title
stringlengths 1
200
⌀ | text
stringlengths 10
100k
| url
stringlengths 32
885
| authors
stringlengths 2
392
| timestamp
stringlengths 19
32
⌀ | tags
stringlengths 6
263
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Creating a Grocery Product Recommender for Instacart | Photo by Scott Warman on Unsplash
Creating a Grocery Product Recommender for Instacart
In the ecommerce shopping experience product recommendations come in many forms: they may be used to recommend other products on one product’s page (Amazon’s “Frequently bought together” feature for instance) or they may be used on the checkout page to show customers products they may be interested in based on their total order. In this post I will detail how I made a recommender for the former case.
Further, recommendations may be more helpful if they are targeted towards a specific segment of customers, rather than made uniformly. For instance if one group of customers tends to buy a lot of nondairy milk substitutes and another group tends to buy traditional milk, it may make sense to make different recommendations to go along with that box of Cheerios. In order to make tailored recommendations I first segmented Instacart users based on their purchase history using K-Means clustering and then made recommenders based on the product association rules within those clusters. In this post I will go through that process and give samples of recommendations.
The Data and Instacart Background
Instacart is an online grocery delivery service that allows users to place grocery orders through their website or app which are then fulfilled and delivered by a personal shopper- very similar to Uber Eats but for grocery stores. In 2017 they released a year of their data composed of about 3.3 million orders from about 200,000 customers. Released in the form of a relational database, I combined the separate tables together to perform EDA, leaving me with the following:
EDA
When performing EDA there were some key questions I wanted to answer:
What are the most popular products and aisles? How “top heavy” was the assortment? That is, how much of the total ordering share do the top products make up? How large are orders?
To get a broad idea of what Instacart tends to sell we can defer to their department sales. Instacart has 21 departments at the top of their product taxonomy. Below are the unit sale shares for each of them:
Instacart seems to be a popular choice for produce. The most popular Instacart “aisles,” the next level down in their taxonomy, are their fruit and vegetable aisles, the below chart showing unit share of total sales for the top 10 aisles:
There are 134 aisles in total with 49685 products so the above chart indicates quite a “top heavy” distribution in terms of product sales with the top 3 aisles accounting for over 25% of units sold. The below chart, showing unit shares for the top 3 products follows the same trend:
Almost all of the top 30 products are produce and there is a steep drop-off in terms of share after the most popular items. It will be interesting to see if K-Means clustering may reveal distinct customer groups from this produce-heavy distribution.
Below are the descriptive characteristics of order size:
count 3.346083e+06
mean 8.457334e+01
std 1.355298e+02
min 1.000000e+00
25% 1.500000e+01
50% 3.600000e+01
75% 1.050000e+02
max 1.058500e+04
Here is a distribution chart with a cutoff at 500 units:
The chart and table indicate that Instacart may have room to improve considering order size- the right skewed distribution indicating that most orders may not be fulfilling all the grocery needs for their respective customers with half of the orders having less than 36 items. A product recommendation system would allow customers to more easily find products they want and expose customers to items they have never bought from Instacart.
PCA and K-Means Clustering
The goal for the K-Means clustering is to group customers into segments based on the products they have bought historically. To accomplish this I intended to implement K-Means on the share of units bought from the sum of each customer’s previous orders. My first step was to transform the combined table I displayed earlier into a table where each row represents a customer and the columns represent the share bought from each aisle. A sample from this table is below:
I then performed PCA to reduce the number of features for the K-Means algorithm. This would allow me to better visualize my clusters as well as help K-Means run more efficiently. In deciding on the number of components to use I referred to the variance % each component represented of the total variance and chose a cutoff after the marginal variance added leveled off:
from sklearn.decomposition import PCA
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
pca = PCA(n_components = 30)
principalComponents = pca.fit_transform(aisle_share_pivot) features = range(pca.n_components_)
plt.bar(features, pca.explained_variance_ratio_, color = 'black')
plt.xlabel('PCA features')
plt.ylabel('variance %')
plt.xticks(features)
plt.xticks(rotation = 45) PCA_components = pd.DataFrame(principalComponents)
The component this happened at according to the chart was at component 5. I then fit sci-kit-learn’s K-Means algorithm on the 6 PCA components and looked at the resulting SSE curve:
from sklearn.cluster import KMeans
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
sse = {}
labels = {}
for k in range(2,15):
kmeans = KMeans(n_clusters = k).fit(PCA_components[[0,1,2,3,4,5]])
sse[k] = kmeans.inertia_
labels[k] = kmeans.labels_
plt.figure()
plt.plot(list(sse.keys()), list(sse.values()))
plt.xlabel("Number of cluster")
plt.ylabel("SSE")
plt.show()
It seems that the curve starts to flatten at cluster 5 so I moved forward with 6 clusters. Here are those clusters plotted on a scatterplot matrix of the 6 PCA components:
Though not perfect, it does seem that I have identified 6 distinct groups that should result in differences in aisle purchase history. The best way to check this of course is to look at each cluster’s aisle share for unit purchases. Below is a heatmap for share of purchases by aisle for the top 20 Instacart aisles:
There are clear differences for the 6 clusters, with the most obvious being the relative amounts they buy fresh fruits and fresh vegetables. This makes sense given that produce makes up over 25% of Instacart unit sales. The differences for each cluster may be better brought out by looking at them each individually, which I do in the charts below:
Cluster 0 are heavy vegetable shoppers, cluster 1 seems to mainly use Instacart for beverages, cluster 2 has a more balanced palette, cluster 3 prefers packaged produce, cluster 4 are heavy fruit shoppers and cluster 5 buy fresh fruits and vegetables almost equally. Differences may also be noticed looking into the less frequently bought aisles, for instance “baby food formula” is the 8th most purchased aisle for cluster 5 but does not appear in the top 10 for any other cluster.
It is also of interest for Instacart’s business is the size of these clusters in terms of number of users and buying power. The table below shows the percent of users belonging to each cluster in the left column and the percent of unit purchases belonging to each cluster on the right.
Interestingly, cluster 5 represents about 35% of the users but almost 50% of the unit purchases. Recall that this cluster’s most bought aisles were fresh fruits and fresh vegetables but in equal amounts and also featured baby food formula in its top 10 aisles. This suggests that this cluster may contain users using Instacart for shopping for families with babies and young children, appearing to be Instacart’s most important customers. An entire project may be carrying this analysis further to isolate Instacart’s best customers! At this point, however, I move forward to creating the product recommender.
Association Rule Mining
With the 200,000 users broken up into cluster I was ready to perform basket analysis via association rule mining on orders. This worked by splitting the total orders table into 6 tables for the 6 different clusters and finding association rules between each product. Association rules specify the relationships products have with each other in terms of how likely they are to be bought together in the same order.
Three of the common rules are support, confidence and lift. Support is simply the frequency an itemset appears in a dataset and is computed by dividing the frequency by the size of the dateset (via Wikipedia):
Confidence is the proportion of transactions containing one item that also contain another item and computed by dividing the support of one or more items by the support of a subset of the numerator, via Wikipedia:
Lift is the ratio of the observed frequency of two or more items over the expected frequency. It indicates if two or more items occur more frequently than they would if they appeared together randomly. A value greater than one indicating a non-random relationship. Formula below:
I computed these metrics by cluster for all items over a minimum support of .01% using a python script employing generators. This was necessary given the size of the dataset (3.3 million orders containing about 50,000 products). The table below shows the output sorted by lift for cluster 5:
As can be seen the highest lift values of the entire dataset are of products similar to each other as can be expected.
Product Recommender
To perform the product recommendations to be displayed on a product’s page I wrote a python script that takes in user_id, product_id, desired lift cutoff and num_products to be returned. With these inputs it determines the cluster of the user (stored in a dataframe outputted from the cluster analysis), filters the dataframe containing the product association rules for that cluster and returns the specified number of products with a lift greater than the lift input, prioritizing the items with the greatest lift. If there are less items than the num_products that meet the criteria it will return all products that do meet the criteria. The code for the recommender may find in the Github repository, link at the end of the article.
In the below I show the recommender in action, showing the outputs for “organic whole milk” for the 5 clusters limited to 5 items.
cluster 0['Whole Milk Plain Yogurt', 'YoBaby Blueberry Apple Yogurt', 'Organic Muenster Cheese', 'Apples + Strawberries Organic Nibbly Fingers', 'Yo Toddler Organic Strawberry Banana Whole Milk Yogurt']
cluster 1['Beef Tenderloin Steak', 'Original Dairy Free Coconut Milk', 'Pumpkin & Blueberry Cruncy Dog Treats', 'MRS MEYERS 12.5OZ HANDSOAP RHUBAR', 'Organic Sprouted Whole Grain Bread']
cluster 2['Whole Milk Plain Yogurt', 'Organic Skim Milk', "Elmo Mac 'n Cheese With Carrots & Broccoli", 'Kids Sensible Foods Broccoli Littles', 'Apples + Strawberries Organic Nibbly Fingers']
cluster 3['Organic Nonfat Milk', 'Paneer', 'Organic Whole Milk Yogurt', 'Organic Plain Yogurt', 'Extra Light Olive Oil']
cluster 4['Puffed Corn Cereal', 'String Cheese, Mozzarella', 'Cold-Pressed Sweet Greens & Lemon Juice', 'Organic Stage 2 Broccoli Pears & Peas Baby Food', 'Superberry Kombucha']
cluster 5['Whole Milk Plain Yogurt', 'YoTot Organic Raspberry Pear Yogurt', 'Organic Atage 3 Nibbly Fingers Mangoes Carrots', "Elmo Mac 'n Cheese With Carrots & Broccoli", 'Blueberry Whole Milk Yogurt Pouch']
The above lists all contain the products with the highest lift associated with organic whole milk for each cluster. What may stick out is that cluster 1’s recommendations don’t make as much intuitive sense as the other clusters’ recommendations. This is most likely because this cluster makes up less than 1% and of unit purchases and less than 2% of users and seems to leverage Instacart specifically for non-milk beverages. Further work would be required to determine if fewer clusters would be optimal but generating non-intuitive recommendations isn’t so much of an issue considering users from this group are not likely to view a milk product anyway. For another example on a less general use product, here are the results from “Mild Salsa Roja”:
cluster 0['Thin & Light Tortilla Chips', 'Red Peppers', 'Organic Lemon', 'Organic Cucumber', 'Organic Grape Tomatoes'] cluster 2['Real Guacamole', 'Thin & Light Tortilla Chips', 'Original Hummus', 'Organic Reduced Fat 2% Milk', 'Thick & Crispy Tortilla Chips'] cluster 4['Organic Raspberries', 'Banana', 'Organic Strawberries', 'Organic Hass Avocado'] cluster 5['Thin & Light Tortilla Chips', 'Organic Large Brown Grade AA Cage Free Eggs', 'Organic Reduced Fat 2% Milk', 'Organic Large Grade AA Brown Eggs', 'Thick & Crispy Tortilla Chips']
Cluster 1 and cluster 3 did not have any items with a lift over 1 for this product.
That’s it for now! The link to the GitHub with the Jupyter Notebooks is here. | https://towardsdatascience.com/creating-a-grocery-product-recommender-for-instacart-c1b6bdf5ae13 | ['Alex Ellman'] | 2020-09-24 21:39:21.865000+00:00 | ['Association Rule', 'Clustering', 'Instacart', 'Recommendation System', 'Market Basket Analysis'] |
How about if… change of consuming habits through innovation | My name is Julien, I am working in Research & Innovation and I have a profound interest in all things concerning product, business analysis, digitalization, data, change management and UX.
This particular article focuses on change in long established retail-chain in Paris during Covid-19.
Last sunday I was driving through Paris in the hunt for Christmas presents. I admit, it’s a bit old-fashioned but there is beauty in being able to see and touch a product before acquiring it. When I arrived at Les Galeries Lafayette & Printemps Haussman, I have realized that there was a long line for accessing it just a few minutes after the grand opening. Why? Perhaps because of the lock-down due to the Covid-19 or because of Christmas getting closer or just a consumming habits to Parisian people.
As with many things — an obstacle/situation is merely providing a case that can be studied and used to improve a service or a process.
When I saw those hundred people waiting outside before the door opening at 1°C(33,8 °F) I had an idea in context of changing consummer experience and giving a break for both consummer & shopping centers. How about using the COVID-19 as a boost to increase customers service satisfaction and make better predictions on potential revenue for the investors and stakeholders of the Shopping mall?
Booking for shop access
With a clear schedule based on the shopping needed and location of the products (1 h/2h/3h) … AI/Physical Shopping assistance
Because we know who and can estimate for how long they are coming, we can provide them with a personal shopper(AI assistant and/or physical person to choose from). The main role would be to keep an eye on the clock to respect the schedule but as well to give a tour, advices and help to the customers on its decision making journey ( of course, with all the safety measurements necessary in pandemic context).
This is not to say that Les Galeries Lafayette, like other providers, has not reacted to Covid-19 to adapt and improve it’s services, — in fact currently you are able to make use of:
Click &Collect Do distance shopping with the help of a personal shopper that you have to contact via their web app and is hidden somewhere within the menu (think about UX!) Shop with the Les Galeries Lafayette mobile application.
Great! But wait, what about the physical access? What about people which do not like to dig into a website and really do research of out all options? Have all profiles been analyzed and do the solutions currently provided cover their needs?
Not yet! How many sales are lost due to those people that would rather go physically to it’s beautiful shopping malls and buy products with or without the assistance, even during Covid-19. How many sales are lost due to bad web based UX?
So, let’s try to imagine designing a value proposition:
We are a) Les Galeries Lafayette & Printemps Haussman which is dealing with limitations and obstacles imposed by b) the French government in context with COVID-19; there are c) multiple stakeholders which profound interest is in having figures and sales on the table to predict the revenue and plan accordingly and there are d) customers which would love to use their services but due to limitations and a general increase of global population and complexity of web products are not having the experience that they would prefer and deserve having.
Let’s say Les Galeries Lafayette opts to consider implementing services that I mentioned (booking app with navigation solution, personal AI shopper/physical shopper). To do so they first need to outline a value proposition. To do so, they can utilize the canva, which can be found here. Such canva has two sides: client profile and value map. The Client profile helps to define your understanding of the client. With help of the canva value map you describe how you are planning on adding value to this client. The client profile and value map have to be aligned. As with many things — there is not just that one type of client and that one type of service, you have to multiply and develop each profile and map it to it’s respective service proposition.
It is worth mentioning that as you create a value proposition for the client you have to keep a close eye on him/her, monitor the response to your new/old service proposition in order to adjust it as and when needed.
What would be the benefits of creating a booking application of the mall for the client?
The scheduling tool would provide the security for a client to access the mall they treasure and love and can be integrated with their personal calendars helping them to better plan and make routing of their day (because honestly, we love planning what we do and we hate waiting for nothing) It would provide more in-depth stats for the shopping mall on its clients and could potentially be integrated with other app solutions already developed by the company (indoor navigation application, the mobile shopping application) Should they opt in and develop the personal AI assistant as well, such could not only advice and educate the client on the variety of product and services they can make use of while staying within the facility ( for example you could ask recommendations on presents or go deeper and fill out a profile of the person for whom you are getting the present to get more educated advice, as well as price range on the said product) It would make the access to the facilities more Covid- friendly, making sure that the client is not waiting for nothing, he shops comfortably surrounded by the amount of people that is currently within limitations set by the government and wants to return soon.
Those two services can be free or chargeable depending on the segment of customer that wants to make use of it and depending on the further intend and backbone of their new user experience.
After they would develop the value proposition, align it, develop it (3–6 month give or take or utilize a ready-made solutions from the ones available on the market, since timing is of concern) they would have to go and test it with the users. To check if the solution developed is valuable Les Galeries Lafayette would have to prove the following:
Which of the products and services really interest your clients?
Which benefits are really important to your clients? What are they waiting for the most?
Which of your solutions will help your client to get rid of their problems? Which of those solutions are they waiting for the most?
As they get the results Les Galeries Lafayette will be able to go further in it’s process of becoming a 21st century venture and provide the utmost experience to the clients. | https://medium.com/@julien-lucchini/how-about-if-change-of-consumming-habits-52565a354fdc | ['Julien Lucchini'] | 2020-12-07 19:44:12.197000+00:00 | ['Innovation', 'Covid 19', 'Change Management', 'Business Analysis', 'User Experience'] |
What If Famous Film Directors Made Porn | Corpse Ride
It was the night before Christmas and Jack’s ex returns from the grave for makeup sex.
Director: Tim Burton | https://medium.com/the-haven/what-if-famous-film-directors-made-porn-d2a0861b10ef | ['David Caracciolo'] | 2019-09-23 20:54:30.782000+00:00 | ['Film', 'Humor', 'Love', 'Sex', 'Movies'] |
Friends in high places, literally | “You won’t make friends in the mountains, you should spend more time on the ground.” That was the worst piece of advice I have ever received. Believe it or not, you shouldn’t take a bit of advice from somebody who never hiked a mountain.
Growing up in a small town, countless of my childhood memories were made on the top of the only hill in the entire town. There was something magical about this tiny hill that made my friends and I always feel the urge to come back. People say mountains are calling and you must go. When I look back, I can tell there was something that we couldn’t say no to our childhood hill which felt like a really big achievement at the time. However, a proud feeling wasn’t the most important thing. My biggest pleasure, above all, was gained in being fully surrounded by nature with my best friends. This was when my love for the mountains and nature started.
We all see these stunning pictures of spectacular mountains and even more amazing views on top, but actually doing the work to get to these places cuts many out of the crowd. We find ourselves wondering what motivates people to get up early in the morning and get lost in a moment when adventuring to an unknown territory. I didn’t go on my first real hike until I moved to Vancouver. I could blame it on the fact that I grew up on the land of flat surfaces and mountains have always been out of reach, but having never gone I just didn’t know what it’d feel like to stand on top of the world. Deep inside I knew that high places make every single experience exceptional.
Spending time out in the mountains really takes things back to the basics. There is no need to check what’s going on on social media, you are able to disconnect and feel the most authentic and true at the same time. It’s only you, nature and your buddies who went on a hike with you. I have to admit, it brings people together in special ways.
Every time I stand on top of the mountain I feel thankful for every single friendship that I made on my childhood hill and all the mountains I’ve climbed so far. I call them friends in high places. | https://medium.com/@godalinkut/friends-in-high-places-literally-305198ed56e2 | ['Goda Linkute'] | 2020-09-27 05:19:05.780000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Friendship', 'Hiking', 'Self Improvement', 'Mountains'] |
Network Automation for ISPs | Network Automation is the new “Next Thing” in the industry. I’ve seen many “Next Things” come and go, although this time — we might have a serious contender for our attention. As with everything new — it has to be learned. Therefore I built a small LAB with Juniper vMX Series Routers where a Python script, executed from a Linux host (off-box) updates BGP prefix-list filters. This is a POC, developed to aid Network Engineers in their daily work of operating an ISP network. In this article — I want to share the automated solution and my thoughts and findings I came across.
Let’s automate!
The whole industry is seeking engineers with automation skills. Every business is looking after someone who can add something to the automation capabilities of an ISP. Honing these skills will make Network Engineers a highly wanted asset in every company. As a seasoned Network Engineer — I see this not only as a trend that, but as something that will stay and will revolutionize the way we are offering services to customers.
Let us practice these skills. Let us take a manual chore and automate to an extent where we take out at least the repeatable tasks and interchange them with an automated “thing”. The problem we are willing to solve with automating part fo the day to day duties of an Operations Network Engineers is the repetitiveness of the manual chores an Engineer has to complete while onboarding new ISP customers. Here is what is mostly done by hand in all companies:
an ISP advertises customer prefixes outbound to its Transit Providers (through outbound filters),
once a new customer joins the ISP, their prefixes are added to the outbound filters,
this task is repeated on all ISP Edge Routers Facing Transit Providers.
Automatization of this part would eliminate the repetitiveness of manually updating the Edge Routers. That chore will be replaced with a centralized Automation Station that updates the outbound filters by running a config update script.
Now that we diagnosed the pain point, we can start drafting a solution that will save Engineers the manual tasks and help us achieve the same result. Now that we have the project requirements laid down — let us list the components we need:
a test network to get this solution tested and de-bugged — EVE-NG ,
, a Version Control System to store the prefixes and track adds and deletions of customer prefixes — Git,
to store the prefixes and track adds and deletions of customer prefixes — Git, an Automation Server that will poll data from Git and push the config to PE routers — achieved through Python script,
and push the config to PE routers — achieved through Python script, a secure communication channel and a mechanism to change the configuration on PE routers — NETCONF.
Let’s draw it:
Protocol data flow — conceptual drawing
1, the customer shares their prefixes that we (ISP) need to accept,
2, ISP saves the received prefixes in Github,
3, Automation Server polls the list of prefixes from Github,
4, Automation Server (via NETCONF) updates the ISP PE routers config (outbound prefix filters).
Now that we have the elements highlighted which we want to use in our automation attempt — we can place them in our ISP test network and go over the big picture, discussing where it will be applied. We will review the onboarding of an IP Transit (IPT) customer and the connections/connectivity mechanisms of the solution we are automating. We will start with understanding the why before we get into the how.
The “why”
Each ISP has it’s own IPT customer onboarding process. It’s a protocol that lays down the necessary steps needed to be taken to successfully connect with customer network and to advertise their numeric resources further up to the upstream transit providers. In this scenario, the validation undergoes the prefixes, owned by the customers. In this article — we simplify the handling of customer prefixes, where we rely solely on inbound/outbound prefix-filters (BGP communities are not in use). Once the prefixes to be accepted are agreed on, they are added into two places:
Inbound prefix filter on the BGP session facing customer network
Outbound prefix filter on the BGP session facing a transit provider network
ACME Telekom ISP
After we identified the places where prefixes are added — we can start to distinguish the tasks based on whether they are unique (configuration is changed on one router only) or repetitive (same configuration changes, repeated on different routers). Here we can see the value added by the automation aspect. We will add the prefixes to one list (GitHub repository), where the Automation Station will change the configuration on all Transit Provider facing PE routers for us.
Let’s look at the configuration of the BGP session facing the IPT Customer. Although the customer is configured under a BGP group hierarchy level, it’s still considered as a unique configuration (added manually, where each customer advertises a different set of prefixes and autonomous system numbers).
show protocols bgp
group IPT-CST-FULL-TABLE {
type external;
neighbor 192.0.2.21 {
description IPT-AS500-CUST-A;
import IPT-AS500-IN;
peer-as 500;
}
}
show policy-options policy-statement IPT-AS500-IN
term ACCEPT {
from {
policy CST-IN;
prefix-list-filter IPT-CST-AS500 orlonger;
}
then accept;
}
term DENY {
then reject;
}
show policy-options
prefix-list IPT-CST-AS500 {
10.128.16.0/22;
10.250.64.0/22;
}
Each time a customer gets boarded, the ACME Telecom IP Engineer configures a similar set of command on the PE router where the customer connects to.
Let’s now take a look at the BGP configuration of the peering sessions towards the Transit Providers. Although each Transit Provider has its own DIRECTIVES (required communities and supported functionalities), PNI (Private Network Interface) configurations. The general idea is similar across all of them — they are accepting valid prefixes from ACME Telecom. To not advertise an invalid prefix by mistake, ACME Telecom filters outbound prefixes. The ACME Transit connectivity (BGP config between ISP and Transit/Customers) looks as follows:
ACME Telekom IP addressing
Each of the BGP sessions uses the same logic and the same building blocks to achieve the same effect — to advertised allowed prefixes. The repetitive router config that is referenced in all policy-statements is the prefix-list-filter PXL-CUSTOMERS that holds ALL prefixes from ALL customers. And it’s the same across ALL ACME PE facing Transit Providers.
ACME PE1 router configuration
show protocols bgp
group TRANSIT {
neighbor 203.0.113.10 {
description TRANSIT-LEVEL4;
export LEVEL4-OUT;
peer-as 200;
}
}
show policy-options policy-statement LEVEL4-OUT
term BADLENGTH {
from {
route-filter 0.0.0.0/0 prefix-length-range /25-/32;
}
then reject;
}
term ALLOWED-PXL {
from {
prefix-list-filter PXL-CUSTOMERS orlonger;
}
then accept;
}
term CATCHALL {
then reject;
}
ACME PE2 router configuration
show protocols bgp
group TRANSIT {
neighbor 203.0.113.12 {
description "TRANSIT-ATLANTIS TELEKOM";
export ATLANTIS-TELEKOM-OUT;
peer-as 300;
}
}
show policy-options policy-statement ATLANTIS-TELEKOM-OUT
term BADLENGTH {
from {
route-filter 0.0.0.0/0 prefix-length-range /25-/32;
}
then reject;
}
term ALLOWED-PXL {
from {
prefix-list-filter PXL-CUSTOMERS orlonger;
}
then accept;
}
term CATCHALL {
then reject;
}
ACME PE3 router configuration
show protocols bgp
group TRANSIT {
neighbor 203.0.113.14 {
description TRANSIT-BANANA;
export BANANA-OUT;
peer-as 400;
}
}
show policy-options policy-statement BANANA-OUT
term BADLENGTH {
from {
route-filter 0.0.0.0/0 prefix-length-range /25-/32;
}
then reject;
}
term ALLOWED-PXL {
from {
prefix-list-filter PXL-CUSTOMERS orlonger;
}
then accept;
}
term CATCHALL {
then reject;
}
The common denominator in all of the policy-statements is the prefix-list-filter PXL-CUSTOMERS which is precisely the same across all ACME Transit facing PEs.
set policy-options prefix-list PXL-CUSTOMERS 10.250.16.0/22
set policy-options prefix-list PXL-CUSTOMERS 10.250.64.0/22
set policy-options prefix-list PXL-CUSTOMERS 192.0.2.0/24
And this is the core concept, around this series of articles focuses on. This prefix-list is the part of the configuration that is updated by the Python script. Precisely the same updates are applied on all of ACME PE Transit routers. The Python script that will be discussed in Part 3 of the series will talk through the code used to update the prefix-list PXL-CUSTOMERS config lines. Without the Automation aspect — IP Engineer needed to log in into each PE router and needed to apply precisely the same configuration to each and every router individually. This change in the process allows shortening the time an Engineer spends on using repetitive configuration, allowing him to address other tasks.
The “how”
Let’s talk now about the “how” that gets our elements to communicate with each other. We will take a closer look at the method of delivery of the code to the server, and how the server communicates with edge routers.
Automation Station connectivity
The script is developed on the IDE station, where it’s pushed to the Computation Resource (Operations Support System or OSS). We develop your code on your local desktop, but we send the code over SSH to the Computation Resource where it’s run when required/scheduled. I decided to lay down this naming on purpose on the beginning of the article to not confuse with the naming used for the NETCONF protocol architecture, where the server running the python (NETCONF) script is the client, and the router is the NETCONF server 😉
NETCONF Client-Server data flow
The OSS requires Internet connectivity + DNS resolution to pull data from Git repositories. After this is set up, few additional packages need to be installed on the server: python3, ncclient, junos-ezc. We install Python3 to understand the script code, ncclient library to use the NETCONF protocol and junos-ezc to understand the Junos Operating System.
Enabling NETCONF on routers
A NETCONF session is seen by the router similarly like an incoming user connection. Once the connection is authenticated and authorized successfully, the external entity queries the Junos OS device operational status and influences the operating state of the device by applying configuration changes. In contrast to other management models like SNMP, NETCONF doesn’t manipulate individual data atoms to effect change. Instead, Junos OS makes use of the concept of a candidate configuration, which is applied to the various software demons when the candidate config is committed. In this respect, NETCONF and the traditional user-based CLI are consistent. Let’s configure the credentials for the Junos OS User Account (authentication). For simplicity — the NETCONF username will have super-user permissions (authorization).
set system login user netconfuser uid 2100
set system login user netconfuser class super-user
set system login user netconfuser authentication password netconf123
We will enable access to the NETCONF SSH subsystem by using the default NETCONF-over-SSH capability. To enable NETCONF daemon to listen on the well-known port tcp/830 — we configure the following:
set system services netconf ssh port 830
NETCONF protocol is another way to getting management access into your devices. If you have management plane protection configured, you have to whitelist source addresses (Automation Server) and allow tcp/830 in addition to your tcp/22 (SSH) connections.
You can verify connectivity by manually accessing NETCONF by initiating an SSH session to port 830 with the netconf subsystem.
t.schwiertz@automationstation:~$ ssh -p 830 [email protected] -s netconf123
Password:
<!-- No zombies were killed during the creation of this user interface -->
<!-- user priv15, class j-super-user -->
<hello xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:netconf:base:1.0">
<capabilities>
<capability>urn:ietf:params:netconf:base:1.0</capability>
<capability>urn:ietf:params:netconf:capability:candidate:1.0</capability>
<capability>urn:ietf:params:netconf:capability:confirmed-commit:1.0</capability>
<capability>urn:ietf:params:netconf:capability:validate:1.0</capability>
<capability>urn:ietf:params:netconf:capability:url:1.0?scheme=http,ftp,file</capability>
<capability>urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:netconf:base:1.0</capability>
<capability>urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:netconf:capability:candidate:1.0</capability>
<capability>urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:netconf:capability:confirmed-commit:1.0</capability>
<capability>urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:netconf:capability:validate:1.0</capability>
<capability>urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:netconf:capability:url:1.0?scheme=http,ftp,file</capability>
<capability>urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:yang:ietf-netconf-monitoring</capability>
<capability>http://xml.juniper.net/netconf/junos/1.0</capability>
<capability>http://xml.juniper.net/dmi/system/1.0</capability>
</capabilities>
<session-id>12262</session-id>
</hello>
]]>]]>
Our router (NETCONF server) is listening to incoming NETCONF connections.
PRO TIP: if you are setting this up in a LAB — don’t forget to enable SSH service on your routers. If you don’t start an SSH server on your routers, you won’t be able to connect to the SSH NETCONF subsystem.
Connecting to GitHub
The GitHub repository was chosen as the Version Control System to store the list of customer prefixes. Each time a new customer gets onboarded, the Engineer adds the new prefixes into the GitHub repository.
The Python script running on the Automation Station requires internet connectivity and DNS resolution. The code refers to an URL to poll information (customer prefixes) from the GitHub repository. The prefixes (text at this point) is copied from the repository and processed by the script to be sent later to the PE routers as “set policy-options prefix-list PXL-CUSTOMERS” commands.
SSH connection
The SSH connection between the IDE station and Automation Station allows management access for admins, and to push code. The Automation Station accepts code from our IDE station (allows for Python PyCharm Remote Development via SSH protocol). We will develop our code on our local desktop, but we will use the Linux machine as the computation resource. The script is set up to be executed manually, by logging into the Linux machine and running the Python script.
The Python3 script
Let’s now assess the Python3 code that automates the prefix list update. In the “why” section, we discussed the BGP configuration element, where we identified a prefix-list named precisely the same way on all Transit facing routers. This unified BGP config is the fundamental assumption we made, on which the whole Python code was written. Each time a new customer joins ACME Telekom ISP — the following prefix-list (on all PE Transit facing routers) gets updated with new customer prefixes:
set policy-options prefix-list PXL-CUSTOMERS 10.250.16.0/22
set policy-options prefix-list PXL-CUSTOMERS 10.250.64.0/22
set policy-options prefix-list PXL-CUSTOMERS 192.0.2.0/24
And this is now done with the Python3 code that adds additional prefixes to the prefix-list above automatically:
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import requests
from jnpr.junos import Device
from jnpr.junos.utils.config import Config
url="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tomaszschwiertz/lines/master/prefix"
read_data = requests.get(url).content.decode('utf8')
list = read_data.split()
set_cmd = """
"""
for x in range (0, len(list)):
set_cmd += ("set policy-options prefix-list PXL-CUSTOMERS " + list[x] + "
")
U="netconfuser"
P="netconf123"
ROUTERS = ["192.0.2.1", "192.0.2.2", "192.0.2.3"]
for device in ROUTERS:
dev = Device(device, port=830, user=U, password=P)
dev.open()
conf = Config(dev)
conf.lock()
conf.load(set_cmd, format='set')
print('Updating ACME-' + dev.facts['hostname'] + ' | ' + device)
conf.pdiff()
if conf.commit_check():
conf.commit()
else:
conf.rollback()
conf.unlock()
dev.close()
We start by looking at the libraries. Requests hold the methods to obtain content from an URL. The user prefixes are stored in GitHub repository prefix list. The imported objects Device and Config enable working with the Junos OS system, and it’s configuration, respectively.
The prefixes (stored as text) are polled as RAW data from and converted into a list of strings. The strings (prefix) are appended to the Juniper command “set policy-options prefix-list PXL-CUSTOMER” which gives us a block of set commands in the variable “set_cmd”. We will use this later when we upload the configuration to the PE routers.
Finally, we see the for loop which cycles through the list of devices (PE lo0.0’s). The script opens a NETCONF session to each of the routers by using the given credentials and port number. The code acts similarly to a super-user connection. The script locks the configuration on the router (an equivalent to a configure exclusive configuration mode), loads the set commands stored in variable “set_cmd” (load merge). At this point, we have let the script generate some logs for visibility — which router is being updated and the candidate configuration to be added (show | compare).
Next, we have a sanity check mechanism in place — we check the correctness of the syntax. If the check result is positive — the change is committed. Otherwise — rejected (rollback 0). During the script operation — the device is locked; therefore, other users are not able to change and submit their candidate configuration to be committed. If the automated configuration update fails — all changes will be rolled back. Junos OS operates under the Batch Configuration Model, which basically allows committing all config lines at once or none at all. This is an essential fragment of the code as it follows the best practices of Change Management, and it separates human configuration input from an automated action. Last two lines take the lock off the device and close the NETCONF session releasing router resources.
The Case Study
Let’s now look at a case study to see the effect of running the script. ACME Telekom has only one IPT customer, his prefixes are advertising outbound to Transit Providers. The below routing table is the same on all ACME Transit facing PEs:
PE3# run show route advertising-protocol bgp 203.0.113.14
inet.0: 24 destinations, 26 routes (24 active, 0 holddown, 0 hidden)
Prefix Nexthop MED Lclpref AS path
* 10.128.16.0/22 Self 500 I
* 10.250.64.0/22 Self 500 I
* 192.0.2.0/24 Self I
The 192.0.2.0/24 IP space is dedicated to ACME infrastructure, prefixes 10.128.16.0/22 and 10.250.64.0/22 belong to customer CUST A. Connectivity is in place, routing works as expected.
Now, a new customer (CUST B) joins ACME Telekom. The customer’s ASN is 600, and his address space is 172.20.0.0/21 and 172.27.128.0/17. From the ACME ISP point of view, the topology changes as follows:
ACME Telekom’s new IPT Customer
To PE4, the following BGP config is added to establish a peering session towards CUST B:
show protocols bgp
group IPT-CST-FULL-TABLE {
type external;
neighbor 192.0.2.23 {
description IPT-AS600-CUST-B;
import IPT-AS600-IN;
peer-as 600;
}
}
show policy-options policy-statement IPT-AS600-IN
term ACCEPT {
from {
policy CST-IN;
prefix-list-filter IPT-CST-AS600 orlonger;
}
then accept;
}
term DENY {
then reject;
}
show policy-options
prefix-list IPT-CST-AS600 {
172.20.0.0/21;
172.27.128.0/17;
}
Now — let’s look at the GitHub repository. Before CUST B joined — the entries in the repository looked as follows:
prefix-list repository — before CUST B gets onboarded
The GitHub repository holds entries about the IP space dedicated to ACME infrastructure and CUST A prefixes (10.128.16.0/22 and 10.250.64.0/22). ACME Engineer ads the new prefixes from CUST B to GitHub and runs the script.
prefix-list repository — after CUST B gets onboarded
And this was the final manual task the Engineer had to action to successfully provision a new IPT service for a new customer. As next — we will examine the logs that the script generates while updating the router config.
t.schwiertz@automationstation:/home/development$ python3 demo.py
Updating ACME-PE1 | 192.0.2.1
[edit policy-options prefix-list PXL-CUSTOMERS]
+ 172.20.0.0/21;
+ 172.27.128.0/17;
Updating ACME-PE2 | 192.0.2.2
[edit policy-options prefix-list PXL-CUSTOMERS]
+ 172.20.0.0/21;
+ 172.27.128.0/17;
Updating ACME-PE3 | 192.0.2.3
[edit policy-options prefix-list PXL-CUSTOMERS]
+ 172.20.0.0/21;
+ 172.27.128.0/17;
The script logged into each router and changed the prefix-list PXL-CUSTOMERS configuration element. For each router, the hostname is gathered from the “facts” data collection and displayed for easier tracking of changes that are introduced. The script successfully cycled through the whole list of IP addresses while committing new config lines. The prefix-list ins now updated, an nd looks as follows:
set policy-options prefix-list PXL-CUSTOMERS 10.128.16.0/22
set policy-options prefix-list PXL-CUSTOMERS 10.250.64.0/22
set policy-options prefix-list PXL-CUSTOMERS 172.20.0.0/21
set policy-options prefix-list PXL-CUSTOMERS 172.27.128.0/17
set policy-options prefix-list PXL-CUSTOMERS 192.0.2.0/24
A new set of BGP prefixes is being advertised to Transit Providers, and it has the new prefixes included.
PE3# run show route advertising-protocol bgp 203.0.113.14
inet.0: 24 destinations, 26 routes (24 active, 0 holddown, 0 hidden)
Prefix Nexthop MED Lclpref AS path
* 10.128.16.0/22 Self 500 I
* 10.250.64.0/22 Self 500 I
* 172.20.0.0/21 Self 600 I
* 172.27.128.0/17 Self 600 I
* 192.0.2.0/24 Self I
A final test to confirm reachability — a traceroute from CUST B lo0 address to a simulated DNS address 8.8.8.8. This test concludes a successful IPT customer onboarding.
CUST-B# run traceroute 8.8.8.8 source 172.20.0.1 | no-more
traceroute to 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) from 172.20.0.1, 30 hops max
1 192.0.2.22 (192.0.2.22) 2.319 ms 2.301 ms 1.752 ms
2 192.0.2.16 (192.0.2.16) 3.348 ms 3.098 ms 2.766 ms
MPLS Label=299936 CoS=0 TTL=1 S=1
3 192.0.2.10 (192.0.2.10) 3.431 ms 2.681 ms 3.442 ms
4 203.0.113.10 (203.0.113.10) 4.694 ms 4.233 ms 4.550 ms
5 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) 5.932 ms 6.066 ms 5.681 ms
The Summary
And that’s a wrap on the Network Automation for ISP article. In this document— we examined the code itself and discussed a case study, where a new customer joins the ISP. We checked the BGP advertisements and prefix-list filters before and after running the automate prefix filter update. The idea described in the article can be expanded on by further developing the Python code and the process itself. To see the code, config, diagrams and more, visit my repository on GitHub Tom’s Network Automation Project. While writing this article — I came on a few ideas that could enrich the process and take the automation aspect even further. Three key concepts can be developed further:
Python Exception Handling , the PyEZ library provides the exception module which contains exception classes unique to Junos. Without processing exceptions, the program crashes and leaves a part of the routers updated, and part unchanged. In a production environment — we want to catch the exception and process sit, leaving a clear message on what went wrong or to re-try the config change. Exception Handling recognizes events like connection authentication error, maximum user limit reached, configuration DB lock error, timeouts and commit errors.
, the PyEZ library provides the exception module which contains exception classes unique to Junos. Without processing exceptions, the program crashes and leaves a part of the routers updated, and part unchanged. In a production environment — we want to catch the exception and process sit, leaving a clear message on what went wrong or to re-try the config change. Exception Handling recognizes events like connection authentication error, maximum user limit reached, configuration DB lock error, timeouts and commit errors. Customer Facing Configuration , how customers are connected to ACME ISP. In this case study, — we had a Single Homed customer. Customers that seek High Availability decide on Dual Homed connectivity. The latter option assumes having two BGP sessions on two separate PE routers. Here we can adopt the same principle of provisioning the same configuration on two different routes that will serve the same client. The repetitive part is customer ASN and prefixes.
, how customers are connected to ACME ISP. In this case study, — we had a Single Homed customer. Customers that seek High Availability decide on Dual Homed connectivity. The latter option assumes having two BGP sessions on two separate PE routers. Here we can adopt the same principle of provisioning the same configuration on two different routes that will serve the same client. The repetitive part is customer ASN and prefixes. Scheduled Script Execution, the script in the present form is triggered by an Engineer, right after he edits the GitHub repository. What if there are multiple customers onboarded during a day? The script could be run once a day by cron tool, let’s say at midnight. This would update prefixes after w the whole day of work. Additionally, an SMTP module could be added to the script that would send e-mails containing logs, generated by the Python script. Such confirmation could be a great aid in making sure that the customer was onboarded successfully.
Network Automation for ISPs
The demand for Network Automation grows from day by day. There will be even more demand for this kind of skills after the vendors release newer hardware, making it easier to work with API’s and on-box/off-box automation. The early adaptors of the automation mindset will be rewarded for taking this step early on their journey towards Network Automation. I enjoy working with automation, as well as writing about it. Like, share and let me know in the comments on what is of interest to you, so I can start preparing the next article😉 | https://medium.com/@tomasz-schwiertz/network-automation-for-isps-e87d4791b1c9 | ['Tomasz Schwiertz'] | 2020-12-16 16:37:10.081000+00:00 | ['Network Automation', 'Netconf', 'Isp', 'Python', 'Git'] |
Tudo o que você precisa saber sobre Design System | Design Systems Repo
This is not a comprehensive list of every design system that I have come across. Rather, it’s a collection of ones that… | https://brasil.uxdesign.cc/tudo-o-que-voc%C3%AA-precisa-saber-sobre-design-system-f6e3f030d640 | ['Jonatan Zylbersztejn'] | 2020-04-21 01:38:47.208000+00:00 | ['Ux Translations', 'Product Design', 'Product Development', 'Design Systems', 'UX'] |
20 Crowdfunding gadgets that simply blew our minds | Remember the groundbreaking Pebble ePaper watch on Kickstarter? It blew up because of its cool concept and product quality. Since then, crowdfunding campaigns have delivered so many new product concepts that we’ve never seen before. So we’re presenting 20 amazing crowdfunding gadgets that wowed us.
Over the years, we have come across many crowdfunding campaigns with outstanding product concepts. Recently, things have become even better-and we’ve seen some of the most amazing crowdfunding gadgets that you’ve never seen before. From personal holographic displays to couch consoles, these crowdfunding gadgets are undoubtedly cool and useful.
Related: 10 Futuristic tech gadgets-rolling TVs, VR treadmills, and more
So today’s daily digest highlights 20 amazing crowdfunding gadgets you can easily add to your life. You’re bound to like these for sure.
Bird Buddy Smart Bird Feeder
The Bird Buddy Smart Bird Feeder actually notifies you when birds arrive. It then snaps a photo and organizes them into a beautiful collection. You’ve never been this close to your feathered friends with any of the other crowdfunding gadgets out there.
Lumos Ultra LED Bike Helmet
The Lumos Ultra LED Smart Helmet protects you during your twilight and nighttime rides. It comes with integrated LED lighting, turn signals, and other smart features that keep you visible and predictable to other drivers. It’s one of the most practical crowdfunding gadgets we’ve seen.
Vaonis Vespera Lightweight Telescope
With the Vaonis Vespera Lightweight Telescope, you can stargaze in your own backyard or during your outdoor adventures. Use it to capture photos of galaxies, nebulae, the moon, and more.
Looking Glass Portrait
It sounds incredible, but the Looking Glass Portrait is a personal holographic display. Just capture a photo with any camera, and this device lets you transform it into a realistic hologram. It can even move and talk in tandem with you.
ROLI LUMI Portable Beginner’s Keyboard
Want to learn how to play the piano? The ROLI LUMI Portable Beginner’s Keyboard lets you play your favorite songs faster since each key lights up with the exact note you need to play.
Artiphon Orba Handheld Musical Instrument
If you’re a musician, you’re going to love the Artiphon Orba Handheld Musical Instrument. It works intuitively as a synth, loop, and controller. Best of all, it fits in the palm of your hand so you can take it anywhere.
Knocki Make Any Surface Smart Device
The Knocki Make Any Surface Smart Device makes the surfaces around you smarter. Just attach it to a surface and watch it transform into a touch interface. You have to see it to believe it.
Rotrics DexArm Robot Desk Arm
The Rotrics DexArm Robot Desk Arm will turn your desktop into a workshop. Its capabilities include drawing, laser engraving, 3D printing, and more. It’s one of our favorite crowdfunding gadgets for creative professionals.
Lofelt Basslet Watch-Size Subwoofer
Why listen to your music when you can feel it? The Lofelt Basslet Watch-Size Subwoofer gives you powerful bass right on your body for an immersive music experience.
Square Off NEO & SWAP Automated AI Board Games
For a cool table game experience, check out the Square Off NEO & SWAP Automated AI Board Games. The pieces move on their own thanks to AI, and the games adapt to your skill level. It’s one of the most fun crowdfunding gadgets out there.
Reevo Hubless eBike
Hands down, the Reevo Hubless eBike is one cool bike. Its wheels are spokeless, so it looks pretty futuristic. With three drive modes-pedal, adaptive, and throttle-it takes you up to 37 miles in style.
Ebite Inc. Couch Console
The Ebite Inc. Couch Console is the perfect accompaniment to your gaming nights and Netflix binges. This modular couch tray has compartments for your remote, snack, and cups. It also has a charging outlet.
BeYou Transforming Chair
The BeYou Transforming Chair is one of our must-have crowdfunding gadgets for your home office. It lets you focus and relax in ten different positions so that you can work comfortably, no matter how you like to sit.
Mendi Brain Training Headband
Stretch your brain power with the Mendi Brain Training Headband. This wellness gadget gives you access to fun, stimulating brain exercises that help you focus and relax. It uses the same technique used by pro athletes, executives, and astronauts.
OmniCharge Omni Off-Grid Portable Camping Power Station
When you’re off-grid, you still need power. And the OmniCharge Omni Off-Grid Portable Camping Power Station can help. It comes with 16 different power ports and boasts a 1,500 Wh battery. That should be plenty for your weekend camping trip.
VAVA Portable SSD Touch Secure External Storage
Want an incredibly secure SSD? The VAVA Portable SSD Touch Secure External Storage is the crowdfunding gadget you’ve been looking for. It has fingerprint and AES 256-bit encryption, so nobody’s getting to your files but you.
WooBloo SMASH Portable Smart Projector
Create a theater-like experience for your movie nights with the WooBloo SMASH Portable Smart Projector. Set it up in your living room, bedroom, or backyard for an incredible project. You can command it via Alexa, too, for convenience.
HeimVision Assure B1 2K Ultra HD Security Camera
Get all the home security features you need with the HeimVision Assure B1 2K Ultra HD Security Camera. This sleek little camera is weatherproof, has two-way audio, boasts a 130-degree field of vision, offers voice assistance, and more.
Recharge FlexBEAM Therapy Device
Post-workout sore muscles are painful. But you can quicken your body’s recovery process with the Recharge FlexBEAM Therapy Device. It targets infrared light on overworked areas of the body to turbocharge the healing process.
ORA GQ Graphene Headphones
And the ORA GQ Graphene Headphones deliver quite an audio experience. They use graphene, which is a Nobel prize-winning material that disperses sound throughout the driver for premium quality. It also gives you a 70% increase in battery life.
These crowdfunding gadgets are truly impressive. When companies and their customers work together to create a new product, the result is nothing short of amazing. Which of these gadgets do you want to get? Let us know in the comment section.
Want more tech news, reviews, and guides from Gadget Flow? Follow us on Google News, Feedly, and Flipboard. If you use Flipboard, you should definitely check out our Curated Stories. We publish three new stories every day, so make sure to follow us to stay updated!
The Gadget Flow Daily Digest highlights and explores the latest in tech trends to keep you informed. Want it straight to your inbox? Subscribe ➜ | https://medium.com/the-gadget-flow/20-crowdfunding-gadgets-that-simply-blew-our-minds-e869441a92e8 | ['Gadget Flow'] | 2021-02-15 17:35:26.043000+00:00 | ['Crowdfunding', 'Kickstarter', 'Indiegogo', 'Gadgets', 'Technology'] |
MANTRA DAO Token Buyback Completion Report | MANTRA DAO’s first buyback precursor to our OM validator earning program
Our OM token buyback event from the proceeds from our recent Breaking the 100 million OM staked NFT sale has been completed! The total number of OM bought during the buyback event was 741,398.88 OM which is equivalent to approximately $50,000 at the time of purchase.
The purchased OM tokens have been transferred to our publicly verifiable address here:
https://etherscan.io/address/0x5b8e6dce497632dcbdbc195c3416f44fea6683e6
MANTRA DAO used 80 $ETH from NFT sale proceeds to buyback 741,398 OM
This initiative is the precursor to our OM validator earnings program where MANTRA DAO spends 50% of its accrued staking/delegator rewards to buy back OM on the open market. Instead of a buyback and burn model, MANTRA DAO uses a buyback and make model which explained by placeholder vs is believed to have better benefits especially for governance tokens which include improved token liquidity! | https://medium.com/@mantradao/mantra-dao-token-buyback-completion-report-e46c278f636b | ['Mantra Dao'] | 2020-12-22 06:44:08.798000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Cryptocurrency News', 'Blockchain Technology', 'Crypto', 'Blockchain'] |
Why should you choose Linux VPS Hosting India for your Website? | I’m using the Best Linux VPS Hosting India which is giving many benefits to my business. And this is improving my business ranking on SERPs. My experience with Linux VPS Hosting is good because I have expanded my business online and this also helps in handling high traffic that hits my website.
