 27 million job posting Data Science Analytics US alone thinking learn Hadoop it’s perfect time Roles Responsibilities Different company different issue data role responsibility developer need varied skill set capable enough handle multiple situation instantaneous solution major general role responsibility Hadoop Developer Developing Hadoop implementing optimum Performance Ability Load data different data source different Design build install configure support Hadoop system Hadoop system Ability translate complex technical requirement detailed design Analyse vast data storage uncover insight vast data storage uncover insight Maintain security data privacy Design scalable highperformance web service data tracking web service data tracking Highspeed data querying data querying Loading deploying managing data HBase data Defining job flow using scheduler like Zookeeper Cluster Coordination service Zookeeper come end article hope thrown light knowledge Hadoop Developer along skill required role responsibility job trend Salary trend wish check article market’s trending technology like Artificial Intelligence Python Ethical Hacking refer Edureka’s official site look article series explain various aspect Big dataTags Big Data Hadoop Hadoop Developer Big Data Analytics Hadoop Training
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4,661 |
Parametric vs non-parametric statistical tests in Python
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Once one has a good understanding of the data they have to work with, they next need to decide what they aim to answer with this information. Understanding the problem at hand is part of the Business Understanding step in the Data Science Process.
The Data Science Process
A business question with a data solution can often be posed as a hypothesis. For example “Is there a difference in the customer conversion rate between our old website design and a proposed new layout?” Having a hypothesis to test is a must-have before statistical testing can occur.
Two types of hypotheses are exploratory and confirmatory; as the names might suggest, exploratory analysis seeks to uncover the “why” and dig into the data while confirmatory hypotheses are more applicable when you have a pretty good idea of what is going on with the data and need evidence to support thinking. It is important to decide a priori which of your hypotheses belong to these categories. It has been argued that limiting exploratory hypothesis testing can help to increase certainty in results.
Once the hypothesis has been determined, the next question to answer is “am I comparing the mean or the median of two groups?”. Parametric tests will compare group means, while non-parametric tests compare group medians. A common misconception is that the decision rests solely on whether the data is normally distributed or not, especially when there is a smaller sample size and distribution of the data can matter significantly. Other factors should also be considered.
Parametric tests are widely regarded as handling data that is normally distributed — data with a Gaussian distribution — well. However, parametric tests also:
Work well with skewed and non-normal distributions.
Perform well when the spread of each group is different or the groups have different amounts of variability.
Typically have more statistical power than non-parametric tests.
If sample size is sufficiently large and group mean is the preferred measure of central tendency, parametric tests are the way to go.
If group median is the preferred measure of central tendency for the data, go with non-parametric tests regardless of sample size. Non-parametric tests are great for comparing data that is prone to outliers, like salary. They are also useful for data with small sample size and/or non-normal, and are especially useful for working with ordinal or ranked data. You should also stick with non-parametric tests for ordinal and ranked data.
Some of the most commonly used statistical parametric tests and their non-parametric counterparts are as follows:
Where n = sample size
There are also tests which compare correlation — looking for associations between variables e.g. Pearson, Spearman, Chi-Squared — and regression tests — seeing if a change in one or more independent variables will predict the change in a dependent variable e.g. simple & multiple regression.
A quick overview of when you might use each of the above tests:
The Paired t test is used when you are looking at one population sample with a before and after score or result. This could be comparing a classroom of students beginning of year proficiency on reading to their end of year proficiency to determine if there was growth or decrease in understanding. The non-parametric counterpart is the Wilcoxon Signed Rank test, which can be used to determine whether two dependent samples were selected from populations having the same distribution and takes into account the magnitude and direction of the difference.
The Unpaired t test, also widely known as the 2-sample or independent t test, is used to compare two samples from different, unrelated groups to determine if there is a difference in the group means. The Mann-Whitney U test, also known as the Wilcoxon rank-sum test, is similar to the Wilcoxon Signed Rank test but measures the magnitude and direction of the difference between independent samples.
Finally, the One-way ANalysis Of VAriance (ANOVA) is used to determine difference in group means for two or more groups where there is one independent variable with at least two distinct levels. An example of this would be predicting the weight of a dog based on breed given a set of dogs of different breeds. The Kruskal Wallis test, an extension of the Mann-Whitney U test for comparing two groups, can be used to compare medians of multiple groups where the distribution of residuals is assumed to not be normal.
There are certain assumptions that are made for data that is to be analyzed using parametric tests. The four assumptions are that 1) the data is normally distributed (or that difference between the samples is normally distributed for paired test), 2) there is similarity in variance in the data, 3) sample values are numeric and continuous, and 4) that sample observations are independent of each other. The below functions from the statsmodels.api module allow us to explore these assumptions during data exploration.
statsmodels.api.graphics.plot_regress_exog() statsmodels.api.graphics.qqplot()
Let’s examine how to call up these tests in Python 3. First, the parametric data:
The stats module is a great resource for statistical tests.
Paired t test is
scipy.stats.ttest_rel
Unpaired t test is
scipy.stats.ttest_ind
For ttest_rel and ttest_ind, the P-value in the output measures an alternative hypothesis that 𝜇0 != 𝜇1; for one-sided hypothesis, e.g. 𝜇0 > 𝜇1, divide p by 2 and if p/2 < alpha (usually 0.05).
One-way ANOVA is
scipy.stats.f_oneway
A significant P-value signals that there is a difference between some of the groups, but additional testing is needed to determine where the difference lies.
For the non-parametric data:
Wilcoxon Signed Rank is
scipy.stats.wilcoxon
Wilcoxon Rank-Sum is
scipy.stats.ranksums
Signed rank and rank-sum tests should be used for continuous distributions.
Kruskal Wallis is:
scipy.stats.kruskal(group1, group2, group3)
Similar to ANOVA, rejection of the null hypothesis does not tell us which of the groups is different, so additional post hoc group comparison is necessary.
In terms of takeaways, it is never good practice to conclude on the results of one test, but significant findings should lead to additional investigation. Bonferroni corrections, a topic for another time, can be used to reduce spurious positives.
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https://zachary-a-zazueta.medium.com/parametric-vs-non-parametric-statistical-tests-in-python-9c7ab48e954a
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['Zach Zazueta']
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2020-09-07 16:09:37.346000+00:00
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['Parametric Tests', 'Hypothesis Testing', 'Statistical Test', 'Python']
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Title Parametric v nonparametric statistical test PythonContent one good understanding data work next need decide aim answer information Understanding problem hand part Business Understanding step Data Science Process Data Science Process business question data solution often posed hypothesis example “Is difference customer conversion rate old website design proposed new layout” hypothesis test musthave statistical testing occur Two type hypothesis exploratory confirmatory name might suggest exploratory analysis seek uncover “why” dig data confirmatory hypothesis applicable pretty good idea going data need evidence support thinking important decide priori hypothesis belong category argued limiting exploratory hypothesis testing help increase certainty result hypothesis determined next question answer “am comparing mean median two groups” Parametric test compare group mean nonparametric test compare group median common misconception decision rest solely whether data normally distributed especially smaller sample size distribution data matter significantly factor also considered Parametric test widely regarded handling data normally distributed — data Gaussian distribution — well However parametric test also Work well skewed nonnormal distribution Perform well spread group different group different amount variability Typically statistical power nonparametric test sample size sufficiently large group mean preferred measure central tendency parametric test way go group median preferred measure central tendency data go nonparametric test regardless sample size Nonparametric test great comparing data prone outlier like salary also useful data small sample size andor nonnormal especially useful working ordinal ranked data also stick nonparametric test ordinal ranked data commonly used statistical parametric test nonparametric counterpart follows n sample size also test compare correlation — looking association variable eg Pearson Spearman ChiSquared — regression test — seeing change one independent variable predict change dependent variable eg simple multiple regression quick overview might use test Paired test used looking one population sample score result could comparing classroom student beginning year proficiency reading end year proficiency determine growth decrease understanding nonparametric counterpart Wilcoxon Signed Rank test used determine whether two dependent sample selected population distribution take account magnitude direction difference Unpaired test also widely known 2sample independent test used compare two sample different unrelated group determine difference group mean MannWhitney U test also known Wilcoxon ranksum test similar Wilcoxon Signed Rank test measure magnitude direction difference independent sample Finally Oneway ANalysis VAriance ANOVA used determine difference group mean two group one independent variable least two distinct level example would predicting weight dog based breed given set dog different breed Kruskal Wallis test extension MannWhitney U test comparing two group used compare median multiple group distribution residual assumed normal certain assumption made data analyzed using parametric test four assumption 1 data normally distributed difference sample normally distributed paired test 2 similarity variance data 3 sample value numeric continuous 4 sample observation independent function statsmodelsapi module allow u explore assumption data exploration statsmodelsapigraphicsplotregressexog statsmodelsapigraphicsqqplot Let’s examine call test Python 3 First parametric data stats module great resource statistical test Paired test scipystatsttestrel Unpaired test scipystatsttestind ttestrel ttestind Pvalue output measure alternative hypothesis 𝜇0 𝜇1 onesided hypothesis eg 𝜇0 𝜇1 divide p 2 p2 alpha usually 005 Oneway ANOVA scipystatsfoneway significant Pvalue signal difference group additional testing needed determine difference lie nonparametric data Wilcoxon Signed Rank scipystatswilcoxon Wilcoxon RankSum scipystatsranksums Signed rank ranksum test used continuous distribution Kruskal Wallis scipystatskruskalgroup1 group2 group3 Similar ANOVA rejection null hypothesis tell u group different additional post hoc group comparison necessary term takeaway never good practice conclude result one test significant finding lead additional investigation Bonferroni correction topic another time used reduce spurious positivesTags Parametric Tests Hypothesis Testing Statistical Test Python
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4,662 |
B2B Marketplaces Will Be The Next Billion-Dollar E-Commerce Startups
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Originally published in TechCrunch on November 4, 2020.
Startups involved in B2B e-commerce such as Faire and Mirakl have burst out of the gates in 2020. Almost overnight, these startups transformed into consequential platforms, earning billion-dollar valuations along the way. The B2B e-commerce industry has broad reach, encompassing everything from commerce infrastructure and payments technology to procurement and supply-chain solutions. But one area of the B2B e-commerce sector holds outsized promise: marketplaces.
These venues for buyers and sellers of business-related products are exploding in popularity, fueled by better infrastructure, payments and security on the back-end and companies’ increased need to conduct business online during the pandemic.
Even before the pandemic, B2B marketplaces were expected to generate $3.6 trillion in sales by 2024, up from an estimated $680 billion in 2018, according to payments research firm iBe TSD. They were already growing more quickly than most B2C marketplaces that predated them, and when COVID shutdowns hit, many companies scrambled to shift all purchasing online. A survey of business buyers conducted by Digital Commerce 360 found that 20% of purchasing managers spent more on marketplaces, and 22% spent significantly more, during the pandemic.
For many entrepreneurs running B2B marketplaces, the pandemic created new demand for their platforms. Yet to convince businesses to make a permanent shift to online purchasing, B2B marketplaces cannot simply remain stagnant, serving as simple transactional platforms. Those that innovate now to introduce adjacent services will emerge as winners in the next few years, with some inevitably becoming billion-dollar companies.
As a venture capital investor in B2B e-commerce companies, I’m carefully watching the industry and have seen several forward-thinking business models emerge for B2B marketplaces. The predominant revenue model of B2C marketplaces, the gross merchandise value (GMV) take rate, or percentage of each transaction, doesn’t always translate well in the B2B world. Instead, B2B marketplaces are discovering creative new ways to monetize their networks, ensuring their approach is tailored to the complex and nuanced world of B2B e-commerce. I’ll delve into each of these models below, providing examples of marketplaces that have successfully begun implementing them.
What makes B2B transactions unique? Before discussing how B2B marketplaces can deploy new business models, it’s important to think about how B2B transactions typically work.
Payment methods: There are four main ways to make a B2B payment: paper check, ACH transfer, electronic fund transfer (wires), and credit/debit cards. Nearly half of B2B payments are still made by paper check, but digital payment solutions are quickly gaining.
Financing: It is customary in B2B transactions to pay “with terms,” such as net 30 or net 60, effectively giving a line of credit to the business buyer that enables them to send payment after delivery of the good or service. Supply-chain financing and dynamic discounting are two mechanisms business buyers use to settle invoices with suppliers on preferred timelines.
Bulk discounts: Business buyers often expect and receive discounts in return for placing high-volume orders. While not a concept unique to B2B, negotiated or custom volume discounts can complicate the checkout process.
Contractual pricing: Businesses often enter into enterprise-level pricing agreements with their suppliers. In some B2B verticals, such as the veterinary supplies market, there is little consistency and transparency regarding the market price of any given item; instead, each buyer pays a bespoke price tied to contractual agreements. This dynamic typically benefits suppliers, which can price discriminate based on buyers’ ability and willingness to pay.
Delivery method and timing: Unlike consumers, businesses may place orders for goods but delay delivery for weeks or months. This is particularly common in the commodities market, where futures contracts specify a commodity to be delivered on a certain date in the future. B2B transactions typically include a negotiation on delivery method and timing.
Insurance: Business buyers frequently purchase insurance as part of their transactions, particularly in high-value verticals such as jewelry. Insurance is designed to protect against damage to the goods in transit or theft.
Compliance: In some verticals, particularly those related to healthcare and chemicals, there is a heavy compliance burden to ensure goods are properly sourced and transported. Is the seller legally registered to sell and transport sensitive goods such as medical equipment or pharmaceuticals?
With all of these considerations, it’s no wonder B2B e-commerce has been slower to digitize than B2C. From product discovery through the checkout process, a consumer buying a bag of licorice looks nothing like a retailer buying 100,000 bags of licorice from a distributor. The good news for B2B marketplace founders is that, based on the parameters above, there are many creative ways to extract value from transactions that go beyond the GMV take rate. Let’s explore some of the creative ways to monetize a B2B marketplace.
Sampling fees
In most B2B verticals, individual transactions are so large that charging fees on a percentage basis means scaring potential customers away. In high-value markets with infrequent orders, charging a take rate on purchase orders will be perceived as unfair, especially when suppliers and buyers know each other already. But the fee-per-sample model is a unique wedge to aggregate suppliers and buyers, who often sample supplies before placing large orders.
One of our portfolio companies, Material Bank, has used this monetization strategy with success. Material Bank is a B2B marketplace for construction and interior design materials that warehouses samples (fabric swatches, paint chips, flooring materials, wall coverings, etc.) from hundreds of brands. Architects and interior designers can order free samples from Material Bank and receive them the next morning, and then ship samples back for free when they’re no longer needed. Material Bank charges the manufacturers a fee every time one of their samples is shipped out. Manufacturers receive new customer leads that require no effort to generate and are happy to outsource sample fulfillment, which was historically a cost center and not a core competency. Other B2B markets where sampling is well-established include chemicals, apparel and packaging materials.
Data monetization
In mature markets, reliable longitudinal sales data exists at the SKU-level, enabling manufacturers to understand exactly how their products perform relative to peers. The best example is the role Nielsen and IRI play in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry. These two companies have exclusive point-of-sale integrations with major retailers. They collect, cleanse, package and analyze sales data, which they then sell back to CPG brands and manufacturers via data services portals.
Brands rely on this information for product development, marketing, distribution and strategy decisions. In most B2B verticals, sales data isn’t centralized to the same degree, so suppliers often have no idea what their precise market share is, or how a certain product performs against its closest competitors. B2B marketplaces have an opportunity to change that. Those that achieve scale will be able to monetize insights from the transaction activity on their platforms, playing a key role in data capture and analytics.
Companies that have successfully monetized B2B commerce data include Panjiva, a global trade data company, and BroadJump, an expense management platform for the healthcare industry.
Embedded financial services
Embedded financial services is the premise that fintech is an ingredient within a broader product suite as opposed to a standalone business model. An oft-cited example is Shopify, which started as virtual storefront software, subsequently monetized payments volume and later introduced Shopify Capital, a small business financing program. Another example is Toast, a software platform for restaurants that started as a point-of-sale system and gradually expanded into other financial services over time, including lending and payroll management. There are three prongs of embedded financial services: integrated payments, lending and insurance. B2B marketplaces are well-positioned to offer all three.
LeafLink, a wholesale marketplace for the cannabis industry, is a pioneer of embedded fintech. The company has amassed a significant share of cannabis wholesale buyers (retail stores) and growers on its platform, a marketplace with embedded inventory management and CRM tools, and is now facilitating noncash payments and supply-chain financing. Due to a lack of federal legalization, many banks are constrained in serving cannabis customers even in states where trade is legal, effectively leaving buyers and sellers unbanked (or you might say high and dry).
Cash on delivery (COD) is the most common payment method, making it difficult for cannabis companies to access financing to fuel growth. LeafLink is solving these vertical-specific challenges with its embedded fintech offerings.
Targeted advertising
Advertising on B2B marketplaces can take several forms, the most common being sponsored listings, similar to Google Adwords. If someone searches for certain products on the website, a supplier can pay to have their products show up at the top of the list. Advertising can take a more traditional form, too, such as printed marketing materials included in packages delivered to buyers. With an understanding of buyers’ profiles and order history, marketplaces can function as originators of direct mail to targeted, qualified buyers.
As a marketplace, wading into advertising can be tricky because neutrality is key, but giving suppliers the option to selectively market to buyers can be a powerful tool. One B2B marketplace that has successfully monetized through advertising is Construct Connect, a bidding platform for construction projects.
Subscription fees
B2C marketplaces rarely charge subscription fees. Dating apps like Tinder, OKCupid and Raya are notable exceptions, since they provide users with access to a valuable curated network, but there are no monetizable transactions (at least, we hope not). In the B2B world, however, monetization through subscription often makes sense. Suppliers are likely to pay for access to high-quality buyers in vertical markets because business buyers tend to be repeat customers making large purchases.
A useful way to attack the “chicken or egg” problem is to aggregate a group of buyers on a platform without charging them. When you reach a critical mass of coveted buyers on a platform, sellers may then be willing to pay a subscription fee to access them. A few examples of B2B marketplaces that have succeeded with subscription fees include Bamboo Rose, a global supply chain management platform, and Cvent, a platform for event management professionals.
Private-label products
Drugstores and department stores have sold merchandise under their own brands for decades. E-commerce sites like Revolve, the multibrand women’s apparel retailer, launched private-label brands over the years without customers realizing it. But in B2B commerce, the notion of private-label products is less common. It wasn’t until 2019 that Amazon launched its first B2B private-label brand, a product line of bulk toilet paper, tissues and paper towels (and subsequently got in hot water with regulators for leveraging its sales data to develop its own brands). We should expect to see more private-label products from vertical B2B marketplaces.
Analyzing sales data on their platforms, B2B marketplaces can not only create private-label products based on those which are the most popular and/or where gaps exist, they can also drive high sell-through on their own items. There’s nothing stopping vertical marketplaces from assuming the role of manufacturer, marketer and distributor of their own products.
The pandemic placed a spotlight on the importance of digitizing B2B transactions in every sector, from pharmaceuticals and CPG, to construction materials, food, supplies, manufacturing and beyond. B2B marketplaces stand to profit from this move to the digital realm, but only those that offer far more than just a place to transact will become billion-dollar businesses.
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https://medium.com/ideas-from-bain-capital-ventures/b2b-marketplaces-will-be-the-next-billion-dollar-e-commerce-startups-6fb42c5be50f
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['Merritt Hummer']
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2020-12-02 15:15:19.156000+00:00
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['Monetization', 'Insights', 'B2B', 'Startup', 'Marketplaces']
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Title B2B Marketplaces Next BillionDollar ECommerce StartupsContent Originally published TechCrunch November 4 2020 Startups involved B2B ecommerce Faire Mirakl burst gate 2020 Almost overnight startup transformed consequential platform earning billiondollar valuation along way B2B ecommerce industry broad reach encompassing everything commerce infrastructure payment technology procurement supplychain solution one area B2B ecommerce sector hold outsized promise marketplace venue buyer seller businessrelated product exploding popularity fueled better infrastructure payment security backend companies’ increased need conduct business online pandemic Even pandemic B2B marketplace expected generate 36 trillion sale 2024 estimated 680 billion 2018 according payment research firm iBe TSD already growing quickly B2C marketplace predated COVID shutdown hit many company scrambled shift purchasing online survey business buyer conducted Digital Commerce 360 found 20 purchasing manager spent marketplace 22 spent significantly pandemic many entrepreneur running B2B marketplace pandemic created new demand platform Yet convince business make permanent shift online purchasing B2B marketplace cannot simply remain stagnant serving simple transactional platform innovate introduce adjacent service emerge winner next year inevitably becoming billiondollar company venture capital investor B2B ecommerce company I’m carefully watching industry seen several forwardthinking business model emerge B2B marketplace predominant revenue model B2C marketplace gross merchandise value GMV take rate percentage transaction doesn’t always translate well B2B world Instead B2B marketplace discovering creative new way monetize network ensuring approach tailored complex nuanced world B2B ecommerce I’ll delve model providing example marketplace successfully begun implementing make B2B transaction unique discussing B2B marketplace deploy new business model it’s important think B2B transaction typically work Payment method four main way make B2B payment paper check ACH transfer electronic fund transfer wire creditdebit card Nearly half B2B payment still made paper check digital payment solution quickly gaining Financing customary B2B transaction pay “with terms” net 30 net 60 effectively giving line credit business buyer enables send payment delivery good service Supplychain financing dynamic discounting two mechanism business buyer use settle invoice supplier preferred timeline Bulk discount Business buyer often expect receive discount return placing highvolume order concept unique B2B negotiated custom volume discount complicate checkout process Contractual pricing Businesses often enter enterpriselevel pricing agreement supplier B2B vertical veterinary supply market little consistency transparency regarding market price given item instead buyer pay bespoke price tied contractual agreement dynamic typically benefit supplier price discriminate based buyers’ ability willingness pay Delivery method timing Unlike consumer business may place order good delay delivery week month particularly common commodity market future contract specify commodity delivered certain date future B2B transaction typically include negotiation delivery method timing Insurance Business buyer frequently purchase insurance part transaction particularly highvalue vertical jewelry Insurance designed protect damage good transit theft Compliance vertical particularly related healthcare chemical heavy compliance burden ensure good properly sourced transported seller legally registered sell transport sensitive good medical equipment pharmaceutical consideration it’s wonder B2B ecommerce slower digitize B2C product discovery checkout process consumer buying bag licorice look nothing like retailer buying 100000 bag licorice distributor good news B2B marketplace founder based parameter many creative way extract value transaction go beyond GMV take rate Let’s explore creative way monetize B2B marketplace Sampling fee B2B vertical individual transaction large charging fee percentage basis mean scaring potential customer away highvalue market infrequent order charging take rate purchase order perceived unfair especially supplier buyer know already feepersample model unique wedge aggregate supplier buyer often sample supply placing large order One portfolio company Material Bank used monetization strategy success Material Bank B2B marketplace construction interior design material warehouse sample fabric swatch paint chip flooring material wall covering etc hundred brand Architects interior designer order free sample Material Bank receive next morning ship sample back free they’re longer needed Material Bank charge manufacturer fee every time one sample shipped Manufacturers receive new customer lead require effort generate happy outsource sample fulfillment historically cost center core competency B2B market sampling wellestablished include chemical apparel packaging material Data monetization mature market reliable longitudinal sale data exists SKUlevel enabling manufacturer understand exactly product perform relative peer best example role Nielsen IRI play consumer packaged good CPG industry two company exclusive pointofsale integration major retailer collect cleanse package analyze sale data sell back CPG brand manufacturer via data service portal Brands rely information product development marketing distribution strategy decision B2B vertical sale data isn’t centralized degree supplier often idea precise market share certain product performs closest competitor B2B marketplace opportunity change achieve scale able monetize insight transaction activity platform playing key role data capture analytics Companies successfully monetized B2B commerce data include Panjiva global trade data company BroadJump expense management platform healthcare industry Embedded financial service Embedded financial service premise fintech ingredient within broader product suite opposed standalone business model oftcited example Shopify started virtual storefront software subsequently monetized payment volume later introduced Shopify Capital small business financing program Another example Toast software platform restaurant started pointofsale system gradually expanded financial service time including lending payroll management three prong embedded financial service integrated payment lending insurance B2B marketplace wellpositioned offer three LeafLink wholesale marketplace cannabis industry pioneer embedded fintech company amassed significant share cannabis wholesale buyer retail store grower platform marketplace embedded inventory management CRM tool facilitating noncash payment supplychain financing Due lack federal legalization many bank constrained serving cannabis customer even state trade legal effectively leaving buyer seller unbanked might say high dry Cash delivery COD common payment method making difficult cannabis company access financing fuel growth LeafLink solving verticalspecific challenge embedded fintech offering Targeted advertising Advertising B2B marketplace take several form common sponsored listing similar Google Adwords someone search certain product website supplier pay product show top list Advertising take traditional form printed marketing material included package delivered buyer understanding buyers’ profile order history marketplace function originator direct mail targeted qualified buyer marketplace wading advertising tricky neutrality key giving supplier option selectively market buyer powerful tool One B2B marketplace successfully monetized advertising Construct Connect bidding platform construction project Subscription fee B2C marketplace rarely charge subscription fee Dating apps like Tinder OKCupid Raya notable exception since provide user access valuable curated network monetizable transaction least hope B2B world however monetization subscription often make sense Suppliers likely pay access highquality buyer vertical market business buyer tend repeat customer making large purchase useful way attack “chicken egg” problem aggregate group buyer platform without charging reach critical mass coveted buyer platform seller may willing pay subscription fee access example B2B marketplace succeeded subscription fee include Bamboo Rose global supply chain management platform Cvent platform event management professional Privatelabel product Drugstores department store sold merchandise brand decade Ecommerce site like Revolve multibrand women’s apparel retailer launched privatelabel brand year without customer realizing B2B commerce notion privatelabel product le common wasn’t 2019 Amazon launched first B2B privatelabel brand product line bulk toilet paper tissue paper towel subsequently got hot water regulator leveraging sale data develop brand expect see privatelabel product vertical B2B marketplace Analyzing sale data platform B2B marketplace create privatelabel product based popular andor gap exist also drive high sellthrough item There’s nothing stopping vertical marketplace assuming role manufacturer marketer distributor product pandemic placed spotlight importance digitizing B2B transaction every sector pharmaceutical CPG construction material food supply manufacturing beyond B2B marketplace stand profit move digital realm offer far place transact become billiondollar businessesTags Monetization Insights B2B Startup Marketplaces
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Javascript (Preload, Prefetch) ใช้ยังไง ทำไมต้องใช้ ช่วยอะไร ??
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Written by
Frontend Developer At Central JD FinTech Co., Ltd
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https://medium.com/23perspective/javascript-preload-prefetch-%E0%B9%83%E0%B8%8A%E0%B9%89%E0%B8%A2%E0%B8%B1%E0%B8%87%E0%B9%84%E0%B8%87-%E0%B8%97%E0%B8%B3%E0%B9%84%E0%B8%A1%E0%B8%95%E0%B9%89%E0%B8%AD%E0%B8%87%E0%B9%83%E0%B8%8A%E0%B9%89-%E0%B8%8A%E0%B9%88%E0%B8%A7%E0%B8%A2%E0%B8%AD%E0%B8%B0%E0%B9%84%E0%B8%A3-d9d510a7d451
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['Tuanrit Sahapaet']
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2019-05-23 10:57:08.285000+00:00
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['Engineering', 'JavaScript', 'Developer', 'Web Development', 'Code']
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Title Javascript Preload Prefetch ใช้ยังไง ทำไมต้องใช้ ช่วยอะไร Content Written Frontend Developer Central JD FinTech Co LtdTags Engineering JavaScript Developer Web Development Code
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3 Stories to Make the World Small
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1. Superman’s Island
In elementary school, a young Clark Kent first discovers he’s hypersensitive. He can hear faint noises miles away and see right through walls, doors, even people.
Since he doesn’t know how to control these powers yet, all the impressions overwhelm him and trigger a seizure. Clark runs away and hides in a closet.
Eventually, the teacher calls his mom to the scene, and she starts speaking to Clark through the locked door:
“Sweetie, how can I help you if you won’t let me in?” “The world’s too big, Mom.” “Then make it small. Just focus on my voice. Pretend it’s an island, out in the ocean. Can you see it?” “I see it.” “Then swim towards it, honey.”
Once he hones in on the one thing right in front of him — his mom — Clark calms down and leaves the closet.
Social media, the internet, our state of constant connection — Clark Kent isn’t the only one who’s hypersensitive. It’s all of us. We share and communicate so much, we too can see other people’s insides; their thoughts, wishes, feelings. It creates a lot of noise too, and we can hear it, even if it’s made far away.
Cheaper entertainment, travel, remote work. As consumers, workers, experiencers, we hold more power to choose than ever. It scares us. There’s too much of everything, and it puts a grave responsibility on our shoulders: What do we do with our limited time? Because we’ll never get to it all.
Unfortunately, we can’t replay our lives like movie scenes. Our moms won’t always be there when we want to run and hide. But we can still make an effort to find our island.
Let the universe be big. You hone your senses. Quiet your mind. Calm down. Focus. Zoom in on the next thing that matters. And then swim towards it.
2. The Wall
In the 1970s, there was an electrician in Philadelphia. The man’s job was to install freezing cases in supermarkets. You know, the long ones with glass doors, from which you pick up your milk and frozen pizza. To set up his own little workshop, the man bought an old bakery.
One summer, he decided to rebuild the front wall. It was made of bricks, about 16 feet high, and 30 feet long. After he had torn down the old one, he called his two sons to the site. They were twelve and nine years old. He told them that they were now in charge of building a new wall.
The boys’ first task was to dig a six-foot hole for the foundation. Then, they filled it with concrete, which they had to mix first — by hand. Clearly, this wasn’t just a job for the summer holidays. For the next year and a half, every day after school, they went to their father’s shop to build that wall. To the young brothers, it felt like forever. But eventually, they laid the final brick.
When their dad came to audit what they had done, the three of them stood back and looked at the result. There it was. A brand new, magnificent, 16 by 30 feet wall. The man looked at his sons and said, “Don’t y’all never tell me that you can’t do something” — and then he walked into the shop.
The electrician’s name was Willard Carrol Smith. It’s the same name he gave his oldest son. Today, we know the 12-year-old as Will Smith.
When Will recounted this story on Charlie Rose in 2002, he said:
You don’t try to build a wall. You don’t set out to build a wall. You don’t say, “I’m gonna build the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that’s ever been built. You don’t start there. You say, “I’m gonna lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid. There will not be one brick on the face of the earth that’s gonna be laid better than this brick that I’m gonna lay in these next 10 minutes.” And you do that every single day, and soon, you have a wall.
“Brick by Brick,” as we might call it, is a story about the value of hard work. But it’s also a story about happiness. Because what Will also said is this:
I think, psychologically, the advantage that that gives me over a lot of people that I’ve been in competition with in different situations is: It’s difficult to take the first step when you look at how big the task is. The task is never huge to me. It’s always one brick.
That’s more than a competitive advantage. It’s a philosophy of relief. By choosing to focus on the next step, the next brick, not the end result, Will never feels overwhelmed. That’s happiness and, if we make that same decision, it’s available to us all.
3. The Bowl
A monk told Joshu, “I have just entered the monastery. Please teach me.” Joshu asked, “Have you eaten your rice porridge? The monk replied, “I have eaten.” Joshu said, “Then you had better wash your bowl.” At that moment the monk was enlightened.
I eat a lot of cereal. Every time I do the dishes is a chance to remember this story. Leo Babauta shared it years ago. He added:
Remembering to do these things when we’re done with the activity isn’t just about neatness. It’s about mindfulness, about completing what we started, about being present in all we do instead of rushing to the next activity. Don’t get your head caught up in all this thinking about the meaning of life … instead, just do. Just wash your bowl. And in the washing, you’ll find all you need.
Some tasks feel inherently comforting, but all tasks offer comfort if we let them. Enough-ness is transferable. You can bring it to all your activities. Whatever life demands of you, if you do it with intention, the outcome won’t matter so much because, simply by being there, you gave it your best.
Life is big, but it’s made of small moments. Every event is a tiny piece of an infinite puzzle. Washing your bowl is choosing to enjoy the shape and detail of each one. And since the puzzle will never be complete, you might as well start doing that today.
