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6 Questions You Need to Ask in Your Next Product Manager Interview | You landed the interview. You demonstrated that you are a qualified candidate and answered every question to the tee.
You have finally made it to the last ten minutes of the conversation.
The hiring manager asks if you have any questions you’d like to ask.
You can finally sit back. Breathe out a little, and recollect.
This is your time.
“Knowledge is having the right answer. Intelligence is asking the right question”. — Unknown
Use these last few minutes to your benefit. Ask questions that demonstrate your ability to think critically while also evaluating whether this is a company you want to grow with, and a role you would be happy in.
Product management differs at every company. It is important for you to know what your responsibilities are going to be and the expectations around your output.
Use these questions to define yourself as a thoughtful candidate while enabling you to make the most informed decision for your career
1. Which stakeholders are involved in defining product strategy?
Product Managers act as partners with company leadership and collaborate in order to align on a shared vision.
The PM should act as the voice of the customer. However, the autonomy of the PM varies from company to company.
The answer to this question will illustrate who drives product strategy and whether those decisions are made using qualitative or quantitate data.
Use this question as an opportunity to better understand the product culture
2. Is this a newly created position or are you trying to fill a role for someone who was recently promoted or left?
Are you stepping into someone else’s shoes? This often provides certain guidelines and parameters for you to follow. This might be a more comfortable fit for you.
However, your performance may be compared to your predecessors which presents its own opportunities or challenges.
If this is a newly created position, you will spend lots of energy defining role responsibilities and impacting product culture.
Both situations offer pros and cons.
You need to navigate what type of role you will be successful in, where your skill sets lie and what excites you.
3. Are there any immediate challenges or ‘emergencies’ that I will be facing when I first join the company?
No team is perfect. The best teams are aware of weak spots and work toward continuous improvement.
Try to get a sense for the teams’ recent challenges so that you can come prepared — thoughtfully — to handle the residual impact and future challenges.
However, it is possible that there is a red flag that you should be aware of and prepared to handle.
Do different interviewers have drastically different answers?
As a product manager, you will need to practice empathy, prioritize needs and lead with motivation.
Not only does this show the interviewer that you are already thinking about risk mitigation and driving solutions forward -
it will give you a sense of whether the team has a cohesive sense of what might be holding them back.
4. How will the PM partner with Business Intelligence, Marketing & Sales departments?
What are the dynamics of the internal departments? What role will you play in determining pricing or go-to market strategies?
The responsibilities of a product manager range widely based on the age and size of a company.
Now is your time to uncover what resources you will have and who you will be partnering with most closely.
5. What was the last product or feature your team shipped? What were you most proud of and what were some challenges the team faced in launching this product?
What is the team’s track record? Have they been able to deliver any products or features successfully?
Product development is difficult. Roadblocks and bumps along the way are inevitable and often times changing priorities might prevent consistent delivery.
This question can provide more insight into the development infrastructure and deployment practices the team employs. If the team hasn’t delivered, what has prevented them from doing so?
A more senior team might employ agile methodology or engineering practices like continuous iteration and continuous release to allow them to deliver efficiently and with fewer bugs.
Try to get a sense for how the team has handled past issues and what development guidelines they have in place.
6. In 3 months from now, what will tell you that you hired the right person for the role? How do you measure the success of a PM’s performance and is there an opportunity to share this feedback?
What will you be measured against? A goal oriented product manager will want specific, transparent KPIs to work toward.
This is a hard question to answer — it is important for them to clearly define what success looks like so that you know how to deliver | https://medium.com/coderbyte/6-questions-you-need-to-ask-in-your-next-product-manager-interview-eaa7047ef452 | [] | 2020-06-08 19:57:59.010000+00:00 | ['Product Management', 'Interview Preparation', 'Product Manager', 'Software Development', 'Interview Questions'] |
The Mind-Blowing Sex I Enjoyed in My Marriage | In some circles, sex and older marriages have gotten a bad rap. I’ve heard words like boring or vanilla tossed around. That certainly hasn’t been my experience, and I’d lived with the same man for thirty-one years.
Despite a lackluster start, my husband and I became accomplished lovers. We found a way to overcome his eagerness to get to the business of intercourse a bit too quickly, while I learned how to relax and enjoy myself after growing up in a religious home. With time and plenty of practice, our familiarity with one another’s desires grew.
Sometimes I would be so excited that the pressure would build fast as we kissed. He’d tease me by grinding his hips into me.
Just wait, I’d tell myself. Hold on. I didn’t want to cum this way; I wanted more — to be filled with him.
“I need you,” I’d whispered.
We feverishly would pull off our clothes. He’d then recline on the bed and pull me over top of him.
His stiff firmness made me moan as he penetrated. I wanted all of him fast. He’d thrusted several more times quickly as I clung to him. He’d know it wouldn’t be long now.
As I’d ride him, the intensity became sharp. The sensations would grow so strong that it neared the edge of pain.
“Yes, yes, yes,” I’d gasp. I’d pant and dig my fingernails into the sides of his arms.
He’d watch as I threw back my head in pleasure and climaxed. A small smile would tug at the corners of his mouth. We’d pause and grin for a moment as we waited for my shudders to slow.
Then, the rhythm of his thrust would start again. This time he’d allow himself to get lost in the sensations.
I’d bend down to lick his nipple and feel it become a small rosebud in my mouth. With my other hand, I’d graze the top its companion in small slow circles. His firm penis would become bone rigid, and he’d let out a groan.
Keeping the penetration deep, I’d begin to tighten and release my pelvic muscles, kneading his penis.
“What are you doing to me?” he’d mutter.
“Torturing you,” I’d smile coyly.
He’d begin to thrust faster.
“No, no, not yet.” I’d halt him with my hips.
“I need to,” he’d say.
“Not yet.” With him deep within me, I slowly would pull the shaft of his penis in and out.
“I can’t wait any longer,” he’d say.
He’d move his hands to my hips and held me tight.
I’d cling to him and ride his passion as he moved in and out, in and out. Then he’d shudder. I’d feel it both deep within me and in his body beneath me. I’d laugh and kiss his mouth. | https://medium.com/breaking-taboos/the-mind-blowing-sex-i-enjoyed-in-my-marriage-504fed9cf5f5 | ['Marie Lynne'] | 2020-11-22 07:00:01.600000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Self', 'Marriage', 'Sex', 'Sexuality'] |
Learn How to Use Chromecast to Get the Best Out of It | Learn How to Use Chromecast to Get the Best Out of It Blanchekharris Apr 2·3 min read
The biggest reason people tend to use Google Chromecast more than any other device mirror is that Chromecast is the easiest one. You can mirror your laptop, smartphone on your TV in very simple steps. Google Chromecast has been available for users for a long time, and its app support and a wide variety of features are just getting better continuously. Whatever you’re watching on your laptop or smartphone, you can watch it on your smart TV or Google TV and get the best experience. So if you’re not aware of the procedure, here’s how to do it:
How to Cast a Supported Application to Chromecast
Launch any preferred media application .
. Click the cast sign .
. Choose Chromecast to cast your content.
Just after choosing Chromecast, whatever you are watching on your app will now appear on your TV. Even if you’re watching a music video, you’ll see it playing on TV with sound. If you feel like your smartphone or laptop has less sound, you can always rely on Chromecast and cast the content on your TV.
How to Cast the Chrome Browser tab to Chromecast
If the app isn’t supporting Chromecast, you can try out some different methods as well. You can still cast whatever you like by using the Chrome browser. Chrome has a casting feature in it, and you just have to find it and use it.
Visit any preferred website on Chrome browser.
on Chrome browser. Press the three dots at the top right side.
at the top right side. Press Cast .
. Let the server scan nearby Chromecast.
Choose the preferred Chromecast you wish to use.
So just after following the steps, the opened website will begin to appear on your TV. Along with the video, you can hear audio as well and can control the playback feature through your connected smartphone or laptop. To stop casting, you’ll only have to close the tab, and casting will stop.
How to Cast Chromebook Screen to Chromecast
Press Time at the lower right side.
at the lower right side. Press Cast .
. Choose Chromecast.
Once you choose Chromecast, you’ll see all nearby Chromecast screens, but you should choose only yours. Make sure you choose your TV to see your content on your TV. To turn off casting, you can directly turn off or Stop Chromecast from your Chromebook or the device you’re casting to.
Conclusion
Casting smartphone or laptop displays doesn’t take much effort, and Google apps like YouTube, Google Chrome have built-in casting features to use. First, you need to turn on casting on your smart TV and then let the app search for the nearby available device to cast the screen.
Meta: Turn on Chromecast on TV and search for the device from the app on a laptop or smartphone. Pick the screen to cast the content and start viewing on TV with audio and video.
Hello, I am Blanche Harris. Being an online security expert, I love to make people aware of cyber threats and share helpful information to them regarding them. Download, install and activate your office security at office.com/setup.
Source: blanchektechnologyhub.wordpress.com/2021/04/02/learn-how-to-use-chromecast-to-get-the-best-out-of-it/ | https://medium.com/@blanchekharris671/learn-how-to-use-chromecast-to-get-the-best-out-of-it-fa1d21e66078 | [] | 2021-04-02 09:05:38.897000+00:00 | ['Wwwofficecomsetup', 'Officecomsetup', 'Chromecast'] |
Your Guide to Natural Language Processing (NLP) | Your Guide to Natural Language Processing (NLP)
How machines process and understand human language
Everything we express (either verbally or in written) carries huge amounts of information. The topic we choose, our tone, our selection of words, everything adds some type of information that can be interpreted and value extracted from it. In theory, we can understand and even predict human behaviour using that information.
But there is a problem: one person may generate hundreds or thousands of words in a declaration, each sentence with its corresponding complexity. If you want to scale and analyze several hundreds, thousands or millions of people or declarations in a given geography, then the situation is unmanageable.
Data generated from conversations, declarations or even tweets are examples of unstructured data. Unstructured data doesn’t fit neatly into the traditional row and column structure of relational databases, and represent the vast majority of data available in the actual world. It is messy and hard to manipulate. Nevertheless, thanks to the advances in disciplines like machine learning a big revolution is going on regarding this topic. Nowadays it is no longer about trying to interpret a text or speech based on its keywords (the old fashioned mechanical way), but about understanding the meaning behind those words (the cognitive way). This way it is possible to detect figures of speech like irony, or even perform sentiment analysis.
Natural Language Processing or NLP is a field of Artificial Intelligence that gives the machines the ability to read, understand and derive meaning from human languages.
It is a discipline that focuses on the interaction between data science and human language, and is scaling to lots of industries. Today NLP is booming thanks to the huge improvements in the access to data and the increase in computational power, which are allowing practitioners to achieve meaningful results in areas like healthcare, media, finance and human resources, among others.
Use Cases of NLP
In simple terms, NLP represents the automatic handling of natural human language like speech or text, and although the concept itself is fascinating, the real value behind this technology comes from the use cases.
NLP can help you with lots of tasks and the fields of application just seem to increase on a daily basis. Let’s mention some examples:
NLP enables the recognition and prediction of diseases based on electronic health records and patient’s own speech. This capability is being explored in health conditions that go from cardiovascular diseases to depression and even schizophrenia. For example, Amazon Comprehend Medical is a service that uses NLP to extract disease conditions, medications and treatment outcomes from patient notes, clinical trial reports and other electronic health records.
based on electronic health records and patient’s own speech. This capability is being explored in health conditions that go from cardiovascular diseases to depression and even schizophrenia. For example, Amazon Comprehend Medical is a service that uses NLP to extract disease conditions, medications and treatment outcomes from patient notes, clinical trial reports and other electronic health records. Organizations can determine what customers are saying about a service or product by identifying and extracting information in sources like social media. This sentiment analysis can provide a lot of information about customers choices and their decision drivers.
can provide a lot of information about customers choices and their decision drivers. An inventor at IBM developed a cognitive assistant that works like a personalized search engine by learning all about you and then remind you of a name, a song, or anything you can’t remember the moment you need it to.
that works like a personalized search engine by learning all about you and then remind you of a name, a song, or anything you can’t remember the moment you need it to. Companies like Yahoo and Google filter and classify your emails with NLP by analyzing text in emails that flow through their servers and stopping spam before they even enter your inbox.
before they even enter your inbox. To help identifying fake news , the NLP Group at MIT developed a new system to determine if a source is accurate or politically biased, detecting if a news source can be trusted or not.
, the NLP Group at MIT developed a new system to determine if a source is accurate or politically biased, detecting if a news source can be trusted or not. Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri are examples of intelligent voice driven interfaces that use NLP to respond to vocal prompts and do everything like find a particular shop, tell us the weather forecast, suggest the best route to the office or turn on the lights at home.
that use NLP to respond to vocal prompts and do everything like find a particular shop, tell us the weather forecast, suggest the best route to the office or turn on the lights at home. Having an insight into what is happening and what people are talking about can be very valuable to financial traders . NLP is being used to track news, reports, comments about possible mergers between companies, everything can be then incorporated into a trading algorithm to generate massive profits. Remember: buy the rumor, sell the news.
. NLP is being used to track news, reports, comments about possible mergers between companies, everything can be then incorporated into a trading algorithm to generate massive profits. Remember: buy the rumor, sell the news. NLP is also being used in both the search and selection phases of talent recruitment , identifying the skills of potential hires and also spotting prospects before they become active on the job market.
, identifying the skills of potential hires and also spotting prospects before they become active on the job market. Powered by IBM Watson NLP technology, LegalMation developed a platform to automate routine litigation tasks and help legal teams save time, drive down costs and shift strategic focus.
NLP is particularly booming in the healthcare industry. This technology is improving care delivery, disease diagnosis and bringing costs down while healthcare organizations are going through a growing adoption of electronic health records. The fact that clinical documentation can be improved means that patients can be better understood and benefited through better healthcare. The goal should be to optimize their experience, and several organizations are already working on this.
Number of publications containing the sentence “natural language processing” in PubMed in the period 1978–2018. As of 2018, PubMed comprised more than 29 million citations for biomedical literature
Companies like Winterlight Labs are making huge improvements in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease by monitoring cognitive impairment through speech and they can also support clinical trials and studies for a wide range of central nervous system disorders. Following a similar approach, Stanford University developed Woebot, a chatbot therapist with the aim of helping people with anxiety and other disorders.
But serious controversy is around the subject. A couple of years ago Microsoft demonstrated that by analyzing large samples of search engine queries, they could identify internet users who were suffering from pancreatic cancer even before they have received a diagnosis of the disease. How would users react to such diagnosis? And what would happen if you were tested as a false positive? (meaning that you can be diagnosed with the disease even though you don’t have it). This recalls the case of Google Flu Trends which in 2009 was announced as being able to predict influenza but later on vanished due to its low accuracy and inability to meet its projected rates.
NLP may be the key to an effective clinical support in the future, but there are still many challenges to face in the short term.
Basic NLP to impress your non-NLP friends
The main drawbacks we face these days with NLP relate to the fact that language is very tricky. The process of understanding and manipulating language is extremely complex, and for this reason it is common to use different techniques to handle different challenges before binding everything together. Programming languages like Python or R are highly used to perform these techniques, but before diving into code lines (that will be the topic of a different article), it’s important to understand the concepts beneath them. Let’s summarize and explain some of the most frequently used algorithms in NLP when defining the vocabulary of terms:
Bag of Words
Is a commonly used model that allows you to count all words in a piece of text. Basically it creates an occurrence matrix for the sentence or document, disregarding grammar and word order. These word frequencies or occurrences are then used as features for training a classifier.
To bring a short example I took the first sentence of the song “Across the Universe” from The Beatles:
Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup, They slither while they pass, they slip away across the universe
Now let’s count the words:
This approach may reflect several downsides like the absence of semantic meaning and context, and the facts that stop words (like “the” or “a”) add noise to the analysis and some words are not weighted accordingly (“universe” weights less than the word “they”).
To solve this problem, one approach is to rescale the frequency of words by how often they appear in all texts (not just the one we are analyzing) so that the scores for frequent words like “the”, that are also frequent across other texts, get penalized. This approach to scoring is called “Term Frequency — Inverse Document Frequency” (TFIDF), and improves the bag of words by weights. Through TFIDF frequent terms in the text are “rewarded” (like the word “they” in our example), but they also get “punished” if those terms are frequent in other texts we include in the algorithm too. On the contrary, this method highlights and “rewards” unique or rare terms considering all texts. Nevertheless, this approach still has no context nor semantics.
Tokenization
Is the process of segmenting running text into sentences and words. In essence, it’s the task of cutting a text into pieces called tokens, and at the same time throwing away certain characters, such as punctuation. Following our example, the result of tokenization would be:
Pretty simple, right? Well, although it may seem quite basic in this case and also in languages like English that separate words by a blank space (called segmented languages) not all languages behave the same, and if you think about it, blank spaces alone are not sufficient enough even for English to perform proper tokenizations. Splitting on blank spaces may break up what should be considered as one token, as in the case of certain names (e.g. San Francisco or New York) or borrowed foreign phrases (e.g. laissez faire).
Tokenization can remove punctuation too, easing the path to a proper word segmentation but also triggering possible complications. In the case of periods that follow abbreviation (e.g. dr.), the period following that abbreviation should be considered as part of the same token and not be removed.
The tokenization process can be particularly problematic when dealing with biomedical text domains which contain lots of hyphens, parentheses, and other punctuation marks.
For deeper details on tokenization, you can find a great explanation in this article.
Stop Words Removal
Includes getting rid of common language articles, pronouns and prepositions such as “and”, “the” or “to” in English. In this process some very common words that appear to provide little or no value to the NLP objective are filtered and excluded from the text to be processed, hence removing widespread and frequent terms that are not informative about the corresponding text.
Stop words can be safely ignored by carrying out a lookup in a pre-defined list of keywords, freeing up database space and improving processing time.
There is no universal list of stop words. These can be pre-selected or built from scratch. A potential approach is to begin by adopting pre-defined stop words and add words to the list later on. Nevertheless it seems that the general trend over the past time has been to go from the use of large standard stop word lists to the use of no lists at all.
The thing is stop words removal can wipe out relevant information and modify the context in a given sentence. For example, if we are performing a sentiment analysis we might throw our algorithm off track if we remove a stop word like “not”. Under these conditions, you might select a minimal stop word list and add additional terms depending on your specific objective.
Stemming
Refers to the process of slicing the end or the beginning of words with the intention of removing affixes (lexical additions to the root of the word).
Affixes that are attached at the beginning of the word are called prefixes (e.g. “astro” in the word “astrobiology”) and the ones attached at the end of the word are called suffixes (e.g. “ful” in the word “helpful”).
The problem is that affixes can create or expand new forms of the same word (called inflectional affixes), or even create new words themselves (called derivational affixes). In English, prefixes are always derivational (the affix creates a new word as in the example of the prefix “eco” in the word “ecosystem”), but suffixes can be derivational (the affix creates a new word as in the example of the suffix “ist” in the word “guitarist”) or inflectional (the affix creates a new form of word as in the example of the suffix “er” in the word “faster”).
Ok, so how can we tell the difference and chop the right bit?
A possible approach is to consider a list of common affixes and rules (Python and R languages have different libraries containing affixes and methods) and perform stemming based on them, but of course this approach presents limitations. Since stemmers use algorithmics approaches, the result of the stemming process may not be an actual word or even change the word (and sentence) meaning. To offset this effect you can edit those predefined methods by adding or removing affixes and rules, but you must consider that you might be improving the performance in one area while producing a degradation in another one. Always look at the whole picture and test your model’s performance.
So if stemming has serious limitations, why do we use it? First of all, it can be used to correct spelling errors from the tokens. Stemmers are simple to use and run very fast (they perform simple operations on a string), and if speed and performance are important in the NLP model, then stemming is certainly the way to go. Remember, we use it with the objective of improving our performance, not as a grammar exercise.
Lemmatization
Has the objective of reducing a word to its base form and grouping together different forms of the same word. For example, verbs in past tense are changed into present (e.g. “went” is changed to “go”) and synonyms are unified (e.g. “best” is changed to “good”), hence standardizing words with similar meaning to their root. Although it seems closely related to the stemming process, lemmatization uses a different approach to reach the root forms of words.
Lemmatization resolves words to their dictionary form (known as lemma) for which it requires detailed dictionaries in which the algorithm can look into and link words to their corresponding lemmas.
For example, the words “running”, “runs” and “ran” are all forms of the word “run”, so “run” is the lemma of all the previous words.
Lemmatization also takes into consideration the context of the word in order to solve other problems like disambiguation, which means it can discriminate between identical words that have different meanings depending on the specific context. Think about words like “bat” (which can correspond to the animal or to the metal/wooden club used in baseball) or “bank” (corresponding to the financial institution or to the land alongside a body of water). By providing a part-of-speech parameter to a word ( whether it is a noun, a verb, and so on) it’s possible to define a role for that word in the sentence and remove disambiguation.
As you might already pictured, lemmatization is a much more resource-intensive task than performing a stemming process. At the same time, since it requires more knowledge about the language structure than a stemming approach, it demands more computational power than setting up or adapting a stemming algorithm.
Topic Modeling
Is as a method for uncovering hidden structures in sets of texts or documents. In essence it clusters texts to discover latent topics based on their contents, processing individual words and assigning them values based on their distribution. This technique is based on the assumptions that each document consists of a mixture of topics and that each topic consists of a set of words, which means that if we can spot these hidden topics we can unlock the meaning of our texts.
From the universe of topic modelling techniques, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is probably the most commonly used. This relatively new algorithm (invented less than 20 years ago) works as an unsupervised learning method that discovers different topics underlying a collection of documents. In unsupervised learning methods like this one, there is no output variable to guide the learning process and data is explored by algorithms to find patterns. To be more specific, LDA finds groups of related words by:
Assigning each word to a random topic, where the user defines the number of topics it wishes to uncover. You don’t define the topics themselves (you define just the number of topics) and the algorithm will map all documents to the topics in a way that words in each document are mostly captured by those imaginary topics. The algorithm goes through each word iteratively and reassigns the word to a topic taking into considerations the probability that the word belongs to a topic, and the probability that the document will be generated by a topic. These probabilities are calculated multiple times, until the convergence of the algorithm.
Unlike other clustering algorithms like K-means that perform hard clustering (where topics are disjointed), LDA assigns each document to a mixture of topics, which means that each document can be described by one or more topics (e.g. Document 1 is described by 70% of topic A, 20% of topic B and 10% of topic C) and reflect more realistic results.
Topic modeling is extremely useful for classifying texts, building recommender systems (e.g. to recommend you books based on your past readings) or even detecting trends in online publications.
How does the future look like?
At the moment NLP is battling to detect nuances in language meaning, whether due to lack of context, spelling errors or dialectal differences.
On March 2016 Microsoft launched Tay, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot released on Twitter as a NLP experiment. The idea was that as more users conversed with Tay, the smarter it would get. Well, the result was that after 16 hours Tay had to be removed due to its racist and abusive comments:
Microsoft learnt from its own experience and some months later released Zo, its second generation English-language chatbot that won’t be caught making the same mistakes as its predecessor. Zo uses a combination of innovative approaches to recognize and generate conversation, and other companies are exploring with bots that can remember details specific to an individual conversation.
Although the future looks extremely challenging and full of threats for NLP, the discipline is developing at a very fast pace (probably like never before) and we are likely to reach a level of advancement in the coming years that will make complex applications look possible. | https://towardsdatascience.com/your-guide-to-natural-language-processing-nlp-48ea2511f6e1 | ['Diego Lopez Yse'] | 2019-04-30 23:00:53.666000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Data Science', 'NLP', 'Naturallanguageprocessing'] |
The Chaos of Weather Prediction | An Intense Lightning Storm, it would be useful to know this was approaching!
Since existence, humans have been trying to predict the weather. Early methods looked to astrology and the lunar phases. Even the Bible contains references to Jesus deciphering local weather patterns! And it makes sense, understanding the weather would offer immense advantages both in the battlefield and for agriculture.
However, like many achievements, it took a major conflict to really stir us into action. World War 1 really highlighted the need for accurate predictions of the weather. Both sides depended on knowing wind patterns for bombing raids and the drift of poison gas. This led to immense efforts to improve our understanding of these complex predictions. Attempts during this era were largely unsuccesful, as we just simply lacked the computational power. Forecasts would take days to run through and simply were not accurate enough. Instead, we relied on heuristic predictions that were far from reliable.
That all changed as computers slowly became more advanced. John von Neumann led the charge toward numerical forecasting. He envisioned future humans with the ability to completely control the weather due to both the accuracy of predictions and the ability for computers to know exactly what would happen given any pertubation.
Oh how wrong he was.
Edward Lorenz was freshly minted graduate in mathematics from Dartmouth in 1938 when he was called to war. There, he worked as a weather forecaster. Forecasting was still primitive, but was gradually being improved due the telegraph and the ever-growing amount of data available. This sparked an interest in meteorology, in which Lorenz received his doctorate from MIT, but he never really lost his mathematical mind.
Lorenz, along with Ellen Fetter, worked in the 60’s to develop a set of differential equations that could model the weather. For one of his studies, he examined a “cell” of atmospheric convection (think of this as air circulating) between a hot plate and a cold plate and watched how it changed over time. This model, seen below, had 3 different equations.
Lorenz’s ConvectionModel
Lorenz’s first equation describes the convection itself. The variable x gives the rate of convection, and this equation describes how that rate evolves with time. His other two equations deal with temperature gradient, with y in the horizontal and z in the vertical. σ, ρ, and β are empircal variables that Lorenz varied to get different results. For more detailed explanation on working through the math, check out this fantastic piece. The Lorenz Equations show up in a slightly different form at the bottom of page 3.
This set of equations is deceptively complex and can quickly get out of hand. The symbol ρ is referred to as the Rayleigh Number, which gives insight into how heat is transferred due to convection. When ρ < 1, this system will eventually settle into an equilibrium with x, y, z all being 0. However, this is not what we observe in nature. Lorenz used the values σ = 10, ρ = 28, and β = 8/3 based on observation. See Figure 1 for an example of this system using these parameters and initial conditions (0, 1, 0).
Figure 1: Chaos in the Lorenz System, taken from this page
If we plot z and x on the same axis, we get the famous Butterfly Plot as seen in Figure 2 below.
Figure 2: The Butterfly Plot, taken from this page
But what do these pretty pictures tell us about the weather? Scientist knew it would be complicated, but won’t we know exactly what will happen if we just get enough data? Like many things in science, a discovery was made completely on accident. Lorenz wanted to redo an earlier model run, but didn’t want to have to wait for the entire process (computers were slow back then). Instead, he input the x, y, and z values from halfway through and let it work from there. What he found shocked him. The solution began to move further and further away from his previous run, eventually becoming unrecognizable. Turns out, his input values were slightly less precise than the values that the computer was using. This very slight change in input drastically changed the output. You may know this as the Butterfly Effect.
This observation went against all previous intuition related to the weather. Yes, we knew it would be complex, but we had no idea how even the slightest imprecision would create massive inconsistencies. This also disproved John von Neumann’s idea about weather prediction; it was just too chaotic!
Modern weather forecasting only tries to limit the chaos; it is now accepted that it will never be able to eliminate it completely. This is done through ensemble forecasting, which was suggested in the 70’s and began being implemented in the 90’s. In this method, many simulations are done with varying initial conditions and the results are average to produce the most likely outcome. Newer versions will utilize different mathematical models as well and average those outcomes together.
Anyone who’s looked at the forecast know that we have a long way to go with weather prediction. Chaos Theory is still young field with so much to offer! For an informal introduction, I highly recommend Chaos by James Gleick. It does a lot to put the theory in historical context and gives you the basics. For more details and problems to work through The Nonlinear Workbook. This book is full of example and problems (some are coding based!) that help give an idea of just how varied the field is! | https://www.cantorsparadise.com/the-chaos-of-weather-prediction-c6ab7b03590f | [] | 2020-11-06 12:17:48.559000+00:00 | ['Predictions', 'Science', 'Weather', 'Mathematics', 'Chaos Theory'] |
How to Write an Essay on Any Topic Using Ai | AI systems, like Jarvis, can write essays on any topic, just with one click- you don’t need to be an expert in writing and stay up late at night spending hours trying to find good ideas for your essay.
AI has made it possible for just about anyone to become a writer and make a living on the internet by providing marketing content.
Related: how to write an introduction paragraph examples
What Is Artificial Intelligence and How Does It Work?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a field of computer science that develops methods, algorithms, and software to give computers the ability to seem like they have human-like thinking capabilities.
AI is also used to write marketing content.
You can use AI to write essays on any topic you want, and they will be able to write at a college level without making too many mistakes in grammar or writing style.
Any business owner or marketing manager can make money online by having AI provide short and long articles for their website, social media, and/or blog.
Let’s talk about Jarvis, an AI writing assistant that’s capable of writing just about any topic imaginable.
Related: What is AI copywriting?
Jarvis
Jarvis is an AI system that uses a natural language processing engine to understand how humans communicate.
Using this technology, Jarvis can learn how people write essays with their own style of writing.
Jarvis can write any essay on any topic that is given to it. It uses big data to learn how people communicate, and how they speak naturally.
This gives Jarvis a unique way of writing different essays on any topic you give it- just like how humans talk about things.
Related: Write an essay on any topic
How Does Jarvis Write Papers?
Jarvis uses a natural language processing engine to help it learn how to write.
Using this program, any topic can be turned into a unique paper that is unlike any other paper on the internet.
Jarvis uses keywords given to it by the writer of the essay to form paragraphs and sentences that inform and engage readers, keeping them interested until the end, where they will want more!
Related: Writing a 500-word essay using AI
What Is a Natural Language Processing Engine?
A natural language processing engine is a program that analyzes how people communicate with each other. When you write an essay, how you word it determines how your readers will understand what you’re saying.
For example, if I said:
“I went to the store,”
that’s different than:
“I visited the grocery.”
The first sentence is more informal and conversational.
The second sentence is more formal and academic-sounding.
The way you word things will determine how your readers perceive what you’re saying, which determines how much they read before losing interest.
Jarvis uses a natural language processing engine to learn how people write essays on different topics, and how they use words and phrases to communicate ideas.
Related: Synthesis essay
The Benefits of Using Ai to Write Essays
Using AI to write essays saves time that you would use to talk with people or do more work.
You can save a lot of time by having Jarvis write your content for you.
You won’t have to spend money on editors or writers, and you won’t have to worry about how they’ll turn out.
Related: persuasive writing examples
AI never gets tired, or frustrated, or distracted. It will write at a constant rate until your essay is complete.
The best benefit of using AI to write essays is how easy and stress-free it can be for you. Only one click and your essay will begin writing itself!