Benefits of using Linux VPS Hosting:-
High Speed:
You got a high speed for a website site that you can work faster without facing any loading issue or slowing down. This can handle huge traffic easily. This also helps in improving the website’s performance and overall performance.
Security:
You get high protection for your resources. This can protect you from viruses, hackers, cybercriminals, and spam. You cant share your resources with anyone.
Low-Cost:
This is cheaper than other servers. At the budget price, you will get this. This will bring quality to your business.
Flexibility:
You can install any software and uninstall its account to your business and website needs.
C-Panel:
You can manage your server from C-panel. You can terminate or suspend clients’ accounts because you have complete authority to do so. So can add or upgrade plans. | https://medium.com/@guptanisu26/why-should-you-choose-linux-vps-hosting-india-for-your-website-320c390c44f4 | [] | 2021-11-23 07:20:22.122000+00:00 | ['Web Hosting Services', 'India', 'Web Hosting', 'Website', 'Servers'] |
An AI Algorithm That Can Win Almost ANY Game | Garry Kasparov vs. Deep Blue (Image Source)
The year was 1997. It seemed that the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, would easily hold his own against Deep Blue, a computer algorithm that couldn’t possibly comprehend the 10¹²⁰ possibilities that a chess game could unfold in. However, rather than shorting out due to the immense number of computations it had to perform, the supercomputer Deep Blue actually ended up defeating Kasparov in the match by a score of 3.5–2.5. How could a computer possibly make these moves without trying out every single possible combination?
Intro to Reinforcement Learning
Enter reinforcement learning, a subsection of machine learning where computers learn from trial and error using past feedback to improve. Rather than using a common mapping of input and output like with supervised learning, reinforcement learning uses rewards for positive behavior and punishment for negative behavior. Computers “train” in a virtual environment where they are passed a certain state that they are in, and have to take a certain action that will maximize the reward that it will get.
A visual representation of reinforcement learning. (Image Source)
An example can be seen in the game of Pong, a game where two players have paddles and continuously bounce the ball back to one another by hitting it with their paddles. The goal of the game is to defeat your opponent by making him miss a ball. The reward function in this case would be positive for hitting the ball back or making your opponent miss the ball, while the reward function would be negative for missing the ball.
When the computer first starts training, it chooses actions randomly from the action space, a set of actions that the agent can take within the game. For the game of Pong, the action space would be moving up or down. However, as the computer attempts to maximize its reward, it recognizes patterns in the game, such as if the ball is moving up, you should move your paddle up. Eventually, the game will be able to play at a decent level.
One thing to note is that the model attempts to maximize its cumulative reward, not its instantaneous reward. An analogy can be seen in the game of chess; capturing a pawn may seem like the best instantaneous move, but gaining a better positioning will provide a better cumulative reward.
Reinforcement Learning Terms
Term #1: Markov Decision Processes (MDPs)
Feel free to skip the first paragraph if you’re not interested in a technical definition for Markov Decision Processes.
One of the frameworks used to generalize reinforcement learning problems are Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In short, MDPs work in the following way: the process starts in a state s, and the machine will choose an action a from the action set A(s) available in state s. Then, the machine is moved to a new state s’, and is given a reward R(s, s’) depending on its initial and current state. The probability that the process moves into state s’ given action a and state s is P(s, s’ | a), assuming that s and a are conditionally independent from past actions made.
A visual representation of MDPs. (Image Source)
Wow! That was a lot to unpack! If you’re interested in learning more about the mathematics behind MDPs, click here. MDPs are used to describe an environment in reinforcement learning, and can be used to formalize nearly any reinforcement learning problem. However, this approach falls short in real-world scenarios where environments are often not fully mapped out.
This is an example of a non-model-free reinforcement learning method, where a formal definition of the environment is necessary for the algorithm to run. In summary, these should only be used with a small amount of possible states and a simple environment.
Term #2: Q-Learning
Q-Learning is an example of a model-free approach that can be used for reinforcement learning. This method updates Q-values when an action a is done in state s. Similar to neural networks, Q-learning heavily relies on this value update rule; a more formalized definition can be seen below.
The Q-learning update rule mathematically. (Image Source)
Note that Q-learning uses several hyperparameters that need to be set beforehand for the model, which makes it more complicated to train properly. Also note that there needs to be an estimate for the optimal future value, which is necessary as the machine tries to optimize the total cumulative reward, not just the instantaneous reward.
Methods for developing estimates for the future values include Deep Q-Networks, which use neural networks to estimate Q-values, and Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG), which tackles the problem by learning policies in continuous, high dimensional action spaces.
Reinforcement Learning in Games
One of the most significant and popular accomplishments of reinforcement learning lie in its potential to defeat complex games, such as DOTA 2. Currently, OpenAI Five, has learned by playing over 10,000 years of games against itself, and can defeat professional teams in DOTA 2, a multiplayer strategy game.
This feat is monumental: DOTA 2 is a much more complex game than chess, involving different sets of abilities, experience points, attacks, defensive moves. In overall, a character can perform over 100,000 possible actions, and each match has over 80,000 individual frames. Another issue is the fact that there are 5 players on each team, meaning that the AI has to work with other AIs to defend their base and attack the opponent’s base.
Gameplay showing OpenAI Five bots battling against human players. (Image Source)
To meet this problem, OpenAI Five uses a deep reinforcement learning model that uses rewards, such as kills, deaths, and assists, to help them improve. Despite never being taught this, AIs have learned how to master professional tactics in the game, and how to prioritize their team reward over their individual reward. This shows that the AI has the capability to learn strategies and moves; it’s incredible how the AI has developed this technology after starting off with random moves.
Reinforcement learning has the power to disrupt many other technologies as well. It can be used for text summarization, chatbots, online stock trading, and much more. As Kasparov said:
“It’s about setting the rules. And setting the rules means that you have the perimeter. And as long as a machine can operate in the perimeter knowing what the final goal is, even if this is the only piece of information, that’s enough for machines to reach the level that is impossible for humans to compete.”
With the growth that reinforcement learning has been receiving in the last couple of years, Kasparov’s statement may soon become a reality, as reinforcement learning continues to disrupts hundreds of fields.
TL;DR
Reinforcement learning is a subset of machine learning that optimizes a machine’s actions by providing a reward function and training in a virtual environment.
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) allow us to formalize our understanding of the environment into an environment a reinforcement learning algorithm can run on.
Q-Learning uses a model-free approach to reinforcement learning, and trains by updating q-values.
Current innovations in reinforcement learning can be seen in OpenAI’s disruption in DOTA 2, where their AI algorithm is able to defeat some of the top players in the world.
Reinforcement learning has a variety of applications, including chatbots and online stock trading.
Further Reading
For information about projects that I am currently working on, consider subscribing to my newsletter! Here’s the link to subscribe. If you’re interested in connecting, follow me on Linkedin, Github, and Medium. | https://medium.com/studentsxstudents/an-ai-algorithm-that-can-win-almost-any-game-50671d2f9e76 | ['Aditya Mittal'] | 2020-10-12 15:25:28.823000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Enjoy Writing', 'Reinforcement Learning', 'Algorithms'] |
A plea on vaccines: the Left has to prove it has learned from Brexit and attempt to educate, not alienate. | Re-post from the Young Fabians blog, originally posted:
In November 2020, when Nigel Farage resurfaced as an anti-lockdown proponent, most people mocked and dismissed him. But I was nervous. I knew he had the potential to whip up a significant movement that could endanger public health. Like him or definitely loathe him, Farage knows how to tap into the frustrations of ordinary people and encourage them to coalesce around a single issue – often, with destructive consequences.
Indeed, as December ticks on and 2020 draws to a close, the issue of Brexit, previously brushed under the carpet by the devastating effects of coronavirus, has resurfaced into public consciousness.
Autonomy played a role in driving the Brexit decision. Disenfranchisement with the political system driven by decades of poor investment and deindustrialisation helped push support for the leave campaign in working-class northern areas like my hometown, where the left was painted as out-of-touch metropolitan snobs. We were criticised not just for our policies and our support of the EU, but for the way in which we conducted our politics. We were viewed as paternalistic and patronising – incapable of understanding the concerns of the ordinary person and instead assuming we knew what was best. It is this feeling of abandonment – a collective divorce from the sense that the Labour Party is the natural home of the working-class- that went on to, in part, help secure a Tory majority with the collapse of the ‘Red Wall’ in 2019.
The Left of the 2020s knows it must concern itself with winning back voters in these areas. And the desire to do so could not be more pressing – the coronavirus crisis has entrenched inequality, exacerbating the divide between the richest and poorest areas of our nation – not just through disproportionate mortality rates, but by the socially segregating effects of the tier system, and the economic starvation brought about by successive lockdowns and job losses. The need for a progressive government focussed on social justice could not be more apparent.
The initiation of a vaccination programme should be heralded as a lifeline for the most deprived areas of the country. Despite this, there is mounting opposition to the roll out of a vaccine across the UK, with individuals concerned that safety limits or standards have been eroded in favour of speed. This could not be further from the truth. But those of us working in medicine know that those seeking to undermine the benefits of vaccination have rarely had a tendency to play by the rules – starting with Wakefield and the MMR vaccine in the late 1990s.
In challenging opposition to vaccination, the Left faces arguably a bigger challenge than even that posed by Brexit. Whereas the lies on the side of buses were manufactured artificially by Cummings behind closed doors, an anti-vaccination movement has been growing organically in western society for some years now. It is often a poisonous debate to step into, soured by a sense of vitriol that will undoubtedly be magnified by calls for mandatory vaccination, or restrictions placed upon those who refuse it. But in my experience working as a doctor, I have only ever had a positive debate about vaccination when both sides have engaged respectfully, and with a genuine desire to learn.
Contrast this with the approach being taken by many on the Left now in the dialogue surrounding a coronavirus vaccine and I fear we have not learned from our mistakes. Those reluctant to accept a vaccine are branded as stupid or irresponsible; pushed away from the debate, rather than ushered in for a conversation. It is this divisive approach – either you are with us, the righteous and enlightened, or against us, that evokes the paternalism that pushed voters away from us previously, helped drive support for Leave, and risks alienating members of communities most in need of the benefits of this vaccine. Censoring anti-vaccination posts in the spirit of public health is sensible, but does nothing to derail anger about restriction on freedoms fuelled by lockdown and the tier system.
If the Left is to support mandatory vaccination, or restrictions on movement for those who refuse it, we need to reach out into communities and do the work to bring people on board now. If we fail, a vacuum of influence will persist, waiting to be taken up yet again by people with an altogether more sinister motivation. If the Left thought the tactics employed in the EU referendum were dirty, a brief foray into the vast expanse of anti-vaccine material out there would prove shocking – just as outrageous in its dishonesty, but presented in a pseudo-scientifically literate way, and often by slick communicators.
Put simply, anybody who thinks contending with the anti-vax movement to ensure mass immunisation is going to be simple risks naivety. Meanwhile, many will attempt to portray mandatory vaccination or censorship as an affront to individual liberty – and the Left has displayed a collective struggle to confront these arguments adequately in recent years.
Our instinct to mock and dismiss these people ultimately risks alienating people and driving them away from our cause. The stakes are too high for us to get it wrong again.
Stephen Naulls is a junior doctor, born and raised in Grimsby, now working in London. He tweets from @StephenNaulls. | https://medium.com/@stephennaulls/a-plea-on-vaccines-the-left-has-to-prove-it-has-learned-from-brexit-and-attempt-to-educate-not-9be1ea63c240 | ['Stephen Naulls'] | 2020-12-14 19:34:54.515000+00:00 | ['Brexit', 'Vaccines', 'Politics', 'Labour Party'] |
Home Less | Haiku is a form of poetry usually inspired by nature, which embraces simplicity. We invite all poetry lovers to have a go at composing Haiku. Be warned. You could become addicted.
Follow | https://medium.com/house-of-haiku/home-less-f50879c3e67f | [] | 2020-11-23 06:21:06.909000+00:00 | ['Poems And Stories', 'Haiku', 'Poetry', 'Poems On Medium', 'House Of Haiku'] |
I Can Barely Stand Up Straight | The growth of life is not a straight line, it is a spiral that eventually leads you back to Source. You may pass your past and future selves along the way, but the person to whom you are responsible is the one who is reading these words. The speculation on these implications can be endless. Once I had a dream that was not a dream in which I was helping my younger self write one of his stories, a story no elementary school child should ever have been able to write. And now I am being influenced by my future selves who have ventured into the past to keep me alive, exorcise a demon or two, and show me what it means to be a man in these tumultuous times when kind, intelligent, empathetic men are in seemingly in short supply. I commune with myself up and down timelines, across densities and dimensions. I am but a humble receiver of their knowledge and wisdom, and I have to figure out how I can become a better one without letting these spiritual struggles spill over into my family life. But maybe I have to make peace with the fact that is out of my control. My younger sister and my parents have already been grievously wounded by my mistakes and it is only through the considerate intervention of the future that I am not currently homeless. For now.
The spiral. It takes you past the lessons you learned to make sure they really sunk in. It takes you past people, places and things that used to annoy you, frustrate you, anger you and cause you immense grief so you can finally reckon with your suffering and leave your earthly baggage behind. The spiral means you keep hoping the next step is your last and at the final moment you pivot and only find a new hallway to traverse, one filled with the pain and emptiness of a poorly-lived life.
But all of this is leading us something. I usually hear ‘spiral’ and I think of alcoholics or the mentally ill spiraling out of control. I’ve been there and done that plenty of times as a mentally ill addict. It’s possible to let your anxiety spiral to the point where you are locking yourself in your closet, and spiraling with substances until the light goes dim in your eyes. But those are downward spirals. What I’m speaking of today is the upward spiral. It may seem like a trap at times, it may seem like you are falling apart, but every step you take is bringing you closer to a reunion with to the divine.
I’ve had a string of sleepless nights. My spiritual guides are trying to wear down my resistance to their loving ministrations with a combination of sleep deprivation and the application of extreme stress. It’s also a test. These things are always tests. They want to break my animal self, the lone wolf, the rabid, chattering monkey, so my true self may emerge. Easter said than done. My ego is a Sisyphean boulder in the way of progress and I love animals more than anything else in the world, even the group consciousness I’m linked into.
But for some reason it’s unnatural for us to act like animals. We used to have more sharply defined barriers that separated humans from beasts. Then we were tampered with and conditioned to believe that we were merely intelligent primates. It’s not so. Though we still deserve respect and dignity and are far beyond the casual, cavalier treatment of those in the spirit realm. We are beyond it. We don’t need to suffer it. We don’t deserve to be treated like misbehaving children when you created a game in which the powerful dominate and eat the weak, who might only be weak because they choose to honor the values you yourselves instilled in them. What will children think of next? I don’t know. You could ask them.
My aim is not blame, for this is a world of many wonders, many mysteries, much opportunity for spiritual growth. It is a world where spiritual infants can mature into adulthood and look back to hoist up the person on the rung beneath them. Its benefit to entities looking to learn and to serve and to honor the many faces of The One Infinite Creator cannot be overstated. But this world is still not our world. There is a reason the angels are trying to rescue as many souls as they can before this timeline unravels. The dark gods of fear and blood are in an unholy rage and if they can’t take that rage out on their celestial opponents they’ll take it out on us.
It’s slightly annoying to have to grab onto the railing while I’m walking up the steps, to constantly stumble into walls, to fall to my knees, to fall flat on my face, to be told I need to admit defeat before this kills me. Because I’m being tortured right now and we’re about to see which goes first, my mind or my body. The thing is, fortunate or not, that my guides can repair my body, reenergize my spirit, but only so much. Just barely enough to keep me functioning so I can put on my brave face in front of my family.
I wish they could just tell me what not to write. I wish they didn’t have to go all passive-aggressive on me and find ways to censor and silence me. This act is getting old. I’m putting it all on display. I am putting my body, mind and soul on the line for you, the least you could do is communicate your wants and needs clearly with me. I would say come in a dream where there is less interference, but I don’t dream these days because I don’t sleep. I can barely stand up.
This new year is almost upon us and if I had one take away it would be this: People can endure the unimaginable without losing the spark that makes them uniquely human. You can torture and degrade and taunt and threaten them, you can force them to keep secrets from those they love the most, you can make them work till they collapse in a heap, and people will keep going. They will keep going not because of some evolutionary survival instinct, but because they believe they are worthy of life and that their family is worthy to have them in their lives. I used to always utter the phrase ‘Ugh, I hate people. People are the worst.’ But I don’t think we are. I think we’re up against it. I think we entered a slaughter house and we only have each other for comfort.
Not only is this world hard at times, really hard, it is also governed by forces that actively seek to destroy those who would speak out against them. People, taken as a whole, are kind, caring, and compassionate because they can readily empathize with another’s suffering. We didn’t choose to come together as societies solely for the sake of convenience. We needed and wanted each other. We recognized ourselves in each other. Contrary to popular belief, people are not stupid creatures. We possess minds more advanced than any artificial intelligence and though we think through them everyday, we have only begun to plumb their depths. People are capable of greatness. People are capable of sweeping change. What motivates us to tackle the most serious issues of the day? Is it self-interest? It can’t be. I posit that it comes from faith in the human family, faith in our own inherent goodness, and a deep, abiding love for the generations of little ones who will be following in our stead.
I said it before, you knock me down and I will get back up. You want me to stop getting up you better hit me harder than silly insults and a few sleepless nights and a relapse or two. You’re going to have to sic the demon on me until I bleed out. Even then, it probably wouldn’t be enough. I was sent from the future to aid humanity in their struggles against the blackest tyranny. Did I end up getting turned and doing horrible things? Yes, and I will atone for every single life that felt the impact of me. But now I’m aligning with my original mission and I am going to make sure people hear as much truth as my friends see fit to confide in me.
Who will be left standing when this war is over? I hope against hope that free people will be left standing. But this is the past and we all know how the past went, don’t we? Nevertheless, we have the opportunity to be a catalyst for the greatest human growth spurt in history. If that doesn’t excite you, nothing will. We have the opportunity to implement, through civil, legal, institutional, and political channels the values that we are striving for in the realms of racial and economic equality, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, climate change, the opioid epidemic and so much more. And we have a chance to bring matters of the spirit out of the darkened pews and into the mainstream as the groundswell of stories of awakenings spread across the planet. They times they are a-changing.
I should end this piece, but I always have this fear that what I’ve written it so off the mark that they’ll poke me for it beyond the veil. That would not be a good day. This is why fiction is safer, because I don’t need to put myself on the line. Ah, well. You can’t win them all. I speak my truth, as I know it, and I have to be content with that.
Blessings to you on this New Year!
Be well,
Timothy | https://medium.com/grab-a-slice/i-can-barely-stand-up-straight-77f0cab0904b | ["Timothy O'Neill"] | 2021-01-01 21:21:40.376000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Spirituallity', 'Mental Health', 'Self', 'This Happened To Me'] |
Na-young: A Survivor | Protesters holding signs calling for the rapist Cho Doo-soon’s castration trying to block his release from prison on Saturday in Seoul, South Korea. Credit…Yun Dong-Jin/Yonhap, via Associated Press
Ansan, South Korea. December 11th, 2008
This marks the exact date when that case happened. Na-young (fictitious name), an 8-year-old girl was kidnapped, tortured, and raped by the criminal Cho Doo-Soon (then 56 years old). This brutality caused Na-young left with permanent damage to her lower abdomen and was told she would be permanently disabled. Na-young also suffered from depression and mental stress after the assault. In trial, Cho who was originally sentenced to life in prison, his sentenced was reduced to 12 years in prison because Na-young testified that he smelled like alcohol, as he was not sound of mind while committing the crime.
If you are not familiar with this case, you can read Cho Doo-Soon case or watch Hope (2013) movie that made based on the true story of that case.
December 12th, 2020
Cho Doo-Soon, now 68, was released from prison. His released was sparking angry demonstrations and anonymous death threats that led to an increased police presence outside the predator’s home. He returned to Ansan to live with his wife less than 1 km away from the victim’s house. He will have to wear an ankle monitor and will be under constant surveillance on probation for 7 years. Ansan’s city government said in a statement that a team of 12 security guards — formerly special forces’ soldiers or martial arts specialists — have been put on shifts patrolling the area around Cho’s house 24 hours a day. Officials are also adding 20 more security cameras as well as new streetlights.
Now, what will happen?
I don’t have law background, and I am not a South Korea’s citizen. I don’t have the capacity of talking about the judgment or law-related things. But I wonder, what will happen next?
What will happen to Na-young? Now she’s 20 years old, only 4 years younger than me. It is reported that one year after the case, after receiving psychiatric treatment, she was said to have recovered 70%. She also started attending school again but avoids news completely to avoid any possible chance of seeing something related to sexual assault. But now, with the perpetrator is living close to her, it is reported that the victim’s family will move away from Ansan. Will she feel safe and be able to overcome any past trauma from that assault?
What will happen to Cho? Public anger has surged, around a million people since 2017 signed multiple petition opposing Cho’s release. He also has various violent case history (including rape) with for most of his cases he was drunk. With extra-monitoring from police with cameras, and streetlights, will it make him come to his sense?
What will happen to other unreported sexual assault victim in my country, Indonesia? Will they live in fear for the rest of their life? In Na-young case, I do believe that psychiatric treatment is one of the most contributing parts which helped her cope past horrible event. But rape is under-reported case. With fear of shame and victim-blaming, it will also become harder for the victim to muster up courage and report to the police. A study by Singapore-based research company ValueChampion has found that Indonesia is the second-most dangerous country for women in the Asia Pacific region.
What will happen to sexual violence eradication bill (RUU PKS)? What will happen to men and women in Indonesia? What will happen to false allegations of rape case? What will happen?
Well, I don’t know. I wish that I know, but I don’t.
But, here is what I know…
What will happen to me?
Honestly, something disgusts me, especially when the sexual assault mostly happened to women.
No, I’m not talking about #MeToo or any kind of short-term feminist movement. Just let those people speak up about their concerns. What really disgusts me is when the default will change. The new normal.
I think what if someday women don’t feel safe anymore near men? Will they appreciate men because they don’t rape of assault them? Will they reward us as good men because we respect consent and not making sexual jokes? Will they respect us because we don’t catcall them? No, it shouldn’t be, and hopefully won’t be, the default, the new normal.
I also wish that Na-young can heal and cope with the past trauma and be happy on her own. I wish she received much love from people so she won’t live in despair. I wish she can be success on her own without people adding “despite of that case”. And lastly, I wish someday she can talk about that case casually. I do believe there is still hope for anyone who experience the same thing. Always realize that it was not your fault, you’re brave and amazing, and deserve to be loved by somebody.
At least, I am that somebody.
Other news and references:
· https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2020/12/13/national/socialAffairs/Cho-Doosoon-Nayoung-rape/20201213181000542.html
· https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/12/world/asia/south-korea-rapist-cho-doo-soon.html
· https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/south-korea-child-rapist-cho-doo-soon-protesters-eggs-13756164
· https://www.thestar.com.my/aseanplus/aseanplus-news/2020/12/15/rapists-release-sparks-outrage
· http://komnasperempuan.go.id/file/pdf_file/2020/Catatan%20Tahunan%20Kekerasan%20Terhadap%20Perempuan%202020.pdf | https://medium.com/@dannyhidayat/na-young-a-survivor-2aecc80d1b9d | ['Danny Hidayat'] | 2021-03-22 01:32:13.244000+00:00 | ['Rape Victims', 'Rape Cases', 'Sexual Assault', 'Rape', 'Survivor'] |
Embracement of masculinity | There have always been people who criticize men for living their lives the way they want to live. Our society has set a definition of men and if you try to do something divergent than their expectations, you’re not ‘man enough’. Things coming in that domain could be wearing make-up, having low and soft voice, lack of facial hair, thin body type, etc.
Prohibiting someone from their basic right to live and eating up the peace of their mind by making judgments about their sexuality is entirely stupid. It is not the facial hair but the actions, mentality and behavior which portrays what kind of a man you are.
There are world famous celebrities like Conan Gray, Harry Styles, members of BTS who often face such criticisms but they keep living their lives in their way, they express themselves through their art and also hit the world records. This sets a different image of masculinity where you don’t let stereotypical aspects to shackle your personality, you listen to your heart, by yourself and do what makes you happy. | https://medium.com/@ranihirani2004/embracement-of-masculinity-79f39344e741 | ['Rani Hirani'] | 2021-06-01 11:01:18.977000+00:00 | ['Love Yourself', 'Stereotypes', 'Toxic Masculinity', 'Masculinity', 'Men'] |
【共鳴讀書 no.161】~教育必須支持天賦、激發天命 | in Both Sides of the Table | https://medium.com/%E5%85%B1%E9%B3%B4%E8%AE%80%E6%9B%B8%E7%AD%86%E8%A8%98/%E5%85%B1%E9%B3%B4%E8%AE%80%E6%9B%B8-no-161-%E6%95%99%E8%82%B2%E5%BF%85%E9%A0%88%E6%94%AF%E6%8C%81%E5%A4%A9%E8%B3%A6-%E6%BF%80%E7%99%BC%E5%A4%A9%E5%91%BD-4837d35d0a33 | ['Jinna Sun'] | 2020-04-03 03:07:07.374000+00:00 | ['Book Review', 'Education', 'Elements'] |
Pair programming with tomatoes | Over the last couple of months, our team has attempted to apply the Pomodoro pairing technique to our daily work routine. We’ve been more or less successful, so here’s more information on how it works:
What is Pomodoro?
Pomodoro (Italian for tomato) is a pairing technique that forces developers to split their work time into smaller units. The units of work consist of 25-minute-long sessions with 5-minute breaks in between, and a longer 20-minute break after every 4 sessions. During these sessions, you should be focused on your task and preferably undisturbed (by your other colleagues, Slack, BBC News, etc). After every session, developers switch their driver and navigator positions.
Why Pomodoro?
A recommended practice of pair programming is to swap the person typing at the keyboard every now and then. But realistically, does this sound familiar? One person is in the fury of refactoring or performing some other “creative” task, while the other one either takes a snooze or browses Reddit on their phone for new fish tank ideas (definitely not me).
Pomodoro ensures that this does not happen by forcing you to switch the pairing roles regularly, resulting in more productive, focused bursts of work. It also ensures that you take breaks, which prevents losing focus.
Conclusion
As I said in the beginning, we’ve tried this technique in our team with various combinations of developers, and everybody found it very easy to get used to. It is admittedly exhausting, but also very effective, to have these 25-minute-long chunks of work where your only worry in the world is your current task and nothing can distract you.
On the other hand, you have to be careful about following the pattern that Pomodoro proposes. Sometimes even when you’re not in the driving position, you might come up with an awesome solution to your problem that you need to type straight away. If that happens, you shouldn’t “steal” the keyboard from your partner (as it does happen on our team sometimes…), but instead let them know about your idea so they can incorporate it themselves.
Lastly, I’ve found parts of this technique very effective even when I’m working on my own (e.g. writing documentation). You can still use the time management part of Pomodoro even when you don’t swap the pairs.
P.S: There are a lot of handy apps that have pre-programmed timers that follow the Pomodoro time pattern, like Focus Keeper. | https://medium.com/ingeniouslysimple/pair-programming-with-tomatoes-fba29ed23be3 | ['Stanislav Hamara'] | 2017-10-12 08:32:03.795000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Productivity', 'Programming'] |
EnlightAID, a framework for all sustainable development | EnlightAID, a framework for all sustainable development
A few weeks ago I wrote an article about the UN Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. It showed the importance of Goal 16 as a foundation for the other goals to be built on. As you may have read, Goal 16 is called Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions and it aims, among other things, to the eradication of corruption. This particular goal is the basis upon which the EnlightAID concept was conceived. Our team embarked on the task of creating something that has never been done before, to give real-time transparency to the use of donations and investments in social and environmental projects. With this work, our aim is to contribute to the correct use of funds meant for social and environmental causes, thus contributing to reducing corruption in this sector. As you may already know, the UN estimates that 30% of the resources allocated to aid is diverted as a result of acts of corruption which means that billions of dollars are lost every year, robbing all of us of the positive that could have been achieved with those funds. Even though the goal that fits EnlightAID the most is Goal 16, we have chosen this one as the foundation to achieve all of them
How does EnlightAID align with the other SDGs?
It is really, very simple. Organizations such as NGOs, charities and foundations can join EnlightAID in order to fundraise with transparency, show impact, create volunteering opportunities and work together with people and companies to achieve social and/or environmental goals. An organization will create a profile that will allow them to do all of that, and more. Each one of the organizations will choose at least one of the EnlightAID causes that address the kind of work they do with their projects. We know that sometimes one organization will be working towards more than one goal which is why they can choose up to three out of the eight available causes. For this article I thought it would be a great idea to share with you what these goals aim for and how they align with the UN’s SDGs, so here it goes!
Women & Children, as the name indicates, this cause is oriented towards projects and actions that are aimed at protecting women and children and advancing their rights. This directly aligns with Goal 5, Gender Equality, and Goal 10, Reducing Inequalities of the SDGs. Both of these goals aim at achieving equality, Goal 5 in terms of gender to empower all women and girls and goal 10 addresses it in terms of the differences among countries. Organizations who have to chosen to work within the Women & Children Cause Category will be developing projects that, among other things, contribute to end all forms of discriminationof women and girls everywhere, eliminate gender violence and exploitation, eliminate practices such as child marriage and female genital mutilation, contribute to ensure social, economic and political inclusion for everyone regardless of their age, sex, disability, origin, religion, ethnicity, economic status, etc. Furthermore, organizations working on this cause can also be working towards eliminating discriminatory policies, laws and practices, along with other lines of work that contribute to ensure women and children have the best chance to develop their full potential and that promote equality among all human beings.
Hunger & Poverty, this cause is in line with the first two SDGs, Goal 1: No Poverty and Goal 2 Zero Hunger. These two SDGs have as objective to “end poverty in all its forms”¹ and “end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture”². Organizations working in the Hunger & Poverty Cause will be working towards those two objectives, and can cover aspects such as creating programs that can ensure people have a living wage over 1.90 dollars a day³, which is the current line of poverty. Furthermore, this Cause targets also the reduction of multidimensional poverty. “Although often defined according to income, poverty can also be defined in terms of the deprivations people face in their daily lives”⁴, multidimensional poverty “identifies how people are being left behind across three key dimensions: health, education and living standards, comprising 10 indicators such as lacking access to clean water, adequate nutrition or primary education. People who experience deprivation in at least one third of these weighted indicators fall into the category of multidimensionally poor.”⁵ Furthermore, the Hunger and Poverty Cause addresses also ensuring food security and agro-sustainability, especially for the most vulnerable people and regions on the planet.
Environment, this Cause is oriented towards targets covered by Goal 7: Affordable and Clean Energy Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities, Goal 13: Climate Action, Goal 14: Life Below Water, and Goal 15 Life on Land. Organizations working towards the Environment Cause might be developing affordable and reliable sustainable energy, doing research in clean energy production systems, working towards providing affordable housing and giving slums basic services, designing inclusive transport systems, participatory processes for sustainable human settlements, reducing negative impacts created by cities, or supporting relationships between urban, peri-urban and rural areas. These organizations could also be working to strengthen the adaptive capacity to climate change of different regions, promoting the integration of climate change measures into policy, establishing mechanisms to raise the capacity for climate change related planning in vulnerable regions, reducing marine pollution, protecting marine and coastal ecosystems, establishing land and marine environment restoration initiatives, addressing ocean acidification and contribute with ending overfishing. Organizations who have chosen to be part of the Environment Cause can also be creating initiatives to increase scientific knowledge and research capacity in topics related to marine and land ecosystems, promote the implementation of sustainable forestry management practices, develop projects to prevent soil degradation and erosion, work on the conservation of biodiversity, take action to end trafficking and poaching of protected flora and fauna, create landscaping plans to protect endemic vegetal species and enhance the global support to protect environment defenders, among many other initiatives.
Education & Culture, as the name indicates, this cause aligns with Goal 4: Quality Education. As the SDG, the aim of this cause is to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”⁶. To achieve this, organizations working in the Education & Culture Cause can be working towards providing free, quality and equitable access to education for all children. They may also have initiatives oriented towards ensuring affordable and quality education at a tertiary level, ensuring women and men have access to skill building. These organizations can also be working towards eliminating gender disparity in terms of access to education, and contributing to safeguard cultural heritage, among other objectives. With the Education & Culture Cause, EnlightAID goes beyond the SDGs to include culture that transcends access to education, we believe that sustainable development must also include access to culture in a broadened spectrum, which is why we wanted to open the doors to organizations working in the arts and music spectrums. Understanding that art and music have a fundamental value in our societies and as such should be accessible to all of the members of our global society, regardless of age, gender or socio-economic background.
Freedom of Speech, this Cause is related to Goal 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions, which targets among other things to ensure access to information and to protect fundamental freedoms⁸. Organizations which have chosen to work in this Cause may represent independent media outlets committed to provide pluralistic information to all citizens.
Healthcare & Sanitation, this cause is aligned with Goal 3: Good Health and Well-being and Goal 6: Clean Water and Sanitation. It has been created to promote access to healthcare, sanitation and water management for all. Organizations working in this Cause might be developing projects to give access to safe drinking water in vulnerable economies, the creation of sanitation and hygiene infrastructure in slums, projects that increase water-use efficiency in all sectors, as well as initiatives to contribute reducing maternal and neonatal mortality, research on epidemics and other health related issues, and ensure universal access to healthcare and access to medicines and vaccines, among others.
Natural Disaster Relief, this Cause aligns with both Goal 13: Climate Action and Goal 17: Partnerships for the Goals. Organizations working on this cause might be creating projects to strengthen resilience towards climate disasters in all regions, responding to this kind of challenge requires, in many cases coordinated action among organizations, companies and governmental entities in multiple countries which is why organizations working in this Cause might be also working towards establishing partnership policy and collaboration agreements.
Social Business, entrepreneurship is one of my personal favorite topics as I believe it is a fundamental part to building sustainable development. As a team we believe that donations can take us really far, but it is only by including entrepreneurs that we can truly have the best chance of meeting the SDGs goals by 2030. This Cause is aligned with Goal 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth, Goal 9: Industry Innovation and Infrastructure, and Goal 12: Responsible Consumption and Production. Social Businesses working on this Cause can be working towards sustainable innovation and research, ending modern slavery and human trafficking, promoting sustainable tourism, developing sustainable infrastructure, supporting the further development of tech4good initiatives, developing circular economy models, among other initiatives.
Of course, these are only some ideas of what the organizations will be working on. As you might be thinking, these are some incredibly complex and big goals we are aiming for, and yes they are. That being said, we believe they can be achieved as long as we work together, combining the efforts of regular people like you and me, companies, non-governmental organizations and governments, and if we can ensure the resources we invest are used well. What do you think? | https://medium.com/enlightaid/enlightaid-a-framework-for-all-sustainable-development-7e56eb8183ac | ['Verónica Celis Vergara'] | 2020-07-04 16:01:01.668000+00:00 | ['Sustainability', 'Transparency', 'Enlightaid', 'Sustainable Development', 'Sdgs'] |
How AI induced Autonomous Cars Are Evolving for Tomorrow | Autonomous cars have been hitting the headlines and dominating the tech-talk in recent years. They seem to be a post-Uber era for personal and public commute and for transportation of goods. However, users are still hesitant to bring this technology to use. To embrace this change, we should understand what self-driving cars are and how it works.
The term autonomous cars don’t completely refer to driver-less cars. The level of autonomy varies with the dependability of humans. A self-driving vehicle refers to a system that uses sensory data gathered from the surroundings to navigate towards the destination without (complete or partial) human interference.
Elements of Autonomous Cars
The technology has been in the development phase for quite some time but now is in its emerging phase across the global market. Many tech giants and automotive companies are investing heavily in autonomous vehicle technology research and development.
One of the biggest investors in the research & development of autonomous vehicle technology is Waymo, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc.
Tesla is another popular name who’s work in the development of autonomous cars is remarkable. Waymo and Tesla have made the most noteworthy achievements in this field.
The components of autonomous vehicle technology include driver assistance systems, GPS and automotive radars, LiDAR system sensors, cameras, cloud services, and ADAS ultrasonic wave components, where AI is a major accompaniment. These data contribute to producing control signals that are vital to operating the vehicle.
Before we get into further details about the impact of artificial intelligence, let us understand the meaning of autonomous at different levels.
Levels of Driving Automation
SAE International has released terminologies for autonomous vehicles driving system, that includes different levels of autonomy in vehicles. This standard terminology for driving automation serves as a baseline for automated vehicles. The following is the explanation of those levels.
Autonomous driving level 0: No automation
This level is considered a “0” level because it doesn’t include any automation in driving. Interestingly, most of the vehicles lie at this level at the moment. The driver (human) handles steering, throttle, and brakes, monitors the surrounding, take turns, navigate, change lanes, and take complete responsibility. However, there may be some warnings and signs to avoid accidents.
Autonomous driving level 1: Automation for driver assistance
This is the beginning level for autonomous cars where the driving system assists the driver(human) but does not take complete control of the vehicle. This level requires the driver to be totally aware of how the car is functioning and be ready to intervene if required.
Autonomous driving level 2: Partially Automated Driving
At this level, autonomous driving becomes more influential. The driving system takes partial control, but the driver takes responsibility for the driving process.
Autonomous driving level 3: Highly Automated Driving
At level 3, the driver can rely on the system to drive the car autonomously, including handling steering, throttle, and barking system. However, depending on the surroundings, the driver must be ready to take control as soon as the system requests it. This enables users to depend on self-driving cars for a longer duration, especially on highways or freeways.
In the first three levels (excluding level 0), the driver is primarily responsible for the operation of the vehicle. Moving on to level 4, the driver is either partially or not responsible.
Autonomous driving level 4: Fully automated driving
At level 4, the system is capable of driving the vehicle without human interference. However, human presence may still be needed. Fully Automated Driving vehicles are expected to reach large-scale market commercialization by 2022. In addition to this, autonomous vehicle sales are projected to generate about 42 billion US dollars in revenue by 2030.
Autonomous driving level 5: Completely Automated Car
At level 5 of automation, the car itself can drive to any destination by making decisions on its own throughout the way. All you need to do is to add the starting and the ending point, and the vehicle can navigate without taking assistance from the driver.
The definition of autonomy varies with the change in its levels. The preliminary automated assistance for drivers has reached commercial uses, and other levels are still in the testing phases before they get fully functional. Consumer interest is another important factor that contributes to the early implementation of this technology as a personal gadget.
Consumers’ Behavior about this Big Move
This is no secret that consumer interest in self-driving vehicles is increasing across the globe. However, it’s still not preceded the ratio of 50% of the US residents. A study found that 47 percent of US respondents were hesitant to adopt Driverless vehicles; the ratio was 74 percent a year earlier. Despite multiple advantages and conveniences, potential users still apprehend towards adopting autonomous cars. Many of them are probably unsure if they should share the streets with autonomous cars.
The Impact of Artificial Intelligence in Driverless Cars
The impact of AI on automated driving is quite overwhelming. AI is fully equipped to bring a fully autonomous driving experience onto the roads.
As long as regulations and social acceptance are concerned, the emergence of driverless cars will not only disrupt the public transport system but have an impact on other industries as well.
When talking about autonomous cars, it is almost impossible not to discuss artificial intelligence. AI is used to enable the cars to navigate through the traffic and handle complex situations. Artificial intelligence is capable of responding to real-time data accumulated from several different sensors installed in the vehicle. Also, AI, combined with other IoT sensors, ensures safe travel
Safety for Autonomous Car
Before AI completely takes control of the driver’s seat, it is being used as a driver assistant to winning the trust of the users, manufacturers, and investors. Meanwhile, it learns user behaviors and surrounding information over time. By analyzing the data accumulated from surroundings, AI can be beneficial in situations where humans are likely to make errors.
AI contributes to the following areas:
Emergency control of the vehicle
Traffic signals Sensors
Cross-traffic Detection
Taking Brakes in emergency
Blind spots Monitoring
However, the processing power required to drive and navigate a vehicle is overwhelming. Without having control over the external environment, there are several variables. For this reason, AI might need a lot of time for learning. There are numerous companies testing AI’s applicability in driving before they become fully functional for personal use.
Maintenance Prediction for Car Owners
AI can be used to gauge the physical condition of the vehicle accurately. Data gathered from the usage can be processed for predictive maintenance.
The experts of Circle Auto Shield said, “Drivers will have an easier time finding a car warranty plan that is cost-effective and meets their particular needs, and that also reflects the car’s current condition.”
Monitoring User Behavior and Predict Preferences
AI is not only responsible for sensing security and navigation, but it would be used for major controls and entertainment features. AI can help users enjoy customized entertainment during the driver-less journey. It can predict preferences based on accumulated data on user behavior over time. AI could possibly help adjust preferences in the following elements:
AC regulation
Seat adjustment
Mirror adjustment
Audio and video selection
Accurate Information for Insurance Regulators
AI integration in these cars would help in ease of claim. Data from the vehicle can be used for faster processing of claims in case of accidents.
Data retrieved from automated cars could be used to evaluate traffic violations and insurance claims. AI can be of help to accurately gauge the driver’s behavior and risk assessment. Using this information, insurance coverage can be offered.
Mobile Apps Integration in Driverless Cars
Today, there’s an app for everything. If you are a tech-explorer-type person, you must agree with what I just mentioned. As soon as autonomous cars begin to hit the streets, new opportunities for mobile app developers will emerge. Developers who want to create new experiences within the cars will offer exciting tools via a mobile app. features like selecting destinations and stops, car speed, and audio and video streaming could be accessed using an app.
More to this, a mobile app would enable car owners to start, lock, and unlock their self-driving cars remotely. With a mobile app, it wouldn’t take more than a few seconds for them to find their car in a crowded parking lot.
Final Thoughts
All of this seems like a plethora of fairytales if we date back to some years. But the world is changing fast, very fast. AI and machine learning technology are getting smarter every day. The progress is faster than our imagination. We might be excited to witness the driver-less era, but fully autonomous driving would probably take a long road before it becomes fully functional.
Read More: https://bit.ly/3nILb4I | https://medium.com/@andrewcole2124/how-ai-induced-autonomous-cars-are-evolving-for-tomorrow-7b9c14be3e9a | [] | 2020-12-23 12:00:29.842000+00:00 | ['Self Driving Cars', 'Autonomous Vehicle Market', 'Driverless Cars', 'Autonomous Cars'] |
Turkey says won’t return from the acquisition of the Russian S-400 rocket regardless of US sanctions | On Thursday, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu expressed Turkey won’t return from its acquisition of the Russian S-400 rocket guard framework and will take proportional measures in the wake of surveying US sanctions constrained over the Russian weapon purchase. On Monday, the United States constrained approvals on NATO part Turkey’s Defense Industry Directorate (SSB), its head, Ismail Demir, and on three different delegates over its procurement of the S-400s rocket.
President Recep Erdogan expressed on Wednesday that the authorizations were an unfriendly strike on Turkey’s guard industry, and they will without a doubt fizzle and reprimanded the assents as a grave misstep.2017 Countering America’s Adversaries through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) establishment is expected to dissuade countries from buying military weapons from NATO for Russia.
“This isn’t observing the guidelines of worldwide law and it is a deliberately and really wrong choice,” Reuters referred to Cavusoglu as saying. “In the event that there was an approach to return choice, it would have happened at this point,” he expressed, implying the acquisition of S-400s Missile. The United States might have settled the issue with decision-making ability on the off chance that it helped out Turkey and NATO, he added.
While, Turkey says its obtaining of the S-400s was not a choice, but rather a need as it couldn’t make sure about a guard framework from any NATO accomplice on pleasing terms. The United States says the S-400s represents a threat to its F-35 champion planes and NATO’s more broad protection framework. Turkey excuses the charges and says S-400s won’t be consolidated into NATO. | https://medium.com/@blackwilliam879/turkey-says-wont-return-from-the-acquisition-of-the-russian-s-400-rocket-regardless-of-us-8df4848972fe | ['William Black'] | 2020-12-19 10:35:54.493000+00:00 | ['United States', 'Erdogan', 'Turkey', 'Russia', 'Nato'] |
Knowledge is More Than a Point of Data. | Every month, with clockwork like precision a brown paper package arrives in the mail. The unwrapping is revealing. For almost 50 years the National Geographic has been enriching my imagination. The connectedness to ourselves, to our planet and cosmos is like a lattice of human context. It’s also an important source for our visual and aesthetic literacy. I see our graphically visual world as distinctly human, whereas raw data points have no human essence. There should be no mistaking data for knowledge.
Big Data, and data visualization are important topics. But it’s troubling when they’re stories reduced to little more than ill-defined link bait. Accepting there’s also no unified theory or singular definitions for either data or it’s visualization is important too. We can discern between structured (bits of ledger) and unstructured data (streams of social chatter), but data itself is simply the columns and rows fodder. It’s the slices of pie in that fill a chart. Spreadsheets and pie charts are meaningless artifacts. It’s the art of asking questions that brings them to life. Transforming crumbs of data into information, in turn gets us to the possibility of knowing.
Without structure, data doesn’t become knowledge. It’s like looking into a murky swamp and trying to understand the dividing properties of an amoeba. Try viewing it in a petri dish instead. Appreciating when there’s no structure, there’s no meaning attracted me to Manual Lima’s book Visual Complexity. It’s influenced my appreciation of visual literacy. It was also cool seeing Mentionmapp on page 153.
With a historical context and framework of techniques and best practices, Visual Complexity also help me discover other visualization leaders (who we’ll write about in future posts). Lima’s depiction of the visualize network being “the syntax of a new language,” made an impression. Knowing that sight is the translational interface between a visual object and a textual relationship, was my… “ahhh, that’s it moment.”
When data intersects with visual science, there needs to be an aesthetic anchoring for knowledge to surface. There has to be an art to the science. Lima shares this Matt Woolman quote; “functional visualizations are more than statistical analyses and computation algorithms. They must make sense to the users and require a visual language systems that uses colour, shape, line, hierarchy, and composition to communicate clearly and appropriately, much like the alphabetic and character based languages used worldwide between humans.”
From his TED2015 talk Lima says, “we can see this shift from trees into networks in many domains of knowledge. This metaphor of the network, is really already adopting various shapes and forms, and it’s almost becoming a growing visual taxonomy.”
Watch Manuel Lima: A visual history of human knowledge
Using data and revealing a world of stories is an art. I’m appreciative of how Lima communicates the aesthetic value of visualization. Turning the complex and the chaotic into meaningful social, political, economic, and human insights is essential. We can’t get so lost in the science of data that we forget the importance of allowing our eyes, and allowing ourselves to both revel in it, and to discover knowledge in the art of data.
Conceptual artist Katie Lewis devises elaborate methods of recording data about herself, be it sensations felt by various body parts or other other aspects of life’s minutiae plotted over time using little more than pins, thread and pencil marked dates. The artworks themselves are abstracted from their actual purpose, and only the organic forms representing the accumulation data over time are left. She describes her process as being extremely rigid, involving the creation of strict rules on how data is collected, documented, and eventually transformed into these pseudo-scientific installations.
From the pen of John (cofounder)
Please visit Mentionmapp today! | https://medium.com/mentionmapp/knowledge-is-more-than-a-point-of-data-dc31f94a1a4 | ['Mentionmapp Analytics'] | 2016-10-30 21:57:16.840000+00:00 | ['Manuel Lima', 'Data Science', 'Data Visualization', 'Big Data', 'Design'] |
SRNT is now listed on Kkcoin | Hello everyone!
Tokens of the Serenity blockchain escrow platform are now listed on KKcoin exchange.
Info: Kkcoin exchange is registered in Singapore, the financial center of the world, providing global users with crypto-trading such as bitcoin, litecoin, ethereum and other digital assets and aggregating a number of global high-quality blockchain assets. Kkcoin cooperates with world-class liquidity providers to ensure the fast and convenient transactions.
Trade SRNT on KKcoin
At the moment SRNT tokens are also listed on Yobit (ETH / BTC) and EtherDelta exchanges. | https://medium.com/serenity-project/srnt-is-listed-on-kkcoin-c71808cccf51 | ['Serenity Financial'] | 2018-03-19 17:25:50.557000+00:00 | ['Forex', 'Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Ethereum', 'Bitcoin'] |
This is your brain on FOMO. | A study by some smart guy called Andrew Przybylski found the condition was most common in those who had unsatisfied psychological needs such as wanting to be loved and respected. So, most of us.
In a society where we’re bombarded with advertising imagery to make sure we’re all super-insecure, it’s the perfect storm for a FOMO epidemic. Get your tinfoil helmets ready, kids!
Illustration: Jason Chatfield
I can’t remember the last time I went out with friends and we didn’t all have to compete for each others’ attention. We’re instantly pitted against the un-winnable battle of a universe of other non-present people who are potentially more interesting. Sometimes it literally takes playing the phone stack game to get us to engage like adult humans.
I’m the guiltiest of my friends of this heinous social disease. I’ve done it for a long time.
Ever since Facebook and Twitter became available on a handheld device, I was that guy checking it for updates. Checking out of wherever I was to be somewhere else. A scorching case of FOMO not seen by the likes of any other early adopters.
Such was the severity, my friends just started excluding me from conversations. What was the point? I was just going to stop half way through and check my phone anyway right? I am also a dork. And who wants to talk to a dork? (Except the Lord)
Trying to hold a conversation with me while I was holding my smartphone was like trying to read bedtime stories to a hyena ripping into a squealing zebra. The amount of patience required not to punch me in the face couldn’t be quantified. The lack of restraint on my part was unfathomably rude.