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https://ngoeke.medium.com/3-stories-to-make-the-world-small-31be8544a66c
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['Niklas Göke']
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2019-10-17 12:09:59.095000+00:00
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['Happiness', 'Stories', 'Self', 'Psychology', 'Mindfulness']
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Title 3 Stories Make World SmallContent 1 Superman’s Island elementary school young Clark Kent first discovers he’s hypersensitive hear faint noise mile away see right wall door even people Since doesn’t know control power yet impression overwhelm trigger seizure Clark run away hide closet Eventually teacher call mom scene start speaking Clark locked door “Sweetie help won’t let in” “The world’s big Mom” “Then make small focus voice Pretend it’s island ocean see it” “I see it” “Then swim towards honey” hone one thing right front — mom — Clark calm leaf closet Social medium internet state constant connection — Clark Kent isn’t one who’s hypersensitive It’s u share communicate much see people’s inside thought wish feeling creates lot noise hear even it’s made far away Cheaper entertainment travel remote work consumer worker experiencers hold power choose ever scare u There’s much everything put grave responsibility shoulder limited time we’ll never get Unfortunately can’t replay life like movie scene mom won’t always want run hide still make effort find island Let universe big hone sens Quiet mind Calm Focus Zoom next thing matter swim towards 2 Wall 1970s electrician Philadelphia man’s job install freezing case supermarket know long one glass door pick milk frozen pizza set little workshop man bought old bakery One summer decided rebuild front wall made brick 16 foot high 30 foot long torn old one called two son site twelve nine year old told charge building new wall boys’ first task dig sixfoot hole foundation filled concrete mix first — hand Clearly wasn’t job summer holiday next year half every day school went father’s shop build wall young brother felt like forever eventually laid final brick dad came audit done three stood back looked result brand new magnificent 16 30 foot wall man looked son said “Don’t y’all never tell can’t something” — walked shop electrician’s name Willard Carrol Smith It’s name gave oldest son Today know 12yearold Smith recounted story Charlie Rose 2002 said don’t try build wall don’t set build wall don’t say “I’m gonna build biggest baddest greatest wall that’s ever built don’t start say “I’m gonna lay brick perfectly brick laid one brick face earth that’s gonna laid better brick I’m gonna lay next 10 minutes” every single day soon wall “Brick Brick” might call story value hard work it’s also story happiness also said think psychologically advantage give lot people I’ve competition different situation It’s difficult take first step look big task task never huge It’s always one brick That’s competitive advantage It’s philosophy relief choosing focus next step next brick end result never feel overwhelmed That’s happiness make decision it’s available u 3 Bowl monk told Joshu “I entered monastery Please teach me” Joshu asked “Have eaten rice porridge monk replied “I eaten” Joshu said “Then better wash bowl” moment monk enlightened eat lot cereal Every time dish chance remember story Leo Babauta shared year ago added Remembering thing we’re done activity isn’t neatness It’s mindfulness completing started present instead rushing next activity Don’t get head caught thinking meaning life … instead wash bowl washing you’ll find need task feel inherently comforting task offer comfort let Enoughness transferable bring activity Whatever life demand intention outcome won’t matter much simply gave best Life big it’s made small moment Every event tiny piece infinite puzzle Washing bowl choosing enjoy shape detail one since puzzle never complete might well start todayTags Happiness Stories Self Psychology Mindfulness
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We Must Have Training to Address the Trauma Our Students Bring to School
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Photo by Chris Benson on Unsplash
By Austin Hawk
Screaming, shrieking, and begging were not the sounds I expected to hear while reading a story to my class. I was teaching in San Antonio, in one of the poorest zip codes in Texas, and Lily, a third grader new to our school, was continually challenging my knowledge and skills as an educator. She had experienced trauma before entering my classroom, and I lacked the necessary knowledge and skills to help her.
My school served students from Haven for Hope, an organization whose mission is to provide care and support to those affected by homelessness in Bexar County. Many students supported and housed by Haven for Hope came through my classroom and Lily was one of them. On her first day, I heard Lily from a distance pleading for her mom not to leave. She had previously been put into the foster system and was now terrified to go to school. Lily was scared that if her mom left, she would not see her again. This stress made Lily’s coming to school and leaving her mom agonizing each day.
The need for school-based mental health services to ensure our students are safe and ready to learn has become even more evident in recent years, following major events like Hurricane Harvey and the tragedy in Santa Fe. Teach Plus Texas Fellows, a cohort of teacher leaders from across the state of Texas who advocate on education policy issues, conducted a statewide survey of teachers to identify the level of need for mental health awareness in schools. The Fellows asked teachers in schools that spanned the socioeconomic spectrum if they had students in their classes who experienced Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs.) Ninety-one percent of teachers said yes, they had students in their classes who had experienced these types of trauma.
Over time, Lily became more comfortable in my classroom; however, I quickly exhausted the skills I had to support her beyond academics. Lily also missed many days of school because she did not want to leave her mother. She needed additional coping strategies and techniques that I was unable to provide due to a lack of training. The school counselor did everything he could to help me while also supporting 600 other elementary school students, completing administrative duties, and leading state programs such as STAAR testing. In the end, we failed Lily by not being able to provide her with the best resources to be a successful student. She came to my classroom below grade level and finished the year in a similar situation. Lily needed to make significant academic growth quickly and unfortunately, that did not happen. As a result, she continued to fall further behind her peers.
This year, Governor Abbott signed into law HB 18, the legislation that provides multiple pathways for all stakeholders in schools to increase awareness about mental health and trauma-informed instruction. As teachers, we must continue to lead and encourage our schools and districts to take advantage of this legislation.
With the passage of HB 18, there are new opportunities to partner with mental health professionals outside of the educational system, and we must advocate for our school leaders to access this resource. In addition, access to professional development opportunities related to mental health, trauma-informed instruction, and suicide prevention now must be available at the district and state level. School districts across Texas should be reaching out to experts to share their knowledge with a variety of school personnel; in my own districts, I recently watched experts present on ACEs and trauma. In addition, school districts should make online learning options available to meet the diverse needs of their employees. As teachers, we must advocate for opportunities to learn about these crucial topics. If districts throughout the state of Texas engage in this work, our state can become a model that will encourage other states to better support their students who have experienced trauma.
Every student deserves a safe and healthy school that includes teachers, administrators, and other school personnel who are prepared and trained to meet their needs. Lily, and many other students like her, will greatly benefit from current and future educators engaging in professional development related to mental health, trauma, and suicide. Their future depends on it.
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https://medium.com/whats-the-plus/we-must-have-training-to-address-the-trauma-our-students-bring-to-school-1d1126a21f0a
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['Teach Plus']
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2019-08-22 18:30:24.052000+00:00
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['Trauma Informed Teaching', 'Mental Health', 'K 12 Education', 'Teachers Leaning In', 'Texas']
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Title Must Training Address Trauma Students Bring SchoolContent Photo Chris Benson Unsplash Austin Hawk Screaming shrieking begging sound expected hear reading story class teaching San Antonio one poorest zip code Texas Lily third grader new school continually challenging knowledge skill educator experienced trauma entering classroom lacked necessary knowledge skill help school served student Hope organization whose mission provide care support affected homelessness Bexar County Many student supported housed Hope came classroom Lily one first day heard Lily distance pleading mom leave previously put foster system terrified go school Lily scared mom left would see stress made Lily’s coming school leaving mom agonizing day need schoolbased mental health service ensure student safe ready learn become even evident recent year following major event like Hurricane Harvey tragedy Santa Fe Teach Plus Texas Fellows cohort teacher leader across state Texas advocate education policy issue conducted statewide survey teacher identify level need mental health awareness school Fellows asked teacher school spanned socioeconomic spectrum student class experienced Adverse Childhood Experiences ACEs Ninetyone percent teacher said yes student class experienced type trauma time Lily became comfortable classroom however quickly exhausted skill support beyond academic Lily also missed many day school want leave mother needed additional coping strategy technique unable provide due lack training school counselor everything could help also supporting 600 elementary school student completing administrative duty leading state program STAAR testing end failed Lily able provide best resource successful student came classroom grade level finished year similar situation Lily needed make significant academic growth quickly unfortunately happen result continued fall behind peer year Governor Abbott signed law HB 18 legislation provides multiple pathway stakeholder school increase awareness mental health traumainformed instruction teacher must continue lead encourage school district take advantage legislation passage HB 18 new opportunity partner mental health professional outside educational system must advocate school leader access resource addition access professional development opportunity related mental health traumainformed instruction suicide prevention must available district state level School district across Texas reaching expert share knowledge variety school personnel district recently watched expert present ACEs trauma addition school district make online learning option available meet diverse need employee teacher must advocate opportunity learn crucial topic district throughout state Texas engage work state become model encourage state better support student experienced trauma Every student deserves safe healthy school includes teacher administrator school personnel prepared trained meet need Lily many student like greatly benefit current future educator engaging professional development related mental health trauma suicide future depends itTags Trauma Informed Teaching Mental Health K 12 Education Teachers Leaning Texas
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3 Simple Reasons Why I Didn’t Replace My Old AirPods With New
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Credit: Suganth on Unsplash
3 Simple Reasons Why I Didn’t Replace My Old AirPods With New Tim Schröder Follow Jun 11 · 4 min read
I remember when I first used AirPods. It was in the office at work. I was chatting with my colleague. And he was mentioning that he thinks about selling his pair of AirPods. He had bought them for working out, but they fell out every time.
Eager to try them, he gave me his pair, and I was amazed. I felt every single little and big positive thing others are saying about the AirPods. They are light and comfortable. Besides, they are easy to wear, easy to pair and charge quickly. I was sold.
The next day, I came back with the money and bought them from my colleague. From then on, I took them with me wherever I went.
For over two years, I’ve used my pair of original AirPods in the craziest surroundings possible.
In planes over the Indian and Atlantic Ocean. In the hustle and bustle of Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. And while working out in Bali, amid a humidity which would make every sauna jealous.
However, just like it has turned out with my iPad: The AirPods and me weren’t a true love story after all. I had worn them down. Over time they lost their charge, appeal, and sound quality. I stumbled across their shortcomings, and we started yelling at each other. Okay, admittedly, it was more me yelling at them, because they had lost their sound level…
As it was time to part, I didn’t replace my old AirPods with new. Here’s why:
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https://medium.com/macoclock/3-simple-reasons-why-i-didnt-replace-my-old-airpods-with-new-346465d49957
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['Tim Schröder']
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2020-06-11 05:11:40.007000+00:00
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['Airpods', 'Experience', 'Wearables', 'Tech', 'Apple']
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Title 3 Simple Reasons Didn’t Replace Old AirPods NewContent Credit Suganth Unsplash 3 Simple Reasons Didn’t Replace Old AirPods New Tim Schröder Follow Jun 11 · 4 min read remember first used AirPods office work chatting colleague mentioning think selling pair AirPods bought working fell every time Eager try gave pair amazed felt every single little big positive thing others saying AirPods light comfortable Besides easy wear easy pair charge quickly sold next day came back money bought colleague took wherever went two year I’ve used pair original AirPods craziest surroundings possible plane Indian Atlantic Ocean hustle bustle Bangkok Kuala Lumpur working Bali amid humidity would make every sauna jealous However like turned iPad AirPods weren’t true love story worn time lost charge appeal sound quality stumbled across shortcoming started yelling Okay admittedly yelling lost sound level… time part didn’t replace old AirPods new Here’s whyTags Airpods Experience Wearables Tech Apple
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Splunk Architecture — Forwarder, Indexer & Search Head Tutorial
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The demand for Splunk Certified professionals has seen a tremendous rise, mainly due to the ever-increasing machine-generated log data from almost every advanced technology that is shaping our world today. If you want to implement Splunk in your infrastructure, then it is important that you know how Splunk works internally. I have written this article to help you understand the Splunk architecture and tell you how different Splunk components interact with one another.
Before I talk about how different Splunk components function, let me mention the various stages of data pipeline each component falls under.
Different Stages In Data Pipeline
There are primarily 3 different stages in Splunk:
Data Input stage
Data Storage stage
Data Searching stage
Data Input Stage
In this stage, Splunk software consumes the raw data stream from its source, breaks it into 64K blocks, and annotates each block with metadata keys. The metadata keys include hostname, source, and source type of the data. The keys can also include values that are used internally, such as character encoding of the data stream and values that control the processing of data during the indexing stage, such as the index into which the events should be stored.
Data Storage Stage
Data storage consists of two phases: Parsing and Indexing.
In Parsing phase, Splunk software examines, analyzes, and transforms the data to extract only the relevant information. This is also known as event processing. It is during this phase that Splunk software breaks the data stream into individual events. The parsing phase has many sub-phases:
a) Breaking the stream of data into individual lines
b) Identifying, parsing, and setting timestamps
c) Annotating individual events with metadata copied from the source-wide keys
d) Transforming event data and metadata according to regex transform rules
2. In Indexing phase, Splunk software writes parsed events to the index on disk. It writes both compressed raw data and the corresponding index file. The benefit of Indexing is that the data can be easily accessed during searching.
Data Searching Stage
This stage controls how the user accesses, views, and uses the indexed data. As part of the search function, Splunk software stores user-created knowledge objects, such as reports, event types, dashboards, alerts and field extractions. The search function also manages the search process.
Splunk Components
If you look at the below image, you will understand the different data pipeline stages under which various Splunk components fall under.
There are 3 main components in Splunk:
Splunk Forwarder, used for data forwarding
Splunk Indexer, used for Parsing and Indexing the data
Search Head is a GUI used for searching, analyzing and reporting
Splunk Forwarder
Splunk Forwarder is the component which you have to use for collecting the logs. Suppose, you want to collect logs from a remote machine, then you can accomplish that by using Splunk’s remote forwarders which are independent of the main Splunk instance.
In fact, you can install several such forwarders in multiple machines, which will forward the log data to a Splunk Indexer for processing and storage. What if you want to do real-time analysis of the data? Splunk forwarders can be used for that purpose too. You can configure the forwarders to send data to Splunk indexers in real-time. You can install them in multiple systems and collect the data simultaneously from different machines in real time.
Compared to other traditional monitoring tools, Splunk Forwarder consumes very less CPU ~1–2%. You can scale them up to tens of thousands of remote systems easily, and collect terabytes of data with minimal impact on performance.
Now, let us understand the different types of Splunk forwarders.
Universal Forwarder
You can opt for a universal forwarder if you want to forward the raw data collected at the source. It is a simple component which performs minimal processing on the incoming data streams before forwarding them to an indexer.
Data transfer is a major problem with almost every tool in the market. Since there is minimal processing on the data before it is forwarded, a lot of unnecessary data is also forwarded to the indexer resulting in performance overheads.
Why go through the trouble of transferring all the data to the Indexers and then filter out only the relevant data? Wouldn’t it be better to only send the relevant data to the Indexer and save on bandwidth, time and money? This can be solved by using Heavy forwarders which I have explained below.
Heavy Forwarder
You can use a Heavy forwarder and eliminate half your problems because one level of data processing happens at the source itself before forwarding data to the indexer. Heavy Forwarder typically does parsing and indexing at the source and also intelligently routes the data to the Indexer saving on bandwidth and storage space. So when a heavy forwarder parses the data, the indexer only needs to handle the indexing segment.
Splunk Indexer
An indexer is the Splunk component which you will have to use for indexing and storing the data coming from the forwarder. Splunk instance transforms the incoming data into events and stores it in indexes for performing search operations efficiently. If you are receiving the data from a Universal forwarder, then the indexer will first parse the data and then index it. Parsing of data is done to eliminate the unwanted data. But, if you are receiving the data from a Heavy forwarder, the indexer will only index the data.
As the Splunk instance indexes your data, it creates a number of files. These files contain one of the below:
Raw data in compressed form
Indexes that point to raw data (index files, also referred to as tsidx files), plus some metadata files
These files reside in sets of directories called buckets.
Let me now tell you how Indexing works.
Splunk processes the incoming data to enable fast search and analysis. It enhances the data in various ways like:
Separating the data stream into individual, searchable events
Creating or identifying timestamps
Extracting fields such as host, source, and source type
Performing user-defined actions on the incoming data, such as identifying custom fields, masking sensitive data, writing new or modified keys, applying breaking rules for multi-line events, filtering unwanted events, and routing events to specified indexes or servers
This indexing process is also known as event processing.
Another benefit of Splunk Indexer is data replication. You need not to worry about the loss of data because Splunk keeps multiple copies of indexed data. This process is called Index replication or Indexer clustering. This is achieved with the help of an Indexer cluster, which is a group of indexers configured to replicate each other’s’ data.
Splunk Search Head
Search head is the component used for interacting with Splunk. It provides a graphical user interface to users for performing various operations. You can search and query the data stored in the Indexer by entering search words and you will get the expected result.
You can install the search head on separate servers or with other Splunk components on the same server. There is no separate installation file for search head, you just have to enable splunkweb service on the Splunk server to enable it.
A Splunk instance can function both as a search head and a search peer. A search head that performs only searching and not indexing is referred to as a dedicated search head. Whereas, a search peer performs indexing and responds to search requests from other search heads.
In a Splunk instance, a search head can send search requests to a group of indexers, or search peers, which perform the actual searches on their indexes. The search head then merges the results and sends them back to the user. This is a faster technique to search for data called distributed searching.
Search head clusters are groups of search heads that coordinate the search activities. The cluster coordinates the activity of the search heads, allocates jobs based on the current loads, and ensures that all the search heads have access to the same set of knowledge objects.
Advanced Splunk Architecture With A Deployment Server / Management Console Host
Look at the above image to understand the end to end working of Splunk. The images show a few remote Forwarders that send the data to the Indexers. Based on the data present in the Indexer, you can use the Search Head to perform functions like searching, analyzing, visualizing and creating knowledge objects for Operational Intelligence.
The Management Console Host acts as a centralized configuration manager responsible for distributing configurations, app updates and content updates to the Deployment Clients. The Deployment Clients are Forwarders, Indexers and Search Heads.
Splunk Architecture
If you have understood the concepts explained above, you can easily relate to the Splunk architecture. Look at the image below to get a consolidated view of the various components involved in the process and their functionalities.
You can receive data from various network ports by running scripts for automating data forwarding
by for automating data forwarding You can monitor the files coming in and detect the changes in real time
coming in and detect the changes in real time The forwarder has the capability to intelligently route the data, clone the data and do load balancing on that data before it reaches the indexer. Cloning is done to create multiple copies of an event right at the data source whereas load balancing is done so that even if one instance fails, the data can be forwarded to another instance which is hosting the indexer
has the capability to intelligently the data, the data and do on that data before it reaches the indexer. Cloning is done to create multiple copies of an event right at the data source whereas load balancing is done so that even if one instance fails, the data can be forwarded to another instance which is hosting the indexer As I mentioned earlier, the deployment server is used for managing the entire deployment, configurations and policies
is used for managing the entire deployment, configurations and policies When this data is received, it is stored in an Indexer . The indexer is then broken down into different logical data stores and at each data store you can set permissions which will control what each user views, accesses and uses
. The indexer is then broken down into different logical data stores and at each data store you can set permissions which will control what each user Once the data is in, you can search the indexed data and also distribute searches to other search peers and the results will be merged and sent back to the Search head
to other search peers and the results will be merged and sent back to the Search head Apart from that, you can also do scheduled searches and create alerts , which will be triggered when certain conditions match saved searches
and create , which will be triggered when certain conditions match saved searches You can use saved searches to create reports and make analysis by using Visualization dashboards
and make by using Finally, you can use Knowledge objects to enrich the existing unstructured data
to enrich the existing unstructured data Search heads and Knowledge objects can be accessed from a Splunk CLI or a Splunk Web Interface. This communication happens over a REST API connection
I hope you enjoyed reading this article on Splunk Architecture, which talks about the various Splunk components and their working. If you wish to check out more articles on the market’s most trending technologies like Artificial Intelligence, DevOps, Ethical Hacking, then you can refer to Edureka’s official site.
Do look out for other articles in this series which will explain the various other aspects of Splunk.
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https://medium.com/edureka/splunk-architecture-c9910b34c745
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['Aayushi Johari']
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2019-06-06 08:24:16.283000+00:00
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['Big Data', 'Log Monitoring', 'Splunk Administration', 'Log Analysis', 'Splunk']
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Title Splunk Architecture — Forwarder Indexer Search Head TutorialContent demand Splunk Certified professional seen tremendous rise mainly due everincreasing machinegenerated log data almost every advanced technology shaping world today want implement Splunk infrastructure important know Splunk work internally written article help understand Splunk architecture tell different Splunk component interact one another talk different Splunk component function let mention various stage data pipeline component fall Different Stages Data Pipeline primarily 3 different stage Splunk Data Input stage Data Storage stage Data Searching stage Data Input Stage stage Splunk software consumes raw data stream source break 64K block annotates block metadata key metadata key include hostname source source type data key also include value used internally character encoding data stream value control processing data indexing stage index event stored Data Storage Stage Data storage consists two phase Parsing Indexing Parsing phase Splunk software examines analyzes transforms data extract relevant information also known event processing phase Splunk software break data stream individual event parsing phase many subphases Breaking stream data individual line b Identifying parsing setting timestamps c Annotating individual event metadata copied sourcewide key Transforming event data metadata according regex transform rule 2 Indexing phase Splunk software writes parsed event index disk writes compressed raw data corresponding index file benefit Indexing data easily accessed searching Data Searching Stage stage control user access view us indexed data part search function Splunk software store usercreated knowledge object report event type dashboard alert field extraction search function also manages search process Splunk Components look image understand different data pipeline stage various Splunk component fall 3 main component Splunk Splunk Forwarder used data forwarding Splunk Indexer used Parsing Indexing data Search Head GUI used searching analyzing reporting Splunk Forwarder Splunk Forwarder component use collecting log Suppose want collect log remote machine accomplish using Splunk’s remote forwarders independent main Splunk instance fact install several forwarders multiple machine forward log data Splunk Indexer processing storage want realtime analysis data Splunk forwarders used purpose configure forwarders send data Splunk indexer realtime install multiple system collect data simultaneously different machine real time Compared traditional monitoring tool Splunk Forwarder consumes le CPU 1–2 scale ten thousand remote system easily collect terabyte data minimal impact performance let u understand different type Splunk forwarders Universal Forwarder opt universal forwarder want forward raw data collected source simple component performs minimal processing incoming data stream forwarding indexer Data transfer major problem almost every tool market Since minimal processing data forwarded lot unnecessary data also forwarded indexer resulting performance overhead go trouble transferring data Indexers filter relevant data Wouldn’t better send relevant data Indexer save bandwidth time money solved using Heavy forwarders explained Heavy Forwarder use Heavy forwarder eliminate half problem one level data processing happens source forwarding data indexer Heavy Forwarder typically parsing indexing source also intelligently route data Indexer saving bandwidth storage space heavy forwarder par data indexer need handle indexing segment Splunk Indexer indexer Splunk component use indexing storing data coming forwarder Splunk instance transforms incoming data event store index performing search operation efficiently receiving data Universal forwarder indexer first parse data index Parsing data done eliminate unwanted data receiving data Heavy forwarder indexer index data Splunk instance index data creates number file file contain one Raw data compressed form Indexes point raw data index file also referred tsidx file plus metadata file file reside set directory called bucket Let tell Indexing work Splunk process incoming data enable fast search analysis enhances data various way like Separating data stream individual searchable event Creating identifying timestamps Extracting field host source source type Performing userdefined action incoming data identifying custom field masking sensitive data writing new modified key applying breaking rule multiline event filtering unwanted event routing event specified index server indexing process also known event processing Another benefit Splunk Indexer data replication need worry loss data Splunk keep multiple copy indexed data process called Index replication Indexer clustering achieved help Indexer cluster group indexer configured replicate other’s’ data Splunk Search Head Search head component used interacting Splunk provides graphical user interface user performing various operation search query data stored Indexer entering search word get expected result install search head separate server Splunk component server separate installation file search head enable splunkweb service Splunk server enable Splunk instance function search head search peer search head performs searching indexing referred dedicated search head Whereas search peer performs indexing responds search request search head Splunk instance search head send search request group indexer search peer perform actual search index search head merges result sends back user faster technique search data called distributed searching Search head cluster group search head coordinate search activity cluster coordinate activity search head allocates job based current load ensures search head access set knowledge object Advanced Splunk Architecture Deployment Server Management Console Host Look image understand end end working Splunk image show remote Forwarders send data Indexers Based data present Indexer use Search Head perform function like searching analyzing visualizing creating knowledge object Operational Intelligence Management Console Host act centralized configuration manager responsible distributing configuration app update content update Deployment Clients Deployment Clients Forwarders Indexers Search Heads Splunk Architecture understood concept explained easily relate Splunk architecture Look image get consolidated view various component involved process functionality receive data various network port running script automating data forwarding automating data forwarding monitor file coming detect change real time coming detect change real time forwarder capability intelligently route data clone data load balancing data reach indexer Cloning done create multiple copy event right data source whereas load balancing done even one instance fails data forwarded another instance hosting indexer capability intelligently data data data reach indexer Cloning done create multiple copy event right data source whereas load balancing done even one instance fails data forwarded another instance hosting indexer mentioned earlier deployment server used managing entire deployment configuration policy used managing entire deployment configuration policy data received stored Indexer indexer broken different logical data store data store set permission control user view access us indexer broken different logical data store data store set permission control user data search indexed data also distribute search search peer result merged sent back Search head search peer result merged sent back Search head Apart also scheduled search create alert triggered certain condition match saved search create triggered certain condition match saved search use saved search create report make analysis using Visualization dashboard make using Finally use Knowledge object enrich existing unstructured data enrich existing unstructured data Search head Knowledge object accessed Splunk CLI Splunk Web Interface communication happens REST API connection hope enjoyed reading article Splunk Architecture talk various Splunk component working wish check article market’s trending technology like Artificial Intelligence DevOps Ethical Hacking refer Edureka’s official site look article series explain various aspect SplunkTags Big Data Log Monitoring Splunk Administration Log Analysis Splunk
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4,668 |
Pipeline Politics: The Appalling Silence of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam
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It has been said that where you stand often depends on where you sit. Such is the case with the term “old plantation.”
People who want to distort the cruel history of slavery in America use the term “old plantation” to conjure false and comforting (to some) memories of happy slaves and their benevolent owners. This historic lie was perpetrated by historians in the early 20th century and beyond with the active support of Hollywood. The narrative came to be known in film and literature as the “plantation tradition,” meaning “works that look back nostalgically to the times before the Civil War, before the ‘Lost Cause’ of the Southern Confederacy was lost, as a time when an idealized, well-ordered agrarian world and its people held certain values in common.”
For African Americans and all honest students of history, however, “old plantation” means something quite different. As Paul Robeson, the great actor, singer and human rights activist put it simply when referring to Hollywood’s tradition of depicting the African American slave as “solving his problem by singing his way to glory”, the “old plantation tradition” is “very offensive to my people.”
All of which makes this little known fact about two members of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s inner circle a little more than curious: In 2010, Clark Mercer, who is now Northam’s Chief of Staff, created an oyster business on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and called it “Old Plantation Oyster Company, LLC.” Mercer’s business partner in Old Plantation was his childhood friend, a then largely unknown 29 year old aide to then State Senator Northam. The aide’s name was Matt Strickler, and the headquarters for their new business was the “country estate” of Strickler’s grandparents. Strickler now serves as Northam’s Secretary of Natural Resources, which puts him at the center of the fierce battle over two proposed massive fracked methane gas projects, the Atlantic Coast and Mountain Valley Pipelines. More on that below.
When Mercer and Strickler created their new “Old Plantation” company, they also started a website, where they boasted that “we think you’ll love our Old Plantations.” And they had big plans, looking to grow 150,000 oysters by the spring of 2011. They even tested their “Old Plantations” at a June 2011 Democratic fundraising dinner.
But all did not go well for the “Old Plantations,” and by 2013, Mercer and Strickler failed to pay their annual LLC registration fee and the State Corporation Commission revoked their privilege to do business. But the Old Plantation Oyster Company website stayed active until as late as June 2018, when this writer started tweeting questions about the “Old Plantation.”
Mercer and Strickler were born and raised in Virginia and each have undergraduate and graduate degrees from fine universities, so they can be presumed to be aware of the history and meaning of the term “Old Plantation.” There is no reason to believe that they are adherents of the offensive “plantation tradition.” More likely, they are just plain tone deaf. In any case, the pair clearly were willing to seek profit from the fact that others might hold an idealized version of history and thus would love their “old plantations.”
But elsewhere in Virginia, plantation politics is alive and well, shining a bright and distasteful light on the pipeline battle over which Matt Strickler and Governor Northam are presiding. And the epicenter is Buckingham County, the geographic heart of the Commonwealth .
Variety Shade Landowners of Virginia is an organization of descendants of a slave owning family in Buckingham County who still own 1,400 acres from the former tobacco plantation of the same name. Unlike, perhaps, others, the Variety Shade descendants clearly are enamored of the false “plantation tradition” mythology. Indeed, their website notes the demise of their ancestors’ slave plantation and laments that “now nothing remains of this lovely plantation except in the memory of those who loved and admired it.”
It is doubtful that the slaves who worked the Variety Shades plantation either “loved” or “admired” the plantation. What we do know is that the freedman who worked on that plantation founded what is now an historic 85% African American community named Union Hill.
Several years ago, Dominion Energy bought 68 acres in Union Hill from the descendants of the Variety Shade plantation owners, at ten times the market rate. Dominion bought the land in order to build a massive compressor station to power the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.
Never mind that the compressor station would create respiratory and other health problems for the many elderly residents of Union Hill.
Never mind that two historic African American churches are within one mile of the proposed compressor station, an area known as the “incineration zone,” in case of an explosion.
And never mind that Governor Northam’s own 15-member Advisory Council on Environmental Justice wrote Northam on August 16, pleading with him to do something to save Union Hill. Their recommendations were unequivocal:
The Governor’s Advisory Council on Environmental Justice (ACEJ) recommends that the 401 Clean Water Act certifications for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) and the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) be rescinded immediately. Likewise ACEJ recommends that the Governor direct DEQ to suspend the permitting decision for the air permit for the Buckingham compressor station pending further review of the station’s impacts on the heath and the lives of those living in close proximity. We also recommend that a review of permitting policies and procedures take place and that the governor direct the Air Pollution Control Board, DEQ, and DMME to stay all further permits for ACP and MVP to ensure that predominately poor, indigenous, brown and/or black communities do not bear an unequal burden of environmental pollutants and life altering disruptions. These actions would ensure that environmental justice has meaningful influence in all current and future energy projects.
In making these recommendations, the Advisory Council was acting within its mandate, which was “to provide advice and recommendations to the Governor to improve equity in decision-making and improve public health in marginalized communities, among other goals listed in Executive Order 73 (EO 73) from October of 2017.” The Council’s letter on Union Hill and the pipelines was “our first formal set of environmental justice concerns to the Executive Branch since our inauguration.”
You would expect a Democratic governor, elected in 2017 with overwhelming African American support, to respond positively to such recommendations from his own Environmental Justice appointees.
You would be wrong.
Instead, Northam’s spokesperson dismissed the August 16 letter as a “draft”that had not been fully approved by the Council. When the Council met 12 days later and unanimously reaffirmed that their August 16 letter was indeed final, Northam’s office dodged again, telling the Washington Post that the Governor would “review the letter carefully and respond to the Council.”
Dominion Energy, on the other hand, made it crystal clear where it stood: “We strongly disagree with the Advisory Council’s recommendations.”
That all leaves Ralph Northam with a simple choice: which side is he on? Does he stand with his own appointees — and with Union Hill? Or does he stand with Dominion Energy.
Northam’s refusal to discuss Union Hill is nothing new. In fact, he has been stone cold silent on Union Hill for four years, despite the fact that the story has been told again and again in protest, in song, on film, on the front page of the Washington Post, and here, here, here, here and here, among many other places.
In marked contrast to his silence on Union Hill, in June, Northam directly addressed Dominion’s plans to build a different compressor station in Maryland (for a different project) that would be visible from George Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation. Northam could have mentioned the fact that that compressor station was to be situated in Accokeek, Maryland a predominantly African American community. But he did not. Instead, he said, “If it’s going to impact their view, if it’s going to contribute to environmental detriment, then it’s something I’m concerned about.”
In any event, Northam’s statement was a game changer. One week later, Dominion surrendered and said it would move the compressor station so as not to interfere with the view from Mount Vernon.
But while Mount Vernon is now safe, Union Hill remains on the chopping block. Northam previously ignored pleas from the Virginia State Chapter of the NAACP, which in July called for a halt to all construction on both the Atlantic Coast and Mountain Valley Pipelines and drew particular attention to the environmental racism inherent in Dominion’s planned compressor station in Union Hill.
He even stayed silent when the U.S. Justice Department came to Union Hill to investigate.
Now Northam leaves his own Advisory Council twisting in the wind.
Meanwhile, something else caught Northam’s attention on August 16 — the same day that the Advisory Council on Environmental Justice issued its plea to stop the environmental racism at Union Hill and to halt construction of the Atlantic Coast and Mountain Valley Pipelines.
That same day, another executive level council was formed to deal with a much different issue: oysters.
Yes, Oysters.
On August 16, Northam announced the formation of an “Aquaculture Working Group” “to develop consensus-based recommendations to promote the sustainable growth of Virginia’s clam and oyster aquaculture industries.” Northam even attended the working group’s first meeting — also on August 16 — pledging that “my Administration is committed to working with all stakeholders to finally resolve user conflicts.”
And who did Northam appoint to lead his new Oyster Council? Secretary of Natural Resources Matt Strickler.
Yes, that Matt Strickler.
Apparently Strickler’s experience selling the “Old Plantations” came in handy.
In April 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote a letter from his jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama that would become a bedrock document of the Civil Rights Movement. Speaking to leaders who, despite good intentions, failed to speak up against injustice, King famously wrote: “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”
Ralph Northam seems to have found the time and motivation to speak out on everything from the view from Mount Vernon to his views on oysters. Meanwhile, two of those closest to Northam, his Chief of Staff Clark Mercer and his Secretary of Natural Resources Matt Strickler, have demonstrated not only tone deafness but little inclination to do anything for the people of Union Hill and many other front-line communities.
Thousands of people stand to have their lives, water, land and future devasted for generations to come by these proposed pipelines. All for two massive and unnecessary fracked gas pipelines that together represent more than $10 billion in new investment in fossil fuel in Virginia.
These pipelines come at exactly the wrong time. when climate change continues apace and is becoming an existential threat to our entire planet. Also to be harmed by these pipelines: Northam’s beloved Chesapeake Bay, including, by the way, the oysters.
Northam’s silence is more than just embarrassing.
His failure to listen to his own appointees is more than just insulting.
One might say his silence is appalling.
It needs to stop now.
