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Zomato, Restaurant Analysis | Introduction
Bangalore(officially known as Bengaluru) is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Karnataka.
With a population of over 15 million, Bangalore is the third largest city in India and 27th largest city in the world.
Bangalore has a unique food culture. Restaurants from all over the world can be found here, with various kind of cuisines.
Some might even say that Bangalore is the best place for foodies.
The food industry is always at a rise in Bangalore, with 12,000 plus restaurants currently active in the city, the number is still increasing.
The growing number of restaurants and dishes in Bangalore is what attracts me to inspect the data to get some insights, some interesting facts and figures.
So, in this article I will be analyzing the Zomato restaurant data for the city, Bangalore.
Breakdown of this notebook:
Loading the dataset: Load the data and import the libraries. Data Cleaning:
Deleting redundant columns.
Renaming the columns.
Dropping duplicates.
Cleaning individual columns.
Remove the NaN values from the dataset
Some Transformations
3. Regression Analysis
Linear Regression
Decision Tree Regression
Random Forest Regression
4. Data Visualization: Using plots to find relations between the features.
Restaurants delivering Online or not
Restaurants allowing table booking or not
Table booking Rate vs Rate
Best Location
Relation between Location and Rating
Restaurant Type
Gaussian Rest type and Rating
Types of Services
Relation between Type and Rating
Cost of Restuarant
No. of restaurants in a Location
Restaurant type
Most famous restaurant chains in Bengaluru
Loading the Dataset
Reading the dataset
Removing the Duplicates
Remove the NaN values from the dataset
Changing the Columns Names
Some Transformations
Removing ‘/5’ from Rates
Adjust the column names
Encode the input Variables
Get Correlation between different variables
Defining the independent variables and dependent variables
Regression Analysis
Data Visualization
Restaurants delivering Online or not
Location
Location and Rating
Restaurant Type
Gaussian Rest type and Rating
Cost of Restaurant
No. of restaurants in a Location
Restaurant Type
Most famous restaurant chains in Bengaluru | https://medium.com/@suchetamaitra/zomato-restaurant-analysis-ce3b57c10f2b | ['Sucheta Maitra'] | 2020-10-21 20:49:21.030000+00:00 | ['Zomato', 'Regression'] |
5 Steps For Better Time Management | Do you always feel like there are never enough hours in the day? Do you feel stressed thinking about the sheer volume of tasks you have to complete? Do you have so much to do and don’t even know where to start?
There are only 24 hours in the day, so if you have a lot to do, it is important to use your 24 hours to maximum effect. Time management is not about making you work harder and longer, it is about working smarter. It is about using our time productively.
Here are five steps to help you manage your time better.
1. Write a to-do list.
The list of tasks you need to complete should be written down. Don’t rely on your memory. The to-do list should be updated every day before you leave work. This ensures that as soon as you come in the next day, you can get started. You don’t have to spend half an hour in the morning thinking about which tasks to start with.
All uncompleted task should be carried over to the following day.
“It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?” — Henry David Thoreau
2. Break large tasks into smaller tasks.
Breaking large tasks into their component elements not only makes them manageable but holds procrastination at bay.
If it is your responsibility to organise an award ceremony, writing “organise award ceremony” on your to-do list is not going to get it done. You need to break it down into the different task involved in organised the ceremony, such as; Find a suitable venue, confirm speakers, design invitation etc. These smaller manageable tasks can then be transferred onto your to-do list.
3. The items on the to-do list need to be prioritised.
The items on the list should be categorised under the following headings:
Urgent and important
Not urgent but important
Urgent but not important
Not urgent and not important
Categorising your tasks helps to identify which items on the list need to be done now, and which can wait.
If your friend Clara has come over to your desk to discuss where to go for lunch, this is neither important nor urgent. It can wait.
If one week before the award ceremony, the trophies have still not been purchased, purchasing them is both an important and urgent task. It is important because an award ceremony without the presentation of trophies/ awards will be a flop.
It is urgent because the engravers need time to do their engraving and the organisers need to check the engraved trophies before the event. With only one week before the event, there might not be much time to rectify any spelling mistakes.
If you are to prepare a sales forecast presentation for the board meeting in two weeks’ time, this task is important, but not urgent. It is important because the information in the presentation will be used to decide the strategic direction of the company. However, it is not urgent because you have two weeks to prepare the presentation.
Two days before the board meeting, if you are still waiting for the Finance department to provide you with crucial information for the presentation, the task now becomes both important and urgent.
“If you want to make good use of your time, you’ve got to know what’s most important and then give it all you’ve got.” — Lee Iacocca
You are about to go into a meeting with an important prospect. Your colleague's phone is ringing off the hook, the Managing Director steps out of his office and looks at you like; “Aren’t you going to answer it?”
Answering the phone is urgent, but not important. It is urgent because you need to do it NOW. It is not important because it will not add to the profits to the company. Whilst you deal with this non-urgent phone call, your prospect, who wants to place a large order with the company is waiting.
4. Allocate time for each task.
We have a tendency to under-estimate the time needed to successfully complete a task. You need to be realistic about the actual time required to complete a task. This will prevent you from feeling stress and disillusioned that you did not accomplish more in the day.
If you are going to spend three hours putting together a sales PowerPoint presentation, two hours in a meeting, one hour updating the database and an hour and a half dealing with customer complaints, that already accounts for seven and half hours of your day.
Based on the time it takes to complete your important and urgent tasks, you can clearly see that you cannot do much more before 5:30 pm.
There is no point feeling stressed that you did not accomplish more in your seven hours. You could not have done more yourself.
Use your previous experience to gauge how long it takes to complete a task. If you are performing the task for the first time, keep a mental record of how long it takes to successfully complete it.
5. Minimising distractions
It can be difficult to focus with the phone constantly ringing, demanding your urgent attention. Other disruptions such as email, social media and colleagues coming over to have a chat, can derail your day. What was supposed to be quick hello can easily turn into a half-hour conversation. A quick peek at FaceBook can result in a whole hour lost to social media.
Ways to minimise distractions include;
• Putting your phone on voicemail.
• Switching of social media.
• Turning off audio and visual notifications.
• Telling people who disrupt you, that you are busy. Suggest a more convenient time to meet with them.
• Scheduling time in your calendar for yourself. If you need two hours of uninterrupted time to work on a presentation, make a specific appointment with yourself to work on it. Block off the time in your calendar, so that you are unavailable.
• Isolating yourself. Book a meeting room for yourself and get your work done.
Time is a valuable, non-renewal resource. Once it is gone, it is gone. We can never turn back the clock, so it is a good idea to manage to the time we have. | https://medium.com/the-post-grad-survival-guide/5-steps-for-better-time-management-bf0a56968ea0 | ['Jacqueline A'] | 2019-04-15 11:31:00.913000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Work Life Balance', 'Productivity', 'Self Improvement', 'Advice'] |
On Disney’s Live-Action “Mulan,” Fiction Fandoms, and “The Chinese Virus”: Interview with Jimmy Wong | From his viral anti-racist YouTube music video, “Ching Chong: Asians in the Library Song” staged as a reaction to an offensive vlog, to starring in Disney’s upcoming live-action version of “Mulan” with an all-Asian cast, Jimmy Wong has built a career on Asian representation — his work, as he describes, is the “antithesis of gatekeeping.”
Countering the anti-Asian sentiments spurred by COVID-19, Wong recently released another music video, “The Chinese Virus,” using his trademark sense of humor to educate the public about the tactic of scapegoating without being too preachy.
Wong’s reach extends beyond his craft of music-making and starring in films and web-series including “Wish Dragon” and “Video Game High School.” Passionate about “nerdy and geeky” content, he has worked to “get more people involved” with his passions and politics, in addition to making others feel proud to be a fan or want to join a fandom.
As a co-host of “Polaris Primetime,” he has introduced viewers to the gaming world on DisneyXD. His innovative cooking show, “Feast Of Fiction,” has brought alive pop-cultural and fictional recipes from books, movies, comics, and video games, most recently publishing a cookbook, “The Feast of Fiction Kitchen: The Ultimate Fan’s Guide to Food from TV, Movies, Games & More.”
Over a video call, Jimmy Wong talked to The International Wave about content creation and social activism, his favorite memories while on the set of “Mulan,” and the ongoing hurdles of racial injustice and underrepresentation.
***
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Woojin Lim (WL): Tell me more about your upbringing and how that has contributed to your career.
Jimmy Wong (JW): I grew up in a traditional Chinese household. Both my parents immigrated from China in the 80s. For over a decade, my brother and I studied piano endlessly, and we would spend anywhere from one to two hours a day practicing. Music has always been a core part of what drives me creatively and what I love in life.
Filmmaking has also been a part of my DNA. Back in the mid-to-late nineties, my brother [now a director, Freddie Wong] and I would grab pool cues to film ourselves in Star Wars-esque lightsaber battles. Freddie would then rotoscope each lightsaber frame by frame, adding sound effects and visuals at a time before you could just press a few buttons on modern-day editing software to create the effect.
I don’t think I’ve ever shied away from the camera. Performing came naturally to me, and I never had to get over embarrassment. What I loved growing up and what I do now; they’re both pretty much the same.
WL: Could you tell us more about your YouTube music video, “Ching Chong: Asians in the Library Song,” in relation to your most recent song “The Chinese Virus”?
JW: The first song [“Asians in the Library Song”] was almost an afterthought. It was the third or fourth video I’d ever made on YouTube when I still wasn’t clear on the direction of my channel. But when the offensive video of a former UCLA student making racist comments about Asians rolled around in 2011, my brother encouraged me to speak out about it.
At first, I didn’t know how to respond, so I went towards my first instinct based on improvisational comedy training: my natural response was to take it in a slightly more light-hearted way. I had no idea that my response was going to catch the amount of traction that it did. To me, it was just a fun take on a way to respond to such a divisive video. I never thought that the song would become a signpost that people would look to in terms of using comedy to get over the fact that blatant racism is still apparent in the world.
Most recently, I made a video about the usage of the term “Chinese virus” as well as the numerous racial attacks targeting Asians across the world. Asians were blamed for an illness that had no nationality. For this video, I wanted to highlight a more educational aspect than just hammering on one person like the first video did. I wanted to focus on the tactic of scapegoating. There’s a lot more at play than the simple naming of a virus that ties into a deeper cultural impact that I don’t think a lot of people realized was happening.
WL: How does the message of your videos translate today in light of America’s ongoing fight against racial injustice?
JW: My songs point at a glaringly bright object in the distance that we’ve been woefully ignorant of for a long time. I look back at the songs I wrote and realize how they barely hold a candle to all of the problems that have now been dug up.
In light of the Black Lives Matter protests and the civil rights movement reigniting itself in America, what is important is to highlight the struggles that affect us all together as disenfranchised and marginalized peoples. Right now the focus is deservedly on Black lives as a minority group that has been more disproportionately affected than others.
The privilege that we have as Asians is apparent when you compare the ways that Black lives have been treated by police forces. Of course, it is unfortunate that Asians are wrongly targeted as people to blame for a virus, but there haven’t been decades of cops murdering Asians in cold blood in the streets and nothing happening to the cops.
I’m not saying that one group’s experience is entirely insignificant as a result. We shouldn’t downplay another’s suffering or prioritize ours. If anything, my point is that both Asian and Black experiences are pointing towards the same root issue in America. It’s not time for us to create borders between races, but to find ways to support each other, and to elevate the right voices in regards to what’s happening.
WL: How do you see your music videos as a vehicle of combatting injustice, if so?
JW: Music is one of many beautiful ways — alongside film and animation — to cut through the noise and present ideas that might be harder to bring up in conversation. Sometimes it is hard to broach a topic like racism without everyone talking past each other. Music has this seamless ability to filter into someone’s mind and change the way one might look at the world. I would love to find more ways to elevate the subject and approach it from a way that doesn’t immediately instigate backlash and defensive attitudes.
That said, I’ve always wanted to make sure I was speaking for something that I had an inherent connection to. In this time, I would much rather promote a Black voice in the community that has experienced these ongoing struggles first-hand and can speak truthfully to their experience.
WL: Switching gears a little bit, how would you describe the creative content — from music covers, podcasts, food shows — that you’ve made?
JW: My content is nerdy and geeky, based off of my long history in gaming, which is a huge passion of mine. I’ve had a “Magic: the Gathering” podcast for the past five years, and we’re at 300 plus episodes now.
What drives me to create content is the desire to get more people involved with what I love, in addition to making people feel proud to be a fan of something or want to become a fan of something. You might say that my work is an antithesis of gatekeeping. Educational content is a great way to bridge that gap between people who might not know anything about something to showing them a little more of a world that they may have been interested in.
That’s also why I make cooking videos to create recipes from television shows that you watch growing up in real life [“Feast of Fiction”]. Through doing that show, I learned how to cook and embraced my love of these fictional fandoms, listening to the community and hearing what fans wanted made.
By finding ways to cross-pollinate and integrate communities together, you are creating a larger, more inclusive and diverse fanbase of people that feel represented, but also feel proud to express their love for something that they truly do enjoy without feeling like they’re going to be shamed for it or locked out by a gatekeeper, because they’re not “real fans.” The key component to my content is that a lot of it is based in education and teaching, welcoming and bringing more people into the fold as opposed to excluding people.
WL: How did you start about your cooking channel, “Feast of Fiction,” and the cookbook you’ve published this past April?
JW: The original inspiration for the channel came in 2011 when I was sitting around the kitchen with my brother. This was after I released the “Asians in the Library” music video and I was looking for something new to do. I already felt the burnout from making music content because I was writing a song, editing, filming, editing, putting the video all together, and the cycle went on and on. Making a new video in a weekly cadence was brutal. So I wanted to find something that was a little more doable and series-based.
So around the kitchen table, my brother and I were asking ourselves, “what do we want to see that hasn’t yet existed in video form?” At that time, I thought it would be cool to make real-life food from video games, movies, animes, and books. Shortly after, I met my co-host Ashley Adams serendipitously, of all places, at Disneyland. She told me that she was also a baking fanatic and that she wanted to be an on-air personality.
A common request on our channel was to make a cookbook that housed all these recipes. Over the course of two and a half years, we figured out all the legalities around making a cookbook, selected and tested the recipes we wanted to make, and finally did a two-week shoot where we got to make all the recipes and take pictures. Making the book was a long and intensive process, but it was a culmination of what we’ve been doing for a long time. It’s something I want to do again because making a book is a great way to immortalize your hard work and legacy in a physical medium that you can share with others as a gift.
WL: What are your personal favorite recipes from the cookbook?
JW: There’s a focaccia bread that we included as our new take on lembas bread from “Lord of the Rings.” There are many recipes for cakes and drinks, from simple to extravagantly complex ones. The book is great because when you open it, it almost feels like an art book. Each picture is its own world and has its own feel. I really love the photos and the art direction that went into the collection.
WL: After graduating from college, you moved to LA to launch a career in acting. How was it like starting off in the industry?
JW: When I first arrived in Los Angeles, my goals were clearly defined. I was trying to do something in the acting world out of college, and I wanted to be a part of the ecosystem that my brother created with all of his friends from his university days. I wanted to test out my ability as an actor, take improv classes, go out for auditions, and try my hand at this life. I knew I wanted to do something in the entertainment and creative world, and acting seemed to be the most intuitive thing to do when I first got to LA.
I told myself that I would give myself 15 years to try and “make it as an actor” before I would choose to do something else because I heard some story about Brad Pitt taking 15 years before he got his breakout role.
For my first year in LA, I went out on auditions after auditions. For three to fours hours a day, I would surf casting websites and submit myself for auditions, driving around LA and and racking up 40,000 miles on my car. Ultimately, I didn’t get that far. I got into a smaller movie, met a lot of great people, and joined the union, but that wasn’t anything close to what I had hoped to achieve. That’s why I started making YouTube videos — I needed a creative outlet. The greatest blessing of starting YouTube was getting involved in shows like “Video Game High School” while building up my presentational ability through guesting and hosting for other shows and channels.
As the years went on, I tried to audition for roles that were more significant. But back then, there just weren’t as many movies that needed Asians and the industry hadn’t reached the point where “Crazy Rich Asians” and “The Farewell” were mainstays of Asian representation in Hollywood. Eight years is about how long I had to wait before I got what I would call a “break,” and that was auditioning for “Mulan.”
I think I made the right choice, not just continuing to blindly pursue acting, but also to look more into what I could do as a creator and a creative. I’ve been able to do a lot consulting, hosting, you name it. It’s been a great outlet for me as an entertainer as opposed to just an actor, because I’d rather not box myself in one specific category. Had I not made that switch, I don’t think I would be anywhere close to where I am today. I’m glad that the internet provided an outlet for me to flex, test out new waters, and fail a lot but also succeed.
Image Courtesy: Edward Wiklund
WL: You were cast as Ling in Disney’s upcoming live action film, “Mulan” (exclusively streaming on Disney Plus starting September 4). Could you tell me more about casting, playing Ling, and how it felt like to be on set?
JW: I remember hearing about the casting of “Mulan” happening about a year and a half before I went to audition for it. I told my manager at the time very bluntly that I had to get in the room for this. I felt like this is what I had been waiting for as an actor for so long.
My character “Ling” is a returning character from the original animation. He’s a man with his heart on his sleeve, the philosopher-type, the one who dreams of something else with his head in the clouds. I fit into a smaller collective of friends supporting “Mulan” and each soldier embodies a different quality to really flesh out the squad.
It was quite an experience to work on something of that scale. All the while, it made me yearn for the days where I had complete creative control because when you’re just a small piece in the big machine, sometimes you’re just ordered to show up, get ready, and wait for your turn to do your thing because you’re just one actor out of a five hundred person crew. There’s a lot of humility involved as well.
Taking part in a process that big, learning how to prioritize the right things, and seeing everyone working at that professional level was an experience that I’ll carry with me into all the projects that I do in the future.
WL: Any fond memories you had while playing the role, on or off set?
JW: We would always go for dinner together after we shot or trained for the day. I remember getting Korean barbecue with Donnie Yen and he was telling us at the dinner table about one of his friends who was a rapper. One of the cast members and I would beatbox and freestyle in our free time. We came up with a song on the spot for Donnie that he recorded on his phone, and he was touched and impressed. Those were fun moments to connect with people beyond the hierarchy that was naturally created on sets of that size.
WL: Why should theatergoers watch “Mulan”? Is there a message of encouragement you’d like to share with the audience?
JW: I hope that “Mulan” can come out when it wants to come out. Most importantly, I hope it’s released at a time when people are feeling safe and comfortable returning to the theater. “Mulan” is a movie that absolutely needs to be seen on the big screen. The cinematography, the landscapes, and everything done by Director of Photography is beautiful and gorgeous.
It’s an experience that will be super inspirational to many young girls growing up and representational for a lot of Asians. I think it’s a great foray into this world of Asian visibility. More projects like this will happen in the future if we show support for this one. The same goes for movies like “Crazy Rich Asians,” “The Farewell,” and “Tiger Tail.” Your ticket buying is a vote for more projects like these to happen in the future.
It’s important that we get as many people into the theaters buying tickets or doing whatever they can to support the movie. “Mulan” features a predominantly Asian cast with tons of living legends, and it’s something that I think is going to be really inspiring for the people who show up to watch it.
WL: Could you talk more about how your work ties into larger topics in Asian representation?
JW: I want to be a face for the Asian community, but by no means do I want to be the only face. In general, the things I want to do is to inspire other people to keep contributing and creating in a way that elevates Asians in the media and correctly finds our place in terms of representation. The most important thing to me is knowing that there’s going to be someone who’s young and looking for inspiration and looking to see themselves on screen to feel included and to know that they have a place in this filmmaking ecosystem as well. It’s the beginning of a new era for Asian representation in cinema.
I would encourage every Asian person who is an influencer, a content creator, or a celebrity out there to use their voice and platforms for good. If they don’t, someone else has to step up the plate and fill that vacuum. And that person might not yet exist.
WL: Do you have any advice for aspiring actors or YouTubers or anyone who wants to be involved in content creation?
JW: Jokingly, don’t be an actor. It’s tough and it’s hard. More seriously, if you want to be involved in the creative space, don’t limit yourself to a single bucket because many novices don’t really know their real life goals and aims in the world yet. Limiting yourself to one bucket or one profession is something that you might regret down the line.
I would say to stay open, find people who can mentor you, talk to people who inspire you, watch their content, engage in the community, and find out what you truly want to do and what makes you happy. Then go towards that.
If you know you want to work in the entertainment space, there are different roles behind the camera that can make a huge difference. You don’t need to relegate yourself to being an actor, especially if those roles are still scarce. Find a business partner that you can keep accountable and they can keep you accountable.
There’s a lot of opportunities out there that are waiting to be taken advantage of and it’s up to us to take those steps. Don’t be afraid to try something new out. If it fails, at least you tried it, and you’ll be at such an early point in your life that the failure won’t harm you.
WL: What are some highs and lows of your career so far?
JW: The highs have to be moments when you feel connected to your community and you know that you’ve done something that has a positive impact. When I get emails saying that my work has helped other people overcome periods of grief, or that my work has helped them grow and move further down their life path, I feel thankful. That’s the kind of thing that I hope to do with every piece of content I ever make.
The lows are obviously my days in the early years when I didn’t know if I was going to make it. I couldn’t pay my rent, and I could barely afford food. I had to rely on my family and my brother for help. During my lows, I tried to find ways to be inspired again, whether it’s watching other content creators, talking to my peers, or building up a good support group. ‘Never Give Up’ and ‘Always Keep Rockin’ are both part of my mottos.
WL: If you could ask yourself a question, what would it be and how would you answer it?
JW: I would ask myself why I decided to speak out on certain issues and not on others. The answer I would give is that there is a lot at play that viewers oftentimes don’t understand about the complexities of the entertainment world. I want to fight battles that I know I can have the most impact on because my time is limited, and so is my effort, ability, and energy. I want to win the war against racism and systemic racism, not just the battle, so I have to choose and pick my fights.
I can’t speak out on everything just because I can speak out on something. I think it’s unreasonable to expect someone to speak up on everything. There’s only so much brainpower that we as entertainers can put towards something in public and a lot of it is behind the scenes that people don’t see. Our public persona is not representative of everything. I highly appreciate the respect that we can give to each other in terms of understanding our workloads and what we decide to take action on.
WL: Last but not least, is there any other message you think is relevant to share today?
JW: Don’t make it about yourself. Especially right now, there are marginalized groups that have suffered for many years, decades, even centuries. Ask them for their opinions, talk to them, and open up dialogue. Don’t be afraid to address the issue with your families. These will be hard conversations but try to stay calm throughout. Cite your sources, be reasonable, and be loving.
Read more…
Interview with Anggun: https://tinyurl.com/intlwave-anggun1
Interview with Eric Nam: https://tinyurl.com/intlwave-ericnam
Interview with Epik High’s Tablo http://tinyurl.com/intlwave-tablo | https://medium.com/the-international-wave/on-disneys-live-action-mulan-fictional-fandoms-and-the-chinese-virus-interview-with-jimmy-b207a70cb148 | ['Woojin Lim'] | 2020-09-02 15:55:18.492000+00:00 | ['Mulan', 'The Chinese Virus', 'Jimmy Wong', 'Asian American', 'Interview'] |
December - is a feeling! | Its not really a month.
I don’t know if its winters that make me feel so or if its the run down to Christmas and hence the world wide holiday fever catching up that give these vibes to me, but since a very long time, I have being celebrating December — like an extended festival and it feels really special + cherish-able to me.
Snuggling is very important and December gives me “guilt-free” snuggling opportunity. Whether with a book or just pillows & a fuzzy blanket or mid-night soupy Maggi noodles, I jump at every such opportunity and never, I repeat never feel bad about going to bed without brushing my teeth or washing my face and rubbing oodles of moisturisers all over my face. Night ablutions can go for a toss in December.
Its that time of the year when I happily skip out on all social events that call for a “P.M.” presence without a cent of FOMO hitting me. Despite being a big big fan of winter dressing and layering myself in scarves and berets, I don’t want to wear stilettos and mascara and then come home and treat sore feet. I have better plans in December.
If it would not have been for December, I swear I wouldn’t have ever seen a rising sun and its magnificence. Thank god the Sun understands the plight of late risers and adjusts itself for a short period. I secretly feel the term “Dolce far niente” was coined by someone lounging under the December Sun on an idlic Sunday afternoon, for nothing seems more fitting than this to justify the meaning of that term.
Just how do flowers bloom in all their resplendent colours and glory in December? Isn’t this suppose to be their dormant period like we were taught in school? Countless flowers — petunia, marigold, chrysanthemum, dahlia, calendula (and that can keep on coming) blossom as if they were just waiting for the calendar to show December.
The terrace of every house, which is usually unkept and ignored all round the year gains prime importance in December. As a preferred venue for warm oil massages or to dry pickles, papads & red chillies or simply sip tea and read the newspaper, every member of the family, no matter their age/lifestyle climbs up to the terrace on multiple occasions in December.
Is it just me or everyone’s appetites roar furiously in December? And if that wasn’t enough reason to worry, December gives you the most succulent of fruits and vegetables like pomelos and peas. Fresh tender green peas is like “chat masala”, you can add it to anything and everything, ranging from Pulao to paneer curries and it equally appeals to everyone’s palettes, age no bar. And I haven’t met a soul who doesn’t relish fried poha with green peas. The melange of simple flavours at its best. My mom often calls papaya, the “mangoes of December” before serving it to me. Disclaimer: It does help me patiently wait for mangoes a little longer.
I think my bias towards December somewhere also stems from its placement at the end of the year. In the last days of the year, I give myself permission to take a break from ideal “do’s & dont’s ”. I allow myself to sleep in late and skip cardio sessions, I will resume it next year I promise myself. I gorge on extra helpings of cakes and hot chocolates, my body will absorb it as an extra layer of insulation I say to myself. I let myself be, the “smart” side of my brain is unable to dominate the “carefree” side of it.
To everyone saying all these feelings are valid in November/January too, to them I say, no baby, November is not half as sweet as December and by the time its January, you are so pepped up with your “New year, New me” goals and resolutions, you simply cant afford to care about the simple joys of the world. The idleness and calmness of December is just overtaken by the fast paced goals of January. There can be nothing like December, ever! | https://medium.com/@ridika-029/december-is-a-feeling-57a77bbded07 | [] | 2020-12-23 06:34:04.188000+00:00 | ['Simple Life', 'Dolce Far Niente', 'Winter', 'December'] |
How long does it take for SEO to work? | It’s the question so many companies ask us here at PENNInk Productions: “How long will it be before my business is on the first or second page of Google?”
Alas, it’s a much more complex and fraught question than you might think. Even if your chosen SEO marketing agency goes as far as giving you an estimate, you can only trust them if it’s based on in-depth research.
On the other hand, if your agency casually suggests they’ll get you first-page rankings “within” or only “after” a certain period of time, you have good reason to be cautious.
Be wary of false promises
It doesn’t matter how reputable a given SEO marketing agency may seem. If they say their SEO work for you will deliver specific results despite not having even looked at your site, they’re almost certainly either novices or shysters.
That’s because no two sites are the same when it comes to search engine optimisation. It could take your site as short a time as 24 hours to rank well for a particular keyword, or it might be a two-year job. So much depends on your site and business history, location and industry.
Nor can the best-informed SEO marketing agency entirely predict when Google will suddenly decide to release another algorithm update, or even all of the effects such an update may have on existing sites like yours.
What can I do?
Well, it’s simple, really. Rather than becoming too obsessed about results that you can’t guarantee, you need to focus on the things you can control.
That means choosing an agency that maximises the chances of your SEO achieving great results in the first place, by implementing such measures as keyword management and analysis, competitor research, on-site optimisation, link building and web ranking reports.
One important thing to remember with SEO is that short-term and long-term aspects work together. Yes, you will often need to wait for big results, and it may be that you’re trying to compete with sites generating thousands or even millions more in revenue than yours.
However, a good SEO marketing agency should also be able to identify and carry out smaller changes that will enable you to enjoy some quick wins.
A realistic attitude to these different aspects of SEO is vital — and when you get on the phone to PENNInk Productions by calling 020 8144 7931 , we can get to work on helping you to achieve impressive boosts in your rankings all the sooner. | https://medium.com/pennink-productions-blog/how-long-does-it-take-for-seo-to-work-b8c00581aacf | ['Pennink Productions'] | 2018-03-01 15:00:22.804000+00:00 | ['Website', 'SEO'] |
What I learned after Al-Anon | Photo by Nonsap Visuals on Unsplash
What I learned after Al-Anon
Failing to save my marriage was only the beginning.
Al-Anon is the 12 step program for people who are in love with an alcoholic. When my children yanked me out of denial of my wife’s alcoholism, several of the people in my life whom I respect advised me to attend.
So I did.
The best thing about groups like Al-Anon isn’t the books, or the steps. It’s the other people you meet that have been down a road that might look a lot like yours.
I chose an all men’s group, because my qualifier was my wife and there were going to be aspects of my story that I needed to talk about without the additional static of being observed by women.
What I remember most is was this exchange: | https://medium.com/storygarden/what-i-learned-after-al-anon-18ff488b629c | ['Thomas P Seager'] | 2020-12-16 12:55:18.600000+00:00 | ['Addiction', 'Al Anon', 'Maslow', 'Addiction Recovery', 'Personal Growth'] |
Join Me In Holding Each Other & This Great Nation in the Light | Join Me In Holding Each Other & This Great Nation in the Light
It’s a stunningly simple Quaker idea that’s easy, simple, and profound
Photo by Samuel Schneider on Unsplash
I sank into bed.
It had been a long week, followed by a beautiful, difficult weekend. My brother-in-law died suddenly last Tuesday— and the shock continues. On Saturday, we gathered in a small group to celebrate his life, to recall his handsome smile, and to comfort those closest to him.
In bed that night, I closed my eyes. I thought of my sister and her children. I gathered them in my mind. I saw them suspended in a giant open hand bathed in the golden light of love. I kept them there, holding them in the light.
I held them there even as I succumbed to sleep.
Crash course
Holding in the Light is a practice that comes from the Quakers. I stumbled on this spiritual practice in a roundabout way.
During my first group meeting for my doctoral studies, our cohort of thirty gathered for orientation weekend. We met, gathered, listened, and were introduced to faculty and to each other. We also took a crash course in Quakerism.
My graduate program was at George Fox University, a Quaker school. I knew George Fox was a small private Christian school with a reputation for personalized instruction and strong teaching. I’d attended both private and public schools my entire life, and didn’t really give the denominational status a huge amount of thought. It’s a Christian school, I thought. It will have good people.
And it did. Quakers have strong faith — and unique practices. That orientation weekend, we were divided into small groups to learn a bit about Quakerism. Dr. Barrett handed out articles, one to each person in our group of five. She smiled as she handed me mine. I glanced down. Immediately, the title intrigued me: “Holding in the Light.” I began to read. | https://medium.com/illumination/join-me-in-holding-each-other-this-great-nation-in-the-light-92f125e80c10 | ['Dr. Audrey'] | 2020-11-03 03:03:40.513000+00:00 | ['Society', 'Mindfulness', 'Family', 'Love', 'Relationships'] |
Python GUI學習筆記(二)：使用PyQt5 | 安裝
pip install PyQt5 pip install PyQt5-tools
找到QtDesigner
將exe程式傳送到桌面建立捷徑
載入.UI檔
from PyQt5 import QtWidgets, uic
import sys
app = QtWidgets.QApplication([])
win = uic.loadUi("mydesign.ui") #specify the location of your .ui file
win.show()
sys.exit(app.exec())
將.ui轉成.py檔案
pyuic5 mydesign.ui -o mydesign.py #轉成mydesign.py
建立視窗
from PyQt5 import QtWidgets
from mydesign import Ui_MainWindow # importing our generated file
import sys
class mywindow(QtWidgets.QMainWindow):
def __init__(self):
super(mywindow, self).__init__()
self.ui = Ui_MainWindow()
self.ui.setupUi(self)
app = QtWidgets.QApplication([])
application = mywindow()
application.show()
sys.exit(app.exec())
改變字體
from PyQt5 import QtWidgets, QtGui
from mydesign import Ui_MainWindow
import sys
class mywindow(QtWidgets.QMainWindow):
def __init__(self):
super(mywindow, self).__init__()
self.ui = Ui_MainWindow()
self.ui.setupUi(self)
self.ui.label.setFont(QtGui.QFont('SansSerif', 30)) # change font type and size
app = QtWidgets.QApplication([])
application = mywindow()
application.show()
sys.exit(app.exec())
改變視窗尺寸
from PyQt5 import QtWidgets, QtGui,QtCore
from mydesign import Ui_MainWindow
import sys
class mywindow(QtWidgets.QMainWindow):
def __init__(self):
super(mywindow, self).__init__()
self.ui = Ui_MainWindow()
self.ui.setupUi(self)
self.ui.label.setFont(QtGui.QFont('SansSerif', 30))
self.ui.label.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(10, 10, 200, 200)) # change label geometry
app = QtWidgets.QApplication([])
application = mywindow()
application.show()
sys.exit(app.exec())
改變文字
from PyQt5 import QtWidgets, QtGui,QtCore
from mydesign import Ui_MainWindow
import sys
class mywindow(QtWidgets.QMainWindow):
def __init__(self):
super(mywindow, self).__init__()
self.ui = Ui_MainWindow()
self.ui.setupUi(self)
self.ui.label.setFont(QtGui.QFont('SansSerif', 30))
self.ui.label.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(10, 10, 200, 200))
self.ui.label.setText("ABC123") #change label text
app = QtWidgets.QApplication([])
application = mywindow()
application.show()
sys.exit(app.exec())
建立QLineEdit
from PyQt5 import QtWidgets,QtCore
from mydesign import Ui_MainWindow
import sys
class mywindow(QtWidgets.QMainWindow):
def __init__(self):
super(mywindow, self).__init__()
self.ui = Ui_MainWindow()
self.ui.setupUi(self)
self.ui.lineEdit.setText("Welcome to LikeGeeks website") #change text
self.ui.lineEdit_2.setMaxLength(10) #set maximum length
self.ui.lineEdit_3.setEchoMode(QtWidgets.QLineEdit.Password) # password input
self.ui.lineEdit_4.setReadOnly(True) #QLineEdit readonly
self.ui.lineEdit_5.setStyleSheet("color: rgb(28, 43, 255);") #change text color
self.ui.lineEdit_6.setStyleSheet("background-color: rgb(28, 43, 255);") #change QLineEdit background color
app = QtWidgets.QApplication([])
application = mywindow()
application.show()
sys.exit(app.exec())
建立按鈕
from PyQt5 import QtWidgets
from mydesign import Ui_MainWindow
import sys
class mywindow(QtWidgets.QMainWindow):
def __init__(self):
super(mywindow, self).__init__()
self.ui = Ui_MainWindow()
self.ui.setupUi(self)
self.ui.pushButton.clicked.connect(self.btnClicked) # connecting the clicked signal with btnClicked slot
def btnClicked(self):
self.ui.label.setText("Button Clicked")
app = QtWidgets.QApplication([])
application = mywindow()
application.show()
sys.exit(app.exec())
使用事件
def crackit():
print(“hazelnut cracked!”)
hazelnut = nut()
hazelnut.cracked.connect(crackit) # connecting the cracked signal with crackit slot
hazelnut.crack()
QComboBox widget
from PyQt5 import QtWidgets
from mydesign import Ui_MainWindow
import sys
class mywindow(QtWidgets.QMainWindow):
def __init__(self):
super(mywindow, self).__init__()
self.ui = Ui_MainWindow()
self.ui.setupUi(self)
self.ui.comboBox.addItem("First item") #add item
self.ui.comboBox.addItem("Second item")
app = QtWidgets.QApplication([])
application = mywindow()
application.show()
sys.exit(app.exec()) #Get all items
self.ui.comboBox.setCurrentIndex(1) #select by index which is zero-based
self.ui.comboBox.setCurrentText("Second item") #select by text
QTableWidget
from PyQt5 import QtWidgets
from mydesign import Ui_MainWindow
import sys
class mywindow(QtWidgets.QMainWindow):
def __init__(self):
super(mywindow, self).__init__()
self.ui = Ui_MainWindow()
self.ui.setupUi(self)
self.ui.tableWidget.setColumnCount(2)
self.ui.tableWidget.setRowCount(4)
app = QtWidgets.QApplication([])
application = mywindow()
application.show()
sys.exit(app.exec()) #Clear QtableWidget content
def clear():
self.ui.tableWidget.clear()
self.ui.pushButton.clicked.connect(clear)
Populate QTableWidget by code
from PyQt5.QtWidgets import QTableWidgetItem
from mydesign import *
import sys
data = []
data.append(('Populating', 'QtableWidget'))
data.append(('With data', 'In Python'))
data.append(('Is easy', 'Job'))
class mywindow(QtWidgets.QMainWindow):
def __init__(self):
super().__init__()
self.ui = Ui_MainWindow()
self.ui.setupUi(self)
self.ui.tableWidget.setRowCount(3)
self.ui.tableWidget.setColumnCount(2)
row=0
for tup in data:
col=0
for item in tup:
cellinfo=QTableWidgetItem(item)
self.ui.tableWidget.setItem(row, col, cellinfo)
col+=1
row += 1
app = QtWidgets.QApplication([])
win = mywindow()
win.show()
sys.exit(app.exec())
讓QTableWidget唯讀
from PyQt5.QtWidgets import QTableWidgetItem
from mydesign import *
import sys
data = []
data.append(('Populating', 'QtableWidget'))
data.append(('With data', 'In Python'))
data.append(('Is easy', 'Job'))
class mywindow(QtWidgets.QMainWindow):
def __init__(self):
super().__init__()
self.ui = Ui_MainWindow()
self.ui.setupUi(self)
self.ui.tableWidget.setRowCount(3)
self.ui.tableWidget.setColumnCount(2)
row=0
for tup in data:
col=0
for item in tup:
cellinfo=QTableWidgetItem(item)
cellinfo.setFlags(QtCore.Qt.ItemIsSelectable | QtCore.Qt.ItemIsEnabled) # make cell not editable
self.ui.tableWidget.setItem(row, col, cellinfo)
col+=1
row += 1
app = QtWidgets.QApplication([])
win = mywindow()
win.show()
sys.exit(app.exec())
設定QTableWidget的column名稱
from PyQt5.QtWidgets import QTableWidgetItem
from mydesign import *
import sys
data = []
data.append(('Populating', 'QtableWidget'))
data.append(('With data', 'In Python'))
data.append(('Is easy', 'Job'))
class mywindow(QtWidgets.QMainWindow):
def __init__(self):
super().__init__()
self.ui = Ui_MainWindow()
self.ui.setupUi(self)
self.ui.tableWidget.setRowCount(3)
self.ui.tableWidget.setColumnCount(2)
self.ui.tableWidget.setHorizontalHeaderLabels(('Column 1', 'Column 2')) # set header text
row=0
for tup in data:
col=0
for item in tup:
cellinfo=QTableWidgetItem(item)
self.ui.tableWidget.setItem(row, col, cellinfo)
col+=1
row += 1
app = QtWidgets.QApplication([])
win = mywindow()
win.show()
sys.exit(app.exec())
在QTableWidget新增QComboBox
from PyQt5.QtWidgets import QTableWidgetItem
from mydesign import *
import sys
data = ['PyQt5','Is','Awesome']
class mywindow(QtWidgets.QMainWindow):
def __init__(self):
super().__init__()
self.ui = Ui_MainWindow()
self.ui.setupUi(self)
self.ui.tableWidget.setRowCount(3)
self.ui.tableWidget.setColumnCount(2)
row=0
for item in data:
cellinfo=QTableWidgetItem(item)
combo = QtWidgets.QComboBox()
combo.addItem("First item")
combo.addItem("Second item")
self.ui.tableWidget.setItem(row, 0, cellinfo)
self.ui.tableWidget.setCellWidget(row, 1, combo)
row += 1
app = QtWidgets.QApplication([])
win = mywindow()
win.show()
sys.exit(app.exec())
打包程式成.exe | https://medium.com/@yanwei-liu/python-gui%E5%AD%B8%E7%BF%92%E7%AD%86%E8%A8%98-%E4%BA%8C-%E4%BD%BF%E7%94%A8pyqt5-2bdbfffd2545 | ['Yanwei Liu'] | 2019-05-08 01:50:36.643000+00:00 | ['GUI', 'Python', 'Programming', 'Windows 10'] |
Build an Automated Twitter Feed With Python | Making the Bot
First we need to consider how we’ll go about getting news links. The most universal way of doing this is via web scraping — we get the source of the page we want to get news from and search our way through it to extract anything we want.
There’s an excellent library for doing this in Python called Beautiful Soup. Get it with the following command:
pip install beautifulsoup4
This is how we can scrape the posts from Hacker News. Web scraping can be slow, especially when you have to load multiple pages, so it should be avoided where possible.
For Reddit, there’s a much simpler alternative. For every subreddit (e.g., r/Python), there’s a JSON file containing all of the data for the top posts and another file for the new posts. In this example, it’s located here.
Reddit JSON data
Let’s start by making a scraper for Hacker News.
First, we need to study the behaviour of the Hacker News site.
The start page for the site is just the top posts of the day — not particularly useful so far. But if you scroll to the bottom, you’ll see a link that says “More.”
This link takes you to the next page, where the URL changes to https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=2 .
You can see that the page changes according to p , where p=1 contains the first 29 posts, p=2 contains the next 29, and so on. It’s important to note that p doesn’t ever go over 20, after which it only ever returns blank pages.
If you right-click and press Inspect Element on one of the post titles, you’re able to see the page’s source.
Pay attention to the source. You see the articles are in an HTML table structure.
Each title is a td (table data cell) with class="title" and contains the URL to the story, which also has the text title.
You can see another element too: <td class="title valign="top" align="right"> . This isn’t an element we want, but it is of the class title so will come up when we try to get title class table data cells. To exclude this element we can make use of the align="right" property and disqualify it from our results if the property is present.
There’s also a “new” page that shows posts by most recent submission.
The new page follows a very similar system; however, instead of p=1 , you must specify the first post number on the page with n=(number) . For instance, https://news.ycombinator.com/newest?n=24 displays 24 through 53.
This is all of the information we need to scrape posts from the Hacker News site, and it’ll allow us to get the source of all the pages, scraping all 29 posts from each page. You can apply this process to most sites, though they’ll vary in layout.
Now, we need to put this information into Python. | https://betterprogramming.pub/build-an-automated-twitter-feed-with-python-792f6e865147 | ['Sam Berry'] | 2020-12-30 04:42:47.353000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Web Scraping', 'Twitter', 'Programming', 'Bots'] |
Benefits of buying Facebook ads accounts | Just to allow you to see how compelling Facebook is, 80% of Internet clients have Facebook accounts, even grown-ups more than 65 use it. That is the justification for why your organization could go to the smallest measure of a spot around the entire world. Then, we will uncover to you a few of the focuses that you might procure if you Buy Facebook ads Accounts.
Client relationship
Facebook advertisement records will place You in more critical contact with your own clients; know precisely what you sell, the items, or even maybe the administrations. It can empower you to have high legitimacy.
Worth-of-mouth advancement
Facebook is a broad Community; clients will begin to spread the data to a lot more individuals. Your administrations and items, your titles, and furthermore your entire group can continue viral.
Focusing on
When You Select the Form of Account, you are probably going to get; you’ll direct your buy to a particular goal. This will be reliant upon the interest of your organization. You will get more profiles and customers of all similar individuals.
Site Traffic Campaigns
On the off chance that you Have a little business or you are a beginner, the Facebook ads account has an awesome highlight to serve you. A specific kind of advertisement urges your customers to tap on your site. It focuses exclusively on boosting the traffic of one’s site. For driving business holders, It’s an incredible chance to advance your organization and furthermore to check your essence
Constant
Those reports will assist you to get assessments continuously With the shoppers. You will get the opportunity to fix bunches of worries at the best second.
Raise Your imminent purchasers
As we have referenced, Facebook brings an objective basically the same as yours. At whatever point these profiles show up on the page, you’ll learn fundamental information identifying with them. This implies you will actually want to know about their preferences, interests, affinities, and numerous others. You might make techniques for this sort of crowd.
Marking
Due to How your Brand will be referred to in many profiles, an expanding number of people will see your news, and you will get planned customers later on. Your image will be altogether more named on the web.
Topographical Localized Advertisements
Additionally, when buying Facebook Ads Accounts, It’s critical to keep At heart that you can acquire accounts that are close to your district. Moreover, you could get reports from all the states you need.
Advancing Your Business
Regardless, in case you are keen on Promoting any firm utilizing some of the most famous stages, Facebook, you should purchase Facebook ads accounts. Because of the openness that the cultural media gives their clients, making movement and getting the most potential customers to their business has gotten truly basic.
Develop Potential Buyers
Facebook lead commercials let you translate the treats of your interest groups. At the point when your crowd concerns their own page and tests out the product. You’re ready to become acquainted with some close-to-home information about them. Accordingly, it’s feasible to know their ability, their inclination, and consideration. You can put together your Content, contingent upon this data. | https://medium.com/@buyfacebookadsaccounts/benefits-of-buying-facebook-ads-accounts-e775be9dd12 | ['Buy Facebook Ads Accounts'] | 2021-12-28 11:05:31.736000+00:00 | ['Facebook Ads Manager', 'Facebook Ads', 'Business', 'Buy Facebook Ads Accounts', 'Facebook Marketing'] |
How to draw a face 10 Minutes : Male & Female | You were requesting for a long time to make the tutorial of face drawing a long with proportion of different parts of face, so here it is
To make it easy and simple i will divide this face drawing tutorial into 3 different parts : Front view, Side view and 3/4 view , this is part one of three, in this tutorial I will cover front view face drawing of both male and female. basic formula are same for both, but some proportions are different for male from female
Note : Let me tell you that this is not Andrew Loomis method of drawing a face but this method follow the theory of Andrew Loomis
Material Used :
HB pencil (Artline)
Scale
Drawing sheet (Medium surface)
Mechanical Eraser
Lets Start with Female Face
Step 1 :
Draw a horizontal line and vertical line intersecting each other and right angle (90º). then mark a distance from point of intersection both side equally and that distance should be half of size of the eye and then mark equal distance in both side and that will be the size of eye.
Step 2 :
Now we will define the size of the nose, now mark a distance on the vertical line from the point of intersection then draw a small construction line(horizontal) on the mark and now make a triangle on that line
Step 3 :
Mark two lines equal to the size of the eye from end point of nose, that will be position of lover lip and other point will be position of chin
Step 4 :
Now draw the basic shape of eye on both side and then I will define the position and shape of eye brow and for that draw a line joining the nose and end of the eye both side, and draw triangular shape and draw eye brows like this as shown in image above. also draw basic shape of nose
Step 5 :
Now its time define the size and shape of the lips, draw vertical lines from the center of the eyeball and the distance between these lines will be the size of lips, now draw the lips like this as shown in image above
Step 6 :
Now its time to provide shape of the chin and for that draw lines both side whose distance will be half of the eye from the end of the eye and then draw two vertical lines from the center of the eye ball, and join them like this as shown in the figure
Step 7 :
For drawing hairs we should mark the hair line, distance between eyebrow line and hair line will be equal to distance between nose and chin
Step 8 :
Now its time to draw ears, distance between nose and eye brow will be size of ear, so draw two parallel lines touching eyebrow and end of the nose as shown in picture. draw the basic shape of ear between these two lines
Step 7 & 8 will be similar expect the hair style of male
For more tutorials : CLICK HERE | https://medium.com/@vkartbox/how-to-draw-a-face-10-minutes-male-female-3544a5f8f6f2 | [] | 2020-12-26 18:02:40.287000+00:00 | ['Drawing', 'Sketching', 'Sketch', 'Pencil', 'Portraits'] |
Is console app fun? | Let’s start how you can improve on programming with the console app. Firstly, you need to understand console app is not just for junior developer. I am a senior developer and I’m still using console app for some scenarios. To make it clear, many services which works on background like e-mail sender, notification sender, calculating some things at specific moments is written by using console app on Linux. Also, your logs is saved with a basic command you know. It is “Console.WriteLine” in C# or “printf” in C or anything else according to the programming language. You don’t need to force yourself to fix a problem on a genius way to show you’re a professional developer. Actually, it mentions that you still should improve yourself with more project. Secondly, you can do as many examples as possible to be senior developer easily. I’ll explain that on giving example about C#. Most of us know that C# essentially is used with Visual Studio. But its size too much and your pc is not enough to run it unless your pc has powerful hardwares like Intel I3 CPU, 8GB RAM. There is one way to solve this problem which is Visual Studio Code. I can’t say that it is better than Visual Studio but it’s requirements less as hardware. So we can create a console app on Visual Studio Code and start to write our code. However, don’t forget you must know how to use terminal. Visual Studio provides us many things on an easier way which doesn’t include terminal but it causes more size and performance problem. If we want to write a program without Visual Studio, we must learn terminal. It’s very simple and it is not hard to learn. There is already one command to create a console app that “dotnet new console”. Let’s examine this on a screen shot;
I knew we could do it! Now, we have a console app. We can do anything we want! Wait Ellon, we’re coming! | https://medium.com/@dmuka/is-console-app-fun-6208ef902952 | ['Muhammet Kandemir'] | 2020-12-23 09:20:46.133000+00:00 | ['Console', 'Fun', 'Learning', 'Csharp', 'Improvement'] |
Peaceful demonstration disrupted in Mogadishu | Peaceful demonstration disrupted in Mogadishu
Citizens took the streets of Mogadishu to have a peaceful protest towards the fast approaching elections, the purpose of the movement was simple;
1. Pressuring the electoral commissions to hold the elections on time and not to postpone them.
2. Remove security and military officials from the electoral commissions.
3. Demanding freedoms in selecting candidates as well as integrity in
The election.
4. Eliminating foreign interference in Somali affairs, specifically
In the elections.
But this was jeopardized as members of the NISA agents attacked innocent protesters, they were not only attacked but also shot at.
In a country where citizens are supposed to enjoy their rights and freedom?, this doesn’t speak well of the present administration.
Farmaajo shouldn’t expect the support of the people he has lost it even before the D-day!. | https://medium.com/@oceanstar843/peaceful-demonstration-disrupted-in-mogadishu-a3122e7894a7 | ['Bigocean Star'] | 2020-12-26 13:11:46.811000+00:00 | ['Elections', 'Somalia', 'Africa'] |
Cultural Icons and Celebrities We Lost in 2020 | Image via Unsplash- Derek Owens
Cultural Icons and Celebrities We Lost in 2020
Like it or not, celebrities make an indelible impact on our lives. People who are so famous in their respective professions of entertainment and athletics become so familiar to us that they are almost like family, even if we rarely have the chance to ever meet them in person. Sadly, the natural progression of life takes some of our most beloved figures from us every year. 2020 has been no exception but perhaps the bleakness of the ongoing pandemic makes the loss of some of our biggest icons this year all the more difficult. Here are some of the brightest stars we have lost during the last 12 months.
Alex Trebek: Some fans of the popular quiz show Jeopardy watched religiously while others perhaps caught a few minutes here and there. No matter how much time was spent watching the beloved host, he was an integral part of the vast majority of Americans’ households for the past 35 years at 7:00–7:30 p.m.
Kobe Bryant: One of the biggest stars in NBA history, the prolific Los Angeles Lakers’ guard was barely a few years into his retirement when tragedy struck. He and his teenaged daughter Gigi were two of nine people killed in a helicopter crash in January while headed to one of her basketball tournaments.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The Supreme Court Justice held her post for 27 years before succumbing to cancer. A staunch feminist and advocate for justice, she left a gaping hole on the bench with her passing, which was rapidly filled in a contentious move by the Trump administration.
Chadwick Boseman: Best known for his work as the title character in Marvel’s Black Panther, he was an accomplished actor with an impressive resume of credits under his belt. However, his superhero role resonated the most with audiences. His sudden passing from cancer was a shock to many.
David Prowse: Although he was an accomplished thespian, his most well-known work was serving as the man under the black helmet. He was Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy, and while his face was never seen on screen in those films, his character is one of the most memorable in cinematic history.
Eddie Van Halen: The primary songwriter, guitarist and co-founder of the famous rock band Van Halen, he was a key figure of 1980s culture. Few musicians rocked out to his level, and his solo guitar work was the stuff of legends.
Regis Philbin: Similar to Trebek, Philbin was a mainstay in households due to his voluminous work on television. In addition to co-hosting Live with Regis and Kathy Lee (and later Kelly Ripa) for years, he also hosted popular game shows like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and countless other programs. His gregarious personality and thick Bronx, New York accent were instantly recognizable even if you only heard him from the other room.
Olivia De Havilland: Although she has been out of the spotlight for years, she was an accomplished actress in early Hollywood; perhaps best known for her work as Melanie Hamilton in the legendary movie Gone with the Wind. She died weeks after her 104th birthday in France, where she had lived for years since retiring from acting.
John Lewis: Few can claim leading a life of service and leadership to the extent of Lewis. He was a leading force in the Civil Rights movement before moving on to a career in politics. He served as a Congressman from Georgia for 33 years right up until his death at the age of 80.
Kenny Rogers: A man of many talents, the seemingly perpetually white-haired and bearded crooner was a staple in country music for years. His Gambler song led to a popular movie. He also broadened his appeal with memorable duets with Dolly Parton and a popular eponymous fried chicken fast-food chain. | https://medium.com/evolve-you/cultural-icons-and-celebrities-we-lost-in-2020-e0df1f29f158 | ['Andrew Martin'] | 2020-12-30 18:40:45.030000+00:00 | ['2020', 'Culture', 'Celebrity', 'Death', 'Pop Culture'] |
Holiday Afternoon Delight | Holiday Afternoon Delight
Whatcha doin’? I texted Ben one afternoon close to Christmas last year.
Just got off work. What’s up? he replied.
Want to come over, drink wine, watch movies, and fuck?
On my way, Ben texted.
Well, that was easy, I thought, smiling to myself. Our schedules didn’t often work out like this. Ben was my friend-with-benefits, back in the Before Covid times. I liked him because he accepted my slightly kinky and extremely horny side and was enthusiastic in bed. Ben and I could also talk about books, movies, and current events: he had a brain and a body in one yummy package. An afternoon with Ben was a treat in every way.
When Ben arrived, his first request was for a shower, as he had come to me straight from work. I sat on the edge of the tub in the bathroom while he showered with the door open and caught me up on his life since we had last seen each other. I sighed as he moved under the water; tall, muscular, and gorgeous, watching Ben shower was foreplay.