Nomophobia (which is a thing, sadly) is the chronic, crippling fear of being out of mobile phone contact. Add a hefty dose of FOMO into that equation and you’ve got yourself a serious social problem infecting an entire generation.
This all may sound like I’m being harsh on a seemingly harmless social faux pas, but as I’ve written before in 2010, social media exists on the very requirement of you obsessively needing to check back in and obsessively tap that little red circle to see how many people Liked or commented on your genius photo of a duck wearing a hat.
There are two parts to this:
1.) By Design
Social media sites know exactly what they’re doing. Peoples’ addiction to them is no accident. Facebook has been redesigned more times than Tori Spelling’s chin, but there’s one thing on the user interface that has never changed- that’s the little red circle with a number in it, hovering over a small light blue globe. The small indicator of how many notifications are sitting there, waiting for you to check. There’s a reason they haven’t changed it too – the human brain.
The way the human brain forms habits and addictions based on patterns, and more specifically, through triggers. Triggers are really powerful things. You can use them to your advantage if you want to hack your brain, but if you let them run your subconscious it’s a one-way trip to the above mentioned simpering mess of FOMOsexual.
(I don’t know what the sexual part is. Let’s not think about it. But I will gift you my new favourite word: Infornography. You’re welcome.)
2.) The Greatest Hits.
FOMO is mainly associated with Facebook and Instagram, which provide constant opportunity for comparison of one’s status.
Oddly enough, the majority of people on Facebook and Instagram don’t tend to post photos or check in when they’re doing nothing. They tend to image craft; posting photos of themselves doing fun things, out with friends, eating great food or having heaps of fun at a bar. With Facebook, you’re getting everyone’s Best Of album. Their Greatest Hits. Epic FOMO bait.
What’s the solution?
Solar flare? Wipe out the internet? FOMOs Anonymous?
The first step is stopping the trigger. The next, ideally, is a digital diet to reset your triggers.
I tried a little experiment would recommend you try if you have FOMO issues. I wanted to see if I could extricate myself from the lure of the little red dot for as long as I could. I would see how high I could get that little number before I felt the need to click it. The result? I’m four days in and I’m recognising the desire to click it every time it pops up, but guess what. I haven’t been socially excluded/missed out on anything/died. I am, however, still a dork.
The first part of breaking an addiction is recognising the problem. Then identifying the trigger.
(This is super easy if your addiction is guns.) I’ve still been logging on every now and then, checking on the events panel. I’m still responding to friend requests and DMs, but I haven’t clicked the notification button. It’s up to about 104. The idea that this is somehow heroic strikes me as more and more ridiculous as each day goes on.
FIG 1: DERPAMINE GENERATOR
The link between seeing the red dot, and needing to click/extinguish it is diluting and my brain’s circuitry is rerouting my attention to other things.
I use an app called SelfControl.app for Mac to blacklist Facebook.com and other tempting servers from access on my laptop, effectively blocking social media from my ‘work’ computer altogether. The spike in productivity is astounding. (and sad, really.)
Not to over-simplify neuroscience, but basically the habit-forming pattern is trigger > action > pleasurable response. (Rinse, repeat.) The more you do it, the stronger the habit/addiction becomes (the stronger the neural pathways become). The more reliant on the dopamine drip you get from that pleasurable response, the less control you have over that addiction. It gets a lot more complicated, but them’s the basics.
The interesting thing is once you’ve clicked on the red dot, the pleasure disappears. The idea of having the red indicator with numbers in it ready to click is more pleasurable than the seconds after you’ve clicked it. It’s the same principle of the study of why window shopping is so pleasurable; The desire to buy a thing is more pleasurable than having spent your money and bought the thing.
That’s the scientific reason people buy things they don’t need or can’t afford. The reason people feel like they need the new iPhone. The excitement of the experience of owning it is far greater before you purchase it than after you purchase it. There’s a reason you can’t walk into an Apple store without feeling excited about potentially walking out with one of those shiny new gadgets. It’s experiential marketing, and they’re very good at it.(They also use knolling… KNOLLING!)
There’s a bunch more scientific research as to how Facebook makes you jealous and sad in the New York Times seemingly rehashed the same time each year.
Without getting too far off track, the basic principle of overcoming FOMO and information addiction is
..Sorry I just got distracted by an article about Bees.
What was I saying? | https://medium.com/scotchbook/this-is-your-brain-on-fomo-d89d571b8bc6 | ['Jason Chatfield'] | 2020-03-18 17:38:17.343000+00:00 | ['Fomo', 'Addiction', 'Psychology', 'Tech', 'Apps'] |
Why I no longer use GMail… | I switched all of my email accounts over to iCloud. My email is now @icloud.com instead of @gmail.com. I did this because of how Google keeps starting and ending projects left and right.
Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash
Gmail has been around for over 10 years and it is unlikely that Google will ever give up on it. I want to make it clear I was not worried about that.
I had several reasons for switching from Google’s Suite to Apple’s Suite.
First reason is that I no longer own Android devices. As you can see in this article, I have an iPhone 11 and plan to keep it. I haven’t owned an Android device in over a year and I plan to keep it that way. So, I don’t need Google Drive storage, Google Photos backup, or anything else Google offers for their phones.
Second reason is that Google Photos unlimited photo storage is ending on June 1, 2021. That is not cool. I used Google Photos for years for backing up my photos and the free unlimited storage was perfect but that is one of the many examples on Google Graveyard of things that Google has started and killed. You can watch Drew’s video on how this update to Google Photos has messed a lot of people up.
Drew from Tailosive Tech Newtork
With that out of the way, another reason why I gave up on Gmail is because I needed to consolidate my emails. I am going from 4–5 to 1–2 emails. I had way to many emails and it is incredibly confusing for myself and my family and friends.
So, I deleted my Gmail. It has been about 2 weeks now and I’m good. I don’t need to check my email on my computer anymore. I have my iPad for any lengthy emails I need to send or receive.
Those are all of my reasons. Those reasons are all of the reasons I needed to switch from GMail to iCloud.
Side Note: I did try and switch to Outlook.com but to send an email via the web when you are new you have to solve this CAPTCHA that is insanely confusing. I get that they are trying to prevent spam but I tried it about 30 times before I gave up and closed my Outlook account.
What do you guys think? | https://medium.com/@dudethatserin/why-i-no-longer-use-gmail-91bc6e7883cf | ['Erin Skidds'] | 2020-12-14 17:07:19.348000+00:00 | ['iPhone', 'Icloud', 'Google Cloud Platform', 'Apple', 'Gmail'] |
Lean In At A Young Age | Lean In At A Young Age
I volunteer to inspire young girls to study hard and pick an academic route that could steer them towards the engineering and science fields. Israel’s 9th graders choose between different majors — calculus, chemistry, physics, and many others. That choice determines their ability to pursue a career path in the STEAM field. Keren Koshman Follow Dec 21, 2020 · 2 min read
One day, I was standing in the library of a school where I was scheduled to talk to thirty young females. I was excited — I brought with me some electronic devices and a story about the engineering and product process that made both of which possible. I had prepared a presentation about the way you could influence the world by imagining and designing it as you wish. .
A few minutes into my presentation, one of the girls raised her hand and asked me if I was a mother. “yes”, I answered. “ So why aren’t you more at home with your kids?” was her next question. I hadn’t even finished half of my presentation before this question left a dire mark on the room’s atmosphere. Her question assumed I chose to prioritize my work over my kids, also assuming that it was not possible to combine. I was shocked, a fourteen year old was sure that being an engineer means neglecting your kids. Suddenly Sheril Sandberg’s book “Lean in” had become a reality, as I realized young women at the age of fourteen might already lean out.
I did not finish my presentation that day. I chose, intead, to speak to them about the hardships of balancing work and family life (or: the hardships of work-life balance). In my own experience, you might feel torn between the demands of work and the rigors and desires of parenthood. But, it is worth it, as there is a balance between the worlds, sometimes tipping to one edge, sometimes to the other. While I don’t advocate STEAM career to all, I do encourage everyone to have as many options as they can, and open all the doors before choosing to walk a specific path. | https://productcoalition.com/lean-in-at-a-young-age-8fb0e598ef28 | ['Keren Koshman'] | 2020-12-23 13:26:12.021000+00:00 | ['Lean In', 'Inspiration', 'Women In Tech', 'Girls Education', 'Youngadult'] |
7 bulletproof keys to stay vegan (and healthy!) | Photo by Gemma Evans on Unsplash
Is it getting hard for you to hold on to veganism?
Are you afraid of failing them? Yes, the animals. Are they the reason why you keep on the vegan path?
Do you feel staying vegan is the least you can do to stop animal suffering happening every second in slaughterhouses around the world?
How to avoid the pitfalls of this non-vegan world? Maybe you feel overwhelmed and want to overcome this situation.
I know those feelings. It took me 23 long years to go from lacto-vegetarian to vegan. And after almost ten years, I don’t have a single reason to go back.
If you feel identified, I can help you to not only stay vegan, but also to enjoy every day of your life being vegan… and healthy!
Here you have my 7 keys to stay strong as a rock:
1. Hold on to your why
Remember your reason to go vegan.
Never forget the main reason why you became vegan in the first place. It’s your anchor in the middle of the non-vegan turbulent ocean.
If you know the principles of veganism, you know exactly what triggered you to transform your mindset, an thus, your relationship with yourself and with nonhuman animals.
You know that veganism is not a trend nor a diet. It’s a life philosophy, a deep questioning of those forms of living which not only harm many sentient beings, they also harm ourselves and the planet.
It turns out that by becoming vegan you also contribute to stop the main cause of greenhouse gas emission, global deforestation, biodiversity loss, soil and water pollution, ocean dead zones, among other environmental concerns. And the Nº1 culprit is animal agriculture.
2. Check your health
A periodic health check-up is a good way to stay on the track.
No, veganism is not a diet. But if you are reading this, chances are that you have at least three opportunities a day to decide what to eat, why and how to eat it.
You care for animals, but you probably want to care for your own health as well. Because being vegan doesn’t mean being healthy. And learning about nutrition is essential to succeed in this paradigm shift.
Going whole foods plant based is the best way to prevent and reverse pandemic chronic diseases (e.g. heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, cancer, etc.) which are directly linked to animal based diets and also to consuming highly processed foods. So, to avoid setbacks that will “unveganize” you, check your health periodically and be mindful of what you eat. Like everyone else should.
3. Veganize the foods you love
You can enjoy every single food you like in its vegan version.
It will take some creativity, but it’s worth it.
List all the non-vegan foods you love. You will soon realize there’s a plant based recipe for each one of them. And many are healthy versions.
Vegan processed foods are great for making the transition or as ocasional whim. They are way better for you and for the animals, because they are free of the toxins from their suffering. But remember that it is preferable to go for real food, no labels or disposable packages needed.
4. Learn from the experts
Read, study, research, learn. A lot.
Today it’s getting easier to become vegan. However, it is vital that you inform yourself. There’s plenty of unbiased science based evidence showing the benefits of a balanced plant based diet for preventing and reversing chronic diseases, and avoiding the greatest animal and environmental damage ever seen in history.
Now it’s also easier to get vegan shoes, clothes and vegan products from brands which don’t experiment with animals.
There are thousands of books, articles, courses, documentaries, videos, websites and blogs to find the latest information on veganism as well as infinite delicious and nutritious vegan recipes. Empower yourself through research.
5. Enjoy preparing your meals
How could you not?
There are colors, beautiful forms and fresh clean smells. Straight from the earth. There is life in vegan meals. No blood and foul-smelling parts of dead animals involved.
The biggest part of going vegan is food related. The other part is relationships, information, clothing decisions and getting vegan products.
If you learn to prepare and enjoy preparing your own meals, you assume responsibility and control over your own health.
Choosing what, why and how to eat it is self-empowering. Deciding to buy real food from local peasant businesses instead of highly processed products from the industries that profit from life (human and non human)is self-empowering. Making the decision to feed yourself is empowering.
6. Know yourself and avoid conflicts
Dig deep into your own mind to know your triggers.
This is a rare advice, you won’t find it elsewhere. There are plenty of initiatives and challenges to show you the basics of going vegan, recipes and nutrition facts. But none of them will tell you how to deal with this decision in the real world.
Ask yourself what leads you to conflict in your relationships. Then learn to acknowledge and manage your emotions to avoid conflicts with those who don’t agree with your values.
You will find many haters in your path; people who choose to feel offended or threatened by the vegan philosophy. Don’t mind them. You are not here to convince anyone. Empathize, because you probably were not born vegan. If you work on your self-awareness, you will find that is better to have peace than to be right.
7. Create a safe space to ground yourself
And make this a daily habit.
What is a safe space? It is an inner space to be only with yourself.
Why is this important? To find peace and tranquility, to free yourself from thoughts that create stress and anxiety. This will help you identify the essential amidst the noise.
You will find plenty of benefits from a quiet space and time for yourself: to breathe, to be still, to observe your feelings, to observe the sensations in your body, to acknowledge your being. This will help you to recognize the voices in your mind calling for different sensory pleasures (maybe unhealthy pseudo food), and be able to ignore them.
This safe space will make you feel grateful for having the sensitivity and courage to go vegan and stop contributing to the suffering of others. By being vegan you will also have more mental clarity which will be supportive of this peaceful state.
So, is there any reason not to stay vegan?
Do you find the reasons exposed here compelling enough? You have the power to decide. Try to avoid haters and naysayers advice, listen to yourself in your own safe and quiet space, where you can create your own vegan world.
Imagine yourself empowered through your food choices, contributing to a more peaceful world, free of human and non human suffering.
Imagine yourself eating plant based, feeling guilt-free, full of energy, with mental clarity, improved health and overall performance.
Imagine yourself certain that staying vegan is the most powerful transformation you can undergo for the animals, for the planet and for yourself.
And always remember that nothing that harms others can do you good. | https://medium.com/@tannia-falconer/7-bulletproof-keys-to-stay-vegan-and-healthy-fc9c176f7b41 | ['Tannia Falconer'] | 2020-12-22 02:44:01.513000+00:00 | ['Philosophy Of Life', 'Consciousness', 'Healthy Lifestyle', 'Veganism', 'Self-awareness'] |
Rating Agency Targeting Crypto is Laughable — Daily Uncrypt Digest — 1/25/18 | Weiss needs to see me after class.
When you tweet about something and wake up thinking about it, you know it was either a pretty damn good tweet (nope) or the topic just demands greater exploration so that we can stomp on some stupidity.
Yesterday, Weiss Ratings, released the first ever ratings report on cryptocurrencies. If you’re not familiar with Weiss, that’s because it’s a company that trails not only market leaders Standard & Poors and Moody’s but Fitch Ratings in an industry that generates a fair amount of eye rolls. As a former employee of S&P (though admittedly not in ratings), Weiss’s attempt at news-making gave me flashbacks I’d prefer to forget.
Reading through Weiss’s comments on different cryptocurrencies shows a student that strolled into school ready to present a book report, only forgetting to glance at the book. Weiss treats coins with a one-size-fits-all approach — Ethereum scores points for doing things that companies do, while Bitcoin suffers because it “has no immediate mechanism for promptly upgrading its software code.”
Financial leaders who have actually taken the time to educate themselves aren’t fooled by Weiss. Ari Paul of BlockTower Capital points out that Weiss’s report “suggests a misunderstanding of the core value proposition of cryptocurrency, however, as they seem to overvalue transaction capacity, and undervalue protocol stability, security, and decentralization.”
The crypto world should be thrilled that traditional finance is taking such a weak stab at institutionalizing crypto — this is how disruption starts. Read the whole article here, courtesy of CNBC. | https://medium.com/uncrypt/rating-agency-targeting-crypto-is-laughable-daily-uncrypt-digest-1-25-18-19cb0a05ad3a | ['Will O Leary'] | 2018-01-25 16:15:14.610000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin', 'Ethereum', 'Crypto'] |
Buds appearing early… leading to reflections on attitude to time and punctuality | As I walked this morning I noticed the buds appearing on the trees.
It was a treat to see them in the depths of winter but also made me reflective as I wondered how nature would ‘cope’ with them appearing so early.
And it brought me back (later in this post) on a reflective conversation I had on Friday with a friend from North Africa on the Western perception of time and timeliness that is received wisdom.
I believe that the bud appears in response to the milder weather. If it gets colder I believe it will stop or die back. It will continue to grow if the weather is mild. The key point is that it will respond to the feedback from the weather (and probably many other feedback mechanisms of which I have no clue). It doesn’t ‘know’ there is a Winter which is supposed to be a certain temperature and produce buds at the same time each year.
Nature doesn’t have a clock. It does have rhythms and cycles that have evolved over billions of years. These make it very resilient. Not in the sense that it shrugs off ‘abnormal’ events but that it it responds and adapts to these events. Over time, these adaptations will make it even more resilient.
This brings me back to my reflection on the Western perspective of time. In general, being prompt and being on time is perceived as of high value. Judgement is often applied when someone is not on time. (read more about this from the google search I conducted on the Western sense of time and punctuality).
Nature helps me here by giving me a source of ‘universal truth’ and helps me compare different approaches to time without risking a racially charged conversation about ‘African time’.
So a friend I mentioned to at the weekend said
But how else could we manage things?
So there are a few hints or guidelines avaiable that I have harvested:
As my friend said, the meeting with you is what I value. This meeting will happen because I value it. If I (or you) didn’t value our meeting or not as much, it may well not happen.
Looking at nature the meeting may not need to happen now. Perhaps there is some feedback happening that tells us that it should happen but today is the wrong day.
At the moment, many people attend meetings because they are in the work diary. They may find them a waste of their time. But they know how they would be perceived if they didn’t attend them. Or suspect they would be perceived if they didn’t attend. Why are we so worried? Can we not trust our colleagues? (a whole different area of exploration!)
So we continue to attend these meetings. During covid-19 meetings were set up that were critical and valuable because the emergency demanded it. Things got done quickly and the existing meetings that were supposed to control things were bypassed or simply ignored.
So we’ve been trained to go to meetings and be punctual. Even, it would seem, if there is no value to the meeting. So who is in charge here? This behaviour feels very mechanistic, inhuman and unnatural.
The humans don’t appear to be in charge. We’ve created machines which are now in charge of us.
I will continue to look to nature to find the answers that it provides. | https://medium.com/@papworth45/buds-appearing-early-leading-to-reflections-on-attitude-to-time-and-punct-d05452a13e98 | ['Alex Papworth'] | 2020-12-14 11:05:37.749000+00:00 | ['Nature Connection', 'Transformation'] |
March 8 | March 8
Happy March 7th Birthday from Birthdaysmessenger.com and Shirtailors.com 🎉💐🎁 We Celebrate #International #Women's #Day. Praise GOD, for mother's, female guardians, grandmother's, our female leaders and all other females around the world. May our FATHER in Heaven, direct, correct and bless all mankind. May HE order our steps, guide us on The Paths that HE wants us to be on, may HE prepare us all for The Blessings, that HE wants us to have. May HE surround us with those who will lead us to a closer right relationship with HIM.🙏 Heal our World 🌍 FATHER GOD 2 Chronicles 7:14. Today's #Celebrity #Birthdays include Brooke Butler, Tamzin Taber, Kat Von D, Selina Mour, Afghan Dan, Stephanie Davis, Freddie Prince Jr., Michelle Dy, James Van der Beek, Judith Jackson, Jessy Kassem, Boris Kodjoe, Ming Xi, Andrea Parker, Camryn Manheim, Kenny Smith, Milana Vayntrub, Kristinia Debarge, Fatima Lopez and Micky Dolenz
May our FATHER in Heaven guide, correct and bless you more than ever before.
Email us at [email protected] for some great Birthday #Gifts. Happy #birthdaywishes #birthdaycake #Birthday
https://amzn.to/2K7fL9E | https://medium.com/@investbuyown/march-8-8158a0dd3577 | ['Pastor Jason Ridgeway'] | 2021-03-08 12:41:24.002000+00:00 | ['March 8', 'Birthday', 'Happy Birthday', 'Happiness', 'Women'] |
TIFF 2020 — City Hall. The American political system is… | The American political system is crumbling. Trump and the Republican Party have destroyed many policies and social safety nets meant to help the most at-risk portion of the population, while parroting far-right and fascist talking points to a voting base looking for someone to blame their problems on. On the other side of the aisle, Joe Biden and the Democratic Party have done next to nothing to stop their opponents, more often than not simply compromising in order to please their wealthy donors. The Democratic establishment will pay lip-service to leftist ideas (Black Lives Matter, affordable housing, education reform), but will never do any of the work to actually accomplish the goals that they talk about. This brings incredible amounts of suffering to those in the lower classes of the American population, who also tend to disproportionately be BIPOC, who just want their voices to be heard. It is here where we find Frederick Wiseman’s new film, City Hall.
Filmed from the fall of 2018 to the winter of 2019, Wiseman’s new film uses its incredible 272 minute runtime to examine in detail the many aspects of what the municipal government of the city of Boston does for its constituents. This includes both meetings within the titular City Hall, but also public works projects such as garbage collection, Veterans Association meetings, pest control, and diversity think tanks.
The first half of the film focuses itself mostly on mayor Marty Walsh, a Democrat and former union leader with the distinctive Boston accent. Throughout his segments we see him speaking with department heads and other employees of the city hall, with much of his messaging focusing on outreach. Marty Walsh wants his constituents to know that he speaks for them, and can represent them to the wider world. These scenes are accompanied by gorgeous shots of downtown Boston, towering skyscrapers, beautiful monuments, and bustling economic sectors. The audience gets the sense that this is a well oiled bureaucratic machine, ready to take on all the tasks associated with helping those less fortunate, even though there are very few tangible solutions offered for these problems.
The second half of the film takes these politicians to task on how little they are actually doing for the community. Wiseman begins to focus his attention on the poorer areas of Boston outside of the downtown core. He starts to include shots of buildings in disrepair, low income housing, and an incredibly evocative shot of a woman collecting cans on the side of the road beside a sign that simply says “VOTE”. Outside of those shots he has long scenes of the citizens of Boston expressing their frustrations with the way decisions are being made in the municipal government. This includes an incredible scene at a town hall focused on the opening of a medicinal cannabis dispensary in the area of Dorchester (coincidentally the same part of Boston that Mayor Walsh is from). This is a longer scene, showing all the ways the government has failed the community in this decision. They are not being informed about how the dispensary license system worked, the companies being given these licenses are not properly vetted on whether or not they will give back to the communities they inhabit, and the people of these communities are not being consulted as to whether or not they want something like this in the first place.
This film really comes alive when the people of Boston are speaking their mind about the way the government is run. An earlier scene involves a meeting discussing what a plot of land should be used for. The meeting’s leader discusses using the land for an NAACP building before being rebuffed by another member of the meeting. She states that the NAACP doesn’t need as much space as is being offered, and says that most of these land developers would rather work with organizations they already have connections with than establishing new connections with organizations that may do better work more specific to the community. She also expresses that it seems like the community around the land was not consulted in these higher level decisions. This shows the municipality is only interested in appearing to do work to help marginalized communities, rather than doing the actual on the ground community focused work.
It’s very easy to read this movie as a simple anti-Trump film, Marty Walsh acting as a crusader against the Republican leader. He even states so much as well, when he describes a photo-op of him standing with all of the immigrant workers in City Hall. But the film is much more nuanced than that, it can show the things that Mayor Walsh has done correctly, but never lionizes him. The film actively shows his failings and flaws in regards to helping his constituents, as evidenced by the anger and frustration his constituents show to his lackluster policies. He may be able to speak on these issues and appear at photo ops, but he is never able to go beyond that. The film is more interested in showing the people of Boston, how they try to work within a system designed to exploit them. It is about the people of an American city, and how the government can help them short term, but will never be able to provide the meaningful change citizens need. | https://medium.com/@tragicmushrooms/tiff-2020-city-hall-68e431fea065 | ['Ryan Vienneau'] | 2020-12-18 18:59:12.554000+00:00 | ['Boston', 'Politics', 'United States Politics', 'Documentary', 'Film'] |
Travel and Crypto trade | So you love to travel, and now since your cryptocurrency trading is in a level that keeps money flowing, traveling becomes a daily lifestyle. Or does it? Carrying your laptop everywhere and searching for chargers can become quite messy, as you might want to take a pleasant walk down the streets of Paris or hop on the local train in India.
Smartphones are the answer! With your phone, you can now trade with ease, and get notifications when it’s best to buy or sell a coin which allows you to enjoy this luxury while traveling.
Not many cryptocurrency exchanges have a well-developed mobile application for trading. In most exchanges, you have to visit their website to carry conduct transactions, which isn’t very user-friendly. The size of the website may appear too large, or even simple tasks such as clicking on certain buttons may be an issue.
Bithemoth takes the cryptocurrency exchange mobile application up a notch. Bithemoth believes in efficiency, safety and compatibility. All three will be taken into consideration when the application starts development in Q4 after the successful launch of Bithemoth’s Exchange.
Alright, so you’re in the airport flying to the beautiful islands of Mauritius, and your Bithemoth Exchange application is running in your mobile’s background when suddenly you hear a notification sound. You pick your phone, and you see the message ‘Bitcoin at $20,000”, and you think to yourself, “let’s sell and upgrade myself to a better hotel in the island and a couple of extra bucks to go scuba diving maybe”.
Another instance, you’re sleeping in the remote mountains of the Everest, and you yet again, you hear a notification sound. You check your phone, barely awake to see the message ‘Bitcoin at $4,000’ flashing! You quickly open the the mobile app to make the purchase you have been so long to make! Ah, the convenience!
Overall, you will be enjoying a lifestyle many dream of while trading your cryptocurrency with a smile on your face whether you’re at the beach, or up in the mountains. Even when you’re lost in the jungles of the Amazon (if you have wifi of course) will be a possibility soon thanks to Bithemoth’s Mobile Application.
Remember –
“To travel is to evolve.” — Pierre Bernardo | https://medium.com/bithemoth-exchange/travel-and-crypto-trade-b6cda80f2969 | ['Bithemoth Exchange'] | 2018-08-27 14:39:21.630000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Lifestyle', 'Trading', 'Bithemoth'] |
You’ve committed to DEI, now what? | In the summer of 2020, footage of George Floyd’s murder while in police custody went viral during the COVID-19 pandemic. Much of America was at home, and many organizations interpreted the tragedy as a catalyst to take symbolic and public steps toward recognizing racial inequities in America and, by extension, at work. The wave of increased solidarity resulted in an uptick in the need to deepen social justice awareness through the creation of equity roles and policies that will ensure organizations are meeting the moment.
As equity practitioners, we questioned what it would take for equity principles to live permanently in organizations, rather than being superimposed as a response to tragedy. We asked ourselves, “What are the enabling conditions to ensure that equity work is truly sustained?” In this article, we answer that question through the research and construction of the ACTT (Accountability, Community, Training, Transparency) Model. The ACTT Model is designed for leaders working in organizations with, at minimum, a stated commitment to equity. It guides leaders to focus their energy as they move organizations from a solidarity stage to a sustaining one. The model is most useful for organizational leadership starting their equity journey, who have a professed desire for change, but are unsure of what that means and where to go next.
Many education organizations, such as schools, districts, and education-serving nonprofits, are working to live up to their stated missions and values by engaging in internally-focused diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and antiracism work. The problem is DEI work is often not implemented in a manner that is sustainable. We define sustainability as radical ownership of DEI practices threaded throughout all levels of an organization, such that it is embedded in the culture, i.e. “the way we do things.” When we envision equity work, we are referring to the matrix of personal reflection, interpersonal engagement, and organizational analysis that takes into account practices that will lead an organization to become more diverse, equitable, inclusive, and antiracist. We believe that DEI implementation as a culture change strategy, based on the research of Cynthia Coburn, Ronald Heifetz and John Kotter, must be urgent and impactful. This is generally difficult in any industry, but especially in one as people-focused as education.
To develop the ACTT Model, we conducted research interviews with leaders across a spectrum of educational organizations — charter management organizations serving 15,000+ students, traditional urban school districts serving up to 5,000 students, and single site schools serving a few hundred students. We also spoke with DEI consultants, senior state and district leaders, education non-profit executives, and former teachers. In exchange for their candor, we promised leaders anonymity as they still work for their respective organizations. They shared rich stories of navigating misalignment and tension as each organization struggles to define successful DEI implementation for themselves within the education space. Their experiences further confirm that this type of data is not yet widely collected, further underlining the need for a model that is applicable across organization and industry.
Our respondents were in various stages of their equity work, including some who started post-George Floyd and others who were multiple years into their strategic plans. Regardless of size, geographical location, or exposure to the work (first year, or beyond) the trends were unanimous — all establishments faced the same problem: diversity, equity, and inclusion was not fully embedded into organizational culture.
To start, senior leadership must believe that focusing on DEI practices — not as an attempt to stay relevant, but as vital to running a successful organization — is urgent and important. Our research is clear that without backing from leadership, DEI work does not reach the needed breadth or depth within an organization to bring about effective change.
Leaders legitimize the importance of DEI and are the gatekeepers to implementation. We balance this truth with the reality that too few education organizations transition from naming equity as a priority to successfully acting on it.
For many education organizations, operating through an equity or DEI lens is awkward and new. It requires leaders to conduct an honest excavation of how their personal (in)actions impact organizational culture. It demands that decision-makers invest significant resources to aid the change process. It insists on envisioning and working toward a different future.
Our research indicates that education leaders tend to choose a set of trending decisions in an attempt to move from initiating equity work to sustaining it. Four of the most common choices are hiring an equity lead (Chief Equity Officer), placing equity work under the Human Resources Team, leading equity work exclusively from the executive suite, and moving forward without facing history. On face value, these may be logical moves that bridge from initiation to implementation. However, in many cases, such as the experiences of our respondents, such decisions happen in isolation as “the fix” and thus result in confusion, stalled progress, and inaction. We describe the opportunities and challenges of these decisions and propose how to approach DEI work so it actually leads to sustainability.
The ACTT Model: A Path Toward Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Sustainability
ACTT Model: Developed by Kori Ricketts and Mekka Smith
Our solution is to provide organizations seeking DEI support with a framework outlining the overarching elements for successfully operating through a DEI lens. We find that many organizations are learning bits and pieces of what works through trial and error, and since leading for equity is often unfamiliar, they are moving forward blindly without a comprehensive plan. We aim to provide clear guidance so organizations know broadly what it takes to move from initiation to and through implementation.
We propose four elements that are critical for equity to persist in an organization: accountability, community, training and transparency. What makes the ACTT Model effective is the application of all the elements simultaneously, instead of in silos. The ACTT Model is designed with practitioners in mind focusing on functionality and ease of use.
Accountability is both personal and organizational. Personal accountability starts with leadership and means each person in the organization takes ownership as an agent of change. This commitment must also be diffused throughout the organization. Organizational accountability refers to the committed resources and goals that will fuel the work’s progress.
Hiring a Chief Equity Officer (or similar position) is an example of a symbolic move toward accountability. It signals that equity is an organizational priority and will share air space in conversations about financial health, operations, people leadership and development. If the Chief Equity Officer commands the power to operate unencumbered to champion equity work throughout the organization, then they have a high probability of success. The trap of only hiring a Chief Equity Officer lies in the temptation of assuming the weight of the title will carry the work.
If the equity leader does not have the authority or credibility to name necessary shifts and initiate meaningful change that translates into clear progress, then the organization simply gains another employee on the org chart. A symbolic role sans substance will enjoy a short honeymoon period, after which reality sets in and staff will sniff out the incongruence of an equity leader who maintains the status quo. This is a shaky situation that positions leadership as disingenuous. It will deplete trust in the organization, and dampen hopes for genuine equity change.
Before rushing to create an equity leader job description, we suggest that organizations grapple with these questions:
How will current leadership practices shift in response to equity commitments?
What could equity leadership look like at multiple levels of this organization?
How are we allocating resources to demonstrate commitment to DEI across the organization?
Creating an equity leadership role is a sign of organizational investment; however, not setting up the leader for success is itself an equity issue. They need real authority in the strategic planning process, a team to distribute the work, and ongoing professional development. When organizational leaders demonstrate accountability, they take ownership of their personal and organizational responsibility to ensure that equity leadership is shared instead of siloed. True sustainability is achieved when all leaders in the organization see DEI as a part of their work.
Community refers to a group of thought leaders who are the engine of the work — they are a coalition of members collectively tasked with keeping the train on the tracks. They bring perspectives from various vantage points throughout the organization and share information outwardly. The community is the hub of thought leadership for all the DEI work.
Explicit commitment from the top is critical for facilitating forward movement on equity priorities. However, when conversation and ownership of the equity work is contained to only one level of an organization, it loses relevance. The top-down leadership trap takes two forms. The first is when senior leaders constrain goal ownership to their ranks. While it is tempting to situate equity fully under executive leadership for legitimization purposes, if leadership has a spotty track record of furthering important initiatives, or if they have a history of (intentionally or not) promoting racist policies, then complete ownership of equity work lands somewhere between laughable and dangerous. When people in authoritative roles are the only ones responsible for envisioning and implementing equity work, they are by definition not representing the full staff and are not locating the work to people most affected by their decisions.
The second trap is when leaders fully abdicate their participatory role in DEI and delegate all of the power and work to a coalition that does not include leadership. When senior leadership takes a hands-off approach, it signals to other leaders in the organization that DEI operates outside of organizational priorities and creates the space for DEI to compete with, instead of drive, stated priorities. Mid-level leaders, for example, must make the decision to focus their teams on organizational priorities led by senior leadership or DEI priorities led by a guiding coalition, and this separation casts the work of the coalition as optional or initiative-worthy, rather than anchoring work that impacts all staff. Mid-level leaders obfuscate the work and the power of the coalition is seen in opposition to the mission instead of driving the mission.
Leaders must adopt the mindset that equity work is everyone’s business. Here are some questions for leaders to plan for community involvement:
Which perspectives are represented in a broad and diverse coalition, and yet, which are missing?
How will various members share their perspectives if they are not part of a select few?
What is the current and ideal state of the messages leadership sends about the importance of the equity work?
Strong equity leadership engages a community of thought leaders from various aspects of an organization to provide insight into implementation work and garners the support and resource allocation from senior leadership.
Training is the intentional development of skill and will for the organization, led by experts in the field. Though experts may be within the organization, it is a best practice that initial work be conducted by external partners so that everyone can benefit from adopting a learning stance. At times, training is eschewed in favor of placing equity work under an established department to ensure it “has a home” and will continue beyond a few facilitated sessions.
HR is often a logical choice to house equity work because it is a gateway for new team members through the recruiting and hiring process. The HR team has the power to link equity to performance competencies, evaluations, and pay structure. For equity work to thrive in this department, an organization needs an HR team leader whose mandate is to honestly report data, model internal changes, and closely support other departments to reflect and adjust their practices.
The trap of placing DEI under a department like Human Resources rests on the implicit assumption that equity imperatives will trickle down through people policies. A number of realities may hamper intended progress. First, very rarely do we find that HR leaders receive ongoing equity training to understand what they should do with this responsibility. As a result, their team is not fully equipped with the knowledge, skills, or mindsets to lead organizational change. Relatedly, it is important to examine how equity is absorbed into a department like HR. If there is no discernible change in how the HR team operates, for instance, by starting to probe for missing perspectives in decision-making conversations, then the department itself perpetuates a culture that lacks key DEI principles. It is unrealistic to expect a department that is not learning and changing to turn around and lead meaningful equity changes across an organization.
We offer these questions to leaders grappling with the implications of training:
What does our ideal DEI partnership look like?
What are our training goals?
Who on our staff do we want involved in training?
How will we ensure ongoing training and facilitation for staff?
Leadership must make a long-term investment in people by providing external facilitation and ensuring training is an explicit imperative for all staff.
Transparency is the vehicle in which to build credibility through a historical reckoning and clear, consistent communication. An essential element of committing to equity work is unearthing and reviewing organizational data that illuminate the problem. Relevant data includes student achievement results, staff culture surveys, performance reviews, and interpersonal observations. Placing this information in the hands of many can be a humbling and scary experience for leaders.
Our respondents shared the power of transparency as a lever for credibility. Staff appreciate when leaders are honest about why progress needs to happen. Leaders tend to be comfortable sharing recent organizational data, yet leapfrog over personal ownership for the current cultural state. If pursuing equity is a priority and the leadership remains stable, then leadership is responsible for why equity has not yet happened. Discussing data in absence of senior leader responsibility is telling an incomplete story. Data sharing should be accompanied by framing, context, and ownership of results. Organizations fall into the transparency trap when they forge ahead with declarations of future plans and fail to share the organizational history of past mistakes and harm.
As leaders take the brave steps toward transparency, here are some guiding questions to consider:
What are the risks and advantages to sharing our data internally?
What are the multiple avenues through which we will communicate our learning and progress?
How have we previously caused harm that needs to be publicly addressed?
Transparency builds credibility. When leaders share clear and consistent communication of the evolution of equity work, they open a space for honest dialogue about how to move forward as a learning organization.
We see ample energy spent on initiating conversations and making declarations of solidarity and change. We also see a lot of uncertainty with what sustainability looks like. Some organizations fall prey to thinking naming the issue or speaking more forcefully about their intentions to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion will organically open up the solution box. Starting equity work without a clear understanding of how to continue it is like placing a bandage on a cancerous sore. An effective treatment plan includes having a clear-eyed understanding of the problem, committing self and resources to drive results, and engaging a team of supporters and experts to rely on for guidance and support.
Accountability, community, training, and transparency create a powerful combination to redesign organizational culture. As organizations embark on the hard work of transforming into more equitable places for their staff, students, and community at-large, they should prepare to not simply state their renewed priorities, but also to confidently ACTT. | https://medium.com/@koriricketts/youve-committed-to-dei-now-what-6d4d18ff41cb | ['Kori Ricketts', 'Mekka Smith'] | 2020-12-10 20:14:26.297000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'Change Management', 'Equity', 'Diversity And Inclusion', 'Leadership'] |
Seven Deadly Wastes: Motion | The Seven Wastes are an idea from lean manufacturing, and I’m exploring how they relate to software development. Last week was inventory, and this week is motion.
Motion is the movement of people or things around work. This is why car factories use moving production lines — it’s much easier for the person who bolts on the wheels to stay still, and have the cars come along on a conveyor.
Reducing motion waste is all about reducing unnecessary movement. Of course, software isn’t a physical thing that we can gather around and look at. Or can we? If your team finds an unexpected situation (perhaps a production bug, or a realisation that your project is going in the wrong direction) then you probably gather everyone together into a meeting to look at the problem.
People gathering around a problem? That’s motion.
Of course, unexpected things happen, and we need to be able to deal with them. But we can take steps to reduce the impact they have.
One way you might already do this is with a daily standup meeting. This is a regular session every day during which we try to head off problems before they hurt us. If we didn’t have the daily standup, we might end up having two or three ad-hoc meetings throughout the day instead. The standup has therefore helped us to reduce motion.
Sprints are another means of reducing motion waste. We schedule a regular time to plan a small chunk of work in detail, and we hope that reduces the potential for chaos down the line.
Another option to explore is policy. Policies are simple sets of rules that tell us how to deal with certain situations. You probably have plenty of polices in your team already. Policies are things like “when we find a bug it gets prioritised by a product owner before developers look at it”.
Policies like that help teams to work autonomously, because they don’t have to ask someone what to do in a given situation. They reduce motion because they stop us from having to run around looking for solutions.
Motion waste is often hiding in plain sight. But finding it, and fixing it, can be an incredibly effective way to speed up your team. | https://medium.com/going-faster/seven-deadly-wastes-motion-323fdec694ed | ['Jez Halford'] | 2017-10-30 13:21:19+00:00 | ['Productivity', 'Agile', 'Lean Startup', 'Software Development'] |
20 Augur Predictions for 2020 | 2020 has the potential to be a breakthrough year for Augur and open prediction markets. Augur is well-poised to be one of DeFi’s headline success stories this year and one of the first DApps to bring non-crypto-natives to Ethereum. It’s still early days, and there will be growing pains, but I expect a big leap forward this year driven by v2 at the product level and the U.S. election cycle at the market level.
I think that predictions with no skin in the game should be taken as entertainment, nothing more. This is why in my newsletter The Augur Edge, I link to my Augur predictions and trades on the Ethereum blockchain, whenever possible. So take the following predictions with a grain of salt.
I made some predictions going into 2019 as well. Many of them were based on the expectation that v2 would ship sooner, which itself was a bad prediction on my part. Now that I’ve learned and thought a great deal more about Augur, hopefully I’ll make slightly less dumb predictions. We’ll see.
Note that a timely v2 launch will be critical for the bullish predictions here to play out.
1. Politics will trump other use cases in v2, collecting over 80% of trading volume. Markets on the Democratic nomination and general election, in particular, will dominate.
I see this as the first inning of a broader, long-term trend. Speculation on sporting events has dominated betting markets until now, but I think this is about to change. By decade’s end, global speculation on political outcomes will be orders of magnitude bigger than sports betting.
There are a few drivers, but the broad one is that the world cares more about political outcomes. That includes the biggest global markets like equities, debt, and currency exchange. There’s been no way to monetize or hedge political outcomes at non-trivial volumes…until now. Augur changes this, due to censorship resistance and limitless liquidity. In 2024, a hedge fund may pour millions into an Augur market to hedge the risk of a trade war.
2. Betting will be the main use case in 2020. Insurance, bounties, and more advanced financial instruments will take a back seat until further down the road.
3. The main product-market fit in (early) v2 will be high-stakes U.S. based political bettors. More casual bettors won’t come online until later when sidechains cut trading costs and other kinks get ironed out.
4. Over 90% of markets will resolve in under 48 hours, due to pre-staking, shorter reporting windows, and fewer ambiguous markets. By comparison, it took 100% of markets in v2 at least a week to resolve.
5. Something like 95% of volume will come from 10% of markets and 5% of market creators. Someday, Augur could be great for long-tail, niche markets, but V2 will see the dominance of a small number of markets and market creators. It will be easier to create markets in v2 due to UI improvements, but it will be harder to create markets that are visible to end users, due to higher upfront liquidity demands.
6. Augur will be one of the first DApps to reach beyond crypto natives, but it will take time to get there. For much of 2020, Augur will still be predominated by crypto folks.
7. Market creation, trading, and resolution will remain decentralized, but market curation will rely more on centralized forces to reduce risk for traders.
8. Augur will get more mainstream-ish news coverage than any other project on Ethereum. The 2020 election is the most covered event in the world and prediction markets are the third (and superior) “P” to polls and pundits that the media can use to forecast results.
9. Guesser will continue to reach new levels of success as Augur’s prime liquidity engine and play a big role in driving Augur forward. It has some some exciting plans coming up in 2020. Keep an eye on it…
Guesser in Augur v1
10. Tradable Invalid won’t work (that well), but it’s okay. The proportion of Invalid markets will still drop significantly, due to market creation templates, curation, and improved incentives. Invalid risk will shift from deliberate scams and accidents to “black swans” e.g., price feeds going offline at the last minute. They will be rarer but more painful when they happen. The biggest markets though will use general knowledge as their resolution source and should be fine.
11. Affiliates will start to thrive in v2. There will be many flavors of affiliates, including odds aggregators, content creators, social media influencers, paid marketers, and builders making customized onboarding UXs and other services that improve access to Augur.
12. Sometime in 2020, Andrew Yang will tweet his Augur odds of winning the nomination. Amy Klobuchar won’t. (This prediction is especially dependent on when v2 is released!)
13. Lightweight services on top of Augur will thrive, including instant settlement, market curation, specialized onboarding UXs, and possibly browser extensions that enhance the UI (and collect affiliate fees). Overlays taking a walled-off exchange approach or trying to compete directly with Augur UI will suffer (if there are any). Overlays pooling liquidity, offering complementary services, and focused on market making will thrive. While most trades will happen on Augur UI, market discovery, navigation, portfolio tracking, and social activity and custom content around markets may be overtaken by other UIs.
14. Augur and PredictIt will be complementary at first, the former serving high-stakes bettors and the latter, more casuals. But competition will start to heat up by late 2020. PredictIt is already buying search ads for folks who google “Augur.”
The top markets on PredictIt
15. We will see the start of a renaissance of developer activity in the augur ecosystem. Things built on Augur may include market making bots, political odds aggregators, arbitrage trackers, affiliate analytics panels, embeddable election odds widgets, mobile price alerts, and maybe even PDot Index for elections (ETF-like baskets of Augur shares that track the success of candidates).
16. Markets will remain inefficient and slow at pricing in news and developments, especially in early v2, leaving ample opportunity for savvy speculators, especially given the deeper liquidity on offer.
17. We will see some cool experiments around user acquisition, especially by overlays and affiliates due to their incentives and operational freedoms relative to the Forecast Foundation’s. I think one of the more successful strategies will be ”free rolls” (small amounts of DAI seeded in first-time user wallets) that are earmarked for Augur use and targeted at promising demographics like high-stakes PredictIt traders.
18. Poyo’s conversion from black hat cat to white hat cat will continue as it will become more lucrative on Augur to do good than evil. Poyo will be a successful “affilicat” helping grow Augur and will go on to become the most prosperous feline market maker and trader in modern financial history.
Poyo will soon take off its black Heisenberg hat and turn into a white hat cat
19. It’s still early days, and at a product and usability level, 2020 Augur will be inferior to, say, 2022 Augur. But the massiveness of the Market around the election cycle will forgive product limitations to a surprising extent.
20. If v2 launches by February 20th, 2020 (2–20–20), and Biden does not take Iowa or New Hampshire, Augur v2 will draw over 50 million USD in open interest. Otherwise…far less.
That last prediction and others assume there will be no *major* fires to put out after v2 launches, but accounts for the prospect of small to medium fires.
Thanks for reading. To stay ahead with fresh insights on the future of prediction markets, join my newsletter The Augur Edge. | https://medium.com/sunrise-over-the-merkle-trees/20-augur-predictions-for-2020-4659aaef43f | ['Ben Davidow'] | 2020-05-07 21:59:58.721000+00:00 | ['Trading', 'Ethereum', 'Prediction Markets', 'Defi', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
Kubernetes and Case studies on it | In this article, we are going to see what is Kubernetes and how it helps industries to grow their productivity.
What is Kubernetes:-
Kubernetes is a Container Orchestration engine that is used to manage the docker container. When we launch the container and due to any reason if it got crashed or deleted or stopped so we need some tool that can continuously monitor and up the container so we have k8s there.
Kubernetes makes sure services are running smoothly just like the developer wants.
Kubernetes Features:-
Automated Rollouts and Rollbacks:-
Kubernetes progressively rolls out changes to your application or its configuration, while monitoring application health to ensure it doesn’t kill all your instances at the same time. If something goes wrong, Kubernetes will rollback the change for you. Take advantage of a growing ecosystem of deployment solutions.
Service Discovery and Load Balancing:-
No need to modify your application to use an unfamiliar service discovery mechanism. Kubernetes gives Pods their own IP addresses and a single DNS name for a set of Pods and can load-balance across them.
Service Topology:-
Routing of service traffic based upon cluster topology.
Self Healing:-
Restarts containers that fail, replace, and reschedules containers when nodes die, kills containers that don’t respond to your user-defined health check and don’t advertise them to clients until they are ready to serve.
Secret and Configuration Management:-
Deploy and update secrets and application configuration without rebuilding your image and without exposing secrets in your stack configuration
The architecture of Kubernetes:-
Kubernetes contains master-slave architecture. It can have multiple masters and multiple slaves that is also known as master-slave architecture
A Kubernetes cluster consists of a set of worker machines, called nodes, that run containerized applications. Every cluster has at least one worker node.
The worker node(s) host the Pods that are the components of the application workload. The control plane manages the worker nodes and the Pods in the cluster. In production environments, the control plane usually runs across multiple computers and a cluster usually runs multiple nodes, providing fault-tolerance and high availability.
Case Studies: Babylon
Challange:-
A large number of Babylon’s products leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence, and in 2019, there wasn’t enough computing power in-house to run a particular experiment. The company was also growing (from 100 to 1,600 in three years) and planning expansion into other countries.
Solution:-
Babylon had migrated its user-facing applications to a Kubernetes platform in 2018, so the infrastructure team turned to Kubeflow, a toolkit for machine learning on Kubernetes. “We tried to create a Kubernetes core server, we deployed Kubeflow, and we orchestrated the whole experiment, which ended up being a really good success,” says AI Infrastructure Lead Jérémie Vallée. The team began building a self-service AI training platform on top of Kubernetes.
Impact:-
Instead of waiting hours or days to be able to compute, teams can get access instantaneously. Clinical validations used to take 10 hours; now they are done in under 20 minutes. The portability of the cloud native platform has also enabled Babylon to expand into other countries.
Kubernetes is a great platform for machine learning because it comes with all the scheduling and scalability that you need. — JÉRÉMIE VALLÉE, AI INFRASTRUCTURE LEAD AT BABYLON “G iving a Kubernetes-based platform to our data scientists has meant increased security, increased innovation through empowerment, and a more affordable health service as our cloud engineers are building an experience that is used by hundreds on a daily basis, rather than supporting specific bespoke use cases.” — JEAN MARIE FERDEGUE, DIRECTOR OF PLATFORM OPERATIONS AT BABYLON
Case Studies: Addidas
Staying True to Its Culture, adidas Got 40% of Its Most Impactful Systems Running on Kubernetes in a Year
Challange:-
In recent years, the adidas team was happy with its software choices from a technology perspective — but accessing all of the tools was a problem. For instance, “just to get a developer VM, you had to send a request form, give the purpose, give the title of the project, who’s responsible, give the internal cost center a call so that they can do recharges,” says Daniel Eichten, Senior Director of Platform Engineering. “The best case is you got your machine in half an hour. Worst case is half a week or sometimes even a week.”