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https://jonsokolow.medium.com/pipeline-politics-the-appalling-silence-of-virginia-governor-ralph-northam-5a5d0cef240
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['Jonathan Sokolow']
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2018-09-04 11:25:03.723000+00:00
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['Politics', 'Politics And Protest', 'Environment', 'Virginia', 'Natural Gas']
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Title Pipeline Politics Appalling Silence Virginia Governor Ralph NorthamContent said stand often depends sit case term “old plantation” People want distort cruel history slavery America use term “old plantation” conjure false comforting memory happy slave benevolent owner historic lie perpetrated historian early 20th century beyond active support Hollywood narrative came known film literature “plantation tradition” meaning “works look back nostalgically time Civil War ‘Lost Cause’ Southern Confederacy lost time idealized wellordered agrarian world people held certain value common” African Americans honest student history however “old plantation” mean something quite different Paul Robeson great actor singer human right activist put simply referring Hollywood’s tradition depicting African American slave “solving problem singing way glory” “old plantation tradition” “very offensive people” make little known fact two member Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s inner circle little curious 2010 Clark Mercer Northam’s Chief Staff created oyster business Eastern Shore Virginia called “Old Plantation Oyster Company LLC” Mercer’s business partner Old Plantation childhood friend largely unknown 29 year old aide State Senator Northam aide’s name Matt Strickler headquarters new business “country estate” Strickler’s grandparent Strickler serf Northam’s Secretary Natural Resources put center fierce battle two proposed massive fracked methane gas project Atlantic Coast Mountain Valley Pipelines Mercer Strickler created new “Old Plantation” company also started website boasted “we think you’ll love Old Plantations” big plan looking grow 150000 oyster spring 2011 even tested “Old Plantations” June 2011 Democratic fundraising dinner go well “Old Plantations” 2013 Mercer Strickler failed pay annual LLC registration fee State Corporation Commission revoked privilege business Old Plantation Oyster Company website stayed active late June 2018 writer started tweeting question “Old Plantation” Mercer Strickler born raised Virginia undergraduate graduate degree fine university presumed aware history meaning term “Old Plantation” reason believe adherent offensive “plantation tradition” likely plain tone deaf case pair clearly willing seek profit fact others might hold idealized version history thus would love “old plantations” elsewhere Virginia plantation politics alive well shining bright distasteful light pipeline battle Matt Strickler Governor Northam presiding epicenter Buckingham County geographic heart Commonwealth Variety Shade Landowners Virginia organization descendant slave owning family Buckingham County still 1400 acre former tobacco plantation name Unlike perhaps others Variety Shade descendant clearly enamored false “plantation tradition” mythology Indeed website note demise ancestors’ slave plantation lament “now nothing remains lovely plantation except memory loved admired it” doubtful slave worked Variety Shades plantation either “loved” “admired” plantation know freedman worked plantation founded historic 85 African American community named Union Hill Several year ago Dominion Energy bought 68 acre Union Hill descendant Variety Shade plantation owner ten time market rate Dominion bought land order build massive compressor station power Atlantic Coast Pipeline Never mind compressor station would create respiratory health problem many elderly resident Union Hill Never mind two historic African American church within one mile proposed compressor station area known “incineration zone” case explosion never mind Governor Northam’s 15member Advisory Council Environmental Justice wrote Northam August 16 pleading something save Union Hill recommendation unequivocal Governor’s Advisory Council Environmental Justice ACEJ recommends 401 Clean Water Act certification Atlantic Coast Pipeline ACP Mountain Valley Pipeline MVP rescinded immediately Likewise ACEJ recommends Governor direct DEQ suspend permitting decision air permit Buckingham compressor station pending review station’s impact heath life living close proximity also recommend review permitting policy procedure take place governor direct Air Pollution Control Board DEQ DMME stay permit ACP MVP ensure predominately poor indigenous brown andor black community bear unequal burden environmental pollutant life altering disruption action would ensure environmental justice meaningful influence current future energy project making recommendation Advisory Council acting within mandate “to provide advice recommendation Governor improve equity decisionmaking improve public health marginalized community among goal listed Executive Order 73 EO 73 October 2017” Council’s letter Union Hill pipeline “our first formal set environmental justice concern Executive Branch since inauguration” would expect Democratic governor elected 2017 overwhelming African American support respond positively recommendation Environmental Justice appointee would wrong Instead Northam’s spokesperson dismissed August 16 letter “draft”that fully approved Council Council met 12 day later unanimously reaffirmed August 16 letter indeed final Northam’s office dodged telling Washington Post Governor would “review letter carefully respond Council” Dominion Energy hand made crystal clear stood “We strongly disagree Advisory Council’s recommendations” leaf Ralph Northam simple choice side stand appointee — Union Hill stand Dominion Energy Northam’s refusal discus Union Hill nothing new fact stone cold silent Union Hill four year despite fact story told protest song film front page Washington Post among many place marked contrast silence Union Hill June Northam directly addressed Dominion’s plan build different compressor station Maryland different project would visible George Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation Northam could mentioned fact compressor station situated Accokeek Maryland predominantly African American community Instead said “If it’s going impact view it’s going contribute environmental detriment it’s something I’m concerned about” event Northam’s statement game changer One week later Dominion surrendered said would move compressor station interfere view Mount Vernon Mount Vernon safe Union Hill remains chopping block Northam previously ignored plea Virginia State Chapter NAACP July called halt construction Atlantic Coast Mountain Valley Pipelines drew particular attention environmental racism inherent Dominion’s planned compressor station Union Hill even stayed silent US Justice Department came Union Hill investigate Northam leaf Advisory Council twisting wind Meanwhile something else caught Northam’s attention August 16 — day Advisory Council Environmental Justice issued plea stop environmental racism Union Hill halt construction Atlantic Coast Mountain Valley Pipelines day another executive level council formed deal much different issue oyster Yes Oysters August 16 Northam announced formation “Aquaculture Working Group” “to develop consensusbased recommendation promote sustainable growth Virginia’s clam oyster aquaculture industries” Northam even attended working group’s first meeting — also August 16 — pledging “my Administration committed working stakeholder finally resolve user conflicts” Northam appoint lead new Oyster Council Secretary Natural Resources Matt Strickler Yes Matt Strickler Apparently Strickler’s experience selling “Old Plantations” came handy April 1963 Dr Martin Luther King Jr wrote letter jail cell Birmingham Alabama would become bedrock document Civil Rights Movement Speaking leader despite good intention failed speak injustice King famously wrote “We repent generation merely hateful word action bad people appalling silence good people” Ralph Northam seems found time motivation speak everything view Mount Vernon view oyster Meanwhile two closest Northam Chief Staff Clark Mercer Secretary Natural Resources Matt Strickler demonstrated tone deafness little inclination anything people Union Hill many frontline community Thousands people stand life water land future devasted generation come proposed pipeline two massive unnecessary fracked gas pipeline together represent 10 billion new investment fossil fuel Virginia pipeline come exactly wrong time climate change continues apace becoming existential threat entire planet Also harmed pipeline Northam’s beloved Chesapeake Bay including way oyster Northam’s silence embarrassing failure listen appointee insulting One might say silence appalling need stop nowTags Politics Politics Protest Environment Virginia Natural Gas
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4,669 |
Linear Regression…Huh?
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If you're new to Artificial Intelligence, chances are you’ve heard the term “Linear Regression” being thrown around. Jeez..could they have picked a more intimidating name? Anyway, I’m here to tell you that it is in no way as complex as the name makes it out to be. Simply put, it is the equation for the slope of a line…and then some.
First of all, what is Linear Regression? This concept simply aims to answer if a line-of-best-fit can be drawn in a random amount of data to determine if a linear relation lies within. Essentially does the x(independent) variable have a direct impact on the y(dependent) variable.
When I was in 9th grade, the math course I took essentially revolved around the formula that forms the basis for much high mathematics. This legendary equation:
Where “b” is the y-intercept and “m” represents the slope of the line. We aim to find a quantitative relation between “x” and “y”.
The only major difference between this formula and the one used for linear regression is the symbol epsilon(ε). Within the context of Artificial Intelligence, this symbol is used to represent the verticle distance of any data point to the line-of-best-fit. The point of these programs is to reduce this value as much as possible over all the points so that you end up with the most accurate value possible.
Now that you’ve hopefully gotten your head around this concept, let’s see what this looks like in code. First thing first, ✨import statements✨. Let’s bring in all the libraries we will need:
Since we’ve imported everything that we will need, let's proceed to store the data within our code. Although you may have a .csv file containing your data, I just made up some data for the sake of this example and stored it in an array:
Now, we have the data (Woohoo 🎉), but we need to reshape it in a way that can be used for this graph. But what is shaping data anyway?
Here we see a block of data that would be of shape(3, 2). From this diagram we can that our block is 3x2 blocks of data. However, to make it a line we can reshape the data into (6,1). We still have the same data, but we’ve simply changed the way it is stored. So back to our example:
HOLD ON, I know the -1 doesn’t make sense…jeez. But the “-1” is used as a placeholder when we do not explicitly know how “long” our data is and I want the computer to figure it out (Since the next parameter is 1, and I have 9 pieces of data, it does not take a whole lotta processing power to figure out that the -1 is actually a 9 but whatever).
Next, I’ll make an object of the LinearRegression class and fit my data. This will essentially train my model to figure out the equation of my best fit line:
The final few steps are to use the prediction function to make a “y” value for each “x” value that I have and plot it. Then I will plot the predicted values on the plotted graph.
After all this setup, you should get a result similar to this:
BOOM! A linear regression graph! Congrats on your completing your first steps to becoming an A.I. developer. You have just learned the bare essentials of linear regression 🧑💻.
However, something is still missing…how exactly does the computer take into account the verticle distance for each point and make sure the line-of-best-fit is as accurate as possible? In future articles, I will cover the Least Square Method to first find the optimum line-of-best-fit, the R Squared Method to check how well the line fits with the given set of data, and how to optimize this line using Gradient Descent. All coming soon…hopefully.
Thanks for reading this article. My name is Rohan, I am a 16-year-old high school student learning about disruptive technologies and I’ve chosen to start with A.I. To reach me, contact me with my email or through my LinkedIn. I’d be more than glad to provide any insight or to learn insights that you may have. Additionally, I would appreciate it if you could join my monthly newsletter. Until the next article 👋!
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https://medium.com/swlh/linear-regression-huh-b3489f13a75a
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['Rohan Jagtap']
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2020-12-19 09:59:36.658000+00:00
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['Linear Regression', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Technology']
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Title Linear Regression…HuhContent youre new Artificial Intelligence chance you’ve heard term “Linear Regression” thrown around Jeezcould picked intimidating name Anyway I’m tell way complex name make Simply put equation slope line…and First Linear Regression concept simply aim answer lineofbestfit drawn random amount data determine linear relation lie within Essentially xindependent variable direct impact ydependent variable 9th grade math course took essentially revolved around formula form basis much high mathematics legendary equation “b” yintercept “m” represents slope line aim find quantitative relation “x” “y” major difference formula one used linear regression symbol epsilonε Within context Artificial Intelligence symbol used represent verticle distance data point lineofbestfit point program reduce value much possible point end accurate value possible you’ve hopefully gotten head around concept let’s see look like code First thing first ✨import statements✨ Let’s bring library need Since we’ve imported everything need let proceed store data within code Although may csv file containing data made data sake example stored array data Woohoo 🎉 need reshape way used graph shaping data anyway see block data would shape3 2 diagram block 3x2 block data However make line reshape data 61 still data we’ve simply changed way stored back example HOLD know 1 doesn’t make sense…jeez “1” used placeholder explicitly know “long” data want computer figure Since next parameter 1 9 piece data take whole lotta processing power figure 1 actually 9 whatever Next I’ll make object LinearRegression class fit data essentially train model figure equation best fit line final step use prediction function make “y” value “x” value plot plot predicted value plotted graph setup get result similar BOOM linear regression graph Congrats completing first step becoming AI developer learned bare essential linear regression 🧑💻 However something still missing…how exactly computer take account verticle distance point make sure lineofbestfit accurate possible future article cover Least Square Method first find optimum lineofbestfit R Squared Method check well line fit given set data optimize line using Gradient Descent coming soon…hopefully Thanks reading article name Rohan 16yearold high school student learning disruptive technology I’ve chosen start AI reach contact email LinkedIn I’d glad provide insight learn insight may Additionally would appreciate could join monthly newsletter next article 👋Tags Linear Regression Artificial Intelligence Technology
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4,670 |
Shaping the Future of Cloud Native Computing Foundation
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I am happy to announce some great news for Intuit and our participation in the technology community at large. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the community behind Kubernetes and other related open source technologies, held an election for its Technical Oversight Committee, and I have been elected as the representative for the end-user community. With a seat on this committee, I can help shape the future of the CNCF projects and represent the end-user community that consumes these technologies. It is important to Intuit that we change the way we develop and run software as we transition to consuming the public cloud away from our private data centers. While Intuit relies heavily on AWS to provide our public cloud infrastructure, the cloud native community drives vendor-neutral innovation and standards that make possible the very best solutions and developer experiences.
Intuit has come a long way in leveraging cloud native technologies. Just in the last year alone, we have operationalized more than a hundred Kubernetes clusters that run more than 250 services in production and pre-production, advancing Intuit’s mission of powering prosperity around the world. Along the way, we have solved many issues that provide value to anyone who is deploying Kubernetes and related technologies to increase developer productivity. To this end, Intuit is committed to contributing back to the open source in the CNCF community. Argoproj developed by the Intuit Developer Platform group is a widely used workflow engine and a continuous deployment Kubernetes tool. I hope that these will become official CNCF projects in the near future.
At Intuit, Kubernetes has served us well so far with an extensible base technology for developing, deploying and operating software at scale. Observability, monitoring, service mesh, tracing and many other areas of the cloud native landscape are well-solved by the community and the CNCF projects. Going forward, I am particularly interested in the cloud native serverless solutions that will allow developers to create and deploy serverless functions (there are many good use cases at Intuit) with the same amazing cloud native developer experience, and I hope to bring the firsthand experiences from Intuit to bear in shaping discussions at the TOC.
I will be attending a twice-monthly TOC committee meeting that is open to anyone in the community. I will attend the Linux Foundation Open Source Leadership Summit in March where will have our first in-person gathering of the TOC. And I will be attending KubeCon in Barcelona in May (I need to brush up on my Spanish)!
The TOC consists of 9 members responsible for leading the technical direction of the CNCF community. Here is the full roster of the TOC. I would like to congratulate the 6 new members that were just elected.
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https://medium.com/intuit-engineering/jeff-brewer-intuit-elected-to-cncf-technical-oversight-committee-aea2866f07af
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['Jeff Brewer']
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2019-02-06 20:29:00.054000+00:00
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['Cloud Native', 'Cloud Computing', 'Infrastructure', 'Cloud', 'Digital Transformation']
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Title Shaping Future Cloud Native Computing FoundationContent happy announce great news Intuit participation technology community large Cloud Native Computing Foundation community behind Kubernetes related open source technology held election Technical Oversight Committee elected representative enduser community seat committee help shape future CNCF project represent enduser community consumes technology important Intuit change way develop run software transition consuming public cloud away private data center Intuit relies heavily AWS provide public cloud infrastructure cloud native community drive vendorneutral innovation standard make possible best solution developer experience Intuit come long way leveraging cloud native technology last year alone operationalized hundred Kubernetes cluster run 250 service production preproduction advancing Intuit’s mission powering prosperity around world Along way solved many issue provide value anyone deploying Kubernetes related technology increase developer productivity end Intuit committed contributing back open source CNCF community Argoproj developed Intuit Developer Platform group widely used workflow engine continuous deployment Kubernetes tool hope become official CNCF project near future Intuit Kubernetes served u well far extensible base technology developing deploying operating software scale Observability monitoring service mesh tracing many area cloud native landscape wellsolved community CNCF project Going forward particularly interested cloud native serverless solution allow developer create deploy serverless function many good use case Intuit amazing cloud native developer experience hope bring firsthand experience Intuit bear shaping discussion TOC attending twicemonthly TOC committee meeting open anyone community attend Linux Foundation Open Source Leadership Summit March first inperson gathering TOC attending KubeCon Barcelona May need brush Spanish TOC consists 9 member responsible leading technical direction CNCF community full roster TOC would like congratulate 6 new member electedTags Cloud Native Cloud Computing Infrastructure Cloud Digital Transformation
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4,671 |
80/20 — Six. A winning campaign strategy
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Many different strategies can stand behind an excellent advertising campaign. Today, I’m going to talk about one that I’ve found to be particularly effective in the online world.
Before I dive in, allow me to state two basic assumptions.
Assumption #1: Always on
Your advertising campaign is always-on. You are always, or almost always, spending money to promote your message. Even if it’s just a minimal investment behind paid search advertising, or promoted social media posts.
Why? Because this gives you the chance to leverage ongoing learning and data to optimize your campaign. If you’re looking to boost your KPIs in a crowded media space, you need to be in-market and in front of the right people at the right time, which requires constant experimentation and adaptation.
Assumption #2: Agility
Your team is agile enough to react to the feedback from your advertising in a timely manner. If you think your organization is too large to be nimble? Re-consider your team structure. Being able to ditch what doesn’t work and improve on what does is key to success.
80/20
Now for the 80/20 strategy. It’s a budget allocation framework to specific channels: 80% to the first and 20% to the second. Depending on your product and our target market, you should be able to easily determine which channel mix will tell your story more effectively to your target audience:
Sure thing budget. Say you have determined that being on Google’s SERP (search engine results page) and on Facebook’s timeline are good places to find people who are interested in your product or service, based on past experience or your audience profile. You allocate about 80% of your media budget to those channels. Experiments budget. In any campaign you allocate a certain budget towards experimentation. This might be towards new channels, creative formats, or ways. Here I’m suggesting a 20% budget allocation.
Now, how often should you experiment?
Six
That’s where the six comes in. I recommend a six-week cycle of experimentation. With digital media, specifically digital media, six weeks is a good timeframe to capture feedback and incorporate changes.
The fine print
This framework comes with a few caveats:
Your media mix may not allow for an 80–20 split. Some channels are more expensive than others, so you may have to reserve a small chunk of the pie for experimentation.
Six weeks may not be enough time to collect data — if your geographic reach is small you may not be able to generate critical mass in six weeks, and need to experiment for longer (although if you’re testing online advertising for more than 10 weeks, it’s not really a test any longer).
Your internal business reporting cycle may conflict with this model.
The critical takeaways are:
Use the bulk of your advertising dollars for what you know are the sure things Always use a small percentage to try new tactics Repeatedly test and refine the new tactics, moving them into the ‘sure thing’ bucket as you see success
How do you manage your advertising campaigns?
Do you set aside budget dollars for experimentation and improvement?
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https://medium.com/empathyinc/80-20-six-27c0d65d15c3
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['Mo Dezyanian']
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2018-10-22 13:46:17.611000+00:00
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['Digital Marketing', 'Marketing', 'Advertising']
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Title 8020 — Six winning campaign strategyContent Many different strategy stand behind excellent advertising campaign Today I’m going talk one I’ve found particularly effective online world dive allow state two basic assumption Assumption 1 Always advertising campaign alwayson always almost always spending money promote message Even it’s minimal investment behind paid search advertising promoted social medium post give chance leverage ongoing learning data optimize campaign you’re looking boost KPIs crowded medium space need inmarket front right people right time requires constant experimentation adaptation Assumption 2 Agility team agile enough react feedback advertising timely manner think organization large nimble Reconsider team structure able ditch doesn’t work improve key success 8020 8020 strategy It’s budget allocation framework specific channel 80 first 20 second Depending product target market able easily determine channel mix tell story effectively target audience Sure thing budget Say determined Google’s SERP search engine result page Facebook’s timeline good place find people interested product service based past experience audience profile allocate 80 medium budget channel Experiments budget campaign allocate certain budget towards experimentation might towards new channel creative format way I’m suggesting 20 budget allocation often experiment Six That’s six come recommend sixweek cycle experimentation digital medium specifically digital medium six week good timeframe capture feedback incorporate change fine print framework come caveat medium mix may allow 80–20 split channel expensive others may reserve small chunk pie experimentation Six week may enough time collect data — geographic reach small may able generate critical mass six week need experiment longer although you’re testing online advertising 10 week it’s really test longer internal business reporting cycle may conflict model critical takeaway Use bulk advertising dollar know sure thing Always use small percentage try new tactic Repeatedly test refine new tactic moving ‘sure thing’ bucket see success manage advertising campaign set aside budget dollar experimentation improvementTags Digital Marketing Marketing Advertising
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4,672 |
The Revolution of the Soul
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Perhaps the first known depiction of the crucifixion — probably from around the year 200 — is a blasphemous graffito that was scratched on a wall in Rome. It shows Jesus of Nazareth on the cross with a donkey’s head, and a cartoonish figure praying beneath him. The inscription reads: “Alexamenos worships his god”. Alexamenos is the butt of a joke, or perhaps the victim of a deadly accusation.
Inverted Values
Christian values were an inversion of Roman values. Christian virtues included embracing poverty, altruism, and pacifism (“turning the other cheek”), these would have been absurd to the Romans. To be a good Roman was to understand the importance of authority, to be loyal to the state and the emperor, to strive for wealth and pay taxes to fuel the Roman war machine.
For the early church, there were no specially-built churches and certainly none of the riches that you’d find in western churches today. Christians were mostly made up of the poor and the marginalised: slaves, immigrants and the lowest classes of Roman citizens.
Some rich Romans, like Perpetua, converted to Christianity. Archeologists have found burial sites with Christian symbology. But the archaeological evidence is always going to be weighted to the rich, who owned property and therefore leave a bigger archaeological footprint. We can assume that most Christians were poor.
Despite their poverty, the history of early Christianity is replete with astonishing stories of selflessness. Christians gave what alms they could, and shared food and shelter.
In Roman society, where there were very little means of contraception or abortion, it was acceptable (though not encouraged) to “expose” unwanted newborn children — in effect, leaving them in the wild or in rubbish tips to be dismembered by wild animals.
Christians would collect exposed babies and raise them as their own as an act of altruism. To Christians, human life has a supreme dignity that only the choice to sin can tarnish. To Romans, life was cheap.
The atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, writing in the nineteenth century, described Christian ethics as “slave morality”. To Nietzsche, there was a successful revolution for the slaves and the poor. The resentment towards the ruling Roman classes, who followed the principles of a pagan “noble morality”, manifested itself in the moral system of Christianity which slowly transplanted paganism.
For Nietzsche, Christian morals were essentially “sour-grapes” made into a system of values. Where the Romans prized sensuousness and power, Christianity prized bodily-denial and pity. A religion that rose from below had inverted noble Roman values.
St Paul is said to have been struck blind on his way to persecute Christians in Damascus. When he regained his sight, he converted to Christianity himself. Painting: Conversion on the Road to Damascus by Michelangelo Caravaggio, 1601 (source: Wikipedia)
Saint Paul the Revolutionary
Early Christianity was initially a cult only open to Jews. It was a new and revolutionary understanding of the providence of Yahweh, the one and only God of the Israelites. Christians claimed that a working-class preacher from Galilee, a backwater province in Roman-conquered Judea, was the Jewish messiah — “anointed one” — prophesised to bring independence to the Jewish people and rule by the authority of God.
This was a controversial and deadly claim to make. Jesus himself had been executed for sedition in the most humiliating way the Romans had at their disposal — crucifixion. How could a dead man — a dead criminal — be the savior of the Jewish people?
One of the Jews who had converted to Christianity was well-heeled and had the privilege — rare among his people— of being a Roman citizen. Paul (formerly Saul) of Tarsus took the revolution a step further.
Saint Paul was formerly a persecutor of Christians but claimed to have converted when he saw a vision of Christ, who commanded him to spread Christianity.
Paul asserted that anybody in the world could be a Christian, not just Jews. Jesus Christ was not just the savior of Jews, Paul stated, but the savior of everybody in the world that believed in His message.
This doesn’t seem revolutionary now, but at the time it was astonishing. Saint Paul, as we now know him, had the idea that people were the same. No matter how rich you were, where you were from or what culture you were a part of, you were the same in the eyes of God as everyone else.
In an ancient world obsessed with particularities and social hierarchies, Saint Paul evoked not only generality but the universal.
This radical leap of reason reveals the philosophical heritage of Christianity, which originates with the ancient Greeks. While more materialist Greek philosophies like Epicureanism and Stoicism were popular among the Romans at the time of St Paul, the Christians took inspiration from Platonism.
Plato was a follower of Socrates, and both philosophers believed in the idea that a soul within us would survive our physical death. The soul (anima in Greek) was not a new idea, there is evidence of belief in the soul dating back to ancient Egypt, and likely to have been pervasive in prehistoric times.
But the immortality of the human soul was by no means as common an idea in the ancient world as it is now. Christianity absorbed the idea of the eternally living soul from the Hellenistic (Greek-speaking) world from which it emerged.
There’s no explicit evidence that Platonism inspired Jesus himself or the earliest Christians, but Platonic ideas were pervasive in the Roman Empire from Judea to Britain. Because of the conquests of Alexander the Great, first century B.C.E. Judaism was heavily influenced by Greek culture and customs. Historians refer to “Hellenistic Judaism” as the dominant spiritual and intellectual climate among Jews at the time.
Whether or not the soul lived on after death was a matter of debate between the Sadducee and Pharisee sects of Judaism. Jesus of Nazareth preached that the soul would survive death and that those who followed him would live on in an eternal “Kingdom of God”.
It was the idea of the soul, unconstrained by material things, that gave Saint Paul the notion that all people are the same. Our particularities such as our status and our appearance, health, and origin are all material: just a messy vesture on a pure soul. He wrote:
“We now have this light shining in our hearts, but we ourselves are like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure. This makes it clear that our great power is from God, not from ourselves.”
In philosophical terms, this is known as dualism: the idea that the body (all your purely physical traits) and your mind/spirit/soul (your personality, your reason and judgement) are separate.
When we strip away all those things, when the soul is considered apart from the body, Saint Paul believed it will be the same as all other souls.
He wrote in a letter to the Galatian Christians:
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man,
there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
We would be judged by God not by status or wealth but the decisions we make. Even private thoughts could be judged by God. Morality was disembodied. Those who were good would live in an eternal paradise, and those who were bad would be tormented forever.
Socrates reasoned that the soul is alive before birth and would live on after death. Plato believed that the soul transmigrates into other bodies after death. Both believed in a perfect world of pure forms that was transcendent over (but existing parallel to) our imperfect world.
Saint Paul had a different idea. He wrote that a perfect world was coming to triumph over the corrupted, imperfect world and that those who did good works would be resurrected in that world. A person’s soul is not alive before the person but has the chance to be resurrected on a perfect Earth after the last judgement.
Saint Paul’s idea was the catalyst Christianity needed to survive. His vision of a universal religion open to anybody to convert to allowed Christianity the flexibility to grow fast throughout the well connected Roman Empire.
That idea, combined with the promise of a better life after death (on the condition of believing), and the warning that the Roman Empire would soon be shattered, meant that Christianity spread like wildfire, particularly among the poor and downtrodden. Christian churches sprang up all over the Mediterranean preaching the coming end of the world.
Official Religion
By the fourth century, the religion had converted many in the ranks of the Roman army. Constantine, a pagan emperor fighting a civil war, was supposedly inspired by a vision and a dream on the eve of the decisive Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312. The sun, he claimed, formed a cross shape and the words “in this sign you will conquer” came to him.
He ordered his soldiers to paint the Chi-Rho sign (the first two Greek letters of “Christ” superimposed) on their shields. With Constantine’s victory secured, Christianity had been validated. The Edict of Milan followed in 313, which promised that Christians would be protected from persecution by pagans.
Whether Constantine had a real vision, or that he simply took a pragmatic measure to motivate his Christian troops, it seemed that the religion had finally become tolerated as equal to other religions.
Constantine himself only converted to the religion close to the end of his life. Every Roman emperor after him (apart from Justinian, who lasted a mere two years on the throne) followed him into the faith. Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.
Roman civic buildings — basilicas — where many Christians had previously been sentenced to death, were converted into churches. Pagan holidays morphed over time into Christian holidays: Saturnalia, Rome’s sacred gift-giving festival held at the time of the winter solstice, became Christmas. Paganism slowly died out, transplanted by the monotheistic religion.
The global march of Christianity was underway. While the religion faltered in the Medieval period as Islam ascended, the economic and military rise of post-Renaissance Europe fuelled the religion’s growth. Missionaries spread the Gospel — meaning “good news” in Greek — to all corners of the world as European nations built their empires.
Christianity has simply become the norm, but in the process has lost the most radical aspects of early Christianity. The “official” status of Christian churches, with their vast reserves of property and money, sit uncomfortably with the revolutionary values espoused by Jesus of Nazareth and the early Christians.
The belief in the immortal human soul is common in our age but does not inspire the same levels of reckless self-sacrifice that the early Christians embraced, a recklessness that astonished and frightened Roman society.
Despite the officialdom of Christianity in the west, it remains the most persecuted religion in the world in real numbers. While Christianity is safely practiced in Europe and America, there are thousands of Christians in jail around the world. Those people are both condemned and comforted by their belief in their immortal soul.
Thank you for reading. I hope you learned something new.
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https://medium.com/the-sophist/the-revolution-of-the-soul-dac7ca5753d7
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['Steven Gambardella']
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2020-10-18 18:35:07.437000+00:00
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['Christianity', 'Philosophy', 'History', 'Self', 'Psychology']
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Title Revolution SoulContent Perhaps first known depiction crucifixion — probably around year 200 — blasphemous graffito scratched wall Rome show Jesus Nazareth cross donkey’s head cartoonish figure praying beneath inscription read “Alexamenos worship god” Alexamenos butt joke perhaps victim deadly accusation Inverted Values Christian value inversion Roman value Christian virtue included embracing poverty altruism pacifism “turning cheek” would absurd Romans good Roman understand importance authority loyal state emperor strive wealth pay tax fuel Roman war machine early church speciallybuilt church certainly none rich you’d find western church today Christians mostly made poor marginalised slave immigrant lowest class Roman citizen rich Romans like Perpetua converted Christianity Archeologists found burial site Christian symbology archaeological evidence always going weighted rich owned property therefore leave bigger archaeological footprint assume Christians poor Despite poverty history early Christianity replete astonishing story selflessness Christians gave alms could shared food shelter Roman society little mean contraception abortion acceptable though encouraged “expose” unwanted newborn child — effect leaving wild rubbish tip dismembered wild animal Christians would collect exposed baby raise act altruism Christians human life supreme dignity choice sin tarnish Romans life cheap atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche writing nineteenth century described Christian ethic “slave morality” Nietzsche successful revolution slave poor resentment towards ruling Roman class followed principle pagan “noble morality” manifested moral system Christianity slowly transplanted paganism Nietzsche Christian moral essentially “sourgrapes” made system value Romans prized sensuousness power Christianity prized bodilydenial pity religion rose inverted noble Roman value St Paul said struck blind way persecute Christians Damascus regained sight converted Christianity Painting Conversion Road Damascus Michelangelo Caravaggio 1601 source Wikipedia Saint Paul Revolutionary Early Christianity initially cult open Jews new revolutionary understanding providence Yahweh one God Israelites Christians claimed workingclass preacher Galilee backwater province Romanconquered Judea Jewish messiah — “anointed one” — prophesised bring independence Jewish people rule authority God controversial deadly claim make Jesus executed sedition humiliating way Romans disposal — crucifixion could dead man — dead criminal — savior Jewish people One Jews converted Christianity wellheeled privilege — rare among people— Roman citizen Paul formerly Saul Tarsus took revolution step Saint Paul formerly persecutor Christians claimed converted saw vision Christ commanded spread Christianity Paul asserted anybody world could Christian Jews Jesus Christ savior Jews Paul stated savior everybody world believed message doesn’t seem revolutionary time astonishing Saint Paul know idea people matter rich culture part eye God everyone else ancient world obsessed particularity social hierarchy Saint Paul evoked generality universal radical leap reason reveals philosophical heritage Christianity originates ancient Greeks materialist Greek philosophy like Epicureanism Stoicism popular among Romans time St Paul Christians took inspiration Platonism Plato follower Socrates philosopher believed idea soul within u would survive physical death soul anima Greek new idea evidence belief soul dating back ancient Egypt likely pervasive prehistoric time immortality human soul mean common idea ancient world Christianity absorbed idea eternally living soul Hellenistic Greekspeaking world emerged There’s explicit evidence Platonism inspired Jesus earliest Christians Platonic idea pervasive Roman Empire Judea Britain conquest Alexander Great first century BCE Judaism heavily influenced Greek culture custom Historians refer “Hellenistic Judaism” dominant spiritual intellectual climate among Jews time Whether soul lived death matter debate Sadducee Pharisee sect Judaism Jesus Nazareth preached soul would survive death followed would live eternal “Kingdom God” idea soul unconstrained material thing gave Saint Paul notion people particularity status appearance health origin material messy vesture pure soul wrote “We light shining heart like fragile clay jar containing great treasure make clear great power God ourselves” philosophical term known dualism idea body purely physical trait mindspiritsoul personality reason judgement separate strip away thing soul considered apart body Saint Paul believed soul wrote letter Galatian Christians “There neither Jew Greek neither slave free man neither male female one Christ Jesus” would judged God status wealth decision make Even private thought could judged God Morality disembodied good would live eternal paradise bad would tormented forever Socrates reasoned soul alive birth would live death Plato believed soul transmigrates body death believed perfect world pure form transcendent existing parallel imperfect world Saint Paul different idea wrote perfect world coming triumph corrupted imperfect world good work would resurrected world person’s soul alive person chance resurrected perfect Earth last judgement Saint Paul’s idea catalyst Christianity needed survive vision universal religion open anybody convert allowed Christianity flexibility grow fast throughout well connected Roman Empire idea combined promise better life death condition believing warning Roman Empire would soon shattered meant Christianity spread like wildfire particularly among poor downtrodden Christian church sprang Mediterranean preaching coming end world Official Religion fourth century religion converted many rank Roman army Constantine pagan emperor fighting civil war supposedly inspired vision dream eve decisive Battle Milvian Bridge 312 sun claimed formed cross shape word “in sign conquer” came ordered soldier paint ChiRho sign first two Greek letter “Christ” superimposed shield Constantine’s victory secured Christianity validated Edict Milan followed 313 promised Christians would protected persecution pagan Whether Constantine real vision simply took pragmatic measure motivate Christian troop seemed religion finally become tolerated equal religion Constantine converted religion close end life Every Roman emperor apart Justinian lasted mere two year throne followed faith Christianity became official religion Roman Empire Roman civic building — basilica — many Christians previously sentenced death converted church Pagan holiday morphed time Christian holiday Saturnalia Rome’s sacred giftgiving festival held time winter solstice became Christmas Paganism slowly died transplanted monotheistic religion global march Christianity underway religion faltered Medieval period Islam ascended economic military rise postRenaissance Europe fuelled religion’s growth Missionaries spread Gospel — meaning “good news” Greek — corner world European nation built empire Christianity simply become norm process lost radical aspect early Christianity “official” status Christian church vast reserve property money sit uncomfortably revolutionary value espoused Jesus Nazareth early Christians belief immortal human soul common age inspire level reckless selfsacrifice early Christians embraced recklessness astonished frightened Roman society Despite officialdom Christianity west remains persecuted religion world real number Christianity safely practiced Europe America thousand Christians jail around world people condemned comforted belief immortal soul Thank reading hope learned something newTags Christianity Philosophy History Self Psychology
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4,673 |
Is Social Media Changing How We Write?