He poured bath gel into his hands, and the scent of coconut filled the air. He slowly lathered up as he talked, starting with circular motions on his chest and flat belly. He rubbed the gel onto his legs and arms, making my stomach clench. Warmth spread throughout my body as he stroked his cock with soapy hands. Soap bubbles slid down his back and over his muscled ass, and I shivered, enjoying the anticipation.
While Ben rinsed off, I grabbed a warm towel out of the dryer, detouring through the kitchen to pick up a bottle of wine and two glasses. Ben wrapped the towel around his waist and followed me into the bedroom.
As he sat on the edge of the bed, I handed the remote to Ben and told him to pick out something for us to watch, his choice of genre.
“Hmm, but I need to pick something you will like as well.” He started clicking through shows as I slowly put my hair into a French twist. “What are you doing with your hair?” he asked.
“Getting it out of the way. Keep looking for a movie, never mind me.”
Hair up, I sank onto my knees in front of Ben and fussed with the towel until it came loose.
“Never mind you, huh?” Ben said, smiling, as I pushed his legs apart. He was already half erect and eager.
‘Yes,” I said primly, then leaned in and took his cock entirely into my mouth. Half erect was the only time I could fit all of him in my mouth. I loved feeling him grow as I ran my tongue around him, pulling back as his length became too much for me. I licked the velvety tip and looked up to meet Ben’s eyes.
“I think you have too many clothes on,” he said, as he started unbuttoning my shirt. “Come up here and make things more even.”
I stood and slipped off my shirt. Still sitting, Ben leaned into my chest, burying his head between my tits and grabbing my ass with both hands.
“God, you smell good,” he said, his voice muffled. He reached up and fumbled with my bra, finally getting it off. He rubbed my tits and then pressed them together so he could lick both nipples at once. I grasped his shoulders as my nipples hardened, and his tongue sent shocks through me.
“You have the most amazing tits,” he murmured as he slipped one hand down to tug at my skirt. “Still too many clothes.” I stepped back and took off my skirt, revealing a red thong. I turned around to show Ben the holiday thong, which had two fluffy pom-pom balls attached on the back, dangling and bouncing as I moved.
“I bought these to wear just for you. A little holiday delight,” I said, jiggling my butt to show off the panties.
“For me?” Ben looked pleased, rotating me in a circle to get a good look. “I think I like that you bought these just for me,” he said slowly, looking up at me and smiling. “Leave them on.” He spanked my ass, hard, just once, and I moaned softly, starting to get wet.
Suddenly shy, I handed Ben the remote again and took a big gulp of wine. “Did you find something for us?”
“I did. You will like this.” Ben pressed play on the remote, and suddenly I was looking at a bedroom scene. An athletic black man was talking to a curvy woman with fair hair. I did a double-take, as I am a curvy woman with fair hair, and Ben is an athletic black man.
“Porn?” I laughed, “with people like us?”
“Yes, with people like us… and it’s Christmas themed!” He pointed out the Christmas tree in the corner of the bedroom on the TV. The man undressed, revealing an enormous hard cock, then slowly reached down, picked up a Santa hat, and put it on his head. We looked at each other and burst out laughing.
“This is perfect!”
On the screen, the curvy woman pushed the man onto his back and started teasing him with her tongue. I did the same to Ben, making sure we were positioned to see the porn as we mimicked it. I ran my tongue around his nipples, the buds tightening against my lips. The faint smell of coconut filled my nose as I worked my way down his chest. Still following the on-screen couple, I ran my tongue up Ben’s length, then took as much of him as possible into my mouth. I used one hand to cup his balls and gently stroke his ass. As the actors increased intensity and speed, so did I, my excitement growing too. I heard Ben inhale sharply and let out a suppressed groan.
I pulled back, giving Ben a short break to regain control. He handed me a condom, and I rolled it down his length, causing another quick inhale as I stroked him.
“I want to be on top,” I said. I straddled him and moved the string of my thong to the side.
“Ladies choice,” he replied, as he slowly moved into me. I shuddered and leaned forward, so my nipples were close to his mouth. I rocked back and forth, feeling every bit of him inside me. His lips grazed my nipples each time I swayed forward, and the teasing caused my tits to ache for more. The couple on TV moaned as they fucked as a counterpoint to our quieter but more intense gasps and moans.
I leaned down and gently licked his earlobe. “Speaking of choice, you’ll have to choose where you are going to cum.”
He stilled suddenly, grabbing my hips to get me to stop moving. “That thought… it’s gonna make me cum…” he panted, concentrating on not moving.
“I love it when you lose control. It’s hot.” I started my rhythm again, a little slower as he locked eyes with me. Ben knew that I would almost always orgasm in this position, and the pressure was building in me.
He grabbed my breasts hard and started licking my nipples. “This is my favorite way to watch you,” he mumbled around my nipples. “Your tits in my face, you riding me… I can feel your pussy around my dick… cum for me now… you ride me so well…cum for me.”
His sex talk did it for me, and I exploded into a million pieces, fucking him as hard as I could, loving the feel of his cock all the way in me, his fingers grasping me firmly, mouth on a nipple.
“Bite!” I gasped, and Ben bit one nipple, then the other, sending another orgasm shuddering through me.
When I could think again, I slowed my movements and looked at Ben, sweat glistening on us both. “Your turn. Make that decision yet? Mouth, tits, pussy?”
Ben smiled and kept kneading my tits, hard enough that I would have bruises in the morning. “Doggy style. Gotta have a good view of my Christmas thong.”
I laughed and moved off him. “Ok, but first, I need more time to lick you.”
I slipped off the condom and started stroking Ben while I leaned down and gently took one of his balls into my mouth. Today I was into biting and spanking, but Ben almost always liked it soft. I licked and sucked him, enjoying the feel of his hands entwined in my hair, directing me faster or slower.
“I want to fuck you,” Ben groaned.
I stopped sucking and fondling him and found another condom. Rolling it on, I looked at the forgotten TV. “Oh look, our lookalikes are doing it doggy style too.” The on-screen couple was fucking fiercely, the pom-pom of the man’s Santa hat bouncing in rhythm with his thrusts.
“They have the Christmas spirit,” Ben agreed, as he positioned himself behind me. He played with the festive balls of my thong. “I love these. You’ll have to wear them every Christmas.” He slid my thong to the side and thrust into me. I groaned in pleasure and pushed back on him hard.
“God, yes.” Riding Ben would make me cum, but doggy-style was my favorite position. I loved feeling his strength, his fierceness, and the sting when he slapped my ass. I love feeling his muscular body cradling mine as he thrust into me, and his hands on my back and butt would get me off. I leaned down and slipped one hand between my legs, reaching to cup his balls for a moment. Ben sped up in response, and I felt his balls tighten in my hands. He slapped my ass again, hard, then leaned forward to grab a breast with one hand.
Breath hot on my neck, he murmured, “I’m gonna cum, can I cum?”
“Yes, fuck me hard!”
Our sweat-soaked thighs slapped together in a faster rhythm, and the bed slammed against the wall as we fucked. His balls tightened again, and I felt his cock pulse as he groaned and came.
We fell apart, sated. As we cooled down, I slipped on a robe while Ben watched me with heavy-lidded eyes. We decided to watch one more Christmas show, ending the afternoon with popcorn and Die Hard. | https://myerotica.com/holiday-afternoon-delight-1e80e10d354b | ['Reese Harper'] | 2020-12-20 16:10:43.355000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Dating', 'Sex', 'Erotica', 'Relationships'] |
Intuitively Understanding Convolutions for Deep Learning | For a non-edge containing grid (eg. the background sky), most of the pixels are the same value, so the overall output of the kernel at that point is 0. For a grid with an vertical edge, there is a difference between the pixels to the left and right of the edge, and the kernel computes that difference to be non-zero, activating and revealing the edges. The kernel only works only a 3×3 grids at a time, detecting anomalies on a local scale, yet when applied across the entire image, is enough to detect a certain feature on a global scale, anywhere in the image!
So the key difference we make with deep learning is ask this question: Can useful kernels be learnt? For early layers operating on raw pixels, we could reasonably expect feature detectors of fairly low level features, like edges, lines, etc.
There’s an entire branch of deep learning research focused on making neural network models interpretable. One of the most powerful tools to come out of that is Feature Visualization using optimization[3]. The idea at core is simple: optimize a image (usually initialized with random noise) to activate a filter as strongly as possible. This does make intuitive sense: if the optimized image is completely filled with edges, that’s strong evidence that’s what the filter itself is looking for and is activated by. Using this, we can peek into the learnt filters, and the results are stunning:
Feature visualization for 3 different channels from the 1st convolution layer of GoogLeNet[3]. Notice that while they detect different types of edges, they’re still low-level edge detectors.
Feature Visualization of channel 12 from the 2nd and 3rd convolutions[3]
One important thing to notice here is that convolved images are still images. The output of a small grid of pixels from the top left of an image will still be on the top left. So you can run another convolution layer on top of another (such as the two on the left) to extract deeper features, which we visualize.
Yet, however deep our feature detectors get, without any further changes they’ll still be operating on very small patches of the image. No matter how deep your detectors are, you can’t detect faces from a 3×3 grid. And this is where the idea of the receptive field comes in.
Receptive field
A essential design choice of any CNN architecture is that the input sizes grow smaller and smaller from the start to the end of the network, while the number of channels grow deeper. This, as mentioned earlier, is often done through strides or pooling layers. Locality determines what inputs from the previous layer the outputs get to see. The receptive field determines what area of the original input to the entire network the output gets to see.
The idea of a strided convolution is that we only process slides a fixed distance apart, and skip the ones in the middle. From a different point of view, we only keep outputs a fixed distance apart, and remove the rest[1].
3×3 convolution, stride 2
We then apply a nonlinearity to the output, and per usual, then stack another new convolution layer on top. And this is where things get interesting. Even if were we to apply a kernel of the same size (3×3), having the same local area, to the output of the strided convolution, the kernel would have a larger effective receptive field:
This is because the output of the strided layer still does represent the same image. It is not so much cropping as it is resizing, only thing is that each single pixel in the output is a “representative” of a larger area (of whose other pixels were discarded) from the same rough location from the original input. So when the next layer’s kernel operates on the output, it’s operating on pixels collected from a larger area.
(Note: if you’re familiar with dilated convolutions, note that the above is not a dilated convolution. Both are methods of increasing the receptive field, but dilated convolutions are a single layer, while this takes place on a regular convolution following a strided convolution, with a nonlinearity inbetween)
Feature visualization of channels from each of the major collections of convolution blocks, showing a progressive increase in complexity[3]
This expansion of the receptive field allows the convolution layers to combine the low level features (lines, edges), into higher level features (curves, textures), as we see in the mixed3a layer.
Followed by a pooling/strided layer, the network continues to create detectors for even higher level features (parts, patterns), as we see for mixed4a.
The repeated reduction in image size across the network results in, by the 5th block on convolutions, input sizes of just 7×7, compared to inputs of 224×224. At this point, each single pixel represents a grid of 32×32 pixels, which is huge.
Compared to earlier layers, where an activation meant detecting an edge, here, an activation on the tiny 7×7 grid is one for a very high level feature, such as for birds.
The network as a whole progresses from a small number of filters (64 in case of GoogLeNet), detecting low level features, to a very large number of filters(1024 in the final convolution), each looking for an extremely specific high level feature. Followed by a final pooling layer, which collapses each 7×7 grid into a single pixel, each channel is a feature detector with a receptive field equivalent to the entire image.
Compared to what a standard feedforward network would have done, the output here is really nothing short of awe-inspiring. A standard feedforward network would have produced abstract feature vectors, from combinations of every single pixel in the image, requiring intractable amounts of data to train.
The CNN, with the priors imposed on it, starts by learning very low level feature detectors, and as across the layers as its receptive field is expanded, learns to combine those low-level features into progressively higher level features; not an abstract combination of every single pixel, but rather, a strong visual hierarchy of concepts.
By detecting low level features, and using them to detect higher level features as it progresses up its visual hierarchy, it is eventually able to detect entire visual concepts such as faces, birds, trees, etc, and that’s what makes them such powerful, yet efficient with image data.
A final note on adversarial attacks
With the visual hierarchy CNNs build, it is pretty reasonable to assume that their vision systems are similar to humans. And they’re really great with real world images, but they also fail in ways that strongly suggest their vision systems aren’t entirely human-like. The most major problem: Adversarial Examples[4], examples which have been specifically modified to fool the model.
To a human, both images are obviously pandas. To the model, not so much.[4]
Adversarial examples would be a non-issue if the only tampered ones that caused the models to fail were ones that even humans would notice. The problem is, the models are susceptible to attacks by samples which have only been tampered with ever so slightly, and would clearly not fool any human. This opens the door for models to silently fail, which can be pretty dangerous for a wide range of applications from self-driving cars to healthcare.
Robustness against adversarial attacks is currently a highly active area of research, the subject of many papers and even competitions, and solutions will certainly improve CNN architectures to become safer and more reliable.
Conclusion
CNNs were the models that allowed computer vision to scale from simple applications to powering sophisticated products and services, ranging from face detection in your photo gallery to making better medical diagnoses. They might be the key method in computer vision going forward, or some other new breakthrough might just be around the corner. Regardless, one thing is for sure: they’re nothing short of amazing, at the heart of many present-day innovative applications, and are most certainly worth deeply understanding.
References
Further Resources | https://towardsdatascience.com/intuitively-understanding-convolutions-for-deep-learning-1f6f42faee1 | ['Irhum Shafkat'] | 2018-06-07 09:11:04.205000+00:00 | ['Towards Data Science', 'Computer Vision', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning', 'Deep Learning'] |
Poor me. Poor you. | Hills of the Heart.
Poor me. Poor you.
What sadness befalls us so?
Stupid me. Dull you.
As such are the hills of the heart,
…
never happy,
never free.
…
Coasting through a bitter life,
Never sure of anything but strife,
And as we strive and strive, and strive
For a life, one of jealousy and rage, fully rife.
…
There is wonder beyond the edge of earthly gaze
Awaiting men unfazed by many-a-shame.
There is the horse rider on a foray, patiently reaching
For the flower of beautiful love, and she is his fate.
…
The hills command bloodshed after bloodshed,
Time and time again, the rush of a stream
Mixes with all the red, tainting the clear peace
Of a gentle lake.
…
Yet, the peaceful lake was once by a castle.
In this castle lived fine rulers, kind and good.
The lake was theirs to own, to consume, to ‘exploit’,
Still, they shared it with the creatures and people of the land.
They knew it would not last forever,
But they hoped the castle would,
Suffering long into the years, it would reflect their hearts.
O how they loved their people! If only they could heal their scars.
…
A drought came upon the land.
The people of the tower took the brunt,
They starved and thirsted,
Protecting the lake at all costs from the monster, a destroyer.
…
It sucked up all of the water, leaving sand in its wake,
It counted not for the love of the King of the heartland,
He and his men carried many buckets
And fetched much water from hidden wells, storing it within the castle’s walls
…
A place where no evil could reach it.
…
The people grew far too impatient,
Setting fire to their hearts.
They burned all their self-control,
And lost all the faith they once had.
…
They attacked.
…
The horse rider was slain.
The king was betrayed.
The castle was destroyed,
And the water flooded the tower, streaming out from breaks in its walls.
…
The castle was no more.
The lake was tainted, now flowing with blood,
never knowing joy
never knowing peace
Love had been stripped
And all kindness vanished, just as dead grass
that may never regrow.
…
Then the people stood on the top of their hill,
Each alone,
crying as fools:
…
Poor me. Poor you.
What sadness befalls us so?
Stupid me. Dull you.
As such are the hills of the heart,
…
never happy,
never free.
…
Then, the ground swallowed up the hill,
As each person put on a brave face
And then the cycle began again and again,
each person killing every heartland
They touched.
…
Hills of the Heart
forever eroded into nothingness
by those it loved,
…
By every single one of us. | https://medium.com/@ayopokiki/poor-me-poor-you-13e60f3aa928 | ['Ayo Okikiolu'] | 2020-04-27 04:23:15.636000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Poem', 'Imagination', 'Storytelling', 'Emotions'] |
How to adjust brightness of an image with Python? | With the method described in this article, we can adjust brightness of an image through a simple python image-processing package: “impytool”
impytool, is an opencv based open-source python package and it is being developed for facilitates some image processing operations.
You can get detailed information from the pypi.org page of the package. | https://medium.com/@ahmetnuriyilmaz/how-to-adjust-brightness-of-an-image-with-python-80b2eb110b01 | ['Ahmet Nuri Yılmaz'] | 2020-12-23 19:42:27.599000+00:00 | ['Image Processing', 'Python Packages', 'Image Editing', 'Opencv', 'Python'] |
The Instactivism Trap | No, you’re not dreaming: Audi was forced to withdraw this ad, as well as to apologize to users who saw a sexual character in that little girl eating a banana.
Bunch of degenerates.
But it’s a good thing we’re talking about sports cars because they’ll help me answer the following question:
Why this outrage culture?
After doing some research, I found that this pattern can largely be explained by 1) virtue signaling, 2) our inability to question our beliefs, and 3) our search for meaning.
1.
Since the dawn of time, human beings have felt the need to affirm their identity through visual signals. Think of the native American who wears different feathers according to his role in the tribe. The modern lawyer, dressed in a perfectly tailored suit and tie, or the fifteen kilograms of jewelry hanging from the neck of your favorite rapper.
Even in our wildest imaginations, we automatically assign symbols to the characters we create. We wear Greek gods with attributes. Apollo displays his lyre while Athena presents her shield. James Bond drives an Aston Martin, while Albus Dumbledore exhibits his long white beard.
These signals are anchored in us. They help us to reveal who we are, through the values we represent.
Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash
There is nothing wrong with displaying one’s identity per se. However, it becomes a problem when you use symbols that you don’t actually embody, for your own self-interest.
It’s the guy who buys a sports car he can’t afford, just to take credit for a social class he doesn’t belong to. It is the person who instrumentalizes marriage, with the sole purpose of accessing certain privileges.
But it is also the ones who participate in a social movement to buy a clean conscience, while they sacrifice neither their time, work nor money for the sake of substantial progress. This attitude is sometimes referred to in the media as performative allyship. And yes, instactivism is so popular that it already has an official name.
In the same way that we buy Rolexes, Gucci bags, and Lamborghinis to signal our competence or success, today we join social movements to signal our moral superiority. This phenomenon is better known as virtue signaling.
2.
Over the years, social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have accumulated more and more data about us. Thus, the more time passes, the more powerful their algorithms become. When applied to the field of marketing, these algorithms are fantastic: they allow advertisers to show the product you need, at the right time, with an amazing level of precision.
But these algorithms have never heard of ethics. And unlike us, they don’t act according to double standards. They operate in exactly the same way, regardless of the content involved. This means that social media sells you not only the products you like but also and above all the ideas that appeal to you.
Assuming that you form your beliefs based on what you see on the internet, social media lulls you forever into the beliefs that you already have at heart, reinforcing them even more. There is more and more content online to reaffirm that you are right. That you’ve got it all figured out, and that anyone who contradicts you is a bunch of jerks. This is what American activist Eli Pariser calls the filter bubble.
Do you ever wonder why people are so blind that they can’t see what you see? You’re absolutely right because they literally don’t see the same thing you do.
“We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented.” — Christof, The Truman Show
In addition, the degree of separation between you and people who disagree with you has increased with the advent of social media.
Before, when you disagreed with Mark, you’d see him there in front of you. You’d interpret every facial expression and every movement. At least you could hear the variations in his tone of voice. Surely you were able to see that his disagreement was not necessarily ill-intentioned and that he may not have been a horribly perverted individual. Instead, he was just another guy who probably saw the world a little differently than you did.
Today, Mark is just a jerk in a little box next to a “comments” section smaller than your thumb. You can barely see his picture, let alone his body language and voice. You don’t perceive him as a human being worthy of respect, just a character on a white background. You then turn every Mark into a vulgar caricature that must be proved wrong.
As a result, you become less and less tolerant of opposite opinions. You develop an allergy to confrontation. The slightest counter-argument becomes a frontal threat. We are so fixed in our identities that any questioning is perceived as a personal attack.
The left wants to raise taxes to finance paternity leave… “WE LIVE IN A COMMUNIST COUNTRY! STALIN IS ABOUT TO MAKE HIS BIG COMEBACK!” A professor opposes a law for equal pay… “ANOTHER RIGHT-WING NEO-NAZI FASCIST FROM THE PATRIARCHY WHO WANTS TO DOMINATE THE WORLD!”
Damn, Mark.
3.
Ask any traditional business leader what is the greatest challenge they face with our generation of workers. I bet the majority of them will mention the following ones:
Poor motivation
Low level of commitment
Lack of loyalty
But we are not to blame. Leaders must adapt to our greatest quest: the meaning of work. We give it so much importance that sociologists go so far as to call us the WHY generation. It obviously refers to the letter Y, which encompasses all people born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s.
At one of his many conferences, Simon Sinek describes the Golden Circle, a marketing model that states that companies should not try to sell us a product, but rather values, a mission, a story. According to the famous British author, if Apple has become the richest company in the world, it is not only because it makes high-quality products. No, it is also and above all because it is a master in the art of storytelling.
When you buy a Macbook, you’re not just buying a computer. You buy a whole set of symbols related to the technological revolution. A lifestyle. Apple is selling you the ability to think differently. When you buy its products, you become an innovator.
Photo by Lewis Parsons on Unsplash
As companies struggle to give meaning to their employees’ work, young people are bored and looking for that meaning elsewhere. Social justice movements have a strong capacity to give meaning to our lives. All the more so when they provide strong emotions. When they are accepted within our group, and reinforced by their popularity on social media. In my opinion, this partly explains the pace at which instactivists consume information these days. Sometimes even at the expense of common sense.
Just think back to the beginning of the year 2020. During the month of April, passions were raging around the COVID-19 pandemic. The popular masses were praising themselves on their civic-mindedness by proudly waving the hashtag #StayHome.
Anyone who was against the lockdown would be severely reprimanded. The treatment of those who claimed their right to freedom was one-sided, and, to say the least, not so friendly. Every evening at 9 p.m., we would applaud the medical personnel on the frontlines from the comfort of our homes. What a touching solidarity.
But a few weeks later, following the murder of George Floyd, these same people suddenly gathered in hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands in the streets, creating new potential sources of contagion. Of course black lives matter, but what about our elders? What about our beloved medical personnel whom we were still applauding just yesterday? It was as if the nasty virus had suddenly evaporated from our streets.
This incoherence demonstrates that instactivists need to feel something all the time. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it makes them feel important.
As long as it fills the void.
There are, of course, activists dedicated to the movement, for whom the Floyd momentum was way more important than the pandemic. More power to them. But instactivists are not dedicated to the movement per se. No, the hashtag #StayHome just got boring after all these weeks. They needed something new. An updated hashtag to rush into. A new reason to get rid of all the accumulated frustration during two months of lockdown.
#BlackLivesMatter was right in time. As proof: three weeks after the murder of George Floyd, the majority of them had already moved on. Most of the brands that had associated their logo with the cause quickly went back to their original branding.
It was time to move on because they had already bought a clean conscience. They had already taken all the advantages they could out of it. | https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/the-instactivism-trap-ace9ccd8a788 | ['Yann Costa'] | 2020-10-15 17:04:09.156000+00:00 | ['Climate Change', 'Activism', 'Responsibility', 'Fake News', 'Social Media'] |
Automatic Machine Learning (AutoML) Landscape Survey | A review of 22 machine learning libraries to help you choose which one might be right for your pipeline.
Alexander Allen and Adithya Balaji
Introduction
At Georgian Partners, our data science team is consistently looking for ways we can improve our efficiency and the efficiency of teams at our portfolio companies. One way is through improving the tooling in our machine learning pipelines. Rather than manually writing code to manipulate datasets it can be more efficient to draw from the vast collection of libraries available. However, there are so many libraries claiming to improve upon different processes in different ways it is overwhelming to make a selection. In this paper we distill down the core functionality of 22 machine learning libraries to make it clear which ones are the right choice for your pipeline.
A typical machine learning project breaks down into discrete steps: collecting raw data, merging data sources, cleaning data, feature engineering, model construction, hyperparameter tuning, model validation, and deployment. Data scientists can best contribute their ingenuity to the model construction phase, yet anecdotally it seems that the most time consuming pieces of machine learning are feature engineering and hyper parameter tuning. Thus, many models are not optimal as they move from experimental stages to production prematurely due to time constraints, or deployment in production is delayed.
Automatic machine learning (AutoML) frameworks reduce the load on data scientists so they can spend less time on feature engineering and hyperparameter tuning, and more time experimenting with model architectures. A quick exploration of the solution space not only allows a data scientist to quickly assess a dataset but also provides a baseline performance to improve upon. This paper provides a functional review of existing AutoML frameworks.
Overview
We survey open source frameworks that automate single or multiple parts of the machine learning pipeline. The parts of this pipeline that are serviceable by automatic frameworks are model construction, feature engineering, and hyperparameter optimization and thus we analyze mature frameworks claiming to optimize any combination of those tasks. We choose libraries that could feasibly be included in the pipeline of an enterprise data science team with minimal implementation effort. Each framework review includes, if applicable, the goal of the library, the statistical method implemented, and the primary differentiating factors to consider when deciding whether to integrate it with a new or existing project.
Partial Solutions
Some AutoML solutions address single portions of the data science pipeline. Although they do not provide an end to end solution, these libraries focus on implementing a cutting edge method to solve a specific problem or operate in a specific environment with unique constraints and thus are worth considering.
Feature Engineering
feature-tools
Link — 1,347 Stars — 139 Forks — 119 Commits — BSD 3-Clause — Last Release 30 May, 2018 (0.1.21)
Featuretools is a package that aims to address the challenges of feature engineering by utilizing the schema from datasets sourced from relational databases. The open source platform is a subset of a commercially available front end service that serves enterprise customers. Featuretools uses an algorithm called Deep Feature Synthesis (DFS) that traverses relationship pathways described through the schema of a relational database. As DFS traverses these pathways, it generates synthesized features through operations applied to the data including sums, averages, and counts. For example, it might apply a sum operation to a list of transactions from a given client id aggregated them into a column. Though, that was a depth one operation, the algorithm can traverse deeper features. Feature tools’s greatest strengths are its reliability and ability to deal with information leakage while using time series data.
boruta-py
Link — 318 Stars — 82 Forks — 62 Commits — BSD 3-Clause — Last Release 5 Mar, 2017 (0.1.5)
Boruta-py is an implementation of the brouta feature reduction strategy in which the problem is framed in an “all-relevant” fashion whereby the algorithm retains all features that significantly contribute to the model. This is opposed to a “minimum optimal” feature set that many feature reduction algorithms apply.
The boruta method determines feature importance by creating a synthetic feature composed of randomly reordered values of the target feature, and then trains a simple tree based classifier on the original feature set and a feature set in which the target feature is replaced by the synthetic feature. The difference in performance for all features is used to compute relative importance.
categorical-encoding
Link — 494 Stars — 115 Forks — 171 Commits — BSD 3-Clause — Last Release 22 Jan, 2018 (1.2.6)
The package extends many categorical encoding methods that implement the scikit-learn data transformer interface. The package implements common categorical encoding methodologies such as one hot encoding and hash coding but also more niche encoding methods such as base n encoding and target encoding., This package is useful to deal with real world categorical variables that, for example, might have high cardinality. The package also directly works with pandas data frames, imputes missing values, and handles transforming values that might have been outside of the training set.
tsfresh
Link — 2,781 Stars — 340 Forks — 243 Commits — MIT — Last Release 14 Oct, 2017 (0.11.0)
This library focuses on generating features from time series data. The extensive package is backed by a German retail analytics company that open sourced this portion of their data science pipeline. It extracts a list of shape features that describe a time series trend. These shape features include features as simple as variance and features as complex as approximate entropy. This allows the package to be able to extract trends from the data which would allow an machine learning algorithm to more readily interpret a time series dataset. The package uses hypothesis testing to take the large generated feature set and reduce them down to the features that most explain the trend. tsfresh is also compatible with pandas and sklearn allowing it to be slotted into existing data science pipelines. Tsfresh’s main feature is its scalable data processing implementation that has been tested in production systems with large amounts of time series data.
Trane
Link — 4 Stars — 1 Forks — 245 Commits — MIT — Last Release 5 Feb, 2018 (0.1.0)
This package is a product of MIT’s HDI Project. Trane works with time series data stored in relational databases and used to formulate time series problems. By specifying meta information about a dataset a data scientist can let the engine formulate supervised problems from time series data extracted from a database. This process is self contained in a json file that the a data scientist would write that would describe the columns and data types. The framework would process this file and generate possible prediction problems which in turn could be used to amend the dataset. The project works tangentially to feature-tools and can be used to generate additional features in a semi-automated manner.
FeatureHub
Link — 32 Stars — 5 Forks — 249 Commits — MIT — Last Release 9 May, 2018 (0.3.0)
Another project from MIT’s HDI Lab, FeatureHub is built on top of JupyterHub allowing data scientists to collaborate when developing feature engineering methodologies. Their system automatically ‘scores’ the generated features to determine their overall value to the model at hand. This crowdsourced approach to feature engineering and machine learning showed results within 0.03 and 0.05 points of winning solutions when tested.
Hyperparameter optimizers
Skopt
Link — 880 Stars — 340 Forks — 173 Commits — New BSD — Last Release 25 Mar, 2018 (0.5.2)
Skopt is a library of hyperparameter optimization implementations including random search, bayesian search, decision forest, and gradient boosted trees. This package contains well-studied and reliable methods of optimization, however these models perform best with small search spaces and good initial estimates.
Hyperopt
Link — 2,161 Stars — 473 Forks — 939 Commits — BSD 3-Clause — Last Release 20 Nov, 2016 (0.1)
Hyperopt is a hyperparameter optimization library tuned towards “awkward” conditional or constrained search spaces which includes algorithms such as random search and tree of parzen estimators. It supports parallelization across multiple machines using MongoDb as a central authority for storing results of hyperparameter combinations. This library is implemented by hyperopt-sklearn and hyperas, two model selection and optimization libraries built on top of scikit-learn and keras respectively.
simple(x)
Link — 362 Stars — 22 Forks — 4 Commits — AGPL 3.0 — Experimental (Manual Install)
Simple(x) is an optimization library implementing an algorithmic alternative to bayesian optimization. Like bayesian search, simple(x) attempts to optimize using the minimum number of samples possible but also reduces computational complexity from n³ to log(n) making it extremely useful for large search spaces. This library uses simplexs (n-dimensional triangles) to model the search space instead of hypercubes (n-dimensional cubes) and by doing so avoids the computationally costly gaussian process used by bayesian optimization.
Ray.tune
Link — 3,435 Stars — 462 Forks — 1,707 Commits — Apache 2.0 — Last Release 27 Mar, 2018 (0.4.0)
Ray.tune is a hyperparameter optimization library primarily targeted at deep learning and reinforcement learning models. It combines a number of cutting-edge algorithms such as hyperband: an algorithm for minimally training a model to determine the effect of a hyperparameter, population based training: an algorithm for tuning multiple models in parallel while sharing hyperparameters, hyperopt, and median stopping rule: stopping a model if its performance drops below median performance., This all runs on top of the Ray distributed computing platform which makes it extremely scalable.
Chocolate
Link — 26 Stars — 26 Forks — 196 Commits — BSD 3-Clause — Experimental (Manual Install)
Chocolate is a decentralized (supports compute clusters running in parallel without a central master) hyperparameter optimization library which uses a common database to federate the execution of individual tasks; it supports grid search, random search, quasi-random search, bayesian search and covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy. Its unique features include its support of constrained search spaces and optimizing multiple loss functions (multiple objective optimization).
GpFlowOpt
Link — 102 Stars — 27 Forks — 407 Commits — Apache 2.0–11 Sep, 2017 (0.1.0)
GpFlowOpt is a gaussian process optimizer built on top of GpFlow, a library for running gaussian process tasks on a GPU using Tensorflow. This makes GpFlowOpt an ideal optimizer if bayesian optimization is desired and GPU computational resources are available.
FAR-HO
Link — 22 Stars — 5 Forks — 110 Commits — MIT — Experimental (Manual Install)
FAR-HO is a library containing a set of gradient-based optimizers running on tensorflow which include Reverse-HG and Forward-HG. The purpose of this library is to provide access to gradient-based hyperparameter optimizers within Tensorflow allowing model training and hyperparameter optimization to occur within GPUs or other tensor-optimized computation environments for deep learning models.
Xcessiv
Link — 1,055 Stars — 76 Forks — 316 Commits — Apache-2.0 — Last Release 20 Aug, 2017 (0.5.1)
Xcessiv is a framework for large scale model development, execution and ensembling. Its power comes from its ability to manage the training, execution and evaluation of large numbers of machine learning models in a single GUI. It also has multiple ensembling tools for combining these models in order to achieve maximum performance. It includes a bayesian search parameter optimizer which supports a high level of parallelism and also supports integration with TPOT.
HORD
Link — 52 Stars — 8 Forks — 33 Commits — No license — Experimental (Manual Install)
HORD is a standalone algorithm for hyperparameter optimization. It generates a surrogate function for the black-box model that is being optimized and uses that to generate “promising” hyperparameters that may be close to ideal in order to reduce evaluations of the full model. It consistently shows higher consistency and lower errors when compared to a tree of parzen estimators, SMAC, and gaussian processes. It is especially ideal for situations with extremely high dimensionality.
ENAS-pytorch
Link — 848 Stars — 135 Forks — 33 Commits — Apache-2.0 — Experimental (Manual Install)
ENAS-pytorch implements efficient neural architecture search in pytorch for deep learning. It uses parameter sharing in order to achieve the most efficient network fastest making it suitable for deep learning architecture searching.
Other
Other Open Source Solutions
These solutions were either too similar to previously mentioned solutions or were still under development enough. They are listed here for reference:
Gpy / GpyOpt (Gaussian process hyperoptimization library)
auto-keras (Keras architecture and hyperparameter search library)
randopt (Library for experiment management and hyperparameter search)
Paid Solutions
As the machine learning space has grown, many companies have sprung up to address various problems that arise throughout the data science process. The following are a list of AutoML companies. We do not comment on their efficacy or specialty as we do not benchmark or test these solutions.
H2O Driverless AI (Full Pipeline)
Mljar (Full Pipeline)
DataRobot (Full Pipeline)
MateLabs (Full Pipeline)
SigOpt (Hyperparameter Optimization)
Full Pipeline Solutions
ATM
Link — 251 Stars — 56 Forks — 557 Commits — MIT — Experimental (Manual Install)
Auto-Tune Models is a framework developed by the “Human-Data Interaction” project at MIT (same as featuretools) for quickly training machine learning models with very little effort. It performs model selection using an exhaustive search and hyperparameter optimization using the Bayesian Tuning and Bandits library. ATM supports classification problems only and supports distributed computing on AWS.
MLBox
Link — 504 Stars — 115 Forks — 854 Commits — BSD 3-Clause — 25 Aug, 2017 (0.5.0)
MLBox is a recent automatic machine learning framework whose goal is to provide a more current and up to date avenue for automatic machine learning. It provides data collection, data cleaning, and train-test drift detection in addition to feature engineering that many existing frameworks implement. It uses Tree Parzen Estimators to optimize the hyper parameters of the selected model type.
auto_ml
Link — 793 Stars — 146 Forks — 1,149 Commits — MIT — Last Release 11 Sep, 2017 (2.7.0)
Auto_ml was developed as a tool for businesses looking to boost the value derived from their data without much work besides cleaning. The framework does the heavy lifting of feature processing and model optimization using an evolutionary grid search based method. It improves its speed by utilizing highly optimized libraries such as XGBoost, TensorFlow, Keras, LightGBM, and sklearn. The framework claims 1 millisecond prediction time at most which is its selling feature. This framework generates quick insights into a dataset such as feature importance and creates an initial predictive model.
auto-sklearn
Link — 2,271 Stars — 438 Forks — 1,839 Commits — BSD-3-Clause — Last Release 5 Jan, 2018 (0.3.0)
Auto-sklearn is a framework that uses bayesian search to optimize data preprocessors, feature preprocessors, and classifiers used in a machine learning pipeline. Multiple pipelines are trained and ensembled into a complete model. The framework was written by ML4AAD Lab based out of Freiburg University. This optimization process is done using the SMAC3 framework written by the same research lab. As the name suggests the model implements sklearn which it uses to source the machine learning algorithms. Autosklearn’s main features are consistency and stability.
H2O
Link — 3,132 Stars — 1,217 Forks — 22,936 Commits — Apache-2.0 — Last Release 7 Jun, 2018 (3.20.0.1)
H2O is a machine learning platform written in Java that operates at a similar abstraction level to machine learning libraries such as sklearn. However, it also contains an automatic machine learning module which utilizes its included algorithms to create machine learning models. The framework performs an exhaustive search over the preprocessors built into the H2O system and uses either cartesian grid search or random grid search to optimize hyperparameters. H2O’s greatest strength is its ability to form large computer clusters which allow it to grow at scale. It is also versatile with bindings in python, javascript, tableau, R and Flow (web UI).
tpot
Link — 4,130 Stars — 705 Forks — 1,766 Commits — LGPL-3.0 — Last Release 27 Sep, 2017 (0.9)
TPOT or Tree-Based Pipeline Optimization Tool, is a genetic programming framework for finding and generating code for optimal data science pipelines. TPOT sources its algorithms from sklearn much like the rest of the automatic machine learning frameworks. TPOT’s greatest strength is its unique method of optimization which allows it provide more unique pipelines. It also includes a tool to convert the trained pipeline directly into code which is a major benefit to a data scientist looking to further tweak the generated model.
Conclusion
These frameworks provide valuable solutions to common data science problems and they have the ability to dramatically improve the productivity of data science teams who then spend less time implementing algorithms and more time thinking about theory. However, there are many libraries not covered by this survey, and there will be new ones developed on a regular basis. We encourage teams to explore github for solutions to their problems and show some love to the many small, but high quality machine learning projects out there.
In our next piece — Choosing the best AutoML Framework — we compare four frameworks head-to-head on 87 datasets. Give it a read! | https://medium.com/georgian-impact-blog/automatic-machine-learning-aml-landscape-survey-f75c3ae3bbf2 | [] | 2018-09-11 14:10:56.394000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Machine Learning', 'Automl', 'Artificial Intelligence'] |
Google Chromecast gets hacked by fans of PewDiePie, want users to Subscribe to his channel | Google Chromecast gets hacked by fans of PewDiePie, want users to Subscribe to his channel Garima Bhaskar Jan 3, 2019·3 min read
Reading Time: 2 minutes
Hackers who claim to be loyal fans of PewDiePie have been hacking various media platforms to encourage people to subscribe to his YouTube Channel.
It started off from hacking printers and printing out messages urging them to subscribe to his channel.
Now, the hacking has moved on to Google Chromecast streaming devices, taking advantage of an unfixed bug.
Thousands of Google Chromecast devices have been hacked and their users are being told the same thing, to subscribe to the YouTube channel of PewDiePie.
According to TechCrunch, the hackers named “Hacker Giraffe” and “J3ws3r” carried out this hacking attack by exploiting a bug by the name CastHack in the Google Chromecast.
Also Read: Nokia 9 with Penta-Lens Camera and In-display Fingerprint Scanner
The hackers have gone as far as creating a website that shows the live count of the total devices hacked.
Last time I checked, about 5000 devices were hacked.
About CastHack
CastHack is the name of Hacker Giraffe and J3ws3r’s latest hack. A total of 72,341 devices have become vulnerable.
They streamed a pop-up that informed the user that they’re being hacked and that their device is vulnerable while also asking people to subscribe to the infamous YouTuber, PewDiePie.
Sensitive information about the users has been exposed. The hackers mentioned that they can make the device reset itself, reboot, pair to a Bluetooth speaker forcefully and so on.
How Google responded to this situation
Google told TechCrunch, “We have received reports from users who have had an unauthorized video played on their TVs via a Chromecast device. This is not an issue with Chromecast specifically, but is rather the result of router settings that make smart devices, including Chromecast, publicly reachable.”
How can you be safe
You can safeguard your Google Chromecast device against these hacking tricks by disabling Universal Plug and Play on WiFi routers.
This will not expose your device over the network.
In order to find out how to disable this on your router, you can do a Google search for your router’s name and get the specific instructions to disable this.
Let’s connect on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Subscribe to never miss a post! | https://medium.com/@bhaskar.gb26/google-chromecast-gets-hacked-by-fans-of-pewdiepie-want-users-to-subscribe-to-his-channel-841c5760d220 | ['Garima Bhaskar'] | 2019-01-03 16:14:36.227000+00:00 | ['YouTuber', 'Chromecast', 'Hacking', 'Google', 'YouTube'] |
Regen Network — Quick Guide & Overview | 🌿 Part 1 — What is the Regen Network?
The founders of the Regen Network were troubled with the current ecological crisis that is facing humanity. They stated that the crisis is a result of us failing to account for the aggregate impact of our decisions that mainly focussed on efficiency, profit, and comfort but deliver severe long-term damage to the Earth 🌍.
Their research on agriculture found that a good focus of efforts for improvement should be on soil. More specifically, on adding carbon to the soil. After all, the ground we walk on is the foundation of the health of our global economy and the Earth. Additionally, research shows that while the agribusiness is worth around $5 trillion in business globally, they produce 12 gigatons of CO2 each year. However, it holds the potential to become a massive carbon sink, being able to sequester billions of tons of CO2 per year into the soil and above-ground. And while consumer trends have been moving towards eco and sustainability, critics are saying that that is not enough for significant change. Therefore, Regen’s founders suggest that we must create the ability to explicitly track the ecological impacts of our actions linear to our financials.
The Regen Foundation is, therefore, focussing its effort on scientific research and infrastructure development that creates a transparent, open Ecological State Protocol. The Regen Consortium and Community Staking Pools along with all other stakers, act as the representative body that administers the ledger and the cultural shift towards true-cost accounting (the Regen Consortium and Community Staking Pool is one-third of the token supply.). They are aiming to create a culture of collaboration towards building an infrastructure that is needed to bring earth’s needs into our collective awareness and take action.
💾 The Regen Ledger
The Regen Ledger serves a directory of ecological data sources. While some data might be more valuable on-chain, the data will be largely sold off-chain to obtain the knowledge as to who submitted the data. The hash of the data will point to where this data is stored. The blockchain technology, in the case of the Regen’s Network, makes automated auditing possible, after which the appropriate data can be completely transparent.
When asked about the matter of data storage for ecological purposes, Gregory Landua, Chief Regeneration Officer at Regen Network told us the following:
“The approach to verification of ecological state, and quantification of that state is what I would call intersubjective verification. In landscape ecology and Earth observation science, we correlate multiple sources of data (information) and bind them together into a “data cube”. The blockchain makes it possible for different data sources to be woven together to correlate, confirm or deny claims about the ecological state as a basic function of a marketplace for the value generated by our ecosystems. The value generated by ecosystems is usually considered a public good. A public good is something the market “fails to account for and therefore is most often considered an externality. That is to say that business profits by degrading public goods. In order to reverse this trend, the provisioning of public goods has to be valued. In order to value something you have to be able to: 1 verify it for the multiple stakeholders who benefit, and 2. quantify the value being generated. Both steps are impossible without a public ledger. While this might be a bold statement, the Regen team believes it to be true. Because, without something that allows different private sources of truth to be brought together for a claim about ecological state and the quantified goods produced by it (carbon sequestration for instance), we cannot efficiently achieve consensus about the value of this public good. Hence, we cannot economically value it, and therefore we continue to degrade it as a matter of course”.
🍃Regen Offerings
Regen’s Network focuses on three different types of offerings. The first, which they’ve already started with an has been very successful so far, is the collaboration with farmers worldwide. The application that Regen is developing enables farmers and funders to create agreements about farming practices and ecological change. Through this offering, the Regen Network is trying to create a standard and, for farmers, profitable ways to make changes to the way they use the landscape.
In the long term, these changes in the way farmers utilize their grounds, will not only produce healthy air and soil, but they will be able to “sell” their ecological services. They are making it an extra income for a profession that’s only just holding its head above the water for years. Gregory Landua mentioned that an initial pilot of the Regen Network showed that by contributing to this project farmers can increase their income with 20%. Moreover, because the Regen Network is integrated and decentralized land stewards can receive around 80 to 85 percent of profits generated, unlike in traditional businesses where middlemen take 80 percent leaving only 20 for the land steward or project.
The second application that will be built on the network is based on transparency. The Regen Network and its team of scientists allow anyone in the world to access open, scientifically valid information about the state of the planet. There’s no longer the need to rely heavily on local authorities. With this transparent information, the network aims to activate the chain of significant environmental change. A third application focuses on the community. The Regen Network is building an open community that holds resources and tools such as high-quality data about ecological subjects.
♻️ Ecological Regeneration Projects
What is regeneration? The Regen Network refers to regeneration as “the growth of vitality, viability and evolutionary capacity of a system. As defined by Carol Sanford, the seven first principles of regeneration are whole, potential, reciprocity, essence, nestedness, nodal, and development”.
The regeneration of the world’s ecosystem is an essential aspect of Regen Networks’ goals towards a cleaner environment. To obtain this goal, the Regen Network doesn’t just work together with farmers for better soil. They also work on three other projects; that is solely focussed on regeneration. The first is the Forest Protection Project. With this project, the aim is to protect the world’s forest, because it would help solve about ⅓ of the climate crisis. While much money gets allocated to the Amazon and other forests around the world, a big part of the money never reaches the forests. The Regen Network states:
“Since indigenous communities protect 25% of the Amazon basin and have territories with deforestation rates 2–3 times lower than other lands, they are key to keeping our forests intact and stabilizing our climate”.
These communities, however, often lack resources to pay consultants and the expensive systems needed. That’s why the Regen Network is aiming to get funding directly to the front line of the rainforest community based on verified monitoring evidence that they are genuinely protecting their forests. Check the video below to see how it works.
Other projects that they are currently developing are the tracking of regeneration and the compensating great farming project. The latter is aimed at helping Ecuadorian Cacao farmers shift to environmentally friendly farming practices. For more detail about all the projects the Regen Network, is or will be working on, check here.
💰 Part 2 — Token and Development
As mentioned above, the Regen Network’s ecological ledger and the contracting platform are built on the Cosmos SDK. However, despite all the possibilities that this ecosystem provides, Regen believes that eventually, governance and incentive issues created by the development of other DApps upon the system will result in issues. Therefore, they are building the Regen Ledger, the first blockchain dedicated to ecological claims. This ledger is a Tendermint-core-based PoS blockchain with bonded validators, which will provide network security and durability.
🌳 TREE Token
The Regen Network’s native digital asset is TREE. At this moment, the Regen Ledger is not live yet, which means TREE tokens are only available through the network’s Simple Agreement for Future Tokens (SAFT).
TREE is heavily influenced by the design of the Cosmos ATOM but adapted for the use of ecological data and outcome markets. The Regen Network will be governed as a public blockchain by token holders according to the same models outlined and implemented by Cosmos.
The initial TREE token supply will be 100,000,000 TREE. However, the supply might change, as the Regen Network will be burning unsold tokens. After that, a small percent (max 1%, varied up to 25 basis points each quarter, a basis point is 0.001%) will be increased and distributed to community projects.
👷♂️ Development
In Q1 of 2019, the first Testnet of the Regen Network was launched. In Q3 and Q4 of the same year, Regen successfully ran Testnet 1001. After which Regen hosted its first community-driven testnet: Congo-1, followed by its second public incentivized testnet: Algradigon-1.
Algradigon-1 Testnet was created to onboard new validators who wanted to join, implement, and ensure the undertaking of upgrades. For a deep-dive into this Testnet, check here. Algradigon-1 was launched on 23rd Jan at 17:00 UTC, with 38 validators signing on the genesis block.
was created to onboard new validators who wanted to join, implement, and ensure the undertaking of upgrades. For a deep-dive into this Testnet, check here. Algradigon-1 was launched on 23rd Jan at 17:00 UTC, with 38 validators signing on the genesis block. COSMWASM Kontraŭa Testnet was launched in Q1 of 2020. It is an Adversarial Testnet that focuses on network load-testing with the Regen Ledger running on CosmWASM.
was launched in Q1 of 2020. It is an Adversarial Testnet that focuses on network load-testing with the Regen Ledger running on CosmWASM. Aplikiĝo Testnet, the fourth Testnet, launched in February 2021. The focus of this Testnet will be on application-specific testing and simulation of the ecosystem service credit creation and trading. It aims at preparing for Stargate and IBC transactions with other Cosmos chains. If everything goes right, this will be the last Testnet.
For more information on Regen Network’s testnet, you can visit https://github.com/regen-network/testnets
👉 To keep up to date with the Regen Network and its developments, visit their Twitter, or have a look at Discord!
More Information & Sources | https://medium.com/stakin/regen-network-quick-guide-overview-1e7215da2aad | ['Gisele Schout'] | 2021-02-08 17:08:30.077000+00:00 | ['Testnet', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Staking', 'Regen Network', 'Blockchain'] |
How to Take Control of Your Bathroom Routine and Set Your Shit Schedule | How to Take Control of Your Bathroom Routine and Set Your Shit Schedule
Can a basic butt bro like me master the fine art of crapping on command?
Shit, shower, shave: the three S’s of a successful grooming routine, but an elusive process to perfect. It takes a disciplined diet and schedule to become a same-time-every-day shitter. My own BM schedule is haphazard and borderline dangerous — too many times have I experienced the shame of the post-shower crap, ruining that fresh, clean feeling I’d just attained by bending over and blasting my ass with the shower stream.
So I wanted to know: Could a basic bathroom bro like me master the fine art of crapping on command? And what would it take to earn my brown belt?
Sarah Greenfield, a registered dietitian and coach in digestive health (who’s even given a TED Talk on poop), tells me that “getting your BMs on schedule requires you to be somewhat regimented, and you may need to do a couple things initially to get your body in the habit of pooping first thing in the morning.”
Are you ready, fellow compooptriats? Let’s get regular.
Step No. 2
Greenfield mentions some “catalysts” that can jumpstart your gastrointestinal tract for that first (of hopefully many more) 7 a.m. shits. It comes as no surprise that caffeine kicks off things. “Drink green tea in the morning,” she says. “Caffeine is a stimulant and can help get things moving.” Caffeine doesn’t necessarily aid in becoming more regular, but rather pushes that first poop through whether it’s ready or not, and primes your body into adapting to a morning poop routine.
After your first caffeine-induced poop, Greenfield says to “stop eating around 6 p.m. and continue to drink water throughout the day to avoid dehydration and constipation.” Poop hack: “If you tend to be more constipated, you can add a little aloe to it.”
At the end of the day, Greenfield suggests, take a serving of “psyllium husk or Calm (magnesium citrate) before going to bed.” This mixture of natural muscle relaxants and fiber “should help you get in the habit or train your body to poop when you wake up in the morning.” However, tread lightly, Greenfield warns. “Start slow and monitor how your body responds. Doing everything together could cause increased transit time,” and by that she means diarrhea.
The Daily Routine
Once you’ve got your catalysts, it’s time to settle into a routine. Not only “does [said routine] help things stay more regulated,” but it keeps your hormones balanced and “keeps things moving through the GI tract.”
First, she recommends doing some morning meditation. “This may sound silly, but when you wake up and extend your calm feeling, you’re getting in your parasympathetic nervous system, or your rest and digestion mode,” she says. “If you can keep it relaxed, this may help get things going.”
From there, stay active, stress-free and hydrated. Taylor Wolfram, a registered dietitian and nutritionist, details the steps to regulating your diet, both timing and food-wise: “Eating meals and snacks at consistent times can help bowel movements become more predictable, but it’s also important to eat a variety of plant-based foods including whole grains, beans, vegetables and fruits, to provide adequate fiber — plus drinking plenty of water throughout the day.”
These things “encourage ideal stool consistency, which make bowel movements easier no matter what time of day,” she says, which “might be more useful than trying to control when bowel movements happen.”
Wolfram adds that keeping your stress levels low is important, as stress can wreak havoc many people’s GI tract. Plus, “staying active helps encourage regular bowel movements. Some people, especially those who participate in endurance sports, find that exercise may induce the need to have a bowel movement.”
Greenfield agrees with this sentiment, telling me that a regular “workout routine can help create a more diverse microbiome, and thus, help with regularity.” In particular, she suggests “twisting yoga poses,” as they “can help stimulate your GI tract and get things moving.”
When You Get Thrown Off Your Cycle
Don’t be discouraged if life gets in the way of your regular poops. Travel, time zones and just eating different foods “can all be stressful on your system and change your poop schedule,” Greenfield says. If this happens, do your best to maintain your workouts, and “taking digestive enzymes daily is great when you’re traveling to stay regular. You can take them on a daily basis if you notice a difference in your digestion.”
“If you miss a meal,” she says, “you won’t be thrown off — just get back on your routine.”
Once you settle into a regimented pooping schedule, the chaos of daily life suddenly becomes a bit more manageable. But it takes focus and discipline. “Distractions, such as using a smartphone while on the toilet, could possibly lead to incomplete evacuation,” Wolfram says. “Focusing on the task at hand and being mindful about your body can go a long way.”
Quinn Myers is a writer based in Chicago. He last wrote about why incels are obsessed with Brett Kavanaugh, even though he’s a Chad.
More Quinn: | https://medium.com/mel-magazine/how-to-take-control-of-your-bathroom-routine-and-set-your-shit-schedule-3f8ef03c59bc | ['Quinn Myers'] | 2018-09-29 16:01:01.981000+00:00 | ['Bathroom', 'Food', 'Health', 'Poop', 'Science'] |
Dear members of our community! | Dear members of our community! We have important news! TBCC Wallet is launching the Binance Cross-Chain Swap function with the help of which users will be able to swap tokens from BEP2 standard to BEP20. All tokens which will not be converted to the new standard during a month will be lost! From now, TBCC tokens are also available for trading under the standard of BEP20 blockchain Binance Smart Chain . In order to swap your tokens to another standard, you need to use Binance Cross-Chain Swap in the TBCC Wallet mobile app. In this article you can find out the main differences between BEP2 and BEP20 token standards.
BEP2 is a token standard for Binance chain, while BEP20 is a token standard for the Binance Smart Chain and it has all the same functions as the ERC-20 standard, which is the most common Ethereum token standard.
Binance Smart Chain (BSC) is a blockchain network built for running smart contract-based applications. BSC runs in parallel with Binance’s native Binance Chain (BC), which allows users to get the best of both worlds: the high transaction capacity of BC and the smart contract functionality of BSC. Furthermore, Binance Smart Chain also implements the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), that allows it to run Ethereum-based applications like MetaMask. The aim of the platform is to enable developers to build decentralized applications (DApps) and help users to manage their digital assets cross-chain with low latency and large capacity.