Solution:-
To improve the process, “we started from the developer point of view,” and looked for ways to shorten the time it took to get a project up and running and into the adidas infrastructure, says Senior Director of Platform Engineering Fernando Cornago. They found the solution with containerization, agile development, continuous delivery, and a cloud native platform that includes Kubernetes and Prometheus.
Impact:-
Just six months after the project began, 100% of the adidas e-commerce site was running on Kubernetes. Load time for the e-commerce site was reduced by half. Releases went from every 4–6 weeks to 3–4 times a day. With 4,000 pods, 200 nodes, and 80,000 builds per month, adidas is now running 40% of its most critical, impactful systems on its cloud native platform. | https://medium.com/@prajapatiyogesh803/what-is-kubernetes-and-case-studies-d416dbc487ed | ['Yogesh Kumar Prajapati'] | 2020-12-27 08:04:03.206000+00:00 | ['Case Study', 'Kubernetes', 'Kubernetes Cluster'] |
10 Creative Ways You Can Improve Your Relationship! | 10 Creative Ways You Can Improve Your Relationship!
Love is always the biggest story. But sometimes, by itself, it is not enough. It is necessary that the two people commit themselves and take responsibility for the relationship. Both must be invested. It is, at the same time, the hardest and easiest thing in the world. Today we tell you then what are the 10 things that, in addition to love, are indispensable to any happy relationship.
1. Trust
Controlling the person we love does not bring us closer to him. On the contrary. It is necessary to trust that we are your choice, to trust that we are important, to trust in the love that you give us (and that we give back). Trust, in short, the love that binds us to that person. This means not letting ourselves be overcome by concerns that, when unfounded and illogical, gradually erode love.
His Secret Obsession has helped thousands of women and men improve their relationships CLICK ON THIS LINK to start right now thanks… (Affiliate link)
2. Friendship
You have certainly heard that the greatest love stories were born out of friendships. True or not, the fact is that the friendship and affection that we feel for our better half is the basis of all the relationship we have with her.
3. Commitment
The success of a relationship depends directly on how much the two parties are invested in it. Your relationship must be your priority, invest in it and invest your time, energy, effort. That way, your better half will know that it is important in your life.
His Secret Obsession has helped thousands of women and men improve their relationships CLICK ON THIS LINK to start right now thanks… (Affiliate link)
4. Communication
Talking is necessary. Listening is necessary. The happiest relationships are those in which the two parties put aside fears and modesty and speak openly about what worries them and what motivates them. The passive-aggressive attitude of waiting for the other person to know what we want (because it is their obligation to know) is halfway to disagreements and frustrations.
5. Respect
Because there is no love without respect. Yes, I do. Passion, maybe. But love? Loving implies respecting the other person. Understand it and respect it for what it is. Its truth is not absolute. Neither does the way you see the world. It is necessary to respect the differences as much (or more) as it respects the similarities.
His Secret Obsession has helped thousands of women and men improve their relationships CLICK ON THIS LINK to start right now thanks… (Affiliate link)
6. Acceptance
Your better half is not perfect. It is full of small (and delicious) imperfections. You will have defects that will bother you and addictions that will make you anxious. It’s part of it. You have to accept the person as a whole. If there is a characteristic in the other person that you do not imagine living with (and that you will hardly accept, even if you say otherwise), the relationship is more likely to be ‘doomed’ and that, sooner or later, will end. But not before a good deal of frustration!
7. Admiration
Loving someone you admire is the greatest luck of all. The admiration we feel towards the loved one is the feeling that drives us to plan a life for two, to want to be part of that person’s life and to be proud to have it in ours.
His Secret Obsession has helped thousands of women and men improve their relationships CLICK ON THIS LINK to start right now thanks… (Affiliate link)
8. Loyalty
Yes, the concept of what constitutes infidelity varies from couple to couple. The important thing is that they both respect the ‘rules’. Loyalty is nothing more than respect for the person we have agreed to make a priority in our lives. If you have doubts about your own behavior, just think “if it were me, how would I react?”.
9. Forgiveness
Your better half will fail. Not always, but sometimes. It will disappoint you, have attitudes that sadden you, you will even be able to make it furious. And if you do, you need to know how to give your forgiveness when it is asked (and deserved). Get rid of resentments and forgive. That way you will feel the true extension of love, which so often leads us to put someone’s feelings above ours.
His Secret Obsession has helped thousands of women and men improve their relationships CLICK ON THIS LINK to start right now thanks… (Affiliate link)
10. Common experiences
When we love someone we want to be part of their life and we want that person to be part of ours. Sharing experiences and tastes is a way to involve someone in our world. Activities for two are therefore essential, whether they are unique adventures or mundane everyday things.
It seems simple. And is!
***NOTE*** THIS ARTICAL CONTAINS AFFILIATE LINKS (AS MARKED AFFILIATE LINK) AND IF YOU CLICK ON ANY AFFILIATE LINKS AND PROCEED TO PURCHASE ANY PRODUCTS I MAY RECEIVE A COMISSION FOR THAT OFFER. THANKS…….. | https://medium.com/@surgetrendscover/10-creative-ways-you-can-improve-your-relationship-1be3253e8d7c | ['Surge Trends Cover'] | 2021-03-09 13:55:38.645000+00:00 | ['Sex', 'Obsessions', 'Dating', 'Relationships Love Dating', 'Love'] |
Integrating an eBPF-based firewall into the TezEdge node with multipass validations | The firewall acts as the TezEdge node’s first line of defense. When a peer first connects to a node, it begins the bootstrapping process, with the first message being the connection message.
The connection message contains the peer’s public key and their proof of work. The proof of work is a small piece of code that is generated based on the associated public key. It is very hard to replicate the proof of work, but it is easy to check its validity. The firewall ensures that each connection starts with a valid and unique (per connection) proof of work. If an adversary wants to start many connections, they must generate many unique proof of works, which makes a DDoS attack very expensive.
The connection message is first subjected to these checks from the firewall. If it passes these checks, the message is allowed to pass into the node. If it does not, the message is rejected without any of its packets ever entering the kernel. This minimizes the node’s attack surface and considerably speeds up traffic filtering.
Integrating the firewall into the TezEdge node with multipass validations
When an erroneous block arrives at our node, we want to invalidate it without having to actually download its operations. We want to avoid allowing them inside the validation subsystem, which minimizes the attack surface for a potential hack.
The goal of multipass validation is to “detect erroneous blocks as soon as possible” without having to download the entire chain data.
For this reason, we’ve placed the multipass validations into the processing of the “head increment”, which is also known as the “CurrentHead” message, which a peer sends to our node (before we know whether the peer is trusted or not).
The CurrentHead message only contains information about the block, and possibly the operations from the mempool (you can learn more about the P2P messages in our old mempool articles 1 and 2). When the CurrentHead message arrives at our node, in the first step we check several validations in it, for example:
future_block — The block was annotated with a time that is too far in the future, so this block will be ignored, we do not download the block’s operations nor the mempool operations.
— The block was annotated with a time that is too far in the future, so this block will be ignored, we do not download the block’s operations nor the mempool operations. fitness_increases — If the received block does not increase fitness, then we are not interested in it, so we ignore it and we do not download the block’s operation nor the mempool operations.
— If the received block does not increase fitness, then we are not interested in it, so we ignore it and we do not download the block’s operation nor the mempool operations. predecessor_check — whether we have the previous block (the predecessor block) saved:
If we do not have it, then we request a “CurrentBranch” message from a peer, which sends us the entire branch. The predecessor block is in this branch. If we do have the predecessor block, we schedule the downloading of the operations for the CurrentHead. Here we also schedule the downloading of operations from the mempool. These operations from the mempool, if validated, can be included in the upcoming block.
Now comes the time for the multipass strict validation. Suppose that the attacker wants to send us several of their invalid blocks.
We need to find out what version of the protocol will be used in the application of the CurrentHead block so that we can validate it before we download the operations from the CurrentHead. This information can be found in the predecessor block. Operations are not downloaded unless the CurrentHead has been validated.
Once we find out the protocol version from the predecessor, then we can call the protocol operation begin_application with the CurrentHead. This validates various items, for example: proof_of_work_stamp , fitness_gap , baking_rights , signature and protocol data .
If we haven’t found the protocol version from the predecessor, we check whether the CurrentHead has the same proto_level attribute as the block that has arrived. If the proto_level is different, then we discard the block. Next, the protocol data is validated.
If we do not pass through any of these validations, we can suppose that the peer is attempting to add an invalid block by changing the message. At this moment we send the “BlacklistPeer” message. We have implemented an initial system for blacklisting malicious peers in TezEdge (with a simple test in CI).
There is a little bit of overhead with the validations on the protocol, but we can afford it thanks to the “connection pool” as described in our previous article.
With this kind of multipass validation, we’ve secured that:
We won’t download the current_branch from the network and possibly the entire history as it can be already re-written or otherwise changed by the adversary.
from the network and possibly the entire history as it can be already re-written or otherwise changed by the adversary. We won’t download the block’s operations from the network.
We won’t download the mempool’s operations (which may have also been compromised)
Next, we plan on integrating the firewall with the TezEdge node through a Unix domain socket with simple commands (block, unblock). Suspicious peers will be automatically blocked through xBPF.
How to test the firewall
Clone the firewall repository
cd tezedge-firewall git clone https://github.com/simplestaking/tezedge-firewall cd tezedge-firewall
2. We can run the firewall with either the OCaml or the Rust node. We’ve prepared two commands with which you can run it on either node.
docker-compose -f docker-compose.firewall.ocaml.yml pull
docker-compose -f docker-compose.firewall.ocaml.yml up
Here are the commands for the TezEdge (Rust) node:
docker-compose -f docker-compose.firewall.rust.yml pull
docker-compose -f docker-compose.firewall.rust.yml up
3. The output is a simulation of what happens when we try to connect with an invalid proof of work, the firewall detects the attempt and blocks the peer. The attacker receives an error message.
We thank you for your time and hope that you have enjoyed reading this article.To read more about Tezos and the TezEdge node, please visit our documentation, subscribe to our Medium, follow us on Twitter or visit our GitHub. | https://medium.com/simplestaking/integrating-an-ebpf-based-firewall-into-the-tezedge-node-with-multipass-validations-769d4c6ccd93 | ['Juraj Selep'] | 2020-12-01 13:04:50.048000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Firewall', 'Ebpf', 'Tezos'] |
GrabAMeal: Enjoy Home-Cooked Food around the Globe with This AirBNB Restaurants | GrabAmeal is the first blockchain integrated meal sharing global platform where cooks and cooking experts can offer their homemade meals to food buyers and food enthusiasts willing to buy healthy, freshly prepared homemade foods.
This is a unique meal sharing platform where buyers can enjoy trust, transparency, and convenience along with good quality foods.
How GrabAmeal works
No matter wherever you are, you can try the GrabAmeal platform both for buying fresh food as well as for setting your home restaurants like AirBNB accommodation sharing. As a food seller you can start your home restaurant wherever you are. As a buyer you can order your meal after checking the list of the GrabAmeal restaurants enlisted on the virtual meal sharing market.
How buyers are facilitated?
The platform GrabAmeal offers facilities to be unique in their ways: the buyer can select cooks from a list of food sellers available from the preferred area. They can select meal type, dining venue, and after having his meal can rate and review the seller and his food quality, which will be saved in blockchain and cannot be tampered further.
How food sellers are facilitated?
Alternatively, hosts can decide on the menu, the time of the day the meals would be available, and the price of the meals. If food buyers are interested in a specific type of meal, they can choose to book it and pay via the website. All transactions will be done on GrabAMeal via using GAM crypto token.
Both the buyer and seller have to maintain their GAM wallet along with certain GAM balance to do transaction on this platform.
If there is any dispute on the GrabAmeal marketplace, there are auditors who can solve the dispute where other users of GrabAmeal can help them in solving the dispute by casting their vote.
GrabAmeal: potential
In GrabAMeal, the scope for business growth in the meal sharing market is enormous. After all, we all need to eat more than a few times a day, many people eat out frequently and the community of healthy homemade food freaks is increasing. If the potential can be utilized and the blockchain technology is leveraged effectively, GrabAmeal food economy in the food industry could be disrupted as people may turn to shared meals more frequently rather than preferring take-out and restaurants.
While anybody can be the buyer on the GrabAmeal platform, cooks have to enlist their name and details.
To know more about GrabAMeal world or if you have any questions, look them up in our website: https://grabameal.world/ico/ or
FAQ https://grabamealworld.freshdesk.com/support/home
or
send us a support ticket
https://grabamealworld.freshdesk.com/support/tickets/new
or
feel free to email us at: [email protected]
To Stay updated on our company updates and announcements,
follow us on:
Telegram,Twitter, Facebook, Medium
Read Our White Paper and One Pager
Subscribe GrabAMeal Channel For latest updates and Press like Icon for updates : | https://medium.com/grabamealworld/grabameal-enjoy-home-cooked-food-around-the-globe-with-this-airbnb-restaurants-afc69c77b9c5 | [] | 2018-05-13 18:05:52.287000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Peer To Peer', 'ICO', 'Ethereum', 'Blockchain'] |
Why I talk about elevator pitch in DevOps Training | The first section in my DevOps training workshop is always “Elevator Pitch.” Some young entrepreneurs often get confused about whether this is a technical workshop or a product design workshop.
I make it clear in this article.
DevOps is “HOW”; Product Vision is “WHAT”
DevOps is the methodology and practice to make the product go faster, but DevOps cannot help you find the right direction
Have you ever lost your way? I did it many times. Due to my business, many cities I travelled to are my first-time visit. I have these experiences:
- If I walk, I’ll take 15 ~ 20 minutes to find a way back;
- If I cycle, I’ll take 30 ~ 40 minutes;
- If I drive, I always use more than 1 hour to find the direction;
Means, the more powerful tool I use, the more time I get back to the original point. The same reason when implementing DevOps in your organization. DevOps can only help you go fast. if your direction is wrong, it helps you go wrong further.
Why elevator pitch is important
Warren Buffett said, “Never invest in a business you cannot understand.” Everyone invests in life, with money or time. All successful entrepreneurs have the capability of persuading people to join and contribute their time or money. If entrepreneurs cannot express the idea in 2 minutes, every second he spends result in losing people or investment. However, not all entrepreneurs know how to present ideas efficiently.
What is the elevator pitch in IT product design?
Elevator pitch is a 30-second, memorable description of what you do. The goal is to earn a second conversation. The 100 words conversation should include Target customers, Product value, Major, main features and Competitors and our advantages.
Elevator pitch has many formats for different purposes. In IT product design, we usually use the following format:
- To [Target User]
- Our [Product Name]
- Is a [Product Type]
- It offers [Value]
- Unlike [Competitors]
- Our product [Advantages]
Here are some examples:
To the traveller, our Airbnb website and APP is an online rental service with online transactions. It can help travellers save money and give them unique experiences of the local culture. Unlike [booking.com](http://booking.com/), our product is affordable.
Or,
To the traveller, our Uber Cab App is a fast & efficient, on-demand car service. it lets you book trips from your pre-specified locations to transport you to your destination. Unlike yellow cabs and limos, our product can guarantee pickups, safer and cleaner than cabs, faster and cheaper than limos.
How to generate a good elevator pitch
The Elevator pitch is not as easy as it looks. There are some rules you need to care about.
As…
Here mentions the target customer segments. If you own a start-up, you should have only one customer segment. No product can benefit all people in the world. If you can not target only one segment, please re-think.
Our…
You need to give the product a name which easy to recall. You don’t want the investor to forget the product after he steps out of the elevator, do you?
Is a…
Here we need to stress two factors, product value and type. This is very important if you want to find the investment because it holds 80% information that the investor wants to know. When I invest in some start-ups, some entrepreneurs may “forget” to mention the product value. When I ask them, they might come up with some keywords, like “cheap”, “cutting edge”, “good user experience”. No. These are not production values.
The product type is also important. When an investor is looking for good start-ups, he has the product type in his mind, like “an online education service”, “a C2C online skills exchange service”. It doesn’t matter you match the keywords exactly but giving the product a type will save time to describe the context.
It offers…
This is the statement of the product’s main features or benefits to the target user. There are two things worth noting:
- The features or benefits should match the customer segments you mentioned in the “As” section.
- Don’t give many features. Remember, too many means nothing at all.
Unlike…
Here we need competitors. Some entrepreneurs say their product does not have competitors at the interview. I do not trust them. Even rocket science has competitors, not to say your product!
We should mention the exact company or product name here. Do not use “Other products”, “some of the product”, “the industry” as the competitor statement.
Our product…
Here is the advantages statement. We need to state the advantages which the competitors don’t have. The benefits also should accurate. “Good user experience” and “strong investor support” are not accepted.
Conclusion
A good start is half the battle.
Anytime you have an idea, you can generate an elevator pitch to identify whether it is a good idea. Try to practise in 3 months, then you will find one good news and one bad news.
- Bad news: 90% of your “good” ideas are not good；
- Good news: You got the 10% good ideas and focus on!
Don’t invest in DevOps until you have a good elevator pitch for the product vision. | https://medium.com/@1sz/why-i-talk-about-elevator-pitch-in-devops-training-b87b31670de2 | ['Steve Zheng'] | 2020-10-15 17:39:54.704000+00:00 | ['Product Design', 'Devops Training', 'Elevator Pitch', 'C Pop', 'Agile Methodology'] |
How to Become a Better Developer Every Single day | How to Become a Better Developer Every Single day
4 ideas to make you a top-class performer without long study nights
Photo by Valeriy Khan on Unsplash
True winners build themselves during their practice time.
That’s something you might have recognized yourself when looking at masterclass performers. You see them doing something and you think to yourself:
“I wonder how much this person practised for achieving this”.
Coding is no exception to this rule. And if you want to be a top performer too, you have to include daily practice of your skills in your life.
Let’s see how you can easily do that with the following list.
You Should Always Have A New Goal And Work Toward It
This is a very personal belief I have, and it’s something that guides me through my life every day. I feel like people always need to set a new goal in their mind. Something that they want to achieve, and they have to work hard to get it.
That’s true for me both on a personal level and in my career. I suggest you set one target at the time for yourself and you build your way toward it.
For example, you could:
Build an app you always wanted to create.
Finally, finish all those Udemy coding courses you have in your library.
Learn a new language you were curious about.
Learn new patterns, techniques, for improving the code you write daily.
Find a way to achieve your goals. Write down the necessary steps if you feel like.
This behaviour has immense value. It will make you grow as a professional because you will learn new stuff and practice. It will give you new occasions because you never know what some knowledge can bring you to in the future. | https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/how-to-become-a-better-developer-every-single-day-22f771de5897 | ['Piero Borrelli'] | 2020-11-19 08:50:05.775000+00:00 | ['Web Development', 'Technology', 'Software Engineering', 'Work', 'Programming'] |
Objective Tragedies | Start with the objective. There’s the virus,
with all the havoc it’s wreaked —
the poorest students falling further behind
(no internet at home), the badly needed
therapy appointments cancelled or unattended,
passersby spitting in the direction of
folks with Asian descent.
Then there’s the subjective. Your favorite
Indian restaurant closing, indefinitely.
Not getting to hug your friend goodbye.
Breaking up, but tenderly,
each of you cupping the other’s face
the way you’d hold a robin’s egg.
The grocery store being out of milk.
Your world is small these days and it’s hard to
triage these things. But since we’re all public health
workers now, it’s become your job to triage,
so you will. You will be a fish in a
Venetian canal, where the waters
(you may have heard) are now clear.
Not, I will add, because of decreased pollution,
but because of decreased boat activity,
which allows sand and sediment to remain on the canal floor.
The difference matters little to the fish,
who can suddenly see where they’re swimming.
No time to distrust it. Keep going.
Keep going. Keep going. | https://medium.com/literally-literary/objective-tragedies-2ff491f8b11f | ['Emma Jane Laplante'] | 2020-03-31 02:25:11.274000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Love', 'Travel', 'Environment', 'Poetry'] |
Parable of the Soils | It’s got a call like gravity
tugging deep inside us.
anchoring one to the ground and centered
It’s a tether to reality
the key to combating anxiety —
Like the taproot,
if left unchecked
what once was sweet
soured.
Sucking up all bad
killing man like flowers.
It matters where ones planted
A parable of soils explains,
our roots affect growth.
Like friends committing treason
and home infested with weeds
suffocate, killing us out from underneath.
Never soaring like a bird with clipped wings. | https://medium.com/at-a-crossings/parable-of-the-soils-e246062841ad | ['Devin Mitchell Durbin'] | 2017-07-02 21:17:20.117000+00:00 | ['Toxic Relationships', 'Positive Relationships', 'Poetry', 'Lifestyle', 'Tangled Thoughts'] |
As lawmakers block the budget on the brink of snap elections, Israel | Israel appears to be on track for a fourth national election in less than two years, marking the imminent fall of the eight-month-old coalition government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
On Tuesday, Israeli lawmakers failed to agree on a crucial budget vote, triggering parliament’s dissolution and a snap election in March 2021. By a vote of 49 to 47, the Knesset narrowly rejected the measure, which would have delayed a midnight deadline on Tuesday to approve the state budget for 2020.
In an effort to gain a plurality, Netanyahu officially cast his ballot in favour of the bill, taking part in the debate. Three Blue and White senators, however, defied their party and voted against the measure. The Prime Minister, addressing the Knesset during the long debate, blamed the new round of elections on Defence Minister Benny Gantz.
After three elections held since April 2019, Netanyahu and former opposition leader Gantz formed a coalition government in May, which failed to reach a conclusion. Although the power-sharing arrangement is still under way, Israel’s political commentators have speculated that Netanyahu may not want to hand over power, but rather dismantle the government early on.
In the meantime, on Monday, Netanyahu, who denies allegations of alleged corruption, went to Twitter to say that he does not want elections again. Speaking to the lawmakers, Netanyahu also asserted that instead of holding new elections, the government should keep its attention on combating the Coronavirus pandemic.
In November 2021, as part of their power-sharing arrangement, Gantz will take over the government from Netanyahu as Israel’s prime minister for the remainder of the three-year term.Nonetheless, Gantz was unable to persuade Netanyahu to agree on a fiscal budget for 2020 and 2021 that would allow the Prime Minister, in November 2021, to award the Minister of Defense the premiership. If the bill had been approved, the deadline for this year’s budget would have been extended from December 23 to December 31.
Although elections in March will result in a crucial change in the political spectrum of Israel, Netanyahu would be considerably risky, noting that he faces massive criticism over alleged corruption allegations and mishandling of the COVID-19 crisis. Likud and Blue and White have been blaming each other for failure to reach an agreement over the budget. At the same time, in an effort to renegotiate the coalition agreement with Blue and White, Likud has been keeping up the budget for several months now.
The Israeli gross domestic product is projected to shrink by 4.5% after the economic consequences of the Coronavirus pandemic, with the unemployment rate remaining at 12.1 percent. | https://medium.com/@akshayprasad891/as-lawmakers-block-the-budget-on-the-brink-of-snap-elections-israel-56094c610449 | ['Akshay Prasad'] | 2020-12-23 14:56:53.148000+00:00 | ['Benjamin Netanyahu', 'Covid 19', 'Israel', 'Coronavirus'] |
Why “Narrow Your Field of Focus” Isn’t the Right Advice for All Writers | If you are an eclectic writer, make it work for you
I once won a tee-shirt for being an eclectic writer. Okay, not every writer’s goal, but at the time, spreading my writing within a wide range of topics worked for me, not against me.
But I often hear the opposite advice from other writers. Perhaps limiting their work to a narrow field of subjects brings them positive results. “Narrow your focus” isn’t the right advice for all of us though.
Some writers are built to be Jack-of-all-trades. What’s more, they are proficient in varied areas rather than churning out mediocre writing.
The idea branching off in several directions leads to poor work and other negative results doesn’t always hold true. People imagine you can’t diversify and maintain integrity and skill. Yet, if you are an expansive writer at heart, you thrive when you spread your abilities.
Writer’s needs vary
I write in several genres, and one feeds the other. Creative writing, for instance, spills into factual articles and I’m glad.
After writing poetry or short stories, my brain is in creative mode. If I then switch to, let’s say, a self-improvement post, it’s easy for me to include metaphors and my unique creative writing voice to my work.
Your needs as a writer may differ. Perhaps focusing on a single theme helps you excel and brings out your best. It might attract readers who enjoy specific subjects too. But it is possible to be eclectic and maintain readership.
Suggestions
If you want to branch out and vary written topics, you might create publications to house them, so readers can go to the articles or stories they enjoy most.
You can also write for other writer’s publications that suit different genres. Your readers will see where you’ve posted written work, and can head in a direction they choose.
Your writer’s voice is probably best maintained though
I say “probably,” in case I’m wrong. Nonetheless, once you’ve built a following of readers who want to come back to your work again and again, varying your tone of writing may disappoint. If they enjoy your work, the chances are they like your writing voice.
What’s a writing voice?
Your writing voice is how your personality shines through into written work. It’s unique to you and reflects your character and fashions the tone of your writing. Often, it’s creative, although, some writers have a natural clean, matter-of-fact style that suits them, and it’s devoid of idiosyncrasy.
Writers are unique
Writers are like honey bees. Some stay close to the nest. They forage for nectar, but don’t spread their wings too far. Others remain close to the queen. Their job is specific, and they are experts.
But there are also bees that venture further afield. They collect nectar from varied flower types. And a few don’t gather nectar so much as they travel far and wide to make sure they know where a new hive can live if a calamity befalls the existing one.
They are adventurous and lead different lives to those bees with an indoor job. All bee careers, however, benefit the hive. They are necessary, and their differences don’t occur by accident.
We humans, whether writers or not, have tendencies peculiar to us. We aren’t the same, and what suits one person doesn’t always suit another.
If you, like me, are an eclectic writer, fear not, you aren’t wrong. No one’s right or wrong to prefer a narrow or wide focus. Figure how your particular writing personality fits into the writer’s market and make the most of it. Don’t restrict your work if it doesn’t feel right. | https://medium.com/the-bolt-hole/why-narrow-your-field-of-focus-isnt-the-right-advice-for-all-writers-475530f5e943 | ['Bridget Webber'] | 2019-12-05 13:22:47.040000+00:00 | ['Personal Development', 'Writing', 'Writer', 'Writing Tips', 'Life'] |
10 online courses for those who want to start their own business | As options for learning online continue to expand, a growing number of entrepreneurs are using them to keep their staff on the cutting edge or even for themselves.
Using tools for online training, including videos, apps, and webinars, rather than sending employees to expensive training classes or bringing in pricey consultants to train on site, can save startup’s both time and money
Small businesses are turning to online training for cost, quality, and access reasons,” says Nate Kimmons, Vice President of enterprise marketing at lynda.com.
“Gone are the days of sending employees off to a two-day, in-person class. Online training serves as a 24/7 resource that the learner can access anytime, anywhere at their own pace from any device. It’s simple to use.”
If you are thinking of trying online training, here are a few things to consider and examples of tools to get you started.
Allow for flexibility.
With face-to-face training, you usually get one chance to soak it all in. But many online programs are on-demand, meaning learners can move at their own pace and watch presentations again and again if needed.
The added flexibility allows everyone to work at his or her own pace and better fit the training into a busy schedule,
Go mobile.
Online education also allows for flexibility across technology formats. Employees can learn at home, on the job, or anywhere they use their smartphone.
Do your research.
Not every online course is worth the money. Check out reviews and feedback offered by users of any given online course.
Coming up now are examples of just ten courses available online offering curriculums in Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Marketing Psychology and Coding to name a few. All vary in price from free all the way up to €200 with links available to the courses for further details
1. Entrepreneurship: Launching an Innovative Business Specialisation
· Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies: The First Step in Entrepreneurship
· Innovation for Entrepreneurs: From Idea to Marketplace
· New Venture Finance: Startup Funding for Entrepreneurs
· Entrepreneurship Capstone
Develop your entrepreneurial mind set and skill sets, learn how to bring innovations to market, and craft a business model to successfully launch your new business.
Enrol here.
2. Entrepreneurship Specialization
· Entrepreneurship 1: Developing the Opportunity
· Entrepreneurship 2: Launching your Start-Up
· Entrepreneurship 3: Growth Strategies
· Entrepreneurship 4: Financing and Profitability
· Wharton Entrepreneurship Capstone
Wharton’s Entrepreneurship Specialization covers the conception, design, organisation, and management of new enterprises. This four-course series is designed to take you from opportunity identification through launch, growth, financing and profitability.
Enrol here.
3. How to Start Your Own Business Specialization
Developing an Entrepreneurial Mind-set: First Step towards Success
· The Search for Great Ideas: Harnessing creativity to empower innovation.
· Planning: Principled, Proposing, Proofing, and Practicing to a Success Plan
· Structure: Building the Frame for Business Growth
· Launch Strategy: 5 Steps to Capstone Experience
· Capstone — Launch Your Own Business!
‘This specialization is a guide to creating your own business. We will cover a progression of topics necessary for successful business creation including: mind set, ideation, planning, action and strategy, will be covered. Rather than just describing what to do, the focus will be on guiding you through the process of actually doing it.
Enrol here.
4. Entrepreneurship: The Part Time Entrepreneur Complete Course
For people who want to pursue Entrepreneurship without giving up your full time jobs succeeding with a Side Gig as a PT Entrepreneur
Identify and take action on part time entrepreneur or side gigs that fit their lifestyle.
Be ready to launch their new business.
“Great course. Focused on Part Time which is nice as other courses are about full time and I am not read for that. Want to make some money as a freelancer and part-time for now. Educational and Instructor is very motivational and encouraging as well. Highly recommend.”
Enrol here.
Price: €200
5. SEO for SEO Beginners
SEO tutorial for beginners: SEO optimise your site, get to the top of the search results and increase sales! Seomatico
Get up to speed with the fundamentals concepts of SEO
Discover how to find the best keywords for your website — ‘keyword research’
Find out how to increase your sites visibility in the search engine results — ‘on page optimisation’
Learn how to build more authority in your niche than competitors so Google puts you’re at the top of the search results
Price: FREE
In this SEO tutorial for beginners, you’ll learn about the Three Pillars of Powerful SEO:
1. Keyword Research: How to find keywords that attract visitors who want to buy
2. On Page Optimisation: How to increase your site visibility in the search engines
3. Off page optimisation: How to build authority on your site using links so Google knows you have the best content for it’s users.
Enrol here.
6. Twitter Marketing Secrets 2017-A step-by-step complete guide
Discover social media marketing secrets, gain 25000+ true twitter fans & followers, twitter Marketing tips!
Reach 25k highly targeted followers in just weeks.
Attract real and targeted followers with just zero money and 20 minutes a day.
Become an influencer on Twitter and sell products and services right away.
“1000+ highly satisfied students within just 5 days of the course launch”
“Best Twitter Marketing Course on Earth!! This Course will Skyrocket your Twitter Career. I highly recommend taking this course”
Price: €120
Enrol here.
7. Marketing Psychology: How to Get People to Buy More & Fast!
Learn a set of “persuasion & influence tools” you can use to ethically motivate people to action in marketing & business
Create marketing that grabs your customer’s attention, triggers curiosity and interest in your product, and ultimately persuades them to take action and BUY from you.
‘The psychology of capturing attention, and how to get people to think and dream about your brand, or the psychology behind getting people to rave for your product after you think that they’ve gotten sick of seeing it.
How to design simple web pages and marketing materials that boost your conversions
Enrol here.
Price: €200
8. Coding for Writers 1: Basic Programming
Learn to both code and write about code
The course uses JavaScript, but talks about other programming languages as well, including providing a survey of common programming languages. It covers common Computer Science concepts, such as variables, functions, conditionals, loops, etc.
Price: €45
Enrol here.
9. Smart Marketing with Price Psychology
Improve online marketing success with fundamental psychological pricing research for your business and marketing
Price your product or service to maximize revenue
Understand how consumers perceive and think about prices
Run promotions that make people think they’re getting an amazing deal
Think about your full set of products and services in ways that maximize earnings
Price: €35
Enrol here.
10. Entrepreneurship: 5 keys to building a successful business
Learn the core components to starting a great business from an entrepreneur who made his first million at the age of 24
This course shows an understanding of how successful entrepreneurs think and how to apply that thinking in your own life.
The foundations you’ll need to develop a business idea that truly resonates with consumers and addresses an actual market demand.
Price: €90
Enrol here.
Each of these online courses will be found to be very flexible as they only require a very small amount of your time per week. They all have excellent feedback from previous users and finally they are all accessible through an online app available through the various app stores on various mobile devices. They all tick three very important boxes.
Launching your own business is very time consuming and requires your undivided attention. Enrolling in courses like these for your staff or even for your own benefit might give your business in the insight or kick it needs. | https://medium.com/the-lucey-fund/10-online-courses-for-those-who-want-to-start-their-own-business-a58572b00f1e | ['Ian Lucey'] | 2017-03-30 12:37:39.082000+00:00 | ['Online Courses', 'Startup', 'Education', 'Entrepreneurship', 'SEO'] |
On the Brexit trade agreement, SaaS and investment | Summary
There are many articles on the impact of the Brexit trade agreement for many important areas of life: the economy, international travel, and fish... But if you’re involved in providing digital services such as SaaS or software more broadly, what does the deal mean for you now, and in the long term?
Tldr; for now, most things stay the same. But they might not forever. And that fact in itself has consequences.
Doing business
What do those of us in tech need to do come January 1st? For most of us, not a lot.
Access for providing digital services remains as before (with some exceptions in certain areas like legal, financial, aviation and TV). There won’t be any import tariffs or taxes, and cross-border payments are unaffected too. So unless you’re in an affected sector, you can carry on as you were before.
But free movement is over. For business trips, company reps can travel over the EU border for 90 out each 180 day period — essentially half the time. This includes being able to take your family with you with minimal (but presumably some) paperwork.
On data, there (probably) won’t be any barriers to data moving across the border, nor any provisions that data must be based on the home territory, which is apparently the first time the EU has agreed to do with with a third country.
Why only ‘probably’? The UK still needs to create the legislation to show the EU that its GDPR-replacement is equivalent, and until that’s done this isn’t guaranteed. Though it’s hard to imagine that the UK won’t create data legislation that passes the EU’s “data adequacy” test, which is due to happen by Q2 2021. After all, as in many areas of the Brexit negotiations, I think the focus in more on the near term optics of sovereignty (having our own UK data protection legislation) with the reality being that most rules will stay exactly the same (basing UK legislation on the EU’s current rules).
But this does still cause a problem, because the rules could in theory change in the future. And this will change how people make decisions, particularly on investment.
Investment
On digital trade, there’s a commitment not only to continue the status quo of no barriers, but also for the UK and EU cooperate on the rules for future ‘emerging technologies’. I think in part the intention here is to assuage the concerns of investors and entrepreneurs who will now be seeing risks in placing long term bets across the border.
And despite this commitment, those risks remain. The dovish interpretation is that the ‘emerging technology’ provision is a failsafe that that’s unlikely to ever be used, and if it were, it would be in the sphere of an extremely sensitive area of society, such as national security.
But the hawkish interpretation — and the one that must be considered — is that the definition of ‘emerging’ is broad and could be used by either side to add tariffs or restrictions on cross-border trade in the future across a whole gamut of emerging technologies — such as AI, the Internet of Things or drones — to protect their investments in home grown companies.
This risk is something entrepreneurs and investors will be thinking about: Will this happen? Unlikely. How big a deal would it be if it were to? Potentially really big. So how should you mitigate this risk? Look for similar opportunities inside your own territory instead. This, I believe, is the psychology that will drive lower investment in technology between the UK and the EU over time.
Government policy thoughts
Less cross-border investment over time (say 5–10 years plus) could mean slower innovation, because innovation relies on competing for access to a relatively small pool of smart and talented people. This in turn creates an incentive for both parties to grow their talent pool.
From the UK perspective, as the smaller party with a centralised government, placing a big strategic bet on investment in STEM subjects seems sensible. With freedom of movement restricted, relocating employees is going to be harder than before.
A large talent pool is an asset that may counterweight the risks of future tariffs for investors, giving confidence to cross-border investors that they might not otherwise have. This in turn would create more job opportunities for that talent, and overall reduces the likelihood of a ‘brain drain’ out of Britain — something that has been feared by many through the Brexit process. It’s therefore imperative we see an updated strategy update on this area from the Government, to give investors confidence before they decide to divert their attention elsewhere.
And one final thought: What will post-Brexit Britain’s role be in the action against ‘big tech’? The EU is bringing in new regulations; the US has started antitrust proceedings. Which of these two great powers does the UK side with, if any? As we’ve seen with tax enforcement, international coordination is essential to efficacy. If the UK becomes a weak link in this coalition, for example by providing a ‘haven’ to big tech, then this is likely to cause significant irritation in the EU, where huge political capital is being expended on the ‘big tech’ issue. Could this in turn make it more likely that the EU takes that hawkish interpretation of emerging technologies sometime down the line? Perhaps.
Further reading | https://medium.com/@wetz/on-the-brexit-agreement-saas-and-technology-investment-594d05e54000 | ['George Wetz'] | 2020-12-29 14:03:54.591000+00:00 | ['Brexit', 'Government Policy', 'Technology', 'SaaS', 'Software Development'] |
This fascinating photo is of a | This fascinating photo is of a suit called The Wildman. No one knows the purpose of this 18th Century suit of armor. It may have been used for bear hunting or worse — bear baiting. It could also be a costume for a festival or a piece of folk art.
As of today, it’s displayed in The Menil Collection in Texas, along with other interesting historical artifacts. As far as we know, it’s the only suit of it’s kind.
One thing is for sure. Whoever wore this was not going to be getting a lot of hugs. | https://medium.com/rule-of-one/no-one-knows-the-purpose-of-this-suit-18-century-of-armor-e37c00a5294 | ['Toni Tails'] | 2020-12-29 13:22:20.269000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'History', 'Creativity', 'Art', 'Productivity'] |
《靈魂急轉彎》影評：人類不因夢想而偉大 | Please follow me on Instagram @angelalovemovie / Email: [email protected] | https://medium.com/@yjangela331/%E9%9D%88%E9%AD%82%E6%80%A5%E8%BD%89%E5%BD%8E-%E5%BD%B1%E8%A9%95-%E4%BA%BA%E9%A1%9E%E4%B8%8D%E5%9B%A0%E5%A4%A2%E6%83%B3%E8%80%8C%E5%81%89%E5%A4%A7-7664308b288c | ['安琪拉看電影'] | 2020-12-27 03:56:36.120000+00:00 | ['靈魂急轉彎', 'Soul', '電影', '影評', '電影評論'] |
Tenderness of mother’s arm for a peaceful sleep- best baby convertible cribs. | Tenderness of mother’s arm for a peaceful sleep- best baby convertible cribs. Mothers are the guardian angels whose world revolves around their kids. A mother understands even what something is not asked by the child. A feeling that cannot be expressed in words. Life begins with the warmth of the mother that stays throughout. A mother makes sure that her child gets the best of everything. Preparations begin right from when the baby is still in the womb. Once the baby is welcomed into the world, she chooses everything to make the baby comfortable. The most important factor of a baby’s healthy growth is a peaceful and sound sleep. It is believed that a good 12–14 hours of sleep is very essential for a baby to have a good metabolism and healthy growth. There is no tenderness anywhere else like that of a mother’s arms and children sleep soundly in them. Undoubtedly, a mother’s arms are the best, but it sometimes becomes difficult for those arms to be available all the time due to various reasons. Radheshyam understands this and we present the tenderness of mother’s arms in our baby convertible cribs. The best convertible cribs for the new addition to your family. All the convertible cribs available at Radheshyam are made of high-quality wood to ensure safety because your baby is equally precious to us as he/she is to you. Time runs rather quickly and in no time your baby will outgrow the first nursery set and this is why Radheshyam brings to you some of the best cribs that can be converted to full-size beds as your baby grows. We understand that children get emotionally attached to their belongings and would not be willing to get separated; hence, we have some of the best crib sets that convert to bed as per the needs of your child and also allows for comfortable adjustments with your kid’s space all through his/her growing years. At Radheshyam, you can find convertible sets that can convert from a crib of a toddler to a full-size bed of an adolescent that provides space for the growing needs of your child. We have a variety of products to furnish your baby’s space. Our theme-based collections namely Baby Boy, Baby Cotton, Baby Girl, Mocha Baby, Natura, and Romantic provide a good range to choose from for your baby either a boy or a girl. No matter what you choose, our products are durable while also being elegant and attractive, sure enough, to be your baby’s best companion as he/she grows. Each and every convertible set at Radheshyam is designed with strong and sturdy rails to adjust to your child’s requirements. The convertible crib sets at Radheshyam are sure to give your kid a peaceful and sound sleep throughout the growth years into adolescence. Your baby’s space is incomplete without a proper arrangement for a sound sleep. The most precious one in your life deserves the best sleep and Radheshyam makes it easy for you. Give your baby the tenderness of a mother’s arm for a peaceful sleep. Give the best baby convertible crib set from Radheshyam. | https://medium.com/@innogenx999/tenderness-of-mothers-arm-for-a-peaceful-sleep-best-baby-convertible-cribs-597a791c31c6 | ['Inno Genx'] | 2021-06-17 16:41:48.532000+00:00 | ['Kid', 'Baby', 'Radheshyam Laminates'] |
3 Ways to Make Money Online. Welcome to my new blog! We are going to… | Branded Surveys
Branded Surveys (or gobranded.com) is a well-known survey taking site that used to be called Mintvine. I have great reviews for this platform because they are one of the highest paying programs out there. They have also recently improved their payout system so that it is so much faster now to approve and redeem your points for gift cards (Walmart, Target, Staples, etc) or cash via Paypal. It’s super user-friendly and their customer service is always responsive and helpful. The dashboard doesn’t show me exactly how much I have made during my whole time on the platform, but I would estimate that it is well over $1,000 over the course of a few years using the service off-and-on.
Main Dashboard
My referral link if you want to use it: https://surveys.gobranded.com/users/register/1c5055880441a65fe4593b066 | https://medium.com/@relaxrosie/make-extra-money-online-462b03fd54cc | ['Relax Rosie'] | 2020-12-29 19:20:11.517000+00:00 | ['Surveys', 'Cash', 'Online', 'Money', 'Finance'] |
Self-Defense Products Market Worth $3.6 Billion By 2025 | The global self defense products market size is expected to reach USD 3.6 billion by 2025, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc., expanding at a CAGR of 5.9% over the forecast period. The market growth is primarily attributed to rising incidences of civil unrest, along with the need for personal safety on recreational activities such as camping and hiking.
Hunting is considered to be one of the most common outdoor activities among the Americans, which, in turn, is driving the demand for folding knives to serve the purpose of self defense, along with other tasks. In 2016, about 11.5 million enthusiasts aged 16 years and above participated in hunting activities in U.S.
Folding knives accounted for the largest share of 71.2% in 2018. Due to the introduction of folding knives, the product has undergone various modifications with respect to utility features, designs, raw materials used for the blades, knife structures, and suitable applications. Manufacturers are also focusing on developing compact products integrated with more than one feature.
For instance, Gerber Auto Knife is a fully automatic equipped tool made of stainless steel designed with an oversized release button for the easy use. Gerber offers folding Tanto Knives equipped with torch lights. Such integrations will further enhance the capabilities and functioning of the folding knives, which, in turn, will favor the market growth.
Pepper sprays have been recording prominent sales and is expected to expand at a CAGR of 5.7% over the forecast period. They are gaining an increasing traction in the global market owing to growing acceptance among women as a convenient self defense product. Due to growing population of tech savvy people and popularity of online shopping, manufacturers are resorting to convenient methods of distribution to reach out to the large customer base. Third party retailers such as Amazon.com, PepperEyes.com, Flipkart, and Xboom Utilities are some of the common suppliers of personal defense products.
North America accounted for the largest share of 30.0% in 2018. Majority of the demand is generated by the U.S. consumers using folding knives, pepper sprays, and stun guns. Rapid increase in investments in research and development of less harmful self-defense weapons for the civilians is expected to boost the market growth over the forecast period. Moreover, growing crime rates in Canada is resulting in government laws to undergo significant modifications, which, in turn, is expected to widen the scope of the market.
The companies operating in this market are focusing on developing new products with integration of multiple utility tools with an aim to meet the customer’s convenience in performing indoor and outdoor activities, along with self-defense purposes. For instance, Buck knives Inc. manufactures folding knives that are suitable for heavy duty applications.
Click the link below:
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/self-defense-products-market
Further key findings from the study suggest: | https://medium.com/@marketnewsreports/self-defense-products-market-913d1a91ecf3 | ['Gaurav Shah'] | 2020-08-26 10:21:44.627000+00:00 | ['Italy', 'USA', 'India', 'France', 'China'] |
“Using College to Start Your Career Right” — Interview with Jesse Steinweg-Woods -Ph.D, Senior Data Scientist at tronc | Vimarsh Karbhari(VK): What are the top three books about AI/ML/DS have you liked the most? What books have had the most impact in your career?
Jesse Steinweg-Woods(JS):
I have many other book reviews at my website: Book Reviews
VK: What tool/tools (software/hardware/habit) that you have as a Data Scientist has the most impact on your work?
JS: Github and the Python library pandas.
Github because it allows all of my code to be in one place and allows me to share it with my team members (along with use some of their code in my work). It also allows version control, code reviews, and a backup for my code.
Pandas because it allows me to prototype quickly and load data in a variety of formats easily.
VK: Can you share about the Data Science related failures/projects/experiments that you have learned from the most?
JS: Bugs in the recommender system I helped build showed me the importance of logging machine learning systems that are used in a production setting.
I also had a project at my last company where the project didn’t work because my assumptions about how the data was being collected were totally flawed.
In the churn model I designed, negative examples weren’t being generated properly and were introducing a bias in the model. I didn’t detect this until I compared the underlying distributions of the features. Check this if a model isn’t working properly in real life to see if it had some sort of a training bias.
VK: If you were to write a book what would be the title of the book? What would be the main topics you would cover in the book?
JS:“Using College to Start Your Career Right.” I don’t think I handled college quite right the first time. Universities don’t focus enough on teaching students career planning skills, and I feel this is sorely lacking in higher education. I would like to help solve this problem with a book from my own perspective.
VK: In terms of time, money or energy what are the best investments you have made which have given you compounded rewards in your career? — Any book, project, conference, meetups can be anything.
JS:
Designing my own website and pet projects. I learned so much about data science and software engineering doing this. Following top data scientists and machine learning academics on Twitter. You learn a lot that way about new publications, novel applications, or just funny anecdotes others in the field share. Networking with other data scientists. This provides a great way to share ideas and new discoveries, along with tips from others that can help you in your own projects.
VK: What are some absurd ideas around data science experiments/projects that are not intuitive to people looking from outside in?
JS:
Sometimes people don’t really understand how machine learning works. Those unfamiliar with it think the computer is “thinking for itself” when all we are really doing is trying to generate a program that can intuit something based on past examples that can be applied to future situations.
VK: In the last year, what has improved your work life which could benefit others?
JS: Try to minimize meetings unless they are absolutely essential. I find I am more productive this way.
VK: What advice would you give to someone starting in this field? What advice should they ignore?
JS: Aim for low-hanging fruit/easy wins first. Sometimes data scientists try to take on projects that are too complicated when simpler ones could be finished in far less time and generate results for your organization much sooner.
I would ignore those who say you absolutely need to know big data tools/deep learning right off the bat, because most likely you won’t need them at first to solve many of your company’s problems.
VK: What is bad recommendations given in data science in your opinion?
JS: People who claim you can become a data scientist in just six months without a closely related background are probably not correct in most cases. The field is very broad and there is a lot to learn. I also don’t like it when people mix up data scientist/data analyst roles. They are not the same thing in my opinion. Both serve different needs and have different skill sets.
VK: How do you determine saying no to experiments/projects?
JS: I try to weigh the impact a project could deliver to the organization along with how much time I think it would take to do it. I prioritize those projects that can deliver the most impact in the least amount of time first. It depends on what data is available however, as you may need data that isn’t yet available to do the project.
VK: Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the amount of data or size of the experiment or a data problem? If yes what do you do to clear your mind?
JS: When starting out with a new database, especially if it is poorly documented (and they usually are unfortunately), it can be incredibly easy to be overwhelmed. I try to start one table at a time inside the database and figure out what the columns mean and whether they may be of value to me. I also try to figure out how the tables are related to each other and how to join them together. This requires patience but you eventually get through it.
VK: How do you think about presenting your hypothesis/outcomes once you have reached a solution/finding?
JS: I try to put myself in the other person’s shoes and ask what would be the best way of getting them to understand a project outcome. This can be especially difficult if the other person isn’t very quantitative by nature, so in this case you really have to narrow down the outcomes of your experiment or project to the absolutely essential parts.
VK: What is the role of intuition in your day to day job and in making big decisions at work?
JS: Intuition definitely helps when deciding what features may be good in a model. It also helps in deciding which projects are worth doing. Unfortunately, both of these only get better with experience.
VK: In your opinion what is the ideal Organizational placement for a data team?
JS: It honestly depends on the team and company. I think Type B data scientists (more focused on software engineering) need to be closely paired with engineering. Type A data scientists (more focused on analysis) need to be closely paired with product or the CEO.
VK: If you could redo your career today, what would you do?
JS: I probably would have either taken more software engineering classes during college or done an internship that had a larger software engineering component during undergrad than I did. I had to learn a lot of software engineering in a very short period of time. While that was exciting and I eventually caught up, it was also challenging. I think it would have been less so if I had more of a familiarity with software engineering best practices before I started to transition into data science out of academia. Software engineering in academia is very different from industry.
