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Can Sirius XM Survive without Howard Stern? — Market Mad House | Sirius XM Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ: SIRI) faces a future without its biggest star; Howard Stern.
To elaborate, Stern’s Sirius contract will end this year and the King of All Media has no new Sirius deal. Instead, Sirius and Howard are still in talks about a new contract, Deadline claims.
I suspect Stern will not sign a Sirius XM contract until he sees if he can get more money elsewhere. Stern’s most probable destination is Spotify (NYSE: SPOT). I think Stern is talking to Spotify because the media claims the Swedish digital audio platform signed a $100 million contract with Joe Rogan.
I think Rogan, the Podcast King, is not a direct competitor to Stern. To explain, Rogan attracts a younger and more intellectual audience than Stern. Essentially, Stern is an old-fashioned Disc Jockey, a merry prankster of the airwaves.
In contrast, Rogan is a smart-alecky tech bro and MMA jock with intellectual pretensions. For instance, Stern clowns around while Rogan has serious conversations with guests between F-bombs.
Why Stern could go to Spotify
I think Stern could go to Spotify because Spotify could offer him a larger audience. Remember, Howard is an egomaniac who calls himself the King of All Media. Hence, Stern wants the biggest audience possible.
Sirius XM (NASDAQ: SIRI) claims its platform had 34.9 million subscribers in 4th Quarter 2020. In contrast, Spotify claims it had 248 million active monthly users on 30 September 2019.
Thus Spotify, can offer Stern something Sirius cannot a far bigger audience. Thus, Spotify could lure Stern to its platform with a deal similar to the Rogan arrangement.
Where will Stern go?
Sirius is not the only potential suitor for Stern. Another potential home for Stern is Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL). Statista estimates Apple Music had 68 million subscribers in December 2019 up from 60 million in June 2019.
Signing Stern could help Apple move beyond music to spoken audio programming (podcasts). For example, Apple could make Stern the cornerstone of an exclusive podcast library. Apple can easily meet Stern’s salary demands because it had $94.051 billion in cash and short-term investments on 31 March 2020.
Could Stern Go to Netflix?
Beyond Apple, another potential home for Stern is Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX). Historically, Netflix has shown little interest in audio.
However, Spotify demonstrates you can make money with digital audio. Spotify reported an ending cash flow of $1.049 billion for the quarter ending on 31 March 2020. Therefore, Netflix could make money in audio.
If Netflix, or Disney’s (NYSE: DIS) Hulu, wants to enter the podcast business, signing Stern could be a good place to start. Offering Stern a big paycheck will send a message to other potential podcast superstars such as Dave Chappelle, Krystal Ball, and Tucker Carlson.
That message is “if you want freedom and a big payday come to our platform.” I think offering podcasts could be a smart move for Hulu, HBO Max, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), or Peacock. To elaborate, Netflix does not offer podcasts now. Podcasts could offer premium content major competitors lack.
Hiring Stern could be a smart move for Amazon. Notably, Amazon could make Alexa the exclusive home of Howard Stern.
Can Sirius XM still Afford Howard Stern?
Under present circumstances, Stern could be too expensive for Sirius to retain. That could threaten Sirius XM’s existence because Stern is its star attraction.
Sirius XM had only $40 million in cash and short-term investments on 31 March 2020. In contrast, Netflix had $5.151 billion in cash and short-term investments and Amazon had $49.292 billion in cash and short-term investments on the same day. However, Spotify had only $1.857 billion in cash and short-term investments on 31 March 2020.
Sirius may not keep Stern because it has competitors who can more offer more money and bigger audiences. For example, a bidding war for Stern between Spotify, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and possibly Disney could make Howard too expensive for Sirius XM. Under that scenario, Sirius XM could cannot afford any major audio stars.
Is Sirius XM Making Money?
Sirius XM (NASDAQ: SIRI) reported quarterly revenues of $1.952 billion on 31 March 2020 down from $2.062 billion on 31 December 2019.
Impressively, Sirius XM reported a $1.102 billion quarterly gross profit on 31 March 2020 down from $1.146 billion on 31 December 2019. However, Sirius’s quarterly common net income rose from $243 million on 31 December 2019 to $293 million on 31 March 2020.
Thus, Sirius makes money, and its revenues are still growing. Stockrow estimates Sirius XM’s revenues grew at a rate of 11.93% in the quarter ending on 31 March 2020. In contrast, Sirius XM’s grew at a rate of 37.74% in the last quarter of 2019.
Sirius also generates cash. Sirius XM reported a quarterly operating cash flow of $416 million on 31 March 2020. That quarterly operating cash flow was down from $532 million on 31 December 2019.
However, Sirius XM reported a small quarterly ending cash flow of $52 million on 31 March 2020. Interestingly, that ending cash flow grew from $30 million on 31 December 2019.
I suspect Sirius’s cash flow is low because it has to make huge payouts to keep stars such as Howard Stern on its platform. Thus, Sirius XM could be a warning to platforms such as Netflix and Spotify that rely on star power to sell subscriptions and advertising. Any cash those platforms generate could go straight to the star and his or her agent.
Is Sirius XM a Good Stock?
Thus Sirius XM can make money and it is capable of growth, but is it a value investment?
I think Sirius XM (NASDAQ: SIRI) could be a bad stock because Mr. Market paid $5.96 for it on 19 June 2020. In 2020, Sirius XM shares rose from $5.74 on 2 January 2020 to $5.96 on 19 June 2020 to $5.90 on 23 June 2020. In 2020, Sirius hit a high of $7.24 on 21 February but fell to a low of $4.44 on 20 March 2020.
Thus, Sirius is cheap, but I think its share price is too low for investors to make money. On the other hand, Sirius could be a good cheap dividend stock.
Is Sirius XM a Good Cheap Dividend Stock?
Sirius paid a quarterly dividend of 1.33₵ on 7 May 2020. Thus, the owner of 100 Sirius (NASDAQ: SIRI) shares could collect $1.33 in dividends on 7 May 2020.
Overall, Dividend.com estimates Sirius XM offered a forward dividend yield of 0.83%, a forward payout ratio of 23.55%, and a three-year average annual dividend growth rate of 9.1% on 19 June and 22 June 2020. Dividend.com claims Sirius XM’s dividend has grown for three years.
Thus, Sirius XM could be a good cheap dividend stock. However, I think Sirius XM faces a brutal battle for survival and an expensive competition for talent that could destroy its business.
What Value Does Sirius XM Have?
On the other hand, Sirius XM still has a platform with 34.9 million subscribers and the ability to attract top stars such as Howard Stern. Hence, Sirius XM has some value, but that value could vanish overnight.
Given those circumstances, I think Sirius XM’s best chance for survival could be an acquisition by a larger platform. For example, a sale of Sirius XM to Spotify. Spotify could buy Sirius XM for its 34.9 million subscribers and enormous stars with proven audiences.
In the final analysis, Sirius XM has a little value that will be hard to maintain. I advise investors to avoid Sirius XM (NASDAQ: SIRI) because it has little value. | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/can-sirius-xm-survive-without-howard-stern-market-mad-house-33144aa019c1 | ['Daniel G. Jennings'] | 2020-06-24 15:58:11.372000+00:00 | ['Podcast', 'Podcasting', 'Spotify', 'Howard Stern', 'Audio'] |
The Week To Be In Crypto [6/25/18] | Market Overview
Bitcoin is the black knight, it is invincible, but how many limbs do we have left?
There is a lot concern around the price, a lot of charts and whatnot going around trying to explain why prices aren’t breaking out for another run, but there is also unprecedented progress being made on projects. I have stopped really looking at the price too much and evaluating everything in relative value. Also, when projecting what a fair price is for a token my back of the napkin calculus looks at the current price in BTC or ETH, the relevant supply (circulating or total, depending on use case) and adjust based on $1000 ETH or $10000 BTC. Does it still seem like a good value, then I’ll get in, if not, it may be best to hang on the BTC/ETH for right now.
What I’m Buying
With the down market its hard letting go of some big losses but its necessary to move funds into assets i consider to have a higher probability of success. Not actively buying too much new, but I am growing my positions in the below.
EasyDEX.PB — Can contribute by sending bts to easydex-pool from a bitshares DEX (can help with that if needed). PBs sent daily EOS style — https://medium.com/@easydex/the-easydex-portfolio-builder-token-campaign-e371e1c67fac DALA — New roadmap coming up with some great additions. Trade this account in forkdelta — https://etherscan.io/token/0xa87c3ec87eb802aad080df0adb331e504d327e5d (NEVER follow a forkdelta link directly) AURA — See podcast link below
Weekly Case Study
Something I have done that worked out well, didn’t work out well, or maybe just warrants further thought.
Yesterday was the conclusion of the Metronome token sale. They held a reverse auction of 8 million tokens over a whole week. With around 30 minutes left less than 1% had sold and the price was around $5 or so. As the price went down every minute a few more tokens would be purchased. I thought anywhere $1–5 was a pretty good price, but there were so many tokens left I held on hoping for $1. Around $1.50–2 range %50 of the tokens disappeared, and before I could unlock my ledger they were all gone. One address bought %20 of the supply and the top 10 addresses hold %40 (and judging by the amounts held I think many of the top 20 holders are the same entity). The tokens are already on forkdelta, you can buy though their wallet, and they will hold a daily auction in perpetuity so I am hoping to find some good opportunities to accumulate, but immediately after the sale the price was 3x the best sale price. So what can be gleaned from this?
Whales run the show in crypto No one has figured out a good ICO model to distribute tokens to a wide audience (not just getting whale-hoarded) Everyone needs to remember #1 when planning for participating in this industry As an individual you will NOT get the best price in ICOs or other similar activities, don’t think you will Make a plan and stick to it. The worst plan is no plan in such a volatile industry
Coming Up This Week
Etherisc token sale kicking off (only accredited for US). Some live products and 25+ in development.
I’m moving! (This has been distracting so I haven’t been paying that much attention to crypto events this week)
Recommended Media
Podcasts
https://multicoin.capital/2018/06/19/podcast-tushar-and-kyle-on-invest-like-the-best-podcast-with-patrick-oshaughnessy/
https://soundcloud.com/crypto-street-podcast/episode-71-alex-wearn
https://thebitcoinpodcast.com/hashing-it-out-12/
Reading
https://medium.com/@wmougayar/a-guide-for-blockchain-usage-metrics-bed86b58df94
https://medium.com/spankchain/development-update-008-june-22nd-2018-85d95f766153
https://multicoin.capital/2018/01/17/an-overview-of-stablecoins/
Follow Me
twitter: https://twitter.com/Tompkins_Jon
linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thejonathantompkins
telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/FqrpRUo8CKHV8gGKRuNNNQ
Weigh in on what i should write about next
**None of the above should be considered investment advice**
written on graphitedocs.com | https://medium.com/the-bitcoin-podcast-blog/the-week-to-be-in-crypto-6-25-18-7e0b855ed32c | ['Jonathan Tompkins'] | 2018-06-25 17:21:17.941000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin', 'Blockchain'] |
Great Conjunction: Saturn & Jupiter; Jupiter embrace after 800 years | 2020 made us distance ourselves from everyone, and here, Jupiter and Saturn are doing the exact opposite. This is a bag of goodies for all the star grazers this winter solstice.
Maybe it’s the gauze and bandage 2020 is applying by a way of gifting the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn to us! Once in a lifetime kinda event | https://medium.com/@mypandit/great-conjunction-saturn-jupiter-jupiter-embrace-after-800-years-5bbece230718 | [] | 2020-12-21 13:05:40.895000+00:00 | ['Jupiter', 'Zodiac Signs', 'Astrology', 'Conjunctions', 'Horoscopes'] |
Uploading A Brain To The Cloud | Doesn’t it sound cool when you read a book or watch a movie about someone uploading a mind or a brain onto a computer? That stuff from science fiction is more real than you can imagine! This doesn’t necessarily have to be scary, I’m not talking about taking your brain or mine from its place, but rather developing something similar to a brain, that behaves and performs tasks similar to a brain, and sending that on to the cloud; basically this is all about doing some machine learning on the cloud!
So what’s this brain then? Modern machine learning algorithms are intended to help supplement human activities; as such, they help perform some of the more mundane tasks or more complex ones such as decision making, recommendation, pattern recognition, object identification, prediction, or natural language understanding.
Developing your equivalent of such a tool is now more than easy, my favorite programming language is Python, and in Python, my two favorite frameworks are sklearn for simpler machine learning and Tensorflow for deep learning. Even though training your equivalent of a human eye and temporal lobes for object detection requires a great deal of processing power, the cloud, distributed computing, and GPU acceleration offer a solution to that problem.
So what is the technology behind all that? It is becoming exceptionally easy to develop a machine learning model, with just a few lines of code, one can, for example, build a model that recommends a t-shirt based on historical purchases:
from sklearn.neighbors import NearestNeighbors
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
train_data = pd.read_csv("data.csv")
model = NearestNeighbors(n_neighbors=5, algorithm='auto').fit(train_data)
X = np.asarray([1, 0, 25000, 1]).reshape(1, -1)
similar = model.kneighbors(X, 5, return_distance=False)
print similar
The small snippet of code above takes in a comma-separated values file as an input, creates a nearest neighbor classifier, and classifies a sample dataset X. Training this model to understand the data is not computationally difficult, but a more advanced model would require more power. I typically use IBM’s Data Science Experience for the more complex end-to-end solutions because you can connect a Watson Machine Learning service and deploy your code to the cloud (i.e. upload a brain) with another small script:
from repository.mlrepositoryartifact import MLRepositoryArtifact
from repository.mlrepository import MetaProps, MetaNames
wml_credentials = {
"url": "
"access_key": "***",
"username": "***",
"password": "***",
"instance_id": "***"
}
ml_repository_client = MLRepositoryClient(wml_credentials['url'])
ml_repository_client.authorize(wml_credentials['username'], wml_credentials['password'])
model_artifact = MLRepositoryArtifact(model, name="My Model")
saved_model = ml_repository_client.models.save(model_artifact) from repository.mlrepositoryclient import MLRepositoryClientfrom repository.mlrepositoryartifact import MLRepositoryArtifactfrom repository.mlrepository import MetaProps, MetaNameswml_credentials = {"url": " https://ibm-watson-ml.mybluemix.net ","access_key": "***","username": "***","password": "***","instance_id": "***"ml_repository_client = MLRepositoryClient(wml_credentials['url'])ml_repository_client.authorize(wml_credentials['username'], wml_credentials['password'])model_artifact = MLRepositoryArtifact(model, name="My Model")saved_model = ml_repository_client.models.save(model_artifact)
This is the beauty of the current technology landscape. These are things that a short while back sounded crazy are no easily doable and things that sound from science fiction are a reality. At this rate, and with the rise of quantum computing, I think that soon, we will really be able to develop something close to a human brain. | https://medium.com/astrolabs/uploading-a-brain-to-the-cloud-a625e57e7bef | ['Aoun Lutfi'] | 2017-11-23 08:46:26.053000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Insights', 'Tech', 'Data Science', 'Cloud'] |
How to check vesting statements in Smart Contracts ? | Vesting is an important tool to keep founders from running away with your money. A vesting contract is set between the founders and their investors and ensures that the money they receive is paid out over time. The payout is split in parts called tranches.
A simple vesting statement could look like this:
Company x receives an investment of $10M. 10% are reserved as a bonus for the team vested over 4 years.
Usually tranches are paid out yearly, so in this case $1M / 4 Years = $ 250K per year goes to the team. Often there will also be a so called “cliff” which is a delay before the vesting period starts.
Normally the contracts are written by lawyers and there needs to be a seperate vesting statement for every investment received. In a situation where hundreds of people invest small amounts of money — as it is often the case in ICOs — this approach is not feasible.
Luckily, with the emergence of smart contracts, vesting statements can be enforced automatically. The amount of individual investors and money received doesn’t matter. Instead of lawyers and lots of paperwork, we just need a few lines of code — beautiful.
Vesting is a tool to make a project more attractive to investors, and I’ve seen this on any good whitepaper so far. But the problem with whitepapers is, that they are just papers and won’t enforce anything. So the vesting statements need to be encoded in a smart contract on the blockchain.
In this guide you will learn how to check vesting statements in smart contracts for yourself.
1. Gather data
I picked Nucleus Vision as an example for this tutorial.
In the whitepaper on page 52 it states that:
“25% of the tokens will be allocated to the founding Nucleus Vision team […]. The team tokens will be locked in a smart contract with a 24-months vesting period and six-months cliff.”
The token supply is 10 billion nCash, so 2.5 billion nCash goes to the team over 2 years. So we have two tranches of 1.25 billion nCash with a cliff of 6 months.
From the whitepaper:
Vesting length = 24 months Cliff length = 6 months
The private sale started in November 2017, the vesting period should start somewhere around this date
Start date = November 2017
2. Transform the dates
Before we can check the blockchain, we need to transform our dates into timestamps suitable for programming:
💡Human readable dates are impractical to use in code, so dates are transformed into either seconds or milliseconds passed since the so called unix epoch. The epoch is defined as 1st of January 1970 midnight GMT. A unix timestamp is expressed by milliseconds passed since the epoch (1st of January 1970).
Timestamps on the solidity documentation: [link]
block.timestamp (uint): current block timestamp as seconds since unix epoch
So can expect the vesting duration and cliff to be measured in seconds on the Ethereum blockchain.
➡️ Transform months to seconds: [Link]
Vesting length = 24 months = 63.070.000 seconds Cliff length = 6 months = 15.770.000 seconds
➡️ Transform date to Unix Timestamp: [Link]
Start date = 1st of November 2017 = 1509494400
now that we have the times we are looking for, we should now …
3. Check the event log
We need to look for a reference for our dates in the nCash Smart Contract. nCash is an ERC20 Token so it lives on the Ethereum blockchain.
Be careful: It’s important that we check what is written on the blockchain, so GitHub is not valid.
➡️ Go to https://etherscan.io/
Tools like etherscan.io are so called block explorers, so basically google for the Ethereum blockchain.
➡️ Search for Nucleus (The first result with the green checkmark is the right one) [Link]
This is the contract that is responsible for creating and managing the tokens. The contract holds all information about which addresses own the tokens and how many.
The token holders tab shows us a list of all token owners. Note the two addresses on top, each owning 25% of the total token supply. It’s safe to assume that these are the team and company reserve tokens stated in the Nucleus whitepaper with 25% each.
Now we need to find out if this supply is locked by any kind of vesting mechanism. Every smart contract has an owner that controls it. The owner can either be a wallet controlled by an individual or a smart contract itself. In our case the owner needs to be a smart contract that enforces the vesting policy. So let’s check that.
➡️ Under TokenTracker Summary click on ERC20 Contract [Link]
➡️ Go to Misc > Contract Creator and klick the first [Link]
Now we see the owner contract. Instead of auditing the whole code, we can simply check the internal transactions that appeared in the contract first.
➡️ Klick on the Events tab [Link]
Here we can see all internal transactions within the smart contract. We are looking for a method that says something about vesting.
The first event in the log says:
NucleusVisionTimeVestingTokensMinted (address beneficiary, uint256 tokens, uint256 start, uint256 cliff, uint256 duration)
Bingo! Looks promising. What we see here is that a function named
NucleusVisionTimeVestingTokensMinted
was called, and that it received five parameters:
address beneficiary uint256 tokens uint256 start uint256 cliff uint256 duration
That is the data we are looking for.
The values are stored as hexadecimal, but etherscan can translate them for us.
➡️ Set correct variable type in the dropdown next to the parameter.
The right ones are:
Address Number Number Number Number
Now we know what the variables contain
mintTokensWithTimeBasedVesting(address beneficiary, uint256 tokens, uint256 start, uint256 cliff, uint256 duration) address beneficiary = 0x356df211c92d53a4e0ccfdd3125e87e8e570ef14 uint256 tokens = 2,5e+27 uint256 start = 1511481600 uint256 cliff = 15552000 uint256 duration = 63072000
To get the token value we have to deduct the decimals defined in the ERC20 contract:
➡️ Calculate the correct token amount [link]
uint256 tokens = 2,5e + (27 — 18) = 2,5e+9 = 2.500.000.000
Bingo! The token supply matches the 25% proposed as team supply in the whitepaper.
Why “-18” ?
💡 Note that an ERC20 contract defines decimals for the token supply, in case of nCash it is 18. So we have to deduct this from the value stored in the variable to get the correct number. From Stackexchange:
If I want 1 token with the ability to subdivide it with a precision of 2 decimal places, I represent that as 100.
tokenSupply = tokensIActuallyWant * (10 ^ decimals)
➡️ Transform Unix Timestamp to date: [Link]
uint256 start = 1511481600 = 24/11/2017
So the vesting started on the November 24th
uint256 cliff = 15552000 (seconds) = 6 months uint256 duration = 63072000 (seconds) = 24 months
We can now calculate the exact vesting period
Use https://www.timeanddate.com/date/dateadd.html to add the dates:
Vesting start = 24/11/2017 Payout starts = 25/05/2018 Payout ends = 25/04/2020
We now know that the vesting function in the owner contract was initialized with the correct values. Now we can check what the function does with our supplied parameters.
4. Check the code
We know from the event logs that we are looking for NucleusVisionTimeVestingTokensMinted in the contract
➡️ Open the code tab: [Link]
💡 The smart contract is what controls the flow of value, and once live cannot simply be stopped or updated. We are looking at a very critical piece of code here, and proper code commenting is a must. That means you should be able to understand what’s going on even without coding knowledge. If the code is not properly commented you have found a red flag.
Fortunately, in our case it is well done.
➡️ Press cmd+f (ctr+f) and search for NucleusVisionTimeVestingTokensMinted
/** * event for time vested token mint logging * @param beneficiary who is receiving the time vested tokens * @param tokens amount of tokens that will be vested to the beneficiary * @param start unix timestamp at which the tokens will start vesting * @param cliff duration in seconds after start time at which vesting will start * @param duration total duration in seconds in which the tokens will be vested */ event NucleusVisionTimeVestingTokensMinted(address beneficiary, uint256 tokens, uint256 start, uint256 cliff, uint256 duration);
This is the event that we saw in the event logs. Events can be triggered by functions:
// member function to mint time based vesting tokens to a beneficiary function mintTokensWithTimeBasedVesting(address beneficiary, uint256 tokens, uint256 start, uint256 cliff, uint256 duration) public onlyOwner { require(beneficiary != 0x0); require(tokens > 0); vesting[beneficiary] = new TokenVesting(beneficiary, start, cliff, duration, false); require(token.mint(address(vesting[beneficiary]), tokens)); NucleusVisionTimeVestingTokensMinted(beneficiary, tokens, start, cliff, duration); }
This function checks that:
require(beneficiary != 0x0);
Beneficiary has an address that is not 0
require(tokens > 0);
Vested token amount is bigger than 0
vesting[beneficiary] = new TokenVesting(beneficiary, start, cliff, duration, false);
New instance of token vesting contract is created with the beneficiary address
require(token.mint(address(vesting[beneficiary]), tokens));
Check if beneficiary is registered
event NucleusVisionTimeVestingTokensMinted(beneficiary, tokens, start, cliff, duration);
Fire vesting event
That is how the event logs are created. From Stackexchange:
Each transaction has an attached receipt which contains zero or more log entries. Log entries represent the result of events having fired from a smart contract.
Now there is a separate function that checks the saved times against the current time, to determine if and how much should be payed out:
function vestedAmount(ERC20Basic token) public view returns (uint256) {
*
*
*/
function vestedAmount(ERC20Basic token) public view returns (uint256) {
uint256 currentBalance = token.balanceOf(this);
uint256 totalBalance = currentBalance.add(released[token]); /** @dev Calculates the amount that has already vested. @param token ERC20 token which is being vested*/function vestedAmount(ERC20Basic token) public view returns (uint256) {uint256 currentBalance = token.balanceOf(this);uint256 totalBalance = currentBalance.add(released[token]); if (now < cliff) {
return 0;
} else if (now >= start.add(duration) || revoked[token]) {
return totalBalance;
} else {
return totalBalance.mul(now.sub(start)).div(duration);
}
}
}
Notice that now is an alias for block.timestamp which we discussed earlier
if (now < cliff)
Check if we are still before the cliff period
(now >= start.add(duration) || revoked[token])
Check if we are still before the vesting period
else { return totalBalance.mul(now.sub(start)).div(duration); }
If we are in the vesting period, return the amount of tokens relative to the passed time (e.g 50% after 1 year, 100% after 2 years)
Note that instead of having fixed tranches of say one year, the vested amount is paid out gradually
Since this is not a security audit, let’s ignore the rest of the code for now.
The parts we’ve discussed showed us that the correct data has been written on the blockchain, we also gained an insight into the internal mechanisms of the vesting functions.
⚗️ Conclusion
The blockchain is disrupting the way businesses are raising money.
In this brave new world a few lines of code move millions of dollars. Contracts are written by coders, not lawyers anymore and vesting statements can be enforced by a few lines of code.
Blockchain is an opportunity to democratize early stage investments. Today, this emerging landscape paints an image that resembles a dusty wild west town, which attracts pioneers and bandits alike. For this town to prosper, we as the citizens need to apply the law to keep the villains at bay. This tutorial gave you a guideline how to check vesting statements for yourself, which should be part of any project due diligence.
My key learnings during my research:
How vesting works
How to transform timestamps
How timestamps are handled in solidity
How we can read smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain
How to read event logs
How vesting is implemented in smart contracts
This tutorial is not a security audit and should rather give you an insight how smart contracts & vesting works. If you want to dig deeper into security audits, I recommend the excellent article by Merunas Grincalaitis
For best practice examples look at the Zeppelin contracts:
Was this guide helpful for you, and for which projects could you apply it? — Leave a comment
🚀 Interested in Tokenized Securities? Check out our newest project: STOCheck.com | https://medium.com/trusteddapps/how-to-check-vesting-statements-in-smart-contracts-2b559afdc270 | ['René Füchtenkordt'] | 2018-08-31 14:46:38.651000+00:00 | ['Smart Contracts', 'Erc20', 'Blockchain', 'Insights', 'Ethereum'] |
My 10 Years Successful Love Journey | You are not just an Option to me, You are my Emotion..
A Friend named HTML:
I have a friend named “HTML”. He looks simple & very structured, it is so easy to deal with him. He helped me to communicate information over the world wide web. We are doing okay but we want to have some fun in life, then we joined with CSS.
Crush on CSS :
“Css’”— Awe!— He is super cool, super stylish, very expressive & I always have crush on him. When ever i see him, I feel so excited to know more about him. He makes my world colourful, I like that very much. Along with that he has some constraints.. But okay we 3 are doing well and having the fun.
After some time, I feel there is something else which is very important that i’m missing! — LIFE!
Then he entered in to my life — Mr. JS
—The Love Journey Begins:
I met this guy called “JavaScript”. I totally fell for him with the way he behaves, There is no constraints like with CSS. He is not that simple like HTML. Every Minute is different & a new story with him.Whenever he is with me I feel like I got my life back.
I can do many things just like that. He can do things completed as well. He won’t put any restrictions, there is nothing called ‘Strict’ with him, So that I no need worry and I can do what ever I want. He respects my privacy, So he never entire into my file system unless I say. He never makes me jealous by talking[executing] about the other ladies[programs] out there ;)
He know so many things, he understands my needs, he is ok if I change my decisions in middle of something(does not require a data type to be declared). If something is not right he will give sweet Warnings where at the place common people can’t find (console), So that I can be careful from next time. Even if I do any mistakes/ Errors, he will wait for me to correct that, So that it won’t ruin my life. The way he takes care of me makes me think to marry him.
We are in love from 10 years, We got married 5 years back. Now we are leading a happy life. BTW, We recently blessed with a kid named ‘ES6’ ;)
There is something new & interesting about him which will make me to know more about him and falling in love with him again & again..
He is like an actor, he has many faces, anyways I always like his Original face. I also like him very much when he is with a face called ‘Vue’. Because it plays very huge role in my life, It making me as ‘UI Tech Lead’. Now he is in a new character called ‘Node’. It transformed him as a “Complete Family Man” from a Client side lover boy. So now he can take care of the Server side responsibilities as well, which will makes my life easier and better. Now I have a chance to build my career as a ‘Full Stack Developer’.
If you are a non JS guy you may feel a little jealous about us. Huff — But we don’t care. Because.,
UI development — Managing HTML, CSS, JS, etc, etc is an Art. Not something that anyone can Act.”
Not a conclusion:
I am so proud of him and I always want to be with him. Can’t Imagine a day without him until..
I go Himalayas and get merged with my real one! Because priorities get change ;)
Yours Lovingly, Me! | https://medium.com/@maneeshamanshumahadevsunkara/my-10-years-successful-love-journey-f20856466e31 | ['Babymanisha. Sunkara'] | 2021-08-12 07:14:06.928000+00:00 | ['Ui Development', 'Creative Writing', 'Lovestory', 'Web Development', 'Front End Development'] |
I’m NOT Broken, Because This Wasn’t a Typical Love Story | I know most of you are thinking. Justin, you clearly have healing to do. Take it slow you beautiful human. And, I hear you. Thank you. I hesitate to say you are wrong, while I also listen to the truth inside me. Maybe these reflections are merely a result of the healing I’ve been doing… but this felt more like an epiphany. I’m not saying I don’t have healing to do. Connecting to radical self-love is journey I am fully on, one of healing, and one with origins way before marriage. And, throughout our marriage, I was on that journey, to reconnect with myself. The human I came into this world as, before society and all it’s boxes got ahold of me. That journey of mine, made marriage complicated. There were times when I felt broken, when I felt really broken. But, in those moments, what I was exploring, was not my brokenness and I always knew; it was the world’s brokenness, other people’s brokenness. Allow me to explain with a corny metaphor I thought of.
I hit pause… on life. Many times. All the moments that were truly hard. Devastating. I was living life on pause. And it was a painfully conscious choice to do so. The DVD wasn’t scratched so bad it wouldn’t play. Remember when your favorite films got scratched so bad that they worked to a point, but you could never finish the movie? That’s not what was happening. The Wi-Fi was not down, and we didn’t lose the remote. I just hit pause from time to time, when I realized people around me, weren’t ready for the rest of the movie. There was nothing broken about me. I chose to push pause. I always saw them as decisions; every single time, and that’s how we discussed them. But, life was on pause never the less. And, life has been a good movie. A great movie in fact. Fantastic. It’s not a movie you would settle for not getting to finish. So, you know the feeling. You’re dying to get on with the movie, but it’s still paused. Somebody needs to go to the bathroom, that person’s getting popcorn, now somebody’s parent called them…. The world was full of reasons for the movie to be paused. Now, at the risk of making a very complex, emotional journey far too simple. When we decided to get a dissolution, I pressed play again. What you saw from me after that, was undoubtedly emotional. I was overwhelmed, unsure of what to think, didn’t know how to feel, didn’t know if it was true. It looked like brokenness, even felt like it to me. But what it really was? After waiting for what seemed like an actual life time, I had the chance before me, to continue watching the movie I had been waiting most of life to see… you know those kind of movies. They make you feel some way.
I understand why I am supposed to feel broken, to go slow, to spend time with myself. I really do. I’m not sure I’m even correct about all this. But, one thing I know about me, is that I listen to myself. And, I feel these things on a spiritual level. A huge barrier to radical self-love, for me, is feeling broken. It’s manipulative, deceptive, and coercive. But, I know in my soul (you know the depth of thought that gives you chills), when I was at my lowest points in life, I was not broken. I was hitting the pause button on a movie I was dying to continue, and that, as you all know, is exhausting after a while. | https://medium.com/@lifesahighheeledadventure/im-not-broken-because-this-wasn-t-a-typical-love-story-79c57e999995 | ['Justin Dickens'] | 2020-12-06 18:13:07.440000+00:00 | ['Self Love', 'Vulnerability', 'Nonbinary', 'LGBTQ', 'Divorce'] |
Why We Serve: Kirsten Green | Why We Serve: Kirsten Green
In this series you’ll hear stories from USDSers and learn why they decided to join, why they stay, and how their work is making an impact for all Americans. U.S. Digital Service Follow Nov 17, 2020 · 4 min read
Attending the White House holiday party is a little-known USDS perk!
Kirsten Green (she/her), Acquisition Strategist @ USDS HQ. From Port Saint John, Florida.
What’s your background?
I started my federal career in 2000, working as a secretary supporting a project management office at the National Park Service in Denver. Since then, I have dabbled in contracting, finance & budget, human resources, training, helpdesk support, system administration, and as a contracting officer. I have had the honor of serving in the following amazing agencies: National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, the General Services Administration (GSA), GSA’s Technology Transformation Service, and the awesome and amazing USDS.
Prior to USDS, what’s the coolest project you’ve worked on?
I have been lucky to work on many cool contracts throughout my 20 years of service.
I am an Army brat, so a few of my most proud contracts include supporting military work being done in Afghanistan and inspection work being done on F-16 aircrafts.
Some of the coolest are probably construction and supply/service contracts I worked on at the National Park Service. I helped rebuild the main road in Gettysburg National Park, built a log dam in Olympic National Park, repaired the air conditioning units in Boston National Historic Park, remodeled the visitor center in Saguaro National Park.
How did you find out about USDS and what made you decide to apply?
While working at GSA, I was accepted to participate in the USDS DITAP Pilot. It is the hardest training course I have ever taken in my government career, but it pushed me to think outside the box, and learn techniques that help change the way the government procures digital services. I kept in touch with many of my classmates, and Traci Walker, USDS Director of Procurement, encouraged me to do a 6-month detail at USDS. After the first few months, I knew USDS was the place for me, and I was hired on in December.
Is your work at USDS different from previous roles you’ve held?
My work at USDS is 100% different from any of my previous roles. However, I have found all the different things I have done in the government help me be successful at USDS. Now, I use all of the skills I have gained to help other contracting officers learn different methodologies, think outside the box, and try new things. It is hard. There are many roadblocks. But there is never a dull moment on any of my USDS projects.
Has your time at USDS changed your view of what’s possible in government?
I work with A LOT of smart, cool people who aren’t afraid to try new things, and then learn from the results. I see how important technology is, and how far behind the government really is when it comes to technology.
After your tour will you continue to serve in government?
You bet. I love being a public servant. I love showing we are good people who do work hard.
What will you miss most about USDS when you leave?
Civil servants, in jeans and t-shirts, collaborating on the couches at Jackson Place is NOT the government norm. I will miss the atmosphere for sure! | https://medium.com/the-u-s-digital-service/why-we-serve-kirsten-green-dc6bb71ec408 | ['U.S. Digital Service'] | 2020-11-17 17:47:10.087000+00:00 | ['Engineering', 'Interview', 'Civictech', 'Design', 'Government'] |
Newspapers Can Make a Climate Change | Responsible news organizations need to add a “Climate” section to their news reporting. This section should have equal footing with all other major sections like News, Politics, Business, Sports, and Tech. The editors would take a lead in reporting the “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” to avoid a global crisis and ecological destruction. Stories in the Climate sections will be the report card on humanity.
“There is no documented historical precedent” — U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
Margaret Sullivan wrote in The Washington Post that the IPCC report needs “sustained emphasis, by the media and the public, all over the world, if we stand a chance of maintaining a livable planet.” Brian Stelter at CNN Business agreed, quoting her article: “… the best minds in media should be giving sustained attention to how to tell this most important story that will create change.” Philip Gourevitch of the New Yorker tweeted “a bracing reminder that every issue we devote attention to other than climate change is really a secondary issue.”
Some in the media understand the problem. For example, front page stories in The New York Times and The Washington Post on October 7, 2018. Since then the coverage in the media and by politicians has been minimal or covered as politics. The layout of the newspapers and the navigation of news sites do not emphasis the importance of this news. Only a new major section on Climate can change this.
A Climate section would have many positive impacts. The new section would elevate the importance of the issue in the eyes of the public. It would put the climate denier stories the same section as stories of the actual impact of warmer oceans and other problems. Climate stories would be moved out of the short term thinking of the Politics section to a more thoughtful section. News organizations would assign editors, writers and other resources to cover the issue. Stories would get reported that might not otherwise be covered. And the media would seem more relevant to the majority and increasing number of Americans who accept that our changing climate is having an impact.
There are more than enough stories that the Climate Section would cover. For example:
Bill Gate’s timely action on a pilot fund in the EU to stop climate change
Impact of warmer oceans on destruction of recent hurricanes
Exxon Mobil’s and others’ support for a carbon tax
Retired rear admiral call for more research funding
Job creation in renewable energy
Disagreements with IPCC’s report
There is a precedent for adding a section in response to a global change. When the tech industry started in the 1970s the technology stories got scattered into many different newspaper sections. Few reporters were covering the industry or its impact. By the 1990s the global impact of the technology on business, culture and our politics was hard to deny. Even though some people still doubted the impact of tech, many newspapers took the lead and added Tech sections. Editors and reporters were assigned and the story was told. Today, it is hard to image a major news organization not covering tech.
☀️
It is time for news publishers to move climate articles out of the Politics section and into a Climate section. News organizations can make this change and have an impact. | https://medium.com/@raydaly/https-medium-com-raydaly-newspapers-can-make-a-climate-change-2ba778c0d746 | ['Ray Daly'] | 2019-01-02 02:37:10.686000+00:00 | ['Climate Change', 'Climate', 'Newspapers', 'News Organizations'] |
Do our kids really need university? | I was a lousy student. In 1992 I enrolled at a technical college to study chemistry. After two years I changed my mind (it happens) and I started studying business at university.
I’m not sure why I studied either of these subjects. Most likely, just like my friends, I went to university for a ‘bit of a laugh’ and to have a good time. Also, in my hometown, it was expected that you went to university. If you didn’t, well, you had failed.
Twenty-five years on, it is clear to me now, that the education system led me in the wrong direction.
In those days (the early mid-nineties) attending university was not that expensive. Eccentric students roamed the campus, lived in dingy flats and went out drinking two or three nights a week. Undergraduates studied a myriad of different subjects and new ideas were discussed over lunch or while playing $5 rounds of golf. It really was a magical time.
I have visited universities in recent years, maybe it’s just me getting old, but I don’t see that same magic on the campuses of 2021. Is attending university really worth all the time and the money? I doubt it.
University is only one option - consider the other alternatives.
When I graduated at the end of 1996 I was twenty-three years old. I didn’t know what I wanted to do and had no work experience at all. I owed $20,000 and had spent five years gathering qualifications. As I was to discover these qualifications were already in plentiful supply and had questionable value within the labour market.
Let me make a quick distinction here regarding a common misunderstanding. Marketing and sales are different. Marketing is a collective term for the decisions which are made to position the product/service package. Selling is the process of getting people to sign on the dotted line. When you graduate with a marketing degree you will be selling not marketing. Universities choose not to tell marketing students this fact because very few students would do the course.
With my B.Com (Training / Marketing) double major completed I assumed that my future employment would involve certain things. Having a nice car, going out for long lunches and making lots of money. Well, that wasn’t quite how it worked out. I discovered that my degree qualified me to work as a salesman. I visited customers, with my red vinyl clipboard ‘at the ready’. Reaching my weekly sales target was a truly hellish experience. My old boss Bill exemplified this with a motivational line he dispensed liberally “If you can’t reach your sales target don’t bother coming back.”
Like a lot of young people at that time, when the post-university dream failed to materialize, I saved face by hopping onto a plane and going off to see the world.
I knew that a ‘real’ job would come my way. ‘No more vinyl clipboards for me,’ or so I told myself.
In summary, since graduating in 1996, I had worked in sales in Auckland and Wellington, New Zealand — it had been stressful and far from glamorous. From 1999 until 2001, I worked in retail in Perth, Australia — it was tedious and the pay was low. In late 2001, I flew out to the United Kingdom on a two-year working holiday visa. Surely, I thought, there will be work for me here? Well, yes and no. Yes, there was work but most of it was so menial that the local people were not prepared to do it. I spent two years shambling around the UK doing a range of temporary jobs whilst teetering on the brink of poverty.
The day I turned thirty years old was not too flash. I found myself in a state of cognitive dissonance. Nearly a decade had passed since I had graduated. It was 2004 and I was washing dishes in a cafe in Brisbane, Australia. Under the counter job, great people and even a few free beers after work but I wondered…….What the hell am I going to do with my life?
Few will admit to it but my experience, as detailed above, is actually quite a common post university outcome. (Students and parents take note!!)
I’ve been extraordinarily lucky. I came to Japan, there have been some challenges but it’s worked out well. I have a wonderful wife and two kids Luca aged nine years old and Juno aged six years old. We call them Loo and Joo — they are bright, bubbly, ferocious, and everything that kids their age should be.
So, when Loo and Joo reach university age (a decade from now) what advice should I offer to them? Let’s imagine for a moment that eighteen-year-old Loo (or Joo) is crazy about Egyptian history. Do I suggest that he/she invests four years studying for a degree in Egyptian history? You must be joking? If you factor in the loss of potential earnings the cost of that degree will balloon to over $100,000.
Alternatively, do I tell Loo (or Joo) to continue cultivating their interest in Egypt? Perhaps, find a related job, accumulate a little money and take a trip to Egypt each year?
For most people, the second option is the preferable choice. The idea of students spending years ‘broadening their horizons’ and learning to ‘think’ is an idealistic view of what education should be. It’s not a true reflection of what happens at university these days.
Of course, the choice is theirs to make. I hope that my experience helps guide Loo and Joo into making smarter choices than I did.
If you are a parent whose child is finishing high school, forward this article to them. A university degree most certainly does not entitle you to an easy life and automatic career success. I hope this short article goes some way toward communicating that fact.
A period of change and adjustment lies ahead for young people and the educational institutions that depend upon them. | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/do-our-kids-need-university-d74e3d460078 | ['Marcus Wallis'] | 2021-06-26 00:30:52.124000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'University', 'Education', 'Parenting Advice', 'Career Advice'] |
Cannabis Market Ought to Be Stood for By U.S. Profession Authorities After Legalisation, Leading Us senate Chairman Mentions | Cannabis Market Ought to Be Stood for By U.S. Profession Authorities After Legalisation, Leading Us senate Chairman Mentions John Swiden Jun 17·3 min read
Cannabis company is just one of the essential subjects on the mind of Us senate Financing Board Chairman Ron Wyden (D-OR), that talked up regarding his sights on cannabis on Wednesday.
The discussion occurred recently at an on the internet occasion, held by the Nationwide Cannabis Roundtable (NCR) and Leafly, concentrated on the cannabis labor force.
Inning accordance with its site, “Leafly is the world’s on-line location to find out about cannabis, discover cannabis stress and items, and purchase them from lawful, certified sellers. Greater than 100 million people go to us every year due to our shown dedication to education and learning and science-based info.”
The occasion was held to share Leafly’s newest ‘Cannabis Tasks Matter: the 2021 Leafly Tasks Report’, and Legislator Wyden, a stalwart supporter of hemp and cannabis company, was present together with various other government personnel and cannabis activists.
“Oregon’s cannabis market is a durable factor to the state’s economic climate, and I’m specific that the market might have a favorable effect across the country. I’m dealing with associates in the U.S. Us senate to finish cannabis prohibition in a way that not just sustains this flourishing market however likewise brings back the lives of those many harm by the stopping working Battle on Medications.” stated Wyden.
Us senate Bulk Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), have been dealing with Wyden to complete an all-encompassing government legalisation plan. The 3 have been helping months, and all those thinking about cannabis legalisation have been complying with carefully as they prepare to present regulations to do away with cannabis prohibition.
Wyden common ideas that he and his associates have referenced before — the possibility for the government federal government to deal with racial splits in the bad guy justice system. Although information have yet to be common, the 3 lawmakers specify that discovering methods to guarantee social justice objectives are got to with unique respect to marginalized populaces.
An essential subject to keep in mind that comes straight from Leafly’s record is that the government federal government is not able to matter marjuana employees in labor stats. This is discounting 321,000 utilized residents throughout the US. Legislator Wyden concurs with Leafly that the prospective for development in task development and financial stimulation would certainly be a significant profit to Americans.
Problems with the government federal government not acknowledging cannabis as a genuine company market are the limitations in position for state-approved companies. Particularly, the difficulties with financial organizations and cannabis bucks, and discrimination in tax obligation reductions and credit ratings.
Wyden, Shumer, and Booker are functioning diligently, and although they’ll confess there’s development being made, they are maintaining their cards near to their breast regarding any type of anticipated days for official declaring.
A couple of of the important things we do understand consist of:
-the proposition will stop big business from controling the market
-there will be concern offered to small company, especially those had by neighborhoods straight affected by the battle on medications
-consideration for clinical utilizes will be an important item of the regulations
-economic effect will be an owning pressure in the proposition preparation
With assistance from within both the Us senate and the Home, and lots of specifies that have legalized cannabis leading the way, a government secure of authorization on cannabis appears more reasonable compared to before. Remain tuned as we comply with the development on nationwide weed legalisation. | https://medium.com/@johnswiden/cannabis-market-ought-to-be-stood-for-by-u-s-a418ed45712f | ['John Swiden'] | 2021-06-17 16:42:12.673000+00:00 | ['Cannabis Industry', 'Cannabisblog', 'Florida Cannabis News', 'Medical Cannabis Market', 'Marijuana'] |
With Figma’s new SVG Exports, less = more | Here’s one big lesson we’ve learned since launching collaborative design tool Figma: when it comes to SVG Export, less is more. For a long time, we stuck as much information as possible into our SVG files, hoping it would help other tools render and import designs accurately.
Fueled by feedback from our community, we’ve had a change of heart and have been gradually tweaking the Export format over the past few months. As our release note junkies have noticed, our SVGs are now simpler, more compact and compatible with more tools (like Android Studio). Read on for a quick primer on SVG and details about what we changed.
Why tools render the same SVGs so differently
SVG — which stands for Scalable Vector Graphics — is an increasingly popular image format for 2D vector graphics. It emerged in 2001 as an open specification aimed primarily for use in web browsers. Unlike traditional bitmap image formats like JPG and PNG that become blurry when resized, SVG is designed to always remain crystal clear.
That’s because SVGs are effectively instructions describing how to paint an image from scratch while bitmap images are static snapshots of the final result. SVG is perfect for assets like logos and icons on the web, where they might show up anywhere from a huge monitor to a high resolution retina screen on a phone.
Here’s the rub though: there’s no standardized way of converting the SVG markup to pixels on the screen.
Here’s the rub though: there’s no standardized way of converting the SVG markup to pixels on the screen. Most tools have their own custom SVG importers or renderers and the quality of these implementations varies widely. The SVG specification is also sufficiently complex that most tools only understand a subset and have bugs even when dealing with the subset that they claim to support.
For example, SVG has a nifty feature that allows you to define instructions in a <defs> block and reference them repeatedly with the <use> element. As we learned the hard way, Android Studio does not support this in most cases.
In addition to choking many importers, our complicated and extraneous markup also bloated the file size and made the output difficult to digest for humans. Many of our users had resort to post-processing with tools such as SVGO and svgito or, even worse, by manually cleaning up the file by hand. 😬😬😬
From Figma’s SVG naïveté… to our new pragmatic approach
People have been asking for smaller, simpler SVGs from Figma for a long time. We resisted making the change because we were hoping that SVG would become the de facto data transfer format between design tools. In this utopia, you could easily spread your design workflow across different design tools depending on what was the best fit for each stage.
We now accept that was a bit of pie-in-the-sky naïveté, and our new SVG Exporter takes a more pragmatic approach.
To understand the improvements, let’s start with a seemingly innocent example: a frame containing a single black rectangle with a grey inside stroke.
With our old SVG Exporter, we generated this embarrassing novel:
<title>Frame</title>
<desc>Created using Figma</desc>
<g id="Canvas">
<clipPath id="clip-0" clip-rule="evenodd">
<path d="M 0 0L 100 0L 100 100L 0 100L 0 0Z" fill="#FFFFFF"/>
</clipPath>
<g id="Frame" clip-path="url(#clip-0)">
<g id="Rectangle">
<use xlink:href="#path0_fill" transform="translate(10 10)"/>
<mask id="mask0_outline_ins">
<use xlink:href="#path0_fill" fill="white" transform="translate(10 10)"/>
</mask>
<g mask="url(#mask0_outline_ins)">
<use xlink:href="#path1_stroke_2x" transform="translate(10 10)" fill="#CCCCCC"/>
</g>
</g>
</g>
</g>
<defs>
<path id="path0_fill" d="M 0 0L 80 0L 80 80L 0 80L 0 0Z"/>
<path id="path1_stroke_2x" d="M 0 0L 0 -10L -10 -10L -10 0L 0 0ZM 80 0L 90 0L 90 -10L 80 -10L 80 0ZM 80 80L 80 90L 90 90L 90 80L 80 80ZM 0 80L -10 80L -10 90L 0 90L 0 80ZM 0 10L 80 10L 80 -10L 0 -10L 0 10ZM 70 0L 70 80L 90 80L 90 0L 70 0ZM 80 70L 0 70L 0 90L 80 90L 80 70ZM 10 80L 10 0L -10 0L -10 80L 10 80Z"/>
</defs>
</svg> http://www.w3.org/2000/svg " xmlns:xlink=" http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink "> Frame Created using Figma
After a lot of hard work, we’ve managed to squeeze all of that down to a tweet:
Let’s go through the larger changes one by one:
Primitives
For simple shapes such as rectangles and circles, we now use the easily understandable SVG shape primitives instead of cryptic paths.
<path d="M0 100V0H100V100H0Z"/>
⬇
<rect width=”100" height=”100"/>
Inside/Outside Strokes
Because SVG only supports center strokes, design tools have had to devise various workarounds to simulate inside and outside strokes. Previously, we did this by using center strokes with a doubled stroke width. That is visually equivalent to having both an inside and outside stroke so we used a <mask> to hide the unnecessary half. This approach greatly inflated the file size and complicated the markup.
We now try to adjust the points in the path such that the visual result will resemble an inside or outside stroke while using center strokes with the original stroke width. For example, a rectangle with an inner stroke can be represented as smaller rectangle with a center stroke.
<mask id="path-1-inside-1" fill="white">
<path d="M0 100V0H100V100H0Z"/>
</mask>
<path d="M0 100V0H100V100H0Z" fill="#C4C4C4" stroke="black" stroke-width="2" mask="url(#path-1-inside-1)"/>
⬇
<path d="M99.5 99.5H0.5V0.5H99.5V99.5Z" fill="#C4C4C4" stroke="black"/>
Minimal Markup
We no longer output purely informational elements like <title> and <g> or attributes like id and version .
We also added some smarts to avoid markup when they have no effect. For example, we used to always output a <clipPath> for clipped frames, but now we do so only when clipping is actually necessary.
Finally, we now inline SVG elements where we previously had a <use> reference to a deduplicated element defined within the <defs> block. Even though we lost deduplication, it turns out that the simplified structure actually reduces the overall file size in most cases. This is especially true when the SVGs are compressed with something like gzip.
Export Options
The new SVG Export defaults are optimized for the most common usecases. For example, most of our users will not miss the id attributes, but for those of you that do, we went ahead and added an option. We also have an option to control the markup for strokes and text objects.