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originally published in Writer’s Digest
We’ve all heard it said that readers have increasingly short attention spans. Spending time with a print medium isn’t as engaging as watching things move or interacting with content on a screen. Does this mean that we should write stories that can be eaten up in one sitting, or novels with chapters that are short, punchy, to the point, and don’t wander too much?
Have we been infected by Twitter? Though you can now write a message 280 characters long, double the initial limit of 140 characters, you can’t say a lot in that space. You have to be very brief, totally succinct. And Instagram? You can’t post anything without posting a photograph, first. On that platform, the image is the focal point. Any text almost an afterthought.
Book reviews on Instagram are really collected impressions. There’s not a lot of depth. If you’ve ever read the pieces in London Review of Books, the difference is startling. Granted, the latter is a print medium, and those take their time quite a bit more, but London’s essays are graduate school caliber. In depth and thoroughly researched, each one is like a crash course in the subjects and themes of the books reviewed.
To be fair, we Yanks have good print reviews, too. I read the New York Times Book Review every Sunday. My hunger for detail is well-satisfied there, to be sure. What’s featured in The New Yorker can be very compelling. But, I digress by speaking about the experience on the other side of the desk as it were, that of reader, and possible book buyer.
So, back to writing. I’ll be honest. Over the last several years, I’ve noticed that my sentences have gotten shorter. Not always, certainly not in a paragraph or segment that is expanding on someone’s memory, drawing the reader further and further back in time. But, in general, I’ve gotten pretty concise.
Has my own attention span gotten short? I confess, I do watch quite a bit of television. The dark dramas I prefer have men and women of few words. The interior spaces, into which the viewer propels herself, are more conversant, but nothing compared to The Age of Innocence, directed by Martin Scorsese. Granted, that film drew directly from Edith Wharton’s novel of the same name, and one would be hard-pressed to trim her down. Today’s fare seems to be heavy on imagery, unless you’re got up a rerun of Upstairs Downstairs, or Downton Abbey. Since both series are British, is this an across-the-pond-trait?
My father, a professor of English at Cornell University, said what he appreciated about the British most was how well they used their language. Their authors aren’t afraid of the esoteric word when it suits. Perhaps we Americans are still hung up on plain-speaking, channeling our prairie homesteading forebears, assuming we have them. Maybe we don’t want to sound fancy, or snobbish. I, for one, use many multi-syllable words because I love the rhythm they bring to the line.
Another point I could make is that the two television series I referenced are not only British, but set in a time before television, and in the early episodes of both, before radio. People had to talk to each other after dinner because there wasn’t a lot else to do. Does this mean that we’ve lost the art of conversation?
We talk to each other a lot over Facebook, but unless one is in a chat session, it’s a matter of making a statement and waiting a while for a reply. Even in Messenger, we’re relying only on words, nothing else. No background noise, no imagery. Everything is by necessity both truncated and stripped down.
What if, in relying so much on social media platforms not only to maintain relationships but to promote our work, we’ve become impatient during the genesis of it? Creating will always take a lot of time, but perhaps now we want it to appear dashed off, rather than deeply probed, considered, and weighed.
I don’t know, but I think about it a lot as I push my novels out into the world. My ideal reader would be someone with a lot of gracious time on her hands, who loves to sit and allow herself to become lost in my fictional world, who doesn’t need to look at the clock all the time.
There are ideals, and there is reality. I just keep wondering, considering, comparing notes with other writers and readers. And, to that end, I invite you to share your thoughts.
|
https://annelparrish.medium.com/is-social-media-changing-how-we-write-8d2f5bb01332
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['Anne Leigh Parrish']
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2018-09-11 15:16:31.035000+00:00
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['Attention Span', 'Social Media', 'Writing']
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Title Social Media Changing WriteContent originally published Writer’s Digest We’ve heard said reader increasingly short attention span Spending time print medium isn’t engaging watching thing move interacting content screen mean write story eaten one sitting novel chapter short punchy point don’t wander much infected Twitter Though write message 280 character long double initial limit 140 character can’t say lot space brief totally succinct Instagram can’t post anything without posting photograph first platform image focal point text almost afterthought Book review Instagram really collected impression There’s lot depth you’ve ever read piece London Review Books difference startling Granted latter print medium take time quite bit London’s essay graduate school caliber depth thoroughly researched one like crash course subject theme book reviewed fair Yanks good print review read New York Times Book Review every Sunday hunger detail wellsatisfied sure What’s featured New Yorker compelling digress speaking experience side desk reader possible book buyer back writing I’ll honest last several year I’ve noticed sentence gotten shorter always certainly paragraph segment expanding someone’s memory drawing reader back time general I’ve gotten pretty concise attention span gotten short confess watch quite bit television dark drama prefer men woman word interior space viewer propels conversant nothing compared Age Innocence directed Martin Scorsese Granted film drew directly Edith Wharton’s novel name one would hardpressed trim Today’s fare seems heavy imagery unless you’re got rerun Upstairs Downstairs Downton Abbey Since series British acrossthepondtrait father professor English Cornell University said appreciated British well used language author aren’t afraid esoteric word suit Perhaps Americans still hung plainspeaking channeling prairie homesteading forebear assuming Maybe don’t want sound fancy snobbish one use many multisyllable word love rhythm bring line Another point could make two television series referenced British set time television early episode radio People talk dinner wasn’t lot else mean we’ve lost art conversation talk lot Facebook unless one chat session it’s matter making statement waiting reply Even Messenger we’re relying word nothing else background noise imagery Everything necessity truncated stripped relying much social medium platform maintain relationship promote work we’ve become impatient genesis Creating always take lot time perhaps want appear dashed rather deeply probed considered weighed don’t know think lot push novel world ideal reader would someone lot gracious time hand love sit allow become lost fictional world doesn’t need look clock time ideal reality keep wondering considering comparing note writer reader end invite share thoughtsTags Attention Span Social Media Writing
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The Literally Literary Weekly Update #5
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One Last Note
Our most-read story was read only 150 times. We have 27,612 followers. What this tells us is that algorithms and user preferences play a huge role in what gets seen and that publications, in and of themselves, don’t carry a ton of weight.
Most people don’t read publications on Medium, they read writers. That’s why it is important for all writers on the platform to be consistent with their frequency and quality.
We at Literally Literary are doing our part to make sure your works are published in a timely manner and that we are only publishing high-level submissions, however, this is a partnership. One between publication, writer, and reader. The more we continue to work together as a community, the more our views will grow back to where they should be.
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https://medium.com/literally-literary/the-literally-literary-weekly-update-5-573502abbd9f
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['Jonathan Greene']
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2020-01-22 14:37:30.023000+00:00
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['Ll Letters', 'Fiction', 'Nonfiction', 'Poetry', 'Newsletter']
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Title Literally Literary Weekly Update 5Content One Last Note mostread story read 150 time 27612 follower tell u algorithm user preference play huge role get seen publication don’t carry ton weight people don’t read publication Medium read writer That’s important writer platform consistent frequency quality Literally Literary part make sure work published timely manner publishing highlevel submission however partnership One publication writer reader continue work together community view grow back beTags Letters Fiction Nonfiction Poetry Newsletter
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Slack Clone with React | Semantic UI | GraphQL | PostgresSQL (PART 1)
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Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash
Introduction
Hey all, this project will be a series. I don’t know how long the series will be as I’m still working on the project as I write these articles. I’ve wanted to build a chat app for quite some time. I came across an older tutorial (3 years ago) of Ben Awad (awesome YouTuber) doing a slack clone, which was perfect for me, so I’m following his approaches and making mine a updated version (a lot has changed in 3 years).
I wanted to practice building more complex projects. I’m learning a lot so far, like working with the PostgresSQL database, using Sequelize for the ORM, and connecting it with Graphql. So I’m hoping you guys can learn something too :) But that’s enough of the intro, let’s dive into the first part.
Installation for Database
Before we get to the good stuff, we need to install the things we need for this project. I’ll be using a Mac throughout this series.
Nodejs of course :) (if you haven’t already => https://nodejs.org/en/download/) PostgresSQL (for Windows and Mac https://www.postgresql.org/download/)
Installation videos
Mac video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZAa0LSxPPU
Windows video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAFZleZYxsc Postico (https://eggerapps.at/postico/) *optional* if your more visual like me :) this is a GUI for your database. (for mac)
That is all you need to get the database portion setup using Postgres (not that much). In the next one, we’ll work on folder setup and installing the packages we need for the backend. Until then folks :)
|
https://medium.com/dev-genius/slack-clone-with-react-semantic-ui-graphql-postgressql-part-1-cd40b5d3460
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['Ajea Smith']
|
2020-09-16 07:03:32.132000+00:00
|
['Postgres', 'React', 'Programming', 'GraphQL', 'Technology']
|
Title Slack Clone React Semantic UI GraphQL PostgresSQL PART 1Content Photo Volodymyr Hryshchenko Unsplash Introduction Hey project series don’t know long series I’m still working project write article I’ve wanted build chat app quite time came across older tutorial 3 year ago Ben Awad awesome YouTuber slack clone perfect I’m following approach making mine updated version lot changed 3 year wanted practice building complex project I’m learning lot far like working PostgresSQL database using Sequelize ORM connecting Graphql I’m hoping guy learn something that’s enough intro let’s dive first part Installation Database get good stuff need install thing need project I’ll using Mac throughout series Nodejs course haven’t already httpsnodejsorgendownload PostgresSQL Windows Mac httpswwwpostgresqlorgdownload Installation video Mac video httpswwwyoutubecomwatchvEZAa0LSxPPU Windows video httpswwwyoutubecomwatchvRAFZleZYxsc Postico httpseggerappsatpostico optional visual like GUI database mac need get database portion setup using Postgres much next one we’ll work folder setup installing package need backend folk Tags Postgres React Programming GraphQL Technology
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Positionality and Identity
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Positionality and Identity
Becoming me!
I aim to reflect and reflexively explore factors within my personal and professional development which have influenced not only who I am, but furthermore my positionality and world view (Takacs, 2003). In doing this, I intend to draw forth suppositions and presumptions influencing my subjectivity and core value.
Photo by Jason Zhao on Unsplash
Having been born in and spending all of my primary school years in newly independent Zimbabwe, I had a middle-class upbringing, even attending private school. Even from a young age, the significant economic divide within the nation was evident; there was a disproportionate number of young people to whom the quality of education I had received was inaccessible (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2018). In a bid to support me in having an appreciation towards the role education could play in further keeping me from becoming a victim of the socio-economic climate, but rather be the one to shape my future. The teaching within my primary school seemed didactic and traditional, contextually speaking. Whilst differing to the traditional approaches to teaching in the UK, it provided a curriculum which drew on the economic, political and cultural needs of the society within which it was set (Higgs, 2012). Although the government had initially made a significant investment towards education during this time from 12 per cent of the nation’s gross domestic product in 1990 to 44 per cent by 1994; low attendance levels of 50 per cent at secondary school nationally fuelled an understanding that education had become a commodity for those who could afford it and it was not a right for all. Academic success within this society which had commodified education was significantly revered. Corporal punishment, as a socially acceptable method of discipline, was utilised within schools to reinforce the importance of educational compliance. There was a bid to instil behaviour, and educational prowess which could be deemed socially acceptable through varying efforts from the regimental approaches used by educators here seemed to significantly align Foucauldian concepts of thought (Foucault, 2012).
Arguably my primary school experience was a crucial factor to actively shape my ontological security whilst seemingly being at odds with the nature of physical security (Mitzen, 2006). Reflecting on the use of negative reinforcement methods for discipline and getting students to learn, factual recall was highly regarded, though seemingly, this was not the case for knowledge understanding and application. This was particularly noticeable when deadlines would come around, as there was an understanding that missing deadlines would mean sanctions. The relationship between students and teachers seemed unilateral, aligning with the banking concept in which Freire (1970) explains professional authority as being mistakenly taken as the authority of knowledge. Retrospectively, the power dynamic above suggested the teacher be an oppressor, who would impose his worldview on the students and further utilising corporate punishment to exert conformity. Whilst the primary schooling and its use of corporal punishment did not initially instil an intrinsic love for learning and education, had they approached the teaching and discipline technique differently, I may have developed a passion for learning much earlier in my life.
When my family relocated to England in 2001, this profoundly affected my epistemology; much in that, it provided a contrasting educational and socio-economic to that which I had experienced to this point. During 2001 a mere 0.8 per cent of the United Kingdom’s (UK) population and further Bhattacharyya, Ison and Blair (2003) outline the poor academic attainment from black African males during these times. My academic achievements, once I had started education in the UK, differed from the findings of their study. While I had barely been above average as a primary school student, I found myself as one of the highest attainers during my first few years, at the West Midlands secondary school I attended. A growing passion for sports overshadowed my academic success; this came particularly as I feel I had never really had the opportunity to pursue sport when I was still back home.
Photo by Alyssa Ledesma on Unsplash
My foci as I developed as a teen started shifting towards sports and my social interactions (social acceptance). These passions had a somewhat detrimental effect on my education. I believed I had been successfully attaining acceptable grades; this came in spite of neglecting studies to focus on other priorities. I feel that individuals such as Osbourne (2002) had articulated quite well the identity struggles young black males had been facing within the educational system. Osbourne (2002) had shown, how like me, a lot of other things young black males had become disidentified with the educational system though they identified well with sport. My perceptions at the time, viewed the society within which I was living held a differing socio-economic divide to that of my preteens; political instability had been replaced by an ethnocultural divide.
Tensions within my life at these times had been shifting away from education towards sports. It took the completion of my GCSEs to realise that whilst the grades I had attained were significantly above the national average; I had not performed to my full potential. This resulted in the epiphany prompting me to focus more on my education. The attainment of good grades had stopped being the main aim of my studies but rather the development of myself as an individual. This aligned with the notion portrayed by Maslow (1954) regarding the importance of basic gratification in self-actualisation.
Social research, in this case, educational research utilises reflective practice as an essential facet. Inquirers such as Dewey, Schön, Brookfield and Freire have spent some time exploring these notions. Reflective practice provides the possibility not only to learn how roles or a task could be done better based on past and present events. It further provides a means by which to explore where I may position myself reflexively. Further to his discussions regarding the contrast between purposeful reflection and causal thought, Dewey (1938) explains the role experience plays in shaping my understanding of the world. The suggestion from Dewey is that while I must take time to reflect in and on action actively; I can never know truth instead only interpretations of my experiences. In alignment with this, Lynch (2017, quoted in Shieber, J. H., 2019) expresses,
‘There just is no way of escaping your perspective or biases. Every time you try to get outside of your own perspective, you just get more information filtered through your own perspective.’ (Pg. 14).
Understanding that it would be particularly challenging to unburden myself of biases which I hold. An essential factor in embarking on any research effort is a greater understanding of what these biases might be. The purpose, as mentioned above, is not only for myself; but also, for those who would explore research which I may produce, to have a clear understanding of influences underpinning my thoughts during the research. The development of my ontological and epistemological position hinged initially on my interpretation of experiences which had transpired during my early childhood, especially those pertaining to my social and educational upbringing.
Conclusion
Photo by Victor Garcia on Unsplash
The path into teaching was not a straight forward one for me; however, it was one which depicted a development in my positioning and the values I regarded highly. Though having studied a degree in architectural visualisation, sport had drawn me in as a socio-economic bridge. I initially embarked on working in varying social and economic settings. I worked as a; sports coach in local schools; project worker in a gang deterrent unit; safeguarding ambassador, with a particular focus on gangs; and youth violence before finally becoming a teacher. This decision had been inspired by my own experiences within the educational system, and I have a great deal of appreciation for the incalculable influence that my educational experience played on my lives. There were vast amounts of skills and a great depth of understanding which I gained while at school and go on to use throughout life. In a similar fashion to that expressed by Osterman and Kottkamp (1993), in order to develop a higher level of self-awareness within my teaching capacity, I have had to engage in reflective practice. In a bid to aid young people to understand better, as well as overcome social and cultural barriers, I have strived to be a mentor to the young people. Having risen through some adversity, I believe I my for some students, provide a source of inspiration. I work towards supporting students in unlocking the potential within their young minds to have a love for learning through having a creative and understanding outlook of the world.
My experiences and the exploration of literature have consolidated my belief that the works of some theories better resonates with me than others. Particularly Foucault (2012) who challenges us to consider how power operates through dominant ideologies and how truth is often significantly influenced by this. Regimes of truth, expressed in Foucauldian philosophy, discusses implications of authority in determining what is deemed to be ‘truth’. There are several dominant ideologies in education. These belief systems influence a range of practices including policymakers, governing bodies, institutional leadership and educators. The dominant ideologies influence an assortment of elements within education including, policy, pedagogical approach and practical approaches. I believe as, with other industries, education is not immune to ideologies and policymakers. In my own settings, I have observed pedagogical approaches and ‘best practice’ being blindly implemented without any exploration into how it fits our unique sector. I would, therefore, like to conduct an investigation into how technologies available within my setting might be utilised to mitigate barriers to learning.
As part of my proposed study, I intend on employing a range of methodological viewpoints. This will be done in order to explore complexities found in schools, along with those surrounding technology use. The study will find its grounding on notions surrounding digital sociology as it approaches technologies as being problematic, especially; the potential imbalances which may be influenced by power differentials, Ideologies advocating use of digital technologies in education as a precursor future societal, technological developments; the role the ‘human experience’ plays in shaping schools and digital technologies (Selwyn, Nemorin, Bulfin and Johnson, 2016). The study will seek out to draw meaning from the experience of the participant, thereby, utilising socio-cultural tenets (Asch, 1952; Vygotsky, 1978). Methodological approaches that may be used within this research will be those best cohering with connectivism, along with, interpretivisim or transformative theories (Siemens, 2004). The study may utilise the transformative worldview principles in order to draw on the thread of political entanglement through which the research may be influenced (Creswell, 2014).
I have through this paper, attempted to express the notion that all knowledge is underpinned by a set of beliefs through which it may be demonstrated during the enquiry. Interestingly as with other social research, we are all influenced by experiences which shape our values and beliefs. Therefore, articulating your positioning prior to, inferring, the influence your viewpoint will have on the beliefs. Sheiber posits the notion that
|
https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/positionality-and-identity-c020b73ec352
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['T W Chirara', 'Bsc Hons', 'Pgce Ma']
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2020-08-06 19:08:52.677000+00:00
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['Teachers', 'Growth', 'Development', 'Identity', 'Education']
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Title Positionality IdentityContent Positionality Identity Becoming aim reflect reflexively explore factor within personal professional development influenced furthermore positionality world view Takacs 2003 intend draw forth supposition presumption influencing subjectivity core value Photo Jason Zhao Unsplash born spending primary school year newly independent Zimbabwe middleclass upbringing even attending private school Even young age significant economic divide within nation evident disproportionate number young people quality education received inaccessible UNESCO Institute Statistics 2018 bid support appreciation towards role education could play keeping becoming victim socioeconomic climate rather one shape future teaching within primary school seemed didactic traditional contextually speaking Whilst differing traditional approach teaching UK provided curriculum drew economic political cultural need society within set Higgs 2012 Although government initially made significant investment towards education time 12 per cent nation’s gross domestic product 1990 44 per cent 1994 low attendance level 50 per cent secondary school nationally fuelled understanding education become commodity could afford right Academic success within society commodified education significantly revered Corporal punishment socially acceptable method discipline utilised within school reinforce importance educational compliance bid instil behaviour educational prowess could deemed socially acceptable varying effort regimental approach used educator seemed significantly align Foucauldian concept thought Foucault 2012 Arguably primary school experience crucial factor actively shape ontological security whilst seemingly odds nature physical security Mitzen 2006 Reflecting use negative reinforcement method discipline getting student learn factual recall highly regarded though seemingly case knowledge understanding application particularly noticeable deadline would come around understanding missing deadline would mean sanction relationship student teacher seemed unilateral aligning banking concept Freire 1970 explains professional authority mistakenly taken authority knowledge Retrospectively power dynamic suggested teacher oppressor would impose worldview student utilising corporate punishment exert conformity Whilst primary schooling use corporal punishment initially instil intrinsic love learning education approached teaching discipline technique differently may developed passion learning much earlier life family relocated England 2001 profoundly affected epistemology much provided contrasting educational socioeconomic experienced point 2001 mere 08 per cent United Kingdom’s UK population Bhattacharyya Ison Blair 2003 outline poor academic attainment black African male time academic achievement started education UK differed finding study barely average primary school student found one highest attainers first year West Midlands secondary school attended growing passion sport overshadowed academic success came particularly feel never really opportunity pursue sport still back home Photo Alyssa Ledesma Unsplash focus developed teen started shifting towards sport social interaction social acceptance passion somewhat detrimental effect education believed successfully attaining acceptable grade came spite neglecting study focus priority feel individual Osbourne 2002 articulated quite well identity struggle young black male facing within educational system Osbourne 2002 shown like lot thing young black male become disidentified educational system though identified well sport perception time viewed society within living held differing socioeconomic divide preteen political instability replaced ethnocultural divide Tensions within life time shifting away education towards sport took completion GCSEs realise whilst grade attained significantly national average performed full potential resulted epiphany prompting focus education attainment good grade stopped main aim study rather development individual aligned notion portrayed Maslow 1954 regarding importance basic gratification selfactualisation Social research case educational research utilises reflective practice essential facet Inquirers Dewey Schön Brookfield Freire spent time exploring notion Reflective practice provides possibility learn role task could done better based past present event provides mean explore may position reflexively discussion regarding contrast purposeful reflection causal thought Dewey 1938 explains role experience play shaping understanding world suggestion Dewey must take time reflect action actively never know truth instead interpretation experience alignment Lynch 2017 quoted Shieber J H 2019 express ‘There way escaping perspective bias Every time try get outside perspective get information filtered perspective’ Pg 14 Understanding would particularly challenging unburden bias hold essential factor embarking research effort greater understanding bias might purpose mentioned also would explore research may produce clear understanding influence underpinning thought research development ontological epistemological position hinged initially interpretation experience transpired early childhood especially pertaining social educational upbringing Conclusion Photo Victor Garcia Unsplash path teaching straight forward one however one depicted development positioning value regarded highly Though studied degree architectural visualisation sport drawn socioeconomic bridge initially embarked working varying social economic setting worked sport coach local school project worker gang deterrent unit safeguarding ambassador particular focus gang youth violence finally becoming teacher decision inspired experience within educational system great deal appreciation incalculable influence educational experience played life vast amount skill great depth understanding gained school go use throughout life similar fashion expressed Osterman Kottkamp 1993 order develop higher level selfawareness within teaching capacity engage reflective practice bid aid young people understand better well overcome social cultural barrier strived mentor young people risen adversity believe student provide source inspiration work towards supporting student unlocking potential within young mind love learning creative understanding outlook world experience exploration literature consolidated belief work theory better resonates others Particularly Foucault 2012 challenge u consider power operates dominant ideology truth often significantly influenced Regimes truth expressed Foucauldian philosophy discus implication authority determining deemed ‘truth’ several dominant ideology education belief system influence range practice including policymakers governing body institutional leadership educator dominant ideology influence assortment element within education including policy pedagogical approach practical approach believe industry education immune ideology policymakers setting observed pedagogical approach ‘best practice’ blindly implemented without exploration fit unique sector would therefore like conduct investigation technology available within setting might utilised mitigate barrier learning part proposed study intend employing range methodological viewpoint done order explore complexity found school along surrounding technology use study find grounding notion surrounding digital sociology approach technology problematic especially potential imbalance may influenced power differential Ideologies advocating use digital technology education precursor future societal technological development role ‘human experience’ play shaping school digital technology Selwyn Nemorin Bulfin Johnson 2016 study seek draw meaning experience participant thereby utilising sociocultural tenet Asch 1952 Vygotsky 1978 Methodological approach may used within research best cohering connectivism along interpretivisim transformative theory Siemens 2004 study may utilise transformative worldview principle order draw thread political entanglement research may influenced Creswell 2014 paper attempted express notion knowledge underpinned set belief may demonstrated enquiry Interestingly social research influenced experience shape value belief Therefore articulating positioning prior inferring influence viewpoint belief Sheiber posit notion thatTags Teachers Growth Development Identity Education
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Predicting House Prices Pith Machine Learning
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Predicting House Prices Pith Machine Learning
If you’re going to sell a house, you need to know what price tag to put on it, for this purpose I wrote a regression algorithm to predict home prices
Introduction
The average sales price of new homes sold in the U.S. is US$388,000. The house price mainly dependent on Location, size and condition … these factors influence a home’s value.
The goal of this artical is to predict house prices using one basic machine Linear Regression and Random Forest , in this mainly we will look at data exploration and data cleaning, I used data from Kaggle with 79 explanatory variables describing every aspect of residential homes such ad Area, space, materials used …
Business Understanding
We are interested to answer the following two questions:
Q1: Get an overview of the our traget variable and find out what distribution its follow ?
Q2 : What are the most important variables to our traget ?
Q3: What is the best model that give us the best result ?
Q4: Can you improve the accuracy of a model ?.
Data Cleaning and Exploration
First we want to see if we have missing value in our data
It looks like we have few columns with a lot of missing valsue.
From above we can safely drop first 5 columns since they have approximately 50% missing value.
Since we don't know much about our data we can replace the the missing value in our categorical variables with mode. Similarly for the continuous variables we will replace nan with the mean.
Explore data
We want get an overview of the our traget variable and find out what distribution its follow
As we see, the target variable SalePrice is not normally distributed.
This can reduce the performance of the ML regression models because some assume normal distribution.
we will make a log transformation, the resulting distribution looks much better.
Q2 : What are the most important variables to our target ?
Our target variable is SalePrice, so we want to see what are the variables that have strong relationship with our response.
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https://hilalalhwaiti.medium.com/prediction-house-prices-with-linear-regression-95ebe04fb286
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['Hilal Alhwaiti']
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2020-11-16 21:27:33.460000+00:00
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['Analytics', 'Linear Regression', 'Python', 'Prédiction', 'House']
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Title Predicting House Prices Pith Machine LearningContent Predicting House Prices Pith Machine Learning you’re going sell house need know price tag put purpose wrote regression algorithm predict home price Introduction average sale price new home sold US US388000 house price mainly dependent Location size condition … factor influence home’s value goal artical predict house price using one basic machine Linear Regression Random Forest mainly look data exploration data cleaning used data Kaggle 79 explanatory variable describing every aspect residential home ad Area space material used … Business Understanding interested answer following two question Q1 Get overview traget variable find distribution follow Q2 important variable traget Q3 best model give u best result Q4 improve accuracy model Data Cleaning Exploration First want see missing value data look like column lot missing valsue safely drop first 5 column since approximately 50 missing value Since dont know much data replace missing value categorical variable mode Similarly continuous variable replace nan mean Explore data want get overview traget variable find distribution follow see target variable SalePrice normally distributed reduce performance ML regression model assume normal distribution make log transformation resulting distribution look much better Q2 important variable target target variable SalePrice want see variable strong relationship responseTags Analytics Linear Regression Python Prédiction House
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About Me — Robert Trakofler. Nice to meet you
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A torchier I made from unsold lamps by Robert Trakofler
antiques into other objects I repurpose furniture into more practical uses I have even made a 15 foot mobile out of antique meet hooks and broken mannequins I suspended from the old soda pop factory ceiling here in Pittsburgh that is my store called Zenith.
I don’t waste anything. All of the leftover food I give away at the end of the week, I give all of my food preparation clippings to a worm farm and compost facility. I recycle what I don’t use in my projects at one of my favorite places the Warhola scrap yard (Andy Warhol’s uncle’s place) so you might guess at this point I am very concerned about the environment.
Silent Scream by Robert Trakofler
As a person of whom has neurological issues and experienced rape as a young man I am also passionate and write about human rights, equality, healing and survival. I have been on the other side of life I had a drinking problem was homeless and even arrested on a few occasions. Artful expression for me (and many others) was indeed a way for me to cope and gain a better understanding through introspection it helped me to survive and transcend many difficulties and obstacles and appreciate even revel in the beauty that surrounds us all and it was in these revelations that sparked the inspiration for me to want to share them in my art.
Robert Trakofler
I often say that at the end of every work of art, be it a poem a painting, a photograph or a written article is a hidden post script that says… Take this, make it yours… and then take it further! It is in this spirit that I write and wish to share with you my humble scrawls in the hope that somehow I can touch a witnesses heart and mind to a grand furtherance…
This is a song I worked on…
An example of my poetry…
I often close my writings with this statement… A poem or any form of artistic expression is nothing without a witness, and for yours… I am always grateful thank you for reading!
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https://medium.com/about-me-stories/about-me-robert-trakofler-d80fab3d98d5
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['Robert Trakofler']
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2020-12-23 16:07:07.840000+00:00
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['Poetry', 'Music', 'About Me', 'Art', 'Photography']
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Title — Robert Trakofler Nice meet youContent torchier made unsold lamp Robert Trakofler antique object repurpose furniture practical us even made 15 foot mobile antique meet hook broken mannequin suspended old soda pop factory ceiling Pittsburgh store called Zenith don’t waste anything leftover food give away end week give food preparation clipping worm farm compost facility recycle don’t use project one favorite place Warhola scrap yard Andy Warhol’s uncle’s place might guess point concerned environment Silent Scream Robert Trakofler person neurological issue experienced rape young man also passionate write human right equality healing survival side life drinking problem homeless even arrested occasion Artful expression many others indeed way cope gain better understanding introspection helped survive transcend many difficulty obstacle appreciate even revel beauty surround u revelation sparked inspiration want share art Robert Trakofler often say end every work art poem painting photograph written article hidden post script says… Take make yours… take spirit write wish share humble scrawl hope somehow touch witness heart mind grand furtherance… song worked on… example poetry… often close writing statement… poem form artistic expression nothing without witness yours… always grateful thank readingTags Poetry Music Art Photography
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4,679 |
No Contact: The Brutal Way To End Heartbreak
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No Contact: The Brutal Way To End Heartbreak
Love addiction is rough.
Photo by Sage Friedman on Unsplash
I’m shocked when people comment on how they appreciate and follow my shitshow of a love life. Truthfully, I wish I could write about political foreign policy or editing tips in Google Docs. But we write about what we know best, and I know my internal rollercoaster quite well right now.
Everything went to hell last week after I had an effing dream about Jon, a guy I fell in love with while I was married.
We ended things shortly after the pandemic hit because we knew there was no chance of success in any relationship until we had divorced our spouses and had a few flings. Well, he immediately started a new, serious relationship before even moving out of his marital home or filing for divorce. That’s his choice, but it was a rough blow worsened only with the few times we still hooked up or texted.
After the traumatic dream and a necessary-but-painful phone call, I’m vowing to finally stick to the No Contact Rule. Granted, I only broke the rule once in 6 months (the rest of the times were all him), but I’m the one who did it last. If we communicate ever again, it will be him. Not me.
No Contact is the human equivalent of drug abstinence. The withdrawals from a relationship mimic the effects of heroin. You can’t do a little bit of heroin to take the edge off. It’s all or nothing. Since Jon was the first person I fell in love with for over a decade, I experienced (and still am experiencing) heartbreak, unlike anything I’ve felt since I was in my twenties.
I did a lot of research to understand the why of the pain when we ended things but I still hurt months later. Dudes fall for me. I don’t fall for dudes. Genuinely missing a person and the relationship is foreign to me. Even when I separated and moved out from my husband 11 years ago, I didn’t feel this.
I will never understand how anyone can be in love with two people at once. I understand loving, but not being in love with two people. I go balls-in when I’m in love; there’s no chance I could fall in love with someone else at the same time.
I learned a lot about love addiction. While I’m not codependent, everyone experiences love addiction to a certain degree. Unfortunately, like a drug, withdrawals make you go out-of-your-mind berserk. Like straight up, batshit crazy, crying in pain like you’ve been stabbed but your body refuses to go numb.
Surprisingly, I also learned that I’m a hell of a lot stronger than I’ve ever been. Perhaps because of all the changes I’ve made in 2020, I’m able to rationalize the pain. Even when it hits me out of the blue and I start crying, there’s another part of me that can step back and say, “you’re grieving the dream of you two. While you may think you’ll never feel that way again, you will. Trust the process.”
I think maintaining a level of rational thought, no matter how tiny, is critical after a breakup. I’ve had quite a few epiphanies about him and our relationship. These were things that I wouldn’t have seen had we stayed together; things that would have hurt me down the road. Clinging to rational thought allows you to separate the dream from reality.