VK: What are your filters to reduce bias in an experiment?
JS:
Make sure the distributions in both your control and treatment groups are as similar as possible along with being representative. Randomization is a good way to help reduce bias.
VK: When you hire Data Scientists or Data Engineers or ML Engineers what are the top three technical/non — technical skills you are looking for?
JS: Assuming I wanted to hire a data scientist (more focused on building products, similar to a machine learning engineer):
Strong knowledge of machine learning
Decent software engineering skills
Good communicator
VK: What online blogs/people do you follow for getting advice/learning more about DS?
JS: I like datatau.com a lot for keeping up to date on things. Twitter is also great if you know who to follow. I prefer to follow a mix of leading researchers in academia and top data scientists at companies. This allows me to get practical tips for projects along with new ideas/tools from research groups. If you want an easy way to get started, just see who I follow on Twitter and branch out from there as you find your own interests. My handle is @jmsteinw. | https://medium.com/acing-ai/in-conversation-with-jesse-steinweg-woods-ph-d-senior-data-scientist-at-tronc-f012fbf3172a | ['Vimarsh Karbhari'] | 2020-02-26 05:54:54.291000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Technology', 'Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Expert'] |
The Beast of Lake Memphrémagog | Education
The Beast of Lake Memphrémagog
A beautiful view of nature’s pristine hiding places in the wilds of Canada (photo courtesy of Matt Thomason via Unsplash)
Thirty-one miles of pristine, mirror-like waters comprise what’s known as Lake Memphrémagog, and well before the first documented sighting of something abhorrent there in 1819, First Nation tribes in the area have known never to set foot or canoe into the lake without back-up.
The tranquil appearance of Lake Memphrémagog might fool you, though. Situated between Newport, Vermont, and Canada’s Magog in Quebec, this zig-zagging streak of blue is actually a freshwater glacial lake; it supplies roughly 200,000 people with potable water, and is home to a grand total of twenty-one quaint islands. Five of these are located in the U.S., another fifteen in Canada, and one is claimed internationally.
Lake Memphrémagog is a hugely popular destination for fishermen, boaters, and swimmers. It even has a ferry service, but it is crucial to remind oneself that all is not exactly as it seems.
Foam-capped waves give way to innumerable species of fish, mussels, and microscopic prawns, but it’s likely also home to something else. In 1816, a man known as Mr. Berry and his wife claimed to have seen a hideous-looking creature swimming in the lake, possessing the frightful appearance of a ‘skinned sheep’ and anywhere from twelve to fifteen pairs of legs.
That sighting was only the beginning.
Some 34 years later, poet Norman Bigham would pen literary pieces about a ‘serpent’ in Lake Memphrémagog which lusted after human prey. This further paved the way for Henry Waldeigh’s experience in 1854. He reported witnessing a creature which initially looked like a log or some kind of overturned canoe. This proved to be illusory. In very short order, the head of the beast emerged and peered just above the water’s surface. The head, Waldeigh claimed, had a breadth of at least two feet. (The latter report does not elaborate on whether Waldeigh observed the creature from shore or while in a fishing boat farther out into the lake.) 37 more years passed before there was another sighting of the creature. William Watt declared to have seen a beast that was a chilling 30 feet long, travelling across the lake with its head raised three feet above the water’s surface.
(Photo courtesy of Ivana Cajina via Unsplash)
Aquatic-cryptid sightings are notorious for how much they differ from one another, even — or especially — when the reports are associated with the same body of water. But with the information gleaned so far, it’s fair to say there are enough puzzle pieces to shine a hesitant light on what type of creature we’re dealing with. And if the details used to connect the dots about this cryptid are accurate, I wouldn’t allow my children into Lake Memphrémagog anytime soon.
Up to this point we have (a) a creature with enough length to resemble an overturned canoe, (b) about fifteen pairs of ‘legs’, (c) a head that is two feet wide, (d) and the appearance of a ‘skinned sheep’.
The amount of limbs reported here seems at odds with those of ‘conventional’ lake monster sightings, in which the aquatic cryptids usually have two sets of limbs (flippers/paddles). Therefore, the many-legs theory may not be entirely accurate, but nonetheless is still possible. It could be that Mr. Merry mistook the creature’s fins, if it had any, for multiple legs. But the ‘skinned sheep’ report is both oddly specific and the most difficult to decipher. I don’t believe the Merrys saw a skinned or injured lake monster emerge from the depths. It is feasible, though, that the creature might have been vaguely pinkish in color. Yangtze river-dolphins are renowned for their unique, carnation-pink hue, so it isn’t outside the realm of possibility that the creature dwelling in Lake Memphrémagog might be similarly-colored.
Fast forward to 1929: by now, Lake Memphrémagog’s mysterious denizen has affectionally been dubbed ‘Memphré’. This time, there’s a frightening new element; three friends relaxing in the area claimed to have seen Memphré on SHORE, explaining later to investigators that it looked like a colossal alligator and even left tracks in the sand. In 1933, twelve vacation-goers on a cruise reported a ‘snake-like fish’ undulating on the surface of the lake, well over fifty feet in length. The witnesses further elaborated that the ‘fish’ had a breadth of ten staggering feet.
The tentative Memphré constructed so far — the one with a canoe-like body, broad head, and possibly-salmon-hued skin — has now undergone another transformation. This time, Memphré has been seen on land, which gives new life to the earlier detail of the creature having many limbs. Memphré wouldn’t necessarily have needed feet to climb ashore; sea-turtles are a prime example. Sea-turtles are hugely intelligent creatures who can swim, clamber onto land, dig holes in the sand for their eggs, and then hoist themselves back into the water afterwards. Why couldn’t Memphré have done the same?
That leaves one irreconcilable detail: the out-of-water version of Memphré looked like an alligator. There is almost no way that an alligator, crocodile, caiman, or other similar reptile can fit the reports about the Lake Memphrémagog beast that began to trickle in in the mid-19th century.
That, to me, means one thing: that there might be more than one type of aquatic-cryptid cruising the chilly depths of Lake Memphrémagog. | https://medium.com/creatures/the-beast-of-lake-memphr%C3%A9magog-47377d7d7797 | ['Brown Lotus'] | 2020-12-21 16:03:10.674000+00:00 | ['Cryptids', 'Canadian Lakes', 'Canadian Cryptids', 'Education', 'Canada'] |
New Pathways for Old Wisdom: Mari Margil on the Rights of Nature | The inherent autonomy of the natural world is old wisdom — an unspoken truth that Indigenous communities have held for millennia — but it’s now being threatened by an extractive economy and the laws that condone it. As global society accelerates toward irreversible damage to our climate, people are fighting for the legal recognition of the rights of nature.
Mari Margil, Executive Director of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER), is one of the leaders guiding the movement and codifying a new pathway for how humans relate to the natural world. In this interview, Mari speaks on the challenges to her work and how anyone can get involved.
Watch Mari’s keynote address with her colleague Thomas Linzey at the Bioneers 2020 Conference here.
You often refer to Ecuador, the first country to codify the rights of nature into their constitution, as leading by example. How have you seen this struggle evolve since then?
Mari Margil
Ecuador’s Constitutional Court has recently selected a handful of cases related to the rights of nature to provide “content” to the rights of nature. This is a very important step. We recently testified before the Court and submitted an amicus brief in one of the cases, in which we make the argument that the rights of nature provides a stronger level of environmental protection than traditional environmental laws.
In addition, we have submitted proposals for reform of existing environmental laws to have them protect the rights of nature, which the Biodiversity Commission of Ecuador’s National Assembly included in its new report. The report is the first draft of legislation being provided to the full Assembly for its consideration.
How does the rights of nature movement relate to the current climate crisis? What gives you hope as we move forward?
The rights of nature movement is very important with climate — and we are building a right to a healthy climate provisions into new rights of nature laws. In places like Nepal, for instance, we are working to advance a right of the Himalayas to a healthy climate — the Himalayas are the fastest warming mountain range on earth. This is shifting the understanding of climate change from simply a human problem to a problem that all of nature faces. And with that, that this is a human and nature’s rights crisis.
What are some of the biggest obstacles you’ve encountered in the legal struggle to recognize rights of the natural world?
There are many that seek to continue with business as usual, in terms of how humans have treated nature — which has been one of use and exploitation, with environmental laws legalizing harm of nature. The consequences are many, including the destruction of ecosystems, accelerating species extinction, and of course, climate change. The status quo cannot hold. The struggle for change comes up against the powers that be that don’t want change, because they profit and grow powerful off of the current system.
[adrotate group=”2"]
How can the individuals reading this article contribute to the rights of nature movement, in the context of their own communities?
It’s really just about helping ourselves understand how the existing system works. It treats nature as existing for human use. Our environmental laws are protecting our use of nature. That’s led to profound impacts globally.
People who aren’t lawyers, academics, or scientists have moved initiatives forward in their own communities and on a national level. We share those stories, do workshops, and meet with people one-on-one to talk through these concepts and what’s happening. We discuss how others are moving for a change, developing strategies and learning how to answer tough questions.
Everybody starts in that same place of the fundamental sense that something is wrong and something needs to shift. I take great hope and inspiration from that because people are doing something that’s really difficult. People are willing to step outside their comfort zone because they know something terrible is happening to the planet, and we need to do something really dramatic to make change.
I think people should take hope knowing that other regular Joes just like them are doing something, that they can do it too, and that they don’t need to be any kind of professor, expert, or lawyer. Anybody can do this.
The recent two-day global forum that CDER presented brought together leading experts and communities around the rights of nature movement. What were your takeaways?
We are so pleased that Bioneers was a co-sponsor of the Global Forum. All panel sessions can be found here. Each speaker illuminated the fact that there is such an amazing amount of work being done to advance both the human right to a healthy environment and the right of nature to be healthy. These rights are related and support each other.
As we saw in the different campaigns presented at the Global Forum, we have a collective, growing understanding that fulfilling the human right to a healthy environment depends on the environment being healthy. That sounds like a simple idea, but is essential. | https://medium.com/bioneers/new-pathways-for-old-wisdom-mari-margil-on-the-rights-of-nature-2936af831aab | [] | 2021-01-19 20:19:58.659000+00:00 | ['Climate Change Mitigation', 'Bioneers 2020', 'Bioneers 2020 Conference', 'Conservation', 'Climate Change'] |
Something About Why a Robin Sings | Turn it once, turn it twice
the lamp won’t light unless you’re patient with it
A calm marigold hue,
I think the extra money spent on those
bulbs made my bedroom walls breathe a sigh of relief
Sometimes, though,
their off-white skin reminds me of when I knew you
Waking up early in the morning, I let the chilly air find a home in my bed.
Freezing my fingertips.
I romanticize the little things -
A lamp, sleeping with the windows open,
cold cold hands.
I remember when I was so good I was over romanticized to the point where you didn’t even recognize me anymore.
I wonder if you are still capable of loving someone to the point where
the red spoons in your utensil drawer turn happily to silver
as if they’d found themselves for the first time
There’s time that I cannot account for — my
brain can’t handle recalling even the good memories sometimes.
Though I want to remember,
I am whole,
I am whole,
I am whole even without them.
After all, it is not the weather that makes a robin sing,
it’s their sarynx.
I am afraid I will not love anyone again -
but there is a note I tacked to my bed frame that
tells me to leave those robins singing for all the right reasons. | https://medium.com/@cassidybishop27/something-about-why-a-robin-sings-522ef35d21bd | ['Cassidy Bishop'] | 2020-12-25 01:21:47.880000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Poet', 'Happy', 'Poem', 'Experimental'] |
What it feels like: to launch a tech accelerator during a pandemic | By Isabelle Tibayrenc
Business France UK is the French government agency that fosters trade and investment relations between France and the UK. In early 2020, the Tech department launched Impact, an acceleration programme tailored for French Tech startups and scaleups targeting the UK as their main export market…and then the world turned upside down!
We launched our Impact programme with a strongly held conviction that the CEOs of French start-ups and scaleups needed to come to the UK to build a successful strategy. Little did we know that months later our strongly held belief would become little more than a pipedream as COVID-19 stopped us from commuting to our office, let alone crossing the channel!
Our cohort was still eager to prepare for their launch in the UK. That meant that postponing the programme was out of the question.
We rose to the challenge.
In less than 3 weeks, while adapting to full-time remote working, and the world seemingly grinding to a halt around us, we transformed the programme.
We went virtual, and here’s how it all went down…
Bring on the challenge!
French Tech CEOs in our cohort embraced the new challenge, and COVID-19 didn’t put them off UK expansion.
In fact, far from it!
Whilst startups and scaleups may have changed tact in their development in non-priority countries, when it came to their key target markets, they were keen to push forward. This isn’t unique to tech, according to a Business France survey 62% of French tech companies who export will keep doing so, despite the pandemic.
The importance of keeping the human in digital
Despite being an increasingly digital world, human interaction remains key to building relationships. It’s a common sticking point, but I’m confident when I say that picking the right tech is not the panacea that it’s made out to be. Stakeholder engagement is far more important, no matter the platform.
Engagement and alignment are fundamental to digital success — and human touch, or lack thereof, can make or break an online programme. It quickly became clear to us that communication is of upmost importance when running an online tech acceleration programme!
As a team, our daily meetings helped us to make sure that we were on the same page and keep up morale internally. We also undertook one-on-one conversations with our cohort and our team of mentors to ensure they were happy with the direction we were heading with the project, allowing space for honest feedback and questions, and giving us the time and space to iron out any doubts.
Lessons were learned
One of the most valuable lessons we took from this experience was that in some cases, virtual meetings can be more valuable than face-to-face!
For example, our one-to-one digital mentoring sessions were a great success. A real advantage to going virtual, is that there’s no such thing as distance. We were able to work with mentors and experts who wouldn’t normally have time to commute and spend half-a-day meeting start-ups. This meant that our cohort benefited from sessions with industry leaders which might not have been possible in other circumstances.
What’s more, the cohort were able to spend more time with the mentors, as meetings weren’t dependent on them being in the UK. This meant that they had more quality time to refine and improve their respective strategies for the UK market.
As can be expected, there were some hurdles. For instance, we ran into the difficulty of shortened attention spans and lower emotional engagement when presentations were delivered to larger audiences.
Participants were more likely to multitask, open emails or finish urgent pieces of work. To avoid this, I would recommend keeping presentations very short, and better yet, very interactive. Ask questions, play a game and get all the participants involved.
We even had some pleasant surprises along the way!
Never underestimate how digital-ready and agile a public organisation can be. Even as someone who has been working at one for years, I was sceptical, but I’m happy to report that my misgivings were misplaced.
Despite not having a culture of remote working at Business France, from day one our team worked from home with ease. Our systems and our technology were well adapted for the situation. Every conversation and document was kept and shared through our secure system and we hosted our first virtual session on 7th April.
Onwards and upwards
No rest for the wicked, we’re already thinking about next year. Pandemic-permitting, for future editions we’re planning to have the best of both worlds. We’ll organise a blended mentoring programme with virtual and face-to-face session to ensure the most valuable programme possible for our cohort and our mentors alike. Who says we can’t have our cake and eat it?!
We are already looking for inspiring entrepreneurs who would be willing to lend a hand to help their peers from across the channel set up in the UK — if you’d be interested we’d love to hear from you.
Isabelle Tibayrenc is Team Lead for Technologies & Innovative Services for Business France in the UK and Ireland. She launched the Impact UK acceleration programme earlier this year.
To find out more about Impact UK, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn, or visit the website. | https://medium.com/@impactuk/what-it-feels-like-to-launch-a-tech-accelerator-during-a-pandemic-174e8c11f569 | ['Impact Uk'] | 2020-10-16 08:12:37.364000+00:00 | ['Accelerator', 'Uk Market', 'Export', 'Adaptation', 'Tech Accelerator'] |
Wisdom Hacks: Learning from the 3 Signs Vashti Ignored | Vashti was the fairest of all the noblewomen in the kingdom of Persia during her time.
Who would not want to show off that kind of beauty? She was royalty’s most prized possession, so much that even when he was in a merriment haze, he could not keep his mind off her beauty. Some philosophers called him the foolish King, but I will tell you this: that man practically adored his Queen. He was so much in love. If good things could last forever, wishes would have been horses.
Do you know what they say about the difference between what men say and what wives hear? This noble couple is proof that this relationship challenge has its roots crusted deeply in ancient times. Vashti was taught from childhood to value her dignity and to respect her royal values. In modern times, she would have been one effortlessly classy woman with highly impeccable taste and a jaw-dropping gorgeous look. No one would have dared to make her feel less of a champion. She would always be on guard emotionally and psychologically. She was a queen in appearance, and she made choices every day for the royal household. She was a great homemaker.
How do you make decisions? When a “yes” clashes with your values and a “no” lands you in trouble with your superiors, what would be your response? Sometimes the first instinct is to repel anything that will dent our values or truth and stand for what we believe is right. That is not an awkward decision at all. We also take chances by stifling our opinions and blindly doing what has been asked of us, comforting ourselves that the responsibility of our responses lies with the person at the other end of the table.
Vashti was an ambassador of high moral standards who would not compromise for anything or anyone, especially not her King, whom she felt was being taken for a fool by the princes of the kingdom. She believed that if he were not drunk, he would not have asked her to parade her beauty in front of other men. She felt his request was condescending and took a decision to save him from disgracing his throne and the royal household. She disobeyed his direct order to “save face.”
It should not have gotten her banishment under normal circumstances, but it did. Do you know why? She crossed her bounds and made decisions for her King. A King no longer has power when his authority cannot earn him respect. Did Vashti undermine his position on purpose? I do not think so. She only wanted to act in a capacity to help him preserve his ‘falling’ dignity. Rendering help is not a bad idea but helping someone who did not ask for it or needs it can come with consequences. We must learn to get the clarity behind instructions before taking action.
Let me show you three things that could have prevented Vashti from falling into the pit that swallowed her royal existence. These three things will guide us on the journey of our Christian faith.
1. Do Not Hear; Listen!
Imagine trying to make a contrary decision for God when he has given a direct order. Look at Jonah’s account. The man decided to go and deliver God’s message for Nineveh to another city. He thought to himself that since all God wanted was for him to preach the gospel of truth, and Nineveh was a dangerous place of choice, he would change course and deliver the same message to a different city. He was lucky because it was God’s business, but he still suffered the consequences by living amid a stink in the belly of a whale for 72 hours. God is always merciful, but not everyone gets a second chance with men.
In Vashti’s case, her husband felt bruised because she refused to heed his attention. He wanted to show the world his inestimable jewel. He wanted to let the people know that he had a worthy Queen who was selfless and agelessly beautiful in and out. Unfortunately, his Queen heard his instruction differently. She heard that she should come out for a beauty parade, and she based her response on that. She refused to let her mind interpret the instruction her ears had received. Everyone needs to learn to hear first and then listen for more clarity. When God speaks, we should learn to hear twice.
2. Comfort is a Dangerous Place to Live In
Vashti was a very comfortable Queen. Her husband adored her because she was ‘good to look at.’ He was so mesmerized by her beauty that he could not see anything wrong with her attitude towards their relationship. She was perfect in his sight. Even as I read that first chapter of the book of Esther again, I like to think that she probably might have gotten away with disregarding the King’s order if it was not a public act of disobedience. Heaven knows how many times he might have had to forgive her child-like tendencies in their inner chambers. She did not have cause to think her decisions through at the banquet because it probably was not the first time, and it was not much of a deal. She was comfortably ignorant.
When you are in a position, never think that you are indispensable. Get wisdom, and in all, continually get understanding. Esther learned from her predecessor’s experience; she never stopped learning how to please her King. She never took advantage of the King’s love and admiration. Young Esther sought to be a better Queen daily, and the King never got enough of her. She continually learned how to massage and satisfy the desires of his ego. She did not stay comfortable because of her beauty.
3. Wisdom Is Given, Not Developed
The King had hosted his people to a 7-day feast, so there were a lot of merriments. Even the Queen had a banquet in the royal court. Noble ladies from all over the kingdom must have been in attendance. She received her measure of respect as Queen. Although the Bible did not tell us why she refused to meet the King, she might probably be trying to set an example for her noble guests that she has some measure of control and was not a trophy wife. As women, sometimes we forget that we were created not to do everything a man can do, but to do everything they cannot do. That is why we are their help-mate.
Vashti displayed that she wanted to have the same measure of authority as her husband. The man respected her and her position so much. He allowed a separate banquet outside the one he was already hosting as the King, but she failed when it was time to engage a sense of wisdom. Being submissive is neither slavery nor folly.
We need the wisdom to understand the concept of submission, and it cannot be built or developed. Only God gives it. This wisdom was what made Esther loved by her King, his subjects, and the people.
Wisdom is of God, and the only way to get it is to seek for it. How do you commune with God? Does he speak, and you choose what to hear? Do you know Him enough to understand him? It is when you begin to understand God that you can seek his wisdom. Does the study of God’s word attract you at all? Are you the kind of Christian who would build aesthetics like Vashti or spend time seeking knowledge and wisdom like Esther? The Church is now closer to you than ever before. The gospel is spreading like wildfire. Most essentially, management tools such as ChurchPad have made the Bible study more interesting than you can imagine.
Start your free trial on ChurchPad today and gain tons of wisdom from different Church fellowships.
By Temitayo Badewole | https://medium.com/@churchpad/wisdom-hacks-learning-from-the-3-signs-vashti-ignored-eb680c540db4 | [] | 2020-12-25 23:28:54.397000+00:00 | ['Spiritual Growth', 'Church Leadership'] |
Todo tendría sentido si no existiera la muerte, de Mariano Tenconi Blanco | in In Fitness And In Health | https://medium.com/los-inrockuptibles/todo-tendria-sentido-tenconi-blanco-663715177dde | ['Los Inrockuptibles'] | 2018-03-20 19:00:46.601000+00:00 | ['Reseñas', 'Mariano Tenconi Blanco', 'Artes', 'Teatro'] |
Power Book II: Ghost (2020) #1.9 Series 1 || Episode 9 >> On Starz | TELEVISION SHOW AND HISTORY
A television show (often simply TV show) is any content prBookmark this siteoduced for broadcast via over-the-air, satellite, cable, or internet and typically viewed on a tv set, excluding breaking news, advertisements, or trailers that are usually placed between shows. Tv shows ‘re normally scheduled well ahead of The Drama with Grandpa and appear on electronic guides or other TV listings.
A television show may also be called a tv program (British EnBookmark this siteglish: programme), especially if it lacks a narrative structure. A tv set Movies may be the Drama with Grandpaually released in episodes that follow a narrative, and are The Drama with Grandpaually divided into seasons (The Drama with Grandpa and Canada) or Movies (UK) — yearly or semiaual sets of new episodes. A show with a restricted number of episodes could be called a miniMBookmark this siteovies, serial, or limited Movies. A one-The Drama with Grandpa show could be called a “special”. A tv set film (“made-for-TV movie” or “televisioBookmark this siten movie”) is a film that`s initially broadcast on television instead of released in theaters or direct-to-video.
Television shows may very well be Bookmark this sitehey are broadcast in real The Drama with Grandpa (live), be recorded on home video or an electronic video recorder for later viewing, or be looked at on demand via a set-top box or streameBookmark this sited over the internet.
The first television set shows were experimental, sporadic broadcasts viewable only within an extremely short range from the broadcast tower starting in the. Televised events such as the 636 Summer OlyBookmark this sitempics in Germany, the 636 coronation of King George VI in the united kingdom, and David Sarnoff’s famoThe Drama with Grandpa introduction at the 6 New York World’s Fair in the The Drama with Grandpa spurreBookmark this sited a rise in the medium, but World Drama II put a halt to development until following the Drama. The 646 World Movies inspired many Americans to get their first television set and in 648, the popular radio show Texaco Star Theater made the move and became the first weekly televised variety show, earning host Milton Berle the name “Mr Television” and demonstrating that the medium was a stable, modern type of entertainment which could attract advertisers. The firsBookmBookmark this siteark this sitet national live tv broadcast in the The Drama with Grandpa took place on September 4, 65 when President Harry Truman’s speech at the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference in San FraThe Walking Dead: World Beyondco was transmitted over AT&T’s transcontinental cable and microwave radio relay system to broadcast stations in local markets.
❏ STREAMING MEDIA ❏
Streaming media are multimedia media that are continuously received by an end user and presented to an end user while being provided by a provider. The verb to be streamed identifies the process of providing or receiving media in this way. [Clarification required] Streaming identifies the delivery method of the medium rather than the medium itself. The distinction between the delivery method and the distributed media is particularly true for telecommunications networks, as most delivery systems are either inherently streaming (e.g. radio, television, streaming apps) or not streaming by nature (e.g. books, video cassettes, sound CDs). There are challenges associated with streaming content on the Internet. For example, users whose Internet coStarzection does not have sufficient bandwidth may experience stops, delays, or slow buffering of this content. And users who lack compatible hardDramae or softDramae systems may have problems streaming certain content.
Live streaming is the delivery of Internet content in real time, similar to how live television broadcasts content over the air with a television signal. Live internet streaming takes the form of source media (e.g. a video camera, sound interface, screen capture softDramae), an encoder to digitize the content, a media publisher, and a content delivery network to distribute and serve that content. Live streaming does not need to be recorded at the point of origin, although it is often the case.
Streaming is an option for dBBC Oneloading files. The end user receives the full file for the content before viewing or hearing it. Streaming allows an end user to use their media player to begin playing digital video or audio before the entire file has been transferred. The term “streaming media” can apply to media other than video and audio, such as: B. Live subtitles, ticker tape, and real-time text that are considered “streaming text”.
❏ COPYRIGHT CONTENT ❏
Copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its BBC Oneer the exclusive right to make copies of a creative work, usually for a limited time.[1][1][3][4][5] The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself.[6][6][8] A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States.
Some jurisdictions require “fixing” copyrighted works in a tangible form. It is often shared among multiple authors, each of whom holds a set of rights to use or license the work, and who are commonly referred to as rights holders.[citation needed][6][10][11][11] These rights frequently include reproduction, control over derivative works, distribution, public performance, and moral rights such as attribution.[13]
Copyrights can be granted by public law and are in that case considered “territorial rights”. This means that copyrights granted by the law of a certain state, do not extend beyond the territory of that specific jurisdiction. Copyrights of this type vary by country; many countries, and sometimes a large group of countries, have made agreements with other countries on procedures applicable when works “cross” national borders or national rights are inconsistent.[14]
Typically, the public law duration of a copyright expires 50 to 11 years after the creator dies, depending on the jurisdiction. Some countries require certain copyright formalities[5] to establishing copyright, others recognize copyright in any completed work, without a formal registration.
It is widely believed that copyrights are a must to foster cultural diversity and creativity. However, Parc argues that contrary to prevailing beliefs, imitation and copying do not restrict cultural creativity or diversity but in fact support them further. This argument has been supported by many examples such as Millet and Van Gogh, Picasso, Manet, and Monet, etc.[6]
❏ GOODS OF SERVICES ❏
Credit (from Latin credit, “(he/she/it) believes”) is the trust which allows one party to provide money or resources to another party wherein the second party does not reimburse the first party immediately (thereby generating a debt), but promises either to repay or return those resources (or other materials of equal value) at a later date.[1] In other words, credit is a method of making reciprocity formal, legally enforceable, and extensible to a large group of unrelated people.
The resources provided may be financial (e.g. granting a loan), or they may consist of goods or services (e.g. consumer credit). Credit encompasses any form of deferred payment.[1] Credit is extended by a creditor, also knBBC One as a lender, to a debtor, also knBBC One as a borrower. | https://medium.com/power-book-ii-ghost-starz-s1-e9-series/power-book-ii-ghost-2020-1-9-series-1-episode-9-on-starz-beee995459fa | ['St Loperyou'] | 2020-01-09 00:00:00 | ['Startup', 'TV Series'] |
A house on fire (part 2) | Photo by Shane Young on Unsplash
Sleep was not Lisa’s best friend. At least it hadn’t been since the day she had lost both her parents in a car accident. Nightmares of the cruelest order painstakingly ate away the ungodly hours of her life. Still, like every human being that gradually moves on from adversity, she was learning to lead her life normally. Paul’s presence had been her greatest ally, being by her side unconditionally.
Paul loved her more than anything in his life and she knew this beyond all doubt. It was two nights to go to their second anniversary and she had a feeling that Paul would be planning a surprise for the coming eve. She was equally excited as Paul’s unfettered care is what had brought her life together and spending time with him in any form gave her bliss and a sense of being alive. The stress at work combined with her personal grief had taken a toll on her and so she had resorted to a sabbatical with an aim of sorting her head and figuring out what she really wanted to do. Paul had been extremely supportive on this. “Peace should not be played with”, he would always say.
Post dinner, they usually sat by the bedroom window with a glass of wine talking about their day. It was a usual night sprinkled with excitement for the day that was to come. At half past 11, they got into bed and Lisa hugged Paul tightly, tighter than she usually did. She wanted to tell him something. Something even she didn’t yet know about. Paul kissed her goodnight and soon fell into a slumber decorated by his pronounced snoring. Lisa couldn’t sleep as usual and got back to reading Kafka by the Shore from where she had left earlier. Somehow, she could associate with Murakami’s magical surrealism really well. Next she knew it was quarter to 8. She wanted to be asleep. She wanted to be normal. Soon Paul would be waking up and she didn’t want him all worried for her yet again. Not today. She closed the book, switched off the bedside lamp and pretended to fall asleep. Half an hour later, still awake, she felt Paul’s morning kiss on her forehead. This was routine and one thing she really looked forward to after her stretch of insomnia. Paul got ready and went to the kitchen to fry some bacon and eggs for breakfast. “You wanna have breakfast right now?”, he called out from the kitchen like he always did, very well knowing the answer that she’d have milk and cereal once she woke up. Soon he left for work. Lisa turned in her bed wondering where to place happiness and where to place gloom in this pinboard of life.
She thought maybe a glass of warm milk would help her sleep and walked towards the kitchen. As she was heating up milk in the microwave, she saw a squirrel by the window sill. She went closer and noticed that it was knocking on the window. Lisa waved but the squirrel kept knocking, unperturbed by her surroundings. As she lifted the window pane, the squirrel rather than running away just stood there looking into her eyes. She noticed that the squirrel had something horridly uncanny about it in the sense that its lips were unusually red as if a cosmetic substance had been applied to them. They stood there for a minute and before she could realise, Lisa had lost control over her eyes. She couldn’t look away. She couldn’t even blink. Slowly she felt her whole self fading away. In a swift movement, the squirrel jumped over her head onto the refrigerator behind her as she fell on the ground with a loud thud. It started running on the refrigerator’s door, scribbling something on it with its face.
Rubbing her eyes, trying to get back to reality, she realised that the effort was all futile and she had already gotten to somewhere else. She smelled fire, but she saw nothing. | https://medium.com/@katyalsahil/a-house-on-fire-part-2-2586043cc8b4 | ['Sahil Katyal'] | 2020-12-16 15:32:14.856000+00:00 | ['Love', 'Short Story', 'Thriller', 'Suspense'] |
Medium Messiah | You suck them dry, Medium messiah,
you believe you’re a teacher, a leader,
you hold yourself above ‘the unworthy’
anointing your brow with false humility
showing your narcissistic knowing smile
the festering notion of your own rotten core
self-loathing, self-absorbed,
self-promoting whore,
you’re a pitiful bore.
Self-awareness unaware
or just unwilling to ever bear,
the knowing that your hunger is internal
always clawing for a hold on the external,
user, liar, two-faced, mirror-truth denier,
incestuous pyramid-scheme provider
you’re no community leader,
just an attention needer,
another look at me bleeder.
Afraid to turn eyeward inward
because the truth lies there,
the self you’re too arrogant to face
too bloated with ego to embrace,
distracting yourself with misdirected attempts
to satiate the gnawing knowledge
that you are far from special,
that you’re painfully dull,
that you’re only interested in yourself,
and promoting your sad
self-abused writing.
You, your own favorite author,
you — user, you — false guide,
sucking off others for pointless accolade,
just another way of trying to prove yourself
to yourself, fill the stinking void,
send your cult-like followers out to wander,
to spread your word, preach your greatness,
but no matter what games you play,
how you destroy what you can’t have,
no matter the empty accolades
you collect from the weak and stupid,
you’ll always just be
the shit on a real writer’s shoe. | https://medium.com/literally-literary/medium-messiah-66f74bf6a638 | ['Heath ዟ'] | 2019-06-17 18:36:29.205000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Poetry', 'Writer', 'Self Delusion', 'Narcissism'] |
Sir Aidan, Feminist Knight | The Friday morning meeting of the Round Table at Eldridge Castle began with an unusual amount of bustle and fanfare. There was a good deal of muttering and whispering among the knights; an announcement was to be made. Eventually, Sir Dyson a respected, gray-bearded knight, rose from his seat and spoke.
“To my considerable regret,” he said, “I must give my two weeks notice.” The room exploded into a chorus of appreciations of Sir Dyson and his work, and eventually, the question of his replacement.
Sir Lucius, clasping a scroll, stood and read the list of candidates:
Sir Peter, of Derbyshire
Sir Randall, of Squireshire
Sir Blake, of Criggy Dell
Sir Lavendel, of Mern
The knights fell into a period of silent reflection, considering the merits of each candidate. But Sir Aidan could not hold his tongue. “Excuse me!” The assembled knights stared at Sir Aidan, stunned by his interruption.
“Does anyone notice a pattern here?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“These candidates,” said Sir Aidan, “all share one distinct quality.”
“Honor?” said one.
“Bravery?” said another.
“A strong yet not overbearing sense of self?” chimed a third.
Sir Aidan sighed.
Sir Aidan considered himself a knight of ideas. His one big idea — the one that excited him and for brief moments had the power to dispel his fears that he was really just average — concerned chivalry.
Chivalry was the buzzword of the day, part of the zeitgeist (a word Sir Aidan could not stand). According to the code of chivalry, each knight served a lady. While Sir Aidan and the other knights rode around England, fighting for the glory of God and king and country, the women of England stayed home, minding household affairs and waiting for the knights to return. At least this is what Sir Aidan and his colleagues believed.
In the evening the knights would ride home, dab themselves with towels, visit their ladies and tell them all about what they had seen and done. No one could remember who started it, but several of the knights would kneel when they returned to their ladies and eventually it became standard practice. The knights brought their ladies presents, ideally plundered from vanquished rivals but more frequently purchased from local shops. But above all, the law of chivalry decreed that knights treat women with courtesy and respect.
Yet Sir Aidan found certain aspects of chivalry unsettling.
Though ladies were its beneficiaries, chivalry was a system created by men. Sir Aidan increasingly felt it was a system actually designed to reward the knights, not the ladies, mainly by allowing them to keep doing what they wanted to do: ride around the country, fight, and then talk about it all later, during meetings.
He thought about all the times he gave presents to his lady, Lady Annabelle. Giving Lady Anabelle presents made him feel good. But how did it make Lady Annabelle feel? He did not know. He had never asked.
He felt very conflicted about kneeling. Knights kneeled as a sign of respect to their ladies. But when Sir Aidan thought about it, he realized that kneeling always brought him relief after a long day. No, kneeling was not so much about showing respect to a lady. It was about being tired.
The more he thought about these things, the more Sir Aidan came to see that chivalry was not in fact a system that helped women. It was a system designed to make women think it was helping them, while it was actually keeping them down. Sir Aidan felt conflicted again. In truth, he felt conflicted probably 80 percent of the time.
Sir Aidan collected his ideas in a notebook at home, mostly stray thoughts and pleasing phrases. He dreamed of publishing a scroll that would transform society, and he particularly liked to think of possible titles. Sometimes, even though he lived alone, he would lock his bedroom door and write these titles out in a large, regal script. His favorite was Beyond Chivalry.
Because Sir Aidan did not consider himself a radical, and in fact prided himself on his conservative bearing and even temper, it was many years before his dissatisfaction with the status quo reached a boiling point.
While riding through the countryside one day, Sir Aidan heard a lady’s voice cry out for help from afar. He charged toward the sound of her cries until he came to a castle. There, in the highest tower, a beautiful lady with golden hair leaned out of the window. Sir Aidan stood by attentively at the foot of the tower as she explained her predicament. As far as he could make out from her rushed exposition, it involved a drunken husband, and it was urgent.
Sir Aidan’s instincts told him to break down the castle door, fight his way up the tower steps, vanquish the villainous husband and rescue the damsel. He had done this a hundred times and it was always the same. It would end with Sir Aidan in the tower bedroom, stepping over the slain husband and cradling the beautiful damsel in his arms. He could replay the stock scenes in his mind like a movie montage: the heaving breast of the buxom damsel; her copious thanks and his “it was nothing’s”; the predictable comedy of removing a full suit of armor; the perfunctory sex act; the awkward, clattering exit.
The montage ceased as a thought occurred to him: by going through the usual motions, he would only be perpetuating a way of life he increasingly found intolerable. Certainly he could rescue the damsel, but what then? She would return to her previous state of helplessness, at the mercy of male aggressors — if not the drunken husband, then the wider patriarchal system itself, just as hell-bent on her captivity and submission. The root social causes that for centuries had been driving hysterical women into castle towers, and then blaming them for it, would continue.
Sir Aidan removed his helmet and explained to the lady, who was growing more impatient by the second, that he did not plan to rescue her after all. Rather, he said, he would work to instill a system of alternate values at the castle from within. It meant granting ladies access to jobs traditionally reserved for men, it meant economic equality, it meant the eradication of the word “damsel,” and quite possibly the disbanding of the Round Table, or at the very least a lady quota. It was quite possible, he explained to her, that real change would take at least a generation. When Sir Aidan yelled these things to the lady in the tower, he cupped his hands around his mouth so she could hear better.
Then he rode back to Eldridge Castle, dabbed himself with a towel, and went to see Lady Annabelle. The clarity of his thoughts made him regret not having his notebook.
The next morning at the Round Table, the knights discussed new business.
“We have heard about an attack on a damsel.”
“In what precinct?”
“Twenty-four.”
Sir Dabney consulted his pocket map and said, “That is the precinct belonging to Sir Aidan.”
Sir Aidan turned to face him.
“Were you aware of this attack?” Sir Dabney asked.
“Yes,” Sir Aidan said. “It was in progress as I approached the castle.”
“And why did you not save the damsel?”
“I believe,” Sir Aidan said, “that I did save her.”
“How is that?” another knight asked.
Sir Aidan, sensing the opportunity to articulate his vision, swallowed hard. “I believe we have been going about it all wrong,” he said. “Ladies do not want to be helped. A just society is one in which ladies can help themselves. The scene I came upon seems to me symptomatic of a wider problem that has rotted our society to its core. To have saved her — by your definition — would have been the equivalent of tossing a single goblet of water on a raging fire.”
This statement stunned the room into silence. For the first time, Sir Aidan understood that, while his ideas seemed reasonable enough to him, they might be regarded as dangerous, even treasonous, by his comrades. Sir Lucius shattered the silence by slamming a fist down on the table.
“You are lucky that duty calls us,” Sir Lucius said, trembling with anger. Several knights called out for Sir Aidan to be murdered on the spot. Sir Lucius held up one hand to silence them.
“If it were not for chivalry, we would tear you apart right here,” he said. The meeting adjourned as the knights rushed to their horses at set out across the countryside to find the damsel in the tower.
Sir Aidan did not ride again. His scroll, Beyond Chivalry, was published to mixed reviews a decade or so hence, under the penname Paul Nothnagle Devere, and dedicated to Lady Annabelle, with the disclaimer “This is not a present.” He is believed to have lived to the age of 72, in happy exile in a rural province far from Eldridge Castle. His replacement, Sir Blake of Criggy Dell, is said to have distinguished himself mightily by the chivalric standards of the Round Table. He is also said to have vowed to avenge the shortcomings of his predecessor. Whether these claims reached Sir Aidan, or whether he would have cared, is not known. | https://medium.com/the-hairpin/sir-aidan-feminist-knight-3fcd25be359 | ['Gregory Beyer'] | 2017-05-01 15:49:13.131000+00:00 | ['Chivalry', 'Humor', 'Knights', 'Feminism', 'Medieval'] |
Debunking the ‘Humans Use 10% of Their Brain’ Myth | Every time one of my clients mentions the idea that humans only use 10% of our brains, it activates a feeling of resistance inside of me. When I reach for a way to express this feeling I see the visual imagery of a vampire turning up his fangs and claws as the slightest bit of sunlight that barely grazes his or her body.
I knew that the common understanding of this 10% brain function was not at all accurate, but, I didn’t have the language or the understanding to explain why.
Whether it was purely intuition or that mixed with what I do know about the brain and brain activity, I wanted to end it.
Let’s assume that it is true. Every time that you say it, you affirm that it is true and you do yourself a disservice.
You are telling yourself and everyone around you that you are only 1/10 of the smart that you could be. No matter what your understanding of reality, there’s no way that can be helpful to your psyche.
Well… get ready. This is going to be a ‘quantum-leap’, if you will, in immediate activation of brain activity. Hold on to your seat!
It’s simply not true.
Can you feel 90% of your brain activating? Hehe. If you actually can, don’t disregard it as your imagination. Experiences like this are becoming more and more real for us collectively. Believe it or not, I have been able to feel my brain waves since 2013.
You probably want more of an explanation, I bet.
Alright, here goes.
Where did this urban myth and massive misunderstanding of human physiology originate?
It comes from a time, many moons ago when we were first understanding the body through the science of histology, which is the study of the microscopic anatomy of biological tissue, or the cells that make up organs.
A histological study of the brain showed us that 10% of the brain was made-up of neurons & 90% was made of supportive or connective tissue which we call glial cells.
Back when this data was collected The Neuron Doctrine or the basic common understanding of neurons is that they were the basic anatomical, and physiological unit of the nervous system & glial cells were more or less just support.
It is easy to see how it’s probable that one eager-to-understand scientist who knew he was reaching levels of knowledge not-yet-known, would conclude that we are only using 10%. Because the other 90% was just holding the neurons together, connecting and supporting them physically & nutritionally.
(Wouldn’t have been the most efficient of Divine Design, hehe. Imagine if 90 % percent of our body simply transmitted food and held things in place. Initially, it may seem like that is almost true, because of the digestive system and such. However, when you give it a little bit more thought every single part of our body not only has a function that is working 24 hours a day for our lifetime (under ideal circumstances of course), but I cannot think of a part of the body that only serves just one function.
With the exception of the appendix, but there is controversial debate and alternative theories to that. Also, I’m pretty sure that it’s proven that even in fit’s current state, it has some detoxifying abilities.
(I didn’t look into the appendix for this article so if I am wrong or right, please share with me in the comments) | https://medium.iam5d.com/debunking-the-humans-use-10-of-their-brain-myth-8f9ce4ebbcaa | ['Richard Thomas Scott'] | 2020-12-25 04:10:19.631000+00:00 | ['Neuroscience', 'Learning', 'Life Hack', 'Brain', 'Thinking'] |
Why You Should Never Consent to a Coding Test in an Interview | Credit: Author
Software engineering interviews nowadays often involve some kind of coding test or programming exercise and I think that’s a very Bad Thing. Here’s why.
Lazy Tropes
Asking software engineers to perform a particular task such as writing an algorithm to generate factorials (a very common one) or to sort a [singly|doubly] linked list can be easily memorised beforehand and offers no insight into a candidate’s skill other than their strength of rote memorisation. You may as well ask the ASCII code of the character ‘A’.
The detailed solutions to many such exercises are widely available online in various reference materials and, in many cases, in books that contain both algorithmic and specific program language implementations to all of the common interview coding questions.
Whilst working at one company I was talking with a colleague about the detailed interview process they were working through with a major hedge fund. Everything technical they asked he had carefully memorised from a widely available interview questions and answers book that a current employee had passed on as a source to all interview questions.
Luckily, he was a skilled engineer, but had consented to go through this frankly monotonous and mundane exercise to secure the position. He shouldn’t have had to do that — not only was it a waste of his valuable time but it also gave the hiring company nothing in terms of ascertaining his ability.
He left a year later, in any case, tired of their low technical bar for hiring and continual ineffective project management practices…
Use of Memory
The same reasoning goes for coding an algorithm in a specific programming language. No software engineer operating in the real world would write a section of code without either some kind of syntax checking aid (such as an editor’s built-in code completion), without referring to some technical documentation, or without just copying a pre-implemented solution where applicable. There’s no sense in reinventing the wheel.
I would wager that much code running the world’s systems today originated as an answer on Stack Overflow.
In all practicality, working with the syntax of a particular programming language comes from use and familiarity. Whilst an interviewer may think that testing a candidate on the syntactical nuances of a particular language is a gauge of their understanding, I, for example, can state categorically that although I have been using the C language for nigh on thirty years that I still regularly get the syntax wrong.
In fact, as my software engineering career has evolved and I have become more familiar with the languages of my own interest, I regularly get confused between syntactical nuances of say, C and C++, or Objective-C. This isn’t because I’m a terrible software engineer (though some may disagree…) but because there’s only so much knowledge you can hold in your head and have direct recall of at any one time.
A good software engineer often doesn’t know the answer to a specific question off the top of their head, but will definitely know where to look to find the answer. Perhaps consider asking the best place to find such information as an interview question?
Common Tasks
Something I touched on briefly earlier on is the maxim of not reinventing the wheel. For example, if you’re working in C and need a serial port routine then you don’t have to rewrite one from scratch unless the situation specifically demands it. Perhaps you need a JSON parser, a very common requirement — unless you’re coding on a limited resource embedded board, on a satellite in geostationary orbit, or in Malbolg then perhaps you should just pull in a pre-written one from a library. Chances are it’s been in use for a long time, has been fully tested, and has detailed (and correct) documentation. Solid.
It’s unlikely in modern software engineering to come across a common task that hasn’t either already been automated in a pre-written library or whose implementation isn’t widely available in algorithmic form.
If you’re like me, and in the game primarily because of the love of the subject, then you’ll probably be actively seeking out those roles where you’re implementing things that have been implemented before. Seeking out strange, new worlds, new life, new civilisations, …
In fact, the concept of software engineers in the far future has more than once been likened to code archeologists where they primarily reuse existing code and spend relatively little time designing and coding new and novel algorithms.
Discussion Discussion Discussion
I do fully endorse finding out where or not the person you’re interviewing ‘knows their stuff’ but using any of the above methods in, in my opinion, utterly worthless. Say it like it is.
For example, a simple discussion on the coding paradigms used in modern software engineering, whether a particular language would be a good choice for a specific implementation, or whether or not a particular software engineering methodology (I’m looking at you, agile) is relevant are far more rewarding and poignant subjects to discuss.
Lead the discussion to highlight general areas, see what insight the candidate has into new problems and perhaps alternative novel methods to tackle older ones. How do they see things evolving, how would they start to address something. Keep open ended, stay away from specifics and minutiae.
And the key there is, discuss. Ascertaining value is not just about ticking boxes and it continually surprises me that many companies that are considered ‘up and coming’ and ‘leaders in their field’ still fall back to outdated, monotonous, and utterly predictable hiring practices that show little value in gauging actual technical acumen.
It’s often said that the interviewee should be interviewing the company just as much as the company is interviewing them. I’m fully behind this one.
Being interviewed by someone with a list of precise technical questions is a pretty much always red flag, particularly when they don’t wish to prolong discussion on any one point. It often shows that the interviewer may not fully understand what they’re asking and any answer that doesn’t precisely match up with what’s written on their script will be classified as incorrect.
The Bottom Line
Some companies have changed to better methods, others, well, fall well short of the mark. This is where I urge you, fellow software engineers, to not engage with companies that follow outdated hiring practices and insist on programming tests and exercises.
Especially prolonged ones!
I’ve heard stories of companies asking for projects to be completed on the candidate’s time, often taking several days.
Others have generic ‘aptitude tests’ for specific languages, multiple choice, where a hint of brain fog within the limited allotted time equals game over!
If you’re new in the game then perhaps you’re not in a position to turn down interviews and I fully understand this, but do see it as a learning experience. Go through the motions, get the experience, learn as much as you can, and if the job does disappoint then just move on. As you move on your confidence will grow along with your knowledge and experience. After all, the company benefits from you, so you must equally benefit from the company.
If you’re an older experienced sort, as I am, then hiring companies — just talk to me. I’ve been around, I’ve seen things and done things, the qualifications are all on the wall and on the C.V., and I resent being channelled down some generic hiring pipeline and repeatedly tested on my ability,
If you think you’re a decent employer and you can’t understand why seemingly excellent candidates keep pulling out then you should take a real long look at your hiring practices. | https://medium.com/swlh/why-you-should-never-consent-to-a-coding-test-in-an-interview-8e22f5078c7f | ['Dr Stuart Woolley'] | 2020-12-29 02:10:38.065000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Work', 'Jobs', 'Interview', 'Software Engineering'] |
How You Get Wet, Why You Get Wet, & How To Stay Wet | By Erika W. Smith
PHOTOGRAPHED BY DAANTJE BONS
When it comes to sex, “ getting wet “ doesn’t refer to getting busy in the shower or having sex on the beach. Instead, it’s about natural vaginal lubrication, also called arousal fluid.
If you have a vagina, you probably know that it’s totally normal for vaginas to be at least a little bit wet. Every day, the glands on the walls of your cervix create a clear mucus that takes bacteria and dead cells away from your body — your vagina’s way of cleaning itself. This discharge is white or clear, and if you’re not on hormonal birth control, it varies throughout your menstrual cycle, becoming thinner, clearer, and stickier around ovulation.