How Does the Binance Smart Chain Work?
As it was mentioned before, Binance Smart Chain is an independent blockchain, but it was also developed as a complementary system to the original Binance Chain. Therefore, BSC utilizes a dual-chain architecture of Binance Chain and Binance Smart Chain. Due to that users can transfer assets from one chain to another with ease. This interoperability ensures that the Binance Chain facilitates fast transactions, which is highly important because many powerful dApps are built on the Binance Smart Chain. BSC extends the functionality of the original Binance Chain greatly and joins a range of cutting-edge protocols which are created in order to bridge the gap between various blockchains.
Users can make transactions on the Binance Smart Chain only with BEP20 tokens. In order to get them, you can use the SWAP function within TBCC Wallet mobile app. There is also another way to get tokens under the standard of BEP20 — just withdraw assets from TBCC Exchange directly to the wallet. In order to use this method, you will need to choose TBCC tokens in the withdrawal section and click on the BEP20 standard button while you are making a withdrawal to the address of your wallet. As it was mentioned previously, you should swap your tokens to another standard within a month (17.06- 17.07. 2021). | https://medium.com/@tbcc-com/dear-members-of-our-community-3c4e3859e545 | [] | 2021-06-17 13:40:58.560000+00:00 | ['Bep20', 'Binance Smart Chain', 'Bep20 Token', 'Tccwallet'] |
Bernie Campaigning in Republican States On Infrastructure | Senator Sanders is talking to Republican voters in Iowa and Indiana. Good.
Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash
It’s no secret that I was one of his biggest supporters of the 2020 primary campaign. One of the things that attracted me to him was that he spoke from the heart and talked about policies, and talk to people regardless of political affiliation with respect and honesty. That authenticity is something that is lacking among mainstream Democrats, and that appeals to not just independents but Republicans.
One of my Republican coworkers ended up supporting him in his previous run. He disagreed with him on social issues, but when he heard Sanders discuss trade policy, climate change, and getting ripped off by Big Pharma he endorsed him. “I spend more on healthcare than my extended family does in Canada. If I was sold a car for twice the price, I’d expect it to be twice as good. Instead I’m spending $700 a month while my Canadian counterparts are spending $180. It’s insane” he said to me.
The story from today on MSN was Bernie Sanders campaigns in pro-Trump districts to get more Republican support for the reconciliation package. It would include investments for infrastructure, climate change, housing, college, and more. The only thought that came to mind was why aren’t other Democrats doing this?
While the corporate press has been largely focused on the inadequate $1 Trillion privatized infrastructure plan with a mileage tax, the $3.5 Trillion plan over ten years benefits the bottom 90% rather than the top 1%. It expands Medicare to include coverage for dental care and vision; makes community college tuition free and invests in infrastructure over ten years. It has no mileage tax in it, provides paid family leave (like other industrialized countries have), invests in mitigating the impact of climate change, affordable housing, and make sure the wealthiest corporations finally pay their fair share in taxes.
If you truly believe in something you must be willing to put yourself out there and fiercely advocate for it. That is what Bernie Sanders is currently doing behind the scenes. And if his colleagues follow suite, it might work. | https://medium.com/@acbc89/bernie-campaigning-in-republican-states-on-infrastructure-ce8201707e7c | [] | 2021-08-19 20:44:23.156000+00:00 | ['Infrastructure', 'Bernie Sanders', 'Politics', 'Education', 'Policy'] |
Human Resources is Not Your Friend | Remember, Human Resources is not your friend, I tell myself as a mantra.
“Morning, Jess. You ready?”
I look up from my laptop to see Elaine in my doorway. Her ivory-colored concealer collects in small lines under her eyes, visible from eight feet away. She is a year younger than I am, and I feel a little sorry for her knowing how much she spends on Botox and Juvederm. They’re not reversing her age.
“Uhm, sure. Where do you want to meet?” Brick is out of the office while his assistant, Reyna, grabs breakfast across the parking lot.
“Conference room is good. Where’s Brick this morning?” Elaine asks.
“With one of his kids, I think. I’m not sure.”
“What’s up, ladies?” Ryan asks as he exits his office for a third cup of coffee from the Keurig.
“Taking a break from spreadsheets?” Elaine asks.
“Dude, I’m working on next year’s budget, and it’s killing me. By the way, I’m going to need a preliminary advertising budget from you, Jess.”
“Another million like we had this year works for me.”
“Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to be possible this time around,” Ryan says.
“Okay, y’all can hammer that out later. Jess?” Elaine nods in the direction of the conference room as Ryan raises his eyebrows. I ignore Ryan’s silent inquiry into what’s happening and lead Elaine into our meeting.
“So, how are things?” She asks as she closes the door behind her.
“Good,” I say. I like Elaine. She’s warm and authentic, unlike the uptight, bony ass bitches working in Corporate.
“Heather’s announcement sure is big news. How long have you two worked together?”
“I’ve reported to her the past four years, but we’ve worked together for seven, more or less.”
Elaine opens her laptop and a notepad. She’s been with Align for six months, covering all hiring and firing in the southwest region. She loves oaky chardonnay and discusses challenges in her marriage, similar to mine. HR is never your friend, and I know better than to trust her entirely, but her warmth and friendliness disarm me.
“We’ll have to grab happy hour again soon,” she says. I nod in agreement. A happy hour sounds lovely, but my stomach twists in anticipation of questions about Brick.
“Let’s get started. You know what this is about?”
“Heather said she filed a complaint against Brick.”
“Correct. I’m investigating whether Brick is creating a hostile work environment for women. Tell me, do you agree with her assessment?”
Loaded question. Do I agree Brick creates a hostile work environment for women? My history with him is complicated, almost as complicated as my history with Heather but for vastly different reasons. He’s moderately sexist, sure, but isn’t every guy who works at Align? Besides, how hostile can the man who promoted me into management while six months pregnant be?
“Heather reports that Brick undermined her in a conversation back in July. Can you elaborate on that?”
“Undermined? Look, Brick’s no stranger to saying inappropriate things. Heck, we all are. I sure don’t want every inappropriate thing I’ve ever said held against me.”
“Yeah, but this is different. Heather alleges Brick told you she is stealing from the company.”
“Whoa. What? Where did that come from?”
“Heather claims he cornered you at the South Texas meeting about Jason leaving the company and that she was helping Jason by providing sales figures to BioMed.”
“Brick never said that to me. I’m sorry. She’s my boss, and I want to help her, but I can’t back her up. I can’t lie to make her perception of events fit with some narrative of Brick, creating a hostile work environment for women. It’s simply not true.”
“So, what happened exactly?” | https://medium.com/not-your-average-jessika/human-resources-is-not-your-friend-232d1876eafa | ['Jessika Lakin'] | 2020-09-27 17:29:25.809000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Fiction', 'This Happened To Me', 'Self', 'Career Advice'] |
Solving the problem of distributing personalized employee training — at scale. | The way people interact, work and learn has shifted rapidly, and the need for a personalized learning experience has almost become expected. However, while a tailored learning experience is relatively simple to deliver to an individual, how do you provide the same experience to thousands of distributed teams across the world, in role-specific packages and multiple languages, while maintaining the same quality standards and effectiveness?
To address this challenge we’ve developed a unique piece of functionality called Smart Assignments — our solution to distributing personalized learning at scale. Smart Assignments use tags to identify user groups or business units within the structure of your organization. A user simply selects the tag(s) that best describes their job-role, and the relevant content will be automatically assigned to them This ensures that the correct content is distributed and assigned to the right user groups across an organization.
What makes our Smart Assignments even smarter is that using the same logic, the platform will also automatically assign the right content to new employees who fit the assignment criteria. This allows L&D managers to minimize management overhead and accelerate onboarding.
Smart Assignments give us an exciting glimpse into the future of learning by being able to design and deliver a personalized learning experience to all your learners — no matter where they are.
Learn more about Smart Assignments here and watch the video below. | https://medium.com/lobsterink/solving-the-problem-of-distributing-personalized-employee-training-at-scale-938ba4201b66 | ['Ashley Kooter'] | 2019-04-16 08:11:43.389000+00:00 | ['Training', 'Elearning', 'Education', 'Learning', 'Personalized Learning'] |
Stratio-AI Cortex: a self-supervised deep learning framework for anomaly detection in time-series | Use-case: detecting anomalies in a vehicle’s cooling system
An internal combustion engine produces heat when it is running and must be continuously thermally controlled in order to prevent damage to its components and maintain peak efficiency. The temperature is typically controlled by balancing the internal heat generation with the heat dissipation capability provided by a cooling system. Additionally, the engine efficiency is lower when it is cold, so there is an ideal working temperature range: between 85 and 95 degrees Celsius. As shown in the diagram below, a vehicle has an initial period where it heats up until the working range and then stabilizes at around that temperature.
Typical coolant temperature profile of a vehicle in operation.
There are a number of components involved in keeping the engine at its working temperature. A water-cooled engine block and cylinder head have interconnected coolant channels running through them. A pump, driven by the engine, pulls hot coolant from the engine and pushes it through a radiator, which dissipates heat to the atmosphere. Additionally, a fan forces air through the radiator in order to improve cooling efficiency at low speeds. The coolant flow is also regulated by a mechanical thermostat. A failure in any of these components is very likely to result in engine overheating and a forced stop.
Diagram of a vehicle’s cooling system, showing all its components, taken from here.
So, how can we find anomalies in the components of the cooling system, from readings of the coolant temperature?
While it is trivial to find temperature anomalies — when the system is operating outside of the working specifications –, finding faults in individual components that do not have direct sensing is a significantly harder problem. Our hypothesis is that some anomalies can be found in the dynamics of the temperature signal.
We do not want to follow a model-based approach to solve this problem since we would have to make one for each variation of the system’s parts, which is unfeasible. So, we opt by following data-based approaches through a deep learning model. We are able to model the dynamic behavior of the coolant temperature and find relationships with usage metrics using Cortex’s self-supervised deep neural network.
Anomaly detection model
In this case, we are modeling the temperature signal as a function of itself and usage variables, such as engine load. This is generally represented in the diagram below.
We query our data lake for data from a subset of our fleet that should represent the normal behaviour and train the model with it. Given that it is a regression model, we can train it with a loss function such as the mean squared error. During training, the model learns the expected temperature behaviour in the dataset. The plot below shows the predicted temperature signal in red and the measured temperature in blue. The second plot shows the temperature residual, i.e., the difference between the predicted and measured temperatures. The sample shows that the model captures the temperature dynamic behaviour with significant detail, as intended.
On the first plot, the measured and predicted temperature signals in blue and red, respectively. On the second plot, the difference between them.
Now that we have seen that the model can learn the normal dynamic behavior of a cooling system, we can use the prediction residual for anomaly detection. For each vehicle, there is a residual time series, which is used to find anomalous situations in the vehicle. An example is shown in the figure below over a two-year timespan, we get a residual signal like the one shown in the figure below.
Residual signal plotted in blue; anomaly threshold in yellow; ground-truth and predicted anomalies in green and red, respectively.
In this figure, the blue line represents the prediction residual series, the yellow line the anomaly threshold, the red regions the anomaly intervals and the green regions the manually annotated anomalies. The annotated anomalies are typically overheating events but some are also component failures (e.g., water pumps). For our purposes, we consider this example to have perfect recall but 50% precision. These cases are reviewed by our analysts in order to improve the precision of our predictions. In this specific use-case, Cortex reduced the development time by 80% when compared to the empirical model we have in production, while improving its precision by about 10% in the same validation dataset.
This use-case showcases how we can quickly train and deploy new anomaly detection models without specifying features (apart from cleaning and scaling the signals), taking advantage of the large amounts of unlabeled data we can access. These models also have the advantage that they can be retrained in production for new vehicles without new labels. | https://medium.com/stratio/stratio-ai-cortex-a-self-supervised-deep-learning-framework-for-anomaly-detection-in-time-series-f2c3c89a8224 | ['Miguel Simao'] | 2020-06-30 08:08:48.193000+00:00 | ['Deep Learning', 'Vehicle Maintenance', 'Data Science', 'Predictive Maintenance', 'Fleet Management'] |
Read Online: 6 Books Written by Controversial Public Figures | Image Courtesy Amazon
“Interesting times” may have been proverbially a curse but at least they make for good current events reading.
* Books by people with friends — and enemies — in high places
* History, in real time, by some current newsmakers
* Download for discreet reading on Kindle or purchase a physical copy
Living in “interesting times” may have been proverbially a curse, but these fractious years do offer plenty of material for amateur (and otherwise) historians of the present day. So put that humanities degree to good use and examine these six “primary sources” by some of the most controversial players on today’s stage as history repeats itself with an ever-more dizzying wobble between farce and tragedy.
1. Unhinged
Omarosa Manigault Newman (why is she only ever referred to by her first name?) may have just recently announced having taped audio from the White House that backs up some of the book’s claims– but this expose is already widely considered pretty reliable, as evidenced by the recent conviction and guilty pleas from some of President Trump’s allies. A veteran of both The Apprentice and the Clinton White House, Omarosa is a complex figure in her own right, and, as many reviewers have pointed out, a capable prose stylist.
Buy: Unhinged by Omarosa Manigault Newman $9.95
2. Dangerous
For something completely different: here’s former Breitbart editor and later Breitbart cause celebre in its struggle against college students, Milo Yiannopoulos. To call him “controversial” is a little like calling a nuclear meltdown a “less-than ideal situation.” Few people on any side of a political spectrum– other than outspoken Nazis, maybe– have inspired as much rancor. Of course, praising outright Nazis has likely helped Milo in this regard.
Buy: Dangerous by Milo Milo Yiannopoulos $14.99
3. A Higher Loyalty
It was inevitable that former FBI director James Comey would write a book. Full of surprisingly nuanced and confessional details, revealing personal opinions we may all have suspected but which Comey concealed, out of principal, while he was FBI director, this book is a clear attempt to save a professional legacy. It’s a compelling one, giving us a charismatic, likable Comey the public may not have seen much of from brief snippets of televised hearings.
Buy: A Higher Loyalty by James Comey $7.68
4. Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out and Finding the Courage to Lead
That Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood foundation, became a household name is perhaps due in equal parts to the recognition of her achievements and the intensity of the attacks directed toward her. Named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2011 and 2012, she has been involved in activism in her native Texas for decades. In addition to women’s health issues, she also campaigned on behalf of garment and hospitality and home care workers.
Buy: Make Trouble by Cecile Richards $9.33
5. Fire and Fury
Michael Wolff’s #1 New York Times best-selling tell-all of the Trump White House is practically required reading for news hounds and current events fiends. Which, these days, is practically all of us.
Buy: Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff $6.00
6. Fascism: A Warning
America’s first female Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright is today the sort of eminence you can say not only authored a book of history but seems to have authored quite a bit of the history that winds up in books. She spent her childhood in the shambles of World War II, her own family’s heritage and history lost until decades later. As a diplomat she helped oversee some of the most dramatic transitions of power in the 20th century. Now she offers this, not a retrospective or an autobiography, but a stern, historically backed up and very reasonable warning. If her previous book was called “Prague Winter,” this one might well be thought of as “Winter is Coming.”
All images courtesy of Amazon
Buy: Fascism: A Warning by Madeleine Albright $13.05 | https://medium.com/@spydotcom/read-online-6-books-written-by-controversial-public-figures-351a0e74bf07 | [] | 2019-01-03 18:35:39.464000+00:00 | ['Hillary Clinton', 'Recommended Reading', 'Books', 'Trump', 'Politics'] |
The future of cybersecurity | Cybersecurity is a cat-and-mouse game. The latest card that security experts are playing is Artificial Intelligence (AI). With organizations moving beyond the traditional perimeters of their businesses, they need AI to back up their firewalls. Mobile end points, the Internet of Things (IoT), and complex compute environments are opening new and as yet unknown vulnerabilities. AI is the new savior. AI is providing the means to identify threats that even the most experienced experts may not notice or didn’t know exists. This is why AI in cyber security is forecasted to generate revenues of $101.8 billion by 2030 (from $8.6 billion in 2019, at a 25.7% CAGR for 2020–2030)[i]. But AI is programmed by humans. It doesn’t take long for a resolute and intelligent human to defeat another. $101.8 billion is going to be insufficient. Because a new era in cybersecurity is on the way as quantum computing becomes a reality.
Quantum computing will provide businesses newer and faster ways to detect and pushback threats to their digital systems. But technology works both ways. Hackers and dark actors, black hats and script kiddies, will also have access to quantum computing. The result could be that cybersecurity will become a game like blitz chess and bullet chess.
Consider RSA encryption. It is based on the difficulty of factoring large integers and is among the most widely used encryption algorithms. Although it would require a massively powerful quantum computer to break an RSA encryption (to break it requires compute resources to factor 2048-bit numbers), technology is getting to that machine faster than we expect. But relax, it isn’t happening overnight — the machine that breaks RSA encryption is still perhaps a decade away.[ii]
But the world of quantum computing is blasting its way to new and unimaginable frontiers every day, so keep a watchful eye on the technology. In December 2020, the University of Science and Technology of China announced that Jiuzhang, a boson sampling device that is a type of quantum computer, did in 200 seconds what the Japanese Fugaku supercomputer, the world’s most powerful, would take 600 million years.[iii] Monstrous machines like these will turn RSA encryption into history. What the world needs is quantum-resistant cryptography.
As it turns out, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is in the process of assessing 69 new methods of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) and wants to establish new cryptographic standards by 2022.[iv] Before we turn the calendar on 2022, be sure that terms like “crypto agility” and “quantum keys” will dominate technology conversations.
Today, while the world is focused on AI, it is quantum computing that is silently laying the blueprint for tomorrows world. Of course, the wise, seasoned and pragmatic security expert already knows that quantum-resistant cryptography is a very tiny piece of the security puzzle. It can do amazing things for enterprise security (mostly it will begin by confusing the daylights out of CXOs). But fancy quantum-resistant cryptography still won’t prevent privilege abuse; or be able to stop an employee from opening a mail attachment that is malicious and sets off trojans and worms; or prevent a business from confusing compliance with a security policy. These will still require a well-established and age-old intervention. We’ll have to continue to invest in educating users — they will always be the last line of defense.
Author:
Pradeep Kar
Founder, Chairman and Managing Director, Microland Ltd | https://medium.com/@microland/the-future-of-cybersecurity-a00d817fef29 | [] | 2020-12-23 04:48:35.047000+00:00 | ['Digital Transformation', 'Cybersecurity', 'Technology', 'Security', 'Quantum Computing'] |
Latest rules for the Futourist token sale | Limited pre-sale
It will last for 72 hours (3 days) or less if the hard cap is reached early.
if the hard cap is reached early. Everyone in this phase will get an 8% bonus , which will be distributed after the crowdsale (bonus only).
, which will be distributed after the crowdsale (bonus only). During the Limited pre-sale, the maximum investment will be capped at 10 ETH per individual contribution .
. In association with Cofound.it, our closest partner, we made a special offer for Cofound.it Priority Pass members. They will be able to contribute 20 ETH per individual .
members. They will be able to contribute . Limited pre-sale means that a higher number of individual contributions will be possible in this phase. Small contributors will be able to participate before the ‘’whales’’ come in. With this model, we want to diversify and widen the initial FTR owner list.
Unlimited pre-sale
Unlimited pre-sale will start right after the limited pre-sale is finished. Limited pre-sale will officially start on 23rd of February.
It will last for 96 hours (4 days) or less if the hard cap is reached early.
or less if the hard cap is reached early. The individual contribution will not be capped.
Public crowdsale
Public crowdsale will start on 27th of February.
It will last for 3 weeks and will end on 20th of March .
and will The individual contribution will not be capped .
. In the case of hard cap being reached early, the public crowdsale will not be opened.
Know Your Customer (KYC) and Whitelisting
Due to demands made by exchanges and banks, the “Know your customer” form (KYC) will be an obligatory step for every investor — for those investing in the pre-sale phases, as well as those investing in the public crowdsale phase. The KYC form will be available online before the pre-sale starts.
KYC in pre-sale
During the pre-sale phases, the form will not be available, so you need to submit KYC form before the presale starts. Doing so, your ETH address will be inserted into our crowdsale smart-contract, which means it will be whitelisted. All collected funds that do not come from a whitelisted ETH address will be returned to the address they came from.
KYC in crowdsale
As for the public crowdsale, the KYC form will be a mandatory step as well, but unlike the pre-sale phases, the KYC form will be available throughout the public crowdsale — you will be able to submit your KYC data whenever after crowdsale begins.
More tokens in the crowdsale & angel investors
Due to continuous requests by our community, we have decided to increase the amount of tokens available in the crowdsale. 35% of the total token supply (instead of 25%) are now allocated to be sold throughout the crowdsale. We have done that in order to let more people in our token crowdsale due to the high interest in the community.
We’d like to stay transparent with our community, so we are publicly announcing the private angel investment phase as well. A part of the tokens is reserved for our angel investors who have supported and financed our project from the very beginning and are the reason Futourist exists. The angel phase will end before the pre-sale, the amount of tokens sold will be publicly disclosed before the public phases take place. Also, Columbus Capital fund, Pinta*, has expressed a high interest for Futourist and will take part in the crowdsale. The angel phase goes along with the increase in the token amount allocated for the crowdsale.
The price of the token remains the same, so nothing else changes besides the higher number of FTR tokens available in the crowdsale and consequently a higher crowdsale hard cap. The market cap of the project remains the same. Our crowdsale hard cap is now 5,600,000 EUR.
ETH price for FTR tokens will be calculated in days leading to the start of the pre-sale. We will release this information then.
*Pinta (CCP) — Is a closed-end actively managed fund investing in crowdfunded blockchain based projects (ICOs). Investment strategy is based on proprietary fundamental analysis. Pinta strives to pursue superior returns on the upside and protects the investor’s funds on the downside.
KYC form itself and whitelisting will be available very soon so stay tuned.
Thank you for your patience and for being our loyal supporters who believe in our great project!
If you have any more questions about our project you can always ask us in our Telegram chat.
Join us on Social Channels:
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Medium
Youtube | https://medium.com/futourist/latest-rules-for-the-futourist-token-sale-e4d332fb355e | ['Ziga Luksa'] | 2018-02-01 14:31:17.268000+00:00 | ['Crowdfunding', 'Crowdsale', 'Travel', 'ICO', 'Blockchain'] |
Facing the Greater Fool | Exploring the claims behind the persistent criticism commonly leveled against cryptocurrency, and why the Greater Fool Theory fails to make its case convincingly when scrutinized.
Early investor / adopter of cryptocurrencies, circa 2019 (colorized)
Introduction: The Many Faces of the Greater Fool
There’s not a specific definition or even attribution of the origin of the Greater Fool Theory (hereafter abbreviated to GFT), probably since the concept of investment mania divorced from fundamentals has existed for as long as trade and commerce. While definitions are extremely important, the lack of a formal origin means we’ll have to settle for the slightly more imprecise language of convention. Perhaps no source is more conventional than the Investopedia article on the Greater Fool Theory, which just so happens to lump Bitcoin in as an example of the theory in action, making it a great place to start.
The two main prongs of GFT incorporate the following components of a “foolish” investment thesis: 1) investing in an asset solely with the goal of selling later at a higher price to a “greater fool”, 2) especially when the current price of the asset is overvalued compared to its intrinsic value. Commonly cited examples of GFT in media include those found in Charles MacKay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, namely the Tulip, Mississippi, and South Sea Bubbles. Similarly, critics of cryptocurrencies often try to draw similarities between the folly of investing in digital assets and the historic speculators who ultimately ended up as bagholders once the hype cycle died down for flower bulbs and mysterious state-affiliated exploration companies, respectively.
Ultimately, I believe both premises of GFT can be argued successfully against, weakening the applicability of the theory. Method one argues that all non-yield-based investing requires a belief in net capital appreciation over time, since if an asset was not predicted to outperform, investment capital would flow elsewhere into other alternatives — thereby making this prong of the GFT overly inclusive, and thus meaningless. The second component in the GFT, which casts doubt on the soundness of an investment when price exceeds intrinsic value, is weakened by the problematic reference to the concept of “intrinsic value” as a fundamental parameter of an asset — we’ll soon examine how the commonly used term is actually an appeal to authority (a type of logical fallacy), and that true intrinsic value doesn’t exist independent from human subjectivity, which is always contentious and debated, not absolute.
Rebuttal 1: All Investing Includes Risk and Expected Gains
The first rebuttal point is easy to make — all investors of any financial asset expect the possibility of selling it for a higher price, and specifically have entered into the speculative position because their underwritten investment case implicitly incorporates positive expected value from the trade. These purchasers of financial assets generally anticipate being able to sell that asset in the future at a higher future price. The decision of which asset to hold in the investible universe, all else being equal, comes down to weighing the pros and cons of a particular investment versus all other alternatives. Even in cases where a position is entered into for hedging purposes, the investor gains value from the improved risk characteristics of the pro forma portfolio when compared to the previous, status-quo version. This example is a brief introduction into the idea of praxeology (of humans fundamentally acting in support of their goals), an underlying methodology of Austrian Economics, which I encourage readers to read up on if they’re interested. At the same time, there is no such thing as investing that is free from speculation, in the same way that there is no true “risk-free” asset. Stocks can miss consensus estimates, corporations can miss interest payments, and even government bonds which are supposedly risk-free can suffer principal loss when new geopolitical events affect market perceptions of the underlying riskiness of the asset.
In this way, we expose one of the errors of GFT’s first prong — specifically the fact that it’s overly inclusive of the entire universe of investing, completely diluting its power. Even the initial purchasers of sovereign century bonds or negative-yielding assets likely incorporate scenarios where rates go further negative, thereby resulting in capital appreciation on their investment. In fact, this is probably the upside scenario that is specifically underwritten from a business case perspective for the investors who have purchased and are currently holding these assets right now. As soon as money is exchanged for any asset (instead of a consumable good), then there’s a directly resulting long position in the asset established, with the corresponding hope and expectation of being able to sell for a higher price. To be clear, reality differs from these expectations, such that investors who are worse at anticipating all the variables do suffer investment losses, though that is not their intention.
Ultimately, it is precisely the actions of individuals who have identified and seek to exploit short-term mispricing of these financial assets which drive the resulting emergent phenomenon of efficient markets in the longer-term. Said another way, this is the apocryphal Benjamin Graham quote (per Warren Buffet) about how the market is a voting machine in the short run, but a weighing machine in the long run.
Rebuttal 2: Intrinsic Value Does Not Exist Independent of Human Subjectivity
We now examine the question of whether intrinsic value exists in any real form, since GFT crucially relies on assets being overpriced relative to this ill-defined baseline. It is interesting that nailing down the concept of intrinsic value can be thought of as both an ontological (the study of existence, not the Chinese token project), and epistemological (relating to the study / theory of knowledge) question at the same time. As part of the process, we’ll walk through some exercises in the following paragraphs, but I posit that when people say “intrinsic value”, it’s actually a short-hand for agreed-upon methods for valuing an asset to then compare against a trading price. Some of the thought experiments will reveal major gaps in the colloquial definition of “intrinsic value” wide enough to drive a truck through, with the resulting imprecision making its usage in the context of GFT essentially a strawman argument, set up only to be knocked down. This, in turn, dramatically weakens the power of GFT as a fair criticism, including when it’s used as to argue against investing in digital assets.
More specifically, the very idea of intrinsic value as an immutable property of a given asset is paradoxical. As a thought experiment, let’s try to value the Empire State building. “Easy enough”, you might say, and point to the roughly ~$2–2.5B range, as informed by earlier deal precedents, or by looking at where the public REIT stock trades at today. Now imagine the world just after the most recent ice age (~10,000 BCE), when modern humans were exploring the Great Rift Valley in Africa. How much was the same plot of land worth back then, intrinsically? Similarly, how much would the Empire State be worth if a virus wiped out all humans a year from now?
In both of the hypothetical scenarios, the answer is pretty clearly zero given the absence of demand for the land, even though the current arrangement of our world results in the Empire State building deriving value from the tourism, commercial activity, and general economic value that is associated with the usage rights associated with the same plot of land. To further clarify, this suggests a major difference between “intrinsic value” and the tangible physical properties of an asset or object (the dirt at the land site in all three scenarios doesn’t change color or consistency depending on whether humans are there to observe it). So we arrive at an interesting realization — that “value” is never actually intrinsic to an asset, but rather is just a short-hand (or heuristic, as referred to by behavioral psychologists and economists) for the sum total of the usage/sales/other rights associated with the land/property. For the Empire State specifically, these are enumerated in the investor disclosure, e.g. the 10-K for ESRT (the NYSE-listed ticker for the Empire State Realty Trust), but for digital assets, those commonly-agreed upon heuristics are still works-in-progress that muddy up the waters, thereby helping unfairly support the Greater Fool Theory.
Continuing the analysis from the bottom-up direction — what is meant by the intrinsic value of a stock? Is it the discounted cash-flow value of the free cash flow thrown off by the business? The EBITDA multiple (which forward year)? An Earnings-per-share multiple? For most stocks, the “right” metric varies depending on which company you’re looking at, which industry you’re looking at, and even who you ask, since there’s still room for debate even in the most liquid and well-covered equities; it is precisely because of the fuzziness of the math, since valuation is truly in the eye of the beholder, that traditional markets see such a frenzy of buyers and sellers, and why I’m not worried about the tribalism and conflict within the cryptocurrency universe going away in a future when the asset class has scaled up.
At the same time, investors and analysts that focus on cryptocurrencies are slowly arriving at some agreed-upon heuristics for looking at certain metrics of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, e.g. ratios based on transaction volume, realized capitalization, or relative to other money or commodity assets. This should result in expected variance (on a percentage basis) in target prices (vs. trading prices) from market speculators narrowing as the cryptocurrencies mature, since the front lines of debate shift from larger details to smaller nuances over time as consensus methodologies are discovered and agreed upon. However, I believe we’re still years away from all of that playing out for digital assets, despite having decades of agreed-upon methods available to plug in for equities, one reason for the distortion and confusion around this whole topic. In the future, it’ll be easier for the retail and institutional investors alike to talk more confidently about the “intrinsic value” of a particular cryptocurrency, but we should be careful not to mistake the absence of a lexical consensus today as evidence of its absence in the future.
A Lesser Greater Fool Theory: What’s Left?
At this point, we’ve examined some serious problems with the Greater Fool Theory when commonly applied to cryptocurrencies. Specifically, the inaccuracy in thinking that a desire to resell an asset for a greater price suggests foolishness on behalf of the investor, when in fact almost all purchasers of financial assets expect net capital appreciation. Second, we explored why the reliance on intrinsic value, as a basis to be compared against the market price, is also a problematic concept given the 1) lack of consensus valuation methodologies in the world of cryptocurrencies compared to traditional assets, and 2) lack of philosophical rigor in the daily definition of intrinsic value in all asset classes, where even when applied to traditional arenas such as stocks and real estate, the word as commonly used refers to a set of heuristics instead of an innate asset-level parameter.
Once GFT loses validity of its two constituent components, then its power as a fair critique of a contemplated asset investment is dramatically weakened since the entire argument at that point rests on two weak premises. To be clear, with respect to getting comfort, GFT is not the only argument that one needs to get over, as there are still plenty of actual investment risks that are unique to cryptocurrencies that remain imperative to diligence. These include learning about the technology, the addressable market, regulatory risk, key-man risk for centralized projects etc. In addition, prospective investors still have to accurately discount for the opportunity cost of capital compared to alternative investments (though traditional asset classes make the comparison easy in terms of risk/reward), and deal with operational issues like securing your keys, keeping a low personal profile. Nevertheless, defusing one of the most common (and in my mind, lazy), phrases used to dismiss further honest debate around cryptocurrencies is a worthy step forward in the broader mission for mindshare and adoption.
Conclusion: Fools Are Sometimes Right, but Often Early
In the classic Hans Christian Anderson fable The Emperor’s New Clothes, it is the foolish child, unburdened by the obligation and fear felt by the rest of the adults in the crowd, who is able to overcome the inertia of the status quo to reveal a truth that ultimately was felt, but not articulated, by others. Although more apocryphal and symbolic than historically accurate, the trope of the court jester (or fool) who is one of the few willing to speak the truth to the monarch, is also applicable here, in the same way that the Greek tragic figure, Kassandra of Troy, was blessed with the power of prophecy but cursed to have no one believe her.
I continue to believe in the inexorability of mainstream cryptocurrency adoption, but have refined that view to think that our journey up the S-curve will largely be an outward-in phenomenon, where those on the fringes of the existing system are still the ones who will more quickly accept the paradigm shift offered by cryptocurrencies, while the majority of the population will only come around later. However, what is currently accepted as normal and quotidian today was once unimaginable, and lampooned as foolish by contemporaries at the time, whether it was the early writers and engineers who dreamt of traveling under and across the sea, soaring through the air, visiting the stars or even creating and enjoying virtually-created digital worlds. If those outlandishly “foolish” ideas turned out to be not only possible, but vital to our society’s commerce and leisure today, what else might we be missing today that will turn out to be vital to the shared future of tomorrow? | https://medium.com/messaricrypto/facing-the-greater-fool-980ff4d02014 | ['Evan Feng'] | 2019-09-04 17:16:12.888000+00:00 | ['Investing', 'Philosophy', 'Messari Analyst', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin'] |
The Worst Technical & Contextual SEO Mistakes You Can Make (2020 Update) | Have you noticed that SEO in the last 3–4 years is a tricky process, which requires more strategic thinking and better user experience than before? Sure it’s just a little part of them: Here’s more than we expected.
As far as I can tell, your most prominent reason why you are here is that you need more traffic, more leads & revenue from organic search. Each of us needs more traffic in the long term, and for this, we make various SEO efforts. But are these efforts efficient for the future of your brand? We need to measure all of them and convince ourselves that improvements will be most trusted.
So what challenges will we see in the evergreen SEO process?
There are a few things we need to know:
I think it’s enough to understand how long is the process of SEO now and maybe beyond. The last one, do you know how to hide a brand in search results? Easy peasy!
Page 2nd of the Google search results
Let’s come to the central thought. Below you will see some worst SEO mistakes (and how to avoid them), which I experienced with various brands and get better performance (take a look at one example — Migros’ SEO Case Study).
Shortly in this post, you can find SEO issues on these pieces:
Crawling & Indexing Technical SEO Content/Context SEO
Now, focus and be ready!
Indexing Issues & How to Avoid
Forget or Skip Using Robots.txt Rules
You have probably heard about robots.txt file and maybe heard how important it is to use this file carefully. There in robots.txt file User-agent, Disallow, and Allow is the most famous lines — if you don’t understand how to use these rules, you shouldn’t wonder about that and permit a webmaster. Robots.txt is used by 500 million websites that were adopted by all major search engines (Google, Yandex, Bing, etc.).
The Robots.txt File
https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt
How robots.txt file works?
It is not necessary to use this TXT file on your leading directory of the website. But, if you didn’t use, then you need to know that:
Major search engines will be crawling all URL paths of your website (search results, filtered URLs, thin pages, etc.)
You will treat crawl-budget (website’s crawl rate limit)which is very important for index health,
Many of your web pages’ ranking will change every day because they may be cannibalization.
For example, if you want to block your search results’ URL path to Google, use that rule:
User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /search
If you want to block the search results, but some of these* allow to indexing:
User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /search Allow: /search?q=cheese
*Some of your search results are specialized and optimized nicely then break them to indexing. If there are no reasons, block all of them. I’d like to share with you a fantastic guide about how robots.txt works and how to use rules in the best way: Here’s a blog post by Matthew Henry.
Failed URLs in XML Sitemap
Supposing you want to hike to a specific destination, you are alone, and there’s no wifi, no G.P.S. How can you walk to this destination? Guide, am I right? And so your website needs to be pointable for significant search engines.
Ups, I forget one thing. You may don’t know what the XML sitemap is. It was just one of those things, like a regular technical SEO doer.
XML Sitemap is one of the most important (after robots.txt) files for your website’s URLs. There you can add all your web pages to show to Google or another one. If you already have that file, Google will crawl them every day.
The file can be in any URL path. There is an example:
Inside XML Sitemap File
Remember those things:
Don’t break here at broken links because Googlebot will crawl and, at every turn, will try to index your broken URLs — it will treat your crawl-budget.
If you have more than 50K URLs, put them into a few files (e.g.,/sitemap-categories.xml, /sitemap-products.xml, etc.).
One sitemap file can’t be more than 50 M.B. That may be a problem for Google when trying to analyze this file.
Except for <loc> protocol, if you don’t need to use other protocols is your right. But before take a look here and understand how XML sitemap protocols work.
Forget to Use Meta Robots “noindex” Tag.
If you want to deindex (remove from the index permanently), you should add <meta name= “robots” content= “noindex”> code into <head> side. Robots.txt is only one part of your crawl management.
As John Mueller said:
“robots.txt is for controlling crawling, not for controlling indexing of URLs.” — Twitter Status
Where should you use the “noindex” tag?
Meta Robots “nofollow” tag code
URL path which you disallow from robots.txt,
Pagination pages (these pages will never have a high rank).
Pass Over the 404 Pages
Still? Really?!
A little break? → Still D.R.E.
I can’t sometimes believe what I see when starting the process of URLs’ health. It’s a long story, but yeah, continued.
“404 Not Found” pages are a pain in the neck. They may be in Google’s index and still get clicks. If any of that clicks will come to an empty page, I’m sure most of the visitors will exit from this page — meaning you lose potential revenue.
You have a lot of ways how to identify these 404 pages:
Google Search Console’s Coverage Report Track with Google Analytics (Needed Google Tag Manager) Analyze with DeepCrawl / Screaming Frog SEO Spider
And so
After you find all failed URLs, fire to 301 redirects. How? Where?
Similar to your failed URL path (most recommended).
or
Pages which is already gain traffic.
or
Direct to #1 level categories or main page.
Technical SEO Issues & How to Avoid
Killer of SEO: Page Load on Mobile is Slower than Desktop Devices
Most users use smartphones — so Googlebot uses a smartphone too, for the most crawling. Over 50% of search results are from mobile indexing, and if your website’s mobile version doesn’t load faster, then you lose more than 53% of potential customers.
“If your site takes longer than two seconds to load, 53% of your customers lose interest.” — Think with Google
Think with Google
We are in an age of mobile-first indexing, where Google dominates. So, providing a fast experience on each device will contribute to your sales and, thus, to your SEO visibility.
I’d like to share two significant brands’ experienced examples:
#1 — Amazon (2012)
In 2012 Amazon’s page load time rose to 1 second and lost $1.6 billion.
#2 — Walmart (2016)
For every -1 second of improvement, they experienced up to a 2% increase in conversion rate.
#3 — eBay (2020)
For every 100ms improvement in search page loading time, eBay.com saw a 0.5% increase in Add to Cart count.
It’s just the most prominent brands’ 3 examples that say if you need a difference in visibility and revenue, be fast like a cheetah! Not only on mobile, at all devices.
So how to test the load speed of pages? I have a few useful tools for you:
Above I just share tools that I use, you can choose any of those. But remember, when you identify the page speed issues, you will need a full-stack developer and a knowledgeable SEO doer. I recommend to you before that to take a look at Ian Lurie’s blog post about “A developer’s guide to SEO.”
Choose who you want your website to be
Misusage in Canonical Tags
Canonical tag helps to show which URL is the original version/should be indexed by search engines. For example, if you have pagination pages, and if you add below code to /cheese?page=2 this page.
<link rel=“canonical” href= “/cheese” />
Google will index just your first page of the category. Now you understand a little bit how it works, but I think you will be impressed to learn more details — waiting for you here.
I see many issues on canonical tags, these are:
Pages without any canonical URL,
Use the same canonical URL to duplicated pages (e.g., https://yourdomain.com and http://www.yourdomain.com),
Canonicalized to an unrelated page (e.g., yourdomain.com/cheese and yourdomain.com/category/cheese),
Without entire domain extension (HTTP/HTTPs, W.W.W./non-WWW, or with/-out slash),
Wrong quotation marks
Use to non-indexable pages (301, 404, 502, etc.),
Use A.M.P. (Accelerated Mobile Pages) URL version to desktop source codes (e.g., yourdomain.com/cheese and yourdomain.com/cheese/amp/),
Use JavaScript in-code to all pages (e.g., rel= “canonical” href=“{{MetaTags.canonical}}”).
There are too many cases; these are just a few of them. So what you need to do to detect these canonical tag issues?
I will show you a more comfortable way: Start to use DeepCrawl, crawl your website, and look at “canonical” issues. If you have more than one report, then start step-by-step to resolve them. After you solve the canonical tag issues, download Screaming Frog SEO Spider and paste all the URLs there to see differences which your developer does. There you can see many reports, but all that you want to see is the “Canonicals” tab.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider, List Mode
Do Not Load Third-party Tools Directly When Page is Opening
To be more precise, I’ve shared a screenshot below.
WebPageSpeed Waterfall Results
If you have an eCommerce website, then surely you are using a few third-party tools for users/your customers. If you load all of the tools directly when visitors come to your website, you are in trouble with time to interactive*. Take a look at the above waterfall view; there is an example that shows how much time needed to load-fully a page.
*What is time to interact?
Google PageSpeed Insights — Lab Data
What do you need to do with third-party tools?
Firstly and except Google tools (G.A., G.S.C., G.T.M., etc.), you should pick up all javascript codes of your tools. Add the below code to your source codes.
The code for load third-party tools after scrolling
window.addEventListener(‘scroll’,() =>
setTimeout(() => {
// load third-party tools here
}, 1000),
{ once: true }
)
The logic of this J.S. event is third-party load tools after a user scrolling your page. Tools like Hotjar, Taboola are for your visitors, and that is why we need to load them after scrolling.
Content/Context SEO Issues
Exceed the Meta Title Pixel Limit
Meta titles are a part of the section for the main summary thing of the content on the page. It’s just seen to users, which is on the search engine results. If you want to level-up your knowledge about the meta title tag, Moz already wrote a guide.
Perhaps you’ve heard that there’s a 60–70 character limit to appear your page meta title fully on Google search results. However, Google doesn’t have a definite character limit — it can be a max 600 px.
What does the 600-pixel limit mean for meta titles?
One letter can be longer than another. For example, M is a letter, and so N is a letter. However, there is a pixel difference between the two. To have a more explicit example, I prepared a visual as follows.
As you will see, both titles with the same number of characters are displayed differently. One on Google limits the title to “…” while the other one appears. Here is what we need to understand; we may show clear titles for users searching on Google while we do not exceed the pixel limit.
How to optimize meta titles and boost your C.T.R.?
I have no words after Brian Dian’s case study:
Here’s What We Learned About Organic Click Through Rate
Pass Over High Traffic Potential of the Old Blog Posts
You may have old blog posts with a low traffic rate. Keep your eyes there before publishing new posts. If you don’t want to lose your blog’s potential traffic, measure the performance of all blog posts.
A few questions to ask before publishing a new post on the blog:
— What is the average ranking of your old blog posts? — Do you get the traffic performance you expect? — What is the average session duration? — What % of the traffic you have per month based on the search volume of the main keywords of the content? — What is the CTR of the main keywords of the content? — Do you have an extensive brief according to specific topics? — Do you compare your post with the best competitors in terms of ranking? — It may bring natural backlinks?
Update your blog posts periodically, prepare comprehensive content that will remain evergreen for next year. Instead of focusing on a single keyword, use relevant keywords that may search by many users. You are not obligated to write blah blah blah just because that keywords are higher in search volume — understand what is mean intent-based. Prepare the best one brief; it helps to content writers.
Here is a part of my content brief:
You can catch a few ideas from this part of the content brief → You can download and use it free — Detailed Content Brief
I’m not going to close here; I’ll be working on this content to keep more comprehensive and evergreen.
If you have more time, you can read my latest Medium posts:
→ Future of Voice Searches & Impact on SEO
→ Do You Care About Your Website’s Externally Linked 404 Pages?
Follow me on Twitter: @AdamitaRoman | https://medium.com/boostroas/the-worst-technical-contextual-seo-mistakes-you-can-make-24114bf882a6 | ['Roman Adamita'] | 2020-05-05 06:56:18.310000+00:00 | ['Boostroas', 'Technical Seo', 'Crawling', 'Content Marketing', 'SEO'] |
20 Secrets to Getting Up Early and Feeling Your Best (Full Guide) | 7–8 hours of sleep. That’s exactly how much time a healthy adult needs to feel completely awake. It is advisory to go to bed and wake up at the same time, even on weekends. This is how a regimen is created. It will not let you ignore the alarm clock. No time for a healthy night’s rest? You get 4–5 hours of sleep a day and want to feel awake and energized? It is possible. The following tips from doctors, psychologists, and coaches will show you how.
Why can’t you fall asleep on time and what to do:
1. You got up late in the morning and now can’t sleep a wink.
If you woke up at 4 PM, then going to bed at 10 PM will be quite hard. No rituals can help here. Even if you worked out for hours, you would feel sleepy only at 2–3 AM anyway. The only solution here is to get up early.
2. You are afraid of sleeping through your alarm.
Let’s say you need to wake up early to get on your plane on time. The trip has been planned, it is incredibly important, and the tickets are expensive. You are afraid of sleeping through your alarm, and this fear prevents you from falling asleep. As a result, you go to sleep an hour later. You hear the alarm go off, but don’t turn it off just to lie in your bed for 2 more seconds. Then you fall into a deep sleep. To avoid that, solve the real problem. You aren’t afraid of sleeping through, you are scared to be late for your plane. That is why you need to convince yourself that you are going to wake up full of energy, completely awake, and energized. Imagine how you get up on time and feel great.
3. You can’t fall asleep because of severe stress.
If you had a difficult and stressful day, you need to prepare yourself for sleep. It is recommended that you use drawing as a way of relaxation instead of using sedatives or any other pills. Drawing can actually calm you down and help you focus on the tip of your pencil. It is important that you don’t think about anything for a while. It doesn’t matter whether you can draw or not. It doesn’t matter what you’re drawing on or how you’re drawing either. What’s important here is the process itself.
4. Tomorrow is a difficult day.
Lots of planned things for the next day, an important event, exam, or a project presentation. All this can leave you wide awake in the middle of the night. You are scared of failing, but you can also anticipate something exciting and pleasant. Drawing will help you with that again, it will protect you from niggling fears and thoughts. Even simple geometric drawing can help you abstract yourself from the present moment.
5. You are depressed.
If you’re trying to overcome depression and feel its presence, then your biochemistry might force you to stay awake rather than your mental state. The best way to fall asleep in this case is to exhaust yourself. Take a math book and try to solve some problems. Try to find a solution. Intensive mental activity has the ability to drain you. Physical activity is a great choice as well. Clean your house, have an evening walk, do some exercises at home. You need to tire yourself out. | https://medium.com/@noizio/20-secrets-to-getting-up-early-and-feeling-your-best-full-guide-7d1e25c544f4 | ['Noizio', 'Focus', 'Relax'] | 2020-12-03 10:37:14.657000+00:00 | ['Sleep', 'Guides And Tutorials', 'Secrets', 'Music', 'Morning'] |
Voice + GUI = The marriage that works! | “Voice is the next big thing!” scream the headlines all over town. If you have followed CES for the past few years, you could not have missed hearing this “prediction”.
“Voice UI” is the future is the claim!
But, we think that a Voice-only UI is actually a step backward.
Our oldest interface
Voice, certainly, is the most natural of input interfaces. Most of us have been using it since we were born (some more than others :-)). Either to communicate our wants or to communicate our displeasure. Sometimes in intelligible ways. Sometimes in unintelligible ways. We learnt to use our mouth lot earlier than we learnt to use our fingers. It’s only natural that we use this God-given ability, to interact with computers which are starting to mimic us more and more.
But the abilities of computers do not always match the abilities of humans.
Computers have a much richer output interface as compared to us — the screen. But humans are limited to using voice both as input and output interfaces. Restricting computers to our limitations of voice-only input/output interfaces is going to artificially stifle their abilities and their usefulness.
“What vegetarian pizzas do you have?”
“You can choose between Veggie Delight, Simply Veggie, Veggie Extravaganza”
Imagine asking your “voice assistant” the above question, and the assistant responding with the above choices. Humans have a very limited capability to process such list style information and would most likely end up choosing the third choice (because they don’t remember what the other two were!).
Now imagine instead asking a pizza app the same question (“What vegetarian pizza choices do you have?”) and the app immediately responding with a screen like this -
The experience would be far more natural.
Or performing a bank transaction by saying “show me the last 6 months statement” to a banking app, and the app instead of speaking back, visually showing you the statement. Exactly as it would have, if you clicked on the GUI to show statements and selected a starting date of 6 months ago
We just reduced a thousand clicks on the screen to a single voice input. But we did not convert the thousands of pieces of information on the screen into a single voice output!
Voice is great as a natural input interface. It's easy, it's intuitive and very fast.
GUIs are great as a rich, comprehensive and high-bandwidth output interface.
Marrying them together to build the apps of the future or converting the apps of today into this paradigm, would open up your app to audiences that expect convenience, speed and are growing up with the notion that voice interfaces will be present everywhere.
If the idea of building voice + GUI apps sounds interesting to you, please sign up below. | https://medium.com/slanglabs/voice-and-gui-e4971d589f51 | ['Kumar Rangarajan'] | 2019-02-23 10:01:44.084000+00:00 | ['UX'] |
Why was i declined for a Discover Card? | Why was i declined for a Discover Card?
I am a student trying to build credit so I have researched every possible credit card. I want to only use the credit card for gas purchases so I went to Discover and tried to apply for the Student Open Road. Which has the best interest rate and amazing cash back on gas purchases. In the application it didn’t ask me anything in detail except how much I make a year. I have a full time job and make more than 5k a year. And yet they declined my application. They said they were sending the reason for their decision in the mail, but that was more then 2 weeks ago. My friend at college makes less then I do and she had no credit either but Discover sent her offers in the mail, and now she has a Discover card. Can anyone explain why I didn’t get approved?
Answer : I recommend one to visit this site where one can get from the best companies: http://finance-solution.us/index.html?src=MEDFEBSu1aew2ne2oo .
Related :
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#repost
“”
#repost
“”
Are there any free credit check’s?
I have visited a couple of websites that claim to give your credit report for free but upon entering the required information they ask for your card details, and/or sign up for 5 pound a month.””
“”
Statistics Question!?
Interest rates for home mortgages have, in general, declined during recent months. With the apparent favorable influence for new-home building, there seems to be a clear relationship between x = the prevailing mortgage interest rates and y = the number of new houses being built per month in a midwestern city over a period of 18 months. A scatterplot of the data collected shows that the linear model is appropriate. The equation of the least-squares regression line is Number of new houses = 672.89 30.65 Interest rate and r 2 = 0.49. What is the correlation coefficient between Interest rate and Number of new houses being built?””
“”
“”After you get approved for an auto loan, what should be my next step?””
Surprisingly, I just got approved for an auto loan through my bank. It is 11.4% interest rate and was told that I pay $230/mo. So I am wondering what is my next step after I got the approval? Do I just get any car that equals my loan? This is my first experience?””
“”
“”Help, scary credit problem?””
My boyfriend tried opening a joint savings account on FNBO Direct and he was accepted for review but I was declined and was given this reason: http://pastebin.com/m41b29899 Then I went to check my credit at annualcreditreport.com and it gave me this error: http://pastebin.com/m2f55ba7 If I have a security freeze on this account does that mean someone is using or trying to use my SSN? I’m going to call on Monday, but I would like to know what this means?””
“”
Does a payday loan center have the right to harass customers?
My sister borrowed $200 a month ago. She didn’t foresee losing work because of pneumonia. She has written the company’s headquarters, send letters, called dozens of times only to be threatened. She finally had to change her phone number because of the harassing phone calls all hours of the day. They were calling in an average of 6 times an hour. Today, a representative from the payday loan center came to her home pounding on her front door for nearly 15 minutes. She has attempted several times to make payment arrangements with this company. They said if she doesn’t pay the entire amount that they will take her to court. She also was threatened by this company to be arrested if she didn’t give them her new phone number. This is a civil matter not criminal according to my attorney. But right does a loan center have to come to her home? Shouldn’t they be reported to a government agency for harassment? Thanks.””
“”
NFCU Auto Loan Process?
Okay so, I got approved for an auto loan at NFCU (Navy Federal Credit Union). Now; my question is… what is the process because I have so many people telling me different things. Can I just get the check at nearest branch? Or do I have to have the VIN#, owners name, make, model, and copy of title?””
“”
I wanna purchase item of 250$ online by credit card of SBI how much it cost in RS.?
i wanna purchase item of 250$ online by credit card of SBI tatanium how much will be in RupesS RS. is their any exchange rate or tax is also their
“”
“”I am a cosigner and I plan on filing bankruptcy, how will this affect me?””
I am considering filing for bankruptcy, and I am a cosigner on my mothers house and a lien was put on it for me owing on a different credit card, my questions regarding this are: -How long will I be on bankruptcy? -Can I still use my credit card that I have now and paying every month on? I paid 500 cash for the card (reusing my own cash basically) -I live in an apartment that I pay rent for and I am considering going on government assistance cause times are hard, will I get the help from them? -How will this affect my mothers home that I cosigned on?””
“”
Who is the best LOAN lender ?
i am a forginer and i want to take a LOAN of 3 Million USD can anyone let me know real (Not a scammer) a real LOAN lending company or a lender ? friends i went all the net and all are scammers please let me know a good LOAN lender for me please (Give me there contact details or email address) Thanks Friends
“”
Where can i get an auto loan for a private party buy with a 555?
Hey, I have a 555 credit score as of today and i am looking for a used car auto loan for a 2005 ford f-150. I need the loan for $15,000 preferably for 72 months. I can easily pay it i was paying my 08 civic si for $405 a month, but i decided to sell it and didn’t pay the last month i had it and apparently it tanked my 700ish score:/ Anyone know where i can get approved for a loan for a private party sale instead of dealer direct? Thanks in advance!””
“”
Why is my credit score different on two different sites?
I have an account with FreeCreditReport.com and TrueCredit.com. Both show my Experian score as of 2/24/2011. However, they are 30 points different. Does anyone know why that would be?””
“”
How do I get a free credit report? (Australia)?
“”
Is there a website where I can get a free credit number check without having to give them a credit card #?
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Where can I borrow $1000 quick?
I have wrecked credit from a bad marraige. Besides, it is too small an amount for a bank and too big an amount for a payday loan place. My employer doesn’t do pay advances and my few friends with money are either in their own bind right now or just do not lend (which is probably why they have it)””
“”
What happens legally if you dont pay back a cash advance loan?
cash advance from checksmart
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Is 551 a bad credit score and how do you up the score?