In my research, I also learned that the one who focuses on working on themselves long after a breakup is usually the one who was most loyal. Also, women tend to focus on reassessing themselves and healing whereas guys are apt to just move on without processing anything. For them, their patterns keep repeating.
This year, especially in the last six months, I’ve transformed in ways I didn’t think possible.
I’m like the latest version of Tony Stark’s armor. While his first Iron Man suit was impressive, each iteration makes him more powerful and adept to take on adversity. This analogy not only shows that I’ve watched way too many Marvel movies during quarantine, but that I never gave myself credit in the past for being a pretty good model of a human.
My knee jerk reaction was to start dating everyone and anyone right away. Being on a fetish site, I have an endless list of guys to bang at my disposal. I had all sorts of threesomes and crazy shit lined up. Plus a lot of dinner dates.
Until I realized: I don’t want any of that. I need to stop doing what seems like a solution on the outside. Deep down, I believed the quicker I got tons of post-marriage dating and fucking done, then Jon and I could be together. Or at least, I could move on as quickly as he did.
It’s not a competition. This is me running my own marathon where I make up the rules and selectively choose who runs with me — if anyone at all.
I bailed on all the prior plans with other guys (coronavirus is a great excuse). It’s been a relief to focus on what I want instead of pushing myself outside of my comfort zone for the sake of getting over someone.
It’s time to do the tough work the right way. The healthy way. I’m not burying the pain or redirecting it elsewhere. Time to suck it the fuck up and face it head-on. If I don’t, I risk hurting others.
Only once have I immediately rebounded after a relationship and it was downright awful how it impacted the other guy. In turn, my rebound relationship was filled with four years of drama because I didn’t take the time to reassess and regroup before moving on with another long-term love.
My old habits would have had me playing the past with Jon on loop. And love addiction would have only played the good parts to make me hurt. Love addiction would also have played the bad parts to also make me hurt. This is where the No Contact order comes in.
No Contact isn’t just not contacting them as the name implies. This means nuking all texts, emails, and anything else you might have. I had a few things that were reminders of him; I tossed them out. I almost got rid of a particular dress that he ripped taking off of me before sex; then I remembered how much I like that dress and I’m not wasting a perfectly good afternoon date dress that another guy would appreciate.
I hated deleting Jon’s texts and emails. I even forwarded him one before I deleted it from my inbox and sent folder. The trick is to do it all when you’re in a frenzied mood. Ironically, it’s when you’re most crazy is when deleting things is easiest because you don’t second guess anything.
I’m finally beginning a true No Contact endeavor. While there will always be a part of me that wishes the phone notification is a text from him, I’m assuming by January 2021 I’ll be a blip in his memory. I don’t say that with self-pity. It’s just the nature of what happens when you fall in love with someone else.
This is my accountability. I’m on Day 2 of For-Real-This-Time-I’m-Not-Going-To-Contact-Him No Contact. There’s the edgy shakes, the bouncing of the knee, and the moments where I’m not breathing. I blame the dream for ruining my No Contact because it was so vividly real. Prior to that, I was doing quite well.
For anyone else going through this, here are some nuggets of wisdom I’ve learned in my research. They don’t all apply fully to my situation but I felt like putting them here as a reminder to anyone else who can use them.
It wouldn’t have gone any other way. You can replay something in your mind in different ways but the results would have been the same.
There was a time when you didn’t even know that person. And you were just fine. They weren’t even a thought in your mind.
If you’re not their “person”, then you’re just not their person. It’s not that you’re not prettier, funnier, or more engaging…it’s just that you’re not their person. You are not their person if they chose to walk away. In my case, it’s not so much the walking away that’s an issue. It’s how he could fall in love with someone else while still engaging in behaviors with me.
People who move from relationship to relationship are extremely insecure or scared to be alone and can’t handle it. Or, they’re narcissists who don’t think they need to reflect and change; they jump into the next relationship thinking they’re perfect.
Sometimes you need to let that shit hurt so you remember what it felt like when you pulled yourself up off the fucking ground.
“You’re going to miss the person you created them in your head to be. And you’re afraid to let go not because you’re going to lose them but because you’re going to lose that dream of them turning into Prince Charming somewhere down the line. You fell for the potential of what you wanted them to achieve. If you look back, you’ll realize that they were so bad that when they were doing the bare minimum you were jumping for joy, thinking they were going above and beyond. But that’s okay because once you separate the dream from the reality, that’s when you can fully let go of that person.” (This is verbatim from Katie Florence, the full video is hilarious.)
He may love you. He probably does. He probably thinks about you all the time. But that isn’t what matters. What matters is what he’s doing about it, and what he’s doing about it is nothing. And if he’s doing nothing, you most certainly shouldn’t be doing anything. You deserve someone who goes out of their way to make it obvious that they want you in their life. Straight forward healthy love.
Never, ever beg someone to be in your life.
The person who stays single the longest after a breakup tends to be the most loyal of the two. It takes an average of 3 to 5 months to heal from a breakup. If that person moved on before that time, then they were fake with you or they’re fake with the relationship they’re in now.
I do want to make something clear: the breakup was mutual (if anything, he says I’m the one that dumped him). I wasn’t blindsided. Also, I’m not worried about ending up single or lonely. I trust that once I can enter the world of the living after vaccination, I’ll find guys who will give their left nut to spend time with me. I’m concerned that I won’t fall for them and it will take years before I have this feeling again.
My hurt stems from how quickly he fell in love with someone else while I not only allowed myself to feel hope each time he messaged me, but I also let it delay my post-breakup self-growth. Never lose yourself trying to hold on to someone who doesn’t care about losing you.
No Contact. Say it with me, Mandalorian style: this is the way.
|
https://medium.com/heart-affairs/no-contact-the-brutal-way-to-end-heartbreak-42e296eb06a6
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['Jennifer M. Wilson']
|
2020-12-24 16:59:57.437000+00:00
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['Relationships', 'Love', 'Mental Health', 'Sex', 'Self Improvement']
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Title Contact Brutal Way End HeartbreakContent Contact Brutal Way End Heartbreak Love addiction rough Photo Sage Friedman Unsplash I’m shocked people comment appreciate follow shitshow love life Truthfully wish could write political foreign policy editing tip Google Docs write know best know internal rollercoaster quite well right Everything went hell last week effing dream Jon guy fell love married ended thing shortly pandemic hit knew chance success relationship divorced spouse fling Well immediately started new serious relationship even moving marital home filing divorce That’s choice rough blow worsened time still hooked texted traumatic dream necessarybutpainful phone call I’m vowing finally stick Contact Rule Granted broke rule 6 month rest time I’m one last communicate ever Contact human equivalent drug abstinence withdrawal relationship mimic effect heroin can’t little bit heroin take edge It’s nothing Since Jon first person fell love decade experienced still experiencing heartbreak unlike anything I’ve felt since twenty lot research understand pain ended thing still hurt month later Dudes fall don’t fall dude Genuinely missing person relationship foreign Even separated moved husband 11 year ago didn’t feel never understand anyone love two people understand loving love two people go ballsin I’m love there’s chance could fall love someone else time learned lot love addiction I’m codependent everyone experience love addiction certain degree Unfortunately like drug withdrawal make go outofyourmind berserk Like straight batshit crazy cry pain like you’ve stabbed body refuse go numb Surprisingly also learned I’m hell lot stronger I’ve ever Perhaps change I’ve made 2020 I’m able rationalize pain Even hit blue start cry there’s another part step back say “you’re grieving dream two may think you’ll never feel way Trust process” think maintaining level rational thought matter tiny critical breakup I’ve quite epiphany relationship thing wouldn’t seen stayed together thing would hurt road Clinging rational thought allows separate dream reality research also learned one focus working long breakup usually one loyal Also woman tend focus reassessing healing whereas guy apt move without processing anything pattern keep repeating year especially last six month I’ve transformed way didn’t think possible I’m like latest version Tony Stark’s armor first Iron Man suit impressive iteration make powerful adept take adversity analogy show I’ve watched way many Marvel movie quarantine never gave credit past pretty good model human knee jerk reaction start dating everyone anyone right away fetish site endless list guy bang disposal sort threesome crazy shit lined Plus lot dinner date realized don’t want need stop seems like solution outside Deep believed quicker got ton postmarriage dating fucking done Jon could together least could move quickly It’s competition running marathon make rule selectively choose run — anyone bailed prior plan guy coronavirus great excuse It’s relief focus want instead pushing outside comfort zone sake getting someone It’s time tough work right way healthy way I’m burying pain redirecting elsewhere Time suck fuck face headon don’t risk hurting others immediately rebounded relationship downright awful impacted guy turn rebound relationship filled four year drama didn’t take time reassess regroup moving another longterm love old habit would playing past Jon loop love addiction would played good part make hurt Love addiction would also played bad part also make hurt Contact order come Contact isn’t contacting name implies mean nuking text email anything else might thing reminder tossed almost got rid particular dress ripped taking sex remembered much like dress I’m wasting perfectly good afternoon date dress another guy would appreciate hated deleting Jon’s text email even forwarded one deleted inbox sent folder trick you’re frenzied mood Ironically it’s you’re crazy deleting thing easiest don’t second guess anything I’m finally beginning true Contact endeavor always part wish phone notification text I’m assuming January 2021 I’ll blip memory don’t say selfpity It’s nature happens fall love someone else accountability I’m Day 2 ForRealThisTimeI’mNotGoingToContactHim Contact There’s edgy shake bouncing knee moment I’m breathing blame dream ruining Contact vividly real Prior quite well anyone else going nugget wisdom I’ve learned research don’t apply fully situation felt like putting reminder anyone else use wouldn’t gone way replay something mind different way result would time didn’t even know person fine weren’t even thought mind you’re “person” you’re person It’s you’re prettier funnier engaging…it’s you’re person person chose walk away case it’s much walking away that’s issue It’s could fall love someone else still engaging behavior People move relationship relationship extremely insecure scared alone can’t handle they’re narcissist don’t think need reflect change jump next relationship thinking they’re perfect Sometimes need let shit hurt remember felt like pulled fucking ground “You’re going miss person created head you’re afraid let go you’re going lose you’re going lose dream turning Prince Charming somewhere line fell potential wanted achieve look back you’ll realize bad bare minimum jumping joy thinking going beyond that’s okay separate dream reality that’s fully let go person” verbatim Katie Florence full video hilarious may love probably probably think time isn’t matter matter he’s he’s nothing he’s nothing certainly shouldn’t anything deserve someone go way make obvious want life Straight forward healthy love Never ever beg someone life person stay single longest breakup tends loyal two take average 3 5 month heal breakup person moved time fake they’re fake relationship they’re want make something clear breakup mutual anything say I’m one dumped wasn’t blindsided Also I’m worried ending single lonely trust enter world living vaccination I’ll find guy give left nut spend time I’m concerned won’t fall take year feeling hurt stem quickly fell love someone else allowed feel hope time messaged also let delay postbreakup selfgrowth Never lose trying hold someone doesn’t care losing Contact Say Mandalorian style wayTags Relationships Love Mental Health Sex Self Improvement
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A Love Tale
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I want to delve into your corners,
to live inside your binds.
I long to feel the sensation of
your edges, trace along your spine.
To live a thousand lives with you,
and travel back through time.
Find the rhythm of each word
page by page
line by line
|
https://medium.com/literally-literary/a-love-tale-c4c9b845f602
|
['Jess Kaisk']
|
2017-03-31 18:42:07.355000+00:00
|
['Literally Literary', 'Stories', 'Bibliophile', 'Poetry', 'Books']
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Title Love TaleContent want delve corner live inside bind long feel sensation edge trace along spine live thousand life travel back time Find rhythm word page page line lineTags Literally Literary Stories Bibliophile Poetry Books
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4,681 |
Could Videos Make Writing a Thing of the Past
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Could Videos Make Writing a Thing of the Past
More people are watching YouTube videos than ever before
By Cmichel67
Videos grab attention quickly and keep people engaged.
Almost everybody from Gen Z can record, edit, and publish to YouTube. Their channels are monetized and most of them like to learn by watching a video instead of finding some book or an article.
Why are they choosing videos over written text? Around 90% of information reaching your brain is visual. You can process visual information 60,000 times faster than text. The written word evolved much later than the spoken word. We can learn and remember more if we watch a video.
Recently, Evan Williams began a question form where Medium users can ask questions. One guy, Kevin, asked him this question:
“The Future of Blogging in a Multimedia World. Gen Z is increasingly consuming more videos. How does Medium stay relevant?”
Evan Williams chose to answer this question in two parts:
Part 1: Reading and writing are going to be around for a long time.
He says writing is older than videos. When writing was invented, it was an incredible technology. Since its invention, it has been becoming more and more popular. Its value is not going down — it’s going up.
When somebody wants to write, it is easy to write. People can record what is on their mind or what they are feeling. Anybody can read without a device. Writing is efficient to consume and lightweight to create.
Evan William calls a book an incredible device that stores and disseminates ideas and information. He says it has the highest accessibility to information ratio. You can learn what you want to learn at your own pace.
Do people — not just Gen Z — watch more videos today?
People are consuming more videos today, but they are reading more text as well. Reading brings slower but deep gratification. If you sleep for eight hours, books are better for learning new information.
All the search engines, newspapers, blogs, lectures, pdfs, and books use text. Every searches a new word on google and then clicks on the democratically promoted articles. People read more these days — if you add the number of printed books, digital books, blogs, messages, posts, and audiobooks:
Pew research center
Gen Z succeeds Millennials and precedes Generation Alpha. People born in the late 1990s to early 2010s are included in Gen Z.
Gen Z plays more games and watches more videos. Evan Wiliams says he played more games and watched more videos as a teenager than he read books. But as he aged, his focus shifted to written words.
He said YouTube is a phenomenon. People watch videos all the time, but most of the videos include written text. Lectures, slides, translated content, tutorials, and silent videos overlaid with text, are a huge part of video consumption.
He said podcasts and audiobooks are becoming popular as well. These fill the time when someone’s hands or eyes are not free. People listen to audiobooks and podcasts during the walk or jog and daily commute to the office.
All this means the written word is moving the videos, audiobooks, and podcasts from behind the scenes. There is no chance people will quit reading any time soon.
Part 2: There’s no reason for Medium to be limited to reading and writing.
According to Evan Williams, Medium will always remain relevant. Youtube provides written transcripts for most of its videos. Similarly, writers can provide an audio or a video for their written words. Medium is working on making audio of popular articles already.
me·di·um: a means by which something is communicated or expressed
At Medium, the goal is to create a deeper understanding of issues and spread ideas that matter. Like TED, some ideas are worth spreading. On an increasingly noisy internet, one voice is not enough. As more writers write about an idea — whose time has come — it creates a social impact.
Medium is trying to build tools — the infrastructure and network — for spreading ideas and deep insights. The writers — the people with deep insights — may choose to use videos to broadcast their words in the future. In contrast to YouTube, Medium will remain a place where people discuss important issues and personal experiences.
Medium’s focus has been the written expression of thoughts and ideas in the past, but it doesn’t have to be limited to only text. Evan Williams said, “… we’ve also dabbled in audio, tappable stories (words and pictures), video, and even events.”
He believes the internet allows all forms of expression — audio, video, written words, and audiobooks — ‘to co-exist and coalesce.’ For Evan Williams, the most important thing is that quality thinking and great ideas can move from one brain to another that may be able to make better use of those thoughts and ideas.
He said he’ll keep on spreading the thoughts that may change the world someday.
Final Thoughts
Book reading and reading for pleasure is going down. Reading trends are going down since the 1980’s — long before YouTube and Facebook grabbed people’s attention.
In the US, reading for pleasure has fallen by 30 percent since 2004, as estimated by the American Time Use Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
According to a report, ‘To Read or Not To Read,’ reading is becoming less popular. The share of grown-ups reading a novel, short story, poem or play fell from 57% in 1982 to 43% in 2015.
In the Netherlands, one study about reading trends concluded that from 1955 to 1995, time spent watching TV grew while reading time declined: “Competition from television turned out to be the most evident cause of the decline in reading.”
In the end, I would like to share two stories:
When J.K. Rowling’s series of novels was released, during the 1990s, children started reading more. In the age of TV, long queues outside the bookshops were a new thing. In 2011, Fifty Shades of Grey, written by E. L. James, hit the shops. Everybody wanted to read erotic details of the affair between Anastasia Steele — a college student — and Christian Grey — a young billionaire.
We live in a competitive world. When the written words make more sense than the TV and movies, people read. In another article, Evan Williams said he wanted Medium writers to produce quality content as good as the Game of Thrones.
|
https://medium.com/technology-hits/could-videos-make-writing-a-thing-of-the-past-46bd4f63c295
|
['Dew Langrial']
|
2020-12-14 00:03:54.686000+00:00
|
['Reading', 'Writing', 'Writing Tips', 'Writing Life', 'Self Improvement']
|
Title Could Videos Make Writing Thing PastContent Could Videos Make Writing Thing Past people watching YouTube video ever Cmichel67 Videos grab attention quickly keep people engaged Almost everybody Gen Z record edit publish YouTube channel monetized like learn watching video instead finding book article choosing video written text Around 90 information reaching brain visual process visual information 60000 time faster text written word evolved much later spoken word learn remember watch video Recently Evan Williams began question form Medium user ask question One guy Kevin asked question “The Future Blogging Multimedia World Gen Z increasingly consuming video Medium stay relevant” Evan Williams chose answer question two part Part 1 Reading writing going around long time say writing older video writing invented incredible technology Since invention becoming popular value going — it’s going somebody want write easy write People record mind feeling Anybody read without device Writing efficient consume lightweight create Evan William call book incredible device store disseminates idea information say highest accessibility information ratio learn want learn pace people — Gen Z — watch video today People consuming video today reading text well Reading brings slower deep gratification sleep eight hour book better learning new information search engine newspaper blog lecture pdfs book use text Every search new word google click democratically promoted article People read day — add number printed book digital book blog message post audiobooks Pew research center Gen Z succeeds Millennials precedes Generation Alpha People born late 1990s early 2010s included Gen Z Gen Z play game watch video Evan Wiliams say played game watched video teenager read book aged focus shifted written word said YouTube phenomenon People watch video time video include written text Lectures slide translated content tutorial silent video overlaid text huge part video consumption said podcasts audiobooks becoming popular well fill time someone’s hand eye free People listen audiobooks podcasts walk jog daily commute office mean written word moving video audiobooks podcasts behind scene chance people quit reading time soon Part 2 There’s reason Medium limited reading writing According Evan Williams Medium always remain relevant Youtube provides written transcript video Similarly writer provide audio video written word Medium working making audio popular article already me·di·um mean something communicated expressed Medium goal create deeper understanding issue spread idea matter Like TED idea worth spreading increasingly noisy internet one voice enough writer write idea — whose time come — creates social impact Medium trying build tool — infrastructure network — spreading idea deep insight writer — people deep insight — may choose use video broadcast word future contrast YouTube Medium remain place people discus important issue personal experience Medium’s focus written expression thought idea past doesn’t limited text Evan Williams said “… we’ve also dabbled audio tappable story word picture video even events” belief internet allows form expression — audio video written word audiobooks — ‘to coexist coalesce’ Evan Williams important thing quality thinking great idea move one brain another may able make better use thought idea said he’ll keep spreading thought may change world someday Final Thoughts Book reading reading pleasure going Reading trend going since 1980’s — long YouTube Facebook grabbed people’s attention US reading pleasure fallen 30 percent since 2004 estimated American Time Use Survey Bureau Labor Statistics According report ‘To Read Read’ reading becoming le popular share grownup reading novel short story poem play fell 57 1982 43 2015 Netherlands one study reading trend concluded 1955 1995 time spent watching TV grew reading time declined “Competition television turned evident cause decline reading” end would like share two story JK Rowling’s series novel released 1990s child started reading age TV long queue outside bookshop new thing 2011 Fifty Shades Grey written E L James hit shop Everybody wanted read erotic detail affair Anastasia Steele — college student — Christian Grey — young billionaire live competitive world written word make sense TV movie people read another article Evan Williams said wanted Medium writer produce quality content good Game ThronesTags Reading Writing Writing Tips Writing Life Self Improvement
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4,682 |
Part Three: Reader and philanthropically-funded Black-owned media (June 22, 2020)
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Part Three: Reader and philanthropically-funded Black-owned media (June 22, 2020)
Subscribe to The Idea, a weekly newsletter on the business of media, for more news, analysis, and interviews.
DIGITAL STARTUPS 2.0
Declining ad revenue has posed a challenge for the Black press, legacy and new publications alike. While ad revenue enticed a number of mainstream, white-owned companies to begin producing content specifically for Black audiences, more recent trends and tools have opened pathways for Black media entrepreneurs. This “second wave” has seen Black creators using podcasts, newsletters, and messaging services to reach audiences and while tapping into reader and philanthropic revenue.
Some Black outlets are leveraging both reader revenue and philanthropy. The TRiiBE, a digital site covering the Black community in Chicago is funded mostly by brand sponsorships, donations from readers through an Indiegogo campaign, with which it successfully raised $20,000 in 2018, as well as philanthropic support. Push Black, which reaches its audience of four million primarily through text and Facebook Messenger, also relies on donations from its subscribers as well as philanthropic support.
Few have turned to paywalls and subscription revenue. The TRiiBE explicitly eschewed the subscription route: One of its founders, Morgan Johnson, said, “We know, as Black millennials, we don’t want to pay for news. We made a conscious decision not to be subscription-based.”
The PLUG, a platform built from a successful newsletter covering the Black tech sector, has found a niche that has made a subscription-based model viable. It has thousands of free newsletter subscribers and hundreds of members paying $100 annually. Sherrell Dorsey, its founder, told The Idea that although revenue first came from advertising partnerships with companies such as Goldman Sachs, she quickly decided in favor of a subscription-based model in the interest of sustainability. Dorsey has accomplished this by turning The PLUG into an insights platform in addition to a news one, providing data indexes and reports on topics such as Black-Owned Venture Capital Firms a Tech D&I Executive Index.
Subscriptions have not been the only challenge, as the distribution of funds by philanthropy remains concentrated and unequal. A 2019 report by Borealis Philanthropy found that 40% of foundation giving went to just three newsrooms: ProPublica, Center for Public Integrity, and the Center for Investigative Reporting. The Racial Equity in Journalism Fund, which Borealis launched last September, aims to address this disparity by supporting news organizations run by people of color. More general funds, like the Facebook Journalism Project, have also prioritized outlets owned by people of color at times. In May, Facebook gave out $16 million in COVID relief grants; more than half of the outlets that were beneficiaries are published by or for communities of color.
However, these philanthropic funds do not necessarily solve the issue of start-up costs. Although MLK50, a Memphis-based nonprofit, is now supported by both of the aforementioned funds, its founder initially self-funded the publication with credit cards. The TRiiBE, too, started with no financial backing. Dorsey told The Idea that although she initially tried to pursue VC money for The PLUG, she received pushback, as many did not see the point in investing in multiple Black media outlets.
NOW WHAT?
Platforms like Medium, Patreon, and Substack have decreased the barriers to publishing. For example, MLK50 is hosted on Medium, while Coronavirus News for Black Folks, a newsletter written by Patrice Peck, uses Substack and aims to address the lack of coverage of the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Black Americans.
Whether these platforms can facilitate sustained support for creators of color or end up reflecting the racial and economic inequities in the rest of media remains to be seen. As of this writing, according to Substack’s ranking of paid publications, there is one newsletter written by a Black writer on its list of top 25 paid newsletters: Roll Call. Written by Austin Channing Brown, a New York Times-bestselling author, Roll Call started in February and costs $7/month.
Subscribe to The Idea, a weekly newsletter on the business of media, for more news, analysis, and interviews.
|
https://medium.com/the-idea/part-three-reader-and-philanthropically-funded-black-owned-media-june-15-2020-d7dd7673dd0a
|
['Saanya Jain']
|
2020-06-23 21:10:26.504000+00:00
|
['The Latest', 'Media', 'Journalism', 'Philanthropy']
|
Title Part Three Reader philanthropicallyfunded Blackowned medium June 22 2020Content Part Three Reader philanthropicallyfunded Blackowned medium June 22 2020 Subscribe Idea weekly newsletter business medium news analysis interview DIGITAL STARTUPS 20 Declining ad revenue posed challenge Black press legacy new publication alike ad revenue enticed number mainstream whiteowned company begin producing content specifically Black audience recent trend tool opened pathway Black medium entrepreneur “second wave” seen Black creator using podcasts newsletter messaging service reach audience tapping reader philanthropic revenue Black outlet leveraging reader revenue philanthropy TRiiBE digital site covering Black community Chicago funded mostly brand sponsorship donation reader Indiegogo campaign successfully raised 20000 2018 well philanthropic support Push Black reach audience four million primarily text Facebook Messenger also relies donation subscriber well philanthropic support turned paywalls subscription revenue TRiiBE explicitly eschewed subscription route One founder Morgan Johnson said “We know Black millennials don’t want pay news made conscious decision subscriptionbased” PLUG platform built successful newsletter covering Black tech sector found niche made subscriptionbased model viable thousand free newsletter subscriber hundred member paying 100 annually Sherrell Dorsey founder told Idea although revenue first came advertising partnership company Goldman Sachs quickly decided favor subscriptionbased model interest sustainability Dorsey accomplished turning PLUG insight platform addition news one providing data index report topic BlackOwned Venture Capital Firms Tech DI Executive Index Subscriptions challenge distribution fund philanthropy remains concentrated unequal 2019 report Borealis Philanthropy found 40 foundation giving went three newsroom ProPublica Center Public Integrity Center Investigative Reporting Racial Equity Journalism Fund Borealis launched last September aim address disparity supporting news organization run people color general fund like Facebook Journalism Project also prioritized outlet owned people color time May Facebook gave 16 million COVID relief grant half outlet beneficiary published community color However philanthropic fund necessarily solve issue startup cost Although MLK50 Memphisbased nonprofit supported aforementioned fund founder initially selffunded publication credit card TRiiBE started financial backing Dorsey told Idea although initially tried pursue VC money PLUG received pushback many see point investing multiple Black medium outlet Platforms like Medium Patreon Substack decreased barrier publishing example MLK50 hosted Medium Coronavirus News Black Folks newsletter written Patrice Peck us Substack aim address lack coverage disproportionate impact COVID19 pandemic Black Americans Whether platform facilitate sustained support creator color end reflecting racial economic inequity rest medium remains seen writing according Substack’s ranking paid publication one newsletter written Black writer list top 25 paid newsletter Roll Call Written Austin Channing Brown New York Timesbestselling author Roll Call started February cost 7month Subscribe Idea weekly newsletter business medium news analysis interviewsTags Latest Media Journalism Philanthropy
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4,683 |
How To Publish Your Content On UX Planet
|
We’re looking for articles, insights, tutorials and case studies on Inspiration, User Experience, User Interface Design, Usability, Interaction Design, Prototyping, Product Design, and any other topic that relates to designing and building digital products.
How To Send Your Article
Send your draft or link to the published article to [email protected] via email, with a short description (one-two sentences) of what your article is about.
via email, with a short description (one-two sentences) of what your article is about. We will review the article and get back to you within 1–2 business days.
Information To Keep In Mind
Your article should be for all Medium audience, not just Medium Members.
Medium only allows articles to be published to one publication at a time. If your article has already been published with a different publication, we aren’t allowed to request it to publication.
Once your article is published with us, we ask you to not remove it from our publication for at least 6 months.
In order to keep the quality of our channel, we maintain the privilege to decline articles that don’t align with our goals and convictions.
We’re always glad to make new contacts and explore new possibilities. We would be very happy to welcome you on board of our UX Planet!
|
https://uxplanet.org/how-to-publish-your-content-on-ux-planet-fd9dc99756db
|
[]
|
2020-06-28 13:33:40.772000+00:00
|
['UX', 'User Experience', 'Writing', 'Ux Writing', 'UX Design']
|
Title Publish Content UX PlanetContent We’re looking article insight tutorial case study Inspiration User Experience User Interface Design Usability Interaction Design Prototyping Product Design topic relates designing building digital product Send Article Send draft link published article infouxplanetorg via email short description onetwo sentence article via email short description onetwo sentence article review article get back within 1–2 business day Information Keep Mind article Medium audience Medium Members Medium allows article published one publication time article already published different publication aren’t allowed request publication article published u ask remove publication least 6 month order keep quality channel maintain privilege decline article don’t align goal conviction We’re always glad make new contact explore new possibility would happy welcome board UX PlanetTags UX User Experience Writing Ux Writing UX Design
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4,684 |
How to create strong hierarchy in digital design
|
Hierarchy is a key element in design, creating a good user experience, and achieving the business goals of a website or app. It’s also one of the biggest mistakes new designers make. When there is no clear hierarchy on a website or an app, you risk frustrating the user and losing them as a potential customer. Let’s dive into what visual hierarchy is, tips for how to achieve it, and how you can use it to improve your websites and app designs.
What is visual hierarchy in design?
There are many definitions of hierarchy. Most refer to a system of organized rankings, it’s an order or power structure to help everyone know who is on top and most important. For example, at a company, this would be the CEO. The CEO is at the top of the pyramid, the top of the chain of command with various leaders and individual contributors underneath in the organization chart.
Visual hierarchy, on the other hand, is the principle of arranging elements to show their order of importance. If everything in your design is the same size, the same weight, or the same color, then nothing is important. This is even more paramount in creating a good user experience for web design. You want to capture the attention of your user and guide them through an experience. Whether it’s a large headline, a bright color, or the placement, there are many ways to create a strong level of hierarchy in web design.
Why is hierarchy important?
Now that we understand what hierarchy is, why is it so important specifically for web design? Our brains have to look at something, we have to understand what we should be looking at first.
If there are too many things to look at on a landing page, then our eyes will have no idea where to look first and process information. If the hierarchy is too confusing on a website, a user will get frustrated and exit the site altogether. This creates a bad user experience. You’ve lost a potential customer forever, they’re not coming back.
In order to achieve a goal for your user, you need to use hierarchy to guide them through the website experience. Are they there to log in and make a purchase? Do they need to pay a bill? Are they looking for information to reach out and hire a company? Or is it more for pleasure, maybe a browsing experience like YouTube or Netflix? Whatever the goal, you must work with the client and use your design expertise to achieve it.
What does good hierarchy look like?
Let’s take a look at some examples of websites using good hierarchy best practices. Take a look at these designs and see if you can spot why the hierarchy works well.
Example of good hierarchy in web design (source: squarespace.com)
In this example of Squarespace’s homepage, there’s a balance of hierarchy. The largest element is a glimpse into the Squarespace product, how you can use their tools to customize your own website.
Next, we read the headline “Everything you need to grow online.” which reinforces the mission behind Squarespace, a tool that helps you develop an online presence. There are clear calls to action with “Get started” buttons and also a balanced flow to the whitespace surrounding these elements.
Example of good hierarchy in web design (source: onemedical.com)
In this example, a large headline with clear contrast tells us immediately what One Medical is and how they help. Next, we notice the lifestyle photography, reinforcing the idea that you can get medical care from the comfort of your own home.
Example of good hierarchy in web design (source: squareup.com)
The centered layout in this example draws our eyes to the headline “Tools to run your business”. Followed by the group of photos underneath, we get a better sense of how Square can help your business. We’re also not bombarded with too many actions, one clear “Get started” CTA button or, in a secondary CTA style, the option to view more solutions.
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https://uxplanet.org/how-to-create-strong-hierarchy-in-digital-design-1f605f04d1fc
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['Monica Galvan']
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2020-12-17 22:23:30.374000+00:00
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['UX', 'UI', 'Visual Design', 'Web Design', 'Design']
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Title create strong hierarchy digital designContent Hierarchy key element design creating good user experience achieving business goal website app It’s also one biggest mistake new designer make clear hierarchy website app risk frustrating user losing potential customer Let’s dive visual hierarchy tip achieve use improve website app design visual hierarchy design many definition hierarchy refer system organized ranking it’s order power structure help everyone know top important example company would CEO CEO top pyramid top chain command various leader individual contributor underneath organization chart Visual hierarchy hand principle arranging element show order importance everything design size weight color nothing important even paramount creating good user experience web design want capture attention user guide experience Whether it’s large headline bright color placement many way create strong level hierarchy web design hierarchy important understand hierarchy important specifically web design brain look something understand looking first many thing look landing page eye idea look first process information hierarchy confusing website user get frustrated exit site altogether creates bad user experience You’ve lost potential customer forever they’re coming back order achieve goal user need use hierarchy guide website experience log make purchase need pay bill looking information reach hire company pleasure maybe browsing experience like YouTube Netflix Whatever goal must work client use design expertise achieve good hierarchy look like Let’s take look example website using good hierarchy best practice Take look design see spot hierarchy work well Example good hierarchy web design source squarespacecom example Squarespace’s homepage there’s balance hierarchy largest element glimpse Squarespace product use tool customize website Next read headline “Everything need grow online” reinforces mission behind Squarespace tool help develop online presence clear call action “Get started” button also balanced flow whitespace surrounding element Example good hierarchy web design source onemedicalcom example large headline clear contrast tell u immediately One Medical help Next notice lifestyle photography reinforcing idea get medical care comfort home Example good hierarchy web design source squareupcom centered layout example draw eye headline “Tools run business” Followed group photo underneath get better sense Square help business We’re also bombarded many action one clear “Get started” CTA button secondary CTA style option view solutionsTags UX UI Visual Design Web Design Design
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4,685 |
Careless citations don’t just spread scientific myths — they can make them stronger
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Science, in theory, is self-correcting. But, as a new study demonstrates, some scientific ideas appear immune to criticism. Striking them down only seems to make them more powerful.