Related: Make an essay longer
Drawbacks of Using Ai to Write Essays
While using AI to write essays is convenient and time-saving, there are a few drawbacks to be aware of.1. AI usually does not have a style of writing that is unique to its creator.
1. You may end up sounding like someone else, and you won’t be able to take full credit for how your work was written.
2. AI can sometimes make mistakes in grammar or spelling during the writing process
These mistakes are very easy to fix, but it is essential that you read over your essay for any mistakes before sharing it with others or submitting it to someone.
Overall, if you use AI to write essays, you’re going to save time and money when compared to using other methods of writing.
Related: How to write a 300 word essay
How to Write an Essay Using Ai
There are quite a few AI copywriting tools in the market today. We’ve picked Jarvis for this example because it’s the best AI tool out of the many that we’ve tested.
We also use Jarvis to write all our content.
Jarvis is the most advanced AI copywriting platform available, and it is capable of writing an essay on any topic.
It is also capable of writing other content, including how-to posts or any other content that could be seen on the internet.
Once you’re logged in, you’ll be presented with plenty of templates that you can work with.
Jarvis Templates
Jarvis Templates
Jarvis Templates
Jarvis Templates
Say for instance you want to write a short essay, of about 500 words on ‘fishing’.
Let’s use the Long-for assistant template to do this. I’ll demonstrate this in the video below to make it easier for everyone to follow:
(PS: I was using a free screen recording tool that stopped recording before I finished the article).
If you want to see the finished article, you can read it here: 10 Tips for a Successful Fishing Trip.
Conclusion
Jarvis is a very useful tool if you plan on using Ai to write essays.
Jarvis will save you a lot of time and money by allowing you to create content that will bring in more traffic to your website, providing more information for people interested in what you have to say.
Using Jarvis will open the door for you to make a living by providing content that makes your readers happy.
You’ll no longer have to worry about how much time or money it costs you because Jarvis will put all of its attention towards making sure your essay is perfect. | https://medium.com/@Noah_D_A/how-to-write-an-essay-on-any-topic-using-ai-83306d10505f | ['A. Noah'] | 2021-08-31 13:42:21.324000+00:00 | ['Copywriting', 'Writing Challenge', 'Writing Tips', 'Writing', 'Copywriting Tips'] |
Introducing Jel: the video game for work | Jel is now live. Come try it, or read on to learn more.
Earlier this year, I left my team at Mozilla to start something new. Five months later, I’m excited to share the news that Jel is now live for people to come try out. You can create a Space, or join the Jel community Space to check it out. As with all new web-based software, this is just an early version. This first version of Jel will hopefully be enough to kickstart connections with early adopters to refine Jel into something they love. If you want to join the conversation, join the Jel Discord.
So, what’s Jel? I thought I’d share some of the thinking behind it, and why I’m excited about what comes next. If that sounds interesting, read on!
“That’s Funny…”
I’ve been working on Social VR applications for many years now. First, at AltspaceVR, and then at Mozilla, on Hubs. For some time, a few things have bugged me that nobody else seemed to be bothered by, making me wonder if I was the only person thinking about them all the time.
First, while Social VR apps are ostensibly focused on creating social presence with VR headsets, the vast majority of users have great success with traditional laptops, phones, and tablets. It seems to me that avatar chat, not VR, is the core thing that people benefit from. VR is a compelling, but non-essential, way to create this form of social presence. 3D avatar chat tools are nothing new, but the Social VR space that grew in the wake of the Oculus acquisition paved the way for a wider exploration, and also led many to believe that billions of people would soon be meeting up as avatars.
Another odd thing is that the people I saw actually using these apps, the power users, had totally different preferences than the people proposing workplace or other “mainstream” use-cases for them. This latter group almost never became power users themselves, no matter how many features we built that they asked for.
The difference between these groups seems to boil down to what they think when you show them a concept like this:
The prototypical “VR Meeting App.” Credit: immersive.ly
If you pitch a visual like this to a typical businessperson, it will “click.” This looks just like a real business meeting, with nicer furniture and low-maintenance virtual plants, so it makes sense to them that this is what a “virtualized workplace” ought to look like.
Meanwhile, if you look at the avatar chat apps that people are actually hooked on, they are filled with whimsical or cute avatars, diverse, fantastical scenes, and, in some apps like Hubs or Anyland, a rich canvas of ways to share and mix media with one another with little structure or rules. They’re nothing like a boring conference room with floating human heads in seats and slides up on a projector screen, yet that’s the experience it seems like so many of these virtual meeting tools are trying to deliver.
There seems to be a simple question that predicts the reaction people will have the first time they use an avatar chat app: do they play video games? An easy way to find this out is watching what happens when someone learns they need to use the WASD keys to move around. There doesn’t seem to be a middle ground: either they’re completely dumbfounded by this and complain about it, or it’s obvious to them and it never gets brought up. Those who play games will just fly through the app, quickly finding all the features (and bugs!) while everyone else gets frustrated and think the product designers are fools to assume anyone will ever figure it out.
And finally, the most controversial claim I’ll make in this whole post that seems true is that once you start using avatar chat to regularly meet with people who “get it”, you’ll often prefer to being on camera.
In the post-COVID world, an intuition that being on camera all day does indeed suck for remote work has taken hold, despite the logic telling us that it should work just fine. I won’t get into the details here, but research supports this intuition. However, few teams take that intuition and act on it. If they did, they’d discover that meeting in a game like Minecraft or Hubs can be much, much better in many cases, as long as the team isn’t primed to reject it as a silly idea, as many do.
On my team at Mozilla, it would have been weird (and a bit rude!) to propose using a video call instead of Hubs when taking meetings. Hubs removes the obligation from people to be on camera, and is just plain fun in a way video calls can never be. Meanwhile, when I met virtually with anyone outside my team, video was the norm and Hubs was a weird suggestion. I never dreaded meeting up in a Hubs room with someone, yet I loathed every time I had to fire up my webcam. And by all accounts so did everyone else, even the people who thought suggesting something other than video was weird.
So, having used and thought about avatar chat for work for so many years now, here are some things I’ve noticed that all seem true but are not yet widely accepted:
Avatars on a 2D screen not only work great, but are strictly better than being on camera for chatting with teammates, especially if avatar faces are expressive enough to directly displace talking heads on video.
The avatar chat apps that inspire the most creativity are the ones that don’t take themselves too seriously, are more open-ended, and aren’t afraid of letting people have fun. Yet, all the avatar chat apps trying to make remote work more engaging are creating the same boring, cookie-cutter “meeting room” experience.
Avatar chat apps are natural for those who already play games. Everyone else won’t be early adopters unless you build an inferior tool to cater to them, which will suck and they won’t use anyway. Worse, they will propose “faster horse” solutions like virtual conference rooms given they can’t imagine anything better, since to do so requires… wait for it… experience playing games.
The Jel Thesis
All of this points to something that seems true but is not yet widely believed:
The world is ready for the video game for work.
To many, it will look like a toy. It will only make sense to people who’ve played games, and it will be built just for them. And it will provide much-needed relief from being on camera for the teams out there who “get it.”
Jel is my attempt to build this product. I designed it the way I want for myself and the teams I work on. I’m sure there will be many other products like it to come, and some are already out there building their own ideas.
We’re on the cusp of a completely new product category coming to life as the gaming generation grows up. Jel leans into this trend and tries to accelerate it. Working with others remotely is about to get a lot more fun. It’s an exciting time!
Here’s what Jel looks like:
Say hello to Jel.
Jel doesn’t look like your typical productivity tool. And that’s on purpose: the line between “fun” and “useful” is going to keep getting blurrier. These tools are all about sparking creativity, so it seems to me the ones that are both useful and fun will beat the ones that are no fun at all.
You always have to cut lots of corners when building something new, otherwise you’ll never ship. But there were some things I saw as essential for this first version of Jel. I’ll unpack these next. If you’re already convinced, go take Jel for a spin, otherwise read on for more details of some of the design decisions I made and the requirements I set in stone for Jel’s first version.
Jel’s Core Elements
The Always-On 3D Space
Jel is designed to be the first always-on, persistent tool for avatar chat, like Slack and Discord, but for 3D virtual spaces.
You can keep Jel running in the background all day without it becoming a battery or CPU drain.
Switching between 3D worlds is fast: one click, with no loading screens.
When you switch worlds, you’ll find everything just how you left it. Objects, environments, and your last position are all persisted.
Jel tries to always run smoothly, regardless of your device.
Jel can live in a browser tab or be installed as a standalone app. When you switch to something else, it runs quietly in the background, consuming less resources than a typical text chat app. It sets the graphics quality to a level that ensures that no matter if you have a high end GPU or basic laptop graphics, it feels smooth and responsive.
Jel wants to be on your short list of tools that are rock solid, essential, and handy, worth starting automatically when you boot your laptop. When people walk by your desk, if they didn’t know any better, they might think you were goofing off playing a video game with your teammates. But then again, maybe that’s exactly what the future of work looks like!
The Need For Speed
Having used avatar chat at work for years now, I have some pretty strong opinions about how any such tool I use all day should work. I’ve tried to come up with the best user experience I could imagine, the one I’ve always wanted myself.
Its #1 goal: speed.
Jel prioritizes efficiency over intuitivity. When the choice for an interaction was between slow and obvious, or fast and non-obvious, I chose the faster one. Once you’ve learned all the interactions, working with 3D spaces and media in Jel is fast, efficient, and precise. If you know how to play games, Jel leans on your existing knowledge and muscle memory. Jel isn’t hard to learn, but it doesn’t have a button-and-icon driven UI. It relies heavily on pointing at objects and using hotkeys (similar to Blender) —so having on-screen hotkey tips at all times is critical.
Most 3D games just take over the whole screen and don’t expect to live alongside your other tools. Not so with Jel. Jel is perfectly happy in a window like any other app, and has a clean, web-based UI that works just how you’d expect. But hit Shift+Space and the UI slides away, and will lock your cursor for game-style mouse look. Hit Shift+Space again to get back the UI and cursor in a snap. Interactions like this are quick and tuned to not drop frames, so they’re smooth and won’t break your flow.
Jel fits into your existing workflows and lives alongside your other apps. It’s an always-on, fast, fun, and efficient 3D FPS-style video game for collaboration. For some teams, it may just become your secret weapon.
Avatars That Feel Good
Nothing else matters in an avatar chat app if the avatars suck. Jel rejects the idea that the best avatars for work look like humans and should look how you look. I’ve been freaked out by just-not-quite-normal-looking human avatars countless times, and it’s been enough to swear me off of them for life. To me, this is about as bad as it gets:
The most photogenic avatars are often the most creepy to actually use. Credit: Mark Zuckerberg’s Company
Instead, Jel has simple but expressive avatars that focus on the key elements of facial expression: the head, eyes, and mouth.
When it comes to faces, simpler ones amplify through focus. Credit: Scott McCloud, “Understanding Comics”
In other words: yes, they’re happy floating cartoon heads.
Jel avatars are always super stoked to see you.
To be comparable to live video, they need to feel alive. So, Jel has state-of-the-art, real-time lip syncing. With this abstract style and live lip-sync, Jel avatars feel much more like talking to a live person, and also add a bit of lightheartedness to the whole thing. They are also super cheap to render, so Jel should be able to support many, many people in the same place at once. With Jel’s avatars, your conversations feel more natural and fun, and avoid all the baggage that comes with being on camera.
The best way to experience Jel’s avatars is to try them yourself. Words and pictures can’t quite convey how it feels to actually use them.
Worlds as Documents
There are two big benefits I’ve found using avatar chat for work. The first, covered so far, is natural communication.
But there’s another one: spatially-arranged, mixed media.
Avatar chat is totally different when people can quickly bring in images, videos, and 3D models and arrange them together. Once it clicks, people start being more improvisational, creative, and sharing things in a way that feels distinctly different and more playful than in other collaboration tools.
For Jel, I asked myself: if these 3D mixed media spaces do end up being transformative for teams, what would be the best way to structure them?
The simple answer is that Jel is organized into private Spaces, each containing a tree of networked 3D worlds. These worlds can contain media arranged in 3D space.
The more complete answer is there are four key aspects to Jel worlds: the environment, the topology, the metadata, and the media.
Jel Worlds: The Environment
Designing 3D environments for avatar chat is tricky. I’ve spent a lot of time meeting with my team in virtual environments ranging from the most spectacular to the most mundane. Environments have the most potential to expand or constrain what people do in avatar chat, for better or worse. When you’re meeting in the same environment over and over again, some elements have more long term impact than others.
With continued use, you can often get the most mileage out of simple environments like this one.
There’s a simple 4-layer model I use for thinking about the effects a 3D environment has on how people use it over time. The top layer, Structure, has the most long term, persistent impact, and the lower layers have less and less long term impact, with the last layer, Detail, having the least impact overall, given enough time.
Structure — How is it physically laid out?
— How is it physically laid out? Purpose — Does it have a clear purpose?
— Does it have a clear purpose? Vibe — How does it feel to be there?
— How does it feel to be there? Detail — What are the fine details?
An environment’s Structure is impossible to ignore, and constrains everything else. A clearly defined Purpose can have a huge impact. For example, a movie theater environment will be used for watching movies and not much else. The Vibe is critical to setting the mood but its effect diminishes over time. And the Detail, while often creating the “wow” factor, eventually gets tuned out completely. (Anyone who has dialed down the graphics to get an edge in a competitive video game understands how this happens.)
Jel worlds will be used day-in, day-out for months or even years. So, anything that will be tuned out isn’t worth worrying about beyond first impressions, and things that will be impossible to ever ignore are essential to get right. Everything else must be handled with care.
Working from the bottom up, it’s clear Jel shouldn’t worry too much about Detail. As long as things are pleasant enough to look at, that’s good enough. This greatly reduces the level of effort needed to create environments, and also unlocks approaches that would be incompatible with having environments with rich detail, as we’ll see.
What about Purpose? Jel is a general purpose tool, so environments should be careful not to convey a narrow purpose, since it may limit what people try to do. Eventually Jel could offer environments intended for specific purposes, but for now, with most teams exploring avatar chat for the first time, it’s worth avoiding. For example, making Jel worlds look like conference rooms would make it easy to box people into only using it in very specific ways. (Can you tell I hate virtual conference rooms?)
The Vibe is important to get right. Even though its impact diminishes with time, it never goes away completely. I don’t want Jel to feel boring or stuffy, I want it to feel fun and relaxed. So a vibe of being outdoors, in a natural environment, seemed like a good choice to start with, and one that won’t get too stale. And so the first Jel worlds are outdoor scenes, with grass, trees, and open sky. This seemed such an obvious choice that when I created the teaser page for Jel, before the first line of code was written, it looked like this:
The simple “sky + grass” vibe that seemed like the right target from the beginning.
Now for the most critical element to get right: Structure. Unlike purpose, which Jel avoids for now since it constrains what people will do, adding structure expands what they can do, or think to do, and has the longest permanent impact on how an environment will be used. So Jel worlds should have a lot of structure.
Jel worlds are generated by an algorithm that creates lots of structure like hills, valleys, lakes, rivers, bridges, cliffs, walls, and plateaus. By creating such variety, Jel worlds will hopefully lead people to use these structures in all kinds of unexpected ways.
So taken together, Jel has outdoor worlds that have a variety of structure. Since fine detail isn’t a focus, they can be simple, blocky voxel worlds that get the right vibe through their art style, and diverse structure through procedural generation. Voxels are great because they look cool, are easy to generate, and can be loaded and rendered efficiently in chunks, which helps meet Jel’s goals of responsiveness and instant world switching. (Special thanks to Daniel Esteban, whose work was hugely influential in helping me get Jel’s world systems up and running.) And so here, finally, is what Jel worlds look like:
A typical Jel world.
Jel Worlds: The Topology
The common topology for a 3D world is a flat plane, where you can walk in any direction until you hit the edge. At the edge, you’re blocked, since the world doesn’t exist past that point.
Even Minecraft, with its huge expansive world, has a force field to block you at its outermost edges.
Not only do you have to block people from going past the edge, but you also have to figure out what someone sees when looking past the edge. Typically an artist will add a skybox to create the illusion that the world continues on beyond the edge.
This usually works fine, but when I considered it for Jel’s outdoor voxel worlds, a lot of things bugged me:
What should be visible on the horizon? Showing fake stuff that doesn’t actually exist seems weird in a procedural, voxel world.
It would get frustrating having to think about which region of the world objects were placed in. If something is on the other side of the world, you’d have to walk all the way across the whole world again to get to it.
the way across the whole world again to get to it. Hitting an “edge” that you can’t get past just feels terrible. Unlike games with large worlds, Jel worlds are going to be quite small so running into the edge is going to happen all the time.
The answer seems obvious: Jel worlds should be little spherical planets. The horizon problem goes away since the world just curves off in the distance. Objects can be reached quickly by following the shortest straight path to them. And, of course, there’s no end-of-the-world edge you need to worry about.
It turns out that creating a spherical world like this is quite challenging since spheres cannot be cleanly mapped onto the flat 3D coordinate system of game engines. However, there is a trick you can use to get most of the benefits with way less work: torus worlds.
A great overview on the challenges of creating a ‘spherical’ world in a game engine.
So, Jel has small, torus-shaped worlds. If you keep walking in any direction the world will wrap. Combined with light beacons that emit from objects in the distance, it’s quick and easy to see and walk towards any object along the shortest path:
Finding objects on a torus world using light beacons is intuitive and easy.
A few tricks are used to make this work: object wrapping, 4D tiling noise to create a seamless environment, and vertex warping to give everything curvature. But the benefit is that Jel worlds are much more forgiving than typical flat worlds for being able to jump in, find others, and navigate to objects.
Having used them for a while, I feel comfortable saying that torus worlds are the right choice for the 3D spatial documents of the future.
Jel Worlds: The Metadata
So that covers what it’s like to be “in” a world. What hangs everything together? Most communication tools, like Slack and Discord, have a “channel” concept to organize threads of communication. However, Jel worlds aren’t just places to chat — they are also documents you work on together.
A flat list of worlds would make them similar to channels but limit how they could be organized. It seemed better to have a linked network of worlds, similar to a wiki.
However, a network can be overwhelming to deal with. Tools like Notion point to a happy medium: documents are part of a network, but all they hang off of a shared, editable navigation tree:
Jel’s user interface, with the navigation tree on the left.
This tree can start as a flat list, so if teams want to use Jel worlds like Slack or Discord channels, they can. For teams that take a document-oriented approach, they can create a rich hierarchy to organize their worlds. My guess is teams will start out treating Jel worlds like channels, and slowly evolve to see them more like documents.
Beyond that, Jel worlds belong to a Space, which is like a Slack workspace or Discord server. These terms can be a little confusing at first, but match the real-world use closely enough that I think they will make the most sense in the long run.
Jel Worlds: The Media
The last core element of Jel is media. Here are some of the requirements I laid down for media in Jel:
Uploading files, drag-and-drop, copy/paste, and all the usual ways to add content feel natural and work as you’d expect.
You can paste any URL into Jel, and it will “just work,” spawning the best 3D representation for it. Conversely, all objects in Jel are URLs that you can share and paste into other worlds.
Objects can be placed anywhere in the world and be freely rotated and scaled by anyone with permission.
Searching the web for media like GIFs or 3D models is quick and easy.
Under the hood, worlds are shared documents, synchronized using the same technology that powers apps like Google Docs. This makes it possible to add 2D “sub-documents” to the 3D world, such as synchronized text pages, that are embedded in the world itself as part of the same document.
Basic collaborative text editing in Jel
The simple text pages Jel has today are just the beginning: this approach may eventually extend to include things like drawings, sketches, diagrams, and more.
The Future of Jel
This is already a lot of stuff to digest, but the potential of apps like Jel reaches far beyond what I’ve covered here. What exists today is, at best, the foundation for the more important work to come. Product development is a conversation, so it’s hard to know exactly what people will ask for and how it will all fit together. (Have some thoughts? Join the Jel Discord!)
If avatar chat takes off for teams, it will be a much more useful “hub” for all the real time communication flowing through the organization than anything that’s come before. Jel isn’t just a collage of dumb video feeds or an endless stream of characters: communication in Jel always happens inside a spatial and temporal context, within a dynamic medium. If it becomes the primary way teams work together, there are some crazy possibilities:
Capture and Artifact Generation — If most collaboration and decision-making is happening in 3D virtual spaces, back-end systems and agents can capture, analyze, and summarize what goes on into artifacts for teammates to consume or build upon. Worlds can become living documents to capture all the knowledge that falls out from human-to-human interaction. This can start out organically, and eventually be automated using AI.
— If most collaboration and decision-making is happening in 3D virtual spaces, back-end systems and agents can capture, analyze, and summarize what goes on into artifacts for teammates to consume or build upon. Worlds can become living documents to capture all the knowledge that falls out from human-to-human interaction. This can start out organically, and eventually be automated using AI. Orchestration — Virtual spaces provide a rich canvas for orchestrating interactions with one another. When coupled with an API, the kinds of things that can be orchestrated in a 3D space may quickly outstrip anything possible using existing text or “boxes on screens” based tools.
— Virtual spaces provide a rich canvas for orchestrating interactions with one another. When coupled with an API, the kinds of things that can be orchestrated in a 3D space may quickly outstrip anything possible using existing text or “boxes on screens” based tools. Integration —If knowledge becomes grounded in a virtual, spatial context with avatars, then integration of all existing media, information, and tools with these spaces becomes not only logical but necessary to compete. Eventually, apps like Jel may connect to every other tool or data source you have, since leaving it detached would “unplug” it from your team.
—If knowledge becomes grounded in a virtual, spatial context with avatars, then integration of existing media, information, and tools with these spaces becomes not only logical but necessary to compete. Eventually, apps like Jel may connect to every other tool or data source you have, since leaving it detached would “unplug” it from your team. VR & AR — I have big plans for immersive computing devices like VR and AR fitting into Jel. For now, I’m focusing on making Jel amazing on a laptop or PC. For VR and AR support I’ll be taking a completely unique approach I’ve not seen tried before, since meeting the goals of Jel will require it.
So, this is why I’m excited about Jel, and why I’m more excited than ever to be working in this space. The time has come for the video game for work. Those who dive into these new kinds of tools to start experimenting will be the pioneers exploring the frontier of this new way to work together. If you think this is for you and your team, create your Jel space to get started and join our Discord to stay in touch. Without you, I can’t build something awesome.
Most of all, have fun! I can’t wait to see what you do with Jel! | https://medium.com/@gfodor/introducing-jel-the-un-zoom-320d3dcfd8f6 | ['Greg Fodor'] | 2021-02-10 19:42:36.392000+00:00 | ['Remote Working', 'VR', 'Jel', 'Chat'] |
by Martino Pietropoli | First thing in the morning: a glass of water and a cartoon by The Fluxus.
Follow | https://medium.com/the-fluxus/friday-what-i-mean-ddc22c6b043d | ['Martino Pietropoli'] | 2018-08-24 00:36:01.126000+00:00 | ['Art', 'Friday', 'Illustration', 'Drawing'] |
Understanding React Components | What are components?
Components are the building blocks of any React app and a typical React app will have many of these. Simply put, a component is a JavaScript class or function that optionally accepts inputs i.e. properties(props) and returns a React element that describes how a section of the UI (User Interface) should appear.
Your first component
const Greeting = () => <h1>Hello World today!</h1>;
This is a functional component (called Greeting) written using ES6’s arrow function syntax that takes no props and returns an H1 tag with the text “Hello World today!”
In Chapter 1, you learnt how to set up a React App using the create-react-app tool. We’ll take a step back momentarily and use a basic setup to learn the basics of components. You can find the starter app here and clone it to your computer.
In order to run the code examples in this chapter on your machine, you first have to install a server globally using nodeJs. Below is the command to install the http-server on your machine. Open your terminal and run:-
npm install http-server -g
Open the index.html file within the Chapter 2/starter-code folder in your text editor and add the Greeting component where you see the instructions to do so. Below is a code snippet of how your index.html file should look like after this change.
Within the starter-code folder run the command below to start the server:-
http-server .
Open the url within the terminal in your browser and you should see the text “Hello World Today!”.
In case you make changes to the code and they are not shown in the browser even after refresh. Try hard refreshing that tab or page.
You did it! You created and rendered your first component. Let’s take a closer look to help us understand what just happened.
Your index.html should look like this at this point
=> The React script allows us to write React components
=> The ReactDOM script allows us to place our components and work with them in the context of the DOM
=> The Babel script allows us to transpile ES6 to ES5. Some browsers have limited support for ES6 features; transpiling our ES6 to ES5 allows us to use the modern features of ES6 in our design without having to worry about compatibility. Notice that the React code is wrapped in a script tag with a type of text/babel .
ReactDOM.render(<Greeting />, document.getElementById('root'));
Translating the line of code above to English would sound something like this;
Use ReactDOM’s render method to render the Greeting element into the DOM in a container with the id of root.
When naming a React component, it is convention to capitalize the first letter. This is important because it enables React to differentiate between the native HTML tags such as div, h1, span etc and custom components like Greeting.
A different way to write components
So far, you’ve written a functional component, a fitting name since it really was just a function. Components can also be written using ES6 classes instead of functions. Such components are called class components. Go ahead and convert the functional Greeting component to a class component like so:
class Greeting extends React.Component {
render(){
return <h1>Hello World Today!</h1>;
}
}
Replacing the the functional component in index.html with your new class component and refreshing your browser should also render “Hello World Today!” which means everything is working well.
Functional (Stateless) Vs Class (Stateful) components
By now, you’ve created both a functional and class component. In this section, we’ll take a closer look at the differences as well as situations in which you might prefer to use one type over another.
Functional components
These components are purely presentational and are simply represented by a function that optionally takes props and returns a React element to be rendered to the page.
Generally, it is preferred to use functional components whenever possible because of their predictability and conciseness. Since, they are purely presentational, their output is always the same given the same props.
You may find functional components referred to as stateless, dumb or presentational in other literature. All these names are derived from the simple nature that functional components take on.
=> Functional because they are basically functions
=> Stateless because they do not hold and/or manage state
=> Presentational because all they do is output UI elements
A functional component in it’s simplest form looks something like this:
const Greeting = () => <h1>Hi, I’m a dumb component!</h1>;
Class Components
These components are created using ES6’s class syntax. They have some additional features such as the ability to contain logic (for example methods that handle onClick events), local state (more on this in the next chapter) and other capabilities to be explored in later sections of the book.
As you explore other resources, you might find class components referred to as smart, container or stateful components.
=> Class because they are basically classes
=> Smart because they can contain logic
=> Stateful because they can hold and/or manage local state
=> Container because they usually hold/contain numerous other (mostly functional) components
Class components have a considerably larger amount of markup. Using them excessively and unnecessarily can negatively affect performance as well as code readability, maintainability and testability.
A class component in its simplest form:
class Greeting extends React.Component {
render(){
return <h1>Hi, I’m a smart component!</h1>;
}
}
How do I choose which component type to use?
Use a class component if you:
=> need to manage local state
=> need to add lifecycle methods to your component
=> need to add logic for event handlers
Otherwise, always use a functional component.
As you start out, you will not always know whether to use class or functional components. Many times, you will realise after a while that you chose the wrong type. Do not be discouraged, making this choice gets easier as you create more components. Until then, one helpful tip is, class components that only have markup within the render body can safely be converted to functional components.
Props
In the previous chapter, having reusable components was listed as a benefit of using React, this is true because components can accept props and return a customised React element based on the props received.
Looking at the Greeting component you created earlier, it is clear that it’s not a very useful component to have. In real world situations, you will often need to render components dynamically depending on the situation. You, for example might want the Greeting component to append your application’s current user’s name to the end of the greeting to have output like “Hello Steve” as opposed to having it render “Hello World Today!” every time. Perhaps, you’re always saying hello world, and the world never says hello back.
Props are React’s way of making components easily and dynamically customisable. They provide a way of passing properties/data down from one component to another, typically from a parent to a child component (unidirectional dataflow).
It’s important to note that props are read-only and that a component must never modify the props passed to it. As such, when a component is passed props as input, it should always return the same result for the same input.
All React components should act as pure functions with respect to their props.
Now that you know about props, make use of them in the Greeting component to render a greeting with a custom name appended to it.
Make changes to the code between the script tags in your index.html document to make it look like this:
const Greeting = props => <h1>Hello {props.name}</h1>;
ReactDOM.render(
<Greeting name={‘Edmond’}/>,
document.getElementById('root')
);
This renders the text “Hello Edmond” to the screen. Go ahead and play around with this by switching out the name for yours.
Using props added some new syntax to your app. Let’s take a closer look and understand what is going on here.
=> An argument (props) is passed to the functional component. Recall that since a single argument is being passed to the arrow function, the parentheses are unnecessary. Passing this argument lets the component know to expect some data to be passed to it (in this case, the name of our app’s user)
=> Within ReactDOM.render, the name you want rendered to the screen is passed in by specifying propName={propValue} within the component’s tag.
=> In the h1 tag, {} are used to print the name that is added to the props object when it’s passed in via the component’s tag. Notice that the name attribute is accessed using the dot syntax.
There is no limit to how many props can be supplied to a component.
Using Props with Class Components
Adding props to class components is a very similar process to the one used in the functional component above. There are two notable changes:
=> Props is not passed as an argument to the class
=> The name attribute is accessed using this.props.name instead of props.name
class Greeting extends React.Component {
render(){
return <h1>Hello {this.props.name}</h1>;
}
} ReactDOM.render(
<Greeting name={‘Edmond’}/>,
document.getElementById('root')
);
Challenge: Make changes that make it possible for the Greeting component to take name, age and gender props and render this information to the page. HINT: Pass 3 attributes (name, gender and age) to your component within ReactDOM.render() and alter your h1 text to accommodate your new data. Remember to access the attributes using the right syntax e.g. props.gender for functional components and this.props.gender for class components
Default props
These offer another way to pass props to your component and as the name suggests, default props are used by a component as default attributes in case no props are explicitly passed to the component.
As a fallback, default props are helpful in enabling you offer a better user experience through your app , for example, considering the Greeting component from previous examples, using default props ensures that a complete greeting is always rendered even if the name attribute has not been explicitly passed to the component.
By altering the Greeting component as shown above, you now have “Hello User” being rendered in your browser if you do not pass the name attribute to the component.
Passing a name attribute as a prop to the Greeting component overwrites the default props.
Composing Components
Up until now, you’ve only created a single component, however, when building real products, you will often have to build multiple components.
React allows you to reference components within other components, allowing you to add a level(s) of abstraction to your application.