The thing is I don’t have a lot of credit cards about 4 with very little amount on them 300.00 limits. Yes they are maxed. Now I pay the minium on time so when should i see an improvement in my score or what can i do besides paying on time.
“”
Can online websites check your age?
If I buy a gift card with my debit card will it not show up on my transactions?
“”
Is there such a thing as a free bankruptcy lawyer??
I’m totally in debt and have no idea how to get out of this whole that i’ve gotten myself into. My only answer is to file bankruptcy and to do that, ive been told i need a lawyer. I can’t even afford my bills now how am i supposed to find a cheap or free lawyer if there is even such a thing? please help me out. I’m desperate.””
“”
Bad credit loan question. www.creditandloans4u.com?
should i do a loan with www.creditandloans4u.com i have bad credit?
“”
#repost
“”
Iss cash flow loans meant only for business finance?
are cash flow loans meant only for business finance?or are they also available for personal finance?what are the loan amounts and repayment periods?
“”
#repost
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#repost
“Why was i declined for a Discover Card?
I am a student trying to build credit so I have researched every possible credit card. I want to only use the credit card for gas purchases so I went to Discover and tried to apply for the Student Open Road. Which has the best interest rate and amazing cash back on gas purchases. In the application it didn’t ask me anything in detail except how much I make a year. I have a full time job and make more than 5k a year. And yet they declined my application. They said they were sending the reason for their decision in the mail, but that was more then 2 weeks ago. My friend at college makes less then I do and she had no credit either but Discover sent her offers in the mail, and now she has a Discover card. Can anyone explain why I didn’t get approved?
“
Best way to build credit quickly?
All you people say pay bills on time. What kind of bills light bills water bill? Cause I have always been udner the udnerstanding those bills don’t matter with your credit if so then make it more clear than just saying pay your bills on time. So that is ALL bills? vehicle payment, insurance, electric, water, phone, cell phone.. blah blah be more specific””
“”
Is there any place that you can check your free credit score and report?
Is there a way to get a free credit report?I tried but they only offer a Free Score””””””
“”
Does your bank quote a real or nominal interest rate when you take out a home loan? Which is more important f?
“”
Has anyone ever had problems getting an apartment with bad credit?
My credit isn’t so great, but I am working on repairing it. I have a few accounts that are in collections, but I don’t have any evictions, or bankruptcies. Does anyone know if I would have to put down more of a deposit, or will the apartment turn me away completely? I heard all they look at are evictions, and bankruptcies. Does anyone know if this is true?””
“”
#repost
“”
How can i build my credit score faster?
“”
“”I filed for chapter 7, then got my car repossed 3 months after completion?””
So I lost my car after filed for bankruptcy 3 months ago. Now I owe them about 3000, and I don’ thave money to pay. Will my bankruptcy protection enable me to lose that debt also?””
“”
“”I owe more than my car is worth, do i let it get repoed and buy a new one first or keep throwing money away?
I currently have a 2011 Nissan sentra that I owe 20K and my interest rate is 18%. I will end up paying 40K for this if i pay it off. My question is should I buy a new car with lower payments and lower interest rate to save money and let my current car be repoed? Or continue to pay on this current car for another 4 years? My thought is I can have a repo on my credit for several years or keep thowing money I dont have into this car.
“”
What is the best credit report company online?
“”
Looking for Bankruptcy lawyers in California?
I am helping my brother look for good bankruptcy lawyers in California. He is in serious financial debt and we are looking at filing for bankruptcy as one of the options. Does anyone know of a good bankruptcy law firm in the California area? Would be great if you could refer some especially if youve had experience with them before! Thanks!
“”
How do I deduct my loss for stock purchased when a company files for bankruptcy and stock is worth zero?
I purchased stock during 2010 in a company. Prior to the end of the year the company went bankrupt and the stock is worthless. How do I deduct this loss off of my taxes? Can I still deduct the loss if I can’t itemize?
“”
Credit/Auto loan question?
Yes, the dealership is finding the lender. My previous lender was Chrysler and they will only finance Chrysler vehicles so I can’t go through them. The dealership actually told me that several banks flat out denied me. I have a copy of my credit report and it’s not all that bad. I’m going to call the credit union today.””
“”
What website offer a free credit report? Everyone I have found ask for a credit card?
“”
#repost
“”
How to get a loan no job or bank account?
need a loan no bank account, job, or credit card””
“”
What difference does co sign for auto loan make?
if someone has bad credit, and someone with good credit co signs for them for a auto loan. Does the loan get approved on the co signers credit, or does the one with the bad credit still erect the loan. Will it still be subject to denial/high payment/high interest rate?””
“”
Who are those guys in the FreeCreditReport.com commercials?
They are (They’re) the ones who sing those catchy songs/lyrics/tunes!!!!!
“”
“”If I consigned on a auto loan, will that be part of my debt to income ratio when applying for a mortgage?””
From another Q&A site: If the other party can prove via cancelled checks that they have made every payment from their own money then no.”””” Any insight?””””””
“”
Will my new mortgage payment be considered when calculating child support payments?
I never said anything about paying LESS for his support. I already pay 20% of my AGI which is well over the 14% my state typically mandates. My question was pertaining to the method the courts use to determine child support payments. I don’t mind continuing to pay what I already pay; I was only curious if that amount could possibly increase.
“”
Are we able to refinance mortgage?
Can anyone please help me? My home is currently in my husbands name & he recently filed chap 7 bankruptcy. We are now behind on our mortgage. Is there any way we can refinance the home into my name? What if I also have bad credit?
“”
How can I find someone to assume my mortgage?
I have a nice small 2 possible 3 bedroom home in central Florida in good shape and with a new roof that I have been paying on faithfully for the last 3 years and am current on my mortgage. My question is how can I find someone who wants to assume my FHA mortgage so I can just be done with this house and go buy another in a different area of the country and is there such a thing as a home trade program? My current home is located close to schools and shopping in a quiet neighborhood and only 65 miles south of Orlando and I only still owe about 47000 dollars on it. The reason I want someone to assume my mortgage is because I want to get this done in a hurry and not have to wait and try to sell it on the open market. Besides I am not really wanting to profit from the sale and just want to help someone else out with an incentive such as them having my equity for hurrying up on this. I believe all they have to have is decent credit and a current job. Is that also right? Has anyone else done this before?
“”
Where can I find small loan for bad credit that is not a payday loan?
“”
Are those Pay Day advance loan places a scam?
I have heard that they charge high interest for small loans.
“”
#repost
“”
Need to know how to get a free credit report?
i got a call from a telemarketer trying to sell me on a trip to Fl. she asked if i wanted to use my credit card, i told her that i didnt have one, so she insisted that i had, and that it was up on her screen that i had a master card, so i got worried about identity theft and went online to check it out. but because i don’t (as far as i know) have a credit card, i couldn’t use the free credit reports on line, is there a nother way to find out about an identity theft with out having to use a credit card?””
“Why was i declined for a Discover Card?
I am a student trying to build credit so I have researched every possible credit card. I want to only use the credit card for gas purchases so I went to Discover and tried to apply for the Student Open Road. Which has the best interest rate and amazing cash back on gas purchases. In the application it didn’t ask me anything in detail except how much I make a year. I have a full time job and make more than 5k a year. And yet they declined my application. They said they were sending the reason for their decision in the mail, but that was more then 2 weeks ago. My friend at college makes less then I do and she had no credit either but Discover sent her offers in the mail, and now she has a Discover card. Can anyone explain why I didn’t get approved?
“
Will bamboo kill gold fish?
I have a small bambo plant that sits in a jar of water. I’d like to put it in with my gold fish.The fish is in a old glass milk bottle. Does any one know if the bambo would kill my fish?
“”
What is worse for your credit score?
I do not own a home
“”
Watch free online movies without given my credit card numbers?
I want to watch free online movies without given up my credit card numbers all the time
“”
Grants to be applied for after filing bankruptcy?
“”
Im 16 years old. and i want a credit card to build credit. i already have a debit card and i need to know how?
old u have to be get one.. and if my parent can sign for me
“”
What if you are having problems repaying an ACE payday loan?
i have a 400 dollar payday loan and have renewed it like 3 times and am not able to pay it off with out giving up my other bills. In texas does anyone know what they can do if it takes a while to pay it off.they cal from irving and said they would file a case but when i asked where and when and how can i call where they are sending it no info was given.i can do it in small amopunts but not the whole thing..Any answers????
“”
What is the definition of Home loan?
don’t give me single line detail!! i need a full para…. please help!
“”
Should I declare bankruptcy or not?
I currently have about $10,000 in medical bills, a $10000 repo, and about $1000 in credit card debt and need some advice. I have been dodging creditors for three years now and all of these debts are at least that old. I have no bank account and no bills in my name and the creditors seem to be unable to track me down to get a lien on me at this time. Even if they did, I have little to offer, as I work two jobs for a HIGH gross of $1,300 a month along with being a junior in college. I am perpetually searching for better work, but I am now 23 and when I was 18 and 19 I was a very stupid young man that managed to get five misdemeanors and a suspended drivers license for three years. I am not here to play victim as I take full responsibility for my actions and consequences but I need to know if a bankruptcy would help me or hurt me. I already live under the radar with no credit whatsoever and my debts are kinda old. With bankruptcy or not my credit is screwed, should I spend the $500 and get one, or just let them become old write offs???””
“”
#repost
“”
Why is it so hard to get approval on an auto loan?
We certainly make enough to live comfortably. Our modest milwaukee suburban home is about 1,400 square feet, property taxes are about $3,800 a year. Our combined income is just under 90k a year. Not rich, but not poor either. The last auto loan I had was for $31,000. 60 month term, it was fully paid off in 31 months. So given that factor, and that any credit we had has ALWAYS been paid on time makes me curious why we weren’t approved. I wonder if putting 25% down on it will help with approval….””
“”
“”What is a loan disbursement, and how does it affect interest?””
i don’t quite understand the nature of a loan disbursement. (i’m dealing with a federal direct unsubsidized student loan and a federal direct parent PLUS loan). is a disbursement like using PART of a loan? or is a disbursement THE loan amount? like say in total over a year you are going to have to borrow 5000 — my question is does splitting it up into 2 disbursements mean you pay interest on 2500 for half a year, then when you want to use the next 2500 for the next half year, after that second half is disbursed, do you start paying interest THEN or at the beginning when you decided you’ll need 5000? i did a really bad job explaining that, but basically my question is what is a disbursement and does getting several disbursements affect the amount of interest accrued? (i understand that each disbursement creates a fee, but i am right now wondering about the interest so that i can compare what’s better)””
“”
Filing For Bankruptcy?
I have been thinking of filing bankruptcy and need some outside advice (before I go to a lawyer). I’m in my mid-late 50s, have never owned a house or condo and probably never will at this rate. I have 3 credit cards which total to about 11,500. Also, I live in Hawaii (most expensive state), my rent is $1600 monthly. I support one child in college (because she is only taking 2 courses at a time, I pay for the entire tuition in her semesters). I need advice: if filing is a smart”””” choice right now? I feel like I’m getting no-where fast””
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#repost
“”
Bankruptcy Filing in question?
I’m trying to sell a car and carry the note, but I’ve been told the people wanting to buy are in bankruptcy payments. Is there any way I can find out if these people have filed bankruptcy?””
“”
Looking for a private lender for lloan for individual who has bad credit.?
I need a personal loan to make car repairs, paymedical expenses and help my single son with two children obtain a place to live.””
“”
What if you don’t know all your creditors for bankruptcy?
I’ve been working on declaring bankruptcy for a little while, but I keep running into the same issue…I don’t remember all my creditors. A lot of my debt is from when I was in college a few years ago, I have a bunch of doctor’s bills but I don’t remember exactly which doctors I saw, accounts have been transferred to outisde agencies, stuff like that. I understood what my lawyer said as any debt I don’t list on my bankruptcy is basically tough luck, so I want to get it all…but how do I go about doing this? I pulled my credit report already, what else can I do?””
“”
I need my bankruptcy information from 1994 how can i get it?
I was discharged from bankruptcy and no longer have the documents, how do i get a copy””
“”
I need a unsecured loan for 10000.00 dollars and my credit is bad since katrina hit.what are my options?
i donot wont debt counceling,they cant help,i just need 10000.00 to combine my few bils and catch my truck payment up.my child support payments end this month and i will have anextra 630.00 a month to pay this note over a 3 year period””
“”
How much mortgage can I qualify for/afford?
@falsi: Thanks for the information but the only people Ive ever heard refer to the 3x salary figure have not been knowledgeable in the area and furthermore it is not the case with any of the people I know. For instance a relative makes 250K annually and purchased a home for 1.3 million which is close to double your estimate. I continually hear of the rule that states that 30% of your monthly income should go to your mortgage which in my case is $2075, if you know about this rule can you elaborate.””
“”
Unsecured credit cards for people with a score between 479–520?
I have a Imagine Gold Credit Card and it’s the only one who I found that would give me a credit line without a deposit, are there any other? I need to build my score and after research I see having 3 credit lines open is the best way to do it.””
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#repost
“”
#repost
“”
Where can I find a list of lenders that offer bad credit loans w/o a co-signer?
I am looking for a personal bad credit loan
“”
I have a checking account with bank of america?
I was wondering if you can set up a bank of america checking account as credit only meaning only deposits and transcations using my debit card can go thru have alot of old payday loans…which I am in the midle of a chapter 7 with and don’t want those old loans I have to try to take money from my account using my routing number and checking account number.
“”
What is the best way to use the 2009 HomeBuyers $8000 credit as a down payment type of payment?
Details on the Missouri Tax Credit Advance: MHDC makes a second mortgage to the homebuyer at the time of closing worth up to 6% of the home purchase price or a maximum of $6,750, which is used to cover downpayment and closing costs. The tax credit advance loan is paired with MHDC financing for the first mortgage in the form of a safe 30 year, fixed rate mortgage (both mortgages must be applied for through a participating lender). The homebuyer then files for the federal tax credit and uses the credit refund to pay off the MHDC tax credit advance loan. If the tax credit advance loan is paid off by the designated deadline (no later than June, 2010), the homeowner pays no interest other than a modest servicing fee. If the tax credit advance loan is not paid in full by the deadline, principal and interest payments to repay the loan over 10 years begin automatically.””
“Why was i declined for a Discover Card?
I am a student trying to build credit so I have researched every possible credit card. I want to only use the credit card for gas purchases so I went to Discover and tried to apply for the Student Open Road. Which has the best interest rate and amazing cash back on gas purchases. In the application it didn’t ask me anything in detail except how much I make a year. I have a full time job and make more than 5k a year. And yet they declined my application. They said they were sending the reason for their decision in the mail, but that was more then 2 weeks ago. My friend at college makes less then I do and she had no credit either but Discover sent her offers in the mail, and now she has a Discover card. Can anyone explain why I didn’t get approved?
“
Can i file my 2009 taxes or do an amendment?
my wife file taxes in 2009 i did not file with her because creditors were coming after her and didn’t want them coming after me, she has since filed for bankruptcy, i have a mortgage and collect ssn, we’ve filed together before, but can we do an amendment so i can file with her for 2009 in order to recoupe some of the interest on the mortgage?””
“”
“”If your house gets foreclosed on, do they give you a 30 day notice?””
My parents, my brothers and I live in a house In Philadelphia that we cannot afford mortgage payments for. We haven’t paid our mortgage in 6+ months, I’m not entirely sure. We got paperwork from our mortgage lender about the Making Home Affordable program and we filled it out and are hoping they can refinance our mortgage to something we can afford. I think I was told that once it’s in review any foreclosure proceedings are halted, until they determine if we’re eligible or not… What I’m asking is, if they determine we’re ineligible and they proceed with the foreclosure, will we get some kind of 30 day notice before we have to leave or will someone show up randomly one day and demand us all to get out? It’s really worrisome… Also, my parents recently filed bankruptcy. I don’t know if that effects foreclosure at all. Does anyone know?””
“”
How can i check my credit report and manage my debts for free?
In Australia
“”
Auto loan with bad credit and on unemployment?
I’m currently looking into purchasing a used car no more than 5000. I am on unemployment and getting about 1800 a month from that. What do you think the chances are of getting financed on unemployment??
“”
#repost
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#repost
“”
“”Where can I find a personal loan of $12,000? … with bad credit?””
Hi, I was wondering if someone can refer me in regards to the loan, I google it but it is soo freaky to type personal information over the internet. I am close to purchase my house and just need 12K to do the closing, is to pay the house in cash. Any trust lender???””
“”
Why wouldn’t i be able to refinance an auto loan for 8500 after making 6 consistent over payments?
I have paid 50 dollars more than the minimum for 6 months on a 19 percent interest car loan.
“”
Can you be charged with fraud for defaulting on a car title loan?
I received the loan in another state. I moved back to Tx but left the car in a relatives garage in the state where I got the loan. I have been unable to make the payments. They are threatening filing fraud chareges on me. I am willing to let them repo the car.
“”
Auto loan not reporting credit not financed by a banl?
so i bought a 2004 hyundai santa fe in chicago,il. the company that financed me is not a bank its a small company i guess called TOTAL FINANCE, ive seen a lof of reviews saying they rip you off and they did they gave me an interest rate od 24% for 39 months. the truck was 11,800 but with interest its 18, 900 or so, i gave 3,000 in cash. so i was wondering if they are not reporting my credit and they are not a bank can they still report to the credit bureau that im not paying my car? ive heard some people say they took their car and left it there and they havent reported they didnt pay their car. i just saw the same truck a year less for 3500 and it made me mad, and i dont wanna pay 20000 for it. what can i do? plus in septemeber my job will end bc where i work the restaurant will close. so is there any chance i can get off of this big loan?””
“”
Best place to get loan with bad credit
I have a poor credit score but I desperately need a small loan. What is the best company to provide this type of service?
“”
What is the best bankruptcy software for an attorney opening a bankruptcy practice?
I’m a lawyer who is about to go into solo bankruptcy practice in the Eastern District of Virginia and I’m looking to buy bankruptcy software. Should I get BestCase, EZFiling, or some third option? I’m especially interested in opinions from attorneys or paralegals who have tried out more than one program.””
“”
Auto loans for bad credit?
My credit score is somewhere between 500 and 550, and I have an auto loan through Drivetime that I would like to get out of. I need a new car (family is bigger, so I need a bigger car), but I still owe 11,000 on my old car. That’s after a year and a half of making on-time payments. I didn’t realize what I was doing when I got this car, now I feel like I’m stuck with it until I pay it off!!! My payments are $420 a month, and I can afford that just fine, maybe even more, but I can’t find a dealership that will approve me without me putting $3000 or more down!!!””
“”
Can I apply for a auto loan if I just got a job today?
“”
#repost
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Does anyone know which credit bureau American Express uses to review your credit history?
I want to apply for an Amex credit card, but would first like to know which of the three credit bureaus is used determine credit worthiness. I am curious because all three of my credit scores are significantly different.””
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#repost
“”
Clear bad debt history?
Left the UK 6 years ago without settling outstanding bills. Have tried to contact 1 company but told account now closed. Do they automatically close after this time. If so is it possible to have previous history of bad debt wiped?
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How to check icici bank credit card balance online ?
“”
If i file bankruptcy?
if i file bankrutcy what will happen it will effect the crdetit history ihave that will destry plez some one tell me detail thanks
“”
How do i find out my credit history?
“”
“”Who knows who to talk to to prequalify for a auto loan,?
“”
“”Okay so my girlfriend likes other guys tbh and rates”””” quite often but everything between us seems fine should the tbh rates bother me?””””
“”
Does anyone know a legit cash advance web-site I can trust?
I need $500.00 as soon as possible. Thank you
“”
What Is A Payday Loan Or Cash Advance Loan?
Can any1 explain it to me?
“Why was i declined for a Discover Card?
I am a student trying to build credit so I have researched every possible credit card. I want to only use the credit card for gas purchases so I went to Discover and tried to apply for the Student Open Road. Which has the best interest rate and amazing cash back on gas purchases. In the application it didn’t ask me anything in detail except how much I make a year. I have a full time job and make more than 5k a year. And yet they declined my application. They said they were sending the reason for their decision in the mail, but that was more then 2 weeks ago. My friend at college makes less then I do and she had no credit either but Discover sent her offers in the mail, and now she has a Discover card. Can anyone explain why I didn’t get approved? | https://medium.com/@rahmedsaftaw/why-was-i-declined-for-a-discover-card-9b8bf47afcb5 | [] | 2019-04-12 19:26:14.809000+00:00 | ['Debt'] |
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7 Ways to Think about Product Roadmap | People frequently ask me to develop talks, workshops, courses or even a degree. For research, my first reaction is to go to my 14,000+ articles in Evernote. If Evernote fails me, which recently happened, I might search Harvard Business Review, Wikipedia, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or Investopedia. It recently proved a challenge to find a comprehensive article on “product roadmap”, so I thought I would share my thoughts on the subject.
One of the keys to building a great company is the founder’s vision, what Simon Sinek calls the “why”. The “why” should be wrapped in an inspiring story to motivate all the stakeholders, starting with investors and customers. A part of the vision is frequently a product roadmap, preferably with social impact. A product roadmap shows the evolutionary plan for product development over time. Frequently the roadmap is steeped in project management or agile management jargon, but this is to lose sight of the customer and their wants, needs and fears.
The product roadmap should reflect a well-defined understanding of the customer segment, but as a new company one should realize that this understanding could change or evolve. In other words, a product roadmap should reflect the iterative, exploratory approach that is best practices in a startup. Therefore, a product roadmap should be additive and not multiplicative. Additive approaches utilize independent components that add value. Multiplicative approaches build on required technology or products. Parler’s recent termination experience with AWS is an example. Develop the product roadmap additively so that value is always maintained regardless of new developments.
I offer seven strategies for how to think about a product roadmap:
1. Features
2. Products
3. Customer experience
4. Cost reduction
5. Customization
6. Platform
7. Hybrid
Features
One traditional way to think about evolving a product is to think about the functionality or feature set of the product. Think about the camera in the iPhone, which launched in 2007. The camera has increased in popularity as people have found new purposes for this tool and Apple adds new camera capabilities with every new phone release. Part of this added camera functionality is for the Facebook user, but part of this expanded functionality and features is for telemedicine and image recognition applications. Done properly the product increases in popularity and value. Done poorly, one has feature creep, the annoying add-on of features that provide no value to the customer. Product development lead by engineers frequently suffers from feature creep.
Products
Another traditional approach to product roadmap is to develop new products, as shown in the image above. I will spare you another example from Apple and will use Ford. Ford, of course, started out with the black Model T. Think about all the new products over the years — trucks, convertibles, the Mustang sports car, the Falcon — all built with combustion engines, and soon the electric car and UMVs. Every successful new product matches a new customer segment or a need for a portion of existing customers. Note how Ford’s strategy was always additive using the same technologies in new ways. Also, Ford (and Apple) combines a product strategy with a feature strategy and has over the years added radios, air conditioning and GPS maps to their cars and trucks. For the younger reader, I would point out that my first car had none of these “expensive” optional features.
Customer Experience
A comparatively new way to think about a product roadmap is to go beyond feature and product and focus on how the interaction between customer and company will evolve. For example, training manuals have been offered for at least sixty years, but now we have videos, toll free customer service, independent consultants supported by the company, content marketing, influencers, user communities and customer mapping to improve the entire experience from the starting Google search to post onboarding. The premier example of a company that constantly perfects customer experience is Disney, who even has a consulting subsidiary to train other companies (such as Miami-Dade Expressway). As the digital technologies advance, we are not far away from personalized, individual services especially in healthcare.
Cost reduction
Clayton Christensen, a famous HBS professor, coined the phrase “disruptive innovation”. Disruptive innovation said that a new competitor could reduce the feature set of an existing company’s product, thereby reducing the cost and expanding the number of customers. Of course, the same strategy would work for your own product. Reduce the feature set, reduce the cost and increase the number of customers who can afford the product. Just be careful that you do not trade your existing customers down to the cheaper product and less gross margin dollars. The computer industry would be an example, where the product originally was a multi-million-dollar mainframe computer and now we have watches with formidable computing power. A better example is maybe Motorola, who offered the first cell phones in a 20-pound briefcase and down-sized them all the way to a flip phone (shown below).
Credit: T Mobile, Samsung
Customization
Customization is the practice of fine-tuning a product or service to match the specific needs of an individual customer or class of customers. SAAS software implicitly is a customization strategy where the customer can decide which part of the feature set they need and are willing to pay for. A great example of customization is Costco, where they have extra-large packs for their large number of small restaurant customers. Regular people have to buy the same package, which helps increase the average customer transaction. Substantially cheaper unit cost and many times better quality (compared to national brands) make this strategy work for regular Costco customers also. Dodge and Ford police cars would be another example. Amex Platinum Card is another.
Platform
Many people talk about the unbundling of services. Why do I need to use Citibank to process payments on my website when I can pick a fintech company that specializes in payments. Then I can pick another provider for my bank account, my wire transfers, my payroll services, etc., all state-of-the-art best practices in fintech. As the owner of the e-commerce site, you could bundle these best of class services and offer them to other e-commerce sites. That’s a platform strategy. Square is a fintech company using a platform strategy. Google and AWS offer a platform strategy for cloud computing. Data storage, connectivity, tools and algorithms and processing, all from one service provider. Platforms originally gained popularity as communities and two-sided marketplaces. Now platforms are becoming the infrastructure for smaller companies. Good for lowering costs and state-of-the-art technology but remember the multiplicative risk of Parler. Consider as soon as affordable to add a second cloud provider, maybe from Russia, India or Brazil. (Note: Brazilians should consider setting up a cloud computing provider as an alternative/backup to the big American companies, assuming the U.S. cannot cut off network connectivity. India is another candidate but they would need to harden the service to new levels. Raised in the cold War, I am reluctant to rely on the Russians.)
Hybrid
It is widely acknowledged that creativity is a combinatorial process (Poincaré, Einstein) wherein components are synthesized to create new components (Herbert Simon). The hybrid strategy builds on the component nature of reality. Today the component we are adding is new technologies. A hybrid example is using Apple Watch to capture biodata for machine learning to determine an individual’s mental health. Machine learning is complementing or even replacing the doctor and there is no COVID risk from visiting the doctor’s office. If you captured the data on one hundred thousand or one million patients, the database might be more valuable than the mental health services. Creating the database to also commercialize would be another form of hybrid strategy. Capturing the data from networked devices in hospitals that monitor patients and provide scheduled medications is another variation of the hybrid strategy. Cybersecurity companies protecting these networked devices could also capture the data for resale, perhaps offering cybersecurity for free.
Conclusion
One of my favorite business books is Ten Types of Innovation by Larry Keeley. This book shows how to add value in the ten parts of the value chain of every company (building on Michael Porter’s original work on value chain). Using the ten alternatives, as shown below, would be an excellent technique to more rigorously evaluate each stage of the roadmap and the entirety of the plan.
With seven ways to approach the development of a product roadmap, no company should lack a multi-year plan. The smaller the company, the shorter the plan with 18–36 months a good time horizon. Iteration and pivots are healthy reactions in startups that suggest shorter plans initially. For the visionary founder amongst us who may object to such a short plan, I would remind you that entrepreneurship is the conversion of the abstract idea to tangible customer value. Pay attention to the tangible such as the earlier end of the product roadmap. | https://medium.com/@roberthhacker/7-ways-to-think-about-product-roadmap-1ada618ad2a | ['Robert Hacker'] | 2021-03-01 11:47:45.923000+00:00 | ['Iteration', 'Platform', 'Product Roadmap', 'Synthesis', 'Vision'] |
We don’t know what we eat… Only Blockchain can bring the solution. | Broken supply chains and rising food prices
All countries are currently facing with food price surges and shortages due to broken supply chains. In this turbulent context, it is often impossible to make sure that the remaining agricultural products available on our stalls are actually safe to eat, free from poisonous crop protection residues.
Then, does it really make a difference consuming products while being able to trust crop protection, harvest, storage and shipping methods with our lives ?
The obvious answer is YES. In fact, unhealthy food production processes are responsible for an increasingly important number of casualties, projected to be over 5 million deaths a year by 2050.
The only solution, Blockchain
Then, how to trustfully isolate the good from the bad products? How to make sure all agricultural products, including animals, are given the care they ought to? Only one answer: Blockchain.
Imagine an immutable, decentralized and always accessible database. A real travelogue containing all production details, accessible as easily as scanning a QR code on the final product.
At Fieldcoin, we are able to extract such critical informations by providing 4.0 Agribusiness technologies to our farmers. This way, they benefit from an extensive use of these state-of-the-art technologies to greatly improve and fully monitor their yield, while being 100% transparent with the consumer. | https://medium.com/predict/we-dont-know-what-we-eat-only-blockchain-can-bring-the-solution-27d734937289 | [] | 2020-06-10 11:14:22.670000+00:00 | ['Food', 'Health', 'Health Foods', 'Blockchain', 'Covid 19'] |
The Enchanted Flower | Photo by Earl Wilcox on Unsplash
Samantha has always been an excellent listener; if she listened closely enough, she could hear them; who are they, you may wonder? The flowers, of course, her name is unique to most because it’s a mash-up of her parent’s stubbornness, if she were born male her father demanded the baby be named Samuel, it’s a fine name spoke the father, it means name of God, mother protested, of course, she deemed the baby was to be a girl when asked how on earth she would know such things, she told him, she heard her in her dreams, how silly he thought, He started thinking about names just in case, but when he was informed the name would be Anthea, which means flower, he laughed loudly, no such name would be given to a child of mine, male or female, my child will have a sturdy, strong name. They still disputed names up to Samantha’s birth, when their doctor advised they merge names, and that is where Samantha was born. The Listener, her full name stood for a few things: God’s grace, Jehovah has been gracious; has given favour, and flower.
She could always hear things that others couldn’t; after all, she was a good listener. People could tell her things and feel at ease afterwards, as if her aura soothed them, leaving them tranquil. She didn’t mind hearing people’s hardships. She was pleased she could assist, but who listened to the listener?
One late winter when she was young, she wandered off far into the forest, her heart ached, too much for her to bare. She spoke her feelings out loud to the most exquisite flower she had ever seen. It had grass-like leaves with a violet-blue/purple hue, and small yellow markings. Her bickering parents were too busy one-upping one another to care much about her or her explorations, branded trifle, silly, childlike games. She’d been talking to the flowers a lot since that dark winter’s day, when she discovered she could hear them answer and hear her. She had to tell her parents about her discovery, full of joy and astonishment, for it was there arguing and disregard of her that had caused her so much anguish in the first place. But it’s never that simple; she frequently wonders why they even had her; they don’t care or listen, and they’re too busy trying to be right. This was the last time she conveyed anything about herself, but it still hurt so much, since her parents disregarded her as nothing more than a silly child, never listening or caring. She never discovered that flower again, but she always hoped one day she would find her saviour, Iris, again. The first creature to listen to the listener. | https://medium.com/@sj90/the-enchanted-flower-b1b189b85342 | [] | 2021-12-24 20:31:39.245000+00:00 | ['Flowers', 'Forest', 'Listening', 'Fiction Writing', 'Fiction'] |
Here’s A Letter You Won’t Read, Dear J. K. Rowling | Lots of members of the LGBTQ community and their allies pointed out how hurtful your comments were.
Then, you issued a response.
I read it with hope. I kept thinking you were going to prove us all wrong. That you would write a piece bursting with kindness. You were going to make us see what you were trying to accomplish with your comments. Maybe it was one of those cases when someone is trying to say a thing, but what comes out of their mouth is a whole different thing. Surely you had an explanation for all of this.
You did…sort of.
In your essay, you explain how you have met transgender people. You’ve read papers, journals, you name it.
However, it soon becomes clear that you have met some transgender people, as in, you have talked to them a few times. Also, you disclosed you suffered domestic violence.
I’m sorry. It mustn’t be easy to come forward with this information, especially now.
Then, you write about the old “queer people are confused people” trope. To cement your argument, you point out how “autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.”
After reading that passage, this was my face…
You were effectively implying that the high number of autistic folks in the LGBTQ community proves that they’re all just a disoriented bunch of people.
Some studies have indeed revealed that autistic people tend to identify themselves as members of the LGBTQ+ community in higher percentages when compared to the neurotypical population.
Some people speculate it might be because we, autistic people, have learned not to care as much about societal expectations and, therefore, are more willing to come out.
It could be.
For example, I can tell you that, once I embraced my autism, accepting my bisexuality came easily.
So, when I read your words, I was startled. Why would you use the autism-LGBTQ intersection to “prove” your point? Aren’t you aware of how hurtful this is for both communities?
One of the many aspects autistic and queer people share is a narrative around us being weird, unusual, or just plain crazy. All because we don’t experience the world the same way as everybody else, nor do we adjust to its standards.
However, your essay gets worse. You explain the reason the fight for transgender people’s rights worries you so much is…
When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman — and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones — then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside.
What’s with this? Really? So, in your mind, the sole reason transgender women want their rights recognized is so they can get into bathrooms to hurt cis women? Do you think they risk their lives just by existing, so they can attack people while in the toilet?
Really?
You devote a large portion of your essay to explain this. It’s hard not to think that it profoundly worries you.
As you know, this essay generated even more reactions. Some wrote you letters. Others created videos trying to explain to you why this was so hurtful, especially because you’re doing it in the middle of Pride Month. There were people who took the time to carefully demonstrate the fault in your arguments.
Many chose to insult you, call you names, and even ask you just to disappear.
I am sorry about that.
Why do we care so much about what one person is saying? Because, even though you are an ordinary person, your hard-earned platform isn’t. Millions of people drink up your words. Also, despite living in a day and age in which the LGBTQ community rights have advanced a lot, there’s still a large percentage of the population who disagrees with transgender people being treated as humans.
Your words will be used as fodder by the anti-transgender rights movement.
Above all, many of us are disappointed. We looked up to you. You helped us understand the concept of diversity. Now we don’t know how to feel about you.
Curious fact. You tweeted, “I’d march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans.”
Screenshot by the author
Well, there has recently been a severe attack on the LGBTQ community, effectively removing protections for trans people when it comes to health care.
True, this did not happen in your country, the UK. Maybe that’s why it’s so difficult for you to understand. But for someone who would march with the transgender community, you have been awfully quiet about this…
So what do we do now?
Strange as it sounds, I want to believe you will pause for a moment and reflect on the whole affair. Will you listen to the people telling you “please, stop, you’re hurting us”? Will you come to see the reason transgender people want to use the toilet is that they want to pee? You know, like everybody else?
I do not possess the gift of clairvoyance, so I have no idea what will happen next. I can only hope you’ll do some thinking and, even more importantly, you’ll take some action. After all, you showed us once there was magic in the world, and that we’re protected by our ability to love.
I have faith that you will see into the hearts of those you have hurt and try to reach out to them. Could it be that I still believe in magic? Could it be that I still hope you have it in you to change?
It might be that I do, even though you’ll never read this letter, and my words will never reach you. | https://medium.com/musing-about/heres-a-letter-you-won-t-read-dear-j-k-rowling-e42948f4771d | ['Gb Rogut'] | 2020-06-21 00:49:09.777000+00:00 | ['Education', 'LGBTQ', 'Life', 'Culture', 'Diversity'] |
Intelligent Arduino Garbage Can ♻️ | Okay, so the topic is mildly clickbait-esq, but this was actually a STEM Project contender in my University (shoutout to Deshan, Nikita, Shaheem and Dinika, my teammates) but since that event never happened I decided to jot down some few words on this creation so I can salvage something out of it.
Something like this^
If you want to see the entire proposal we made for this project, you can view the slides from here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1tqTH2z-8C9fRM861DEc47bhG_6U4hrni-SvEPZ_k74w/edit?usp=sharing
But the TLDR is that we created an Intelligent Garbage Can which would send an SMS alert to the Garbage Collectors once the garbage in the can fills up to a pre-determined height so they can collect it effectively.
The current problem with entities such as the CMC is that they usually collect garbage routinely which has a fatal flaw. Sure they can collect garbage every Sunday in a neighborhood but Street A’s garbage cans might fill up by mid-week and Street B’s might get filled up once every two weeks, the routine system is not effective at all.
So we created a prototype to solve this using an Arduino board, a GSM Module, an UltraSound Scanner and a LDR.
Fairly standard equipment.
The GSM Module is inserted with a Mobitel PrePaid SIM.
Arduino Uno R3 Board.
The LDR is the item in the bottom left. The tiny cross can be screwed to the left or to the right depending on how sensitive you want the LDR to be. However since it is Digital, depending on how sensitive you make it, you can only make it give a HIGH or LOW signal back to the Arduino, this works for us since we only need it to see if the Bin lid is open or not (Two Boolean States).
If there is light, that means the bin is open, so the program shouldn’t measure the distance and act accordingly as that can give us wrong values, so only if it is dark (bin is closed), can you actually measure the accurate depth of the bin. This contraption was meant to be attached at the bottom of a bin’s lid.
In Action! Forgive the Death Note Anime Figurine.
The code is also pretty self explanatory, I’ve added comments so you can digest it:
Looks like I’ve added my phone number there as well.
This program will check for multiple conditions and do the final output (Send SMS)
If the bin is closed (We know this from the LDR). If the height is less than the threshold (We know this from the US Scanner). If both conditions are true, then the SIM800L Module will send a message notifying the user and go to sleep for a long time (to prevent the risk from spamming, I wouldn’t want to DOS myself and also sending SMS’s ain’t cheap).
Eventually looking like this:
But yeap, that’s about it. A garbage can that messages you when the garbage can is full. Not the brightest idea if you take out your garbage by yourself because you can see it, but if its a tertiary party that doesn’t know this, they would get the notification to come clean out the garbage to prevent situations like this:
Stolen from ft.lk
These same modules can be manipulated to do other things, do you want to build a motion sensor that sends you an SMS if something is moving about at an Ungodly hour? Can do, the possibilities are truly endless.
If you actually made it here, thanks! It means a lot to me. Here’s a Pokemon created out of garbage for you. And always remember, its called Garbage Can not Garbage Cannot. | https://medium.com/@sahasrenuja/intelligent-arduino-garbage-can-%EF%B8%8F-aa7a8a0fe342 | [] | 2021-06-17 10:26:16.734000+00:00 | ['Arduino', 'Garbage', 'Coding', 'Tinkering'] |
Oráculos: Conectando los Smart Contracts con el Mundo | 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/astec/or%C3%A1culos-conectando-los-smart-contracts-con-el-mundo-9bcfda4ebffb | ['Federico Ast'] | 2021-01-20 18:17:19.630000+00:00 | ['Legaltech', 'Contratos Inteligentes', 'Ethereum', 'Smart Contracts', 'Blockchain'] |
How to Debug Metamask Errors? (Developer Edition) | Metamask Error
Localhost Error
While developing a Dapp, for testing purposes, a local account with Ganache is used. When Metamask is connected to localhost 9545 and it throws error you can try:
Restarting Ganache, Restart Browser or restart computer. Also check Metamask configuration and prefer using “127.0.0.1" instead of local host. Another parameter recently added is Chain ID. I tried using hexadecimal number, it refused — but provides a number to use.
Wrong address error
When Dapp is loaded, Metamask is injected into the Javascript code and then Metamask prompts user for access of account address.
However, when Dapp finishes loading, Javascript code will resume and then an object is instantiated which points to the smart contract using libraries like web3 or ether.
If metamask is connected to wrong network you will grab a wrong address or no address for smart contract.
To solve this, you need to select the correct address and reload the web page.
Incorrect nonce error
Another error is transaction doesn’t have correct nonce.
Nonce — This is an integer that is incremented for every transaction. So say, 1st transaction has nonce 0, 2nd transaction has nonce 1 so on and so forth.
Metamask saves this value of nonce in its memory. If a user resets Ganache, his nonce is reseted in local Blockchain, however they are not updated in metamask.
Hence, when Metamask sends transaction, it throws an error because of the nonce mismatch.
Reset your metamask account. Setting → Advanced → Reset Account
Error in Solidity Code
Another error is when there is some error in Solidity code. In this case the transaction will fail without any popup from metamask.
This is because Metamask before sending a transaction estimates the cost of gas spent on the transaction and it anticipates if the transaction will be successful or not.
Debug the Solidity code
Did it run out of Gas?
Another common error with Metamask is ‘Did it run out of Gas?’ This could be due to two reasons.
a. The estimation of gas required by Metamask was wrong.
In that case you have to manually update the gas emit in confirmation popup of metamask.
b. You trigged an error in solidity code.
Debug the Solidity code
Response has no error or result for request
Last error is ‘Response has no error or result for request’ this happens when ganache is too slow to respond to metamask.
This happens when either ganache is not running or ganache isn't responding.
You can simply solve this by restarting ganache.
Ultimate Metamask Reset
Use this as the last weapon, when none of the above technique seems to be working and you need to completely reset metamask.
Follow the steps in the diagram illustrated below.
Metamask reset
Restart the local Blockchain. Write test for Smart Contract and make sure all of them passes. Deploy Smart Contract to local Blockchain Enviorment. Ganache is synchronized with Metamask.
For this, you can use mnemonic phrase from Ganache in Metamask. In Metamask, select correct network. Select correct account. Reset account. Reload the front-end by clearing cache. | https://medium.com/@alijnmerchant/how-to-debug-metamask-errors-developer-edition-7a345b81873f | ['Aliasgar Merchant'] | 2020-12-08 20:03:45.125000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Blockchain Development', 'Metamask', 'Blockchain Technology'] |
Cooking As a Busy Millennial with No Money | Eileen L. Wittig | Cooking can be a scary thing. There are a lot of things to keep track of, there are sharp knives, Gordon Ramsay is in your head telling you how bad you are at the basic skill of feeding yourself, and, amazingly, fast food is faster. But it’s also a lot cheaper than eating out, it tastes good, and it feels good to make real live actual meals for yourself. And it’s hella romantic.
Thankfully we don’t live in a communist country, which means we have stores filled from floor to ceiling with every ingredient you could ever want (assuming it’s not banned by the FDA — soft cheeses, I’m looking at you), farmer’s markets where you can snack and look at puppies while you grocery shop, specialty international stores, foods being prepared and packaged ever more conveniently, recipes all over the web … all of it, at our fingertips, cheap.
Which all means that you really can cook, even if it seems scary. In fact it’s so easy that you can get to the point of making up your own recipes fairly quickly. It’s also easy — and hardly takes any more time — to make enough food for dinner and lunch so you don’t have to spend time or money buying lunch at work.
So in the interest of leveling up in the Adulthood world, and just saving money so we don’t go broke, here are eight two-meal recipes you can make in half an hour, some of which are healthy-ish, and all of which are cheap and easily customizable.
*
Carbonara Mac n Cheese
(This is a stick-to-your-ribs recipe so prepare yourself)
This is what you need:
One box mac n cheese (yes you can use Kraft)
One block of cheddar cheese (store brand is fine)
Two eggs (not necessarily ~organic~ or ~free range~)
Heavy whipping cream (just the little carton, not that huge thing)
Butter
Black pepper
If you want to be fancy:
Ground nutmeg (yup in the actual baking aisle with the spices)
Bacon/hot dog/kielbasa/chicken/etc.
What you do:
Cook the pasta. While it cooks, grate or cut up about half the block of cheddar cheese.
When the pasta is done and drained, turn the stove down to low heat. Make the mac n cheese like you normally do, with the cheese packet and butter and everything. Use the cream instead of milk. (If you want it to be richer and more stick-to-your-ribs, stop cooking the pasta when it’s about 98% done and add more cream than you’d normally add.)
Add your half block of cheddar cheese, the meat if you’re using any, and the two eggs into the mac n cheese. Stir until the eggs aren’t raw anymore. If you notice it’s getting a little dry and it’s not as saucy anymore, just add cream until it’s as saucy as you like.
Add black pepper and nutmeg to taste (You barely need any nutmeg!! It’s a very strong spice. Add a pinch at a time and taste as you go.)
Obviously turn off the stove, and then presto. Done.
*
Burgers
This is what you need:
A pound of hamburger (preferably 80% lean)
Hamburger buns/rolls/pieces of bread
Cheese of your choice, if you want
Worcestershire sauce
Salt
Pepper
Ketchup/mustard/etc
What you do:
Cut the pound of hamburger into thirds. Put one third in a baggie and freeze it for later. Take the other two thirds and roll them into balls, then flatten them a bit with your palms (don’t totally squish them or they won’t be as juicy). Press the middle down a bit more so the meat makes a shallow bowl — they’ll hold the seasoning better this way.
Heat a skillet on medium-high heat until it fizzes a bit when you spray water on it. Put the burgers on the skillet, season the top with salt and pepper and put some Worcestershire sauce into the little crater in the middle. Don’t worry about it if it spills out onto the skillet. Cook for a couple minutes, then flip and season the other side again with salt, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce. Add the cheese at this point if you want a cheeseburger. Cook for another few minutes, time depending on how well done you like your burger. Then just flip it onto your bread and garnish with whatever you usually put on your burger.
NOTE: In the name of everything do not press down on your burger while it’s cooking!! That will squeeze all the juicy goodness out of the meat and you’ll be left with a sad, dry burger. Don’t eat sad burgers.
Gnocchi with Tomato Sauce
(This is another stick-to-your-ribs recipe. Like really.)
This is what you need:
Gnocchi (potato pasta, usually with the other pastas). It’s a little more expensive than regular pasta and it looks like you’re getting less for your money, but it’s so filling that you don’t need a lot. And it’s a change from the usual pasta.
Regular tomato sauce, whatever kind you like (I personally like the Italian herb kind but it’s total personal preference)
Olive oil
Mozzarella cheese (preferably fresh but grated is ok too)
Grated parmesan cheese
Oregano if you have some
What you do:
Cook the gnocchi. If you’ve never cooked it before, it’s kinda fun: bring a pot of water to a boil and drop in the gnocchi in batches so you don’t have them crowded into layers. When they float to the top of the water (it only takes a few minutes), they’re done cooking and you can take them out and put them in a bowl while you cook more batches.
While you’re cooking them, pour the sauce into a big skillet and heat on medium heat until it’s hot. Turn the head down to medium-low, add the cooked gnocchi, a bit of olive oil, and oregano, and stir in. Top with mozzarella and parmesan cheese and let it sit until the cheese is a bit melted. Spoon into a bowl and prepare to feel like you’re never going to have to eat again.
*
Tarragon Chicken
This is what you need:
Two chicken breasts, each cut in half
Just plain ol’ noodles. The curly kind. Enough for two meals.
Heavy whipping cream (just the little carton)
Two big carrots (the Bugs Bunny kind)
Olive oil (the virgin-er the better, it tastes better)
Lemon juice
Tarragon
Salt
Black pepper
If you want to be fancy:
Mushrooms
White wine (for cooking. And drinking. Both.)
What you do:
Pour a couple tablespoons of olive oil into a big skillet and heat it up on high heat. (How you know it’s ready: if you splash a bit of water on the pan and it hisses and evaporates, it’s hot.)
Add the chicken breasts without splashing hot oil on yourself. Cook until the bottom is golden brown, then flip and repeat. As soon as both sides are browned, pour in that little carton of cream and enough noodles for two meals. If you’re using wine, pour a glass for yourself and then pour about half a glass into the skillet.
Turn the heat down to medium-high and cook, stirring once in a while to keep things from sticking to the pan. If you have a cover for the skillet, great, put that on. Otherwise, it’s fine (don’t tell Cordon Bleu or Michelin I said that) but you might need a bit more liquid to keep it saucy.
While that’s cooking cut up your carrots, and your mushrooms (after you rinse them and twist off the stems!) if you’re using those.
When the noodles seem to be about half done, add the carrots and mushrooms and then keep cooking and stirring until the noodles are all done and the chicken isn’t pink inside anymore. The cream should be mostly gone, absorbed by the noodles, with a bit left over for an instant sauce.
Turn the heat down to very low and add a few squirts of lemon juice. Try to get it on the chicken first instead of the cream directly, because the shock of the acid on the cream can make the cream curdle a little, and while that’s not absolutely the end of the world, it’s not great either. Mix that in with the salt, pepper, and tarragon to taste.
Et Voilá!
*
Bacon Alfredo
This is what you need:
Pasta (whatever kind you like)
Heavy whipping cream (just the little one)
Bacon (two meals’ worth)
Nutmeg
Garlic powder
Salt
Black pepper
What you do:
Cook two meals’ worth of pasta like you normally do. While it’s cooking, cook the bacon if it’s still raw. When they’re done, dump the bacon, half the cream, a little garlic powder, a dash of nutmeg, a little salt, and some pepper into the pasta. Stir it up and eat it.
*
Beef Stroganoff
This is what you need:
Hamburger (a pound-ish, preferably 80% lean)
Plain ol’ curly noodles
One can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup
Worcestershire sauce
Salt
Pepper
What you do:
Put all the hamburger in a skillet and cook it on medium heat while you’re making the noodles. When it’s all done, dump it all together and add the can of soup, a few spoonfuls of Worcestershire sauce, and some salt and pepper. Mix it all together and boom. Done.
*
Asparagus and Bacon Pasta
(This one’s especially good in the Spring and Summer)
This is what you need:
Pasta (whatever kind you want)
Bacon (enough for two meals)
Asparagus (10 stalks)
Grated parmesan cheese
Lemon Juice
Olive oil
Red pepper flakes
Salt
Pepper
Garlic powder
What you do:
Cook enough pasta for two meals. While it’s cooking, cook the bacon if it’s not cooked already, and chop the bottom ends of the asparagus off (the white, kinda dried-up part). Then chop the stalks into bite-sized pieces. Heat a bit of olive oil in a small skillet. When it’s hot (when it fizzles when you spray a bit of water on it), add the asparagus, toss it in the oil to coat, and cook it, flipping occasionally, until it’s soft.
When it’s all done, throw the asparagus and bacon in with the pasta. Pour in enough olive oil to coat the pasta and add a dozen squirts of lemon juice, four shakes of red pepper flakes, as much cheese as you want, and salt, pepper, and garlic powder to taste. Mix it all up, put it in a bowl, and eat up.
*
Potato Soup
This is what you need:
Three cups of chicken broth
Six red potatoes, skin-on, washed, with the eyes cut out (I know, I know. We need to give them a different name.)
Two carrots
Peas
Two cans of chicken breast (with the other canned stuff in the can aisle, usually next to the tuna. I promise you it’s real chicken that tastes like chicken and everything.)
Salt
Pepper
Rosemary
Thyme
Garlic powder
Onion powder
What you do:
Pour the chicken broth into a pretty big pot and get it boiling. While it’s heating, cut the potatoes into bite-size pieces. When the broth is boiling, add the potatoes. Chop up the carrots and add them after the potatoes have been cooking for about five minutes. After another five minutes, add the chicken and peas (even if you got frozen ones). Stir it all, breaking up the chicken a bit, until the potatoes are soft enough for you to easily pierce with a fork. Add salt, pepper, rosemary, thyme, garlic, and onion to taste. Stir it in and serve it up. | https://medium.com/fee-org/cooking-as-a-busy-millennial-with-no-money-eileen-l-wittig-f1d16c073aa8 | [] | 2017-02-13 21:51:06.108000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'Recipe', 'Millennials', 'Cooking', 'Food'] |
Saving Aston Martin | Aston Martin DB5. Three words guaranteed to make your heart beat faster.
There's a 99.9% chance you first discovered the Aston Martin DB5 through Ian Fleming's James Bond. What else would a cunning, skillful, and sophisticated Intelligence Officer drive?
Just 1,021 examples of the DB5 were built between 1963 and 1965. Of those, only 123 were Convertibles. Rarest of the rare though, are the 39 left hand drive Convertibles.
Rarer still is chassis number DB5C/1278/L with engine number 400/4711/VC. The Vantage engine features three legendary Weber carburetors, renowned for delivering top-end performance. 65 DB5 Coupes and 12 Convertibles were built with the Vantage engine.
You probably appreciate the rarity of DB5 Convertible with the Vantage engine, but wonder the significance of chassis DB5C/1278/L?
This particular 1964 DB5 Convertible was owned by American businessman Peter Sprague, savior of Aston Martin Lagonda.
After Christmas, 1974 workers at Aston Martin Lagonda went back to work; only to find the doors locked.
The company was pronounced bankrupt and the creditors were in control. This didn't sit right with Sprague. His wife, tired of his angst, challenged him to do something about it. Thankfully, he did.
The story gets even better. This historically significant Aston Martin DB5 is currently on the market. Contact Gullwing Motorcars. | https://medium.com/everyday-driven/saving-aston-martin-94309e1f3e45 | ['Pete Weishaupt'] | 2020-12-24 13:13:26.226000+00:00 | ['Success', 'Automotive', 'Mindset', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Resilience'] |
Blockchain Report — 11/13/2018. Summary: Binance CEO Says… | Summary: Binance CEO Says Cryptocurrency Market Is Still Good, Trading Volume Is Better Than It Seems; Cryptocurrency Exchange EtherDelta Pays $400,000 Fine To U.S. SEC; Singapore Government Develops Blockchain Based Token System
Watch: Latest Episode of Blockchain Report on YouTube
Binance CEO Says Cryptocurrency Market Is Still Good, Trading Volume Is Better Than It Seems
According to CCN, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (a.k.a. CZ) believes that the cryptocurrency market is still rock solid despite the fall in prices since the beginning of January. He said that although trading volume has fallen significantly, it is still better than a few years ago. CZ said:
“Compared to January [of 2018], we are probably down 90 percent. So we only have one-tenth of the trading volume compared to what we had in January. But, compared to like a year or two years ago, we’re still trading at huge volumes. Business is still okay, we are still profitable, and we are still a very healthy business.”
CZ also clarified that the number of Binance users has been steadily increasing since January as well as a steady increase in the number of people depositing Bitcoin onto Binance.
Finally, CZ emphasized that trading volume listed on websites such as Coinmarketcap can be wrong because they don’t record over the counter (OTC) transactions. That means the actual trading volume for cryptocurrencies is 2x or 3x the amount listed on Coinmarketcap.
CZ thinks that a cryptocurrency price rally will happen. “Sooner or later, something will trigger it,” he says.
Cryptocurrency Exchange EtherDelta Pays $400,000 Fine To U.S. SEC
According to The Daily Hodl, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has announced that they’ve settled charges against Zachary Coburn. Coburn is the owner and founder of the ethereum-based cryptocurrency exchange EtherDelta.