The study, published in PLoS ONE by Kåre Letrud and Sigbjørn Hernes of the University of Applied Sciences in Lillehammer, Norway, looks at citations and mis-citations of three articles critiquing the so-called Hawthorne effect. It’s the first in a series of planned investigations of what Letrud refers to as “tenacious scientific myths”.
Continue reading at Nature Index
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https://medium.com/dr-jon-brock/careless-citations-dont-just-spread-scientific-myths-they-can-make-them-stronger-d2d2a386c8cf
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['Jon Brock']
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2019-10-21 07:26:43.761000+00:00
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['Science', 'Science Publishing', 'Hawthorne Effect']
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Title Careless citation don’t spread scientific myth — make strongerContent Science theory selfcorrecting new study demonstrates scientific idea appear immune criticism Striking seems make powerful study published PLoS ONE Kåre Letrud Sigbjørn Hernes University Applied Sciences Lillehammer Norway look citation miscitations three article critiquing socalled Hawthorne effect It’s first series planned investigation Letrud refers “tenacious scientific myths” Continue reading Nature IndexTags Science Science Publishing Hawthorne Effect
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4,686 |
Finding the Meaning Of Life In Suffering
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“If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated — chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point! I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key!” Chapter eight, Notes from the Underground
Fyodor Dostoevsky uses the character of the Underground Man to celebrate liberty. The Underground Man embodies the freedom to choose — to choose suffering over health, horror over delight and immorality over morality. He has devoted his life to a perverse idea of rebellion whereby he continuously throws himself into bonfire in the hope that someone will notice him. He commits violence upon himself to show others of the violence they are doing to themselves.
It is the existence of the irrational that the Underground Man is trying to expose. His life is a performance; he is acting as a mirror, presenting to his audience the side to them that is illogical. For man is far too unpredictable and inconsistent to reduce itself to that which is rational, moral, reasonable and logical.
To purposely be offensive, foul, rude and arrogant, to be as irrational as one can be, is an act of rebellion against a system that believes people are mere straight lines.
He strives, against the disbelief of those around him, to become ever more so angry, isolated and unhappy — he is committing mutiny only to demonstrate to his audience what it is like to be chucked off the ship and into the ocean.
He hopes to insult his audience, to show them how pathetic they are for trying to control the little world around them.
The people have a great many schemes and plans that they hope will end their suffering, yet, once heaven appears on the horizon, they hunch over again and discover something else to be miserable about. When they are in Naples, they dream they are in Rome, as Emerson wrote. The Underground Man understands this, he has seen it before many times, over and over again:
“But if he is not stupid, he is monstrously ungrateful! Phenomenally ungrateful. In fact, I believe that the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.” Chapter eight, Notes from the Underground.
This is the nature of man. But, if you believe in the rationality of man, then how do you justify the history of the world? For history is a great catastrophe, an endless cycle of betrayal and misery where there are no victories or triumphs.
A person of modern-day rationality must either look away or squeal in horror. Because history is not rational, it is not even sensible, but, instead, a chaotic mess defined by extraordinary acts of horror and cowardice. There is no end to the immense amount of suffering we have caused ourselves. Why, then, do people continue to believe that the future will be different?
Notes from Underground is an attack on the ideologies that seek to end suffering, namely Marxism and utilitarianism. Dostoevsky argued that despite humanity’s attempt to create the “Crystal Palace,” an all-inclusive utopia, one cannot avoid the truth that people do not always want to act in their own self-interest; the attraction to protest the rational is a part of our natural energy even if it is harmful.
People are always struggling for freedom, and for a chance to declare themselves as independent from the platoon. Indeed, reason and comfort have attracted the horde. But, sometimes, someone will step aside from the crowd just to hear their own voice again even if that means crime or drudgery.
Humans do intend to be good, but they do not wish to be perfect. Sometimes they want to see what it is like to be terribly bad, to feel the vibrations of chaos and watch the way the cards flutter as they fall.
No one deserves to be a saint, but no one wants to be one either. And, here lies, Dostoevsky wrote, the problem with progressing towards a utopia — nobody truly wants what they seem to seek. Dostoevsky argues this brilliantly in Notes from the Underground:
“Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element.” Note from the Underground, Chapter eight
Give people exactly what they want, the rationalist argues, and the pain suffered because of the shortage will disappear. But, there is no reason to believe this to be true. Solve all the difficulties in the world, and we will not simply put our hands together and admire our shiny new world, but only create, from thin air, more problems, more worries, more uncertainties.
People want to feel alive, they want to discover who they truly are, what makes them gasp, what makes them bleed. Sometimes they tear the hairs from their arms just to feel the pain. Sometimes they swear at those they love just to feel the grief.
But, they commit these crimes only to prove that they are man and not machine, that they are powerful, and that they do indeed have a choice, a great ability to choose between an infinite number of possibilities. And, how they adore the shaking tension before making such a decision!
This irrationality, this darkness cannot be calculated — it is born from the madness of free will. No amount of reason and logic will ever straighten the molecules of our genes. And, even if we were to succeed in our schemes to reinstate reason and logic, it would not be long before we would lose our minds only for the purpose of discovering that we have one.
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https://medium.com/personal-growth/finding-the-meaning-of-life-in-suffering-604182cf11cd
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['Harry J. Stead']
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2018-12-27 00:29:53.976000+00:00
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['Life Lessons', 'Culture', 'Philosophy', 'Life', 'Psychology']
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Title Finding Meaning Life SufferingContent “If say calculated tabulated — chaos darkness curse mere possibility calculating beforehand would stop reason would reassert man would purposely go mad order rid reason gain point believe answer whole work man really seems consist nothing proving every minute man pianokey” Chapter eight Notes Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky us character Underground Man celebrate liberty Underground Man embodies freedom choose — choose suffering health horror delight immorality morality devoted life perverse idea rebellion whereby continuously throw bonfire hope someone notice commits violence upon show others violence existence irrational Underground Man trying expose life performance acting mirror presenting audience side illogical man far unpredictable inconsistent reduce rational moral reasonable logical purposely offensive foul rude arrogant irrational one act rebellion system belief people mere straight line strives disbelief around become ever angry isolated unhappy — committing mutiny demonstrate audience like chucked ship ocean hope insult audience show pathetic trying control little world around people great many scheme plan hope end suffering yet heaven appears horizon hunch discover something else miserable Naples dream Rome Emerson wrote Underground Man understands seen many time “But stupid monstrously ungrateful Phenomenally ungrateful fact believe best definition man ungrateful biped” Chapter eight Notes Underground nature man believe rationality man justify history world history great catastrophe endless cycle betrayal misery victory triumph person modernday rationality must either look away squeal horror history rational even sensible instead chaotic mess defined extraordinary act horror cowardice end immense amount suffering caused people continue believe future different Notes Underground attack ideology seek end suffering namely Marxism utilitarianism Dostoevsky argued despite humanity’s attempt create “Crystal Palace” allinclusive utopia one cannot avoid truth people always want act selfinterest attraction protest rational part natural energy even harmful People always struggling freedom chance declare independent platoon Indeed reason comfort attracted horde sometimes someone step aside crowd hear voice even mean crime drudgery Humans intend good wish perfect Sometimes want see like terribly bad feel vibration chaos watch way card flutter fall one deserves saint one want one either lie Dostoevsky wrote problem progressing towards utopia — nobody truly want seem seek Dostoevsky argues brilliantly Notes Underground “Shower upon every earthly blessing drown sea happiness nothing bubble bliss seen surface give economic prosperity nothing else sleep eat cake busy continuation specie even sheer ingratitude sheer spite man would play nasty trick would even risk cake would deliberately desire fatal rubbish uneconomical absurdity simply introduce positive good sense fatal fantastic element” Note Underground Chapter eight Give people exactly want rationalist argues pain suffered shortage disappear reason believe true Solve difficulty world simply put hand together admire shiny new world create thin air problem worry uncertainty People want feel alive want discover truly make gasp make bleed Sometimes tear hair arm feel pain Sometimes swear love feel grief commit crime prove man machine powerful indeed choice great ability choose infinite number possibility adore shaking tension making decision irrationality darkness cannot calculated — born madness free amount reason logic ever straighten molecule gene even succeed scheme reinstate reason logic would long would lose mind purpose discovering oneTags Life Lessons Culture Philosophy Life Psychology
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4,687 |
Persephone Rises
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Persephone Rises
A poem
Art by Moga Alexandru
I remember; The crispy grass under my soles,
The tall lavender kissing my sore knees and my hands
Dancing around trees; Dirt beneath my fingertips and
A feeling of urgency towards stillness.
The voices of the woods would call me and I would answer
In sober desperation; The world is dying, I don’t want to spend
More than one minute in the same place because there is
So much to see and much earth to greet; Soon everything will collapse,
Starting by my lungs, one against the other, so I’ve been saving my breath
For the words that matter.
The Fae asked me to have faith in the cycles, in the seeds about to sprout
Yet I feel I’ve been cropped, harvested and soon, the soil will follow,
Eating down my legs and my arms; swallowing my limbs whole, engulfing
All that once was into a new beginning; An imploding volcano,
Erupting itself.
I see stones made out of empty shells and webs abandoned, evicted;
Long-gone spiders left circular notes, which I study and memorize by heart.
It is the lore of the forest, the words of a song I forgot the rhythm yet my
Syncopated hearth tries to retrieve it; I thought I could sing the world anew.
I thought I could mend the roots and the branches with saliva and tears,
But they keep on breaking; crippled jungles seek shelter beneath my arms,
The toasted wings of a weary phoenix, tired of the chthonian act of rebirth,
Pushed from the legs of Gaia more than once; beaking the primordial egg
Until it cracks open and cuts my skin, plucking my feathers.
But I resist.
The colossus of trees resist.
The agitated animals resist, clawing the fields, standing the sacred ground.
My eyes lighten the flames, and the ashes fall heavy and agglutinated
As dunes of sand of a dying desert.
A forbidden idea of possibility enters the pores of the forest, each hole,
Each cave wants to be more, to extort life from every leaf and dewdrop.
I twist stalagmites with my bare hands to extract the juice of persistence
And it rains all over the burnt land, the wounded seeds.
The tiniest creatures seem to celebrate this second chance, this existence.
I think of the many times I wanted to end mine, desiring to be
Shoved down into the cold, wet earth, stretching my whole body;
Finding new heartbeats beneath the steps of new ancestors,
Drinking new blood from the gems of a pomegranate.
Soothed, remade, strong enough to germinate again.
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https://medium.com/giulia-listo/persephone-rises-1ab79252b817
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['Giulia De Gregorio Listo']
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2020-01-24 20:12:55.204000+00:00
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['Poetry', 'Nature', 'Love', 'Writing']
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Title Persephone RisesContent Persephone Rises poem Art Moga Alexandru remember crispy grass sol tall lavender kissing sore knee hand Dancing around tree Dirt beneath fingertip feeling urgency towards stillness voice wood would call would answer sober desperation world dying don’t want spend one minute place much see much earth greet Soon everything collapse Starting lung one I’ve saving breath word matter Fae asked faith cycle seed sprout Yet feel I’ve cropped harvested soon soil follow Eating leg arm swallowing limb whole engulfing new beginning imploding volcano Erupting see stone made empty shell web abandoned evicted Longgone spider left circular note study memorize heart lore forest word song forgot rhythm yet Syncopated hearth try retrieve thought could sing world anew thought could mend root branch saliva tear keep breaking crippled jungle seek shelter beneath arm toasted wing weary phoenix tired chthonian act rebirth Pushed leg Gaia beaking primordial egg crack open cut skin plucking feather resist colossus tree resist agitated animal resist clawing field standing sacred ground eye lighten flame ash fall heavy agglutinated dune sand dying desert forbidden idea possibility enters pore forest hole cave want extort life every leaf dewdrop twist stalagmite bare hand extract juice persistence rain burnt land wounded seed tiniest creature seem celebrate second chance existence think many time wanted end mine desiring Shoved cold wet earth stretching whole body Finding new heartbeat beneath step new ancestor Drinking new blood gem pomegranate Soothed remade strong enough germinate againTags Poetry Nature Love Writing
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4,688 |
Song Lyrics Without the Suck
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Over the past few years I’ve been involved with a number of music-related web projects, including Loudwerkz, DMOD (RIP), and Ink19. Although I make my living on the web and love what I do, I suppose I’ve always been secretly jealous of those snobby record store employees who hear the latest cuts first, troll naive customers, and argue with their coworkers about song meanings :).
Fortunately, the web has lowered the bar to all of that stuff. What would we do without Pandora, Last.fm, and (more recently) Turntable? The one missing piece for me has always been a good song lyrics site. Sure, there are lots of lyrics engines on the web, but they’re all dreadfully designed, spam-centric, and just scuzzy feeling in general. Search for lyrics for your favorite song on Google, and you’re bound to end up looking at popup ads for diet pills.
If you’re like me, this makes you sad. And irritated. So there I was, bitching about this on Twitter one evening, when Seth Banks proposed that we actually do something about it. So we did.
Last week, Seth and I launched Lyricful, which aims to be the first classy lyrics site. We started with a nice clean design and paired it with a sizable lyrics database (growing every day), an intuitive search interface, and some SEO know-how. We’ve also added a few other things we felt fans would find useful, like song previews, concert information, and easy sharing features.
Most importantly, Lyricful isn’t running any invasive eyeball-bleeding advertising. The only ads on the site are in the form of song preview links and concert ticket referrals, relevant to the artist you’re currently browsing (which directly benefits the artist). We built this for ourselves, as music lovers and fans, which means that we wanted to make it as easy as possible to get right to transcribing, discussing, and sharing your favorite lyrics.
Since the soft launch, we’ve started working with a number of artists who were interested in Lyricful and its sister site, MusicNewsHQ. To start with, we’ve added featured / verified artist spots, which will help promote up and coming artists and ensure accuracy of the site contents. Double win. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this project evolves, having both artists and their fans involved in the process. Got feedback for us? We’d love to hear it!
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https://medium.com/zerosum-dot-org/song-lyrics-without-the-suck-58603e599528
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['Nick Plante']
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2017-11-04 17:35:43.101000+00:00
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['Startup', 'Song Lyrics', 'Side Project']
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Title Song Lyrics Without SuckContent past year I’ve involved number musicrelated web project including Loudwerkz DMOD RIP Ink19 Although make living web love suppose I’ve always secretly jealous snobby record store employee hear latest cut first troll naive customer argue coworkers song meaning Fortunately web lowered bar stuff would without Pandora Lastfm recently Turntable one missing piece always good song lyric site Sure lot lyric engine web they’re dreadfully designed spamcentric scuzzy feeling general Search lyric favorite song Google you’re bound end looking popup ad diet pill you’re like make sad irritated bitching Twitter one evening Seth Banks proposed actually something Last week Seth launched Lyricful aim first classy lyric site started nice clean design paired sizable lyric database growing every day intuitive search interface SEO knowhow We’ve also added thing felt fan would find useful like song preview concert information easy sharing feature importantly Lyricful isn’t running invasive eyeballbleeding advertising ad site form song preview link concert ticket referral relevant artist you’re currently browsing directly benefit artist built music lover fan mean wanted make easy possible get right transcribing discussing sharing favorite lyric Since soft launch we’ve started working number artist interested Lyricful sister site MusicNewsHQ start we’ve added featured verified artist spot help promote coming artist ensure accuracy site content Double win I’m really looking forward seeing project evolves artist fan involved process Got feedback u We’d love hear itTags Startup Song Lyrics Side Project
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4,689 |
Random Numbers in Python
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We make numerical calculations when the analytical solutions are not available. For example, if we flip a fair coin a large number of times, then we know “analytically” that the outcome will be heads or tails roughly equal the number of times (50% each). For complex systems, a numerical solution might be needed. This article covers a few ways to generate random numbers in Python for the purpose of numerical solutions to differential equations or Monte-Carlo simulations for forecasting.
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay
What are Random Numbers
Random numbers are the number chosen from a certain distribution. Depending on the distribution, some numbers are more likely to be chosen than others.
If the distribution is uniform, then all numbers have equally likely to be chosen.
If the distribution is Gaussian, then the numbers closer to the mean of the distribution have a higher probability of getting chosen. This is particularly useful when working with Brownian motion such as in particle diffusion.
Sometimes the distribution is not available, and a random entity needs to be drawn from a list with each entity (or number) having an equal probability of getting drawn. A modeler may choose to select the same entity again in subsequent draws (with replacement) and configure the code to not draw the same entity again (without replacement).
Random Library in Python
All you need information: random numbers on python.org, random numbers on analyticsvidhya. I am summarizing a few statements that are used more often.
import random # Random number between 0 and 1
random.random() # Get same random number every time
random.seed(1) # Random Number between a and b with uniform distribution
random.uniform(1,2) # Random Number with Normal distribution
random.gauss(1,2) # mu = 1 and sigma = 2
Quick Test 1: Red and Green balls
In some cases, random entities are needed to be picked from a list. For example, consider a typical interview question: What is the probability of drawing a green ball from a bag of 1 green and 4 red balls. Answer is 1/5 = 0.20. In other words, if I draw balls (with replacement) from the bag a large number of times (say, 100), then 20 of those would be green. Let’s test it programmatically.
green_ball_count = 0
for i in range(0,100):
new_ball = random.choice(['g', 'r', 'r', 'r', 'r'])
if new_ball == 'g':
green_ball_count = green_ball_count + 1 print (green_ball_count)
# output is 19 which is close to 20
Quick Test 2: Unfair Coin
Let’s assume that we only know the probabilities of the occurrence of the events. For example, in the case of an unfair coin, the head (H) occurs less than the tail (T). The probability(H) = 0.2 and probability(T) = 0.8.
H_count = 0
for i in range(0,10000):
new_flip = random.choices(['H', 'T'], weights=[0.2, 0.8])
if new_flip == ['H']: # notice that this function returns a list
H_count = H_count + 1 print (H_count)
# output is 1973 which is close to 2000
Law of Large Numbers
In both the above examples, we see that as the number of coin flips or balls drawn from the bag increase, the results from the numerical solution (simulation) come closer to the analytical solution. Let’s test this programmatically.
In the following code, a fair coin is flipped 1000 times. For the first few runs, the average numerical probability fluctuates but reaches a stable value of 0.5 for a larger number of flips.
for i in range(0,1000):
new_flip = random.choices(['H', 'T'], weights=[0.5, 0.5])
total_flips = total_flips + 1
if new_flip == ['H']: # notice that this function returns a list
H_count = H_count + 1 numerical_probability.append(H_count/total_flips) import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.plot(numerical_probability)
plt.xlabel("flip counts")
plt.ylabel("numerical probability")
Numerical probability approaches the theoretical value of 0.5 for a large number of experiments
Real-World Applications
Safety Stock Calculations. Like an unfair coin, the demand for various items is not evenly distributed. In other words, there are more chances that the demand is below or above the forecast. Here is a research paper on this topic. Estimating Film Porosity and Thickness for Sensors: Brownian motion plays an important role in how aerosol particles get deposited on surfaces. Here is a research paper on this topic. Check out the “Predictions by the Numbers” documentary from Nova PBS.
Advanced Topics
Please free to reach out to me if you have any questions, suggestions, code requests, or if you found any errors in the above code.
Contact: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anshumanlall/
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https://medium.com/predmatic/random-numbers-in-python-c897d719169b
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['Anshuman Lall']
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2020-12-28 18:28:25.832000+00:00
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['Monte Carlo Simulation', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Probability', 'Random Numbers']
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Title Random Numbers PythonContent make numerical calculation analytical solution available example flip fair coin large number time know “analytically” outcome head tail roughly equal number time 50 complex system numerical solution might needed article cover way generate random number Python purpose numerical solution differential equation MonteCarlo simulation forecasting Image ClkerFreeVectorImages Pixabay Random Numbers Random number number chosen certain distribution Depending distribution number likely chosen others distribution uniform number equally likely chosen distribution Gaussian number closer mean distribution higher probability getting chosen particularly useful working Brownian motion particle diffusion Sometimes distribution available random entity need drawn list entity number equal probability getting drawn modeler may choose select entity subsequent draw replacement configure code draw entity without replacement Random Library Python need information random number pythonorg random number analyticsvidhya summarizing statement used often import random Random number 0 1 randomrandom Get random number every time randomseed1 Random Number b uniform distribution randomuniform12 Random Number Normal distribution randomgauss12 mu 1 sigma 2 Quick Test 1 Red Green ball case random entity needed picked list example consider typical interview question probability drawing green ball bag 1 green 4 red ball Answer 15 020 word draw ball replacement bag large number time say 100 20 would green Let’s test programmatically greenballcount 0 range0100 newball randomchoiceg r r r r newball g greenballcount greenballcount 1 print greenballcount output 19 close 20 Quick Test 2 Unfair Coin Let’s assume know probability occurrence event example case unfair coin head H occurs le tail probabilityH 02 probabilityT 08 Hcount 0 range010000 newflip randomchoicesH weights02 08 newflip H notice function return list Hcount Hcount 1 print Hcount output 1973 close 2000 Law Large Numbers example see number coin flip ball drawn bag increase result numerical solution simulation come closer analytical solution Let’s test programmatically following code fair coin flipped 1000 time first run average numerical probability fluctuates reach stable value 05 larger number flip range01000 newflip randomchoicesH weights05 05 totalflips totalflips 1 newflip H notice function return list Hcount Hcount 1 numericalprobabilityappendHcounttotalflips import matplotlibpyplot plt pltplotnumericalprobability pltxlabelflip count pltylabelnumerical probability Numerical probability approach theoretical value 05 large number experiment RealWorld Applications Safety Stock Calculations Like unfair coin demand various item evenly distributed word chance demand forecast research paper topic Estimating Film Porosity Thickness Sensors Brownian motion play important role aerosol particle get deposited surface research paper topic Check “Predictions Numbers” documentary Nova PBS Advanced Topics Please free reach question suggestion code request found error code Contact httpswwwlinkedincominanshumanlallTags Monte Carlo Simulation Python Data Science Probability Random Numbers
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4,690 |
If I Had to Ring In the New Year with Anyone
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Let’s be perfectly honest. I am the single mom to one happy five year old, and I am rather blissfully self-partnered these days. It’s a little bit funny because I used to be a very social butterfly. I’m the sort of INFP who can easily mask as an ENFP whenever she is truly comfortable, and in her “element.”
But motherhood has admittedly changed me. Even though it took a few years for me to adjust to being a parent and to finally get over the loneliness and isolation of single motherhood, I am now remarkably happy living my life on my own.
At this point, my New Year’s Eve is going to involve some Thai takeout and Frozen games with my daughter. But do you know what? I’m looking forwards to it. My life is currently on my own terms, and I love that.
Years ago, I would have been especially sad and lonely on New Year’s Eve. I would have felt that I definitely needed other people to make the holiday a good one. People as in plenty of peers and a boyfriend.
These days I feel much differently about what makes a good holiday. And I’m not bothered by being alone. That’s why, when folks first began asking me to share my dream guest list for New Year’s Eve, I froze.
It took a long time for me to figure out who I would really want to connect with if “anything was possible.” And for the most part, I realized my list would be all about women who inspire me.
Stevie Nicks
“When you grow up as a girl, the world tells you the things that you are supposed to be: emotional, loving, beautiful, wanted. And then when you are those things, the world tells you they are inferior: illogical, weak, vain, empty.”
In a lot of ways, Stevie Nicks feels like my spirit animal. I wish I could be as cool as she is at 71 years old.
I’ve written about Stevie before, and I’ve always planned to write about her again. In Stevie, I don’t just see an incredible artist, but a woman who made her own path without worrying so much about what the world expected her to be.
Stevie has been very vocal about her choice to be child-free and her overall singleness despite having had many lovers… and even being something of a hopeless romantic at heart.
She hasn’t lived an easy life, but she’s been through some shit (like drug addiction and a three month marriage) and lived to tell the tales. I would love to spend time with her and soak up some of that ageless wisdom.
Helena Bonham Carter
“I think everything in life is art. What you do. How you dress. The way you love someone, and how you talk. Your smile and your personality. What you believe in, and all your dreams. The way you drink your tea. How you decorate your home. Or party. Your grocery list. The food you make. How your writing looks. And the way you feel. Life is art.”
For as long as I can remember, I have always been a little bit obsessed with Helena Bonham Carter. I love the roles she’s played in countless movies, and the way she’s been able to make each character so different despite own her distinctive appearance.
Helena is a small woman (only 5′ 2″), yet something about her always seems larger than life. She’s been romantically connected to powerhouse men like Kenneth Branagh and Tim Burton, but she’s never appeared to be overshadowed by them.
I respect her fierce independence and I’ve loved watching her age gracefully over the years without catering to Hollywood’s whims. A lot like Stevie, I sort of want to be Helena when I grow up, at least in certain ways.
bell hooks
“Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know love we have to invest time and commitment... dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love--which is to transform us. Many people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high. They want to do nothing, just passively receive the good feeling.”
When it comes to bel hooks, I’m embarrassed to say that I am late to the party. I only began reading her this year, but I love the way she tackles really tough subjects like love, feminism, culture, and politics.
Her commonsense approach and honesty are refreshing and I identify so much with some of her revelations about life and love, though I’ve only just scratched the surface in reading her work.
I know that I could learn a great deal from bel and would welcome any time to chat with her.
Amy Tan
“It’s a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.”
Ever since grade school, Amy Tan has been one of my favorite writers in the world. I can’t adequately express how much I love her work and wish my writing had just a fraction of her beauty and sensibility.
Most folks are familiar with Amy for her novel The Joy Luck Club. That was my first experience with her writing as a child, and I understand that while we are very different writers, she has still made an enormous impact upon my own work and what I dare to reveal.
Back when I used to write copy for a social media marketing agency, I often thought a lot about Amy and the fact that her writing career began with mundane copy too. She has often inspired me to press onward.
The cast of Frozen
“I’m here. What you need?”
Just in case you missed it, I love Frozen. Especially Frozen 2. And I love how it’s such a feminist fairytale, honestly. One of my favorite parts in the film happens so quickly you might miss it. When Kristoff reunites with Anna he simply says, “I’m here. What do you need?”
You know, instead of taking over and trying to do everything for her, he asks and actually listens. Then, he actually does what she needs, without an argument.
I’ve written before that Frozen 2 is a love letter to single women everywhere. And that holds true for me even when looking at Anna and Kristoff’s relationship. Disney has done a great job with the franchise and I hope to see more positive and women-driven Disney films.
So, as long as we’re talking about a fantasy New Year’s Party, I’d love to party with the cast of Frozen because I find each actor hilarious and down to earth. Idina and Kristen especially inspire me as woman who are thriving in Hollywood.
My real New Year’s Eve might seem sort of boring.
Again, I plan to grab my favorite Thai takeout and play some games with my kid. I’ll have a glass or two of moscato and maybe I’ll stay up to watch the ball drop, but maybe not.
What I love most about my life right now is that it’s my choice. And while I can’t ring in the New Year with any of the fantasy guests on this list, that doesn’t mean I can’t include them in my life throughout 2020.
Like it or not, the New Year is a natural time to look ahead and live with more purpose. There’s no reason why the work of these artists can’t continue to inspire me and my own work moving forward.
And who knows? Perhaps one of these days I will get to cross off a few of these names on my bucket list of folks whom I’d like to meet.
Stranger things have happened.
|
https://medium.com/honestly-yours/if-i-had-to-ring-in-the-new-year-with-anyone-c362d4aaa6fd
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['Shannon Ashley']
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2019-12-29 15:59:51.283000+00:00
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['Inspiration', 'Women', 'Writing', 'Holidays', 'Life']
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Title Ring New Year AnyoneContent Let’s perfectly honest single mom one happy five year old rather blissfully selfpartnered day It’s little bit funny used social butterfly I’m sort INFP easily mask ENFP whenever truly comfortable “element” motherhood admittedly changed Even though took year adjust parent finally get loneliness isolation single motherhood remarkably happy living life point New Year’s Eve going involve Thai takeout Frozen game daughter know I’m looking forward life currently term love Years ago would especially sad lonely New Year’s Eve would felt definitely needed people make holiday good one People plenty peer boyfriend day feel much differently make good holiday I’m bothered alone That’s folk first began asking share dream guest list New Year’s Eve froze took long time figure would really want connect “anything possible” part realized list would woman inspire Stevie Nicks “When grow girl world tell thing supposed emotional loving beautiful wanted thing world tell inferior illogical weak vain empty” lot way Stevie Nicks feel like spirit animal wish could cool 71 year old I’ve written Stevie I’ve always planned write Stevie don’t see incredible artist woman made path without worrying much world expected Stevie vocal choice childfree overall singleness despite many lovers… even something hopeless romantic heart hasn’t lived easy life she’s shit like drug addiction three month marriage lived tell tale would love spend time soak ageless wisdom Helena Bonham Carter “I think everything life art dress way love someone talk smile personality believe dream way drink tea decorate home party grocery list food make writing look way feel Life art” long remember always little bit obsessed Helena Bonham Carter love role she’s played countless movie way she’s able make character different despite distinctive appearance Helena small woman 5′ 2″ yet something always seems larger life She’s romantically connected powerhouse men like Kenneth Branagh Tim Burton she’s never appeared overshadowed respect fierce independence I’ve loved watching age gracefully year without catering Hollywood’s whim lot like Stevie sort want Helena grow least certain way bell hook “Genuine love rarely emotional space need instantly gratified know love invest time commitment dreaming love save u solve problem provide steady state bliss security keep u stuck wishful fantasy undermining real power lovewhich transform u Many people want love function like drug giving immediate sustained high want nothing passively receive good feeling” come bel hook I’m embarrassed say late party began reading year love way tackle really tough subject like love feminism culture politics commonsense approach honesty refreshing identify much revelation life love though I’ve scratched surface reading work know could learn great deal bel would welcome time chat Amy Tan “It’s luxury writer ever think life” Ever since grade school Amy Tan one favorite writer world can’t adequately express much love work wish writing fraction beauty sensibility folk familiar Amy novel Joy Luck Club first experience writing child understand different writer still made enormous impact upon work dare reveal Back used write copy social medium marketing agency often thought lot Amy fact writing career began mundane copy often inspired press onward cast Frozen “I’m need” case missed love Frozen Especially Frozen 2 love it’s feminist fairytale honestly One favorite part film happens quickly might miss Kristoff reunites Anna simply say “I’m need” know instead taking trying everything asks actually listens actually need without argument I’ve written Frozen 2 love letter single woman everywhere hold true even looking Anna Kristoff’s relationship Disney done great job franchise hope see positive womendriven Disney film long we’re talking fantasy New Year’s Party I’d love party cast Frozen find actor hilarious earth Idina Kristen especially inspire woman thriving Hollywood real New Year’s Eve might seem sort boring plan grab favorite Thai takeout play game kid I’ll glass two moscato maybe I’ll stay watch ball drop maybe love life right it’s choice can’t ring New Year fantasy guest list doesn’t mean can’t include life throughout 2020 Like New Year natural time look ahead live purpose There’s reason work artist can’t continue inspire work moving forward know Perhaps one day get cross name bucket list folk I’d like meet Stranger thing happenedTags Inspiration Women Writing Holidays Life
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4,691 |
The Last Prompt before the Drawing in December is….
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Dec. 1st to Dec. 14th prompt
Photo by Oskars Sylwan on Unsplash
In these dark times…we need a little light. I would like to hear a piece on what the writer can imagine a New Year's Eve Party for 2021 will be like …but with a positive spin-off to it. I want to uplift people and give them hope for the holidays, for Pagans, and Christians alike. I would prefer it to be from the perspective of the writer as well. That the writer is at this party and will tell me this grand story.
I want to hear of this legendary party…where even the God’s might look down with envy. Now it doesn’t all have to be campy. There could be that loud drunk girl…who throws up on so and so…etc. There could be drama. BUT, I do want to hear that it mostly resolves it’s self and is happy in the end.
And it doesn’t have to be a regular party…nor even on this planet. Use your imagination, for your only limitation, is your inhibitions. Let go. Go ID on this shit. Dig deep. Maybe there is a lesson in what you will write. Maybe it’s just a feel-good story or a comic strip. Or you write about a secret BDSM club scene that escalates past midnight. Explore your hard limits. But stay within the Submission Guidelines rules of course.
So I’d like my writers to please put in your subtitles: A Rebel’s Prompt: A Grand Party. The submissions must be no less than 50 words and no more than 2,500 words.
Anyways, on Monday, December 14th, at midnight the prompt will end. Then on Tuesday, December 15th, 2020 I will announce the winner of this prompt. Finally, on Friday, Dec. 18th, I will announce the winner of the Grand Advertising Prize!!! Good Luck!