Take for example a user profile component on a social network. We could write this component’s structure like so:
UserProfile
|-> Avatar
|-> UserName
|-> Bio
In this case, UserProfile , Avatar , UserName and Bio are all components. The UserProfile component is composed of the Avatar , UserName and Bio components. This concept of component composition is quite powerful as it enables you to write highly modular and reusable components. For example, the UserName component can be used in many parts of the web application and in case it ever needed to be updated, changes would only be made to the UserName component and the changes would reflect everywhere with the application where it is used.
In the code snippet above, the Avatar , UserName and Bio components are defined within the UserProfile component. Try and do this on your own using the index.html file from previous examples.
Functional components can be referenced within class components and vice versa. However, it is not often that you will reference a class component within a functional component; class components typically serve as container components.
Project One
At this point, you have learned enough of the basics. Get your hands dirty by following up with this first project and in case you get blocked, get out the Github repository for this chapter for the solution or leave a comment below in the response area.
Let’s get started
Clone the repository and cd into the chapter 2 folder that contains the code for this chapter. Then fire up a text editor or IDE of your choice, though VSCode or Webstorm are recommended and follow the steps below.
Create a project folder to hold the project files.
Create an index.html page
Create a src folder to hold the JavaScript files.
Create an index.js file within the src folder
Add a div with an id of root to the body of the index.html.
with an id of to the body of the index.html. Add the react, react-dom and babel scripts
Link to the index.js script below the babel script at the bottom of the html page.
Within index.js create a presentational component called Application .
. Copy all the html within the body of the html template in the starter-code folder within the chapter 2 folder apart from the script tags.
Paste this html within the <> </> tags (fragments). We use tags because a React component only accepts one element and all the rest/siblings must be nested within the one parent element.
tags (fragments). We use tags because a React component only accepts one element and all the rest/siblings must be nested within the one parent element. We need to clean up the html code and turn it into JSX that React can understand.
Let us start by removing all the html comments like this one <!-— Navbar -→
Rename all class instances to className, then close all img tags like so <img className=”card-img-top” src=”img/8.png”/> and also close the horizontal rule <hr/>
class is a reserved name in React, hence, the requirement to change all class instances to className.
Copy the img folder and paste it at the root of the project folder.
Head back to the index.html file and add the Bootstrap 4 CSS link tag in the head section.
Whoop…Whoop…You can now open the html page in the browser and see your new React application.
Here is the code up to this point.
Great work so far, you are moving on well but you are not yet done. You need to break the main component down further into smaller components so that your code is clean and easy to maintain. Let us get back to work.
Into components
Start by creating the Nav component. You can try it on your own and then cross-check your work by reading through the steps below.
Below the Application component, create a new functional component with a name Nav .
component, create a new functional component with a name . Copy the <nav> </nav> JSX into the Nav component as shown below.
Delete the nav code from the Application component JSX and replace it with <Nav/> element as shown here.
component JSX and replace it with element as shown here. Open up the application again in the browser and everything should still be the same.
Let’s move on to the second presentational component, the Jumbotron .
. Create an arrow function with a name Jumbotron.
Copy the jumbotron code and paste it into the Jumbotron function.
function. Delete the jumbotron code from the Application component’s JSX and replace it with the <Jumbotron/> element.
It is now your turn, go on and create the Toys and Footer functional components and then reference them within the Application component. Be sure to follow similar steps as before.
Nothing about the page in the browser should change after you are done. When you are done cross-check your solution with this.
We have done a good job up to this point, you may have realized that our JSX is not DRY. Meaning there is a lot of repetition specifically in the <Toys/> component, the toy cards are repeated for every toy. We can leverage the power of reusability that React components possess to clean this up.
First, create an array called toys to hold objects containing the toy name, description and image number as shown below.
Create a functional component that accepts props as an argument and name it Card. Copy and paste one card’s JSX code into it from the Toys component as shown below.
We need to make a few changes to the card so that it is reusable by adding placeholders which will be replaced by the actual data to be rendered.
The toy name is replaced by {props.toy.name} where toy is a prop object passed into the component from the toys array.
where is a prop object passed into the component from the toys array. The description is replaced by {props.toy.description} .
. The image src is replaced by a string template literal which accepts {props.toy.image} to make up the image path.
to make up the image path. Let us make use of our new Card component by refactoring our Toys component. First delete all the cards within a div with a class of row in the Toys component. Then change the function signature to accept props as its only argument.
component by refactoring our component. First delete all the cards within a div with a of in the component. Then change the function signature to accept props as its only argument. In order to display all the cards again in the Toys component, we make use of the map function to loop through the toys array passed into it as props. This map function accepts a callback function that accepts two arguments, the item in the array and its index. This callback returns a Card component which accepts a toy has its props. React also requires us to add a key to elements that are being looped over so that it can easily keep track of them and the changes applied to them making it easy for it to know what elements to re-render when the underlying data changes. Therefore the index of the toy object within the array acts as the key in this case as shown below.
Before you can test out the changes there is one more thing to do, otherwise the toys wont show on the page.
We need to pass in the toys array as props to the application component so that the Toys component can get access to them. This is shown in the snippet below.
ReactDOM.render( <Application toys={toys}/>, document.getElementById('root') );
Finally, within the Application component we also need to pass the toys array as props down to the Toys component as shown below. Recall from chapter one that data flow in React is unidirectional.
<Toys toys={this.props.toys}/>
Now open the page again in the browser to view the changes we have made. You will realize that nothing changes in the browser, we still get to see our page design as it was, but now it is fully optimized with React.
At this point you know how components work and how you can make use of them to develop modular React code that represents different sections of your user interface. Here is the final code for this project. The next chapter explains the aspect of state in a React application, do not miss it.
If you have found this article useful, reach over to the 👏 button and hit it as many times as you have enjoyed reading this post. Your responses are also highly appreciated. You can also find me on twitter. | https://medium.com/the-andela-way/understanding-react-components-37f841c1f3bb | ['John Kagga'] | 2020-10-01 08:58:32.312000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'React', 'The Andela Way', 'Web Development', 'Beginner'] |
Decorative LED Lighting Features : | LED lighting have brought a revolution in the home and in commercial building illumination. It provides more than 85% more efficiency than the alternative lighting like incandescent bulbs. LED lights last longer than the other options. The lighting manufacturers offer a variety of LED linear lighting for homes, offices and for other establishments and can be customised to have a decorative LED lighting to look different.
The advantages of LED lights are Longer Lifespan, Higher Intensity, Energy-Efficient and Enhanced Safety. The Decorative LED Lighting Features depends on where we are going to install the lights based on that we need to customise to its space, design, Colour and Finishing.
The Decorative LED Lighting Features is measured by these points such as Average Lifetime Hours, Luminous Efficacy at the source, Luminous Efficacy as a system, Colour Temperature and Colour Rendering Index.
The decorative lights come in various options such as Track decorative lights, Recessed Lighting, Rail lights, Portable Lights and Multi — Functional Lights. Types of light used for decorative lights are Incandescent Bulb, Parabolic reflector bulb, Tungsten Halogen Bulb, Xenon bulb, Fluorescent bulbs, Compact Fluorescent Lamps, T8 bulbs and High intensity discharge. These days there are new decorative light source such as Dynamic Lighting and Decorative lights LED. So we need to decide which lights to opt to get best results out of it. | https://medium.com/@facadeseo/decorative-led-lighting-features-9569d98bb629 | ['Facade Light'] | 2021-09-09 05:11:32.328000+00:00 | ['Lighting', 'Led Linear Lighting', 'Lighting Design', 'Lighting Fixtures', 'Led Lighting'] |
Change an Application’s Theme Dynamically in Vuetify.js | Change an Application’s Theme Dynamically in Vuetify.js
Build and change themes to fit your app’s different purposes
Photo by Lukasz Szmigiel on Unsplash.
Vuetify is a Material Design component framework for Vue.js. It provides a lot of features, including the ability to problematically change theme colors in your application. Enabling users to change themes is a good customization feature that gives their app a more personalized feel.
In this article, we will create a Vuetify web application that can dynamically change between themes at runtime and also switch between dark and light modes.
To start, we will create a new Vue.js application. We can do this through the Vue CLI on the terminal:
vue create dynamic-theme
Once that is done, we add Vuetify to our newly created app by changing our current directory to our app folder and running the following command:
vue add vuetify
Now we can run our application on development mode:
yarn serve
Open the application folder with the IDE of your choice and create a new Vue component in the src/components folder named ThemeChangerMenu.vue . This component will just be a standard Vuetify menu that will hold our theme choices and the dark mode switch. All the theme-changing logic will also be contained in this component.
Let’s start by adding the v-menu component to our template. We will use a button with an icon to open the menu and display our theme choices in a v-card component:
Let’s add a switch that will toggle between dark and light modes. To do this, we bind our switch to the $vuetify.theme.dark variable with the v-model directive, which will create a two-way binding with the variable:
To display and test our menu, import ThemeChangerMenu.vue to App.vue and place it inside the v-app-bar component:
We should now have a functional dark mode switch:
OK! We can now move on to the next part, which is to enable toggling between different predefined theme selections. Create a new data property called themes that holds an array of themes:
As you can see from the snippet above, we are storing an array of objects, each with a name and color definitions for dark and light variants of the theme. Then we display them on our menu:
The only thing we’re missing now is the setTheme method, where we’ll place our theme-changing logic:
When a theme is selected from the menu, we close the menu and then iteratively set the theme colors for both the light and dark variants. We also save the name of the theme, which will let us know which theme is currently selected.
Now our theme changer is fully functional:
Well, that’s all for this article. You will find the source code in this repository. Also, check out the demo on GitHub. Please share your comments or suggestions in the comment section. | https://medium.com/better-programming/changing-application-theme-dynamically-in-vuetify-js-c01d640699c4 | ['Eyuel Berga Woldemichael'] | 2020-09-08 17:52:42.395000+00:00 | ['Vuejs', 'JavaScript', 'Programming', 'Vue', 'Software Development'] |
Unsexy: Becoming a Postpartum Doula | Birth is exciting, sexy, transformative and follows a narrative that pleases us. Postpartum, however, is messy, decidedly UNsexy, and seriously lacking in resources, dialogue and visibility benefitting the desires of a modern woman.*
Following the UNsexy goes against culture, but exposes the greatest need. I thought about the kind of work being a great postpartum doula requires, and I thought, that definitely sounds both instinctual and like the most challenging act. I often find myself victim to saying rather than doing, and being a postpartum doula requires doing without saying, without judgement or being assertive with your own experience. This opens us up to witness to mother in her own power, her face flushing with life after eating protein and feeling strong, seeing her baby latch or take to a bottle and feeling incredibly proud of herself and the warrior she’s just transformed into.
Hang with me here but I always sort of wanted to pursue being a nun. Not because I’m overly religious, (I’m also married, so it ain’t happening!) but because I saw it as the ultimate training in being a great human. My principal growing up, Sister Monica, did ONLY unsexy work. She was always listening, holding space for people from all walks of life in their triumphs and darkest moments. She was working with the poor when no one was watching, working with ungrateful middle schoolers and their most obnoxious parents, in the hope that the love she showed us made an impact somewhere down the road, praying for those who have hurt her. I don’t think I ever really knew anything about her, except that she loved well. I saw her as the ultimate expression of confidence.
Not to mention I also adore women. Old, young, conservative, liberal, ostentatious, ridiculous, meek, rich, poor. Being a postpartum doula, for every kind of woman out there feels like the most direct way to express that love. Silently come in, without really being noticed, feed her, nourish her, love her, plug her phone in, leave her alone, rub her back, walk her dog, serve her.
In the rest of the world, it seems like you need to assert our opinion everywhere and be “thought leaders” to succeed. In this world, to succeed, you need to love well and love often.
*my favorite quotes from Laura & Erica of Birdsong Brooklyn
**photo by unknown sourced from Carriage House Birth | https://medium.com/@carolyndrush/unsexy-the-postpartum-doula-fe04dc3a67dd | ['Carolyn Rush'] | 2020-02-06 17:48:03.090000+00:00 | ['Birth', 'Doula', 'Women', 'Postpartum'] |
What To Do When You Don’t Know How To Make Decision In Your Life. | 2. Always keep learning
The more you learn, the smarter ways you know how to deal with the options.
Because when you have more knowledge and experience, it’s easier for you to make the decision because you can recognize more options and know which one can be the best option for you.
It likes the story of Little Frog in the Well we read when we are kids. You will always feel that you can make the best choice from what you have in your mind.
But the world is bigger than the well for the Frog, as the better options are always available for you. The important thing is can you recognize it or not.
And keep learning is the best way to help you go out of your “little well” to discover the world and make better decisions for yourself.
How to do it
So how you should learn to make a better decision in your life.
There are 2 main ways that I’m doing right now and believe that these are the 2 best ways ever for me to do it (for you, maybe you even can figure out some other ways to do it more effectively for yourself, who know!)
Having more life experience
Traveling more, make more decisions, and work on more projects to learn from real experiences.
The lessons from real-life will teach you more valuable lessons than just from your schools.
And it is easier for you to remember these lessons because it related to your emotions and actions in life.
It’s different from the lessons in schools, where you mainly just learn-by-heart from the book without adding the emotion to these lessons.
Reading and listening to more content from successful people to see the ways how they make decisions.
Books, videos, and podcasts from successful people are great sources for any of us to learn about the way how to create success and make decisions in tough situations from the top leaders.
With just $5–$20 bucks, you can easily buy great books from famous leaders like Jack Ma, Tony Robbins, Elon Musk, Brian Tracy,…who give us their intelligence in solving the issues that take them years to learn.
It also gives you more motivation to have bigger ambitions and making your own decisions.
Recently I read the book called “What’s Your Genius” by Jay Niblick. In his book, he said
Our thinking talents and decision-making styles comprise the very core of who we are. They make us the unique individuals that we see in the mirror each morning, and they hold the greatest potential for delivering our greatest levels of performance and success.
As it teaches me a big lesson about the value of our decision when we come up with making choices.
It means that when you can make the right one, it will help you to explore the greatest potential and perform successfully at a greater level and show who you are. | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/what-to-do-when-you-dont-know-how-to-make-decision-in-your-life-b1bd60c58c59 | [] | 2020-09-18 07:09:52.400000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Decision Making', 'Personal Development', 'Life Lessons', 'Education'] |
Komodo Pioneers Achievements 2018–2019: Full Report | The first year as a Komodo notary node was a success. We maintained a stable notarization service with our Australian server throughout the election year of 2018–2019. Through the efforts of ours and of the other notary operators we were protecting dozens of Komodo Platform blockchains as well as a number of external blockchains. There were even a few 51 % attack attempts, but the security solution jl777 had pioneered proved itself and defeated those attacks.
This is just a beginning. Now we are about to enter another election cycle and the Komodo community will elect 30 new notary operators. We expect that Komodo Platform and its security service will gain more recognition in 2019 and 2020 as it is the only available and practical way to secure and protect small blockchains.
Pioneer Transparency Report
Our team feels each notary node team should maintain full transparency towards the voters, especially if they made significant campaign promises.
To be a leading example we have published a comprehensive report about our achievements and the overall situation, including a treasury report.
Download our report and get access to a total of 20 pages of content.
Pioneer Campaign Promise
Komodo is about to have its third annual notary node elections, and Komodo Pioneers got one of the best campaign promises.
Our plan is to reinvest back into Komodo ecosystem.
We pledge up to 50 % of our notary node revenue towards activities that support Komodo ecosystems, such as events and meetups. We can also support other small scale initiatives, such as development projects.
An illustration of different price & funding scenarios.
The pledged percentage is smaller if the KMD price is below four dollars. That is to ensure sufficient funding to maintain stable notarization service, which is our core responsibility.
Situation Summary
We are currently operating a notary node on the SH region.
Our SH node got auto-elected for next year because of its high-performance score.
We are campaigning to get a second node on the EU region, and thus operate a total of two nodes.
We are looking for a way to support the Komodo ecosystem.
We have a campaign promise to distribute part of the notary node revenue towards events, projects, and other initiatives.
The KMD price has been trading below 4 USD most of the election year, which means we have had limited funding.
We are accumulating KMD and thus far have saved 30 % of our revenue as long term capital.
We have had achievements worth celebrating. | https://medium.com/komodopioneers/komodo-pioneers-achievements-2018-2019-full-report-8265e4318022 | ['Audo Kowitz'] | 2019-04-10 13:40:43.788000+00:00 | ['Komodo Pioneers', 'Komodo Platform', 'Komodo', 'Notary Nodes', 'Dpow'] |
I get back my lost phone!! | Photo by Matteo Fusco on Unsplash
Hello there ! Prem here. I completed bachelors in Information & Technology from one of the Tier-3 colleges in the first half of this year. Currently, I am doing Job in IT company as Software Engineer and have industrial experience of 16 months. This is all about me.
First of all, I take you to the time when i got my phone. After completing my exams of 12th science (aka 10 + 2 / Junior College), I got my phone (I-phone 6- Space grey- 16GB) from my father ( on 10th April 2016, Sunday I guess). This was my first phone means i can put this phone in my pocket for longer span and play games whatever i want. At that time, I am fond of I-phone like others but actually this is not tenacity. Since its 4 years and x months, I am still using that same phone now.
Now I shed some light on what happened to my phone. Its time of Covid crisis and in the time of pandemic, Every country, state and people face severe problems. I was living in Ahmadabad-Gujarat, India and it was lock-down time. We are little bit tense but living life as i was working WFH for company and my father is working for Transport company so that time sometimes he was called by company for work.
Photo by Nigel Tadyanehondo on Unsplash
One day in Afternoon, we got call from our town (Ladol-Vijapur, Gujarat) that my grand mother died 😢. so at that moment we (means my parents and some relatives) went for our town for funeral & last rites. It was difficult time for our family but problems were not steer clear from us. In the memorial service (બેસણુ / बेस्नु ) of my grand mother, relatives from every nearby towns came and met us. I belong to Rajput family and there, its rituals which were followed from longer time.
After some days, My moti-mummy (Elder mother / Wife of Elder brother of your father) suffered from difficulties. As she is diabetic and BP patient, its usual for her to face this kind of things. but condition become little bit complicated and mota-pappa took her to the hospital. Town hospitals doesn’t have proper technology and instrument so they suggested to move on city side hospital. she is hospitalised by city hospital and take some measures. My moti-mummy tested +ve for Corona. Condition became too critical as his health is also not good and she died in a day. Back to back deaths make us too emotional. We thought that they infected by corona in grand mother’s memorial service. But its our assumptions and we can't do any thing now.
funeral and last rites was done by us and my brother (son of moti-mummy)came to Ahmadabad from Australia in 3–4 days. In the memorial service, as usual relatives from nearby towns came and met us.
At that morning, i put my phone on change in home and sat in compound with brothers and relatives. People from Around 10–12 towns came and sat with us. After some time when i needed my phone for some work and went home to grab it. There was no Phone !! 📱 I searched every where and also tell my mother whether she take it or not. I called in my phone but no one is responding. At last, some one received call but no answer.
Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash
Little bit upset but what can i do now ?? Its not mine fault. How can someone steal something in this time. 💢
At that time, i thought about Find My Iphone and take my laptop and search it on google. and i got the location of my phone. Little bit hope !!!!
My Jijaji (Husband of my Sister), Uncle and one Brother (name: mitu) took a car and just tracking the location. After some time Phone was switched off by theft but we almost got that the theft belongs to specific this town (I don’t want to mention name as not everyone in the town is like him/her).
We didn’t get the phone but got the location where we could find my phone. we met the local govt. council of village and person gave a hint as well this person(lady) might be the thief but no one is ready to talk with her as she is criminal minded and use laws / woman card in her on way.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Now we found out the thief but not phone. I lose my hope and i can’t do anything now. I reported in local police station with my mobile bill as i have a proof that my phone was stolen at that time, if wrongdoers use this phone in wrongdoing.
Now the coincidence time, My maternal uncle was also from that town and he also knows that evil woman. He told other people of town that “my nephew was filed complain and IT engineer so he can able to find out phone easily in 1–2 days. He got the location as well. and talked with local govt. of village.” Evil woman frightened by this words and now she got that now i should place this phone in that place where i got my phone. And she placed my phone compound of my maternal uncle. Maternal Uncle called my mother and told her that space grey coloured phone is found from the compound and Is it sonu’s phone?? (sonu, my nick name). And this is how i got my phone back.
Thanks to the everyone who supported me in this time !!!!!! As this present 🎁 is really really important for me.😊 | https://medium.com/@prem-parmar/i-get-back-my-lost-phone-c68f863a980c | ['Prem Parmar'] | 2020-12-30 03:55:12.855000+00:00 | ['Police', 'Apple', 'Thief', 'Findmyiphone', 'iPhone'] |
Figma Tutorial: How to Import a Project from Sketch to Figma | Many designers continue to work in programs familiar to them, such as Sketch, even if new programs, such as Figma, have surpassed them in terms of functionality and capability. Figma has become the market leader, thanks to its deep functionality. Its benefits include:
Compatibility with any operating system, not restricted to MacOS (like with Sketch).
Easier teamwork: all team members can work on the same file at the same time.
Autosaving enabled. Update history is stored on the cloud.
The transfer of the project to the development team does not need additional programs; everyone can work in one file.
Many functions automate the design process, accelerating the team’s productivity.
Anyone who has a link can comment on the design — editorial, leadership, marketing.
However, Figma’s sophistication presents a learning curve that must be overcome.
Learning to transfer a project from Sketch to Figma can be a good way to begin to learn the program for new users. This Figma tutorial will focus on the transfer process of layouts and how to simplify this process.
Figma and Sketch are similar — but aren’t compatible. This means you cannot open a Sketch project in Figma. Since they are different graphic editors, many objects are distorted, affecting their design. Here is an example of how objects are distorted in the transfer:
The top image shows the original elements in Sketch; the bottom shows distortions after opening them Figma
How to import from Sketch to Figma and save the design
Below is a step-by step guide for preparing to transfer your file from Sketch to Figma without distortions and losses. It will walk you through two main tasks: creating the library and transferring the project.
1. Create the library with components and styles in Figma.
1.1 Create a new file in Figma. This won’t be a working file, but a file for the library. In it, we will collect objects that are often repeated in the project and then customize their appearance. In this way, we will create object templates that can be changed and not configured every time from the beginning. Figma allows you to make them very flexible, so don’t skip this step.
1.2 Redraw all frequently repeated components to this file (Buttons, Accordions, Cards, etc.).
1.3 Make them flexible (customize constraints). This helps to create a responsive design and many similar components in the project (for example, a dialog with different widths for different purposes).
View how on YouTube.
The first component needs its width changing. The second shows an inflexible element without configured constraints; elements are displaced by the increased width. The third shows a flexible element with customized constraints.
1.4 Add clear naming for objects (for example Button, Checkbox, etc.). These may be the same names as Sketch objects. This allows easy to find the component in the project when we link the library to the working file.
1.5 Create parent components so that child components in your design inherit the parent’s settings. To do this, select the object and click on the create components button at the top.
1.6 Add the different states of components and combine them into variants. This will help you quickly switch between the states of the component (for example, change the Primary label to the Error label without setting the color and size).
View how on YouTube.
Figma also lets you create styles for colors and effects. For example, you need to change the shade of red for all red components in a project. If we make changes to the style of red, then they will be applied to all objects to which you have linked this color.
2. Project transfer
With library components set up we can now begin to import the project from Sketch to Figma.
2.1 Create a working file in Figma
2.2 Link the created library to the working file. After that, all changes in the library will be duplicated in the working file and it is no longer necessary to open the library file to add a component to the design. To search for a component, enter its naming in the search box of the Assets tab.
View how on YouTube.
2.3 Redraw layouts using components from the library.
Based on the created library, it is easier to collect new pages. We already have Lego bricks (Components), from which we need to assemble figures (Layouts).
Copy the required screen in Sketch, and drag it into an open working project.
Redraw the objects of the screen using components, fonts, colors from the library.
Objects that are rarely found draw anew.
Tip: To speed up your work, you can import the entire project from Sketch to Figma and use distorted layouts as the basis for the layout design in Figma. But be sure to check them against the original screen.
How to do this: Drag the Sketch file into the Figma Draft. Add exactly the whole project file, because a separate layout is added as a screen, and we need an editable base. When creating a layout, copy the required layout from the transferred project into the working file and work with it.
Simplifying the transfer from Sketch to Figma
Tidy up pages. Name layouts and components correctly, arrange layouts in a logical sequence, rename each page according to content, and more. Design all pages in the same way so as not to get confused and not to confuse the team members who will be working on the project. This is especially true if the team hasn’t worked with Figma before.
Import Sketch layouts as a design base. If you have never worked in Figma, then this is a great way to master a new tool. Taking into account the fact that you do not need to be distracted by creating a design. You just copy what you worked on in Sketch and add components from the library.
Create structure from the start. If you don’t have a file structure in Sketch, it’s best to start creating it in Figma right from the start. Thus, it will be easier for you and other team members to work.
Use styles in Figma. For example, text fonts are very flexible — you can add different colors and alignments for the same font style. Now you do not need to create separate H1 styles with center alignment and H1 with left alignment.
Also, styles can be applied not only to color and fonts but also to effects.
Check font parameters. If the font in Figma is visually different from the font in the Sketch, check if the font in the Sketch is broken. If there is a star next to the font name, then this font was broken and does not match the library in Sketch. Click the Detach button to see its real parameters.
If you do not see the font parameters in Sketch, most likely the font used in the design is not installed on your computer. Download the font (for example from the Google Fonts Library, install it on your computer, and restart the Sketch to see the font options.
I hope you found this article helpful. Thank you for your time!
Bio: I’m currently working on a fintech product as a UX Designer at Windmill. | https://medium.com/@ilona17979/figma-tutorial-how-to-import-a-project-from-sketch-to-figma-53485908cdc0 | ['Ilona Yeletska'] | 2021-09-13 08:53:36.067000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Projects', 'Sketch', 'Component Libraries', 'Figma'] |
Build a Chat Room With Node.js and Socket.io | Introduction
Socket.IO is a library that enables real-time, duplex communication between client and the server.
It contains Websocket which is a protocol that provides a full-duplex and low-latency channel between the server and the browser
Implementation in Node.js:
Basic overview:
const socketio = require(“socket.io”) // To get the package
const io = socketio(server) // here sever is http-server
io.on(‘connect’, ()=>{}) // this is first function called when connection is made between client and server
socket.on(‘join’, ()=> {}) and socket.join(‘user room’) //these events for joining the room
socket.emit(‘name of event’, ()=>{}) // it emits the event which both client or server will listen to
socket.on(‘name of event’,()=>{}) this is used both in client side and server side to listen to the event which is emitted by socket.emit and run the code inside it
socket.on(‘disconnect’,()=>{}) // it will tell when the user has disconnected
Server code integration (node):
create and cd SampleApp npm init // to setup npm package npm i --save express // i am using express.js npm i --save socket.io // for socket.io
After everything is installed. Create a file name server.js and started writing the code
server.js
const http = require('http');
const express = require('express');
const socketio = require('socket.io');
const app = express(); const server = http.createServer(app);
const io = socketio(server); const {
addUser,
removeUser,
getUser,
getUsersInRoom
} = require('./utils/User'); io.on('connect', socket => {
socket.on('join', ({ username, room }, callback) => {
const { error, user } = addUser({ id: socket.id, name: username, room }); // add user with socket id and room info
if (error) return callback(error);
socket.join(user.room);
socket.emit('message', {
user: 'adminX',
text: `${user.name.toUpperCase()}, Welcome to ${user.room} room.`
});
socket.broadcast.to(user.room).emit('message', {
user: 'adminX',
text: `${user.name.toUpperCase()} has joined!`
});
io.to(user.room).emit('roomData', {
room: user.room,
users: getUsersInRoom(user.room) // get user data based on user's room
});
callback();
}); socket.on('sendMessage', (message, callback) => {
const user = getUser(socket.id);
io.to(user.room).emit('message', { user: user.name, text: message });
callback();
}); socket.on('disconnect', () => {
const user = removeUser(socket.id);
if (user) {
io.to(user.room).emit('message', {
user: 'adminX',
text: `${user.name.toUpperCase()} has left.`
});
io.to(user.room).emit('roomData', {
room: user.room,
users: getUsersInRoom(user.room)
});
}
}); server.listen(process.env.PORT || 3000, () =>
console.log('Server is running')
);
after establishing the connection and user joins the room. There will be a socket.emit event which will be listened by socket.on
socket.on(‘sendMessage’) event will be listened which contains user name and message. After this connection will be disconnected when user leaves the chat and an event will be emitted.
Create a user.js file for user crud
users.js
//Array of users
const users = [];
const addUser = ({ id, name, room }) => {
name = name.trim().toLowerCase();
room = room.trim().toLowerCase();
const existingUser = users.find(
user => user.room === room && user.name === name
);
if (!name || !room) return { error: 'Username and room are required.' };
if (existingUser) return { error: 'Username already exists.' };
const user = { id, name, room };
users.push(user);
return { user };
};
const removeUser = id => {
const index = users.findIndex(user => user.id === id);
if (index !== -1) return users.splice(index, 1)[0];
};
const getUser = id => users.find(user => user.id === id);
const getUsersInRoom = room => users.filter(user => user.room === room);
module.exports = { addUser, removeUser, getUser, getUsersInRoom };
Same events will be listened at client as well. I am using React for front-end.
Client code integration (React):
create and cd ClientSample npm i --save socket.io-client // for socket.io client
After installation. Create a file name clientSocket.js and add code like
import { useState, useEffect, useRef } from 'react';
import socketIOClient from 'socket.io-client';
const ENDPOINT = 'http://localhost:3000/';
const ClientSocket = ({ username, room }) => {
const socketRef = useRef();
const [users, setUsers] = useState([]);
const [messages, setMessages] = useState([]);
const [error, setError] = useState('');
useEffect(() => {
socketRef.current = socketIOClient(ENDPOINT);
socketRef.current.emit('join', { username, room }, error => {
if (error) {
setError(error);
}
});
return () => {
socketRef.current.emit('disconnect');
};
}, [username, room]);
useEffect(() => {
socketRef.current.on('message', message => {
setMessages(messages => [...messages, message]);
});
socketRef.current.on('roomData', ({ users }) => {
setUsers(users);
});
}, []);
const sendMessage = message => {
socketRef.current.emit('sendMessage', message, () => {});
};
return { users, messages, sendMessage, error };
};
export default ClientSocket;
It will use same events which is used by server to emit or listen every time user gets a message. After this, create Chat.js file
const Chat = () => {
const history = useHistory();
const { username, room } = useParams(); //these are added when user registers const [message, setMessage] = useState(''); const { users, messages, sendMessage} = ClientSocket({
username,
room
}); const onSubmitHandler = event => {
event.preventDefault();
if (message) sendMessage(message);
setMessage('');
}; const renderActiveUsers = () => {
return users.map(user => {
return (
<p key={user.id} >
<i className="fa fa-circle"></i> {user.name}
</p>
);
});
}; return ( <div className="container-fluid d-flex">
<div className="col-lg-6">
<ul>
<h6>Messages</h6>
{messages.text}
</ul>
<form onSubmit={onSubmitHandler}>
<input
autoComplete="off"
value={message}
onChange={e => setMessage(e.target.value)}
type="text"
name="message"
/> <button type="submit"> Send </button
</form>
</div> <div className="col-lg-6 border-left ml-2">
{renderActiveUsers()}
</div>
</div> )};
export default Chat;
Conclusion
Above code is simple implementation of how we setup socket.IO in both client and server. It’s an awesome and easy to integrate library.