We hope Figma’s new short ‘n sweet SVGs have been treating you well. If you have feedback, please let us know in the comments below! | https://medium.com/figma-design/our-new-svg-exports-are-short-n-sweet-1b2e2cedf319 | ['Biru Mohanathas'] | 2018-08-21 00:00:03.637000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'UI', 'SVG', 'Design', 'Engineering'] |
The gospel of Elektra Abundance | The gospel of Elektra Abundance
Transgender actress Dominique Jackson of “Pose” was always a believer.
“My grandmother’s proud of me, my family’s proud because here I am, I’m closer to God now.” In a 2015 interview, she thinks back on the Anglican altar boy in Trinidad, and being raped by the priest. I’m catching up with Dominique Jackson, the star of FX’s Pose, struck by how the imperious Elektra Abundance is, in reality, a spiritual seeker.
She started out life in hell.
“We live in this realm,” she sighs, “where things exist but we pretend they don’t exist, so that makes them, you know, nonexistent.”
It led to a long investigation into what ‘exists’ . . . finding God, and herself.
As in the Protestant Reformation, she had to figure out what a priest meant to her. Did he handle “God” for you?
That remained true for her family and community, even after they learned of the abuse, so she was left without a spiritual narrative, except dying. “I felt that it would be better for me to save my family’s name by dying than to come forward as myself or live as myself and bring them shame and disrespect.”
She laughs. “And then I woke the hell up.” | https://medium.com/belover/dominique-jacksons-spiritual-journey-1b7ffd13e969 | ['Jonathan Poletti'] | 2020-05-02 06:07:38.256000+00:00 | ['Transgender', 'Religion', 'LGBTQ', 'Life', 'TV Series'] |
Red Flags I Completely Missed at the Beginning of My Relationship | When you are in the midst of or at the very end of an unhealthy relationship, it can be easy to realize that something was… off.
However, it’s important to remember that red flags are often far from obvious. They are subtle and while it’s easy to notice them in hindsight, it’s much harder when you are in the situation yourself.
When I reflect on the beginning of my relationship I can see that I had warning signs from the very get-go. I just didn’t pay attention.
Not all red flags mean that a relationship is abusive, it can simply mean it’s unhealthy and/or toxic.
There is one particular relationship that I am now able to look back and recognize that the red flags presented themselves very early in the relationship.
For example… | https://medium.com/fearless-she-wrote/red-flags-i-completely-missed-at-the-beginning-of-my-relationship-f7d8b8d37b07 | ['Carrie Wynn'] | 2020-09-25 15:48:58.528000+00:00 | ['Psychology', 'Relationships', 'Self', 'Mental Health', 'Women'] |
How To View The End Of A Relationship So You Can Move Forward | How To View The End Of A Relationship So You Can Move Forward
Job loss, end of a friendship, break-ups…
At the end of a relationship, how can we view them so it’s easier to move forward?
Did you fired or did you quit? Did he break with you? Or did you break up with him? Did she unfriend/unfollow you first? Or did you?
How much you care about the answers to these questions depends on your ego.
How much you judge someone for how they answer these questions is how hard you judge yourself when a relationship ends for you.
Because what is the ultimate outcome of each of these questions?
It doesn’t matter who broke up with whom, whether leaving a job was by choice or not.
The relationship ended.
Everyone’s heard of the saying, “one door closes, another door opens.”
It’s not anything new but I want to expand on that.
Like a Hotel.
Using this analogy will help you change your mindset, helping you get over a relationship that ended or give you the courage to end a relationship that you know you should have ended a long time ago.
Hotel of romantic relationships.
Hotel of jobs.
Hotel of friendships.
When the door closes, it doesn’t matter if you closed the door or if someone closed the door for you.
It’s closed.
Now, where are you? The lobby.
Depending on your mindset after the door closed, this lobby can be a shitty one like the Motel 6 with a broken vending machine and a creepy dude behind the counter or a fancy one like Shangri La.
You can stay in the lobby as long as you want and recover, read some books, get some snacks, go to the gym, or get a facial.
When you’re ready, you can start looking for the types of rooms you’d like to stay in. (ie enter the dating scene, find a job, make friends)
You don’t even have to stay at that hotel.
You can leave those big shiny doors to the open world and do something else.
Don’t want to start dating again?
Don’t. The Hotel of Relationships will always be there.
Have enough money saved to do some travelling?
Do it.
Always wanted to open up an Etsy shop and sell your sock puppets?
Do that. Screw the Hotel of jobs.
Therefore, it doesn’t matter how a relationship ends, it’s how you start your next chapter that determines where you go in life.
So think of it as a hotel and perhaps this mindset will help you get over a relationship that ended or give you the courage to end a relationship that you know you should end.
So Readers, which hotel are you currently focusing on? | https://medium.com/change-becomes-you/how-to-view-the-end-of-a-relationship-so-you-can-move-forward-f9578b9fc06f | ['Katharine Chan', 'Msc', 'Bsc'] | 2020-12-17 16:28:22.276000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Love', 'Mindset Coaching', 'Self Reflection', 'Recover'] |
Customer Life Time Value (CLTV) | In this article, I will discuss the ways to reveal this potential value.
This is the second and the final part of the article series about Customer Value. In the first part, I discussed the core of customer value calculation: RFM metrics and scores.
This final part will be about Customer Life Time Value prediction using BG/NBD and Gamma Gamma Models.
With RFM Analysis, a company can have a vision of its customers’ current behavior by scoring and segmenting them based on their purchasing habits and therefore be able to maintain an effective CRM.
What is CRM?
Customer relationship management (CRM) combines practices, strategies, and technologies that companies use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle. It tries to understand the customer profile of the company and to communicate according to these profiles. Analyzes customers, finding audiences belonging to certain behaviors, and organizing campaigns suitable for that audience. Moreover, CRM targets to gain new customers other than existing customers. All in all, CRM offers you the opportunity to improve your profitability, productivity, and efficiency.
What is CLTV?
CLTV, an alias for Customer Life Time Value, is the ultimate metric used to understand and influence the customer’s behavior by predicting each customer’s equity covering the period where he/she is alive. Being alive is a metaphor for “a customer who still purchases from the company.” The existing customers’ purchasing habits will be of great help for creating different patterns and measuring the CLTV of a new customer and the existing ones.
CLTV is based on 4 metrics; let’s examine them one by one:
Recency: The period between the first and the last purchase date, that is the duration where we can observe the behavior of this customer,
T: The age of the customer within the company that is the period starting from the first purchase date until today,
Frequency: Number of purchases the customer has, that is how often he/she purchases,
Monetary: The average of the total prices among all the purchases.
CLTV Calculation compares customer behavior. Each customer is evaluated according to their purchasing status. There are different approaches for calculating CLTV, and I will share the most common one:
CLTV = (Customer Value / Churn Rate) * Profit Margin
Customer Value = Average Order Value * Purchase Frequency
Churn Rate = 1 — Repeat Rate
It is possible to degrade the above equations and reach this one:
CLTV = Expected Number of Transactions * Expected Average Profit
So how would these values be calculated?
Expected Number of Transactions: Calculated using BG/NBD Model
Expected Average Profit: Calculated using Gamma Gamma Model
We are projecting future time using some models(BG-NBD and Gamma-Gamma) with CLTV Prediction. We make predictions about the customers’ process not only now but years later.
BG/NBD Model
Given the Frequency, T, and Recency values of a customer, it is possible to predict the expected number of purchases that he/she would make within a specified time period.
Gamma Gamma Model
It is used to estimate the average monetary value of customer transactions. Given the Frequency and Monetary values of a customer, it is possible to predict the expected average profit of a customer.
Online Retail II dataset will be used for this approach. | https://medium.com/@iambideniz/customer-life-time-value-cltv-f732b1bb6e4d | [] | 2021-06-08 08:51:15.087000+00:00 | ['Rfm Analysis', 'Crm Analytics', 'Data Science', 'Cltv', 'CRM'] |
Critical Point of Traditional Marketing and Digital Marketing | The internet is quickly changing the world as we know it. For the first time in the history, a single businessperson can compete on equal footing with large, multinational firms. Anyone can sell something, collect the money for the item, then go purchase it and sent it to the buyer. Today, armed with nothing more than information and a little bit of know-how, people are becoming millionaires
There are many facets of traditional marketing and examples might include tangible items such as business cards, print ads in newspapers or magazines. It can also include posters, commercials on TV and radio, billboards and brochures.
The world of digital marketing continues to evolve and as long as technology continues to advance, digital marketing will as well. Examples of digital marketing include things like websites, social media mentions, YouTube videos, and banner ads. Specifically, digital marketing is similar to traditional advertising, but using digital devices.
Nearly half of all smartphone users have used their phones while shopping in brick-and-mortar stores — 40% of them to compare the competition’s prices. Statistics for who’s scanning QR codes and with what device appear to be mixed, although most data places iPhone users at the top, with the user age range being 25–34. Japan and the U.S. are currently leaps and bounds ahead of other countries in QR code scans around 60% with Canada and the U.K. trailing dozens of percentage points behind.
Now creative digital advertisers are use it for innovative promotions and give new life to boring places. Famous angry birds and Instagram create a display advert for their offline promotions with QR code shape Designs and Both QR codes take you directly to download the app, and are a great showcase for both ad creativity and self-explanatory promotion of the apps themselves.
Sukiennice Museum in Poland has added a whole new effect to their paintings to turn each one in to a story with QR code. Visitors can scan QR code for particular painting, and get the inside scoop direct from the YouTube video.
Still, QR code creation jumped a whopping 1,253% in 2011, with two million of them created in less than three months. By far, most were used to lead users to a web address, but they can also store vCard details, Google Maps info and even YouTube video links.
If you haven’t seen them in your favorite newspaper or magazine, it’s called a Quick Response Code or a QR code. In short, let’s just say, it’s like a bar code but better.. The difference is that a “QR CODE” will take you instantly to a web page when scanned by a smartphone. It’s one of the latest cool technologies that helps bridge the virtual world and the physical world.
My conclusion is QR CODE, the critical point of Digital and Traditional marketing. | https://medium.com/enfection/critical-point-of-traditional-marketing-and-digital-marketing-bede0ee7d91f | ['Madhawa Chandrasiri'] | 2017-03-16 09:27:25.522000+00:00 | ['Advertising', 'Marketing', 'Digital Marketing', 'UX', 'Qr Code'] |
Is Data Science Worth Learning? | My answer to the question is YES a big YES in this case. Did you know there is power in data?
“We’re entering a new world in which data may be more important than software.” — Tim O’Reilly,
It has gained popularity over the past several years with experts in the field predicting it to be the future.
From being marketable, a well paying, and life-changing, Data science is deliberated as the hottest job of the 21st century. In our previous article, we looked at The Era of Data. Todays’ feature We shall discuss the need to have data science as a skill and to give you a reason to consider data science as a career.
Introduction
Data science is the study of data. It is the study of the extraction of information or knowledge from data. It involves the use of scientific methods, processes, analysis, algorithms, and systems to extract information from data and create insights.
With data science, you venture into one of the most interesting career paths in the field of data. So who is a data scientist?
According to Hillary Mason, “A data scientist is someone who can obtain, scrub, explore, model, and interpret data, blending hacking, statistics, and machine learning. Data scientists not only are adept at working with data, but appreciate data itself as a first-class product.”
Here are the reasons why data science is worth learning.
High Demand
Data science has been described by numerous names one being the career of the future but getting a data scientist is becoming a major headache to companies. The job market is not able to keep up with the high demand for data scientists. According to IBM, the demand for data scientists will increase from 364,000 to 2,720,000 job openings will be generated in the year 2020. This should be a major force to make you choose data science as a path to follow.
High Pay
With high demand comes to a great cost, given the demand of data scientists the pay is also high. According to PayScale.com, the average data scientist is paid $96,000 per year. Glass-door says that Data Scientists make an average of $116,100 per year. If this paycheque is not enough to drive to becoming a data scientist lets proceed to the next reason why you need to become a data scientist.
Data Science will save lives.
Traditionally a doctor had to manually images from the Xray MRI scans and the CT scans in order to find irregularities within them.
None the less this was difficult as the eye is not able to completely find all the deformities in the scans and would result in incompetent analysis and in worst cases were not able to suggest the proper treatment. With the advancement in Big data and deep learning technologies, it has become possible to detect microscopic deformities in the scans. With data science, the medical sector has changed due to the use of data. Data science also adds life-saving to one of the reasons to choose it as a career.
Note this is a single example of data science in medicine.
Low competition in the field
Due to the need for Data scientists the competition that is on is among the employers trying to have the best data scientists. This is due to the shortage of the required skills in the market.
Data science is new
If history is to tell a tale, is that anything new in the market tends to gain favor among the people. It is the same case when it comes to DataScience. Data science is new yet the impact in the 21st century is already being experienced in many fields. It has become the sexiest job of the 21st century. Research says that data related courses are in high demand in recent years due to the huge volumes of data generated every day.
With data science, you are always learning
if you love the book be sure that data science will always keep you at your toes to always better yourself. Data Science will not only give you a great career but also help you in personal growth. You will be able to have a problem-solving attitude. Data science will secure your future since it is a growing technology.
Summary
From being in high demand, a high paying, life-saving Data science is a life-changing career.
According to Mark Cuban “Artificial Intelligence, deep learning, machine learning — whatever you’re doing if you don’t understand it — learn it. Because otherwise, you’re going to be a dinosaur within 3 years.”
With the review above data science is wort the time. Studying the course today will create make your tomorrow better. Data science is the new oil of the 21st century the sexiest job, the future career. If you ask me Data science is worth your time? YES, data science is the future.
Hope you liked our article leave a comment a like if you liked our article.
#happylearning #keeplearning
Africa Data School
www.africadataschool.com | https://medium.com/swlh/is-data-science-worth-learning-ae3937809acf | ['Africa Data School'] | 2020-09-10 17:48:28.613000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Datascience Training', 'Technology', 'Data Science', 'Data'] |
Poker Test: pattern-based random number detection in Python | The test that we will use relies on the concept that a sequence, even if it follows a uniform distribution, it can not be claimed as random . Moreover, this tests checks if there is a correlation between the digits of the sequence and extracts information from patterns of the well known card game Poker.
Process
Let us assume a sequence of 5 consecutive integers like those that follow:
All we have to do is determine if they match with one of the orderless seven combinations that follow:
Quintuples
A chi-square test X² can be applied, based on the number of the quintuples in each category when we have a sequence in decimal system. Sometimes categories can make groups in order to meet the “five in each category” condition. To be more specific, this test uses a simpler version to facilitate the programming involved. In the set of five numbers we count the number of distinct values and then the categories could sum on five instead of seven.
Five in each category
In our case, we will introduce poker test in a binary sequence e.g. 010010011010100101… So, every time you want to understand whether your sorted binary attribute that is used for your prediction model is biased or not, make sure that it’s randomly distributed. Otherwise, your output can’t rely on such independent variables which fail to pass the poker test. In other words, the feature selection you have done could be wrong, even if the binary dataset is balanced.
Hypothesis Test for Randomness using Chi-Square Test
In previous articles we used a lot the well-known non parametric test Χ² but we used it as a method to make a goodness of fit in a specific distribution. This time we will use this method in order to decide whether our output is random or not. In case of a binary output such as A or B, like 1 or 0 and Yes or No, probabilities help you understand that, if the output is random, then p₀ = p₁, when
★ p₀: The probability that the next digit is equal to 0
★ p₁: The probability that the next digit is equal to 1
This means that both events have the same probability to occur. So, this test can ensure that no number is displayed more than others, and the data is uniformly distributed. In general, the random test in X² has Ho: p₀ = p₁ and H₁ : p₀ ≠p₁. The test statistic has m freedom degree where m is the length of each part of digits that we use in the bit sequence. As you can see below, we represent the test statistic that we will use in randomness test and then we will discuss why it has the following form in functional call where C(d,i) is the i combination of d, where d is the length of each k non overlapping part.
Function Call
We choose an integer m and we divide sequence in k non overlap parts each of which has a length equal to k = n/m and let nᵢ be the observed number of occurenes of the iᵗʰ type of sequence of length 2ᵐ. The poker test determines if the sequence of length 2ᵐ each appear the same number of times in sequence , as we could expect it for a truly random sequence.
In this part, we will give an example using hand calculations at first and Python code later on.
Example. Let’s have the following sequence s with length L = 30, we choose m = 3 and so k = 30/3 = 10.
s = 100 111 101 110 011 001 101 001 010 000
m = 3 and k = 10
We need to calculate the frequency nᵢ. For this reason we have exactly 8 = 2³ combinations which are the following:
After finding the frequency each sample occurred in our sequence, we are ready for calculations…
From all the calculations above, finally we extract X² = 0.133 and now it is time to compare it with the Xo² with m = 3 degrees of freedom which is equal to 7.814 with a = 0.05. So 0.133 < 7.814 and this means that we can’t reject Ho and our sequence tends to be random!
Python Code
We create a function named PokerTest which takes as an input a bit sequence in string format and an integer m. If the sequence is random, then this function returns ‘The sequence is random’ else the bit sequence fails to pass the poker test. As we mentioned before, this can help detect fraud patterns in outputs that are correlated with binary target or binary features that want to use in a specific analysis only for sorted values.
Thank you for your time! | https://towardsdatascience.com/poker-test-pattern-based-random-number-detection-in-python-ec2dba4955bc | ['Elena Chatziapostolou'] | 2020-12-02 21:03:40.804000+00:00 | ['Poker', 'Data Science', 'Python', 'Fraud', 'Cryptography'] |
10 Typical parental errors that parents make intentionally | 10 Typical parental errors that parents make intentionally
Today I will introduce you the 10 Typical parental errors that parents make intentionally. So keep reading the article till the end:
1. Panic: Many parents become scared about their babies and become very watchful. This can put pressure on parents and make them live in a nightmare instead of spending the best moments of raising the newborn.
2. Crying: As a parent, you do not like your child crying because we associate it with something very negative. Although the baby has clean and not hungry diapers, crying can happen.
3. Food: There is a perception that babies can not cope through a night without breast milk. Which is wrong! Both infants and mothers can sleep through the night without the baby getting breast milk.
4. Vomiting: It may be difficult to see if the baby just gasps or not. Vomiting is not usually a problem as long as your baby seems okay.
5. Fever: For the first three months, parents need to react quickly if the child has a fever. That is why they need to check him continuously.
6. Car seat: It is important that your baby seat is installed well enough or asks for help from people who know how to do it.
10 Typical parental errors that parents make intentionally
7. Teeth: It is never too early to start looking after children’s oral hygiene. Children should not have milk in bed when their teeth have come out due to the risk of getting holes. Use a wet cloth to massage the baby’s gums and start brushing the baby’s teeth within a year.
8. Marriage: When all the attention goes to the little newcomer in the family, many may overlook caring for their relationship or marriage. I consider this point among the most important Parenting Errors.
9. Argument: Arguing too much (or too little) in front of a child is not healthy. However, parents should also not ignore their angry feelings, as it can lead to more family breakups — which is not good for the couple or the child.
10. Sources: Many people today get their ideas about parenting through books and on the Internet, but it may be a good idea to make sure of every information from doctors or Parenting coordinators.
That was all about the 10 parenting errors that parents make intentionally. Don’t be shy and add new points in the comment section to complete the list above.
Thank you. | https://medium.com/@sosteachers/10-typical-parental-errors-that-parents-make-intentionally-cb8a0463e8a4 | ['Sos Teachers'] | 2020-07-08 12:56:37.637000+00:00 | ['Education', 'Baby', 'Children', 'Parenting', 'Kids'] |
Where Are the “Unbrotherly” Men? | When I cheated on my husband, I also cheated on my family. I treated those blameless, beloved people extremely badly, either overtly or by negligent and selfish default. I have never hidden from that at all. The fact that I was given any chance at all to repair these relationships still seems miraculous to me and the work I have put into that repair has been consistent.
Do you know who else had a terrible time in that awful year? My lover’s wife. And his teenage daughters. For them, too, this was not the first time that they'd lived through the aftermath of an affair. He’d cheated on them before, which is something I had not known until the end of my own involvement with him. In the case of my lover’s wife, her obvious immediate trauma was overlaid with an extra dose of sickening deja-vu.
In the aftermath of the affair, one of the frequent accusations leveled at me was my lack of “sisterly” consideration for my lover’s wife during the time that I had been cheating. I was told, often, that I had let the feminist side down by enabling such poor treatment of another woman. I’d colluded with her husband in treating her badly. She might not have been my friend, but as a woman, I have a sisterly duty to other women, and I had breached that.
On an academic level, I don’t disagree with this perspective. Of course, if all women simply refused to become involved with married men — or they ended their involvement when they discovered the truth — then married men would not be able to cheat. That’s basic and it’s obvious.
Where, though, was the similar opprobrium toward my former lover for his lack of “brotherly consideration” for my husband? I don’t recall anyone suggesting that for a moment. Not once. If I dared to suggest that this particular path was not a one-way street, I was invariably scoffed at. “That’s different. It’s between you and your husband.” I heard that many times.
Yes, it was. And by that metric, my lover’s cheating was between him and his wife. Surely? What was the difference?
This morning, I was scrolling through the Instagram stories of the highly popular “LaLaLaLetMeExplain” account — a generally brilliant, no-nonsense account that I adore and highly respect. Layla, who runs the blog and the Instagram account, was directing a public message to a woman who, in essence, had asked whether her lover would ever leave his wife for her. And she said this:
“Enabling him is…a vile thing to do…I’m never going to not be clear about how horrible it is for women to f*ck over other women in this way.”
Again, I don’t disagree. It is a horrible thing to participate in actions that allow someone else to be hurt. I am deeply ashamed that this is something I have done in my life and of course I feel bad about it. But for me, as a woman, I was expected by outsiders to feel an extra layer of shame that was never draped across my male lover. And this is simply not fair.
Women get the benefit of the ethical doubt. There is a positive bias toward women in terms of expected “goodness”. This has been established by countless studies. And while it sounds like a good thing — who wouldn’t want to be thought of, by default, as more morally sound? — the net effect is that when we slip up, we women are expected to pay a higher price.
And who’s demanding that higher price? Often, it’s our “sisters”. It is other women. Even the ones who claim to be the most feminist.
We are punished harder. By each other.
I really don't know why I’m surprised. In my youth, boys were studs when they slept with lots of people while girls, despite the influence of 90s “ladette” culture, were still seen as slutty if they did the same. When, as a teenager, one of my friends’ fathers left the matrimonial home and set up shop with a new partner (which happened fairly often, in fact), no eyebrows lifted at all. But when a friend’s mother did similar, she was viewed as a shocking example of nearly inhuman cruelty; she was shunned by everyone she knew, including my friend himself. | https://medium.com/fearless-she-wrote/where-are-the-unbrotherly-men-a14f75dcb068 | ['Em Unravelling'] | 2020-11-20 20:36:07.481000+00:00 | ['Women', 'Relationships', 'Society', 'Gender Equality', 'Feminism'] |
Spotlight: Senior Software Engineers Ashley Romualdo and Melanie Moy | Spotlight: Senior Software Engineers Ashley Romualdo and Melanie Moy
Our engineers talk about the Grace Hopper Celebration and women in tech
The Grace Hopper Celebration is the world’s largest gathering of women technologists. This year, 22,000 women in tech gathered in Houston, TX for #GHC18 to learn from inspirational leaders in technology. Our Senior Software Engineers Ashley Romualdo and Melanie Moy had a great time attending, and we sat down with them to talk about the conference, their careers and contributions to our team, and how women can empower more women to work in engineering.
What are some key insights you took from attending the Grace Hopper Celebration?
Ashley: “That we should have more conferences like this. I’ve been to technical conferences, but none had the impact on me that this one had. Career, soft skills, working in teams, asking for promotions, what career path to take, how to manage time, it’s all so important and something I don’t think is addressed enough in the technical field.”
Melanie: “1.) We are losing women in tech at various stages of the funnel (in school, in hiring, after several years in industry).There are solutions at all of these stages, we just need to implement them. 2.) Certain personality traits are disproportionately held by women (such as perfectionism or self-doubt), and these personality traits can be detrimental to career growth. Fortunately, there are policy changes that can help address some of these challenges.There are also personal changes that individuals can make if they are aware of the negative consequences that these traits can have.”
Melanie Moy, Senior Software Engineer
Do you have a favorite quote, keynote speaker, or key takeaway?
Melanie: “Self-doubt and lack of self-confidence keeps people from trying new things, but you ‘miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.’”
Ashley: “I was trying to take down some favorite quotes, but I couldn’t type fast enough to get them all. They had some amazing speakers.”
“Women, especially, tend to be perfectionists and skip opportunities until they know they can meet every requirement and check every box, but we don’t have to be perfect. We just have to be confident that we can learn and are capable, even if we don’t know everything ahead of time. This ties in well with not being afraid of failure.”
“It’s about progress, not perfection.” — Regina Kunkle
Why do you think these conferences are valuable for women in tech?
Melanie: “It’s a great opportunity to find a large group of people who struggle with the same issues that I struggle with. When working in an industry that is dominated by men, it can be very challenging to find someone that identifies or has experienced the same hurdles that you have. It is also inspiring to meet and speak with women leaders that have overcome the barriers that you’ve faced.”
Ashley Romualdo, Senior Software Engineer
Ashley: “For one I think it’s wonderful just to be reminded that there are others out there! I felt so at home surrounded by other female software engineers with the same challenges and stories as me. It was really inspiring. I also think it’s a great way to bring attention to the statistics — that women and minorities are still underrepresented in tech and to talk about what we can do to change that.”
Is working in engineering something you always wanted to do?
Ashley: “No, I wanted to be a vet. Then in high school, I wanted to be a neurosurgeon. Luckily, my high school had an amazing program where you could spend time at hospitals and shadow doctors and surgeons to learn what the day to day is like. It wasn’t for me for so many reasons. I also ended up taking a web development course in high school that I enjoyed, so I looked into the computer science program. Once I started my first programming course I knew this was what I wanted to do.”
Melanie: “Yes, I guess? I have always been a logical problem solver. Even though there are a lot of professions where logical problem solving skills are useful, engineering is the most common career for someone with those skills.”
What do you love most about it?
Ashley: “It’s challenging and rewarding. There’s nothing like having someone hand you a problem, thinking through for not just a solution, but the right solution. Then getting the almost immediate satisfaction of watching it work.”
Melanie: “I get to solve interesting problems, and I get to work with smart people who make me a smarter person, a better communicator, and a stronger teacher every day.”
What unique experience/qualities do you bring to our team?
Ashley: “Probably tenacity, which luckily isn’t a quality unique to me on the team. Always wanting to not just understand that something works, but how and why it works.”
Melanie: “I’ve received consistent feedback that I’m easy to talk to and that people feel comfortable opening up to me. I don’t know what kind of magic makes this happen, but I feel very privileged to be able to help people work through their problems. This line of open communication helps us resolve issues and bring awareness to problems before they fester.”
Why should more women get into software engineering?
Melanie: “If there’s anything I’ve learned from going to the Grace Hopper Conference, the problem isn’t that there aren’t enough women interested in software engineering. It’s that too many of those women are scared away from it. So, my advice to them would be:
“Don’t allow your fear and self-doubt keep you from doing what you enjoy. Software engineering is as rewarding as you think it will be and not as hard as everyone makes it out to be.”
Ashley: “The same reason men get into software engineering. It’s an in-demand field, it pays well, and it’s intellectually stimulating. I don’t think you need anymore reason than that.” | https://medium.com/main-street-hub/spotlight-senior-software-engineers-ashley-romualdo-and-melanie-moy-7be3428773b6 | ['Main Street Hub'] | 2018-10-16 16:27:09.842000+00:00 | ['Women In Tech', 'Team', 'Software Engineering', 'Engineering', 'Company Culture'] |
Social Media and Bullying | Social media. It’s everywhere, right? Teens and young adults are practically on it every day for multiple hours at a time. I mean I can’t say I’m not on it for hours at a time. Things like Instagram and Snapchat are on the minds of teens and young adults all the time.
Social media is great for keeping up to date with everyone’s favorite celebrity and actors and actresses in Hollywood. I think it’s great to see what’s the new thing that everyone’s raving about. It also can be great to keep up with your friend’s lives too. There’s an occasion cyber bullying on social media like Instagram and Snapchat, even Facebook. Bullying is bad enough in person, but cyber bullying is worse. I feel like since there’s no face-to-face that kids develop more depression or insecurities that can happen face-to-face.
It’s hard for teens and young adults to cope with what people are saying to them over these social media platforms. I believe that teens that keep it to themselves deal with it worse than those who express it to a therapist or a loved one. My point is that it’s things like bullying or cyber bullying that cause teens to go into a depression. There’s so many people that cause those kind of things.
A lot of people have social media like Instagram and Snapchat, and so many people keep up to date with everyone’s life. Then you have those people that are cruel to someone who’s innocent. People are put down for what they look like or something that they are wearing. They go into a depression that can be hard to get out of, especially if the person keeps “attacking” the person about simple things. It’s so hard now with millennials and gen Z’s because they are on social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat that it’s hard for people to cope if they have been bullied. | https://medium.com/@jaynaruppal/social-media-and-bullying-60b08dd5463a | ['Jayna Ruppal'] | 2019-09-20 18:11:01.172000+00:00 | ['Facebook', 'Social Media', 'Instagram', 'Bullying', 'Snapchat'] |
Code Review Etiquette. Keeping Peer Review Classy | Code Review Etiquette
The Do’s and Don’ts of Peer Review
Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash
When I hear the word “etiquette”, it brings to mind images of perfectly set dinner tables and the knowledge of the proper fork to use during every course of a meal. So, when I found out that there was a certain etiquette that goes along with reviewing code, I was confused to say the least. After learning to code and getting my first job as a programmer, I still had to go to some type of finishing school?! Not quite.
In this article, we will discuss code review etiquette, a.k.a. the social norms involved with making a pull request and reviewing others’ pull requests. So, sit up straight and get your pinkies up, because we are about to get downright polite.
Why is code review etiquette important? Etiquette is important for several reasons, one of them being that if you don’t abide by it, no one else will enjoy being around you.
With code review, not following etiquette means that people will not enjoy reviewing your code, sending code your way for reviewal, or both.
Code reviews are vitally important to the health and strength of your code. They also contribute to your overall development as a programmer. If you learn to code review properly and do it well, you will improve your code leaps and bounds. These benefits apply beyond the individual coder, and to the team and company at large. When everyone performs good code reviews, the team and the company prosper.
There’s actually two types of etiquette when it comes to code review: the one from the coder and the one from the reviewer.
A code review is a critique and a critique can often feel more personal than the code writing itself. A sloppy, under-researched, or insensitive code critique can cause difficulties between team members, reduce overall team productivity, and diminish code quality over time.
The code
Imagine you are dining at a fancy restaurant. There are certain rules and social norms you expect. You expect the waiter to look polished and clean, polite and helpful, and you expect them to give you a menu and remember your order. It is all toward the purpose of making the diner’s experience more pleasurable and predictable. Like the waiter, the person writing the code should have in mind that it will be reviewed by a human being and as such should try and make that person’s job easier.
Code Clean
Someone is going to read what you write, so the least you can do is not make their job any harder. This means, not using any weird or irrelevant variable names. It also means making your code less complex. If you have a tendency to try and be clever with your code, don’t. It only makes the job of your reviewer and the programmers who come after you much harder.
Self Review
Make sure to read your own code before submitting it for review; make sure it does what it’s supposed to do and try to run some static analysis on it to clean up any possible problems.
Explain yourself
Most comments are either meaningless or a sign that the code could be improved, but do leave a comment explaining your algorithm or your reasoning if it took you some thought to get to your conclusions; also, fill in the description for the Pull Request, or leave a comment there if you feel that something else deserves an explanation.
Don’t take it personally
Don’t take the comments from the reviewer personally. You are not your code. If someone attacks the code, don’t make them enemy #1. Instead, work through the code with them to understand their reasoning; agree or disagree, but treat the code as an object, and not as an extension of yourself.
The review
Let’s go back to our fancy restaurant. The waiter serving you that evening is still new, and learning the ropes of the restaurant so they make a couple mistakes over the course of the night. You don’t mind that the waiter forgot a drink that you ordered, but your date berates them with insults. This does not follow in line with etiquette of a nice restaurant, nor does it help the new waiter improve. The reviewer is like the diner. They should have in mind that the person who wrote the code (or the waiter) is a human being and, as all human beings, has flaws and feelings, and those should be taken into consideration when commenting code during reviews.
Comment the code, not the coder
Without realizing it, engineers can neglect the difference between insightful critique and criticism because of adding personal relationships into the review. The focus of the code review is the code, and not its creator, so watch the way you address any issue.
Try to refrain from expressions such as:
“you should return out of this function early”
“we should return out of this function early”
Replace them with:
“return out of this function early”
Notice how the amount of text needed to communicate the same thing without using personal references takes fewer words and has greater clarity. This helps with human interaction, separates code discussion from personal discussion, and fewer words are needed to communicate the same idea.
Explain, don’t complain
If the same person makes the same mistake over and over again, explaining and not complaining might be difficult to manage, but the truth is that it is much more effective to say “there is a better way to do this”, and to show them the path, than it is to say “this is really wrong”, especially if you believe that it is truly wrong. Both statements get the basic message across, but the second statement challenges the person who wrote the code to defend it. When explaining that there might be a better way to write particular code, it can be helpful to provide sample code or an informational article to point them in the right direction.
Don’t let things escalate
If you find that you are exchanging many comments on a code review, and things seem to be escalating, try to have a conversation in person instead. Do it as soon as possible. Another way to avoid escalation is to remove passion indicators, such as exclamation points, from your comments. Instead of “yelling” at them what they did wrong, present the side effects of their code and ask how they might improve it. By changing your passionate statement to an informative question, you are allowing them to grow as a coder and explore new fixes.
You do not want to be the bad waiter, nor the rude customer in our programming restaurant. If you take these etiquette tips and apply them to your code review flow, your future self and your current teammates will thank you for it. Remember that code reviews are meant to improve code and avoid costly errors. Take your ego out of the code and always keep your pinkies up. | https://medium.com/coding-in-simple-english/beginners-guide-to-code-review-etiquette-d5ec3888af2b | ['Mariel Grace'] | 2020-04-23 01:19:27.943000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Software Development', 'Github', 'Programming', 'Code Review'] |
The Challenge: The Best Single Season Challengers of all time. | At times a new contestant comes on to a season of The Challenge and they immediately look like they are going be a staple on the show. They are either a great competitor or extremely entertaining for the tv show or ideally both. For some people like Wes it was obvious that he would be great on the show for years both as a character, antagonist and a as a competitor winning 5 eliminations and making the final on his first season. Another example being Laurel who was physically dominant from the beginning winning 5 daily challenges and also was great tv getting into fights, drama and hook ups. However, there have also been players that have had those types of excellent rookie seasons where you might think they are a going to be back on The Challenge over and over but for one reason or another they never came back. Here is my list of the best cast members who did only one show and than never came back.
Honorable Mentions:
Aviv Melmed (Fresh Meat), Christena Pyle(The Inferno), Pete Connolly (Fresh Meat II) & Noor Jehangir (Fresh Meat II)
Men:
5. Antoine de Bouverie (Battle of the Sexes)
Battle of the Sexes is an exception to the rule that the early Challenges were easier to win, during each daily challenge competitors earned points based on how they performed which were used points to determine who got voted out. Antoine made it all the way to the end of the of the season being the final man voted out before the final. He consistently performed better than most with the only people beating him being three time undefeated champion Jamie Murray, “The Godfather” Mark Long & someone who is coming up later. Antoine was one of my favorites on this season, he worked through the language barrier hilariously trying to pick up on American slang, gave good confessionals and had a really fun friendship with Shane at a point offering to give up his game for Shane to stay in the game. Antoine would have certainly been good to see on at least one more season.
Women:
5. Carley Johnson (Fresh Meat II)
Carley does not look like the person that you would expect to win a season particularly considering that she was against Challenge champions like Laurel, Jillian, Evelyn, Sarah & CaraMaria. She was not particularly great as a tv character but she was also on a cast with a lot of strong personalities so I give her a bit of a pass there. Athletically, Carley was objectively the worst performer in the Fresh Meat combine and was the last woman picked. However after being picked by Landon, Carley won 2 daily challenges, beat Evelyn in an. elimination and went on to win the season which was impressive. I do not think she is the kind of contestant who could replicate that type of performance had she come back but that doesn’t take away from what she did accomplish and for me she barely beats Aviv for the 5th spot.
Men:
4. Michael Ross (Rivals)
To this day it is surprising that Mike was cast, even as a replacement, on a season of The Challenge. He is not the typical party guy but more of an intellectual dorky guy and not particularly athletic (of course by saying that I am not trying to insult him since he is the challenger most similar to myself by far). Yet considering how well Mike did on Rivals maybe taking a chance on a guy like him every now and then is not such a bad idea for the show. Mike, together with is partner Leroy, never finished last in a daily challenge avoiding every elimination round and even winning one daily. He was also a lot of fun on the show giving good confessionals, getting in a huge blow up with JEK, hooking up with Paula and an all time Challenge friendship with Leroy. He finished 3rd behind 4 challenge champions and was a really good guy on Rivals who brought something rare ad different to the show.
Women:
4. Heather Cooke (Rivals II)
Cooke is awesome and someone that to this day fans are still clamoring for production to bring back and compete on another season of The Challenge. After her first partner went home due to a family emergency she got paired with CaraMaria and they were a strong team winning 2 eliminations, one daily challenge and finishing second behind the dominant team of Emily and Paula in the final. Cooke was also a fun character that season particularly since their team was the target for a majority of the season making her play with her back against the wall. Cooke from what I understand was in the mix for a season or two after Rivals but she chose to prioritize her soccer career instead of hoping that production would bring her back on The Challenge. Out of the women on this list she is the most likely to come back though since she was an alternate on this past season of The Challenge: All Stars.
Men:
3. Marlon Williams (Rivals II)
Marlon is one of the biggest question marks to me as to why he never was brought on to another season of The Challenge he has reportedly wanted to return for awhile appeared on a season of ex on the beach and is still advocating to get back on the show. Athletically he is a beast winning 1 daily challenge & 2 eliminations before eventually losing a swim during the first part of the final to two teams of champions in CT & Wes and Frank & Bananas. Over the course of his season, he got involved in the drama on the show fighting with multiple people including CT and most notably Knight after he made fun of Marlon for his sexuality and had two separate hook ups first with Derek and later with Nany over the course of a single season. Similarly to Cooke I could see The Challenge finally giving him another shot since advocating to come back on Instagram worked for Devin and today he is even bigger and stronger than he was on Rivals II so hopefully Marlon will get another shot.
Women:
3. Svetlana Shusterman (The Duel)
Svetlana is the player that immediately jumps to mind for me when thinking about this category. She was one of the absolute stars of the duel being an underdog fighting against the strong alliance of Robin, Kina, Jodi & Diem. Svetlana developed a strong friendship with Aneesa before eventually being forced to go against her in a crushing final elimination. She managed to miraculously eliminate the biggest villain of the season Beth after a long battle where she gave it everything she had and Beth recklessly ripped out the flag instead of unclipping DQing and giving Svetlana the win. On the Duel Svetlana won 2 daily challenges, 3 eliminations and finished second to an underrated challenge beast, Jodi. The producers allegedly asked her to come back for every seasons all the way up until Vendettas. She was almost on the gauntlet 3 before leaving at the airport and considering she had the opportunity repeatedly she seems to be happy with her life away from tv. What pushed her ahead of Cooke for me was that she was on an individual season instead of a pairs season, she had more daily challenge & elimination wins and that I personally found her to be the slightly more entertaining of the two.
Men:
2. Mitch Reid (Battle of the Bloodlines)
Mitch came in to Bloodlines as Cory Wharton’s cousin and was a really great partner to balance out Cory.He was able to keep up decently with Cory in the physical aspects but more importantly he was able to balance out Cory’s terrible puzzle ability since they were one of his strengths. Mitch was a relatively relaxed guy in the house but he did provide some pretty good confessionals and competition wise he won an elimination against Raphy and then he and Cory won the two final daily challenges and they finished a strong second place in the final to CaraMaria and her cousin Jamie. To my knowledge they have not asked him back for another season and he has been working as a cameraman and occasionally appearing on episodes of Teen Mom OG with Cory and Taylor.
Women:
2. Brittini Sherrod (The Duel 2)
Brittini came in to the season and looked like she was in pretty good shape but the Duel 2 did have some strong competition including champions like Rachel, Tori & Paula among others. She socially integrated herself in with the power players partnering up with Landon and being friends with Rachel & Aneesa. Even though she was not the most dynamic personality she absolutely rocked the competitions winning 3 daily challenges, 2 eliminations and finished a strong second place only behind Rachel who is one of the top women in the history of The Challenge. Brittini was asked to come back for more seasons but instead she made the decision to focus on her fairly successful acting and modeling career. You cannot really blame her for prioritizing her career even though it would have been good to see her back for at least one more season of The Challenge.
Men:
Colin Mortensen (Battle of the Sexes)
Colin was from The Real World Hawaii and came on to the first Battle of the Sexes and was absolutely dominant. He certainly didn’t come in as someone who was out of shape but he did not have bulging muscles and considering only 3 of the 18 men made it to the final with a number of other really strong competitors. The way he physically dominated the season was incomparable, during the season the top 3 cumulative performers each week became the “inner circle” and got to vote out anyone else of their gender, Colin did well in every daily challenge even winning several with an ankle injury. He was in the “inner circle” for the entire season and went on to take home the money along side Mark Long & Jamie Murray. By the time Colin came on to The Challenge he had already been vocal about his disdain for the Real World and the Challenge saying that production was manipulating things and that the other contestants acted like children but he was releasing a book so decided to come on for the free publicity and managed to kill the competition. Considering that he continued to “expose” the Challenge for uneven editing and gave production a really hard time on the show it makes sense that he never came back to the show. Regardless of his rocky relationship with production Colin was still the best single season male challenger of all time.
Women:
Sarah Greyson (The Gauntlet)
Sarah’s run on The Gauntlet was the most successful underdog story ever on a season of The Challenge. She had been voted off of her Road Rules season after they failed a mission and then was immediately called dead weight and useless by her teammates specifically Adam. She proved her critics wrong by still holding the record for most individual elimination wins in a season with 5 (including beating 2 men) and then she went on to win the final with her team. In addition to over performing physically Sarah brought a good amount of entertainment throughout the season getting in arguments and giving great confessionals.She said on a Reddit AMA that they did ask her back often but that she “wanted to be taken seriously for something just showing up and getting picked on a bunch on national television.” It could have been great to see her back but she also went out on top and is the best underdog story in the history of the show. | https://medium.com/@henryldimaria/the-challenge-the-best-single-season-challengers-of-all-time-607bb1910ee6 | ['Henry L Dimaria'] | 2021-05-26 18:14:57.237000+00:00 | ['One And Done', 'The Challenge', 'Reality', 'MTV', 'TV'] |
How to setup CI CD pipelines for Android with Azure DevOps | CI CD AAB (Android App Bundle) to Google Play Console
DevOps & CI/CD are buzz words for a while now and they have really proven their value in today’s fast moving world and Agile development process. One understands the true value only when they have actually been a process of it and see for themselves the immense amount of time and headache it saves.
At Royale Cheese initially we had setup CI/CD for Android via Microsoft’s Visual Studio App Center (an upgrade of Hockey App), but last year they declared the retirement of MBaas which got us worried about the overall future of VS App Center. That was one of the reasons we wanted to switch away from it. Secondly, the free tier provided around 400 minutes of build time per month per account which would had been sufficient for other technologies, but Android takes around 15 minutes to create a single build and deploy. We all know what gradle is capable of 😉. So having multiple apps (both iOS and Android) in the same account didn’t fare well.
We were already using Azure DevOps for CI/CD for other technologies and it seemed promising. It’s future plan had no issues of shutting down and it provided around 1800 minutes of free build time. We decided to give it a try and so far don’t have any complaints. We have started loving and adoring Azure DevOps and hope it stays this way.
Alright! Enough with the issues, let’s see how we can get the build & deployment going. In this tutorial we are going to make the newer Android App Bundle (.aab) and not .apk to upload to the Google Play Console.
Prerequisites
Paid Google developer account, an app added to the Play Console.
Azure DevOps account with an Android repository created
A jks file to sign the build
Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration is the process of running a build & a test suite every time a change has been pushed on to the repository. Since the Android build do take a substantial amount of time and usually cloud CI/CD tools gets costly with more build time it is better to schedule a the CI pipeline once a week. I will be using a demo project named Android created in my devops account to create ci cd pipelines. The project has a blank activity and support Lollipop 5.0 and above.
Open your project and navigate to Pipelines section on the left panel as in the screenshot below.
Click on Create Pipeline which will open the below page.
Here we are going to select Use the classic editor which is easier than the other options. The other options will eventually lead to writing yaml files for configuring your pipelines.
Usually you might have dev, qa and/or uat branches to upload to the internal or beta channels on Google Play Console and you would only want to promote the app to production from your Google Play Console. So select your branch from which you want to run the build and click Continue. For me everything is on the master branch.
Ideally we would be tempted to select the Android template and get on with our life; Don’t Do It. Since the Android template doesn’t provide a way to generate an .aab file we are not going to use it. Instead select an empty job.
We will now have an empty Agent Job 1 to which we will be adding tasks.
We are going to have to do the following tasks to create our CI pipeline:
Setting up a jks file
Unsigned build via gradle
Generate .aab file
Create an Artifact
Let’s start step-by-step.
Setting up a jks file
If you have uploaded an apk or aab in the past to the play store you must have used a jks file to sign the build. You should the use the same jks file in this step. If you haven’t generated a file yet here is a good documentation.
Get a hold of your jks file since we are going to upload it now. Click on + sign besides Agent Job 1 which will open a list of tasks to add. Search for Download secure file.
Click on the Add button to add the task. It will give an error saying Some settings need attention. It is asking for a secure file to be uploaded. Click on the gear/settings icon besides the Secure file field and upload your jks.
We will now provide a name to this file so that it can be referenced from the sign task. Click on the Output Variables drop down and enter KeyStoreFile in the Reference name. This will update the Variables list to reflect the variable name.
Unsigned gradle file
Click on + sign besides Agent Job 1 which will open a list of tasks to add. Search for gradle.
Click on the Add button to add the task. We are going to turn off Publish to Azure Pipeline under JUnit Test Results section. You can keep it on as per the requirement. Secondly, we are going to update the task name. Since we are going to make a release build update your task name to buildRelease. If you want to build using a particular flavour you can update your task name accordingly. e.g. if you are using dev as a flavour name update your task name as buildDevRelease.
Generate .aab file
Click on + sign besides Agent Job 1 which will open a list of tasks to add. Search for Command line.
In the Script section clear the field and set the below text.
COPY
jarsigner -verbose -sigalg SHA256withRSA -digestalg SHA-256 -keystore $(KeyStoreFile.secureFilePath) -storepass $(StorePassword) -keypass $(KeyPassword) $(system.defaultworkingdirectory)/app/build/outputs/bundle/release/*.aab $(KeyStoreAlias)
There are 4 variables in the script out of which we have already set KeyStoreFile.secureFilePath. Time to set other 3 variables StorePassword, KeyPassword and KeyStoreAlias. Navigate to the Variables tab on the tap and add the variables and their values as shown in the screenshot below. Once you are sure that the values are correct you can click on the lock icon to secure it. Once you lock and save no one will be able to view it including you, so make sure you still have a backup of the details in case you want to use it somewhere else.
Create an Artifact
The above step creates an .aab file but still needs to be converted in to an artifact so that it is available to the CD pipeline for release.
By now you are a pro at adding tasks to Agent Job 1. Add the following two tasks to Agent Job 1: Copy Files & Publish build artifacts. To avoid confusion of which tasks to select I have added the screenshots below.
Now select the Copy Files task and set $(system.defaultworkingdirectory) in the Source Folder field, **/.aab in the Contents and $(build.artifactstagingdirectory) in the Target Folder*.
Click on Save & queue and click Save to save our CI pipeline.
That is it for the Continuous Integration. We will now head on to the Continuous Deployment to find out how to release the generated artifact to the Internal Testing channel on Play Console.
Continuous Deployment
While Continuous Integration deals with creating a build on the machine itself, Continuous Deployment is all about how will you publish that build to the Play Store, App Store, Self-Hosted or Cloud server. In order to deploy to the Play Store you will need a Google Play Console account and an app created in Play Console with the same bundle id.
Next, we will go back to our Azure DevOps project and select Releases under the pipeline section.
Since there is no pre-defined template for uploading a build to the Play Store, we are going to select an empty job.
We will now enter a stage name for our deployment. You can name it whatever you want. I have kept it as Play Store Deployment
Let’s connect the CI artifact with our current CD pipeline. Select Add an artifiact from the artifacts. This will open a dialog on the right to which we will select our artifact. Click the drop down for Source (build pipeline) and you will see Android-CI as one and only option (unless you have added more CI pipelines or altered the CI name).
Select the Android-CI and click Add. After adding the artifact our release pipeline will look something like below.
Since the CI & CD pipelines are separate we should setup a way to automatically trigger the CD pipeline when the CI is successful. To achieve that select the lightning icon for the artifact we just added. This will open a dialog on the right which will have a setting to enable/disable the Continuous Deployment trigger. When the build trigger is enabled our release pipeline will automatically start when a new build is completed by our build (CI) pipeline. We are not going to enable the Pull Request trigger.
So far we have setup the pipeline to start automatically when a new build is available in our build pipeline. We have also setup a Play Store Deployment stage to which we will add tasks for the actual deployment in the next section.
Deployment task
Select 1 job 0 task hyperlink which will switch to the Tasks tab. Select the + plus besides the Agent Job to open a list of new tasks. When you search for Google Play. you will see Google Play by Microsoft. Install the item if not already installed. Once installed and when you search for Google App again you will see a few new tasks as below.
Select the task that says Google Play — Release Bundle and click the Add button (Don’t select Google Play — Release). Some settings will need attention which we will take care of one-by-one.
Adding a service connection
Firstly we need to create a new service connection. Click on New button besides the Service Connection field. It will upon up a dialog which primarily asks for a Service Account E-mail and a Private Key. We are going to create a service account on Google Play Console to upload the build. This account will also have a private key attached to it for authentication purposes.
To create the account visit Google Play Console and select API Access under Developer Account under Settings.
Click Create new service account button which will pop open a dialog as below.
Click on the link in step 1 which will redirect you to a new tab of Google Cloud Console.
Click + CREATE SERVICE ACCOUNT on the top to start creating a new account. In the newly opened page I have entered Google Play Console in the service account name but it can be whatever you want. Enter the service account description if needed.
Click CREATE to continue. It will then ask for what permissions do you want to allocate for the user. Click the Role drop down and search for Owner. Select the Owner with Full access to all resources.
Click the Continue button and select Done in step 3 since we don’t want to add any users or groups who can perform actions as this service account. You will be redirected to the list of keys page. Now select the newly created account and go to the Keys tab. Here we are going to add a new Private Key for our service connection.
Select Add Key and from the drop down select Create new key. It will show a pop up of which type of key you want to create.