When you’re turned on, your body creates some extra lubrication to prepare for any kind of vaginal penetration, such as fingering, P-in-V sex, using a sex toy, fisting, or anything else involving the vagina.
What is arousal fluid?
The lubrication your body produces when you’re turned on is different from your everyday vaginal discharge. This kind of lubrication is primarily coming from your Bartholin’s glands, which are located on either side of your vaginal opening, instead of the glands on the walls of your cervix. Your Skene’s glands, which are located near your urethra and also contribute to squirting, might also add some lubrication, too ( though not all researchers agree on this). Additionally, your labia will get wet — that’s because when the blood rushes to your genitals, your vulva starts to “sweat,” producing extra moisture.
How can I get turned on?
The best way to “get wet” is to spend a lot of time getting turned on before you begin any penetrative activity. Kissing, making out, dry-humping, dirty talk, and other forms of foreplay will help you get aroused and get wet.
However, many people don’t produce enough lubrication to make vaginal penetration feel good, even if their minds and bodies are extremely turned on. This is called arousal nonconcordance, and it’s particularly common for people with vaginas.
“Arousal nonconcordance is a mismatch between how turned on a person feels and how their genitals are behaving,” sex educator and author of Come As You Are, Emily Nagoski previously told Refinery29. “It’s nearly universal; almost every woman will, at some point, experience it, just as almost every man experiences erectile issues.”
There are a ton of factors can lead to decreased lubrication, including using hormonal birth control, breastfeeding, taking medications like antihistamines or antidepressants, smoking cigarettes, or even not drinking enough water.
What if I can’t get wet?
While arousal nonconcordance might be frustrating, there’s an easy remedy: lube. As Ina Garten says, if you don’t make your own, store-bought is fine. And even for people who produce a lot of lubrication naturally, adding some store-bought lube can make sex feel even better.
As Nagowski said, “How wet is wet enough? Wetness where? And when? The amount of wetness most bodies create is just not enough for penetration that lasts more than a few minutes, so really everyone engaging in penetration should use lube.”
What kind of lube is best?
The right lube for you will depend on personal preference and your sex life: Some types of lubricant shouldn’t be used with latex condoms, for example, because they can increase the risk of the barrier breaking. A safe place to start is with a water-based lube. They’re not the slipperiest out there, so you may have to reapply — but they’re typically safe to use with condoms and sex toys (just read the bottle to be sure). | https://medium.com/refinery29/how-you-get-wet-why-you-get-wet-how-to-stay-wet-4d9cd8bfff11 | [] | 2020-12-13 16:33:19.053000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Sex', 'Sexuality', 'Dating', 'Relationships'] |
MovieBuzz System Design: Coding End To End System From Scratch! | Database Choice
We want to store 10 million user details and 5 million movie details. We are looking for a highly available database. We can compromise with the Consistency of user details and movie details. The best choice for storing this big data is Cassandra.
When the user opens the application we want to show a list of running movies in the user’s city. Once a user selects a movie, we want to show the user a list of the nearest Theatres in the user’s city running the shows for given movie. We can’t achieve this using Cassandra. We need a search engine for that. We can use ElasticSearch to solve these use-cases.
Cassandra is designed for heavy writes. As any write operation is just adding data to Memtable in RAM and appending data to commit log in the target node. So we can store all the movies and theatres details in Cassandra. The read operation in Cassandra is performance intensive. As reads have to go through n number of SSTables on disk via multiple caches in memory and disk. So we should try to avoid reading from Cassandra as much as we can.
Whereas for ElasticSearch, write operation is costly as every time we insert a document in ElasticSearch, we are indexing that document. So we should only store Movies and Theatres fields on which we want searchability. We are not allowing users to search movies by Actor names, so we should not store Actors associated with movies in ElasticSearch.
We can’t compromise on consistency in case of which seats are available and we don’t want multiple users to book the same seats in the same theatre. So we need a highly consistent relational database even if at the cost of availability. For this use-case, we can go with the sharded SQL database. | https://medium.com/@bhushan-gosavi/moviebuzz-system-design-coding-end-to-end-system-from-scratch-606dbd66e568 | ['Bhushan Gosavi'] | 2021-04-26 18:00:18.243000+00:00 | ['System Design Project', 'Kafka', 'Kubernetes', 'Cassandra', 'Elasticsearch'] |
House Price Prediction Machine Learning Model. | Thousands of houses are sold every day. There are some questions every buyer asks himself like: What is the actual price that this house deserves? Am I paying a fair price? In this project, a machine learning model is proposed to predict a house price based on data related to the house (its size, the year it was built in, etc.). During the development and evaluation of the model, I have demonstrated the code used for each step followed by its output.
Note:-Here I’m using Jupyter Notebook. You can even use Google Colab or any other ID. I tried to add comments in all the cells so that you can understand them easily. If you still have any doubt you can reach me through the links given at the end of this blog.
I have divided the blog into Simple steps. In order to make you all more clear.
Import the necessary libraries and loading data.
Data is rightly skewed hence Transforming it
VISUALIZING NULL VALUES
FEATURE ENGINEERING
filling missing values
LOADING LIBRARIES
Modeling:
1. Gradient Boosting: Gradient boosting is a machine learning technique for regression and classification problems, which produces a prediction model in the form of an ensemble of weak prediction models, typically decision trees. It builds the model in a stage-wise fashion like other boosting methods do, and it generalizes them by allowing optimization of an arbitrary differentiable loss function.
2. XGBoost: XGBoost is an optimized distributed gradient boosting library designed to be highly efficient, flexible and portable. It implements machine learning algorithms under the Gradient Boosting framework.
3. LASSO: Lasso regression is a type of linear regression that uses shrinkage. Shrinkage is where data values are shrunk towards a central point, like the mean. The lasso procedure encourages simple, sparse models. This particular type of regression is well suited for models showing high levels of multicollinearity or when you want to automate certain parts of model selection, like variable selection/parameter elimination.
4. RIDGE: Ridge Regularization is a technique that helps overcoming over-fitting problem in machine learning models. It is called Regularization as it helps keeping the parameters regular or normal.
The score of the model is 0.12503
Conclusion/ Results
As a result, we can say, XGBOOST is the best fit to this dataset, gives 0.107 accuracy. Gradient, lasso, ridge Models are working very well on this Dataset. Ensembled all the models together for better results.
Future Scope
In future, the models can be upgraded with some better techniques in terms of getting higher and better accuracy. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/house-price-prediction-machine-learning-model-41cb1cf98914 | ['Syed Nauman'] | 2020-12-17 15:09:01.001000+00:00 | ['Kaggle', 'Machine Learning', 'House Price Prediction', 'Board Infinity', 'Médium'] |
Beyond Damage Control: Institutional Reform | (Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash)
1
Well, it ain’t over. And even when it is over, it won’t be over.
As I write, it seems as if Biden will win the Electoral College by a hair. But at the moment Biden not only has close to 4 million more popular votes than Trump: he has beaten Obama’s popular vote count in 2008 and thus has set a record for the total number of votes cast for any presidential candidate in US history. And still, Biden hasn’t yet won the office.
This is, frankly, madness. Even more insane than the fact that the Trump regime is preparing to throw any legal challenge it can against the electoral results to see if any of them stick. The “damage control” election that I understood this one to be has come to pass and, hopefully, we will have dodged one bullet aimed at the heart of American Liberal Republican Democracy.
But any more of these skin-of-the-teeth victories will be the death of us, and I am not talking death brought on by angst on an individual level. That can be palliated by meditation, social media and cable news fasting, listening to Vivaldi, and Sauvignon Blanc, all of which have a much-appreciated calming effect. I am talking about the death of us as members of a political society. And much of what is going on in this interim period where votes are counted and strategies formulated is not encouraging. When the smoke clears, we need to get beyond damage control and get real about institutional changes that are needed if the US body politic is to survive. Otherwise the patient will die, and it we will have no one to blame but ourselves.
2
One might have predicted that Centrist Liberals and Progressive Leftists would snipe at each other in the wake of an election that shows Right-wing Populist Nationalism and economic Libertarianism to be very much alive, even if they seem to have lost this electoral battle. Some of the Centrist Liberals have argued that the Democratic party needs to tone down its rhetoric, and never utter the words “Black Lives Matter”, “LGBTQ rights”, and “democratic socialism” ever again. Some of the Progressive Leftists have drawn the opposite conclusion, affirming the counterfactual conditional that if the Democrats had run Bernie Sanders or, to a lesser degree, Elizabeth Warren, the election would have been a blowout, as much a rejection of the Democratic old guard as the Republican Conservative right, whether establishment or alt. It would be nice if we all just didn’t go there for a while. We need to take a deep breath before we start thinking of circular firing squads.
While I tack closer to the latter, Sanders-Warren form of progressivism, I despair of the doctrinaire purism that seems to have taken hold in large swaths of that camp. When a podcast lambasted Noam Chomsky, of all people, as out of touch and over the hill for supporting Biden as a bulwark against the ecological murderousness of Trump, I began to understand both how the Left tends to eat its own, and its penchant to miss the very point of “the political” at the same time they try to defend it. But it’s also clear to me that the bland establishment centrism advocated by Mark Lilla and others defends a form of Liberal Democracy that makes no real difference to a nation deeply distressed by both economic and social injustices. It also ignores the hard work that Progressive and Left-populist grassroots groups, the heart of the Democratic Party’s Warren-Sanders wing, did the lion’s share of mobilizing voters to flip Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and perhaps even Georgia at this point. Would such voters be inspired by a centrist appeal toward “change, but not too much change, since, well, that would actually change things?” I have my doubts.
I think that both points of view, the “moderate” and the “radical”, are missing the larger, more urgent point: that before one can wonk on and deliberate about policy and political theory, serious institutional change must take place in the framework of the Federal government. Because if it doesn’t, the USA will cease to be even a nominally functional Liberal Democratic Republic. It won’t even be anarchy, which is after all a respectable political position. (Chomsky’s, in fact.) It will be chaos. The chaos which we are experiencing now; and the fact that few of the voting public recognize it that we are all in a chaotic free-fall is a key part of the problem.
The Electoral College is merely freakish at this point. It makes the presidential votes of New Yorkers, Californians, and residents of all the other non-swing-states pretty much meaningless. This is old, old news. Few like it, but it has not been eliminated through a Constitutional Amendment because the Constitution is insanely difficult to amend — and this by design.
I can understand, if not exactly endorse, James Madison’s attempt at constructing a procedural republic at the time he drafted the Constitution. By making its precepts vague, and by making it difficult to change or evade, he enabled the Constitution to handle and limit the power of those “factions” which, by pressing their interests against their counterparts’, promote either political instability or, if victorious, political tyranny. Madison’s procedural republic will “work” if politics is basically a matter of creating a modus vivendi where wealthy agrarian, Jeffersonian oligarchs (many of whom being slaveholders) compete against wealthy commercial, Hamiltonian oligarchs (many of whom desire only to exploit or exclude hoi polloi). But it is not 1787 anymore (not that 1787 was all that hot to begin with). The Constitution does not work, if it ever did work for free and equal citizens regardless of their station in life, regardless of race or gender or class. Unless the Electoral College goes by the boards, it is likely that, in an ideologically polarized nation such as the US, it will replay in 2024, 2028, etc. ad nauseam.
There is far more institutional change that needs to be addressed, far beyond the scope of this essay. But it is important to mention at least four items where change is desperately needed. First, the Presidency is far, far too powerful. The powers of the presidency had, in the republic prior to World War II, been hemmed-in largely by norm rather than by rule, with the result that the norms were chipped away by executive chicanery, bit by bit, until Donald Trump smashed them to dust with ease and little resistance from Congress and the Courts.
Second, the Senate is undemocratic and unrepresentative. This also is old, old news. That Wyoming, the least populous state in the union, has as many senators as California, the most populous, systematically degrades the power of Californian citizens to have their say through their representatives in the upper chamber. It needs to be reformed, either by expansion with Senators apportioned by population, or abolished altogether. Mitch McConnell was never elected to be proconsul to Trump, lording it over the entire nation from his perch in Kentucky’s seat in the Senate chamber.
Third, the Supreme Court is both too independently powerful, insofar as a “stacked” court can invalidate popular and just policies on political whim, covered over with a thin pretext-coat of legal varnish; and not independently powerful enough, since the President and the Senate can play all sorts of political games with its composition, without paying any price. The difference between the Merrick Garland and Amy Coney Barrett candidacies have made the sheer cynicism of the Republicans on this matter clear as glass. While legal reasoning is distinguishable from political reasoning about effective policies, it is naïve to think that one’s political philosophy has no bearing on one’s legal philosophy, one’s jurisprudence. It is time we give the idea of the absolute separation of law and politics a decent burial. In doing so, it is insane to think that a lifetime sinecure on the highest court of the land is defensible. That has to go.
Finally, the corrupting influence of big money and social media alike needs to be addressed. Corporate influence, through lobbying and media disinformation, helps miseducate the electorate to endorse policies that are not only unjust but against their own interests and benefit. But in the past two Presidential election cycles it is social media that has played the chief villain. Social Media discourages critical, analytical thought, expressed by the give-and-take of reasons and with an assumption of good faith on the part of those with whom you disagree. That is gone, and unless we get it back, a key condition of Liberal Republican Democracy will vanish. Social Media in general needs to be tightly regulated. (Facebook, in particular, needs to be regulated out of existence.) Far from being an attack on free speech, public control of social media is its precondition.
3
Liberals, Progressives, Left Populists, Social Democrats and Democratic Socialists, even Conservative never-Trumpers, have had a rough couple of weeks. It is tempting to think that, if things continue to go the way they seem to be going, they can breathe a sigh of relief, and conclude that things are slowly getting back to equilibrium. On this account, the 2020 election has proven that the United States of America lost its heart and mind only temporarily, and that all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. This sense of relief is understandable. We all need to take a deep breath. But it is not responsible. It is not commendable. It is not honest.
The truth is that, except for those that have struggled and fought their way to the top of the power heap (with the unacknowledged help of bottom-up organizers and a demographic that is changing, however glacially, toward liberty, equality, and solidarity), nothing has really changed at all. Even if all the institutional changes advocated above come to pass — hardly a given — close to half the electorate has, for whatever reason, concluded that Donald Trump was worth voting for, either as a form of damage control from their perspective, or because they view him as a socio-cultural and political savior, or, in a more paltry sense, because they think he is good for their 401k accounts. Trumpism, even if the Republican establishment rejects it, is not going away any time soon.
That close of half the electorate is okay with someone whose depraved indifference to COVID-19 has led to over 230,000 deaths and counting, has led to children in cages and children separated from parents who cannot be located, to forced sterilizations, to a crashed economy, and manifested utter indifference to the very middle and working classes that he has claimed to be the champion, has led to monumental corruption, influence peddling, and self-dealing — has led to all this, well, this is no trivial phenomenon. It is a sign that both the wreckage of the past two years and the indefensibly close race that is now concluding is not just a problem of institutions. It is a problem of political culture. There is no rational, ethical, political reason why it should have been this close. The problem is not limited to institutional structures. The problem is us.
Cultural change cannot be brought about by fiat. It isn’t easy. But unless the USA figures out a way to imagine and entrench a Liberal Democratic Republican political culture, to sustain, normatively, its institutions and public practices, the disasters of 2016 and 2020 will be recurring, oscillating events. I will discuss this in a subsequent essay, but let me conclude with this ambivalent sentiment: it may be time to breathe a sigh of relief and get at least one good night’s sleep, but the travails are not over yet. Not by a long shot.
I do not relish being the bringer of bad news in the wake of good news. But it wouldn’t be honest to do otherwise. | https://lnelson10051954.medium.com/beyond-damage-control-institutional-reform-5b688217f9c0 | ['Laura Nelson'] | 2020-11-06 17:02:16.679000+00:00 | ['Supreme Court', 'Political Philosophy', 'Electoral College', 'Senate', '2020 Presidential Race'] |
Who is a Life Partner? | Who should be a life partner?
Is there some KIND of life partner that you need to expect?
Surely, he/she has to have that one quality,
Or more than just one quality?
The perfect one, who never makes mistakes.
The one who can never cry, even though there’s something hurting so bad.
What kind of a perfect life partner makes mistakes!
And even if they do, what should you do to be the other perfect one?
Remind them constantly about whatever wrong has happened between you two. Blame them, just keep on playing the blame game!
And yet you expect the other person to be the PERFECT LIFE PARTNER? | https://medium.com/@radhasharmapujari/who-is-a-life-partner-e2da06e77727 | [] | 2020-12-17 13:10:16.630000+00:00 | ['Problems', 'Partnerships', 'Life Partner', 'Partners', 'Relationships'] |
Data pipelines: what, why and which ones | Data pipelines: What, why and which ones
Photo by Clint Adair on Unsplash
If you are working in the Data Science field you might continuously see the term “data pipeline” in various articles and tutorials. You might have also noticed that the term pipeline can refer to many different things! There are pipelines spanning different parts of your IT stack, pipelines for a specific tool, and pipelines within a specific code library. UbiOps, the company I work for, also offers its own form of pipelines, for instance.
It can be quite confusing keeping track of what all these different pipelines are and how they differ from one another. In this article we will map out and compare a few common pipelines, as well as clarify where UbiOps pipelines fit in the general picture.
What is a Data pipeline?
Let’s start at the beginning, what is a data pipeline? In general terms, a data pipeline is simply an automated chain of operations performed on data. It can be bringing data from point A to point B, it can be a flow that aggregates data from multiple sources and sends it off to some data warehouse, or it can perform some type of analysis on the retrieved data. Basically, data pipelines come in many shapes and sizes. But they all have three things in common: they are automated, they introduce reproducibility, and help to split up complex tasks into smaller, reusable components.
You might be familiar with ETL, or its modern counterpart ELT, which are common types of data pipelines. ETL stands for Extract, Transform, Load and it does exactly that. ELT pipelines extract, load and only then transform. They are common pipeline patterns used by a large range of companies working with data. Especially when they work with data from different sources that need to be stored in a data warehouse. ETL or ELT pipelines are a subset of Data pipelines. In other words, every ETL/ELT pipeline is a data pipeline, but not every data pipeline is an ETL or ELT pipeline.
On the other side of the spectrum of data pipelines we have the more analytics focused pipelines. These are often present in data science projects. They are pipelines that process incoming data, which is generally already cleaned in some way, to extract insights. It goes beyond just loading the data and transforming it and instead performs analyses on the data.
A data pipeline is not confined to one type or the other, it’s more like a spectrum. Some pipelines focus purely on the ETL side, others on the analytics side, and some do a bit of both. There are so many different ways you can go about setting up a data pipeline, but in the end the most important thing is that it fits your project’s needs.
Why do you need data pipelines?
Okay, we covered what data pipelines are, but maybe you’re still wondering what their added benefit is. Setting up pipelines does take time after all. I can assure that that time is well spent, for a couple of reasons.
For starters automated pipelines will save you time in the end because you won’t have to do the same thing over and over, manually. It allows you to save time on the repeatable tasks, so you can allocate more time to other parts of your project.
Probably the most important reason for working with automated pipelines though, is that you need to think, plan and write down somewhere the whole process you plan to put in the pipeline. In other words: it forces you to make a design up front and think about the necessities. Reflecting on the process and documenting it can be incredibly useful for preventing mistakes, and for allowing multiple people to use the pipeline.
In addition, pipelines allow you to split up a large task into smaller steps. This increases efficiency, scalability and reusability. It helps in making the different steps optimized for what they have to do. For instance, sometimes a different framework or language fits better for different steps of the pipeline. If it is one big script, you will have to stick to one, but with most pipeline tools you can pick the best framework or language for each individual part of the pipeline.
Lastly, pipelines introduce reproducibility, which means the results can be reproduced by almost anyone and nearly everywhere (if they have access to the data, of course). This not only introduces security and traceability, but it also makes debugging much easier. The process is the same every time you run the pipeline, so whenever there is a mistake, you can easily trace back the steps and find out where it went wrong.
How do UbiOps pipelines fit in this picture?
If you are familiar with UbiOps you will know that UbiOps also has a pipeline functionality. UbiOps pipelines are modular workflows consisting of objects that are called deployments. Every deployment serves a piece of Python or R code in UbiOps. Deployments each have their own API endpoints and are scaled dynamically based on usage. With pipelines you can connect deployments together to create larger workflows. This set-up helps in modularization, allowing you to split your application into small individual parts to build more powerful software over time. UbiOps will take care of the data routing between these deployments and the entire pipeline will be exposed via its own API endpoint for you to use.
Screenshot of a pipeline in UbiOps, image by author
When we look back at the spectrum of pipelines I discussed earlier, UbiOps is more on the analytics side. In the end you can do with UbiOps pipelines whatever you specify in the code, but it is meant more for data processing and analytics, rather than routing data between other technologies.
Comparison of different pipeline frameworks
As I mentioned earlier, there are a ton of different pipeline frameworks out there, all with their own benefits and use cases. A few that keep popping up in the data science scene are: Luigi, Airflow, scikit-learn pipelines and Pandas pipes. Let’s have a look at their similarities and differences, and also check how they relate to UbiOps pipelines.
Luigi
Luigi was built by Spotify for its data science teams to build long-running pipelines of thousands of tasks that stretch across days or weeks. It was intended to help stitch tasks together into smooth workflows. It’s a Python package available on an open-source license under Apache.
The purpose of Luigi is to address all the plumbing typically associated with long-running batch processes, where many tasks need to be chained together. These tasks can be anything, but are typically long running things like Hadoop jobs, dumping data to/from databases, or running machine learning algorithms.
Luigi has 3 steps to construct a pipeline:
requires() defines the dependencies between the tasks
defines the dependencies between the tasks output() defines the target of the task
defines the target of the task run() defines the computation performed by each task
In Luigi, tasks are intricately connected with the data that feeds into them, making it hard to create and test a new task rather than just stringing them together. Because of this setup, it can also be difficult to change a task, as you’ll also have to change each dependent task individually.
Airflow
Airflow was originally built by AirBnB to help their data engineers, data scientists and analysts keep on top of the tasks of building, monitoring, and retrofitting data pipelines. Airflow is a very general system, capable of handling flows for a variety of tools. Airflow defines workflows as Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), and tasks are instantiated dynamically.
Airflow is built around:
Hooks , which are high level interfaces for connecting to external platforms (e.g. a Postgres Hook)
, which are high level interfaces for connecting to external platforms (e.g. a Postgres Hook) Operators , which are predefined tasks that become nodes of the DAG
, which are predefined tasks that become nodes of the DAG Executors (usually Celery) that run jobs remotely, handle message queuing, and decide which worker will execute each task
(usually Celery) that run jobs remotely, handle message queuing, and decide which worker will execute each task Schedulers, which handle both triggering scheduled workflows, and submitting Tasks to the executor to run.
With airflow it is possible to create highly complex pipelines and it is good for orchestration and monitoring. The most important factor to mention for Airflow is its capability to connect well with other systems, like databases, Spark or Kubernetes.
A big disadvantage to Airflow however, is its steep learning curve. To work well with Airflow you need DevOps knowledge. Everything is highly customizable and extendable, but at the cost of simplicity.
scikit-learn pipelines
scikit-learn pipelines are very different from Airflow and Luigi. They are not pipelines for orchestration of big tasks of different services, but more a pipeline with which you can make your Data Science code a lot cleaner and more reproducible. scikit-learn pipelines are part of the scikit-learn Python package, which is very popular for data science.
scikit-learn pipelines allow you to concatenate a series of transformers followed by a final estimator. This way you can chain together specific steps for model training or for data processing for example. With scikit-learn pipelines your workflow becomes much easier to read and understand. Because of this, it will also become much easier to spot things like data leakage.
Keep in mind though, that scikit-learn pipelines only work with transformers and estimators from the scikit-learn library, and that they need to run in the same runtime. These pipelines are thus very different from the orchestration pipelines you can make in Airflow or Luigi. With Airflow or Luigi you could for instance run different parts of your pipeline on different worker nodes, while keeping a single control point.
Pandas Pipes
Pandas pipes are another example of pipelines for a specific Python package, in this case Pandas. Pandas is a popular data analysis and manipulation library. The bigger your data analysis becomes, the more messy your code can get as well. Pandas pipes offer a way to clean up the code by allowing you to concatenate multiple tasks in a single function, similar to scikit-learn pipelines.
Pandas pipes have one criterion: all the steps should be a function with a Data Frame as argument, and a Data Frame as output. You can add as many steps as you need as long as you adhere to that criterion. Your functions are allowed to take additional arguments next to the DataFrame, which can be passed to the pipeline as well.
With the DataFrame in, DataFrame out principle, Pandas pipes are quite diverse. They are comparable to scikit-learn pipelines in terms of use cases, and thus also vary a lot from Airflow and Luigi. They might be pipelines as well, but of a very different kind.
Comparison
Clearly all these different pipelines are fit for different types of use cases, and might even work well in combination. It is for instance completely possible to use Pandas Pipes within the deployments of a UbiOps pipeline, in this way combining their strengths. Let’s put the aforementioned pipelines side by side to sketch the bigger picture.
In the spectrum of pipelines, Luigi and Airflow are on the higher level software orchestration side, whereas Pandas pipes and scikit-learn pipelines are down to the code level of a specific analysis, and UbiOps is somewhere in between. Luigi and Airflow are great tools for creating workflows spanning multiple services in your stack, or scheduling tasks on different nodes. Pandas Pipes and scikit-learn pipelines are great for better code readability and more reproducible analyses. UbiOps works well for creating analytics workflows in Python or R.
There is some overlap between UbiOps, Airflow and Luigi, but they are all geared towards different use cases. UbiOps is geared towards data science teams who need to put their analytics flows in production with minimal DevOps hassle. Luigi is geared towards long-running batch processes, where many tasks need to be chained together that can span days or weeks. And lastly, Airflow is the most versatile of the three, allowing you to monitor and orchestrate complex workflows, but at the cost of simplicity. With its increased versatility and power also comes a lot of complexity and a steep learning curve.
scikit-learn and Pandas pipelines are not really comparable to UbiOps, Airflow or Luigi, as they are specifically made for these libraries. scikit-learn and Pandas pipelines could actually be used in combination with UbiOps, Airflow or Luigi by just including them in the code run in the individual steps in those pipelines!
Conclusion
Data pipelines are a great way of introducing automation, reproducibility and structure to your projects. There are many different types of pipelines out there, each with their own pros and cons. Hopefully this article helped with understanding how all these different pipelines relate to one another. | https://towardsdatascience.com/data-pipelines-what-why-and-which-ones-1f674ba49946 | ['Anouk Dutrée'] | 2021-09-08 13:43:52.702000+00:00 | ['Ubiops', 'Python', 'Pipeline', 'Scikit Learn', 'Data Science'] |
How I learned to love “Sunset Boulevard” | Norma Desmond stands at the top of an extravagant staircase. The once-rapturous commotion from the barrage of policemen and gossipers that litter the actress’s mansion has ceased, leaving only Norma in an awkward silence as prepares to descend down the steps of her home and give one final, fabulous performance.
“What is the scene?” she asks the director, just before throwing out an even more troubling (and telling) question: “Where am I?”
“This is the staircase of the palace,” answers legendary filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille.
“Oh, yes…yes,” says Norma as a manic look cements itself on a face completely removed from reality. “Down below. They’re waiting for their princess.”
People watch in both amazement and horror as DeMille shouts “Action!” and Norma descends her Hollywood steps. As she slowly treds downwards, nobody in the room is quite sure what they’re watching—all they know is they can’t stop watching it. It’s hilarious, tragic, mesmerizing all at once. This at-one-time-adored actress who ran Hollywood for years…now lives in a fantasy world and sits on the brink of destruction. She is nothing but a mere shell of the respected thespian she once was.
And then she utters that famous, final line: “All right, Mr. DeMille. I’m ready for my close-up.”
Every cinephile knows this quote—it’s one of the most famous lines to ever close out a movie. Film historians have studied over and glorified that line. Entire filmmaking and acting careers are owed to that line. Gloria Swanson got a freaking Oscar nomination for that line. It’s a line that packs a punch, that says so much about Hollywood’s cynical system for actors, that’s tragic and soaring and satiric and horrifying all at the same time. That line deserves some goddamn respect.
A lot more respect than I gave it the first time I watched Sunset Boulevard.
To be fair, at the time, I was only 18 years old—aka a big ole dumb-shit. And you can’t really trust what any 18-year-old thinks. Unless you’re Greta Thunberg and the whole world agrees that you deserve the Nobel Peace Prize way more than Donald fucking Trump, then there’s nothing your 18-year-old-or-younger-self could possibly say to make me go, “Huh, I never thought about it like that.”
So don’t hate me too much when I say that that final line from Sunset Boulevard—that legendary, majestic line—washed over my 18-year-old self’s blank-eyed stare as he laid on his disgusting dorm bed sheets that he didn’t wash once (not fucking once) during his freshman year at college. That line—much like the rest of Sunset Boulevard—didn’t mean jack to the 18-year-old version of Travis “Oh, We Just Call Him Bean”…uh, Bean.
Try to cut me some slack though. Yes: I was real freakin’ stupid. But I was also scared, unsure of myself, tepid, void of confidence, meek, questioning of my each and every movement.
And, maybe worst of all: I was passionless.
College is a great time to break out of your shell, to force yourself to find a personality in a world that will chew you up and spit you out if you don’t. What’s strange is you’re not even really thinking about any of this while it’s happening. You simply have to grow. To evolve. To push yourself to be more than some post-pubescent teen whose only real worry in life is that the high school cafeteria will run out of chocolate milk or that you won’t have enough money to add fries to your lunch or that the nacho cheese machine will run out of nacho cheese before you can get there (I’m starting to think I coped with my anxiety through food?). You have to be more than that. You have to start thinking about the impact you’ll have on the world.
So when you graduate high school and step out into the real world, it truly does become survival of the fittest. You don’t know how or in what way you’ll evolve—but you will. And looking back on those days, I realize that what I really needed in my life was something to be passionate about. That kind of passion would unlock a part of me that was always scared to come out and take on the world; that kind of passion would be my gateway to becoming a real, complicated person.
And one day, I found that passion through a movie called Magnolia.
I don’t know how many people will be able to connect with that idea. “Really? You became a better person because of a movie?” But it’s true. Paul Thomas Anderson’s ensemble epic spoke to me in a way I had never experienced. For the first time, a piece of art moved me and shook me to my very core. I had never seen storytelling and emotion like this. This movie revealed a part of the world that was both foreign and uncomfortably relatable at the same time. Magnolia mixed the common and the profound to create something extraordinary—something that, up until that point, I didn’t realize movies were capable of doing.
And that’s why I was watching Sunset Boulevard that fateful morning during my freshman year of college. Presumably I had spent the previous night pounding Keystone Lights and drinking jungle-fucking-juice. Seriously: at these college parties, there’d be tubs of this jungle juice—which was probably some combination of vodka, rum, fruit punch, and a second-string quarterback’s fresh saliva—and you would just dip your red Solo cup in that batch and drink it up like it was lemonade on a hot summer day.
Like I said: I was stupid. Which means I was in no position to fully understand the gravity of that famous final line from Gloria Swanson—and certainly means I was in no position to scoff.
I was busy looking for the next Magnolia. I was on a mission to watch each and every single movie I was supposed to watch. The legendary pictures, the revered classics, the kinds of movies that would reveal a brand new beautiful way of looking at the world. Back then, several other movies, Mulholland Drive and Jerry Maguire and Sideways, would speak to me. While others, like Citizen Kane and Vertigo and Sunset Boulevard, would not.
Maybe you can already tell, but it didn’t take long before I began to realize myself as a sort of contrarian—and, yes, that trend has persisted. If you want an example of how much of a contrarian I’ve become over the years, just know that one of my favorite films—if not my absolute favorite film—is Showgirls. These days, Showgirls speaks to me on the kind of profound level that Magnolia did all those years ago. The movie is the very definition of effort. Nomi Malone so desperately wants to make an impact on the world that she pushes herself (and those around her) to the very precipice of destruction. Thus, Showgirls becomes both a cautionary tale and a mantra. If you want to make it in this world, you’ve got to believe you can reach unreachable heights-but that doesn’t mean you should repel the people around you. Because what’s the point of rising to the top…if you’re going to be lonely at the top?
Maybe you can see some tension brewing already, because that’s practically the theme of Sunset Boulevard. Norma Desmond is the original Nomi Malone from Showgirls. Her journey feels like the unshakable backdrop of Magnolia. And do I really need to lay out the obvious correlation between Sunset Boulevard and another one of my favorite films: Mulholland Drive? A movie that’s quite literally about a woman’s disillusioned understanding of Hollywood?
So what happened all those years ago that I didn’t immediately fall for a movie like Sunset Boulevard?
Well, I think the damning evidence from Exhibit A has been well established: I was dumb. But I also don’t think I was ready for a movie like Sunset Boulevard. If film historians told me to love a movie? I would find every reason I possibly could in order to hate it.
When I say, “I wasn’t ready for Sunset Boulevard,” I don’t mean to say that I didn’t have the mental capacity to understand the complexity of that final line. There have been times where I hated a movie, then watched it again a month later and loved it. The human mind is complicated. And because it’s complicated, it’s also fickle. Which means, from moment to moment, you don’t know how your brain is going to react to a film.
So when I frame everything in that light, it’s not very surprising that I didn’t care for Sunset Boulevard. I now joke about being fat and dumb because self-deprecation has replaced food, is now my new way of combatting the inescapable anxiety that floods my everyday. But back then, none of this was very funny. I was lost and confused and, worst of all, really, really sad.
Sometimes that sadness manifested in vulnerability, which is when I would watch a movie like Magnolia. But sometimes that sadness resulted in anger and negativity and contention—which is when I would watch a movie like Sunset Boulevard.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve been able to better fit together the pieces of my life. I used to look back on that doughy 18-year-old version of myself and cringe. But now? I feel for that kid. I mean…man. What a mess that dude was. He had spent the first quarter of his life morphing his personality from moment to moment so that he could fit into whatever clique presented an opportunity to escape the desolate, mentally-crippling landscape he had been stuck in for years. And now, removed from the inherent comfort of his childhood home and scared to make new friends, that kid was searching for a movie—a fucking movie, of all things—to fill that void he so desperately wanted to escape.
So for whatever reason in that undoubtedly trying moment while I laid in my filthy dorm room bed, I simply didn’t connect with Sunset Boulevard. But now as I watch Billy Wilder’s famous film for a second time, Sunset Boulevard clicks. And it hits hard. Because only now—15 years later when I’m able to look back at the younger version of Travis Bean with empathy and care—do I realize how important Sunset Boulevard was to my growth as a human being.
That rebellious cinephile in me still exists in some form today. I mean, I still love Showgirls to death—that, I’m confident, will never change. But I’ve also relaxed in my need for my favorite movies to define me. I’ve lost the desire to renounce these “oldhead” films I had resisted early on because I saw them as a threat to my already-fragile self.
In fact, if anything, I now feel a burning appetite to revisit those older movies. I don’t want to just consume all of the classics—I want them to become part of my being. I want to recognize all of the beauty I begrudgingly chose to ignore all those years ago. I want to discover that a movie like Sunset Boulevard owns all of the beautiful traits that I cherish in my favorite modern films, like beautifully decorated sets and unabashed dramatic flair and a distinct auterial vision.
And if you’ve seen Sunset Boulevard, then you’re probably chuckling at that last sentence. Because the movie is all of those things—and so much more.
What now truly sticks out to me about Sunset Boulevard is that it’s anything but a “classic Hollywood film.” Yes: of course it’s a classic. But not in that sterile, formulaic way in which I remembered the movie being. If anything, Sunset Boulevard thrives on flamboyance, on black comedy, on an overwhelming desire to offer something outside of the cinematic norm.
The more I read about the film, the more I realize that Billy Wilder wanted to create something that made people uncomfortable, that disrupted the everyday. You’re never quite sure whether to laugh at the absurdity of what’s going on or to take each and every situation very, very seriously. I think Sunset Boulevard frustrated me years ago because the entire film was a seeming paradox. At various moments, the film felt like either a scathing indictment of Hollywood’s sawmill system for actors or a satiric look at how stupid and ridiculous the entire system is in the first place.
And the beauty of Sunset Boulevard is…well, it’s both of those things at the same time. It is a paradox—a beautifully campy melting pot; a cavalcade of thoughts and ideas that both challenge and condemn the land of Hollywood.
And that is how I learned to appreciate this movie. Yes, Sunset Boulevard owns all of the classic staples of a big-budget Hollywood affair that I scoffed at years ago: inventive camera work, endlessly quotable lines, noir-ish dialogue, a legendary lead performance (in the form of Gloria Swanson). But Sunset Boulevard is also a wild film that plays with the formula, that goes beyond what’s expected, that very much wants to be anything but an adored classic beloved by cinephiles around the world.
And that, right there, became my connection to Sunset Boulevard. This isn’t necessarily a movie that was destined to be adored by cinephiles from around the world—it’s a movie for me. It’s a movie that would go on to influence Showgirls, and Magnolia, and Mulholland Drive, and Paprika, and Barton Fink, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I mean, these are all movies I love. For years, I’ve had a vibrant connection with Sunset Boulevard.
I just didn’t realize it.
By rejecting Wilder’s film so early on, I unknowingly sent myself down an ironic path where I would come to love all of the movies that Sunset Boulevard would go on to inspire. So now when Norma Desmond utters that final line—“Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up”—I’m not thinking about how it’s a classic quote I must remember to retain my cinephile card. Instead, I’m struck by the sadness of the situation. I feel for Norma Desmond, who just wants one fucking person in this world to recognize her pain. I’m moved by how the style, how the aesthetic, how the message of the film all works together to make the ending of Sunset Boulevard a profound, overwhelming experience-and an important step in my growth as a lover of film. In order to fall in love with a film, you must first give yourself over to it.
And that’s what I hope to accomplish by writing more about the movies I watch. I’m done laying out rules for myself and how I’m supposed to watch movies and what movies I’m allowed to love. Instead, I’m going to surrender to each and every cinematic experience. By doing that, I hope to learn and grow and change with each and every movie that I watch. | https://tl-bean.medium.com/how-i-learned-to-love-sunset-boulevard-266ca51942a3 | ['Travis Bean'] | 2020-12-11 17:19:45.750000+00:00 | ['Movies', 'Film'] |
In Syria, the Alt-Right finds it isolationist voice | For the third time, President Trump is trying to withdraw from Syria. For the third time, his own allies, including Lindsey Graham, are attacking him — and pressure is piling high on the White House to find some kind of way to remain in Syria to keep America’s allies, the Kurdish-dominated YPG, from enduring a major Turkish offensive.
But I think this will be the last Syrian ‘withdrawal’ — not merely because third time’s the charm, but because as impeachment now closes in, Trump needs to build up his base’s loyalty. And there have been few greater rifts between Trump and his otherwise fanatical base than Syria.
Thus to close the ranks, Trump will probably give his Alt-Right base what it has long sought in Syria — and in doing so, will help solidify their neo-isolationism as part of the Republican Party’s platform for many years to come.
Syria: where the Alt-Right meets the Old Left
Syria is a weird place in American politics. Its Ba’athist state ideology is rooted in anti-Israeli resistance and Arab socialism — old school planks of America’s Old Left, and ideas which, in the early days of the 2011 Syrian uprising, pulled many Left-wing Americas towards affinity with the murderous Bashar al-Assad. Noam Chomsky, amongst others, has at times defended Russian airstrikes and Assad’s own war crimes.
The Old Left anti-imperialism knee jerk was predictable. What was surprising was the surge of their ideological rivals, the Alt-Right, rushing to agree with them. By 2012–13, an odd assortment of Old Left vanguards and Alt-Right activists had weaved a narrative arguing against U.S. involvement in Syria.
To the Alt-Right, Syria is a symbol of everything they despise about American foreign policy. It is a country without strategic resources, like oil, making it worthless from a pure dollar standpoint. It is very far away, with Europe and America’s Middle Eastern allies absorbing its refugee crisis, making it not very urgent to the U.S homeland.
Garrison’s rosy view on Trump’s foreign policy — forgetting that someone else will pick up the sword as soon as its dropped.
And to the Alt-Right, the civil war is a battle not between the legitimate aspirations of a downtrodden population and a totalitarian government but a struggle between an authoritarian but still preferable regime facing down a horde of ‘globalist’ jihadists — flipping the whole script on who is the good guy and the bad guy.
That last part is the most important in understanding the Alt Right’s fixation on Syria: to them, Assad is the “least bad” of the actors on the ground, and he ticks their boxes in a number of important ways. He is a brute but secular dictator; he, therefore, is an ally against jihadism. He is nominally anti-Israel; for the white supremacists, this is a plus. But that doesn’t totally exclude the non-white supremacists; Assad’s tacit, long-standing truce with Israel negates his rhetoric. The white supremacists focus on the de jure state of war between Syria and Israel; the rest of the Alt-Right can focus on the de facto peace now decades old. The anti-Israel rhetoric, coupled with no real follow-through, thus bolsters two planks of the Alt-Right in Assad’s favor.
Assad’s enemies, meanwhile, are nothing more than anti-Christian, anti-Western jihadists created by the same nefarious forces that produced 9/11 — whether that’s the more realistic narrative of the Gulf Arab states or a shadowy, ridiculous global Illuminati cabal. All the Syrian rebel factions are just jihadists of differing stripes, their records of Assad’s war crimes mere “agiprops” created by their well-financial backers. Even if Assad isn’t exactly ideal, his enemies are the epitome of evil, however, the varying factions of the Alt-Right define that word.
But more than anything, the Alt-Right is motivated by the notion that this is a blow against the Forever Wars they believe dominate American foreign policy. A scroll through Reddit’s now-quarantined /r/The_Donald reveal this strong sentiment. Comments that talk about the ‘forever war’ lead the discussion on Trump’s tweets:
And it is this sentiment, far beyond the specifics of Syria, that matters. The Alt-Right is now in the bloodstream of the GOP: it is the party’s base, and will be for many years to come, even as it evolves and fractures. They may debate the specifics of isolationism, but seem unlikely to cast it aside entirely: instead, it will motivate their decisions in the GOP’s primaries and shape the party’s overall conversation towards foreign policy.
That is a remarkable change in a party that just 16 years ago rallied to President George W. Bush to invade Iraq, and which ran on that wartime platform and won in 2004. Much has changed about the party, but its shift towards isolationism is perhaps is most dramatic — and leaves the world wondering just what kind of American retrenchment is steadily unfolding in front of us. | https://ryan-bohl.medium.com/in-syria-the-alt-right-finds-it-isolationist-voice-6a0327ae087 | ['Ryan Bohl'] | 2019-10-07 20:41:01.717000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Middle East', 'Syria', 'Trump', 'Foreign Policy'] |
You Know What’s Good For You | You Know What’s Good For You
“In light of your failure to nominate competent candidates for President of the USA, and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective immediately.
Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths, and territories (except North Dakota, and Utah, which she does not fancy).
Our new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, will appoint a Governor for America without the need for further elections. Congress and the Senate will be disbanded. A questionnaire may be circulated next year to determine whether any of you noticed.
To aid in the transition to a British Crown dependency, the following rules are introduced with immediate effect:
— — — — — — — — — — — —
1. The letter ‘U’ will be reinstated in words such as ‘colour,’ ‘favour,’ ‘labour’ and ‘neighbour.’ Likewise, you will learn to spell ‘doughnut’ without skipping half the letters, and the suffix ‘-ize’ will be replaced by the suffix ‘-ise.’ Generally, you will be expected to raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels. (look up ‘vocabulary’).
— — — — — — — — — — — —
2. Using the same twenty-seven words interspersed with filler noises such as ‘like’ and ‘you know’ is an unacceptable and inefficient form of communication. There is no such thing as U.S. English. We will let Microsoft know on your behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker will be adjusted to take into account the reinstated letter ‘u’ and the elimination of ‘-ize.’
— — — — — — — — — —
3. July 4th will no longer be celebrated as a holiday.
— — — — — — — — —
4. You will learn to resolve personal issues without using guns, lawyers or therapists. The fact that you need so many lawyers and therapists shows that you’re not quite ready to be independent. Guns should only be used for shooting grouse. If you can’t sort things out without suing someone or speaking to a therapist, then you’re not ready to shoot grouse.
— — — — — — — — — — —
5. Therefore, you will no longer be allowed to own or carry anything more dangerous than a vegetable peeler. Although a permit will be required if you wish to carry a vegetable peeler in public.
— — — — — — — — — — —
6. All intersections will be replaced with roundabouts, and you will start driving on the left side with immediate effect. At the same time, you will go metric with immediate effect and without the benefit of conversion tables. Both roundabouts and metrication will help you understand the British sense of humour.
— — — — — — — — — —
7. The former USA will adopt UK prices on petrol (which you have been calling gasoline) of roughly $10/US gallon. Get used to it.
— — — — — — — — — —
8. You will learn to make real chips. Those things you call French fries are not real chips, and those things you insist on calling potato chips are properly called crisps. Real chips are thick cut, fried in animal fat, and dressed not with catsup but with vinegar.
— — — — — — — — — —
9. The cold, tasteless stuff you insist on calling beer is not actually beer at all. Henceforth, only proper British Bitter will be referred to as beer, and European brews of known and accepted provenance will be referred to as Lager. South African beer is also acceptable, as they are pound for pound the greatest sporting nation on earth and it can only be due to the beer. They are also part of the British Commonwealth — see what it did for them. American brands will be referred to as Near-Frozen Gnat’s Urine, so that all can be sold without risk of further confusion.
— — — — — — — — — — —
10. Hollywood will be required occasionally to cast English actors as good guys. Hollywood will also be required to cast English actors to play English characters. Watching Andie MacDowell attempt English dialect in Four Weddings and a Funeral was an experience akin to having one’s ears removed with a cheese grater.
— — — — — — — — — — —
11. You will cease playing American football. There is only one kind of proper football; you call it soccer. Those of you brave enough will, in time, be allowed to play rugby (which has some similarities to American football, but does not involve stopping for a rest every twenty seconds or wearing full Kevlar body armour like a bunch of nancies).
— — — — — — — — — — —
12. Further, you will stop playing baseball. It is not reasonable to host an event called the World Series for a game which is not played outside of America. Since only 2.1% of you are aware there is a world beyond your borders, your error is understandable. You will learn cricket, and we will let you face the South Africans first to take the sting out of their deliveries.
— — — — — — — — — —
13. You must tell us who killed JFK. It’s been driving us mad.
— — — — — — — — —
14. An internal revenue agent (i.e. tax collector) from Her Majesty’s Government will be with you shortly to ensure the acquisition of all monies due (backdated to 1776).
— — — — — — — —
15. Daily Tea Time begins promptly at 4 p.m. with proper cups, with saucers, and never mugs, with high quality biscuits (cookies) and cakes; plus strawberries (with cream) when in season.
God Save the Queen!
P.S.: Only share this with friends who have a good sense of humour ( NOT humor)! | https://medium.com/@grierson11/you-know-whats-good-for-you-f2b407ad88de | ['Dr John Grierson'] | 2020-12-01 15:30:09.142000+00:00 | ['President', 'The Queen', 'Independence'] |
Deploying Helm Charts into K8S with Terraform | Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash
“Look mom, no hands on Console”, Deploying Helm charts into Kubernetes has never been easier with Terraform
I have just started my DevOps journey with Terraform not long ago and there are too much deployment methods into Kubernetes cluster. The existence of multiple deployment guide and pattern makes it easy for developer to get their code into the cluster with the requirement of knowing the ins and out of Kubernetes.
There are plenty of mode of deployment such as:
1) Creating a surrogate container to run CI/CD tasks via platform like Gitlab/Github Actions/Jenkins etc
2) Direct injection of manifest file/deployment on CI tools
3) Helm, a tool that distills deployment component together into a single package(includes deployment, ingress, service, configmap etc)
In this post, I am going to show how to deploy any charts into your cluster via terraform. | https://medium.com/@lucheeseng/deploying-helm-charts-into-k8s-with-terraform-7125fc048647 | ['Nicholas Lu'] | 2020-12-07 17:55:59.221000+00:00 | ['Kubernetes', 'Helm', 'Eks', 'DevOps', 'Terraform'] |
10 best moments from Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton’s first rally together. | “This election is about something much bigger.”
Today, Hillary Clinton and First Lady Michelle Obama brought more than 11,000 people to Winston-Salem, North Carolina for their first-ever joint rally.
As the two pointed out, this election has become more than just a difference between political parties — it’s about the moral fiber of our country.
At the rally, both Hillary and Michelle talked about why this election is so personal. Here’s what they had to say:
1. Hillary hailed Michelle’s years of work advocating for girls education and healthy eating.
“She has spent eight years as our first lady advocating for girls around the world to go to school and have the same opportunities as boys. She has worked for healthier childhoods for our kids here at home, better nutrition, more exercise — and we are seeing the results.”
2. And she gave a shout out to Michelle’s awesome dance moves.
“Among the many real privileges I’ve had is to see the president and the first lady dance. Wow, one could only hope.”
3. She said what we all know is true:
“Let’s be real — as our first African-American first lady, she’s faced pressures I never did. And she’s handled them with pure grace. By any standard, she has been an outstanding first lady who has made us all so proud.”
4. Michelle was touched by Hillary’s words.
“Hillary’s mini tribute to me was … very generous. But I just want to take this moment publicly to thank Hillary. It takes a level of generosity of spirit to do what Hillary has done in her career and her life for our family, for this nation. And if people wonder, yes, Hillary Clinton is my friend, she has been a friend to me and Barack and Malia and Sasha, and Bill and Chelsea have been supportive from the very day my husband took the oath of office.”