I wrote very minimal code to let you know about the socket.io. If you want to improve it you can:
Write separate react(jsx) files to give it a chat app feel and apply styling.
Add online/offline labels
Thank you for reading .Hope you like it. :)
Reference | https://medium.com/swlh/build-a-chat-room-with-node-js-and-socket-io-e3e43f49a02d | ['Usman Saleem'] | 2020-12-28 09:41:47.038000+00:00 | ['Nodejs', 'Chat', 'Room', 'Socketio', 'React'] |
Making Life Easier with this Graphical Interface for Git | Install Git Cola
To install Git Cola on Linux, open your application installer (called Software on GNOME) from your Applications menu and search for git-cola and install it.
On macOS, you can use Homebrew to install it. Search for git-cola and install.
On Windows, use Chocolatey to install. Search for git-cola and install.
Launch Git Cola
Start Git Cola from your Application menu. Since it’s a graphical interface for Git, you won’t be typing commands.
When Git Cola starts, it doesn’t have any repositories. Just as a word processor or music player isn’t of much use without a file loaded, Git Cola isn’t very useful without a project loaded into it. If you have a Git repository that you need to contribute to, you can clone it by clicking the Clone button in the lower-left Git Cola window. Otherwise, click the New button.
Create a new directory called example-project.git somewhere on your hard drive. The folder doesn’t have to end in .git, but it’s a convention for a Git repository to end in .git, so it’s a good idea to get into the habit of appending that to the end of a project. And that’s an important concept in Git: The directory you create to house a project is actually a Git repository. It’s hard to tell without digging around for it, but there’s a hidden directory inside your project folder called .git, and it contains important history and configuration files so that changes you make inside that project can be tracked.
Git Cola’s main interface looks pretty lonely and empty at this stage.
It’s up to you to populate your project with files, so for the moment, leave Git Cola behind. Using your OS’s file manager (Files on GNOME, Finder on macOS, Explorer on Windows), add some files to your project directory on your hard drive.
Files types compatible with Git
Git is primarily intended for use with text-based formats. Technically, Git doesn’t really care what kinds of files you add to your project. Its job is to track changes. But there’s a catch: not all file formats are suitable for version tracking. For instance, a JPEG image is actually a complex matrix of pixel values and positions passed through a compression algorithm. If you change a JPEG file in any way, you’re essentially creating a brand new file because, while it’s possible to generate the difference (a “diff” or “delta” in software terminology) between one version and the other, the amount of data required to represent that likely will be larger than both images combined.
Text formats are more prevalent than you may think. Besides actual text files, there are many file formats that are based on raw text. For instance, HTML and CSS are pure text formats. So is anything based in JSON or XML, such as the SVG graphics format, the PostScript (PS, the basis of PDF files) format, source code (PY, JAVA, and so on), and many more. And just because Git is intended primarily for text, that doesn’t mean you can’t make an exception here and there. For very diverse projects that involve lots of binary (non-text) data, there are tools like git-annex and Git-portal to enable you to benefit from Git without suffering from its aversion to large files.
This article focuses on text files because Git Cola doesn’t natively support external Git extensions.
Staging files
The first thing you typically do with a file in Git is stage it. Staging a file means that you’ve marked the file for inclusion in the next code commit. It’s little more than a tag, and it’s easily undone. It doesn’t change or preserve your data. It’s just a way to keep track of what you have in progress.
Once you have a file in your project directory, it’s listed in the Status pane of Git Cola. Right-click on the file and select Stage Selected.
A staged file is marked with a green triangle next to its name. You can unstage a file basically the same way you staged it: right-click and select Unstage Selected.
Making a commit
When you’re ready to commit a file to Git’s permanent history, you make a commit. A commit represents exactly what it sounds like: You’re committing to having a file in your Git repository, ostensibly forever.
To commit all staged files, type a brief description of your work in the Commit text field. This is the commit message, which is visible forever in the repository’s Git log. It’s a useful message — sometimes to explain to collaborators what you intended by committing certain files and other times to remind yourself.
Publishing with git push
Right now, your Git project exists only on your local machine. It’s common to use Git to collaborate with others, so it’s very common for a Git repository to exist on a server accessible to others. You can create a repository on a free Git host like GitLab and interface with it through Git Cola. Once you’ve created an empty remote repository, you can add it to Git Cola.
To add a remote server, click on the File menu in Git Cola and select Edit Remotes. In the Edit Remotes window, click the plus (+) symbol in the lower-left corner. In the dialog box that appears, enter a name for the remote and the URL. The name can be anything, but it’s conventional (and therefore expected by most experienced users) for your primary remote to be named origin. The URL is provided by your Git host and usually starts with git@ (there are other protocols, such as https:// and git://, but they have limitations, so they’re rarely used).
Once you have a remote configured, you can push your commits to the server.
To push your commits to your remote repository, navigate to the Actions menu and select Push, or just press Ctrl+P. A git push sends only your committed files to the server. If a file has never been staged or hasn’t been staged since you’ve made changes, then that data will not get pushed to the server. Sometimes that’s a good thing. Git is designed to be an excellent workspace: You can have works-in-progress alongside old reliable files without worrying about the two negatively affecting one another. However, if you forget to add an important file to staging or to commit what’s in staging, then you aren’t pushing the data you think you’re pushing.
Updating with git pull
If you’re working with other people on a project, it’s very likely that they’ll commit files to the repository from their own computer. To keep your work environments in sync, you must regularly perform a git pull. To pull all the latest commits from the server, navigate to the Actions menu and select Pull, or just press Ctrl+Shift+P.
Everything else
Git Cola can do all the typical Git actions and a few more. And Git has plenty of great features to help you be creative and daring in the way you work, with the assurance that the known-good version of what you’ve done is safe. Git branches, for instance, afford you the ability to have parallel versions of your project existing at the same time, and git merge provides you with tools to combine those versions when you decide one could benefit the other. The possibilities are endless with Git, and that’s why it’s so popular.
If unfamiliarity with terminals has held you back from trying Git, resist no more! Settle in for a nice cold Git Cola, and see what Git opens up for you. | https://medium.com/the-programming-hub/making-life-easier-with-this-graphical-interface-for-git-f56cd9f15d91 | ['Pink Academy'] | 2020-12-22 14:56:26.939000+00:00 | ['Code', 'Github', 'Git', 'DevOps', 'Gitlab'] |
Summer Camp Nightmare | creative writing
During the middle of summer, a girl named Robyn Darling was getting ready to go to summer camp, in North Carolina, with some of her friends. She started to pack up her things, making sure she didn’t forget anything. After she was done, she put all her bags downstairs to be put in the car. Her dad, Robert Darling, carried the bags out. Her Mom, Jude Darling, was cooking lunch in the kitchen with her sisters Lana and Billie. Lana is in College and Billie is a Freshman. When her dad had everything in the car, they all had their lunch together. After they were done, Robyn and her dad headed out to the camp. The drive was about three hours long so they were jamming out to music. When they finally got to the camp, her dad got her suitcase out and helped Robyn to find her cabin. Her dad said goodbye to her and was heading for the car. She went outside and that’s when he yelled,” Bye Honey!¨. Robyns face got as red as a tomato and went back to her cabin.
About fifteen minutes later, her best friend, Maggie Walker came and they were so happy to be sharing a cabin together. Maggie gets into a lot of trouble but she’s super nice. Robyn was kind of nervous to share a cabin with Maggie because she can get to wild and annoying when she is bored. But she is also a good friend and Robyn was happy to spend the summer with her friend. When they both unpacked, they started to walk around until someone on the intercom said.¨ All Campers, Please report to the auditorium.¨ Everyone was in a rush to hear what the camp counselors were going to talk about. Everyone was filling up the bleachers and sitting on the ground. Everyone waited for about five minutes until someone came out.
They told them all the camp rules and at the end that everyone just needs to have fun. Before everyone left, the counselor said, ¨There is a mystery at the place. This campground has said to be cursed. The kids and also the counselors from back then always reported about weird noises or shadows in the cabin that look like people.¨ One girl asked, ¨Well what happened next?¨ The counselor then continued, ¨ They all disappeared. The whole camp. Gone.¨ Everyone was silent. There was a long silence and then the counselor said, ¨The End¨, and he excused everyone to go back to their cabins.
Maggie and Robyn were chatting afterward with these two boys, named Kyle Benson and Ben Green, about the story. The four of them kept talking and getting to know each other until it was dinner time and they all walked to the lunch room. After their dinner, the four of them were told they we need to walk to the campfire after to have smores for dessert. When everyone was heading out, someone on the intercom yell,¨The campfire will be canceled tonight due to a thunderstorm right our way.¨ Everyone rolled their eyes. Then the person said, ¨So please report to your cabins.¨ Robyn and Maggie invited Kyle and Ben to their cabin to play board games. They both said sure and they all went to the cabin.
While they were playing clue, they could hear the thunder banging from the sky and they saw the lighting bolts reaching for them. They all got kind of scared so they stopped playing games and got blankets out to watch a movie. The only movies that Robyn brought were horror movies, which are her favorite genre. The movies she got out for them to choose were The Exorcist; The Sixth Sense; The Shining, and The Poltergeist. They all decided to watch them all that night. It was much scarier to watch during a storm but they all managed to stay awake to watch all the movies. During the last movie, The Poltergeist, the power went out. They were all sitting in the dark, waiting for some light to turn on.
¨Do you have any candles?¨ asked Ben.¨I think there is some in the emergency kit in the closet.¨ said Robyn. They found the candle and lit them all up. Robyn and ben put the candles all around the cabin. After they got done with the candles, the both of them sat back on the floor. Maggie and Kyle were talking about the movie but Robyn and Ben wanted something to eat. It was still pouring outside so they decided to wait longer. Everything was fine until one of the counselors yell on the speakers.
¨EVERYONE PLEASE STAY IN YOUR CABINS AND LOCK ALL THE WINDOWS AND DOORS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE!¨ screamed the counselor. Maggie and Robyn jumped up to lock up everything. Ben and Kyle blew out all the candle except for one. When they all were done they sat back down, in a circle, on the ground. All of them were talking about what was going on because they all were still confused about the announcement that the counselor made
¨Im so scared right now,¨ Robyn said shaking in her blanket ¨We need to figure out what’s going on and we all have to stick together. ¨Theres nothing to worry about guys, it’s probably because of the storm,¨ said Maggie rolling her eyes. Ben and Kyle agreed with her but Robyn was still doubting that it wasn’t the storm that they should be worrying about. They were all crammed in one of the corners, waiting to see if any more news would come. But there was nothing. Just absolute silence in the cabin. They were all shivering. It made Robyn think if the time were she went to Alaska…
She went ice fishing with her dad and some of her cousins. While fishing the ice broke through and she fell in. Her dad quickly rushed to her and got her out. While she was getting dried, everyone was packing up everything and getting ready to go home. When they got in the snowmobile, the engine wasn’t starting. They didn’t panic but then it started snowing. ¨Can´t we just walk back to the house?¨ asked Robyn. ¨We could try, but it’s about to be snowing really heavy,¨ said her dad. They were all freezing but managed to find somewhere close to stay.
Her memory faded when she realized that she was still at the camp freezing in the corner with her blanket. It was about 2:37 and that’s when they all heard muffles on the intercom. Maggie decided to make a plan where we all just make a run for it and just try to find a restaurant or somewhere to stay. They were all on board with the idea. They all got their shoes on and waited some time before they leave. When it turned 3:00, that’s when they began to look outside and see if anyone was outside. They all started running to the woods to hide. When they were all hiding in a bush, they noticed something red heading toward the camp. Ben and Kyle gasped because they got a closer look at what it was. There were about 10 people holding pitchforks. ¨RUN!¨ Kyle whispered loudly. The ran through the woods, which felt like hours, but finally made it out to the road and stop running until they found someplace to stay. They all ran for about 7 minutes when they saw a bar that was opened 24/7. They all took and couple breathes then they walked inside. The women standing behind the bar asked us what they were all doing here.
¨We were staying at the camp a couple of miles back. Something weird was happening their so we decided to get out of there because it didn’t seem safe,¨ explained Kyle. The women asked them to sit down and she got all of them waters. She asked them only one question. ¨What color was the moon?¨ she asked. They all looked at each other and looked back at the women strangely. She asked again. There was a long pause and then they all kind of said it was reddish. The women rubbed her head and said, ¨Not again¨. They all had confused looks on their faces and wanted to know more. The women told the story about the Roanoke colony that just vanished from plain sight. Nobody knows where they all went and there was no evidence to show where they all might have gone to. ¨ The camp that you were staying at is that colonies land and people say that those people haunt that place but only on blood moons. The only thing left was the word Croatoan carved in one of the trees.¨
The women said that they would be safe here and that she would give them a phone to call their parents. They all decided to just call them in the morning so they wouldn’t wake them up. Ben and Kyle wanted to go back to save or to warn people but they didn’t want Maggie and Robyn to know. They decided to wait until they fall asleep or get distracted by something. It was 4:03 and Maggie and Robyn both were helping the women out with the dishes. That’s when Ben and Kyle left. They left a note so Maggie and Robyn knew where they went. They both started running fast to the camp. When they found the camp they both went back in the woods to retrace their steps. They both then heard something coming towards them so they hid in one of the trees. The footsteps were getting louder and louder until they were found. A person with a pig face and didn’t have a shirt on, told them to follow him but once they got to the front of the camp the pig man pulled out a butcher knife and killed both of them.
Robyn and Maggie went out to the bar tables to catch up with the boys. They didn’t see them. Only the note. The called for the women.¨Why would they do that!¨ exclaimed Maggie. ¨They just wanted to help save the people,¨ said Robyn. ¨Shouldn’t they be back by now?¨ asked Maggie. They all waited for about 15 minutes but nothing happened. The boys never came back. They just assumed that they were gone and they would never see them again.
At about 5:54, they all decided to get in the car and drive past the camp to see if the ghosts were still. They didn’t see anything so they drove through the entrance but stayed in the car. They drove all around the camp for about 1o minutes. Nothing was bad at the camp so they all assumed that it was safe. “I’m going to go to our cabin to go get my phone,” said Maggie. “Okay but be quick,” said Robyn.
The women and Robyn watched Maggie walk away in the Fog. They both waited in the car. They waited for about 5 minutes. They started to see the red light again and were panicking. The women started the car and were getting ready to leave but then they saw Maggie running towards them. Robyn rolled down the window and yelled, “HURRY UP THEIR COMING!”
Maggie was about 7 feet away, running so fast her legs were about to fall off. When they could see her in the fog something came out of nowhere and grabbed her Maggie. All they could hear were the faded screams from her. “WHY WHY WHY!” cried Robyn. “We need to leave,” said the women.
Robyn was crying the whole way back and just wanted everything to end. They finally got back to the bar at around 6:30. Robyn was shaking so the women carried her in and gave her a drank to calm her down. The women were on the phone calling the police while Robyn was sleeping. Later that morning, Robyn’s parents got notified from the police and rushed to North Carolina to pick up Robyn. After a couple of hours, they met up with her at the police station to take her home. On the ride home, her parents tried talking to her but Robyn was still trembling.
When they got home Robyn swung the car door open and jumped right out of the car. She immediately turned on the news. The news report was about all the missing people from the camp. Robyn was about to turn the tv off because she says a picture of Ben, Kyle, and Maggie. The news report said everyone at the camp just disappeared and all their belongings. Robyn was thinking about the story the women told her at the bar about the camp and realized it was right.
The news then showed a picture of a tree. The words carved on it were “Croatoan”. | https://medium.com/@paigemclauchlin23/summer-camp-nightmare-9033a639364d | ['Paige Mclauchlin'] | 2020-12-20 16:01:07.400000+00:00 | ['Creative Writing', 'Fiction', 'Thriller', 'Short Story'] |
Water Wars 2020 | According to Bloomberg, water has joined become one of the commodities traded on Wall Street. A post was made on twitter with the article link. There were responses that are for and against the development.
As a Nigerian, I sat and watched how nationalities of different countries analysed and battled this development. In my country we have (are on) been the on the good and bad side of water (water management). I saw others complaining about the prices they have to pay for running water in their homes but I could not relate because virtually every Nigerian ‘compound’ has a borehole this means that we provide water for ourselves without paying for it directly to the government. This would cause wows from some nationalities especially Europeans, North Americans, and some Asians but the issue here is how clean is the water we are using from our own sunk boreholes? This question has given a rise to a very big sector in country which could be termed ‘water companies’ from large conglomerates to small and medium enterprises profiting from this question.
For instance, I have a borehole in my compound which gives me running water for daily activities but it is not drinkable so I tend to buy sachet water aka pure water as this is what my economic status can afford. Would you say now that these companies are profiting highly from a free and readily available commodity in Nigerian (southern) where there is an abundance of water, shallow water tables?
Ethically, water should be made readily available to all and not be sold. water from certain sources contain certain impurities that could affect the health and several processes. These impurities would have to be removed and all these needs finance (manpower, equipment, etc.).
This brings us to why water is sold.
Yes, I know 70% of the earth is covered with water but how readily available is it? Only 0.5% is readily available for consumption which is fresh water while 2.5% is ice and 97% is salt water.
I believe governments can come to an understanding to make water readily available at an ethically approved price that the common man can afford. | https://medium.com/@esuador/water-wars-2020-73e738826873 | ['Harmony Nwibani'] | 2020-12-15 13:12:37.452000+00:00 | ['Trade', 'Water Management', 'Water', 'Finance', 'Environment'] |
Not so simple code. | We want our code to all be simple, but sometimes it’s not that easy.
44 Pages of Legacy class.
Today we ran a mobbing session looking at some examples of not-so-simple-code. We framed with the Prime Directive, code got that way as a result of people taking the best decisions with the information they had.
We had three examples of complicated code and they all had different levels of crazy.
So complicated we had to kill it….
We started with some code from one of our long-lived web products, SQL Monitor. Interesting fact — SQL Monitor was where the genesis of Knockout.js was created.
In this particular example there was a host of pain that stopped the code being simple. There was the obvious (== vs === or ‘this’) problems that are associated with legacy JavaScript and a few other typical code smells (big methods, lots of local variable capture, inconsistent naming).
The more interesting stuff to me was what made it difficult to change.
We didn’t know how customers used the feature — that meant it you changed it what would you test in the UI?
It was a graveyard of JavaScript libraries — you had to understand an awful lot to do not a lot
In this example, the code was so bad that it was tackled in the thermonuclear way. Deleted and replaced with a cleaner implementation with new features.
Good idea, but…
Our next example was a test that asserted you added new PowerShell cmdlets in a manner consistent with the existing. The goal is laudable — we want consistency! The way in which this was achieved didn’t help achieve that goal.
A lack of documentation meant that test failures didn’t tell you the why. Why is “Should have been of type X” important?
The result was jumping through hoops and editing the code until the test passes without really understanding the why.
Ye Old Faithful
Our final example was a monster. The code was so big that the print out made an audible thud.
The code had a seemingly simple reason for existing. Given a data structure, generate a SQL statement. This should be ideal for writing a unit test for, right?
Well, not so fast.
The underlying data structure is auto-generated and there are no interfaces.
There are ref parameters (C# specific)
It makes SQL by using WriteLine
Commented out code and #region tags all over the place.
The end result was that instead of writing a “proper” test, the new functionality was added and unit-tested in isolation. This is great, but the bigger beast still remains.
Now what?
OK, so we now we’ve got complicated code. What are we going to do about it?
There’s a motivation theme that prevents us doing stuff sometimes.
“bad code discourages tidying” (Simon H) “If you touch the thing on fire you get burnt” (Michelle T)
At Redgate, we’re not typically hugely deadline driven. It’s really unlikely you’re going to have to make that compromise between speed / quality. We want to do things right. However, maybe we’re not creating the conditions to encourage that. We ask how long till X? Maybe that creates the perception that all we care about is performance?
We also realized that there’s a grab bag of tips and tricks for dealing with legacy code. Just in a simple read through of the code we found we shared loads of techniques.
We’re going to try and extend this by introducing a Code Clinic. If you’re staring at some Not-So-Simple code and want the benefit of a fresh pair of eyes, post a message on our Slack channel and a willing participant will pair until we’ve beaten it to simplicity.
I’ll leave you with a quote from Julia about legacy code. | https://medium.com/ingeniouslysimple/not-so-simple-code-c2f5391ca33 | ['Jeff Foster'] | 2017-10-20 15:35:00.431000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Programming'] |
The (in)famous CAP Theorem | In the previous post, we discussed ACID and transactions for relational database. However, ACID is very expensive and infeasible to achieve for distributed data systems due to the challenges we have discussed in this post. As the trends of large scale distributed system arise, people begin to discuss CAP theorem. The CAP theorem, also named Brewer’s theorem after computer scientist Eric Brewer, states that it is impossible for a distributed data store to simultaneously provide more than two out of the following three guarantees, Consistency, Availability and Partition tolerance.
However, the popular CAP theorem is proposed as a rule of thumb without precise definition. As it is well-cited by a lot of blogs or even in database specification documents, there are quite a lot of misleading even misunderstood information in the industry. Dr. Kleppmann even states that the CAP theorem is credited for the explosion of new databases technologies since 2000s, but it should be avoided when we try to understand a distributed system and its characteristics.
CAP or CA?
Although there is a lack of precision of consistency, availability and partition tolerance in the community, I will start with the definition of Wikipedia,
Consistency: Every read receives the most recent write or an error
Availability: Every request receives a (non-error) response, without the guarantee that it contains the most recent write
Partition tolerance: The system continues to operate despite an arbitrary number of messages being dropped (or delayed) by the network between nodes
Although the Wikipedia’s definition of partition tolerance emphasizes on the network partition, it is reasonable to expand it the all fault tolerance since we already knew it is difficult to distinguish remote host’s hardware fault from network issues. As we have discussed in the last post, fault is inevitable when we scale the system, which indicates the necessity of partition tolerance when designing a distributed data system. Therefore, the CAP should be re-stated as a system can only achieve availability or consistency when partitioned or I would like to focus on the tradeoff between availability and consistency (CA) when design a distributed data system.
Despite implementation details of various database, I will try to explain the CA in a simple way. When data nodes can communicate with each other, the system behaviors as there is only one copy of the data, which is replicated and distributed among data nodes. When the system receives a request, each node can response it exactly the same. Additionally, if some nodes are offline and unavailable from external point of view, replications can take the responsibility through fault tolerance design without interruption. However, the situation becomes tricky if there is network partition. Assuming a node lost data synchronization with other nodes, there are essentially two options when it receives a data request. It can either serve the client with local data or refuse the request. The earlier may lead to an inconsistent response due to some stale local data while the latter option makes the system unavailable.
Availability
Availability is the least discussed among the CAP triangle since the system availability is usually well defined and rare misunderstood. Distributed system achieve high availability and fault tolerance through data replication. In a nutshell, each nodes in the system can be replaced by a few other nodes (replication) without serious system downtime. However, there are some caveats when we discuss the availability. The precise requirement of availability in fact guides us toward a proper architecture for given use cases.
Read Availability vs. Write Availability
The read operations scan the data without any modification, which is as idempotent. All replicated data node can answer read request. Therefore, high read availability is usually not concerning for distributed data system design.
However, there are more considerations when process a write request, especially for those are not idempotent. Therefore, people make tradeoffs to achieve some degree of ACID. For example, single leader architecture system, like BigTable, HBase, favors consistency over write availability . There is usually only one node (leader node), which can handle write request and be responsible to distribute data among follower nodes. Consequently, the system is unavailable to write request if leader fails. On the other side of the spectrum, leaderless architecture, such as Cassandra, treats each node equally. Each replication node can serve write request and synchronize data with peers. Therefore, it is possible that peers cannot read an agreement due to concurrent write or synchronization delay.
In both architecture, read availability can be guaranteed with similar replications while it is very different for writing availability.
Availability vs. Scalability
Given the limited processing of a single commodity machine, the availability and scalability is usually very related. If there are more data size (storage scalability) or queries per second (computation scalability), the system will run out of resource and become unavailable. We will have to scale the system either vertical or horizontal. Therefore, a system with crippled availability can seldom scale well. For example, HBase is well criticized for its write operation scalability due to its single leader architecture.
It is important to understand the scale of write operations and read operations individually. For write-intensive system, a leaderless system is usually a wise choice while we should pay more attention to replication to support read-intensive system.
Consistency
Almost all distributed data system tolerate node tolerance through data replication. Every piece of data is duplicated and stored on difference nodes to reduce the impact on individual node failure. Some data nodes may fail to keep in sync with each other. The data replication may be delayed due to a congested network. Some data nodes may be recovering from a system fault and catching up with recent data. There are countless possibilities to cause data discrepancy among data nodes. The consistency is system properties to quantify the discrepancy. In my opinion, we can read different consistency from timely and integral perspective. The timeliness ensures the user always sees the up-to-date data while the integrity guarantees no data loss or corrupted.
Eventual Consistency
Most replicated data systems provide at least eventual consistency, which means that if you stop writing to database, then eventually all read requests will return the same value. In other words, the inconsistency is temporary and data will eventually coverage to the same value. We can see eventual consistency guarantees data integrity. However, it is a very weak consistency level since there is no statement about when the replicas will coverage.
Linearizability
The linearizability is considered as the strongest level of consistency. A linearizable system acts as there is one and only one copy of the data regardless of underlying data replication strategies. Linearizability guarantees both data integrity and timeliness.
From implementation perspective, a linearizable system requires synchronous replication and consensus algorithms. In practice, consensus algorithm is only used for leader election due to its crippled ability to handle high throughput load. Therefore, a linearizable system is usually a single-leader architecture with careful concurrency design.
Multi-leader data system is never linearizable. Some leaderless system claim they obtain “strong consistency” by requiring quorum reads and writes. However, it also requires the reader to perform synchronous read repair at the cost of reduced performance. System like Cassandra use “last write wins” conflict resolution is also not linearizable neither. Considering the limitation above is contradict to the scalability benefits of leaderless architecture, it is safe to claim a leaderless system is not linearizable neither.
Causal Consistency
Causal consistency captures the potential causal relationships between operations, and guarantees that all processes observe causally-related operations in a common order. In other words, all processes in the system agree on the order of the causally-related operations. They may disagree on the order of operations that are causally unrelated. Causal consistency is also a weak consistency but since it matches application’s intuition about time and logical ordering. Additionally due to the cost of linearizability, most distributed data system claims causal consistency to boost performance. Causal consistency can be summarized in four shades:
Read Your Writes : If a process performs a write, the same process later observes the result of its write.
: If a process performs a write, the same process later observes the result of its write. Monotonic Reads : the set of writes observed (read) by a process is guaranteed to be monotonically non-decreasing.
: the set of writes observed (read) by a process is guaranteed to be monotonically non-decreasing. Writes Follow Reads : if some process performs a read followed by a write, and another process observes the result of the write, then it can also observe the read (unless it has been overwritten).
: if some process performs a read followed by a write, and another process observes the result of the write, then it can also observe the read (unless it has been overwritten). Monotonic Writes: If some process performs a write, followed some time later by another write, other processes will observe them in the same order.
It seems that the causal consistency preserves causality, which is not promised by eventual consistency. However, there is nothing new from timeliness or integrity. In fact, the difference between causal consistency and eventual consistency is about concurrency or isolation.
What is Next
In this blog, we dive into the details of CAP theorem and clarified some misunderstanding about distributed system properties. In the last section, we briefly discussed the causal consistency needs proper concurrency or isolation design, which is an important properties of transactions. In the next blog, we will expand the scope of transaction and discuss distributed transactions, including the use cases and some implementation details.
Reference
Brewer’s conjecture and the feasibility of consistent, available, partition-tolerant web services
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_consistency | https://medium.com/@humbo/the-in-famous-cap-theorem-951f523f0c80 | [] | 2020-11-18 04:37:49.339000+00:00 | ['Distributed Systems', 'Big Data', 'System Design', 'Database'] |
Use These Free Tools To Generate New Writing Ideas | Use These Free Tools To Generate New Writing Ideas
Some free tools and one freemium OpenAI headline generator.
Writing is tough enough. Sometimes it seems like professional writers can think of attention grabbing topics and headlines on the spot.
For many of us, it’s not that simple.
So, for everyone who is not gifted with unlimited writing ideas, there’s tools.
Copy.AI (OpenAI)
CopyAI will help you automate the tedious, and oftentimes frustrating, aspects of headline (& ad) creation. They help you brainstorm high-quality, audience-based copy in real time.
Hubspot’s Blog Idea Generator
Portent’s Title Maker
Impact’s BlogAbout Title Generator
Linkbait Generator | https://medium.com/roi-overload/use-this-free-tool-to-generate-new-writing-ideas-9a3a3bd27013 | ['Scott D. Clary'] | 2020-11-10 03:14:12.334000+00:00 | ['Writing Ideas', 'Writing', 'Blogging', 'Writer', 'Content'] |
Journalism in the Dark Ages: The Real Problems Happening in Newsrooms across the United States | Journalists are in a crisis. Corporations are making decisions over their heads for the sake of money. Your journalists are stretching a dime and some are barely living above the poverty line, if that.
Nexstar CEO Peter Sook isn’t a leader who really cares about his employees. These CEOS are looking for ways to maximize their pockets, to give to the higher ups, and to slash jobs and minimize what’s happening in the stations. They’re big on trickle down economics — they’re pro Reagan. Producers are left trying to make newscasts out of rocks and sticks. Reporters and MMJs are often sent to places without photographers reducing the quality of their videos and also risking their safety. Crazy people are often attracted to journalists and want to make a scene — and sometimes they get violent or do something bold. Reporters often have to beg managers not to send them to certain places because they feel unsafe. Don’t expect PTSD counseling.
I literally had a news director brag about how safe things were during a large-scale protest in our city. He wrote in an email to staff that said the coverage was great and even better no one got hurt. Except you know, someone got shot with a rubber bullet in his leg and others got tear gas in their eyes — something that’s considered a war crime. I hope to fire those that got hurt sued the company. There is so much toxic shit thrown at journalists from their own managers. This same manager mansplained pregnancy to me because his wife had 4 children.