The SEC decided to charge Coburn with unlawfully operating a securities exchange and failing to register with the SEC as an exchange. Stephanie Avakian, who works with the SEC, says:
“EtherDelta had both the user interface and underlying functionality of an online national securities exchange and was required to register with the SEC or qualify for an exemption.”
What makes this case especially interesting is that the EtherDelta exchange runs using smart contracts and it runs entirely on code. However, the SEC says that ultimately the programmer who wrote the code must take the same responsibility as a person running a centralized exchange.
Singapore Government Develops Blockchain Based Token System
According to NewsBTC, a trading platform was created between the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and Singapore Exchange (SGX). The aim of the platform is to enable the settlement of tokenized securities among different blockchani platforms.
MAS chief fintech officer Sopnendu Mohanty stated:
“This project has demonstrated the value of blockchain technology and the benefits it can bring to the financial industry in the short to medium term. The concept of asset tokenisation, as well as other learnings gleaned from this project, can potentially be applied to a broad spectrum of the economy, creating a whole new world of opportunities.”
Tinku Gupta, head of technology for SGX, meanwhile said:
“We are delighted to drive this important industry effort to accelerate innovation in the marketplace. Based on the unique methodology SGX developed to enable real-world interoperability of platforms, as well as the simultaneous exchange of digital tokens and securities, we have applied for our first-ever technology patent.”
Do you want daily blockchain and cryptocurrency news delivered directly to your inbox or feed? Sign up today for the Blockchain Report athttp://blockchainreport.tv.
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- Telegram 💬: https://t.me/blockchainreportnews | https://medium.com/blockchain-report/blockchain-report-11-13-2018-7e1d9c582fe9 | ['Christopher Durr'] | 2018-11-13 13:05:28.068000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Blockchain', 'Investing', 'News', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
Building Image Classifier using Keras and TensorFlow | One of the simplest ways to get started with TensorFlow, a machine learning library by Google is to build an image classifier from scratch. TensorFlow is pre-dominantly used for neural networks and it is a open sourced library. Since tensorflow is a low level library it provides more flexibility to develop own functionalities and services for the users especially developers. And also, they support a good number of programming languages including Python. The recent update of TensorFlow to TensorFlow 2.x has made a lot of difference especially in its integration Keras which is a high-level deep learning API that helps to easily build, train, validate and execute neural networks. Done with the introduction. Let’s go build our Image Classifier :)
Photo by Dan Gold on Unsplash
Importing Libraries
I am working on the Google Colab and the following are the codes to import tensorflow and keras libraries.
import tensorflow as tf
from tensorflow import keras
tf.__version__
Loading Datasets
Keras has some utility function to get common datasets. This includes the MNIST, California dataset etc. For our purpose, we will load the Fashion MNIST data. We will be splitting the data into train and test set.
fashion_mnist=keras.datasets.fashion_mnist
(train_X,train_Y),(test_X,test_Y)=fashion_mnist.load_data()
print("train_X has shape of: ",train_X.shape)
print("train_Y has shape of: ",train_Y.shape)
print("test_X has shape of: ",train_X.shape)
print("test_Y has shape of: ",train_Y.shape)
Output:
train_X has shape of: (60000, 28, 28)
train_Y has shape of: (60000,)
test_X has shape of: (60000, 28, 28)
test_Y has shape of: (60000,)
Now we have to scale down the pixel intensities to 0–1 range by dividing them by 255. By normalizing our inputs to a standard scale, we’re allowing the network to more quickly learn the optimal parameters for each input node. Moreover, if your inputs and target outputs are on a completely different scale then the default parameters for your neural network (eg. learning rates) will likely be improper for your data. Also we will take some data from the train data to the validation set.
// taking first 5000 records for validation set
valid_X,train_X=train_X[:5000]/255.0,train_X[5000:]/255.0
valid_Y,train_Y=train_Y[:5000]/255.0,train_Y[5000:]/255.0
Sample of the images in the dataset:
class_names = ["T-shirt/top", "Trouser", "Pullover", "Dress","Coat",
"Sandal", "Shirt", "Sneaker", "Bag", "Ankle boot"]
n_rows = 4
n_cols = 10
plt.figure(figsize=(n_cols * 1.2, n_rows * 1.2))
for row in range(n_rows):
for col in range(n_cols):
index = n_cols * row + col
plt.subplot(n_rows, n_cols, index + 1)
plt.imshow(X_train[index], cmap="binary", interpolation="nearest")
plt.axis('off')
plt.title(class_names[y_train[index]], fontsize=12)
plt.subplots_adjust(wspace=0.2, hspace=0.5)
plt.show()
Sequential API
We will build a neural network with two hidden layers. One hidden layer with 300 neurons and other with 100 neurons. The neural network is created using layers of neurons connected sequentially. So the Sequential API helps in connecting the layers of neurons together.
model=keras.models.Sequential()
You might have noticed the dimension of the input data while loading the data. (60000, 28, 28) means that there are 60000 images with dimension 28 x 28. So our next step is to flatten the data we have. The input data is then passed through a Flatten layer than converts the image into 1D array.
model.add(keras.layers.Flatten(input_shape=[28,28]))
Now we will create the hidden layers and intialize their respective activation functions.
An activation function is a function that is added into an artificial neural network in order to help the network learn complex patterns in the data. We use softmax at the last layer since this is a multi-label classiication.
model.add(keras.layers.Dense(300,activation=”relu”))
model.add(keras.layers.Dense(100,activation=”relu”))
model.add(keras.layers.Dense(10,activation=”softmax”))
The above is a good article if you want to know more about activation functions.
model.summary()
Each node in a hidden layer will have a weights and bias associated with it. When the 784 input connects to the each nodes in the hidden layer it creates 784 * 300+ 300 = 235500 parameters for dense layer. Similarly the denser layer will have 300*100+100=30100 parameters associated with it. The dense_2 layer will have 100*10+10=1010 parameters.
Model’s list of layers can be accessed by
model.layers
//assigning the values of weights and bias of first hidden layers
hidden1=model.layers[1]
weights,biases=hidden1.get_weights()
Compile the Model
Now we need to specify the loss function and optimizer we will be using. Below is the documentation of TensorFlow for the losses associated.
Since the output is multi-class we will be using sparse categorical cross entropy.
The type of entropies available in TensorFlow are provided in the documentation below.
Now the model created, lets define the loss function and optimizers to be used.
model.compile(loss=”sparse_categorical_crossentropy”,optimizer=”sgd”,metrics=[“accuracy”])
Training and Evaluating the Model
We will fit and the model and the evaluate the results against test data. We are initializing 30 epochs for the training. Epochs indicates the number of passes of the entire training dataset the machine learning algorithm has completed.
history=model.fit(train_X, train_Y,epochs=30,validation_data=(valid_X,valid_Y))
model.evaluate(test_X,test_Y)
X_new = X_test[:3]
y_proba = model.predict(X_new)
y_proba.round(2)
y_pred = model.predict_classes(X_new)
y_pred
np.array(class_names)[y_pred]
y_new = y_test[:3]
y_new
Model evaluation gives us an accuracy of 87% which is decent enough. Now we will try to see the output thus generated with the images in the dataset.
for index, image in enumerate(X_new):
plt.subplot(1, 3, index + 1)
plt.imshow(image, cmap="binary", interpolation="nearest")
plt.axis('off')
plt.title(class_names[y_test[index]], fontsize=12)
plt.subplots_adjust(wspace=0.2, hspace=0.5)
plt.show()
The image classifier built looks decently well enough for the dataset. This is a very simple implementation of neural networks in image classification. Hope you got some insights from the article. Follow for more :) | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/building-image-classifier-using-keras-and-tensorflow-fef21c54732a | ['Vishnu Satheesh'] | 2020-12-25 16:14:49.231000+00:00 | ['TensorFlow', 'Image Classification', 'Deep Learning', 'Keras', 'Neural Networks'] |
The Great Pause Week 39: Amish Mash | John Miller’s family was not unusually large. It is just that he lived long enough to find out what simple multiplication does.
Recently, on the eve of his 95th birthday, John Eli Miller died in a rambling farmhouse near Middlefield, Ohio, 40 miles southeast of Cleveland, leaving to mourn his passing perhaps the largest number of living descendants any American has ever had.
He was survived by five of his seven children, 61 grandchildren, 338 great-grandchildren and six great-great-grandchildren, a grand total of 410 descendants.
Shortly before his death, which came unexpectedly from a stroke, I had the privilege of two long visits with John E. Miller, during which I learned the feeling of one man who had personally watched the population explosion of the 20th century. A national magazine had determined that the venerable Ohio farmer was head of what almost certainly was the largest family in the United States.
A Swedish newspaper in 1958 ran a competition for the largest family in that country and when a family named Hellander turned up with 265 members, headed by a 92-year-old great- grandmother, it asserted a claim to the Swedish and to the world championship.
Soon reports of even larger families were streaming in to editors, with an elderly Mormon couple in Utah claiming 334 living descendants taking the lead. However, I was certain that among the Old Order Amish Mennonites, a sect in which families of more than 100 are commonplace, a family larger than this could be found. Through the medium of the Sugarcreek Ohio Budget, a unique weekly newspaper that is read by the Old Order Amish in all their communities throughout the nation, it was soon ascertained that John Eli Miller, with his clan of more than 400, had the largest family among them. So far as could be learned, this family was the largest in America and probably the world’s largest among monogamous peoples.
When John Miller and his family refused to pose for photographs because of their religious opposition to “graven images,” the magazine gave up the idea of a story about this “largest family” but the interviews disclosed a number of facts about the impact of extremely rapid population growth on this family and the cultural group of which it is a part. These facts merit the serious attention of all students of population problems.
PERSONAL POPULATION CRISIS
John Miller actually had seen with his own eyes a population explosion in his own lifetime. His data were not statistics on a graph or chart, but the scores of children at every family gathering who ran up to kiss Grandpa, so many that it confused a poor old man. His confusion can be forgiven for there were among them no less than 15 John Millers, all named in his honor. And what young man, much less an old one, could remember the names of 61 grandchildren and 338 great-grandchildren and keep straight just who their parents were?
The remarkable thing about this great clan of his was that it started with a family of just seven children. This was actually a little smaller than the typical family among the Amish, who have been found by one researcher to average 8.4 children per completed family. Two of his children died in early life: Samuel Miller, who left six children when he died at 40, and Lizzie (Mrs. Jacob Farnwald), who left four when she died at 28.
During most of his long life, therefore, John Miller’s family was not unusually large. It is just that he lived long enough to find out what simple multiplication can do.
One of his daughters, Mary (Mrs. Jacob Mast), had only five children. But all four of his sons had quite large families. His son, John, Jr., with whom he lived at the family homestead, had six children by his first wife, who died in an accident, and nine more by his present wife, a total of 15. Andrew Miller had 12, Eli Miller, 11, of whom ten are living, and Joseph Miller, ten, of whom nine are living.
Of the 63 grandchildren born to John Miller’s family, 61 lived to survive him, all but six now grown and married. And of 341 great-grandchildren born to the families of his 55 married grandchildren, only three had died, two in infancy, and one in an accident. All six of his great-great-grandchildren were born during the last year of his life and were healthy infants.
MODERN MEDICINE PROLONGS LIFE
Thus, a major factor in the world-wide population crisis was vividly evident in John Miller’s family: the fact that nearly all children born in the 20th century, who enjoy the benefits of modern medicine, are growing up to become adults and to have families of their own. A century ago, the ravages of smallpox, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, diphtheria and the many fatalities that occurred at childbirth would have left a far different picture in a large rural family. Even though the Amish live in rural areas, they avail themselves of the benefits of medical care. Now most Amish children are born in hospital delivery rooms.
While the sharp reduction in infant mortality and childhood disease is a happy development of science, it inevitably means that population grows with extraordinary rapidity. The Miller family offers a cogent example. John Miller had seven children; his children averaged nine offspring; and his married grandchildren had averaged six each when he passed away. Six married great-grandchildren had one apiece. These were not unusually large families among the Amish nor among the rural families of other Americans in the past century. Yet this clan numbered 410 when John Miller died.
Moreover, at the end of his life, the postman was bringing John Miller word of the birth of a new descendant on the average of once every ten days. This rate, we calculated, would have accelerated to one every other day as his more than 300 great-grand- children reached marriageable age. Only eight were married when he died and six had had children by their first wedding anniversaries.
So great is the rate of progression of population growth that had John Miller lived one more decade he would have seen more descendants born to him than in all his 95 years of life and would in ten more years have counted at least 1,000 living descendants!
The rate at which population increases is almost unbelievable- even when a man is watching it happen within his own family. John Miller found it difficult to comprehend what was happening. When I told him that all available evidence indicated that he had the largest family in the United States, the kindly old man passed a gnarled hand before his failing eyes and shook his head in amazement. . . .
What did John Miller think about his family? Did it worry him to see it growing so large? Indeed it did. Significantly, his concerns were the very ones that the demographers, the economists, the sociologists, and other serious students of world population problems have been voicing. He was not an educated man, for the Amish still believe eight grades of education in a one-room country school is sufficient, but John Miller summarized it in one simple question he constantly repeated, “Where will they all find good farms?” . . .
Some day, at some point, John Miller’s plaintive question, “Where will they all find farms?” will have to be answered in the bleak negative. They can continue now only by buying farms others will sell them. Some day no more farms anywhere will be for sale. A finite world is of limited size. So, ultimately, at some point, is the population it can hold.
REDUX
The foregoing essay originally appeared in 1961 in Population Bulletin, a monthly publication of the Population Reference Bureau of Washington DC. The author was the late Glenn D. Everett and the essay was later reprinted in Garrett Hardin’s annotated collection, Population, Evolution, Birth Control (1964).
Last week I described the Green Revolution, for which Norman Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. While the technological industrialization of agriculture has to many seemed a major advance for our species, we ignore the disturbance it has wrought upon nature at our peril. It has become a familiar canard that the greening of agriculture as we march into the future, with organic, biodynamic, regenerative, permaculturally designed, vertical, and “sustainable” alternatives making greater market inroads every year, cannot possibly keep pace with population growth and so industrial agriculture must remain much as it is, gradually becoming more efficient and productive, into the uncertain and perilous future.
What seems to be neglected in that pronouncement is that industrial agriculture can no more feed 8 billion people than can organic farming. That was Malthus’s point.
If the subsistence for man that the earth affords was to be increased every twenty-five years by a quantity equal to what the whole world at present produces, this would allow the power of production in the earth to be absolutely unlimited, and its ratio of increase much greater than we can conceive that any possible exertions of mankind could make; yet still the power of population being a power of a superior order, the increase of the human species can only be kept commensurate….
— Malthus, T.R. 1798. An Essay on the Principle of Population
Humanity, despite many noble but half-hearted attempts over the past century, has been unwilling to hold its increase in line with the power of production in the earth. That unwillingness appears to be hard wired. So too are the boundaries of what Earth can supply or insults that it can absorb. A reckoning beckons. Push-back from the microbial world is only one of many auguries. | https://medium.com/@cooldesign/the-great-pause-week-39-amish-mash-7f4e083dab0b | ['Albert Bates'] | 2020-12-13 09:36:14.074000+00:00 | ['Biodiversity', 'Climate Solutions', 'Agriculture', 'Population', 'Extinction'] |
3 Best Websites For Finding Coupons And Deals Online | 3 Best Websites For Finding Coupons And Deals Online Sadixezi Jun 21·5 min read
Nearly no one shops online any longer without first searching for a rebate, special coupon code, or coupon or something to that affect. Indeed, Statista projects that almost 136 million individuals will access will be computerized coupon clients in the United States in 2018, exploding to more than 145 million by 2021.
What’s more, individuals are shopping on the web now like never before (on the off chance that you couldn’t as of now tell by the vanishing physical stores in your neighborhood). TechCrunch announced in 2016 that 79% of Americans currently routinely shop on the web. In 2000, this number was 22%. So in case you will purchase on the web, you should get the best arrangement, correct?
Capital One Shopping: Best program augmentation for online customers
11 Best Websites For Finding Coupons And Deals Online — Capital One Shopping
Capital One Shopping is a program expansion that each online customer ought to have in their toolbar. In addition to the fact that it is 100% free, however it’s anything but a couple of seconds to introduce, and can set aside clients some genuine money! What’s more, best of all, whenever it is introduced, it does the entirety of the hard work for you, from discovering investment funds to alarming you when costs drop.
When you introduce the augmentation, all that you need to do is shop at your #1 online stores and Capital One Shopping will look through large number of different traders to guarantee that you are getting the best cost. In the event that they track down a more ideal arrangement elsewhere, they will caution you and lead you straightforwardly to it. What’s more, on the off chance that you are stressed over passing up coupon codes, don’t be. Capital One Shopping tracks down the best coupons from around the web and attempts them consequently.
On top of the arrangements that Capital One Shopping finds for you, clients can likewise acquire credits to use towards buys on famous locales. You can even go past the program expansion and download the application. On the application, you can undoubtedly filter item standardized tags, or quest for items themselves, and see whether there is a superior value elsewhere.
In this way, in the event that you haven’t made Capital One Shopping a piece of your internet shopping schedule, the time has come to dive in!
Disclaimer — Capital One Shopping repays us when you get the program augmentation utilizing the connections we gave.
slickdeals: Best arrangement sharing local area
slickdeals
slickdeals is our top choice among this rundown for some reasons. To begin with, it’s extraordinarily simple to set up Deal Alerts. You can redo an alarm to be shipped off you, so you don’t pass up large reserve funds. For instance, on the off chance that you realize you need another PC, you can set up an alarm to be shipped off you the second slickdeals tracks down another markdown offer on workstations.
slickdeals alarms
In the event that you discover an arrangement while scouring the web, you can likewise post an arrangement on the site for others to appreciate. This kind of friendly sharing isn’t finished by most locales, and it permits you to discover covered up pearls for gigantic investment funds. This goes into the slickdeals gatherings, which give a great method to share cash saving tips and manages different clients. This hasn’t been done viably since FatWallet was near (R.I.P.)
You can likewise customize your first page on slickdeals to be more tweaked to what in particular you’re keen on.
slickdeals alter
As you can find in the picture above, you can tell the site which classes interest you most and least, choose how you need the arrangements to show up, characterize stores that you like to shop at, and show which sorts of arrangements interest you most. This is a colossal life hack, so you’re not perusing many a page, taking a gander at items and administrations that don’t intrigue you.
We’ve likewise found slickdeals to have the most broad assortment of offers. You’ll discover rebate offers on food supplies, computer games, wellbeing and excellence, clothing, monetary items and administrations, travel, and substantially more. You’ll likewise track down the most mainstream bargains (through votes and utilization) quickly noticeable on the right-hand side of the page.
At last, slickdeals has perhaps the best blog among all arrangement locales. It’s consistently refreshed and gives item surveys, cash saving tips, coupons and arrangements by store and month, and substantially more. Generally speaking — this is our undoubtedly, go-to webpage for cash back and online arrangements.
Hip2Save: Find coupon codes, cash back offers, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg
hip2save
Hip2Save started as a blog from a mother who needed to help loved ones set aside cash. Quick forward ten years and it’s perhaps the most mainstream online arrangements destinations in presence. Hip2Save has a considerable lot of the very highlights that the other online arrangement locales do, for example, coupon codes, limits, and money back offers, yet it has numerous highlights that make it sufficiently special to be your go-to bargains stage.
In the first place, you can turn into a Hip2Save Insider, which permits you to make your own profile so you can acquire identifications and get bargains that are extraordinary to YOU. Why sit around idly going through offers that don’t make any difference (like children stuff on the off chance that you don’t have children) when you can tailor it explicitly to your necessities?
This can be as the arrangements you see on the site to the bulletin offers you get. What’s more, when you’re an Insider, anything you do on the site will procure you focuses that you can recover for sections into select challenges and giveaways through Hip2Save.
For those of you stuck to your telephone, Hip2Save offers portable applications like most different locales, yet one thing we cherished was the capacity to get text-based notifications for the most sultry arrangements posted on the site. It’s sifted down so you will not get barraged with consistent proposals for everything — simply the most perfect ones.
At long last, Hip2Save has an enormous data set of printable coupons. For those of you who like to shop available and use paper coupons, this is a shared benefit. You can even discover Target Cartwheel offers, just as Ibotta and Checkout51 discounts for compound reserve funds. Hip2Save is certifiably not a monstrous, public organization like Groupon, which is something we like about it — it’s anything but’s a family, it’s anything but a phenomenal site to set aside a huge load of cash. | https://medium.com/@sadixezi/3-best-websites-for-finding-coupons-and-deals-online-238e6c23d95e | [] | 2021-06-21 15:19:45.885000+00:00 | ['Coupons Promocodes', 'Coupon', 'Coupon Codes', 'Coupons Code', 'Free Coupon'] |
The Brave Words of a 17-Year-Old Partisan Before Being Executed | The Brave Words of a 17-Year-Old Partisan Before Being Executed
Scaring the enemy by having no fear of death
Lepa Svetozara Radić being escorted by German Soldiers to be executed (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
It is difficult to make the irrational choice of murdering an enemy when you know that after this action the consequence will be paid with the same bullet. Even if they have murdered your whole family in front of your very eyes, our instinct is to do anything possible to survive. History has shown us that some would die for their country so they can honor it.
However, one brave soul made the decision of taking justice into her own hands as she had the right to and condemn those that had wronged her with death. Lepa Svetozara Radić was a Bosnian Serb member of the Yugoslav Partisans in World War II. She joined the partisans because she wanted to avenge the death of her parents and protect those that didn’t have the courage to fight against the German invasion.
Sadly, one party of Yugoslav Partisans had fallen in the hands of the German troops and they were all executed for killing German soldiers. It was Lepa that did not go out without a fight. In February of 1943, she was up for execution for shooting at German troops. What is more surprising and the reason as to why I have said ‘a girl’ is because this happened when she was only 17 years of age.
Lepa Svetozara Radić having a noose tied around her neck in 1943 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
As her execution was prepared, a German commander wanted to offer her a way out of her sentence in exchange for revealing the location and identities of her leaders. Her response shocked not only the soldiers but the entire world.
She responded by saying that she wasn’t a traitor and that her comrades from the Yugoslavian Partisan party would reveal their location as well as identities themselves when they came to avenge her death. It is incredible the courage that this teenager, or better yet, hero showed, even when faced with death.
However, those were not her last words. As the German troops were waiting for the order to push the chair she was standing on she has shouted these last words:
“Long live the Communist Party, and partisans! Fight, people, for your freedom! Do not surrender to the evildoers! I will be killed, but there are those who will avenge me!”
These words would have just shown the braveness of not only such a teenager but the partisans as a whole. Even with how outgunned they were, that did not matter to them as they knew that the Reich would fall and crumble someday. This can be seen in Lepa’s last words. No matter if she did make the ultimate sacrifice, her death would be avenged which would bring her soul a step closer to victory.
It is imperative to realize that unlike others that died throughout World War II, she had a choice and she chose to die with her dignity and honor. | https://medium.com/history-of-yesterday/the-brave-words-of-a-17-year-old-partisan-before-being-executed-d71e2ad5dc4b | ['Andrei Tapalaga'] | 2020-12-01 21:02:49.156000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'History', 'Culture', 'Heroes', 'World War II'] |
Oraichain: Project review | Project review by: Robert Toriyama
Artificial Intelligence on Blockchain
Artificial intelligence and blockchain are impacting the future of virtually every industry. Both Artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain deal with data; AI on the blockchain can provide more value as data can be analyzed, and more insight can be generated.
One of the most promising applications of blockchain technology is smart contracts.
A smart contract is a computer program or a transaction protocol which is intended to automatically execute, control or document legally relevant events and actions according to the terms of a contract or an agreement.
Smart contracts have many benefits and applications but one of the limitations is; they follow strict rules making it almost impossible to integrate an AI model in a smart contract.
Introducing Oraichain; Oraichain is a data oracle platform that aggregates and connects Artificial Intelligence APIs to smart contracts and regular applications. Oraichain enhances smart contracts by allowing them to securely access external AI APIs. While, currently, blockchain platforms focus on price oracles, with Oraichain, smart contracts are able to utilize reliable AI data; This provides dApp users with new and valuable functionalities.
The Oraichain mechanism seems similar to Band Protocol and Chainlink, but it focuses more on AI APIs and the quality of the provided AI models.
The Oraichain mainnet is planned to launch in early 2021. Oraichain Testnet Validator Program was recently launched, and it is a key milestone for Oraichain ahead of its mainnet.
The Oraichain network has a native token ORAI with a supply of just 86 million. On December 25th, 2020 Oraichain burned 63 million ORAI tokens, that is 73% of the total supply as part of the new Oraichain tokenomics.
After the burn, the new total ORAI supply is roughly 23 million as seen in the table below:
The future of the world’s first AI-powered data oracle looks promising. It is a low market cap in comparison to Band Protocol and Chainlink.
Website: https://orai.io
Telegram: https://t.me/oraichain
Twitter: https://twitter.com/oraichain
Medium: https://medium.com/oraichain
DeFi Bloks Project rating: 9/10
Disclaimer: Information shared in this article should not be taken as investment advice, always do your own research before making any decision. | https://medium.com/@defibloks/oraichain-project-review-a3f6c1b0dbc1 | ['Defi Bloks'] | 2020-12-26 16:15:39.873000+00:00 | ['Smart Contracts', 'Data', 'Oraichain', 'Blockchain', 'Project Review'] |
Why Technical Debt is like a game of Jenga and what can Scrum Masters do about it | Why Technical Debt is like a game of Jenga and what can Scrum Masters do about it Rishika Mittal Follow Nov 28 · 4 min read
What is Technical Debt??
Well, technical debt is a metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham in 1992 to communicate problems due to “not developing in the right way” with non-technical stakeholders. To put it simply it is a loan you never intended to take.
Why should your IT landscape worry about this??
Well, to draw a parallel technical debt is very similar to Financial Debt and we all know how dangerous and potent a thing that is.
Technical Debt costs companies money and decreases efficiency which essentially means that everyone from developers to customers has to pay for the cost of technical debt in the system. Technical debt incurred over a period of years starts making maintainability of the code in production systems a costly and time- consuming affair along with also having possible side effects like bad system performance.
The more customized & unstable the code is, the more technical debt you have and the more time and effort you need to spend on the upkeep and maintenance of the code. But the correlation is not always linear and easy to calculate, which sometimes lets the debt lurk in the background. Also as the team progresses with the same pattern of development it becomes more dependent on specific developers who are the only ones able to maintain it.
And like an addiction, once you incur technical debt in your code, it just does not stop and you keep on incurring more until a point where adding anything new is like playing a game of Jenga where you don’t know if the last change will topple the whole thing over.
The bottom line is that technical debt is slowly but surely killing the system you work with. Hence the more you think about it the more you can understand the relevance. If it is not clear maybe the picture below can shed some light on this-
Source: Vincent Deniel
What can you as a Scrum Master do?
Start the conversation on Quality -Challenge the team enough on Quality and check if the team is abiding by the quality over speed principle or the Built-in Quality SAFe principle. Be mindful and observant in the refinements for compromises being made and question them. For example, if you see the team taking a shortcut and that is being accepted then ask the reason behind that. Though one should be mindful that in some cases debt cannot be avoided. In those cases, it should be incorporated in the strategic design or the architectural runway. Limit WIP — Discuss with the team(including the PO) what they think can be delivered with good quality and structural solutions and enable the customers in the right manner. This may sound like velocity but while velocity is measured in terms of the amount of work, WIP is all about the unit of work(eg. the Count of user stories at any stage of development which the team is confident of working upon at one time ). Encourage the team to choose their WIP and work according to that in the team. Enablers- An enabler(as per SAFe) supports the activities needed to extend the Architectural Runway to provide future business functionality. You can have a discussion with the architects in the team and also the team to have an overview of the technical debts they may have incurred along the way. Enable them on the thought process so that they become increasingly self-dependent and have the right mindset for quality. You can create a separate category for the enablers at a feature or user story level or create tags as per the agreement in the teams and then have discussions over a period of time over a dashboard view. Root Cause Finding- If the team faces an issue due to code quality make sure that you facilitate the root cause session in a manner that helps the team understand the root cause and also come up with definitive actions. The 5 why analysis has proven to be a good method for me.
With these 4 checks as a Scrum Master, you can guide your team towards a stable and mature system.
Visual Story Template: curiouspiyuesh.com
Technical Debt while unavoidable in some cases should never be a symptom of a quick fix that enabled crappy code delivery to customers. These are my thoughts on technical debt, its impact, and what can be done to minimize or prevent it. Do let me know your thoughts on this as well, looking forward to the comments. :-) | https://medium.com/serious-scrum/why-is-technical-debt-dangerous-and-what-can-scrum-masters-do-about-it-64ed55d59bdf | ['Rishika Mittal'] | 2020-12-17 21:56:21.544000+00:00 | ['Technical Debt', 'Scrum Master', 'Scrum', 'Serious Scrum'] |
The Importance and Benefits of Using Android App Bundles | How Does Dynamic Delivery Work?
For those who use APK format for publishing, Google Play takes the APK files, does nothing in terms of optimization, and distributes them directly to users.
In the case of app bundles, Google Play splits the bundle into a number of smaller APK’s known as Split APK’s based on various aspects.
The part of the app which is always downloaded is packed in a split APK called Base APK which consists of shared code. While using app bundles, Play automatically makes split APK’s for resources, assets, and native libraries. These resource-specific APK’s are called configuration APK’s.
We can better understand how Google Play serves different APK’s to different users based on their system and region if we look at a simple example.
Consider a user with the following traits: a Pixel 2XL mobile with the English language, density corresponding to xxxhdpi, and an arm64 processor. With dynamic delivery, if this user installs the app then dynamic delivery will find the split APK’s that user needs, as shown:
This is how dynamic delivery helps to deliver the optimized APKs based on user specifications. The introduction of dynamic delivery and app bundles helps us to serve smaller apps. | https://medium.com/better-programming/android-app-bundles-f0ae021f0a5f | ['Satya Pavan Kantamani'] | 2020-05-27 12:47:33.727000+00:00 | ['Android App Development', 'AndroidDev', 'Android Apps', 'Android', 'Programming'] |
What to buy for Christmas — Apple Edition | What to buy for Christmas — Apple Edition
Let’s kick things off with the high priced gifts, iPhones, iPads and watches.
iPhones
This one is easy, iPhone 12 mini.
iPhone 11, iPhone 12 mini and iPhone SE. | Image from Apple.
It has the newest design, OLED display, A14 SoC and superb cameras. The SE and iPhone 11 are great devices in their own right but the mini will last years and never look dated compare to the other two.
It’s just a fantastic device in an era of big fat phones.
iPhone 12 mini starts at $699/£699 while the SE is $399/£399 and the 11 is $599/£599, and I get it, the prices are quite different but we aren’t in $1000+ territory just yet.
Compare to the iPhone 11, for $100 more you get a superior device in every way except for a smaller display with the 12 mini being 5.4" OLED and the 11 being 6.1" LCD.
iPhone 12 mini is black, white, red, green and blue. | Image from Apple
Compared to the iPhone SE however, thats a different story, these are very different and the price will show that. The SE is $300 cheaper that the 12 mini but the design and specs show that, with the 12 mini have a larger OLED display in a smaller form factor and face ID thanks to its modern new design while the SE has a 2015 design, fat juicy bezels and a 4.7" LCD display with touch ID.
The choice is easy but the wallet might make that choice for you, the 12 mini is the best but at a high price while the SE is great for it’s price but very dated in design.
iPads
This one is a little tricky, iPad Air and iPad are the lower end models and honestly the only ones worth buying now.
iPad Air and iPad 8th Gen. | Image from Apple.
You can’t go wrong with either of these but I believe the iPad Air is best of the two, once again it comes down to design and specs for me and I think the Air will last for years due to having the newest chip and design while the iPad 8th Gen has a very dated design and older chip.
iPad Air starts at $499/£499 and the iPad 8th Gen starts at $329/£329 and both feature pencil support but the air supports the Pencil 2 and can be attached to the side of the iPad Air.
For $170 more you’ll be getting a better design, chip, display and camera if you use it.
So I have to go with the Air for most but the 8th Gen is a great gift for an elderly relative or child.
iPad Air comes in silver, space grey, blue, green and rose gold.
iPad 8th Gen comes in silver, space gray and gold.
Watches
The Apple watch SE is a fantastic watch for its price, at $279/£269 it comes in at $120 cheaper than the Series 6 and only loses out on always on display, blood oxygen and ECG apps which many won’t ever use.
Apple Watch SE. | Image from Apple.
It’s basically an updated Series 4 sport model at a good price and comes in space grey, silver and gold.
I know the Series 3 is still available at $199/£199 but its very dated now and can’t imagine it’ll last more than another year or two of updates while the SE should give you at least 3 to 4 years of updates and comes with a newer design.
But then again the Series 3 might be suited for your kids in the short term.
Now let’s discuss the non wallet busting products.
Beats Flex
The Beats Flex are Apple’s latest Bluetooth earbuds, and bring some of the great features of its AirPods to headphones costing just a third of the price.
Beats Flex in black, smoke grey, flame blue and citrus yellow. | Image from Apple.
We are in a world of true wireless Bluetooth earbuds now the headphone jack is dying out, they have wires connecting the earbuds to each other but have the W1 chip to connect to the iPhone instantly like AirPods.
They come with USB-C charging which is great unlike AirPods with the lightning port, a 10-minute quick charge when the battery is low provides about 90 minutes of playback.
The new Beats cost $49/£49 and replace the £129 Beats X as the cheapest wireless earbuds from Apple, sitting below Apple’s £129 AirPods.
Everyone included in the box.
By far the best value at the moment from Apple, I would advise against AirPods at the moment because Gen 3 is due next spring and rumoured to feature a whole new design similar to the current $230 AirPods Pro.
And no I wouldn’t recommend the AirPods Max at $549/£549 because its ridiculous and I’m sure they won’t be worth the price.
Anything else?
Chargers
Ok, so your new iPhone doesn’t come with a plug. Let’s take a look at some decent options.
Anker Nano 20W brick is a great product and slightly cheaper than the official Apple one, it’s also smaller and easier to carry around.
Anker Nano 20W charger.
You can find it on Amazon here or from Anker direct in the US, EU and UK.
Wireless charging is also another great way to charge your new iPhone and this one is a bit tricky because the iPhone 12 series charge at 7.5W for standard Qi wireless charging and 15W for MagSafe charging which is Apples new wireless charger at $39/£39 but still requires a 20W charging brick sold separately.
I use a Belkin wireless charging pad from Amazon and have never had any issues but I also have a MagSafe charger and that works well but the MagSafe is a lot more when you add the brick cost, MagSafe does charge faster but again its at a cost.
MagSafe Charger. | Image from Apple.
MagSafe Charger is available here for $39 and you can pair it with the above Anker Nano 20W or Apples official $20/£20 brick.
Belkin Boost Up 15W Wireless charger is available here for £35 with brick and £29 without.(Remember this will only charge the iPhone at 7.5W, MagSafe charges at 15W)
Belkin Boost Up 15W Wireless Charger.
So my Apple Christmas picks are…
iPhone 12 mini, iPad Air, Apple Watch SE, Beats Flex and MagSafe Charger.
I hope this has helped in anyway or given you some ideas at least, Happy Holidays! | https://medium.com/macoclock/what-to-buy-for-christmas-apple-edition-5d3f75b5a025 | ['Sam Castle'] | 2020-12-11 07:11:54.617000+00:00 | ['Apple Watch', 'iPhone', 'Airpods', 'iPad', 'Apple'] |
Creating a Dataset of 700,000 PDFs for NLP in 14 Hours to Help the Planet | Copyright: Canva
Creating a Dataset of 700,000 PDFs for NLP in 14 Hours to Help the Planet
Why we needed to build a huge dataset
You might ask why creating a dataset with 700,000 PDFs for Natural Language Processing (NLP) may help the planet?
Here´s the answer.
At Omdena we deal with many different Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects where data scientists from around the world go hands-on with organizations, communities, and technology partners to solve meaningful and impactful problems.
In this context, we started a project with the World Resources Institute (WRI) where 50 AI changemakers applied NLP to identify financial incentives for forest and landscape restoration. The focus was on Latin America (most specifically Mexico, Peru, Chile, Guatemala, and El Salvador).
Deforestation: Photo by Boudewijn Huysmans on Unsplash
Using NLP to mine policy documents, we would be able to promote knowledge sharing between stakeholders and enable rapid identification of incentives, disincentives, perverse incentives, and misalignment between policies.
If a lack of incentives or disincentives were discovered, this would provide an opportunity to advocate for positive change. Creating a systematic analysis tool could enable a standardized approach to generate data that can help craft policies that restore more degraded land more quickly.
The problem
In the beginning, we had a starting dataset of a few dozens of PDFs provided by WRI to allow us to train the NLP models and we established a task team to web scrape many more as these models are heavily dependent on lots of data.
The main sources of policies for the five countries were the websites of the Federal Official Gazettes. We successfully accessed each one and by using Scrapy and Selenium we retrieved tens of thousands of documents. Besides the federal documents we also needed to retrieve policies from the state and regional levels to train the NLP algorithms to work at the scales WRI needed.
However these five countries have 108 states and regions in total and accessing each of the Official Gazettes for each of these would be impractical as we neither had enough time, nor the computational resources and team size needed.
Google?
As search engines usually index the whole spectrum of internet pages we started to think our answer could be in Google as it is the main page indexer available.
But how could we scrape Google in search of 1,300 combined keywords for each of those 108 states and regions in a quick and effective way?
And more than that, assuming that we could have all the Google results that we wanted, how could we download those documents quickly and cost-effectively?
How we did it
To answer those we needed to scrape Google in an almost unlimited way, but the problem is that Google protects its data very effectively by adopting restrictions to IPs that behave like scrappers. One way to bypass that is by using IP rotating proxies: you set different IPs that will rotate for predefined and as much unpredictable possible length of time for each set of keywords to disguise Google efforts to block or ban this IP. So we could build a solution using that but even though our estimates showed us that it would take much more time than we had.
Then we started to shop around to see where to find a ready tool to do the task fast. We found Apify. Apify is a one-stop-shop for web scraping, data extraction, and RPA needs. They have a huge set of services to scrape Facebook pages, Instagram, Amazon, Airbnb, Twitter, Youtube, Tripadvisor, IMDb, many more… and Google Search Results Scraping! We contacted them and readily established a great partnership.
For Google SERPs in Apify, it is possible to work either via console or programmatically via their API. We chose the console and to upload JSON files with the queries needed and setting many parameters like language (Spanish), country code (for each one), number of results per page (with a number bigger than 100 results per query the retrieved URLs became too much unrelated to our query. We chose 100 results per page to be faster as possible), number of concurrent queries (we established the maximum value (100) for it to be as fast as possible), exact geolocation (one for each country), among many other parameters.
Figure 1 — Apify task running multiple queries
To feed the queries we used a keyword structuring that consisted of [Geo Keywords — for each of the 108 states and regions] + [Type of legal documents keywords] + [Knowledge Domain Keywords — specific to the environmental terms we were looking for] + filetype: pdf (as we just wanted PDFs).
So we had 142k different queries to run in Apify and we divided those into separated JSONs and ran 10 parallel tasks in Apify. The longest execution time was 8 hours for the biggest JSON file. With those, we generated approximately 9MM URLs that gave us 738k unique URLs of PDFs to be downloaded. We unified this in a single CSV file to be further downloaded.
Then we moved to AWS and built a 100% serverless architecture to help with the downloading problem. We used horizontal scaling to scale five Lambdas allowing each one to send 150k URLs in batches of 10 URLs to SQS for further downloading.
You may be asking why we didn´t download the URLs directly from the start but Lambda has a maximum execution time of 15 minutes. So it would be impossible to have that many parallel Lambdas needed to download this huge amount of documents. A way of bypassing that is to break these tasks into smaller tasks with an execution time of fewer than 15 minutes. So sending those URLs to an SQS queue and using this queue to trigger a Lambda to download 10 URLs each, allows each Lambda to download up to 10 documents in less than 15 minutes making it feasible. We also used approximately 900 concurrent Lambdas to accelerate the total download time.
Because of this architecture, we downloaded the documents in 5,5 hours, creating a dataset of 2,4Tb data in S3. Also because of the availability of the websites in the downloading moment, we managed to download 672k (or 91% of the original documents).
FIGURE 2–100% Serverless Architecture on AWS
The results
I downloaded a sample of 1,000 documents to my local machine and extrapolating the time taken, it would have taken 2 weeks using my machine and internet connection (100 Gbps) uninterruptedly to download them all.
So using AWS Lambda and Amazon SQS we were able to complete it in 5,5 hours or 61x faster than in my local computer!
To scrape Google for the 740k URLs from an EC2 instance would require a huge amount of IP proxies making it very expensive. Besides, there would be a limitation regarding internet connection and probably we would need to use many EC2 instances combined with these IP rotating proxies to download these URLs in a reasonable time what would make the costs more prohibitive. So basically we wouldn´t have the needed resources in time and money to achieve this scale of results and without Apify we couldn´t have done this.
By using both Apify and AWS allowed us to complete this huge task in less than 14 hours!
Our estimates are that we spent around US$ 0,15 per Gb of highly qualified information which makes this method a cost-effective one. Besides, it is also a highly available solution and quickly replicable for our future projects.
I´d like to make a special thanks to Erika Ureña and Jordi Planas who actively participated in making this happen in an indispensable way. Also, I´d like to thank all my colleagues at Omdena who have worked on this challenge.
Last but not least a very special thanks to our great partner Apify, who trusted in our capabilities and without whom this would not have been achieved. | https://medium.com/omdena/creating-a-dataset-of-700-000-pdfs-for-nlp-in-14-hours-to-help-the-planet-a821fa6f801d | ['Leonardo Sanchez'] | 2021-01-02 17:24:49.655000+00:00 | ['Tech For Good', 'Naturallanguageprocessing', 'Data Science', 'AI', 'Deforestation'] |
Stop Itching and Flaking With Anti-Dandruff Hair Oil For Men & Women | Heebs Healthcare Pvt. Ltd.
Taking care of your skin and hair is an important part of maintaining its elasticity. As the winds get colder in winters, it causes dryness which leads to flaking on the scalp along with itching from dandruff or eczema if present already. For this reason alone you need a supplement oil that can be applied regularly at least twice per week for greater benefits such as expanding blood circulation within head tissue while also lessening chances for future breakage by providing needed nutrients not found naturally elsewhere.
Here is Anti-dandruff hair oil that helps to draw out the common brilliance in your locks and keeps them looking healthy, vibrant.
Use Reawaken Dandruff Control Hair Oil
Don’t let itchy flaky dandruff-prone scalp wear you down. Reawaken Dandruff Control Hair Oil helps to gently cleanse your scalp and remove dandruff flakes to help reduce dandruff. This anti-dandruff and hair fall control oil also nourishes and moisturizes your scalp and cleanses the hair follicles to promote healthy, beautiful, problem-free hair. This soothing and relaxing dandruff oil helps to calm your senses and may promote better sleep.
It’s A Blend Of:
Rosemary oil, for centuries, has been known as an effective healing herb. It is also used in cooking. Using rosemary oil for the hair has many benefits. It is said to have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties which help improve blood circulation, counter hair loss, and much more. It is also known to work on dandruff and treat itchy scalp.
Tea tree oil is an essential oil that has been used for thousands of years. Tea tree oil for hair is known to offer antibacterial, antiviral, antifungal, and anti-inflammatory benefits. The oil is also known for treating head lice and dandruff.
Sesame is a tall annual herb from the Pedaliaceae family. Normally used as a food ingredient and condiment, sesame oil also has beauty and medicinal uses. In Ayurvedic medicine, it is used as base oil for about 90 percent of the herbal oils. In aromatherapy, sesame oil is popularly used as a massage oil and carrier oil for essential oils.
Benefits of Using Reawaken Dandruff Control Hair Oil
Fights Dandruff
Dandruff is a condition in which the scalp develops dry, white flakes of dead skin, sometimes accompanied by itching. Dry scalp and hair aren’t the only causes for dandruff, it can also be the result of oily, irritated skin, poor hygiene, skin conditions like contact dermatitis, or infection by a fungus called Malassezia.
Tea tree oil is known for its antifungal properties, meaning it can help treat dandruff. It is also a potent cleanser, so regular use can keep your scalp clean from grime and dead skin cells, keeping hair follicles free of build-up and dandruff. Hair oil for dandruff control can also help control excess oil production by the sebaceous glands, keeping the scalp moisturized and free of dandruff. Dandruff is a result of dry skin, sensitivity to hair products and the fungus growth on the scalp amongst other reasons. Applying sesame oil for hair helps to get rid of these problems helping reduce dandruff. If you’re suffering from dandruff and an itchy scalp, sesame oil is the tonic that will definitely work for you. Sesame oil has antibacterial properties, which keep fungal and bacterial infections at bay by inhibiting the occurrence of dandruff and other hair issues.
Promotes Hair Growth
Research shows that tea tree oil is conducive to faster hair growth. The essential dandruff hair oil nourishes hair follicles and roots, producing strong and thick hair. Apart from soothing an itchy scalp, reducing dandruff and flaking, and preventing excess oil production, tea tree oil improves blood flow and allows nutrients to reach hair follicles, balances the pH level of the scalp, and stimulates the hair growth cycle to give you a head full of strong healthy hair.
Rosemary oil, when used in combination with other carrier oils for a hair massage, improves blood circulation and boosts hair growth. According to Ayurvedic experts, 50 per cent of Indian women approximately, are losing hair faster than before. When sesame oil is massaged into your scalp, it nourishes it and supplies the much-needed nourishment for the hair follicles and shafts. This leads to good hair growth. Using hair oil for dandruff and hair growth also helps heal any damage caused by the chemicals used during any treatments, or hair coloring. Sesame oil is rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids such as omega-3 and omega-6, and it is important to understand that the deficiency of fatty acids often leads to hair loss. Massaging your hair with sesame oil improves blood circulation, which means your hair grows again in no time.
Nourishes the Scalp
According to research, tea tree oil can improve symptoms of seborrheic dermatitis, a common skin condition in which scaly patches appear on the scalp. Research also indicates improvement in itchiness and greasiness after using hair oil for dandruff and itchy scalp. Further to this, as tea tree oil has antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory properties, it is useful in soothing skin irritation and wounds. This essential oil acts as a natural conditioner for the scalp and eliminates agents that cause the skin to flake.
Do you know that rosemary oil has a high nutritional value? It is known to nourish the hair follicles, thus adding a lustrous shine to your mane. Sesame oil penetrates deep into the skin easily. This allows it to nourish the scalp and the hair from within. So, using sesame oil for hair that is damaged, does wonders to ensure they’re treated inside out. At times, dandruff can also be caused due to severe dryness, but sesame oil can treat that too! It penetrates into the hair follicles and heals the damage, which is caused by harsh heat. Thus, it prevents split ends and brittle hair.
Prevents Hair Loss
Dandruff is a common cause for hair loss as hair that grows on a dandruff-infected scalp suffers a great amount of cuticle and protein damage. Inflammation and scratching the scalp also leads to breakage and hair loss. As tea tree hair oil for dandruff is effective in soothing the scalp and treating dandruff, it can also prevent excessive hair fall.
Dandruff and excess sebum can block hair follicles, making hair roots weak and resulting in hair fall. As tea tree oil addresses both these concerns and keeps the scalp clean, it is Effective in Preventing Hair Fall. Stress can lead to a lot of hair loss. Oil massage in itself helps with stress. When you use sesame oil for hair massage, its soothing properties help combat the hair loss induced by stress.
Prevents Premature Greying
If you’ve started seeing grey hair, despite being young, get your hands on sesame oil and massage it into your scalp and hair. Make sure you use sesame oil for hair to retain its natural color for long, hence ensuring that premature greying is avoided. The sesame oil, in fact, has properties that help darken the hair, so the hair that has already greyed prematurely gets darker. Sesame oil has hair-darkening properties, which can inhibit premature greying of the hair. However, the antioxidant properties may also help to deal with this issue. So, make sure you use sesame oil regularly to retain your hair’s natural color for long.
How to Use Reawaken Hair Oil For Dandruff And Hair Fall?
Apply hair oil for dandruff removal into the scalp by parting the hair. Massage the scalp gently in a circular motion using your fingertips so that the oil is absorbed into the scalp. Leave for an hour or two before washing with shampoo. For best results, wash hair with Reawaken Hair Fall Control Shampoo Conditioner.
How Often Should You Oil Your Hair?
Oiling your hair 1–2 times a week is enough. Doing it every day can attract dirt and also strip away essential oils from your hair. Combing, rubbing and vigorously massaging your hair with oil can also cause breakage.
Where To Buy Best Dandruff Control Hair Oil In India?
Reawaken Dandruff Control Hair Oil is an innovative hair care product that helps you to remove dandruff and grow longer, stronger, and more beautiful locks. Now buy the best Reawaken Dandruff Control Hair Oil online from Amazon or Flipkart at the best price with an amazing shipping service for men & women. | https://medium.com/@heeb/stop-itching-and-flaking-with-anti-dandruff-hair-oil-for-men-women-d964ad237dba | ['Heebs Healthcare'] | 2021-11-30 05:56:34.343000+00:00 | ['Hair', 'Beauty', 'Hair Loss', 'Grooming', 'Hair Care'] |
Influencers: Who They Are and Why Brands Need Them | The large and fine print are taken with skepticism. Consumers don’t believe what brands say anymore, and it takes a lot of convincing and spending in order to close a sale.
According to the 2015 Edelman Trust Barometer, the majority of countries now sit below 50 percent with regard to trust in business.
This great age of distrust is caused by brands that use unproven, mostly exaggerated claims in order to sell. Remember those barefoot running shoes that claimed to strengthen muscles and reduce injuries? They got sued by consumers because their entire marketing strategy lacked scientific merit. The company ended up paying a $3.75 million settlement.
There was also a series of banned advertisements in the UK for beauty products that featured “excessively photoshopped” models, a disputed Nutella ad that said the spread is good for your health, and many other claims that cost businesses a lot of money.
Bringing trust back through social proof
“Eighty-one percent of shoppers conduct online research before they make a purchase. Sixty percent begin by using a search engine to find the products they want, and 61 percent will read product reviews before making any purchase.” — Social Times
When customers see your product online, how do you think you will fare? Will your snazzy website and descriptive product information be enough to convince? If you find that your customers require more confirmation and validation, your product needs more social proof.
What is social proof?
According to Fast Company, social proof is the concept that people will conform to the actions of others under the assumption that those actions are reflective of the correct behaviour.
Social proof is shown in the following instances: a restaurant full of patrons, a newly launched gadget sold out on the first day, a long queue outside a bar; and a waiting list for a luxury purse.
There are many forms of social proof, but we’ll focus on the influencers — people who have the power to affect the purchase decisions of others. Influencers could be subject-matter experts, celebrities, journalists, big brand owners, and many more. Recently, there is also a rise on social media influencers such as YouTubers and Instagrammers who have gained a cult-like following.
Although the popularity of an influencer could greatly help a brand, social proof could also come from average consumers whose honest reviews and testimonials sway prospective buyers to purchase.
How influencers help businesses
Influencers can help your business in many ways. Here are some:
Testimonials — A positive testimonial from a well-known influencer featured on your landing page is a quick and effective way to establish trust.
— A positive testimonial from a well-known influencer featured on your landing page is a quick and effective way to establish trust. Reviews — Buyers are smart. Most will head over to the reviews section even before they finish reading the product description. Having a line-up of five-star reviews is great social proof. “Product and service reviews become particularly powerful when the opinions of larger populations are accounted for,” according to Kissmetrics.
— Buyers are smart. Most will head over to the reviews section even before they finish reading the product description. Having a line-up of five-star reviews is great social proof. “Product and service reviews become particularly powerful when the opinions of larger populations are accounted for,” according to Kissmetrics. Endorsements — Paid or unpaid approval or endorsements from influencers can catapult your brand to success. One example is Taylor Swift’s Instagram post about emerging artist Garrett Borns (aka BØRNS). She called one of his songs, ‘Electric Love’, an instant classic. He has been everywhere since: On The Tonight Show, at music festivals, and now currently embarking on his own world tour.
— Paid or unpaid approval or endorsements from influencers can catapult your brand to success. One example is Taylor Swift’s Instagram post about emerging artist Garrett Borns (aka BØRNS). She called one of his songs, ‘Electric Love’, an instant classic. He has been everywhere since: On The Tonight Show, at music festivals, and now currently embarking on his own world tour. Clients — Displaying the logos of known companies you have worked with is great social proof. It sends a message of trust to potential customers, something along the lines of “if these big companies trusted our business, you should too”.
— Displaying the logos of known companies you have worked with is great social proof. It sends a message of trust to potential customers, something along the lines of “if these big companies trusted our business, you should too”. Media features — Being featured in various media outlets is a strong indicator of trust. Most businesses have a separate page where they upload all their media features, citations, reviews, etc. Homepage display of logos of media outlets that paid attention to your brand is social proof.
A new breed of influencers
Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube influencers are practical ambassadors. Sponsorships don’t cost that much (Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner can charge up to $300,000 per Instagram post) and they have dedicated followers. They are also very relatable, and unlike superstars, they are far easier to reach.
“Consumers trust the opinions of those in their social media group, including friends, bloggers and celebrities, more than messages they are getting directly from brands,” Liz Dunn, founder & CEO of Talmage Advisors, told CNBC.
Take the teatox mania that took Instagram by storm, for example. These “fat-burning”, “digestive-cleansing” tea industry is enormous, with hundreds of brands all over the world. The industry grew exponentially with the help of influencers who posted photos of themselves with the product.
Other influencers that brands target are usually in the beauty, health, and fashion industry. Michelle Phan, a beauty vlogger on YouTube, started out by making makeup tutorials. She has since worked with cosmetic giants Lancôme and L’Oreal.
According to a McKinsey Study, marketing-inspired word-of-mouth generates more than twice the sales of paid advertising, and these customers have a 37% higher retention rate. Given the importance of peer recommendations and their amplification through social media, influencer marketing has become a widely discussed topic among marketers.
When consumers are uncertain as to whether to purchase or not, social proof serves as the assurance, the nudge, and the final push that buyers need.
If you haven’t included social proof in your marketing strategy yet, now is the best time to do so. Bambrick Media, a digital marketing agency based in Brisbane, has led successful marketing campaigns for over 500 individual businesses. Talk to us about your next campaign today. | https://medium.com/digitaldisambiguation/influencers-who-they-are-and-why-brands-need-them-e981dd36b374 | ['Jason Mcmahon'] | 2017-08-27 23:51:08.315000+00:00 | ['Digital Influencers', 'Branding', 'Influencers', 'Social Media', 'Digital Marketing'] |
From Space Force to Starfleet | As we enter 2021, the ongoing exploration and penetration of space by human beings is occurring along two related but separate paths: government/military on one hand, and private/commercial on the other.