Select the JSON option and click CREATE button. This will ask you to download the file. Store it some place secure we are not going to use the whole file as it is, rather if you open the file it will have a key called private_key.
Before we use this value head back to our google play console’s API Access page and click on Done button. It will refresh the list of service accounts with your service account added to the list.
For the newly created service account there will be Grant access button for that row. Click on the button which will open a page to invite the user. Don’t get confused with the term invite since Google has probably reused a page to display the same information for the service account.
Click on the Invite User on the bottom right and in the pop up dialog that comes up click on Send Invite. This action will redirect you to Users and Permissions page with the service account added as a new user.
We will now setup the Service Email and the Private key in Azure DevOps. First, copy the email of the newly created service account into the Service Account E-mail in the Azure DevOps tab. Next open the private key json file and copy the value of private_key to Private Key field. Here is what it looks like.
Click on Save which will add the service connection to the Service connection field. Next enter your bundle id in the Application id (com.google.MyApp) field. Finally in the Bundle path you can browse to select the .aab file by clicking the 3 dots on the right. Usually the aab will at location
<your CI name>/drop/app/build/outputs/bundle/release/*.aab
If you haven’t run a CI pipeline yet you can set the path as
$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)/_Android-CI/drop/app/build/outputs/bundle/release/*.aab
If you are using a flavour prefix release with your flavour name in the path. e.g. the path should be
$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)/_Android-CI/drop/app/build/outputs/bundle/devRelease/*.aab
You can select which track you want to launch to from the drop down.
That is all the settings you need. You can now Save the pipeline and run the CI pipeline to build an aab and upload it to the Play Console.
Conclusion
This seems to be a long tutorial but once you are successful in setting up the CI/CD pipelines it would be a huge time saver for your developers. Secondly, it will run on the cloud so there is no need for a physical machine. You can trigger the build from your phone by logging in to Azure DevOps. Hope you have enjoyed this article and hope it helps others in your team.
To learn how to setup CI CD pipeline for iOS you can visit this tutorial.
For any queries, you can leave a comment below. Please do follow my page for many more upcoming tutorials. | https://itnext.io/how-to-setup-ci-cd-pipelines-for-android-with-azure-devops-2a4ded0de0e7 | ['Arjav Dave'] | 2021-03-24 08:05:26.498000+00:00 | ['Azure Devops', 'Ci Cd Pipeline', 'Android', 'Aab', 'DevOps'] |
The great conjunction of 2020 astrology predictions- Saturn conjunct Jupiter | In this video I discuss The great conjunction of 2020 astrology predictions. On December 21, while we will be stepping into winter via the winter solstice, we will also have a powerful Saturn Jupiter Conjunction in the sign of Aquarius ushering in some powerful and new energy that I feel is fresh and optimistic.
Learn more now by watching the video!
There are not many times in life where you get the opportunity to move in flow with energy that is going to help you close the doors from the past that keep you emotionally. You may try to get ahead and find that there are challenges and barriers that get in the way and to try to get over them requires a great amount of your energy. You also may learn, that this whole time, you are the one that has been getting in the way from you having the success, and relationships, and life that you really want. Well there is a huge opportunity for you to realize what you need to do to finally move forward, especially in relation to those emotional ties or deep seated issues that keep you from realizing success.
If you are on the right path, you can expect to keep experiencing more favor and reap the rewards of all the hard work you have been doing thus far. Your actions and your conviction to do the hard things no matter what will be rewarded. Congrats!
This energy is also favored for those of you that will finally break free from the limited views that keep you back and help you realize that if you need help, healing and freedom is available to you, but it may require the help and support of another to move ahead. It’s the perfect time to consider working with a coach and if you are ready to move forward, the right time is not Jan 1st or some arbitrary date in the future. When you are conscious that you are stuck and need help, that is the time to act.
Check out https://www.yashicasintuition.com/coaching if you are interested in working with me privately. | https://medium.com/@yashicasintuition/the-great-conjunction-of-2020-astrology-predictions-saturn-conjunct-jupiter-fed585228e1a | ["Yashica'S Intuition"] | 2020-12-20 22:07:49.710000+00:00 | ['Astronomy', 'Spirituality', 'The Great Conjunction', 'Astrology', 'Horoscopes'] |
UX Case Study: RootLogic App — the new way of growing | 2) Low Fidelity Prototype
I decided to face RootLogic design with a dashboard as the main screen, which will show the value of weather variables in real-time and the current status of every component.
An important point of dashboard design is that, at a quick glance, users have to be able to know what is going on. Since its function is informative, no changes or actions are executed on the dashboard. To do this, each control has an individual screen.
3) Testing
A usability test took place to evaluate the LoFi Prototype. Users were asked to perform tasks and the rate of success was measured. During the test, they were also asked to express their feelings and thoughts out loud. Feedback was useful to define:
Icons: the dashboard layout was understood, but there was a general agreement on the fact that icons would allow faster recognition of components. People were asked which icons they associated with each component, and this feedback helped to make icon selection in HiFi stages.
the dashboard layout was understood, but there was a general agreement on the fact that icons would allow faster recognition of components. People were asked which icons they associated with each component, and this feedback helped to make icon selection in HiFi stages. Wording: I confirmed that words used in the app were understood (For example AC, Tank, etc).
I confirmed that words used in the app were understood (For example AC, Tank, etc). Navigation: the navigation bar remained unchanged but the way of getting to the list of devices changed. This is shown below:
Old navigation
New Navigation
4) High Fidelity Prototype
The color palette consists of:
Dark purple.
Turquoise: This color was used for interactions, some CTA buttons and to show ON mode.
Red: To show OFF mode.
Shades of purple: The color palette was completed with shades of purple and white.
Icon selection was done with user feedback, as mentioned earlier. The idea was to pick minimalistic icons to avoid visual overload on our dashboard.
The main screen was divided into two sections in order to differentiate sensors and tappable controls:
Each control screen is different because they all perform different tasks. Let’s take a look at them: | https://medium.com/@ceciweissbein/ux-case-study-rootlogic-app-the-new-way-of-growing-dac842ee852d | ['Cecilia Weissbein'] | 2020-03-23 20:44:44.926000+00:00 | ['UI', 'UX', 'Plants', 'User Experience', 'Indoor Farming'] |
Story of Prophet Adam (AS), Life of Adam (AS) | Story of Prophet Adam (AS)
A long long time ago…
Allah (s.w.t) created the sun. The moon, and the earth.
After creating these, he saw that his creation was incomplete. So he asked his angels to collect clay from the earth. The obedient angels collected clay and Allah made a man like figure with it. And the god named him Adam (AS).
But the figure didn’t move for forty long years. It just stood still there. When Iblis saw this figure, he was confused and scared. And after forty long years one day..
Allah (s.w.t) breathed his spirit into Adam (AS)!
When the spirit reached the head of the figure, it sneezed. When the spirit reached his eyes, he saw all the amazing food lying around. Then the spirit reached his stomach and Adam (AS) felt hungry. The Prophet had seen the fruits lying around so before the spirit could even reach his legs, he jumped towards the fruits. Adam (AS) fell down as he couldn’t move his legs. Then, Allah asked all the angels including Iblis (Shaytan) to prostrate before Adam (AS) as a sign of respect. One by one all the angels prostrate before the Prophet except Iblis!
Iblis said that he was better than the Prophet and he was made from fire. Allah got angry with this disobedience so he banished Iblis (Shaytan) from paradise. From that day, Iblis was called as the Shaytan! And he was thrown into the hell! Shaytan was now very angry with the humans as he was banished from the paradise. Because of them, he wowed to take revenge by misleading the humans.
Allah then taught Adam (AS) the names of every animal in paradise. The lion, the sheep, camel, elephant, dove, peacock and many many more..
Allah told the Prophet Adam (AS) that he was allowed to eat every fruit in the garden, except one. Allah told the Prophet Adam (AS) that he should not eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge and that it was forbidden and he spent most of his time playing with animal in paradise.
After a few years, the Prophet Adam (AS) became lonely as there were no other humans in paradise. Allah (s.w.t) saw this. So decided to give Adam (AS) a wife. That night when the Prophet was sleeping Allah (s.w.t) created the first woman. When the Prophet Adam (AS) woke up he was happy to see the woman He then named her Hawwa (Eve), because she was made from something living. Both of them lived happily in paradise for a long time. Shaytan was still angry at the humans. Many years had passed by. So Shaytan knew that the Prophet Adam (AS) must have forgotten the words of Allah (s.w.t).
>>>>Read More | https://medium.com/@themercyblogs/story-of-prophet-adam-as-life-of-adam-as-6c5045785c3d | ['Babla Ali'] | 2020-05-16 15:52:34.332000+00:00 | ['Prophet Adam', 'Prophet', 'Muslim', 'Blog', 'Islam'] |
Glad Tuesday | Glad Tuesday
What stage of acceptance are you at for anything, everything, today, tomorrow, the future. I keep pondering the question that has no answers and no ending. The Queen of overthinking reporting for duty once again. The things that should make Owen sleepy generally have the opposite effect on him. I gave him a lavender bath. Before the bath, he was yawning and could hardly keep his eyes open but he always has to take a bath. We must do the routine. I very rarely use lavender because he likes to drink the bath water and I have to watch him like a hawk when he has soap in the tub. He got out of the tub like he was ready to take a five-mile run and two hours later he’s finally asleep. He would almost be asleep and then pop up, get not even an inch from my nose, and scream. I have to remind myself of the victories. The dude is growing. He climbed in my lap today and I thought he is solid as a rock, all muscle, and must have gained ten pounds. For early breakfast, he ate cereal and two waffles. We got up at five so there was a lot of time for second breakfast that consisted of eggs. I asked if he wanted some and he said no but he ate at least one before I asked if he wanted more. He said, “one more time”. So I gave him a little more. And then he ate mine off my plate when I got up to get more coffee. The bottomless pit continued. Not an hour later he asked for veggie straws and he said, “you want a donut”. Unfortunately, we had no donuts and he really doesn’t like sweets anyways. He has become a typing machine. He wanted to find animal sounds on YouTube. He had it pulled up on the tv. He started typing in “a n i m” saying the letters as he typed and when animal sounds came up in the list he selected and said, “hello zebra”. I am trying to teach him how to find things. He has no concept of where things are located. Like tonight I asked him to take the water jug from the front door to the kitchen. I broke it down in steps for him but he has a hard time working through each step and stopping for further instructions. Plus, he doesn’t understand when I say a location like floor or ceiling. I finally got close to him and walked him through each step. When he carried the jug to the kitchen I asked him multiple times to sit it down but that process was hard he brought it back in the living room until I made him take it back in the kitchen. I am celebrating that he got it to the kitchen. One step at a time we grow and together we walk forward. Find your happiness, share your joy, and let the world see your smile. Smiles to all and donut daze! | https://medium.com/@lynnbrowder/glad-tuesday-d8d52f1be332 | ['Lynn Browder'] | 2020-12-16 04:12:47.023000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Parenting', 'Autism', 'Life Lessons', 'Inspiration'] |
Indoor Air Quality in Winter | The weather outside may be frightful, but the air inside could easily be worse. Although the holiday season is here, it’s important to think about the effects that winter will have on your indoor air quality.
Why does indoor air quality get worse in winter? Unfortunately, the cold season is one of the worst times of the year for indoor air quality, either at home or at work. People stay inside tightly-sealed buildings while reducing the amount of warm air escaping outdoors, replacing ventilation for heating. This means people are breathing a greater amount of recirculated — not fresh — air. This traps pollutants and moisture in, including dust, pollen, spores, and more, which increase the concentration of contaminants in the air.
But now, with Covid-19, and people being cooped up indoors up to 90% of the time and with Christmas and New Year holidays around the corner, it also increases the risk of spreading the virus in enclosed environments.
What Makes Indoor Air Quality Dangerous?
1. Sealing in the pollution
When it’s cold, everyone shuts up all their windows and doors. However, this traps in VOCs, dust, and other harmful airborne molecules, which significantly decreases air circulation. According to the EPA, this is a cause of indoor air pollution, exacerbated by the winter when people sealed off their windows and doors.
2. Wood and Other Heat Sources
For homes with a fireplace, wood is often preferred to avoid high electricity and gas bill. However, wood smoke, if left unchecked, can raise PM2.5 to hazardous levels. Other sources such as a heater can make the air warmer but very dry, which can cause cracked skin and lips. Beyond the skin, excessively dry air can cause a dry nose and throat, which lowers our immunity and increases the chance of getting sick.
3. Over-humidifying
Cold air is usually dry, so people tend to compensate this by turning on their humidifiers. A humidifier will add moisture to the air and reduce dryness of your skin, lips, nose and throat. Just be sure to use a humidistat to prevent the humidity from getting too high, which could lead to mould growth and dust mites, which can cause serious problems for both buildings and people’s health.
4. Being Indoors For Too Long
The air we exhale emits a lot of water vapor every minute. Tiny water droplets floating in the air, including our body odor, are trapped inside, which creates a smell. This slowly increases air temperature, which also increases the humidity. With higher humidity and zero air circulation, the environment is quicker to be less hygienic and prone to bacteria and viruses.
So, What Can We Do?
Open the windows occasionally to ventilate with fresh air, but beware of outdoor air pollution. Use an air purifier and check the air filter from time to time, replacing them as needed. Safely store toxic chemicals (paint, spray, etc…) in a cabinet instead of leaving them out in the open. Avoid smoking indoors. Clean your home occasionally (vacuum the floor, wash the bed sheets, etc…) to avoid indoor pollutants from piling up. Use an indoor air quality monitor and act when needed when readings are not in the safe zone. Like PiCO Home!
Using PiCO Home
With PiCO Home in our office, we are able to monitor the air quality levels throughout the day. It seems that the air quality is good when we’re home, but is high when we work, due to the heater and humidifier. Knowing this, we adjust them as needed and turn on our air purifier to keep our environment safe and healthy! | https://medium.com/@steve-tan/indoor-air-quality-in-winter-ca44257353c1 | ['Brilliant'] | 2020-12-23 07:37:14.186000+00:00 | ['Air Pollution', 'Air Quality', 'Smart Home', 'Covid 19', 'Winter'] |
The Master of Masterstroke Makers | Upon returning from his tour of Pakistan, India, and China, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is meeting with his security advisors Dabae Aldhiyb and Jihaz Thaelab, as usual aboard his super yacht, Serene, anchored off the Red Sea coast.
A Saudi naval flotilla stands guard.
Both of his advisors were trained at Erik Prince’s Academi, the security company formerly called Blackwater USA… who is brother of U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
Aldhiyb seeks permission to offer his views, “Your Royal Highness, indeed you have made the right move in appointing His Royal Highness Prince Khalid bin Salman as vice defense minister.
“There could be no better choice. His Royal Highness carried out air missions against ISIS and during Operation Restoring Hope, flying missions over Yemen. Also very importantly, he has trained extensively with the American Armed Forces both in the United States and in Saudi Arabia, and of course, he has worked as an officer at the office of the Minister of Defense. Our friendship with America is our life.
“Your Royal Highness, you moved at the right moment because our consultants in Washington, DC tell us that there are some who continue the vile propaganda that His Royal Highness Prince Khalid made the call at the discretion of Your Royal Highness.”
Thaelab, who was restless to speak, added, “Your Royal Highness, we have also received reports that a journalist, Jonathan Swan of http://www.axios.com is insisting that he is still waiting that His Royal Highness Prince Khalid shares with him footage of Jamal [Khashoggi] leaving our Istanbul consulate. These nasty people are trying to link Jamal’s disappearance to His Royal Highness Prince Khalid because he had stated that our Kingdom is fully cooperating with the local authorities to uncover what happened after he left [the consulate].”
Finally MBS declared, “God be praised that I got Khalid safely out of America. Now, I have appointed Reema Bandar Binte Sultan as our ambassador in Washington. She has the right connections, being the daughter of Bandar Bin Sultan.
“You all know that His Royal Highness Prince Bandar, served as our ambassador in Washington, DC for twenty-two years, and had very close friendship with President George HW Bush.
“Princess Reema has spent many years in Washington while her father was ambassador. She graduated with a degree in museum studies from George Washington University.”
Thaelab, once again restless to speak, seeks permission, and offers, “Your Royal Highness, indeed, you have made a great decision. Being an expert in museology, Her Royal Highness can heighten our service to America by sustaining some troubled American museums. I learnt from our advisors that burdened by troubled finances, the Newseum took a new step in the fight for its life and sold their building to Johns Hopkins University.
“Your Royal Highness, this museum was based on the American constitution’s First Amendment. Surely Her Royal Highness can offer it the needed lifeline, and get it out of its First Amendment mess.”
MBS quickly adds, “You are right, Jihaz, while everything is perfect with America but their First Amendment stands at odds with our Saudi… the House of Salman’s values. You know that how I put this concept to rest when I told China that it has the right to take anti-terrorism and de-extremization measures in Xinjiang to safeguard its national security.
“We remain grateful to our beloved Great Britain for assigning the beloved Colonel [TE] Lawrence to free us from the Turks, but now this Turk, [President] Erdogan does not stop troubling us. He keeps insisting that Jamal’s case should not be put to rest.
“I assure you that under my command, our Kingdom will continue fighting First Amendments everywhere. Not only, I assured China verbally but also signed 35 economic cooperation agreements with China worth a total of $28 billion.
“India is another country fighting a freedom movement. This why I gave them more $100 billion… they have a lot of headaches… there is Kashmir to be kept under occupation, and they have more than 200 million Muslims to contend with.”
Once again, Aldhiyb seeks permission to talk and offers, “Your Royal Highness, certainly your move to appoint Her Royal Highness Princess Reema Bandar Sultan in Washington, DC is a great move. Not only all the American… I will say that feminists the all over the world are also singing your praises.”
MBS declares, “Dabae and Jihaz, do also note that His Royal Highess Bandar having been ambassador to the US for more than two decades has most valuable Rolodex… you know the rotating file device used for storing business contact information. Her Royal Highness Reema will have access to this treasury.
Thaelab seeks permission and adds, “Your Royal Highness in one stroke you have won the hearts of all feminists and you have also protected His Royal Highness Prince Khalid from any possible embarrassment.
“Your Royal Highness, may God give you greater glory, you are the master of masterstroke makers.” | https://medium.com/@ChaiWhy/the-master-of-masterstroke-makers-dc7ac7e2cd46 | ['Chai Why Blog'] | 2019-03-10 21:57:27.263000+00:00 | ['China', 'India', 'Pakistan', 'International Relations', 'Saudi Arabia'] |
What Are The Pros And Cons Of Multi-tenancy In Rails Application? | There are more ways than one to develop a web application to meet different needs. Sometimes, a separate instance of the application is installed for each customer, in a setup known as a single-tenancy. While in multi-tenanted applications, a single instance of the software and the supporting infrastructure serves multiple users in a multi-tenancy architecture. Here every customer or tenant shares the software application and a single database. In a multi-tenant architecture, the application is designed to segregate the configuration and data to ensure every tenant works with a customized virtual application instance. The software is intelligent enough to know who the data belongs to once the data in the database gets tagged as belonging to one user or another.
Multi-tenant applications are mainly grouped into three type of users. Admins who have top-level access and are the clients who own the site. Then come the managers, the resources from the company, who manage the projects and users at the company level and finally the end users of this application. Each page will be accessible to users depending on their authorizations. Users might be given the ability to customize certain parts of the application, like the color of the user interface (UI) or business rules, but they cannot customize the application’s code.
Advantages of Multi-tenancy:
Multi-tenancy reduces cost by sharing same power resources and software across its clients. The software requires licenses and support, and the cost for this will increase if you need to buy them for each customer, as in the case of single-tenancy. Shared infrastructure will automatically lead to lower costs.
In a multi-tenant application, you’ll only have to monitor and provide administration for a single platform, unlike single-tenant applications where you have to manage different sets for each client. This way a multi-tenant SaaS provider can deliver more efficient and effective support, including problem resolution and troubleshooting.
A multi-tenant architecture will make it easy for you to increase your capacity when more strength & power is required. The total capacity of the entire system increases and becomes more scalable when you bring in new hardware to the platform, not for merely a single client but all associated clients. Adding features for a single client makes it available to other clients.
Upgrading the software version or system resources for multi-tenant applications are easy since there is a single, centralized place for up gradation, installation and more.
Disadvantages of Multi-tenancy:
A multi-tenant app has lesser flexibility than a single-tenant app to set low-level configurations. This might not be a problem for you, but if your application requires a lot of customization for each new tenant, then a multi-tenant app might not be the best solution.
A multi-tenant app is more complex than an equivalent single-tenant app, whose configuration can remain essentially static. In a single-tenant application, you don’t require any code to detect which tenant a web request is intended for or to protect your clients from the leakage of data between tenants. The log formats are simpler since logs are segregated with a separate instance of the application for each client.
Since a multi-tenant application is backed by a single database, running on a single server, it has lesser areas prone to failure, but those failure points can prove a lot more disastrous. All tenants experience loss of service When the database for a multitenant app is unavailable, unlike when a single-tenant application instance breaks. It brings down a single tenant. Other instances continue unaffected.
How to create a multi tenant Rails app?
Apartment is a top Ruby library known for separating tenant data. Simply put, you can create tenants using Apartment, and to each tenant, the library will automatically assign a new isolated schema. The creation of isolated database instances is also possible with Apartment. Apartment will provide you tools to help you handle multiple tenants in your Rails application. While still allowing some data to exist in a common tenant, If you need to have certain data sequestered based on company or account, Apartment can help. Apartment will allow you build Rails-based SaaS apps with partial or full white-labeling right from the beginning. To get the most out of Apartment, consider using a PostgreSQL database.
Now how does Apartment work? Apartment fetches data from the schema corresponding to the elevator: domain, subdomain, or full host name. Using these elevators, the library analyzes each request to the database. Apartment segregates tenants by subdomains, by default, but you can set it up to use domains quickly. Keep in mind, when it comes to a shared schema, Apartment doesn’t work. Your development team only needs to assign IDs to tenants and send database requests with those IDs to implement a shared schema approach, and if you’re going to provide subdomains or custom domains for your clients, you’ll need Detectify. For modern Rails-based SaaS apps, you’ll want more flexibility. Here’s where Detectify comes into the picture. Detectify can build database requests using both subdomains and domains. Detectify, when sending a URL-based request to the database also lets the app ignore routes. Overall, Detectify proves to be a more advanced multi-tenancy gem than Houser.
Conclusion:
Multi-tenancy is more often than not a misunderstood and misused term. Multi-tenancy is an architectural approach enabling a single instance of an application to be shared among multiple organizations or users, also known as tenants and is applied only to SaaS. The core principle here is, it is the single instance of the application which is being shared. Hence, multi-instance architectures aren’t the same as multi-tenant architectures.
Anything which is poorly designed will never work ideally, but here more than most cases, a poorly designed multi-tenancy will do you no good whatsoever. This is because a poorly designed multi-tenancy can hinder the core function of it, which is the reduction of operations costs, by impacting automation among other things. The development of a multi-tenant Software as a Service application with Rails goes further than just designing the database layer. If you choose the perfect database architectures at the beginning itself, it will be a lot easier to develop, scale and support your web application in the long run. | https://medium.com/swlh/what-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-multi-tenancy-in-rails-application-547d0f9c205f | ['Amit Ashwini'] | 2020-03-20 12:02:33.749000+00:00 | ['Entrepreneurship', 'Software Development', 'Ruby on Rails', 'Web Development', 'Startup Lessons'] |
Graph Data Modelling in Java | Modelling data is a crucial aspect of software engineering. Choosing appropriate data structures or databases is fundamental to the success of an application or a service.
In this article, I will discuss some techniques related to modelling data domains with graphs. In particular, I will show how labelled property graphs, and graph databases, can be an effective solution to some of the challenges we sometimes encounter with other models, such as relational databases, when we deal with highly-connected data.
By the end of this article we will have a simple — but fully functional — implementation of an in-memory labelled-property graph in Java. We’ll use this graph to run some queries on a sample dataset.
All the code presented here can be found on GitHub.
Sample domain: book reviews
Before writing this article, I headed over to kaggle.com and browsed through some of the data sets available there. Eventually, I picked this book review data set which we’ll use as a running example throughout this article.
This data set contains the following CSV files:
BX-Users.csv, with anonymised user data. Each user has a unique id, location and age.
BX-Books.csv, which contains each book’s ISBN, title, author, publisher and year of publication. This file also contains links to thumbnail pictures, but we won’t use those here.
BX-Book-Ratings.csv, which contains a row for each book review.
If we picture this data set as an entity-relationship (ER) diagram, this is how it would look like:
Some fields are denormalized, e.g. Author , Publisher , and Location . While this might or might not be what we eventually want (depending on the performance characteristics of certain queries), at this point let's assume we want our data in normalized form. After normalization, this is our updated ER diagram:
Note that we split Location into 3 tables ( City , State , and Country ) because the original field contained strings such as "San Francisco, California, USA" .
Now, suppose we store this data into a relational database. As a thought exercise, how easily can we express these two queries with SQL code?
Query 1 : get the average rating for each author.
: get the average rating for each author. Query 2: get all books reviewed by users from a specific country.
If you’re familiar with SQL, you’re probably thinking joins: whenever we have relations that span multiple tables, we typically navigate the relations by joining pairs of tables via primary and foreign keys.
However, both queries involve a non-trivial amount of joins — especially the second one. This is not necessarily a bad thing — relational databases can be quite good at executing joins efficiently — but it might lead to SQL code that is difficult to read, maintain, and optimize.
Moreover, in order to navigate many-to-many relationships, we had to create join tables (e.g. BookRating or BookPublished ). This is a common pattern which, however, adds some complexity to the overall schema.
We could denormalize some of the data, but this would have the side-effect of locking us into a specific view of our data and causing our model to be less flexible.
Domain modelling with Java classes
Now let’s suppose we want to store our entire data set in memory. The sample data set that we got from Kaggle contains less than a million entries, so it will easily fit in memory.
Storing our data in memory is a trivial but perfectly valid approach, especially if we want to support a read-only workload and we don’t need to guarantee write consistency and persistency. If we need to offer those guarantees, we can still store the data in memory, but we’ll probably need to ensure that our data structures are thread-safe and that we somehow persist the changes to non-volatile memory.
We’ll start with some classes, for example:
Soon, though, we are confronted with a question: how do we link these classes together? How do we establish relationships between books and authors?
In the case of Book and Author , we might consider that a book has one author (let's keep things simple and suppose each book has only one author), and use a direct reference:
This makes it trivial to get the author of a book. However, the reverse (getting all books written by an author) is more expensive, because we need to scan the entire list of books. For example, if we’re looking for all books by Dan Brown, we need to write something like this:
When we have many (e.g. millions) books, this will perform poorly. We could store references to books in the Author class itself:
However, this solution doesn’t “feel” good. Every time we want to change a book’s author, we have two places to change.
Besides, how should we handle relationships that contain extra data? For example, the relationship between a book and its publisher contains a piece of extra data, i.e. the year of publication. It’s not clear where we should put this field: should we declare it in the Book class? Then how do we handle cases when a book has multiple publishers and/or years of publication? Should we create a new class (e.g. BookPublished ), essentially adopting the join table pattern of relational databases?
Labelled property graphs
I would argue that both the relational and the Java reference models share a common trait: they represent relationships as entity data.
In both cases, not only does an entity contain attributes about itself (e.g. a Book table contains its title and ISBN code) but it also contains data about how it's connected to other entities.
This entity-centric (or table-centric) model, which is adopted by RDBMSs, has been traditionally successful thanks to its efficiency in storing and retrieving huge amounts of entities. If our data has a lot of loosely-connected entities, a table-centric model works well. However, when our data has a lot of relationships, representing them as data might result in more complex queries and, overall, in a less flexible data model.
Graph models adopt a different approach: in a graph, relationships are modelled explicitly and are treated as first-class citizens of the data model, just like entities.
You may recall from mathematics that a graph is a collection of nodes (also known as vertices) and edges (sometimes called relationships). Each node stores some data, and each edge connects two nodes. Here’s a picture of a sample graph with 6 nodes and 6 edges:
On top of this, a labelled property graph model adds a few extra features:
Each node and each edge have a label that identifies their role in the data model.
Each node and each edge store a set of key-value properties.
Each edge has a direction, i.e. it is a directed graph (as opposed to undirected graphs, where edges don’t have directions)
This is essentially the model adopted by production graph databases such as Neo4j and Titan.
So how can we model the book review domain as a labelled property graph? Here’s my first take at it:
Nodes have labels (e.g. the Book node is labelled "Book") and some properties -- for example, the Book node has two properties, isbn and title . These properties correspond to entity attributes in our ER diagram.
Edges have labels too (e.g. the edge connecting User and Book is labelled "Reviewed"). Some edges also have properties -- for example, the Reviewed edge has the rating property, which stores the rating a user gave to a book, and the Published by edge has a year property, i.e. the year the book was published. Other edges don't have properties -- for example, the In City edge which connects a user to the city where they live doesn't have properties because we don't need to store extra data on that relationship.
The picture above represents the schema of our graph model. When we create a graph instance and store some data in it, here is how it could be pictured (this is just a subset of the entire graph):
This could have easily been drawn on a whiteboard. In fact, when it comes to connected data, adopting a graph model is arguably quite natural and intuitive.
For more information about labelled property graphs, and how to model data with them, I recommend checking out Neo4j’s Graph Modeling Guidelines or Kelvin Lawrence’s free book on Apache Gremlin.
Implementing a labelled property graph in Java
Let’s see how we can implement a labelled property graph in Java. All the code in this section can be found in this repository on Github (the repository also contains code to parse the CSV files from Kaggle.)
We’ll start by defining the Node and Edge classes. We'll also define a common superclass, GraphElement , which represents elements that have a label and properties.
Nothing surprising here, except maybe those outgoingEdges and incomingEdges fields in the Node class. This is essentially how we connect nodes and edges together, and how we'll navigate the graph to extract meaningful data (we'll see that soon.)
I chose to represent outgoingEdges and incomingEdges as lists, but these might as well be sets (e.g. hash sets or tree sets) or other structures. The choice depends on a number of factors (e.g. whether we need to guarantee uniqueness of each edge.) However, these consideration are beyond the scope of this article -- if you are looking for efficient in-memory graph databases, you might want to consider products such as Memgraph or Neo4j embedded. For this example I decided to keep things simple and use plain array lists.
Also, each node has an id field. Unsurprisingly, the primary function of this field is to guarantee uniqueness of each node.
Next, we’ll define the Graph class which exposes methods for creating nodes and edges:
The two maps nodeIdToNode and nodeLabelToNode allow us retrieve nodes by their id and label, respectively. This will become especially useful when we start writing queries.
We define a BookReviewGraph class as a subclass of Graph :
We don’t use random-generated ids (e.g. UUIDs); instead, we repurpose entity data as ids. This has a couple of advantages:
it’s easier to debug, and
it’s easier to query (if we’re looking for books by author, we can just get the node with id = "author-" + authorName )
Sample queries
Now that we have a basic graph implementation for our book review domain, let’s see how we can implement the two queries we introduced above:
Query 1 : get the average rating for each author.
: get the average rating for each author. Query 2: get all books reviewed by users from a specific country.
The pattern for both queries will be the same: starting with a node (or a set of nodes), we navigate through edges and nodes, until we reach the data that we want to return.
In general, querying a graph means extracting a subgraph, i.e. a specific pattern of nodes and edges, that yields the desired answer.
Query 1: average rating for each author
Let’s start by writing a query that returns the average rating for a specific author.
The query will traverse a section of the graph in order to extract the data we want (average rating for each author.) We can break it down into 4 steps:
Start from the node corresponding to the author we are interested in. Navigate through the “Written by” edges that point to the author node. Get the source nodes of the “Written by” edges. These will be book nodes. Navigate through the “Reviewed” edges that point to the book nodes and extract the rating property from these edges.
As a picture:
In code:
Using this query, we can easily find the average rating for each author:
Here’s the output of the query with the data set we got from Kaggle:
Gustavs Miller 10.0
World Wildlife Fund 10.0
Alessandra Redies 10.0
Christopher J. Cramer 10.0
Ken Carlton 10.0
Jane Dunn 10.0
Michael Easton 10.0
Howard Zehr 10.0
ROGER MACBRIDE ALLEN 10.0
Michael Clark 10.0
...
Query 2: books reviewed by users from a specific country
This query adopts the same pattern as the previous one. We start with country nodes and traverse the graph until we get to book nodes, then we collect book titles:
In code:
Here’s the output we get with the Kaggle data set, when we query for books reviewed in Italy:
La Tregua
What She Saw
Diario di un anarchico foggiano (Le formiche)
Kept Woman OME
Always the Bridesmaid
A Box of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning/The Reptile Room/The Wide Window/The Miserable Mill (A Series of Unfortunate Events)
Aui, Language of Space: Logos of Love, Pentecostal Peace, and Health Thru Harmony, Creation and Truth
Pet Sematary
Maria (Letteratura)
Potemkin Cola (Ossigeno)
...
Improving performance with indices
In both queries above, the starting point into the graph is a precise node which we get via the graph.getNodeById() method. This works when we know the id of the starting node.
However, in many cases we might not have a starting node — instead, we might need to start with a set of nodes.
For example, suppose we want to code the following query:
Query 3: given a book title, get the average age of users who reviewed a book with that title.
Our starting set of nodes is made up of the books with the given title. We could go through each book node and filter out books with a non-matching title:
This is essentially what databases refer to as a full table scan: in order to find the books we want, we have to go through all of them sequentially. The cost of this operation is linear in the number of books, so this can potentially take a long time.
In almost all cases (except maybe when the sequence is very short) we can improve performance by using a map (essentially a simplified version of an index in a database).
First, we create a map ( booksByTitleIndex ) which we update every time we add a new book:
Now we can use this index at the beginning of our query:
When we run this query on the Kaggle data set, here’s the output we get with title “Dracula”:
30.338983050847457
A HashMap is a good choice when we want to find exact matches on a certain property, because the average cost of finding exact matches is constant (O(1)).
When we want to find entities based on the total order of a certain property (e.g. get all users whose age is above 25), we can use a different data structure, e.g. a TreeMap, where the cost of finding elements is logarithmic.
If we wanted to find elements by prefix, a Trie would be the right choice to implement an index.
Conclusion
In this article we’ve seen how we can model a data domain using graphs, and how to implement a simple labelled property graph in Java. The code is quite basic and lacks error handling and thread-safety, but it’s a starting point to understand and apply graph modelling to data domains.
In the past year, I have worked on a project that has involved the analysis of high volumes of interconnected data. Modelling this data as graphs has allowed my team and myself to have an intuitive understanding of how the data is connected: transitioning from whiteboard brainstorming to data model implementation was a straightforward process. Initially we were unsure how the data would eventually be queried; adopting a graph model has allowed us to keep our model flexible and easy to query throughout the project.
The last decade has seen a growing interest in graph databases in the software community. Most of the technology powering these databases is not really new; what’s new is the fact that we now have a lot of interconnected data, and we want to query this data based on how elements are connected together, rather than just the values they hold. | https://medium.com/swlh/graph-data-modelling-in-java-dc815a0b8b24 | ['Alberto Venturini'] | 2020-09-22 10:31:53.804000+00:00 | ['Data Modeling', 'Java', 'Neo4j', 'Graph Database', 'Graph'] |
When You Are Heartbroken, Remember This — Love Lies in You. | When You Are Heartbroken, Remember This — Love Lies in You.
Photo by Becca Tapert on Unsplash
When I experienced my first heartbreak in high school, what troubled me more than the abysmal feeling one feels in heartbreak was the fear that I may never feel this kind of love ever again. So strongly I believed (naively, obviously) that you get one shot in life when it comes to true love that I thought having squandered it now, I’ll never get a second chance at true love again.
But it didn’t take me long to realize how wrong my thinking was when six months after I joined college, I fell in love again with double the intensity, double the fever of love. But this time, things turned out to be even worse. Not only she didn’t like me, but for some reason, she hated my guts so much that she attacked my any attempt even to befriend her with total finality.
Again I was left heartbroken; again I thought that I was very fortunate to have got a second chance in love and now this chance, too, gone there was no way I would get a third chance again, that not again the blessing of love would dawn upon me.
But contrary to my beliefs, I turned out to be wrong again. I did get a third chance, and then when it too failed, I got the fourth chance, and by the time I finally got a chance to have a blessed love and get married to her, I had been spurned more than half a dozen times in love.
And these experiences gave me a different perspective on love, which is often missing in the discussions about love. That even though the kind of person has an important bearing on our falling in love (we can’t love everyone), the inherent capacity to fall in love lies within us. In fact, this so romanticized event of ‘falling in love’ is more about us than the other person.
Some of us are more prone to feel this feeling of falling in love. Even after falling and failing in love, again and again, some of us don’t lose hope in love. For us falling in love is not merely an idea attached to a person or thing but a state of mind, a way of living that rests within us.
That doesn’t mean that you jump into a relationship with a parachute on, ready to give up at the first hiccup you get in a relationship, comfortable in the belief that you will again fall in love, so why bother. No, I didn’t mean that. In fact, one of the indicators of the strength of your love is how much ‘total’ is your love for the other person, without re-consideration.
What I’m trying to say that love is not like some rare Halley’s Comet event that you can witness only once or twice in your life. The capacity to love is forever shining upon you, within the deepest recesses of your heart. Yes, at times there will be clouds, and the world will feel loveless, and you will feel dejected and dreary, your days doleful and disappointed.
But, sooner or later, the clouds will part away and, the blue sky will appear again and, the sun of love will shine on your life. At that time the choice is yours — stay closed thinking what you have lost is eternal, or start realising this fact that more than the others, this 'love' is about you, and if you learn to see this love within yourself, unearth its light and warmth, you can never be without love. | https://psiloveyou.xyz/when-you-are-heartbroken-remember-this-love-lies-in-you-dd1f63a8d5a1 | ['Nitin Dangwal'] | 2021-02-23 06:33:25.048000+00:00 | ['Relationship Advice', 'Relationships', 'Relationships Love Dating', 'Relationship Building', 'Love'] |
Manage multiple LinkedIn accounts at once place: The Pro Guide | Manage multiple LinkedIn accounts at once place: The Pro Guide Circleboom Jul 2·8 min read
Do you offer multiple clients LinkedIn lead generation, consulting, or any other LinkedIn service simultaneously? Or creating content and manage multiple LinkedIn accounts as a social media specialist or brand/business owner?
Trying to manage multiple LinkedIn accounts can be difficult if you are not organized because you may have personal and professional profiles on the platform at the same time.
You might forget to edit a post about your brand. But, when having shared a post on a business account you manage, it is easy to get distracted. Yet, this single blunder can jeopardize the entire brand strategy you have invented.
How do you keep track of multiple LinkedIn profiles without losing your mind?
Take a seat back and leave social media publishing work to Circleboom.
Relax. We have come to assist you in avoiding more major issues when working with social media.
Why learning how to manage multiple LinkedIn accounts matter?
LinkedIn marketing is incredibly valuable for B2B businesses, any business leaders who pay attention to networking, and building a community for vendors, sellers and buyers in your niche.
Because;
· LinkedIn has more than 750 M professionals on the platform,
· 4 people out of the 5 members drive business decisions within their company,
· And mostly seen as a #1 platform for lead generation.
Brands have a one-of-a-kind opportunity on LinkedIn. You can reach the world’s professionals — all in one place — where opinion leaders, executives, senior influencers, and decision-makers are ultimately active, which sets it apart from other social media platforms.
And if you ask that can you have multiple LinkedIn accounts, the answer is yes.
What is more, you can easily manage multiple LinkedIn accounts thanks to automaton and scheduling tools like Circleboom. This kind of third-party scheduling apps will take the burden off of your shoulders. You can schedule your LinkedIn posts days and even weeks away.
Yet, not all LinkedIn schedulers offer you to manage multiple LinkedIn accounts and post to multiple LinkedIn accounts at one place, and usually does not provide a platform to design and edit your LinkedIn post in the same place before publishing or scheduling.
But Circleboom social media scheduler does all of them.
You can design your LinkedIn content with Canva built-in tool
You can use Unsplash stock images when creating content such as LinkedIn article covers
You can add GIFs to your posts to drive engagement
You can schedule your content to be published on a particular date and time
If you have multiple content to post, you can add them to your queue to post automatically based on intervals
You can find relevant articles to publish on LinkedIn Page through Circleboom Article curator and add those articles to your queue
You can connect RSS feeds from different sources and automate RSS feed posts too.
How to manage multiple LinkedIn accounts with a few clicks?
The full-featured social media scheduler from Circleboom can schedule and publish your posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google My Business all at the same time!
Thanks to the intuitive design approach, the rest will be simple if you’re a regular social media user.
Creating content (uploading images/videos/gifs, writing captions, and scheduling it on the calendar for the target day and time) will be among the steps.
So, let’s start publishing on multiple LinkedIn accounts.
Step #1: Log in to Circleboom Publish first. If you don’t already have a Circleboom account, create one now.
It will possibly only take a few seconds to sign up.
Circleboom Publish can help you manage multiple accounts from a single dashboard.
Step #2: On the dashboard, you will find options for Twitter, Facebook Groups, LinkedIn Profiles, LinkedIn Pages, Google My Business, and Instagram.
To manage multiple LinkedIn accounts, click “LinkedIn Profile,” or to manage your LinkedIn Business Page, click “LinkedIn Page.”
With Circleboom Publish, you can manage multiple LinkedIn accounts and schedule LinkedIn posts.
Step #3: On the left-hand menu, locate the “Create New Post” button once your LinkedIn account or LinkedIn Page has been added.
You will go over the steps for scheduling LinkedIn content in this section.
You can schedule posts on your LinkedIn Company Page or your Profile from the Create New Post dashboard.
Step #4: To schedule your posts, go to the Create New Post dashboard and select your LinkedIn account or page.
You can also use Circleboom Publish if you want to schedule posts on LinkedIn for multiple accounts (up to 5 accounts in Pro subscription).
Since you can add multiple LinkedIn accounts or other socials, select the one needed
LinkedIn account selection
When you click the select account box, you’ll be presented with several options. For example, you could use the option “select by the social media platform” to schedule your posts across all of your LinkedIn accounts.
You can also use the “Select by Group” alternative to group the accounts that you post to regularly.
If you manage multiple LinkedIn accounts of different brands, you can group them or select per platform.
Step #5: After choosing your LinkedIn accounts, you can write your post and preview it on the right hand.
You can upload a pre-designed image or video or use Canva’s built-in feature to create your post in seconds.
It also allows you to use the built-in Unsplash, Giphy, and Canva APIs to edit your posts. Circleboom Publish is a one-stop-shop for social media management.
Once you’ve clicked on “Design on Canva” button, the smart template bar for multi-platforms will open. Here, you can quickly choose “LinkedIn post” to continue.
If you were already using and signed up to these platforms, you won’t need to open another tab to edit your posts, thanks to Circleboom’s integrated system.
On Circleboom Publish, Canva’s graphic features for images and videos can help you improve your content.
Step #6: When you are finished, you’ll see “Add to my Queue,” “Schedule it,” and “Post” options below the post preview.
You can use Circleboom Publish to schedule LinkedIn posts for a later date. Later, a new page will be opened. Here, choose the date and time.
Select your scheduling time and day.
Alternatively, if you want to add your content to the queue (it can be several article links to be shared, for example), then go to the option for “Add to my Queue.”
Click to “Go to Queue Settings” to manage intervals of queues
Next page, choose your time zone and periods of intervals.
Based on the time zone you live or your audience is active, create your queue plan.
That’s it.
If you need to create a more detailed plan, such as turning some days off from the queue, and choose days selectively, try “Create Advanced Plan” on the right.
What about content curation for multiple LinkedIn accounts?
In addition to the operational task of social media management, content creation can be a stumbling block for you. However, you could succeed in LinkedIn if you considered the needs and desires of your audience, start providing informative and engaging content and be recognized as a sectoral thought leader.
Circleboom Publish isn’t just another social media management app. You can find useful and trendy articles related to your relevant topics using Circleboom Article Curator, as we mentioned at the top.
Discover Articles, Select and Auto Post to LinkedIn
With the “Discover Article” feature, you will only choose your preferred language and interest areas from over 300 Circleboom-created interest categories.
You’ll see a list of articles related to your interests as you select them, and you can add your favorites to your queue.
Circleboom will auto-post your articles based on the posting time interval and frequency you pick once you’ve added them to your queue and set your queue preferences.
You can use Circleboom’s Article Curator to find interesting articles and create a posting queue to have your content auto-posted on LinkedIn by following our step-by-step guide below.
Step #1: Assuming that you are still logged in, this time, go to the “Discover Article” option on the main menu.
Click on it browse articles.
To discover articles, set your interest areas.
Step #2: Select your interest from the “Manage Your Interests” button above.
Choose related topics from featured or type your interest are keyword in the search bar.
Choose article language and interest areas.
Step #3: Circleboom will prompt you to the article curation page once you’ve selected your interest topics.
By clicking the small square box in the right corner of the articles, you can select them. A blue box will appear as you select your articles. When you’ve made your choices, click “Add selected articles to queue.”
The rest would be the same if you did not set your queue settings.
After clicking on the blue button above, you will need to choose your account once again.
Then, select your queue and posting intervals, and save your settings. That’s all, and your articles will be auto-posted from now on!
Wrap Up
Every second, a new professional join LinkedIn to become a part of this rapidly expanding community.
More than 1 billion times per month, these business professionals contact LinkedIn Pages, and 96 percent of B2B marketers have used LinkedIn to spread their content in the last 12 months.
With its article curator tool and options to schedule, Circleboom Publish can help you find high-quality content. It can help immensely you schedule posts on LinkedIn, particularly if you manage multiple LinkedIn accounts at once. | https://medium.com/@circleboom/manage-multiple-linkedin-accounts-at-once-place-the-pro-guide-6616f4f39c29 | [] | 2021-08-13 12:51:53.314000+00:00 | ['Multiple Linkedin Account', 'Scheduler For Linkedin', 'LinkedIn', 'Manage Linkedin Accounts', 'Manage Multiple Accounts'] |
How to get an Analyst role as an Engineering Undergraduate? | This article covers everything you need to know about Analyst (Business Analyst/Associate/etc.) roles for engineering undergraduate students — from finding job opportunities to acing the recruitment process. You may use this as the first step in your journey and feel free to do your own research ahead.
I received a job offer for the role of an Analyst at a growing management consulting firm, about 10 months ago. As I see the next batch gearing up for engineering campus placements, I find many students in the same dilemma as mine. Among engineering undergraduates, it’s common to find students who wish to switch their domain because they found their passion elsewhere. They go on to become amazing entrepreneurs, graphic designers, product managers, and whatnot.
As for me, I wanted a role where I could not only use my technical skills to solve problems, but also contribute to the underlying business value and the impact on the end customer. Hence, I went onto preparing for the Analyst (Business Analyst) role. I learned from the experience of some amazing people in my network working in similar roles and I credit them for enabling this article.
What are Analyst roles and which ones are focusing on?
LinkedIn defines the role of an Analyst as —
“An analyst gathers, interprets, and uses complex ‘data’ to develop actionable steps that will improve processes and optimize results.”
Now, this ‘data’ can be customer data, system data, or even economic data. Accordingly, the job role of an Analyst exists at a variety of companies but the job function varies from industry to industry.
Different types of Analysts (inexhaustive, indicative representation); Graphics: Sketchify
For example, a management consulting firm might hire an Analyst for industry research and other background analysis that goes into preparing proposals. We’ll be talking about these roles in detail in this blog.
As for other examples, a service-based IT firm might hire an Analyst to churn data running behind their processes and derive insights from it. A product-based company might have an Analyst who would be responsible to track metrics behind the product and enable business decisions. Similarly, an Analyst at a financial services company might be involved in wealth management and financial statement analysis.
Note: These job titles are indicative, they might vary.
Do you really want this role?
Given the fact that you’re reading this article, I’d like to believe you have already decided to take up this role. But if not, here’s how you can decide:
For those of us who don’t have a crystal clear dream job or dream company, exploration is the key. We keep on exploring different ventures until we find something that feels perfect. The ones who succeed in finding the right fit are the ones who introspect deeply before they decide which roles are they going for.
How do you do that? This is what worked for me —
Look within yourself. Analyze your skills, your interests, and align them with your passion/dream. Find out everything about the role — either from articles like this one or from people working in the role. Compare both these answers and conclude if you wish to go for the role. Repeat for each role you come across.
How to find internships or job openings?
Once you’ve decided that you want to pursue this role, you need to start looking for jobs in this domain. The conventional method is to apply via campus placements. The alternative to this is finding jobs off-campus, i.e., via LinkedIn and other channels. I’ve talked about finding internships and jobs for this role in detail in this podcast —
If you have any queries regarding the ways I have shared in this podcast, feel free to drop me a message. Trust me, they work! :)
Go through the job description before applying and make sure its something you really want to do. If you don’t understand the role, find people having an experience of that role through LinkedIn or your college network and reach out to them with specific questions. Then, tailor your resume or CV according to the job profile and make sure you’re honest and thorough with everything you mention.
What can you expect from a Business Analyst/Associate recruitment process?
Now that you’ve applied for the job, let’s have a look at the exact recruitment process that I went through, along with some tips that helped me ace each stage. After the pre-placement talk by the company, the recruitment was done in 2 steps:-
Online Test
Most companies have an online aptitude test as the first step of the hiring process. This test usually consists of two parts:-
Quantitative Aptitude Logical Reasoning
Few companies may have these 4 sections as well:-
Video Interview (Behavioral questions to be answered in short 2–3min videos and uploaded) Programming (To test fundamental problem-solving and coding skills) Guesstimates (Rough estimates based on inadequate information and logical conjectures) Case Study (A business scenario with a problem statement and few questions to be answered)
Alternatively, if these extra sections are not in the first online test, they might be introduced as the second stage of the online test for some shortlisted students only.
Multiple Rounds of Interviews
Major shortlisting is usually done through the online test. Next comes the interview rounds. Usually, there are 2 or 3 rounds of interviews, subject to the recruiter’s discretion.
Round 1 — The interviewer tests your basic problem-solving skills, technical knowledge, and logical thinking skills. They usually ask questions about your resume/CV. These questions are relevant to the role you’re applying for. For example, if the role involves data analysis skills, they might ask you questions about Python, SQL, Excel, Tableau, etc., or any data science projects that you might have mentioned.
Mention only the skills and projects in your resume/CV that you’re confident about and are relevant to the job. Take each question as an opportunity to give your best answer as well as direct the recruiter’s attention towards your achievements or something you want to highlight. Don’t try to be a ‘know-it-all’. And finally, try to be calm and confident, but not too comfortable that you forget its a formal conversation. :)
Round 2 — The next round is usually conducted with a senior leader of the firm. The interviewer might ask you both technical as well as non-technical questions. Again, your CV plays an important role here. They might also ask you to solve a guesstimate or a case study on the spot.
Prepare well for business case studies and guesstimates. While solving them during the interview, it’s always advisable to keep the interviewer in the loop with your thought process. Build your solution in a structured manner and explain it step-by-step to the interviewer. This helps in establishing effective communication with them.