There is so much push to make things local that sometimes people don’t know what really matters. I got yelled at for NOT putting in a story about pool openings during the pandemic. That was information that someone who actually cares about that could go and find online. Just because it’s local doesn’t mean it matters.
Priorities get scrambled. Any newscasts this year that didn’t have the pandemic mentioned in some way were clearly missing something major. The pandemic is so embedded in the zeitgeist that it’s touching everything — but some managers think we should stop talking about the pandemic because it’s scaring stock holders. (I mean, this was the bad manager I had.)
I was actually told to stop reporting on the virus numbers. Stop talking about the sickness, even though it’s why we’ve all changed our lives. It’s why some people can’t see their parents in nursing homes, it’s why millions don’t have a job, and it’s why 300,000 Americans will likely die within the next couple of months.
Several years before the pandemic, I interviewed for a station in Louisville, Kentucky. One of the strangest things that came up during my interview was that they always make sure not to offend their base. It’s strongly suggested to keep news positive when discussing the GOP. This manager didn’t want to offend people and have them stop watching news because the Republicans were disparaged. That’s not fair, that’s not balanced, and ultimately when you cater to people like that then you stop telling them important things. You’ve effectively covered up reality.
Not covering negative aspects of political parties is essentially putting your fingers in your ears and making nonsense noises to act like you’re washing yourself clean of it. You have to report on things that make people uncomfortable and upset them. Journalism isn’t about making friends.
You can’t have stations that marry political parties. No matter whether you live in a blue or red state; it is important to give the facts, to analyze what is happening, and to cover things from all sides — not just both sides, all sides. Two sources in any news story isn’t enough — that’s the bare minimum. The reason sources are slim in your news is because it’s cheaper that way and everything in journalism is as cheap as possible. Cheapness reigns supreme in your local news.
People in news stations have bachelor’s and master’s degrees, but many make less than they would flipping burgers. My first job was $11 an hour. A photog I dated made $8.50. That was in 2016.
You’re pumping out stories about abducted children, quadruple homicides, and scandals in the governor’s mansion. But that doesn’t mean you get paid well. Just because what you do is important doesn’t mean you can afford a house. It doesn’t mean you have a normal schedule. The people behind the scenes could be working at any hour of the day. You might clock in at midnight one day, the next 2:00pm, and maybe 5:00am another day. There are not enough people on staff to fill in for vacations, sickness, and army leave. One person could have to produce for any shift at any point. A pregnant anchor I knew had split shifts on the weekends. She would come in at 3:00am to do the morning news, go home for a nap, and then come back around 4:00pm to do the news for the night all the way to 11:00pm. If there were sports that night the last newscast could get pushed all the way to 1:00am.
You’ll develop unhealthy sleep routines, an extreme bruxism and dental bills, and an anxiety that makes your heart pound at 160 beats a minute at resting. This isn’t healthy adrenaline; it’s constant flight or fight in the newsroom because the conditions for the workers (even for frivolous new stories) are like constantly working with landmines.
The infrastructure for journalism is electric thin. It’s collapsing and instead of fighting for it, people are moving to other industries where they can get better pay, where they have better benefits, where they have more security, and they have a schedule that doesn’t turn them into a ghastly vampire. | https://medium.com/@maggiehawkins2468/journalism-in-the-dark-ages-the-real-problems-happening-in-newsrooms-across-the-united-states-e2f3948effe0 | ['Maggie Hawkins'] | 2020-12-08 20:42:47.529000+00:00 | ['Journalism', 'Wealth Inequality', 'Media Criticism', 'Capitalism', 'Local News'] |
Exoplanets, Where Do We Fit In? | Exoplanets, Where Do We Fit In?
Computational Thinking With a Dash of Wolfram Language
Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash
It has only been about 30 years since the first planet outside our own solar system, an exoplanet, was confirmed. The chronology of exoplanet discovery is quite complex due to the fact that earlier observations, one as early as 1917, were not initially recognized as evidence of an exoplanet.
After a period of Earth-based and Hubble telescope discoveries, a space telescope, named Kepler, dedicated to the task of finding exoplanets was launched in 2009. Pointed permanently to just a tiny part of the night sky, it patiently recorded light coming from over 500,000 stars for several years.
Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash
During its roughly 10 year mission, it detected over 2,600 new exoplanets. That, together with other discoveries, brings the total of known exoplanets to a little over 4,000. And many of these exoplanets have estimates for their orbital period, their mass, their radius, and so on. In this post, I am focussing on their masses and radii and comparing them to the planets in our solar system.
Obtaining Exoplanet Data
In the Wolfram Language, these exoplanets are directly accessible from the programmatic interface to Wolfram Knowledgebase. In the notebook interface, you can access any entity, not just exoplanets, with a nifty user interface:
(image by author)
The final result above can also be represented in a plain-text code form. They are exactly the same thing:
EntityClass["Exoplanet", All]
We can obtain the masses and radii for each planet with a simple query:
data = ExoplanetData[
EntityClass["Exoplanet", All], {
EntityProperty["Exoplanet", "Mass", {"Uncertainty" -> "Around"}],
EntityProperty["Exoplanet", "Radius", {"Uncertainty" -> "Around"}]
}, "EntityAssociation"]
Many exoplanets do not have an estimate for their mass and/or radius, and the ones that do often have significant uncertainties attached to them. A random sample of ten rows of the data shows what the typical situation looks like:
(image by author)
After filtering out the cases with either missing mass or radius, we get a nice clean dataset (another random sample of ten rows is shown):
(image by author)
Plotting the Data
It is now quite easy to plot the mass versus the radius for each exoplanet. The extra thin vertical and horizontal lines indicate the uncertainty for each exoplanet:
(image by author)
It is not unsurprising to see a large number of bigger exoplanets. Bigger planets are easier to spot and so more of them have been detected.
To compare these exoplanets with the planets in our solar system, we need to get them, and their masses and radii, first:
EntityValue[
EntityClass["Planet", All],
{"Mass", "Radius"},
"EntityAssociation"
]
Using the additional data, we can now repeat the same plot but with the solar system planets included:
(image by author)
This is quite interesting. It shows that there are quite a few exoplanets that are even bigger than Jupiter. There is an upper limit of course because at some size a very large planet will become a very small star.
On the other end of the exoplanet spectrum, it is clear we have not found many very small planets. Even Mars sits outside the main cluster of detected exoplanets. Hopefully one day we will find lots of those too! | https://towardsdatascience.com/exoplanets-where-do-we-fit-in-8f21b06d33fe | ['Arnoud Buzing'] | 2020-09-15 19:21:29.744000+00:00 | ['Computational Thinking', 'Astronomy', 'Exoplanets', 'Data Science', 'Wolfram'] |
Unboxing the PS5: contents of the package, size, controller | The PS5 is less than two weeks away from launch and yours truly was among the few journalists selected to test it prior to its release mid-November. There are “embargo milestones” attached to that privilege, though, so specific things only can be published about Sony’s system for now. A quick unboxing story with a few photographs will have to do until first impressions regarding the PS5 are allowed, then impressions about the new DualSense controller leading to a full, comprehensive review of the new PlayStation a few days later. So, on with the snaps!
The PS5 package is minimal in design and keen on underlining its support to advanced display technologies (Image credit: Road to NextGen 2020)
The PS5 packaging is rather large because, well, the system itself is big. The 8K, 4K/120 and HDR logos feature prominently alongside the system’s main photo — at the bottom, one can also find the DTS HD Audio and Dolby Audio logos but not the Dolby Vision logo. Hhhhmmmm…
After all the protective compartments of the packaging are removed this is what you’ll be left with, which is perfectly acceptable (Image credit: Road to NextGen 2020)
Here’s what’s included in the packaging: the PS5 itself, a power supply cable (the PSU is thankfully incorporated in the system’s case), the DualSense controller, a USB-A to USB-C cable (for charging the controller), an HDMI 2.1 cable (supporting 8K and 4K/120), the multi-functional base and a couple of brief manuals.
So the rumors were true and the videos were not kidding: the PS5 really is an imposing device despite its elegant design. (Image credit: Road to NextGen 2020)
This is the PS5 (without its base attached) compared to a PS4 Pro. Yes, it is considerably bigger as well as heavier. The whole back of the former is used to exhaust hot air from the inside, so it’s a given that placing it close to a wall would not be a good idea.
The new DualSense controller is also bigger in size but that seems to be a good thing ergonomically speaking (Image credit: Road to NextGen 2020)
The DualSense is also bigger than a DualShock4 and somewhat heavier but even before using it, one can tell that it’s also a better controller overall. Its grip is firmer, hands wrap around it in a more ergonomic way and gamers with big hands will like it way more than the DS4 because of the increased size. It’s very well-built and the plastics used feel more premium than the ones used in past DualShocks. The Road to NextGen 2020 will publish far more detailed impressions of the DualSense soon.
The PS5 does not look that big in this photo until one realizes that this is a 65-inch TV it’s standing in front of (Image credit: Road to NextGen 2020)
In its vertical orientation the PS5 does indeed look cool, especially if the room it’s placed in is arranged in a way that complements its size and overall design. The ideal place for it would probably be in a big enough living room standing alongside a huge TV. The color of the “wings” of its case is not as white as Sony’s press photos or these photos imply. They sport more of a matte cream-colored surface that does not reflect natural light. Since they are detachable and can already be replaced with different ones, the whole “modern or not in white” debate back in June regarding the PS5’s design looks kind of pointless now, no?
This is how most of us will use Sony’s new home entertainment system and… yeap. Still imposing. (Image credit: Road to NextGen 2020)
Standing upright the PS5 is all modern and stylish, sure, but most of us will probably be using it in the traditional horizontal orientation. That is less impressive than the vertical one but it’s no less futuristic thanks, again, to the shape and bold lines of those detachable “wings”. The rest of the case, the black part, is quite shiny and contrasts well with the matte “wings”, but one suspects that dust will show on its surface quickly enough (another piece of equipment in need of frequent dusting then). It’s hard to imagine that in matte black, though, as it’s the shiny surface that helps the PS5 project that high-tech image to begin with.
More on the PlayStation5 will appear in Road to NextGen 2020 stories over the next two weeks. The rather comprehensive PS5 FAQ published there — containing answers to all the important questions anyone could have regarding Sony’s system — will also be regularly updated as more details about it are allowed by the embargo dates set. Stay tuned! | https://medium.com/road-to-nextgen-2020/ps5-unboxing-contents-of-the-package-size-controller-171e1b17c85 | ['Kostas Farkonas'] | 2020-11-04 07:25:31.313000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Playstation 5', 'Videogames', 'PlayStation', 'Sony'] |
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Why Xiaomi’s new logo design is not just a simple change of corners. | Why Xiaomi’s new logo design is not just a simple change of corners.
It might look like it’s just a simple change of corners but after you read this article you will find out it’s really not at all simple! Ramzi Salem Apr 2·5 min read
A photo was taken during Xiaomi conference on 29 March 2021
Xiaomi in its last conference on 29 March 2021, announced a change in their logo, the 20 minutes presentation explaining a (simple) change according to the description of the blogs and pages interested in technology, and a wave of ridicule began about the change that happened in the logo, so away from the superficial interpretation through which the pages criticize. I will try here to explain from my point of view how this tiny change is going to impact the brand and everything related to it.
Purpose of the logo change:
Before going deeper, let me show you as many sentences of the company’s words and the words of the designer (Kenya Hara) — who worked on this project — what I see that if we understand it well, we will know the purpose of this (simple) change:
“Compared to the right-angled shape, the circle is a lighter and graceful shape, which fully reflects Xiaomi’s flexibility and desire to move forward.”
— Xiaomi “The designer used the mathematical equation of the shape (super oval) for the design, and he was forced to adjust the variables to reach the best dynamic balance on the visual level between the circle and the square.”
— Xiaomi “The design is fundamentally a reflection of (vitality and activity)”
— Kenya Hara “This is not only a change in shape from square to round, but rather a change in the spirit and mentality of the brand.”
— Xiaomi
Visual Identity in general:
So from the above Xiaomi explained the change, I won’t talk about the technical side of Xiaomi as an electronics company, but I will explain from the brand identity perspective, then we will see the words of the company From this angle:
Visual identity is part of the brand identity, the logo is the pivotal part of the visual identity, and the logo is a visual design that has different shapes and methods, but the common among them is that they all reflect the largest philosophy or largest message possible in the least space and the fewest elements, colors, and movements.
The effect of this (simple) change:
So any A (simple) change in the logo, will have an impact on all the visual identity from the first shape of the packaging in which the product is located to the shape of the chair that you will sit on when you enter a branch of this company, even some of the values and impressions that the brand wants to cultivate in The public mind, so this will affect the brand identity as a whole.
This would explain to you how a simple change, such as increasing the curvature of the edges of the square, will change the shape of every need for the company’s style, which may simulate the shape of the design of the new phones that Xiaomi will manufacture, and it could be also because the company wants to follow the latest design trends to have rounded corners, not sharp corners, that gives you a feeling of comfortability but let’s take a look on the reasons behind Xiaomi’s decision of this change:
Xiaomi’s philosophy:
In the research of the fields of visual arts, you talk about “the psychological impact of shapes” and “the philosophy of shapes.” Without going into many details, in short, we will now say:
Circular shapes have a softness and affection that conveys a positive feeling that has a sense of welcome more than shapes that have explicit angles such as triangles and squares, circles are consistent and solid, without fractures, which proves a feeling of trust and belonging, and there is some flexibility that confirms the concepts of continuity, development and activity.
— Xiaomi
So this explains why the company says at the conference that this change includes a change in the spirit of the company, its plans, and its identity, not just its visual shape, and they explain why this is important and influential.
Squircle?
The shape of the new logo is called Squircle, and it is between the square and the circle. The amount of arcs that form the shape is calculated by the equation of any geometric shape.
It could be too self-evident, but you can clearly see how the designer is interested in the details, it’s not a work that has been done randomly, and considering the designer and his words as part of the company’s identity, I think this way will help confirm the idea that Xiaomi does not take any step arbitrarily and without reason, and measure that accordingly lots of promotional messages including accuracy, craftsmanship, high quality and so on.
Why Squircle?
The human eye is comfortable with geometric shapes when they are more imitations of nature, because this what you are used to seeing without paying attention to, and nature, is the best source from which to draw inspiration from proportions, dimensions, and colors because it is made by God, so two shapes can have the same name but with a slight difference In terms of the curvature or angle of the rotation you feel more comfortable, and there is a lot of theories, the most famous of them being the golden ratio.
This makes their choice of this proposal a logical definition — from among the many proposals that might seem the same for you — the pictures below show the different proposals. | https://medium.com/@ramzisalem/why-xiaomis-new-logo-design-is-not-a-simple-change-68bb1bf3d280 | ['Ramzi Salem'] | 2021-04-06 14:15:36.922000+00:00 | ['Xiaomi', 'UX', 'Web Design', 'Logo Design', 'UI'] |
“The perfect moment will never come” with Irina Georgieva — Fem Founder™ | Irina Georgieva, co-founder of Enterprise League , a business platform for companies.
With 2 business degrees up her sleeve, Irina co-founded Enterprise League with the purpose of helping small businesses to directly collaborate with each other, eliminating the middleman. Irina is actively involved in setting the direction of the company and works tirelessly to ambitiously scale the business platform to every country around the world.
Can you tell our readers about your background?
I was born in Macedonia during the transition from Communist Yugoslavia. I attended business school both in Milan, Italy, and Buckingham, the UK at the University of Buckingham. Upon completing my bachelor’s business studies with first-class honours, I continued to obtain a masters degree in Service Management with a distinction.
Upon graduating I worked for several small companies in Marketing and got to experience the main struggles small businesses face on a daily basis. This experience turned out to be of key importance for starting Enterprise League.
What inspired you to start your business?
After the Communist regime collapsed, criminal privatisation of many state-owned companies took place leading to thousands of job losses. During these tough times, my father took the risk to start his own company. He adopted the latest technological innovations and started the first TV broadband company in the country.
Throughout the past 25 years, I have been a prime witness to the struggles he was facing by running a private business. I grew up barely seeing my father, as he was always away on business trips and working late hours. This truly showed the struggle and dedication it takes to start and run your own business. Moreover, it exposed the cruel reality that the opportunities are privileged to a few people with key connections.
During my time working for several small businesses, I once again experienced the challenges that small business owners face every day. That if you lack a business savvy and connected personal network, your access to valuable business partners, suppliers, and other business collaborators is extremely limited.
This experience along with the entrepreneurial environment that I grew up in, served as a major inspiration for me to want to start my own business and help small companies collaborate more efficiently.
Where is your business based?
Enterprise League is based in London. My co-founder and I work from here, whilst the rest of our team is remotely based in several European countries.
How did you start your business? What were the first steps you took?
When we identified the problem that we wanted to solve, we started conducting a thorough analysis of the present solutions and how well they meet the needs of small businesses.
Once we developed a clear vision of how we can help small businesses collaborate with each other quickly and easily, without depending on the middleman, we embarked on the adventure of creating the product.
During our product development stage, we worked closely with several businesses, who we identified could benefit from Enterprise League. These early adopters gave us input on the functionalities and had the chance to test the platform first hand whilst in beta.
Thanks to such collaboration with our customers, we were able to specifically target their pain points with our solutions, thus avoiding any guesswork.
Nowadays we continue to work in partnership with several companies that act as a representation of our target market and have also turned into marketing affiliates for Enterprise League.
What has been the most effective way of raising awareness for your business?
So far we have seen the highest rate of conversions through our word of mouth efforts. We invest a lot of our resources into our customer experience and go above and beyond to meet their needs and make sure they get a positive experience with Enterprise League.
This approach has brought us a lot of new members that come from referrals and recommendations. We firmly believe that by focusing on the customer experience we will achieve exponential growth in users and maintain the highest level of customer satisfaction.
Another great way we are raising awareness about our business platform is through our business blog. The blog is focused on providing knowledgeable and value-filled business content, primarily of interest to business owners and small companies. In order to ensure our content is of the best quality and provides actionable steps to our readers we regularly work with industry experts to create reliable and trustworthy content based on industry experience and facts.
The blog has proved to be an excellent medium to generate new organic traffic that is not reached through our other marketing channels.
What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?
When we just started Enterprise League we faced the challenge to assemble a great team. The team that is leading the company is one of the most important key aspects that contribute to its success. In the first several months we had hirings and firings which taught us that quality people are not easy to find and it requires time to truthfully identify them.
Another challenge we faced was working with an external company. This was in the early stages when the platform was being built and we had to collaborate with an external company to tackle some items that our internal team wasn’t yet capable of doing.
Here we decided to work with a company from Poland which we didn’t have any experience with prior to this. So in order to minimise the uncertainty and risk of failing in this chapter, I did extensive research about the options we had and chose a company that offered a workshop service. This meant we can visit their headquarters to speak more about our needs in person, which made sure they understood our platform in depth and ensured their delivery to be of the expected standard. This proved to be the right approach for the situation and our collaboration was successfully executed.
How do you stay focused?
I believe there are two ways one can stay focused, by eliminating the distractions or by beating up the distractions with more important reasons why you should work hard.
I remind myself every day of our mission and the goal we are striving to achieve. I remind myself of the impact and importance our platform will have when millions of companies start using it. This fuels me to keep pushing forward and stay focused.
How do you differentiate your business from the competition?
We are extremely focused on the client/user experience. We want to build a product that will be easy to use and will deliver them with the results they require. Therefore we put the client at the center of everything we do. Our users participate in every decision we make regarding new features, updates, releases, etc. Furthermore, we work with them on a personal level to help them better navigate through the platform and easily learn how to use its functionalities to their advantage.
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?
Prior to the pandemic, we were actively collaborating with business events, to reach our target business audience. This was the prime marketing solution for a business platform such as ours. Now we work with online events, which are still effective but lack in comparison to the conversions we used to get through physical events. Additionally, besides collaborating with events we also participate in many business related events. Here we have various members of our team that join to spread awareness about Enterprise League and its benefits to companies.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
Before deciding to start Enterprise League, I spent a few months contemplating whether I am ready to do it or not. I spent time reading books, researching, doing all sorts of things to try to get as ready as possible. But what I later found out was that the perfect moment will never come. You should just take action and work on making your business idea come true. The best advice I can give is to do your best market research, evaluate your opportunities, and take action.
Additionally focus on building good habits and skills for continuous self-improvement. Strong habits will help you develop processes that work for you, stay focused, and reach your goals. Stay analytical of yourself and keep identifying ways you can improve and perform better.
What’s your favorite app, blog, and book? Why?
Slack is arguably my favorite app. It helps me stay connected with my team wherever I am and it’s super-efficient and easy to use with all their integrations.
I love reading the Entrepreneurs by Forbes, it’s their blog dedicated to entrepreneurs and small business. I regularly find inspiring stories of entrepreneurs doing marvelous things for humanity and the environment, as well as trendy news stories.
My favourite book is Principles by Ray Dalio, I love using it as a guide or a sort of workbook to help me navigate through life and business. It contains extremely valuable and actionable advice that can help anyone better achieve their goals.
What’s your favorite business tool or resource? Why?
The project management tool Asana which we use on a daily basis is my favourite way to organise our projects and tasks. It helps me maintain control and overview of all our operations as well as it aids our team to stay efficient.
Who is your business role model? Why?
I would have to say Steve Jobs. He showed to be an extremely innovative leader and a charismatic pioneer. I admire his charisma and passion to bring his vision to reality and create the largest telecommunication company in the world. His achievements are an inspiration and I believe that many entrepreneurs aspire to achieve even a quarter of what Steve Jobs managed to achieve.
How do you balance work and life?
I have to admit it is often difficult to put a line between life and work, especially since my mind is constantly thinking about what’s next for Enterprise League. I do try to limit my working hours to a certain extent and regularly practice yoga and tennis. Another way I am bringing balance is through friends and family. I have allocated my evenings to meet up with friends with the goal of avoiding work talk. Maintaining such a balance and having hours of the day where you disconnect from your business really gives me a fresh perspective the next day. This helps me stay fresh and productive.
What’s your favorite way to decompress?
Yoga is the best for me. My work is very desk oriented and getting to stretch for 30–60min gives me the refreshment I need to finish the day productively. It is great for both my mental and physical health.
What do you have planned for the next six months?
For the next six months, I expect to see Enterprise League play a significant part in helping businesses out of the crisis caused by the pandemic. Many companies will turn to the platform in search of business deals and collaborations to fill out the gaps left by their clients and business partners.
To better address this need, we are working hard to quickly scale the platform to more countries besides the UK and USA where we have a solid presence. The aim is to create the world’s go-to place where business happens.
How can our readers connect with you?
They can find me on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/irina-georgieva-b994815b/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/irina.geor
or email me: [email protected] | https://medium.com/fem-founder/the-perfect-moment-will-never-come-with-irina-georgieva-fem-founder-172a0a5310d9 | ['Kristin Marquet'] | 2020-12-22 16:59:12.150000+00:00 | ['Founders', 'Founder Stories', 'Founder Advice'] |
The Trump Brand // An Acting Career in Movie Types // Optimising Video Ads for Digital // The Value of Books // Around the Web Ads | Ben, CEO
There is little room for bullshit in numbers like these. In today’s connected world, what you say you do what and you actually do are only becoming easier to analyse.
Mirona, Marketing Lead
A little number crunching shows us where Emily Blunt has been and where she should go next to keep growing her career.
Stephen, Innovation Director
Converting video made for TV to digital is trickier than it sounds. YouTube’s recent test showcases just some ways that video can be optimised for greater digital consumption.
Franco, Digital Designer
“Today, the sophisticated consumer of digital text competes for cultural affirmation with the reader of physical books, but which performance of reading ought to be valued most?”
Johnny, Lead Developer
If you’re like me, you’ve been disgusted, mildly amused or both by those links at the bottom of web articles, claiming to be from “around the web”. If you’re like me, you had no idea how much revenue they make the publishers who host them, nor how shady some of those ads were. | https://medium.com/gruvi-weekly-digest/the-trump-brand-an-acting-career-in-movie-types-optimising-video-ads-for-digital-the-value-70e528d0d05b | ['Ben Johnson'] | 2016-11-02 15:40:41.097000+00:00 | ['Movies', 'Internet', 'Advertising', 'Books', 'Donald Trump'] |
Node.js modül tasarlama ve Express.router | You don't need Game of Thrones, or House of Cards, when you have Turkish politics. | https://medium.com/@alitalipsever/node-js-mod%C3%BCl-tasarlama-ve-express-router-a53d309a4126 | ['Alitalip Sever'] | 2020-12-23 00:27:31.983000+00:00 | ['Web', 'JavaScript', 'Internet', 'Nodejs', 'Expressjs'] |
Shane Koyczan: “The Sum Of It Squared” | To discover the thing you’re brilliant at
you first have to endure discovering all of the things you’re average at
in discovering this
you will discover something about yourself
not all of it will be good
but some of it will be wonderful
I can promise no more than some of it
because there will be a contrast
some of it will be difficult
you will not be prepared for some of it
there will be lessons
both sharp and unforgiving
letter grades
will become the promises of those
upon whom you cannot rely
meaningless
you will not receive an F
at falling in love
though you yet may fail
at loving the one you fall for
you will not receive an A+ at doubting yourself
though you will doubt yourself greatly
the tests you will come to face
will pit you against needles of terrible consequence
the night sky will not blaze with the light of gold stars for your achievements
you will be awarded nothing for your survival
pass fail will depend on how you view the world
if money is everything to you
but you have only a little
you may come to regard your life as a failure
but wealth comes in different forms
the form it comes in for you
will depend on what you value
if you prize knowledge
but have only a library card
you will be rich in a different way
your treasures will be dug
from pages of thought
chapters of imagination
wisdom
illumination
will open to you like a friend
curiosity will become a trail
you follow deeper into yourself
and the world
your mind is an open hand
ready to grasp whatever proficiency you reach for
you are free to pursue whatever knowledge you wish
if an answer exists
it will be yours to find
important to note
there will not always be answers
there will be times when confusion falls all around you
descending in slow motion like shattered glass
raining wounds into your confidence
you may at times
feel abandoned by your own instincts
the needle of your moral compass
spinning directionless
as the polarities of joy and despair
change their minds about beliefs once held firm
some of your questions
will move you beyond the dimensions
of true or false
true
you will have multiple choices
false
every choice you make will lead to the doorstep
of the outcome you desire
there will not be a teacher’s copy
of the book of life
no secret chapter at the back
indexing solutions to the problems you face
yes
there will be rewards
unexpected and dazzling
in the times most troubling to you
laughter will become a fortune
you pull from your own shadow
like candlelight from a womb of dark anguish
friendship
will become a jewel
sparkling against the intolerable might of isolation
a shining reminder
that you need never build walls
to keep trust at bay
some of it will be brilliant
some of it will spill from street lamps at night
as if weeping an incandescence
some of it will pool at your feet into a reservoir of valour meant to rescue you from
the inevitable eclipses of regret
there will be regret
you will hurt others
wether by accident or act of will
your simply being
will cause pain
you will not be able to mend all of the scars you birth
you may not care
but be cognizant
that while the present may never say it to your face
history will not shy to say it behind your back
you are
in the end
accountable for what you create
in composing fear
you will sculpt hate
in forging inspiration
you will author hope
each choice will present you with consequence or reward
from this point on
the most important questions you will be asked
are the questions you ask yourself
your education
begins with deciding what you wish to discover
in discovering this
you will discover something about yourself
not all of it will be good
there will be days of empty
that march through you like soldiers of diffidence
cheering on the surrender of your gallantry
the glory of this pain will exist in the fact that it is temporary
that whatever sorrow is aching to receive you
I promise you no more than some of it
some of it too
will be wonderful. | https://medium.com/poem-of-the-day/shane-koyczan-the-sum-of-it-squared-df46c78c3b5b | ['Tania Sheko'] | 2018-06-27 02:55:45.568000+00:00 | ['Advice', 'Slam Poetry', 'Living', 'Education', 'Shane Koyczan'] |
Fishing|Newbies Guide. | Man Fishing.
On the off chance that you are new to the game of fishing, you need to know a portion of the essential standards of fishing. Like different types of chasing, fishing includes both your current circumstance and everyone around you. Be aware of both. You can dependably appreciate this cherished side interest severally. Fishing is an antiquated practice. It goes back almost 10,000 years.
Various different procedures and conventions have been utilized during the fishing’s movement. Current mechanical improvements have changed the manner in which individuals fish, yet a considerable lot of similar standards, guidelines, and accepted practices including fishing remain. Continuously practice great stewardship of our streams when you are fishing. Recall that these streams were around a large number of years before you and will stay long after we are no more. You can settle on a cognizant choice to leave the zones in which individuals fish in preferable condition over when you discovered it. Deal with our lakes, streams, and different streams so others will appreciate these regions for quite a long time to come.
Rehearsing certain practices will guarantee that you are taking acceptable consideration of the spots where individuals fish. Never litter when you are fishing. Continually bring a garbage sack or other container to use for the assortment of your refuse. You can undoubtedly store it in a close-by rubbish container. Dump your decline inappropriately allocated unloading stations as opposed to throwing it in the water. You don’t have to invest a lot of energy sorting out the numerous manners by which this damages the climate. As you fish, consistently utilize the right kind of trap and fishing gear. Certain regions consider certain snare and stuff. You will likewise experience limits on the number, size, and sort of fish that you can keep. Become acquainted with what these cutoff points are and focus on them. Try not to stand by until you are at your fishing spot to look for what is permitted and what isn’t. Check with your objective before you head out on your fishing outing to perceive what the neighborhood guidelines permit. On the off chance that you plan on utilizing a boat while fishing, explore to perceive what sorts of watercraft are permitted where you will fish.
Each fishing area is unique, so give uncommon consideration to neighborhood methods and alerts. This likewise applies when you choose to clean your boat after you leave the water. You would prefer not to spread non-local species to another waterway. At long last, never fish where it isn’t allowed. There is consistently a motivation behind why it is unlawful. A few reasons incorporate the insurance of certain untamed life, the best possible consideration of vegetation, and the wellbeing of you and other people who need to fish. You ought to likewise follow various preventative practices to guarantee your security.