Of these, the private/commercial ventures are accelerating much more rapidly, involving multiple projects from multiple companies, with the prospect that the private sector might achieve (if Elon Musk of SpaceX has anything to say about it) a manned mission to Mars before any national government agency does so.
are accelerating much more rapidly, involving multiple projects from multiple companies, with the prospect that the private sector might achieve (if Elon Musk of SpaceX has anything to say about it) a manned mission to Mars before any national government agency does so. As for the government/military side of U.S. space activities, primary attention for many years has been focused on launching and monitoring a wide range of reconnaissance satellites. In addition, the U.S. government has worked cooperatively with Russia and other nations in launching and maintaining the International Space Station, which in turn is the ninth habitable space platform to orbit Earth, having been preceded by several Soviet/Russian stations including Salyut, Almaz and Mir, and the U.S. Skylab.
Space Force
Meanwhile, at the direction of President Donald Trump, the U.S. established in December 2019 a new branch of the Armed Forces known as the U.S. Space Force (USSF), to become fully operational over the next 18 months. Space Force is the successor to the Air Force Space Command, originally established in 1982, and will function within the Department of the Air Force, meaning the Secretary of the Air Force has overall responsibility for the USSF under the guidance and direction of the Secretary of Defense. Additionally, a four-star general known as the Chief of Space Operations (CSO) will serve as the senior military member of the USSF.
According to the Space Force website, the USSF will organize, train, and equip space-capable forces in order to protect U.S. and allied interests in space and to provide space capabilities to the joint force. USSF responsibilities will include developing military space professionals, acquiring military space systems, and maturing the military doctrine for space operations. NASA and the Space Force will partner on matters such as space domain awareness and planetary defense, and Space Force members can also be NASA astronauts. For example, Colonel Michael S. Hopkins, the commander of SpaceX Crew-1 to the ISS, was commissioned into the Space Force on December 18, 2020.
NASA
Despite its cooperative connection with Space Force, NASA’s primary focus with respect to manned spaceflight has been and remains civilian rather than military.
Apollo 15 astronaut James Irwin, August 1971 — WikiImages, Pixabay
Without doubt, NASA’s proudest accomplishment to this day remains the crewed missions to the moon and back during the years 1968 through 1972, a feat that to date has not been matched by any other nation or space agency. But as of 2021, that will soon change, mainly due to the efforts of various commercial/private companies.
NASA’s moon missions relied upon the magnificent Saturn V rocket, which to date is still the tallest, heaviest and most powerful launch vehicle ever brought to operational status, and the only rocket that has carried humans beyond low earth orbit. The Saturn V was designed under the direction of Wernher von Braun at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, with Boeing, North American Aviation, Douglas Aircraft Company, and IBM as the lead contractors.
But the Saturn V is no more. Today, NASA’s hopes for manned missions to the moon and beyond rest with the Space Launch System (SLS), potentially the biggest and most powerful launch vehicle in NASA history. Its development began in 2011 but has been plagued by delays and cost overruns. At present, the first unmanned launch of the SLS is planned for late 2021, with a possible first manned mission by mid-2023.
Meanwhile, other rockets from private/commercial developers are poised to outpace the SLS in the race for manned space travel. Top contenders include:
SpaceX
Space Exploration Technologies Corp.
SpaceX is an American aerospace manufacturer and space transportation services company headquartered in Hawthorne, California, founded in 2002 by Elon Musk with the main goal of reducing space transportation costs to enable the colonization of Mars. SpaceX has developed several launch vehicles, notably its Falcon 9 rocket, as well as the Dragon cargo spacecraft. SpaceX has flown humans to the International Space Station in its Dragon 2 capsule.
SpaceX Falcon 9 launch, Cape Canaveral — Unsplash
Of all commercial companies, SpaceX is by far the current leader in actual mission accomplishments, which include:
the first privately funded liquid-propellant rocket to reach orbit (Falcon 1 in 2008)
the first private company to successfully launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft (Dragon in 2010)
the first private company to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station (Dragon in 2012)
the first vertical take-off and vertical propulsive landing for an orbital rocket (Falcon 9 in 2015)
the first reuse of an orbital rocket (Falcon 9 in 2017) and
the first private company to send astronauts to orbit and to the International Space Station (SpaceX Crew Dragon Demo-2 and SpaceX Crew-1 missions in 2020)
Notable among these achievements was the December 2015 powered vertical landing of a Falcon 9 rocket. With this achievement, the Falcon 9 became the only launch vehicle other than NASA’s now retired space shuttle to safely land after orbital flight. Since 2015, SpaceX has repeated this landing feat multiple times, including on ocean landing platforms. In March 2017, SpaceX demonstrated that it could relaunch and safely land a previously flown Falcon 9. Reusability is a key factor in Elon Musk’s strategy to lower the cost of space travel.
In September 2016, SpaceX introduced the Interplanetary Transport System, a two-stage to orbit launch vehicle. Originally nicknamed the “BFR” for “big Falcon rocket” but later dubbed Starship, the vehicle is comprised of a Super Heavy first stage and the Starship orbital second stage. Taller and heavier than the mighty Saturn V, Starship is Musk’s candidate for manned deep-space travel, including to Mars. To date, Starship has performed a number of successful suborbital test flights and landings, although a hard landing on December 9, 2020 resulted in destruction of the vehicle. Once in service, the Starship with its Super Heavy booster will be the largest operational rocket in history.
Although SpaceX is currently well ahead in the commercial space race, several other companies have entered the fray, including:
Rocket Lab
Rockeet Lab is a private American aerospace manufacturer and launch service provider, originally founded in New Zealand in 2006 by current CEO Peter Beck. The company has developed a sub-orbital sounding rocket named Ātea and a lightweight orbital rocket known as Electron designed to launch small satellites. The company established headquarters in California in 2013, and its first commercial launch occurred in November 2018 from New Zealand. Among its products are two innovative rocket engines, the Rutherford and the Curie.
Virgin Galactic
Virgin Galactic is an American spaceflight company within the Virgin Group headed by Richard Branson, which aims to provide suborbital spaceflights to space tourists and suborbital launches for space science missions. SpaceShipTwo, Virgin Galactic’s current suborbital spacecraft, is air launched from beneath a carrier airplane known as White Knight Two.
Branson’s original plan for a maiden flight by late 2009 was repeatedly delayed, most seriously in October 2014 by the in-flight crash of VSS Enterprise, the first version of SpaceShipTwo. On December 13, 2018, VSS Unity finally achieved the project’s first suborbital space flight with two pilots, reaching an altitude of 51.4 miles and officially entering outer space by US standards. In February 2019, the project carried three people, including a passenger, on VSS Unity VF-01, reaching an altitude of 55.9 miles and briefly achieving in-flight zero gravity.
Blue Origin
Blue Origin, LLC, an American privately funded aerospace manufacturer and spaceflight services company headquartered in Kent, Washington. Founded in 2000 by Jeff Bezos, the company’s strategy for cheap space travel is based, like SpaceX, on reusable launch vehicles. Blue Origin is taking an incremental approach from suborbital to orbital flight, with a focus on developing rockets that take off and land vertically.
Blue Origin New Shepard test launch, 2015 — Image by Blue Origin
The company began flight testing its suborbital New Shepard launch vehicle in 2015, but as of late 2020 had not yet begun commercial flights. It is also developing an orbital launch vehicle called New Glenn as well as a large rocket engine dubbed BE-4. In may of 2019, Bezos announced plans to develop a moon lander called Blue Moon, to be ready by 2024. As of 2020, Blue Origin is part of a consortium of companies working with NASA’s Artemis program aimed at returning humans to the moon.
United Launch Alliance (ULA)
United Launch Alliance (ULA), an American spacecraft launch service provider founded in 2006 as a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing.The company manufactures and operates a number of orbital and deep space rocket vehicles. Its customers include the U.S. Department of Defense and NASA.
The company currently utilizes two heavy-lift, expendable launch systems, the Delta IV Heavy and the Atlas V, with which it has orbited a variety of weather, telecom, national security and scientific satellites. In addition, a modified Atlas V is rated for human spaceflight, and to date has launched one unmanned test mission of the Boeing CST-100 Starliner, a capsule capable of carrying up to seven occupants. On that flight, the Starliner rendezvoused with the International Space Station, though it did not dock, and later landed safely in New Mexico.
As the foregoing demonstrates, humankind is making notable progress toward reliable, routine space travel. Humans could return to the moon before 2025, and a manned mission to Mars might be accomplished — if Elon Musk is correct — in less than a decade.
But what about eventual travel to another star system such as Proxima Centauri, our nearest stellar neighbor, some 4.2 light years away? Here, by most accounts, the challenge is currently beyond human capability.
The Problem in a Nutshell
Human spacecraft can’t achieve the speed required for a trip of reasonable (even survivable) duration. Say, for example, that our vehicle were traveling at the same velocity as Voyager 1, until recently the fastest-moving object ever launched by humans at roughly 38,000 miles per hour. At that speed, Voyager would take over 75,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri.
A few months ago, on September 27, 2020, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe reportedly reached a temporary velocity of roughly 290,000 miles per hour, taking advantage of a powerful gravity assist from the sun. No man-made object has ever traveled faster. But even at that speed, it would take a spacecraft roughly 9,800 years to reach Proxima Centauri.
For interstellar travel to be feasible, our spacecraft would have to achieve at least a modest fraction of the speed of light. If we could achieve 10% of light speed, for example, our trip to Proxima Centauri would take perhaps 44 years. Not impossible to imagine; but still a very long time. The problem, again, is that we simply don’t have the capability to achieve even 10% of light speed.
What we’re missing is the energy to reach such speeds. All types of spacecraft propulsion currently use some kind of chemical fuel carried within the vehicle. This puts a serious limit on maximum speed. That speed can be somewhat augmented by, for example, the sort of gravity assist utilized by the Parker Probe; but we’re still just poking along, relative to light speed.
Wanted: Warp Drive
That said, a variety of more exotic concepts have been proposed by propulsion scientists, though in practical terms we can’t do any of them — at least not yet. One example is the proposal by physicist Miguel Alcubierre for a literal version of Star Trek’s warp drive, in which the fabric of spacetime is manipulated to achieve relativistic speed. Alcubierre has stirred a lively debate as to whether his concept is even theoretically feasible within the limits imposed by Einstein’s general relativity. Meanwhile, however, the basic problem remains: even if theory permits it, colossal, probably impossible amounts of energy would be required.
As of this writing, most reputable scientists doubt that humans will ever achieve anything like warp speed technology. If that remains true, then it might also be true that Earthlings will never travel to even our closest stellar neighbors in space, and Star Trek will remain an unfulfilled dream. On the other hand, human ingenuity has busted through apparent limits time and time again. We really don’t know how to do Star Trek yet, even in theory. But a hundred years from now? Maybe. | https://medium.com/on-the-trail-of-the-saucers/from-space-force-to-starfleet-888d6e477894 | ['Michael Lindemann'] | 2021-03-13 22:46:49.059000+00:00 | ['Space Force', 'Warp Drive', 'NASA', 'Spacex', 'Star Trek'] |
The Truth Is — Working Remote Made Me Unhappy | To make it clear, I’m not a digital nomad. I worked for a corporate company when I ended up going remote.
Working remote wasn’t a choice for me, as I’m sure it wasn’t for a lot of people during 2020.
And we all know what kind of shit-show 2020 was.
Before said shit-show, I used to work for a ‘little’ company called Yelp. Maybe you’ve heard of it, maybe you haven’t.
I worked as an Account Executive, a fancy title for sales, and loved it. I called business owners and tried to pitch them. Yeah, I’d get cursed out. I’d get called terrible names. I’d get hung up on. And that motivated me.
OH YEAH, SUSAN? YOU NEVER WANT TO HEAR FROM ME AGAIN? Yeah okay, I’ve heard that 80 times today. Talk to you next week!
It’s the nature of sales, what can I say. We were trained to be relentless sharks.
Not only was the job itself fun, the environment was everything I could ask for at a job. Picture Wolf of Wall Street but instead of stocks… advertising sales. Footballs flying across the office, people hitting the Gong when they made a sale, clapping, and an exuberant amount energy. It was fucking lively.
I lived for that.
And you know what shit on all of that? Coronavirus. | https://byrslf.co/the-truth-is-working-remote-made-me-unhappy-ffc5af0ad031 | ['Taylor Silva'] | 2021-06-20 16:00:18.973000+00:00 | ['Beyourself', 'Work', 'Remote Working', 'Working From Home', 'Life Lessons'] |
Entrepreneuring pg140 | Colorful companion to my memoir The Incompetent Psychic
Truckee River Studios poster c1985
I returned the computer manual the next day and asked if I could experiment with a title page.
“Okay.” Larry powered up the keyboard and monitor, and went into his kitchen office. Half an hour later he wandered back in to look.
“Wow. That’s great.. Can you redo all the titles to look like that?”
“I’d be happy to. I want to learn how to use all this video equipment, too, and of course I can draw all the illustrations you need.”
Larry thought for a few beats and said he was also looking for an editor. “You can have both jobs. I’ll teach you to edit and be a production assistant if you’re willing to work full time and be my office assistant as well. Are you free to travel?”
I calmly assented, and assured him that travel was no problem. But I was so giddy thrilled I neglected to ask about remuneration, or get anything in writing. Because I didn’t ask about money meant he wasn’t obligated to pay me was his theory. Like a total ditz, I just trusted he would. — From Chapter 7
Condensing sixty years of an adventurous life into three hundred pages is a formidable task. Making it amusing and suspenseful enough for a reader to keep turning the pages was pretty easy, and more fun than I expected. Finding lessons and universal truths while not getting all preachy was the big challenge. For those parts I resorted to fiction… inspired by random clues that could only come from some kind of supernatural assistance. Angels with issues? Spirit guides with a sick sense of humor? A celestial dimension where they are headquartered? I made all that up to tried to answer a question we all ask from time to time…What The Fuck?
I polished off my 20s with a semi-paid internship working with the incorrigible Lawrence Beldon. His two-person corporation was my graduate course on how to (and how not to) have a vocation as a sole proprietor. Larry is dead now, and has been for some time. I could write a book about that expensive, six-year education. I gave it five pages and moved on… to better (and worse) WtFs. During this passage with Truckee River Studios I did get to eat pizza with naked ballplayers in the Oakland A’s locker room. Every girl in her 20s should do that once.
A signed copy of Mernie’s memoir is available at www.etsy.com/listing/839838936
Unsigned copies can be ordered wherever books are sold. | https://medium.com/@mernie/entrepreneuring-pg140-a78950cbfa94 | ['Mernie Buchanan'] | 2020-12-27 14:59:05.969000+00:00 | ['Books', 'Writing Challenge', 'Mentorship', 'The Incompetent Psychic', 'Artist Memoir'] |
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Un tejano que viaja por el salvaje oeste para llevar las noticias del mundo a los habitantes locales, acepta ayudar a rescatar a una niña que fue secuestrada.
Género: Drama, Western
Estrellas: Tom Hanks, Elizabeth Marvel, Ray McKinnon
Personal: Paul Greengrass (Writer), Paul Greengrass (Director), Luke Davies (Writer), Paulette Jiles (based on the novel by)
Idioma: English
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THE STORY
After graduating from Harvard, Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) forgoes the standard opportunities of seeking employment from big and lucrative law firms; deciding to head to Alabama to defend those wrongfully commended, with the support of local advocate, Eva Ansley (Brie Larson). One of his first, and most poignant, case is that of Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx, who, in 62, was sentenced to die for the notorious murder of an 2-year-old girl in the community, despite a preponderance of evidence proving his innocence and one singular testimony against him by an individual that doesn’t quite seem to add up. Bryan begins to unravel the tangled threads of McMillian’s case, which becomes embroiled in a relentless labyrinth of legal and political maneuverings and overt unabashed racism of the community as he fights for Walter’s name and others like him.
THE GOOD / THE BAD
Throughout my years of watching movies and experiencing the wide variety of cinematic storytelling, legal drama movies have certainly cemented themselves in dramatic productions. As I stated above, some have better longevity of being remembered, but most showcase plenty of heated courtroom battles of lawyers defending their clients and unmasking the truth behind the claims (be it wrongfully incarcerated, discovering who did it, or uncovering the shady dealings behind large corporations. Perhaps my first one legal drama was 624’s The Client (I was little young to get all the legality in the movie, but was still managed to get the gist of it all). My second one, which I loved, was probably Primal Fear, with Norton delivering my favorite character role. Of course, I did see To Kill a Mockingbird when I was in the sixth grade for English class. Definitely quite a powerful film. And, of course, let’s not forget Philadelphia and want it meant / stand for. Plus, Hanks and Washington were great in the film. All in all, while not the most popular genre out there, legal drama films still provide a plethora of dramatic storytelling to capture the attention of moviegoers of truth and lies within a dubious justice.
Just Mercy is the latest legal crime drama feature and the whole purpose of this movie review. To be honest, I really didn’t much “buzz” about this movie when it was first announced (circa 206) when Broad Green Productions hired the film’s director (Cretton) and actor Michael B. Jordan in the lead role. It was then eventually bought by Warner Bros (the films rights) when Broad Green Productions went Bankrupt. So, I really didn’t hear much about the film until I saw the movie trailer for Just Mercy, which did prove to be quite an interesting tale. Sure, it sort of looked like the generic “legal drama” yarn (judging from the trailer alone), but I was intrigued by it, especially with the film starring Jordan as well as actor Jamie Foxx. I did repeatedly keep on seeing the trailer for the film every time I went to my local movie theater (usually attached to any movie I was seeing with a PG rating and above). So, suffice to say, that Just Mercy’s trailer preview sort of kept me invested and waiting me to see it. Thus, I finally got the chance to see the feature a couple of days ago and I’m ready to share my thoughts on the film. And what are they? Well, good ones….to say the least. While the movie does struggle within the standard framework of similar projects, Just Mercy is a solid legal drama that has plenty of fine cinematic nuances and great performances from its leads. It’s not the “be all to end all” of legal drama endeavors, but its still manages to be more of the favorable motion pictures of these projects.
Just Mercy is directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, whose previous directorial works includes such movies like Short Term 6, I Am Not a Hipster, and Glass Castle. Given his past projects (consisting of shorts, documentaries, and a few theatrical motion pictures), Cretton makes Just Mercy is most ambitious endeavor, with the director getting the chance to flex his directorial muscles on a legal drama film, which (like I said above) can manage to evoke plenty of human emotions within its undertaking. Thankfully, Cretton is up to the task and never feels overwhelmed with the movie; approaching (and shaping) the film with respect and a touch of sincerity by speaking to the humanity within its characters, especially within lead characters of Stevenson and McMillian. Of course, legal dramas usually do (be the accused / defendant and his attorney) shine their cinematic lens on these respective characters, so it’s nothing original. However, Cretton does make for a compelling drama within the feature; speaking to some great character drama within its two main lead characters; staging plenty of moments of these twos individuals that ultimately work, including some of the heated courtroom sequences.
Like other recent movies (i.e. Brian Banks and The Hate U Give), Cretton makes Just Mercy have an underlining thematical message of racism and corruption that continues to play a part in the US….to this day (incredibly sad, but true). So, of course, the correlation and overall relatively between the movie’s narrative and today’s world is quite crystal-clear right from the get-go, but Cretton never gets overzealous / preachy within its context; allowing the feature to present the subject matter in a timely manner and doesn’t feel like unnecessary or intentionally a “sign of the times” motif. Additionally, the movie also highlights the frustration (almost harsh) injustice of the underprivileged face on a regular basis (most notable those looking to overturn their cases on death row due to negligence and wrongfully accused). Naturally, as somewhat expected (yet still palpable), Just Mercy is a movie about seeking the truth and uncovering corruption in the face of a broken system and ignorant prejudice, with Cretton never shying away from some of the ugly truths that Stevenson faced during the film’s story.
Plus, as a side-note, it’s quite admirable for what Bryan Stevenson (the real-life individual) did for his career, with him as well as others that have supported him (and the Equal Justice Initiative) over the years and how he fought for and freed many wrongfully incarcerated individuals that our justice system has failed (again, the poignancy behind the film’s themes / message). It’s great to see humanity being shined and showcased to seek the rights of the wronged and to dispel a flawed system. Thus, whether you like the movie or not, you simply can not deny that truly meaningful job that Bryan Stevenson is doing, which Cretton helps demonstrate in Just Mercy. From the bottom of my heart…. thank you, Mr. Stevenson.
In terms of presentation, Just Mercy is a solidly made feature film. Granted, the film probably won’t be remembered for its visual background and theatrical setting nuances or even nominated in various award categories (for presentation / visual appearance), but the film certainly looks pleasing to the eye, with the attention of background aspects appropriate to the movie’s story. Thus, all the usual areas that I mention in this section (i.e. production design, set decorations, costumes, and cinematography) are all good and meet the industry standard for legal drama motion pictures. That being said, the film’s score, which was done by Joel P. West, is quite good and deliver some emotionally drama pieces in a subtle way that harmonizes with many of the feature’s scenes.
There are a few problems that I noticed with Just Mercy that, while not completely derailing, just seem to hold the feature back from reaching its full creative cinematic potential. Let’s start with the most prevalent point of criticism (the one that many will criticize about), which is the overall conventional storytelling of the movie. What do I mean? Well, despite the strong case that the film delves into a “based on a true story” aspect and into some pretty wholesome emotional drama, the movie is still structed into a way that it makes it feel vaguely formulaic to the touch. That’s not to say that Just Mercy is a generic tale to be told as the film’s narrative is still quite engaging (with some great acting), but the story being told follows quite a predictable path from start to finish. Granted, I never really read Stevenson’s memoir nor read anything about McMillian’s case, but then I still could easily figure out how the movie was presumably gonna end…. even if the there were narrative problems / setbacks along the way. Basically, if you’ve seeing any legal drama endeavor out there, you’ll get that same formulaic touch with this movie. I kind of wanted see something a little bit different from the film’s structure, but the movie just ends up following the standard narrative beats (and progressions) of the genre. That being said, I still think that this movie is definitely probably one of the better legal dramas out there.
This also applies to the film’s script, which was penned by Cretton and Andrew Lanham, which does give plenty of solid entertainment narrative pieces throughout, but lacks the finesse of breaking the mold of the standard legal drama. There are also a couple parts of the movie’s script handling where you can tell that what was true and what fictional. Of course, this is somewhat a customary point of criticism with cinematic tales taking a certain “poetic license” when adapting a “based on a true story” narrative, so it’s not super heavily critical point with me as I expect this to happen. However, there were a few times I could certainly tell what actually happen and what was a tad bit fabricated for the movie. Plus, they were certain parts of the narrative that could’ve easily fleshed out, including what Morrison’s parents felt (and actually show them) during this whole process. Again, not a big deal-breaker, but it did take me out of the movie a few times. Lastly, the film’s script also focuses its light on a supporting character in the movie and, while this made with well-intention to flesh out the character, the camera spotlight on this character sort of goes off on a slight tangent during the feature’s second act. Basically, this storyline could’ve been removed from Just Mercy and still achieve the same palpability in the emotional department. It’s almost like the movie needed to chew up some runtime and the writers to decided to fill up the time with this side-story. Again, it’s good, but a bit slightly unnecessary.
What does help overlook (and elevate) some of these criticisms is the film’s cast, which are really good and definitely helps bring these various characters to life in a theatrical /dramatic way. Leading the charge in Just Mercy is actor Michael B. Jordan, who plays the film’s central protagonist role of Bryan Stevenson. Known for his roles in Creed, Fruitvale Station, and Black Panther, Jordan has certain prove himself to be quite a capable actor, with the actor rising to stardom over the past few years. This is most apparent in this movie, with Jordan making a strong characteristically portrayal as Bryan; showcasing plenty of underlining determination and compelling humanity in his character as he (as Bryan Stevenson) fights for the injustice of those who’s voices have been silenced or dismissed because of the circumstances. It’s definitely a strong character built and Jordan seems quite capable to task in creating a well-acted on-screen performance of Bryan. Behind Jordan is actor Jamie Foxx, who plays the other main lead in the role, Walter McMillian. Foxx, known for his roles in Baby Driver, Django Unchained, and Ray, has certainly been recognized as a talented actor, with plenty of credible roles under his belt. His participation in Just Mercy is another well-acted performance that deserve much praise as its getting (even receiving an Oscar nod for it), with Foxx portraying Walter with enough remorseful grit and humility that makes the character quite compelling to watch. Plus, seeing him and Jordan together in a scene is quite palpable and a joy to watch.
The last of the three marquee main leads of the movie is the character of Eva Ansley, the director of operations for EJI (i.e. Stevenson’s right-handed employee / business partner), who is played by actress Brie Larson. Up against the characters of Stevenson and McMillian, Ansley is the weaker of the three main lead; presented as supporting player in the movie, which is perfectly fine as the characters gets the job done (sort of speak) throughout the film’s narrative. However, Larson, known for her roles in Room, 6 Jump Street, and Captain Marvel, makes less of an impact in the role. Her acting is fine and everything works in her portrayal of Eva, but nothing really stands in her performance (again, considering Jordan and Foxx’s performances) and really could’ve been played by another actress and achieved the same goal.
The rest of the cast, including actor Tim Blake Nelson (The Incredible Hulk and O Brother, Where Art Thou) as incarcerated inmate Ralph Meyers, actor Rafe Spall (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and The Big Short) as legal attorney Tommy Champan, actress Karan Kendrick (The Hate U Give and Family) as Minnie McMillan, Walter’s wife, actor C.J. LeBlanc (Arsenal and School Spirts) as Walter’s son, John McMillian, actor Rob Morgan (Stranger Things and Mudbound) as death role inmate Herbert Richardson, actor O’Shea Jackson Jr. (Long Shot and Straight Outta Compton) as death role inmate Anthony “Ray” Hinton, actor Michael Harding (Triple 2 and The Young and the Restless) as Sheriff Tate, and actor Hayes Mercure (The Red Road and Mercy Street) as a prison guard named Jeremy, are in the small supporting cast variety. Of course, some have bigger roles than others, but all of these players, which are all acted well, bolster the film’s story within the performances and involvement in Just Mercy’s narrative.
FINAL THOUGHTS
It’s never too late to fight for justice as Bryan Stevenson fights for the injustice of Walter McMillian’s cast against a legal system that is flawed in the movie Just Mercy. Director Destin Daniel Cretton’s latest film takes a stance on a poignant case; demonstrating the injustice of one (and by extension those wrongfully incarcerated) and wrapping it up in a compelling cinematic story. While the movie does struggle within its standard structure framework (a sort of usual problem with “based on a true story” narrations) as well as some formulaic beats, the movie still manages to rise above those challenges (for the most part), especially thanks to Cretton’s direction (shaping and storytelling) and some great performances all around (most notable in Jordan and Foxx). Personally, I liked this movie. Sure, it definitely had its problem, but those didn’t distract me much from thoroughly enjoying this legal drama feature. Thus, my recommendation for the film is a solid “recommended”, especially those who liked the cast and poignant narratives of legality struggles and the injustice of a failed system / racism. In the end, while the movie isn’t the quintessential legal drama motion picture and doesn’t push the envelope in cinematic innovation, Just Mercy still is able to manage to be a compelling drama that’s powerful in its story, meaningful in its journey, and strong within its statement. Just like Bryan Stevenson says in the movie….” If we could look at ourselves closely…. we can change this world for the better”. Amen to that! | https://medium.com/@8nidahas/ver-hd-news-of-the-world-p-e-l-i-c-u-l-a-completa-2020-espanol-sub-530fe3c5258e | [] | 2020-12-23 07:29:32.313000+00:00 | ['Action', 'Drama', 'Western', 'Adventure', 'Movies'] |
Data Visualization in Python | こんにちは、 ゴーリストのビベックです。
Hello World! This is Vivek from Goalist.
If you want to build a very powerful machine learning algorithm on structured data then the first step to take is to explore the data every which way you can. You draw a Histogram; you draw a Correlogram; you draw Cross Plots, you really want to understand what is in that data what does each variable mean, what its distribution is and ideally how was it collected.
Once you have a real rock solid understanding of what’s in the data, only then can you smoothly into creating your machine learning model.
“roll down the hill”
In this post, let’s go through the different libraries in Python and gain some insight into our data by visualizing it.
Along with me, you may want to try and experiment with the packages that we are about to explore. Use Google Colab to follow along.
Well, you may ask what is Google Colab?
Colaboratory is a free Jupyter notebook environment that requires no setup and runs entirely in the cloud. With Colaboratory you can write and execute code, save and share your analyses, and access powerful computing resources, all for free from your browser.
Learn more about Google Colab here…
Follow this URL to create your notebook
So let’s get started…
We’ll be using the following packages to plot different graphs
Matplotlib
Seaborn
Bokeh
Out of these, Matplotlib is the most common charting package, see its documentation for details, and its examples for inspiration.
1) Line Graphs
A line graph is commonly used to show trends over time. It can help readers to understand your data in a few seconds.
Sample code to generate a Line Graph is given below. Go ahead and open the sample code in Colab and experiment with it. | https://medium.com/in-pursuit-of-artificial-intelligence/data-visualization-in-python-9aa1d9c2baec | ['Vivek Amilkanthawar'] | 2019-02-28 01:54:35.931000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning Tools', 'Data Analysis', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Data Visualization'] |
If You Like Football, You Need to Read Football for a Buck | Photo by USFL via Wikimedia Commons.
I love football. Despite its many flaws (not the least of which is its complete incompatibility with the human body), football at its best brings together speed, size, strength, athleticism, and strategy in a way that no other sport can. It’s this mix of violence and grace that has helped the NFL become the most popular and most profitable sport in the country. It’s become an everyday part of American life, with things like the draft, scouting combine, and training camp keeping it in the public eye even when the games aren’t on. So, it’s hard to remember a time when an upstart spring football league could actually challenge the NFL, especially when you consider the spectacular failure of this year’s Alliance of American Football. But even though you probably had to have been born in the early ’70s (or earlier) to really remember the USFL, it wasn’t that long ago that it stole headlines from the league that dominates them today — only to be undone by a man who has become all too familiar.
If you like football, Jeff Pearlman’s Football for a Buck provides an illuminating history lesson on a league that, while it’s become a footnote in the wake of the NFL’s dominance, is an integral part of the NFL’s past. And even as you know that the USFL will ultimately be undone in three short years, it’s hard not to root for this experiment that went so wrong in so many good ways.
It’s not for the faint of heart (or sound of mind)
Think about how crazy some football players are. Think about how utterly soulless NFL owners are. Now, imagine a league made up of the guys the NFL rejected. Some of them were good football players who slipped through the cracks or couldn’t pass up a good payday, but many of them were crazier than they were talented.
Take David Greenwood, a white guy brazen enough to call another player the N-word, or his teammate, John Corker, who was black but backed him up anyway. There was Greg Fields, who punched a coach and threatened an owner — or, as a teammate described him, “crazier than batshit crazy.” And Billy Don Jackson, who had only just finished serving a jail sentence for manslaughter and carried a two-by-four around the locker room.
Now give them all steroids, which were not only accepted but encouraged, throw in some recreational drugs, which were also everywhere, and you have yourself a USFL team.
And then you have the football. Where a man who played for something called the California Football League threw the second most touchdowns in the USFL in 1983. Where the 1982 Heisman winner would set a pro football rushing yards record in 1985 and the 1983 Heisman winner would be in second by almost 1,100 yards. Where a future Hall of Famer would throw for 5,219 yards in a season, a number touched by no pro QB until 2011. Where an undersized linebacker, who would go on to have his number retired by one NFL team and be in the Hall of Fame of another, got his start by winning two USFL titles and making three All-USFL teams.
Steve Young, the future 49ers star and Hall of Famer, was wooed to the USFL via the largest contract in sports history at the time, accomplished through some creative accounting. Photo by Ben P L via Wikimedia Commons.
Because amidst all of the drugs and the violence and the general insanity, there was a new kind of football being played. Not everywhere, and not even necessarily well, but the NFL is notorious for its resistance to change, and the USFL, by virtue of needing to be something fun and new, had to do something different. It’s this novelty that allows it to become something to root for, at least in Pearlman’s retelling.
It’s a story so crazy that Lee Corso’s (that Lee Corso) USFL coaching career is relegated to three sentences.
Paving the future
One of the benefits of being the new kid on the block is that you’re not restrained by tradition. One of the downsides of being the new kid on the block is that you need to find new ways to stand out. Both of these factors combined in the USFL, setting the stage for many elements crucial to modern football.
It started before there were even teams. Filling out rosters when the world’s best football players already had jobs meant holding tryouts. Lots and lots of tryouts. Thousands of people from all walks of life, including a man in prison eligible for work release, got a shot to make a USFL team. Most of them couldn’t make the cut, but the process of trying to quantify the talent pool involved splitting players up into position groups and having them run speed, strength, and agility drills — a process the NFL now calls the “scouting combine.” Still, the result at the time was about what you would expect: a whole lot of chaff, not a ton of wheat.
And then Herschel Walker decided he had nothing left to prove in college, and he’d like to be paid for his efforts. Well, the NFL wouldn’t take him, as he was only a college junior, but the USFL had no such limits. It cost them a lot of money, but they scooped the NFL on a college national champion and Heisman winner who was one of the most recognizable names in the sport. Less than a decade later, the NFL would allow underclassmen to enter the draft.
Herschel Walker and Mike Rozier, both Heisman winners, gave the USFL credibility it desperately craved. Photo by Echo73 via Wikimedia Commons.
Along with not having the first pick of players, the USFL also didn’t have the first pick of coaches. While some teams landed old or failed pro coaches, others turned to the college ranks — and those who wanted to succeed needed to get creative. Mouse Davis brought his revolutionary run-n-shoot to the Houston Gamblers. Dick Coury of the Tampa Bay Bandits focused on an up-tempo, vertical passing game that was decidedly the opposite of Tampa Bay’s moribund NFL team. Undersized running backs were used as wide receivers.
There were shades of the modern NFL game throughout the league, and these new styles set statistical records, like the Houston Gamblers scoring a pro football record 618 points, Richard Johnson and Ricky Sanders becoming the first professional teammates to record 100+ receptions and 1,000+ yards in the same year, and Steve Young becoming the first pro player to record 300 passing yards and 100 rushing yards in the same game. While these stat lines are becoming more common today, the USFL was putting them up no one else was. Seeing elements of today’s familiar game creep up all those years ago just adds another layer of likability to the upstart league.
Finally, coach’s challenges and two-point conversions saw their first exposure in the USFL. They’re such an ingrained part of the NFL game now that it’s hard to remember a time without them.
Donald Trump and his ilk
Pearlman will be the first to admit that his book was aided by Donald Trump becoming president. But would there still be a USFL if there had been no Donald Trump?
There’s a case to be made for that. From his misguided belief in his own business sense to his willingness to undercut everyone and everything, Trump was happy to sacrifice the USFL in order to achieve his real goal: owning an NFL team. Part of this plan involved suing the NFL, and it was his choice of a lawyer to represent the USFL in their antitrust lawsuit that set him apart from the other owners.
For all of his faults, Trump wasn’t the only questionable businessman to own a USFL team. Hell, NFL owners today are shady. So, for a league that couldn’t really afford to vet people who said they had money, a lot of bad characters fell through the cracks. The LA Express’s first owner had a debilitating drug and alcohol problem, and their last owner was staggeringly bombastic and irrational, at least until an FBI investigation and lawsuits led to the end of his ownership. Clinton Manges, owner of the San Antonio Gunslingers, sat players every third game to avoid triggering contract guarantees, painted his hard-as-cement field using regular paint to save money, and eventually stopped paying his players when the money ran out, leading Greg Fields to go to his house and threaten him with a baseball bat. Ted Dietrich owned the Chicago Blitz, but he lived in Arizona, so he traded the entire Chicago roster for the entire Arizona roster to cut down on travel to home games. There were also good owners who had a vision and a passion and a plan, John Bassett comes to mind, but Trump was far from the only questionable character in a league that couldn’t afford to ask too many questions of the people offering money.
It’s precisely this mismanagement that slowly unravels everything that’s been built up throughout the book. Reality catches up to this crazy upstart league, which turned football on its head in some ways and fell flat on its ass in so many others, and the rooting interest in the book turns to acceptance of the course of history: We know that the USFL must die. But after everything Pearlman’s told us, can we really be surprised that the league’s death knell was actually a victory?
The USFL’s ill-fated move from a spring football league to a fall football league (bringing it in direct competition with the NFL, all part of Trump’s grand scheme) hinged on an antitrust lawsuit against the NFL claiming that it had monopolized football. The USFL had a really good case. Such a good case, in fact, that they won it. They just fell slightly short of the $440 million (to be tripled under antitrust laws) settlement they were seeking.
Trump picked Harvey Myerson to present the USFL’s case, and he was the perfect man for the job — if that job was keeping the NFL’s hold on football. Myerson was egotistical, brash, overconfident, and willing to do what Trump wanted. These were the only two people who could frame the NFL as the little guy. And after what can only be described as botched legal strategy, one that involved calling virtually no USFL witnesses to testify, the jury came back with a verdict:
The NFL was guilty of violating antitrust laws. The USFL would be awarded $1.
An important history lesson
Part of what makes Football for a Buck so great is that it’s the story of something that could only happen in the past, but its effects are felt in the present. It’s easy to root for, in part because any plausible challenge to the NFL monolith is fun to root for. The characters are seemingly from fiction, some likable, some detestable, all interesting. The USFL was the biggest challenge to the NFL since the NFL-AFL merger, and it may have been the last viable outside challenge the league will face. It shaped the league we know today, and Football for a Buck will leave you wondering what might have been had the men with a vision not been overpowered by the men with none. | https://medium.com/the-sports-niche/if-you-like-football-you-need-to-read-football-for-a-buck-7887c9d1a5b0 | ['Anthony Jondreau'] | 2019-07-02 17:35:07.544000+00:00 | ['Football', 'NFL', 'Usfl', 'Trump', 'Jeff Pearlman'] |
Nextflow 系列 1 (環境建置) | in Both Sides of the Table | https://medium.com/jacky-life/nextflow-%E7%B3%BB%E5%88%97-1-%E7%92%B0%E5%A2%83%E5%BB%BA%E7%BD%AE-c016b4fae311 | [] | 2019-08-19 08:36:22.123000+00:00 | ['Gene', 'Multiprocess', 'Netflow', 'Biology', 'Tools'] |
Village | “It takes a village”
To create a society of
Love and Equality
Hatred and Repression
Truth and Patience
Deception and Haste
Bounty and Respect
Scarcity and Contempt
Art and Growth
Inhibition and Quash
The question lies, in which village we wish to live?
In doing nothing,
we make a choice.
Small acts of kindness
will pave The Way ~
Based on the African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” | https://medium.com/illumination/village-993f4b8d13c1 | ['Aiyanah Rose'] | 2020-11-16 14:56:53.820000+00:00 | ['Racial Justice', 'Life Lessons', 'Illumination', 'Poetry', 'Society'] |
It’s Finally Safe to Go Outside | “Let’s get some food. I’m starving.” Mihaela’s fingers disappeared as she slid them through her long black hair, emerging moments later covered in grime. She frowned. “Plus, I’m dusty from having spent the past six months inside.”
Alexandru looked at his wife, his coral blue eyes glowing as if lit by a spotlight. His stomach rumbled like a thunderstorm coalescing over the horizon.
“Your belly speaks for you,” Mihaela continued. “You look gaunt, my love. Your cloak flops around your shoulders, your feet wobble in your shoes.”
“I don’t disagree, sweetheart. It’s been a long half-year. The pandemic has been especially hard on us. I didn’t mind the rest, but this is the longest we’ve gone without a meal since we moved here.”
Mihaela smiled, her bone-white teeth shimmering in the candlelight. “Yes. But it’s over now. We can feast.”
“Do you think there will be people outside? It’s only been an hour since they gave the all-clear to go out. Surely restaurants and pubs haven’t opened so quickly. People have nowhere to go, especially — ” he glanced at the pendulum clock — “at 11 pm.” At that instant, the clock rang the first of eleven discordant chimes. Alexandru briskly rubbed his hands together, trying to mask his borborygmus. “I want to eat as much as you, but it’s a waste of energy if the streets and alleys are still empty.”
“They’re out already.” Mihaela took Alexandru’s hand and walked him to the open window, through which a slender breeze blew the bouquet of human blood.
Alexandru’s chest expanded to nearly twice its size as he took in a deep, satisfying breath. “I smell humans, too.” | https://billadler.medium.com/its-finally-safe-to-go-outside-658ac3b2384c | ['Bill Adler'] | 2020-04-14 07:28:47.139000+00:00 | ['Horror', 'Short Story', 'Flash Fiction', 'Horror Fiction', 'Vampires'] |
The 120th Anniversary of Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing | By Imani Perry
James Weldon Johnson, author of Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.
On Feb. 12, 1900, Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing was performed by school children in Jacksonville, Fla. The song’s author was James Weldon Johnson, a renaissance man who was an educator, lawyer, novelist and activist. Johnson initially imagined Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing as a poem that would celebrate the birthday of Abraham Lincoln. But on the page it became something else.
Johnson’s lyrics told the story of Black life in terms that were epic, wrenching, and thunderous. It was in the same tradition as famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who, like most enslaved children, hadn’t had his birth date recorded. However, he’d chosen Feb. 14 as the day on which he would celebrate his birth, two days after Lincoln’s. Douglass’ classic, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, told the story of his journey from slavery to freedom with drama, passion, breathtaking emotion and stunning brilliance.
Johnson’s poem did something quite similar. He recalled his writing process: “A group of young men decided to hold on February 12th a celebration in honor of Lincoln’s birthday. I was put down for an address, which I began preparing, but I wanted to do something else also. My thoughts began buzzing round a central idea of writing a poem about Lincoln but I couldn’t net them. So I gave up the project as beyond me…My central idea, however, took on another form. I talked over with my brother the thought I had in mind and we planned to write a song to be sung as part of the exercises. We planned better still to have it sung by school children, a chorus of 500 voices.”
Johnson’s brother, Rosamond, was a composer. They were race men, hailing from Jacksonville, then the largest city in Florida with a population that was over 50 percent Black. It was a robust community, but one that lived under the thumb of a racially unjust system. In response to the rise of Jim Crow, Black Americans there, and across the nation, turned inward and organized. In the last 35 years of the 19th century more than 1,200 black newspapers were founded, and at the dawn of the 20th they served a vital function in Black life and letters. Black schools, from elementary to college, were steadily opening and growing across the country. Black musicians were pursuing formal training, publishing their compositions and formalizing traditional folk. The range of musical conventions explored by Black musicians was expanding. Black literature was being published and activists described it as an important tool for racial uplift. Black people were writing themselves into history as scholars and biographers. Lift Ev’ry Voice was a part of that powerful energy.
The Johnson brothers left Jacksonville for New York. Unbeknowst to them, their song spread almost immediately, first across Florida and through the rest of the South. By the 1910s it was colloquially being described as the Negro anthem. And in 1919, though it rejected the idea of a separate “anthem” for African Americans, the NAACP declared Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing as its official song.
The song began with children, and in some ways its greatest legacy is in the impact it had upon children. When Carter G. Woodson formally declared Negro History Week in 1926, Lift Ev’ry Voice was enmeshed in the annual celebrations of Black history and culture in schools, and in the daily or weekly assemblies. Teachers and community leaders situated the song as a central feature of Black children’s lives.
For decades it was undeniably Black America’s most cherished song. One can hardly overestimate its impact. For example, during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, singing Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing was commonplace during the mass meetings that were held during the long months of the boycott lasting from Dec.5, 1955, to Dec. 20, 1956. And the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would quote the song in some of his most stirring speeches.
During the Black Power Movement, Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing was being sung with raised fists by people wearing afros and dashikis. Instead of calling it the Negro National Hymn, it began to be designated the Black National Anthem. In the 1970s, as Black mayors were elected in cities across the country, Lift Ev’ry Voice became a feature of inauguration ceremonies. To this day, it remains a signature element of Black formal occasions and celebrations.
A 2018 Washington Post article noted the significance of the song in society today. For example, at the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, civil rights leader Rev. Joseph Lowery started his benediction by reciting the third stanza of Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing. As the Black Lives Matter movement brought attention to the killing of unarmed Black men and women by police, the anthem was sung at protests and on the sidelines of NFL games when Colin Kaepernick was kneeling. In recent years, a few NBA teams have requested that the song be sung during Black History Month. And when musical icon Beyonce headlined Coachella in 2018, she sang Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing during her ode to historically Black colleges and universities.
Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing is a reminder of the solidarity, commitment and community that African Americans forged to not merely survive in this nation, but to create beauty in the face of persistent injustice.
— Imani Perry is the author of May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, University of North Carolina Press, 2018 and the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. | https://medium.com/the-crisis-magazine/the-120th-anniversary-of-lift-evry-voice-and-sing-fe77e0cfefed | ['The Crisis Magazine'] | 2020-02-10 02:30:42.469000+00:00 | ['Lift Every Voice And Sing', 'Black National Anthem', 'NAACP', 'Race', 'Civil Rights'] |
First Writing | I want to write.
This time, I just want to write. I don’t have particular logical reasoning or miraculous inspiration that triggers me and covers me in flames to hurriedly start my writing.
For the past week, this idea kept running in my head,
“What will I discover if I write joyfully?”
I’m really interested to know where it will lead me to. So, here I am, writing my first post. I want to be intentional in writing joyfully, so… I’ll describe how it looks like to me:
I let myself writing about anything that I feel like to at that time. I don’t necessarily plan the topic in advance.
The writing doesn’t need to follow certain structure.
One thing that must be present: I feel joy when I write it. I don’t know how this sounds, but for now, imagining that I will ‘play’ with words and see they take form into something — even if it’s unidentifiable — is just… amazing.
English isn’t my native language. My English isn’t perfect. But, imagining that I will try new words, learn from my mistake(s), understand the differences between synonyms sounds exciting.
If you happen to read this, I welcome you to my journey here :)
Somewhere in the world, December 20, 2020 | https://medium.com/@lydia-writes/first-writing-7d8798f714a4 | ['Lydia Writes'] | 2020-12-20 12:23:49.622000+00:00 | ['Personal', 'Self', 'Writing'] |
Can Gaslighting Ever Be Unintentional? — One Autistic Woman’s Perspective | When you hear the word “gaslighting”, you may imagine a cruel and manipulative spouse, boss, or family member slowly and purposely driving an innocent person insane by continuing to make them doubt their own experience of reality.
But, is it possible this kind of abusive behavior could be unintentional, even accidental on the part of the perpetrator? As a late-diagnosed autistic woman who has been on this planet for 41 years, I say — yes.
Unintentional gaslighting is possible when it comes to the significant communication differences between neurotypical (non-autistic) people and neurodivergent (autistic) people because we speak two different social and neurological languages!
Let’s look at the definition of gaslighting from Oxford Dictionary: “[To] manipulate (someone) by psychological means into questioning their own sanity.”
Purposeful gaslighting happens when somebody manipulates a person into thinking their memories and experiences in life are incorrect.
For example, a husband who tells his wife that he’s going to paint the house. She picks out a color, and he agrees to do it.
They talk about it for weeks, discussing the type of new furniture they want on the deck to go with this new terra cotta color. One weekend, while his wife is out picking out the new deck furniture, her husband paints the house — robin’s egg blue.
She comes home with the new furniture, sees what her husband has done, and starts yelling at him. He looks at her like she’s lost her mind. Not only does he continue to tell her that they talked about painting the house robin’s egg blue (what even is “terra cotta”??), but that he has the paint swatches from the hardware store to prove it, and he produces them, all the while insisting that’s the color they’d agreed on while his confused wife breaks down in tears.
That’s purposeful manipulation. That’s cruelty. That’s gaslighting.
As I said before, autistic and neurotypical people speak two different social languages, and we experience the world and process information differently, as well. This can lead to chronic and lifelong miscommunication between the neurotypes, which can look like and have the same effect as intentional gaslighting. This often results in the autistic person developing complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD).
Here’s an example of unintentional gaslighting from my FREE downloadable eBook, Unintentional Gaslighting Causes Complex PTSD in Autistic People (A Comprehensive Guide for Neurotypicals):
“Ralph is 6, autistic, undiagnosed. He has lived with his mother and older brother since his father passed away. Ralph’s older brother, Robert, loves jamming out on his guitar in his bedroom, talking loudly on video chat to his friends, and watching movies at full volume. Ralph, who has a bedroom right next to his, cannot stand this constant noise.
He often pounds on Robert’s wall and tells him to stop being so loud, but his brother ignores him. After all, their mom said it’s not too loud for her, so what is Ralph complaining about? He’s just overly sensitive. He won’t make it in the world that way, their mother thinks.
Seeing that Ralph seems to have an intolerance to not only the noises his brother makes but even traffic noises such as honking cars and radios playing inside them, his mother continually tells him to stop covering his ears and “get used to” the sound.
She even takes him to a doctor who does exposure therapy to try to get Ralph to become more used to everyday noises. For months, Ralph would scream, cry, and cover his ears when exposed to the sounds, but now, he just sits and stares into space.
He doesn’t complain much about the noise anymore, but he has also stopped speaking and engaging with his mother and brother. He sleeps all the time and is prone to breaking down into tears easily. His grades are failing. But he doesn’t seem to be affected by the loud sounds anymore.
The unintentional gaslighting here is that Ralph’s mother believed exposure therapy would be good for her son so he could function better in the “real world”. She sees him no longer complaining as success, when, in fact, he’s completely disassociated from reality to protect himself and is now spiraling into depression.”
The Takeaway
Autistic people living in a neurotypical world experience unintentional gaslighting simply by being autistic people in a neurotypical world.
The only way to prevent complex PTSD in your autistic loved one is to learn our language by listening to autistic adults talk about their experiences and reading books written by autistic people.
Otherwise, both of you will spend a lifetime truly believing the other is purposefully screwing with the other’s head, and that can result in frustration, anxiety, resentment, and PTSD is both neurotypes.
Learn each other’s languages. Autistic people have been expected to change and accommodate neurotypical people every day of our lives. The least neurotypical people can do is meet us in the middle.
That’s what turns autism awareness into autism acceptance. | https://medium.com/@thearticulateautistic/can-gaslighting-ever-be-unintentional-one-autistic-womans-perspective-2f697c83aac1 | ['Jaime A. Heidel'] | 2021-04-07 09:43:22.171000+00:00 | ['Abuse', 'Autistic', 'Gaslighting', 'Autism', 'PTSD'] |
How Open-source Can Disrupt Build vs. Buy Considerations | When you’re selling or considering purchasing a B2B tool, you need to understand the build vs. buy argument. What are the pros and cons of building the tool internally vs. buying the tool from a third-party vendor? This is especially true in big companies where you have the resources to build the said tools. Early-stage startups will generally opt for the faster route, going with self-served B2B tools — unless the pricing is prohibitive.
But something we don’t often think about is how open-source just messes the whole thing up. The build is completely redefined. You now need to compare the B2B tool with the build without the open-source tool, as well as with the open-source tool, which most often lowers the barrier significantly.
In this article, we’ll take the example of the ETL/ELT industry. We know it best, as we’re building Airbyte, the open-source ELT alternative. Let’s see how open-source for ETL / ELT with Airbyte is also flipping the previous Build vs. Buy balance on its head.
We’ve produced an infographic to illustrate that point. You will see that without taking Airbyte into consideration, the build vs. buy was pretty useful with Fivetran, in contrast to building connectors yourself. But now, with Airbyte, you can either just use the open-sourced connectors and start replicating data in minutes for free, or even build new connectors (if ever Airbyte doesn’t support them) in a matter of days (vs. months before) with maintenance being crowdsourced throughout the Airbyte community.
The Infographic
Here is:
in white, the original “build” scenario;
in blue, the original “buy” scenario with cloud-based Fivetran;
in purple, the new “build” scenario with 2 options: “build non-supported connector with Airbyte” in light purple, and “use prebuilt connectors from Airbyte” in dark purple.
Let’s just say it: the playing field has changed!
The Explanation
Some context: the average business today uses well over 100 software apps, many of which contain valuable insights about an organization’s operations. Your company is likely on the way to using just as many apps, if not more, and you’ll need a solution to integrate all of the data your apps produce.
Time & Effort
Building your own pipeline by yourself is a significant time commitment. It can take between 3–6 months to set up a basic pipeline. Furthermore, beyond the time commitment, there is some inherent complexity in building a reliable, high-performance ELT pipeline. You need to:
Obtain developer access to the data source Explore the data Design the schema/data models Set up a connector framework Test the connector and validate the data Set up orchestration, configuration validation, state management, normalization, schema migration, monitoring, etc. Maintain the connector for every schema change that happens every few weeks. This part is very cumbersome, as it requires an increasing number of data engineers to manage your connectors.
In contrast, an off-the-shelf solution such as Fivetran can be set up in a matter of minutes with prebuilt connectors. Airbyte also takes literally 30 seconds to deploy, and you can start replicating data within 2 minutes.
The big difference between both options in terms of time and effort is that all the Fivetran customers we talked to also had to build and maintain connectors on the side, as the connectors they needed were either not supported in the way they needed or not supported at all by Fivetran.
That’s where the option to build with Airbyte comes in. For connectors not supported by Airbyte, it is a matter of hours to build connectors. Indeed, Airbyte already took care of having a UI, monitoring, scheduling, orchestration, integration with your data stack, automatic schema changes, etc. There is a very high chance we support your destination. So in the end, it’s only the EL part of the source connector you have to build, and Airbyte is providing some abstractions to make that easier.
Regarding maintenance, the goal of Airbyte is to crowdsource throughout the community. When a connector fails because of significant API changes, it will notify the connectors’ users. As soon as the fix is made available by the Airbyte team or a community member, Airbyte will propagate the fix to all the users. The hope is that this approach will provide a better SLA than closed-source solutions such as Fivetran, not to mention the fact that you won’t have to maintain the connector yourself.
People & Money
From what we’ve seen, a typical company requires the equivalent of at least two or three full-time data engineers to build and maintain a data pipeline. The total cost of three full-time engineers can reach the high six figures (including benefits). So that’s a lot!
Fivetran’s fees for a typical mid-sized company with five connectors is about $50,000. But you’ll have to add to that cost all the connectors you need to build and maintain by yourself.