Amanda Dalmas
J.D. Harms, Mimi Bordeaux, Crystalclearcandace, Scott Leonardi, Ann Marie Steele, Iva Hotko, Robert Milby, Ben Kassoy, Lizzie Finn, Terri Seddon, Zach J. Payne, Kino McFarland, Regina, Calluna, Ed Newman, Shalini C, Tathy M Ntumba, Katy Madgwick, Lavender Nightmares, Gun Roswell, Ngang God’swill N., Penni Livingston, Charlotte Ivan, Dionne Charlet, Lauren Tolbert, J M Mantium, Michael Ritoch, Background Noise Comics, rstevens, marcialiss17, Pablo Stanley, Andy Anderson, Rhonda Skinner, Erica N, David Heatley, Lovely Daye, Wolfie Bain, Ora, Markmalady, Barry Dawson IV, Chelsea Cristoffor, Ravyne Hawke, Aaron Quist, Denis Adair, Jeff Suwak, Sivasai Yadav Mudugandla, Mohan Boone, Ema Dumitru, Suntonu Bhadra, Josie Elbiry
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https://medium.com/the-rebel-poets-society/the-last-prompt-before-the-drawing-in-december-is-b24bf1b16edd
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['Amanda Dalmas']
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2020-11-29 22:18:05.659000+00:00
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['Partying', 'Contests', 'A Rebels Prompt', 'The Rebel Poets Society', 'Storytelling']
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Title Last Prompt Drawing December is…Content Dec 1st Dec 14th prompt Photo Oskars Sylwan Unsplash dark times…we need little light would like hear piece writer imagine New Years Eve Party 2021 like …but positive spinoff want uplift people give hope holiday Pagans Christians alike would prefer perspective writer well writer party tell grand story want hear legendary party…where even God’s might look envy doesn’t campy could loud drunk girl…who throw so…etc could drama want hear mostly resolve it’s self happy end doesn’t regular party…nor even planet Use imagination limitation inhibition Let go Go ID shit Dig deep Maybe lesson write Maybe it’s feelgood story comic strip write secret BDSM club scene escalates past midnight Explore hard limit stay within Submission Guidelines rule course I’d like writer please put subtitle Rebel’s Prompt Grand Party submission must le 50 word 2500 word Anyways Monday December 14th midnight prompt end Tuesday December 15th 2020 announce winner prompt Finally Friday Dec 18th announce winner Grand Advertising Prize Good Luck Amanda Dalmas JD Harms Mimi Bordeaux Crystalclearcandace Scott Leonardi Ann Marie Steele Iva Hotko Robert Milby Ben Kassoy Lizzie Finn Terri Seddon Zach J Payne Kino McFarland Regina Calluna Ed Newman Shalini C Tathy Ntumba Katy Madgwick Lavender Nightmares Gun Roswell Ngang God’swill N Penni Livingston Charlotte Ivan Dionne Charlet Lauren Tolbert J Mantium Michael Ritoch Background Noise Comics rstevens marcialiss17 Pablo Stanley Andy Anderson Rhonda Skinner Erica N David Heatley Lovely Daye Wolfie Bain Ora Markmalady Barry Dawson IV Chelsea Cristoffor Ravyne Hawke Aaron Quist Denis Adair Jeff Suwak Sivasai Yadav Mudugandla Mohan Boone Ema Dumitru Suntonu Bhadra Josie ElbiryTags Partying Contests Rebels Prompt Rebel Poets Society Storytelling
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4,692 |
Everything You Need to Know About AirPods Max
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The headphones also have a digital crown and button straight from an Apple Watch. The crown allows you to change volume, control ANC, use Siri, etc.
Features
These headphones of course have their whole list of features and gimmicks for marketing. Let’s quickly go through them:
The headphones have an array of 6 different microphones for adaptive EQ (including inside your ear). This is a marketing thing we saw on the HomePod. Was it groundbreaking? No, not really.
They will auto-pause when you take them off and put them around your neck (which is nice).
20 hours of battery life is good. Really happy to hear that.
It was rumored that the headphones would be bi-directional (meaning you could put them on either way and they’d adapt) but it turns out they are not. It does, however, say the left and right inside the ear cups. Similar to what Bose has done.
Spacial audio is something new we saw with AirPods Pro and is coming on the Max’s as well. It’s a really cool feature for watching movies and is actually a really cool feature that you won’t find in competitors' headphones.
They also have that AirPods magic which means that they pair with your phone and work amazing. It also of course has Active Noise Cancellation and Siri.
Accessories
It wouldn’t be a modern-day Apple product if they didn’t price gouge you on accessories, Best Buy style.
Apple has two main add ons (kinda) for the Max. The first is a bi-directional lightning to eighth-inch jack for $35. It will let you use the headphones with a wired connection.
The other add on isn’t as much a necessary purchase right now as it is a future one. Apple has confirmed that replacement cups will cost $69 each. I’ve never been so proud and disappointed with Apple at the same time.
Thankfully, the case which can put the headphones in a special lower power mode to save battery comes with the headphones.
But is it Worth the Price?
While the AirPods Max look really cool, it brings up the question of whether it is worth the price tag.
For $550 you can get really nice sounding headphones. And while those headphones don’t have the AirPods “magic”, they do have features the Max doesn’t have. For example, you can’t use an external amp to power the headphones.
But the real competitors to these are Sony’s and Bose headphones. The Sony WH-100X M4’s (yep, worse name on the planet) only cost in the $300 range. They have really good noise canceling and are highly acclaimed. Sure they won’t have that AirPods touch or the spatial audio, but is that worth the cost? We’ll have to see how good they sound once reviewers get their hands on them.
So Should You Buy Them?
No matter what, don’t buy them right now. Even if you’re interested in picking them up, you should wait till reviewers can try them. The headphones are already sold out so you won’t be getting them before Christmas.
There are also rumors that Apple will release a “sports-edition” version which will only cost $350. It might be worth waiting out a month or two to see how these really turn out.
|
https://medium.com/macoclock/everything-you-need-to-know-about-airpods-max-7f529ec6d3a
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['Henry Gruett']
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2020-12-15 17:40:18.383000+00:00
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['Technews', 'Technology', 'Technology News', 'Tech', 'Apple']
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Title Everything Need Know AirPods MaxContent headphone also digital crown button straight Apple Watch crown allows change volume control ANC use Siri etc Features headphone course whole list feature gimmick marketing Let’s quickly go headphone array 6 different microphone adaptive EQ including inside ear marketing thing saw HomePod groundbreaking really autopause take put around neck nice 20 hour battery life good Really happy hear rumored headphone would bidirectional meaning could put either way they’d adapt turn however say left right inside ear cup Similar Bose done Spacial audio something new saw AirPods Pro coming Max’s well It’s really cool feature watching movie actually really cool feature won’t find competitor headphone also AirPods magic mean pair phone work amazing also course Active Noise Cancellation Siri Accessories wouldn’t modernday Apple product didn’t price gouge accessory Best Buy style Apple two main add ons kinda Max first bidirectional lightning eighthinch jack 35 let use headphone wired connection add isn’t much necessary purchase right future one Apple confirmed replacement cup cost 69 I’ve never proud disappointed Apple time Thankfully case put headphone special lower power mode save battery come headphone Worth Price AirPods Max look really cool brings question whether worth price tag 550 get really nice sounding headphone headphone don’t AirPods “magic” feature Max doesn’t example can’t use external amp power headphone real competitor Sony’s Bose headphone Sony WH100X M4’s yep worse name planet cost 300 range really good noise canceling highly acclaimed Sure won’t AirPods touch spatial audio worth cost We’ll see good sound reviewer get hand Buy matter don’t buy right Even you’re interested picking wait till reviewer try headphone already sold won’t getting Christmas also rumor Apple release “sportsedition” version cost 350 might worth waiting month two see really turn outTags Technews Technology Technology News Tech Apple
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4,693 |
Live Discussion 29.05.20 update!
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Last Friday we had a live discussion with Eugeny Ponomarenko and Peter Sharia about wipe and concept prospects!
Let’s check out together, what’s new!
Eugen, so the actual game will not be updated and you aim directly to a new concept?
That’s right. We had a difficult choice to continue to maintain existing game which isn’t good, so we decided to focus on new promising gameplay
With the new direction of Worldopo, what will happen with my WPT, Hexagons, Mining Farms, Buildings, Resources, etc?
Wipe is inevitable, but I can assure you that we will be careful of dropping players assets and, for sure, your WPT will stay with you
As for hexagons, we will provide some kind of assessment: for instance, there will be a minimal amount of hexagons left, enough to construct a building, which will remain in the player’s possession. As for the single hexagons, we will provide chose of tokenizing enough nearest hexes to a minimal amount, or compensation for the player after a wipe
Thank you, Eugene. Will a player have the option to decide if we can remove all of our Hexagons from the map and trade them back in for WPT? I know a lot of us have made many mistakes and would like the option to make a fresh start now that we are not guessing as much where to place the Hexagons like we were in the beginning.
Our plan is to make a fully functional in-game stock market where you can trade your tokenized assets, resources, and so on.
There will be a lot of us who are here from the very beginning when rules are totally far from now and honestly I hope you will come back with 2 rules instead of 100500 rules … you know, less is more!
I can’t agree more. The less the rules, the better the game. We trying to reach that
I have a lot of inventory slots that I don’t use, can I sell it back or you see use needed all those slots? In what manner they will be used?
No, they will not be used in new games in this manner.
We want to cut all unnecessary items and assets, which make a lot of noise and nothing else. Like, we drop drones, because their main purpose, for now, is to collect resources, and players need to build waypoints and it doesn’t make the gameplay any better. Thet’s why we want to simplify the game process and there will be no scissors and no wires
So does it make sense to play actual version or wait for new which will come in days? Weeks? Months?
Several months for sure. Can’t be more specific. We would be happy to mark the date. It’s a long way to release for sure, our team is currently working on a new scalable platform. When it’ll be ready, we can add assets and features and show you something!
Will you be asking for alpha testers?
Probably yes. They helped us much also last time
I would like to hear more about the new ways of earning WPT through the new resource tree. Examples of low end versus high end?
So, it’s the most exciting part of the new concept. Farms will be only one of the many options for players to earn WPT. There will be a looped model of WPT circulation inside the game economy, where the player with farms depends on a player with Power Stations, and all of them need skilled workers provided by players with Universities. And they can trade all of it for WPT. A stock exchange is included.
What will happen to farms? Will there be WPT return so for all levels also?
Farms will be removed from players and refunded with WPT, for all levels of farm. After wipe players could buy new farms that will be tokenized and limited.
Any updates on PvP?
PvP isn’t in our top priority, and it’s a hell of a task to make it realtime on real map. Say, there will be a simplified version of PvP, can’t say more for now.
Can we reach a high level on multiple branches? Or we have to pick one?
You can get as much as you want, but it will take you a crazy amount of time and resources.
What do you recommend we do in Worldopo while waiting for the new game? With the inevitable demise of most related gameplay, should we keep placing Hexagons? Building Resource buildings? Collecting Resources? Or just concentrate our gameplay on mining Gems (WPT) only?
For now, we recommend building farms and earn more WPT while you can, to take it later on with you, and rebuild a brand new world after the wipe. You also can try playing RPS in meanwhile!
PlayMarket: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.qubit.rpsgame
AppStore: https://apps.apple.com/ru/app/rps-cryptolord-worldopo-icq/id1507803151
Do you have some things to show already?
We will share when we have. At the moment there is more work on code, then on polishing design. You will see new buildings and so on, next weeks, in our posts so follow the updates!
Btw, Design. There will be a major change. We move from Landscape to Portrait.
Will there still be a ranking system in-game? In-game chat?
Yes, of course.
What about dead or inactive hexes?
Those would be wiped, but we will refund the WPT used for standalone hexes.
So I should not bother with producing any more resources, apart from Quibits for repairs? No need for them moving forward?
Qubits, brains, and cash have no future and place in the bright new world
Stay tuned for the next live discussion at 12.06.20!
|
https://medium.com/worldopo/live-discussion-29-05-20-update-e75ac3841c01
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[]
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2020-06-01 18:28:29.777000+00:00
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['Discussion', 'Development', 'Games', 'Updates', 'Crypto']
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Title Live Discussion 290520 updateContent Last Friday live discussion Eugeny Ponomarenko Peter Sharia wipe concept prospect Let’s check together what’s new Eugen actual game updated aim directly new concept That’s right difficult choice continue maintain existing game isn’t good decided focus new promising gameplay new direction Worldopo happen WPT Hexagons Mining Farms Buildings Resources etc Wipe inevitable assure careful dropping player asset sure WPT stay hexagon provide kind assessment instance minimal amount hexagon left enough construct building remain player’s possession single hexagon provide chose tokenizing enough nearest hex minimal amount compensation player wipe Thank Eugene player option decide remove Hexagons map trade back WPT know lot u made many mistake would like option make fresh start guessing much place Hexagons like beginning plan make fully functional ingame stock market trade tokenized asset resource lot u beginning rule totally far honestly hope come back 2 rule instead 100500 rule … know le can’t agree le rule better game trying reach lot inventory slot don’t use sell back see use needed slot manner used used new game manner want cut unnecessary item asset make lot noise nothing else Like drop drone main purpose collect resource player need build waypoints doesn’t make gameplay better Thet’s want simplify game process scissors wire make sense play actual version wait new come day Weeks Months Several month sure Can’t specific would happy mark date It’s long way release sure team currently working new scalable platform it’ll ready add asset feature show something asking alpha tester Probably yes helped u much also last time would like hear new way earning WPT new resource tree Examples low end versus high end it’s exciting part new concept Farms one many option player earn WPT looped model WPT circulation inside game economy player farm depends player Power Stations need skilled worker provided player Universities trade WPT stock exchange included happen farm WPT return level also Farms removed player refunded WPT level farm wipe player could buy new farm tokenized limited update PvP PvP isn’t top priority it’s hell task make realtime real map Say simplified version PvP can’t say reach high level multiple branch pick one get much want take crazy amount time resource recommend Worldopo waiting new game inevitable demise related gameplay keep placing Hexagons Building Resource building Collecting Resources concentrate gameplay mining Gems WPT recommend building farm earn WPT take later rebuild brand new world wipe also try playing RPS meanwhile PlayMarket httpsplaygooglecomstoreappsdetailsiddequbitrpsgame AppStore httpsappsapplecomruapprpscryptolordworldopoicqid1507803151 thing show already share moment work code polishing design see new building next week post follow update Btw Design major change move Landscape Portrait still ranking system ingame Ingame chat Yes course dead inactive hex would wiped refund WPT used standalone hex bother producing resource apart Quibits repair need moving forward Qubits brain cash future place bright new world Stay tuned next live discussion 120620Tags Discussion Development Games Updates Crypto
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4,694 |
Forced to Throw Out Their Old College Admissions Standards, Higher Ed Institutions Should Seize on the Crisis to Create Better Ones for the Future
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Forced to Throw Out Their Old College Admissions Standards, Higher Ed Institutions Should Seize on the Crisis to Create Better Ones for the Future The 74 Apr 17 · 4 min read
Commentary by Conor Williams
American higher education has always been enamored with longevity. Student tour guides on campuses across the country tout their institutions’ origin stories, quirky campus traditions and historical successes as they strut backwards past various stately, be-columned buildings with cornerstones announcing their decades — or centuries — of academic tenure.
It’s understandable enough: Many colleges and universities bill themselves as unique clubs with particular characteristics that they’ve developed organically over time. More seriously, the academy has an instinctive reverence for intellectual history; campuses have long served a key role as repositories of human wisdom.
And yet, framing the academic life in terms of links to the past can also create institutional calcification. It can make today’s status quo seem like the only possible way of organizing a campus.
Take colleges’ admissions processes. Several months ago, before the pandemic, California civil rights activists filed suit in an effort to force the system to drop standardized college admission test scores as an admissions requirement. Now, suddenly, unexpectedly, they’ve gotten their wish. Earlier this month, the University of California (UC) system announced that, among other things, its schools would not require students to include standardized test scores with their applications — starting with the 2021 freshman class.
The global coronavirus pandemic is shaking the very foundations of that chunk of the higher education universe. Indeed, public health concerns canceled spring administrations of both the SAT and ACT. For now, UC’s change is temporary, but the system’s size and scope — it enrolls more than 280,000 students across 10 campuses across the state — should open a broader conversation about how to make college admissions fairer. It’s worth asking: If we can do without mandating standardized assessments in college admissions now and the sky doesn’t fall, why bring them back at all?
The UC wouldn’t actually have to blaze a trail. As it happens, my alma mater, Bowdoin College, was the first college in the country to go test-optional (more than 50 years ago). The college has tracked the academic trajectories of students who submit test scores against those who don’t for decades, and it says that it doesn’t find any real impact. (In case it matters: I did submit my scores.) Their findings aren’t unique: When it comes to predicting students’ likelihood of graduating from college, high school grade point averages appear to be significantly better than scores on standardized college admissions assessments. Major university systems in Indiana and North Carolina — part of more than 1,000 test-optional campuses across the country — have followed Bowdoin’s example.
Advocates for making these admissions tests optional also cite studies that flag possible biases in their design. One study has found evidence of bias against African-American test takers in the verbal section of the SAT, arguing that it “favors one ethnic group over another.” There’s also a socioeconomic angle. “The highest predictive value of an SAT isn’t in how well a student will do in school, but how well they were able to avail themselves of prep material,” John A. Pérez, chairman of University of California’s Board of Regents, told the Los Angeles Times last fall. “And access to that prep material is still disproportionately tied to family income.”
At present, there’s ample reason to believe that these assessments have come to serve less as an upward mobility path for historically underserved students and more as an amplifier of existing social inequities. And yet, the tests’ critics shouldn’t overplay their hand (and the research behind it). While college admissions tests have sometimes served as an unfair hurdle for students, particularly those from diverse backgrounds, a good test-optional policy would convert them into an alternative pathway.
“Scores are best used not as the basis for a rank ordering of individuals,” wrote professor Danielle Allen in a 2014 Century Foundation book, “but as thresholds, dividing an applicant pool into those above and those below a line that is roughly predictive of likelihood of success.” That is, they could allow students with lower GPAs to prove their mettle — and earn admission — with higher scores.
What’s more, generally because of inequitable allocation of public education resources, many students from historically underserved communities attend schools that do not offer the full range of advanced coursework and extracurricular activities prized in competitive college admissions. Assessments like the SAT and ACT, however imperfect, could be used to give high-scoring students from under-resourced schools a chance to boost their admissions chances.
Does such a test-optional policy seem impossibly radical? Would it be such an unconscionable departure from college admissions’ meritocratic aspirations? It certainly doesn’t seem so. Suddenly, admissions offices in California are capable of breezing away the core metrics of prestige higher education — things the university system was preparing to defend in court just months ago. Perhaps this status quo was overdue for an update.
Those admissions policies aren’t a pile of natural, set-in-stone definitions of a quality applicant. They’re just the ones we’d gotten accustomed to. As colleges pause on mandating college’s admissions assessments, a decision made for them by the pandemic, it’s an opportunity to think seriously about what’s lost and what would be gained by making this change permanent — not just in our chaotic present, but as part of building a better, fairer future.
This article is part of The 74’s ongoing coverage of how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting schools. See more and sign up for The 74’s daily morning newsletter to receive the latest in your inbox.
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https://the74million.medium.com/forced-to-throw-out-their-old-college-admissions-standards-higher-ed-institutions-should-seize-on-3b89e09fea95
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[]
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2020-04-17 18:56:29.616000+00:00
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['College Admissions', 'Higher Education', 'Coronavirus', 'See more']
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Title Forced Throw Old College Admissions Standards Higher Ed Institutions Seize Crisis Create Better Ones FutureContent Forced Throw Old College Admissions Standards Higher Ed Institutions Seize Crisis Create Better Ones Future 74 Apr 17 · 4 min read Commentary Conor Williams American higher education always enamored longevity Student tour guide campus across country tout institutions’ origin story quirky campus tradition historical success strut backwards past various stately becolumned building cornerstone announcing decade — century — academic tenure It’s understandable enough Many college university bill unique club particular characteristic they’ve developed organically time seriously academy instinctive reverence intellectual history campus long served key role repository human wisdom yet framing academic life term link past also create institutional calcification make today’s status quo seem like possible way organizing campus Take colleges’ admission process Several month ago pandemic California civil right activist filed suit effort force system drop standardized college admission test score admission requirement suddenly unexpectedly they’ve gotten wish Earlier month University California UC system announced among thing school would require student include standardized test score application — starting 2021 freshman class global coronavirus pandemic shaking foundation chunk higher education universe Indeed public health concern canceled spring administration SAT ACT UC’s change temporary system’s size scope — enrolls 280000 student across 10 campus across state — open broader conversation make college admission fairer It’s worth asking without mandating standardized assessment college admission sky doesn’t fall bring back UC wouldn’t actually blaze trail happens alma mater Bowdoin College first college country go testoptional 50 year ago college tracked academic trajectory student submit test score don’t decade say doesn’t find real impact case matter submit score finding aren’t unique come predicting students’ likelihood graduating college high school grade point average appear significantly better score standardized college admission assessment Major university system Indiana North Carolina — part 1000 testoptional campus across country — followed Bowdoin’s example Advocates making admission test optional also cite study flag possible bias design One study found evidence bias AfricanAmerican test taker verbal section SAT arguing “favors one ethnic group another” There’s also socioeconomic angle “The highest predictive value SAT isn’t well student school well able avail prep material” John Pérez chairman University California’s Board Regents told Los Angeles Times last fall “And access prep material still disproportionately tied family income” present there’s ample reason believe assessment come serve le upward mobility path historically underserved student amplifier existing social inequity yet tests’ critic shouldn’t overplay hand research behind college admission test sometimes served unfair hurdle student particularly diverse background good testoptional policy would convert alternative pathway “Scores best used basis rank ordering individuals” wrote professor Danielle Allen 2014 Century Foundation book “but threshold dividing applicant pool line roughly predictive likelihood success” could allow student lower GPAs prove mettle — earn admission — higher score What’s generally inequitable allocation public education resource many student historically underserved community attend school offer full range advanced coursework extracurricular activity prized competitive college admission Assessments like SAT ACT however imperfect could used give highscoring student underresourced school chance boost admission chance testoptional policy seem impossibly radical Would unconscionable departure college admissions’ meritocratic aspiration certainly doesn’t seem Suddenly admission office California capable breezing away core metric prestige higher education — thing university system preparing defend court month ago Perhaps status quo overdue update admission policy aren’t pile natural setinstone definition quality applicant They’re one we’d gotten accustomed college pause mandating college’s admission assessment decision made pandemic it’s opportunity think seriously what’s lost would gained making change permanent — chaotic present part building better fairer future article part 74’s ongoing coverage coronavirus pandemic affecting school See sign 74’s daily morning newsletter receive latest inboxTags College Admissions Higher Education Coronavirus See
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4,695 |
Book Reviews From the Library
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Becoming by Michelle Obama
In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America — the first African American to serve in that role — she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments. Along the way, she showed us a few dance moves, crushed Carpool Karaoke, and raised two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare. (Good Reads)
Sandcastles by Sana Rose
Sana has been a poet and story-writer long before she decided to be a Homoeopathic Physician. Her first collection of poetry ‘The Torrent from My Soul: Poems of A Born Dreamer’ was originally published in 2011. Her second poetry collection ‘The Room of Mirrors: Reflections in Verse’ is soon to be published by Roman Books (UK & India). Currently, she is working on her second novel, a psychological mystery. (Good Reads)
The First Free Women by Matty Weingast
Matty is co-editor of Awake at the Bedside and former editor of the Insight Journal at Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. With almost two decades of meditation experience, Matty is currently a resident at Aloka Vihara, a nuns’ monastery in northern California (From the Forward)
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Jane was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critique and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen’s plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage in the pursuit of favorable social standing and economic security. (Wikipedia)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Charlotte was an English novelist, and poet, the eldest of the three Bronte sisters. She and her sisters, Emily & Anne, originally published under the names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. (Wikipedia)
Secret History of Witches by Louisa Morgan
Louisa lives and writes and rambles with her familiar, Oscar the Border Terrier, on the beautiful Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. A musician and a yogini, she finds inspiration in the artistic environment where she makes her home.
Under the name Louise Marley, she has written a number of other historical fiction novels, as well as fantasy and science fiction. (Amazon)
The Red Pencil by Andrea Davis Pinkney
Andrea is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of numerous books for children and young adults, including picture books, novels, works of historical fiction and nonfiction.
She was named one of the “25 Most Influential Black Women in Business” by The Network Journal and is among “The 25 Most Influential People in Our Children’s Lives” cited by Children’s Health Magazine.
Andrea was selected to deliver the 2014 May Hill Arbuthnot Lecture. This distinguished honor recognizes her significant contributions to literature for young people provided through a body of work that brings a deeper understanding of literacy for children and young adults. (Author Site)
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https://medium.com/from-the-library/book-reviews-from-the-library-6729fd044cc0
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['Laura Manipura']
|
2020-03-25 16:19:09.161000+00:00
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['Books And Authors', 'Book Review', 'Ftl Letter', 'Writers On Medium', 'Books']
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Title Book Reviews LibraryContent Becoming Michelle Obama life filled meaning accomplishment Michelle Obama emerged one iconic compelling woman era First Lady United States America — first African American serve role — helped create welcoming inclusive White House history also establishing powerful advocate woman girl US around world dramatically changing way family pursue healthier active life standing husband led America harrowing moment Along way showed u dance move crushed Carpool Karaoke raised two downtoearth daughter unforgiving medium glare Good Reads Sandcastles Sana Rose Sana poet storywriter long decided Homoeopathic Physician first collection poetry ‘The Torrent Soul Poems Born Dreamer’ originally published 2011 second poetry collection ‘The Room Mirrors Reflections Verse’ soon published Roman Books UK India Currently working second novel psychological mystery Good Reads First Free Women Matty Weingast Matty coeditor Awake Bedside former editor Insight Journal Barre Center Buddhist Studies almost two decade meditation experience Matty currently resident Aloka Vihara nuns’ monastery northern California Forward Pride Prejudice Jane Austen Jane English novelist known primarily six major novel interpret critique comment upon British landed gentry end 18th century Austen’s plot often explore dependence woman marriage pursuit favorable social standing economic security Wikipedia Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte Charlotte English novelist poet eldest three Bronte sister sister Emily Anne originally published name Currer Ellis Acton Bell Wikipedia Secret History Witches Louisa Morgan Louisa life writes ramble familiar Oscar Border Terrier beautiful Olympic Peninsula Washington State musician yogini find inspiration artistic environment make home name Louise Marley written number historical fiction novel well fantasy science fiction Amazon Red Pencil Andrea Davis Pinkney Andrea New York Times bestselling awardwinning author numerous book child young adult including picture book novel work historical fiction nonfiction named one “25 Influential Black Women Business” Network Journal among “The 25 Influential People Children’s Lives” cited Children’s Health Magazine Andrea selected deliver 2014 May Hill Arbuthnot Lecture distinguished honor recognizes significant contribution literature young people provided body work brings deeper understanding literacy child young adult Author SiteTags Books Authors Book Review Ftl Letter Writers Medium Books
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4,696 |
Stateful Kubernetes Applications Made Easier: PSO and FlashBlade
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For stateful applications on Kubernetes, Pure Service Orchestrator automates and productionizes those services with FlashBlade as shared storage. This repository presents three illustrative example applications: a simplistic shared scratch space as well as file-sharing services NextCloud and OwnCloud.
I assume the reader has only a basic understanding of Kubernetes and is interested in how to use FlashBlade with Kubernetes.
For a more general introduction and guide to PSO for both FlashArray and FlashBlade, see this explanation of Kubernetes Storage, Kubernetes documentation, and Containers-as-a-service architecture.
Introduction
The Pure Service Orchestrator (PSO) automates the process of creating filesystems on FlashBlade and attaching them to the running applications in Kubernetes.
But first, why run applications in Kubernetes? There is a generic set of problems that almost all applications need to solve: recovering from hardware failures, scaling up or down resources, orchestrating connectivity between inter-linked services, securing and isolating environments, and provisioning resources for running applications. Kubernetes helps solve these problems, simplifying the operation of production services.
Why Use PSO and FlashBlade
In Kubernetes, applications run inside a set of pods, which are ephemeral and not tied to physical compute or storage resources. If the pod needs persistent storage for any reason (and there are many!), then PersistentVolumes are needed. But manual storage administration is complicated: creating volumes, attaching them to running pods regardless of protocol, and finally deleting volumes. In a fully automated system, none of these steps should involve a human!
PSO automates the process of provisioning storage and hides the details of storage creation and attachment to each pod. The result is self-service storage that matches cloud-native workflows and applications.
FlashBlade provides shared filesystems for Read-Write-Many (RWX) volumes. These are critical for scale-out applications that spawn multiple pods; each additional pod is able to automatically share access to a common data store. FlashBlade can also support Read-Write-Once (RWO) volumes.
While I focus here on FlashBlade filesystems as volumes, PSO also serves FlashArray and block devices. The details of storage administration are different for block (FlashArray) and file (FlashBlade) volumes, and PSO hides all of these differences from the end-user. For example, a developer creating an application that uses a ReadWriteOnce volume can choose between latency sensitive or bandwidth sensitive performance simply by changing the text between “pure-file” and “pure-block.” All of the annoying differences between iSCSI, Fibre Channel, and NFS mounts are hidden automatically by PSO.
How to Use PSO with FlashBlade
Compared to traditional storage workflows, PSO automates most of the requests and interactions between users and administrators for file system creation and mounting. The result is a self-service storage infrastructure; no direct interaction is necessary between administrators and users.
Administrators install and occasionally upgrade the PSO software and users (developers) interact only via standard Kubernetes PersistentVolume mechanisms.
For the Kubernetes Administrator
PSO is a software layer for Kubernetes that utilizes the public REST API provided by FlashBlade to automate storage-related tasks and is installed via helm.
The one-time PSO configuration requires a FlashBlade management IP, data VIP, and the corresponding API token. These API tokens prove that PSO has permission to create and delete volumes or filesystems so safeguard them appropriately.
To get the API token, use the following command from the FlashBlade CLI:
pureuser@flashblade-ch1-fm2> pureadmin list --api-token --expose
Name API Token Created Expires
pureuser T-c4925090-c9bf-4033-8537-d24ee5669135 2017-09-12 13:26:31 PDT -
Then, add the following to the PSO values.yaml (example) file to add a FlashBlade under management:
FlashBlades:
- MgmtEndPoint: "10.62.64.20"
NFSEndPoint: "10.62.64.200",
APIToken: "T-ab0ed3e0-5438-4485-9503-863e6a9c1434"
The PSO works by fulfilling any PVC claims with a StorageClass with corresponding name, “pure-file,” by creating a matching filesystem.
Update the default storageClass to use the “pure-file” class if you want FlashBlade to be the default for PVCs that do not specify StorageClass.
> kubectl patch storageclass pure-file -p '{"metadata": {"annotations":{"storageclass.kubernetes.io/is-default-class":"true"}}}'
After this change, view the configured StorageClasses and their associated provisioner with the following command:
> kubectl get storageclass
NAME PROVISIONER AGE
pure-block pure-provisioner 24d
pure-file (default) pure-provisioner 24d
Finally, to view the PersistentVolumes in the system which were automatically created by PSO:
> kubectl get persistentvolume
...
The PersistentVolumes reported here should match the filesystems created on the FlashBlade, as seen with the following CLI command in the FlashBlade:
> purefs list --filter "name = 'k8s-*'"
Name Size Used Hard Limit Created Protocols
k8s-pvc-98bb10ca-c037-11e8-9ada-525402501103 1T 0.00 False 2018-09-24 13:22:46 PDT nfs
k8s-pvc-98c51436-c037-11e8-9ada-525402501103 800G 52.50K False 2018-09-24 13:22:46 PDT nfs
k8s-pvc-98d6147c-c037-11e8-9ada-525402501103 20T 450.00K False 2018-09-24 13:22:48 PDT nfs
k8s-pvc-9fcfdf49-beb3-11e8-9ada-525402501103 5T 0.00 False 2018-09-22 15:05:33 PDT nfs
Adding a StorageQuota (example) allows the administrator to limit the number of claims or the total amount of storage requested. These limits cause graceful failures in the case of buggy jobs that consume too much storage.
For the Kubernetes User
The following examples create a PersistentVolumeClaim that will be satisfied by the PSO by using a storageClassName of “pure-file”. The storageClass signals to Kubernetes how to satisfy the claim request. Switching to use a FlashArray block device instead can be done by using “pure-block” as StorageClass.
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
name: file-claim
spec:
storageClassName: pure-file # This line is all that is required to use PSO
accessModes:
- ReadWriteMany
resources:
requests:
storage: 15Ti
A PersistentVolumeClaim is a request for a PersistentVolume of certain type and size. If there is a plugin for the specified storageClass, then it will create a matching PersistentVolume. To attach this storage to a container at a specific path, refer back to the claim as follows:
volumes:
- name: myvol
persistentVolumeClaim:
claimName: file-claim
containers:
...container config...
volumeMounts:
- name: file-claim
mountPath: /mountpoint
What did you NOT need to do?
Create a filesystem via a UI of any kind (GUI or CLI)
Log in to the node and issue the commands to mount the filesystem
Think about what happens if the physical node fails and you need to move the app
Track who uses which filesystem so you know when to cleanup
And what you do get is that the volume automatically follows your container if Kubernetes restarts or moves the container to a different physical host.
Example 1: Shared Scratch Space
The first example to illustrate PSO is a simple Deployment and PersistentVolumeClaim to create a shared scratch workspace. In other words, the application is a standard Linux shell and command line tools.
A shared scratch workspace is useful when a small team needs to work together, for example for forensics investigation of log files. The goal is to automatically create a shared scratch space to download necessary data to work with and produce derivative datasets. PSO automates the creation, connection, and cleanup of the workspace on FlashBlade.
scratch-space.yaml.
The yaml file creates two pods that both mount a shared “/scratch” directory for collaborative work. This illustrates the core steps necessary to use a persistentVolumeClaim to attach a volume to pods in a Deployment.
To use this shared scratch space, each user connects to a pod and spawns a shell by running ‘exec’ on one of the pod instances:
> kubectl exec -it scratchspace-7877bc68f9-s8nxw /bin/bash
Once this shell has been started, the user can collaborate using the ‘/scratch’ directory and all results will be visible to users in other pods.
What if a third user wants to also collaborate? Adding additional workspaces that share the same filesystem is as simple as:
> kubectl scale deployment scratchspace --replicas 3
Each additional replica pod is automatically connected to the filesystem, i.e., the mounting and unmounting of the filesystem is automatically handled by PSO.
There are many directions to make this example even more useful: 1) add a unique name to the resources based on a ticket number, 2) automate cleanup of resources when finished, and 3) use a prebuilt container image with already installed tools.