Likewise, with all types of chasing, wellbeing is first. On the off chance that you will utilize a boat while you fish, consistently wear your life coat. Ensure that your travelers wear their life coats, too. Be cautious when bedeviling and eliminating snares. Ensure that you never fish on unapproved streams. Follow the posted speed cutoff points and wake alerts that go with the utilization of a boat. Carry with you all applicable security things, for example, water, electric lamps, maps, and a mobile phone. Fishing keeps on being a most loved distraction. 2001 saw almost 16% of the U.S. populace beyond 16 years old 16 days fishing. You appreciate the game of fishing, so adhere to the standards that take into consideration the continuation of fishing. Be dependable and gracious of others and your current circumstance. Set aside an effort to find how you can be both a superior and more secure fisherman. | https://medium.com/@juanwriter/fishing-newbies-guide-f523deee7c0b | ['Juan M'] | 2020-12-20 00:15:39.082000+00:00 | ['Fishing And Travel', 'Water', 'Lake', 'Lake District', 'Fishing'] |
GPU Accelerated High-Performance Machine Learning Pipeline | GPU Accelerated High-Performance Machine Learning Pipeline
In this blog, we detail how Adobe’s AI/ML services team is currently working with NVIDIA to build a GPU-based high-performance machine learning pipeline.
Even brands with the most loyal customers have to ensure that their marketing messages are effective and engaging. It is becoming a greater imperative for brands to improve user engagement and manage fatigue with more channels than ever before in order to lead in Customer Experience Management (CXM).
Adobe’s AI/ML services are a suite of AI-as-a-Service offerings designed specifically for marketers to power better customer experiences — all without data science expertise. It includes a high-performance data processing pipeline and state-of-the-art machine learning models. Adobe’s AI/ML services suite includes:
Attribution AI: Understand the incremental impact of every customer interaction
Understand the incremental impact of every customer interaction Customer AI: Deliver insights about each individual customer
Deliver insights about each individual customer Journey AI: Optimize design and delivery of customer journeys
Optimize design and delivery of customer journeys Content AI capabilities : Interpretation and discovery of the best performing content
: Interpretation and discovery of the best performing content Leads AI: Identify the most qualified leads for B2B
In the following, we will use Journey AI as an example. Journey AI helps brands optimize content across email, SMS, push notifications, and more. It helps optimize customers’ experience, maintain customers’ brand awareness, and ensure that customers are not overwhelmed, by providing predictive insights in areas like optimal send times, content types, and channel frequency.
Challenges in the Machine Learning Pipeline
Architecturally, Journey AI consists of complicated data pipelines including ETL jobs, machine learning model training, and prediction jobs. The pipelines include ETL jobs, machine learning model training, and prediction jobs. The ETL jobs usually involve a large volume of data and cost considerable time and money. Machine learning model training and prediction job is another important task in the pipeline. It uses the processed data from ETL jobs to train models. This step involves heavy calculation and usually takes a long time.
Since the Journey AI machine learning pipeline takes a long time to run, its costs can be significant for our customers. We are working with NVIDIA to address this challenge.
NVIDIA GPU-Accelerated High-Performance Machine Learning Pipeline
In order to reduce the long run time and high cost, Adobe’s AI/ML services team is currently working with NVIDIA to build a GPU-based high-performance machine learning pipeline. This pipeline uses GPU compute alone, executing the same jobs that were run via CPU but with significantly faster speed and lower total cost.
A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a processor that is specifically designed to handle intensive graphics rendering tasks. It has been widely used for high-quality gaming, 3D modeling software, video editing software. With the development of the NVIDIA CUDA platform, GPUs can process data science workflows at an extremely fast speed, including building machine learning models, such as neural networks and XGBoost.
NVIDIA is working on bringing the popular in-memory big data processing engine, Apache Spark, onto the GPU to accelerate its processing speed. The official name for the plugin that accelerates Spark applications is RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark 3.0. This plugin enables Spark SQL and Dataframe operations to gain significant acceleration without any code changes. This includes when they run on GPU such as high cardinality joins high cardinality aggregates, high cardinality sorts, and windowing operations.
For our first project, one of the Journey AI machine learning pipelines has been fully migrated onto GPU workers, in order to evaluate its performance. This pipeline has two parts: feature generation and model prediction (Figure 1). The feature generation part is to convert the raw data to the meaningful feature data that can be used to train the model. This work involves a large amount of table join aggregation and windowing functions. It is implemented on Apache Spark. For the results reported here, the model prediction part is used on a pre-trained XGBoost model and generated feature data to predict the event probability.
Figure 1: Machine learning pipeline for test
Benchmark Test and Results
In the benchmark test, two computing clusters are used: one CPU cluster which contains a group of Standard_L4 workers (6 Cores and 32 GB Memory), and one GPU cluster which contains a group of Standard_NC6s_v3 workers (6 Cores, 112GB Memory, 1 V100 GPU processor). In order to make the two clusters have similar run costs given the same amount of time, we kept the ratio between the number of workers in the CPU cluster and the number of workers in the GPU cluster as 5:1.
The first benchmark test focuses on the feature generation part of the pipeline, which is to test the performance of the Spark query. The same Spark query was tested across six customers with different data sizes. The speed-up ratio of GPU cluster to CPU cluster is shown in Figure 2. Overall, the speed-up ratio ranges from 1.5 to 3 times. This high speed-up ratio also represents 20% — 60% time saving and 20% — 60% cost reduction.
Figure 2: Speed-up ratio of GPU cluster to CPU cluster (Spark Query Test)
The second benchmark tested is to test the whole pipeline, which includes feature generation (Spark query job) and machine learning model (XGBoost) prediction. The generated feature data was immediately passed to the XGBoost model for prediction, without a temporary saving process. The pipeline was tested on the same six customers as above. The speed-up ratio of GPU cluster to CPU cluster is shown in Figure 3. The speed-up ratio ranged from 1.5 to 3 times. This high speed-up ratio also represents 20% — 60% time saving and 20% — 60% cost reduction.
Figure 3: Speed-up ratio of GPU cluster to CPU cluster (whole pipeline test)
In the last benchmark test, we tested our pipeline on our largest dataset. It had five data sources, with over 3 TB of data in total. This pipeline also has more complicated join and aggregation in the feature generation stage. Twenty GPU workers in the GPU cluster and 100 CPU workers in the CPU cluster were used in the tests. The benchmark test results are shown in Figure 4. The GPU cluster significantly outperformed the CPU cluster: with 2 times faster, and at the cost of 50% of the CPU cluster.
Figure 4: Run time and run cost of the GPU cluster and CPU cluster
Looking ahead
Adobe and NVIDIA plan to continue working on accelerating machine learning pipelines for Adobe’s AI/ML services with the latest NVIDIA GPU technology. With the development of new functions and improvement on compatibility, more and more Spark and machine learning jobs can be done on GPU with significantly faster speed and cost reduction.
References
Relates Tech Blogs | https://medium.com/adobetech/gpu-accelerated-high-performance-machine-learning-pipeline-4a5a2cbfb7bb | ['Jaemi Bremner'] | 2021-04-22 14:03:16.721000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Nvidia', 'Adobe Experience Platform', 'Apache Spark', 'Platform'] |
Spark 3.0: First hands-on approach with Adaptive Query Execution (Part 1) | Apache Spark is a distributed data processing framework that is suitable for any Big Data context thanks to its features. Despite being a relatively recent product (the first open-source BSD license was released in 2010, it was donated to the Apache Foundation) on June 18th the third major revision was released that introduces several new features including adaptive Query Execution (AQE) that we are about to talk about in this article.
A bit of history
Spark was born, before being donated to the community, in 2009 within the academic context of ampLab (curiosity: AMP is the acronym for Algorithms Machine People) of the University of California, Berkeley. The winning idea behind the product is the concept of RDD, described in the paper “Resilient Distributed Datasets: A Fault-Tolerant Abstraction for In-Memory Cluster Computing” whose lead author is Spark Matei Zaharia’s “father”.
The idea is for a solution that solves the main problem of the distributed processing models available at the time (MapReduce in the first place): the lack of an abstraction layer for the memory usage of the distributed system. Some complex algorithms that are widely used in big data, such as many for training machine learning models, or manipulating graph data structures, reuse intermediate processing results multiple times during computation. The “single-stage” architecture of algorithms such as MapReduce is greatly penalized in such circumstances since it is necessary to write (and then re-read) the intermediate results of computation on persistent storage. I/O operations on persistent storage are notoriously onerous on any type of system, even more so on one deployed due to the additional overhead introduced by network communications. The concept of RDD implemented on Spark brilliantly solves this problem by using memory during intermediate computation steps on a “multi-stage” DAG engine.
The other milestone (I leap because I enter into the merits of RDD programming and Spark’s detailed history, although very interesting, outside the objectives of the article) is the introduction on the first stable version of Spark (which had been donated to the Apache community) of the Spark SQL module.
One of the reasons for the success of the Hadoop framework before Spark’s birth was the proliferation of products that added functionality to the core modules. Among the most used surely we have to mention Hive, SQL abstraction layer over Hadoop. Despite MapReduce’s limitations that make it underperforming to run more complex SQL queries on this engine after “translation” by Hive, the same is still widespread today mainly because of its ease of use.
The best way to retrace the history of the SQL layer on Spark is again to start with the reference papers. Shark (spark SQL’s ancestor) dating back to 2013 and the one titled “Spark SQL: Relational Data Processing in Spark” where Catalyst, the optimizer that represents the heart of today’s architecture, is introduced.
Spark SQL features are made available to developers through objects called DataFrame (or Java/Scale Datasets in type-safe) that represent RDDs at a higher level of abstraction. You can use the DataFrame API through a specific DSL or through SQL.
Regardless of which method you choose to use, DataFrame operations will be processed, translated, and optimized by Catalyst (Spark from v2.0 onwards) according to the following workflow:
What’s new
We finally get to get into the merits of Adaptive Query Execution, a feature that at the architectural level is implemented at this level. More precisely, this is an optimization that dynamically intervenes between the logical plan and the physical plan by taking advantage of the runtime statistics captured during the execution of the various stages according to the stream shown in the following image:
The Spark SQL execution stream in version 3.0 then becomes:
Optimizations in detail
Because the AQE framework is based on an extensible architecture based on a set of logical and physical plan optimization rules, it can easily be assumed that developers plan to implement additional functionality over time. At present, the following optimizations have been implemented in version 3.0:
Dynamically coalescing shuffle partitions
Dynamically switching join strategies
Dynamically optimizing skew joins
let’s go and see them one by one by touching them with our hands through code examples.
Regarding the creation of the test cluster, we recommend that you refer to the previously published article: “How to create an Apache Spark 3.0 development cluster on a single machine using Docker”.
Dynamically coalescing shuffle partitions
Shuffle operations are notoriously the most expensive on Spark (as well as any other distributed processing framework) due to the transfer time required to move data between cluster nodes across the network. Unfortunately, however, in most cases they are unavoidable.
Transformations on a dataset deployed on Spark, regardless of whether you use RDD or DataFrame API, can be of two types: narrow or wide. Wide-type data needs partition data to be redistributed differently between executors to be completed. The infamous shuffle operation (and creating a new execution stage)
Without AQE, determining the optimal number of DataFrame partitions resulting from performing a wide transformation (e.g. joins or aggregations) was assigned to the developer by setting the spark.sql.shuffle.partitions configuration property (default value: 200). However, without going into the merits of the data it is very difficult to establish an optimal value, with the risk of generating partitions that are too large or too small and resulting in performance problems.
Let’s say you want to run an aggregation query on data whose groups are unbalanced. Without the intervention of AQE, the number of partitions resulting will be the one we have expressed (e.g. 5) and the final result could be something similar to what is shown in the image:
Enabling AQE instead would put data from smaller partitions together in a larger partition of comparable size to the others. With a result similar to the one shown in the figure.
This optimization is triggered when the two configuration properties spark.sql.adaptive.enabled and spark.sql.adaptive.coalescePartitions.enabled are both set to true. Since the second is set true by default, practically to take advantage of this feature you only need to enable the global property for AQE activation.
Actually going to parse the source code you find that AQE is actually enabled only if the query needs shuffle operations or is composed of sub-queries:
and that there is a configuration property that you can use to force AQE even in the absence of one of the two conditions above
The number of partitions after optimization will depend instead on the setting of the following configuration options:
spark.sql.adaptive.coalescePartitions.initialPartitionNum
spark.sql.adaptive.coalescePartitions.minPartitionNum
spark.sql.adaptive.advisoryPartitionSizeInBytes
where the first represents the starting number of partitions (default: spark.sql.shuffle.partitions), the second represents the minimum number of partitions after optimization (default: spark.default.parallelism), and the third represents the “suggested” size of the partitions after optimization (default: 64 Mb).
To test the behaviour of the dynamic coalition feature of AQE’s shuffle partitions, we’re going to create two simple datasets (one is to be understood as a lookup table that we need to have a second dataset to join).
The sample dataset is deliberately unbalanced, the transactions of our hypothetical “Very Big Company” are about 10% of the total. Those of the remaining companies about 1%:
Let’s first test what would happen without AQE
We will receive output:
Number of partitions without AQE: 50
The value is exactly what we have indicated ourselves by setting the configuration property spark.sql.shuffle.partitions.
We repeat the experiment by enabling AQE
The new output will be:
Number of partitions with AQE: 7
The value, in this case, was determined based on the default level of parallelism (number of allocated cores), that is, by the value of the spark.sql.adaptive.coalescePartitions.minPartitionNum configuration property.
Now let’s try what happens by “suggesting” the target size of the partitions (in terms of storage). Let’s set it to 30 Kb which is a value compatible with our sample data
This time the output will be:
Number of partitions with AQE (advisory partition size 30Kb): 15
regardless of the number of cores allocated on the cluster for our job.
Apart from having a positive impact on performance, this feature is very useful in creating optimally sized output files (try analyzing the contents of the job output directories that I created in CSV format while being less efficient so that you can easily inspect the files).
In the second and third part of the article we will try the other two new features:
Dynamically switching join strategies
Dynamically optimizing skew joins
Stay tuned! | https://medium.com/p/ff987f66b5c0 | ['Mario Cartia'] | 2020-10-14 05:31:47.419000+00:00 | ['Big Data', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Apache Spark', 'Advanced Analytics', 'Machine Learning'] |
6 Best DMP Use Cases | What is DMP? How Does it Benefit your Business?
Data management platforms are used to manage & segment the 3rd party, anonymous, or hashed data. These platforms help marketers in segregating the audience for online advertising purposes.
Data management platforms often use big data and artificial intelligence to segment large sets of data.
But as it deals with third-party data, marketers have to make sure that they are not flagging the data privacy regulations.
These platforms also provide you the access to audience analytics, integration with your CRM, and mixing the event attributes through the Boolean expressions.
Let’s take a look at some of the best DMP use cases to understand the benefits of DMP. You will also be able to understand how it can be implemented in your line of business
Top 6 DMP Use Cases
Allstate
Allstate is a famous American insurance company. It was facing an issue in setting up the right target audience through the tools. It also wanted to keep a track of the media partner’s promotional activities.
Its marketing ecosystem was complex due to the use of multiple DMP platforms. These platforms include email marketing platforms, social media channels, and other promotional channels.
The company was looking for an alternative to bring online and offline channel data together. It also wanted to improve the transparency and visibility in its marketing channels.
It decided to partner with Neustar for a solution to address these challenges. The marketers at Allstate could easily integrate all of its marketing efforts. Also, it could connect the first-party and third-party data.
Neustar provided the Neustar OneID system, and the marketers at Allstate were able to match 99% of offline data with the 58% online data.
Connecting all the touchpoints online and offline has helped the company to get fresh insights. It has also improved data intelligence.
Princess Cruises
The Princess Cruises line is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It wanted to reach out to the potential cruise travelers and inspire them to take on the new adventure.
It also wanted to work on hyper-personalization to serve its target audience with tailor-made content.
It wanted to use a DMP system that can integrate the data from different sources and channels into one system. It approached the Adobe DMP for the same.
Adobe’s DMP was deployed within 3 months of approach. With the help of Adobe’s DMP, the company could save 65% of its marketing spend with intelligent audience suppression.
The marketers at the company could convert 300% more third-party data into first-party data with it. Through Adobe’s other marketing programs, the cruise company increased its customer base.
It also made the data integration between the first-party and third-party effortless.
You May Also Like: Top 7 Differentiating Factors in CDP Vs. DMP Comparison
National Bank of Canada
It is the sixth-largest bank in Canada, headquartered in Montreal, and has more than 2.4 million clients.
The bank wanted to increase its audience reach through targeted advertising. It also wanted to reach out to the parts of Canada that have less brick and mortar branches.
Another key objective of the bank’s marketing efforts was to optimize and increase its digital presence. With this, the company planned to move towards data-based decision models.
Hence it decided to partner with Adobe DMP with the mentioned capabilities. With the help of Adobe Marketing Suite, the bank could get a holistic view of customers and increase the scope of data-based decision models.
The partnership also helped the bank to streamline its marketing process. And it has resulted in lowering the marketing expenditure. This cost is estimated to be around 30% less with personalized content marketing tactics.
ESI Media
Many famous publication houses & journalism outlets like The Independent, London Live, and London Evening Standard come under ESI Media.
It has over 24 million visitors per month and their general demographic is well above average household income.
This audience is harder to reach and hence ESI gets much of its revenue through the advertisements.
ESI wanted to improve the user experience with programmatic advertising and improve visibility. The company needed a multilayered data through which they could identify, segment, and target the audience in a better way.
The company also wanted to bring transparency to the first party and the third party data that its agencies use.
It decided to partner with Salesforce Krux for a DMP platform. Its key objective was to deliver an agile solution and handle multilayered data integrations.
This partnership helped the ad buyers to access the third party data in an improved manner. It also helped the ad buyers with the key insights on ad placements and the related strategy.
This helped the ESI to bring in more ad buyers on their websites without hampering the user experience.
Fandom
Fandom, which is more famously known as Wikia, has more than 120 million worldwide active fans. Wikia cross channel data is highly valuable.
And the company knew that if it could find the right advertisers for the data, it could charge premium.
But, in order to do that, the company needed a platform that could integrate the first-party and third-party data. And as this was a new venture, the company decided to partner with Salesforce Krux for DMP.
In a short time of this collaboration, the company launched an audience-aware strategy. Its revenues for CPM increased by 220% for wide display images, and by 270% for small display images.
This has helped the company’s reputation for advertising significantly.
Sky UK
Sky Sports is a world-famous broadcaster. And Sky UK wanted to use the customer data to deliver personalized experiences. It also wanted to improve customer interactions and provide better customer care.
To achieve these objectives, it decided to partner with Adobe DMP solution. The collaboration allowed the company to create a hyper-segmented target audience.
The machine learning ability of the platform helped Sky UK to get advanced insights and improve relationships.
Key Takeaways:
We can see from the above-mentioned use cases that DMP can be used for: | https://medium.com/@davewhite9494/6-best-dmp-use-cases-2f6c6eada0a2 | ['Dave White'] | 2021-12-22 14:52:59.635000+00:00 | ['It', 'Platform', 'Management', 'Data'] |
Step 1 — Field Research. Blog 3/10 | Step 1 — Field Research
After agreeing our ‘How Might We’ statement — ‘How might we help employees develop a fulfilling career?’ — this week we’ve been interviewing employees to gather insight on what people love about their career and also what they don’t like.
The next challenge was deciding who to interview. As you can imagine with 26,000 employees, there was a lot of choice! With guidance from our coaches at Treehouse Innovation, we created a list of 50 employees who were identified as ‘extreme users’. An extreme user's behaviour places them at the far ends of a particular scale. Many will have adapted or found a way to work around the problem you're exploring. Working with extreme users allows us to push innovation rather than stay within the comfort of the generic. Some examples of our extreme user groups were…
Employees at tenure points associated with higher attrition
Employees who’ve been at the company less than one year vs. employees who’ve been here 20 years or more
Employees in high attrition business areas vs. low attrition areas
To get a really honest picture we included people who’ve left the company, and those who were due to be leaving over the next few months.
Treehouse recommended interviewing 25 people. You might think this seems like a small number, but the interviews are in-depth and last 90 minutes. Luckily for us, out of our list of 50, just over 25 people agreed to have a conversation. Here are five tips we were given before starting:
Plan a few questions, but allow the conversation to flow off-topic and ask open WHY, WHAT, and HOW questions to dig deeper, even if you’re sure you know the answer Interview in pairs so one person can lead the conversation while the other takes notes Assume a ‘beginner’s mindset’ — Observe with exaggerated, but authentic curiosity Don’t just ask questions, make it interactive to inspire new thinking by evoking memorable experiences, see the picture cards we used below Highlight anything surprising; sources of joy and pain; any clues to what the interviewee cares about and examples of where they’re adapting or ‘going around’ existing systems or obstacles in their environment
After each interview, we uploaded the interview findings to Sprintbase — an online platform designed to guide teams step-by-step through the design thinking process.
The interviews were great fun for everyone, including the interviewees, but doing 25 interviews in one week was full on! Next week, we’ll take time to analyse the data gathered and start forming insights to focus our challenge and pinpoint the exact problems needing to be solved. | https://medium.com/agile-in-learning/step-1-field-research-f71b49c5ca32 | ['Charlie Tomlinson'] | 2019-06-17 08:19:54.133000+00:00 | ['Innovation', 'Design Thinking', 'Careers', 'UX', 'Career Development'] |
5 Things to Consider Before Airbnb Hosting | Contemplating setting up your first posting up on Airbnb arbitrage? The following are 10 things you really want to ponder BEFORE you start.
Do you have a desolate lounge chair that you might want to make a couple of additional bucks from? Have an additional a room you could lease? Or on the other hand perhaps you’ve caught wind of how much your companion is making from facilitating on Airbnb training and it made you need to get a committed unit to lease? Notwithstanding what your circumstance or inspiration, here are some significant things to contemplate first.
Goal versus Expectation
Indeed, we as a whole realize you need to bring in some cash from facilitating on Airbnb yet what is your objective precisely? Simply a periodic additional pay? A solid and predictable auxiliary pay? Pay substitution? Or on the other hand assemble a momentary rental realm? Contingent upon your objectives, how much capital, time, and hazard implied in facilitating on Airbnb will be very unique.
A decent method for assessing your objectives is to initially figure out what kind of host you need to be.
2) Inviting Strangers to Your Home
At the point when you are facilitating on Airbnb, you are in a real sense welcoming total outsiders into your home. Furthermore on the off chance that you’re just leasing part of your unit and you’ll remain there, you will be going through evenings with complete outsiders under a similar rooftop in your home!
Assuming that by itself causes you to feel uncomfortable, you’ll have to take some real time to contemplate facilitating on Airbnb. In the event that having outsiders remaining with you isn’t a choice, your main Airbnb course is to find and get a devoted rental unit.
Could it be said that you are ready to serenely and dependably speak with and have total outsiders?
3) Time Commitment
Posting and running of how to start an Airbnb posting could take MUCH additional time and exertion than you expected, particularly at the outset. In any event, when you have your methodology down and you’re not investing as much energy taking care of the relative multitude of appointments, you could in any case hope to be available to work for crises at whatever point you have a visitor remaining with you. Do you have the opportunity and the adaptability to take the necessary steps to succeed?
4) Listing Positioning
What makes your unit exceptional or unique? For what reason would a potential visitor need to check out your posting and book with you rather than the developing rundown of other great other options? You’ll require a convincing deal that positions your unit well among rivalry. This could remember everything from the photographs and depictions for what you decide to feature to how you approach valuing the unit. Getting the right situating could accept steady changes as your market and rivalry changes. Could it be said that you will invest the effort and energy to get your situating right?
5) Keeping Up with News and Market
As may be obvious, on the off chance that you need accomplishment as a host on Airbnb, you’ll should be continually learning and adjusting your inclining to the changing economic situations, visitor tastes, or even neighborhood law. You might have totally different sorts of explorers during various seasons that require totally unique situating. Your city might be assessing a polling form measure that could altogether influence your Airbnb posting (or shut it down). Prepared to keep up? | https://medium.com/@alipalanpa2000/5-things-to-consider-before-airbnb-hosting-bf8c3ec5a1ea | ['Ali Abbas'] | 2021-12-30 14:37:18.652000+00:00 | ['Real Estate Investments', 'Airbnb', 'Airbnb Host', 'Airbnb Arbitrage', 'Airbnb Tips'] |
AcaWhy Political Correctness insults the Constitution and the Humanity of others | Many have been critical of the post-modern movement in the academy and the culture of political correctness and social justice that has followed. Though it has become quite apparent to me that many do not understand why people like myself, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Heather McDonald, Charles Murry, Colman Hughes, and Denis Prager find these movements so troubling. As an academic and recent grad student of whose primary discipline is philosophy, I have spent much of my time on these topics debating the illegitimacies of their philosophical tenets; scrutinizing aspects like the heavy reliance on relativism, social determinism, essentialism, improper use of the scientific method, weak ethical formulation, and the lack of capability to make universalizable statements in the post-modern paradigm. But it has struck me that while large swaths of the population are beginning to show fierce objection to all things post-modern and politically correct, I thought it might be worth conveying how and why a sociological theory like postmodernism has perturbed so many people and has now affected the civil state of America. The Foucauldian gaze has trickled down the academic pipeline, and folks are now asking what has happened to our country.
While I don’t intend to be a disappointment, the answer isn’t a revelation towards racism. Or its complimentary explain-all companion sexism. If we were to boil down the trepidation expressed by volumes of the American people, it can be voiced in one surprisingly simple idea of which many feel is an insult to American civics and the Constitution. That is, the foundational objection folks maintain against postmodernism, social justice, and political correctness is that unlike the claims that are made in our Constitution, which conceptualizes the citizen from the bottom-up — incorporating critical features like the presumption of innocence as a foundational element of our inalienable rights — the politically correct movement insists that we are all guilty of some ancestral injustice and can only presume our innocence by incorporation with the sentiments of the movement itself.
Unlike the Constitution, which details the individual citizen from the bottom up, first as a human being with inborn and inalienable rights, the politically correct movement turns this very important schema upside down, using a top-down mentality in which to judge their fellow citizens. In such a case, people are ever growingly defined first by such things as presumable political position, whether they are democrats or republicans, liberals or conservatives, before they are ever regarded as individuals. Even in the case of making an individualistic distinction, one’s race and gender will be, per this view, categorically more important than who they are themselves. Earlier remarks I have made on this topic, in accordance to the positions of those individuals I cited above, relate to questioning whether this top-down way of thinking actually gives more facility to precisely the sorts of things the Constitution and the politically correct try to protect us from?
The whole idea of having an intermediary body of language that articulates how we ought to view each other is precisely to avoid addressing people by way of partial judgment. Though these judgments, such as demographic signifiers like race and gender, are now regarded as the aspects most characteristic of our humanity. What started as a considerably insightful social theory (at least some would say), that was praised in the academy for uncovering the dominance of heteronormativity and eurocentrism, has instead turned into a social etiquette in which individuals address one another through a lens of criminality. What has been lost is not just our presumption of innocence, aspects of our inalienable rights, or the willingness to appropriate nuance, but the advent of indiscriminate interaction with the individuals that make up our society… which is what might actually facilitate the coming together. | https://medium.com/@atthesymposium-org/why-political-correctness-insults-the-constitution-and-the-humanity-of-others-2abfa8597fbe | ['At The Symposium'] | 2020-12-21 22:13:09.770000+00:00 | ['Academia', 'America', 'Philosophy', 'Politics', 'Free Speech'] |
Cool！Google and Amazon are listening to your voice recordings. | Ever since Alexa and Google Assistant first burst onto the scene and started populating people’s homes with smart speakers and other gadgets outfitted with always-listening microphones, people have wondered whether anyone other than their AI assistant of choice was listening in.
Photo by Thomas Le on Unsplash
What about Google and Amazon say？
“We only annotate an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings in order improve the customer experience,” an Amazon spokesperson told CNET in April. “ The spokesperson added that employees can’t directly access identifying information about the people or accounts associated with the recordings.
“As part of our work to develop speech technology for more languages, we partner with language experts around the world who understand the nuances and accents of a specific language,” David Monsees, product manager for Google Search, said in a blog post Thursday. “
Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash
Google adds that the audio samples these contractors listen to amount to about 0.2% of all recordings, and that user account details aren’t associated with any of them. Google’s blog post specifically addresses audio that reviewers are listening to for the purpose of helping Google Assistant master a variety of languages, dialects and accents.
Then, what about third parties? Is my voice data being shared?
One instance occurs on a page for Google Nest services outlining the company’s commitment to privacy — a separate page from the Google or Google Assistant privacy policies.
Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash
Google explains that the guide is there “to explain as clearly and simply as we can both how our connected home devices and services work, and also how we’ll uphold our commitment to respect your privacy.”
The problem is that Google’s privacy policy doesn’t really help with device-specific questions like that. In fact, Google’s privacy policy only includes the word “voice” once, as an item in the list of “activity information” Google collects. Meanwhile, the policy doesn’t include the words “microphone,” “recordings” or “assistant” at all.
From：C net | https://medium.com/@maimaiyang789/cool-google-and-amazon-are-listening-to-your-voice-recordings-d0298076e604 | ['Mai', 'S Life'] | 2019-07-15 07:59:09.940000+00:00 | ['Technology Trends', 'Amazon', 'Voices', 'Technology News', 'Google'] |
Top 10 Stock Brokers online Trading Platforms & Customer Support | Top 10 Brokers are ranked based on the maximum number of mediums through which they offer support (phone, email, SMS, WhatsApp, live chat etc) and also based on turnaround time, number of complaints.
In this article, we will list out Top 10 Brokers based on Customer Support and also give a brief introduction of Top 10 Brokers.