5. The first lady laid out all the reasons Hillary is beyond qualified for the job.
“I admire and respect Hillary, she has been a lawyer, a law professor, first lady of Arkansas, first lady of the United States, a U.S. senator, secretary of state. Yeah, that’s right. Hillary doesn’t play. She has more experience and exposure to the presidency than any candidate in our lifetime. Yes, more than Barack, more than Bill, so she is ready to be Commander-in-Chief on day one and, yes, she happens to be a woman.”
6. And touched on what’s at stake in this election.
“That is the choice we face between those who divide this country into us versus them and those who tell us to embrace our better angels and choose hope over fear.”
7. And made the case that this election extends far beyond partisan politics.
“Let me tell you, this is not about Republicans versus Democrats. None of that matters this time around. This election is about something much bigger: it is about who’ll shape our children and the country that we leave for them. Not just for the next four or eight years, but for the rest of their lives. Because as Hillary pointed out, we know the influence our president has on our children. How they turn on the TV and they see the most powerful role model in the world — someone who shows them how to treat others.”
8. Michelle brought up their shared experience of growing up in working-class families.
“I know that Hillary was raised like Barack and I in a working family. Hillary’s mother was an orphan abandoned by her parents. Her father was a small-business owner staying late night working and keeping her family afloat. Hillary knows what it means to struggle for what you have and want something better for your kids. That’s why since the day she launched her campaign, Hillary has been laying out concrete, detailed policies that’ll actually make a difference for kids and family in this country.”
9. She called on all of us to make sure Hillary wins.
“If Hillary does not win this election, that’ll be on us. It will be because we did not stand with her. It will be because we did not vote for her — and that’s exactly what her opponent is hoping will happen. … They are trying to convince you that your vote does not matter. Saying that this election is rigged. Understand they are trying to get you to stay home. They are trying to convince you that your vote does not matter — that the outcome already has been determined and you should not bother to make your voice heard. They are trying to take away your hope.”
10. And, finally, implored all of us to take the ultimate high road:
“I want you to remember that folks marched and protested for our rights to vote. They endured beatings and jail time, they sacrificed their lives for this right. I know you can get yourself to the polls to exercise that right because make no mistake about it casting our vote is the ultimate way ‘we go high, when they go low.’ Voting is our high, that’s how we go high — we vote!”
Check out the entire campaign event here.
So, are you with Hillary and Michelle? If so, make sure you’re registered and make your plan to vote. | https://medium.com/hillary-for-america/10-best-moments-from-michelle-obama-and-hillary-clintons-first-rally-together-54936332574f | ['Brian Mcbride'] | 2016-10-30 02:53:53.311000+00:00 | ['Hillary Clinton', 'Politics', 'Michelle Obama', '2016 Election', 'North Carolina'] |
Exactly the same reasoning for myself! | Exactly the same reasoning for myself! I cut all my hair off at school because everyone looked the same, and I wasn’t About to conform anymore, to me, hiding your face wasn’t beauty; it was about bringing out your eyes and cheekbones with short, messy, shaven-in-places hairstyle | https://medium.com/@wellbeingisgirlpower/exactly-the-same-reasoning-for-myself-6e00c3dd674a | [] | 2020-11-11 14:53:07.251000+00:00 | ['Hairstyle', 'Short Hair', 'Metoo'] |
The Witch and the Pirate | The Witch and the Pirate
(Image Credit: Greg Manchess/National Geographic)
In the wake of the War of the Spanish Succession, after the Peace of Utrecht, countless privateers and veterans of the Royal Navy became unemployed sailors. Some of those desperate jobseekers then headed from England to New England to make a fresh start in life. Among them was a good-looking, charismatic Cornishman from England’s West Country, named Samuel Bellamy. He arrived in East Ham Harbor in the summer of 1715, probably in late July. Then, not long after he set foot on the shores of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Sam awoke one morning with a particularly nagging hangover. So, he decided to take a walk and clear his head a bit before really getting the day started. Little did he know that this would lead to a chance encounter with someone that would change his fate forever.
As if drawn by destiny, he wandered into the scrub pines and heard the voice of a young girl, who was singing a siren song on a swing. Maria was an innocent yet alluring blonde-haired, blue-eyed, 15-year-old virgin, and Sam was a dashing and daring, tall, dark, and handsome 25-year-old sailor. None-the-less, as if they were soulmates reunited across time and space, the moment Sam and Maria saw each other it was love at first sight. Their lingering stare immediately gave way to an erotic embrace, which gave way to a brief love affair. The problem was that she came from the well-to-do Puritanical Hallett’s of Yarmouth, so her parents wholly disapproved of the footloose out-of-work seaman who seemed to be trying to take advantage of their naive young daughter. They even made it quite clear to Sam that he would not become their son-in-law.
Still, wanting nothing more than to have her hand in marriage, like a proper gentleman, Sam Bellamy vowed to set sail and return a wealthy man who would be far more deserving of her as his wife. He had lofty ambitions of becoming a treasure hunter and headed down to the coast of Florida to find sunken Spanish ships filled with riches beyond his wildest dreams. However, when that plan soon failed, Sam did what most down-on-their-luck sailors did back then and became a pirate. Samuel Bellamy joined a brutal band of buccaneers and soon ousted Captain Benjamin Hornigold in a bloodless coup, in which Ben was deposed by the crew, making Sam the appointed commander of his very own vessel, in virtually no time at all. Bellamy was now well on his way to becoming one of the infamous “Pirates of the Caribbean”.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Black Sam Bellamy, Maria Hallett had become pregnant during their forbidden rendevous, so by the time he became a cutthroat captain, she really began to show. To make matters worse for her, Maria defiantly refused to identify who the father was, although everyone in town suspected that it was Sam. This made the highly devout townspeople of Eastham Village quite nervous in the heyday of witch-hunting, so, in the end, they accused her of having sex with the Devil. After all, she could be seen at night all by herself bathed in moonlight on the cliffs that overlook the beach, and no self-respecting Christian woman would have done such a thing back then. In the early 18th-century, it was improper for a God-fearing lady to be out unaccompanied after dark.
With that being said, Maria Hallett’s premarital pregnancy scandal eventually brought so much shame on her fine upstanding family, and their local community, that the expectant mother was inevitably put in the Eastham jail. There, one day in a damp dark cell, she gave birth to a stillborn son. This just made things worse for the poor girl, because after accusing her of anything and everything that they could think of, the townspeople drove the so-called witch out of town, forcing her to go build a hut in the wilderness of what is now Wellfleet. Luckily, the native Wampanoag took pity on her and taught Maria about what was edible, and what was medicinal, versus what was poisonous. Otherwise, she would have surely died. Thus, in time, a few of the villagers of Eastham even came to rely on “Goody” for some of her herbal remedies.
Regardless, as Maria Hallett tragically transformed from maiden to mother to crone in only a few short months, eventually all she had left in this world was the hope that her lost love would return to her, just as he had promised, so long ago. Hanging on to that hope, she never stopped looking for him, in spite of the weather, or anything else. The condemned and exiled teenager kept a near-constant vigil as a lonely sentinel on the bluffs above the beach. Day and night she would walk through the windswept dunes of the barren moors, desperately scanning the horizon in search of Sam’s ship. Somehow, Maria just knew that Sam was out there, somewhere, doing what he had set out to do. More importantly, one day he would return for her just as he had vowed when he declared his undying love to her before setting sail as a treasure hunter.
Little did she know, at the height of his career as a captain, in the midst of the “Golden Age of Piracy”, having plundered more than fifty ships, Sam Bellamy finally decided that it was time to reclaim his beloved bride-to-be with his bountiful booty, as the highest-earning pirate in history. However, being blinded by love, Captain Bellamy foolishly began to steer due north, parallel to the shoreline along the coast of Cape Cod, as his heartstrings inexorably pulled him toward her. Unfortunately for everyone involved, this also drew his fleet into the eye of an extremely severe seven-day storm, ultimately causing the three-masted, twenty-six gun galley to capsize and the ballast canons to come crashing down through the decks, pinning the men and their treasure to the seafloor with the full force of nature’s fury. So, when it was all said and done, only two of the one-hundred-forty-four men on board managed to live to tell the tale.
In the end, as a result of a noreaster, on April 26th of 1717, Captain Bellamy went down with his ship and crew in the crashing breakers of the surf. The reality was that he had lived for loot and he had died for love. Then, each day after that, Goody grew wearier and wearier from the sight of the shipwreck as parts of it washed ashore and the rest sank beneath the waves. Eventually, she just died of a broken heart, and as a result of that poignant end to their tragic tale, sometimes when the gale winds blow into the harbor, you can still hear the ghost of Goody Hallett shrieking out like a wailing banshee. As the couple endlessly longs for a second chance at their ill-fated romance, the “Witch of Wellfleet” continues to haunt the bluffs, while the poltergeist of the “Prince of Pirates” haunts the beaches. To this very day, his tortured soul is still trying to make it ashore as she yearns for him atop the cliffs overlooking the cape. | https://medium.com/@joshuashawnmichaelhehe/the-witch-and-the-pirate-724f631174e2 | ['Joshua Hehe'] | 2020-12-30 12:55:26.487000+00:00 | ['Humanity', 'Biography', 'History', 'Tragedy', 'Love'] |
What I Learned Making Games in Unity | What I Learned Making Games in Unity
Or, why you should learn C#
Photo by Kirill Sharkovski on Unsplash
Making games, and writing C# scripts in Unity is a lot like doing other types of coding, with a bunch of visual fun stuff plopped on top. It is definitely hard, but it’s hard fun. The Unity3D editor itself has lots of built-in tools for easy prototyping, like programmer-art style graphics with simple blocks with smooth matte textures and ready-made physics materials to get things attracted to the floor or bouncing around. But if you want those little blocks to move or to do anything interesting, you’ll need C# scripts.
C# is syntactically similar to C++ but with a garbage collector like Java. The creator of C# also created TypeScript, which is a strongly-typed extension of JavaScript that adds advanced object-orientation features like classes and objects. C# is also maintained by Microsoft and was built from the ground up to be open-source and fully cross-platform compatible. Also, since Unity is built on Microsoft’s .NET framework, by writing scripts for Unity, you’ll be learning tools that you can use in many other contexts.
But let’s get back to business. What good am I doing learning Unity? For starters, because it’s something that is fun for the most part, it’s a really good introduction to programming for people who are a little bit more on the scripting-nervous side. Everything placed in the world is an object and is visually represented in the Hierarchy. You can create objects with parent-child relationships for either functional or organizational purposes. This is done either by dragging and dropping or by changing the object's parent through code.
Editor Windows and Fully-Expanded Hierarchy of an Arcade-Style ball-rolling game
The only thing you have to keep in mind when changing the parent of a GameObject is that the object's position (or transform component) will be with respect to the parent object. So if you don’t want your programmer art rolling off the screen, you will need to set the parent's position to 0,0,0 in the world (also known as resetting the transform component of the GameObject). The only time this wouldn't be the case would be if you actually do want two objects to always be moving only in relation to each other, like if you were simulating the Earth going around the Sun, and the Moon going around the Earth, in which case the Moon would be a child object of the Earth, while the Earth rotates around the sun, as shown in the hierarchy below:
The moon is shown as the earth’s child, so it always moves in relation to it
You can get into a lot of trouble with this stuff if you’re too heavy-handed, however. Take the hierarchy in the rolling ball game in the first picture: we want the camera to follow the ball around the arena, so it makes sense to just have it as a child right? Wrong! If we set the camera as a child of a ball that is rolling around, guess what the camera is going to do: end up rolling around the ball, very rarely showing us what we want to see! Not good. What do we need to do then? Add a script! This script, called SmoothFollow, is a part of the Unity Standard Assets package, which is horrendously out of date and needed a code snipped in one spot updated and I can go through that in the future if anyone needs. However, this script works just fine for what we need.
Code Snippet in question
In the snip above, we have the LateUpdate method, which is called once per frame (React lifecycle methods, anyone?). We’re using LateUpdate here because the Update function of our ball controller, is what is making the ball move, and we want our camera to change after the ball moves. The eulerAngles.y is getting the y component of the object’s rotation component (in wantedRotationAngle it's looking at the target, whereas in currentRotationAngle it’s looking at the camera’s transform). We then use the wanted height and rotation to dampen/update the camera's current height and rotation, and then we move the camera to the desired x-z distance from the ball. This looks complicated to understand, but the Unity engine here is doing more or less all of the more complicated matrix transformations that would otherwise be necessary to do something like this from scratch.
And there you have it! I may have not convinced you to learn C# yourself, but I for one learned a lot by playing around and making little games in Unity. | https://medium.com/dev-genius/what-i-learned-making-games-in-unity-3936075af5b8 | ['Melody Soriano'] | 2020-12-06 19:06:15.777000+00:00 | ['Game Development', 'C Sharp Programming'] |
Elon is changing the world as we know it, by disrupting two entire sectors. The auto and the energy sectors. Is he gonna give a hand to disrupt the monetary system? Is Tesla gonna be the first big… | I wonder if this conversation from rocket scientist to rocket scientist has already happened?
image from the author
Elon is changing the world as we know it, by disrupting two entire sectors. The auto and the energy sectors.
Is he gonna give a hand to disrupt the monetary system? Is Tesla gonna be the first big company to break the mold?
Michael Saylor was in his board meeting, having an objective and courageous conversation with his staff, and concluded that having $500,000,000 in cash in the bank was a liability, it was worthless.
Now he just YOLO it!
image from the author
Michael Saylor with cojones to the Moon!!! | https://medium.com/@nunofabiao/i-wonder-if-this-conversation-from-rocket-scientist-to-rocket-scientist-has-already-happened-535bf0a17d75 | ['Nuno Fabiao'] | 2020-12-22 10:10:38.692000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Money', 'Tesla', 'Monetary System', 'Economy'] |
Chairman Nadler Statement on Resignation of Attorney General William Barr | “From misleading the American public about the Mueller report to his dangerous efforts to overturn COVID safety measures, from his callous disregard for civil rights to his rampant politicization of the Justice Department, William Barr was willing to do the President’s bidding on every front but one. Barr refused to play along with President Trump’s nonsensical claims to have won the election. He is now out as Attorney General one month early.
“In 37 days, President-Elect Biden will be sworn into office. Whomever Joe Biden chooses as the new Attorney General will have a tremendous amount of work to do to repair the integrity of the Department of Justice — and I, for one, look forward to being a partner in that project. The work must begin without delay.” | https://medium.com/housejudiciary/chairman-nadler-statement-on-resignation-of-attorney-general-william-barr-a919bbc82605 | ['House Judiciary Dems'] | 2020-12-14 23:47:36.144000+00:00 | ['Donald Trump', 'Ag Barr', 'Oversight'] |
Learning Class Variables and Methods | Song
new
Takes in three arguments: a name, artist, and genre.
The way I was able to complete this first lab was to first create a class called Song.
class Song
end
than define initialize to three arguments — (name, artist, and genre)
I define initialize and set it to three arguments. The reason we set three arguments to initialize is when an instance is created it will instantly provide the name of the song, artist name, and genre the song belongs to.
def initialize(name, artist, genre)
end
2. name
has a name
I created an instant variable @name = name inside the initialize method — Every time an instance Song is created it will instantly provide the name of the song.
def initialize(name, artist, genre)
@name = name
end
3. artist
has an artist
I created an instant variable @artist = artist inside the initialize method — Every time an instance Song is created it will instantly provide the name of the artist.
def initialize(name, artist, genre)
@name = name
@artist = artist
end
4. genre
has a genre
I created an instant variable @genre = genre inside the initialize method. — Every time an instance Song is created it will instantly provide the genre the artist belongs in.
def initialize(name, artist, genre)
@name = name
@artist = artist
@genre = genre
end
5. class variables
has a class variable, @@count
The way to know if a variable is a class variable is based on @@
Class Variable
@@count = 0 # the reason for the zero is because it will be our starting point and currently has no songs.
Class Method
def self.count
@@count
end
6. has a class variable, @@artists, that contains all of the artists of existing songs
I set @@artists to an empty array because no artist has been initialized. Once we start to have songs it will get (<<) pushed into the empty array.
Class Variable
@@artists = [ ]
Class Method
def self.artists
@@artists
end
7. has a class variable, @@genres, that contains all of the genres of existing songs
I set @@genres to an empty array because no genres have been initialized. Once we start to have genres it will get (<<) pushed into the empty array.
Class Variable
@@genres = [ ]
Class Method
def self.genres
@@genres
end
8. is a class method that returns that number of songs created
I created a class variable @@count = 0 this will be our starting point and will take a count of the number of songs it has stored and return the number of songs that was initialized. In order for the class variable to keep count I than had to create a class method .count that returns the entire count of songs.
The way to create a class method is to include self. Self will be referring to the class it’s currently in, inside the method will return @@count which will reference the class variable @@count array and the current songs that are in the array.
def self.count
@@count
end
I then have to create a class variable @@count += 1
The count of songs will increment by 1 as soon as a new song is created, or initialized. We are using the @@count class variable, inside of our #initialize method, which is an instance method. We are saying: when a new song is created, access the @@count class variable and increment its value by 1.
9. is a class method that returns a unique array of artists of existing songs
I had to create a class variable for self.artists, within the self.artists block it will return the entire @@artists array without any duplicates. The reason I was able to return the new @@artists array without duplicates is that of the .uniq (Returns a new array by removing duplicate values in self.)
def self.artists
@@artists.uniq
end
The self. before the method name is a reminder that the method will not be running on a particular artist instance, but will be acting as the factory from which all artists are made: the Song class.
10. .genres
is a class method that returns a unique array of genres of existing songs
.genre_count
I had to create a class variable for genres, within the genres block it will return the entire @@genres array without any duplicates. The reason I was able to return the new @@genres array without duplicates is that of the .uniq
def self.genres
@@genres.uniq
end
11. is a class method that returns a hash of genres and the number of songs that have those genres.
Within the class method of self.genre_count, I created an instance variable genre_count = { } to an empty hash. The empty hash will be the starting point for our hash and will be the key/value of the stored genre and the number of songs. Next @@genres (references the stored genres in the array.) .each will iterate over each genre if a genre is true, it doesn’t match any genre in the hash it moves on to the next line and add 1 to a new key, else if a genre is false it match a genre it will skip the next line and move on to the next line and increment the value by 1 in the matching key. I then return genre_count to get the entire hash key/value.
def self.genre_count
genre_count = {}
@@genres.each do |genre|
if !genre_count[genre]
genre_count[genre] = 1
else
genre_count[genre] += 1
end
end
genre_count
end
12. .artist_count
is a class method that returns a hash of artists and the number of songs that have those artists
Within the class method of self.artist_count, I created an instance variable artist_count ={ } to an empty hash. The empty hash will be the starting point for our hash and will be the key/value of the stored artists and the number of songs. Next @@artists ( references the stored artists in the array.) .each will iterate over each artist if an artist name is true it doesn’t match any name in the hash it will move on to the next line and add 1 to a new key, else if an artist name is false it match a name, it will skip the next line of code and go to the next and increment the value by 1 in the matching key. I then return artist_count to get the entire hash key/value.
def self.artist_count
artist_count = {}
@@artists.each do |artist|
if !artist_count[artist]
artist_count[artist] = 1
else
artist_count[artist] += 1
end
end
artist_count
end | https://medium.com/@Johnson_Joseph/learning-class-variables-and-methods-2ba8b36488e6 | ['Johnson Joseph'] | 2019-02-28 18:08:49.804000+00:00 | ['Flatiron School', 'Ruby', 'Programming', 'Codingbootcamp', 'Software Engineering'] |
Altcoin April | March so the arrival of the so called “altseason”, where many mid and low market cap coins saw significant, double or even treble figure growth despite the relatively low pace of growth with top 10 cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin included.
As we enter April, Bitcoin’s market dominance is one of the lowest that has been seen for some time, currently at 50.1% according to coinmarketcap.com. This not only reflects on traders looking for high volatility outside of the top currencies but also the emergence of new projects and the advancement of existing projects.
The industry has stopped clamouring for institutional and Wall Street approval and adoption and is instead focusing much more internally on some of the stand out projects to emerge from the crypto space.
Below we take a look at two of of the coins that have seen exceptional growth throughout March and which one will likely continue to grow through April and the news stories and announcements that are continuing to prompt these large price movements.
DASH
Dash has started April with some good news and a consequent price surge in a prime example of the sort of news that moves markets. ElectroPay, a cryptocurrency payment solutions provider, has released its in South America its first set of crypto keypads with Dash support (amongst others) which will increase adoption on the continent. DASH has also seen significant upgrades to its network as well as a number of other positive news stories surrounding the project.
Dash, currently ranked #13 by market cap, is up 11.21% over the past 24 hours. DASH has a market cap of $1,000,886,510 USD with a 24-hour volume of $348.8M.
Tezos (XTZ)
The price of a Tezos token reached $1 valuation for the first time in 2019 on 30th March. It gained 100% since the beginning of the year when its price was $0.499.
Tezos has enjoyed what seems to be the revival of the “Coinbase Effect”. In 2017 and 2018 a coin getting a listing on coinbase.com would be enough to send its price straight upwards, an effect that has diminished somewhat during the “crypto winter”.
However, Coinbase recently announced that it would allow its clients to stake their XTZ holdings (the TEZOS network runs on what is known as a Proof-of-Stake Consensus rather than mining) and earn annual returns. Offered via Coinbase Custody, all staked XTZ tokens would be held in fully-insured cold storage wallets, making it a very attractive proposition with attractive returns for institutional investors, which has seen Tezos speculators stocking up of the token in anticipation of big investors fuelling demand.
If you’d like to find out more about trading TEZOS, DASH or any of the many other cryptocurrencies available on our platform then contact Aston Tech International today. | https://medium.com/@astontechinternational/altcoin-april-34bd74cc76d0 | ['Astontech International'] | 2019-04-01 11:10:12.973000+00:00 | ['Tezos', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Altcoins', 'Dash'] |
The Biochemistry of Lust: How Hormones Impact Women’s Sexuality | Estrogen (Marilyn Monroe: The Venus Hormone)
Estrogen holds court on the dance floor. She is having a ball flirting and dancing. Her ample backside swings with the rhythm of the music, while her satiny skin glows. Estrogen is a total package deal with a quick wit and a strong mind. But yeah, her physical allure doesn’t hurt either. She’s impossible to ignore. Her laugh is contagious, and her hourglass curves make all her dance partners weak in the knees. She’s not afraid to make a fool of herself ether, and she falls down a few times while dancing. But that’s okay, her bones are strong and resilient. She notices Testosterone checking her out by the buffet. Wow, he is soo gorgeous and sexy, he makes her all tingly. She can feel her panties getting moist. Um…
Estrogen, the Marilyn Monroe of hormones, dominates the first half of a woman’s menstrual cycle and is opposed by progesterone in the second half. Estrogen comes in three forms: estradiol (E2), estriol (E3) and estrone (E1). Estradiol is the most biologically active hormone for premenopausal women, while estrone is more active after menopause. Estriol is primarily active during pregnancy (2).
Remember what I said about hormones being shapeshifters? One of the most fascinating facts in human physiology has got to be the fact that estradiol, the hormone most associated with femininity, is synthesized from testosterone (16).
Estrogen is responsible for more than just breasts and baby-making. It affects every part of a woman’s body and brain, and it has a profound impact on her sexual functioning. It is responsible for maintaining pelvic blood flow, the creation of vaginal lubrication, as well as the maintenance of genital tissue (17).
When estrogen is in short supply, women struggle with diminished genital and nipple sensitivity, difficulty achieving orgasm, increased sexual pain, and inadequate lubrication (17). Women with low estrogen are at risk for vaginal atrophy, which has to be among the most delightful aspects of aging (NOT).
Another issue I am intimately familiar with.
As I moved deeper into the menopausal rabbit hole, I experience vaginal irritation, dryness, and constant UTIs, all of which were due to estrogen bidding me a fond farewell. When estrogen leaves the building, the vaginal lining (the epithelium) gets thinner, the vagina itself may shrink and lose muscle tone and elasticity.
And as for those persistent UTIs that bedevil menopausal women like me, they are due to the increase in vaginal pH. When the vagina becomes more alkaline, it kills off good bacteria, leaving a woman a sitting duck for a number of vaginal and urinary tract infections.
Remember this, a happy pussy is an acidic one (ideal pH 3.8–4.2).
The normal level of estradiol in a menstruating woman’s body is around 50 to 400 picograms per milliliter (pg/mL). This fluctuates with the menstrual cycle. Below this threshold, and there is an increased risk for the problems mentioned above. When women are in menopause, estradiol levels are often as low as 10–20 (pg/mL) (17).
Estrogen: The True Lady of Lust?
Testosterone, the loud and proud androgen, is usually assumed to be the sexual mover and shaker for both men and women. Estrogen, it has been argued, just gives a woman a wet vagina, the motivation to use it comes from her testosterone.
This is the view expressed by Theresa Crenshaw in The Alchemy of Love and Lust. In contrast to men, she argues that women have four sexual drives 1. Active (aggressive) 2. Receptive (passive) 3. Proceptive (seductive) and 4. Adverse (reverse). These drives are representative of our hormonal makeup.
She differentiates along standard party lines and claims that testosterone fuels women’s active sex drive, while estrogen fuels the receptive and proceptive drives. According to Crenshaw, ever contrary progesterone doesn’t fuel anything but a nap (the adverse drive).
However, some researchers believe that estrogen’s role is underestimated in female desire and that the conversion of testosterone to free estrogen in women might play a major role in female desire. (18). “Free” in this case means a hormone that is biologically active and available for our bodies to use.
According to Emory professors, Cappelletti and Wallen, for most female mammals the most important hormone governing sexual behavior is estrogen. That would make human females rather weird and unique if our sexuality was testosterone-driven.
Plus, research does show that estrogen alone is capable of increasing desire in women(19).
Estrogen Replacement
Mode of delivery (e.g., by mouth, or transdermal) is an important and possibly overlooked factor when looking into HRT. One major problem with oral estrogen’s like Premarin (aside from the fact they’re made of horse pee!) is that when estrogen is taken by mouth it raises levels of SHBG (sex hormone-binding globulin).
SHBG is a protein secreted by the liver that binds both estrogen and androgens. It prefers androgens. This means that it will reduce free androgens and estrogens, both of which are associated with sex drive.
In a randomized, controlled study of 670 women comparing transdermal estrogen therapy with oral (Premarin), it was found that transdermal estrogen improved sexual functioning according to scores on a self-report measure. Women who used horse pee (Premarin) showed no improvement in sexual functioning and presumably had to come up with some new hobbies (20).
As a side note, I keep visualizing a poor, pregnant mare being badgered by some pharmaceutical rep going, “Just pee in the bucket Seabiscuit; we need the money!” But I digress…
Bioidentical Hormone Replacement
Women who are interested in HRT often opt for bioidentical hormones. They have become popular for a few reasons. In 2002, the WHI (Women’s Health Initiative) study dropped a bombshell on the world’s menopausal women and linked hormone replacement with a 26% increased risk of breast cancer and an increased risk of cardiovascular events and stroke. Within three months of published reports of the dire findings, prescriptions for hormone therapy (HT) dropped by 63% (21).
Also, popular books like The Sexy Years by Suzanne Somers have promoted the use of compounded bioidenticals instead of FDA approved drugs. Compounded bioidentical hormone therapy (CBHT) is custom formulated by a compounding pharmacy and tailored to the individual. They are often perceived as safer and more natural.
What Are Bioidentical Hormones?
From my readings, this may be short-sighted. First up, let’s talk about what bioidentical hormones are. According to the Endocrine Society, bioidentical hormones are “compounds that have exactly the same chemical and molecular structure as hormones that are produced in the human body.”
They are often plant-derived in comparison to the Premarin and Provera (used in the WHI study), which is a synthetic estrogen synthesized from conjugated horse urine and synthetic progestin respectively.
Note that Premarin could be considered “natural” given the fact there’s nothing more natural than horse pee! However, it isn’t identical to what your body makes.
Bioidentical progesterone is made from diosgenin that is derived from wild Mexican yam or soy, while bioidentical estrogen is often synthesized from soy. Both bioidenticals, like all hormone therapies, are extensively processed in a lab (22).
The Endocrine Society’s definition is broad and doesn’t refer to the sourcing, manufacturing, or delivery method of bioidenticals. This definition can refer to both FDA approved HRT as well as non-FDA approved hormone replacement.
There is no evidence that bioidenticals are safer than synthetic hormones. Nor, is there isn’t any evidence supporting CBHT as a better alternative. With CBHT there are issues regarding dosage, purity, and strength.
According to an article in The Mayo Clinic Proceedings, “Compounded hormone preparations are not required to undergo the rigorous safety and efficacy studies required of FDA-approved HT and can demonstrate wide variation in active and inactive ingredients.” (21).
There are several FDA approved bioidentical hormones that are on the market. They differ from CBHT in that they have some science behind them and they are carefully formulated and manufactured according to strict specifications (21).
Is Hormone Therapy Safe?
I think it depends on who you ask and what you read. It also depends on your particular situation. I recommend any woman interested in hormone replacement do some serious study on this issue. The WHI study scared the bejesus out of women, their doctors, and created a lot of hysteria. There were several issues with that study that are beyond the scope of this article.
One book I recommend is Menopause: Change, Choice, and HRT by Australian physician Dr. Barry Wren. He goes into detail about the WHI study and its shortcomings, including the fact that the women who participated in the study were older (average age 63), smokers/former smokers, overweight/obese, and in poor health.
There is a critical “window of opportunity” for women to go on HRT. It is recommended that women do it within ten years of their last period. Primarily, because going for many years without estrogen can cause permanent changes to the body that HRT could exacerbate.
For example, estrogen helps prevent cholesterol from building up in your arteries. After you have been without it for a while, your arteries will likely have some damage. Taking an estrogen, particularly in oral form, increases the presence of liver proteins that cause blood to clot.
This factor, combined with arthroscopic buildup, could lead to an increased risk of stroke or heart attack. But taking estrogen before arterial damage has occurred, and within the 10-year window of opportunity, might reduce your risk of heart attack or stroke (23).
Estrogen: Points to Remember | https://kayesmith-21920.medium.com/the-biochemistry-of-lust-how-hormones-impact-womens-sexuality-574040b59ebe | ['Kaye Smith Phd'] | 2020-05-01 02:43:28.540000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Science', 'Sexuality', 'Sex', 'Women'] |
If I’d be 20 again…. | I’m a happy 31 year old — my work delights me, consumes me, lets me afford the basics and lets me travel the world, more importantly it contributes directly to improving it. The last decade of choices eventually worked out — could always have been worse and in rare cases it could have been better
But I feel nervous imagining myself to be 20 again — my CAT attempt seems way tougher now (though I had the grades), the job scene seems more damp and competition seems to be fiercer. Each generation has its challenges, but then each generation is also entitled to nostalgia. So if I’d be 21 again
- I’d surely travel the world : no matter how expensive it is, I’d figure a way to travel and expose myself to the breadth and depth of human race
- I’d connect to people very actively : would reach out to my friend’s fathers, father’s friends, relatives, write and meet interesting people
- I’d self study : there is so much online that with some self motivation, a lot can be mastered
- Or, if I’d study abroad : I’d find someone to pay for it! :) Else I’d fall back on internships or volunteering
- I’d serve : Social work opens a side of us that we haven’t experienced — so I’d serve, yes
- I’d read the classics, listen to the best music around, learn music and theatre….where the hell did so much free time go?? :)
- I’d dream big : surely….really big — global. And I’d use a global benchmark for my field to inspire myself
- I’d read non-fiction selectively : No pop self-help, just sensible or deep stuff + lots of TED talks + a broad range of articles with opposing views
- I’d have more meaningful conversations : debates around ideas and dreams on how to dent the Universe
- I’d be more resourceful : in starting my venture or in finding a job — I’d be creative and whacky, not confirming or trying to look ‘good’. I’d take lots of risks
- I’d go more easy on myself : If there are any 20 year olds who have figured their life out fully, chances are they’ve not fully explored the possibilities that lie before them. Or they are terribly fortunate :)
- I’d negotiate hard with parents : while they and I want the same thing (my happiness and success) the HOW is often different. There is value to pushing back, particularly on the ‘big decisions’ of life
- I’d not take my time for granted : Its great to have survived to the 30s but its always worthwhile to directly go for what you really wanna do — why wait?
So wishing all my lovely 20 year old friends a happy 20s :) | https://medium.com/@abhishekthakore/if-id-be-20-again-388f078993bd | ['Abhishek Thakore'] | 2021-04-27 05:54:34.164000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Classics', 'Youth', 'Chill', 'Parents'] |
Image Effects for Android using OpenCV: Image Blending | What is the Alpha Channel?
When an image is visualized, the values assigned to its color space channels are what control the appearance of its pixels. If each pixel is represented as an 8-bit channel, then the range of the pixel values is from 0 to 255, where 0 means no color and 255 means full color.
For a color space such as RGB, there are 3 channels—red, green, and blue. If a color is to be assigned to a pixel using RGB, then all you need to do is just specify the values of the 3 channels. For example, if the pure red color is to be represented using the RGB color space, then the red channel will be assigned the highest possible value, and the other 2 channels the lowest possible values. Thus, the values for the red, green, and blue channels will be 255, 0, and 0 respectively.
Besides specifying the values for each channel of the color space, there’s another factor that controls how the color appears on the screen—pixel transparency, which allows you to control whether the pixel is to be transparent or not. We do this using a new channel added to the color space named alpha.
For making the RGB colors transparent, a fourth channel is added, representing the alpha channel. This channel has the same size (rows and columns) as all other channels. Its values are assigned the same way that values for the other channels are assigned. That is, if each pixel is represented as 8-bit, then the values for the alpha channel range from 0 to 255.
We know that the 0 value for any of the RGB channels means no color (black) and 255 means full color (white). For the alpha channel, what do values 0 and 255 represent? These values help calculate the fraction of pixel color that will appear on the screen, according to the equation below. This fraction is then multiplied by the pixel value to get the result.
Fraction = Alpha/255
When the alpha is 0, the fraction is also 0.0, and thus the old pixel value is multiplied by 0 to return 0. This means nothing from the pixel is taken, and thus the result is 100% transparent.
When the alpha is 255, the fraction will be 1.0, and thus the full value of the pixel is multiplied by 1.0 to return the same pixel value unchanged. This means no transparency at all.
As a summary, the 0 value for the alpha channel means that the pixel is 100% transparent. The alpha value 255 means the full pixel value is used unchanged and thus the result is not transparent at all. The pixel is more transparent when the alpha value approaches 0.
According to the above discussion, we know how to make an image transparent. This leaves us with a question. How is this useful? Let’s discuss one benefit—alpha blending or compositing.
Assume that there is no alpha channel at all and we need to add the color of the 2 pixels listed below:
Pixel1 = (R1, G1, B1) = (200, 150, 100) Pixel2 = (R2, G2, B2) = (100, 250, 220)
The result of adding Pixel1 to Pixel2 is as follows:
Pixel3 = Pixel1 + Pixel2 = (200, 150, 100) + (100, 250, 200) = (300, 400, 320)
If each channel is represented using 8 bits, then the channel values range from 0 to 255. The combined colors above exceed this range. When the channel value is outside the range (below 0 or above 255), it will be clipped to be inside the range.
Thus, the result of adding the above 2 pixels is: 255, 255, 255. Assuming that the result of adding most of the pixels in 2 images exceeds the range, then the output image will be nearly white, and thus the details in the 2 images are lost. To overcome this issue, we use the alpha channel.
When adding 2 pixels together while using the alpha channel, the value in the alpha channel specifies how much of the pixel contributes to the result of the addition. Let’s discuss this.
Assume that the alpha channel is added to the previous 2 pixels, as follows:
Pixel1 = (R1, G1, B1, A1) = (200, 150, 100, 120) Pixel2 = (R2, G2, B2, A2) = (100, 250, 220, 80)
The alpha values for these 2 pixels are 20 and 80. These values are used to calculate how much color from each pixel is used in the addition. For 8-bit images, the percentage is calculated as follows:
Fraction = Alpha/255
For the first pixel with a value of 120 to the alpha channel, the result is (120)/255=0.471. This means a fraction of 0.471 will be used from the first pixel. In other words, 47.1% of the pixel color will appear in the result.
For the second pixel, the result is 0.314, which means 31.4% of the second pixel color is used in the addition.
After calculating the fractions, the result of the addition is calculated as follows:
Pixel3 = Fraction1*Pixel1 + Fraction2*Pixel2
By substituting the values, the result is as follows after being rounded:
Pixel3 = 0. 471*(200, 150, 100) + 0. 314*(100, 250, 220) = (125.6, 149.15, 116.18) = (126, 149, 116)
The new result of combining the 2 pixels after using the alpha channel is within the 0 to 255 range. By changing the values of the alpha channels, you can change the amount of color taken from each pixel.
In the previous example, using the alpha channel helps the preserve the result within the 0 to 255 range. Note that there are 2 alpha values used for the addition, one for each image. This leaves us with a question. What if the values for the 2 alpha channels are 0?
Note that an alpha of 255 means that the color isn’t transparent at all. When adding a pixel with alpha 255, the full pixel color is used. So, if the alpha values for the previous 2 pixels are 255, the result of addition will be (300, 400, 320) where all values are outside the 0–255 range. How do we solve this issue? This is by using just a single alpha value rather than 2, according to the equation below:
Pixel3 = Fraction*Pixel1 + (1- Fraction)*Pixel2
This equation confirms the values in Pixel3 will be in the 0–255 range. Assuming that the alpha value to be used in the addition is the one saved in the first pixel, which is 120, then the fraction is 0.471.
Let’s edit the pixel values to work with the worst case, where the pixels values are high, as given below. The values in the red channels of the 2 pixels are 255.
Pixel1 = (R1, G1, B1, A1) = (255, 150, 100, 120) Pixel2 = (R2, G2, B2, A2) = (255, 250, 220, 80)
The new pixel value is:
Pixel3 = 0.471*(255, 150, 100) + 0.529*(255, 250, 220) = (255, 202.9, 163.48) = (255, 203, 164)
The result of addition is that all values are inside the range (especially the red channel).
At this point, the alpha channel is introduced to highlight its benefit in the blending or compositing of 2 or more images. The next section works with the alpha channel in OpenCV.
Working with the Alpha Channel in OpenCV
When an image is read in OpenCV using the Imgcodecs.imread() method, the default color space of the image will be BGR (Blue-Green-Red). This color space doesn’t include an alpha channel, but OpenCV supports other color spaces that include the alpha channel. The one we’re going to use in this tutorial is BGRA, which is the regular BGR color space after adding a fourth channel for alpha.
So the image is read as BGR, and we want to convert it to BGRA—how do we do that conversion? Note that the previous tutorial used the Imgproc.cvtColor() method for converting an image from BGR to gray. It can also be used to convert BGR to BGRA, according to the line below.
The Imgproc.cvtColor() method accepts 3 arguments. The first one is the source Mat. The second one is the destination Mat in which the result of the color conversion will be saved. And the third argument specifies the current color space of the source Mat and the desired color space of the destination Mat.
Mat img = Imgcodecs.imread("img.jpg");
Imgproc.cvtColor(img, img, Imgproc.COLOR_BGR2BGRA);
The default value for the alpha channel is 255. Thus, the original image will appear as it is. Using the for loops listed below, we can access each pixel and edit its alpha channel. All values for the alpha channel are set to 50.
Inside the for loops, each pixel is returned using the get() method, by specifying the current row and column indices. This returns a single pixel in a double array named pixel . Because the color space is RGBA, which includes 4 channels, then each pixel has 4 values. Thus, the length of the returned array is 4. In order to access the alpha channel, which is the fourth channel, index 3 is used. The alpha channel is changed for the current pixel to be 50.
To apply these changes, the current pixel is set to the edited array, according to the put() method. Finally, the image is written using Imgcodecs.imwrite() . Note that the image extension is PNG, because PNG supports transparency.
The image returned from the above code is shown below. Note that the image has high transparency because a small alpha value (50) is used.
If the above code is changed to use a value of 160 for the alpha channel, the result will be less transparent, as shown below.
This section used the alpha channel for just a single image. We can also blend 2 images together using the alpha channel. We’ll look at how to do that in the following section.
Image Blending
This section adds 2 images together while using the alpha channel. The code for adding such images is listed below.
The 2 images are read in the 2 Mat arrays img and img2 . These images have to be of equal size at the current time.
A third Mat is created named result to hold the result of the addition. To make this Mat of the same size as the previous 2 Mat arrays, it’s initially set equal to the first Mat img .
Using the 2 for loops, the current pixel is returned from the 2 Mat arrays. The used alpha value is set equal to 200, and then the fraction is calculated. After that, the new pixel is calculated by multiplying the fraction by the value returned from the first image, and the inverse of the fraction by the second image. The results of these multiplications are added together. The new pixel is then put into the result Mat. Finally, the image is saved.
The saved image returned from the above code is shown below. Note that the first image appears stronger than the second image. The reason for this is that the fraction taken from the first image is 200/250=0.8, but just the fraction 0.2 is used with the second image. In other words, 80% of the pixels values in the result Mat are taken from the second image, and the remaining 20% are taken from the second Mat.
If the alpha value is made 50, then 80% of pixels values in the result Mat are taken from the second image and only 20% are from the second image. The result is shown below.
If the alpha is set to 0.0, then the result will be identical to the second image. If 255.0, then it will be identical to the first image.
This section blends 2 images together by blending each pixel. In the next section, we’ll look at blending a specific region from one image into another image. | https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/image-effects-for-android-using-opencv-image-blending-319e0e042e27 | ['Ahmed Gad'] | 2020-02-19 21:50:13.969000+00:00 | ['Opencv', 'Java', 'Heartbeat', 'Android App Development', 'Image Processing'] |
Mystery Doors | Curio Facts is a channel where you can find videos related to all the rare, unexplained and hidden facts of earth. | https://medium.com/@curiofactss/mystery-doors-8dc2d6683cea | ['Curio Facts'] | 2020-12-25 20:32:59.948000+00:00 | ['Curio', 'Education', 'Curiosity', 'Mystery'] |
A Life Full of Adventure|A life well Lived. | A Life Full of Adventure|A life well Lived.
you will notice me, I’ll be leaving my mark like initials carved in an old oak tree
You wait and see
Maybe I’ll write like Twain wrote
Maybe I’ll paint like Van Gogh
Cure the common cold
I don’t know but I’m ready to start cause I know in my heart
I wanna do something that matters
Say something different
Something that sets the whole world on its ear
I wanna do something better
With the time I’ve been given
And I wanna try
To touch a few hearts in this life
Leave nothing less
Than something that says “I was here”
Thank you lady antebellum for this song!
its more than music to me, its a reminder a guide to do better, to look within, to find that is unique about me and what I can do while here on this earth and to do just that without getting tired ♥️
As i search within my soul, in my mind amd heart for that which feels special, the journey is still on and the road is still wide and clear for me to walk on
I am ready, to search, to make it my mission to seek till I find it. To Do, to experiment, to move and allow myself to experience from all different dimensions and I believe that I will find what am looking for, soon ♥️
Cheers to living a purposeful life! A life full if adventure! A life full of Greatness and courage! A life lived fully! Feeling Alive ♥️ | https://medium.com/@metamorphosis11/a-life-full-of-adventure-a-life-well-lived-9983e8d4ac52 | ['She Has A Great Scent'] | 2019-03-17 10:59:55.097000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Purpose', 'Adventure', 'Journey', 'Life'] |
The Road to 30: Private Land Conservation | However, most protected areas are on public lands: in the United States, 60 percent of the land is privately owned, but only 3 percent of protected areas are on privately owned land. As a result, the loss of nature is particularly acute on private property, reducing carbon sequestration and threatening ecosystems.
Between 2001 and 2017, 75 percent of all natural areas lost to development within the United States were on private lands. These lands are being lost almost five times faster than lands owned or managed by federal or state governments, and unprotected private lands are losing habitat for threatened and endangered species twice as quickly as on federal lands.
Natural private lands often contain key habitat. But the things that make them good habitat — such as water, soil, and topography — also make them attractive for development or agricultural use. For example, lands that have a balanced supply of moisture and store water (mesic ecosystems), such as riparian areas, disproportionately occur on private lands. Up to 80 percent of wildlife species depend on mesic resources for some part of their lifecycle, but it’s estimated that over half of America’s wetlands have already been lost to development.
Pine Draft Farm in Hampshire County, W.Va., EQIP project | Will Parson, Chesapeake Bay Program
Although private lands are losing nature rapidly, things could be much worse. Many farmers, ranchers, and forest owners have a tradition of sustainable management, protecting wildlife and habitat, and restoring degraded lands. These landowners have helped prevent the decline of nature on private lands from being even more severe. Their efforts can be enhanced and supported if we provide the tools and resources to do so.
Private lands are valuable, but unprotected. Going forward, private land conservation must be expanded to reach the 30x30 goal. Due to the lower percentage of federal lands outside the Western states, private lands must make up a larger portion of protected areas in other regions to maintain connectivity for ecosystems and wildlife habitat.
Private conservation in practice
Conservation easements and fee simple acquisition
Private lands are typically conserved either through outright purchase by private conservation organizations, or by the creation of conservation easements. Land purchase (or ‘fee simple acquisition’) by a conservation organization is straightforward: after the organization owns the land, that organization is able to manage it as they choose. While this can be a good solution in situations where landowners want to sell their land, it doesn’t address the millions of landowners who want to retain land ownership while also protecting their land. That’s where conservation easements come in.
Budeau Wetland Easement Field Tour | NRCS Oregon
Conservation easements are voluntary agreements by a landowner to protect a property, often containing agricultural or ranch land. These landowners permanently give up or limit further development rights in order to protect a property’s conservation value, while preserving their right and access to the land. Easements are legal agreements that exist forever and are not altered even if the land changes hands. Owners are typically paid for placing their land under easement, or receive other types of incentives.
As families across America begin to face the risk of needing to sell some or all of their working lands, landowners may enter into an easement contract in order to avoid selling their lands or to benefit estate planning. Many landowners also enter into easements because of commitment to conservation and sustainable stewardship of their land.
In the United States, easements protect an estimated 40 million acres of natural habitat, helping pave the way to the 30x30 goal. In addition to saving places and species, conservation easements ensure that agricultural lifestyles remain viable, tying conservation efforts into the fabric of local communities.
Across the country, private lands and easements must become part of an integrated conservation network that includes wildlife corridors, tribal management areas, and large-scale protected landscapes like national parks and wildlife refuges. View the storymap to see places where private lands already form key pieces of conservation networks.
Land trusts, funding programs, and easement incentives
To create conservation easements, landowners contract with either a government agency or a nonprofit organization called a land trust. The agency or organization acquires the easement, meaning that they assume responsibility for ensuring that the easement terms are upheld. This responsibility includes stewardship of the property and ensuring that the terms of the agreement aren’t violated. | https://medium.com/westwise/the-road-to-30-private-land-conservation-a7b2b0815b1d | ['Tyler Mcintosh'] | 2020-11-11 22:32:19.053000+00:00 | ['Public Lands', 'Agriculture', 'Community', 'Conservation', 'Wildlife'] |
Building a k8s External Gateway | This design for an external k8s Gateway can provide a high level of security from outside access. It ensures that only the specific ip address and ports used by services are exposed to outside traffic and provides the option to add traffic rate limiting to services using additional annotations in the services.
In addition to your k8s cluster, the solution consists of three components.
Linux Gateway. A host running Free Range Routing (FRR) and configured to use NetFilter Tables.
Metallb. Metalb is a k8s Load Balancer manager. It uses the Loadbalancer API to allocate ip addresses and direct traffic to PODs. It operates in two modes, this solution uses BGP mode to advertise service addresses.
NFT Operator. The nft operator works alongside metallb configuring firewall rules and linux traffic control for optional rate limiting.
The Linux Gateway. Linux has all of the necessary networking capabilities to create the k8s gateway. In this solution we recommend the use of Ubuntu 18.04LTS however you can use other distro’s if you wish. One of the benefits of using ubuntu 18.04 is that the default output queuing discipline (qdisc) is fq_codel (fair queuing with controlled delay). This queuing mechanism is ideally suited for our purposes as its fair queue functionality allocates on a flow basis and the controlled delay functionality avoids starvation without requiring significant configuration. Practically this means that this queuing scheme should provide some protection against a small number of bad actors, assuming the count doesn’t get too high or the bandwidth overrun. It can be configured on distros either by default as every interface must have a default qdisc (often fifo) or via linux-tc. In addition the nft_operator also configures the ingress qdisc on the public network interface. This special qdisc is applied on input path and can be used for filtering and input rate shaping, it’s used for the latter by the nft_operator. There are lots of possible configuration options for managing traffic, we will cover some of them in part 3. There are a number of good routing implementations for linux, we chose FRR, a well maintained fork of quagga that uses common industry configuration syntax. The routing configuration is pretty simple, it uses BGP towards the k8s system and if deployed in an enterprise network could use BGP towards the existing network, however the solution does not require the use of BGP on the public network side.
Creating & configuring the Linux Gateway
Host. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS server on host or VM with a minimum of 2 NIC. When running in a VM, recommend having sufficient physical NIC cards to allow the use of passthru avoiding more complex linux bridge configurations. Using Linux bridge is possible but not covered here. Install FRR. FRR for Debian derivatives is available at https://deb.frrouting.org. Follow the instructions exactly Configure Linux.
a. Configure the two NICs, one in the same address range as the k8s cluster, the other an address on the public network. Note that only a single address is required, an additional subnet is used for the Service gateway. Ubuntu configures these interfaces with netplan.
b. Enable linux networking features.