Example 2: NextCloud
NextCloud
NextCloud and OwnCloud are both open-source file sharing applications providing an alternative to cloud services like DropBox. These applications provide similar file sharing services across multiple client platforms while keeping the data in-house instead of an offsite 3rd party cloud; either performance, cost, or data governance may drive this desire for an in-house service instead of external. Both applications rely upon persistent storage for the user’s data and metadata.
The NextCloud configuration borrows heavily from existing documentation for NextCloud. This configuration is kept simple in order to highlight the usage of persistent storage.
The config file combines three major elements:
Service ‘nextcloud’ that exposes the application externally
Deployment ‘nextcloud’ that starts the application server and mounts a filesystem
PersistentVolumeClaim that PSO will use to create a matching filesystem on the FlashBlade
Create the nextcloud service as follows:
> kubectl apply -f nextcloud-pure.yaml
To make this application accessible externally, I used a NodePort service, which is not recommended in production. To access the NextCloud application, find the port assigned by Kubernetes:
> kubectl get svc nextcloud | grep NodePort
Connect to the NextCloud server by using that port number and the ip address of any Kubernetes node. Production environments should configure load balancers instead.
Using InitContainers for Setup
The NextCloud example utilizes an initContainer to solve a common problem: configuring the volume to meet the conditions expected by the application. An initContainer is a container that is run to completion before the application container is started and must complete successfully for the application to begin. InitContainers encode the steps necessary to satisfy pre-conditions or dependencies that the user does not want to or cannot build into the main application container. As an example, an initContainer can download a dataset to the persistent volume for the primary application to use.
The NextCloud server expects the “data/” directory to be owned by the www-data user and to have permissions of 770, otherwise the application fails. To accomplish this, an initContainer performs two simple commands to achieve this precondition:
initContainers:
- name: install
image: busybox
command:
- sh
- '-c'
- 'chmod 770 /var/www/html/data && chown www-data /var/www/html/data'
volumeMounts:
- name: nc-files
mountPath: /var/www/html/data
Many applications, especially legacy applications not originally built for containers, expect preconditions on the volumes and initContainers are the easiest way to achieve this. Beyond the simple example here with busybox, different container images can be used to place data or install necessary software on the volume.
Example 3: OwnCloud
OwnCloud
The OwnCloud deployment involves multiple applications working together: mariadb and redis alongside the owncloud server. These applications use a mix of block devices and filesystems. For example, MariaDB is an RDBMS service that requires a block device backed volume whereas OwnCloud stores user data on a filesystem-backed volume. Derived from docker documentation for OwnCloud.
With PSO, multiple applications and volume types can be mixed and modified easily. For example, switching the Redis application between “pure-file” and “pure-block” is as simple as changing the value in the yaml config before deploying.
Running multiple different applications on FlashBlade works well because the system is 1) built to support high concurrency and many simultaneous applications, 2) scales-out seamlessly and non-disruptively, and 3) is architected natively to leverage the mixed IO performance of NAND flash.
Deploy this set of applications and volumes together with the following command:
> kubectl apply -f owncloud-pure.yaml
Note that there is a helm chart for OwnCloud here but it is currently not working due to a failed connection between OwnCloud and mariadb. With the default storageClass set to “pure-file,” this helm chart would automatically use FlashBlade as the backing store.
Quick Tips for Usability
Below are some quick-tips that I found useful in running the OwnCloud application.
Run OwnCloud reporting commands internally:
kubectl exec oc-owncloud-0 occ user:report
Log in to the server and look around at the contents of the filesystem.
kubectl exec -it oc-owncloud-0 /bin/bash
Summary
A good software engineer always looks to automate tedious and error-prone tasks in order to increase the team’s productivity. Running Kubernetes and the Pure Service Orchestrator automates almost all storage related tasks: filesystem creation, mounting, and deletion. The result is simple and agile infrastructure that just works.
Legal stuff — Please note: I am an employee of Pure Storage. My statements and opinions on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent those of Pure Storage.
|
https://joshua-robinson.medium.com/stateful-kubernetes-applications-made-easier-pso-and-flashblade-aa3e2ebb0248
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['Joshua Robinson']
|
2019-03-26 18:44:01.561000+00:00
|
['Kubernetes', 'Pure Storage']
|
Title Stateful Kubernetes Applications Made Easier PSO FlashBladeContent stateful application Kubernetes Pure Service Orchestrator automates productionizes service FlashBlade shared storage repository present three illustrative example application simplistic shared scratch space well filesharing service NextCloud OwnCloud assume reader basic understanding Kubernetes interested use FlashBlade Kubernetes general introduction guide PSO FlashArray FlashBlade see explanation Kubernetes Storage Kubernetes documentation Containersasaservice architecture Introduction Pure Service Orchestrator PSO automates process creating filesystems FlashBlade attaching running application Kubernetes first run application Kubernetes generic set problem almost application need solve recovering hardware failure scaling resource orchestrating connectivity interlinked service securing isolating environment provisioning resource running application Kubernetes help solve problem simplifying operation production service Use PSO FlashBlade Kubernetes application run inside set pod ephemeral tied physical compute storage resource pod need persistent storage reason many PersistentVolumes needed manual storage administration complicated creating volume attaching running pod regardless protocol finally deleting volume fully automated system none step involve human PSO automates process provisioning storage hide detail storage creation attachment pod result selfservice storage match cloudnative workflow application FlashBlade provides shared filesystems ReadWriteMany RWX volume critical scaleout application spawn multiple pod additional pod able automatically share access common data store FlashBlade also support ReadWriteOnce RWO volume focus FlashBlade filesystems volume PSO also serf FlashArray block device detail storage administration different block FlashArray file FlashBlade volume PSO hide difference enduser example developer creating application us ReadWriteOnce volume choose latency sensitive bandwidth sensitive performance simply changing text “purefile” “pureblock” annoying difference iSCSI Fibre Channel NFS mount hidden automatically PSO Use PSO FlashBlade Compared traditional storage workflow PSO automates request interaction user administrator file system creation mounting result selfservice storage infrastructure direct interaction necessary administrator user Administrators install occasionally upgrade PSO software user developer interact via standard Kubernetes PersistentVolume mechanism Kubernetes Administrator PSO software layer Kubernetes utilizes public REST API provided FlashBlade automate storagerelated task installed via helm onetime PSO configuration requires FlashBlade management IP data VIP corresponding API token API token prove PSO permission create delete volume filesystems safeguard appropriately get API token use following command FlashBlade CLI pureuserflashbladech1fm2 pureadmin list apitoken expose Name API Token Created Expires pureuser Tc4925090c9bf40338537d24ee5669135 20170912 132631 PDT add following PSO valuesyaml example file add FlashBlade management FlashBlades MgmtEndPoint 10626420 NFSEndPoint 106264200 APIToken Tab0ed3e0543844859503863e6a9c1434 PSO work fulfilling PVC claim StorageClass corresponding name “purefile” creating matching filesystem Update default storageClass use “purefile” class want FlashBlade default PVCs specify StorageClass kubectl patch storageclass purefile p metadata annotationsstorageclasskubernetesioisdefaultclasstrue change view configured StorageClasses associated provisioner following command kubectl get storageclass NAME PROVISIONER AGE pureblock pureprovisioner 24d purefile default pureprovisioner 24d Finally view PersistentVolumes system automatically created PSO kubectl get persistentvolume PersistentVolumes reported match filesystems created FlashBlade seen following CLI command FlashBlade purefs list filter name k8s Name Size Used Hard Limit Created Protocols k8spvc98bb10cac03711e89ada525402501103 1T 000 False 20180924 132246 PDT nfs k8spvc98c51436c03711e89ada525402501103 800G 5250K False 20180924 132246 PDT nfs k8spvc98d6147cc03711e89ada525402501103 20T 45000K False 20180924 132248 PDT nfs k8spvc9fcfdf49beb311e89ada525402501103 5T 000 False 20180922 150533 PDT nfs Adding StorageQuota example allows administrator limit number claim total amount storage requested limit cause graceful failure case buggy job consume much storage Kubernetes User following example create PersistentVolumeClaim satisfied PSO using storageClassName “purefile” storageClass signal Kubernetes satisfy claim request Switching use FlashArray block device instead done using “pureblock” StorageClass kind PersistentVolumeClaim apiVersion v1 metadata name fileclaim spec storageClassName purefile line required use PSO accessModes ReadWriteMany resource request storage 15Ti PersistentVolumeClaim request PersistentVolume certain type size plugin specified storageClass create matching PersistentVolume attach storage container specific path refer back claim follows volume name myvol persistentVolumeClaim claimName fileclaim container container config volumeMounts name fileclaim mountPath mountpoint need Create filesystem via UI kind GUI CLI Log node issue command mount filesystem Think happens physical node fails need move app Track us filesystem know cleanup get volume automatically follows container Kubernetes restarts move container different physical host Example 1 Shared Scratch Space first example illustrate PSO simple Deployment PersistentVolumeClaim create shared scratch workspace word application standard Linux shell command line tool shared scratch workspace useful small team need work together example forensics investigation log file goal automatically create shared scratch space download necessary data work produce derivative datasets PSO automates creation connection cleanup workspace FlashBlade scratchspaceyaml yaml file creates two pod mount shared “scratch” directory collaborative work illustrates core step necessary use persistentVolumeClaim attach volume pod Deployment use shared scratch space user connects pod spawn shell running ‘exec’ one pod instance kubectl exec scratchspace7877bc68f9s8nxw binbash shell started user collaborate using ‘scratch’ directory result visible user pod third user want also collaborate Adding additional workspace share filesystem simple kubectl scale deployment scratchspace replica 3 additional replica pod automatically connected filesystem ie mounting unmounting filesystem automatically handled PSO many direction make example even useful 1 add unique name resource based ticket number 2 automate cleanup resource finished 3 use prebuilt container image already installed tool Example 2 NextCloud NextCloud NextCloud OwnCloud opensource file sharing application providing alternative cloud service like DropBox application provide similar file sharing service across multiple client platform keeping data inhouse instead offsite 3rd party cloud either performance cost data governance may drive desire inhouse service instead external application rely upon persistent storage user’s data metadata NextCloud configuration borrows heavily existing documentation NextCloud configuration kept simple order highlight usage persistent storage config file combine three major element Service ‘nextcloud’ expose application externally Deployment ‘nextcloud’ start application server mount filesystem PersistentVolumeClaim PSO use create matching filesystem FlashBlade Create nextcloud service follows kubectl apply f nextcloudpureyaml make application accessible externally used NodePort service recommended production access NextCloud application find port assigned Kubernetes kubectl get svc nextcloud grep NodePort Connect NextCloud server using port number ip address Kubernetes node Production environment configure load balancer instead Using InitContainers Setup NextCloud example utilizes initContainer solve common problem configuring volume meet condition expected application initContainer container run completion application container started must complete successfully application begin InitContainers encode step necessary satisfy precondition dependency user want cannot build main application container example initContainer download dataset persistent volume primary application use NextCloud server expects “data” directory owned wwwdata user permission 770 otherwise application fails accomplish initContainer performs two simple command achieve precondition initContainers name install image busybox command sh c chmod 770 varwwwhtmldata chown wwwdata varwwwhtmldata volumeMounts name ncfiles mountPath varwwwhtmldata Many application especially legacy application originally built container expect precondition volume initContainers easiest way achieve Beyond simple example busybox different container image used place data install necessary software volume Example 3 OwnCloud OwnCloud OwnCloud deployment involves multiple application working together mariadb redis alongside owncloud server application use mix block device filesystems example MariaDB RDBMS service requires block device backed volume whereas OwnCloud store user data filesystembacked volume Derived docker documentation OwnCloud PSO multiple application volume type mixed modified easily example switching Redis application “purefile” “pureblock” simple changing value yaml config deploying Running multiple different application FlashBlade work well system 1 built support high concurrency many simultaneous application 2 scalesout seamlessly nondisruptively 3 architected natively leverage mixed IO performance NAND flash Deploy set application volume together following command kubectl apply f owncloudpureyaml Note helm chart OwnCloud currently working due failed connection OwnCloud mariadb default storageClass set “purefile” helm chart would automatically use FlashBlade backing store Quick Tips Usability quicktips found useful running OwnCloud application Run OwnCloud reporting command internally kubectl exec ocowncloud0 occ userreport Log server look around content filesystem kubectl exec ocowncloud0 binbash Summary good software engineer always look automate tedious errorprone task order increase team’s productivity Running Kubernetes Pure Service Orchestrator automates almost storage related task filesystem creation mounting deletion result simple agile infrastructure work Legal stuff — Please note employee Pure Storage statement opinion site necessarily represent Pure StorageTags Kubernetes Pure Storage
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4,697 |
10 Game-changing AI Breakthroughs Worth Knowing About
|
From the beginning of my AI journey, I found several ideas and concepts promising unparalleled potential; Pieces of research and development that were absolutely mind-blowing; And breakthroughs that pushed this field forward, leaving their mark on its glorious history.
Also, in the last few years, the number of people pointing to the “Skynet-terminator” scenario has increased exponentially … ^_^!
So today, I decided to curate a list of some of the most interesting ideas and concepts (from my own experience) that kept me going all these years.
I hope they’ll inspire you too, as they did to me.
Several objectives, possibilities, and “new ways of thinking” have emerged out of these ideas, so don’t take any of these lightly. We never know what will happen next.
A year spent in Artificial Intelligence is enough to make one believe in God — Alan Perlis
So let’s get started with the very first love of an AI Enthusiast.
|
https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/10-game-changing-ai-breakthroughs-worth-knowing-about-b2076afc4930
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['Nishu Jain']
|
2020-12-03 12:42:41.796000+00:00
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['Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning', 'Deep Learning', 'Research', 'Technology']
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Title 10 Gamechanging AI Breakthroughs Worth Knowing AboutContent beginning AI journey found several idea concept promising unparalleled potential Pieces research development absolutely mindblowing breakthrough pushed field forward leaving mark glorious history Also last year number people pointing “Skynetterminator” scenario increased exponentially … today decided curate list interesting idea concept experience kept going year hope they’ll inspire Several objective possibility “new way thinking” emerged idea don’t take lightly never know happen next year spent Artificial Intelligence enough make one believe God — Alan Perlis let’s get started first love AI EnthusiastTags Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Deep Learning Research Technology
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4,698 |
How to Get Your Retro Gaming Backlog Under Control
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How to Get Your Retro Gaming Backlog Under Control
It’s time to stop procrastinating and start gaming
Most gamers have a massive backlog. If you’re a retro gamer like me, you own — or want to own — multiple consoles, which only compounds the problem.
If your backlog is an overwhelming nightmare like mine once was, I’ve got good news for you: there’s a way around it. In this article, I’m going to show you how you can completely eliminate it.
After many misadventures in gaming, here’s how I learned to deal with my backlog.
1. Examine your console collection
Take a look around your TV stand. Chances are, you have more games for some consoles than others.
Make downsizing your backlog easier by starting with the console that has the least amount of games.
Only have two games to complete on your GameCube, but have twenty for your PS1? Then start with your GameCube.
The only time this advice doesn’t apply is if one of those games takes an insanely long time to complete.
Some games (*cough cough* Rayman) are almost impossible to finish in a short period of time because there are absolutely no save points throughout the levels, which brings me to my next point.
Image by Francis on Dribbble.
2. Play your easiest games first
Certain games are a lot less demanding than others. I completed Mario: Double Dash eons ago because it’s not that hard. Portal Runner for the PS2 is another great example. It can be completed in a couple of hours, give or take.
I’ve played them multiple times. The objectives are clear for both games, so they’re easy to play. It’s nice to know that they’re sitting in my collection just for fun.
Imagine if your entire game library was like that.
The moral of the story? Knock out the less challenging games first, and you’ll be flying through levels and your backlog before you know it.
3. Stop spending like a banshee
You might be dying to get your hands on a game series from a manga you love, like Ranma 1/2.
The problem? You don’t own the console for it.
Prioritize by putting these games on your to-buy list — but don’t buy them. Doing this will save you time and money.
Complete the games you already own before further cluttering up your retro library by stocking up on more consoles and games.
You can always reevaluate later and see if the games you might want to play are still important to you.
Image by Francis on Dribbble.
4. Take charge of your time
Setting a schedule may take the spontaneity out of gaming, but it’s also one of the best ways to get rid of your backlog.
It doesn’t mean that you never play other games randomly or for fun. But maybe you set every Saturday aside for a month straight so that you can finally complete Mother or Crash Bandicoot: Warped.
Now that you’ve narrowed down which games to play, spend a couple of weekends just grinding it out.
Rinse and repeat, and watch in awe as your to-play list magically grows smaller.
5. Get yourself a level book
Can’t remember which games you completed? Instead of scrolling through your memory cards, start recording them in your new level book.
Engineers use level books to record field notes for surveying. It turns out they also make the perfect video game notebook: they’re small, lightweight, and easy to use.
Your level book doesn’t have to be fancy; you could even use a plain notebook. But make sure to keep it with your game collection so that it doesn’t get lost in the abyss or mixed up with your office supplies.
Don’t underestimate having a level book — it’s a secret power-up that you definitely need in your arsenal. It will prevent you from losing track of games you’ve completed or are currently working on.
Image by Francis on Dribble.
There will always be more games
And gamers wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s time to clear out your backlog and make way for the shiny and new.
There are going to be a lot of games coming out for the PS5 and the latest Xbox in 2021. This is the moment that we’ve all been waiting for.
It’s time to demolish your backlog, once and for all.
Are you ready to knock it out of the park?
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https://medium.com/super-jump/how-to-get-your-retro-gaming-backlog-under-control-b6e788caa22d
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['Ilene Kuehl']
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2020-12-16 06:29:39.890000+00:00
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['Features', 'Gaming', 'Retro', 'Videogames', 'Productivity']
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Title Get Retro Gaming Backlog ControlContent Get Retro Gaming Backlog Control It’s time stop procrastinating start gaming gamers massive backlog you’re retro gamer like — want — multiple console compound problem backlog overwhelming nightmare like mine I’ve got good news there’s way around article I’m going show completely eliminate many misadventure gaming here’s learned deal backlog 1 Examine console collection Take look around TV stand Chances game console others Make downsizing backlog easier starting console least amount game two game complete GameCube twenty PS1 start GameCube time advice doesn’t apply one game take insanely long time complete game cough cough Rayman almost impossible finish short period time absolutely save point throughout level brings next point Image Francis Dribbble 2 Play easiest game first Certain game lot le demanding others completed Mario Double Dash eon ago it’s hard Portal Runner PS2 another great example completed couple hour give take I’ve played multiple time objective clear game they’re easy play It’s nice know they’re sitting collection fun Imagine entire game library like moral story Knock le challenging game first you’ll flying level backlog know 3 Stop spending like banshee might dying get hand game series manga love like Ranma 12 problem don’t console Prioritize putting game tobuy list — don’t buy save time money Complete game already cluttering retro library stocking console game always reevaluate later see game might want play still important Image Francis Dribbble 4 Take charge time Setting schedule may take spontaneity gaming it’s also one best way get rid backlog doesn’t mean never play game randomly fun maybe set every Saturday aside month straight finally complete Mother Crash Bandicoot Warped you’ve narrowed game play spend couple weekend grinding Rinse repeat watch awe toplay list magically grows smaller 5 Get level book Can’t remember game completed Instead scrolling memory card start recording new level book Engineers use level book record field note surveying turn also make perfect video game notebook they’re small lightweight easy use level book doesn’t fancy could even use plain notebook make sure keep game collection doesn’t get lost abyss mixed office supply Don’t underestimate level book — it’s secret powerup definitely need arsenal prevent losing track game you’ve completed currently working Image Francis Dribble always game gamers wouldn’t way It’s time clear backlog make way shiny new going lot game coming PS5 latest Xbox 2021 moment we’ve waiting It’s time demolish backlog ready knock parkTags Features Gaming Retro Videogames Productivity
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4,699 |
Understanding customer mindsets will save insurance companies
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In an age of ever-increasing technological disruption, insurance companies need something much more human: a deep understanding of their customers.
The insurance industry is at a critical inflection point. Finding itself increasingly disconnected from mistrustful customers and unaware of their true needs, traditional insurers are at risk of losing out to a combination of new entrants and incumbents who are quicker to adapt to changing expectations. To survive and succeed, insurers can’t just move faster, they need a clear idea of where to go and which opportunities to pursue.
We recently completed an extensive ethnographic study to truly understand the unique fears, hopes and motivations our customers have and alongside this developed a behavioural framework that provides clear direction for brands and stimulates new ways of creating value for both businesses and their customers.
A difficult climate
The insurance industry faces challenges on all fronts: the speed of technological change and shifting consumer behavior make them ever more vulnerable to new entrants. Existing markets are becoming more and more commoditised, with margins being squeezed in a race to the bottom. All the while companies race to keep up with changes to regulation in an already highly complex and heavily regulated sector.
In this perfect storm, it’s easy to miss new opportunities for value creation based on addressing unmet customer needs. Whilst the fundamental needs to plan for a rainy day, retirement or an unforeseen life event are somewhat timeless, the way we live our lives and the scenarios that keep us awake at night have evolved and multiplied. Alongside this, what we look for in products and services has changed profoundly in recent decades, as forward-thinking companies re-define customer expectations.
The traditional insurance industry hasn’t kept up, relegating customer insight to an afterthought, leading with incremental improvements to tired propositions and segmenting customers by socio-demographics.
Changing demographics, falling trust
The foundational shifts in Western Europe and US society are well documented: on average young people are buying cars, raising families, and getting on the property ladder later than ever (if at all).¹ This delayed ‘adulting’ is accompanied with a decline in traditional support networks and safety nets, such as organised religion and trade union membership, and a rise in lower paid, less-secure employment.² All of which creates an underlying atmosphere of uncertainty and anxiety for many, with most Americans and Europeans believing today’s children will grow up to be worse off than their parents.
This uncertainty about what the future holds should make insurance the perfect product for these fluid times. Yet trust is at an all time low. The financial services sector is the least trusted sector globally, behind automotive, manufacturing, and, perhaps surprisingly given recent privacy and fake news stories, the technology industry.
Going beyond segmentation with behavioural mindsets
To understand why trust is so low, and how to unearth new opportunities for value creation, you need to go beyond traditional approaches that cluster customers based on socio-demographic factors or digital maturity (or even worse, meaningless generational groupings such as ‘Millennials’ and ‘Gen Z’). These ways of grouping customers ignore context, behaviour and psychology, and are therefore poor springboards for innovation.
Instead, Fjord uses design research to develop behavioural mindsets that are rooted in a deep understanding of where the category sits in the lives of customers and their subsequent goals, needs, feelings and beliefs.
Rather than focus groups that foster respondent bias and surveys that skim the surface, Fjord spent three weeks with a cohort of insurance customers from all walks of life, combining diary studies, mobile ethnography and in-depth interviews to understand their aspirations, motivations and mental models used to understand the category.
Meet today’s insurance customer mindsets
Our findings reveal shocking levels of mistrust among customers, but the biggest mistake insurance companies make is assuming customers think about the category in a similar way. Our behavioural mindsets framework reveals this couldn’t be further from the truth.
These mindsets not only allow clients to look at their customers in a new light, but they make sense of existing trends in B2C innovation we’re seeing in the market and point towards new strategies and propositions that can unlock new value and revenue streams.
We uncovered four broad behavioural mindsets, each of which has implications for new propositions:
1. “Optimizers”
Optimizers strongly believe in the concept of insurance and are willing to go above and beyond to find the best cover for them, i.e. invest more time or pay a bit more money. Because of this investment in a better fitting product, they tend to be ‘brand sticky’ rather than brand loyal, staying with a provider because they’ve put the effort in to get the right policy, rather than affinity with the brand.
The opportunity: Optimizers can we won over with bespoke services that are tailored to their needs. A great example is InsurTech start-up Wrisk, that provides dynamic risk scores, bespoke multi-product policies, and adapts to customers’ changing lives. However, whether large numbers of cautious Optimizers are willing to trade big brand security for tailored services from unproven start-ups remains to be seen.
2. “Satisfiers”
Satisfiers just want the basics done at the right price and see insurance as a necessary evil. They rely on trusted third-parties and price comparison sites to get the job done swiftly, using rules-of-thumb that combine brand and price, e.g. quickly sorting policies by price and choosing the cheapest policy from a brand they recognise. Again, this is not brand affinity but big brand familiarity.
The opportunity: Offer Satisfiers clear, simple and transparent policies that address familiar anxieties as well as new fears — such as mental health and caring for elderly parents — whilst helping them avoid the familiar pitfalls of price hikes and loopholes. MoneySavingExpert is one brand well placed to address this opportunity, and already caters to this mindset through its Cheap Energy Club. It’s easy to imagine how this proposition could be replicated across insurance products.
3. “Experiencers”
Experiencers are focused on getting the most out of today rather than planning for tomorrow, and as such see insurance as more hassle than it’s worth. When they are legally required to buy insurance, the minimal viable product does just fine.
The opportunity: Help them buy ‘thinner slices’ of insurance when they absolutely need it, rather than forcing them to choose off-the-shelf products with a 12-month lifespan. On-demand insurance providers such as Trov do this well, providing insurance for specific items during specific times of the day. FinTech start-up Revolut also plays in this space, selling travel insurance as a bank account bolt-on and activating it when the customer leaves the country to ensure you only ever pay for it when you really need it.
4. “Seekers”
Seekers have passions or parts of their life that need optimal cover, whilst for everything else a basic policy (or no policy) will suffice. We met a 38-year-old with three health plans to ensure she had access to the best medical treatments available, including alternative treatments not available through traditional policies, and a twenty-something insurance cynic who made an exception for first-class ski cover for his action-packed winter breaks.
The opportunity: Win Seekers over through policies and services tailored to their passions and built around (and for) their communities. For instance, Bought By Many works with insurers to develop policies and negotiate discounts for underserved customers or those with niche interests, e.g. exotic pet owners or beauty salon owners. It has also recently started rolling out its own unique policies, such as Fixed for Life, a pet insurance policy which never increases in price.
Customer discontent as brand opportunity
In his 2018 letter to shareholders, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos rejoiced in the fact customers are “divinely discontent,” as these “ever-rising” expectations provide ever-increasing ways of creating customer (and ultimately shareholder) value and staying one step ahead of their competitors. Our research has shown that customers can be discontent in meaningfully different ways, which presents opportunities for brands willing to think differently and develop new propositions that solve for these unmet needs.
If you’d like to find out more about all the findings behind Insurance Mindsets, including the product strategies and value propositions aligned to these four mindsets, please get in touch.
This initiative was a collaboration between Fjord London and Accenture Insurance Strategy.
[1] For US data on the delayed marriages, births and ‘adulting’ see ‘The Changing Economics and Demographics of Young Adulthood: 1975–2016’. The UK Office for National Statistics has data on the increasing age at which people get married, as well as the declining rate of marriage overall, as well as the rising age at which people have their first child.
For insightful analysis of why young people drive less, and the long-term factors contributing to a delayed transition into ‘adulthood’ see ‘Young people’s travel — what’s changed and why?’ by Department for Transport.
[2] UK trade union data is taken from ‘Trade union statistics and bulletin for 2017’ by Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy.
For the decline in UK organised religion, particularly among young people, see the Centre for Religion & Society reports on Young People and the ‘No Religion’ population.
For the rise in self-employment, and the fact that 45% of self-employed people between 35–54 years old don’t have a pension, see ONS ‘Trends in self-employment in the UK’.
Research from Resolution Foundation shows that typical self-employed person earns 40% less than an employee.
Tax Research UK (using HMRC data) shows almost 80% of self-employed people in the UK are living in poverty.
See TUC data showing that half of self-employed over 25 yr olds (approx. 2 million UK adults) earn less than the minimum wage.
|
https://medium.com/design-voices/understanding-customer-mindsets-will-save-insurance-companies-2d021063f73
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[]
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2019-05-07 14:21:18.103000+00:00
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['Insurance', 'Design', 'Research', 'Mindset', 'Customer Experience']
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Title Understanding customer mindset save insurance companiesContent age everincreasing technological disruption insurance company need something much human deep understanding customer insurance industry critical inflection point Finding increasingly disconnected mistrustful customer unaware true need traditional insurer risk losing combination new entrant incumbent quicker adapt changing expectation survive succeed insurer can’t move faster need clear idea go opportunity pursue recently completed extensive ethnographic study truly understand unique fear hope motivation customer alongside developed behavioural framework provides clear direction brand stimulates new way creating value business customer difficult climate insurance industry face challenge front speed technological change shifting consumer behavior make ever vulnerable new entrant Existing market becoming commoditised margin squeezed race bottom company race keep change regulation already highly complex heavily regulated sector perfect storm it’s easy miss new opportunity value creation based addressing unmet customer need Whilst fundamental need plan rainy day retirement unforeseen life event somewhat timeless way live life scenario keep u awake night evolved multiplied Alongside look product service changed profoundly recent decade forwardthinking company redefine customer expectation traditional insurance industry hasn’t kept relegating customer insight afterthought leading incremental improvement tired proposition segmenting customer sociodemographics Changing demographic falling trust foundational shift Western Europe US society well documented average young people buying car raising family getting property ladder later ever all¹ delayed ‘adulting’ accompanied decline traditional support network safety net organised religion trade union membership rise lower paid lesssecure employment² creates underlying atmosphere uncertainty anxiety many Americans Europeans believing today’s child grow worse parent uncertainty future hold make insurance perfect product fluid time Yet trust time low financial service sector least trusted sector globally behind automotive manufacturing perhaps surprisingly given recent privacy fake news story technology industry Going beyond segmentation behavioural mindset understand trust low unearth new opportunity value creation need go beyond traditional approach cluster customer based sociodemographic factor digital maturity even worse meaningless generational grouping ‘Millennials’ ‘Gen Z’ way grouping customer ignore context behaviour psychology therefore poor springboard innovation Instead Fjord us design research develop behavioural mindset rooted deep understanding category sits life customer subsequent goal need feeling belief Rather focus group foster respondent bias survey skim surface Fjord spent three week cohort insurance customer walk life combining diary study mobile ethnography indepth interview understand aspiration motivation mental model used understand category Meet today’s insurance customer mindset finding reveal shocking level mistrust among customer biggest mistake insurance company make assuming customer think category similar way behavioural mindset framework reveals couldn’t truth mindset allow client look customer new light make sense existing trend B2C innovation we’re seeing market point towards new strategy proposition unlock new value revenue stream uncovered four broad behavioural mindset implication new proposition 1 “Optimizers” Optimizers strongly believe concept insurance willing go beyond find best cover ie invest time pay bit money investment better fitting product tend ‘brand sticky’ rather brand loyal staying provider they’ve put effort get right policy rather affinity brand opportunity Optimizers bespoke service tailored need great example InsurTech startup Wrisk provides dynamic risk score bespoke multiproduct policy adapts customers’ changing life However whether large number cautious Optimizers willing trade big brand security tailored service unproven startup remains seen 2 “Satisfiers” Satisfiers want basic done right price see insurance necessary evil rely trusted thirdparties price comparison site get job done swiftly using rulesofthumb combine brand price eg quickly sorting policy price choosing cheapest policy brand recognise brand affinity big brand familiarity opportunity Offer Satisfiers clear simple transparent policy address familiar anxiety well new fear — mental health caring elderly parent — whilst helping avoid familiar pitfall price hike loophole MoneySavingExpert one brand well placed address opportunity already caters mindset Cheap Energy Club It’s easy imagine proposition could replicated across insurance product 3 “Experiencers” Experiencers focused getting today rather planning tomorrow see insurance hassle it’s worth legally required buy insurance minimal viable product fine opportunity Help buy ‘thinner slices’ insurance absolutely need rather forcing choose offtheshelf product 12month lifespan Ondemand insurance provider Trov well providing insurance specific item specific time day FinTech startup Revolut also play space selling travel insurance bank account bolton activating customer leaf country ensure ever pay really need 4 “Seekers” Seekers passion part life need optimal cover whilst everything else basic policy policy suffice met 38yearold three health plan ensure access best medical treatment available including alternative treatment available traditional policy twentysomething insurance cynic made exception firstclass ski cover actionpacked winter break opportunity Win Seekers policy service tailored passion built around community instance Bought Many work insurer develop policy negotiate discount underserved customer niche interest eg exotic pet owner beauty salon owner also recently started rolling unique policy Fixed Life pet insurance policy never increase price Customer discontent brand opportunity 2018 letter shareholder Amazon founder Jeff Bezos rejoiced fact customer “divinely discontent” “everrising” expectation provide everincreasing way creating customer ultimately shareholder value staying one step ahead competitor research shown customer discontent meaningfully different way present opportunity brand willing think differently develop new proposition solve unmet need you’d like find finding behind Insurance Mindsets including product strategy value proposition aligned four mindset please get touch initiative collaboration Fjord London Accenture Insurance Strategy 1 US data delayed marriage birth ‘adulting’ see ‘The Changing Economics Demographics Young Adulthood 1975–2016’ UK Office National Statistics data increasing age people get married well declining rate marriage overall well rising age people first child insightful analysis young people drive le longterm factor contributing delayed transition ‘adulthood’ see ‘Young people’s travel — what’s changed why’ Department Transport 2 UK trade union data taken ‘Trade union statistic bulletin 2017’ Department Business Energy Industrial Strategy decline UK organised religion particularly among young people see Centre Religion Society report Young People ‘No Religion’ population rise selfemployment fact 45 selfemployed people 35–54 year old don’t pension see ONS ‘Trends selfemployment UK’ Research Resolution Foundation show typical selfemployed person earns 40 le employee Tax Research UK using HMRC data show almost 80 selfemployed people UK living poverty See TUC data showing half selfemployed 25 yr old approx 2 million UK adult earn le minimum wageTags Insurance Design Research Mindset Customer Experience
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