Final Round — The last round of interviews is a behavioral one where they try to know you better. This is the place to give thoughtful answers, and not spill some technical jargon. You can expect questions around your educational background, your motivation behind applying for the job, your college experiences, your personality traits, and your ambitions and goals.
Needless to say, be honest with the interviewer. Try not to give conventional answers. Everybody wants a job for the salary and the recruiter knows that. Only a few want it to fuel their passion. All in all, share your story. The recruiter wants to hire a human being, not a machine that can work for them 8 hours a day. Show them the person you truly are.
Final Words
That sums up the recruitment process you’d find for Analyst roles at most organizations. Like you might have observed, it is quite similar to most other job roles. What makes it different is the kind of expectations the interviewer has from you.
Since you’re an engineering student, they don’t expect you to know every trick of the trade at a management consulting firm. But they’d at least expect you to have done your due diligence about understanding the role. They don’t expect you to know in detail about their business. But they’d expect you to know about everything you have done in the 3–4 years of your college life. | https://medium.com/@singhishita/how-to-get-an-analyst-role-as-an-engineering-undergraduate-a4f6b9180231 | ['Ishita Singh'] | 2021-09-03 12:24:32.286000+00:00 | ['Engineering', 'Analyst', 'Campus Placements', 'Job Interview', 'Recruitment'] |
Dengvaxia: The Controversial Vaccine | The controversy regarding the Dengvaxia vaccine made many Filipinos lose trust in vaccination. Because of this, less Filipinos now receive vaccinations, leading to the ongoing measles outbreak.
Thus, we are here to talk about Dengvaxia, the controversial dengue vaccine, and how it is different. But before we talk about the vaccine itself, we will first talk about dengue.
Dengue in a Nutshell
According to Mayo Clinic, dengue is a viral disease that is common in Southeast Asia and the western Pacific islands. A person gets dengue through mosquitos that carries the virus that cause dengue.
There are two forms of dengue: mild and severe. Mild dengue makes a person experience high fever, rash, and muscle and joint pain. Severe dengue, on the other hand, can cause bleeding, a sudden drop in blood pressure, and death.
Having dengue immunizes someone from the dengue virus that made them sick. Unfortunately, there are four types of dengue viruses. Every time a person is infected by a dengue virus, the risk of having severe dengue increases.
Dengvaxia and the Controversy
Image directly lifted from Inquirer.net
To combat dengue, Sanofi Pasteur released Dengvaxia, the first dengue vaccine in the world. It promised to provides protection from the four types of dengue viruses.
However, Sanofi Pasteur found out a major flaw in the vaccine. People who received the vaccine without being infected by dengue before have an increased risk of having severe dengue. People who had dengue before receiving the vaccine, though, immunizes them for up to 6 years. Thus, Sanofi Pasteur does not recommend Dengvaxia for people without a prior history with dengue.
The Philippine government spent ₱3.5 billion on Dengvaxia and has given it on more than 700,000 children aged 9 years old and above. Of the 700,000 children, 70,000 of them are at risk of severe dengue.
Decreases in Immunization
Because of the Dengvaxia controversy, less people opted to vaccinate themselves. Vaccination of children from tuberculosis, polio, and measles went down. Vaccination from the virus that cause cervical cancer also went down. Soon enough, the measles outbreak began, claiming hundreds of lives.
Why Dengvaxia is Different
Dengvaxia is a relatively new vaccine, compared to other vaccines such as the measles vaccine. Thus, it is unfair to judge all vaccines because a new vaccine has unwanted side effects. The measles vaccine has been around for many years, and it has saved many lives. The issue of Dengvaxia, therefore, is not a matter of whether or not vaccines can save lives. Rather, it is a matter of incompetence on the part of a handful government officials. | https://medium.com/bata-mo-bakuna-mo/dengvaxia-the-controversial-vaccine-91dba6b1ef1a | ['Batang Nabakuna'] | 2019-03-27 16:08:19.407000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Philippines', 'Dengvaxia', 'Vaccines'] |
10 Basic Tech Terms You Need to Get Used to As a UX Designer | 1. Front-end VS. Back-end
Frontend and backend are two of the most used terms in the tech industry. They are like two sides of the same coin, but they define what you do as a developer.
Front-End development deals with the details of your website or app that the users see and interact with. This includes images, navigation menus, buttons, etc. The better your front-end is, the higher the chances of a good user experience.
Back-End development deals with the side that is hidden from the users. It includes complex tasks like data saving and organizing. The backend communicates with the front-end to make sure that the web is working properly. If a user fills a form in your website, the back-end processes it and returns the relevant information displayed on the screen.
2. Fullstack developer
A full-stack developer is capable of working on both the back-end and front-end development. They are skilled in both and detailed enough to focus on either side. It is easy to find a job as a full-stack developer. But being an expert on both sides is not easy and will take a ton of work.
Difference Between Front End, Back End, and Full Stack Developer by Think Future Technologies, 2020.
3. HTML (HyperText Markup Language)
People use language to communicate. Just like that computer's language to communicate with the internet is HTML or HyperText Markup Language. HTML is not a programming language. It is used to organize and format documents like Microsoft Word. HTML It has gone through some evolutions, and the latest updated version is HTML5.
4. CSS (Cascading Style Sheet)
While we can only use HTML to add text elements and create the structure of the content. CSS handles appearance. This includes stylings such as colors, layouts, spacing, and animations.
5. Javascript
Javascript handles the behavior of a website. It is a programming language that allows you to implement complex features on the web. Think of HTML as a frame, CSS as the colorful body, and JavaScript as behavior and manner. Like this alligator gif shown below.
HTML+CSS+Javascropt, giphy.com
6. API (Application Programming Interface)
API exchanges the data between the front-end and back-end. It also receives requests from the front and sends a response to the back. So, in other words, it allows applications to exchange data. It’s like a communication service.
7. on-Premise VS. on-Cloud
On-Premise means the business hosts its own data center on-site. It is the traditional approach where you have to buy and maintain in-house servers. You need to have IT staff qualified to maintain and watch the servers.
On-Cloud is a term that refers to computing services provided via the internet. This includes computing, database, monitoring, security, networking, etc. The main feature of cloud computing is that you pay for what you use. The cloud service provider usually takes care of its own maintenance costs.
8. SaaS (Software as a Service)
SaaS is the most common use of a cloud-based service. It is a way of accessing an application via an internet browser. You don't need to download the software onto your computer, tablet, or smartphone. SaaS allows users to access data from any device with an internet connection and a web browser. For example, we connect to Gmail via a web browser, and the service provider, Google, hosts the entire application. As users, we don't develop or maintain the infrastructure.
9. Server-side VS. Client-side
Remember the front-end VS back-end? Think of front-end and client-side synonyms and backend and server-side synonyms.
10. GUI (Graphical User Interface)
GUI is the desktop interface where you see icons, drop-down menus, and windows. It is a mouse-based system where you point and click to indicate what you want to do. GUI objects include icons, cursors, buttons, etc. It is more user-friendly than a command-line interface. | https://uxplanet.org/10-basic-tech-terms-you-need-to-get-used-to-as-a-ux-designer-8098dbedb96a | ['Eva V.'] | 2021-01-15 06:23:35.743000+00:00 | ['UX Research', 'Product Design', 'Design', 'Branding', 'Tech'] |
#nonewbooks2019 and #100📚2020 | About a month ago, I made peace with the fact I wasn’t going to hit my goal of 100 books this year. I would have had to read a book every 1.5 days in order to do that, and I knew I would rather focus on enjoying what I was reading at the moment and re-assessing at the end of the year.
I had a two-part goal for reading (which was also my sole New Year’s Resolution this year): not to buy any books for the whole year, and to read 100 books (whether mine, the library’s, or friends’). I hit the first part of that goal out of the park — the only content I bought this year was a print issue of Jacobin; and I came close with the second part of the goal — 85 books in total.
This was a huge year of change — I transitioned out of my non-profit youth organizing job after more than 4 years of working there; I moved from a comfortable Logan Square apartment I had lived in for 4 years to a new place in Bridgeport, a neighborhood I had spent almost no time in; and, I was elected to the leadership body of the largest socialist organization in the United States in nearly a century on a mandate of building a socialist #GreenNewDeal program and a strong national organization. And somehow, in between all of that, I was able to read more than I’ve ever read in a single year (that I can remember/have tracked!)Not to be too corny with the ‘pointing out organizing lessons from life’, but setting a goal and working towards it really does make a huge difference, even if you don’t make that goal.
I definitely prioritized breadth over depth — which, frankly, has been the case since the 2016 election. That slap in the face made me realize that there’s still a lot I need to learn about politics, economics, and the way the world works in order to have a grasp on the material conditions that we’re trying to influence with our strategies for change. For me that looks like listening to 20+ podcasts instead of music on a daily basis, and having my non-fiction wildly outweigh my fiction intake, and making peace with the fact that I am going to be the person introduced at the party as the ‘organizer who used to be an artist’ and I’ll probably never go back to a balance of both.
I don’t read very many books that I don’t enjoy, but there were definitely some highlights this year that were personally enjoyable (and that I think should be read by others). So, in no particular order, here are my highlights from the year:
Thanks GoodReads Books for the page count!
Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past Trilogy — This trilogy (made up of The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End) was a blast to read, although the tone and pacing varied wildly throughout. A great deep-dive into Chinese science fiction (to whatever extent that is or is not its own ‘genre’), it moves from first contact to something beyond your wildest imagination.
This trilogy (made up of The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End) was a blast to read, although the tone and pacing varied wildly throughout. A great deep-dive into Chinese science fiction (to whatever extent that is or is not its own ‘genre’), it moves from first contact to something beyond your wildest imagination. Taylor Branch’s America During the King Years Trilogy — This trilogy (made up of Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan’s Edge) was the main reason why I didn’t make it to my goal this year, because it’s over 3000 pages in length. But, if you have the patience to read it, do. You’ll see the big picture and the daily insecurities that comprise the considerations necessary in building a movement.
This trilogy (made up of Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan’s Edge) was the main reason why I didn’t make it to my goal this year, because it’s over 3000 pages in length. But, if you have the patience to read it, do. You’ll see the big picture and the daily insecurities that comprise the considerations necessary in building a movement. American War, by Omar El-Akkad — I wish more journalists decided to hop over to fiction, because this book felt like it was ripped from the headlines. Only recommended for folks like myself that enjoy reading work more dystopic than the current reality for whatever reason.
I wish more journalists decided to hop over to fiction, because this book felt like it was ripped from the headlines. Only recommended for folks like myself that enjoy reading work more dystopic than the current reality for whatever reason. Stolen: How to Save The World from Financialisation, by Grace Blakeley — Easily the most important book I’ve read on financialization and the financial crisis — mostly because it lays things out in such a clear, no-nonsense narrative style while also leaving lots of time at the end to propose specific solutions. Although Labour may not have won this round electorally, I’m excited to see what comes from the program laid out in this book.
Easily the most important book I’ve read on financialization and the financial crisis — mostly because it lays things out in such a clear, no-nonsense narrative style while also leaving lots of time at the end to propose specific solutions. Although Labour may not have won this round electorally, I’m excited to see what comes from the program laid out in this book. Dhalgren, by Samuel Delany OR Black Leopard, Red Wolf, by Marlon James — The reason I’m putting both of these together and recommending you choose one is because they both read like an extended (900 pages for Delany, 620 for James) hallucination that will give you nightmares, guaranteed. They both happen to be by Black men and are deeply influenced by Black myth/storytelling traditions, but also have entirely different settings/plots/worlds that are built. That being said, though, there’s some kind of connecting thread about the animal nature of human existence and how we can, or can’t, survive it without going crazy.
The reason I’m putting both of these together and recommending you choose one is because they both read like an extended (900 pages for Delany, 620 for James) hallucination that will give you nightmares, guaranteed. They both happen to be by Black men and are deeply influenced by Black myth/storytelling traditions, but also have entirely different settings/plots/worlds that are built. That being said, though, there’s some kind of connecting thread about the animal nature of human existence and how we can, or can’t, survive it without going crazy. We Make The Road By Walking, by Myles Horton & Paulo Freire AND A Planet to Win by Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos AND Ella Baker & The Black Freedom Movement by Barbara Ransby — These three were the books that I read this year that every organizer must read next year. Ransby lays out a deeply political biography of a crucial organizer that built a movement we should all draw inspiration from; Horton + Freire have a book-length conversation about the methodology for how to weave eduction + movement-building together in dialogic unity; and the GND crew lay out the program for an ecosocialist politic that can actually put us on the path to climate justice without a martyr complex.
These three were the books that I read this year that every organizer must read next year. Ransby lays out a deeply political biography of a crucial organizer that built a movement we should all draw inspiration from; Horton + Freire have a book-length conversation about the methodology for how to weave eduction + movement-building together in dialogic unity; and the GND crew lay out the program for an ecosocialist politic that can actually put us on the path to climate justice without a martyr complex. New York 2140 OR Red Moon, by Kim Stanley Robinson — Every leftist should be reading a lot more science fiction, and KSR is arguably the best leftist science fiction author. Both of these, his two most recent works, are not nearly as good as the Mars Trilogy (which I read in 2017), but both are arguably still worth reading — one for the post-climate disaster adaptation realism, and the other for its gripping plot (but not its Orientalist undertones).
There were so many other good books I read this year — The Shock Doctrine, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, The Making of Global Capitalism, At The Dark End of The Street, No Shortcuts, Our Common Wealth, A Little Life, Our History Is the Future, Marxism and Politics, Red State Revolt, and The Great Derangement stand out as highlights — but I don’t want to just rehash the reviews I posted on Goodreads/Instagram all year long.
When I started the year, I stayed off social media for over a month to get a jump on reading, solely posting my reviews. This felt like a good practice overall, but this technology really has imprinted so deep into the way that we interact with each other on a basic level that it feels impossible to stay off and still have a connection to what’s happening in my city and my political/social sphere.
Although I didn’t meet my goal this year, I’m setting basically the same goal for 2020:
100 books in one year — #100📚2020
It feels like this will be a good way to start a new decade — continuing an extended sprint to read a lot of the books I already own, falling in love with the library, and focusing on building the concentration necessary for extended study. It won’t be easy to maintain a serious relationship, a Presidential election year, a growing political organization, bills and more- but it’s a goal that feels worth setting. We’ll see if I meet it this time around. | https://medium.com/@estelle-sean/nonewbooks2019-and-100-2020-d317744302df | ['Sean Estelle'] | 2019-12-28 04:53:31.630000+00:00 | ['Dsa', 'New Years Resolutions', 'Books', 'Goodreads', '2020'] |
The Social Game | John’s totally into the Super Bowl. He’s just not into sports or contact. | https://backgroundnoisecomic.medium.com/the-social-game-122c9a909443 | ['Background Noise Comics'] | 2020-02-04 05:35:06.981000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Social Anxiety', 'Super Bowl', 'Comics', 'Sports'] |
Putting Up With Constant Bullying At Work | The Day I Finally Quit
It was a Saturday. I woke up early to reach the office by eight. Everybody would be there by eleven.
So I only had three hours to do a job I had never tried before.
I made the most out of what I had. And it turned out pretty well. I wish I had snapped a photo of it. But I didn’t have the chance. As everyone came along, they appreciated the art I had managed to create. Well, that would be everyone but one.
When the boss finally came along, it was already noon, and I was busy with my work. A high-pitched shrill sound shook me from inside as he screamed my name. As I rushed into his cabin, he accused me of sabotaging the office wall. He used all sorts of language to describe how much he hated it. He even went on throwing the paperweight towards me in a fit of rage.
Luckily, it missed me by a few inches.
Realizing he had gone too far, he regained his calm and apologized to me, and relieved me for the day. But he did not forget to mention the cost of repainting the wall would come out of my paycheck.
At the time, they already owed me a month worth of salary thanks to their irregular payments.
In hindsight, it was never about the art. My denial, in front of his spouse, had rubbed him the wrong way. He wanted to teach me a lesson from day one. I never had a chance to win him over.
I returned home looking like a construction worker, with paint all over my shirt. As soon as I reached my apartment, I burst out in tears. I went to sleep empty stomach that night.
The next day, I felt much better. It was Sunday, and I had all day to cope. I told my girlfriend what had happened. She used to adore my artworks like babies. So she was as furious as a wounded tigress. And the things coming out of her mouth were hilarious. She (seriously) planned to take over the office setup to turn it into my private art gallery. The sheer childish charm of her blabbering further lightened my mood, and I prepared myself to continue the job. I did not want to get back in that office again. But I was under parental pressure. So I sucked it up. And I planned to show up at work the following day. I needed the job until I get something better. But my plan changed soon.
In the evening, my phone biped receiving a Facebook notification. As I opened it, I could not believe my eyes. The boss had taken selfies with my wall art making all sorts of faces, and posted them online. He and his friends were having a real good time trash-talking the piece. And to make sure I see it, he tagged me in each of them.
It was then that I told myself enough was enough, and if I saw him ever again, I might lash out. And I didn’t want to give him the power to destroy my calmness. It only took me minutes to mail my resignation. And with that, it was the end of his days of fun. | https://medium.com/invisible-illness/putting-up-with-constant-bullying-at-work-2c4fac0d5df2 | ['Anirban Kar'] | 2020-12-17 06:04:05.936000+00:00 | ['Trauma', 'Abuse Of Power', 'Abuse', 'Mental Health', 'Stress'] |
Memory Disorders in the Cinematic Universe | “ Sometimes you will never know the true value of a moment until it becomes a memory,” — Dr. Seuss.
Memories are more than simple stored thoughts; they are pure valuable moments that give life meaning. Moreover, movies are a form of visual communication that possess a significant impact on humanity’s state of mind. The portrayal of memory in films possesses beneficial effects as it can educate the audience on the reality of memory disorders, in contrast to some rather adverse effects, which carry misleading depictions of people with memory conditions.
Beneficial Effects of Portrayal
“ We love films and storytelling as a people. It’s just a human compulsion to listen to and tell stories,” — Film composer Mychael Danna.
Although cinema is often deceiving, it still possesses the capacity to educate and remain accurate in certain cases. More explicitly, the movies that adequately depict memory disorders, similar to Alzheimer’s disease, an irreversible, progressive brain disorder that slowly destroys memory and thinking skills, or Korsakoff’s syndrome, a chronic memory disorder caused by a severe deficiency of thiamine, can enhance the audience’s awareness about how severely these conditions can impact our lives, often causing us to lose sight of ourselves and the overall value of life. The movies that most accurately depict memory disorders include Memento (2000), I Know Who You Are (Sé َQuién Eres) (2000), and Finding Nemo (2003). Consequently, memories are a substantial part of life that guide us through identity and value.
Adverse Effects of the Portrayal
Movies possess a digital world that can capture the viewer’s attention; however, films often involve limited relation to reality. In particular, they depict various memory disorders deceptively, such as amnesic symptoms, post-traumatic amnesia, and amnesic recovery. It is detrimental for movies to portray memory disorders inaccurately, considering the inadequacy of society’s comprehension, support, and proper attitude towards the affected individuals.
Amnesia Symptoms
Firstly, films portray amnesic symptoms inaccurately through major personality and identity loss, although, realistically, the symptoms involve complications in comprehending new information and in recalling previous events alongside an unaffected personality. Amnesic symptoms are imprecisely depicted in the movie Overboard (1987).
Post-traumatic Amnesia
Secondly, films illustrate post-traumatic amnesia with severe loss of autobiographical awareness when, in reality, it defects the ability to apprehend new knowledge. This delusion is represented in the movie Santa Who? (2000).
Amnesiac Recovery
Finally, movies present people with improbable recovery that retrieves the amnesic individual’s personality, identity, and full mental capacity. This treatment occurs through a second head injury, as occurred in the movie Tarzan the Tiger (1922). This is inaccurate, considering memories are not temporarily attainable.
Conclusively, memories are valuable treasures that endure for a lifetime. Movies possess the potency to educate us about the veracity of memory conditions, although, in polarity, they can be deceitful regarding the portrayal of certain disorders. Overall, life would be utterly meaningless without the pure essence of our memories. | https://medium.com/@alyousiflujen/memory-disorders-in-the-cinematic-universe-11f7ea022f1 | ['La'] | 2020-12-21 18:04:52.168000+00:00 | ['Memory Disorders', 'Cinema', 'Film', 'Movies', 'Memory Loss'] |
Analyze and Improve Entity Framework Core Performance | Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
Is EF Core slowing down your .Net application? In this article, I’ll show you how to analyze and improve Entity Framework performance using small examples and a monitoring tool. Fortunately, most problems are just a matter of configuration and usage.
1. The setup
I am using NetCore 3.1 with EF Core 3.1 and Microsoft SQL Server2017 Express.
These are the database models:
public class Student
{
public int Id { get; set; }
public int ClassId { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public virtual Class Class { get; set; }
} public class Class
{
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public virtual ICollection<Student> Students { get; set; }
}
We start with a simple controller to retrieve students and their class from a database. We order them by name and take the first five thousand results, then convert our database models to DTOs. Of course, we’re lazy, so we use Automapper and EF Core’s lazy loading proxies to automatically load the class for each student.
[HttpGet]
[ProducesResponseType(StatusCodes.Status200OK)]
public async Task<ActionResult<ICollection<StudentDTO>>> GetAll()
{
var models = _dbContext.Student
.OrderBy(s => s.Name)
.Take(5000)
.ToList();
var dtos = _mapper.Map<ICollection<StudentDTO>>(models);
return dtos.ToList();
} public class StudentDTO
{
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public ClassDTO Class { get; set; }
} public class ClassDTO
{
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
} public class MappingProfile : Profile
{
public MappingProfile()
{
CreateMap<Student, StudentDTO>();
CreateMap<Class, ClassDTO>();
}
}
After that we can run the application. When calling the API we get as result the students and their classes converted to JSON.
2. The problem
When calling the API, you will notice very poor performance. On my machine I measured more than 10 seconds. A bit long to retrieve just a few rows from a database, don’t you think?
But how is that even possible? Why is it so slow?
Let’s find out.
3. Analysis
To find out what is taking so much time and what is going on under the hood, I prefer MiniProfiler. It’s a simple and straightforward tool for .Net profiling.
After setting up and triggering a few calls, this appears in MiniProfiler’s web interface:
Average duration of about 10 seconds!
If you click on one of the calls, the MiniProfiler detail page will open.
4. The N+1 Problem
So lets dig deeper into one of the calls. You will be surprised when you see what is going on, at least I was: | https://medium.com/@matratze/analyze-and-improve-entity-framework-core-performance-e9ce4e683707 | ['Mad Matratze'] | 2020-12-19 16:50:31.545000+00:00 | ['Dotnet Core', 'Dotnet', 'Entity Framework', 'Entity Framework Core', 'Sql'] |
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CARSAREAS | https://medium.com/@piyushgujral21/hyundai-i20-e7967240d4e8 | [] | 2020-12-20 13:29:15.572000+00:00 | ['News', 'Latest News', 'Cars', 'Automotive', 'Automobile'] |
What It’s Like to Live in the Richest Country in the World | Everyday Life
As with anywhere in the world, everyday life in Qatar can vary greatly from person to person. However, there are many rules, laws, and aspects of life in Qatar that help dictate the Qatari people and contribute to a very different lifestyle than what many of us may know or be used to, ourselves.
Here are a few of them…
Housing
As far as housing goes in Qatar, more than 90% of all of the people in the country live in Doha, Qatar’s architecturally unique, capital city filled with skyscrapers, shopping malls, and fast food restaurants. This means that housing often lacks spaciousness and majority of people live in condos or apartments.
The average cost for rent per month in Qatar is about $1,510 USD or 5,500 Qatari Rial, but this can obviously vary greatly depending on where you live. Luckily, rent is one of the only living expenses that Qatari people have to worry about because electricity, water, and phone lines throughout the country are free.
Jobs
Although Qatar’s income varies greatly from the richest of the people, to the poorest, a job is almost guaranteed for everyone in the country. After all, thanks to its strong economy, Qatar’s unemployment rate is one of the lowest in the world, at 0.2%.
Oil and gas is the very clearly the largest industry in the country due to the petroleum deposits mentioned above, and potentially the best industry to be in. Majority of Qatar’s population is actually comprised of people that came to the country looking for work, due to the country’s petroleum deposits and the fact that Qatar does not charge income taxes.
This surge of people moving to the country created a boom in other industries including finance, insurance, construction, and real estate. In addition, Qatar’s plans to host the 2022 World Cup is creating a heavy contribution to the construction industry.
Weather
Weather conditions in Qatar can be extreme. In the summer, temperatures can reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit, or 50 degrees Celcius. This means that temperatures in the late fall and winter months are actually fairly pleasant, however, the cooler temperatures bring flies and frequent sandstorms that give zero visibility and almost require you to stay inside.
Rain is pretty few-and-far between in Qatar, averaging about 8–9 days per year of rainfall. When the rain does hit, it can be nice for helping settle sand/dust levels, however, flash floods are not uncommon either and can completely take over roadways.
Daily Commute
One of the most predominant normalcies in Qatar is the bad driving and traffic conditions. Qatar follows most US road-laws, requiring seatbelts, having speed limit laws, and forbidding driving under the influence (in Qatar, even one drop of alcohol will give you a DUI).
Although their laws are common to other places, roads are considered to be particularly bad due to the high volume of traffic and long travel times that result. As a means to try and keep roads functioning relatively well, laws are strict and fines within the country are steep, and almost certain to hit if one fails to abide by the rules.
One of the upsides to driving in Qatar is the cheap price of gasoline due to the country’s oil reserves. Gas is oftentimes cheaper than a bottle of water and is pumped for drivers by a pump attendant year round.
Religion
Religion is something that’s very important in Qatar. The Islamic culture and calendar helps dictate daily life for majority of everyone in the country. For example, because Friday is the Islamic holy day, work and school weeks run from Sunday through Thursday and it’s common for most businesses to be closed for most, if not all, of the day on Friday’s.
Wardrobe choices throughout the country are also dictated by the Islamic religion. Most Qatari men wear traditional white thobes and headdresses of white or white and red. Qatari women can be seen wearing black abayas, which can be plain or decorated elaborately, and hijab’s or veils that help cover their face.
Because wardrobe is so important to the Qatari people, in 2014 they went so far as to launch a campaign requesting modest dress code for tourists visiting the country.
While majority of the Qatari people are Muslim (part of the Sunni sector of Islam, to be specific), other religions are allowed to be practiced. Some of the other main religions practiced throughout the country include Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism.
Education
Education in Qatar is required for all children and is based on a 12-year public school system, much like the United States. However, public education in Qatar is completely free and the quality of schooling varies greatly from person to person.
Schools in Qatar are independently owned, meaning that every school does not follow the same curriculum and guidelines. This requires families to individually decide what’s important to their children's educational and future needs and match them up with a school that matches their values. As a result, many of the better schools in Qatar have waitlists and children are not guaranteed a spot in their school of choice.
Some of the subjects taught in most Qatari schools include Arabic, English, math, science, and Islamic studies. Meanwhile, some of the more elite schools can have certain subject-focuses like business, commerce, science, technology, or religion. | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/what-its-like-to-live-in-the-richest-country-in-the-world-c195fad102d5 | ['Kiah Swenson'] | 2020-12-26 13:49:09.075000+00:00 | ['Economics', 'Culture', 'Money', 'Finance', 'Data'] |
The Brutal Rape and Murder of Six-Year-Old Lisa Bonham | Lisa Jane Bonham was born on November 6, 1970, to Vernon and Doris Bonham. She has an older brother, Darin. The Bonham family resided in Martinez, California.
In early September 1977, the family was headed home to California when they decided to stop in Reno, Nevada, to visit Vernon Bonham’s relatives at 2485 Riviera Street near Idlewild Park.
On September 3, 1977, Darin, 12, and Lisa, 6, spent time riding the amusement park rides at Idlewild Park, about half-mile away. At 2 pm, Lisa walked back to their family’s home to ask Doris for a dollar.
When Lisa had not returned after 30 minutes, Darin went to the residence, but she was not there.
Lisa Bonham. Reno Gazette-Journal, July 28, 2008
At 5 pm that day, a Reno couple stopped at the eastbound Scenic View pull-out from Interstate-80 at Mogul, about four miles west of Reno. They were looking in trash bins for aluminum cans to recycle when they found a grocery bag containing girls’ clothing and some pine needles.
The couple did not know about Lisa’s disappearance and took the bag home. When they read about Lisa in the next day’s newspaper, they took the bag to the police. It contained Lisa’s red short-sleeve blouse, red and white checked shorts, red sandals, white socks, and a purse still holding the dollar bill.
A witness told police that one of three men in a Volkswagen convertible talked to Lisa and gave her an apple before she disappeared. Police found the convertible sitting at Idlewild Park at 5 am on September 4. They ran a check on the car and found it listed as stolen at South Lake Tahoe. Police arrested a man found in the vehicle, a 29-year-old Las Vegas dealer, Danny Lee Palmer.
Palmer admitted talking to Lisa and giving her the apple but denied any involvement in her disappearance. About ten days later, the police cleared him as a suspect in that case.
Police had little evidence in Lisa’s case, and no one had witnessed the abduction.
Law enforcement instigated a search for Lisa Bonham from Idlewild Park to Verde, NV, near the California-Nevada border. They searched the land along the Truckee River, where divers probed deep pools and underwater tree branches, and nearby areas toward Reno. Searchers even went into California, but the massive search was unsuccessful.
Authorities then issued an all-points bulletin to all western states for the missing girl because they believed she might have been taken across state lines into California.
About ten days after her disappearance, authorities set up a command post at the summit of Old Dog Valley Road, approximately 14 miles west of Reno, and searched the area. Fourteen officers were on horseback, and searchers fanned out at 7:30 pm and continued until dark. They checked campgrounds, logging roads, quarries, and other places to no avail.
A Strange Map
On Wednesday, September 21, 1977, Reno police released an image of a map indicating a possible location for Lisa Bonham’s body. They had received the map via the postal mail the week before, which instigated another search. The envelope was postmarked from Oakland, CA. The pine needles found in the grocery bag came from this area. After searching the site suggested in the note, authorities came up empty-handed and chalked it up to a hoax.
Reno Gazette-Journal, September 22, 1977
The Discovery of Lisa Bonham
The search for Lisa Bonham ended in mid-November 1977 when a young couple, Jane Lazovich, 16, and Mickey Cutler, 19, found a jawbone near Dog Valley Road’s summit in Sierra County, California.
“It was just laying on the surface of the ground,” Jane told the Reno Gazette-Journal.
The couple put the jawbone in their truck.
Lisa said, “We thought it might have been too old for a 6-year-old, but I looked at a book, at tooth development, and it seemed to fit.”
On September 4, Jane’s mother looked at it, decided it was human, and called the police.
Authorities searched the area where the couple found the jawbone and discovered some rib bones and a shoulder bone — overall, about a quarter of Lisa Bonham’s skeleton. No additional bones were found. Animals likely scattered the rest. Investigators said her killer had not buried the body, just discarded it. Identification was made through dental charts.
Sierra County Sheriff’s Department and the FBI joined the murder investigation that would take over two decades before an arrest.
23 Years Later A Killer is Finally Caught
Doris Bonham had high hopes that DNA technology would help solve her daughter’s murder. Her wish came true 23 years after her sweet little girl was taken from her.
On Wednesday, May 31, 2000, authorities arrested Stephen Robert Smith, 57, and charged him with murder. Smith was a dealer at the Peppermill Hotel-Casino in Reno and a registered sex offender.
Reno Gazette-Journal, October 4, 2000
In the late 1960s, Smith had molested two sisters, ages 15 and 12, at Sparks’ construction site. Even though he was convicted, he spent a minimal amount of time in prison and was paroled in 1976, 10 months before Lisa’s abduction. Despite his criminal history, he was never looked at as a possible suspect in Lisa Bonham’s kidnapping and murder.
In 1992, a major crimes task force was formed to investigate unsolved murders, but Smith’s DNA was not in the database.
Anjeanette Damon of the Reno Gazette-Journal wrote, “Smith’s parole officer persuaded him to submit a blood sample, which was entered into a DNA database at Washoe County. When a new DNA-indexing system became available, local police departments began submitting their unsolved cases.”
Detectives in the Bonham investigation did not believe that any semen remained on Lisa’s clothing after multiple blood and DNA tests had been previously conducted. However, Renee Romer, the lead molecular biologist in the DNA Unit of the sheriff department’s crime lab, cut samples from the edges of the original stain and found enough DNA to make a match.
Stephen Robert Smith confessed to raping and murdering Lisa Bonham in 1977. Smith said he saw Lisa walking near Idlewild Park on her way to her family’s residence and spoke to her. He knew she would be coming back, and as she was returning to the park, he grabbed her and forced her into his back seat, then covered her with a blanket.
Smith drove to Dog Valley near Verdi, where he tied her up and raped her. He tried unsuccessfully to smother Lisa; she had escaped from her bonds. Smith then squeezed her neck, possibly breaking it. He raped her again when she stopped moving.
Smith removed Lisa’s clothes and placed them in a bag in a garbage can at the scenic overlook along I-80 near Mogul, where the couple eventually found the bag and took it to the police.
During the trial, Doris Bonham confronted her daughter’s killer on the stand.
“Mr. Smith, do you understand at all what you have done to us?” she asked.
“After your first molestation … castration and penile amputation should have been performed on you. I hope you suffer an agonizing death in prison, and I know you will spend an eternity in hell.”
After Doris returned to her seat, Smith addressed the judge.
“I’m very sorry,” Smith said. “I am very, very sorry that I took your daughter’s life. I know that this can’t make up for what I did.”
Stephen Robert Smith was ultimately found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. District Attorney Richard Gammick did not seek the death penalty because he had hoped Smith might disclose information about other unsolved child abductions and murders. Detectives interviewed Smith, but he claimed he knew nothing about them, and he passed a lie detector test. Regardless, authorities did not rule him out in other cases due to the unreliability of polygraph tests.
There is little information currently available on Stephen Robert Smith, but a poster commented in an online article that Smith died in 2009.
Lisa Bonham’s father, Vernon Bonham, passed away from cancer in 2010. Her mother and brother still reside in California.
Sources
Barber, Phil. “Police Suspicious of Sighted Car: Girl Still Missing.” Reno Gazette-Journal. September 5, 1977. Accessed December 14, 2020. https://www.newspapers.com.
Barber, Phil. “Lisa Bonham Skeleton Found: Clues Sought in Dog Valley.” Reno Gazette-Journal. November 14, 1977. Accessed December 14, 2020. https://www.newspapers.com.
Damon, Anjeanette Damon. “Sparks Man Arrested in 1977 Reno Killing of Girl.” Reno Gazette-Journal. June 1, 2000. Accessed December 14, 2020. https://www.newspapers.com.
Henderson, Mike. “Mother Confronts Daughter’s Slayer.” Reno Gazette-Journal. November 10, 2000. Accessed December 14, 2020. https://www.newspapers.com.
Henderson, Mike. “Sparks Man Admits Abduction and Assault.” Reno Gazette-Journal. October 4, 2000. Accessed December 14, 2020. https://www.newspapers.com.
“Man Cleared in Bonham Investigation.” Reno Gazette-Journal. September 13, 1977. Accessed December 14, 2020. https://www.newspapers.com.
“Mystery Mapmaker Sought; New Search.” Reno Gazette-Journal. September 22, 1977. Accessed December 14, 2020. https://www.newspapers.com.
Stevenson, Jack. “Lisa Bonham Searchers Come UP Empty-Handed in Dog Valley-Verdi Area.” Reno Gazette-Journal. September 15, 1977. Accessed December 14, 2020. https://www.newspapers.com. | https://medium.com/@debrabuck/the-brutal-rape-and-murder-of-six-year-old-lisa-bonham-75c88988d246 | ['Debra Buck'] | 2020-12-19 17:01:26.891000+00:00 | ['Crime', 'Murder', 'True Crime', 'Mystery'] |
Finding correlations in time series data | Understanding ML
Finding correlations in time series data
How to find a correlation between different length of time series vector and predicted result.
If you’ve ever worked with data analysis it’s highly likely that you know about the idea of data correlation. There are many ways of calculating correlation within your data, and most of them are already implemented in popular data science toolkits. What I want to show you today is how to figure out a correlation between different length of time series vectors and target result (or any other value).
This might come handy when trying to design models that rely on time series data. Let me give you an example. Imagine you’re dealing with weather data. Your goal is to predict the population at some point in the future. That population is not dependent on current weather conditions but rather on the past.
Data Sample
Here we have a few samples from our dataset. It shows five consecutive time periods with some population numbers and the end of each period. Our goal is to predict a population in each time period. Usually to solve that problem we need to design some kind of model. The model itself doesn’t matter that much, important thing is to find what kind of features we should feed into it.
We know that the current population doesn’t depend on current conditions but rather on the condition through its life cycle. We can search for publication on that subject and try to figure out the right amount of data. After a while, we decided that our population probably depends on temperature from the last 4 weeks, precipitation from 6 weeks, and humidity in the last 2 weeks. That’s ok but is there a better way to find that correlation in the data? Can we even check if our periods are correct?
Problems with standard correlations
When thinking about data correlation we usually think about a correlation between a number, and the other number. Occasionally we might calculate correlations between categorical variables. This case is different. If we take under consideration a series of temperatures like that:
[21,22,21,25,19]
Order in which each number comes in is important. If we want to replace the whole series with some cumulative value (like an average or moving average) it’s not going to work.
[21, 25, 19, 22, 21]
This gives us the same average value but clearly shows a different situation. Another problem is to choose the right length of the vector. It’s not so easy to compare information gain when providing a longer vector.
[16, 18, 22, 15, 17, 21, 22, 21, 25, 19]
A common thing to do would be to provide a very long vector to the model and let it figure out a correlation by itself. That would work but in case of time series that usually we don’t have that much training data (and we cannot just create more). Even if we gather data from each day over the last 5 years, we have (on average) 1826 records. That’s way too low if you want to create a deep model with a very long input vector.
Predictive Power Score (PPS)
Recently, a different idea is gaining popularity. It’s called Predictive Power Score (PPS) and is based on calculating predicting power for every property in the dataset. Predictive power is a measurement of the success of a Decision Tree model predicting a target variable with the help of a predictor variable.
When you’re calculating PP for one variable (A) predicting another variable (B), we have to treat our variable B as the target, and A as the only feature. After that, we’re creating a Decision Tree (either Regressor or Classifier) and calculate meaningful metrics (e.g. MAE for regression problem or F1 for classification).
Basically, you have to repeat that process for every pair of variables. Normalization of the score is optional because usually the raw score already has a meaning. In most cases, you don’t have to calculate PPS for all possible combinations of features. It’s enough to calculate only PPS between each feature and target. In our example, we would calculate PPS for pairs: (Temp, Population), (Perc, Population), (Humidity, Population).
The only problem with this method is that it’s not solving our problem :)
Extended PPS
If we look at the standard PPS we’re able to check the predictive power of one variable. Our problem is a little different and let me show you how that looks like.
Our target is Population and the standard PPS approach would show us scores for only one item from each feature.
That’s ok, but we can do way better than this. Just try to find a correlation between the last x values of that vector and the target. Let’s start from the last row because for that one we have previous data.
We still have a problem with the first 4 rows because we don’t have the previous 5 rows to get the data from. There are two solutions:
Drop those rows
Create data
The first option is easy and usually, when you have >100 rows it shouldn’t affect the precision of the prediction. If you want to go with the second option you can use a moving average or other methods to populate that data. For now, we’re just going to go with the first option.
How to create a Decision Tree using sklearn?
To create DT we can use sklearn library and execute code like:
from sklearn.tree import DecisionTreeRegressor
from sklearn.model_selection import cross_val_score
X = [
[22, 26, 29, 27, 22],
[15, 22, 26, 29, 27],
[19, 15, 22, 26, 29],
[25, 19, 15, 22, 26]
]
Y = [76, 12, 53, 352] regressor = DecisionTreeRegressor(random_state=0)
score = cross_val_score(
regressor,
X,
Y,
cv=2, #change that base on the data size
scoring='neg_mean_absolute_error'
)
As a result, we should get some value of negative MAE.
What do we have to calculate?
Right now the question is “How many previous data points we should use to achieve the best score?”. We could create vectors with different lengths and compare scores for each of them.
If we look on Temp feature only we should get datasets like
Temp_five = [
[22, 26, 29, 27, 22],
[15, 22, 26, 29, 27],
[19, 15, 22, 26, 29],
[25, 19, 15, 22, 26]
]
Temp_four = [
[26, 29, 27, 22],
[22, 26, 29, 27],
[15, 22, 26, 29],
[19, 15, 22, 26]
]
Temp_three = [
[29, 27, 22],
[26, 29, 27],
[22, 26, 29],
[15, 22, 26]
]
Temp_two = [
[27, 22],
[29, 27],
[26, 29],
[22, 26]
]
Target always remains the same, the only thing that changes is a set of features. At this point, we’re calculating a score for each length and comparing the result to get the right length of the Temp vector.
Let’s assume that the result looks like that:
Base on this we can decide that the right length of the Temp vector is 4 (the lowest error). Now we perform a similar process for every single feature there is and come up with a final set of features.
Bold selection shows a set of features for one training sample with a target of 76. When designing NN we can then assume 14 (4 x Temp + 2 x Perc + 8 x Humidity) input features. So our training set for bottom 3 samples will look like:
X = [
[26, 29, 27, 22, 0, 0, 55, 88,
97, 75, 53, 40, 38, 36],
[22, 26, 29, 27, 0, 0, 100, 55,
88, 97, 75, 53, 40, 38],
[15, 22, 26, 29, 0, 0, 95, 100,
55, 88, 97, 75, 53, 40]
] Y = [
76,
12,
53
]
Real-life example
If you wonder how this method behaves on real-life data here is an example:
Each column represents one feature and each row represents a different length of the vector constructed from this feature. In this example, I’ve calculated MAE for vectors between 3 and 51 elements for each feature.
Which features should I choose?
There are a couple of rules to select the right features. The first one (and the most obvious one) is to select features with the lowest MAE score. We can sort those columns and start selecting ones with the lowest values. The question is “How many columns?”. The answer might not surprise you, it depends :). When you have more training data you can allow your model to be larger and so, select more features. If you have only a handful of training data you cannot design a model with >200 features because you’re getting into the curse of dimensionality territory.
Another thing if the length of each column. As you can see on this example reanalysis_specific_humidity_g_per_kg is a useful feature (one of the best we have) with 2 minimum values of MAE . When we have a case like this we usually selecting a shorter vector. So the decision is to select a vector length of 14 instead of 27, even if both have the same value of MAE (30).
Another thing to discuss is the last column. Some of the columns shouldn’t be treated as a vector, instead they should be used as a single feature. weekofyear column contains a week number for a given training example. There is no point in sending a vector of week numbers to the model because it always increases by 1 for every week. But it's still important to look at this column because it clearly shows how length affects accuracy.
Some tradeoffs
Sometimes you might want to make some tradeoffs when selecting vector length. Look on feature 15 ( station_min_temp_c ). It scores 35 MAE with a length of 3 and then beats that score with a length of 26. The difference between two scores is only 1 and we're adding 23 extra features just to get that 1 MAE. You have to remember that when building a model with multiple features, at the end length of your input vector is a sum of all vectors you've selected. Increasing input length by 23 forces you to have more training data and a larger model. In this case, I would personally select a 3 item vector rather than 26, or just test two different models. If the result won't improve when changing from 3 to 26 items you should use 3 because it produces a simpler hypothesis (according to the Occam's razor rule).
Mistakes when selecting features without extended PPS
The last thing I want to show you is how easy is to make a mistake when selecting features without this method. Let’s look at columns 4 ( reanalysis_dew_point_temp_k ) and 11 ( reanalysis_tdtr_k ). You can tell just by looking at them that column 4 has a better predicting capability. But if you were selecting the length of those vectors by hand (or random) you can make reanalysis_dew_point_temp_k worse than reanalysis_tdtr_k . Without any prior knowledge about this feature, you can select its length to be 3 which gives us MAE of 38 which is worse than 37 scored by column 11 in row 21. That way you've just made one of the best features you have as useful as one of the worst features you have.
Conclusion
The extended version of PPS is a powerful tool to select a set of features while building your model. Sometimes it might lead to a deeper understanding of the data event without expert knowledge on the subject. Even if it might take a while to calculate all PPS for different lengths of input vectors it is a time well spent. EDA ( Exploratory Data Analysis) is still one of the most important parts of every Data Science/Machine Learning project, and you shouldn’t skip it or just limit yourself to the default set of tools. | https://towardsdatascience.com/finding-correlations-in-time-series-data-845e5dc538c4 | ['Kemal Erdem', 'Burnpiro'] | 2020-06-28 21:48:54.203000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Data Analysis', 'Exploratory Data Analysis'] |
5 ways to introduce your dog to your new baby | Having a newborn in a house where the dog was the only baby for a while, can be a challenge and requires a lot of preparation before even you have the baby.
From changing routines to house training your dog to live with a baby, if you are a dog owner and pregnant these following tips will help you better approach the challenge of dog meets baby:
Introduction
Introduce your dog to as much as possible ahead of time so when the baby arrives, as little changes as possible. Walk around with a doll in your arms so your dog gets used to your hands not being free for him all the time.
Don’t rush the process.
Everyone is eager to have a happy family and get those cute dog/baby photos. Please remember that this is a process and can take a while.
Never, ever leave your baby (or toddler) alone with your dog.
Even to go to the bathroom. Even with a dog that your baby snuggles up to, that has never shown aggression and is the most docile, friendly dog in the world, under certain circumstances can injure or kill your child. It is rare but preventable.
Dog-walking duties
If someone else will take over dog-walking duties, transition before the baby comes home.
Start from early
Invite friends to bring their babies over so your dog gets used to crying and fussing sounds.
It is known that if you own a dog that loves you it will love your baby too. A dog that loves its owner and is secure in its owner’s love will often protect and defend that owner's property. Showing love and affection for both and dispelling resentment or rivalry if the best approach. | https://medium.com/@bebiboom/5-ways-to-introduce-your-dog-to-your-new-baby-7150dd816d2e | ['Bebiboom', 'Bagender Prediction'] | 2019-02-26 10:26:52.790000+00:00 | ['Baby', 'Pets', 'Newborn', 'Parenting', 'Dogs'] |
Revisiting the question ‘Simplified Chinese or Traditional Chinese?’ | Having gone through the journey of studying 1,500 Chinese characters, I feel it’s time to revisit this question that I asked in the beginning, with the benefit of hindsight.
I did choose to study Simplified characters, but if you ask me the same question right now, my answer would be Traditional characters, for the following reasons:
1 — It takes about the same effort to study either set, if you use the Heisig method. He wrote two books: Remembering the Traditional Hanzi (RTH) and Remembering the Simplified Hanzi (RSH). Regardless of which book you choose, you will still need to make up around 3,000 mnemonics, that’s it.
2 — It is easier to learn a Simplified character knowing the Traditional character than the other way round. Most of the time, you need to remove some strokes, or replace a complex component with a simpler component.
For example: consider the character 仅 (simplified) and 僅 (traditional), which Heisig assigned the keyword merely. In the simplified version, it is made up of the component 亻(keyword person) and 又 (again). In the traditional version, it is 亻(person) and 堇 (spinach).
I find that going from 僅 to 仅 is easier on the brain. The logic is that we’re replacing the component 堇 with 又 for the sake of simplification. To go the other way round from 堇 to 又, I usually have to try to make up a new mnemonic story to incorporate this more complex component into the character. It’s as if I have to learn a new character, with the added danger of mixing it up with a similar mnemonic in my brain.
3 — If you intend to learn Hán tự (Vietnamese characters derived from Chinese), Kanji (Japanese) and Hanja (Korean) later on, then it’s better to study Traditional characters. Since each of these character sets is based on the Traditional character set (with some of their own simplification). For me this is a really nice perk of going Traditional.
4 — If you like calligraphy then consider that people usually do calligraphy in Traditional characters.
5 — If you intend to study through reading comic in the beginning like me, then consider that there are a lot more good quality comic translations (including manga and manhwa) into Traditional characters.
6 — I feel that Heisig’s Remembering the Traditional Hanzi has a better logic to it than his Remembering the Simplified Hanzi. For example in RSH, 丬 is treated as if it’s derived from 兆, while in fact they are completely different components (when I learnt it I did feel something was off because their stroke orders differ so much). In fact 丬 is the simplified version of 爿, as correctly presented in the RTH.
7 — The only reason that I think you should start with Simplified characters is that if you are not a very creative person and needs to rely on https://kanji.koohii.com/ to look up stories created by other people, then consider that koohii seem to have more simplified characters than traditional characters (because it’s more based on kanjis).
If you’re also starting out like me and have this question in mind, hope my insights help you make a more informed decision.
Happy learning :) | https://medium.com/@ryanphung/revisiting-the-question-simplified-chinese-or-traditional-chinese-3088a44b2d50 | ['Ryan Phung'] | 2021-11-10 09:24:26.307000+00:00 | ['Chinese Language', 'Simplified Chinese', 'Chinese', 'Traditional Chinese', 'Heisig'] |
Tycoon @ the age of 6?? | I met one of my friends (hi there Tommy!) last week and told him the latest business story of one of my Kids. Tommy asked if I have more stories to share and once I started pouring more of them — he said that I must share them with other Parents, too.
So here I am — writing my first item on Medium :-)
A little about me — I’m 41, married the Keren (Poonchi), father of Jonathan (YoYo), Daniel (DoonDoon) and Amit (Tooni). Yes — we looooove nicknames… (I’m Shnooki, btw).
YoYo and DoonDoon are 10.5 y/o twins, and Tooni is 6.5 y/o.
I’m working @Dynamo — a startup operating in the Parent-Kid-Smartphone arena. We create value for both Parents and Kids in this domain. Fun!
I wrote a business book for children — Buzz’s Business — which shares little entrepreneurships by a little Kid— Buzz.
So the first story I’d like to share with you is about DoonDoon and how he created — without understanding it (I hope…) — a monopoly when he was 6 years old… Here goes:
One of the activities in my Kids’ school is a yearly market where the Parents donate different products such as fruits, vegetables, sweets, flowers and such. Then all are being sold to Kids in different stands located in the school’s yard.
That year, one of the stands was a Popsicle stand with different flavors. A couple of days after the event my wife received a call from DoonDoon’s teacher… The teacher did not explain much, but simply said that “DoonDoon was a bit of a trouble maker during the market event, something related to the Popsicles”. My wife gave me the job to discuss with DoonDoon what happened there.
As usual in these cases I always ask my Kids in a “by the way mode”. Not calling “yo boy get here now, we need to talk” or something. I learned that I get more information and more authenticity this way.
And in our family the best “by the way” way is while we’re riding our bikes. I used the opportunity when DoonDoon and I went riding together and asked him “How was the market the other day?” and then after he answered the Kids’ ultimate reply “It was fun” I tried to understand what happened there. It went something like this:
Me: I heard that there was an issue with the Popsicles or something?
DD: Yes. The teacher didn’t like what we did.
Me: Interesting. What didn’t she like?
DD: I asked some Kids to buy Popsicles from the stand and then we opened our own stand of Popsicles next to the market’s stands.