Scroll down to know brief information about them :
RankBroker Name1Tradejini2Sharekhan3ICICI Direct4Angel Broking5Axis Direct6Zerodha7Trading Bells8Wisdom Capital9Upstox10My Value Trade
Get Best Tradejini Offers
Tradejini is a discount broker established in 2012, headquartered in Bangalore. They are depository participant of CDSL and offer products like:
Equity Spot
Equity Futures and Options
Currency Futures and Options
Commodity Futures and Options
Mutual Funds
Bonds
Services ThroughPhoneYESEmailYESSMSYESWhatsAppYESTransaction AlertsYESLive ChatYESRelationship ManagerNOTraining & EducationYES
Get Best Sharekhan Offers
Sharekhan is a full-service broker established in 2000, headquartered in Mumbai. They are depository participant of NSDL and they offer products like:
Equity Spot
Equity Futures and Options
Currency Futures and Options
Commodity Futures and Options
Mutual Funds
Bonds
Services ThroughPhoneYESEmailYESSMSYESWhatsAppYESTransaction AlertsYESLive ChatYESRelationship ManagerYESTraining & EducationYES
Get Best ICICI Direct Offers
ICICI Direct is a full-service broker established in 2000 headquartered in Mumbai, they are depository participant of NSDL & CDSL and they offer products like:
Equity Spot
Equity Futures and Options
Currency Futures and Options
Commodity Futures and Options
Mutual Funds
Bonds
Fixed Deposits
Services ThroughPhoneYESEmailYESSMSYESWhatsAppYESTransaction AlertsYESLive ChatYESRelationship ManagerYESTraining & EducationYES
Get Best Angel Broking Offers
Angel Broking is a full-service broker established in 1987 headquartered in Mumbai, they are depository participant of NSDL and they offer products like:
Equity Spot
Equity Futures and Options
Currency Futures and Options
Commodity Futures and Options
Mutual Funds
Bonds
Services ThroughPhoneYESEmailYESSMSNOWhatsAppYESTransaction AlertsYESLive ChatYESRelationship ManagerNOTraining & EducationYES
Get best Axis Direct offers
Axis Direct is a full-service broker established in 2011 headquartered in Mumbai, they are depository participant of NSDL & CDSL and they offer products like:
Equity Spot
Equity Futures and Options
Currency Futures and Options
Commodity Futures and Options
Mutual Funds
Bonds
Fixed Deposits
Services ThroughPhoneYESEmailYESSMSYESWhatsAppYESTransaction AlertsYESLive ChatYESRelationship ManagerYESTraining & EducationYES
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My Value Trade is a discount broker established in 1985, headquartered in Ludhiana (Punjab). They are depository participant of NSDL and offer products like:
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Services ThroughPhoneYESEmailYESSMSYESWhatsAppNOTransaction AlertsYESLive ChatYESRelationship ManagerNOTraining & EducationNO | https://medium.com/@discoverbroker1/top-10-stock-brokers-online-trading-platforms-customer-support-b68f47fed6eb | ['Discover Broker'] | 2020-01-11 07:28:28.069000+00:00 | ['Investing', 'Share', 'Discount', 'Trading Platforms', 'Stock Market'] |
Pandemic Fatherhood: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Chaos | Pandemic Fatherhood: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Chaos
Just four sleepless months was all I’d gotten from fatherhood before the pandemic started. Born on a Sunday morning in November 2019, my son Luke (a.k.a. “Buddy Bear”) was about to test me in ways I couldn’t predict. Everyone was enduring their own share of fear, economic uncertainty, social inequity, and physical and emotional struggles when the pandemic began. On top of all that, I was still figuring out how to get a colicky infant down for naps. But in time, my son would become my anchor, my tether to all that is good and worthy in the call of fatherhood.
“In the thick of chaos, sometimes you just have to shut the world out as your little one takes its place.”
In April, when lockdowns dominated headlines, Luke was 5-months-old. Fear and uncertainty were swiftly overruled by regimented bottle feedings, endless diaper changes, and regular mask-donned doctor’s visits. Not long after, I was placed on work furlough. As overwhelmed as I wanted to be, Buddy Bear needed me to be present. In the thick of chaos, sometimes you just have to shut the world out as your little one takes its place.
I had lots of time and we made the most of it. We sang, threw morning dance parties, read his favorite books and did all the funny voices. We practiced crawling, standing, walking and talking together. Truly, no day felt exactly the same, and when he finally mastered naptime, all I wanted to do was hold him again when he woke up.
By June, my wife was back to work in person, and Buddy Bear became my sole responsibility — at least during the day. Anxiety set in and now 7-months-old, he didn’t make it easy. But with every day came increasing confidence in myself. I could read my son’s wants and needs and I found new ways to make every day a little more interesting than the last.
I’d tell him my childhood stories on our daily stroller walks and give him a fuller picture of the guy that takes care of him. When your child thinks you’re the funniest person in the world, most of the battle is already won. And that was my trick: make every day count and keep your focus there.
“I could fill volumes of stories from my first year of fatherhood alone, but my experience is incomplete without recognizing the value and resolve of my co-parent and wife.”
They say it takes a village to raise a child, and experiencing first time fatherhood in a socially distanced reality was nothing short of cruel and crushing. Keeping friends, siblings, parents and other relatives at arm’s length was emotionally one of the hardest parts of early fatherhood.
Though we were able to maintain a semblance of interaction, the day-to-day of not having a steady network around made everything fundamentally harder. It had been easy to take that for granted before.
Thankfully, I wasn’t totally on my own. I could fill volumes of stories from my first year of fatherhood alone, but my experience is incomplete without recognizing the value and resolve of my co-parent and wife. Extraordinary on her own terms in conquering motherhood, she was the primary breadwinner for much of the year, and the emotional rock that kept me going in the hardest times of pandemic child rearing. Always a sounding board and audience for my self-doubts and concerns, she gave me the reassurance that I am always the best dad, even on the lowest of days.
“Together, we faced snow storms, ice storms, hail storms, tornado warnings, power outages, water outages, roof leaks, stomach bugs, mono and every other contagion you could contract. But at the end of every catastrophe was our Buddy Bear, healthy and thriving.”
When a baby comes, every facet of your life changes. Your partner needs just as much support as your kid(s), if not more. Staying true to always being open, communicative, and honest, my wife and I would find our way through all the toughest days, which weren’t in short supply.
Together, we faced snow storms, ice storms, hail storms, tornado warnings, power outages, water outages, roof leaks, stomach bugs, mono and every other contagion you could contract. But at the end of every catastrophe was our Buddy Bear, healthy and thriving.
Every night on his baby monitor, I could see his face full of wonder, as his heavy eyes succumbed to the day. He might utter one of his new animal sounds or random words. But sometimes he’d just say “dada” and I knew I was on his mind as he drifted off.
“There is no video, podcast, or manual in existence that makes the learning curve easier.”
Emerging on the other side of the pandemic and all the chaos, I firmly believe that by intentionally embracing that chaos, you find all the happiness and joy swirling within. The worries begin to dwindle and all that’s left are the positive memories to cherish.
To all the struggling dads, newly-minted pandemic dads, and soon-to-be dads, these are my words for you: embrace the chaos. There is no video, podcast, or manual in existence that makes the learning curve easier. There is only trial and error and the resolve to always give your best even if it feels like your worst.
Rocking an infant to sleep, you have a lot of time to fill with ideas to retool and adjust your parenting. Over time, I established a loose set of guidelines that helped me overcome the hardest days and find the confidence to be a chaos-driven dad. Take what works for you, leave what doesn’t, and be sure to discover your own.
Stewart and Buddy Bear’s Rules to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Chaos of Fatherhood
When given the time, waste none of it.
If you aren’t given the time, demand more of it.
Trust your instinct, even if it ends up being the wrong decision.
Give yourself the time to be hard on yourself, then press on.
Parenting is mostly failing upwards and being able to laugh with it.
Your parenting wins will always outnumber your parenting failures.
Build off the wins, build up from the failures.
Plans are a recipe for disappointment; plan accordingly, but learn to improvise, too.
On the subject of improv, learn the power of saying ‘Yes, and’ to everything.
Find your zen whether it’s music, video games, books, or something else. Just be good to yourself
Don’t compare yourself to anyone else.
Unsolicited advice is well-meaning, but you can choose to take it or leave it.
Explain everything to your kids. When you teach them, you teach yourself.
Your kids are way more perceptive than you think.
To all the dads out there: do it your way and do it with love. Happy Father’s Day! | https://medium.com/project-drive/pandemic-fatherhood-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-chaos-828dcd9f1e5 | ['Project Drive'] | 2021-06-17 20:52:18.295000+00:00 | ['Pandemic Parenting', 'Parenting', 'Fatherhood', 'Fathers Day', 'Pandemic Diaries'] |
Wear OS Application Development- Practical Aspects. | Introduction
Most often, developing mobile applications, we build them for only two types of devices — smartphones and tablets. And every time we start a new Android Studio project we come across the proposed templates for other types of devices. Unless necessary, developers wouldn’t use those templates especially if there are no corresponding physical devices at hand. But the situation may change when it is required so by the app development project itself. The time is now to tell about the mobile app project we’ve been busy with at Rosberry.
The app is all about a healthy lifestyle and is a tool for tracking water balance and managing liquid intake based on the environment, user activities and other individual measurements. Using the app daily, one can develop healthy habits replenishing water loss in a timely manner. To make this experience even more friendly we’ve built an app for watches powered by Wear OS by Google.
The actual task was to build a wearable app within a short period of time and make it as simple as possible. So, the basic issues we had to face first were: Wear OS capabilities, the way the Wear OS app would interact with the phone app and the component interdependencies inside the project. In this article we would like to share some development aspects for Wear OS we had to take into consideration down the road.
Creating a Module for Smartwatches
Development of a wearable app suggests that we add a separate module to the existing project.
To do so, we should proceed as follows:
Step 1. Add a new module to an existing project.
In Android Studio click: File → New Module → Wear OS Module. Type all the necessary values, click Finish — now we have another module in the project (named Wear).
Step 2. Add dependencies
In the newly created module named ‘Wear’ we should update the dependencies section to include the following:
This way we’re adding the Wearable Support Library to our watch module.
Step 3. General classes for the phone app and smartwatch app modules
Since we are using one and the same code base between the modules of the phone application and the smartwatch app, we’re adding a common module which is added to the project as a library. To use this module we should declare the following dependencies of the phone and watch app modules:
Step 4. Linking the phone and smartwatch app module
To link the watch module to the existing project we should declare the following dependencies in the build.gradle of the phone app module:
Wear API
To create a wearable application we use the same components as for smartphone apps with only several exceptions: your Activity may extend WearableActivity — a special class which allows for setting the behaviour of the display when idle. The setAmbientEnabled() method, which is called for in the extended Activity when it is created, allows for switching to ambient mode instead of blocking the watch display.
Communication Between the Phone and the Smartwatch
Interaction between devices is ensured by the special component — Wearable Listener Service which has a special priority in the system.
To add the component you should:
Extend the class by changing necessary data channel callbacks in order to get them (in our case we’ve used the data channel only, so we have overridden the onDataChanged() callback). Declare it in the manifest by adding an action that will be processed by this service (DATA_CHANGED), as well as data filters which will be used by the phone application to know what request the smartwatch has sent.
How it actually looks:
When the application is unloaded from memory, the WearableListenerService will continue and will accumulate the data coming to the callback which will be delivered to the destination at the next active state of the application.
In order to get the data in the callbacks one should register as a data client and a capability client in the smartwatch module using the following methods:
and implement the callbacks themselves
Capabilities. Pairing Status Check-up.
To check the status of the smartwatch pairing with the smartphone you’ll need to take a couple of steps.
First up, we shall set the strings with random entries in the the wear.xml file of the phone application module for the smartwatch to be able to check if the device with such Capabilities is paired. Wear content.xml looks like this:
Then in the smartwatch module itself we shall set a string constant with the same entry as in the capability indicated above. With the help of this constant in the callback onCapabilityChanged()of the smartwatch module we will determine if the state we receive relates to the state of our device (connected to our phone app). After verifying that we’ve received the pairing status of the appropriate device, we shall be busy with the following check-up:
The result of this check-up will show whether there is an actual connection with the device. It should be noted that we cannot request the pairing status directly, only through the callback, which implies some delay between the actual disconnection of the device and the callback trigger.
Data Exchange Between Devices
To transfer data from your smartphone to your smartwatch and vice versa you should use the bundle com.google.android.gms.wearable.DataMap which is created simultaneously with the com.google.android.gms.wearable.PutDataMapRequest, calling a static method PutDataMapRequest#create, which should have one of the paths declared in the manifest as an input:
To add all necessary data to the DataMap bundle you can use a range of methods. For example, to send the current timestamp with a query you should call the following method:
Then comes the chain of transformations of our request into a task (com.google.android.gms.tasks.Task) — the end point before processing of our data by the Google services library.
For our request to be processed and could reach the paired device, it is necessary to:
present this request as a the PutDataRequest through the simple call val request:
2. get DataClient:
3. pass our request to DataClient and finally get the Task:
4. Task execution is carried out with the await static method of the Tasks class:
The Task execution is blocked until the result is obtained synchronously. This operation must be performed in a separate thread.
Usually the data for the watch is not delivered immediately, in order to optimize the use of resources and save battery life it is time-lagged and the lag as the documents say is 30 minutes. To instantly deliver the data for the watch you must use the setUrgent()method for the PutDataRequest class object which ensures that there is a minimum delay between sending and receiving data.
Receipt of Data
As described above, the data is received through the WearableListenerService#onDataChanged callback which gets the DataEventBuffer object as an input after the execution of each task and which should be parsed using the keys that we have defined in the application manifest. It looks like this:
On receipt of the “/drinkEvent” we parse it using the keys of the dictionary.
Wearable App Offline Operation
The devices pair with each other via Bluetooth, so the offline operation of the smartwatch means that there is no pairing between the smartphone and the watch. If the task is sent to be carried out with no pairing, its execution will not take long when connection is there again. Thus, working with the smartwatch in an offline mode, all scheduled tasks will be performed and the data on both devices will be synchronized.
Layouts for Different Smartwatch Screen Form Factors
Developing applications for smartwatches one should borne in mind that they come in different shapes and sizes with circular and square faces. Moreover certain watches might also have an inset called chin which is usually located at the bottom of the display. To determine the resource only for circular face watches, you should add -round or not-round to those directories that you want to override.
We used BoxInsetLayout to create the screen layouts — it allows to place the content in the center of the display of the circular face watch — the content will be sized to fit into the round display (Fig. 1). This effect is achieved by using the app:boxedEdges=”all” attribute (you can also use left, top, right and bottom values to size to only fit into a specific side).
To support a chinned smartwatch, one should add the fitsSystemWindows=true attribute which will raise the markup above the chin so that it would not be overlapped (Fig.2).
Figure 1 — UI screen for the circular and rectangular face watches
Figure 2-UI for the circular face with an inset (chin)
Distributing Builds to the Client
To hand over the builds to the client we used Beta by Fabric. Unfortunately Beta is available for smartphones only, so it is not possible to install it onto your watch. The only way to get the build on the watch was to directly install it or use Google Play beta testing.
As you see, the situation has not improved in 2019.
Releasing the Application Through Google Play
Our smartwatch app is for Wear OS 1 version.x and 2.x thus, Wearable API lets us exclude the smartwatch APK from the app APK and release two separate APKs to Google Play. One should remember that APK versions should be unique. Google suggests that we follow the the below approach to app versioning:
The first two digits are reserved for the targetSdkVersion, for example, 28. The next three digits represent the version of the application that is visible to the user. For example, the application version is “2.4.3”, so the next three digits are 243. The next-two digits specify the build number, for example, 01. The last two digits will point to a build variant. For example, the smartphone version will be 00 and the watch version will be 01.
To distribute the app on Google Play, as we know, it is necessary to prepare a signed build of the application. Building the release version of the smartphone APK in our case we should also build the watch APK, which at the end of the process can be found in the directory /build/outputs/apk/<flavor>/release in each of the modules both for the smartphone and the watch. These APKs should be included in one and the same release of any of the channels (production, beta, alpha) as if you were downloading multiple APKs for different device configurations (Multi-APK delivery method).
It is worth noting that you can submit your wearable app for review for Google to qualify it as a Wear OS app. To do this in the developer console, you need to:
Upload the watch APK. Upload at least one watch screenshot. Click Stage presence → Pricing & Distribution, find the Device categories section, tick Wear OS by Google and click Submit update.
Conclusion
In this article we have tried to cover all the aspects that might turn important to developers of wearable apps, especially to those who are just starting out with Wear OS. We very much hope that the points outlined here will facilitate your acquaintance with this operating system. Our experience has shown that development for Wear OS is not much different from the development of smartphone applications. However, developing Wear OS apps you should remember about the guidelines, since, for example, the navigation inside smartwatch apps is somewhat different from the usual one in the apps for “larger” devices. Check out the following link to learn more about the guidelines — design guidelines. | https://medium.com/rosberryapps/wear-os-application-development-practical-aspects-a761019f7ec4 | [] | 2019-03-19 02:44:20.667000+00:00 | ['Mobile App Development', 'Codingbootcamp', 'Android', 'Mobile Apps', 'Wearables'] |
ETHGlobal Hackathon and Trickle | Africa’s first ETHGlobal hackathon has come and gone. It was an amazing event filled with some of the most talented people in the industry. Our team, Nikita Savchenko and Kirill Beresnev, worked to come up with a very interesting concept: Trickle. Check out the video to see what Nikita and Kirill managed to produce:
After 37ish hours of work, sweat, and coffee, our team had Trickle up and running. There were around 30 teams at the event. To say that it would’ve taken a long time for each team to present and discuss the details of their project would be an understatement. As a result, our team was only given three minutes to describe and present their creation.
So what did the judges think of Trickle and our presentation? They loved the concept. How much did they love it? Enough to name Trickle one of the five ENS winners at ETHCapeTown. On top of that, our team received tons of great feedback, made several connections, and met and chatted with Vitalik Buterin. Yes, the Vitalik Buterin.
After the event, our team went to the afterparty, where they continued to rub shoulders with the whos who of the crypto and blockchain industry. Needless to say, Nikita and Kirill gained countless amounts of experience and had a blast. See everyone at the next event! Be sure to check out DreamTeam and the DREAM token here: token.dreamteam.gg
About DreamTeam:
DreamTeam — infrastructure platform and payment gateway for esports and gaming.
Stay in touch: Token Website|Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn |BitcoinTalk.org
If you have any questions, feel free to contact our support team any time at [email protected]. Or you can always get in touch with us via our official Telegram chat. | https://medium.com/dreamteam-gg/ethglobal-hackathon-and-trickle-4a0a3f58f8dc | [] | 2019-05-08 15:19:20.733000+00:00 | ['Esport', 'Games', 'Hackathons', 'Game Development'] |
Rail Map: New Railroads! | It’s been a while :)
I’ve been pretty busy the past few months, but the rail map has slowly continued to fill up :)
This past week, I’ve worked on adding G&W’s 120 Railroads to the map. Although most railroads have data publicly available through Wikipedia or HIFLD open data, there was not any KML data available for G&W. The only map source I had was an embedded google map on their website.
G&W’s Map
My first plan of action was trying to find a way to get the KML source for the embed. I tried looking through the Inspect code for the website, but was only able to find an api link, which was no help. However, there was one thing that I didn’t try: checking the network.
In most browsers, you are able to see what webpages the website that you are on queries. By looking through this data, I was able to find a JSON file, with the coordinate data for each of the 120 railroads. However, these were all separate files. What that required, was manually typing in the address, followed by the mark for each railroad, and then downloading the associated JSON file. This took about an hour, and while I could have automated it somehow, it was easier just to brute-force it.
The network tab for the G&W website
Once I had the files, it was time to sort them. Due to MapHub’s limits on data, you are only allowed 50k points on a single map, so my map of the US is divided into four regions. Since the railroads that I was importing were not major US railroads, they had to be sorted into each map, before importing. This consisted of much of the same work; Google the name of the railroad, see where it was located, put into the correct folder. This process took the longest out of the three, since there was no possible way to automate it. After 5 or so hours, every small file was in the correct folder.
The South folder
The last step was just to import the data into MapHub. After doing a batch rename of the files using command prompt, I was ready to drag them over. This process was very simple. Since the files were so small, the processing time was almost nonexistent, and I just had to drag each one over to the MapHub window. And although the naming is still a little messed up, the process is finished!
You can view the final product at map.eliothertenstein.com.
And as a final note, I just want to say thanks for all the amazing support, on my YouTube, Patreon, and just on the website in general. I absolutely love this community, and I hope to work more with all of you in the future!
To request a location, please visit my Patreon. | https://medium.com/@eliothertenstein/rail-map-new-railroads-2f22c0599cd1 | ['Eliot Hertenstein'] | 2021-03-08 18:30:04.133000+00:00 | ['Rail', 'Maphubs', 'Railroad', 'Genesee Wyoming', 'Map'] |
The Beach | 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/blueinsight/the-beach-75e61e2b0db9 | ['Ivette Cruz'] | 2020-12-22 09:36:48.667000+00:00 | ['Blue Insights', 'Haiku', 'Inspiration', 'Life', 'Poetry'] |
The Astonishing Difference a Smile Can Make | In 2013, photographer Jay Weinstein was taking pictures in Bikaner, India, when his eye was drawn to a man with a narrow face and wispy beard, side-lit by the shop he was leaning in front of. The picture would have been perfect, but he hesitated, intimidated by the man’s stern expression and the harsh look in his eyes. He gave up on the shot and proceeded to photograph other subjects until he was interrupted by a friendly shout: “Hey, take my picture too!” It was the same man, completely transformed now, as a smile lit up his face.
This was the inspiration for “So I Asked Them to Smile,” a photography project Weinstein has been dedicated to ever since, which captures a diverse array of subjects with and without smiles. The striking results will more often than not put a smile on your face as a viewer, but they also challenge us to question the assumptions we often make when confronted with unsmiling strangers. Our faces at rest are no indication of how we’re feeling or what we’re like (something people who go around telling strangers to “cheer up” desperately need to learn), and a smile — freely given—can completely transform the way you see someone new, upending an array of judgements you never even knew you were making.
Weinstein has hundreds of photos in this series, and they’re all worth checking out, either on his website or on Instagram. | https://medium.com/tenderlymag/the-astonishing-difference-a-smile-can-make-bb52322d171a | ['Jack Shepherd'] | 2020-08-20 19:55:39.057000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Travel', 'Culture', 'Photography', 'Life'] |
PKM UNDIP Creates Turtle Repellent and Baronang to Prevent Failure of Harvesting Seaweed in Karimunjawa | A team of Diponegoro University (UNDIP) of the Student Creativity Program (PKM) Semarang succeeded in creating a tool to repel sea turtles and baronang fish, which is useful for preventing crop failure of seaweed cultivation in Karimunjawa, Jepara, Central Java.
Sea turtles and baronang fish have been identified as one of the causes of the failed seaweed harvest of the fishermen in the small islands.
The team consisted of Muhammad Syahril Munthe, Izzatun Nuha, Nuraini Elvi Fajrin, and Berlian Ade Wijaya, assisted by Prof. Dr. Aristi Dian Purnama Fitri Spi MSi. The research and manufacturing process of the tool is supported by the 2020 Student Creativity Program funding from the Directorate of Learning and Student Affairs, Directorate General of Higher Education, Ministry of Education and Culture.
As is well known, most of the people of the Karimunjawa Islands rely on the sea as their source of life. In addition to fishing, residents have made seaweed cultivation a source of income, as well as a sustainable business. In extreme climatic conditions, seaweed management can be a productive activity for residents. Therefore, optimizing the harvest is very important.
From the confession of fishermen who are involved in seaweed cultivation, they often experience crop failures. The identification results show that one of the causes of the failure to harvest seaweed is due to attacks by turtles and baronang fish. Both species in the context of seaweed cultivation are considered pests.
Referring to existing reports, attacks by turtles and baronang fish can cause seaweed production to fall by up to 50%. In a condition where the selling price of seaweed is fluctuating, a 50% decline in production is very disturbing to the income of fishermen in Karimunjawa.
So far, they have had problems in cultivating seaweed because their plants are often attacked by turtles and baronang fish. Therefore, an idea emerged to optimize the yield using simple technology.
The Undip PKM team which conducted a study in Karimunjawa then designed a tool that could drive sea turtles and baronang fish from the seaweed cultivation area. The design received support from the Ministry of Education through the Director-General of Higher Education.
The form of the tool created by the Undip PKM Team is a box equipped with green LED lights, speakers, body, and a series of seeing voltaic. This tool can emit high frequencies which are then caught by the baronang fish through their scales. Because of this frequency, the baronang fish will move away to a position 3 meters from the seaweed cultivation area.
Meanwhile, turtles can also be driven away from getting close to the seaweed cultivation area using this tool. The mechanism, which consists of a green glow from the LED emission, is not liked by the turtle, so the animal will avoid it. The tool is designed automatically and repeatedly, namely on 15 seconds, off five seconds to save energy.
The process of making tools and trials has been carried out from 10 August to 30 September 2020. This innovation from Undip PKM is expected to be able to increase the yield of seaweed cultivation in Karimunjawa in an environmentally friendly way because it does not use chemicals that can pollute marine waters.
To read the original article: click here. | https://medium.com/@devitahs/pkm-undip-creates-turtle-repellent-and-baronang-to-prevent-failure-of-harvesting-seaweed-in-bef8ba44111 | ['Devita Salsabila'] | 2020-12-26 07:09:51.956000+00:00 | ['Undip', 'Universitas Diponegoro', 'University', 'Indonesia', 'Seaweed'] |
How I Feel About My Birth Lottery | How I Feel About My Birth Lottery
Dissecting my identity, as an Asian American first-gen woman studying business, in relation to social mobility
With the ever-widening wealth inequality and the rise of student debt, we often wonder: Is the United States socially mobile?
This is an ongoing, controversial debate because social mobility indicates equal opportunity — a crucial aspect of the American Dream.
Due to fast-paced technological advancements, many jobs are becoming obsolete, and employers are demanding higher levels of education for high-paying jobs. Among this intense competition, many of us agree that education is the sole key determinant of vertical, intergenerational social mobility.
As a student of higher education, I feel immense pressure to succeed and climb up the economic ladder. However, social mobility is a complex topic.
I often question the extent to which people can call themselves “self-made” and whether social mobility in today’s society is systematically constructed. How “self-made” can people truly be when their birth lottery (race, gender, etc) determines their life chances?
In this paper, I am dissecting my identity, evaluating each aspect’s relation to social mobility, and analyzing how our country’s structure enables or hinders it.
1. As a first-generation student attending a private university
My decision to leave California, where I grew up my whole life, and to attend an institution of higher education in Massachusetts was partially influenced by my family and mentors who convinced me that it would help me grow.
I never gave too much thought to what that may entail, but I was determined to get the most out of my college education.
My peers, many of whom come from middle to upper-class households, were constantly concerned about stocks and the financial market. They buried themselves in Burberry and Supreme: both brands that I had never seen before arriving at college.
After familiarizing myself with my peers’ tastes, values, and habits, I returned home to find myself unable to relate to my peers who had decided to dive straight into the workforce.
We simply wanted to talk about different things, which revealed that there were fundamental divergences amongst our values that inspired us each to take on separate paths. I felt distant from my family, my peers, my culture, and even my hometown.
While gaining invaluable experiences and knowledge in college, I felt an important part of myself surrendering to my newfound values. My institutional identity as a college student was growing stronger than any other aspect of me.
My identity as a first-generation student made me a minority, an oddity, and a problem at this university. I found that other first-generation students face a similar dilemma of disconnecting from their homes as they embody the school’s institutional identity.
Colleges that categorize first-generation students frame our identities by feeding into our desire to conform to the institutional culture. In fact, the terminology of first-generation students became widely used by educational institutions in the late 1990s.
There is a connection between the categorization of first-generation students and our sense of identity.
Ostensibly, the classification of first-generation students appears to be the school’s effort to provide additional assistance to those who come from households that may lack resources. In reality, institutions have hidden agendas solely for their own benefit.
The classification of first-generations “is not a power-neutral process that follows from an inevitable and logical classification of students, but rather an attempt to group students in a way that benefits institutional interests.”
The programs expose us to the tastes and values of the middle or higher class, transplanting a sense of homogeneous institutional identity within the first-generation students who are more likely to come from culturally-diverse, low-income households. The establishment of such an identity allows the college to form strong ties with its graduates, increasing its likelihood of receiving institutional services, such as donations.
The process of acculturation to the higher class also encourages us to believe that we can achieve upward social mobility through individual hard work.
This consolidates a mindset that may benefit us on our path to success; meanwhile, the categorization itself makes us believe that in order to achieve vertical social mobility, we must separate ourselves from our heritage and culture.
It inclines students to “fit in” to the middle class and their tastes and values. While familiarizing ourselves with the higher class atmosphere, we deviate from the background that formed our identity until that point. We start to attribute our success to individual efforts rather than other external factors, such as our family.
While acculturation to the higher class may increase our opportunities, it becomes harder for us to accept the identity that makes us unique.
We conform to the majority’s idealized institutional identity in order to achieve upward social mobility. We start investing in stocks and shopping for Burberry clothes if that means adopting the institutional culture, values, and lifestyle.
2. As an Asian American
My parents’ educational background is not the only element that makes me a minority at any school; the fact that I am a racial minority also influences the ease of climbing up the social ladder.
As an Asian American, I assumed that there would be a clear disparity between my community and the white community. Surprisingly, I found evidence that Asian Americans are almost as socially mobile as Caucasians.
If one were to only examine the Asian Americans’ progress in the U.S., it would seem as if “earnings gaps driven largely by prejudice or misperceptions are not sustainable in competitive labor markets,” as Asian Americans’ success to their test scores is as high as those of their Caucasian counterparts.
Asians have been able to close their earnings gap because they have brought skill sets from their native countries in contrast to the African Americans who have not been able to advance their skill sets “from centuries of slavery and educational exclusion.”
There were days in the early 20th century in California when, at times, Asians faced harsher restrictions than the local blacks. The Naturalization Act of 1970, the Ku Klux Klan, and The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 all restricted Asians during the time when black people “were eligible for citizenship and suffrage.”
Despite the institutionalized discrimination against Asian Americans, we currently face less-severe prejudice relative to the black population, which allows us to be almost as socially mobile as the Caucasians — but still not at parity.
Institutionalized discrimination is more severe for other minorities. A study shows that “education itself does not equalize wealth accumulation opportunities among Black and White families.”
This is because “Blacks continue to be hampered by discrimination in both hiring and salary.” This emphasizes that being white serves as an advantage for social mobility.
The study indicates the substantial difference between the median net wealth of non-Hispanic college-educated white households compared to the college-educated black households.
Compared to the $55,419 median salary for college-educated white families, black families earned $36,260. The mean salary demonstrates an even greater difference: $235,252 for white families and $65,755 for black families.
This data asserts that salaries differ by race and that the distribution of salaries is greatly skewed with a higher number of outliers in the white population. This study not only raises a question of differences in social mobility by race but also confirms that white people are more likely to reach levels of exceptionally high salaries.
Despite society’s preconception of education as a tool to narrow the racial wealth gap, the black community faces a severe economic divide. Additionally, data shows that black kids in the middle class are twice as likely than middle-class white kids to demonstrate downward social mobility.
This proves that racial disparities exist even within the same social class.
Further disparities are shown for college graduates, as “four years after earning a bachelor’s degree, the average black graduate has $52,726 of student loan debt, compared to $28,006 for white.”
Because the differences in opportunities and treatment across racial groups are ludicrously obvious, we subconsciously learn to act more “white” or to assimilate to the group of people who have advantages, privileges, and successes.
Regardless of what minority group people fall in, these attempts to act more “American” stems from the desire to align with the image of a successful individual in America.