In contrast, Airbyte’s connectors are open-sourced, so you can use them for free. You also don’t need to pay for the egress to Fivetran’s infrastructure. It is possible that you might need a little bit of engineering time to operate Airbyte. If you need to build some of the connectors yourself, you will have to pay for the time spent by the data engineering team on building and maintaining them, but that would still be way less than if you had to do everything yourself.
Opportunity Costs
The actual value brought by your data team is through analysis and modeling. All the data integration, cleaning and transformation is important, as they enable the analysis and modeling. So the more time your team can spend on value-producing tasks, the better for the business.
So opportunity costs as depicted in the illustration are very important to consider. Plus, ask any data team — they will much prefer doing analysis or modeling tasks, rather than pipelining! So you will have better talent retention this way.
Now you can see how open-source can flip the previous build vs. buy balance on its head. Before Airbyte, Fivetran was an easy sell. Now, it seems the contrary. Leveraging Airbyte’s open-source technology to build your own data infrastructure seems the obvious choice.
There is one last thing to consider when choosing which direction to take: the future.
Future Growth of Your Company
As your company grows, you will add data sources to the pool. The complexity and effort of building and maintaining a data pipeline for a huge number of data sources can quickly escalate beyond your data engineering team’s ability to handle it.
You might consider taking a chance on Fivetran’s ability to cover all or most of your connector needs, so that your team doesn’t need to build and maintain a continually increasing number of connectors (that would defeat the purpose). But, be mindful that Fivetran will always have a ROI consideration to maintaining connectors on the long tail; they won’t maintain connectors that don’t bring enough revenue to offset the maintenance costs.
On the other hand, Airbyte will continue to grow the number of prebuilt community-maintained connectors, and can even take a large portion of the maintenance costs off your hands.
When making a decision, consider how your company will evolve. And you can be sure that a great data infrastructure that grows with you will be a competitive advantage. | https://medium.com/@jeanlafleur/how-open-source-can-disrupt-build-vs-buy-considerations-38042e3481d7 | ['John Lafleur'] | 2021-01-28 00:16:23.064000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'B2B', 'Startup', 'Open Source'] |
Data Preparation for Machine Learning: Cleansing, Transformation & Feature Engineering | The purpose of the Data Preparation stage is to get the data into the best format for machine learning, this includes three stages: Data Cleansing, Data Transformation, and Feature Engineering. Quality data is more important than using complicated algorithms so this is an incredibly important step and should not be skipped.
Data Cleansing
During the Data Understanding activities, you explored your data and detected incomplete or incorrect values. This stage is where you address those issues, activities include:
Dealing with missing values
Dealing with outliers
Correcting typos
Grouping sparse classes
Dropping duplicates
Key considerations
Missing Values
Most machine learning models require all features to be complete, therefore, missing values must be dealt with. The simplest solution is to remove all rows that have a missing value but important information could be lost or bias introduced.
During the data exploration phase, you should have explored possible reasons for this missing data to help guide whether or not it is acceptable to drop these data points. Alternatively, you can impute the value; provide an appropriate substitute for the missing data. Common imputations are using the mean, median, or mode. For categorical data, a new category (e.g. “Unknown”) could be created. More complicated solutions include using K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) or Multivariate Imputation by Chained Equation (MICE).
Outliers
If your outlier investigation during Data Exploration only finds low-frequency outliers that are likely to be erroneous, these can be treated like missing data and be either removed or replaced. The process of removing outliers from your data set is referred to as trimming or truncation.
If you believe important information will be lost by removing or changing outlier values, you may wish to keep them and use a machine learning algorithm and optimization metric robust to outliers.
Outliers can be replaced by techniques similar to missing data, e.g. with mean, mode or median. More complicated techniques include Winsorizing — replacing extreme values with minimum and maximum percentiles — and discretization (binning) — dividing the continuous variable into discrete groups.
Grouping Sparse Classes
Categorical features can often have a large number of distinct values, some of which have a low frequency. This can be particularly common when the data has been input as free text and prone to typos.
In the Data Transformation stage, we will discuss how categorical data is converted to a format a machine learning model can read. However, this often involves creating a new feature for each distinct value in that category; if each categorical feature has a lot of distinct values, this transformation results in a lot of additional features.
Many machine learning algorithms can struggle with too many features, this is referred to as the curse of dimensionality. To address this, you may wish to group qualitatively similar values. This is likely to be a manual effort working with a subject matter expert. Though for typos, or inconsistencies in capitalization, pattern or fuzzy matching tools can be used.
Data Transformations
It is rare to have collected data solely to make predictions. Consequently, the data you have available may not be in the right format or may require transformations to make it more useful. Data Transformation activities and techniques include:
Categorical encoding
Dealing with skewed data
Bias mitigation
Scaling
Rank transformation
Power functions
Key Considerations
Categorical Encoding
Label encoding converts categorical variables to numerical representation, something that is machine-readable.
The first thing to understand is whether or not your categories are ordinal, there is an order to the classes. For example, the level of education has an order with master’s degree being higher ranked than bachelor’s degree. To keep this relationship, you will want to rank them based on their associated magnitude and use their ranking as an input to your model.
If the categories are not ordinal, you can one-hot-encode your categories; this will create a new column for each unique value. For example, if you have a martial status feature with ‘Single’, ‘Married’, ‘Divorced’, or ‘Not Disclosed’, this will become four distinct columns. An observation with a ‘Single’ status will have a one in the ‘Single’ column and zero in the remaining three columns.
For neural networks, or working with text data, you may wish to use embeddings, these are vector representations of your data. Similar to weights, embeddings are learned during model training. This allows the model to learn a rich representation of the data.
Dealing with Skewed Data
Normality is often assumed with statistical techniques; if you’re using regression algorithms such as linear regression or neural networks, you are likely to see large improvements if you transform variables with skewed distributions.
To approximate a more symmetric distribution, you can use roots (i.e. square-root, cube root), logarithms (i.e. base e, or base 10), reciprocals (i.e. positive or negative), or Box-Cox transformation.
Scaling
Scaling is a method of transforming data into a particular range. This is important when using regression algorithms and algorithms using Euclidean distances (e.g. KNN, or K-Means) as they are sensitive to the variation in magnitude and range across features.
The goal of scaling is to change the values of each numerical feature in the data set to a common scale. By doing so, changes in different features become more comparable. Scaling can be done with normalization (min-max scaling) or z-score standardization.
Bias Mitigation
If you’ve discovered that there is bias in your data, you can mitigate this with various preprocessing techniques. These often replace the current values, or labels, with those that will result in a fairer model.
Examples of preprocessing bias mitigation algorithms are Reweighing, Optimized preprocessing, Learning fair representations and Disparate impact remover.
Feature Engineering
Feature engineering is the process of creating new features based upon knowledge about current features and the required task. It is important to have a clear understanding of the data to do this step, this may require you working with a subject matter expert. This activity may also require you to find new data sources. Two key activities are:
Feature extraction, and
Capturing Feature Relationships
Feature Extraction
You may find that columns in your data are not useful in their current state, possibly because they are too granular. For example, a timestamp is unlikely to be useful to find trends whilst the time of day, or day of the week might be.
In text analytics, feature extraction involves creating structured (columnar) from the raw text strings. This could simply be creating a new column with values one or zero indicating if particular phrases are mentioned, or columns could be created for each word (Bag-of-Words) and their value is a representation of their frequency (TF, or TF-IDF).
Capturing Feature Relationships
Rather than expect the model to find relationships between two features, they can be explicitly called out. You are then helping your algorithm focus on what you, or your subject matter expert, know is important.
Possible methods to derive relationships include calculating the sum, the difference, the product or the quotient. For example, a machine learning model may not easily find the connection between the longitude and latitude values of two address but by providing the distance between the two, you better enable it to derive patterns. | https://towardsdatascience.com/data-preparation-for-machine-learning-cleansing-transformation-feature-engineering-d2334079b06d | ['Stacey Ronaghan'] | 2019-09-20 04:12:50.511000+00:00 | ['Feature Engineering', 'Data Analysis', 'Machine Learning', 'Data Cleaning', 'Data Science'] |
qiibee (QBX) ICO Alert Report | Q&A With qiibee
How does the qiibee token function within the platform and why is it needed?
qiibee: qiibee’s token economics are designed so that brands can easily issue their own tokens with the LoyaltyToken Protocol. To do so, they first need to specify their own loyalty tokens suited to their needs. After defining these parameters, the brands can then go to the public market, buy the respective amount of QBX needed, freeze these QBX in the smart contract and create their own branded loyalty tokens. The brand receives the own branded loyalty tokens on corporate wallet, meanwhile all loyalty tokens remain backed by QBX in the smart contract. Now the brand is ready to start their loyalty program on the blockchain as desired.
Customers can now get loyalty tokens via different ways in different loyalty programs, hold on to them, redeem, send to friends or even exchange into other cryptos or FIAT.
And, by structuring the use cases and lifecycle of QBX as described above, the demand from agencies & loyalty system providers reselling the QBX to their brand portfolio, brands & merchants buying QBX to create their own loyalty token and customers to use loyalty tokens is directly translated into demand for QBX on public exchanges.
What are the current issues facing the loyalty rewards market, and why is blockchain the ideal answer to solve these issues?
qiibee: According to Reuters & Affinity Capital Exchange (2017), an estimated $500 billion USD in points are left unredeemed by members. This figure clearly shows that brands have to make their programs more effective to really drive customer behavior. While loyalty programs have become fairly common, at the same time, customers increasingly expect more personalized and shared interactions across brands’ loyalty programs, which makes it essential for brands to rethink their loyalty strategies.
Loyalty is a tricky game for brands:
High outstanding liabilities
High customer acquisition costs
Low engagement and redemption
Low inter-operability of programs
Loyal customers have a hard time today as well:
No real value of collected points
Lock-in and low usability of points
Fragmentation of loyalty market
Exploitation of personal data
qiibee is therefore based on the blockchain for numerous reasons:
It gives tokens real value; customers earn their tokens from the brands. After that, how they want to use those tokens is completely in their hands. They can exchange, trade, invest or cash out — they have total control over their tokens.
It connects the loyalty market; this creates interoperability between various brands and programs, making their rewards programs even more rewarding.
Later: It allows P2P exchange; customers can trade tokens without relying on the middleman.
100% certainty that the quantity and type of loyalty tokens earned cannot be deleted or manipulated.
A traditional database belongs to someone. With a blockchain database, the foundation is independent — thus, it doesn’t belong to anyone, so competing brands don’t experience competing interests.
Interoperability from different databases.
Establishing partnerships with brands who will implement the qiibee rewards system would seem to be a vital objective. What is your current strategy to acquire these partnerships and can you name some brands you have now, or plan to secure in the near future?
qiibee: To spur the adoption, qiibee is currently working with five marketing agencies, which make the loyalty programs part of their own portfolio, provides them with their marketing expertise and offer them to their existing brand clients. This approach has three main advantages: it allows for strong partnerships with interests that are aligned between the parties involved, fast scaling of sales pipeline via multiplicators and improving of the product offering based on bundled sales feedback from agencies.
qiibee already signed contracts with three big brands and already have eight additional confirmed token launches:
Lattesso, second largest cold coffee producer in Switzerland with 2,800 point of sales
Sausalito, biggest cocktail producer in Germany with five million customers
Foodchain, Y Combinator backed start-up, with 900 locations in 73 countries
How will you deal with both retailers and consumers who do not want to hold digital tokens for any period of time due to high volatility?
qiibee: Most brands, in fact, do not want to have any volatility risk in their balance sheet. Therefore, we created different mechanisms which satisfy the specific needs of each brand. Brands can, for example, choose to issue their loyalty tokens just-in-time so that they never actually hold loyalty or qiibee tokens by themselves.
For customers, on the other hand is the volatility one of the main attractions of a blockchain-based loyalty program. Even if the initial reward is just marginal, it can increase in value and potentially give the customers a reward, which is worth their loyalty. In the case that the customer does not want that volatility, he can still just cash out his loyalty tokens and reward himself with small amounts of FIAT money.
The Qiibee app is currently live on both iOS and Android. What has been the reaction from both the retail and consumer community? What does your current user base look like now, and in the near future?
qiibee: We are getting awesome feedback from retail and community about our qiibee Wallet. People love the idea to actually have all their loyalty awards as an overview in one app, as well as being able to exchange these awards for each other. Based on the first campaign we did with Lattesso, we saw more then 10,000 Wallets being opened in around 1.5 months. If we keep adding more companies and growing at this pace, we will reach one million wallets in the next 12 months.
You’re a global company, are there any specific regions you are targeting first or that you have seen have the most growth over the past year?
qiibee: As described above, qiibee is working with five major marketing agencies which include qiibee in their portfolio and push loyalty on the blockchain across their brand clients. Four of these five marketing agencies are located in the DACH region, which is consequently also the market we target first. Through our Asia roadshow and the contacts knitted, we already established partnerships there and have a contract with a marketing agency based in Indonesia. The next step is to focus on the expansion to Asia and following the the global market.
What does the roadmap look like for 2018–19? | https://medium.com/ico-alert/qiibee-qbx-ico-alert-report-763214306398 | ['Ico Alert'] | 2018-09-27 21:10:17.924000+00:00 | ['Loyalty', 'ICO', 'Blockchain', 'Brands', 'Protocol'] |
Resourceful | When I think of Resourceful, I think of MacGyver. We’ll illustrate why in the story below but for now let’s look at what all Resourceful people have in common:
They are very open-minded, willing to embrace a variety of possibilities, ideas and diversity of people and thought;
they believe wholeheartedly in themselves that they can come up with a workable solution to any problem;
they use their imagination to develop new ideas and solutions but also to come up with new ways to do old things better;
they are NOT procrastinators;
and they never give up because they are hopeful and positive that there is a solution to every problem.
Take a look around your office, at your team — who represents a Resourceful person? I bet you immediately looked at one or two people. They are invaluable because they value a strong team to help them be more resourceful. They love to learn and network and are never afraid to ask a question. All of that information and knowledge of where to find information is exactly what makes them so Resourceful. “If there’s a problem, yo I’ll solve it!” is there mantra!
MacGyver
I was trying to find one of MacGyver’s resourceful moments that might translate well to the workplace. Here is the closest thing I found:
Using candlesticks, microphone cord and a rubber mat, MacGyver cuts the microphone wire, attaches it to the two candlesticks, wraps them with the mat to keep himself from being electrocuted… and then, using this homemade defibrillator, resuscitates his friend who was implanted with a remote-triggered heart attack-causing device by evil Soviet spies.
Talk about Resourceful! Sure, this seems absurd to some people, but it’s the thinking behind it that we all recognize very clearly in some of our co-workers, right? A new problem presents itself and everyone around the conference room table is stuck trying to come up with the solution. In walks your “MacGyver” who just has a knack for knowing a guy who once used this one line of code to instantly stop a process so that the rest of the team could get into the database and find and fix the problem. Your “MacGyver” has this way of connecting dots that most of us didn’t even know were able to be connected.
Having Resourceful people in your company is obvious; keeping them may be harder unless you provide enough knowledge and opportunity to learn from others to keep their information banks loaded. That investment will most certainly save you once, if not many times, when problems arise. | https://medium.com/elements-by-jobber-group/resourceful-805322a40cb6 | ['Jobber Group'] | 2017-06-08 21:20:23.710000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Traits', 'Macgyver', 'Solutions', 'Resourceful'] |
3 Defining Qualities of Highly Intelligent Students | They’re Attuned to Their Emotions
“There is no separation of mind and emotions; emotions, thinking, and learning are all linked.” — Eric Jensen
It can get lonely pretty quickly when you’re only focused on getting good grades. I remember being holed up in my room, just to study for hours on end. Despite acing every test, this only alienated me from my classmates.
Alternatively, truly intelligent students are known to thrive well with others. They have the emotional intelligence that allows them to manage their emotions and create positive relationships with their peers and professors.
This, of course, leads to better learning, supportive friendships, academic success, and future employment. More importantly, these skills often provide the foundation for habits that are beneficial later on in life.
Therefore, developing your emotional intelligence may give you an edge as a student. The iconic study that tracked high-IQ students for over 75 years found that those who achieved success had will-power, perseverance, and a desire to excel — qualities linked to emotional intelligence.
Meanwhile this year, a study in Australia also found that emotionally intelligent students get better exam results and better grades.
How to cultivate it
One of the best ways to ensure emotional intelligence is by active listening. During interactions, we’re usually concerned about what to say next or when the other person has finished speaking. This robs us of the opportunity to listen fully to what is being said.
Active listening requires more than summarizing back what we heard, but actually discerning the emotions behind them. It involves genuinely following the conversation by also responding with your own body language. | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/3-defining-qualities-of-highly-intelligent-students-1022c7f9070 | ['Jaleel'] | 2020-12-17 16:41:49.298000+00:00 | ['Education', 'Self Improvement', 'Self', 'Personal Development', 'Lifestyle'] |
Cloth Diapering 101- Cost | My father always told me that he was wrapped in flour sacks that were thrown away by the U.S. military as a kid while running around the muddy rice fields, which have since been replaced by Taipei 101. I was, however, raised with disposable diapers because wealth was more abundant during the late 1980s. It is unfathomable to think that after three generations that I would convert back to cloth diapering. My father was skeptical that me, a mega germaphobe, will be willing to touch poo and pee. I was not certain that I would not be put off by the stinky poo, but I told him that I was determined to go green.
What about the cost of water and electricity for washing these diapers?
Washer cost (7 loads a week)
Cost Per Month: SGD $14
Cost Per Year: SGD $170
How many cloth diapers do you need?
I googled a bunch to see how many cloth diapers that I needed. Most people think that 16–24 diapers are good enough for a two-day laundry cycle. I am probably going to just wash the cloth diapers every day on the short 20-minute cycle to keep them stink-free.
Initial investment
BumGenius Pocket Style 5.0 x 5 (with Amazon Prime baby registry 15% discount) USD $19.95*5 = USD $99.75 = SGD $135.66
BumGenius Freetime All-in-One x 5 (with Amazon Prime baby registry 15% discount) USD $21.99*5 = USD $109.75 = SGD $149.26
GroVia AIO x 2 packs (3 pieces/pack)USD $68.25*2 = USD $136.5 = SGD $185.64
GroVia O.N.E. (2 pices/pack)USD $44.95= SGD $61.13 GroVia wetbag in blue USD $10.95 = SGD $14.89
GroVia wetbag in violet dot USD $12.00 = SGD $16.32 OsoCozy Organic Reusable Prefolds x 2 packs (6 pieces/pack) USD $13.53*2 = USD $27.06 = SGD $36.80 Thirsties Organic Cloth Diaper Doubler, Large x 2 packs (3 pieces/pack) USD $8.50*2 = USD $17 = SGD $23.12
GroVia Organic Cotton Soaker Pad x 2 packs (2 pieces/pack) USD $18.95*2 = USD $37.9 = SGD $51.54
Total = SGD $675
Cloth diaper cost + Washer Cost for 2 Years = SGD $675 + SGD $340 = SGD $1014.40
I plan to dry the diapers in the sun most days with occasional dryer usage during the monsoon season.
Disposable Diaper $0.24 per diaper
3,000 in the first year = SGD $720
1,800 in the second year = SGD $432 Disposable Diaper Trashbag SGD $645 for two years
Disposable Diaper Cost + Trashbag Total = SGD $1797.6
You aren’t saving that much just for a single child, but we do foresee having a second kid in the near future so cloth diaper will become cheaper for the second kid since we are only paying for the washing at that point.
Another thing that I was considering is not buying any shorts for baby kumquat given the messy situations of potential diaper blowouts. There is no shame for a baby to run around in a onesie with a cloth diaper.
XOXO
Bebe, M.D. | https://medium.com/@bebe_md/cloth-diapering-101-cost-b536cb3ea284 | ['Bebe'] | 2019-02-25 12:35:24.614000+00:00 | ['Parenting', 'Baby', 'Green', 'Millennials', 'Diapers'] |
Becoming a Man… NOT! | Self esteem, exit stage left
From Fitness Got Me
My rough years at a hyper macho hispanic middle school gave way to a great Summer. It ended, as all Summers do, and I moved to a trailer park in Forest Park, TX with my mom. It’s not as hillbilly redneck as it sounds. :)
I’d never tried dating girls. Guys were out of the question. I was way too shy and withdrawn to make the first move, and way too nerdy for them to.
Ever since I was little I got along with girls better than boys.
Being friends with them worked very well. Unfortunately, the friendships always crumbled as soon as I said or did anything. My first such experience was at Charles Baxter Junior High School in Everman, TX.
Thin and tall, Jennifer was my idea of beauty. Her long hair flowed in the wind when we walked from my trailer to hers or vice versa. She’d come over to watch Saturday morning cartoons. I’d go over after school to hang out, listen to music, and help her with homework. Usually we’d do that in her room, a place that filled me with nervousness and hope.
Not that anything ever came of it. I’ve never been able to tell when someone likes me as more than just a friend unless they come right out and say it.
One semi-brave day I decided to tell her I “liked her” liked her. I say “semi-brave” because I didn’t have the courage to do it face to face. Instead I slipped a note into her locker. That was the end of things. No fanfare. No real explanations. We drifted apart, but we both knew what had happened.
Meanwhile back at our double-wide my young mind was enjoying the new home. My mother had gotten remarried to a man named Alvon. He was an artist, a good one. Though we had three bedrooms, I slept on the couch. The third room was devoted to a studio.
Well… to him it was a studio. To me it was an illicit paradise. There were copies of Playboy and Penthouse scattered about. Also Jugs, Hustler, and other less reputable fare. Ostensibly they were for “research.” It was a burgeoning teen’s heaven.
I couldn’t begin to tell you how many hours I spent in the bathroom next to his studio. I’ll leave figuring out why as an exercise for the reader. Mostly I stuck to the standard bits: naked chicks with naked guys doing naked adult things.
Not always. In the backs of the sleazier ones were ads for phone sex lines, toy manufacturer’s, and even “sexy penpals.” The ones that grabbed my attention the most?
Shemales
Yes, it’s a derogatory term. It was the only word they used, so it was the only one I knew. Regardless of the political correctness (or lack of it), they amazed me.
Here were these women who had once been men. Their gorgeous hourglass figures were hypnotizing. They managed to encompass all of the things I was attracted to in men and women, which was exhilarating.
They also spoke to me on a deeper level. One that I was afraid to listen to.
It was the start of a lifelong problem: sublimating gender with sexuality.
I had another set of friends, all guys, all gamers. Tony was a super cool guy with beautiful golden hair and awesome taste in music. Mark was a lot like me: curly hair and thick glasses. We wandered the nearby forest, played Battletech and D&D, and watched Saturday Night Live. What we didn’t do was talk about anything real.
Then came Jesse.
I also gamed with him, but we connected on a deeper level. He lived with his grandparents, who were super cool. His grandfather would let us ride in the back of his truck on the way to the comic book / game store. His grandmother always had a sweet smile and sweet treats.
I was head over heels “in fatuation.” He was handsome and the ladies loved him. He could talk to them with confidence in a way I never could.
Once we went to Wet and Wild (the local water park). He got the numbers of a couple of sexy twins and I got their less-than-sexy friend’s.
He’d go on to date both of them, making me jealous of them and him. I’d go on to have another school yard sexual encounter like I’d had years before. She had horrible hygiene “down there” and we didn’t stay together long. It didn’t help that she lived an hour away and I’m not the best phone-talker.
Long story short: her mustache tickled when we kissed and her initials were PMS (no joke).
Of course, I could never tell Jesse how I felt. Jennifer had taught me that emotions end friendships. Society had taught me that feelings for guys were ridiculed at best, punished at worst.
I stayed over at his house a lot, sleeping in his room and wishing he’d notice me on his own.
It wasn’t all sad pining for the unattainable. It wasn’t even mostly that. We had a lot of genuine fun. As always, there were parts of my sexuality and gender that I’d never dare to share. That still left plenty of room to talk about more than games, girls, and cartoons.
Looking back now, I’m glad it never went beyond that. If anything had happened he’d probably just be another in a long line of personal and emotional failures. Instead we’re still friends, though it’s all on Facebook because he lives several states away. The feelings of my youth have faded, but not the thankfulness I have for him being such a good friend. | https://medium.com/transginger/becoming-a-man-not-82891c96b113 | ['Ginger Mcmurray'] | 2018-03-25 07:36:47.830000+00:00 | ['Childhood', 'LGBTQ', 'Autobiography', 'Gender Identity', 'Transgender'] |
Mathematics. A form of Apophenia? | Mathematics. A form of Apophenia?
Photo by Sergio Souza on Unsplash
Lately, I was watching the award-winning drama biopic: A Beautiful Mind, starring Russell Crowe as ‘John Forbes Nash Jr.’, a mathematical genius diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. The movie, with its extraordinary plot and execution forced me to learn more about Nash and schizophrenia. As I was surfing through the internet about schizophrenia, I came across a concept called ‘Apophenia’. As I continued searching about apophenia, I realized that the word apophenia was also used in the chart-topping drama series: The Queen’s Gambit. Apparently, in one of the episodes, a reporter asks Beth Harmon, a prodigious chess player whether she has ever heard of ‘apophenia’. Harmon replies to the report’s question saying that she has never heard of apophenia.
Well I too didn’t know the meaning of apophenia so I simply searched up its definition.
Apophenia is the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things.
The reporter then asks Harmon whether she sees unusual patterns on the chess board during her games. Harmon thinks for a while then replies with a no.
Honestly, I found the entire idea of apophenia rather interesting. When I first read about it on the internet and then watched the clip from The Queen’s Gambit where ‘apophenia’ was mentioned for the first time, my mind immediately related it with mathematics (yes, I know, I apologize for this nerdy approach, but I had to).
As a student, I am extremely fond of mathematics. I have always been flabbergasted by its theories, its applications… its omnipresence in nature and even its mysteries. The reason why I instantly related apophenia to math is because I believe that ‘patterns’ make up a major portion of mathematics… may it be observing mathematical patterns and relationships in nature or even using math as a tool to provide structure and framework to the patterns we see everywhere around us.
common example of apophenia
Apophenia, on some sites on the internet has also been defined as a ‘human experience’, wherein people see familiar objects or patterns in unrelated or random things and places. We have all had this moment where we’ve seen animal figures and faces in clouds. We also tend to visualize familiar patterns, symbols or faces on tree barks, or certain textures on the wall or even on a slice of toast. Well all these actually count as ‘everyday examples’ of apophenia.
Wait, hold on. Before I continue sharing my personal opinions and thoughts regarding the link between mathematics and apophenia, let me make it clear that I am not an expert in math and nor do I have any expertise and experience in neurology, psychology, or any other subject or course that studies apophenia in people. I am just as curious as John Nash and Beth Harmon (less actually, both of them were far beyond genius… even though Harmon is a fictional character). | https://medium.com/@atharvaghatnekar/mathematics-a-form-of-apophenia-ef353a36be94 | ['Atharva Ghatnekar'] | 2020-12-27 15:00:28.163000+00:00 | ['Math', 'Patterns', 'The Queens Gambit', 'Mathematics', 'Psychology'] |
Creating a React-Leaflet Custom Component Using Hooks | Creating a React-Leaflet Custom Component Using Hooks
Photo by Timo Wielink on Unsplash
In my previous post I showed how easy it is to set up your own maps using React-Leaflet, and even drop some markers and popups on them.
Leaflet provides every basic map functionality you need but it’s meant to be as lightweight as possible. To go beyond that there are hundreds of third-party plugins providing different tiles, ways of loading and displaying external data, custom markers and paths, etc.
React-Leaflet provides the same core functionality but does not support any Leaflet plugin. There are a few third party plugins ported to React-Leaflet, but most of the ecosystem present in Leaflet is missing.
The recommended approach when you need extra functionality is to create your own React-Leaflet components.
Custom Components
To create your component, you will have to extend the appropriate abstract class from the ones exposed by React-Leaftlet.
You can extend:
MapControl
Meant for controls, handles positioning.
Meant for controls, handles positioning. ControlledLayer
Base class to handle adding and removing layers.
Base class to handle adding and removing layers. MapEvented
Base class that handles event bindings. Except MapControl and ControlledLayer , the rest of the base components inherit from this one. That includes the Map component, the top-level component that instantiates a Leaflet map and provides it to its children.
Base class that handles event bindings. Except and , the rest of the base components inherit from this one. That includes the component, the top-level component that instantiates a Leaflet map and provides it to its children. MapComponent
Base class handling map panes. Panes are DOM elements used to control the ordering of layers on the map.
Base class handling map panes. Panes are DOM elements used to control the ordering of layers on the map. MapLayer
Base class extending MapComponent , handles adding and removing the layer to the map when relevant. Exposes the layer in layerContainer .
Base class extending , handles adding and removing the layer to the map when relevant. Exposes the layer in . GridLayer
For creating tile layers, handles opacity and z-index .
For creating tile layers, handles and . DivOverlay
Handles shared logic for Popup and Tooltip components.
Handles shared logic for and components. Path
Extends MapLayer with methods to style paths.
There’s not a lot of examples of custom components out there, but most of what I’ve seen that does not have to do with tile layers extend MapControl .
MapControl handles positioning and it’s a good fit if what you are trying to show on your map does not need to fill all of it or depends on a geographical position.
Our Example
Following our previous example we will be creating a map that shows a list of markers with Unesco Heritage sites and shows a legend on the bottom of the map when we select one instead of the classic popup.
Most of our components will re-use the existing ones, we will have a HeritageMap , using our existing MyMap component, but this time using only one provider. The stamen watercolor provider with its hand-made look seems like a nice choice for this.
Our HeritageMap will receive a list of heritage sites and print a marker for each of them. No custom components here, just reusing the existing ones.
A Leaflet map knows what area to show using either:
The bounds prop: two geographical points defining a square that has to fit inside the map.
prop: two geographical points defining a square that has to fit inside the map. A center point and zoom value.
When there is no Marker selected we calculate the map bounds using Leaflet’s latLngBound . By extending the bounds with the positions of all the markers we get a a final result that includes them all so they are all shown on the map when loaded. Finally we set a little padding using pad(0.1) so there are no markers just on the borders of the map.
Galicia’s Unesco World Heritage sites.
When of the markers is selected, we set the center to its position and use the default zoom of 14 .
The Custom Component
Our legend with the marker information will be a custom Leaflet Control.
Why a Control? Because it’s the only extendable element that it’s meant to be on our screen all the time and not positioned on the map or around a Marker .
We use an useEffect to add the control when our component is mounted. The control will be positioned to the bottomleft corner of the map and contain a div with the legend and its own styling (a pirate font seemed on point). We also have to define the required onAdd() method to return the HTMLElement that will fill the control. Note this is a string representation of a DOM element and not JSX.
All that is left it’s to be sure to clean up the control on unmount returning a function that calls its remove function.
But, but… you said to extend the appropriate React-Leaflet abstract component!
Yes! But while writing the example using React Hooks I found this way easier and more readable. Then I found Paul le Cam has a v3 on its way which changes the available hooks and the way of working with them. Maybe this was one of the reasons.
The previous “what component to extend from” list is still valid. Just use the wrapped original Leaflet component and you can extend them this way and use them on your React-Leaflet maps.
Now that we have our HeritageLegend component we can just use it in our map.
The HeritageLegend component inside our MyMap. Full example here.
After all that, we can click on any of our Markers and: Ahoy! The map will be centered around it, zoomed and its information will be shown like this:
Roman Walls of Lugo ahoy!
Summing up
As you can see it is possible to extend Leaflet controls to create your own and use them inside React-Leaflet.
There’s not a lot of documentation on using React-Leaflet with hooks. Its v2 docs just mentions the useLeaflet hook as we use it here, and there isn’t a lot of examples using it online, or combining it with React Hooks.
My recommendation would be to wait until v3 comes out, and meanwhile create your own components like this. It is not clear when will it be released, but you can follow the next branch on its Github repository. | https://medium.com/trabe/creating-a-react-leaflet-custom-component-using-hooks-5b5b905d5a01 | ['Lucas Andión'] | 2020-09-21 08:02:47.459000+00:00 | ['Maps', 'Leaflet', 'React Hook', 'Unesco Heritage Sites', 'React'] |
Introduction to Hidden Markov Models | Introduction to Hidden Markov Models
Markov Chains
Let us first give a brief introduction to Markov Chains, a type of a random process. We begin with a few “states” for the chain, {S₁,…,Sₖ}; For instance, if our chain represents the daily weather, we can have {Snow,Rain,Sunshine}. The property a process (Xₜ)ₜ should have to be a Markov Chain is:
In words, the probability of being in a state j depends only on the previous state, and not on what happened before.
Markov Chains are often described by a graph with transition probabilities, i.e, the probability of moving to state j from state i, which are denoted by pᵢ,ⱼ. Let’s look at the following example:
Markov chain example
The chain has three states; For instance, the transition probability between Snow and Rain is 0.3, that is — if it was snowing yesterday, there is a 30% chance it will rain today. The transition probabilities can be summarized in a matrix:
Notice that the sum of each row equals 1 (think why). Such a matrix is called a Stochastic Matrix. The (i,j) is defined as pᵢ,ⱼ -the transition probability between i and j.
Fact: if we take a power of the matrix, Pᵏ, the (i,j) entry represents the probability to arrive from state i to state j at k steps.
In many cases we are given a vector of initial probabilities q=(q₁,…,qₖ) to be at each state at time t=0. Thus, the probability to be at state i at time t will be equal to the i-th entry of the vector Pᵏq.
For instance, if today the probabilities of snow, rain and sunshine are 0,0.2,0.8, then the probability it will rain in 100 days is calculated as follows:
The 2nd entry equals ≈ 0.44.
Hidden Markov Model
In a Hidden Markov Model (HMM), we have an invisible Markov chain (which we cannot observe), and each state generates in random one out of k observations, which are visible to us.
Let’s look at an example. Suppose we have the Markov Chain from above, with three states (snow, rain and sunshine), P - the transition probability matrix and q — the initial probabilities. This is the invisible Markov Chain — suppose we are home and cannot see the weather. We can, however, feel the temperature inside our room, and suppose there are two possible observations: hot and cold, where:
Basic Example
As a first example, we apply the HMM to calculate the probability that we feel cold for two consecutive days. In these two days, there are 3*3=9 options for the underlying Markov states. Let us give an example for the probability computation of one of these 9 options:
Summing up all options gives the desired probability.
Finding Hidden States — Viterbi Algorithm
In some cases we are given a series of observations, and want to find the most probable corresponding hidden states.
A brute force solution would take exponential time (like the calculations above); A more efficient approach is called the Viterbi Algorithm; its main idea is as follows: we are given a sequence of observations o₁,…,oₜ . For each state i and t=1,…,T, we define
That is, the maximum probability of a path which ends at time t at the state i, given our observations. The main observation here is that by the Markov property, if the most likely path that ends with i at time t equals to some i* at time t−1, then i* is the value of the last state of the most likely path which ends at time t−1. This gives us the following forward recursion:
here, αⱼ(oₜ) denotes the probability to have oₜ when the hidden Markov state is j .
Here is an example. Let us generate a sequence of 14 days, in each 1 denotes hot temperature and 0 denotes cold. We will use the algorithm to find the most likely weather forecast of these two weeks.
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
obs_map = {'Cold':0, 'Hot':1}
obs = np.array([1,1,0,1,0,0,1,0,1,1,0,0,0,1])
inv_obs_map = dict((v,k) for k, v in obs_map.items())
obs_seq = [inv_obs_map[v] for v in list(obs)]
print("Simulated Observations:
",pd.DataFrame(np.column_stack([obs, obs_seq]),columns=['Obs_code', 'Obs_seq']) )
pi = [0.6,0.4] # initial probabilities vector
states = ['Cold', 'Hot']
hidden_states = ['Snow', 'Rain', 'Sunshine']
pi = [0, 0.2, 0.8]
state_space = pd.Series(pi, index=hidden_states, name='states')
a_df = pd.DataFrame(columns=hidden_states, index=hidden_states)
a_df.loc[hidden_states[0]] = [0.3, 0.3, 0.4]
a_df.loc[hidden_states[1]] = [0.1, 0.45, 0.45]
a_df.loc[hidden_states[2]] = [0.2, 0.3, 0.5]
print("
HMM matrix:
", a_df)
a = a_df.values
observable_states = states
b_df = pd.DataFrame(columns=observable_states, index=hidden_states)
b_df.loc[hidden_states[0]] = [1,0]
b_df.loc[hidden_states[1]] = [0.8,0.2]
b_df.loc[hidden_states[2]] = [0.3,0.7]
print("
Observable layer matrix:
",b_df)
b = b_df.values
We get:
Simulated Observations:
Obs_code Obs_seq
0 1 Hot
1 1 Hot
2 0 Cold
3 1 Hot
4 0 Cold
5 0 Cold
6 1 Hot
7 0 Cold
8 1 Hot
9 1 Hot
10 0 Cold
11 0 Cold
12 0 Cold
13 1 Hot
HMM matrix:
Snow Rain Sunshine
Snow 0.3 0.3 0.4
Rain 0.1 0.45 0.45
Sunshine 0.2 0.3 0.5
Observable layer matrix:
Cold Hot
Snow 1 0
Rain 0.8 0.2
Sunshine 0.3 0.7
Now let’s use the algorithm:
path, delta, phi = viterbi(pi, a, b, obs)
state_map = {0:'Snow', 1:'Rain', 2:'Sunshine'}
state_path = [state_map[v] for v in path]
pd.DataFrame().assign(Observation=obs_seq).assign(Best_Path=state_path)
We get:
Start Walk Forward
s=0 and t=1: phi[0, 1] = 2.0
s=1 and t=1: phi[1, 1] = 2.0
s=2 and t=1: phi[2, 1] = 2.0
s=0 and t=2: phi[0, 2] = 2.0
s=1 and t=2: phi[1, 2] = 2.0
s=2 and t=2: phi[2, 2] = 2.0
s=0 and t=3: phi[0, 3] = 0.0
s=1 and t=3: phi[1, 3] = 1.0
s=2 and t=3: phi[2, 3] = 1.0
s=0 and t=4: phi[0, 4] = 2.0
s=1 and t=4: phi[1, 4] = 2.0
s=2 and t=4: phi[2, 4] = 2.0
s=0 and t=5: phi[0, 5] = 0.0
s=1 and t=5: phi[1, 5] = 1.0
s=2 and t=5: phi[2, 5] = 1.0
s=0 and t=6: phi[0, 6] = 0.0
s=1 and t=6: phi[1, 6] = 1.0
s=2 and t=6: phi[2, 6] = 1.0
s=0 and t=7: phi[0, 7] = 2.0
s=1 and t=7: phi[1, 7] = 2.0
s=2 and t=7: phi[2, 7] = 2.0
s=0 and t=8: phi[0, 8] = 0.0
s=1 and t=8: phi[1, 8] = 1.0
s=2 and t=8: phi[2, 8] = 1.0
s=0 and t=9: phi[0, 9] = 2.0
s=1 and t=9: phi[1, 9] = 2.0
s=2 and t=9: phi[2, 9] = 2.0
s=0 and t=10: phi[0, 10] = 2.0
s=1 and t=10: phi[1, 10] = 2.0
s=2 and t=10: phi[2, 10] = 2.0
s=0 and t=11: phi[0, 11] = 0.0
s=1 and t=11: phi[1, 11] = 1.0
s=2 and t=11: phi[2, 11] = 1.0
s=0 and t=12: phi[0, 12] = 0.0
s=1 and t=12: phi[1, 12] = 1.0
s=2 and t=12: phi[2, 12] = 1.0
s=0 and t=13: phi[0, 13] = 0.0
s=1 and t=13: phi[1, 13] = 1.0
s=2 and t=13: phi[2, 13] = 1.0
--------------------------------------------------
Start Backtrace
path[12] = 1
path[11] = 1
path[10] = 1
path[9] = 2
path[8] = 2
path[7] = 1
path[6] = 2
path[5] = 1
path[4] = 1
path[3] = 2
path[2] = 1
path[1] = 2
path[0] = 2
Which leads to the output:
We used the following implementation, based on [2]:
def viterbi(pi, a, b, obs):
nStates = np.shape(b)[0]
T = np.shape(obs)[0]
# init blank path
path = path = np.zeros(T,dtype=int)
# delta --> highest probability of any path that reaches state i
delta = np.zeros((nStates, T))
# phi --> argmax by time step for each state
phi = np.zeros((nStates, T))
# init delta and phi
delta[:, 0] = pi * b[:, obs[0]]
phi[:, 0] = 0
print('
Start Walk Forward
')
# the forward algorithm extension
for t in range(1, T):
for s in range(nStates):
delta[s, t] = np.max(delta[:, t-1] * a[:, s]) * b[s, obs[t]]
phi[s, t] = np.argmax(delta[:, t-1] * a[:, s])
print('s={s} and t={t}: phi[{s}, {t}] = {phi}'.format(s=s, t=t, phi=phi[s, t]))
# find optimal path
print('-'*50)
print('Start Backtrace
')
path[T-1] = np.argmax(delta[:, T-1])
for t in range(T-2, -1, -1):
path[t] = phi[path[t+1], [t+1]]
print('path[{}] = {}'.format(t, path[t]))
return path, delta, phi
Learning and the Baum-Welch Algorithm
A similar approach to the one above can be used for parameter learning of the HMM model. We have some dataset, and we want to find the parameters which fit the HMM model best. The Baum-Welch Algorithm is an iterative process which finds a (local) maximum of the probability of the observations P(O|M), where M denotes the model (with the parameters we want to fit). Since we know P(M|O) by the model, we can use a Bayesian approach to find P(M|O) and converge to an optimum.
HMM have various applications, from character recognition to financial forecasts (detecting regimes in markets).
References
[1] https://cse.buffalo.edu/~jcorso/t/CSE555/files/lecture_hmm.pdf
[2] http://www.blackarbs.com/blog/introduction-hidden-markov-models-python-networkx-sklearn/2/9/2017 | https://towardsdatascience.com/introduction-to-hidden-markov-models-cd2c93e6b781 | ['Tomer Amit'] | 2019-10-30 16:13:50.143000+00:00 | ['Statistics', 'Mathematics', 'Data Science', 'Probability', 'Machine Learning'] |
Reservation Confirmation for Your Holiday Stay 2020 at the Hotel California | Dear Guest,
Thank you for booking your stay with us at the Hotel California for December 24, 2020 through indefinite! We are very much looking forward to welcoming you to our property and would like to assure you that late check-ins are accommodated at every hour. We consider ourselves “programmed to receive” and have staff on call to greet you at whatever time is most convenient. If you arrive after the hour of 1 a.m., you will find the night man at the concierge desk and he’ll be happy to help you with all of your check-in needs, make you feel relaxed, and to close the door behind you.
We have received some questions regarding our policies around COVID-19 protocols and would like to assure you that masks are optional here at the Hotel California, as you will notice that we follow more of a “permanent pod” situation. Despite the reluctance of some of our newer guests, we have also decided to proceed with our longstanding and unending traditions: nighttime dancing in the hotel courtyard, wine hours, and year-round nocturnal incantations up and down our corridors. We have decided not to cancel these activities despite medical advisement to the contrary, because they are a trademark and make us who we are (diseased). Should you wish to participate, a woman, along with an entourage of traditionally beautiful young men will be sent to your room to guide you, via candlelight to the festivities, which we like to call Kill the Beast and involve a litany of boar-on-the-floor style rules and, like that weird-ass game are also impossible to understand or predict, take place at a hotel, and are executed by people with little regard for the lives/dignity of other human beings. Please note that, although your escort has some very inflexible ideas surrounding addiction and blame, she, too, will not be wearing a mask, as she believes you can will your way out of contracting or spreading the novel Coronavirus, as well.
DIRECTIONS AND CHECK IN
The Hotel California is located off I-5 — look for the shimmering light, or just follow someone actively flouting public health measures in your area and eventually you’ll get here.
When you arrive, please use the abandoned parking lot by the beach, as our patrons have been barred from the town’s shared spaces. You can get your ticket validated at the front desk, or you can devise your own validation, or you can validate other people around you and they will, in turn, validate you, in a back-and-forth kind of way, such that all that is required for validation is a mutual agreement to refrain from holding yourself or one another responsible for your actions. At check-in, please have available your photo ID, and your alibis.
Room type: You have been booked in our California King Deluxe room, which does not include a California King size bed, but does have mirrors on its ceilings. We think you’ll find it a lovely place, but if there’s anything else we can do to improve your stay, please don’t hesitate to let us know. Feel free to address us as Captain, or honestly, whatever you want.
Check out: We used to request check-out by 1 p.m., but have found that our guests do not respond well to being given instructions they feel limit their sense of freedom, or even modest requests for considering the good of mankind, so honestly, just check out any time you like. | https://medium.com/the-haven/reservation-confirmation-for-your-holiday-stay-2020-at-the-hotel-california-37cf232853dd | ['Alicia Oltuski'] | 2020-12-24 00:17:30.212000+00:00 | ['Holidays', 'Humor', 'Hotel', 'California', 'Comedy'] |
Moving out of your flat doesn’t have to be a headache… | Moving out of your flat doesn’t have to be a headache… CocoonSync Jan 22·4 min read
Moving out of your flat doesn’t have to be a headache…
The packing. The boxes. Saying goodbye to flatmates. The cleaning…
Let’s face it, moving out of your flat is no fun. A toxic cocktail of stress, frustration and anxiety — not to mention money and time spent — and that’s before you even think about renting a new place. With difficult rental agencies, inefficiency at every turn and a lack of decent flats on the market, moving flat can be a real nightmare.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to simplify the whole process? To plan ahead, minimise stress and have a clear idea of what the future will look like? Imagine a world in which renting in London was easy…
Enter CocoonSync.
Let us tell you a little story…
Picture the scene: two flatmates living in convivial bliss in a flat in Brick Lane. They make breakfast for each other, share secrets and dance around the flat singing into cucumbers. All is well.
Suddenly, August arrives. “We need to talk”, says Michael. “When our rental agreement ends in January, I’m moving back home.”
Luckily, Karim has a girlfriend, a serious girlfriend, and they decide that in January, they will move in together.
Karim and his girlfriend begin to form a plan. “We’ll start looking for a new flat now,” they scheme, “so we can plan ahead and make our lives easier.” It’s genius, they agree… but they soon discover a flaw in their masterplan.
It’s almost impossible to find long-term accommodation in London in advance
They search and search but to no avail. Oh, there are plenty of properties online. There are flats to rent in Hackney, flats in Dalston, Shoreditch, Brixton and Clapham. But they’re all available in August or September. There’s not a single flat shown that will be available in January. Not in Hackney , Dalston , Brixton or Clapham
They keep searching and searching, their stress levels rising. The frustration puts their relationship to the test in a way no squabble or dispute had ever done before. As if that wasn’t enough, tensions mount between Michael and Karim, too. There is much less dancing in their flat. Everything starts to go sour.
Finally, Karim and his girlfriend find a place. But guess when they found it? That would be in December, which is the first time they began to see flats available to rent in January online.
One day, Karim is having a coffee with a friend and he tells this sad and sorry tale over an iced caramel macchiato and a cookie (mmmm…).
And it turns out that Jerome’s landlady gave him 6 months notice that she was planning to sell the Bethnall Green flat he was renting. Like Karim, he searched in vain for a place that would be available in 6 months’ time, but could only find places to rent for that month or the next. Lots of stress, sleepless nights and internet trawling later, he finally found a place only a few weeks before he had to leave his current accommodation.
“No way!” exclaims Jerome, “Something similar happened to me, too!”
“This will not do!” cried Karim and the two began to chat in earnest. And, over a second caramel macchiato, an idea began to form. An idea that would become CocoonSync.
CocoonSync is changing the way we rent flats in London
Karim and Jerome are the founders of CocoonSync. Bonded by a mutual frustration about the inefficiency of rental sites, they created a platform to help people move out with none of the stress.
CocoonSync shows you flats that will become available to rent in the future, so you can plan ahead.
CocoonSync gives you:
Less stress: know in advance where you’ll be moving to
Exclusive access: browse flats in London that are not available on other rental websites
Value for money: get an early deal rather than breaking your budget on a last-minute decision
A better experience: get a private viewing from the current tenants and learn insider tips about the neighbourhood
Freedom and flexibility: don’t waste time searching fruitlessly for a flat — get ahead of the game and secure a great place to live with time to spare
More choice as a student: secure your student accommodation in London in advance so you’re totally prepared to start the new term
Karim and Jerome want you to learn from their mistakes. Don’t let the stress of moving out get you down. Plan in advance with CocoonSync. | https://medium.com/@cocoonsync/moving-out-of-your-flat-doesnt-have-to-be-a-headache-5043e3489dcc | [] | 2021-02-03 15:26:38.956000+00:00 | ['London Accommodation', 'London Tenant', 'London'] |
Our Mission. | A little bit about Wonderspace and our mission to tackle the coworking industry…
We seamlessly connect you with the most flexible hot desks, fixed desks and private offices around, so that you can focus your energies on making your business soar.
Our service is tech-driven, hassle-free and broker-free… And it costs you nothing.
Whether you’re a corporate giant or plucky sole trader, chances are you’ve been finding work spaces in the same way since day one. We started Wonderspace because the way people work is changing and so too are the types of spaces that enabled them to thrive… And traditional real estate models just aren’t keeping up with these changes.
Wonderspace brings together the best contemporary work spaces, meticulously curated to every business’ individual needs. Whether you’re looking for a hot desk, fixed desk or an entire serviced office for you and your team: you’ll find it here and you’ll find it for free. All the time, effort and technology we put into finding your space (and delivering it to you via our intuitive website and tech-enabled services) are paid for by the office providers.
No stress, no brokers
Digital technologies are transforming the way we work — it makes sense that they should be able to transform where you work as well. We harness the best tech in the business to bring you a service free from endless calls, emails and dashes to one unsuitable space after another.
Our aim is simple: to find you the perfect space and get you moved in many times faster than any traditional broker would manage.
Flexible licenses, not lock-in leases
There’s more to serviced offices and co-working spaces than the incredible networking opportunities and energising interiors. 99.9% of our spaces offer flexible licenses instead of more traditional leases — that means no more lock-in and allows for month-to-month flexibility.
Those monthly payments cover all-inclusive access to exactly what you need, and the timeline to occupancy is vastly reduced. What’s more, you can also adjust or leave the space equally quickly, as and when your business requires.
Transparent, up-front and better-value pricing
Perhaps best of all, serviced offices and co-working spaces are often nowhere near as expensive as more traditional office spaces. While the flat monthly payments might look high at first glance, they include a whole host of rates, taxes and additional expenses that would otherwise bump up the costs of a workspace dramatically.
That encompasses everything from ready-fitted out furnishings, to cleaning services, to lightning fast wi-fi and more — and no requirement to strip everything out and return it to its original empty space whenever you do vacate.
If you’re looking for a new office space, be sure to reach out to our team at [email protected] or visit our website www.wonderspace.ai | https://medium.com/wonderspace/our-mission-7f043fea7858 | ['Anton Gabb'] | 2019-03-17 20:50:07.752000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Coworking', 'Interior Design', 'Real Estate', 'Technology'] |
Imagining My Family’s Way Through the Pandemic | Once upon a time, I was a young mom, living with my young children, my husband, a dog, two cats, and a lizard. My family lived in a small brick house on a small brick street. Our neighborhood nestled under the arm of St. Michael’s Parish. I watched my red-headed son growing bigger, with his preternatural inclination to language, fierce temper, and the need for the world to be just and fair. And then there was my daughter… a stubborn young child, with an energetic streak of mischief and physicality and a watchful, sometimes suspicious, eye on the world around her.
Like my own mom, I have a good imagination and a love of stories. I pretended many things both for the kids and myself when they were little. I pretended the muppet, Grover, lived in the upstairs closet. When it snowed, I pretended that we lived on the prairie in the 1890s, just like Laura Ingalls and her family. When I shoveled the snow on the sidewalk in January, I told the kids that this was the path leading Pa home from hunting bears.
Once, at Christmastime, Hedwig from Harry Potter delivered “owl mail” down the chimney from Professor Dumbledore, personally inviting them to the Hogwarts world. I hoped to make childhood enchanting and magical for them (but maybe also for me).
My daughter cooperated and sometimes enjoyed the pretend, but she also had a burning and innate need for “the truth.” When she was six years old, she followed me around the house asking, “Is Santa real? Is Santa real? Is Santa really, really real?” She asked again and again for over an hour.
I felt torn. I tried to find good, reassuring motherly things to say, like “What do you think?” Or, “Santa’s magic is not just about a big man in a red suit. It’s about finding joy and generosity.”
These responses were not enough for my truth-seeker. “But I want to know if he is alive.”
I sighed, looking down at her small, determined face. “Sometimes kids think they want to know things, but they don’t really want to know them. What do you think you want?”
“I really want to know if he is alive and real.”
My heart hurt a little. I didn’t know what to do. What if childhood lost something important and special for her? “He is not alive,” I said.
“Okay,” she replied in her stubborn, matter-of-fact way. “I thought so.”
Yet, she seemed okay after that—still the same spirited child she’d always been. And I continued to share stories with them, continued to try to imbue the atmosphere of childhood with possibility. But, just like the characters in my beloved stories, there were unseen forces at work. Parts of the story we’re not privy to.
I had to face a great fear for parents: telling their kids a bad and frightening thing.
In the story of my young family, there was a time when imagination and truth became confused with lies. When hope and illusion became muddled in fog. A time when I couldn’t tell the difference between a wolf and a grandmother.
“My, what big teeth you have,” said Little Red Riding Hood. But Little Red Riding Hood was me. | https://humanparts.medium.com/imagining-my-familys-way-through-the-pandemic-b7d56e18c58f | ['Katy Friedman Miller'] | 2020-12-21 19:44:48.176000+00:00 | ['Parenting', 'Hope', 'This Is Us', 'Resilience', 'Imagination'] |
Case Study on Kubernetes: Spotify | Let’s see what is Kubernetes?
In simple language, Kubernetes is an open source tool for automating container deployment, scaling, and management.
Google open-sourced the Kubernetes project in 2014. Kubernetes combines over 15 years of Google’s experience running production workloads at scale with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community.
Why we need Kubernetes and what it can do?
Containers are a good way to bundle and run your applications. In a production environment, you need to manage the containers that run the applications and ensure that there is no downtime. For example, if a container goes down, another container needs to start. Wouldn’t it be easier if this behavior was handled by a system?
That’s how Kubernetes comes to the rescue! Kubernetes provides you with a framework to run distributed systems resiliently. It takes care of scaling and failover for your application, provides deployment patterns, and more. For example, Kubernetes can easily manage a canary deployment for your system.
In today's era, almost all companies(no matter big or small) using Kubernetes for managing their production environment in a much better way.