Me: (somewhat puzzled…) OK… And the teacher didn’t like it. I think I understand why. But I’ve got to ask you — for how much did you buy the Popsicles in the market stand?
DD: 1.5
Me: And for how much you and your friends sold them in your stand?
DD: 1.5
Me: (feeling like a good parent who will soon teach a lesson) Hmmm DoonDoon — why did you think that anyone will buy from you and not from the original market stand? It’s the same price, no?
And then DoonDoon replied something I wouldn’t have imagined a 6 years old could answer:
DD: Well daddy — I told my friends to buy all the Apricot flavored Popsicles, and this way the Kids who wanted Apricot flavored Popsicle would have to come to our stand. We were the only ones who sold it.
Me: …………. ;-)
Next story: The twins first real profitable business and how I taught them what is P&L (Profit & Loss). | https://medium.com/@nimrodlevin/tycoon-the-age-of-6-5297347e2e7e | ['Nim Bar Levin'] | 2019-12-02 12:31:57.597000+00:00 | ['Parenthood', 'Young Business Leaders', 'Business', 'Family'] |
Using Sequelize as ORM | 1. Sequelize has a CLI
Sequelize has a CLI (Command Line Interface) where I don’t need to really create the folders manually like models, seeders, migrations, and config. It’s a seperate npm package with the core Sequelize package, so I don’t really notice it until I read the bottom of their documentation. All you have to do is
$ npm install sequelize --save
$ npm install sequelize-cli -g --save
$ sequelize init
Sequelize then creates the model, migration, seeder, and config folders. By default it will be created in the root of your project. If I want to set where the folders should be, I only need to create a .sequelizerc file in the root of my project. We can also generate and run the seeding and migration of the database. It’s very convenient in my opinion.
2. Sequelize is ORM only
Unlike some ORM like Waterline (Sails JS) or Loopback, Sequelize only have one main purpose that is to help with database queries and management. I’ve used Sails JS Waterline before and it only supports basic queries (as of version 1) very well but hard to use for a more complex query that I can do in Sequelize, maybe because it focuses more on the whole framework. I haven’t tried other ORM yet but for me personally, Sequelize is a good ORM to use if you don’t really use any framework that include an ORM of their own like express. It supports most of the main stream SQL databases (Mysql, Postgresql, SQLite).
3. Very flexible, yet simple
One of the thing I also loved from Sequelize is that it can perform a more complex query without me having to create a raw query for it. Even though some complex query are not so straight forward, but many were straightforward such as upsert, find and count, ordering based on joined table, and so on. The database configuration is also straightforward and I can create database based on the environment that I’m running it on.
4. A big community
Sequelize have a big community and had helped me a lot when I needed to do something and cannot seem to find the right way to do it. It’s been my saviour for almost two years and any weird questions I asked to google seem to have an answer in Stackoverflow or their github repo issues. It’s a mature ORM (stable version 5 as of now) I must say and also well documented to get started. | https://medium.com/dev-genius/using-sequelize-as-orm-a70455153028 | ['Ringga Gustavino'] | 2020-06-14 13:31:17.774000+00:00 | ['Sequelize', 'Database', 'JavaScript', 'Software Development', 'Postgres'] |
In My Fifties, I’m Finally Learning to Say ‘F*ck You’ | In My Fifties, I’m Finally Learning to Say ‘F*ck You’
How midlife loosened my tongue
Photo: Gwendal Cottin/Unsplash
When I flipped off the speeding truck, I knew things had changed. Sending a hearty “fuck you” to a stranger was a thing I had almost never considered before, but in the moment, it seemed oddly, perfectly natural. I briefly reconsidered the wisdom of this change when he doubled back. And then I did it again.
Walking on my quiet country road in upstate New York, as I do every day, a jumped-up pickup with a tiny red-hat-wearing boy at the wheel came roaring down the road at an unreasonable speed. Frightening, aggressive speed. When he rounded the corner and saw me on the side of the road, he floored it. It scared me, but it also enraged me beyond caring for the fear. Just as he passed, the massive and menacing truck feet from my body, I shot my middle finger high up in the air, thrusting it in his direction with my best angry face and what felt like power. I was shaking, but it felt fabulous, like triumph. Reclaiming my space.
I heard his loud engine slow and stop at the far end of the road. Then it started up again, hurtling back in my direction. He was rounding on me, in his dirty, muscled gray truck. He looked to be younger than any of my kids and smaller than all of us. But he was armored in his noisy vehicle, empowered to terrorize a middle-aged woman out for a walk on her quiet country road. I actually thought, “What would his mother think? Would he treat her this way?” Then I realized, of course he would. He’s mentored by a culture that tells him he is in charge because of his gender and his race, and he can behave any ugly way he’d like. Swagger and bluster, slash and burn. Such a tired, old story.
As he came screaming back in my direction, pumping up his speed at regular intervals in a menacing display of power, I felt a new wave of fear. Terror, even. What was I playing at; who did I think I was? Me, on foot, without weapons save a stream of words and a finger against a rage boy in a big, loud machine. He had the advantage, for sure, though it wasn’t right. It wasn’t respectful or neighborly, and it laid bare the ugly core of our national shame. I felt my anger rising again as this incident felt like a metaphor for so much. He was bearing down on me fast. I was shaking.
As he swept past me again, gunning his engine even more, just feet away, I threw both of my middle fingers in the air, holding them high above my head as he receded in the distance. I wanted to be sure he saw that I had also doubled down. I would not be bullied. The little asshole.
Again, the engine slowed and stopped. I could hear its idling threat at the end of my short road. My righteous indignation vanished and was replaced by pure quaking fear with a healthy side of regret. What exactly was I doing? This was not a game. I turned and started walking quickly for home, which was not far. “Maybe I can make it,” I foolishly thought. “Maybe I’ll beat him. But then he’ll know where I live! He probably already knows; everyone knows everything out here. Shit, Lisa, now you decide to be a tough chick?” Still, the thunderous idle a quarter-mile away, me race-walking home. Then, a tiny red car appeared, heading my way. My husband, home from the grocery. Home to save me from my folly, the public debut of my midlife rage. He escorted me back, and the truck, thankfully, didn’t return. The change was complete, and no one was more surprised than me. I’m leaning hard into it. | https://humanparts.medium.com/in-my-fifties-im-finally-learning-to-say-f-ck-you-215a9a0a27b9 | ['Lisa Renee'] | 2020-11-02 20:21:43.416000+00:00 | ['Language', 'Personal Essay', 'Midlife', 'This Is Us', 'Women'] |
Star Wars, Mandalorian, and The Father Who’s Not There | Yes, it’s Luke! Yes, the de-aged CGI looks freaking weird. Yes, the lightsaber fight is supeerr coool!
But no, that’s not why The Mandalorian season finale is really good. Here’s why.
The most intimate stares in cinema history after Bella & Edward, and Jack, Rose, & the Iceberg.
At its heart, Star Wars is a soap opera.
George Lucas often said that Star Wars is a family drama, a soap opera if you like. It’s not about spaceship, sword fight, or quasi-religion practiced by fighting monks. Yes, it’s what makes Star Wars really fun to watch. But in its core, Star Wars is about the father and son relationship. A story about an absent father figure and its repercussions to the biggest family saga in the galaxy.
The legendary “I am YOUR father,” spoken by Darth Vader (Vader means Father in Dutch language, see?) to Luke Skywalker perhaps is the famous twist in cinema history. Aside from the shock factor (and countless parodies), it sends a seismic shockwave to the story arc and meaning of the saga.
When this happened, it added a layer to the story dynamic. Now, it’s not only about Luke Skywalker’s monomyth hero’s journey. Coined by Joseph Campbell, the idea became what George Lucas based Star Wars on. But now, “I’m Your Father” adds the greek tragedy flavor about a family separated from birth. A boy who never knew his father, siblings who never see each other, and a father who separated from his children. In sum: It’s a family problem.
The Prequels were often slammed for its bad direction (Lucas always mentioned he was never comfortable as director), stiff acting, and corny love story (and also: Gungan). But here’s the thing, George Lucas said what he wanted to achieve in the prequel is to set the pretext of why a kind hearted boy turned into a person full of hate and anger.
The boy Anakin hardly ever had father’s figure in his life. We never know who or what happened to Anakin Skywalker’s biological father. Early on, he already had a close attachment to his mother. His separation from his mother to become a Jedi made him longing for a woman’s presence. Thus, he developed a clinging attachment to Padme.
Anakin then lost a father’s figure when Darth Maul stabbed his lightsaber through Qui-Gon Jinn’s body. He was then left with Obi-Wan, but the young Obi-Wan was never a father figure. A big brother, perhaps, but not a father. Obi-Wan took care of Anakin not because he deeply cared for him, but because he made a promise to Qui-Gon. Perhaps in guilt, the old Obi-Wan becomes a father figure for Luke, Anakin’s son. Something he should have done long ago.
When Anakin lost both his mother and Padme, everything he dear most is lost. He was gone and turned into the dark side. Who doesn’t? Where eventually he got the attention of a father figure that he always craved? Yep…the dark lord, Emperor Palpatine himself.
On The Return of The Jedi, Luke refused to kill the emperor and grab the ultimate power when he had a chance. He loves his father so much, and there’s nothing that can change that. He wanted to become a Jedi, like his father before him. The same reason why Darth Dad turned into Anakin Skywalker once more, and fulfilled his own prophecy to bring balance to the force: love. He decided that he wanted to become a father that he never had.
If we look at that perspective, George Lucas is a genius. And no, don’t take it from me. Take it from Dave Filoni, the guy behind Clone Wars & Mandalorian.
How The Sequels got it wrong
If Lucas still has his way, the sequel would focus on the children of Skywalker. He envisioned it as a grandfather-father-son story. Instead, Disney and J.J. Abrams wanted to have their own shocking plot twist, therefore:
1) Shows that the main protagonist is Rey, and she’s revealed to be the granddaughter of Emperor Palpatine.
2) Ben Solo / Kylo Ren kills his own father, Han Solo.
Now let’s focus on this. It just felt wrong. There is almost no consequence nor justification of this killing. In storytelling there are plants and seeds. You plant a story early, and seed it at the end of it. For every action there is reaction, Newton said.
But now, the message was: Hi, I’m Kylo and I want to be like grandpa, the baddest motherfucker in the galaxy. But…why? Anakin became bad not because he wanted to, it’s because the circumstances regarding his upbringing. In the real world, someone isn’t born bad. What did Han do to Ben when he was a kid? What did Luke do to him at the Jedi Academy? Why is Kylo super into grandad? Who fucked him up?
Perhaps there’s an explanation of Ben upbringing somewhere in Star Wars Legends, terms of storyline that’s not included in the official films/animation series. But why can’t you tell it in three 120-ish minutes films?
And seriously….out of nowhere….Rey is the Emperor’s granddaughter? But then at the last shot of the sequels…booyah! Now I’m a Skywalker, bitch! Ermm excuse me, what the actual fuck? What? How? Why? Who approved this story??
By ignoring the family drama, the sequels abandon the core legacy of the creator of Star Wars.
How The Mandalorian Got it right.
The Mandalorian is a western. A story about a man from nowhere, a stranger doing his own business. Then it slowly revealed Mando’s name, background, and even face. And at its climax, it’s all worth it.
Mando or Din Djarin was portrayed as an orphan. He lost his family when he was young. He grew up with a bunch of ‘extremists’ who raised him with creed, code and honor. Not love. Therefore, Mando barely has any complex emotions. And he should, he is a bounty hunter after all.
Until he met The Child.
In sixteen times we see them, his closeness to Baby Yoda getting closer and closer. At first we see their dynamic as a guardian and protector. Then slowly we realize that throughout the series, Mando is bumbling his way into fatherhood. “Don’t eat that!” Mando said when Baby Yoda ate the frog’s egg. Have you heard that in your own home?
In a way, Mando became a father that he never had. He sympathizes and understands what it means to be alone in the universe.
Like Lucas’ Star Wars, often the best moments in Mandalorian are not necessarily the action piece. It is the emotional connection. It could be when Mando almost lost The Child and got him back at the last minute or the way he held The Child close to his chest.
At heart, Star Wars is about family. Regardless the definition of family is between a Mandalore and a Baby Yoda. Kudos to all the creators behind The Mandalorian. They understood Star Wars. To quote Filoni, “We don’t want only action, we want to feel uplifted, and Star Wars is an adventure that makes you feel good.”
That’s the key reason why Mando farewells Baby Yoda felt really good. There are rumors that Pedro Pascal wanted to have Mando open his helmet more, betraying his character’s creed. Thank god he did.
You can’t trade the most exquisite special effect in cinema with pure human emotion. And Pedro Pascal acting when he sees the CGI creature is just touching. It’s something we always wanted for our soul. We, as humans, fundamentally want to be a good person. We wanted to be selfless and hopeful of things to come. We wanted to be selfless and hopeful with Grogu’s future.
Only real men cry to a green puppet.
I hope Din Djarin’s Mandalorian saga ends there. It should. It’s a perfect way to say goodbye. Losing someone you love is painful, but it makes you grow up. The child has grown, the dream is gone.
That is the way. | https://medium.com/@adhyatmika/star-wars-mandalorian-and-the-father-whos-not-there-449e03db1d49 | [] | 2020-12-21 11:41:26.964000+00:00 | ['Psychology', 'Star Wars', 'Fatherhood', 'The Mandalorian', 'Baby Yoda'] |
Exploring community power with Bethereum | ‘Community’ might be an overused word in cryptocurrency, but it’s one of the most important pieces of this abstract puzzle we are all a part of.
A community is simply a group of individuals that have certain attributes, attitudes or interests in common. As a result of these shared characteristics, this group of individuals is brought together through commonalities which can create a strong, meaningful bond.
The internet has brought communities together by providing places to hang out, interact and engage with one another across the entire world. In today’s digital landscape communities are becoming increasingly important still. Especially here, in our slightly weird and wonderful niche of cryptocurrency, communities are thriving.
There are Ethereum fanatics, Tron maximialists, XRP evangelicals, Bitcoin Cash followers and many more vibrant communities. Crypto has shown that digital communities are extremely valuable and that’s why so many new cryptocurrency projects are so keen to build up one of their own.
The power of Bethereum’s community
The Bethereum team discovered the key ingredients to growing a loyal, engaged community. It is imperative to provide top tier support, exceptional customer service, consistent effort and non-stop engagement. It’s tough — but it’s worth it to grow a community that other projects are envious of.
The community has been an integral part of Bethereum’s focus since the inception of the company. There is continuous work and strategizing put towards devising the next upcoming way to engage the Bethereum community — lovingly named the Bethereans.
Of course — it’s a two way street. Bethereum are always free to listen to what the community has to say. Here’s why:
This is done to keep our players happy and engaged, and of course to make them want to bring their friends to play too, but we feel we benefit from this in more ways. Listening to ideas and feedback from our community members, who naturally share with us the enthusiasm and interest in what we do, helps us to constantly improve. — Bethereum medium
In short, by going above and beyond to create an excellent experience for the community, Bethereum theorizes that community members will feel inclined to play and compete more, or chat and share with their friends more frequently using the Bethereum platform.
Why are communities so important?
A devoted group that supports and uses your product, platform or service is an extremely powerful asset. Dedicated supporters will go to the moon and back for you and will promote your services as much as they can.
Communities are keen to get involved and contribute towards the success of their favourite projects. This means that communities are a great source of product initiatives and ideas — great for the development of any project.
By keeping a community happy, crypto projects are able to spread their brand image and grow their business with less marketing spend than competitors without the community backing. Product champions that tirelessly promote a product can be the best growth tool available.
A look into the Bethereans world
It’s no good just telling you that Bethereum has a strong, engaged community. So we can show you too.
Bethereum Anywhere
At the end of 2019 Bethereum hosted a Twitter competition where the community joined in to share themselves using Bethereum anywhere. An endless stream of pictures came flooding in, showing Bethereum users around the world placing bets and having fun in the most unlikely places.
Even after the competition ended the photos kept coming — just showing how strong and passionate the Bethereum community is. Here are a few of our favourites.
Colosseum, Rome, Italy
Nassfeld, Austria
SiGMA conference 2019 | https://medium.com/bethereum/exploring-community-power-with-bethereum-9cc567e15d3e | [] | 2020-01-29 18:16:04.360000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Community', 'Esport'] |
Hard-to-Recycle: Beauty Packaging 💄 | Every year, 120 billion units of beauty packaging is created. Groundcycle is helping you divert your personal care products at their end-of-life so it doesn’t end up in landfill.
We are collecting: All brands of empty cosmetic, hair care, or skin care packaging. This includes items such as… conditioner bottles and caps; eye liner pencils (non-wooden) and cases; eye shadow tubes; face soap dispensers and tubes; hair gel tubes and caps; hair paste plastic jars and caps; lip balm tubes; lip gloss tubes; lotion bottles, tubes, dispensers, and jars; mascara tubes; plastic concealer tubes and sticks; shampoo bottles and caps; shaving foam tubes (no cans); spray bottles and triggers.
*Do not send in: Aerosol or pressurized cans, electronic items such as blow dryers and straighteners, perfume bottles, nail polish bottles or removers, wooden eyeliner pencils, any bio-medical, bio-hazardous waste, or partially full and full packaging (tubes, jars and containers) such as nail-polish, lotion, soap or ointments.
Why NYC can’t recycle it: Beauty packaging is often made of mixed materials which make it impossible to recycle through traditional means. Other items are rendered too small and get filtered out of the system.
We are diverting it with: TerraCycle. TerraCycle’s Zero Waste Box™ allows you to pay to recycle almost any type of specialty waste stream. The packaging is separated, cleaned, shredded and pelletized so they can turn into various recycled products. Learn more about their process here.
To participate: Add ‘HTR-Beauty Packaging’ to your upcoming service so our driver knows to look out for it. Please place your beauty packaging in a bag and tie it to the handle of your bin for our collection. Do not include them inside your Groundcycle bin with your food scraps as this will contaminate the material and render it unfit for recycling. If you are participating in another one of our recycling initiatives, please store waste streams separately to help us cut down on our additional sorting time.
How long: From September 9 to October 3 | https://medium.com/@groundcycle/hard-to-recycle-beauty-packaging-fdba7e0f04e | [] | 2021-09-08 03:17:02.762000+00:00 | ['Sustainability', 'Recycling', 'Plastic Pollution', 'Plastic', 'Zero Waste'] |
Open letter from the CEO: 2016 will be a defining year | As is customary at the year’s end, I wanted to reflect and write a post for our productboard community. I thought about what to write and then I realized I’d already said it in an internal message to our team. And since we have a culture built on transparency, I decided to turn it into an open letter and share it with all of you here.
I also realized that there has been a lot written about leadership, but there are very few concrete examples, especially from the startup world. I hope you can take something from my post and in return, comment and tell me what you think.
Happy new year to all and thank you so much for being part of productboard!
Sent via Slack: January 1st, 2016:
Happy new year @everyone!
2015 has been an amazing year and I want to take a moment to reflect.
When we entered 2015 there were just three of us, random prototypes, but no real product, no users, no customers, no funding, no office, but we had a strong vision. Vision that we can change the lives of all the people who make product decisions, that we can help startups and corporations alike to make products that people really want.
The beginnings weren’t easy, most people thought we were crazy, most people didn’t believe we can make a difference, but we did.
We grew our team, raised funding, had a great San Francisco hacker house period, participated at conferences, had fun during our retreat in Lisbon, opened real offices. We first launched private beta, interviewed hundreds of product managers, and later gained first paying customers. Our Product Hunt appearance came as an amazing surprise that brought many people’s attention to our endeavor and put us on the map.
We are exiting 2015 with a cutting edge product, with highly differentiated user experience. We have many paying customers and hundreds of users, real revenue coming in, we have a team stronger than ever. Our competitors are rightfully afraid, our customers love us. Lots to be proud of.
My thanks goes to all of you, for your hard work, your perseverance, your creativity, and dedication. Your attention to detail and your desire to make something truly great even if it means long hours and many iterations before perfection is achieved. I am grateful I can be on the team with you.
Not everything went great though. I have made mistakes. I have mis-hired, asked you to build features that we’d scrap or redo later, changed focus a little more than I’d like to. I hope you trust me though, the same way I trust you, that I have the best of intentions and that I do everything I can to learn from and recover from the mistakes I’ve made. I believe you trust me in my goal to make productboard a truly great, world-class and respected company. That you appreciate my desire to make productboard the absolutely number one choice for any product leader and decision maker on earth.
2016 is going to be a defining year.
We need to continue making absolutely amazing product with utterly differentiated user experience. We need to continue investing into scalability, flexibility, security, and our ability to learn incredibly fast.
We need to learn and optimize how to share our vision and the benefits of our service with our target segment in broader market. It will be a lot of creative experimenting and learning, which means a lot of fun. (OK, frustration as well, but mainly fun.)
Thanks to our increasingly validated product-market fit, we will be transitioning from a small, scrappy startup. We will still be a startup but a bit more mature one. We will need to grow the team, learn how to get organized and work together optimally, learn how to sustain our culture. All that while staying focused, dedicated, hungry and nimble. It will require great leadership, brilliant execution, and a can-do attitude. It will be hard, but we know how to do it and I am hopeful we will do great.
We will need to withstand the pressure and lure of really big deals that are off our ideal target segment. I promise to guard us from spreading ourselves too thin, from, as Geoffrey Moore puts it, the deadly sales-driven culture.
When we will look back at the end of 2016, we will see a striving team, hundreds of happy paying customers, we will have unstoppable momentum. We will have touched and improved lives of thousands product leaders all around the world. I am confident about that.
Once again thank you so much for being part of productboard and for all your contribution. I am looking forward to an amazing 2016. My door (and slack) is always open to any feedback, ideas, and suggestions.
Here’s to 2016, here’s to helping product leaders make products people really want.
–Hubert | https://medium.com/productboard/open-letter-from-the-ceo-2016-will-be-a-defining-year-9b18e2f453e3 | [] | 2017-05-30 18:35:53.943000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Company'] |
Flutter Community Submission Guidelines | Greetings!
We want you to write great articles, and we know you want to write great articles.
To that end, we’d like to offer a few tips to help make sure you write the kind of great articles we can publish here at Flutter Community.
Submission
If you would like to have your article featured, please feel free to email or reach out to our Editors on Twitter to let us know. Please do not email us the article. Just let us know that you would like to be added as a writer so that Medium will give you the option to submit the article to the Flutter Community publication.
Note: When submitting articles, please do so in draft mode.
Email: [email protected]
Twitter:
Nash — (@Nash0x7E2)
Simon — (@devangelslondon)
Scott — (@scottstoll2017)
Do’s:
Be informative. People are reading your article because they think you have something to tell them they don’t already know.
Make it a reasonable length. A technical article really should be at least four minutes. Anything shorter than four minutes isn’t really telling people very much and is probably too light in content for us to publish. In the other direction, anything over a nine-minute read tends to make the brain itch. If you’re getting close to nine, see if there’s a place you can break it into parts.
Use a header image in at the top of your article. It may not seem necessary when you’re on your article’s page but when it’s listed with other articles in a list, not having an image is going to make a bad impression. The image isn’t necessarily for those reading your article, it’s for people who are browsing the list on the front page.
Provide a place to pause. When an article is just a wall of text then people don’t absorb it very well. This is why experienced writers break an article up into chunks and have a header for each chunk, like the word “Do’s” over this chunk. It’s not just easier to read, it also provides a place for the reader to stop if they need to talk to someone else, chase their child or save the robot vacuum from the cat.
Add some humor. Make it fun. Toss in a gif of a cat… on a robot vacuum.
Even if you’re not being funny, use images… but make sure they make sense in the context of your article.
If you’re writing a new article that you want to publish in Flutter Community, please submit it to F.C. as a draft and don’t publish it to your own page until we publish it here. For one thing, we catch a ton of errors and you don’t want to put your article out there without first having someone go over it carefully. Second, it really does create some strange problems for us on the backend if you publish first and then submit it. Of course, if you’re submitting an article you published a long time ago, ignore all of this.
Are you talking about code? Then use a gist. Medium doesn’t work with the embed link but you can paste the HTML link from you gist in here and it’ll work just fine.
Be different. If you submit an article about how to parse JSON then we’re probably just going to send you to the links to all the other articles we’ve published about parsing JSON, like this awesome one by Pooja that already has over 3500 claps.
USE THE FREE VERSION OF GRAMMARLY. Unless you’re someone with poor English skills who is writing a fantastic technical article that takes on a topic in a great way, we’re not going to rewrite it for you. If an article is technically outstanding and written by someone who is trying their best to write in English, then we will invest three to five hours to rewrite it for them. We have a number of incredible Arab writers for whom English is not easy and, in the past, we’ve sometimes spent an entire day reworking the English in their articles because the articles were so great, they were worth it.
But if English is clearly your first language and you have spelling errors or can’t get “they’re”, “there” and “their” straight; your submission is going to get bounced back to you.
The last is something that applies to me, personally. I go back and reread every one of my articles about an hour after I publish, again two days after I publish and then again a week after I publish. Every single time I end up in a panic, yelling “WTF WAS I THINKING?!?!” while I frantically try to fix five or six embarrassing errors before anyone else might read the article.
You laugh… try it sometime.
Don’ts
Don’t send in “empty articles”. This means don’t send us pieces that tell the reader nothing they didn’t already know. Don’t send in an article that is just your opinion from start to finish, or that doesn’t contain anything the reader can use.
Don’t write three paragraphs about how you’re going to explain something and then copy the doc comments from the source code and try to pass it off as an article. It’s been tried. It won’t get published.
Don’t put installation instructions for a plugin or package in an article. People reading your article aren’t installing it; they’re reading your article because they’re trying to figure out if they want to install it. Besides, the installation instructions are right there in the Readme, we don’t need another copy of them here.
Don’t send us advertisements disguised as articles. “This is the greatest package ever! It’s so awesome, it’s the most awesomest awesome in the history of awesome!” Then we click on the link and see the article was written by the person who made the package.
Let me try to act shocked and surprised… … … … Nope, can’t do it.
Don’t thank your own repo for being so awesome. Yes, it actually happened…
Don’t spam us with a bunch of tiny articles that are all two to three minutes each, or even less, and don’t have much information in them. Especially when it’s nothing but a link to some package and a cut/paste of the Readme about how to install it. It’s pretty obvious when someone is spamming low-quality articles just because they want to be able to say they’ve written a bunch of published articles.
Don’t send us an article if we’ve already published a bunch of good articles on that topic unless the SDK has changed and you’re writing to tell people how to handle the new version, including how it differs from the way things were done before.
If a change in the SDK results in any existing article being wrong, then please let us know. We’ll pull the old one and start actively looking for a replacement. That’s going to happen quite a bit over the next couple of years; so if you’re looking for an opportunity to break into writing, then keep your eyes open. There will be plenty.
In Summary
We want you to write great stuff that we can post. The more great content people can find at Flutter Community, the better it is for everyone. But, at the same time, we can’t just fill up space with things that will leave people feeling like being here was a waste of time, or like they were being spammed with ads disguised as articles.
So remember… Be different, be informative, use Grammarly, don’t advertise and for goodness sake, don’t forget the most important thing:
Cat gifs get claps. | https://medium.com/flutter-community/flutter-community-submission-guidelines-acf359177d51 | ['Scott Stoll'] | 2019-09-08 15:44:21.529000+00:00 | ['Guidelines', 'Writing'] |
Alternative reasoning is an art. | Let’s take this popular interview question as an example to see how we can balance our arguments.
Would you rather work independently or in a team? | https://medium.com/whatisepeolatry/alternative-reasoning-is-an-art-20cd9eae8979 | ['Vanessa P'] | 2021-03-05 18:15:32.561000+00:00 | ['Speech', 'Linguistics', 'Communication', 'Language'] |
A Love Letter to LA Offers a Haunting Magic | at Launch Gallery, Los Angeles (through November 16)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
Magic is the word that first comes to mind when describing the two-artist exhibition currently at Launch Gallery. A Love Letter is an exhibition of landscapes — quintessentially Los Angeles landscapes — that serve as landmarks for both the city’s, and the artists’, zeitgeist.
While the very word “landscape” is meant to describe the portrayal of scenic views, in this exhibition that scenery encompasses more than a cityscape or forest; it includes a personal landscape, a view of the world as defined by the City of Angels in which the artists reside. Both seem clearly in love with the town whose very name conjures images of winged beings flitting among the neon signs and hiking paths, past palms and flowering trees, bringing both darkness and light, perhaps intertwined.
Lynne McDaniel, Left
Lindsey Warren, Pasadena Water Tower
The result for these artists are works that feature a profusion of light and a realm of surprising stillness even in the most urban of scenes. Trees abound — Lynne McDaniel’s trees are often a forest, deciduous or evergreen, and while taken from her own walks in the LA area, they have a quality that essentially defines LA; Lindsey Warren focuses on palms, and when she includes other trees they have a more exotic, decidedly Southern California nature.
Warren has created vibrant oil-on-canvas works that fully embrace the film-industry-coined description of the “Magic Hour,” that brief time when the blue sky goes gold before fading into an overripe sunset. Her images are stylistically heightened photorealism, depicting buildings and traffic lights, palm trees and street scenes, all under near-twilight and ever-glowing skies. The views represent a time that seems to be an eternal summer, a narrative California dream constructed from landscape. Warren tells her story of the city, capturing its architecture, flora and fauna, and above all the quality of its sky — of day on the edge of transition into night.
Lindsey Warren, Hollywood Forever
Lindsey Warren, Mt Washington Specimens
Warren offers the shadows of palms: palms over buildings, palms gracing a prosaic stoplight. She gives us wavering fronds and tropical blooms, such as a white bird of paradise. Her trees and plants overall have either a tropical or desert feel, and are lingeringly green even as the sky darkens them to near-silhouettes. One of my favorite works includes a full moon and two palms so close together that they seem lovingly paired, their green and brown fronds still sun-kissed.
In Venice Twilight, a radiant painting that reveals a section of the Venice skyline, the central structure highlights windows that reflect the coming sunset, embraced by a semi-circle of seven palms. Other city skyline paintings feature only a few distant trees; in one, Inglewood Sunset, a plane soars overhead in a patch of blue above the gold and orange sunset, while billboards and the curved poles of streetlights serve as stand-ins for plant life. Palms and other trees cluster again, pure silhouettes, in the glowing sunset hovering over Hollywood Forever.
Lindsey Warren, Venice Twilight
Each of Warren’s light-filled works are steeped in LA sunshine, burgeoning sunsets, shadows imprinted on sidewalks called into existence by the sun. When moonlight is present, it is yet in thrall to the last embrace of sunlight. Warren, an LA native, has found a dream-perfect technicolor palette to make even viewers the most skeptical of the city’s charms thrill at the chance to celebrate them. Having been away from Los Angeles on the east coast for a number of years, she returned to her hometown three years ago and is clearly embracing its history, its poetry, and seeing the city with fresh, visionary eyes.
Lynne McDaniel, Eastbank
Lynne McDaniel’s rich, mostly monochromatic oils on paper are darker and moodier than Warren’s. McDaniel paints verdant, bucolic scenes, yet in some works, such as her 2019 Eastbank, she creates a reminder of a world that may be teetering on the edge of apocalypse. McDaniel often goes dark, emotionally, in her work, and says here she was trying to depict solely the lush landscape around her home and studio in the Arroyo Seco. “But, I couldn’t help myself,” she laughs. “I did add in a few less peaceful images.” In the afore-mentioned, large-scale work, McDaniel’s luxuriant, tree-filled scene has wavering bits of red: the imminent disaster of fire in the fertile hills. Already the dark trees seem filled not just with the shadow of nightfall but smoky, as if the artist’s panoramic view grants us one last, lush look at nature, all too easily turned to ash.
Lynne McDaniel, Untitled (arroyo)
Lynne McDaniel, Redflag
A beautiful series of drawings created on accordion-fold paper in charcoal and graphite, January 2015, gives a stunning series of views along a road that leads into the woods. The road appears to be dirt, the view is long, more trees tower like cathedrals in the distance. The scene is both intensely peaceful, filled with dusky quiet, and also haunting. Where does this road lead? How dark will those trees be when the road at last comes to an end?
Lynne McDaniel, Untitled (arroyo)
More ethereal is her 2019 Untitled (arroyo). This painting gives us a view of trees that are carefully delineated; we see them as separate entities rather than forest. The scene is a captured moment, a moment’s rest from a hike in the woods. The trees are watchful and waiting. They seem to ask what will the person watching thembring? If the trees offer shelter and shade and rest, will the person viewing the scene appreciate that peacefulness, or shatter it?
McDaniel describes her work in general as a response to the environmental issues facing California: from climate change to fires, drought. But the works exhibited here are also beautiful, dense images taken from her daily walks near her studio. The primarily black and white palette evokes old photographs and 19th century Hudson River School landscape artists, such as Thomas Cole, if the gold and green hills in The Oxbow had been viewed from a more intimate perspective and gone black. Her work serves as a modern take on romanticism and dotted with an entirely original sense of the ominous and glorious.
Lynne McDaniel, Bridge
Lynne McDaniel, Hill
Like Warren, McDaniel’s work is luminous, a tribute to light and shadow and the sensuous beauty of Los Angeles. It is both real landscape and dream — a heightening of the senses, an expression of love for the city and the nature within and around it. Simply put, both artists’ work and their differing landscapes quench the thirst of viewers longing to drink deep the magic of this golden metropolis.
@riotmaterial | https://cvonhassett.medium.com/a-love-letter-to-la-offers-a-haunting-magic-d0d43bc6a48e | ['Riot Material'] | 2019-10-28 15:23:21.387000+00:00 | ['Art', 'Painting', 'Photography', 'Artist', 'Review'] |
How Beyoncé Became a Black Man’s God | How Beyoncé Became a Black Man’s God
After years of feeling excluded by the megastar’s music, I finally converted to the Beyhive
Photo: Travis Matthews ©2020 Parkwood Entertainment
In a Brooklyn bar one night, a bestselling author called me a Beytheist. A Beyoncé atheist, a nonbeliever. The Mrs. Carter Show World Tour had touched down at the Barclays Center that evening, and the BK crew wanted to know what I thought of the concert. Michael Jackson wowed me at Madison Square Garden in high school; Janet’s theatrics, pyrotechnics, and killer choreography blew me away through four different performances in the ’90s; Madonna’s Girlie Show tour, too. I said that Beyoncé fit in that tradition, but anything less than “Beyoncé is God” fell on deaf ears. I’d blasphemed and been excommunicated. I think the Beyologian (Beyoncé theologian) still mutes me on social media to this day.
I would be converted, though. First came Beyoncé, the 2013 surprise that dropped complete with music videos for each song. Lemonade and Homecoming strengthened my faith. And after this weekend’s Black Is King, I am now a firm believer that Bey is the MJ of our time. This is my testimony.
Sweet Beyhive, please don’t swarm down upon me. Forgive me when I confess that when Destiny’s Child dominated BET and the dance floors of my late twenties, I thought the Child to watch was LaTavia Roberson. When I first bumped into the most commercially successful girl group of all time, an editor had charged me with interviewing veejay-turned-talk-show-host Ananda Lewis over at MTV. She’d just wrapped up a segment with Destiny’s Child, and introduced me to the four members. I was far more excited to meet Ananda; I barely gave 18-year-old Beyoncé Giselle Knowles a glance.
Truth was, Destiny’s Child didn’t really speak to me. And upon the group’s disbandment, solo Beyoncé didn’t speak to me either. As a cishet male, I never felt her body of work took me into consideration. I don’t mean that I thought that was her responsibility. But the subject of “Bills, Bills, Bills” was a trifling, good-for-nothing scrub. The dudes addressed on “Bootylicious” weren’t ready for the jelly. Per “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” if we liked her then we should’ve proposed marriage. “Irreplaceable” said she could replace me in a minute, and in fact, he was on his way over. Dancing to her hits on dates or at parties felt obligatory, even embarrassing — and I’m sure a lot of straight men can relate. Loving Beyoncé meant embracing a level of masochism I wasn’t built for.
All the amazing music hung together as more than a collection of singles, more cohesive than everything she’d done before. When I wasn’t looking, Beyoncé became the center around which the pop universe revolved.
Yes, Janet Jackson asked “What Have You Done for Me Lately.” Madonna’s feminist anthems, like “Express Yourself,” weren’t written with me in mind either. But their music, personas, and presentations still convinced me to press play over and over on classic albums like The Velvet Rope and Ray of Light. Despite its obviously empowering overtones, something about Beyoncé’s music always felt like a middle finger, a great big “boy, bye.” I can remember when her solo career seemed questionable; her success wasn’t a fait accompli, believe it or not. Her very first single — “Work It Out,” from the Austin Powers in Goldmember soundtrack — didn’t even crack the Billboard Hot 100, though her hula-hooping in the video was hella hypnotic.
And yet here we be. Rolling Stone ranks “Crazy in Love” higher on its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list (#118) than anything by either Janet or Madonna. In 2020, Beyoncé is pop music’s gold standard, and I for one now worship at the hem of her rainbow Thierry Mugler minidress.
I can’t say I deliberately listened to Dangerously in Love, B’Day, I Am… Sasha Fierce, or 4 more than once. (I know. Heresy.) But Beyoncé baptized me. I surfborted the wave of her internet-breaking album the night it appeared out of nowhere, and by 5 a.m. had written — I swear — the first review of Beyoncé on the internets. Visual albums weren’t new to my generation. Weren’t Purple Rain and Under the Cherry Moon Prince’s visual albums? Certainly the Rhythm Nation 1814 short film qualifies, among others. Beyoncé, though! All the amazing music hung together as more than a collection of singles, more cohesive than everything she’d done before. When I wasn’t looking, Beyoncé became the center around which the pop universe revolved.
I love a good concept album inspired by real-life ish artists go through. I grew up on stuff like my parents’ What’s Going On, the Motown classic created out of the Vietnam War experience of Marvin Gaye’s brother. Lemonade marked the fissure and reconciliation of her marriage to Jay-Z, set to Daughters of the Dust-worthy visuals and more incredible music. Does it appeal to my arty snobbism that Beyoncé seemed to set the pop-hit formula aside to hunt down higher art in her visual albums era? Definitely, though it’s not lost on anybody that all her secured bags from HBO, Netflix, and Disney+ in the past four years mean she’s even richer without topping the singles charts.
Homecoming aesthetically built on what she started when she mentioned she liked her “Negro nose with Jackson 5 nostrils” on Lemonade’s “Formation.” Meaning, she doubled down on serving up triple-stage Blackity-Black culture to her audience, White fans be damned. As a Morehouse grad, I soaked in all the easily recognizable HBCU marching band drumline rat-a-tat-tat in the Coachella performance that Bey later flipped into her Netflix concert special. As a proud Alpha, I picked up all the fraternity choreography and Greek letter imagery that went into the bombastic show. Beyoncé spoke to me. One of the grandest displays of African Americana in music that the world’s ever seen, Homecoming earned a place in the Black Smithsonian from day one.
Her newest project, this weekend’s pan-Africanist, Afrobeat-infused visual album Black Is King, has already stimulated deep-seated emotion (the empowering “Brown Skin Girl”) and a fair amount of critical thinking. Some have noted that Disney+ isn’t available on the African continent, questioning who this Wakandified version is really for. (Black Is King in fact streams in several African countries on the M-Net and Canal+ Afrique networks.) The images of hyperaffluent Africans — filmed in sections of Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa — serve a sweet spot in the Black American psyche that understandably loves to see our people dripping in prosperity, the way many of us prefer to imagine our ancestors and the precolonial motherland. Contrarians blasted Bey’s affirmation of capitalism and noted that none of her world tours have stopped through Africa. The fact that there are even two sides to the story of Black Is King proves that her art has transcended to another level.
“Y’all haters corny with that Illuminati mess,” Beyoncé dissed on Lemonade’s “Formation,” a response to actual accusations from conspiracy theorists about her membership in that theoretical secret order. A close friend had turned me onto the idea years before Bey addressed it, pointing out all the supposedly occult symbolism in her videos and explaining why he wouldn’t support her anymore. Seeing her at Citi Field in 2016 for the Formation World Tour, I laughed at the Jumbotrons during her performance of “Don’t Hurt Yourself.” Singing the line “Love God herself,” both screens the length of a baseball stadium flashed “GOD IS GOD. I AM NOT.” I expected no less from a humble Southern girl raised Christian down in Houston. Beyoncé is not a Five Percenter; she’s Beyoncé.
And yet. Midway through Black Is King, someone drops this voiceover: “I can’t say I believe in God and call myself a child of God and then not see myself as a god.” In an album of lyrics and Warsan Shire poetry full of ideas about royalty, manhood, and the beauty of Blackness, the quote can float by. But whoever it comes from, Beyoncé approved its inclusion, and the line recalls my favorite Bible verse. Psalm 82:6 reads, “Ye are gods and all of you are children of the Most High.” That said, Beytheism is long behind me. Yes, Beyoncé is God… aren’t we all? | https://level.medium.com/how-beyonc%C3%A9-became-a-black-mans-god-4edbac9c6a44 | ['Miles Marshall Lewis'] | 2020-08-03 14:13:43.781000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'Music', 'Beyonce'] |
Lust and the Vitality of Man | Photo by C D-X on Unsplash
The intoxicating allure of the flesh, the burn and fire of pleasure, and the exhilaration of women have been both a blessing and a curse in our lives. As men, we are lonelier and more afraid than ever before. We live lives of dissipation, intoxicated with pleasure that cannot fulfill, and feel the deep-seated fear that we are not really men, but boys pretending to be something we are not.
Sure, many of us might make a lot of money. We may have reached the heights of power in the worldly sense. A select few may even feel that they have “mastered” women, in a way that inflates the ego beyond measure. But little if any of us possess real virtue, that quality of heart that is the true token of manliness, and is only tried in a fire that few of us have really tested. The fire of virtue is one where very little external reward is found. The fruit is personal, internal, spiritual. No one may see it, but it may be the key to finding an existence where we no longer have to feel like we are hiding behind eyes that betray a lie. We all put up a front, pretending to be confident, arrogant, and cool. We might be able to fool ourselves for a time, but our actions continue to reinforce seeds of doubt.
It is as if women have seen that we as men betray a lack of vitality. They see it in our eyes, our actions, the way we interact with them. There is no middleman between the arrogant player and the shy nice guy who can’t muster so much as a hello. We are either too cocky or not confident enough. Unfortunately, it seems that both minds are still rooted in lust. The arrogant men among us are driven by sex and a deep need for it. It is a way to accomplish the incessant demands of the ego, to feel validated as a man, and to create power where there can only be a sense of disconnect and misuse of a great gift. The nice guy might pretend to be better, to be somehow more “heroic” or a type of saint. He pretends to respect women, but he will not admit that he actually worships them. He has no respect because his mind is rooted in lust as much as the arrogant. He has given himself to a false god of worship in a way that the cocky worship themselves. More often than not we fall into one of these two categories, but neither one is yet to transcend lust.
To find the true vitality of man, where the joy of life fills every breath, where the spirit of goodness is more than sexual pleasure, requires a sacrifice of that social prerogative that maddens us in a quest for sex and power. We need to redefine what power and pleasure are to begin to thirst for something different and profound. This requires a new type of ideal. We chase that banker, entrepreneur, executive type of power. We chase the type of power where we can have endless access to money and all the pleasure that goes with it. Endless women, endless sex, seem to be a huge motivator for us. But how many of us, deep down, hate that ideal? We only serve its end because we are slaves to our desires. The man of the forest, the man that wields ax and sword, the man who is attuned to nature and to women, has all but died.
The quest for vitality must begin with a realization of the weakness we have succumbed to, and the cheap alternatives we have chosen for life. It would be amazing to see what we would seek if we were not tied down to an attachment to sex. How much of our power-seeking is aligned to a craving for sex? How much “power” would we be allowed to forego, if we could seek an alternative quest that would be much more satisfying? We must not let lust dissipate the fire within, and allow it to lead us to a life that is good, but not great. There is no alternative to the battle that must be waged to find this life. We are afraid to face the pain that feels unnatural, unfair, unmerited. We are bitter that we cannot find love, we are bitter that our lives are only pain, and we are bitter that we feel so empty. It is only in facing this darkness that we will be able to be truly free from it. Our love must be transformed beyond the distorted form it has taken. It has become ugly and twisted by its self-centeredness. It has taken the form of temporary thrill with heightened misery. Only when the heart looks outward will we begin to crave more than a body. Until our heart yearns for something more, for something higher, there will be nothing motivating enough to forego the pleasures of the flesh. | https://medium.com/@benjaminavery77/lust-and-the-vitality-of-man-ea7a6be68392 | ['Benjamin Avery'] | 2020-12-19 04:35:43.792000+00:00 | ['Beauty', 'Power', 'Mindset', 'Lust', 'Love'] |
React Hooks (Conceptual Understanding) — Part 1 | Master React Hooks Step By Step
Hooks Defined
Hooks are functions that let you “hook into” React state and lifecycle features from function components. Hooks don’t work inside classes — they let you use React without classes.
If you are already famililiar with hooks also head over to Building an Input/Tagging Component tutorial using React Hooks.
Hook 1 — useState
First and foremost we will learn in detail about useState to manage state in functional component.
Example 1 : useState with simple value
With useState we can use state in a functional component.
Let’s understand useState with the help of a simple example. (Ignore the CSS in the examples as they are not the topic under discussion)
import React, {useState} from 'react'; export default function Counter() {
const [counter, setCounter] = useState(0);
return (
<div className="content">
<h1 className="count">{counter}</h1>
</div>
);
}
So, we have a very simple function that uses useState and renders an h1 wrapped within a div. The counter is being displayed within the h1 tag.
The output will be the value 0 displayed on the screen.
The output will be 0 displayed on the screen.
The working source code is here
Let’s dissect how this works.
What does calling useState do?
useState takes in an initial state as a parameter and returns an array with two objects. First, the state value that you passed and second, an updater function, which can be used to modify the state.
Internally react preserves this state value. So, when the component is rendered again because of state changes, the latest value is always available.
NOTE: Since the functional component doesn’t have render method whenever the state changes the entire function code component is executed. React internally manages to diff and state for optimization and also preserves the state.
What do we pass to useState as an argument?
The only argument to the useState() hook is the initial state. Unlike classes, the state doesn’t have to be an object. We can keep a number or a string if that’s all we need. I
We could also pass in an object to useState.
NOTE: We can create multiple state variables by using useState multiple times as shown below.
const [counter, setCounter] = useState(0);
const [error, setError] = useState('');
In the above, the counter variable is initialized to 0 and the error variable is initialized to empty string.
What does useState return?
It returns a pair of values: the current state and a function that updates it. This is why we write const [counter, setCounter ] = useState(0) . This is similar to this.state.count and this.setState in a class, except you get them in a pair.
Tip: What Do Square Brackets Mean?
You might have noticed the square brackets when we declare a state variable:
const [counter, setCounter] = useState(0);
The names on the left aren’t a part of the React API. You can name your own state variables:
const [count, setState] = useState(0);
This JavaScript syntax is called “array destructuring”. It means that we’re making two new variables count and setState , where count is set to the first value returned by useState , and setState of the second one is an updater function which can be used to modify the state (count in this case).
For Demo Purpose Only
For e.g. internally useState may be implemented as shown below (code is for reference only and does not represent the original react useState code). Note the return part of the useState function. It returns the state and an updater function.
const useState = function (istate){
let _state; // local state // sequence hooks, are internally defined in this case.
if (sequence == undefined) {
sequence = sequenceGen();
} _key = sequence(); // internal implementation
let hook = hooks[_key]; // Get from hook store
if (hook == undefined) {
hooks[_key] = istate;
_state = istate;
} else {
_state = hook;
} // Updater function
let _updater = (k,newState) => {
_state = newState;
hooks[k] = newState;
return _state;
} //Bind the _updater with the key as 1st parameter
_updater = _updater.bind(null, _key); return Object.freeze([
_state,
_updater
]);
}
The most important part is the return function. When you call useState you get an array back with two objects, the first one is the state value and the second one and updater function as shown above.
Example 2: Updating state using the updater function
To update state we will use the updater function returned by the useState method call.
For e.g. to update the counter we can use the below code, anywhere, maybe on click of a button, etc.
setCounter(counter+1);
NOTE: Don’t do
setCounter (counter ++)
as it means
counter = counter + 1
And since counter variable is const (best practice) it will give you error or no updates will happen.
Let’s see an example of this. We will add two buttons, to the page. One will increase the counter when clicked and the other will decrease the counter.
We will write an increment() and decrement() helper function which will be respectively invoked from the button click.
Code Extract:
function Counter() {
const [counter, setCounter] = useState(0);
function increment() {
setCounter(counter+1);
}
function decrement() {
setCounter(counter-1);
}
return (
<div className="content">
<h1>My Awesome Counter </h1>
<hr/>
<h2 className="count">{counter}</h2>
<div className="buttons">
<button onClick={increment}>+</button>
<button onClick={decrement}>-</button>
</div>
</div>
);
}
The output of the above is shown below.
Full Source code of updating state is here
Example 3: Better Practice: Use the updater function with the functional parameter
The updater function also takes a function as a parameter just like setState. This is useful when you are dealing with asynchronous bugs and your state updates are interdependent.
So, instead of
setCounter(counter+1);
Use the functional updater function
setCounter((prevState) => prevState + 1);
A working example is here
function Counter() {
const [counter, setCounter] = useState(0);
function increment() {
setCounter((prevState) => prevState + 1);
}
function decrement() {
setCounter((prevState) => prevState - 1);
}
return (
<div className="content">
<h1>My Awesome Counter </h1>
<hr/>
<h2 className="count">{counter}</h2>
<div className="buttons">
<button onClick={increment}>+</button>
<button onClick={decrement}>-</button>
</div>
</div>
);
}
The output remains the same.
Example 4: Using multiple state variables
Let us know see how to use multiple state variables. Let’s add a feature to show error message, when the counter goes negative.
Let’s create a variable to hold the error state.
const [error, setError] = useState("");
Let’s modify the JSX as shown below.
{ error.length > 0 && <div className="animated error">
{error}
</div>
Here we are checking for the presence of error and if true we display the message.
Now, to make it work let’s modify the increment() and decrement() function.
First’ let’s take a look at the decrement function. In the decrement function if the counter is 0 and if you click the decrement button we change the error state.
NOTE: Whenever you call any updater function, the React component is re-rendered on the next cycle.
function decrement() {
if (counter == 0) {
setError("You cannot order negative quantity!");
return;
}
setCounter((prevState) => prevState - 1);
}
NOTE: I am using both the functional syntax and non functional syntax for your reference. In this case both will work without any issue as we are not sequentially accessing state value immediately after state change.
Now, let’s also modify the increment() function. As once the valid action is performed the error has to be cleaned.
function increment() {
if (error.trim() != "") {
setError("");
}
// Here variable name could be any thing.
// I am calling it as prevState, you can also call it as
// prevCounter
setCounter((prevState) => prevState + 1);
}
In the increment function first we check if any errors were there and if yes we reset the error to empty and invoke the updater function.
The full code in action is here
NOTE: I have added some CSS and animation to make it pretty.