/etc/sysctl.conf — add net.ipv4.fib_multipath_hash_policy=1
Also check that forwarding is enabled net.ipv4.ip_forward=1 Configure FRR.
a. /etc/frr/daemons — bgpd=yes & restart frr
b. Configure frr using vtysh
Note in the BGP configuration that this includes a bgp peer to an upstream router. Where there is an upstream peer, it would be customary to summarize the range allocated to metallb seen in the aggregate-address entry. When a host route is advertised by metallb in this range, FRR will advertise the aggregate route only limiting the host route to the gateway. (Note. The metallb webpage provides another alternative advertising summaries however that solution will install a less specific route in the gateway defeating the benefit of host routes)
Using BGP dynamic peers removes the need to manually add a peer entry for every node running the metallb speaker. As this is dynamic a password is suggested not for security, more for avoiding misconfiguration of bgp neighbors incorrectly populating the routing table.
While discussing the BGP configuration, it’s worth noting that the connection between the metallb speaker nodes and the gateway is eBGP, shown by the different AS numbers used. iBGP, where the same AS number is used, or eBGP could be used in the configuration, however the selection mechanism is different with eBGP allowing more extensive routing policy to be applied, it is not being used in this case.
Finally redistribute connected avoids the need to statically specify the local interface networks.
Metallb
MetalLB is a k8s Load Balancer manager. It uses the service API to allocate IP addresses to services and configures IPtables to map connectivity into PODs. It has an address manager or IPAM for keeping track of addresses used by the service and runs goBGP in pods called speakers on all of the nodes that provide external access. In our example all nodes will be running the speaker, we will discuss alternatives and impacts later. Each service configured to use a load balancer is allocated a host route advertised by the speakers to bgp peers, in this case the Gateway. Therefore if no services are advertised there are no routes in the Gateway to the k8s system causing all packets to be dropped at the Gateway. This behaviour is very different to standard routing behaviour where the routers task is to forward all packets and then a firewall is put in place to limit what can be passed. Combining Metallb using BGP with a router is a good way to create secure access assuming you are careful on how the overall routing structure is configured.
Installing & configuring Metallb.
https://metalb.universe.ft/installation provides comprehensive instructions for installed metallb, just follow the instructions. Configure Metalb. Metallb is configured using a configmap. A simple configuration can be used. Just apply the following in the metalb namespace with kubectl apply -f
Note that this document covers how this system operates with kubeproxy in the default mode, iptables mode, not IPVS. If your k8s cluster has a default configuration, it will be using iptables mode.
NFT_Operator.
This k8s ansible operator increases the security of the linux gateway. When a service is created in k8s, the protocol and port number are defined, metallb dynamically adds a host route and the nft_operator watches for services to be created and applies filters based upon the service configuration. The operator uses net filter tables, not IPtables. In addition to performance benefits, one of the most important aspects of nftables used is the ability to make filter table changes atomic. Unlike iptables, nftables processes the complete configuration and then replaces it avoiding incomplete configuration errors that can be introduced in iptables. As previously mentioned, the nft_operator also configures linux traffic control (tc) adding an ingress qdisc to the public interface. Adding an annotation to the service definition, a traffic rate can be added for the service to control bandwidth for that service.
Installing & configuring the nft_operator
https://github.com/acnodal/arbf-nft-operator provides detailed instructions for the installation of the operator Configure the nft_operator. The operator is configured using custom resource
Note enable_ssh and enable_bgp are applied on the firewalled interface allowing ssh access and bgp peers to be established from the public network. If you’re troubleshooting you can add a rule to /etc/nftables.d/local-chain.nft to enable your specific addresses to pass, this file is created but not managed by the nft_operator.
How it works.
The metallb speaker runs on each node and a peer is established between each node running the speaker and the Gateway
A k8s user defines a service to access Pods and the in the spec the type is defined as LoadBalancer
Kubeproxy ipdates iptables in the k8s nodes to enable access to POD(s)
Note: Just a snippet, take a look at iptables-save on a node.
Metallb allocated an ipaddress from the configured range and the speakers will advertise reachability to that address as a /32 host route resulting in the route being in the gateways routing table. It also updates iptables adding rules to direct public addresses to POD(s) building on the iptables managed by kubeproxy. Note ECMP load balancing to the nodes.
Nft_operator updates the nftables in the gateway using ansible adding specific firewall rules for the service defined and ingress traffic shaping if specified ensuring that only traffic specified in the k8s service definition gets to the application or ingress pods.
In Understanding Packet Forwarding we describe in detail how traffic is forwarded to nodes, the use of externalTrafficPolicy and ingress controllers.
. | https://medium.com/thermokline/building-a-k8s-external-gateway-4d98028f10ca | ['Adam Dunstan'] | 2020-04-20 13:07:50.677000+00:00 | ['Kubernetes', 'Networking', 'Cloud Computing', 'Web Development'] |
APESWAP — DECENTRALIZED EXCHANGE PLATFORM ON BINANCE | Implementation
It’s mid-2021. I have to say that this has been a great year for the blockchain industry. They range from the collapse and rise of Bitcoin prices to the rapid rise of a successful DeFi. DeFi, which is also known as decentralized finance, has been a huge boon to the blockchain industry and the world at large. As cryptocurrency is known to function as a secure, decentralized store of value, DeFi creates a decentralized financial instrument free of traditional centralized institutions.
The DeFi world is experiencing rapid growth in 2020, in 2019, the value of the DeFi industry was US 2 275 million. But as of February 2020, its value has grown significantly, to $ 2.5 billion by early July, 3 3 billion by mid-July, and 4 4 billion by July 25. Such growth rates indicate the growing interest of the masses in DeFi.
Like the rise of ICOs in 2017–2018, they have seen an increase in the number of fraudulent projects in the DeFi space. This fraudulent project has taken advantage of the popularity of the DeFi industry.
Those most affected by this are people new to the DeFi space who do not have or cannot properly investigate these projects.
As a writer in the blockchain industry, I decided to create this post to help newcomers identify legitimate and real projects.
There are many of them. Today I will tell you about one of the best I have found. I must say that this project is one of the DeFi surviving projects in 2021.
What is ApeSwap?
ApeSwap is an automated market making platform, a farm to grow and store crops in the Binance Smart Chain (a pancakeswap fork). ApeSwap is built by DeFi Apes, for DeFi Apes. We have a dedicated team of experienced monkeys who have been in the crypto space for many years. BANANA is the native currency of our platform. Place bets, collect and get bananaon ApeSwap.
What is the vision of ApeSwap. Finance?
Community-we are Defi monkeys and we have to take care of each other. A strong, vibrant and happy community is the # 1 priority for ApeSwap to thrive. We joke about monkeys and bananas, but in the end, our community wins.
BANANA Utilities-our monkey developers will continue to work hard to implement new features to get the most out of your BANANA ! We understand the importance of creating utilities, storage templates and the demand of our beloved monkeys.
Collaboration-we understand the importance of working with other #BSC projects in space. We are actively looking for and discussing interior projects for a mutually beneficial partnership.
Why Choose ApeSwap?
Binance Intelligent Chain ( BSC) is currently on Defi, no questions asked. You just have to look at the many pancake exchange style automatic market makers (AMMS) that are launched every day to see how fast the space is expanding.
ApeSwap. Finance will add a 24-hour time key to our smart contract and remove all migration codes (i.e. the famous “tapestry code”). This means that even if one of our monkeys becomes a scammer (they don’t want to) and tries to maliciously change the smart contract, you will be able to see the changes 24 hours before the action starts. Therefore, there will be no benefit to anyone trying to make such a change. Everyone will have enough time to get out of the forest with their banana banana before changes can be made. Also, there is no migration feature!
Audit
Smart contract audits are expensive. More than clusters, clusters, and banana clusters a banana can cover. However, the security of our monkey funds is the most important factor for us, and we know how important quality audits are to you. Therefore, we not only conducted one of them, but also conducted an audit of two. One is BSC Gemz, the other is Certik.
Association
Monkeys are friendly creatures-we love partnership-and we don’t have it, but two big (social) distances!) jungle parties in recent weeks as we welcome BakerySwap.org and stocky.Finance in the monkey family.
Banana Drive
The first BANANA cars opened up to accept donations of BANANA and other tokens for 3 days, and we raised over 4 4,000 for our sweet primates. To demonstrate our commitment to this project, we will use 100% of our revenue for foreclosure and incineration.
For each swap, a fee of 0.3% is charged (standard for all DEX), 0.05% of the amount of each transaction goes to the treasury of Ap “” VAP. For the first 3 months, 100% of our Apeswap treasure will be used to buy and burn banana plants. At the end of this period, we will reassess the best use of these funds in the community.
#Apeswap #BANANA #BNB #BSC #Crypto #BinanceSmartChain
Official site : https://apeswap.finance
Telegram : https://t.me/ape_swap
Twitter : https://twitter.com/ape_swap
Medium: https://ape-swap.medium.com
Github: https://github.com/ApeSwapFinance
Author: Bitcointalk profile: Kassynell
Bitcointalk profile link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2269710
Wallet — 0x0D65A002974d123F7eD68F721cbf52E514c65518
Proof of Authentication — https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5330167.msg56921822#msg56921822 | https://medium.com/@tontonov-dimooooon228/apeswap-decentralized-exchange-platform-on-binance-f4c41dd1949e | ['Дима Тонов'] | 2021-05-03 10:31:53.949000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'Bsc', 'Mining', 'Defi'] |
Achieving Zero Waste From the Bottom Up at Cascade Engineering | What type of training or guidance do new employees/contractors receive about the program? How do employees help shape the program?
Darby: We have a policy identifying where all waste goes. So, as you can imagine, there are a lot of different places— from office supplies to manufacturing supplies, oil to compost, plastic, glass, metal —and there are multiple sources for all of it. We have labeled bins and recycling containers, which we try to provide in convenient locations. For instance, upstairs, downstairs, the kitchen; areas that make sense.
You’re probably going to ask me, “How do you make sure people follow and put things where they need to?” That is a big concern, and with our ISO 14001 Certification (environmental management certification) we do get audited every year on this; we have to stay on top of it. The biggest impact is in orientation and people who come on site. They have to understand that we are zero waste, that we have no trash cans, and that it’s not appropriate for them to just put it in any container that they see fit, whether it’s labeled or not labeled. It is a constant reminder; it is education.
Kenyatta Brame: We have a unique culture, in the sense that this is grassroots-driven. I remember when I first got here, we still had the dumpsters, and through my first week of work, we did something called a “dumpster dive.” We’re going to jump inside this dumpster to see, to hold ourselves accountable, to make sure that we’re not contaminating the streams. If you go into one of the plants, an employee will tell you what you need to do. You just can’t dump things in any way.
I think that what’s unique about Cascade, in the sense that this wasn’t Fred sitting in his office saying, “You must do this.” These were employees on the floor saying, “This is how we’re going to do this,” to get to a level that we’ve achieved at this point.
What tips do you have for other companies that would like to reduce or eliminate their landfill waste?
Darby: As people are starting out, I would encourage them to track their progress on an annual basis, and not just look at their financial progress, but look at your progress relative to your environmental footprint, look at your progress relative to your people, and measure it.
And I think that’s part of the magic of the triple-bottom-line reports or B Corporation, or even the ISO 14001. If you track it, and you measure it, and you hold yourself accountable to it, you’re more likely to make that progress and to push through those barriers, because you’re seeing the results.
Fred Keller: There’s something about expecting the unexpected. There’s a prize in there, somewhere. You don’t know what it’s going to be. It isn’t necessarily going to be financial, but it might be. In our case, we found that there are financial benefits, obviously, adding$280,000 to your bottom line every year.
And it’s really hard to find the cost of doing that. People separating things out is pretty minimal, but there is some cost associated with having it happen. It does take everybody. The bottom-up thing is really kind of an important element: Letting the folks own it, as opposed to having it being imposed, is something that I think really helps. So that the leaders become cheerleaders, as opposed to enforcers.
What are some innovations in this area that have been impressive to you?
Fred Keller: I was in Israel working with a partner and learned of an organization, UBQ, that was working on this idea of taking, literally, garbage and making it recyclable. It would be plastic rich, but it would be full of other stuff, not very clean.
Christina Keller: Yeah. UBQ is really revolutionary because it is the first time that you can use true waste. We have so much waste that we don’t know what to do with. We don’t have to till a field for it, we don’t have to do an industrial application.
Everyone wants to talk about bioplastics now. But when you think about a true lifecycle analysis on a compostable bioplastic that you’re getting your coffee in, you are often utilizing grain or corn that has taken fertilizer and pesticides and all these other things to create, and it has an alternate use, consumption.
But they are then taking it down to make it into the bio-based product lines, is another industrial action that’s combining that down. And then, they’re making it into plastics that are compostable. But how often are they actually composted in an industrial composter? Often, those are then going into the landfill.
When you look at the full carbon lifecycle of a bioplastic that is compostable, you’re adding up a lot of chemicals to the field, adding a lot of industrial applications, and then you’re not really getting the benefit of that, from an excess perspective. Also, it generates methane.
Beyond recycling, what other business process changes have evolved to help you achieve this goal?
Brame: If you make a “bad” part, we can sell it as a secondary product. And we had some employees thinking, “You know what? That’s OK, because we’re still going to sell it.”
So we actually had some conversations with employees to say, “If we’re selling it as a good product versus a secondary product, there is a difference in our margin.” Some people had “aha!” moments — even though we are able to sell it, we’re selling it for 25% or 75% less. Therefore, take the time to make a good product so we can sell it at the appropriate rate, so we can all continue in this journey.
People ask questions about things that they may not have asked before. We have found that employees empowered with information make good decisions for the business.
Darby: There was a point in time where we were sending plastic parts to Beta Plastics for recycling, and then they were grinding up and reselling it. And we had asked, “Can’t we buy some of that back and reuse it in our product?” Now we buy as much of that back as we can, that’s within spec, to re-engage into new product.
For example, a group worked with Waste Management on an innovation to utilize more of the curbside recycled content into our carts. We are continuing the innovation cycle. We started with 10% recycled content while still meeting all of the standards for rigidity and making sure that it’s strong enough — those carts go through a lot, being outdoors and being racked every week. Now they’re there working on the next gen, which will be closer to 40% recycled content.
A lot of this, as you heard from the team, is a continuous improvement effort. It’s not getting there on the first step, but it’s setting the intention or direction. We want to have less waste, we want to be good for the environment, and then it’s really that innovation cycle getting closer and closer each time. | https://bthechange.com/achieving-zero-waste-from-the-bottom-up-at-cascade-engineering-f0b254baade4 | ['Christopher Marquis'] | 2020-12-11 08:06:06.156000+00:00 | ['Employee Engagement', 'Climate Change', 'B Corp', 'Zero Waste', 'Manufacturing'] |
台北的繁華與台南的氣質，城市化帶來的顏值革命？ | Get this newsletter By signing up, you will create a Medium account if you don’t already have one. Review our Privacy Policy for more information about our privacy practices.
Check your inbox
Medium sent you an email at to complete your subscription. | https://medium.com/y-pointer/taipei-tainan-city-c2e0b34ec033 | ['侯智薰 Raymond Ch Hou'] | 2020-04-10 15:16:07.765000+00:00 | ['Taiwan', '生活', '中文', 'Life', '城市'] |
It Doesn’t Matter How Old I Get, I’ll Always Have a Bowl of Rotting Fruit on My Counter | It Doesn’t Matter How Old I Get, I’ll Always Have a Bowl of Rotting Fruit on My Counter
Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash
There is a white porcelain bowl that sits on my counter, just beside the french press that still holds soggy grounds from yesterday’s coffee. On any given day, it accommodates three very brown bananas, a few bruised apples that are quickly turning to mush, as well as the oranges that nobody wants to eat because they are too soft for human consumption.
This is my life, and I have come to accept it.
It occurred to me the other day, as I sliced up previously mentioned apples for an apple crisp, that it does not matter how rich or mature I become in this life, this bowl of rotten fruit will forever remain.
The reason for this is simple. I am lazy. I am unorganized. I am, at heart, unapologetic about the decaying fruit on my counter.
In my younger years, I would attempt to rectify this blatant exposition of slobbery by not having a fruit bowl at all. I’d stow away the pears and Granny Smiths in the fridge, which did alleviate the problem of rotten fruit on the counter but eventually cause me an even larger dilemma.
This came down to the mantra, out of sight, out of mind.
While my counter would be pristine, the crisper drawer of my refrigerator looked as though a small rabid animal had taken up residence and was collecting foodstuffs for a long and challenging winter.
Because the fruit was tucked away in the fridge and out of sight, I would forget about it and think while at the grocery store, “huh, I haven’t eaten an apple in over a week, I must buy a bag!” Only to get home, remember that I’m not doing the fruit bowl thing anymore, look in the fridge and realize that the drawer is full of nearly gone-off apples.
At this point, any rational person might remember their high school home economics class and the FIFO rule (first in, first out) but not me. I would dump the new bag of apples atop the already month-old apples and think, well, my friend, you sure have a lot of apples to eat in here.
So eventually, I took up with the fruit bowl on the counter once more and accepted the cloud of fruit flies that would seemingly appear out of nowhere within seconds of setting the dish on the counter.
Ultimately, I don’t mind the rotting fruit because, in the end, it prompts me to do what I do best.
I make fruit better by baking it into something sweet.
Every few weeks, I will take a gander to the countertop where the rotting fruit sits, almost artistically, and realize that today shall be a baking day. Then I spend no less than 7 hours straight making apple jam for fresh turnovers, banana bundt cakes, candied pears with caramel sauce and any type of crisp I can think of with the almost-mouldy remnants of the bottom of the fruit bowl.
The best part of these baking days is watching my family enjoy the fruits of my labour. Not because I’ve spent countless hours harping on them to “eat the fruit in the bowl. It’s going bad!” But instead, because I’ve transformed this fruit into something more enjoyable.
Yes, sure, the extra mounds of refined sugar I’ve added to the mix may not be optimal for our health, but that’s why we have the fruit bowl! In those first few days of filling the thing, when the fruit items are nice and firm and brilliantly coloured, it is a welcome snack, which the children tuck into readily.
So we go through cycles.
Healthy fruit-eating one week, then everyone avoiding the bowl like the plague the next week, and finally the rotting fruit getting transformed into a delightful treat the following week.
And that, my friends, is why I will forever have a bowl of rotting fruit on my counter. It just works. | https://medium.com/@authorlindsaybrown/it-doesnt-matter-how-old-i-get-i-ll-always-have-a-bowl-of-rotting-fruit-on-my-counter-612b68d750d5 | ['Lindsay Brown'] | 2020-12-21 16:40:54.612000+00:00 | ['Food', 'Life Lessons', 'Home', 'Adulthood', 'Humor'] |
Does Scrum get in the way of technology? | Scrum is but a tool
Scrum is one of my favorite tools for software development. This agile framework is a well-balanced system that enables the development team to have a sense of control over what gets done in each interaction.
Part of this control is because Scrum offers transparent communication to the people dealing with stakeholders. The system is optimized to give precise estimations about when things will actually get done, and this can be communicated upwards in the chain of command.
Of course, as a tool, Scrum only works when used properly, and some texts explain why/how people fail to use Scrum properly. I don't want to write a text about this.
My text is about my professional struggle with doing a reconciliation between scrum and the development team. Let me explain:
Look out for Icebergs
An iceberg is a piece of change that demands unequal efforts from different team members e.g. improving the visual of a site hardly demand efforts on the back-end but for sure will require people working on the front-end to work a lot.
Image from Basecamp
Part of the problem starts when we have to deal with icebergs.
In this example, the person who works with the front-end (let's call them "Jordan") is "blocked" to start new work until they finish coding the whole visual improvement though the person on the back-end ("Alex") can keep working on the next backlog item [BI].
Eventually, Allex will finish their task but won't able to deliver value because the value also requires front-end work.
Scrum is equipped to deal with situations like this because, in theory, the teams should be cross-functional, so Alex should be able to pick up the remaining front-end work to complete the BI, even if the result, code-wise, is not optimal.
Let's imagine Alex picking up their first task on the web project. Alex has to download it, install some tools, study the project a bit, maybe interrupt the specialist on the web to ask some questions, and even pair up. All of this happens before Alex is even able to contribute to the project.
When the contribution is done, as it’s not their specialty, the code might need a deeper review from Jordan (especially if they didn't pair up because Jordan was busy improving the visuals of the site).
Business-wise, we're wasting money because Alex is being paid to be productive and for a while they become the opposite, potentially becoming a drag for the other teammates as well.
In the long run, it pays off, because eventually, Alex gets so confident on doing web that cross-functionality becomes more fluent but this is not always possible, depending on the company you work for.
And even depending on the willingness of people on the team. Scrum disregards that individuals tend to have a specialization, preferences, and cozy feelings about working on one area of software or the other. This also impacts the performance that people tackle a particular BI.
We're not always on the same page
The other part of the problem is that different parts of writing software gave different lifecycles.
Scrum teams that have QA as a member recognize that writing and testing code are two different activities, with their own pace. Why doesn't Scrum do the same for web, mobile, and back-end writing efforts?
About QA: proper testing can only be done after all relevant coding activities are finished, so it's easier to recognize writing and testing as different activities which are time-dependent on each other.
The answer is, of course, because increments on Scrum are value-oriented, which per se, makes a lot of sense in the product perspective but they don't always make sense for people dealing with technology within the Scrum team. Specialty when this relies on bureaucracy.
Let's say that Jordan has finished the lift up that had been proposed by a visual designer. As styling for the web is a complicated matter, even after finish coding, the team's policy dictates that the designer needs to sit with Jordan to make small adjustments, when necessary.
Here Jordan might find themself looked up in a cycle of development-and-revision which takes a while, should we block Alex to work on other tasks?
The idea behind Scrum says that "yes" because if Alex works too much in the future, the team might make discoveries that would invalidate Alex's work, also leading to their time being wasted.
Particularly I'd rather have Alex working on their specialty because it would cause less rework (which is very expensive) and try to mitigate too much work in the future by having talks about how integrations between front-end and back-end would happen.
In this scenario, Alex and Jordan make agreements about how the integration plays out (largely the schema of data and endpoints) and Alex starts working in non-user-oriented tasks about delivering such agreements to the front-end.
To validate Alex's own work, Alex also has to integrate their own changes on the front-end right away but without digging deep into solving BI from the end-users' perspective i.e. Alex's concern is about making technological advancements on the software.
With integration solved, when Jordan can pick up the equivalent BI from the tasks Alex has already integrated, Jordan will have a much simpler time finishing their own task and will be responsible to deliver the BI from the end-users' perspective.
Pretty much I am advocating to make the front-end activities as the "interface" for considering increments done from the end-users' perspective. The tradeoffs with the by-the-book Scrum approach don't seem too bad in my developer's eyes, I'd love more managemental perspectives here.
So does Scrum get in the way of technology?
IMO yes, but it does it as part of the well-balanced system that I had mentioned so not much harm comes from it.
So in the end, it's a matter of understanding your own situation and decide if you will play by the rules or invent your own, like applying the shu-ha-ri method. | https://medium.com/code-thoughts/does-scrum-get-in-the-way-of-technology-64e16b6c71a5 | ['Marcos Vinícius Silva'] | 2020-12-15 17:03:07.553000+00:00 | ['Framework', 'Agile Methodology', 'Developer Stories', 'Software Development', 'Scrum'] |
An overview of text classification | An overview of text classification
Imagine we have a large number of text files and we need to classify these text files into different topics. What should we do? This article will walk you through an overview of text classification and how I would approach this problem on a high-level basis. I would like to address this problem in three steps — data preparation and exploration, labeling, and modeling.
Data Preparation and Data Exploration
The first step is data preparation and exploration. I will transform our text data into a matrix representation through different word embedding methods. Then, I will perform an N-gram analysis and topic modeling to explore the data in more detail.
Word Embedding
Bag of words
Most text analysis and machine learning models use the bag of words embedding, which tokenizes our text into tokens, normalize tokens, count occurrences, apply weights (optional), filter out stopwords, and create a document-term matrix. Bag of words assumes the independence of the words and does not take into account the sequence of the words. I will use the bag of words approach for my data exploration and machine learning models.
Word2vec Embedding
Deep learning models often use the pre-trained word2vec embeddings, which incorporate the information of word similarities. The advantage of word2vec is that it has much fewer dimensions than the bag of words approach, and our document-term matrix will be a dense matrix, and not sparse. I plan to use a word2vec embedding (e.g., word2vec-google-news-300) for my deep learning models.
Character Embedding
Some deep learning models use character embedding and build models at the character-level directly [1][2]. Characters can include English characters, digits, special characters, and others. The advantage of character embedding is that it can model with uncommon words and unknown words. I might try character embedding with my deep learning models to compare with the word2vec embedding.
N-gram analysis
With the bag of words approach, we can investigate the single word (unigram), and combinations of two words and three words (Bigram/Trigram). With N-gram analysis, we can have a descriptive view of which words or word combinations are being used the most.
Topic modeling
Next is topic modeling. There are two ways to do topic modeling: NMF models and LDA models. Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is a matrix decomposition method, which decomposes a matrix into the product of W and H of non-negative elements. The default method optimizes the distance between the original matrix and WH, i.e., the Frobenius norm [3]. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a generative probabilistic model optimizing the posterior distribution of the topic assignment [4].
Both NMF and LDA require users to define the number of topics. How do we know how many topics we should put in the model? We can use a grid search and find the optimal parameters (topics, learning rate, etc.) that can optimize the log-likelihood value [5].
The output is a list of topics and their associated words, which can then be used to predict the topic of each file. However, since it is unsupervised, we cannot validate and iterate the model, and the performance of this prediction is often less than ideal. So instead of using the model to predict file topics, my goal for this step is to come up with a list of topics, so that we can use this list of topics to facilitate labeling.
For the implementations of N-gram analysis and topic modeling, check out this article.
Labeling
Now, we should have a list of topics produced from the topic modeling. We can then label our files to this list of topics.
If we have resources, we can hire third parties to do the labels. Otherwise, we can label the topics ourselves. We can even construct our labeling task as a survey, with dropdown choices from prepopulated topics. We will also include the “Other, please specify” option if none of the topics match with the file.
Topic modeling also predicts the topic for each file. Although it might not be the most accurate, we can still use this information to try choosing a balanced sample of topics to label.
Modeling
Machine learning model
We randomly sample our labeled data into training (70%), validation(20%), and testing (10%) datasets (the percentages depend on the sample size). The input of my machine learning model is the bag of words matrix for the text files. For any additional information of text (e.g., file source), we can dummy code this information and concatenate the dummies to our document-term matrix. The output is the labels.
I would like to test four machine learning models and compare their performances on model accuracy and confusion matrix through k-folds cross-validations.
- Multinomial logistic regression
- Multinomial Naive Bayes
- Support vector machine
- XGBoost
Multinomial logistic regression is the most basic and easiest to interpret. However, I suspect multinomial logistic regression would perform the worst. Multinomial Naive Bayes is another popular model for text classification that can give us a benchmark result. Support vector machine and XGBoost should provide us better results. We will need to do some hyperparameter tuning to find the best performing model. From my experience, with various hyperparameters and methods to avoid overfitting, XGBoost usually works the best. For implementation details, check out sklearn and xgboost documentations.
Deep learning model
Three types of deep learning models are suited for NLP tasks — recurrent networks (LSTMs and GRUs), convolutional neural networks, and transformers. The recurrent network takes a long time and is harder to train, and not great for text classification tasks. The convolutional neural network is easy and fast to train, can take many layers, and outperform the recurrent network [6][7]. The transformers model is the state of the art method, however, I do not have much experience with transformers. Thus, I will only talk about the convolutional neural network.
The input of the deep learning model is the matrix of the word2vec embedding for each text file. Again, we randomly sample our labeled data into training (70%), validation (20%), and testing (10%) datasets. We can increase the percentage of our training set if our sample size is small.
We will randomly separate training data into different batches. The sample size for each input needs to be the sample for each batch. Thus, we need to find the longest input text and pad all the other input text to match the length of the longest text.
For constructing the deep learning model, we can add multiple layers of convolutional blocks and then feed the results into a softmax layer to get the classification result (see figure 1). Note that with text analysis, we need to make sure that our receptive field is as large as possible so that the network is looking at the entire length of the input text for each document. Thus, we use many layers and dilated convolutions to increase the receptive field. The code below shows an example code of a convolutional block (note that for text generation, we will need to use a causal convolutional block. But for text classification, many-layered dilated convolution will be fine). For each layer, we can increase the number of dilations by a factor of 2. Then we can tune and train the model and apply various techniques to prevent overfitting until we are satisfied with the model performance. And the final step is to predict all file labels with our trained deep learning model.
Now you have a high-level view of text classification. Enjoy!
Figure 1. Illustration of a convolutional network for classification [7].
References:
[1] http://proceedings.mlr.press/v32/santos14.html
[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.06615.pdf
[3] https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/decomposition.html#nmf
[4] https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/decomposition.html#latentdirichletallocation
[5] https://www.machinelearningplus.com/nlp/topic-modeling-python-sklearn-examples/
[6] http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs224n/slides/cs224n-2020-lecture11-convnets.pdf
[7] http://www.philkr.net/dl_class/lectures/sequence_modeling/04.pdf | https://towardsdatascience.com/an-overview-of-text-classification-b1ec14db358c | ['Sophia Yang'] | 2020-12-24 22:24:52.236000+00:00 | ['Cnn', 'Machine Learning', 'Text Classification', 'Classification', 'Topic Modeling'] |
Project Manager’s High | A traveler of both time and space...to be where I want to be…find me another space in another time.
Follow | https://medium.com/datacrat/project-managers-high-5fa9d08b9c81 | [] | 2019-04-08 10:58:01.887000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Technology', 'Life Lessons', 'Data', 'Project Management'] |
How much your happiness cost? | Wouldnt be nice if happiness has a price tag? People who are desperate but rich enough could even buy happiness. Where the whole world will be striding towards how to earn money leaving happiness behind. How pathetic?
These are my delusions, but still, hard truth how the human being programmed these days gives a glimpse of the dark future.
From choosing careers to death bed, we forget the real meaning of happiness and embedded the synthetic way of happiness. Reckoning happiness can only be attained by the materialistic things around us.
Choosing a career not because we love it, but just because we wanted to fill our bank. Money is vital there is no debate in that, but when you replace happiness with money then that's an issue.
I hear people shouting Passion!! but the majority of these people are lying scumbags indeed. They usually mold themselves in society by faking their passion.
The word passion should be an inner force, now it's been more like a force exerted by society onto us. Taking what the world gives us to lead us to nothing but society’s hoax, which masquerades alike truth but they are pure disbelief.
Are you ready to put a price tag on your happiness yet? | https://medium.com/@ashikshafi0/how-much-your-happiness-cost-9122c7ccc2a8 | ['Ashik Shaffi'] | 2020-12-27 14:48:15.944000+00:00 | ['People', 'Belief', 'Society', 'Happiness', 'Money'] |
Victorian Houses vs. New Builds: Which are Easier to Maintain | You may dream of a Victorian terrace house, the floorboards creaking under each step, the decadent designs and of course the heaps of character. On the other hand, you might think that Victorian houses are overrated and you’d rather a fresh new home. Ask most people whether they would prefer to live in a Victorian Terrace or a new build and they’ll have a strong opinion. As a piling contractor, I am oftentimes asked which is better from a professional’s point of view. I always answer the same, the truth is, it completely depends on what you need from your property. Every type of home comes with benefits and, on the flip side, disadvantages. In this article I’ll take you through the pros and cons of Victorian and new build houses.
Victorian Houses
When you are talking about Victorian houses the home is likely to have been built between the 1830s to the early 1900s. There was a boom in property building when the Industrial Revolution began, as materials were more readily available. Period houses have a certain set of characteristics that make them easy to define and are widely regarded as sought-after family homes. It’s also popular to renovate Victorian terrace properties into separate flats. Their high ceilings and lots of floor make for perfect apartments.
Pros
Sturdy
Victorian houses were built to last. The fact that Victorian and Georgian houses have been standing tall for decades — sometimes even centuries — proves that they are sturdy structures. The way in which they were built allows the houses to spread the load across the ground so the weight is distributed evenly. By today’s standards, Victorian foundations seem very shallow and in some cases, the concrete footings are no more than 200mm deep.
Investment
These homes are incredibly ornate and beautiful, there is no denying that Victorian and Georgian houses are beautiful to look at. Aside from the pleasure of owning an aesthetically pleasing home, it is also this kind of curb side appeal that makes them an amazing investment. Some of the sought-after features that are associated with Victorian properties include:
Bay windows
Stained glass
Unique tiles
Feature fireplaces
High ceilings
All of these accents are more selling points for the Victoria house, they are filled with character and history. Once you’ve decided to move on (if you ever do) you’ll have little trouble selling it when it’s time to move on with these features.
Space
High ceilings give the illusion of a larger space and you’re a lot less likely to find this feature in newly built homes. Furthermore, Victorian houses often offer more floor space than new builds as they were built at a time when cities were not so densely populated. Consequently, Victorian homes are a lot more likely to be spacious. On many occasions you will also have ample opportunity to extend (for example with a loft conversion or kitchen extension).
Cons
Upkeep
Older houses require more attention from their owners to keep them in good condition. Everybody has experienced damp and mould, it may be one of the most aggravating things in an older property. On top of this, when you first move in you may find that you need to replaster the walls, have a new roof or even address any structural problems that might occur. You’ll often find Victorian houses located on suburban leafy streets, therefore pesky tree roots could be crawling under your house. If there are trees outside it’s worth investigating whether your property has any subsidence issues, if you do find subsidence, your property could require underpinning.
Cold
High ceilings and sash windows mean high heating bills, and keeping Victorian homes warm is a notoriously expensive endeavour. Victorian houses were made with sash windows that look great but can be draughty. You may find a Victorian property with double glazing already installed, however this isn’t always the case. You could replace these windows to conserve energy however it can be a pricey process.
It can be tempting to replace the wooden sliding sash windows in a Victorian property with double glazed uPVC. However, it completely changes the look of the house, so if you’re going down that road make sure you explore all your options.
If you’re planning to buy a Victorian property because of their beauty, make sure you first consider the responsibilities to keep that home looking as pretty as it does.
New Builds
A lot of people will hear ‘new build’ and think of a white square block; new properties often lack the curbside appeal of period properties. The reality is that new builds can be rather plain, but not all of them. Recent modern developments such as the Scandi-inspired timber framed models have meant that new builds are becoming more desirable and a lot more aesthetically pleasing.
Pros
Unused
Your own space! There is nothing better than it. A new build property is yours to make, it’s a complete blank canvas. It’s difficult to argue the appeal of buying a brand new property. Untouched carpets, freshly plastered walls and double glazing make new builds ideal for those looking for a low maintenance way of living. New builds are simple to decorate as well, after waiting for the house to settle for 6–12 months you can decorate to your heart’s content.
Even better is the warranty that new builds come with, meaning you’re safe in the knowledge that you won’t be lumped with a bill for a new roof a few months after you’ve moved in. This provides peace of mind to many first time buyers, who don’t want to stress of the upkeep of a Victorian property.
You can also sleep 100% sure that there aren’t any ghosts in your house. What a benefit!
Modern Materials
Building materials are always improving and recently there’s been an emphasis on sustainability. Many modern housing developments are now taking the steps to encourage greener living, whether that be using solar panels and heat pumps or planting bee-friendly plants in their gardens.
With the most modern materials, a new build home should be built to a better standard than Victorian houses.
Safe
Older period properties are a lot less likely to comply with health and safety regulations that are in place for new build houses. For example in a new build home, rooms over a certain size are required by law to have an opening window that is large enough to escape from in the event of a fire. Families find these high safety standards extremely appealing as older properties do not always need to pass these regulations.
Cons
Lack of Character
‘But it’s not as pretty’ is one of the main complaints with modern properties. They simply lack character. New build housing developments can be strange to look at, all the houses being a carbon copy of the one next to it. For some, this is not a problem. Others enjoy the unique aspects of a period property. Curb side appeal isn’t as high with new buildings so if you’re looking to sell your property you may have a tougher time.
Location
Modern properties are often located in the suburbs or a little further out of town, as the Victorians built properties close to central amenities. This means that new housing developments are often pushed to more spacious areas where there is land available.
Location is a really important selling point depending on your wants and needs. New build housing developments are usually within good locations of schools and local amenities rather than the city centre. For families, this can be a huge benefit. For other, it could be a massive con.
Conclusion
We can all appreciate the beauty of a Victorian house, whilst also appreciating the practicality of new builds. There are pros and cons to both and you can be quite surprised by the amount of people who don’t know the responsibility of a Victorian home before buying it. If you have a busy lifestyle and your priority is safety and security, a new build is a great option. If you think that ongoing maintenance is worth the trade-off for a house that is full of character and a little more spacious, start researching Victorian or Georgian properties in your area.
Visit Dart & Co for advice on all your construction and foundation queries. | https://medium.com/@dartandco/victorian-houses-vs-new-builds-which-are-easier-to-maintain-65bd328e966f | ['Dart'] | 2020-12-15 16:20:57.976000+00:00 | ['Housing', 'Victorian House', 'New Build', 'Home'] |
Lottery For The Parents And Grandparents Program Might Be Delayed | The Parents and Grandparents Program or PGP 2020 is a popular option, especially since family reunification is one of the Canadian immigration goals. Now that the expression of interest window has closed, it is time for IRCC to hold the lottery.
However, as things stand, it seems that the IRCC will delay the immigration lottery till next year. Applicants will have to wait until early 2021 to get their results. Canada planned to hold the lottery by the end of December, but the pandemic is still posing problems.
The Expression of Interest window for the PGP this year opened between October 13 and November 3. Potential sponsors were able to submit their applications during this period. Permanent residents and Canadian citizens had to submit their form online to IRCC to make their wish of sponsoring their parents and grandparents known. IRCC was going to select eligible sponsors through a randomized lottery.
Canadian PR Visa From The Comfort of Your Home! Discover Your Immigration Options Today!
IRCC’s Response
According to the IRCC website, the sponsors are going to receive invitations to apply towards the end of 2021. The applications need to be submitted by early 2021. IRCC offered an explanation for the delay in an email to CIC News.
IRCC is in the process of going through the submissions made this year. The goal is to eliminate duplicates and create a new, randomized list. As soon as the list is prepared, IRCC will send out invitations to apply. The pandemic caused the program to open late this year, and there are other problems that are still holding back progress.
The PGP is a helpful pathway for immigrants who want to bring their parents and grandparents into Canada by sponsoring them.
Canadian PR Visa From The Comfort of Your Home! Discover Your Immigration Options Today! | https://medium.com/@betterplaceimmi/lottery-for-the-parents-and-grandparents-program-might-be-delayed-1653ab8170d6 | ['Betterplace Immigration'] | 2020-12-24 15:27:13.873000+00:00 | ['Betterplaceimmigration', 'Canada Immigration', 'Canada', 'Parents', 'Immigration'] |
Public Official Twitter-blocking Unconstitutional? | Public Official Twitter-blocking Unconstitutional?
Court says “Yes” for the president — why Congress could be a different story
The Second Circuit recently ruled that @RealDonaldTrump can’t block people who disagree with him on Twitter. Does the decision apply to members of Congress and other elected officials? It’s not clear. Here are a few things for courts, lawmakers, and aspiring plaintiffs to keep in mind as they consider new questions on the topic.
New precedents
In Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump (decided July 9, 2019), the Second Circuit Court of Appeals held that posts created through President Trump’s personal Twitter account (@RealDonaldTrump) established a “public forum,” in which speech protected by the First Amendment (like political speech) could not be curtailed by the government (through the president or his staff “blocking” people holding viewpoints with which they disagreed).
This case follows the recent Fourth Circuit decision, Davison v. Randall (decided January 16, 2019), which upheld the lower court’s finding that the Facebook “page” of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors Chair, Phyllis J. Randall, was a public forum and that Randall acted “under the color of state law” when she deleted her post and corresponding comments by the plaintiff, constituent Brian Davison, and banned him from commenting on the page. The court agreed that Davison’s First Amendment rights were violated when he was banned from the page and his Fourteenth Amendment due process rights violated because he was given no notice or opportunity to appeal the ban.
Importantly, both decisions involve the banning or blocking of constituents by the elected official. However, neither decision addressed the question of whether the First (or Fourteenth) Amendment argument would apply to the the blocking of non-constituents — if, for example, the President blocked non-U.S. citizens outside of the United States or if the Loudoun County chair blocked citizens of Oregon.
Both decisions also concluded that the elected official’s social media activity created a public forum — for President Trump, through his ostensibly “personal” Twitter account; and for Supervisor Randall, through her creation and maintenance of a Facebook “page,” — so that subsequent banning or blocking was the equivalent of a government action, even though it occurred on a private platform. Neither decision addressed the question of an elected official blocking a person with a personal account where activity on the account does not meet the test of actions taken “under the color of law” or actions that would create a public forum.
New questions
Soon after the Knight Institute decision was announced, two new cases were filed against Rep. Ocasio-Cortez [D, NY]: one by former New York Assemblyman, Dov Hikind (complaint) and another by Joe Salads, a candidate for Congress in NY-11 (the district currently served by Rep. Max Rose [D, NY]). Notably, both suits challenge the blocking of plaintiffs on Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s personal or campaign Twitter account, @AOC, rather than her official Congressional account, @RepAOC, and both defendants appear to live outside of the district represented by the congresswoman.
1. Do persons other than “constituents” have standing to challenge social media blocking?
In both the Knight Institute and Davison cases, the persons bringing suit were constituents of the respective elected officials. In the United States’ geographical system of representation, a “constituent” is a person who lives in the district, state, or jurisdiction represented by an elected official. One of the first questions the court will have to consider in these new cases is whether the right to interact with an elected official is limited to constituents or if non-constituents have standing to bring the case.
Precedent from Long Ago: the Congressional Franking Privilege
Article I, Section 5, clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress broad powers to makes its own rules and discipline its members: “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member.”
(Me nerding out on historical discussions of Franking abuses)
With the advent of digital communications, Congress exercised its right to make rules for its members by including email and social media under the authority of rules governing the “Frank.” “The congressional franking privilege, which allows Members of Congress to send official mail to their constituents at government expense, dates from 1775, when it was approved by the First Continental Congress.” (Pontius) Of course, this privilege was abused many times over the years.
This abuse led the the creation of the Congressional Franking Commission, which is charged with regulating and limiting how official resources are used for communication. Over the years, these came to include limitations on processing or responding to letters received from outside the state or Congressional district served.
To this day, a letter that arrive in a Congressional office from outside the district will be stamped “professional courtesy” and forwarded (usually unopened) to the office of the lawmaker who represents the sender. Similarly, Congressional webforms limit incoming messages to residents of the district or state represented by the lawmaker, and the House “Communicating with Congress” API will not process message delivery from non-constituents.
With the advent of electronic communications, Franking limitations have been extended to cover new media, for example:
Electronic newsletters can only be distributed to subscribers and must undergo a Franking review ensuring that they do not include partisan or personal content.
Offices may not send more than 500 of the same unsolicited emails at a time.
Offices may only send individual letters or emails in response to “solicited communication” from constituents (via phone, fax, letter, or email, etc.)
Offices may not use official resources to invite non-constituents to participate in official online or telephone town halls.
The limit on use of official resources to engage with non-constituents is meant to prevent incumbent advantage and keep lawmakers from using taxpayer resources to grow their audience (perhaps with aspiration for higher office). It is, however, not without its critics. Fellow legislative nerd and lawyer, Daniel Schuman, points out (via email) that lawmakers’ activities as committee members impact and require input from people beyond their districts:
I don’t know whether I think that drawing the line around constituents is appropriate for government congressional accounts. Tweeting at and following members of a committee, even though they’re not your member, seems not unreasonable to me. … So long as members play multiple roles within the institution it’s hard to limit engagement.
The Firewall: Ethics limits on official resources for personal or campaign activity
In addition to Franking limitations on engagement with people not represented by the lawmaker, Congressional Ethics rules place strict limitations on the use of official resources for non-official purposes. For example:
Congressional staff members may not be assigned to carry out personal or campaign-related tasks — including communications or social media.
Lawmakers may not use supplies purchased with office allotments for personal or campaign-related activity.
Lawmakers may not convert personal social media or email accounts to official use; they must establish a new “official” account, which cannot be used for personal or campaign-related activity.
Rep. Dan Crenshaw [R, TX] expressing the frustration that many new lawmakers felt upon establishing their new “official” social media accounts and starting back at zero followers.
Franking and Ethics limitations that prioritize (and in some cases restrict) official communication by members of Congress to constituents and prohibit access or maintenance of personal or campaign accounts by Congressional staffers will be an important factor for courts to consider in determining whether non-constituents have a justiciable claim that their rights are violated when their ability to view or engage with lawmakers’ content is curtailed.
2. Do tweets (or Facebook posts) on lawmakers’ personal or campaign accounts create a “public forum”?
The Court in Knight Institute found that tweets by the @RealDonaldTrump Twitter account, though technically the “personal” account of President Trump, created a “public forum” because of several factors:
Bio lists government position: The bio on the @RealDonaldTrump Twitter profile included the president’s position and title.
2. Subject to public records law: The court noted (and DoJ stipulated) that tweets from @realDonaldTrump “are official records that must be preserved under the Presidential Records Act.”
3. Subject has the authority to make policy unilaterally and has used the account to do so: The court noted that the president’s personal account is used “to take actions that can be taken only by the President as President” (including announcing the firing of the Secretary of State and certain cabinet nominations).
4. Account accessed and maintained by staff during official government activity: The court also noted that the account is run by White House staff and the president when acting in an official capacity “the parties exercising control here are a public official, the President, and his subordinate, Scavino, acting in his official capacity.”
Are Congressional tweets different?
1. Bio lists government position: Certainly most accounts of Members of Congress, even on personal or campaign accounts, satisfy the first Knight Institute factor: most note their position and district or state their personal or campaign bios.
However, the other Knight Institute factors that caused the Court to consider tweets by @RealDonaldTrump to be a “public forum” may not be present in the case of tweets by Members of Congress on their personal or campaign pages:
2. Not subject to Presidential Records Act (or any specific public reporting rule): Congressional communications are (official, campaign, or personal) are not subject to records preservation statutes, including FOIA, though committees are subject to archiving requirements. (h/t Daniel Schuman)
3. Cannot take unilateral action or make policy via tweet: Unlike the president, Members of Congress cannot take unilateral action (such as firing or appointing a cabinet member or imposing trade sanctions) via Twitter. At most, a member of Congress could announce a bill that he or she has or will introduce, or how he or she intends to vote on a pending legislative proposal. The concurring opinion in Davison v. Randall by Judge Barbara Milano Keenan highlighted this question as one the court left unanswered:
I question whether any and all public officials, regardless of their roles, should be treated equally in their ability to open a public forum on social media. …The Supreme Court recently cited a series of decisions in which “a unit of government” had created a public forum… However, it appears to be an open question whether an individual public official serving in a legislative capacity qualifies as a unit of government or a government entity for purposes of her ability to open a public forum.
4. Not administered or accessed by government staff: As noted, Congressional offices are prohibited from allowing Congressional staff members to access or update personal or campaign accounts.
Any court considering whether the Second and Fourth Amendment decisions are applicable to Congress will have to take these differences into account.
So what should the rule be?
Recent and pending cases make clear that we are still in a mushy world with few rules or norms when it comes to public officials and social media — and that there is great need for clarity. Ultimately, it should be possible to establish a standard that maintains First Amendment protections in legitimate public fora for all citizens, maintains the ability of elected officials to serve their constituents and responsibly steward public resources, and still allows elected officials to maintain personal and campaign accounts online according to their own needs. Common sense principles might include:
Elected officials (at any level) should maintain separate accounts for the conduct of official business as opposed to personal or campaign accounts. Posts or tweets by official government accounts should be understood create a public forum (still up for debate: whether activity on that public forum can be limited by the government to constituents only). Personal or campaign accounts of public officials may block or ban any account for any reason (regardless of whether that person is a constituent or not). If a government official uses a personal or campaign account for official purposes “under the color of law” and meet the Knight Institute factors, its posts or tweets may be considered a “public forum”
Questions for the Court:
Address the difference (if any) between the rights and privileges of constituents and people who are not served by the public official in question . While all certainly have First Amendment privileges and the “right to petition the government for redress of grievances,” Congress has, within its own rules, limited communication to and from lawmakers supported by official resources to that with and for constituents, and this may an important distinction to address.
. While all certainly have First Amendment privileges and the “right to petition the government for redress of grievances,” Congress has, within its own rules, limited communication to and from lawmakers supported by official resources to that with and for constituents, and this may an important distinction to address. Examine the Knight Institute factors finding tweets as “public forum” to the specific case of Congress, in which there are no public records requirements for individual members, individual lawmakers (in most cases) may not take unilateral action or make or announce new policies through social media, and official resources may not be used for maintenance or access to personal or campaign accounts.
Recommendations for elected officials (who are not the president):
Maintain separate personal, campaign, and official accounts and clearly note this status in the “bio” of the account Do not conduct official business through personal or campaign accounts Do not allow staffers paid by public funds to access or update personal or campaign accounts Do not allow campaign or personal employees, volunteers, or family members to access or update official accounts
Recommendations for Franking Commission and Ethics Committee: | https://medium.com/g21c/public-official-twitter-blocking-unconstitutional-31dd73b8719a | ['Marci Harris'] | 2019-07-29 17:38:39.624000+00:00 | ['Twitter', 'Social Media', 'Congress', 'G21c Articles', 'Facebook'] |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.