Spotify is one of those companies which early adopt container technology and then migrating from Homegrown Orchestration to Kubernetes.
An early adopter of microservices and Docker, Spotify had containerized microservices running across its fleet of VMs with a homegrown container orchestration system called Helios.
They say that one of the major risks is migrating from local fleet to Kubernetes so to mitigating the risks, they run helios alongside too.
But another plus is Kubernetes fit very nicely as a complement and now as a replacement to Helios. During the migration, the services run on both, so we’re not having to put all of our eggs in one basket until we can validate Kubernetes under a variety of load circumstances and stress circumstances.
One of the main power of Kubernetes is its vast open source community. By which “It’s been surprisingly easy to get in touch with anybody we wanted to, to get expertise on any of the things we’re working with. And it’s helped us validate all the things we’re doing.” -JAMES WEN, SITE RELIABILITY ENGINEER, SPOTIFY
Success Story:
Their success story that’s come out of the early days of Kubernetes is a tool called Slingshot that a Spotify team built on Kubernetes. “With a pull request, it creates a temporary staging environment that self destructs after 24 hours,” says Chakrabarti, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING, INFRASTRUCTURE AND OPERATIONS, SPOTIFY. It’s all facilitated by Kubernetes, so that’s kind of an exciting example of how, once the technology is out there and ready to use, people start to build on top of it and craft their own solutions, even beyond what we might have envisioned as the initial purpose of it.
Thanks for reading :) | https://medium.com/@techq/case-study-on-kubernetes-spotify-3fb4b0da1914 | ['Gaurav Gupta'] | 2020-12-25 03:00:57.787000+00:00 | ['Spotify', 'Containers', 'Orchestration', 'Kubernetes', 'Technology'] |
Entering Esports: Bethereum’s Path to Growth | Look around — the growth of eSports is undeniable. Even boomers are starting to get it.
The ever expanding digital world has catapulted eSports into households across the globe. Games aren’t just about playing with your friends anymore. The competition is fierce. With ever increasing connectivity the battles get tougher and the stars become even bigger.
What is Esports?
Esports stands for ‘electronic sports’. It’s a form of competition that has been around since the 80s — people compete using computer games to see who’s best.
By and large, those unfamiliar to esports don’t respect the discipline. They don’t realize the amount of technical skill required to be the best. But the prizes make it clear that esports is here to stay.
The DOTA 2 international championship had a prize pool of $34.3 million in 2019. Epic Games, the creators of Fortnite, pledged to provide $100 million for Fortnite esports prize pools in the first year. The Fortnite World Cup in summer 2019 turned children into millionaires. Kyle Giersdorf or ‘Bugha’, a 16 year old American, won the solo World Cup and claimed a prize of $3 million.
Esports is becoming a legitimate career for many people. Whether it’s winning major tournaments, becoming a famous streamer or even making a living from online wager matches, there is a lot of potential in esports right now.
But it’s not just big cash being thrown around for no reason — the revenue and viewership numbers are shooting up.
Esports growth
Way back in 2012, the global eSports market revenue was just $130 million. Flash forward to 2019, the projected figure is ten times that at at $1.1 billion and is expected to reach nearly $1.8 billion just three years later in 2022.
This climb in annual revenue is fueled by consistent viewership growth. A report by Newzoo found that in 2018 the total esports audience was 380 million people, which maintained a 13.8% year on year increase. The same report predicts a total audience of 557 million by 2021.
Naturally as viewership grows revenue increase. The money comes from all kinds of sources — advertising, sponsorships, merchandise, ticket sales and more. Alongside this, the esports space becomes more trustworthy. Brands are less hesitant to get involved when they can see consistent growth figures and large engaged audiences.
But it’s not just about the companies. Viewers like to feel involved and get a thrill from esports too.
Esports matches happen every day. Much like sporting events, there are people around the world that want a piece of the action. Bethereum is capitalizing on the growth of esports by providing a blockchain based social betting solution that tackles some key issues with traditional betting. It’s a new, innovative platform for a growing, innovative industry.
Bethereum and Esports
Bethereum is a peer-to-peer betting platform focussed on sports and esports. There aren’t any calculated odds — players places their bets with other individuals to bet on a desired outcome, creating the odds themselves. The entire platform is built with the aim of bringing fun and social elements back to betting.
A key focus for the growth of Bethereum is honing in on the ever expanding esports market to capitalize on an audience that is enthusiastic about social engagement and gamification.
In order to bring communities together, Bethereum has introduced propositional gamification elements like leaderboards, live chats, special events, achievements, avatars and more. They are aiming to increase retention and social engagement and judging by these metrics, propositional features have been very successful.
An interesting insight here is that traditional betting companies struggle to offer esports betting and remain profitable, due to the difficult task of setting reliable odds. With Bethereum’s peer-to-peer betting solution every bet is operationally profitable with a 4.75% commission taken from the winner. This enables Bethereum to continue operations and scale their platform to meet the needs of esports betters over the long term.
Expansion of Bethereum
The Bethereum team are eager to scale, but are dead set on playing by the rules — an admirable stance to take in the cryptocurrency world that should help in the long term.
There is already a fully working sports and esports betting platform, but Bethereum are in the process of obtaining their betting license. Presently, the platform has been used as free-to-play, mostly as a proof of concept. However, Bethereum are reportedly about to receive a Curacao license, so the service can be commercially tested in selected territories. Further expansion will be done in accordance with proper locational licensing and legal requirements with esports as a key target market.
*This article was written by The Daily Chain, a Media partner of Bethereum.
Source: The Daily Chain | https://medium.com/bethereum/entering-esports-bethereums-path-to-growth-c350b0ab82e7 | [] | 2019-12-29 10:12:19.185000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Gaming', 'Esports', 'Betting', 'Igaming'] |
Creating Your First Python Package | This is my first blog post with hopefully many more to come, talking about how to create your first Python package and release it on PyPI. I’ve been writing software for my startup and for various ad hoc development projects for the past couple of years, however, after I put out my first package a couple of weeks ago, I realized there is so much one learns and sees the benefit of, that not writing code in a “good practice” way actually becomes more painful.
Being a data scientist first, best software principals weren’t always at the forefront of my mind when doing projects. After forcing myself to write tests and attempt to pick up more best practices, I find it being a mindset that I can’t believe I’ve lived without for so long. These are things learned from a small package, I put out in under 1 weeks too! For those of you who are interested, the package is called icd. I have also just released a second one called fastteradata, however, I accidentally got too excited and am currently in progress of writing the retroactive tests for it and doing a major cleaning of the code now.
Some of the benefits of writing your first package, no matter how small, will be:
Being forced to think much more modularly Writing code with tests in mind Thinking about making the api simple enough for others to intuitively grasp and reuse your work Learning new tools that come along with writing tests
Enough about the benefits, let’s get to it!
First, let’s go through a very basic package example starting with the folder structure. A great resource for folder structure templates is a package called cookiecutter. There are many different templates to choose from, and you just pick one, call the command on a downloaded example, and in no time you have some basics filled out to get you started faster. In my case, I used the pypackage-minimal template because I wanted a simple skeleton and wanted to use pytest.
After you use cookiecutter, you’ll want to make sure you have the following files, which we will go through each one at a high level. You can explore each one of these items in much more depth later on.
Directory <package_name> — Where all of your actual package code will live Directory tests — Where all of your tests you write will live tox.ini — Used in conjunction with pytest for multi-environment testing codecov.yml — Allows you to measure how much of your code is backed by tests LICENSE.txt — License to distribute your code under README.rst — Where your initial documentation will live (for larger packages, you might move some of the documentation out of your README into something like a Sphinx site.) setup.py — Used to generate and specify details about your package
Great, now that we have the structure let’s look at actually writing some code. In your package_name directory, which from now on we will call animalsounds, let’s first start by creating an __init__.py file to represent the package. In that file, we can place something like:
from animalsounds.sounds_generator import generator __version__ = '0.1.0' __author__ = First Last <[email protected]>' __all__ = []
This will be where everything gets imported for your users to access. In this case, we import the generator method from a file, sounds_generator. Now, create a sounds_generator.py file and place something like the following inside.
sounds_dict = {“cat”:”meow”,”dog”:”woof”,”fish”:”...”} def generator(animal): “”” Summary: Translates what the sound different animals make Args: animal (str) – A string of the animal you want to hear, valid options include ‘cat’, ‘dog,’ and ‘fish’ Returns: A string of the appropriate sound. “”” sound = “” try: sound = sounds_dict[animal.lower()] except: raise Exception(f“We don’t know what a {animal} sounds like! You could be on to something!”) return(sound)
You’ll notice in this simple function that the doc strings are almost longer than the actual code logic. This is something that you will thank yourself in the future for a thousand times over. But now that we have our first python package function, what’s next?
Tests!
Any piece of code that you write, you should be writing with tests in mind so that you can better break apart larger functions into base components to hopefully get more reuse out of them. In this case, we wrote our package code first, however, you can also write your tests first, knowing your function can’t fulfill them and only then fill in the code until the test passes. There is a lot of great material out there for Test Driven Development (TDD) if you want to explore the philosophy behind it more. This is something that is a major level up in best practice coding that once you force yourself to do, everything seems so much easier.
For this example, we will be using pytest. So first, same as last time, within our tests directory, let’s place an empty __init__.py file. Next let’s write some tests! When using pytest, by default, it searches the tests directory for files and methods that begin with “test_” recursively. So let’s make a file called test_generator.py and place the following code in it.
import pytest import animalsounds def test_generator_cat(): sound = animalsounds.generator(“cat”) assert sound == “meow” def test_generator_dog(): sound = animalsounds.generator(“dog”) assert sound == “woof” def test_generator_fish(): sound = animalsounds.generator(“fish”) assert sound == “...” def test_generator_notfound(): with pytest.raises(Exception): animalsounds.generator(“emu”)
Now, with the following code, we have covered every case for our generator method. Pytest syntax for most tests will just be an “assert” command with your test of the function with known parameters compared to the expected behavior. The last test we wrote, we took advantage of testing even when we expect the function to raise an Exception case. This syntax in pytest is simply the with pytest.raises(Exception): line followed by an invocation of your method that should raise the exception. You can be more specific in these cases as well with specifying specific types of Exceptions.
To invoke the tests and see them pass, just cd to the root of the project and after making sure you have pytest pip installed, type pytest in the terminal and there you go!
Packaging up
Now that we have our code and our tests, let’s expand the functionality of our testing basis a little by introducing tox. Tox allows us to run through tests in multiple environments so that you can be sure your code will work with the differences between python versions as well as linux vs. osx. In our tox.ini file, let’s place the following code:
[tox] envlist=py34,py35,py36 [testenv] passenv = * commands=py.test --cov=animalsounds tests/ codecov --token={env:CODECOVTOKEN} deps=pytest pytest-cov codecov
The above code essentially says we are going to try and test using python3.4, 3.5 and 3.6 environments lays out the dependencies, which in this case is just pytest and some code coverage libraries, and specifies the commands to execute in each environment. This is a great time to talk about code coverage.
The idea behind code coverage is to see what percentage of your code is covered by your tests. It gives a good idea of the confidence of deploying and trusting the methods you write can be repeatable and trusted. This is because the report comes back with a percentage vs. a normal build just having a pass or fail status based on if all 1 of your tests pass or all 1,000 of your tests pass. Codecov is a service that attempts to do just this. Pytest-cov is a package that allows us to generate the specified codecov reports from pytest, which you can see us invoking in the first command. Then the second command is what uploads the codecov report to the service so we can pull down the appropriate badge. When you set up your codecov account, you can sync up your specified github repo and are given a token for each repo. So when we run tox on our local machine, we will have to set the CODECOVTOKEN environment variable before running tox .
Uh oh, as you can see with tox testing the different python environments, you can see there is a syntax error for the python3.4 and 3.5 environments. That is because our package uses a new feature in python 3.6, the function string. f” some string {variable_to_render}” We can either go back and change our package code for compatibility, or in this case, I like the clarity and syntax better, so let’s just remove the py34 and py35 environments in our tox.ini file.
Ok, almost there!
So at this point, we have our package logic, our tests, multiple environments tests, and code coverage reports. Now what happens if others start contributing to our repo and someone edits code, but forgets to run tox or pytest locally before pushing to our repo? Bugs could be introduced and people who depend on your code now have things that break. This is where Continuous Integration (CI) comes in. For this, we will be using travis. What travis does is every time someone pushes to our github repo, we tell travis to run tests and generate new code coverage reports via tox and if something breaks the build, we can send off notifications alerting us of the tragedy. This then auto updates image sources for our code coverage and build passing/failing badges in our README.
To set up travis, we just connect our repo, insert our CODECOVTOKEN environment variable into the settings for our project, and we are good to go!
So now that we have all of the main code components for our new package, now we have to set the license, write documentation and example use in the README, and edit our setup.py file.
For the license, look up and pick out your favorite software license and just copy paste into your LICENSE.txt file.
For the README, use an online real time editor and try to write it in Rich Structured Text (rst) format with examples, docs, dependencies, installation instructions, etc. If you used cookiecutter, you should already have a nice template to work from.
Finally, the setup.py file, you can follow a form like this:
import setuptools setuptools.setup( name="animalsounds", version="0.1.0", url="https://github.com/username/animalsounds", author="First Last", author_email="[email protected]", description="An exploration of different animal sounds.", long_description=open('README.rst').read(), packages=setuptools.find_packages(), install_requires=[], classifiers=[ 'Development Status :: 2 - Pre-Alpha', 'Programming Language :: Python', 'Programming Language :: Python :: 3', 'Programming Language :: Python :: 3.6', ], )
Can We Upload Yet?
Once we have all of these items, have pushed to github, have seen our continuous integration run our tests and generate the build passing and coverage reports, we can now upload our code to PyPI with confidence!! How do we get it up there though? Well, we are in luck because there’s a python package for that, and it’s called twine.
Twine makes sure to package up and upload your code to the PyPI servers through a secure connection. You will have to also go on PyPI and create a user account before doing this, but after doing the one line twine command to register and upload, you now have your first package deployed!
Congratulations! Try to pip install it and give yourself a pat on the back! | https://medium.com/38th-street-studios/creating-your-first-python-package-181c5e31f3f8 | ['Mark Hoffmann'] | 2017-11-17 16:54:01.309000+00:00 | ['Test Driven Development', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Software Development'] |
Ice, water, steam: reflecting on the language of agile teams | Ice, water, steam: reflecting on the language of agile teams
How to move to a fluid state, so you can adapt to uncertain times
Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash
Lately, I’ve been thinking about what we need to do to continue our journey towards world-class engineering, and perform at that level over the long term. I’ve also been thinking about how Xero’s next stage of growth is going to look nothing like our last stage of growth. In fact, I believe it’s less about growth itself and more about transformation. A transformation akin to turning ice or steam into liquid water. Let me explain.
The language of agile organisations
Have you ever noticed that when describing the ideal state of most modern organisations, we use the language of liquid? The properties of water are much like the properties of an organisation that can adapt to changing and uncertain times. It’s ‘fluid’ and ‘dynamic’ and ‘responsive’. It can be channelled and controlled, and has a constant and controlled force built up behind it.
This aspirational language is common in large, traditional, long-standing corporations the world over. These organisations have heard about agile methodologies and operating models like the oft-referenced Spotify model of tribes, squads, chapters and guilds. And recently, they have started listening to the people and consultants who have told them for years that they needed to ‘get agile’.
When we talk about organisations like this, you’ll notice that there is a tendency to (not always kindly) use the language of ice: ‘middle management permafrost’, ‘frozen in time’, ‘moving at a glacial pace’. So when they say they want to become more agile, what they’re really saying is they want to transform their organisation from ice to water. Now, if I recall my high school physics correctly, there are two ways to do this: we can increase pressure, or we can turn up the heat.
You can see this in the way digital transformation projects are run in many large organisations. They try and get everyone to go, go, go! They put pressure on with hard deadlines and high expectations, hoping that the momentum will cause that solid block of ice to move and flow, like water. They’re trying to chip away at that ice and heat things up. Which is all very well if you’re an old-school organisation that wants to be more agile. But what if you’re a newer SaaS or tech company?
Channelling the steam of innovation
When it comes to the tech sector, this liquid language still describes our ideal state. But the current state of many of these companies is probably better described with the language of steam (yes, I’m taking this analogy as far I can!). You often hear about start-ups that are experiencing ‘explosive growth’ and under ‘high pressure’. You hear about things ‘heating up’. And inside those companies, you often hear things like ‘it’s hard to see clearly’ and maybe even ‘it’s a bit foggy!’
Everyone is trying to channel that energy, but they don’t have time to think about it too deeply, because there’s a vent of steam over there to try and control. No wait, there’s another one over there. No, wait! Another one! You hopefully see where I’m going with this. You have organisations with massive growth, fuelled by the ‘steam’ of innovation and the fact their product is taking off in the market. That may be okay for the first few years, but it’s also very opportunistic. There’s little time to focus on turning all of that into something that is sustainable and that will endure in the long-term.
When we do get the opportunity to think about what’s next for companies like this, we also don’t want to slow things down so much that they turn into a slow-moving corporate with no ability to adapt. So how do we get this balance? How do companies like Xero or Facebook or Google become 100-year old companies, without freezing up? (Because the dark side of playing with steam is that you can get burned; it’s not too smart or sustainable in the long term.)
Well, how about we start by reducing the heat and the wrong kind of pressure.
Cooling things down (but not too much)
I had a lot of people approach me when I started at Xero because they were worried about Xero becoming ‘too corporate’. So I asked: what do you mean by that? Because if you don’t want to be bureaucratic and political and slow-moving, then I totally agree! But, if what you’re saying is that you don’t want any kind of consistency, any kind of clear and repeatable way of doing the right things, or a set of best practice standards to work towards, then I’m probably less aligned to agree with that point of view.
We need to take the best bits of long-standing organisations to cool things down (like a bit of ice in our glass) but not enough that we become frozen too. It’s a tricky balance, because if we cool things down too quickly — implementing too much structure and too many processes — we could end up with a cultural disaster. We don’t want to lose that energy, we just want to transform it into something that is more sustainable. So we need to do this gradually.
A great example is the technology we use. We want teams to think about solving the problem, not necessarily what tool they use to do it. So we encourage diversity in technology. Cooling it down might look like reviewing all those tools and thinking about which ones are truly adding value, so we can condense down our list and make better use of the stuff we already have. Another example is tech debt — spending more time paying off some tech debt definitely reduces the pressure on teams, and thereby reduces some of the heat they can feel from unplanned outages and constraints on releasing quickly and often.
Thoughts on transforming your team
If you’re a people or team leader, I think you have an opportunity to reduce the wrong kind of pressure for your team. You don’t need to wait for a big strategic review either — you can start right now.
Deal with ambiguity
I’m not talking about the real ambiguity in our lives (hello, COVID-19!) that we need to deal with through things like fostering resilience, providing support and being empathetic. No, I’m referring to the ‘manufactured’ ambiguity that often results from not communicating clearly or consistently and where people don’t know what you expect of them or how they should operate. In those situations, it’s your job to deal to that ambiguity.
By being clear about what the team’s focus should be, focusing on the important rather than the urgent, and limiting work-in-progress, you’re reducing the pressure on your team. Ask yourself this: are you clear on what you’re expecting from your teams? How clearly have you made those expectations known? What simple messaging have you used to outline what needs to be achieved? And what support are you putting in place to help them achieve those outcomes?
Use the support model
Speaking of support, I’m a big fan of the idea of reframing traditional reporting lines (as shown on most org charts) into ‘supporting lines’. If you’re not familiar with this concept, it is designed to better illustrate servant leadership in action. Those who are closest to the customer are placed at the top of the chart, who are then supported by the managers beneath them, supported by the executive team, and so on down to the CEO as the ‘ultimate supporter’ at the base of the chart. It’s a good reminder that we’re here to support our teams — the people ‘on the ground’ should feel supported by all these people, not pressured by the weight of a structured reporting model.
Reduce cognitive load
The average person has a certain amount of cognitive load they carry on any given day. Getting out of bed and starting your day, sending the kids to school… all these routine activities still take up a certain amount of your cognitive capacity. When you finally get around to starting to work, you are already not operating at 100% available cognitive capacity. And when a global pandemic happens, you are operating with even less! So as leaders, we need to consider the cognitive load that the work environment brings and think about what we can do to reduce unnecessary pressure.
At Xero, we have #human as a value of ours, so we are encouraged to frequently check in with the people we support and our colleagues and find out how things are going. We also have a number of initiatives in our engineering practice that are geared towards reducing the cognitive load that an engineer faces each day — things like clear standards, education, tooling and support from other engineers with some of the trickier problems they are facing.
Focus on the next thing
There are so many things that you cannot legitimately control about the operating context you and your organisation are in. So why spend all your energy on those things when you can instead focus on what you can control. Think about the things that won’t change: your purpose, your long-term vision, your values. And focus on the next thing you can do to work towards those, no matter how small that next thing is. That’s why at Xero we tend to talk in 10-year language. Things may change in the short-term, but if we are clear about what we’re trying to achieve, who we are trying to help, and what we want to be as an organisation, then that can help orient us to what is important (over what is simply just urgent).
At Xero, we’re in the business of making people’s lives better. That’s not something we can do overnight, and it’s not something we can do if we burn people out. It is our enduring purpose and it requires endurance. So we’re working hard to make sure that we have the right amount of support and clarity to balance out the heat and the pressure so that we continue to innovate in a sustainable way.
Part of that work is encouraging our teams to be agile in the true sense of the word — fluid, dynamic, responsive — and sustainably so. By doing this, instead of leaping on every opportunity or getting bogged down reinventing the wheel, they can focus on the real work of solving customer problems. So next time somebody talks about being agile, maybe think about what state your team is in and whether you just might need a different style of transformation. | https://medium.com/humans-of-xero/ice-water-steam-reflecting-on-the-language-of-agile-teams-81c18d097c07 | ['James Bergin'] | 2020-08-31 00:48:20.454000+00:00 | ['Engineering', 'Agile', 'Team', 'Organizational Change', 'Technology'] |
WE BURNED 883,579,150btsg | The new supply is 116,420,850btsg
As we promised, unsold and unused tokens from our ICO were burned!
https://etherscan.io/tx/0xa16b3db51ee0206cfb083758ca45156e202a86cb496377db95186a0b6a078c83
Following our Crowdfunding, which took place in 2018, this is the Official Distribution of the BTSG token.
Remember that the Total Supply is actually an Initial Supply, as ours is a dPoS (Delegated Proof of Stake) Blockchain, which means that the supply will vary according to inflation.
Total Initial Supply — 116.420.850 btsg
Crowdfunding (50%) — 58.210.425
(50%) — 58.210.425 Reserve Fund (20%) — 23.284.170
(20%) — 23.284.170 Team (15%) — 17,463,128
(15%) — 17,463,128 Marketing&Partnerships (7%) — 8.149.460
(7%) — 8.149.460 Advisor (5%) — 5.821.043
(5%) — 5.821.043 Bounty Contest (2%) — 2,328.417
(2%) — 2,328.417 Airdrop Contest (1%) — 1,164,209
🙏 Thank you all for your trust in BitSong
Try the new bitsong music player
Website | Discord | Telegram | Github | https://medium.com/@bitsongofficial/we-burned-883-579-150btsg-9de9d7f8ef04 | [] | 2020-12-19 12:18:43.459000+00:00 | ['Bitsong', 'Music', 'Burn', 'Blockchain', 'Events'] |
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A case against form objects | Note: The current article is based on Ruby on Rails examples, but the core idea should be applicable to other frameworks/languages.
The first
Let’s start trying to define some concepts:
What’s a form object?
What’s their architectural purpose?
According to the articles linked at the bottom and our own experience working on several Rails codebases using form objects, there’s a variety of definitions and objectives. To enumerate a few:
What are they? what they do?
A plain old ruby object that runs validations on data input
Virtual models that represent the aggregation of other model objects
Replacement for strong parameters (input params whitelist)
A way to refactor model life-cycle callbacks
A form object is an object designed specifically to be passed to form_for
This type of objects is used to make the life of a controller a bit easier and take params processing responsibility out of it. Creating form objects basically means making proper type coercions and introducing simple validations
Encapsulating the aggregation of multiple ActiveRecord models might be updated by a single form submission
The Form Object quacks like an ActiveRecord, so the controller remains familiar
An object that lets you manage complex behaviour easily
Why use them? What’s their main purpose?
Extracting business logic from controller and/or model layers
Providing view-backing helper methods (eg: providing options for complex selects)
Easily implementing Rails conventions on complex forms that do not map directly into a single AR model
Moving responsibilities to the form object reduces decoupling between the controller, model (including multiple models), and the view template.
As you can see a form object is a broad, non-uniform idea. There’s no consensus on what they are, or when to use them or what their responsibilities are.
And this is the first problem: the Form Object concept is communicatively poor. When I need to work on a codebase that uses form objects, I don’t know which of all these ideas I will find behind them, or, more frequently, what mix of them.
As a summary (and keep this idea in mind as we will review it later) we can say that the general idea is that form objects are a good way to refactor code complexity and condensation of responsibilities either in some part of the system (usually the model and/or controller layers).
An example
Most of the Form Objects that I came across with are used like this. And according to the articles linked below, it might be considered the most popular implementation:
class SomethingController < ApplicationController def create @form = MyForm.new(action_params) if @form.valid? @form.save! redirect_to "someplace" else render :new end end
def new @form = MyForm.new end end
This looks like almost every “rails-way” controller (if valid? save & redirect; else: render). Exactly what a rails dev expects to see.
Short & sweet, straight to the point.
This must be OK, right?
The second
Let’s analyze what the form object is in charge of in these few lines, what knowledge it manages only by taking a look at its public API
new(params) => has knowledge of the request’s params. Makes it a good place to house input data transformations to adapt it to model’s needs.
valid? => The form runs validations. This means it has knowledge of the params, its types, and the validation rules, which also mean knowledge of business logic and domain rules.
save! => Object persistence. That means that it also knows how to create them from params and how the persistence layer works.
@form => Variable passed to the view layer. Makes it a potential place to hold view-backing logic (eg: form_forchoices for selects and check/radios, conditional rendering, form_for model, etc)
Deep inside, in a shady corner, our single responsibility principle intuition, lonely cries Yeah… is it perhaps too much?
An object that knows too much does too much. This exerts a gravitational pull of code on the whole system:
I need a few more view backing helpers, where should I put them? => in the form object.
new validations? => form object.
Need to map params to some model attributes/objects => yeap, the form object.
Even worse if you give it as one of the posts says the opportunity to send mail and/or user notifications.
And the worst part is, and here comes the second problem: it does make sense to put those in there.
Changes like these will probably pass code review as there’s no good argument against them.
Our form object is now the new fat controller/model. It holds and attracts the same problems that we were trying to solve when we first introduced them.
The third
There’s yet another other problem and perhaps the more concerning one: you probably already have objects that are in charge of these responsibilities.
persistence : it is a model’s responsibility. Delegate on those classes instead of imitating them. Making the controller look like a “blog-in-10-minutes” controller is not enough as an argument.
: it is a model’s responsibility. Delegate on those classes instead of imitating them. Making the controller look like a “blog-in-10-minutes” controller is not enough as an argument. business logic : to hold business logic use service objects. They are a natural place for complex business logic.
: to hold business logic use service objects. They are a natural place for complex business logic. input validation : use validation objects. There are multiple libraries you can use to implement them (including ActiveRecord::Model, https://github.com/soveran/scrivener, https://github.com/dry-rb/dry-schema)
: use validation objects. There are multiple libraries you can use to implement them (including ActiveRecord::Model, https://github.com/soveran/scrivener, https://github.com/dry-rb/dry-schema) view backing/helper methods: use a view model / presenter object.
If you are shooting for a form object, you probably have a medium sized app and already have some of these in your codebase. Why add yet another architectural concept that has a rather vague definition and overlaps over other component’s responsibilities?
We need to embrace the idea that if the use case is complex, the code will be complex. Brushing the complexity under the carpet doesn’t make it disappear.
A proposal
Using the ideas above, the same controller could look like:
def new @form = SomeFormViewModel.new(defaut_values) end def create validation = SomeValidation.new(action_params) if validation.valid? result = SomeService.new(validation.params).call if result.success? redirect_to “someplace”, info: “everything went ok.” else redirect_to “someplace”, error: “uh oh… something gone oops: # {result.errors}” end else @form = SomeFormViewModel.new render :new end end
pros:
It is not 100% rails-way but the structure is pretty similar and easy to follow
The controller is composing and delegating logic to single-purposed objects.
The limits and purpose of each piece are well defined.
Each piece has a single focus, so they are easier and faster to test (and to maintain those tests)
The code structure and responsibilities distribution are self-replicating. Is easier to build a culture on top of these and it should also be harder for a change that mixes up responsibilities to pass code review.
Conclusion
This is an idea that arose out of an analysis of some of the codebases we inherited or built ourselves in the past and we now need to maintain. This is most likely not the only solution, and it is definitely not a “default recipe” that should be followed blindly.
Form objects are not bad per se. Their intention is good and they are usually better than a bloated model or controller. Perhaps next time you see one or think of adding a new one, some of these ideas come to your mind.
If you find anything useful or that you think it would be good for your codebases, let us know!
Linked articles | https://medium.com/sinaptia/a-case-against-form-objects-16aa6ef44b27 | [] | 2020-06-24 19:45:44.688000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Developer', 'Ruby on Rails', 'English', 'Development'] |
The Biggest Thing Biden Hasn’t Learned From His Foreign Policy Mistakes? | Neville Chamberlin declares his treaty with the 3rd Reich means “peace for our time.”
The controversy over Joe Biden’s Ukraine escapades stirs memories of my own Ukrainian adventures. The first occurred about the same time Biden was haranguing President Reagan for pursing his “Star Wars” missile defense program, the same initiative most observers now credit as the single biggest policy initiative that brought the Soviet empire to its knees.
It was October, 1991 and the chill as I stepped off the New York to Kyiv flight wasn’t just because the thermometer measured freezing temperatures, it was due more to the Soviet Premier’s threat that Moscow would retaliate against any Soviet state that sought independence — the very independence I was there to help initiate.
A few days earlier, a dear friend, Marc Nuttle, had called my business partner and I in our Sacramento office and asked if we were up for getting involved in Ukraine’s independence campaign. The brilliant Sal Russo was the senior partner in a firm I’d joined just 2 years earlier. We were Republican media consultants. Marc wanted us to go to Ukraine and make the first television commercials ever aired on Soviet television not sponsored or approved by the state.
Having the year before come off the campaign to help defeat the Communist regime in Nicaragua in the first ever election to successfully overthrow a Communist dictator, Sal and I were anxious to help drive a stake through Communism’s Soviet heart.
Marc’s experience working against Communists around the world far surpassed mine. I wonder if the countries who then suffered under Soviet oppression realize today the incredible contribution Marc made in laying the groundwork for their eventual freedom.
What we suspected then was that If one Soviet state successfully left the Soviet Union, every other state would follow. And those countries behind the iron curtain not officially part of the Soviet Republic would quickly turn against their Russian masters.
The world would change dramatically. It was the promise of that change that motivated Marc Nuttle, Sal, and me to jump headlong into the fray. I suspect that for the fourth American in our group, the uber talented lawyer and executive, John Hewko, it had at least as much to do with freeing the country of his parent’s birth as it did destroying the Soviet empire.
The prospect of that world altering change is also why the foreign policy establishment in the west, including Senate Foreign Relations Committee member Joe Biden, were afraid of Ukraine’s independence.
The foreign policy mandarins like Biden in Washington and Europe cared far more for predictability than for dismantling the greatest threat to freedom the world had ever known. The messy upheaval of the crumbling Soviet empire caused people like Biden spasms. | https://medium.com/@tonymarsh755/the-biggest-thing-biden-hasnt-learned-from-his-foreign-policy-mistakes-4f49edcb8887 | ['Tony Marsh'] | 2020-11-20 21:21:18.807000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Biden', 'Trump', 'Republican Party', 'Foreign Policy'] |
CompTIA A+ Study Tips That Actually Work | Study Effectively — The Method
This process evolved out of my own study efforts over several months. It became developed in this form by around the time I passed the 1002 exam and began studying for the Network+ exam, which I will detail in another post. I used this method to study for and pass both the Network+ and Security+ in just under two months each. Had I done this for the entirety of the A+, I would have just passed sooner.
Using the official CompTIA material, you will know some of it already. For example, if you do not know what a mouse or a monitor does, you should probably consider doing something else with your life. Any question you get wrong or have to guess to get an answer, Certmaster will show you the right answer and why after a few questions. HAND WRITE THE ANSWERS WORD FOR WORD ON PAPER FIRST, preferably with white paper and blue ink (Yes, I know there’s a lot of hippy dippy nonsense out there about this, but there’s just something about this that actually works.).
Writing it down first word for word from Certmaster onto paper really does make the information stick much better. I have found this to be true with myself as well as all the students who apply this technique. To give a sense of scale, I had 30–50 pages of notes for each of the four exams (1001, 1002, Network+, Security+).
After about half of a major chapter (there are 5 or 6 major sections for each exam) of handwritten notes, then go type the notes in your word processor of choice BY READING FROM THE HANDWRITTEN NOTES NOT COPY/PASTING FROM CERTMASTER. Typing from handwritten notes refreshes the mind with all the memories of reading the right answers, writing them out, and now typing gives a third type of mental stimulus that helps the material stick better. Loop this process until the end of each major section.
Next, record yourself teach yourself each point from the notes. At least use some kind of audio recorder, but a screen capture with audio or video with audio is preferable. In addition to reviewing the material with another type of stimulus, you also make recordings that you can play in the background when you are alone or bored. You do not need to ever show these to anyone, but this really does help. Listening back to these recordings is another form of mental stimulus that helps you absorb the information and quite granular details. It does not have to be great; it just has to work good enough for you.
There will certainly be questions that you keep getting wrong, so loop the write it, type it, record it, listen to it method until it is burned into your mind. I had to do this process five or six times for some specific information that was giving me a lot of trouble. If it seems like a lot of work to pass an exam that is going to require several hours of dedicated study just about every day for months on end, you are 100% right.
Somewhat counter intuitively, I have discovered that this reduces the overall study time for students because it takes fewer touches for each point of material than reading and practice questions alone. Getting all the variety of methods of stimulus for the material makes the internalization process work much better. My students who stick to the method do better, pass faster, and understand the material better than those who do not follow the process. | https://medium.com/an-idea/comptia-a-study-tips-that-actually-work-79c62126ef89 | ['Tyler Harris'] | 2020-10-03 02:03:08.837000+00:00 | ['Comptia', 'Technology', 'Self Improvement', 'Certification', 'Comptia Certifications'] |
Visualizing your Risk Momentum | The risk factors in not achieving a goal are not easily defined and even if defined are not easily quantified. In the end for short terms goals the best thing you can do is measure how well you have achieved action toward that goal. For long term goals, well, what are they a bunch of short term goals. I say that last sentence as I laugh maniacally because it is so terribly simplistic and likewise wrong but it still it has some truth. In this post I am going to discuss a simple chart designed to be used in a bullet journal for visualizing “Risk Momentum” on a short term, weekly, goal. Don’t let the simplicity of the chart fool you. It is complex in what it surfaces and how to populate it. The first part of this series is a post titled “Time Management — Bullet Journaling: Weekly Chronodex”.
Image 1. Risk Momentum Chart
The Risk Momentum Chart (Image 1) is simple in design but carries a lot of nuance. The basic principle is that each day has a block made up of 4 quadrants and each quadrant can be either be colored green or red. Red represents insufficient expected progress toward the goal in order to achieve it by the end of the week and green means just the opposite. The more red you accumulate the less likely you are to meet the goal. Sounds simple. It is. But what it is surfacing is that if the goal will only take 4 hours to achieve and by the end of day 3 you have all red i.e. not worked on it at all, the likelihood you will give that needed time in the next two days is small. You have high risk momentum. What if it is part green and part read? Here is where is gets tricky. This chart is entirely subjective. Subjective not only in progress but also in what progress means. Let me give an example.
Image 1 shows a weekly goal of 2 blog posts. On Monday I outlined the first post. I gave myself 3 out of 4 green for that day. Maybe I would have given myself 4 out of 4 green if I had outlined both posts or started writing the longer of the two. Unless I feel way ahead of the curve a 3 out of 4 green is about as good as I can hope for on a Monday. Tuesday I did no work on it. All red. Wednesday I wrote and published the first longer post. I felt pretty good about it and I feel like that is about as much as I would expect for that single day toward this goal so it got an all green indicator.
The example is simpler than life usually is. Let’s add some complexity. The risk evaluation can’t be done in isolation. If I knew on Wednesday when I wrote the one post that I was out of town on Thursday then for the same effort I would have only given myself 1 or 2 green. The risk of not meeting the goal is higher and I needed to have done more today to mitigate the risk. I must evaluate the risk mitigation for the day not only by evaluating the work done that day on the goal but relative to what other days I can reasonably expect to apply effort. The “momentum” part is that I must also evaluate the risk mitigation for Wednesday by how much green or red momentum I have prior to Wednesday. If Monday and Tuesday were all red then Wednesday with the same effort would be less green than what I evaluated in the example (2 or 3 out of 4 would be green). I must not consider the results of Wednesday in isolation. It is very valuable and drives mindfulness of the risk while presenting it in a simple view anyone could understand even if not a simple evaluation technique.
In the end… the more red you see the more risk you have accumulated that the goal will not be met. Be brutally honest every day. Take into account momentum and forthcoming needed efforts for this and other obligations and assign a risk mitigation to that Risk Momentum chart for the day. | https://medium.com/@m-ruminer/visualizing-your-risk-momentum-dd35531ff90c | ['Michael Ruminer'] | 2020-09-23 23:44:55.657000+00:00 | ['Risk Momentum', 'Time Management', 'Risk Management', 'Bullet Journaling'] |
An Alarm That Recently Unsettled Me — AskEditors.com | An incident unfolded slowly before me as I sat at a table deeply engrossed in the reading of a literary text. It was past 10 in the night, the atmosphere looked serene. Suddenly, I heard a man ranting loudly about his phone. I thought the phone must have been stolen. There was long silence visibly interrupted by a woman crying out “I can’t find my teeth”. I listened keenly as she was being led away by those people trying to pacify her. The story was real, not as fictional as the literary text I was reading.
Shortly after that, I heard the woman shouting repeatedly, “Come and beat me, mad man.” Then she shrieked as I heard the footsteps of some people rushing to rescue her from her supposedly heavyweight husband. From her railings I could surmise, if I heard her clearly, that she had lost almost two pregnancies in the boxing ring of her matrimonial home fighting her Mayweather husband. She insisted she must speak even when her helpers were holding down her Mayweather who was still bent on unleashing greater terror on her, probably giving her a total knock-out.
The story climaxed when I heard her say it was over between two of them and that she was going to call her lawyer to file a divorce suit. It was on this chapter of the story that I heard the most insulting statement ever spoken to womanhood. Her husband replied her, “go, I will return your bride price.” What! He would return the bride price of a woman who produced children for him? He would return the bride price to whom? Her parents? What an insult to her parents!
The most touching chapter of the story happened when the atmosphere returned to normal around 12 am when all sympathisers had gone their own way. Then, I heard one of their female children sobbing out loudly. I could not endure the grief coming from the third floor into my room in the second floor in a three-storey building. I fought back my tears. I was pressed within me to go up to console the small child and bring her to my room and tell her that what happened between her parents was not her fault, but I could not, rather, I went to my bed. I thought about how what a child raised in such atmosphere of hate and violence would grow up to be in future.
I strained my ears to catch the origin of the fight from one woman who was blaming the woman on why she had to seize her husband’s phone. I surmised that the woman must have done that on an alleged infidelity on the part of her husband.
Dear Reader, there is little that can be done about this couple. They are married already and divorce is not an escape route if they have Heaven in mind.
I am pressed in my spirit to tell all the singles like me, that if you think that love is blind, wait, marriage will open your eyes. Why can’t you commit your life and relationship to the ONE who knows the future? God instituted marriage, and it must be done in His own way. Marriage is God’s field, do it the way He had programmed it, not the way you think it should be. And if you think you can do it in your own way, go ahead, time will tell. Think about your future with that guy or lady and the children you are going to raise in that home. If at least, you can’t pity yourself, pity the unborn children. God will not only hold you responsible for your own sins, but the sins (or corruption) of those children who are entrusted into your cares. Are you laying a good foundation based on trust? Is the relationship based on purity? Any relationship built on pre-marital sex is faulty. If your foundation is faulty, you are pulling out bits and pieces from the walls of your marriage-the rest is wreck. Surrender your life to Jesus Christ and He will make it beautiful. You will only experience PEACE on earth, if you find JOY in the Holy Ghost and LOVE in your spouse. God richly bless you.
© Alade Blessing. | https://medium.com/@blexin4christ/an-alarm-that-recently-unsettled-me-askeditors-com-4879b0a4ef63 | ['Alade Blessing'] | 2021-01-08 11:06:42.874000+00:00 | ['Domestic Violence'] |
Empyrean beats | Beating to the rhythm of gamma-ray beats
Bound to a black hole 15,000 light years away,
Mass’ violence — its unfathomable yen —
Saps stars…we grasp gamma music.
Beating stars take lifetimes to die;
Their swan songs are vast funeral pyres.
Their verb reverberates violently,
Sometimes hunted by singularities.
Gas clouds bigger than a solar system
Learn the stellar cries of decay;
They relay space cadences,
Spent starlight dances with our senses. | https://adroverlausell.medium.com/empyrean-beats-676d01e124a2 | ['Miguel Adrover'] | 2020-08-21 18:07:24.230000+00:00 | ['Astronomy', 'Black Holes', 'Science', 'Poetry', 'Stars'] |
Review of EDC Blockchain | What does EDC Blockchain do? Who does need such services?
Now it is important for every cryptocurrency to create its own ecosystem. The appearence of smart contracts made it possible to create own applications on a single blockchain. Decentralization makes it possible to safely store the large amounts of information, to create various applications. The information stored in the blockchain cannot be changed.
Existing blockchains with smart contracts such as Ethereum have faced with scalability problems when new applications interfere the work of already existing applications. As a result, the overall productivity of the entire network slows down. In addition to the slow operation, there are the following problems: limited use of tokens, a complex token programming that requires a special knowledge, vulnerabilities of tokens that can affect the overall security of the network.
Technology does not stand at one spot. Different developers offer their own solutions to existing problems. The EDC Blockchain team carefully analyzed all existing developments and created its own blockchain based on BitShares 2.0 Graphene technology. This technology provides the highest level of performance at the moment, which allows to create the large-scale applications with a large number of users on the EDC Blockchain platform. Each application is created on a separate blockchain. At the same time, even the most powerful application does not affect to the overall operation of the network and does not slow it down. The technology used allows to make payments in the network at a speed of 100 000 operations per second.
The second problem is the complexity of creating your own applications. Within the existing blockchains, the knowledge of special programming languages is required to create an application. EDC Blockchain has developed a modular blockchain system and its own constructor that allows to create applications without having special knowledge from flexible modules, customizing the applications for own needs.
Constructor of the blockchain allows EDC to issue tokens for public sales of tokens and to tokenize the existing assets. It allows to create a cryptocurrency that you can mine with the PoS mining algorithm.
With a holistic ecosystem and 1 million users, EDC blockchain provides marketing services to promote startups located on the platform.
What has already been done?
We have already created our own wallet that supports EDC tokens. In the future, it will be a multi-currency wallet connected to the exchange.
EDC Blockchain uses the LPoS mining algorithm, which allows EDC holders to send a part of the tokens not involved in circulation to the leasing program, earning money on EDC storage. Thus, EDC holders are interested in storage of EDC, not sale, as they receive additional profit for storage.
Income from the leasing program is accrued on a daily basis. Their size depends on the lease term: 3 months — 8% per month (0.27% per day), 6 months — 10% per month (0.33% per day), 12 months — 12% per month (0.4% per day). From the wallet EDC holders can transfer EDC to the leasing program.
To promote the project and the growth of the community, an affiliate program is provided. The unique referral link of the user can be found in the wallet.
In the wallet there is a coin constructor, in which, by choosing a special plan and paying for it, you can create your own application with a coin or token on the blockchain.
Plans for future
Now EDC wallet is available only in the web version. In the future, it is planned to create a wallet for various operating systems and mobile devices.
Now it is possible to create applications within the EDC blockchain. In the future, it is planned to develop a global blockchain constructor, which, using a unique modular EDC Blockchain system, allows to create applications on any existing blockchain.
It is planned to launch its own exchange and connect it with the wallet.
The plans provide for the creation of a platform for the public sale of tokens to attract investment in crypto startups.
The EDC blockchain platform will launch a global marketplace for the needs of the community.
Links:
Website: https://blockchain.mn/ru
Wallet: https://blockchain.mn/ru/wallets-ru/
Blockchain: https://explorer.blockchain.mn/
Leasing program: https://explorer.blockchain.mn/rich-list
Bounty campaign: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5143869
Login at Bitcointalk — lylya75 | https://medium.com/@vera55nika55/review-of-edc-blockchain-f18b46dcf50b | ['Veranika Nika'] | 2019-06-05 12:13:08.490000+00:00 | ['Marketplace', 'Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Wallet'] |
Melissa & Doug Mine to Love Doll Feeding and Changing Accessories Set (Diaper Bag Set, Baby Food & Bottle Set, Promotes Pretend Play Skills) | The Melissa & Doug Mine to Love Doll Feeding and Changing Accessories Set is two sets in one. The feeding set includes an easy-close embroidered bib, disappearing orange juice and milk bottles, a divided dish, two jars of pretend food, a spoon, and a spork. The Melissa & Doug Baby Doll Accessories Changing Set includes a cloth diaper with self-stick closure, a plastic wipes dispenser with six removable wipes, and a jar of pretend ointment. This feeding and changing baby toy set is a great gift for kids ages 3 to 6 years. Add the Melissa & Doug Annie 12″ Drink & Wet doll to round out the pretend play experience and give kids an engaging option for screen-free fun.
Kids will be ready to take good care of their baby dolls with the two-pocket diaper bag. The cushy, padded handles and easy-open compartments will comfortably hold a cloth diaper, a container of wipes, and a container that can hold rash ointment (all included). An easy-close, embroidered bib keeps the baby clean during mealtime, which is organized with a divided dish, fork, spoon, and yummy “applesauce” and “peas and carrots” for the baby. Disappearing “orange juice” and “milk” bottles add nutrition and fun!
For more than 30 years, Melissa & Doug has created beautifully designed imagination- and creativity-sparking products that NBC News called “the gold standard in early childhood play.” We design every toy to the highest quality standards, and to nurture minds and hearts. If your child isn’t inspired, give us a call and we’ll make it right. Our phone number is on every product!
TWO BABY DOLL SETS IN ONE: The Melissa & Doug Mine to Love Doll Feeding and Changing Accessories Set consists of two individual sets: The Diaper Bag and the Baby Food & Bottle Set.
BABY-FEEDING ACCESSORIES: The feeding set includes an easy-close embroidered bib, disappearing orange juice and milk bottles, a divided dish, two jars of pretend food, a spoon, and a spork.
COMPLETE CHANGING SET: The Melissa & Doug Baby Doll Accessories Changing Set includes a cloth diaper with self-stick closure, a plastic wipes dispenser with six removable wipes, and a jar of pretend ointment.
GREAT GIFT FOR KIDS 3 TO 6: This toy set is an ideal gift for kids ages 3 to 6 years. Add the Melissa & Doug Annie 12″ Drink & Wet Doll to round out the caregiving play experience and give kids an engaging option for screen-free fun.
“THE GOLD STANDARD IN CHILDHOOD PLAY”: For more than 30 years, Melissa & Doug has created beautifully designed imagination- and creativity-sparking products that NBC News called “the gold standard in early childhood play.”
100% HAPPINESS GUARANTEE: We design every toy to the highest quality standards, and to nurture minds and hearts. If your child is not inspired, give us a call and we’ll make it right. Our phone number is on every product!
Price:
Source Link:
Melissa & Doug Mine to Love Doll Feeding and Changing Accessories Set (Diaper Bag Set, Baby Food & Bottle Set, Promotes Pretend Play Skills) | https://medium.com/@ivaper/melissa-doug-mine-to-love-doll-feeding-and-changing-accessories-set-diaper-bag-set-baby-food-b0f3af7916f6 | ['Best Bacare', 'Baproduct Top World'] | 2019-10-05 12:21:47.795000+00:00 | ['Bag', 'Accessories', 'Baby'] |
Why “Do the ends justify the means?” is the wrong question | Outcome bias versus moral philosophy
In a recent article, I wrote about outcome bias and the core principle of decision analysis:
The quality of a decision should be evaluated using only the information available to the decision-maker at the time the decision was made.
If you’re new to the topic, I recommend checking out my gentle intro. This article is a footnote for my fellow nerds.
The 3 main perspectives on moral philosophy
Consequentialism: consider the consequences!
Deontology: do your duty!
Virtue ethics: be virtuous!
Moral propaganda or decision intelligence?
Don’t misunderstand outcome bias as propaganda against consequentialist morality.
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You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s about that if you’ve been subjected to flatfooted explanations of outcome bias that play fast and loose with the words “intentions” and “consequences.” …
Experts in decision analysis have a nifty trick for sniffing out unskilled decision-makers. Curious to know what they’d say about you? Find out by revisiting our quiz from last week with a follow-up question.
Quiz time!
Heather is Canadian, kind, friendly, smart, and loves animals. She is a sustainability consultant. In college, she studied math and psychology. She likes going for long walks and lives near several hiking trails.
Which is more probable about Heather?
Heather has a PhD. Heather has a PhD and owns a dog.
Make sure you’ve prepared your answer before you scroll down!
For added flavor, take my quick quiz before you read on.)
Learning is a good thing, but don’t learn the wrong lessons by misdiagnosing your mistakes. Sometimes, life throws you a random curveball you couldn’t have anticipated no matter your level of decision genius. When that happens, adjusting your decision process is bad thinking.
Let me explain with an example.
Imagine that you’re about to observe the simultaneous flip of a fair coin and roll of a fair six-sided die. Before it happens, you are offered the choice between two gambles: | https://medium.com/@lohkiubyt/why-do-the-ends-justify-the-means-is-the-wrong-question-14b44c550771 | [] | 2020-12-12 17:31:29.055000+00:00 | ['Science', 'Questions', 'Love', 'Life', 'Justify'] |
Exhausted? Frustrated? Angry? Let’s Get Inside Your Head | Exhausted? Frustrated? Angry? Let’s Get Inside Your Head
The science of anger and rage, Covid fatigue, imposter syndrome, and other feelings we’re struggling with right now
Perhaps you, like me, are exhausted, frustrated, angry, and maybe even aghast at the behavior of others. That in mind, this week’s newsletter offers some clues to the science behind some of these strong and potentially self-damaging feelings and emotions—because, I believe, knowledge is understanding, and we could all use a little of that right now.
Ever feel like you’re not deserving of your success or you’re unqualified for a new task, even though other people seem to think you’re capable? Yeah, it’s called imposter syndrome and it’s more common than you might realize, among talented artists, CEOs and the rest of us—and the pandemic is making it worse. Oh, and while interviewing experts for this story, I had a revelation about myself. I hope my soul-bearing nakedness helps you deal with any self-doubt you might have.
For many people, the roots of anger run deep, stretching back lifetimes and beyond. Occasionally, and visibly of late, anger can explode into rage. The propensity for blind rage is in all of us, experts say. In this article from a few months ago, I dug into what’s going on, biologically and emotionally, when we get mad. Understanding it can help us see the motivations of others more clearly.
Be honest: You’re feeling it. I’m feeling it. We’re all feeling it. But the timing is not good. Psychologists and other scientists I just spoke with are seeing evidence of Covid fatigue, and the epidemiologists promise that if we let our guard down, we could make the pandemic much worse. This article explores what’s at state, what people are feeling, and why. Some fascinating insights like how our minds evaluate the risk of an infectious disease or anything else based on what doesn’t happen: “Imagine you’re in a car crash. The next time you drive, you’ll be anxious. But with each successful trip, your brain can unlearn the danger and you start to feel safer behind the wheel. This psychology works even on psychologists.”
I wrote this exactly a year ago this week, and, well, some things never change. The stress of politics, if you let it become chronic, can like any stressor raise blood pressure and fuel headaches and affect your sleep. But in a survey, 11.5% of Americans said stress from politics was making them physically ill — and that was before this week’s debate. What was most interesting was the big gap between liberals and conservatives.
I don’t know why I thought this would be a good week to refloat this explainer from last year, but here it is, true as ever. This deep dive reveals the many shades and nuances of narcissism—it is way more complex than you might realize. At its core: “Extreme narcissists always need to prove that they are ‘winners’ in comparison to other people they view as ‘losers.’”
I know, I know: It’s those other people. Well, not really, scientists say. We’re all susceptible to belief in conspiracy theories, and while this susceptibility exists on a spectrum, it’s not a left-right thing. But oh, yes, ideology plays a big role, and odds are good you know someone who has recently bought into a doozie or two. This article will help you understand other people better, but perhaps yourself, too.
OUT THERE
Dana Smith writes this week: There’s an evolutionary reason that being treated unfairly is so rage-inducing — in fact, it’s one of the most primal sources of anger… The phenomenon is called inequity aversion.
Ashley Abramson wrote last year: Feeling tired isn’t an automatic reason for concern — some level of fatigue is normal. “I think people expect themselves to do too much, so they’re just fatigued because they’re mentally or physically exhausted.”
BEFORE YOU GO…
I asked three leading scientists who study coronavirus transmission if they would eat indoors in a restaurant right now. Two said flat “no way” and one just made a reservation for a very special occasion, and she’s got a plan for making sure the risk is low. I also asked them what a person who plans to dine in should look for (assuming you don’t want to drop $100+ on a carbon dioxide monitor), and what to do to lower the infection risk. They offered a lot of great, science-based advice, including some simple surprises like limiting the time you might be exposed by taking a walk while you wait for your food.
***
I hope you feel just a bit more enlightened about the human condition and ways to improve it. If so, don’t be afraid to forward this to a friend (they can subscribe here). If you have questions, comments or suggestions, you can reach me at rob dot britt on gmail or follow me on Twitter.
— Rob | https://medium.com/luminate/exhausted-frustrated-angry-lets-get-inside-your-head-2333a5a1be24 | ['Robert Roy Britt'] | 2020-09-30 17:43:43.832000+00:00 | ['Wellness', 'Mind', 'Brain', 'Neuroscience', 'Wellbeing'] |
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