Example 5: use multiple state attributes with single updater function (issues and tips)
Now, if you keep multiple attributes withing one updater function, then you have ensure that all state properties are manually merged (setState automatically merges properties)
For. e.g.
const [user, setUser] = useState({username: 'r', password: 'a'});
The above code blocks creates a state variable user, which contains two attributes/properties, username and password and one updater function setUser.
Next create an input screen (jsx) for capturing username and password. We assign name attribute to each input so that we can refer it later.
<div className="row">
<div className="fields">
<label>Username</label>
<input type="text" name="username" onChange={handleChange}
placeholder="enter username" />
</div>
</div>
<div className="row">
<div className="fields">
<label>Password</label>
<input type="text" name="password" onChange={handleChange}
placeholder="enter password" />
</div>
</div>
We also have to create a handleChange function to capture the user input and store it within the state variables using updater function, setUser
function handleChange(e) {
setUser({
[e.target.name] : e.target.value
});
}
So, here we are invoking the setUser function and updating the property dynamically, only those property which is changed.
e.target.name
refers to the input whose value is getting changed.
The problem with this approach is that , as the updater function doesn’t automatically merge the properties, you will see weird behavior, i.e. if you enter username, then the password field gets emptied and vice-versa.
You can see the problem in action here
To fix this issue change the handle change function as shown below.
function handleChange(e) {
setUser({
...user, //Merge properties with using objects with useState
[e.target.name] : e.target.value
});
}
Here, we first merges all the user properties and then updates the specific property as needed.
The fixed code in action is here
Hook 2— useReducer
The second hook is the useReducer hook. Those who love working with redux may find this interesting. React now provides a built in useReducer hook, which can be used instead of the redux library.
It’s an alternative to useState . It accepts a reducer of type (state, action) => newState , and returns the current state paired with a dispatch method. (If you’re familiar with Redux, you already know how this works.).
NOTE: useState returns and updater function and useReducer returns a dispatch function, which can be used to dispatch or call various actions.
useReducer is usually preferable to useState when you have complex state logic that involves multiple sub-values (the username , password example, thought it's not complex, but real objects can get bigger) or when the next state depends on the previous one. useReducer also lets you optimize performance for components that trigger deep updates because you can pass dispatch down instead of callbacks. (from react docs)
First’ let's define our reducer.
// YOU CAN NAME THIS REDUCER, as CounterReducer to make it more
// meaningful function reducer(state, action) {
switch (action.type) {
case "increment":
return {
...state,
counter: state.counter + 1
}
case "decrement":
return {
...state,
counter: state.counter - 1
}
case "reset":
return {
...state,
counter: Number(action.value)
}
default:
return state;
}
}
NOTE: The only mandatory thing is the action parameter should have a type property.
Let’s also define an initial state ( we are creating this as a const outside our main component).
const defaultState = {counter: 0, someothervalues: "test"};
NOTE: someothervalues is not of significance.
Now, withing our Counter component, create a reducer and initialize it.
const [state, dispatch] = useReducer(reducer, defaultState);
The state is stored in const/variable and the dispatch will be used to modify the state.
We will create increment, decrement and reset JSX to test the dispatch action.
<div className="buttons">
<button onClick={()=> dispatch({type:"increment"})}>+</button>
<button onClick={()=> dispatch({type:"decrement"})}>-</button>
<button onClick={
()=> dispatch({type:"reset", value:value})}>reset
</button>
</div>
Dispatching action
To dispatch the action on the button click we simply have to invoke/call the function by passing the action type.
And voila you have your reducer feature implemented in functional component.
In the demo code, below I also show how to use useState along with reducer. So, the hooks are quite flexible and you can adapt it to your needs.
The full code in action
Hook 3— useEffect
The next important hook is useEffect. The useEffect hook allows us to hook into the lifecycle of the component, like componentDidMount, componentDidUpdate, componentWillUnmount. So this one function plays the role of about three lifecycle events from class component.
Do note, though, the functional component doesn’t have a lifecycle event, but then hook allows us to perform this operation, as real use cases need this feature.
Let’s begin with a simple example. Now we want to execute some code on each render, including first and subsequent. The following example demonstrates it.
Usage
The useEffect function takes a callback function which will be executed on render.
Example 1: useEffect — Runs always (on all render) (componentDidMount and componentDidUpdate)
function TestUseEffect() {
const [count, setCount] = useState(0);
useEffect(() => {
console.log(`RENDER: Count: ${count}`);
});
return (
<div>
<p>useEffect api</p>
<p>Count: {count}
<button onClick={() => setCount(count + 1) }>+</button>
</p>
</div>
)
}
To use this refer the code block below
function App() {
return (
<div className="App">
<h1>Hello</h1>
<h2>Start editing to see some magic happen!</h2>
<TestUseEffect />
</div>
);
}
const root = document.getElementById("root");
ReactDOM.render(<App />, root);
So, if you click on the button (open up the console window/browser dev tools), you will see the log getting outputted each time the render happens.
NOTE: You can have more than one useEffect() call in the same component.
Now, sometimes, we don’t want some function/or feature to be executed on each render, but only on the first render, like componentDidMount of a class component.
Let’s see how to achieve componentDidMount feature with useEffect.
Example 2: useEffect — On first mounting only (like componentDidMount)
Typically this is required when you need to fetch some data or other operations when the component first mounts.
function TestUseEffectDidMount() {
const [count, setCount] = useState(0);
useEffect(() => {
console.log('componentDidMount fetch Data...');
}, []); // The empty array is the key
return (
<div>
<p>TestUseEffectListener</p>
<p>Count: {count}
<button
onClick={() => setCount(count + 1) }>
+
</button>
</p>
</div>
)
}
To use this effect refer the code below
function App() {
return (
<div className="App">
<h1>Hello</h1>
<h2>Start editing to see some magic happen!</h2>
<TestUseEffect />
<TestUseEffectDidMount />
</div>
);
} const root = document.getElementById("root");
ReactDOM.render(<App />, root);
Passing an empty array[] as the second parameter, makes the useEffect runs only once.
Passing an empty array [] tells React that your effect doesn’t depend on any values from props or state, so it never needs to re-run.
If you run the application and open-up the console, you will see the log only gets outputted on first render.
Example 3: useEffect — simulate componentDidUnmount
Let’s simulate componentDidUnmount with useEffect. The useEffect function can return an optional cleanup function
Let’s create a simple component that will be unmounted.
function TestUseEffectUnMount(props) {
const [count, setCount] = useState(1);
const {onCountChange} = props; useEffect(() => {
// Do something here
return () => {
console.log('componentUnmount cleanup...');
}
}, []);
return (
<div>
<p>TestUseEffectUnMount</p>
Count: {count}
<button onClick={() => setCount(count + 1) }>+</button>
<button onClick={() => {setCount(count - 1);
onCountChange(count)} }>-</button>
</div>
)
}
NOTE: The useEffect here returns a callback function. Here you can do the necessary cleanup like removing eventhandlers, reference cleanup etc.
This component takes a prop which has a callback function called onCountChange. So when the counter changes when clicking on the decrement (-) button, this component informs the parent component.
Let’s take a look at the parent component that uses <TestUseEffectUnMount/> component.
function App() {
const [show, toggleVisibility] = useState(true);
const onCountChange = (count) => {
alert(count);
if (count <= 0) {
toggleVisibility(!show);
}
}
return (
<div className="App">
<h1>Hello</h1>
<TestUseEffectDidMount />
{
show && <TestUseEffectUnMount onCountChange={onCountChange}
/>}
</div>
);
}
Do note here the parent component <App/> is passing a callback handler onCountChange to <TestUseEffectUnMount> component.
So, when the count changes and alert is shown the and the visibility of the show variable is toggled.
Also, in the return statement the <TestUseEffectUnMount> is only shown if the show variable is true.
So, what happens here is when the counter reaches 0 (on clicking the decrement ‘-’ button, this callback is invoked and the condition becomes false, and the Component will not be rendered thereby firing the cleanup from the useEffect hook.
Let’s mount this component.
const root = document.getElementById("root");
ReactDOM.render(<App />, root);
Take a look at the completed demo codepen url below.
Example 4: useEffect — Optimizing Performance by Skipping Effects
In some cases, cleaning up or applying the effect after every render might create a performance problem. In class components, we can solve this by writing an extra comparison with prevProps or prevState inside componentDidUpdate :
componentDidUpdate(prevProps, prevState) {
if (prevState.query!== this.state.query) {
// make an ajax call
this.setState(...);
}
}
This requirement can be achieved with the useEffect Hook API. You can tell React to skip applying an effect if certain values haven’t changed between re-renders. To do so, pass an array as an optional second argument to useEffect :
useEffect(() => {
console.log(`Query param changed to ${query}`);
}, [query]); // Only re-run the effect if query changes
In the example above, we pass [query] as the second argument. What does this mean? If the query is mumbai , and then our component re-renders with query still equal to mumbai , React will compare ['mumbai'] from the previous render and ['mumbai'] from the next render. Because all items in the array are the same mumbai == mumbai , React would skip the effect. That’s our optimization.
If the query changes to some other value, say delhi due to user action then the effect will fire.
See the <OptimizedComponent/> output in the codepen below.
The complete example can be experimented here (Keep the browser console window open to verify the log messages)
Tip (from React docs)
Unlike componentDidMount or componentDidUpdate , effects scheduled with useEffect don’t block the browser from updating the screen. This makes your app feel more responsive. The majority of effects don’t need to happen synchronously. In the uncommon cases where they do (such as measuring the layout), there is a separate useLayoutEffect Hook with an API identical to useEffect .
Hook 4— useContext
The useContext hook enables to hook onto the react context api. It comes in very handy to avoid prop drilling.
Steps to use context API
Import useContext Use React.createContext to create the shareable context (multiple components will use this) Create a Provider (ThemeProvider in this case) and set the value to be the object that needs to be shared across component. useContext as required in child components.
First import the useContext
const {useReducer, useState, useContext} = React;
OR
import {useReducer, useState, useContext} from React;
We will create a theme context that allow us to change the style of the application.
const ThemeContext = React.createContext();
Let’s now create a ThemeProvider. The ThemeProvider provides a dropdown list with themes to be selected.
const ThemeProvider = ({children}) => {
const [theme, setTheme] = useState("theme1");
function handleChange(e) {
setTheme(e.target.value);
e.preventDefault();
}
return (
<ThemeContext.Provider value = {theme}>
<select onChange={handleChange}>
<option value="theme1">Theme 1</option>
<option value="theme2">Theme 2</option>
</select>
{children}
</ThemeContext.Provider>
);
}
When the user changes the theme the handleChange event is fired and we use the setTheme updater function.
Once this parent component is rendered all the child component will render as well.
Let’s create a <Counter/> and <Footer/> component both which need theme. I will not delve into the details of the <Counter/> component as it is more or less the same that we discussed so far. But I will highlight the required code to make context work.
The <Counter/> Component
function Counter() {
const [state, setState] = useReducer(reducer, defaultState);
const [value, reset] = useState(0);
const theme = useContext(ThemeContext);
function handleChange(e) {
reset(e.target.value);
}
return (
<div className={`app ${theme}`}>
<h1>useContext </h1>
<h1>{state.counter}</h1>
<input style={{width:"20%", textAlign:"center"}} type="number" value={value} onChange={handleChange} placeholder="enter initial counter value and press reset"/>
<div className="buttons">
<button onClick={()=> setState({counter: state.counter+1})}>+</button>
<button onClick={()=> setState({counter: state.counter-1})}>-</button>
<button onClick={
()=> setState({counter: Number(value)})}>reset
</button>
</div>
</div>
);
}
The important code block is
const theme = useContext(ThemeContext);
The above piece of code grabs the theme from the context.
And we use this theme as part of the jsx as shown below.
<div className={`app ${theme}`}>
Now, let’s take a look at the <Footer/> Component
The <Footer/> Component
function Footer() {
const theme = useContext(ThemeContext);
return (
<footer className={theme}>useContext demo</footer>
);
}
The Footer component too grabs the theme and applies it as a className.
Now here the theme could be anything, we are using css classes to simulate it.
Now, let’s take a look at the <App/> component which connects all these pieces together.
The <App/> Component
function App() {
return (
<ThemeProvider>
<Counter />
<Footer/>
</ThemeProvider>
);
}
const rootElement = document.querySelector("#root");
ReactDOM.render(<App />, rootElement);
Our <Counter> and <Footer> Component is wrapped within the <ThemeProvider>.
Now the beauty of this approach is if we hadn’t used the context, then the theme value would have be required to pas through all the component hierarchy.
Here is a complete working application with theme support using context api. | https://codeburst.io/react-hooks-conceptual-understanding-part-1-5deb04e89f0 | ['Rajesh Pillai'] | 2019-12-02 12:00:58.341000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'React', 'Hooks', 'Reactjs', 'ES6'] |
Unblocked is Now Shardus | The Unblocked Ledger Coin Project has been developing both a distributed ledger technology and a payment network application that uses this technology. It’s similar to how blockchain is the underlying technology that makes the Bitcoin payment network possible. Combining the technology and the application under the Unblocked Ledger Coin name appears to have caused some confusion. To better differentiate the technology from the application, we will be renaming the project.
The new name for our project will be Shardus, a name that emphases the sharding aspect of our technology. The new name of the payment network built with this technology will be Liberdus. The word Liberdus is a combination of the words Libertas and Solidus, names of coins used in the Roman and Byzantine periods.
While the name is changing, our effort remains the same: Shardus is building a protocol that incorporates sharding and auto-scaling to provide high throughput, low latency, and immediate finality while maintaining the highest level of decentralization and security.
The first application of Shardus technology will be Liberdus, a coin and payment network designed to address the problems of traditional blockchains — namely scalability, decentralization, security and long-term sustainability. Thanks to Shardus technology, Liberdus will be able to accomodate billions of active users and can be applied to many future global-scale decentralized applications.
The Unblocked Ledger Token (ULT) which is distributed by the project for code development and bounties will eventually be renamed the Shardus Token (ST). However, since this requires deploying a new contract to change the token name and symbol, it will take some time to setup and execute. We will send an announcement when this is ready.
We thank everyone for their support and hope that you will continue to follow our efforts through the new Shardus channels.
Follow Shardus
Website: https://www.shardus.com
Telegram: https://t.me/shardus
Twitter: https://twitter.com/@ShardusLedger
Medium: https://medium.com/@shardus
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Shardus/
Github: https://github.com/shardus | https://medium.com/shardus/unblocked-is-now-shardus-9591bce12e42 | [] | 2018-08-20 22:48:38.412000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Distributed Ledgers', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Ethereum', 'Bitcoin'] |
Coronavirus Disproportionately Hurts Minorities. So Could Contact Tracing. | This story is part of a series on the possible impacts of Apple and Google’s contact-tracing technology. You can read the others here.
Apple and Google announced a partnership last week to track the spread of the coronavirus using “contact tracing” software. The ambitious effort harnesses Bluetooth technology and smartphones to alert someone if they’ve been near an infected individual.
Though Apple and Google have promised the feature will be “opt-in,” in practice, businesses could require that people use it. Civil liberties advocates are already considering the consequences of what is essentially a surveillance tool.
Just as minorities have been disproportionately harmed by the coronavirus — Black Americans are dying at drastically higher rates — these communities may also be harmed by the significant privacy implications of contact tracing tools.
The long-standing effects of such technology could be something akin to the domestic surveillance programs that emerged after the September 11 attacks and persist today, experts say. Under the Patriot Act, a sweeping set of reforms that allowed the United States government to spy on regular Americans, policing powers were expanded at the expense of personal privacy. The normalization of surveillance during a pandemic, even in the form of mobile contact tracing, could have unintended societal effects. One could imagine cases of profiling if such data allows communities experiencing an outbreak to be identified, for example.
Contact tracing tools could also be the start of a slippery slope toward further surveillance measures that uniquely impact poor people — individuals already subject to large amounts of data collection through public-benefits and welfare programs, and therefore more easily targeted by data-driven surveillance. “Low-income communities are among the most surveilled communities in America,” wrote Kaveh Waddell in The Atlantic. Immigrants at the U.S. border have also been forced to surrender their most private data — their DNA.
Private employers may force workers to use contact tracing apps as a company safety measure, building on announcements from Amazon and Walmart to screen the temperature of some employees. In this way, too, marginalized communities would be disproportionately impacted by the surveillance. Black Americans are overrepresented in “nine of the ten lowest-paid, high-contact essential services,” according to a recent McKinsey report.
“My fear is that [the coronavirus] will be used as an excuse to expand the reach of surveillance beyond its initial purposes,” said Margaret Hu, a cyber-surveillance researcher and law professor at Washington and Lee University.
Apple and Google have promised information will be anonymized and decentralized, and that unlike GPS-enabled systems, location data won’t be collected. Instead, randomized beacons — or unique keys — will be broadcast and logged by people’s devices. If someone is diagnosed with Covid-19 and submits that information to the app, people they’ve recently crossed paths with can be notified.
Come May, APIs released by the companies will be available to public health authorities who can develop contact tracing apps for iOS and Android systems, which run on nearly every phone in the world. In a second phase of the proposed plan, Apple and Google will eventually bake this feature into their underlying platforms. While it’s not entirely clear what this will result in, presumably it means that some contract tracing functionality will be available to users without downloading an additional app.
Some people fear Apple and Google could eventually allow contact tracing data to be used for purposes outside the scope of monitoring Covid-19 exposure — to single out the coronavirus “hot zones,” for instance. “When and if society decides that this sort of surveillance is acceptable (and, critically, builds up the other components — like testing — of an effective response) the technology will be ready,” writes technology analyst Ben Thompson.
Surveillance that is normalized during times of crisis tends to persist even after the event has passed. In 2002, for instance, President George W. Bush enacted the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), or Muslim registry, which required thousands of noncitizens from primarily Muslim-majority countries to submit biometric data, undergo interrogation, and regularly consult with immigration officials. The system was allegedly created as an anti-terrorism measure, but it sowed fear among Muslim communities. While it was eventually dismantled in 2016 by President Obama ahead of President Trump’s inauguration, the Trump administration has suggested a similar program using NSEERS as a framework.
“Do those powers have a shelf life limit? Will they end when the pandemic ends? The war on terror has not ended,” said Paromita Shah, executive director of Just Futures Law, a grassroots organization that advocates against the criminalization and deportation of immigrants.
Shah is even worried about data that remains solely within the custody of health officials. Apple and Google are letting governments decide who qualifies as a “public health authority” and can, therefore, develop a contact tracing app. According to TechCrunch, in a recent press call, Apple said that app data would be processed on a user’s device but “‘relayed’ through servers run by the health organizations across the world.”
“The tech giants said that because the data is decentralized, it’s far more difficult for governments to conduct surveillance,” TechCrunch reported. More difficult may not mean impossible, of course, nor is it assured that this data will be unhackable.
Meanwhile, the line between public and private services has become increasingly porous amid the crisis. Palantir, for example, the data-mining company best known for tracking undocumented immigrants for ICE, is now assisting the United Kingdom’s National Health Service in modeling the potential spread of the coronavirus.
“Governments around the world are demanding extraordinary new surveillance powers intended to contain the virus’ spread, often in partnership with corporations that hold vast stores of consumers’ personal data,” warned the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy nonprofit group.
The potential public health benefits of contact tracing are obvious. If deployed through software updates, and the system reaches critical mass, it may prove more useful than similar programs in countries like Singapore where only one in six people opted in. As Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and White House advisor, put it to Vanity Fair on Wednesday, “from a pure public health standpoint, it absolutely makes sense.” But even Fauci, who said he had not discussed contact tracing with Google and Apple, acknowledged that such a program has a cost: “Boy, I gotta tell you the civil liberties-type pushback on that would be considerable,” he told the magazine.
In the absence of a meaningful federal response to the pandemic, Silicon Valley is filling a power vacuum with privatized solutions to a public health crisis. And as we interrogate the validity of programs such as mobile contact tracing, we shouldn’t ignore their capacity to become permanent fixtures of a surveillance apparatus.
“This isn’t to say that I’m not about making sure that everyone is safe and healthy and has access to good medical care,” Shah said of technological health tools. “But we know these inequities exist, and yet we think the data is going to bring us to a different place?” | https://onezero.medium.com/coronavirus-disproportionately-hurts-minorities-so-could-contact-tracing-b0e6263bb47b | ['Sarah Emerson'] | 2020-04-17 05:31:00.889000+00:00 | ['Apple Google Collab', 'Contact Tracing', 'Equality', 'Coronavirus', 'Surveillance'] |
Brother Rice High School Adapts to Online Learning | By Gaby Rios and Gabrielle Galarowski
With the transition to online learning, classrooms have been left empty. (Photo/Don Harder, Creative Commons)
For Marta Carbol, who teaches Spanish at Brother Rice High School, the transition to online learning at the dawn of the pandemic was difficult at first.
“In the Spring, it was a very difficult thing for me to cope with, because I was not very well prepared, you know nobody was,” she said. “This was so new to everyone, when had we ever shut down the school for that length of time?”
On March 21, Gov. J.B Pritzker’s first statewide stay at home order went into effect beginning at 5 p.m. that day, through April 7, which marked the state’s most aggressive step yet, in order to curb the spread of COVID-19.
Chicago Public Schools have remained closed this fall and online through at least winter break, and many suburban schools that had been offering hybrid courses moved to online-only in November when COVID-19 cases skyrocketed.
For many, the transition to online learning proved to be a challenge. As with a traditional face-to-face classroom setting, teachers have the ability to interact with their students, present learning material in an engaging manner, and check the understanding of their students. For Brother Rice High School, located at 10001 S Pulaski Rd in Chicago’s SouthWest side, the order came with a harsh reality that COVID-19 was not going away anytime soon.
Overview picture of Brother Rice High School. (Photo/Brother Rice High School) (Edited/Gabrielle Galarowski)
As the world was learning how to adapt in the pandemic era, schools like Brother Rice had to change curriculum to online models and teach in a completely different way than what many had grown accustomed to.
Carbol had to come up with a new assignment each day for the students because they didn’t meet after the stay at home order went into effect. Carbol would have to grade over 400 emails a day and if she missed one day, the next day, she would have double the assignments to grade.
However, she said she views this as a blessing because it helped her to become proficient in using technology, and helped her to prepare for a hybrid model that Brother Rice decided to implement for the fall semester. Carbol had to be more creative with her work so all her students could focus, and that the students at home could feel more included.
This is a short audio of a teacher at Brother Rice High School. (Credit to Gaby Rios)
Researchers at Brown University teamed up with school administrators to launch their first set of data from a new National COVID-19 School Response Data Dashboard, created to track cases of the virus.
From Nov. 9th to Nov. 22nd, out of the 812,698 high school students enrolled, only 367,001 students are meeting in person.
“What the high school did, is that they divided the school literally in half,” said Andrea Quinn, a parent of Seamus, a Brother Rice senior. “So, one group is the maroon group and the other half is the orange group. And they divide each grade level in half.”
Seamus Quinn easily adapted to the sudden change.
“I don’t think it’s really affected me that much, seeing as everything in this world has shifted online, and my teachers are really good at getting information to us,” he said. “Especially now since I contracted coronavirus, and I am quarantining. It’s just been really easy, and it’s not that big of a switch from in class learning to e-learning.”
Seamus is adapting well to online learning, but he is still missing out on significant events, such as prom, graduation, and other high school experiences. He also misses the social interactions that came with an in person education.
“I miss seeing my friends that I would see on a daily basis, because we don’t always have classes together, since we are on a 50/50 schedule,” he said. “It’s a bit lonely sometimes just missing faces that I would normally see everyday, but I’m getting used to it, and hopefully by this time next year, we won’t have to worry about this virus, and we’ll all get to be together again.”
Even though Seamus has not fallen behind, some students have.
Carbol has a few students that didn’t adapt well to online learning. Some of her students are having a hard time focusing in class. Carbol has reached out to those students by calling home and emailing that she will help them in any way she can to see them succeed.
Some students have dismissed Carbol’s help, and are struggling with the transition, while some are stressed because of the pandemic and the different learning environment that is currently transpiring.
According to an analysis of Google search data, searches of in person, and online learning has surged throughout the United States. The concern is high, and many are wondering what will become of their education.
Credit to Gaby Rios
According to Pew Research Center, 65% of K-12 parents are concerned that their children are falling behind in school. With 72% of lower income parents concerned, 63% of middle income parents, and 55% of upper income parents are concerned how this pandemic will affect their children’s education.
Online learning has not only affected teachers and students, but parents as well. For Andrea Quinn, she talks about how the process has allowed her son to have a better focus on school.
This is the main entrance to Brother Rice High School. (Photo/Brother Rice High School)
Parents have to make sure that they are quiet while their children are at school. Some parents have made quiet spaces for their children to do online learning at home. Quinn makes sure that her son doesn’t have any distractions around, but ultimately it is Seamus’ responsibility to not get distracted.
“From a high school perspective, because the way the school was prepared and initiated it, it has been a seamless transition, from an educational component of things,” she said. “He is still held accountable for the attendance, the assignments, for everything.”
Distractions are becoming an increasing issue for some students that are at home compared to being in the classroom and the teacher must try to keep them focused. While distractions don’t affect Seamus, it has affected other students, who believe it is a good time to play video games or some other distracting activity during class.
Society is always changing, unpredictable events happen, schools are adapting to provide the best education that they can.
Even though Brother Rice High School originally struggled with the immediate transfer to online learning, they are currently striving with the hybrid model. They are keeping students engaged and learning. It also incorporates the much needed social interactions that come with being in person that many students crave and miss.
The ongoing COVID-19 crisis is giving Brother Rice students first-hand experience of how to manage unexpected events, which further gives them the tools to manage future crises as they progress through their lives.
“The teachers are really trying to do the best that they can, and keep things moving along,” said Quinn. “Like they would be doing on a normal class day.” | https://medium.com/@ggalarowski/brother-rice-high-school-adapts-to-online-learning-9970a971a0d0 | ['Gabrielle Galarowski'] | 2021-03-11 03:27:05.010000+00:00 | ['High School', 'Brother Rice High School', 'Chicago', 'Online Learning', 'Hybrid Learning'] |
The Algorithmic Accountability Act Is Designed to Remove Bias From Big Data | By Caroline Hsu
How does your Netflix account always seem to know just what cheesy rom-com or gory slasher flick you’re in the mood for? How is an iPhone X able to recognize your face as easily as a person does? How can Google Maps calculate routes that circumvent traffic jams and get you where you need to be in as little time as possible? These, and many other technological innovations, are possible due to algorithms.
Photo by Chris Ried
In the world of computer science, algorithms can be defined as lists of instructions that tell computers what to do. In this increasingly digital age, algorithms are a part of almost everything we do. Amazon uses algorithms to suggest items that you might want to browse. Online dating sites like eHarmony and OkCupid use algorithms to match up potential couples. Financial analysts and traders train algorithms to predict and react to fluctuations in the stock market at speeds that no human being could ever accomplish. Modern society has grown reliant on algorithms for a lot of the tasks we take for granted, and this reliance shows no signs of stopping. Although these increasingly complex algorithms present new and exciting opportunities to harness the power of computers to better modern life, they still have flaws.
Photo by Victor Garcia
The Algorithmic Accountability Act, sponsored by (2020 presidential candidate) Senator Cory Booker from New Jersey and Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon, seeks to address some of these flaws. Algorithms are essentially just lines and lines of code, and as such, they cannot think for themselves. However, algorithms often have the unintended effect of reflecting the unconscious biases of their creators. For example, a facial recognition algorithm called Rekognition, championed by computer engineers at Amazon, was recently accused of racism. In a study conducted at MIT, Rekognition could successfully identify the genders of lighter-skinned individuals, but misidentified the gender of darker-skinned individuals at a 20–30% rate. This isn’t because the algorithm itself harbors prejudice against people of color, but because its coders originally only trained it on white subjects. This major oversight could have dangerous implications in the real world — a recent Georgia Tech study concluded that the algorithms behind self-driving vehicles were consistently unable to identify dark-skinned people as pedestrians. In practice, that would make dark-skinned people more likely to get hit by self-driving cars than white people. Driverless cars aren’t the only technology accused of potentially dangerous bias — Amazon, Facebook, and Google have all been accused of algorithmic bias in the past five years.
The Algorithmic Accountability Act would be a huge stride forward for ethics in tech. Under the act, large tech company and data broker algorithms would be held accountable to a greater degree — they would have to evaluate any algorithm involving behavior prediction, sensitive data, or the monitoring of publicly accessible spaces for discrimination and potential privacy breaches. If any concerns arose in these evaluations, tech companies would need to address them in a timely manner. This way, we can reap all the technological benefits that algorithms have to offer, but without suffering the discriminatory, hurtful, and even physically harmful consequences of race, gender, or class-based algorithmic bias.
Subscribe to our Newsletter | https://medium.com/in-kind/the-algorithmic-accountability-act-is-designed-to-remove-bias-from-big-data-82d69fb2bd42 | ['In Kind'] | 2019-04-25 16:40:41.078000+00:00 | ['Big Data', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Policy', 'Technology', 'Algorithms'] |
About BrookLinen + New Launches January 2021 | Brooklinen provides beautiful home essentials such as bed, bath, and lounge wear. By cutting out the middleman, they’re able to bypass costs like wholesaling, storefronts and designer licensing fees that have no bearing on quality. Therefore, buyers are able to purchase products at such an amazing deal! Brooklinen gives you the quality and comfort at an affordable price. The founded philosophy is that people deserve simple, beautiful, home essentials without the luxury mark up.
Below are images of two of their best sellers! The comforter and robe are super soft — it’s like laying on a cloud. The high quality and luxe feel of their products make it feel like it’s more expensive than what you paid for. Products are breathable and do not weigh you down.
All — Season Down Comforter ($349)
Super Plush Robe ($98)
Upcoming: Colorway Launch in January 2021
New Silk Colorway — Cerulean (Launching w/o January 17)
Yes, cerulean shot to the spotlight from that iconic scene in The Devil Wears Prada, but it remains popular for a reason! This playful shade offers much-needed brightness going into the new year, and paired with our Mulberry Silk eye-masks and pillowcases, this new colorway is perfect for taking an at-home spa day.
Winter Heathered Cashmere Colorways (Launching w/o January 24)
Brave the cold with our warmest, softest sheets, Heathered Cashmere! This bedding features a unique diagonal weave and custom napped finish for an incredibly cozy feel without being too insulating. In late January we’ll be launching a new evergreen colorway, a classic White, and a jewel-inspired limited edition colorway, Jade.
Winter Classic + Luxe Colorways (Launching w/o January 31)
Inspired by longer and warmer days, we’ll be launching bold new colorways for our Classic + Luxe Collection heading into February: Our best-selling cotton sheets will be reinvented with retro-inspired jewel tones in the Abstract Forest Purple, Abstract Forest Dark Green and Visible Spectrum patterns, balanced by neutral, soothing colorways Deep Navy and Clay.
Be sure to check their site down below and be on the look out for their new launch, Colorways! | https://medium.com/@xxweekend-lust/about-brooklinen-new-launches-january-2021-d148b678860a | [] | 2020-12-23 18:11:25.617000+00:00 | ['Influencer Marketing', 'Home', 'Shopping', 'New York', 'Review'] |
2 ways to train a Linear Regression Model-Part 1 | One of the simplest Supervised Machine Learning models out there is Linear Regression. In this post, we will discuss two different ways we can train a Linear Regression model.
Let me list them out really quickly before I move into explaining each one in detail:
1. Train using closed-form equation
2. Train using Gradient Descent
The first way directly computes the model parameters that best fit the model to the training set and the second computes it iteratively. I will talk about closed-form equation in this post and will create a Part-II talking about Gradient Descent and variants of it.
But first, how does a linear model make predictions?
Linear regression consists of finding the best-fitting straight line through the data. This best-fitting line is what we call the regression line. A linear model makes prediction by computing the weighted sum of input features, plus a constant called the bias term¹
The equation for a Linear Regression model prediction can be given by:
How do we train this model?
You see the different θ’s in the equation? Those are called model parameters. To train a model, we need to find the value of θ (model parameters) that minimizes the cost function. There are 2 ways to do this! But first, let’s define our cost function.
The most common measure of performance of a regression model is RMSE. So, we need to find values of θ that minimize RMSE. But in practice, it is much easier to minimize MSE. Let’s say the cost function we are trying to minimize is Mean Squared Error. The MSE is calculated using the below equation
Now that we have our cost function defined, let’s go ahead and jump into the first way of finding the best model parameter values (θ).
“Closed-form” Equation
There is a mathematical equation that computes the model parameters directly. This equation is called the Normal Equation. You can read more about Normal Equations here. The Normal equation is given by:
But inserting all the values that we have into this equation; we will be able to compute the best model parameters that minimize our cost function. Easy right? Let’s test the equation on a linearly generated data.
X = 2*np.random.rand(100,1)
#add X0 = 1 to each instance(bias term)
X_b = np.c_[np.ones((100,1)), X]
y = 2+4*X +np.random.randn(100,1) fig = plt.figure()
plt.plot(X,y,"b.")
plt.axis([0,2,0,10])
plt.title("Randomly generated Linear data")
plt.show()
fig.savefig('result1.png')
# Normal equation
theta_cap = np.linalg.inv(X_b.T.dot(X_b)).dot(X_b.T).dot(y) print(theta_cap)
The function we used to generate the data was 2+4x+noise. The normal equation has computed values of θo and θ1 that are close enough! Let’s write some code to do prediction
X_new = np.array([[0],[4]])
X_new_b = np.c_[np.ones((2,1)), X_new] y_predict = X_new_b.dot(theta_cap)
print(y_predict) plt.plot(X_new, y_predict,"r-")
plt.plot(X,y,"b.")
plt.title("Linear Regression model prediction")
plt.axis([0,2,0,15])
plt.show()
While the normal equation computes the inverse of X^T X, the computational complexity is almost O(n^3), which if you haven’t figured out is bad! There is another approach that solves this in O(n^2) time. This approach computes the pseudoinverse of X using a matrix factorization technique called Singular Value Decomposition. In simple terms, SVD divides the matrix X into the matrix multiplication of 3 matrices. More about SVD can be found here. A simple implementation of this can be done using pinv() function from Numpy’s linear algebra model.
np.linalg.pinv(X_b).dot(y)
Why SVD is more efficient than Normal Equation?
a. Normal Equation works only if X^T X is invertible or singular. Pseudoinverse on the other hand is always defined.
b. As mentioned above, SVD has less computational complexity than Normal equation.
But both these approaches are very slow when the number of features and instances are large. Which is why the next way of training the model might be better for such cases. I will discuss that in my Part-II post.
Let’s end the post by doing a simple Scikit-Learn implementation of Linear Regression on the generated dataset and see if we get model parameters similar to the one computed by Normal Equation.
from sklearn.linear_model import LinearRegression
lin_reg = LinearRegression()
lin_reg.fit(X,y)
print(lin_reg.intercept_)
print(lin_reg.coef_)
And lo and behold, it does! Notice how sklearn gives us the same result as computing pinv(). That is because sklearn computes the pseudoinverse of X.
Conclusion
In this blog we learnt:
How linear models make predictions — the general equation for Linear Regression How to train a model and minimize the cost function — the equation of Mean Squared Error The 1st method of training a Linear Regression model using Closed Form equation — the Normal Equation A simple implementation of the Normal Equation Computing pseudoinverse using Singular Value Decomposition Scikit-learn implementation of Linear Regression
If you enjoyed this blog please leave a clap or comment. It lets me know that my blog was helpful :) Happy learning, folks!
References
1. Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems. Book by Aurelien Geron. | https://jeffyjacob.medium.com/2-ways-to-train-a-linear-regression-model-part-1-e643dbef3df1 | ['Jeffy Merin Jacob'] | 2020-10-27 13:24:40.457000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Linear Regression'] |
Introducing Chris McNeil: Winner of OnlineMedEd’s Scholarship for Future Black Physicians — OnlineMedEd | Supplied by Chris McNeil
For Chris McNeil, there has always been the sound of a low rumbling on the horizon.
Growing up in Lawton, Oklahoma, it was artillery fire that came from the massive United States Army proving ground at Fort Sill, where his father served. “It was like a continuing thunderstorm,” McNeil, 30, says.
As he got older, McNeil — now a fourth-year medical student at the Oklahoma State University (OSU) Center for Health Sciences in Tulsa — began to notice the constant rumbling that no young Black man in the U.S. can ever ignore.
“[It’s like] rebuilding Black Wall Street, but in a metaphorical sense. [It’s] that sense of endearment and empowerment, and it’s not just for Black people. And we need it as a country right now.”
Following the brutal police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis this May, the whole world heard it, too. Pain, anguish, and global demonstrations against racial injustice followed. A new generation found their voice for equality, but quickly realized the scale of the challenge at hand.
From ongoing discrimination at med school that feeds a healthcare system woefully short of a minority presence, racism remains a malignant presence in American medicine, too.
McNeil studies mere miles away from the site of the horrifying 1921 race massacre in Tulsa that claimed up to 300 Black lives, and destroyed ‘Black Wall Street’. He knows the lonely road many Black med students have to walk, because he has walked it himself.
As the recipient of the OnlineMedEd Scholarship for Future Black Physicians, that long-running barrage still rings in McNeil’s ears — but he knows exactly what he needs to do to help silence it, within medicine.
“I’m so excited to be in a position where I’m not only becoming a physician, but I’m going to help empower a community,” he says.
From Bavaria to Oklahoma
McNeil was born in Würzburg, Germany in 1989, due his father Leonard — a physician’s assistant in the U.S. Army — being posted to Europe. He grew up in the Barvarian spa town of Bad Kissingen, before the family relocated to Lawton in 1998.
Like his great-grandfather Moses, Leonard hailed from South Carolina. Moses was the first free man in the McNeil family.
“The stories I heard about [Moses] were legendary, [he was] almost like Paul Bunyan,” Chris McNeil, who named his own three-year-old son Moses, says.
Supplied by Chris McNeil
“He was taking railroad spikes out of the ground with his bare hands, he was an awesome guy, and an amazing motivator.”
Leonard met his Delaware-raised wife Jacqueline in Virginia, in the mid-1980s. Before Chris, they had a daughter, Jessica, who is now a nurse practitioner in Dallas.
From his mom, who has long worked in education, McNeil says he received the life-long urge to be prepared for any outcome. As a kid, he always had too many things in his backpack.
From his father — “my hero” — McNeil got the trademark family passion and drive, as well as his first curiosity about a career in medicine.
“A lot of my medical upbringing came from seeing him in a white coat, and being able to see how he’d interact with soldiers,” he says.
“He bought hope. When people saw that white coat, it meant something very, very symbolic to them, like ‘okay, I’m going to find relief. Something good is going to happen.”
Outside his father, McNeil saw few other Black people in the medical field. Back then — and now — most jobs in Lawton were either through the military, or at the town’s massive Goodyear Tire plant (after leaving the Army as a Major, McNeil’s father now serves as the plant’s Chief Medical Officer).
“Medicine was more of a bet, or a challenge [for young Black kids]. I knew it was really hard, [that] not a lot of people do it, very few people I knew were in it, but it was something I wanted to do.”
“Medicine was more of a bet, or a challenge [for young Black kids],” he says. “I knew it was really hard, [that] not a lot of people do it, very few people I knew were in it, but it was something I wanted to do.”
A talented athlete, McNeil received a wrestling scholarship to OSUin 2008, studying biology. Considered one of the premier college wrestling programmes in America, OSU’s head coach was John Smith, a two-time Olympic champion. While never one of the Cowboys’ wrestling stars, McNeil quickly impressed Smith.
“[McNeil] shows everybody that there’s no excuses,” Smith said of McNeil, in 2011. “He’s getting one of the toughest degrees at Oklahoma State.
“On top of that, he’s making every practice and making great grades. He works at what he earns. He’s probably one of the greatest influences on our young people, and the program.”
Along with his cauliflower ears, McNeil still points to wrestling as fostering his desire to win, and continually improve. A business degree, with a major in entrepreneurship, would follow his pre-med studies, as would a revelatory college trip to South Africa.
The drive to become a physician returned in 2016, when he began a bridge programme to the OSU Center for Health Sciences. The following year, he started his first year at med school, studying osteopathic medicine.
His wife Jessica gave birth to Moses during McNeil’s first year, while daughter Madison came along just before he sat his COMLEX Level I test.
With OSUCHUS located in a largely Black West Tulsa neighborhood, McNeil — a dedicated OnlineMedEd user — recalls the surreal sensation of being one of only a handful of Black students in his classes.
“It was crazy,” he says. “I was one of the only Black medical students inside, but on the walk to get into the medical school, I was in familiar territory.
“I was in the majority for a brief moment in time. For some people it was scary, we had to have a lot of security, but it was a really interesting dynamic. It was like being in South Africa again, and going from a majority to a minority by crossing [through] a door frame.”
Having the conversation
Racism has long coursed through the veins of American medical education. From its prohibitive costs, lower acceptance rates due to rigid testing techniques, and ongoing mistreatment and micro-aggressions, the challenges today loom as large as they always have.
Despite Black Americans making up nearly 13 percent of the overall population, only five percent of physicians are African-American. For aspiring Black male physicians, the numbers are even worse.
“It was crazy. I was one of the only Black medical students inside, but on the walk to get into the medical school, I was with my people.”
According to Forbes, only 2.9 percent of all enrolled medical students in 2019 were Black men. Shockingly, that figure has decreased from 3.1 percent in 1978 (total enrollment for Black women in medical school has increased from 2.2 to 4.4 percent in the last 40 years).
“I think the primary problem for Black males in pursuing medicine or any professional career is racism and bias, but it does not take the form we traditionally think of such as closed doors or signs that say ‘Blacks not allowed,” Dr. Marc Nivet, of UT Southwestern Medical Center, says.
For Black kids in Oklahoma, McNeil compares the challenge of going to med school as akin to a long, arduous “pilgrimage to Mecca.”
“There’s two major barriers in terms of making more Black doctors in Oklahoma,” he says. “The first one is pipeline. Oklahoma schools are not a priority for a lot of administration and legislative actions.
“You have schools that are dilapidated, and don’t have a ton of [advanced placement] classes, you have teachers that are underpaid, classes that are over-filled, and that doesn’t make for an enriching learning environment.
“The second part is there is no affirmative action in Oklahoma. In order for you to make more physicians … what scaffolding do you have to compete on? Will power isn’t going to cut it.”
In the week following Floyd’s murder, McNeil got a call from a classmate, telling him OSU had yet to put out a statement denouncing racism and violence.
While showing huge increases in undergraduates, graduates, and faculty of color since 2010, OSU was yet to open a Department of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
Unified by McNeil, students banded together, and went to OSU’s President with a proposal. Conversations started in June. By October, the new department was officially announced.
“In order to make the bridge to more Black doctors, it has to start with us.”
“In order to make the bridge to more Black doctors, it has to start with us,” he says.
Conversation about the role of race in med school is starting to change too, the 30-year-old says, with more of his fellow white students reaching this year to ask about the challenges that he has faced.
A confident, gregarious soul, McNeil is happy to engage, but wants folks to know the ‘emotional scarring’ many students of color carry makes these conversations hard for many.
“I think it’s in the same way as when we’re in the hospital and a patient dies,” McNeil says.
“Now we have to go to the next patient, but there’s no sense of decompression. There’s no ‘let’s talk about his life, let’s have a moment of silence, we didn’t know this guy, what’s the aftermath that happens.’
“All those emotional scars that build up over time. That same thing happens to students, and the students who want to become physicians. It’s not that George Floyd was the superhero, but [what happened] allowed the discussion to happen — and that is therapeutic.
“Yes, Black Lives Matter, but every Black person is unique in their own right,” he continues.
“Not everyone is going to have an optimistic discussion about what needs to be done. Some people are very much stuck in what they need to do for themselves or their community.
Supplied by Chris McNeil
“Having the opportunity to talk about this stuff by no means makes me an expert on the Black community. It just makes me excited to be a part of the movement forward, and that’s very important for people to understand.”
‘Raise your words, not voice’
“Raise your words, not voice,” legendary Persian poet Rumi once wrote. “It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.”
From an army brat growing up to the sound of booming cannons, to a rising young Black leader in medicine, Rumi’s wisdom fits McNeil’s approach to life, almost perfectly.
Driven by family, medicine, and the potential to inspire positive change as a physician, McNeil knows the task ahead of him isn’t an easy one. He also knows what incredible rewards exist if the work is put in.
“[It’s like] rebuilding Black Wall Street, but in a metaphorical sense,” he says.
“[It’s] that sense of endearment and empowerment, and it’s not just for Black people. And we need it as a country right now.” | https://medium.com/onlinemeded/introducing-chris-mcneil-winner-of-onlinemededs-scholarship-for-future-black-physicians-dbf4c38307db | ['Ben Stanley'] | 2020-11-13 21:33:56.290000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Racial Justice', 'Medicine', 'Blm', 'Medschool'] |
From the Chicago Suburbs to the PGA Tour | From the Chicago Suburbs to the PGA Tour
By Matt Harness
This article appeared in the November 2021 edition of Chicago District Golfer.
The day after Nick Hardy finished his first PGA Tour event as a full-time member, he was back home in Northbrook. Following a red-eye flight from California, there was no time for unpacking, so his luggage was happily abandoned by the front door.
Operating on less than two hours of sleep, Hardy drove more than 50 miles to Olympia Fields Country Club for a fundraising event to benefit his alma mater, the University of Illinois.
A goal of his since he was a student at Westmoor Elementary, the 25-year-old Hardy earned his promotion to the PGA Tour by placing 21st during the 2020–21 Korn Ferry Tour season. The top 25 secured memberships to the PGA Tour.
For those who know Hardy, it came as no surprise that he spent little time celebrating his monumental achievement.
“I wasn’t very emotional,” he said. “I know I have bigger fish to fry.”
Hardy’s mom routinely tells her son to enjoy his accomplishments. But, like many children, Hardy often doesn’t hear the advice of his parents.
“When he got his card, he said this is just the beginning, a checkmark on the list,” said Kim Hardy Busscher, who was there when Hardy clinched his card at The Club at Indian Creek in Omaha, Nebraska, on Aug. 15. “He’s always been that way. I know it’s silly for me to say, but I’m so happy he made his dream come true.”
•••
Hardy never had a plan B. Ever since his dad took him to Anetsberger Golf Course, a 9-hole, par-3 course in Northbrook, golf has consumed him. Born the same year Tiger Woods — his golf idol — went pro (1995), an 8-year-old Hardy won the first junior tournament he entered and continued on to an All-American career at Illinois before turning pro in 2018.
“He was good right away,” John Hardy, Nick’s father, said. “He could spin the ball out of bunkers, and that’s all he wanted to do. He’s always been determined. His whole life has been geared toward getting better.”
Kim Hardy Busscher remembers picking up her son from youth baseball games and taking him to the driving range. There, Nick hit golf balls in his baseball uniform.
“John and I never had to say anything to him about golf,” she said. “He was self-motivated from a young age.”
Childhood friends Jon Goldstein and Eric Markus attest to Nick’s drive and discipline. All three attended Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook. Nick and Goldstein were teammates on the golf team. Markus is Nick’s caddie, a job he’s held since the two were in high school.
“Everyone knew he was different,” said Markus, who’s known Nick for nearly two decades. “His work ethic and attitude separated him from the others. He wanted it more, but he also put in the time.
“Nothing mattered to him besides getting to the tour. That mindset is a big reason why he made it.”
Charlie Danielson, a college teammate, understands better than most the qualities needed to reach the highest level of his sport. He played with European Tour pros Thomas Pieters and Tom Detry at Illinois. Pieters, a four-time European Tour winner, competed in the 2016 Ryder Cup.
“Talent only takes you so far in this game,” Danielson said. “If one word describes Nick, it’s toughness. He believes he’s as good as anyone out there, and he puts his nose to the ground and works his tail off to prove that.”
•••
Several signs pointed toward Nick’s progression to the PGA Tour. He qualified for the U.S. Amateur in 2013 at age 17 and advanced to match play. In 2014, he made the Semifinals of the Western Amateur at Beverly Country Club in Chicago. He played in two U.S. Opens as an amateur, making the cut in 2015 at Chambers Bay as a 19-year-old. In 2016, he won the Illinois State Amateur Championship by 10 strokes with a record-breaking -28 total.
On the Korn Ferry Tour, he made 34 cuts in 41 tournaments, posting 10 top-10 finishes and 19 top 25s. He ranked eighth in scoring average (69.17) and second in ball-striking, which combines a player’s proficiency off the tee and approach to the green.
“I take pride in how consistent and relentless I was every single day,” Nick said. “Even if I didn’t have my best stuff, I always strived for good finishes.”
In his debut as a card-carrying PGA Tour player, Nick tied for 36th at the Fortinet Championship (Sept. 16–19), matching six-time major champion Phil Mickelson. His haul of $32,608 was roughly 10 percent of the $349,054 he earned in 21 months on the Korn Ferry Tour. Nick’s mom and youngest sister Shannon made the trip to the Silverado Resort & Spa North in Napa, California to cheer him on for the final two rounds.
It was Nick’s 13th start on the PGA Tour and eighth time he made the cut.
“I’ve seen him play in some big tournaments, but this one felt different,” Kim said.
•••
Throughout his journey, Nick has maintained the same disposition, according to people close to him. Michael Wenzel, the director of golf at the Northbrook Golf Academy, first encountered Hardy as a junior player at both Anetsberger and Heritage Oaks Golf Club, formerly Sportsman’s Country Club, also in Northbrook.
“He was very competitive and worked hard at his game,” Wenzel said. “I remember he and his dad would play at Anetsberger in the most miserable conditions. There were times I had to tell them to go home.
“He’s always been humble and gracious. He’s come back and talked to our young kids. We’re fortunate [in Northbrook] to have watched him grow up.”
Although she doesn’t know Hardy personally, Katie McPike, who works behind the counter at Anetsbeger, where he holds the course record, remarked how proud the Northbrook community is of him, as much for his talent as for his humility.
“I’ve heard nothing but good things about him as a person,” McPike said. “It’s so wonderful he still considers [Anetsberger] his home.”
Justin Gerbich, coach of the 2021 Class 3A state champion Glenbrook North boys golf team, said Nick was, and remains, a role model.
“He usually was the best player, but he still put in flagsticks and grabbed bags to put into the van,” Gerbich said. “Coaches we played against still ask me about him. Everyone is genuinely excited for Nick. That means a lot.”
Goldstein agrees.
“He never acted like he was better than you, even though he was,” Goldstein said. “I never heard anyone say a bad thing about him. Nick just loves golf.”
While Nick knows he’s talented, he thrives on the intangibles to be successful, especially his willingness to learn from failure.
“My grit, my unwillingness to give up is what got me here,” he said. “You have free will, and it’s how you choose to respond to certain situations that define you. Golf is a reflection of yourself. You always have to look yourself in the mirror. The only person who can beat me is me.” ●
Matt Harness is a freelance writer who writes frequently on golf.
Arlington Heights’ Ghim Wraps Successful First Year on Tour; Gives Back
Doug Ghim had a healthy outlook after his first full season as a fully-exempt member of the PGA Tour.
No, he didn’t reach his goal of playing at the BMW Championship, the second-to-last event reserved for the top-70 players in the FedExCup Playoffs standings. But, by virtue of qualifying for the playoffs, Ghim, a native of Arlington Heights, secured his playing privileges for the 2021–22 season.
“I was disappointed to not make the BMW because I was really close,” said Ghim, who ended up 83rd. “The learning curve is quite intense in your first year, but I learned a lot about my game and about me as a person. From that perspective, it was a really good year. I know I got better.”
The 25-year-old Ghim, who lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, started the 2021–22 season Sept. 16 at the Fortinet Championship, formerly Safeway Open, at the Silverado Resort and Spa North in Napa, California, but missed the cut. He finished tied for 14th at last year’s tournament, giving him a head start in the FedExCup rankings.
“The fall was huge for me,” he said. “Coming from the Korn Ferry Tour, I didn’t get into every event, but I was able to get into more tournaments because of my early results.”
One such tournament was THE PLAYERS Championship, which often boasts the best field of the season. Ghim played in the final pairing on Sunday with eventual champion Justin Thomas; he tied for 29th.
In 27 tournaments, Ghim made 18 cuts and recorded nine top 25s, including a top 5 at The American Express at PGA West in Palm Springs, California. Advanced analytics suggested Ghim was one of the best ball-strikers on tour, ranking 25th in strokes gained from tee to green. Putting was his weakness, as he finished 162nd in strokes gained on the greens.
“I learned how to more accurately measure my progress,” Ghim said. “It’s very easy to look at results as the only evidence of progress. I now understand what I need to do better and who I am as a player. Being a top-10 player, winning majors, playing in a Ryder Cup are great things I want to do someday. But right now those aren’t appropriate expectations for me. I know what’s realistic for me.”
Although he lives in Las Vegas, Doug Ghim maintains strong ties to the Chicago area. In addition to being a Cubs fan, he’s a junior board member of the Illinois Junior Golf Association and an ambassador for First Tee — Greater Chicago.
“I want to do everything I can do to support giving kids more opportunities and more accessibility to our game,” Ghim said. “I learned how to play competitive golf through the IJGA and met so many great people along the way.
“As for the First Tee, I came from immigrant parents and had more of a blue-collar golf story. Chicago is a diverse city, and I’d like our game to reflect that. It would be really cool to open eyes of kids who otherwise don’t know anything about golf.”
Northbrook native Nick Hardy, who just began his maiden season as a card-holding PGA Tour member, is also a First Tee — Greater Chicago ambassador and IJGA junior board member.
— Matt Harness | https://medium.com/@CDGAGolf/from-the-chicago-suburbs-to-the-pga-tour-bb637605998d | [] | 2021-11-23 22:04:22.004000+00:00 | ['Nick Hardy', 'PGA Tour', 'Golf', 'Chicago', 'Cdga'] |
Useful Tips For A Healthy Body | Even with the advancements in the field of Medicine, there are a lot of people around the world suffering from many health related issues like, Heart burn, Ulcer, Heart diseases, Weight issues and many more. All of these issues are mainly related to our lifestyle, the we live our lives is not suitable for our bodies and by continuing to live such lives, causes all the health issues. Here are few tips that can help improving our overall health and could safe us from many health related issues
1. Get Enough Exercise
In the past people had to use their physical bodies in the course of their normal work. But today someone may get up, go to work in a car, then sit down, get up to go home in the car and when arriving at home, sit down again for the rest of the day. In such a life there is no physical labor. This physical inactivity is one of the main reasons for a host of diseases. Sport, running. walking and other things must be added to our life if our normal work does not require us to exert ourselves physically. This would also help us in losing weight and to maintain a healthy body.
Click here to get weight loss supplement
Click here to get Diabetes supplement
2. Go to sleep when you feel sleepy
This may sound simple, but many people stay up late even when their body is telling them that it is time to sleep. Yoga and Ayurvedic doctors also say that it is better to sleep in the night and be active during the day. However, people such as students will take coffee and stimulants to study late into the night. Others develop the habit of remaining active at night and sleeping during the day. While we can do this, it eventually takes a toll on health. Alternative health doctors say that this kind of unnatural living is one of the contributing factors in the causation of cancer and other diseases
3.Fast on a Regular, Systematic Basis
If you would ask any person to work 365 days per year without any rest, they would complain and say that they must have some rest or else they will break down. But we have never bothered to ask or to think about our digestive organs which we compel to work day after day without a rest. They cannot protest the way a person would to his boss, but they do give us signals that they cannot work non-stop. When we ignore those signals and still compel them to work, those organs break down. That is why periodic fasting is necessary. Refrain from eating for one complete day. This gives a rest to your digestive organs and also helps in the elimination of wastes from your body. Regular fasting allows a person to gain extra time for intellectual or spiritual pursuits. Fasting is not for hermits in a cave, but is a sensible practice that anyone can practice. You can practice any diet that fits your lifestyle and you can carryout without hurting your body, diets like; Military diet or Keto diet are very popular these days and provides some amazing results.
Click here to get Custom Keto diet
4. Wash with cool water before going to bed and take proper dental hygiene
As mentioned above, proper sleep is essential for the maintenance of health. If you wash your important motor and sensory organs (hands, arms, eyes, legs, mouth, genitals) before sleep using cool water, this will relax you and prepare you for deep sleep also keep regular hygiene of your teeth as teeth issues are also rising up these days because of our busy lifestyles and lack of attention.
Click here for your dental health
5. Perform meditation on a regular basis
Your body is linked to your mind. Many of the diseases of this era are psychosomatic. Stress and anxiety take their toll on our physical health. Meditation is a mental exercise which, among other things, allows you to detach yourself from the worries of life. Learn a simple technique and do it regularly.
6. Get up early every day
Once again the old proverb, “Early to bed, early to rise makes a person healthy, wealthy and wise.” I don’t know if it will make you wealthy, but it will certainly make you healthy. Your body needs just enough sleep, not too much and not too little.
Click here to get healthy supplement | https://medium.com/@ahsan88/useful-tips-for-a-healthy-body-5234f5d6a1c9 | ['Ahsan Shareef'] | 2020-12-25 20:40:39.147000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Fitness Tips', 'Diet', 'Work Life Balance', 'Life Lessons'] |
Advantages of Dual Citizenships | Dual citizenship means a person has the nationality of two or more than two countries at the same time.
There are some countries that do not permit their citizens to acquire dual citizenship. They may require an applicant to surrender all existing citizenship, or by giving away its citizenry from someone who willingly to acquire another nationality, for example, the Indian Citizenship Act, 1995, does not permit dual citizenship, renunciation of Indian citizenship is compulsory when the person is acquiring citizenship of another country, after the renunciation of Indian Passport, they are eligible to apply for OCI Card -Overseas Citizen of India Card.
Some countries do not require to renounce citizenship. Some counties allow multiple citizenships while others allow multiple citizenships but only for the selected country, for example, Pakistan has dual citizenship agreement with only 19 countries including UK, USA, Australia, Belgium, Bahrain, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, and Turkey but they need to apply for NICOP — National Identity Card for Overseas Pakistani, if they are not residing in Pakistan.
Dual Citizenship
What are the benefits of Dual Citizenship?
Dual citizens are entitled to many benefits and opportunities offered by each country. They can have access to two social service systems, they can be registered voters in either land and able to work in either country, depending on the rules. They are also entitled to work in either country without requiring a work permit or work visa. They can buy properties in both countries as land acquisition in some countries is limited to their citizens only. Dual nationality holders can establish businesses in both or any country.
People who are citizens of two or more countries may find themselves with increased freedoms. Dual citizenship gives people greater opportunities for economic advancement, educational opportunities, and travel opportunities.
Second citizenship from a developed country not only provides good jobs, investment, business opportunities, and visa-free travel to many countries. It also provides access to quality health care, education, and an improved lifestyle, even many developed countries are providing free access to health care and education to their citizens. Dual nationality can also allow enjoying Tax optimization as well because in some countries income from other countries is exempted from taxes.
It is important for a person to research all the benefits and disadvantages of dual citizenship before they choose to do so. Although some people have disadvantages while others have advantages, it is important to consider the advantages of citizenship before making a final decision. If you find yourself needing dual citizenship help, you should consult a lawyer who specializes in this type of law, because this is an expensive, complicated, and very time-consuming process.
When considering whether or not to get dual citizenship, it’s important to realize that every situation is unique. A lawyer can help you determine whether or not dual citizenship is right for you. Even if you are already a citizen of another country, you may decide to get dual citizenship so you can visit that country.
The law of dual citizenship is very complex, so it is important that you only get help from a professional, if you have questions or concerns about the law. You can discuss your options with a knowledgeable lawyer, who can help you decide on the best course of action. Whether you have a good reason for getting dual citizenship, or just want to live and work in two countries, you may be able to find the solution for yourself. | https://medium.com/@sachwani074/advantages-of-dual-citizenships-a3e3f1477073 | ['Salim Sachwani'] | 2020-12-23 11:34:53.271000+00:00 | ['Dual Citizenship', 'Apply For Oci Card', 'Oci', 'Dual Nationality', 'Immigration'] |
Ethical Dilemma: Self-Driving Cars | The Rules
There are three laws of robotics set out by Isaac Asimov in 1942.
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human to come at harm. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Later, Isaac Asimov added a fourth:
0. A robot may not harm humanity or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
A world of self-driving cars seems to be something that many people in the Artificial Intelligence field fantasize. However wonderful you believe this fantasy may be, we can’t disregard the ethical concerns that many researchers have. Can cars truly make a right decision when someone’s life is on the line?
When you’re on the road and there is about to be an unavoidable accident, you simply makes a reaction in that given moment. It is sudden and understood as just a reaction. However, in the world of self-driving car, there is no driver to make a reaction. Instead, there is a programmer who decides what the car’s course of action will be beforehand. If you were to drive left into a motorcycle, it was your reaction. If the car were to turn left into a motorcycle, it was premeditated murder.
Many may argue the benefits of self-driving cars will significantly decrease car crashes because it eliminates the risk of human error. Although this may be true, crashes will still occur and their outcome can be seen as unethical. What happens in a car crash will have been determined years in advance by programmers. By saying “minimize harm” is the answer, it still brings up questions. If the car needs to decide between crashing into one of two motorcyclists, which one should it choose? The one wearing a helmet or the one without? If you chose the one with a helmet because it “minimizes harm”, then you are punishing the responsible citizen. And in the reverse situation, the car wouldn’t be “minimizing harm” anymore.
The algorithms in self-driving cars will favor certain objects to crash in to with no fault given to the humans involved. Additionally, many question whether they would buy a car that saves as many lives as possible, or one that would save the passenger no matter what. Should self-driving cars be programmed to make a random decision, or a decision based off of fatalities and priorities? If you were to ride a self-driving car that made a random decision, then there would be no morals involved.
The Trolley Problem
David Engber / Source
It’s all a question of morals. Therefore, we can analyze a famous philosophical problem, the Trolley Problem.
If a trolley with broken breaks was approaching two paths as depicted above and you had control over which path it would take, which would you choose? More importantly, why did you make your decision? This example is pretty simple, having to choose between five or one. However, MIT made a Moral Machine where you can test to see what you would do. There are many more factors involved including: age, species, gender, social values, and fitness.
MIT Moral Machine / Source
Whatever we think we would do, it’s either that we probably wouldn’t do or it just isn’t morally correct.
There are a couple things that all autonomous vehicles should do:
Align with our values
Perform even better than humans
Use machine learning
Machine learning is thought to solve all our abstract problems by using logic and math. When trying to solve this problem, manufacturers are trying to use an evolutionary approach. By setting out simple rules at the very beginning, the machine can learn on its own what is good and bad. Through the evolution, we can provide checkpoints such as a situation and analyze whether the machine’s decision makes sense and if people agree. If not, we tell the machine that it was wrong to make that decision and it can keep learning from there. A good analogy would be raising a child. You don’t tell them everything, but they figure out lots on their own. At the end, the self-driving car would end up matching our own values.
Although not everyone may agree, this is believed to be the best approach to solving the dilemma. There will much more debating for what is morally correct, but we need to come up with something because the benefits of self-driving cars are astronomical. | https://medium.com/@zoepetroianu/ethical-dilemma-self-driving-cars-a69b97194f41 | ['Zoe Petroianu'] | 2020-12-13 14:49:36.528000+00:00 | ['Self Driving Cars', 'AI', 'Technology', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Computer Science'] |
Stomps One Foot | Photo by ALEXANDRE DINAUT on Unsplash
A child who dared to dream after sunrise
was a ballet dancer flitting around a ballroom
in a perfect petal-pink tutu, gliding
with arms spiralizing slender
tiny feet atop the ball, not the tippie
as is customary, except in her imagination
where the ties of matching slippers
lace up skinny kindergarten calves and
plain brown hair was arranged like
a bagel on her head so as not to
encumber her focus or hinder
the sophisticated battle cry in her mind…
then the turreted lift, a pleasant landing
back straight as a defiant plank unflexed,
and compact limbs which shear the air,
each entrusted with a muscle packet needing
no momentum whatsoever, just pockets
of pure energy, poised.
For this ante meridiem charade, a chorus
of dancers were twirling
she is but one part of the whole, swirling,
equidistant, until…
her mother in her oatmeal streaked
apron peeks
in to check
on her progress and shrieks
‘you’re supposed to be getting dressed!’ the girl
stunned, cries defiant
‘I am!’ | https://medium.com/geezer-speaks/stomps-one-foot-694a30698ff2 | ['Lavender Bixby'] | 2021-07-07 09:04:19.350000+00:00 | ['Ballet', 'Poetry', 'Children', 'Imagination'] |
Categorizing Listing Photos at Airbnb | Re-training a DNN like ResNet50 using a few million images requires a lot of computational resources. In our implementation, we used an AWS P2.8xlarge Instance with Nvidia 8-core K80 GPU, and sent a batch of 128 images to 8 GPUs per training step. We did parallel training with Tensorflow as the backend. We compiled the model after parallelizing it because otherwise the training wouldn’t work. To further speed up training, we initialized model weights with pre-trained imagenet weights loaded from keras.applications.resnet50.ResNet50. The best model was obtained after 3 epochs of training, which lasted about 6 hours. Afterward the model started to overfit and the performance on validation set stopped improving.
One important note is that we built in production multiple binary-class models for different room types instead of building a multi-class model to cover all room types. This was not ideal but since our model serving was mostly offline, the extra delay due to multiple model calls affected us minimally. We will transit to a multi-class model in production soon.
We evaluated our models based on precision and recall. We also monitored metrics like F1 score and accuracy. Their definitions are reiterated as below. In a nutshell, precision describes how confident we are about the accuracy of our positive predictions, and recall describes how much percent our positive predictions cover all actual positives. Precision and recall usually go against each other. In our context, we set a high bar (95%) for precision because when we claim the photo is a certain room type, we should really have a high confidence about that claim.
TP: True Positive, TN: True Negative, FP: False Positive, FN: False Negative
A confusion matrix is the key to calculate these metrics. Our model’s raw output is a probability score from 0 to 1 for each image. To compute a confusion matrix for a set of predictions, one has to first set a particular threshold to translate the predicted scores into 0 and 1. A precision-recall (P-R) curve is then generated by sweeping the thresholds from 0 to 1. In principle the closer to 1 the AUC (Area Under Curve) of a P-R curve is, the more accurate the model is.
In evaluating the models, we used the aforementioned golden set where the ground truth labels were provided by humans. Interestingly we found accuracy differed from room type to room type. Bedroom and Bathroom models were the most accurate ones while other models were less accurate. For brevity, we only show the P-R curve of a Bedroom and Living Room here. The cross point of the dotted lines represents the final performance given a particular threshold. We append a summary of the metrics on the chart.
P-R Curve of Bedroom
P-R Curve of Living Room
There are two important observations:
The overall performance of the Bedroom model is much better than that of the a Living Room. There could be two explanations: 1) A Bedroom is easier to classify than a Living Room because Bedroom setting is relatively standard while Living Room can have a lot more varieties. 2) The labels extracted from Bedroom photos have higher quality than those extracted from Living Room photos since Living Room photos occasionally also include Dining Rooms or even Kitchens. Within each room type, a fully re-trained model (red curve) has better performance than the partially re-trained (blue curve) model, and the gap is larger between Living Room models than between Bedroom models. This suggests re-training a full ResNet50 model has different impact for difficult room types.
For the 6 models we shipped, precision is generally above 95% and recall is generally above 50%. By setting different threshold values people can make trade-offs. The model is set to power a number of different products across multiple product teams inside Airbnb.
The users compared our results of to well-known third-party image recognition APIs. It was reported that the in-house model overall outperformed third-party generic models. This implies by taking advantage of your own data, you have a chance to outperform even the industry state-of-the-art model for a particular task you are interested in.
At the end of this section, we’d like to showcase a few concrete examples that exemplify the power of this model.
The left two photos were correctly predicted as bedrooms; The right two photos were correctly predicted NOT as bedrooms.
The left two photos were correctly predicted as bathrooms; The right two photos were correctly predicted NOT as bathrooms.
The left two photos were correctly predicted as pools; The right two photos were correctly predicted NOT as pools, because they were aquarium and waterfront.
Beyond Classification
When doing this project, we also tried a few interesting ideas beyond room type classification. We want to show two examples here and give people an idea how exciting these problems are.
Unsupervised Scene Classification
When we first tried out room type classification using pre-trained ResNet50 model, we generated image embeddings (2048x1 vectors) for listing cover- page photos. To interpret what these embeddings meant, we projected these long vectors onto a 2D plane using PCA techniques. Much to our surprise, the projected data are naturally clustered into two groups. Looking into these two clusters, we found that the left group were almost exclusively indoor scenes and the right group were almost exclusively outdoor scenes. This meant without any re-training and simply by setting a cut line on the first principal component of the image embedding, we were able determine indoor and outdoor scenes. This finding opened the door to some really interesting domain where transfer learning (embedding) met unsupervised learning.
Indoor and Outdoor photos are automatically clustered by the first and second principal component.
Object Detection
Another area that we tried pursuing was object detection. A pre-trained Faster R-CNN model on Open Images Dataset already provided stunning results. As you see in the example below, the model is able to detect Window, Door, Dining Table and their locations. Using Tensorflow Object Detection API, we did some quick evaluations on our listing photos. A lot of the home amenities could be detected using the off-the-shelf result. In the future, we plan to retrain the Faster R-CNN model using Airbnb’s customized amenity labels. Since some of these labels are missing in the open source data, We will likely create labels on our own. With these algorithm-detected amenities, we are able to verify the quality of the listings from hosts and make it much easier for guests to find homes with specific amenity needs. This will push the frontier of photo intelligence at Airbnb to the next level.
Window, Door and Dining Table are successfully detected.
Conclusion
Here are a few key take-aways that might be helpful for other deep learning practitioners:
First, deep learning is nothing but one particular kind of supervised learning. One cannot overestimate the importance of high-quality labels to the data. Since deep learning usually requires a significant amount of training data to achieve state-of-the-art performance, finding an efficient way to do labeling is crucial. Fortunately we found a hybrid approach which is economical, scalable and reliable.
Second, training a DNN like ResNet50 from scratch can be quite involved. Try to start in a simple and fast way — train only top layers using a small dataset. If you do have a large trainable dataset, re-training a DNN from scratch might give you state-of-the-art performance.
Third, parallelize the training if you can. In our case we gained about 6x (quasi-linear) speed-up by using 8 GPUs. This makes building a complex DNN model computationally viable and it is much easier to iterate over hyper parameters and model structures. | https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/categorizing-listing-photos-at-airbnb-f9483f3ab7e3 | ['Shijing Yao'] | 2018-05-25 19:16:35.177000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'AI', 'Data Science', 'Deep Learning', 'Airbnb'] |
Depend on a first-class Online Seller for Buying Computer Accessories and very good quality Products | It is safe to say that you are searching for an Online Electronic Shop in BD? Akasnil. the shop is the biggest PC extras online shop in Bangladesh.
There are a few embellishments that are not accessible in the neighborhood market. Regardless of whether these things are accessible, their quality is unremarkable and costs are high. You don’t get fulfillment getting them. In such circumstances, it is astute to purchase these things from a first-rate online dealer, which not just gives you an affirmation of exclusive requirement, however a sticker price that is serious and amicable to your pockets.
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Workstations are picking up fame at a quick rate. Thus, the interest in PC embellishments is likewise expanding. Buying PC extras online shop is one of the least complex and most advantageous approaches to get hold of items you need. For this situation, there is positively no compelling reason to visit a nearby shop genuinely. You can just put in your request on the web and own the item that you had focused on. The items are of standard quality and bear brand signature. You won’t get any degree for whining against the exhibition level of the extra.
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Super current items
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Extraordinary client care
Do you have any questions about web-based shopping? Try not to stress a lot as a first-rate online dealer mastermind full-fledged client care offices deal with all your questions and questions. | https://medium.com/@akasnilhaq77/depend-on-a-first-class-online-seller-for-buying-computer-accessories-and-very-good-quality-15ae37cc85c0 | [] | 2020-12-13 05:16:50.478000+00:00 | ['Online Marketing', 'Online Shopping'] |
How to Do Cocos-BCX MainNet Token Mapping? | Attention
Please identify the official designated mapping address of Cocos-BCX：0xAC1E002563E0945ad8F1c193171e3ce2617B269e
DO NOT send your ERC20 tokens from exchanges to the above address!
Please beware of fraudulent websites and impersonating social media accounts.
This mapping can be done in two ways currently: Bitpie Wallet for mobile users Mapping and MetaMask Extension Mapping for PC users . Exchange Mapping will be available soon.
It is highly recommended that you use a safe ERC20 address to swap.
The mapping ratio is 1:1, i.e. 1 ERC20 COCOS = 1 MainNet COCOS
Please beware that a transcation hash can only be mapped once. It takes some time to complete the entire mapping, so do not repeat the operation.
Please beware that all mapping applications on the day will be processed in batches at 6 pm every day.
Bitpie Wallet Mapping for Mobile Users
Transfer ERC20 COCOS to the official designated mapping address of Cocos-BCX（0xAC1E002563E0945ad8F1c193171e3ce2617B269e）
Please make sure to confirm the official mapping address multiple times.
2. When you submit the mapping, you need to enter transcation hash（ID）. So click on the transcations record to copy transcation Hash.
3. When you submit the mapping, you need to have a COCOS MainNet account. If you do not have a MainNet account, you can also register directly with Bitpie Wallet.
4. Bitpie Wallet registration process:
Select wallet system COCOS (Cocos-BCX) and create COCOS MainNet account following to rules.
5. After you get transcation hash and Go to the mapping DApp（ https://cocosmap.cocosbcx.net）, click “Submit Mapping”, fill in transaction hash and mainnet account and confirm signature.
6. After the transfer is successful and the 12 blocks are confirmed, the transcation hash and MainNet account information obtained by the above transcation are signed, and then wait for the same amount of MainNet COCOS to arrive.
7. Enter the MainNet account for query.
8. If your phone is iOS, please download bitpie pro version.
The above is a detailed guide on the MainNet COCOS mapping for mobile users, which has been released on the official website and official social channels. Users who hold ERC20 COCOS should arrange the time reasonably and choose to map the currently circulating ERC20 COCOS to the MainNet COCOS through official and third party tools. | https://medium.com/bitpie/how-to-do-cocos-bcx-mainnet-token-mapping-cc169cd40d30 | ['Bitpie Wallet'] | 2020-04-08 14:04:17.837000+00:00 | ['Blochchain', 'Bitpie', 'Games', 'Cocos Bcx', 'Mapping'] |
Relaxing Your Muscles Can Relax Your Mind | Relaxing Your Muscles Can Relax Your Mind
Progressive muscle relaxation therapy is one of the simplest science-backed treatments for anxiety
Credit: Delmaine Donson / Getty Images
During the early days of the novel coronavirus outbreak, doctors in China noticed that many people hospitalized with Covid-19 were developing anxiety and sleeping problems. These patients were forced to spend weeks cut off from contact with friends and family, and so the doctors partly attributed their woes to the unsettling effects of social isolation.
At a hospital in Hainan province, a physician study team decided to treat their patients’ isolation-induced anxiety and sleeping problems using a relaxation technique known as progressive muscle relaxation therapy, or PMR.
“Progressive muscle relaxation teaches you how to relax your muscles through a two-step process,” explains Mohammad Jafferany, MD, a clinical professor of dermatology, psychiatry, and behavioral sciences at Central Michigan University. Jafferany was not involved with the Chinese research, but he has studied the clinical effects of PMR. “First, you systematically tense particular muscle groups in your body,” he explains. “Next, you release the tension and notice how your muscles feel when you relax them.”
Twice a day for five consecutive days, a group of Covid-19 patients at the Hainan hospital listened to piped-in instructions that guided them through a typical PMR therapy session. They lay down on their backs and then tensed and relaxed the muscles of their hands, arms, head, neck, torso, and legs. According to the results of that study, which was published in May in the journal Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice, the patients’ scores on a clinically validated anxiety measuring tool improved by 22%, and their sleep scores improved by 30%. Meanwhile, the study team observed no anxiety or sleep benefits among a control group that received standard care but not PMR.
“First, you systematically tense particular muscle groups in your body. Next, you release the tension and notice how your muscles feel when you relax them.”
The Chinese study is just one of dozens of research efforts stretching back decades that have found relaxation therapy to be a highly effective treatment for stress, anxiety, and all their attendant symptoms and side effects. It may not have the hype of trendier or newer mental-health remedies, such as mindfulness meditation or CBD oil. But experts say PMR is among the surest ways to calm an anxious mind and body.
How progressive muscle relaxation works
The conventional view of muscle tension is that it’s the product of top-down processes; the brain interprets something as concerning or stressful, and this causes the muscles to tighten up. But experts say that the relationship between physical and mental states tends to run in both directions.
“One of the things we know about anxiety is that many things can feed into it, and one of them is muscle tension,” says Michelle Newman, PhD, director of the Laboratory for Anxiety and Depression Research at the Pennsylvania State University.
It may be helpful to think of negative thoughts and worries as anxiety manifested in the mind while tension is anxiety manifested in the body. “Any one of those things can start the anxiety process and trigger the others in a sort of upward negative cycle,” Newman explains. “And intervening in any one of them can break the cycle.”
According to Newman, PMR is a tool of cognitive-behavioral therapy, or CBT, which many experts now consider the “gold standard” in psychotherapy. CBT’s aim is to change the recurring thought patterns or behaviors that promote negative mental states, including the ones associated with anxiety. And Newman says that progressive muscle relaxation is one of the more common techniques that cognitive-behavioral therapists employ with their patients. In fact, some of her research has found that among people with generalized anxiety disorder, progressive muscle relaxation techniques were just as effective as thought-based CBT exercises or interventions.
“Doing a quick scan of tension every hour and then taking the time to release that tension gets people into the habit of sustaining and functioning with a lower level of tension throughout the day.”
Her work is just the tip of the iceberg. One 2015 study in the journal Stress determined that progressive muscle relaxation not only lowers a person’s subjective feelings of psychological stress, but it also significantly lowers the body’s circulating levels of the stress hormone cortisol. There’s also a nearly endless stream of research papers linking muscle relaxation therapy to symptom improvements among people with cancer, arthritis, and other medical conditions. For a 2020 study, Central Michigan University’s Jafferany found that PMR even helped reduce skin symptoms among people with psoriasis, a chronic inflammatory condition that causes itchy and painful skin rashes. Any condition that stress or inflammation makes worse, muscle relaxation therapy can likely make better, he says.
Not only is PMR effective for a variety of anxiety- or stress-associated conditions, but it’s also “more straightforward” than mindfulness meditation and some other popular stress therapies, Newman says. Many people struggle with meditation practices; tensing and relaxing muscles is easier. “But one of my personal pet peeves is that when people do it, they don’t do it optimally,” she says.
How does one do PMR optimally? “You should practice twice a day for 15 minutes each time,” she says. There are literally hundreds of guided PMR practices online, but this one from the U.K.’s National Health Service is a good place to start. Most practices involve tensing individual muscle groups, such as the muscles of the hands or forehead, for five to 10 seconds while breathing slowly and calmly. Next, deeply and fully relax those same muscles and concentrate on the difference between how your muscles felt when they were tense and how they feel now that they’re relaxed. The specifics of PMR routines vary, but many start with the limbs before working their way to the torso and, finally, the head and face.
Along with those two daily practice sessions, Newman says that you should take time every hour for a quick “body scan” to identify and release points of tension. “The idea is that people get into the bad habit of creating and sustaining muscle tension,” she says. “Doing a quick scan of tension every hour and then taking the time to release that tension gets people into the habit of sustaining and functioning with a lower level of tension throughout the day.” People who practice these techniques consistently will gradually become better at quickly identifying and releasing muscle tension.
“The more you build up tension, the harder it is to let it go,” Newman says. “And tension triggers more stress and anxiety, which feed back into tension.” Muscle relaxation therapy breaks up that debilitating feedback loop. | https://elemental.medium.com/relaxing-your-muscles-can-relax-your-mind-50466e20de9d | ['Markham Heid'] | 2020-08-13 15:14:17.172000+00:00 | ['The Nuance', 'Anxiety', 'Stress', 'Therapy', 'Health'] |
4 Things About Software Development Today That Would Surprise the Coders of the Past | Computers have now been in our lives for decades — and for most of that time, we’ve been watching them and trying to predict the future. Some changes weren’t hard to anticipate. We knew that faster, more powerful hardware would drive languages up the ladder of complexity. We predicted the way that code would infiltrate the devices around us, replacing all-in-one personal computers. And we’ve spent years anticipating the seismic shifts of virtual reality and artificial intelligence.
But other changes came as more of a surprise. Here are four things that the the pioneering programmers of the past might not have expected.
1. Programming languages are still text
In 1978, Brian Kernighan wrote this, the world’s first “Hello World” program, not knowing how famous his code would become. His starter example is preserved as a museum piece:
The first hello / WikiCommons
Today, nearly a half-century later, you’ll have no trouble recognizing the syntax of this basic C code. Which tells us something: programming languages are conservative.
Even though language churn is real, even though new APIs and frameworks spring up overnight, the mainstream shifts slowly. Object-oriented programming was invented with Simula in the 1960s. It rose to prominence with C++ in the 1990s, and — despite some worthy challengers — it’s still the dominant paradigm today. In fact, one of the most striking features of modern programming is that so many of the world’s most important languages share a similar C-inspired syntax, from C# to Swift, Dart to Go, Java to JavaScript. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Programming luminaries have predicted for years that the way we write programs would change. We’ve been expecting natural-English languages that anyone could use, then flowchart-style visual languages that wouldn’t have any text at all, then AI-powered languages that would write themselves. Interesting experiments and niche tools aside, we’re still writing code in more or less the same way we did a generation ago.
2. Most software is cheap or free
Twenty years ago, installing a new piece of professional software meant spinning up a CD, clicking through a setup wizard, and watching one slow-moving progress bar after another. Some setup programs would cheekily suggest you use the wait to grab a coffee.
Installing software also meant shelling out serious cash, assuming you wanted a legitimate license. Consider this fine software specimen, on which an empire was built:
Microsoft Office, 25 years ago
Office 95 could be yours for a couple of hundred dollars, if you qualified for the right promotion. But a business that needed a new, full copy of the professional version would be on the hook for $599. And that was back in 1995. In inflation-adjusted dollars, buying Office 95 today would cost an eye-watering $1033. (At the time, businesses still saw it as something of a deal because it bundled together several applications in one package and underpriced its most serious competitor, Novell PerfectOffice.)
For corporate developers, the story was even more expensive. Most Microsoft developers either purchased an MSDN subscription from Microsoft (for several thousand dollars) or worked for a company that did, because of the tremendous cost of buying operating systems, development tools, database software, and other tools separately. Even the much-loathed Microsoft FrontPage was introduced with a list price of $699.
Today, that model has died. What happened? First, open-source software won the development world. It had the most enthusiastic community, some of the world’s most valuable pieces of software, and a price that was impossible to beat (free). Then it spread to the business world, where companies are now more likely to pay a metered usage cost through something like Amazon Web Services or Azure than buy seat licenses. And then it spread to the consumer world, with tech companies that give their software away and sell other people the chance to put ads in front of their audience.
Some companies still survive on a software-for-money model (Adobe comes to mind, along with many game developers). But these tend to be small or mid-sized software companies. The big players like Microsoft, Google, and Apple make increasingly small amounts from software sales. Some, like Facebook, don’t even have a way to charge for their software.
3. Desktop apps are just a special type of web app
Ever since the internet first reached the public consciousness, sometime in the early 1990s, we’ve been expecting it to change the world. As a result, many of the transformations it triggered were small surprises, even though they tore down and remade fundamental parts of our world. If you’ve been around long enough, you’ve seen the decimation of the music industry, the remaking of commerce, the death of print media, and the rise of distributed social groups for sharing news and information. All of these shifts were monumental, but none of them was unanticipated.
Another change that wasn’t too surprising was the steady erosion of desktop software in favor of web apps. Once it became possible to do something with JavaScript in a web browser — with universal compatibility and no installation process — it quickly became preferred. This process was repeated over and over again across different domains. Of course, desktop applications were still important for some capabilities and some professional niches… or were they?
Enter Electron.
With the help of Node.js, Electron created a desktop shell wrapping the client web stack (JavaScript and the DOM) and the web server stack (with some extensions for plugging into operating system APIs). If that sounds like some serious overhead — you aren’t wrong. Even worse, every Electron app gets its own distinct copy of this heavy-weight execution environment. It sounds like a bloated nightmare, but computing power and memory were already so plentiful that developers could afford the overhead. The rest is history — Electron became a professional-quality tool suitable for building applications like Atom and Visual Studio Code.
Of course, native desktop apps aren’t all dead. But Electron is thriving, and there’s a new wave of technologies coming that help developers hide desktop applications inside web applications. WebAssembly has broken the door down, leading the way to new projects like Blazor. The world has inverted.
Back in the early days of the internet, we knew that the performance gap between desktop and web would shrink. We knew that the concerns of the day (the slow interpreted nature of the JavaScript language, the extra layer of the HTML DOM, the non-native graphics API) would become less important. Some of us even knew that every type of app would eventually be made to run in a web browser. But did anyone realize that the advantages of this development model — its broad reach, and the lure of using the same technology stack everywhere — would lead us to put desktop applications inside fake, virtualized web browsers and web servers? And that the cost of that design would become almost trivial?
4. We lost the security war
In the early 2000s, we were looking at new ways of computing — and steadily increasing security risks. Untrustworthy apps could install viruses. Hackers could crash websites, and steal credit card data, documents, and emails. Identity fraud was difficult to fight.
Fast forward to today and the situation is… basically the same. Data is still stolen. Networks are still hacked. The only challenge of early-internet computer security that we’ve come close to solving is that of viruses, because we’ve created giant sandbox models for games and most consumer apps. But with universal global computing and the Internet of Things, the perimeter we need to defend has grown impossibly wide.
Security experts know that foolproof security is never possible. Instead, we strive for something called defense in depth — a layered sequence of defense measures that force attackers to thwart several systems to steal our secrets.
Defense in depth in a computer network
But here’s the problem. In the last two decades, we’ve failed to shore up the weakest link: the end user. Even though we’ve developed technologies for biometrics, we’re more likely to use facial recognition to index our Facebook pictures than to protect our data. Identity between people can’t be (practically) proved. We have facilities for encryption that we rarely use on our own data or communication. And here’s something that would stun the security expert of two-decades-ago: mysteriously, text passwords with arbitrary rules about capitalization and special characters are still a thing.
It’s true, of course, that security is an ongoing struggle, and that human nature is hard to change. But when billions of dollars can be stolen simply by asking, we’ve failed to protect our end users. And how can we explain when the world’s most technologically advanced country holds an election that’s influenced by a low-tech phishing attack? | https://medium.com/young-coder/4-things-about-software-development-today-that-would-surprise-the-coders-of-the-past-41e9a2e389ca | ['Matthew Macdonald'] | 2020-04-13 15:23:43.153000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Security', 'Software Engineering', 'Programming', 'Computer Science'] |
5 Ways to Thrive During the Pandemic | So, life is just rolling along and then all of a sudden, everything changes in ways we couldn’t have dreamed of. We are in the midst of a pandemic, a fight for social justice, an upcoming and life changing election, wildfires, hurricanes and financial collapse. Everyone is being tested. How do we cope while navigating these challenges? What practices can we infuse into our daily lives to have less reaction, less frequency of reaction, less intensity of reaction and quicker recovery time?
Life keeps coming, exactly as it may, in its own strange and upside-down ways.
We don’t have to fight against what is happening. We don’t have to resent what is happening. We can even choose to receive what is happening, just as it is, and trust that it is showing us a different path.
There are strategies we can choose. The following have helped me navigate these times and open up to new ways of living life to the fullest.
1) Become willing to see things in a new light
Being asked to stop everything as we knew it is, can be used as an opportunity to evaluate our lives. We can notice where we have been in the “trance” of mindlessness — doing one thing after another without taking time to come up for air. We have been asked to slow down. Even the Earth showed us how it could heal when we paused. Maybe that’s what we need, to shed toxic layers of things that don’t serve us.
2) Allow yourself to feel what you feel
Don’t try to push your feelings away. What we resist, persists. We can always compare our situation to someone else’s and find gratitude for what we do have, but if we don’t acknowledge our own pain and fear, stand in it and process it, it will eat away at us from the inside out, resulting in anxiety and physical manifestation. Buddha says, “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.” We have to feel it to heal it. And this, too, shall pass. Period.
3) Practice self-care
This is the time to get to know ourselves in a whole new way. We have to retreat sometimes to move forward. Everything is changing, and this situation has blown up our comfort zones. It is so easy to want to numb out, but our bodies and spirits are begging for restoration.
Set up your day by creating your own mantra. Who do you want to be in this moment for yourself? Practices, such as yoga and meditation, ground us and decompress the fight-flight-freeze reaction of our nervous systems.
Here is a guided Meditation to Create Ease. Go inward to let your deeper wisdom guide you. Set your intention of what you want your life to look like on the other side of all of this. Commit to being stronger and more expanded, with a healthier body and soul.
4) Be of Service
Find ways to support others and reach out. Our consciousness will expand when…
To continue reading this article, visit https://www.mukhayoga.com/blogs/the-community-hub/5-ways-to-thrive-during-a-pandemic | https://medium.com/@sharonp-94230/5-ways-to-thrive-during-the-pandemic-bff49c50bafd | ['Mukha Yoga'] | 2020-12-22 22:15:38.089000+00:00 | ['Self Care', 'Pandemic Diaries', 'Guided Meditation', 'Intentional Living', 'Meditation'] |
I see red | Take your broken heart and make it art. ~ Carrie Fisher, Princess Leia
“Not Forgotten” by Maxine Noel
It is Thanksgiving and I have much to be grateful for even if this is the worst year I have experienced since I relocated to the US in 2006.
“Still Dancing” by Jon Labillois
Since I have made America my homeland I have come to love Thanksgiving even more than Christmas as a holiday of observation.
MMIW protesters
As a practitioner of shamanism it is a tradition that is fraught with conflicting stories and sentiments.
Art Heals: The Jingle Dance Project
How the holiday is enshrined in US history — how it commemorates the pilgrim and puritan settlers tales of arrival in their New World versus the atrocities committed on Native American tribes already living here, how they treated the people then and now — is a sad and sorry tale, an open wound that has yet to heal.
Sarah Ortegon in Times Square on March 7/Maria Baranova
As with all things American, the history of the Americas is a brutal tale of greed and gore that has never been fully or truthfully acknowledged by our government and its leadership.
I have therefore decided to raise my red flag on Thanksgiving 2020 to focus on the plight of indigenous women and girls, abused and killed, missing and gone.
The REDress Project — Jaime Black
Today I join Métis artist Jaime Black, creator of the installation piece “The REDress Project” and Tia Wood, champion jingle dancer/singer of 2017 Gathering of Nations fame, and all those in the missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW) movement.
MMIW performance by A Tribe Called Red
Thanksgiving is kind of like Columbus Day for Native people. Why would we celebrate people who tried to destroy us?
Thanksgiving stories were among the few appearances made by Native Americans in popular historical narratives, effectively erasing history-altering crimes, like the killing of tens of millions of buffalo, from the country’s consciousness. That massacre led to the mass starvation of Indigenous people. | https://medium.com/@icurra/i-see-red-4f5279b0650f | ['Bhakti Issa Urra'] | 2020-11-23 18:29:54.659000+00:00 | ['Thanksgiving', 'Myths And Lies', 'Indigenous Loss', 'Truth And Consequence', 'American History'] |
[LeetCode] 3Sum | Given an array nums of n integers, are there elements a, b, c in nums such that a + b + c = 0? Find all unique triplets in the array which gives the sum of zero.
Notice that the solution set must not contain duplicate triplets.
Example 1:
Input: nums = [-1,0,1,2,-1,-4]
Output: [[-1,-1,2],[-1,0,1]]
Example 2:
Input: nums = []
Output: []
Example 3:
Input: nums = [0]
Output: []
解題想法：
這題本來想寫自己的想法下去，但發現這位大大真的寫得太好了，根本無懈可擊，讓我直接引用她的寫法吧，再次感謝 Fion carry，但她是用 C#，會 C# 的也可以學一下大大的寫法，她的文章有圖文並茂喔，值得大家去看。
[Day 7] 演算法刷題 LeetCode 15. 3Sum (Medium)
將 array 從小到大升冪排序 將須要找出的3個數的 index 分別表示為 first , second , third 用 for 迴圈計算，並將 first 做為 nums 的 起始點 second 則為 first + 1 為起始點 third 則為 nums.Length - 1 為起始點 並判斷 nums[first] + nums[second] + nums[third] 是否為 0
若等於 0，則為解答之一，Add 到 List
若小於 0，則代表負數太大，需要將 second 移至下一個較小的負數 (second++)
若大於 0，則代表正數太大，需要將 third 移至上一個較小的正數 (third--)
7. 另外判斷 first 是否已經重複，若重複則跳過此次迴圈，因為答案也會是一樣的
如 {-1, -1, 0, 1, 2}
8. 另外判斷 second 是否已經重複，若重複則 second++，並跳過此次迴圈，因為答案也會是一樣的
如 {-4, 2, 2, 2, 3}
7. 與 8. 是讓效能再更好的其中之一條件，不用重複查找已經查找過的數字。 若沒有寫也是會過的哦！
簡單好懂版：
Runtime: 1648 ms, faster than 13.79%
Memory Usage: 17.8 MB, less than 7.12%
概念相同，程式縮減版：
Runtime: 780 ms, faster than 51.52%
Memory Usage: 16 MB, less than 63.27%
參考文獻： | https://medium.com/jacky-life/leetcode-3sum-bb1deec8ba31 | [] | 2020-09-21 13:48:01.879000+00:00 | ['Leetcode', 'Python'] |
美國田納西州聖誕發生爆炸案 | A columnist in political development in Greater China region, technology and gadgets, media industry, parenting and other interesting topics. | https://medium.com/@frederickyeung-59743/%E7%BE%8E%E5%9C%8B%E7%94%B0%E7%B4%8D%E8%A5%BF%E5%B7%9E%E8%81%96%E8%AA%95%E7%99%BC%E7%94%9F%E7%88%86%E7%82%B8%E6%A1%88-c64637cc985f | ['C Y S'] | 2020-12-26 02:32:28.134000+00:00 | ['USA', 'Government'] |
PPoS Test Report from Darmacash Community Member Solensson | 2020.4.4
Darmacash Website
This is Solensson. I am a crypto investor. My twitter is https://twitter.com/Solensson1.
Last time I bring you the DPoS (DarmaCash project team calls it PPoS) test experience of the DarmaCash project. Check here https://medium.com/darmacash-project-community/a-dpos-test-report-from-community-members-5a259e5c108e. Today I will share you something related to the PPoS at your wallet. I hope this article can make you clear how to check the information, income and corresponding common operations of your PPoS.
The DarmaCash project developer said that they used agile development methods for the development work. I think they are telling the truth because we see a lot of update and the testnet roll back several times. So let’s first try to find what the improvements are.
At the darmd daemon, press ‘enter’, you now can see the PPoS network status.
Also, I find that when use ‘buy_share’ command at wallet, you just need to input the number of votes you want to buy instead of calculating the figure at last version.
From these details, I think the project team puts user experience first, and projects that consider user experience are good projects!
Now let’s cut into the subject, after all, I think users are most concerned about how to find their PoS status.
Type ‘e’ command to start prompt mode.
Type ‘help’ command to list available command.
You can try the command one by one if you have time and it is a very interesting process.
‘list_share’ command
Type ‘list_share’ command to list your active staking information. As you see the output that I pledged 1,000 and 15,000 testnet toekns at pool ‘DMC_001’ and ‘DMC_TEST02’.
‘repo_share’ command
If you want to redeem the pledged tokens, use ‘repo_share’ command. The share ID can be get from the output of ‘list_share’ command. In the below example I redeem 1,000 tokens.
Type ‘list_share’ command to show the left active share. However you can type ‘list_share all’ command to list all the staking information including redeemed records.
‘list_share status’ command
Type ‘list_share status’ command to show your votes status. If the status is immature, it means you votes can’t be used for voting process, or in simple words, ‘immature’ means no reward. Once the status becomes mature, you will get your PoS reward.
‘show_stake_info’ command
Type ‘ show_stake_info ‘ command to show your profit of staking. It shows your last 7 days’ reward and total reward.
‘close_stake_pool’ command
Type ‘ close_stake_pool ‘ command to revoke your staking pool.
I think it’s a remarkable thing to complete the PoS function on DAG. The overall function and user experience are very good. I hope the DarmaCash project will continue to surprise me.
I am Solensson, you can follow me at https://twitter.com/Solensson1.
This article can be reposted but be sure to retain all information.
What is DARMA Cash?
DARMA Cash (DMCH) is a high-speed blockchain which aims to integrate state-of-the-art privacy technologies on the basis of Monero (XMR) to achieve truly private addresses, concealed financial data, masked identities, traceless IP, private Smart Contracts and DeFi based on Oracle and atomic swap technology.
DARMA Cash Project v2 is the next generation of DARMA Cash blockchain v1. Consensus algorithm is PoW+PPoS(We call the decentralized PoS without node restrictions Pool PoS, or PPoS) based on original cryptonight. DARMA Cash is industry leading blockchain to have bulletproofs, TLS encrypted Network. PPoS and smart contracts will be launched in this version.
Specifications:
Block size: 1.5MB
Consensus: PoW+PPoS
Premine: 3% (All is donated to community by project team)
Algorithm: CN (ASIC friendly)
Block time: 15seconds
Max emission: 460 million(DMCH)
Confirmation time: 180 seconds
Speed: 70 TPS
Official Links
Website：http://www.darmacash.com/
BTT：https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5193031.0
Community Links
Telegram：https://t.me/DarmaCash
Discord：https://discord.gg/MZTc5Hu
Twitter : https://twitter.com/CashDarma | https://medium.com/darmacash-project-community/ppos-report-from-darmacash-member-solensson-3e22c6c78352 | [] | 2020-07-01 03:07:03.084000+00:00 | ['Btc', 'Smart Contracts', 'Defi', 'Crypto', 'Anonymous'] |
Toni Harris and Katie Andrews were right! | Toni Harris and Katie Andrews were right! Hindsight is 20–20, and was early in the morning and probably before coffee. But The problem is that the guy was a perv, photographed or filmed you without permission, and, when the incident was over, paid no price. He actually misappropriated your likeness. That is not a crime, but rather a civil wrong called a “tort” in the law. That is why professional photographers walk around with releases for people to sign. You could have confronted him-loudly-and called him out for photographing you without permission. He would have at least been embarrassed. You might have intimidated him into deleting the photo or video, but at least he would have left the incident with some degree of shame. Men won’t change unless women demand that they pay a price every time they violate the person or the dignity of a woman. | https://medium.com/@rml-inthepublicinterest/toni-harris-and-katie-andrews-were-right-97f9b5462f95 | ['Robert Lipshutz'] | 2020-10-23 13:10:16.564000+00:00 | ['Metoo', 'Womens Rights', 'Culture'] |
Sennheiser debuts two new headphones for the U.S. market: The IE 300 IEH in-ear and the HD 250BT over-ear | Sennheiser debuts two new headphones for the U.S. market: The IE 300 IEH in-ear and the HD 250BT over-ear Kyle Jan 16·2 min read
World-renowned headphone maker Sennheiser has announced two new models for CES 2021. First, let’s take a look at the IE 300, a new in-ear headphone (IEH), featuring a refined version of the company’s 7mm Extra Wide Band (XWB) transducer, with an optimized membrane foil that minimizes natural resonances and total harmonic distortion, which is specified to be less than 0.08% at 1 kHz/94 dB.
[ Further reading: The best headphones you can buy ]In addition, the space behind the transducer is designed to minimize reflections within the housing, and a resonator chamber in front of the transducer removes masking resonances in the ear canal. The end result is a promised frequency response from 6Hz to 20kHz (no tolerance given). According to Sennheiser, the IE 300 “delivers clear high frequencies with a subtle and warm musicality that brings greater intimacy to vocals.”
Of course, durability and comfort have not been overlooked. The IE 300 comes with several sizes of silicone and memory-foam eartips, because using the right size for your ears is crucial for getting the best sound out of any IEH as well as maximizing noise isolation. Each earpiece features an individually adjustable ear hook for stability, and the included cable is reinforced with para-aramid that can withstand thousands of bend cycles.
The cable is detachable from each earpiece thanks to its gold-plated Fidelity+ MMCX connector that’s seated in a recessed socket for additional strain relief. In addition, you can use an alternate cable, including balanced cables with 2.5- or 4.4mm connectors that are available as optional accessories.
The IE 300 will be available by the end of January for an MSRP of $299.95.
Sennheiser’s latest addition to its wireless-headphone stable is the entry-level HD 250BT, which has been available in Europe since last year but is now coming to the U.S. market. Touted as offering “club sound for everyday life,” the HD 250BT offers 25-hour battery life and Bluetooth 5.0 wireless connectivity with support for high-quality codecs such as AAC and aptX. In addition, you can tailor the sound to your individual tastes with an intuitive equalizer offered by Sennheiser’s Smart Control app.
Sennheiser says this This over-the ear, closed-back headphone offers rugged construction, soft earpads that provide surprisingly effective noise isolation, and intuitive onboard controls. Even better, it’s highly affordable with an MSRP of only $69.95. Like the IE 300, it will be available in the US at the end of January.
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details. | https://medium.com/@kyle37866673/sennheiser-debuts-two-new-headphones-for-the-u-s-222747396fc | [] | 2021-01-16 05:14:45.946000+00:00 | ['Cutting', 'Consumer Electronics', 'Deals', 'Surveillance'] |
How a Potato Ended a Minor League Baseball Player’s Career | A potato was the downfall of minor league catcher Dave Bresnahan. (Photo via PublicDomainPictures.net)
A well-intended prank involving a potato will go down as one of baseball’s strangest stories
Dave Bresnahan had a closer connection to professional baseball than most. His great uncle, Roger Bresnahan, was a Hall-of-Fame catcher during a 17-year big-league career. Dave was good enough to play in the minor leagues, but it was what he did with a potato, rather than a ball, that he will be remembered for during his time in the game, and what contributed to the end of his playing career.
Unlike Roger Bresnahan, who hit .279 and was a key cog of some of the earliest New York Giants teams led by legendary manager John McGraw, his descendant Dave had a more modest baseball resume. Selected in the 18th round of the 1984 draft by the Seattle Mariners, he never truly took off, joining the Cleveland Indians system in 1986 and falling into the role of a backup catcher — not the position a young player wants if they are trying to make it to the majors.
In 1987, Bresnahan was with the Williamsport Bills, the Indians’ Double-A affiliate, when he made a decision that would change his baseball legacy forever and also bring an end to his playing career. He decided to play a prank.
On August 31st, the Bills were well out of contention (finishing with a record of 60–79) and just playing out the string. Bresnahan had previously taken a potato, peeled it and carved it into the likeness of a baseball with the plan to switch it with a ball during a play — essentially an elaborate hidden-ball trick.
He wanted to use the tater in a very specific situation. He planned to pretend to pick off a runner at third by wildly throwing the potato he had concealed on purpose and then tag the befuddled opponent with the actual ball when he headed home. He knew he was going to play on the 31st because it was a scheduled double-header against the Reading Phillies, and the seldom-used backstop may not have seen much action otherwise.
It wasn’t a poorly thought out plan, as Bresnahan had even previously called up major league umpire Tim Tschida, who was an acquaintance, to run the hypothetical by him of what would happen if such a play were to happen. After being assured that the runner would simply be returned to third base, he felt confident in giving it a whirl.
In the fifth inning, he acted on his plan. With opposing runner Rick Lundblade on third base, he told umpire Scott Porter that he needed a new glove. He went back to the dugout and grabbed new leather and the spud. Once game action resumed, he took the potato out of concealment and threw it purposely over the head of his third baseman, Rob Swain, hoping the runner would bite. It worked as planned and when the runner came home, he was tagged by the Besnahan, who had the official game baseball in his possession .
Confusion ensued. After the umpire inspected the baseball and the spud, he awarded home to the runner. It was not a joke enjoyed by all, as Williamsport manager Orlando Gomez immediately pulled Bresnahan from the game and fined him $50. The very next day the Indians released him for his trickery. His playing career was over and he never played professionally again.
Although he was punished for the stunt, it was simultaneously regarded as pretty clever by many, even if they wouldn’t admit it. The next year, the Bills retired his number in front of a bulging sold-out stadium that boasted a $1 admission and a free potato. To be fair, the writing was on the wall for Bresnahan, who was approaching 26 at the time of the joke. He hit just .154 that season and had a lifetime batting average of .210. He was not headed to the majors or even a much longer minor league career. The potato just happened to be the crushing blow.
Bresnahan since went into a career in real estate. As he told milb.com, he rarely thinks about what made him baseball famous. “I don’t ever really think about it. It just kind of makes me chuckle because people still call me on it. People Google my name and they call me on it and want a response. I don’t put a thought to it, though, unless someone puts it to me.”
As it turned out, he wasn’t trying to cheat or make a mockery of anything with the potato. He was simply attempting to inject something different in what had turned into a long season and pull off one of the time-honors trick plays loved in baseball — just in a different way. “My teammates challenged me. They said why don’t you do it. It took me about two weeks to get the nerve, but I finally decided to do it. I’m not really a class clown type but I have a great sense of humor, and I was just trying to break the monotony of a poor season for me and the team.” | https://medium.com/sportsraid/how-a-potato-ended-a-minor-league-baseball-players-career-75fdd61676a0 | ['Andrew Martin'] | 2020-02-17 14:59:56.592000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'Sports', 'Humor', 'Baseball', 'MLB'] |
Ulysses on Reading Ulysses by James Joyce | Mosaic of Ulysses tied to the mast, photo by Dennis Jarvis used with permission
OK, Penelope thought it would be funny to buy me this book for my 2800th birthday, because I do spend most of my time reading nowadays, instead of traveling all over the world going to war. I’ve really calmed down, that’s for sure.
Anyhow, this book is weird. If it’s about me, why are there no boats or Trojan Horses or wars or anything?
Alright, I tried pretty hard, and I got through a few hundred pages when the guy I figured out was supposed to be me, this Leopold Bloom fella, starts masturbating in public.
That really shocked me.
I mean, have you ever heard that song, “Killing me softly with his song?” That's the way I feel about this Joyce guy now. I mean, Homer never even mentioned the public masturbating in his epic about me. That’s because Homer was blind and couldn’t see me when I would do it — which was a lot.
I mean it took me ten years to get home to Penelope. You better believe there was some fapping on board that ship.
But then I got scared. If Joyce knew about the masturbating all the time in public while I was away, what else did he know about?
Did he know about how gassy I was? Surely not. I mean my comrades knew because they had to smell it in the boat all the time, and they made fun of me. In fact, that’s the real reason they tied me to the mast in that episode that Homer got so wrong. It wasn’t because of the siren’s song. It was because I had a terrible case of the stinky farts and they didn’t want me to come below deck so they tied me to the mast up above.
And if he knows about how gassy I was, then he probably knows about Circe.
In Homer it’s supposedly Circe who “turns” my men into pigs and I have to do all kinds of trickery to get them turned back to men.
But in this MeToo era it should be pretty obvious to everyone — Circe didn’t have to “turn” those guys into pigs because they already were swine. Dogs. Worse. They were sex fiends.
Homer was papering all that over, luckily. But what if this guy Joyce knows the truth and is going to reveal exactly how piggish we were on that ten year long home journey home?
Shit.
I just hope he doesn’t know the worst of it. That it only took ten years because there were that many whores between Troy and Ithaca. Especially that one called Molly. Oh God, he doesn’t know about Molly, does he? I can still hear her now — “Yes, I will, yes, yes.” What a passionate lass.
We can’t have Penelope finding out about her now, can we? I just threw this piece of junk Ulysses into the trash where it belongs and I picked up my aged and respectful version of The Odyssey and started at the beginning. Feeling good! Order restored. No fucking stream of conscious and no killing me softly with his song and no Ireland.
Just Greek men being heroes. Oh Gods, I feel like myself again! Here we go:
Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy. | https://medium.com/pickle-fork/ulysses-on-reading-ulysses-by-james-joyce-5968c676cac4 | ['Simon Black'] | 2019-05-17 14:08:32.944000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Literature', 'Funny', 'Fiction', 'Satire'] |
XRP: Buy.Sell.Hodl. | Time series modeling and cryptocurrency forecasting
XRP is the symbol for Ripple cryptocurrency. HODL (Hold on for Dear Life)
The ‘irrational exuberance’ that drove the 2017/18 rise was based on investors believing that trees could grow to the sky. Now that they see they can’t, those conditions probably won’t repeat themselves (or maybe they will, people have short memories).
Task at hand.
Can we build a model that could day trade us to the moon?
Conclusions first, what did we learn?
basic time series models are not able to accurately forecast daily prices— fundamental assumptions are violated. our best guess is a random guess
coin price history and Ripple subreddit thread titles are not enough information to predict prices (it’s all public information, no advantage).
day trading cryptocurrency is not recommended unless user has information not available to the public or a better model that accounts for the stochastic behavior of the market
Nitty gritty for those who are interested.
Getting into the mud, I will try my best to explain the finer details.
Formal task at hand.
Given coin price history and ripple subreddit thread titles, can we build a model that could perform better than a random guess?In other words, can our model demonstrate a test root mean square error (RMSE) that is less than the standard deviation of the test data (random guess).
Approach.
Gather data using various web scraping tools in python. Perform exploratory data analysis (EDA) and normality checks to validate model assumptions. Utilize autoregressive models with increasing complexity to see which could best predict the market price. Analyze the results.
Step 1) Gathering data
In order to do data analysis, there has to be data. Ripple coin historical price data was gathered using Selenium. Reddit thread titles were gathered using pushshift’s api.
Step 2) Exploratory data analysis (EDA) and normality checks
Purpose of EDA and normality checks is clean, understand, and to be one with the data. The plot shows price over time (y-axis is in log scale). Price skyrockets after the first quarter of 2017 and increases more than 2 orders of magnitude by the beginning of 2018. The data is not normally distributed so the percent change was utilized to help transform the data to be more normally distributed (an assumption of autoregressive models). After transforming the data, the dicker fuller test yielded a p-value under 0.05 and the Q-Q plot (not shown here) fell more in line with the 45 degree line (still had heavy tails).
Second piece of data was the thread titles from ripple subreddit. A python toolbox called VADER was used perform sentiment analysis on the thread titles. VADER outputs a compound score between -1 to 1 for titles with a negative or positive sentiment, respectively. Below shows the price daily percent change (green) and the thread title sentiment score (blue). It is interesting to observe that the rise in price after 2017 correlated with the change in sentiment to be overall positive. However, the data only contains titles from the ripple subreddit so it is likely bias toward a positive/bullish mentality.
3) Autoregressive models
Autoregressive (AR) models are a class of models that could be used to predict a time-varying process. In short, it uses data from the past to predict the future. AR models were built with increasing complexity and parameters were optimized using an exhaustive grid search. The ranges of each parameter for the grid search was guided by the autocorrelation function (acf) and the partial autocorrelation function (pacf). The grid search utilized a rolling window approach to evaluate each model where a training set of data was used to forecast the following point, which was then compared to the actual value. The rolling window process was repeated over the validation set and the RMSE metric was used to score each model. The optimized models are summarized in the table below.
The most complex model, SARIMAX, is the only model that incorporates the exogenous data (Ripple thread title sentiment analysis). The sentiment analysis from the previous day was added to predict the following day.
Overall, as the model complexity increased (column 1 and 2), the validation RMSE (column 3) decreased. It was very hopeful to observe this trend during model optimization however, the test RMSE (column 4) shows that each model scored relatively the same. More on why in the following section.
4) Results analysis
If the test RMSE matches the standard deviation than the model is no better than a random guess. After optimizing each model it was discouraging but unsurprising to see how each of the models performed on the testing data. All the models had the same amount of the test RMSE. How can that be? Well, turns out the standard deviation of the test data matches that of the test RMSE (random guess woohoo!). Furthermore, after looking at additional rolling statistics on the data, it was discovered that the test data behaved statistically different compared to the training and validation data. The process was too non-stationary, generally stoachastic or random, to allow the models to perform well on the test. Lastly, if everyone else in the market incorporates the same information in their model, a basic model shouldn’t be expected to out perform the market.
Additional comments.
Markov chains maybe a better model as it could account for the various states spaces. Ripple coin market behavior is not consistent and thus should not be treated as so. All code to perform the analysis is listed on my github https://github.com/rdoooooo/XRP_buy_sell_hodl This was my first medium post, all feedback is welcomed!
References | https://medium.com/@richardddo/xrp-buy-sell-hodl-8e265d35e434 | ['Richard Do'] | 2019-02-02 20:51:46.061000+00:00 | ['Sentiment Analysis', 'Data Science', 'Autoregressive', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Time Series Forecasting'] |
Sleepless midnight poems (Session 44) | Sleepless midnight poems (Session 44)
"If I told you
I am hurting,
would you stop
or would
you
dig deeper?
Sometimes I
wonder when
I'm laying
and my eyes
are fixed
to the ceiling
I wish it were
starry.
And I try
to hold to that
thinking, you know?
So my will would not
mistaken me,
and stay.
But you seem
to be a mind reader,
because your fingertips
find the trail from
my mouth
to my doom.
To sanity and hatred.
And I give in
and I almost can
remember what
was I thinking.
And your touch
I can't tell.
Hardly soft,
or just
softly hard.
Either way
it hurts so good.
And as I open
my mouth,
I remember
what was I
thinking;
I'm an open book,
but you don't know
how to read." | https://medium.com/poets-unlimited/sleepless-midnight-poems-session-44-2168db3eccb6 | ['Tina Miller'] | 2017-03-31 15:57:38.031000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Poets Unlimited', 'Poem', 'Poetry On Medium', 'T Miller'] |
The Perfect Blog Format | In todays world the average person has an attention span that can be measured in nanoseconds. Your blog format and the way your site is set up plays a huge impact on how long a reader will stay on the site. Developing a solid blog outline for each one of your posts can help you keep a structure that helps keep your readers engaged and lowers your bounce rates.
When someone clicks to an article they find online, typically they will read the main headline, followed by a sentence or two. Instead of continuing to read the blog post, they’ll scan the outline of the blog, read the subheading, and skip to the last few sentences. By examining the blog outline in this way, a reader decides if they’re going to read the whole article or leave the site. This is where having a strong blog format comes into play.
Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean that your content will most likely get skipped and skimmed through. We’ve got an excellent guide on your blog format, followed by the best way to create your blog outline. It’s all about the engagement, power words, visuals, and emotional calls to action! Continue reading if you’re ready to start grabbing those headlines.
How to Demand Excitement and Interest With Your Blog Format Techniques
Crushing the Headlines
The headlines are one of the most dynamic elements of your blog format. Besides images and videos, the headlines will be the first thing a reader notices.
The Title
Start by coming up with an attention grabbing title. Titles that ask questions can quickly grab the reader’s attention. Open-loop titles work extremely well also. These are titles that leave the reader hanging in suspense. This usually leads to them NEEDING to finish the article to satisfy their curiosity. Here’s a good example of an open loop title:
“The Verdict is In On This Month’s Data: YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT WE FOUND!”
Don’t get too overdramatic with your headlines or oversell the article. If it seems over the top to you, most likely it’s over the top to your readers. Try and proof read your article from a readers standpoint. How would the headline tags you’re using make you feel? What emotional responses would they manifest?
The Subheaders
After knocking the title out, you can focus on the other main points of the article, such as your H2, H3, and H4 tags. A good article should have multiple headline tags of different size.
Typically when an article is skimmed, the headlines will be the only content that actually gets digested. An article’s headlines are your way of telling the reader what that blog post outlines. A reader can walk away with the main topics of your article, and what type of value they stand to gain from going back and reading the whole length of the post (which is exactly what we’re going for).
Using extra care and attention on your H1-H4 tags drastically improve your SEO as well. By making this step a habit, you’re killing two birds with one stone.
Pictures Need to Be a Focal Point of Your Blog Format and Blog Outline
The pictures that help make up your blog format are just as important as the headlines. Images pop and grab the readers attention faster than any other dynamic of a website. Pictures are visually pleasing, and typically trigger a positive emotional response from the reader. Don’t be afraid to go heavy on the pictures.
This doesn’t mean post a ton of pictures you found on the first page of image search. Each picture should have some thought put into it. Only use pictures that are extremely relevant to the content you’re writing about.
Ensuring that only high-relevancy images are used get used accomplishes two things. First, it helps your site rank higher in the search engines and helps tell Google what type of readers to recommend your site to.
If your site is centered around the fitness niche and you’re writing an article about the top ten exercises of 2021, but you post pictures of the top low sugar drink recipes, you’re going to confuse the algorithm. This is a sure fire way to not get your site indexed and ranked.
When you’re coming up with ideas for your blog format or drafting a blog outline, be sure to include ideas for the meta tags of your photos as well. This won’t help keep customers engaged on the front-end, but it could draw potential subscribers on the back end by way of SEO.
Use only the highest quality images possible. These images are clearer and more brilliant, which gives your site an extra boost of visual appeal. Put two websites side by side with the same exact visual content. One has in 720 and the other is in 1080. I know which one I’m going with every time. Your readers are no different. The blog game is all about producing quality content.
If you really want to put the extra effort in, take the time to post pictures of real people and real situations. Recent studies have shown that readers prefer photos of real people as opposed to stock photos. This simple hack can massively boost engagement and conversions on a website.
As a side note, be careful when you’re using photos and other content for your website. Be sure to check out this article with information you should have regarding the legal aspects of blogging.
Format Your Blog To Include Short, Concise Paragraphs
This is one of the most important blog format rules in my book. The goal of most bloggers is to turn their site into a lengthy, multiple page authority site on whatever their niche topic is. This is a great goal, and it takes A LOT of content.
However, keep your paragraphs very short. Each paragraph should be no longer than two to three sentences at the most. This is extremely important from a readability aspect.
Keeping the paragraphs of your content short help break the article down into small, digestible pieces. Remember, the average digital subscriber only stays on a page for about 30 seconds. Keeping their attention by breaking the content down into small sections will drastically decrease your bounce rate.
Choose Your Font Carefully
Large, flashy types of fonts are appropriate for certain websites. Especially if those websites are from the late 90s and early 2000s. I’m only kidding (sort of).
Larger, big-print style fonts with blocked letters and loud colors are not bad when it comes to using certain landing pages that have a lot of sales copy on them. But to be honest, even those pages are dying out as time goes on.
Trends are changing online (as they always do), and readers have shown they prefer smaller, more minimalist fonts that don’t stick out as much. In today’s internet world of fonts, I suppose less is more.
Utilize a Table of Contents For Your Articles
This goes along with having short paragraphs spread throughout your content. This is another measure to help ensure readability and smaller, easier to read sections as opposed to monstrous, thousand word essays.
Use a plugin like WordPress Elementor that has an awesome table of contents block available for use. The table of contents available in Elementor allows you to link to each different section individually.
This makes reading a lot more convenient for your subscribers, as they can freely skip between different passages, following along with the topics as they do so. By using this feature, it lowers the risk of having readers become confused when they’re reading a 5,000 word authority post that’s been shortened by an illusion.
That’s one thing that is actually very ironic to me. Current online trends show that people heavily favor humungous authority sites with a lot of content. That’s a ton of reading. It’s funny that this happens in a time period where people have the shortest attention spans we’ve ever seen.
By this data, you would think micro blogging and mini-niche sites would still run the market. But the times they are a-changin’.
Using Lists and Quotes
Using bulleted lists can be a great way to bring attention to your blog format.
Lists bring attention to the area where the reader sees the bullets or numbers
They’re broken down, using the same theory as short paragraphs
Make important points easy to follow and remember
“Using quotes and testimonials can be another creative way to bring attention to certain parts of your article”
Brandon Crawford
Author
Following these simple blog format tips and hacks can be a very simple way to engage your readers more. More engagement ends up turning into more traffic, which means more success for you as a blogger. Check back for part 2 of this article, where we cover Blog Outline.
Check out the full article at https://theblogfather.net/?p=179 | https://medium.com/@theblogfathertrilogy/the-perfect-blog-format-e9c804bf5d06 | ['The Blogfather'] | 2021-08-23 07:37:32.935000+00:00 | ['Blog Content', 'Blogging Tips', 'Website Content', 'Blogging', 'Blogs And Blogging'] |
Why are there so many witches in Hunza, Pakistan? | Most of us are familiar with tales of witch trials in colonial America and early modern Europe around 1450 to 1750. Dozens of witches were burnt alive and hanged to death in Salem, Massachusetts and around Europe. The witch-trials happened because the young women were believed to be possessed by the devil and were accused of practicing witch-craft. Although this was centuries ago but to the people of Gilgit-Baltistan in the northern mountains of Pakistan, the presence of “witches” is very much a contemporary concept.
Photo by Charlie Harutaka on Unsplash
The folklore of the people of this mountainous region revolves around witches, shamans, demons, and fairies among others. Historically the witches are believed to be evil female spirits living among us as human beings. They are accused of being able to smell humans who are going to die in the near future and are often feared for they attack their prey in the dark. It’s believed that sometimes they work in clans and their male accomplice known as a “Fanis”, in the native language, distributes the flesh of the human they preyed on.
There is no sure way to tell who is a witch but the society has some vague standards by which women are judged. For example, in many cases, women with crooked or large teeth and an overall unpleasant appearance are thought to be witches. A witch’s daughters will also be witches by inheritance and the sons would conveniently not inherit this curse. In some cases, a witch gets nauseous when someone around her dies and she pukes her guts out.
In the olden days, due to lack of electricity, people depended on lanterns and oil lamps. Women were advised to stay inside their homes after dark. If a woman roams around at night, chances were that she will be considered a witch because she is not afraid of the dark like the others. One popular tale revolves around a witch attacking a princess in the royal fort and the princess defended herself by throwing hot oil onto the witch’s face.
Photo by Mark Tegethoff on Unsplash
Although there was no witch-craft being practiced in the region, men took it upon themselves to beat or injure women who were assumed to be witches. It was a way to confine women to their homes and a way to cover domestic abuse. Men were praised for their bravery for standing up to the witches and the “witch” was ostracized from society. All the kids would be scared of even going near her house. The stories of a witch eliminating her husband or even her own kids were prevalent. The men never confronted the “witch” and everyone just talked behind her back.
Statistically speaking, the ratio of “witches” to the general population is very high in the Karakorum mountain valleys. If you speak to any of the locals, everyone knows dozens of witches. The question arises, are almost all women witches in someone’s story? Growing up listening to the tales of witch-hunts around me always made me curious about whether there were any evil feminine entities roaming around at night. As an adult, I have understood that this was just another false narrative by the patriarchal system we live in. | https://medium.com/illumination/why-are-there-so-many-witches-in-hunza-pakistan-3888340c0e57 | ['Nazia Akhtar'] | 2020-11-22 18:34:00.759000+00:00 | ['Halloween', 'Storytelling', 'Women', 'Patriarchy', 'Gender Equality'] |
Congressional Action to End the Bans — Now and Into the Future | Congressional Action to End the Bans — Now and Into the Future
Trump thought he won, but Members of Congress are pushing back.
By Manar Waheed, Senior Legislative and Advocacy Counsel, ACLU APRIL 10, 2019 | 9:30 AM
For the first time since President Trump issued his Muslim ban, Congress proposed a legislative solution today to protect immigrant communities from discriminatory bans, immediately and permanently.The long-awaited NO Ban Act, introduced by Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Representative Judy Chu (D-Calif.), would immediately rescind the Muslim ban as well as President Trump’s asylum ban and refugee ban, definitively ending these discriminatory abuses of authority by the Trump administration. It would also change the standard by which presidents can invoke ban authority in the future.
Under current law, the executive branch can bar large groups of people from entry without effective accountability or regard for other parts of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). The text of the provision that President Trump has relied on in support of his bans says that the President may “suspend the entry” of groups of non-citizens based on a finding that such entry would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States.” And, in a historic failure, the Supreme Court relied on this statutory authority — and discounted the Constitution and other parts of the INA — when it allowed the Muslim ban to remain in effect.
So it’s this specific “entry suspension” provision that the NO BAN Act works to limit. The bill would curtail the broad and unspecific language in the current law and would instead require the government to meet a more stringent standard in suspending or restricting entry based on “credible facts” and connected to “specific acts” that have actually occurred. It would require that such a drastic measure be narrowly tailored to meet a compelling government interest using the least restrictive means in doing so. And it would also establish a system of checks and balances, such that Congress would be routinely notified and briefed on the status, implementation, and constitutional and legislative authority for the executive’s actions.The NO Ban Act would also expand the non-discrimination provision of the INA to prohibit discrimination based on religion. If passed, presidents would be prohibited by statute from using rank prejudice against a religion in lieu of individualized consideration in the visa process — which would help prevent another Muslim ban from ever being instituted again.
The damage of the bans does not end with those directly impacted. Discriminatory government rhetoric and policies like the Muslim ban play a role in the escalation of bigotry, harassment, and attacks on community members and faith-based institutions. Beyond individuals from the listed countries, the Muslim ban has caused real pain in hearts, homes, and neighborhoods of the American people as well as those around the globe.
Of course, the proposed legislation is not perfect and there is still work to be done. Members should clarify that bars on entry should only be focused on those responsible for the “specific acts” that the ban seeks to address, as in many previous executive orders. And we still need legislation that explicitly protects all communities against discrimination in immigration.
Still, the NO BAN Act is a significant step forward for Muslim and immigrant communities that could be targeted discriminatorily. It is the first legislation in a long time to proactively create standards based upon facts rather than unchecked “suspicion” that can better protect Muslims, Arabs, Iranians, Middle Easterners, and South Asians from the discrimination they have long faced. By creating substantive standards and accountability, it greatly reduces the possibility of future bias-based bans for all communities.
With the NO Ban Act, Congress has the opportunity to correct a wrong perpetrated by the Trump administration and exacerbated by the Supreme Court. From airport protests to tragic stories of Muslim families separated, we have heard the outcry for far too long. The people do not want an America with a Muslim ban; we want an America free from discrimination on a road to equality. It is time for our elected officials to step up to the plate, and for those seeking office to make commitments. Who’s in? | https://medium.com/aclu/congressional-action-to-end-the-bans-now-and-into-the-future-2370f8e4a9b1 | ['Aclu National'] | 2019-04-10 14:06:08.455000+00:00 | ['Immigration', 'Speak Freely', 'Religious Freedom', 'Politics'] |
I Know Everything About You, and I Still Love You | “Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” (Matthew 10:16, ESV)
The title quote is by Anna Draper in “Mad Men”, who consoles and expresses her love for Don Draper despite his many mistakes and people he had harmed during his time as a Madison Avenue ad man. He is womanizing, unfaithful to his wives, an unapologetic alcoholic, and an incredibly abusive and selfish boss.
But, he then goes to California to be greeted by the unconditional love of the only person in the world who ever knew him. Although I don’t agree with and am disgusted by Don Draper’s decisions, I really am not that much better in my mistakes and my sin.
Do I have an Anna Draper in my life? Do I have people who still love me even though they know my demons and all my fatal flaws?
Yes, I do. My mother is one of those people, but I also have many friends who love me unconditionally and who still see me as a good person no matter what my mistakes are.
To me, Anna Draper is the embodiment of Matthew 10:16, someone who forgave a man who wronged her
In the verse, Jesus commissions the Twelve Apostles to go forth in a dangerous mission because they will be among wolves. To survive, they have to be wise as serpents but to follow Christ, they have to be innocent as doves. To say that there were a lot of people hostile to Jesus’s mission is an understatement, but Jesus told his followers to be innocent as doves because following Christ’s love outweighs human pettiness any day of the week.
And Jesus calls us to follow him.
Most of life is learned not through preaching, but experience. How many people have been told that smoking is bad, but do it anyway? How many people have been told that drinking is bad, but do it anyway? I certainly know that I’m a person that has to learn more from experience than from any warnings or preaching, and I know that most human beings are the same.
For that, I think I am the luckiest person in the world. For what it’s worth, that love is usually reciprocal. If a friend is a good enough friend, their mistakes don’t matter to me. My loyalty and unconditional love is my biggest gift, but also my biggest curse.
I have friends who have been convicted of horrible crimes, and to protect their privacy I won’t reveal which ones, but they’re some of my best friends. I still love them and don’t judge them; and they still love me.
For the majority of people, their biggest critics are themselves
No one will judge them more than they judge themselves. We tend to be much more critical of our own flaws, and less critical of the flaws of others. And while that might not be healthy, think about the converse of being super critical of other people’s flaws but never critical of your own — that’s self-righteous sin at its finest.
I am a super flawed person. I am selfish. I don’t donate enough. I too frequently don’t give to the homeless. I have prejudice in my heart. I fail all the time at the morals I preach. I am not a good enough friend, son, brother, or boyfriend too much of the time.
That’s why I try to love others, no matter who they are, no matter what they’ve done. Mercy trumps justice any day of the week. And while I believe everyone should be held accountable and be given justice, that doesn’t mean that their mistakes make them undeserving of love.
How can anyone grow without knowing that they’re loved?
For what it’s worth, the person who knows everything I’ve done and still loves me is Jesus
I am as much a sinner as Paul or Peter were, and yet I constantly subconsciously elevate myself above others. But I don’t have the right. I believe that no matter who you are, no matter what mistakes you’ve made, Jesus still loves you. It’s not something you have to earn — it’s something you always have.
I think back to the people who still love me, even though they know everything about me. Those people have had to take substantial leaps of faith to love me despite knowing every flaw I’ve had.
I can only hope that the world rids itself of its self-righteousness and gives more grace. You can think someone is wrong, but why don’t you look inward to see how you are wrong and not up to par of the perfection standard too?
Despite my faith, I have never once gone up to another person and accused them of being a sinner. It’s simply not my place because I’m not God. You can say that something is a sin, but I have always felt like both Christians and non-Christians have a very immature view of sin. Self-righteousness is a sin. Gluttony is a sin. Greed is a sin.
I am the foremost of sinners and make many mistakes that people don’t know about. Just on my run today, I almost ran into someone and knocked into them. I’m not always kind to others, and can get angry and defensive when I feel like I am being attacked. I am too impatient. I can become too imposing about my political beliefs.
The world needs more mercy and grace, and less judgment. And so I endeavor to be more like Anna Draper, who is someone who can love everyone around them, no matter what they’ve done. I am proud that, to this day, I have never called someone else out for being a sinner when I sin so much; all the time. | https://medium.com/koinonia/i-know-everything-about-you-and-i-still-love-you-fcb7ec1fa83 | ['Ryan Fan'] | 2020-08-27 23:53:17.748000+00:00 | ['Spirituality', 'Television', 'Ideas', 'Relationships', 'Religion'] |
biography of albert einstein in hindi | Albert Einstein Facts | Albert Einstein Born in Germany on 14 March 1879, Albert Einstein became well established in the scientific community for his general theories of relativity, which redefined understandings of space, time, matter, energy, and gravity. In 1921, Einstein won the Nobel Prize for Physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect — and he is today considered one of the most respected figures in the history of science..
What things did Albert Einstein Invent?
1. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity was rejected in Britain until 1919
Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity made him instantly famous when it was confirmed by British astronomers, led by scientist Arthur Eddington, during a solar eclipse in 1919.
But when the unknown Einstein first published it in 1905, the theory convinced hardly a single British thinker — either in the sciences or the humanities. University of Cambridge scientists either ignored, reinterpreted or rejected relativity, for lack of experimental evidence, until it was accepted and taught to undergraduates by Eddington in 1920.
University of Oxford philosophers were even more scathing, ridiculing the theory as late as 1919 because it appeared to contradict their training in the Greek classics such as Euclid.
2. Albert Einstein abandoned pacifism as soon as the Nazis came to power
threat-long before most European and American politicians. In 1939, he even recommended to US President Franklin Roosevelt the building of an atomic bomb, thereby helping to launch the Manhattan Project in 1941–2.
But after the Second World War, Einstein changed his mind yet again and fought very publicly against nuclear weapons. His last public act, days before his death in 1955, was to sign the anti-nuclear Russell-Einstein Manifesto, initiated by British philosopher Bertrand Russell.
3. Albert Einstein turned down the presidency of IsraelI In 1952, Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel, following the death of his long-time sparring partner, Chaim Weizmann. He turned it down, while simultaneously observing that his relationship with the Jewish people had become his “strongest human bond”.
This decision was the culmination of three decades of ambivalence towards Zionism. Jewish by birth, and also by sympathy, Einstein always suspected that Zionism would encourage the use of violence. Although he raised money for the Zionist cause in the 1920s, and supported the foundation of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem-to which he willed all of his papers after his death- Einstein remained too much of an individualist to commit himself to any nation.
1950: Physicist Albert Einstein (1879–1955) delivers a US television broadcast against the hydrogen bomb. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images).
4. Albert Einstein never returned to Europe after 1933 From the 1920s, Einstein was celebrated as a citizen of the world, partly as a result of his global lectures in Europe, Japan, Palestine, South America and the United States. But after he left Europe in 1933, and settled in Princeton, New Jersey, he never returned to his homeland.
Indeed, he never left America before his death in 1955 — despite countless invitations to travel. Part of this reluctance was his undying distrust of his native Germany following the horrors of the Nazi period. In addition, Einstein had no wish to entangle himself in the politics of Palestine. But most of all, he loved solitude in Princeton for the sake of his all-important physics.
5. Albert Einstein is probably the most quoted figure of our time Albert Einstein is one of the most widely quoted people of all time, and probably the most quoted figure from the 20th century.
The website Wiki quote has many more entries for Einstein than for Aristotle, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin or Stephen Hawking, and even than Einstein’s opinionated contemporaries Winston Churchill and George Bernard Shaw-including an ever-expanding section of Misquotations and invented ‘quotations’.
Beyond science, Einstein was an avid commentator on education, marriage, money, the nature of genius, music-making, politics and more. As he seriously joked to a friend in 1930: “To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.”
Andrew Robinson is the author of 25 books in the arts and sciences. | https://medium.com/@kamalapujhari84/biography-of-albert-einstein-in-hindi-albert-einstein-facts-47796d175ae1 | ['Kamala Pujhari'] | 2020-01-03 05:17:59.511000+00:00 | ['Science', 'Education', 'Albert Einstein', 'Facts', 'Biography'] |
An influencer sold her love as an NFT for $250,000 and is going to have dinner with the mystery buyer | An influencer sold her love as an NFT for $250,000 and is going to have dinner with the mystery buyer ChainLobby Aug 10·2 min read
A Polish influencer made $250,000 (1 million Polish Zloty) after becoming the first person to sell her love as an NFT (non-fungible token) online.
Marta Rentel, who goes by the Instagram handle @martirenti, sold the asset of “digital love” on July 13 to a currently unknown buyer, with whom she will go on a dinner date once the transaction is complete.
NFTs is “digital assets stored on blockchain technology — the same technology that makes cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin possible.”
The report added: “The idea behind storing information on a blockchain is that it becomes next to impossible to edit it or remove it. This means when you buy an NFT, the record of your purchase is put on a digital ledger forever.”
Speaking to Insider, 26-year-old Rentel said she wants to be sure that people distinguish “Marta Rentel” the person, from “Marti Renti” the online persona, whose love she has sold.
“Nothing on the internet is physical, it’s a part of my online persona,” she told Insider.
According to her website, this philosophy extends to her wider work as an influencer. It reads: “My name is Marti Renti. It’s not my ‘real’ name though, it’s the digital version of it, coming from the parallel world where the internet is my stage.”
Rentel, who has 654,000 Instagram followers, said she set out to achieve something “unique” by tokenizing an emotion. She has also decided to sell other NFTs through her website, such as exclusive ownership to her Instagram photos and YouTube videos.
She told Insider the idea was inspired by Italian artist Salvatore Garau who sold an invisible sculpture titled “Io sono” (meaning “I am”) for $18,300 in May, according to Artnet.com.
Rentel told Insider selling her love was more than just an unusual way to make money or consolidate her place in history books, she believes it makes a statement to other women about their autonomy.
“For me, selling digital love is empowering for women because we can love without compromising our freedom and individuality,” she said.
“Digital love is transactional, but so is marrying a man just because he is wealthy and stable, right?” she added.
When asked if she thinks real love could develop from the digital transaction, Rentel said there is every chance that the mysterious buyer could also be “a woman or child who is very rich.”
Despite this, Rentel remains positive on her website, writing: “If I manage to successfully mint my Digital Love and find my second half, then why shouldn’t other feelings and emotions just follow?”
Source: Insider inc | https://medium.com/@ChainLobby/an-influencer-sold-her-love-as-an-nft-for-250-000-and-is-going-to-have-dinner-with-the-mystery-22bb5ed1c8e0 | [] | 2021-08-10 10:20:55.297000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Nft', 'Love', 'News', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
All the Distributions You Need to Know | Binomial distributions appear in many real-world contexts. If a situation meets all of the four following criteria, chances are you’re looking at a binomial distribution:
There are only two possible and mutually exclusive outcomes — for example, yes or no, customer or not, etc. (The bi in binomial.)
There is a predefined, finite, and constant number of repeated experiments or trials.
All trials/experiments are identical in that they are all conducted in the same fashion as the others, yet are independent in that one trial’s outcome does not affect others’.
The probability of success is the same in each of the trials.
Consider, for example, a company that wants to predict the chance that a customer will purchase a product after being exposed to identical advertisements. After determining p and the maximum amount of ads the company would like to run (n), the company can then use a binomial distribution’s mass probability function to determine how many advertisements are worth running in their marketing campaign.
Bernoulli Distribution
The Bernoulli Distribution is the Binomial Distribution with only one experiment. It happens in an experiment with only two outcomes, successfully with probability p and unsuccessfully with probability q = 1 - p.
Source: Statistics How To. Image free to share.
The Bernoulli distribution really isn’t a distribution as it is a special case of the Binomial distribution, but it’s good jargon to understand.
Poisson Distribution
A Poisson distribution models the probability of a given number of events occurring in a fixed interval of time or space if these events occur with a constant mean rate, independently of the time since the last event. The controllable factor of each distribution is λ, which is the mean rate.
Source: Statistics How To. Image free to share.
For instance, if you are keeping track of the number of emails you receive every day and notice you receive an average of 14 a day. If receiving an email does not affect the arrival times of future emails, then the number of emails you receive a day probably obeys the Poisson distribution. there are many other examples of these distributions in other scenarios. For example, the number of phone calls received by a call center per day or the number of decay events per second from a radioactive source have been shown to follow a Poisson distribution.
The distribution follows the probability mass function of:
a is substituted with λ. Graphed in Desmos.
Bimodal Distribution
A bimodal distribution has two peaks (hence the name, bimodal). They are usually a mixture of two unique unimodal (only one peak, for example a normal or Poisson distribution) distributions, relying on two distributed variables X and Y, with a mixture coefficient α.
This means that when a bimodal distribution arises in scenarios where it would seem to be unimodal, there may be an external force at play. In fact, in 2010 professor Richard Quinn caught his students at the University of Central Florida in a cheating scandal on the midterm based on the distribution of scores. Test scores are almost always normally distributed, as it is with midterms at almost any university or with the ACT or the SAT. The Fall 2010 midterms, however, had two peaks.
You can find the full cheating accusation lecture on YouTube here. Image free to share.
Because unnatural bimodal distributions are almost always partial combinations of two unique unimodal distributions, the professor realized that the two distributions represented two groups of students: the ones that didn’t cheat, and the ones that did. The unimodal distribution that performed worse has stark resemblance to the Summer 2010 midterm distribution. After the professor discovered this, he did some investigation and discovered that the test bank had been leaked to a group of students.
Although bimodal (or multimodal) distributions can be revealing of systematic biases or issues, they often occur naturally as well. These naturally bimodally distributed variables include:
the time between eruptions of geysers
the color of galaxies
the size of worker weaver ants
the age of incidence of Hodgkin’s lymphoma
traffic analysis
water demand
Normal Distribution
The most standard (and hence ‘normal’) distribution is the normal distribution, also known as the bell curve, based on its appearance.
Its most standard and well-known properties include the relationship between percentiles of data and standard deviations.
68.2% of the data is within one standard deviation of the data.
95.4% of the data is within two standard deviations of the data.
99.6% of the data is within three standard deviations of the data.
Source: ExcelUser. Image free to share.
The equation exp(-x²) gives the Bell curve. While this is not the formal probability mass function (which is much more complex), the normal distribution can be created using this equation. A good way to think about this is that exp(x) creates a curve that gradually diminishes to the left and increases to the right, whereas exp(-x) creates a curve that gradually diminishes towards the right and increases towards the left. By applying the squared function, these two functions are ‘combined’, with gradually diminishing properties of both functions.
It’s fascinating that that the probability mass function manages to incorporate pi, whereas we could also write it without pi at all and only using e. Graphed in Desmos.
Within statistics and machine learning, normal distribution plays a significant role, such as in the assumptions of machine learning models. Linear regression models assume that the residuals — the errors of data points from the line’s fit — are normally distributed, for instance. It is definitively the most studied and well-known distribution, with various theorems, properties, and applications to other areas well documented and explored.
In nature, physical characteristics of plants and animals (like height or weight) form a normal distribution. The performance of stock prices tends to fit a normal distribution, and common prediction and measurement errors tend to be distributed normally. It has been observed that natural epidemics follow the path of a Bell Curve. Other measures of performance such as IQ, musical ability, and standardized testing are normally distributed. This has to do with the Central Limit Theorem, which essentially states that various random signals naturally combine together to form a normal distribution.
Uniform Distribution
A uniform distribution is one in which the y-value is approximately the same for every value of x plugged into the probability mass function.
An approximate uniform distribution. Source: ResearchGate. Image free to share.
This distribution is the most standard in equal probabilities, such as throwing a die. A uniform distribution, while it may seem boring, has many statistical properties that can make it useful. for instance, consider the German Tank Problem. In World War II, the Allies needed to estimate how many tanks the Germans were producing, and realized that they could use sequential serial numbers on captured tanks to estimate the total number of tanks.
In a uniform distribution from 1 to n, captured serial numbers can be assumed to be an equal distance from each other. Using this property, the Allies were able to create a formula to estimate the number of tanks n that were in production. Often, if the distribution is unknown, depending on the context, it can be usually be assumed to be a uniform distribution. Many principles of statistical inference are based on this premise. | https://towardsdatascience.com/all-the-distributions-you-need-to-know-ad570514987b | ['Andre Ye'] | 2020-07-04 20:16:34.509000+00:00 | ['Statistics', 'Data Analysis', 'Data', 'Data Science', 'Mathematics'] |
What Does It Mean to be Spiritual? A Rational Answer. | The year 1745 wasn’t the best to be David Hume. This man, who many now consider to be the greatest philosopher to write in the English language, had over the years made enemies in the wrong places. In an epoch dominated by dogmatism, Hume was an outlier, and he wasn’t afraid to show it. And so, when he sought the chair of Ethics and Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, people were outraged.
How can we possibly let a man who has undermined the will of God and religion in his writing teach about ethics, they wondered; a man who went out of his way to preach the wonders of extreme skepticism and cold atheism. As per their interpretation, this was a man who clearly sought to crush the foundation of morality on which they had built their society.
Now, these charges, of course, lacked merit, and Hume saw it to himself to correct them in an essay he wrote to the Lord Provost of Edinburgh titled A Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh. He noted each charge and then wrote a rebuttal comparing it to his real position. Unfortunately, however, this didn’t help. The clergy was overwhelming against his appointment, which he eventually withdrew. He continued to be chastised for the rest of his life due to the content of his work.
As someone reading this in the 21st century, someone who is familiar with Hume’s work, I find this particularly interesting. Hume was a famous skeptic, no doubt, and he certainly did deliver some devastating critiques in regards to the existence of God and the religions built in his name, but the people’s core charges, it seems, suggest that he was a man entirely devoid of any kind of faith, that he was advocating some kind of nihilism — claims that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, as I see it, Hume’s later work, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, is perhaps the most spiritual work of philosophy written in the Western world.
Today, the term spirituality has one of two connotations: the first is a classic religious one; the second is inspired by New Age culture. Both of them seem to diverge away from a world where science and reason dominate. Broadly speaking, I think it’s correct to suggest that both categories embody spirituality better than cold, hard reason and that they are right in doing so. Many smart and thoughtful religious people, for example, have a relationship with truth that most scientifically-minded people should be envious of. But at the same time, some of the most religious and New Age-oriented people I have ever encountered are also among the least spiritual people around. Why? Because spirituality goes beyond dogma—something Hume showed perhaps better than anybody.
Anyone who has spent enough time reading and thinking and living will come to the same conclusion that Hume did when he exercised his famous skepticism: In a world where we have complete information about everything, reason can give us certain answers; in the real world, however, where we are not even close to having all the answers — a world where words are fallible, where perception is fallible, where imagination is fallible, reason is more of a guide than it is a hallmark of truth. An example: Those who confidently claim that life is meaningless in the name of reason defeat themselves by doing so, because that claim can’t be made logically in a world we don’t fully understand — it’s an example of the intellect dumbing itself down with language when our experience so obviously tells us otherwise.
Now, by doubting everything from his opponents’ arguments and the promises of religion and even the principle of causality (an especially devastating critique that some philosophers believe we might never recover from) to even his own positions, Hume showed that we all mostly operate on faith and habit in ways that aren’t obvious. The point was never to illustrate that we can’t know anything, but more so, it was to humbly suggest that there are limitations to what the human mind can comprehend and understand, and we have to learn to operate in this complex world in spite of that fact without getting tangled away in our minds.
Maybe one-day scientific instruments will remove the limitations that hold us back, and that’s possible, but the chances are that the mysteries of both the Universe and our conscious experience are simply too complex to be confined to words and formulas. The confidence that many science-minded people (who often ironically don’t understand how science works, mistaking it for the dogma of scientism) have in science’s ability to comprehend and disprove what lies beyond the laws of physics are just as lacking in concrete evidence as the certainty of the narratives that some religious-minded people are intent on imposing on others.
In this vein, true spirituality is defined by skepticism — of both self and of authority, of both today’s religions and of today’s science. It’s individualistic, and thus, it’s the opposite of dogmatism. As soon as you use a phrase or a story to reduce away the complexity of life without acknowledgement, you are closing a gap left by reality with something that hides the uncertainty that is inherent in everything from our knowledge to our perception. True rationality is open-ended, and it’s skeptical about itself even as it does its best, knowing that an undiscovered mystery still lies ahead.
The hallmark of any dogma, whether religious or scientific, is the attempt to use today’s information to do away with the unknown unknowns of a future without accepting that this future could very well prove us wrong, just as the past has been proven wrong, again and again, whenever we have entered a new paradigm. Today’s truths do indeed allow us to project the patterns we can expect to see tomorrow to a healthy degree, but this truth is always probabilistic, and even a high probability truth can be wrong in unanticipated ways due to our own fallibility.
Right now, the knowledge we use to assert the laws of physics is based on only 5 percent of the Universe, with the remaining 95 percent being clouded away by dark matter and dark energy — entities that we don’t have good assumptions about. Somehow, complex systems produce sums of wholes that are greater than their parts in ways that we don’t understand. We call this emergence, which makes it sound like we know something we definitely don’t, and it can be observed everywhere in nature. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems suggest that, due to the self-reference problem, logical systems will always be incomplete. And of course, again, Hume’s critique of causality gives us a reason to doubt the very foundation that we use to build all of our scientific knowledge on, and if not that (as the great Karl Popper almost convincingly argued), then it at least tells us that there might be knowledge out there that science can’t uncover in its current form.
When it comes to metaphysics, traditionally, philosophy has leaned towards either theism or materialism. The former reasons the existence of God and has usually monopolized spirituality, and the latter is concerned with the sub-atomic particles that it assumes makes up everything. This materialism is also the implicit assumption that guides most scientists and thus conditions people living in the modern era, which is mostly fine, except for one thing: Given where we are right now, materialism is just as much of a dogma as most materialists assume theism is. In fact, I’d argue that these categories are both wrong and that a rational skeptic practices science or religion as they do, in the relevant domain, but doesn’t make any confident claims about the future, thus embracing what I define as spirituality by default.
The question then, of course, is: What does this spirituality represent beyond skepticism? The answer is: A healthy respect for an uncertain reality; a mysterious future looked upon without assumptions and with only awe; a search for truth with open-ended rationality and a mind willing to entertain the absurd without pretending that the mask of language can define the unknown without the corroborating knowledge. Spirituality, in this sense, doesn’t rule out what reasonable people think of as God or the supernatural, nor does it ignore what science currently tells us; it lets you be you and me be me, as we both honor the uncertainty that reminds us that there is something bigger than us to be discovered.
Whenever I reflect on this spirituality in my own life, I am brought back to late-summer nights spent with people I love at an old German-style cottage in the country. Even driving away from the city, it would feel like we were being compelled by a force of nature to move away from the sounds, the lights, the people, to something more honest, more pure in its expression. We would drive until the highways were replaced by broken roads, the high-rise apartments by enveloping trees, the web of pressures and expectations in our lives by the openness of freedom and potentiality.
On these nights, as we settled in, as time began to dance to a different beat, we would sneak out of the back door and walk down to the dock and sit ourselves right where its wooden structure met the water. It would be quiet. The lake would be still. The moonlight would radiate. At first, the conversations that began inside would carry on outside, but eventually, our silence would match the silence of nature.
In this silence, we would stare. We would stare at the ripples in the lake, and we would stare at the movement of the forest beside us, but mostly, we stare up. We would stare at the unpolluted sky, at a million little dots of brightness, with each one of them representing a different center of reality, with each constellation telling a different story. And in these moments, I would be reminded of something I am otherwise quick to forget: I may be infinite in the complexity of my experience, but I am finite in the Universe. And with that, I would only smile — lightly, humbly, knowing that there’s more, knowing that this isn’t it. | https://medium.com/personal-growth/what-does-it-mean-to-be-spiritual-a-rational-answer-857380fda855 | ['Zat Rana'] | 2020-05-11 07:09:05.595000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Philosophy', 'Self Improvement', 'Life', 'Spirituality'] |
Oracle — How to reimport objects and data into the schema | Developing a custom solution on a Data-Driven Application like RedPrairie/JDA WMS may require you to restore data, again and again, to be able to thoroughly test your custom solution. Sending a request daily or even multiple times a day can be frustrating. Even more so, the wait time a developer has to spend to wait, especially if the developer and DBA are in different time zones. I’m a developer who prefers to automate tasks rather than doing things manually again and again — it’s frustrating doing the same thing over and over again manually when you can spend the time to write a script that automates the task for you.
Here’s how you do it! But do remember, I tend to minimize downtime by creating multiple test schemas for developers/testers, this way they can rotate the username/schema in the MOCA Registry and restart the App Server, which barely takes a minute to do so.
Here’s an example:
Multiple test user/schema
Ali, How do you automate the process of dropping and recreating the user/schema in oracle and then importing data to bring it back to the previous state?
You’ll first write a bash script that calls in the SQL script within the bash script. After importing the environment variables, you’ll have the following command in the end:
DATETIME=$(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S) echo “$DATETIME” sqlplus username/password@pdb @/directorytosqlscript/filename.sql
This is how your SQL script will look like…
alter session set “_ORACLE_SCRIPT”=true; drop user username_testd cascade; — USER SQL
CREATE USER username_testd IDENTIFIED BY “password”
DEFAULT TABLESPACE “yourTSname_TS”
TEMPORARY TABLESPACE “TEMP”; --Assign roles and priviliges here and then you'd want to exit out of sqlplus so you can run your import script to restore username/schema objects. --EXIT
exit;
Next, you’ll have your bash script run in continuation to execute the import script. I generally prefer to keep the scripts dynamic and not hardcode things when I don’t have to:
DATETIME=$(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S) echo “$DATETIME” sqlplus username/password@pdb @/directorytosqlscript/filename.sql DUMPFILE “”
DUMPFILE=”$(find /directorytodumpslocation/ -name “schemaname*.DMP” -printf “%f
”)”
if [ -z “$DUMPFILE” ]
then
echo “\$DUMPFILE is empty. File not found!”
echo “Exiting…”
else
echo “\$DUMPFILE found.”
echo “Executing impdp to import schema”
impdp impdp_username/password@pdbname DIRECTORY=Directorylocation DUMPFILE=$DUMPFILE LOGFILE=testd_import_schemaname_$DATETIME.log transform=disable_archive_logging:y STATUS=300 REMAP_SCHEMA=schemaname:schemaname_TESTD
fi
Now the script will work with just a simple execute statement using import dump utility and create user and objects through the dump file.
Script Execution screenshot:
Script Started
Script executed Successfully: | https://medium.com/@ali-ahmed-jdawms/oracle-how-to-reimport-objects-and-data-into-the-schema-64854fe5224f | ['Ali Ahmed'] | 2019-11-21 10:26:25.525000+00:00 | ['Import', 'Automate', 'Oracle', 'Script', 'Impdp'] |
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