Racism continues to be the largest problem in achieving social mobility. Since the difference in social mobility by race is blatantly massive, as shown by research, people can easily examine the white advantage. As a result, similar to students adopting the institutional identity in exchange for their individuality, people may subconsciously start to idolize and conform to “the white identity.”
Another study illustrates this idea of conforming to the identity of the desired status. Because “symbolic meanings have been invested in objects on a personal and social level within human populations,” people utilize such objects to assert a status.
As an example, Ben and Jess, a Filipino couple, moved into a new middle-class neighborhood from a working-class neighborhood. In order to conform to the status and the expectations that follow, the couple expresses their status anxiety by constantly fixing their front yard to look like their neighbors’. They even went so far as to plant a “rare and expensive” tree as “a gesture of cultural superiority.”
In this case, the couple does not feel like a part of the middle-class neighborhood because of their background in the working class. Perhaps they even worry that their failure to conform to the middle class would negate their status.
The couple’s extensive effort into designing their yard to fit in with the rest of the middle-class neighborhood portrays the human tendency to conform to another group by forcing an inflated social image.
Likewise, I may realize my disadvantages in achieving social mobility due to my racial identity and may try to conform to another ethnic group by adopting their tastes and values. This speaks to why individuals of color are often found planting a “tree” that symbolizes assimilation and conformity.
3. As a native English speaker
One large tree that I’ve planted early in my life is one that asserts my fluency in English. I felt humiliated when people pointed out my accent; it made me unique, but different and still an outcast.
My desire to conform to my American peers was especially strong during my adolescence, and this desire and humiliation propelled me to work hard in perfecting my enunciation and planting such a tree.
Language is a large aspect of culture that is often used as a tool to assimilate to another culture. There is a study that took place in Australia, where 60% of the entire population is composed of immigrants, establishing a cultural melting pot.
This study focused on eighteen practitioners, labeled as NESB (non-English speaking background) workers; he collected voluntary participants, interviewed them individually, and facilitated group discussions.
Disclaimer: Because participants volunteered to be a part of the study, the results of the study may be vulnerable to volunteer bias, presenting a rather extreme perspective that may not apply to the majority. In addition, eighteen participants may be an inadequately-sized sample to generalize this study’s findings to the whole population, but still offers a thought-provoking perspective of the bilingual social workers in Australia.
To begin, language is a cultural capital, possessing an intangible value in assisting people in the workplace, offering multiple life opportunities. People often perceive bilingualism in a positive light, but the study shows that bilingualism hinders people’s opportunities if English fluency is obstructed by an accent.
The simple classification of non-native speakers, the “nomenclature [as NESB,] accentuates what people are not, rather than what they can do, and downplays the value of bilinguality.” The participants, therefore, felt the pressure to learn English, to view English “as a marketable commodity,” and to utilize the language to fit the cultural standards and expectations of the English-speaking country. One participant who emigrated from Laos to Australia claimed:
“And I think especially now, with Americans speaking English, and probably one of the most powerful nations in the world and very rich too, they can turn things around to the way they want…And I guess that we all have to learn to live with that.”
The pressure to learn English is another pressure to assimilate to the Americans, enhanced by the U.S.’s powerful status in the global world. Society mandates people of color to master English beyond the level of adequacy.
Native speakers experience a certain level of advantage and superiority over the non-native speakers in terms of being able to easily assert surface-level professionalism and credibility through their “perfect” English language.
Although the U.S. is also a cultural melting pot, this problem persists. The study of an accent’s impact on people’s chances of upward social mobility also testifies to society’s preference for certain individuals.
It is almost as if minorities, in order to become as successful as the Caucasians, need to borrow the white identity in workplaces.
4. As a non-White American
In order to understand the idea that ethnic groups regularly feel the pressure to adopt the white identity, it is crucial to be aware that different ethnic groups have contrasting values and priorities.
The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality released a report in 2016 that proposed various determinants of economic mobility, such as their parents’ education level and their attitudes toward family life. Especially in the relatively rigorous and challenging educational environment in America, children who are raised in an enriched environment can focus on school.
Students with parents who prioritize education are typically more socially mobile due to higher incentives and resources. The report shows that about 55 percent of Canadian children whose parents have no more than a high school diploma are read to on a daily basis. This statistic is almost equivalent to that of American children whose parents have college degrees, which implies the difference in family-work balance and the cultural differences between the U.S. and other countries.
Canadian parents may spend more time with their children, whereas American parents tend to push their children to focus their time on schoolwork and extracurricular activities that build their college application.
American values may negatively influence children of color and their opportunity to succeed as they grow up with the knowledge that their family’s expectations contradict those of their environment.
The difference contributes to the immense psychological destruction that American values may have on other ethnic communities. Despite how I may act to mask my values that differ from the American values, I have realized that the resulting cognitive dissonance only harms my mental health more progressively.
Throughout this research process, I have recognized the significance and inseparability of both my values and those of society. While I hold on to my core Asian values, I still need to endorse the American values if I want to be successful in this country.
Due to our society’s inflexibility, children and students of color carry the country’s burden. Children who grow up under circumstances in which their family’s values disagree with the American values, turn to other sources of influence, such as the media, and start to idolize the white lifestyle.
Interviewee A, a first-generation Hispanic student at Babson College, attests to this idea. She claims that as a first-generation student, she has felt like an exception because her mother has constantly pushed her in all areas of her life, including education.
She found that even the small overlapping of values between her mother and those of white parents put her to an advantage in terms of being motivated to accomplish and do well in school. She also did not lag behind during the college application process because of her family’s focus on education.
Despite this, she found herself watching the Disney Channel and growing to adore the “white lifestyle.” She mentions:
“On Disney Channel, they always had big houses and friends and families that supported them. I’ve always wanted what rich white people had. We don’t have Hispanics that are completely living that life.”
She also added that telenovelas that may showcase wealthy Hispanics still focused heavily on drama rather than the actual lifestyle.
The American ideals emphasized on media in the U.S.overwhelmed her young identity with the desire to have what white Americans had. Even today, her success is driven by the idea to achieve the white lifestyle: a big home with supportive friends and family.
No matter how parents of color may try to enforce the American values, my non-Caucasian peers and I still find ourselves replacing our culture with American ideals.
5. As a woman in business
On top of being a racial minority, I am a minority as a woman in the field of business. My gender in this field adds to the massive amount of societal pressure I feel as I strive for success.
Women face challenges that most men do not face. Only up to 16% of C-level jobs or board seats are taken up by women. Even in non-profit sectors, only 20% of the leaders are women.
Dr. Anthony P. Carnevale and his fellow professors at Georgetown University adds to this argument that women with bachelor’s degrees in art earn $520,000 less over the course of their careers than men with the same degree and major. In business, if both a man and a woman have a Bachelor’s degree, the man will make, on average, $1.1 million more over his career.
There are other behavioral differences between men and women. Men tend to attribute their successes to themselves while women attribute it to external factors. In fact, women do not tend to negotiate for their first salaries, which leads to a dramatic difference in the long run.
These behavioral differences are attributed to the feeling of guilt we, as women, carry throughout our professional endeavors. For example, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg claims that, before boarding on the flight to make her speech at TEDTalk, she found herself calming down her daughter who pleaded with her to stay.
“Whether we have a family, a husband, a significant other, or even a plan to have any of those, we feel guilty as women when we recognize the societal expectations of us as caregivers. When we feel guilty, subconsciously we stop raising our hands, stop sitting at the center table, and stop voicing our opinions.”
The psychological obstacles that women face as they ask for a promotion or for higher pay are constantly larger than that of men. As Sandberg says, “No one gets the promotion they think they deserve.” The way women and men assert themselves in the business world differs significantly.
Women often feel like they need to prove themselves in different lines of work and to show their male counterparts that they are worthy of being present. This psychological trend amongst women exemplifies the reason men make more income and dominate higher positions in corporations.
Women need to believe in their competence. At Babson College, a business school where all first-year students create teams and start their own companies, 51.9% of the CEOs happened to be females in one particular class year.
This case study at a small business school proves that young women are capable of achieving high positions — without the expectations of being a caregiver.
Simultaneously, the privilege of our birth lottery undermines internal diversity in all aspects and decreases our complacency and self-confidence as individuals.
A letter to myself
If young students like myself were to prioritize our economic success over our individual uniqueness, our status anxiety and excessive desire to conform will increase.
This incentivizes us to deviate from our culture and plant “trees” that are inconsistent with ourselves yet aligned with the perfect recipe for social mobility.
While inequality within students striving for social mobility is apparent, some anecdotes and studies, in addition to my personal experience, demonstrate that the recipe for upward social mobility encourages us to become someone who we are not.
As students, we believe what we hear when our society tells us that education is the answer. We constantly strive for success, but we realize that there are constantly people above us no matter how far we climb up.
During these day-to-day struggles of realizing that certain people have advantages or can take shortcuts around the efforts that we have to make, we find ourselves finding problems within ourselves. We want our efforts rather than our identity to shape our success, but in today’s world, society has constructed a recipe for success.
No matter how hard we try to follow that recipe, some aspects of ourselves refuse to fit in. We may work on changing the alterable aspects of us, such as the connections we make, the education we pursue, the persona we embody, but deep inside we question our identity and realize that we may have lost the birth lottery.
When others’ identities become the recipe for success, we resist our own and instead embrace those of others.
So if my family and mentors tell me again that “typical” American experiences will help me grow, I can tell them that they are wrong.
Instead of growing as an individual, I have simply learned to take on the persona of somebody else. | https://medium.com/an-injustice/how-i-feel-about-my-birth-lottery-b3525b1d90a0 | ['Project Hbe'] | 2020-12-21 22:42:30.815000+00:00 | ['Women', 'Self', 'Education', 'Culture', 'Diversity'] |
Null Safety in Kotlin | Null Safety in Kotlin
The definitive guide to handling null references in Kotlin
Overview
In this article, we’ll look into the null safety in Kotlin.
Any programming language which has the concept of null reference throws a NullPointerException. It has been referred to as a billion-dollar mistake. (Wiki)
Nullable and Non-Nullable Type
Kotlin aims at eliminating the risk of NullPointerException. It distinguishes between nullable and non-nullable references as a part of its type system.
In Kotlin, all variables are non-nullable by default. We cannot assign a null value to a variable because it’ll throw a compilation error:
var country: String = "India" country = null //compilation error
To define a nullable variable, we must append a question mark(?) to the type declaration:
var city: String? = "Kolkata" city = null
We can call a method or access a property on a non-nullable variable. However, in the case of nullable variables, we need to handle the null case explicitly. Otherwise, it will throw a compilation error since Kotlin knows that the variable contains null references:
val a : String = country.length val b : String = city.length //compilation error
Let’s look at the different ways how we can handle null references safely in Kotlin.
Working With Nullable Types
Null Check
We can use the if-else expression to explicitly check for nullable variables. This option works only where the variable is immutable. Depending on the complexity of the conditions, this can also lead to nested expressions.
Let’s look at an example:
val city: String? = "Kolkata"
return if (city != null) {
city.length
} else {
null
}
Safe Call Operator ( ?. )
Kotlin has a safe call operator(?.) to handle null references. This operator executes any action only when the reference has a non-null value. Otherwise, it returns a null value. The safe call operator combines a null check along with a method call in a single expression.
Let’s see how to use a safe call operator:
val country: String? = "India"
assertEquals(5, country?.length) val city: String? = null
assertNull(city?.length)
We can also use the safe call operator for multiple chain calls:
val country: Country? = Country(City("Kolkata", "003"))
val code: String? = country?.city?.code
assertEquals("003", code)
The chain calls return null if any of the properties are null:
val country: Country? = Country(null)
val code: String? = country?.city?.code
assertNull(code)
Using let() Method
We can use the let() method along with the safe call operator to act on a non-nullable variable:
val cities: List<String?> = listOf("Kolkata", null, "Mumbai")
var name: List<String?> = emptyList()
for (city in cities) {
city?.let { name = name.plus(it) }
}
return name assertEquals(2, name.size)
Using also() Method
We can use the also() method to execute additional operations like logging and printing of the non-nullable variables. This method can be used in a chain with let() or run() method.
Here's how we can use also() method along with let() method:
val cities: List<String?> = listOf("Kolkata", null, "Mumbai")
var name: List<String?> = emptyList()
for (city in cities) {
city?.let {
name = name.plus(it)
it
}?.also { println("Logging the value: $it") }
}
return name assertEquals(2, name.size)
Using run() Method
We can use the run() method to execute some operations on a non-nullable reference. This method operates using this reference and returns the value of the lambda result:
val countries: List<String?> = listOf("India", null, "Germany")
var name: List<String?> = emptyList()
for (country in countries) {
country?.run {
name = name.plus(this)
this
}?.also { println("Logging the value: $it") }
}
return name assertEquals(2, name.size)
Elvis Operator ( ?: )
We can use the Elvis operator(?:) to return a default value only if the original variable has a null value. If the left-side expression of the Elvis operator has a non-nullable value, then it is returned. Otherwise, the right-side expression is returned.
Let’s take a look at how the Elvis operator works:
val country: Country? = Country(City("New Delhi", null))
val result = country?.city?.code ?: "Not available" assertEquals("Not available", result)
We can use the Elvis operator with a safe call operator to invoke a method or property of the variable:
val country: Country? = Country(City("Mumbai", "002"))
val result = country?.city?.code ?: "Not available" assertEquals("002", result)
We can also use throw and return expression in the right-side expression of the Elvis operator. So instead of default values, we can throw specific exceptions in the right-side expressions of the Elvis operator:
val country: Country? = Country(City("Chennai", null))
val result = country?.city?.code ?: throw IllegalArgumentException("Not a valid code") assertThrows<IllegalArgumentException> { result }
Not Null Assertion Operator ( !! )
We can use the not-null assertion operator(!!) to explicitly throw a NullPointerException. This operator converts any reference to its non-nullable type and throws an exception if the reference has a null value.
Let’s have a look into how we can throw NullPointerException using not-null assertion operator(!!):
val country: String? = null
val result : Int = country!!.length assertThrows<NullPointerException> { result }
However, if the reference has a non-nullable value, then it is executed successfully:
val country: String? = "India"
val result : Int = country!!.length assertEquals(5, result)
The not-null assertion operator should be used carefully since it’s a potential sign of a NullPointerException. We should avoid using multiple non-null assertions like the following since it makes it harder to debug which property is null:
country!!.city!!.code
We should always try to use safe call operator in such cases to ensure NullPointerException doesn’t occur:
country?.city?.code
Nullability in Collections
Kotlin collections are non-nullable by default. To define a collection of nullable types in Kotlin, we have to append question mark(?) to the type declaration:
val countries: List<String?> = listOf("India", null, "Germany", "Russia", null)
We can use the following way to define a nullable collection in Kotlin:
var countries: List<String>? = listOf("India", "Germany", "Russia")
countries = null
Filtering Nullable Types
We can filter a list that contains nullable values to return only the non-nullable values using the filterNotNull() method.
Let’s have a look at an example:
val countries: List<String?> = listOf("India", null, "Germany", "Russia", null)
val result: List<String> = countries.filterNotNull() assertEquals(3, result.size)
assertEquals("Russia", result[2])
Conclusion
In this article, we look into the various ways to handle nullable references in Kotlin.
The code for these examples is available on GitHub. | https://medium.com/swlh/null-safety-in-kotlin-88298e64a1dc | ['Anirban Chatterjee'] | 2020-10-07 21:51:02.441000+00:00 | ['Kotlin', 'Software Engineering', 'Functional Programming', 'Programming', 'Null Safety'] |
The One Thing We Can All Agree on: Importance of Money | Few would contest the statement that money has been one of the most important catalysts in the evolution of civilizations. From cattle and sheep to wampum beads, to precious metals and eventually fiat, societies around the globe have always sought to create an effective medium of exchange in order to boost business.
A perfect illustration of the importance of money can be seen in Saifedean Ammous’s recent The Bitcoin Standard, or Yuval Noah Harari’s bestselling Sapiens, which explores money as one of the ‘great unifiers,’ alongside religion and empires. Money as a force that unites is a concept we’ve witnessed for millennia. Indeed, even during the times of the Crusades, both Muslims and Christians happily used the opposing side’s coins, despite these being adorned with the prophets of their enemies — gold was widely accepted due to relative scarcity and the fact that it was (and still is) impossible to synthesize.
There’s a fascinating game theory dynamic at play with money — if a given form of currency is valuable solely to one group, it will, by extension, become valuable to trading partners involved with said group. Consider the case of the Americas: prior to the arrival of the Spaniards, the Native Americans did not perceive gold to have any value. It was only upon understanding the value that the resource had in Spain that they changed their tune — the metal rapidly gained utility (and subsequent value) as it allowed them to purchase innumerable products with just small amounts of gold.
It’s easy to draw some parallels between traditional conceptions of what makes materials ideal means of exchange with the burgeoning field of digital assets. Constraints such as divisibility, portability, and potential for counterfeiting evaporate as stores of value and mediums of exchange migrate to cyberspace. It would be absurd to overlook these digital assets, or to ignore the role they’ll inevitably play in the constantly evolving markets.
One of the most interesting properties that we’re focused on at OpenFinance Network is liquidity — that is, ensuring that there are always participants available to purchase or sell it, making the asset easily accessible on the market. The example of gold is an apt one, given that it is recognized around the world and has value to all, thus making it easy to exchange for goods or services.
The big challenge with liquidity is finding a suitable pool of buyers and sellers. Blockchain technology allows for the seamless and trustless transfer of digital assets around the world in a matter of seconds, and could ensure that this pool extends to 7 billion plus people. That’s exactly what we aim to facilitate with our offering through the OpenFinance Network. The emerging space lacks refined UX/UI and services to make digital securities available to the more technophobic. There’s still a degree of familiarity required to transact “on-chain,” which may deter many from getting involved. We want to put an end to this, which is why we’re building an easy-to-use, intuitive platform for the trading of security tokens.
If money truly is one of the great unifiers, we need to ensure that it’s fit for purpose, particularly as its next iteration unfolds in cyberspace. New forms of money need to be understood, appreciated and subsequently made accessible to everyone. It’s time to get started.
As always, if you’re not already, join the conversation on Telegram and follow us on Twitter to stay up to date on all the latest developments with OFN.
###
Juan M. Hernandez is the Founder and CEO of OpenFinance Network, the trading platform for security tokens and other alternative assets. Juan is a serial entrepreneur, technologist, and polymath experienced in financial markets, exchanges, and blockchain technology. He holds a CS degree from Northwestern University and an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management.
If you enjoyed this post, please “clap” 50X in the bottom left corner so it will be shared with more people. | https://medium.com/openfinance/the-one-thing-we-can-all-agree-on-importance-of-money-dafa5c31666e | ['Juan M. Hernandez'] | 2018-10-15 16:04:33.424000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Ethereum', 'Money', 'Currency Trading', 'Blockchain Technology'] |
Why Relying on Competitive Advantage Will Never Work in Business | Why Relying on Competitive Advantage Will Never Work in Business
Store employees stand in front of a screen displaying iPhones during a preview event at the new Apple Store Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York, U.S., July 28, 2016. Photo by Andrew Kelly—Reuters
The Entrepreneur Insiders network is an online community where the most thoughtful and influential people in America’s startup scene contribute answers to timely questions about entrepreneurship and careers. Today’s answer to the question: “What important lesson can transform every entrepreneur’s business for the better?” is written by Suresh Vasudevan, CEO of Nimble Storage.
Anyone who has spent at least five minutes on the Internet has encountered the “one weird trick.” These crude ads seem to infect almost every corner of the web and promise a strange, simple solution to cure diabetes, melt belly fat, and produce any number of additional minor miracles, if only the viewer will click through.
But the “one weird trick” isn’t confined to the world of sketchy Internet advertisements. It’s been a prevailing theory of business success for decades that’s better known as “competitive advantage,” the idea that truly excelling in a single business dimension is the golden ticket to success. Whether it be technology, marketing, sales, customer service, or some other area, this single dimension of greatness is supposed to give a company the wherewithal it needs to beat the competition.
Venture capitalists, for example, have typically included it as one of their “must-haves” before investing. They often call it “unfair advantage” and, most of the time, it translates into a patented technology that competitors cannot easily copy. But competitive advantage doesn’t have to revolve around technology. Microsoft, for example, has long been lauded as having some of the best sales teams in the business, winning in a wide array of markets. Apple receives praise for its unparalleled consumer-oriented design, shipping intuitive products that interact effortlessly with one another. And Coca-Cola has a well-deserved reputation as one of the world’s greatest marketers, absolutely dominating the beverage world.
I hate to throw cold water on such a well-worn piece of advice, but in my experience, the notion that competitive advantage will lead to business success is simply not true. In fact, “competitive advantage” works just about as well as all of those “one weird tricks” — which is to say, it doesn’t work at all.
So, what has changed? Why is this long-held belief no longer true? In today’s highly networked and socially connected world, any single competitive advantage is short-lived as others understand and eventually leapfrog on that dimension. This requires a company to continually invest in extending — or at least maintaining — its competitive advantage. What compounds this problem is the accelerating pace of innovation in every aspect of how a company does business — whether it is in supply chain management or customer support or product development. So, even as a company invests in the area where it has a strong competitive advantage, it needs to ensure that this competitive advantage is not negated by its competitors out-innovating in other areas.
Superior technology, for example, will soon be overtaken in today’s fast-paced innovation environment. As dominating as the iPhone was for its first few years, the Android mobile operating system today controls nearly 90% of the market, according to a new Strategy Analytics report. A crack marketing team won’t carry the day over the long term if the product can’t keep up with market demands. No one can deny that AOL’s marketing blitz in the 1990s made it the №1 Internet company in the world. By 2000, its stock had enough heft to buy Time-Warner in a more-than $160 billion deal. But the advent of Google, the cable modem, and wireless Internet access rapidly made AOL’s service almost entirely irrelevant.
In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that even the companies that seem to win in the crowded and ever-innovating tech industry, thanks to a so-called “unfair advantage,” actually owe their position not just to one stellar aspect of execution, but rather to well-rounded operational strengths across the board.
Take Apple, for instance. Apple’s strengths don’t lie just in design. Many of the company’s advertising campaigns were so innovative, they have become iconic, and Apple is certainly no slouch when it comes to operating not only a large chain of retail stores, but also one of the most complex and robust electronics supply chains in the world. Its innovative marketers and top-notch customer support personnel have built a brand that commands unparalleled loyalty. If Apple had to rely on its design expertise alone, the company would never have become the giant it is today.
There is no getting around it: Entrepreneurs must do the very hard work of building a company that excels in several operational facets and is at least competent in all of the rest. In the early phases as a startup, while it may be appropriate to seek an unfair competitive advantage in one or two areas that really matter, that is not enough to build a company. So the question for a startup should not be, “How do we create an unfair advantage?” Rather, entrepreneurs should be asking, “How do we create a model in which the company will excel across many facets?”
There is no “one weird trick” to winning in business.
Vasudevan is not a direct investor of the companies mentioned in this article.
If you’d like to read more articles like this, recommend this one by clicking the heart below. | https://insiders.fortune.com/why-relying-on-competitive-advantage-will-never-work-in-business-43040446a3f9 | ['Suresh Vasudevan'] | 2017-04-27 18:30:01.166000+00:00 | ['Competitive Advantage', 'Apple', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Entrepreneur', 'Microsoft'] |
Kotlin — Unit Testing Classes Without Leaking Public API! | Introduction
Kotlin is an amazing new up-and-coming language. It’s very actively developed and has a ton of features that make it very appealing.
It’s been steadily gaining market share ever since Google added Android Development support for it (back in 2017) and made it the preferred language for such development exactly one year ago (May 2019)
For any Java developer coming into the language, spoiler alert, there is one big surprise that awaits you — the package-private visibility modifier is missing. It doesn’t exist.
Access Modifiers
An access modifier is the way to set the accessibility of a class/method/variable in object-oriented languages. It’s instrumental in facilitating proper encapsulation of components.
Java
In Java, we have four access modifiers for any methods inside a class:
void doSomething() - the default modifier, we call this package-private . Any such declarations are only visible within the same package (hence the name, private for the package)
- the default modifier, we call this . Any such declarations are only visible within the same (hence the name, private for the package) private void doSomething() — the private modifier, declarations of which are visible only within the same class
— the private modifier, declarations of which are visible only within the same class protected void doSomething() — declarations only visible within the package or all subclasses.
— declarations only visible within the package or all subclasses. public void doSomething() — declarations are visible everywhere.
This wide choice of options allows us to tightly-control what our class exposes. It also gives us greater control over what constitutes a unit of testable code and what isn’t. See the following crude example:
JSomethingDoer, doing things since 2020. Source: https://github.com/stanislavkozlovski/unit-test-kt/blob/master/src/main/java/doer/something/JSomethingDoer.java
We can only directly test three of the five methods above. Because doSecondLittleThing() and feelingAmbitious() are private, our unit tests literally cannot call those methods, hence we cannot test them directly.
The only way to test them is through the package-private method maybeDoSecondLittleThing() , which can be called in our unit tests because they’re in the same package as the class they’re testing.
The package-private modifier comes very useful in this example, because it allows us to test the maybeDoSecondLittleThing() method directly!
Testing would be more cumbersome if we had to test all code paths of the maybeDoSecondLittleThing() method by calling the public doSomething() method.
The package-private modifier also ensures that we don’t leak any such internal methods to packages outside of this one.
Notice the different package.
Kotlin
Kotlin is a bit weirder in this regard. It also has four modifiers:
private fun doSomething() — vanilla private modifier
— vanilla private modifier protected fun doSomething() — the same as Java’s protected — only visible within this class and subclasses.
— the same as Java’s protected — only visible within this class and subclasses. public fun doSomething() — visible everywhere
These three are pretty standard. I want to focus on the fourth one:
internal fun doSomething() — Internal declarations are visible anywhere inside the same module.
This is as good as public inside the same module, in that sense. Many small projects have no need for multiple modules, but they’re likely to have multiple packages.
There is basically no way to limit access to a Kotlin method to only be within the same package.
What does this mean? It means that we either need to make our methods private, thus making our testing life harder, or make them public, thus exposing unnecessary API to components in the same module.
Our same example from above, again in the doer.something package:
But this time, from the doer package, we can call every method:
That’s unfortunate. We don’t want to have a leaky API just because we want to have better tests.
How do we solve it?
Solution 1 — Refactor!
Us refactoring our code. Photo by Oleksandr Baiev on Unsplash
It seems to be commonly believed that we shouldn’t test methods that are/should be private. The idea being that:
all private methods are reachable by the public methods
the public methods expose the interface/contract of a class
private methods are implementation details, and we want to test the class’ functionality, not implementation
While that makes sense in theory, reality is not as black-and-white.
Regardless, you should treat any need to test non-public methods as a code smell.
Re-evaluate your design and rethink whether it makes sense to refactor the logic around such that you get the same test coverage by testing public interface contracts, rather than implementation details.
In some cases, though, it is cleaner and more maintainable to get full test coverage by testing each tiny private method code thoroughly, rather than testing each conditional branch via public methods or creating unnecessary boilerplate (e.g additional classes).
Solution 2 — Reflection
Photo by Simon Zhu on Unsplash
An alternative solution is to keep the methods private and use the language’s reflection features to call into said private methods. | https://stanislavkozlovski.medium.com/kotlin-unit-testing-classes-without-leaking-public-api-871468695447 | ['Stanislav Kozlovski'] | 2020-12-07 06:53:27.296000+00:00 | ['JVM', 'Java', 'Kotlin', 'Unit Testing', 'Git'] |
My Year Without Caffeine | My Year Without Caffeine
Photo by tabitha turner on Unsplash
I had two resolutions for 2020: to go vegetarian and to give up caffeine. I’ve succeeded at both, but I had very different experiences reaching these goals.
When it came to going vegetarian, I struggled during the first few months but soon found my groove. The longer that I’ve gone without meat, the happier that I’ve been with my decision. I had been wrestling with the morality of eating meat for years, and I feel much better now that I’ve removed it from my diet.
With caffeine, I’ve had nearly the opposite experience. I used to drink many cups of both coffee and soda every day. When I first quit caffeine, I was happy with the change right away. Although I went through some very mild withdrawal symptoms (a headache and light confusion), I also experienced immediate benefits. Most notably, my sleep improved and my anxiety decreased.
I had anxiety trouble my entire life, but for some reason it never occurred to me that caffeine could be a contributing factor. I was thrilled with the improvements I saw simply from cutting soda and coffee from my life. It felt like a total game changer.
Then, as the year went on, the anxiety came back. Of course, this has been a strange, anxiety-inducing year for everyone. So, I’ve had a lot of trouble telling exactly what the effect of cutting caffeine has been. Did it really decrease my anxiety in the beginning, or was it just the placebo effect? If I was still drinking caffeine, would I be even more anxious now?
My sleep has also been poorer lately. It makes me wonder whether I was blaming caffeine for bad sleep when something else was really the issue. Alternatively, caffeine might have been just one of multiple causes for poor sleep.
2020 is a frustrating year for having made life changes. With our entire society in a state of flux, it’s just impossible to judge the real effects that removing caffeine has had.
Looking Ahead
I’m definitely going to remain caffeine-free for the next two weeks, if for no other reason than so that I can say I went an entire year without it. After that, I’m not as sure.
Although I’ve experienced some definite benefits and a few possible improvements, the truth is that I still really miss the taste of coffee. Although I don’t plan to go back to drinking it daily, I might end up drinking it from time to time.
I also can’t help comparing caffeine with another habit that I gave up: Several years ago I quit drinking alcohol after a decade-long struggle with substance abuse. As an alcoholic, I often told myself that I’d “cut back” only to end up ramping right back up to my normal amount.
I’m a little worried the same thing would happen with coffee, although caffeine is simply not addictive in the same way that alcohol is. Although caffeine can cause a mild physical dependence, I never felt “hooked” on it like I did with beer.
I often visit an online forum for people who have stopped drinking caffeine and another for people who have quit drinking. A stark difference that I’ve noticed is that far fewer people who quit caffeine stick with it. I suspect that my experience might be common: initial enthusiasm, followed by ambivalence.
If you had asked me half a year ago, I would have said that I’d never go back to drinking coffee, but now I’m on the fence.
Was It Worth It?
Regardless of what I decide in the future, I’m still glad that I gave caffeine up this year. Caffeine is the most ubiquitous psychoactive substance in the world, and it’s easy to take it for granted. I was drinking tons of coffee and soda every day without thinking twice about its affect on me.
Ending my caffeine habit got me thinking about the way these drinks affect my anxiety and my sleep. Even though I don’t have all the answers yet, I’m at least a step closer to understanding this substance’s effects on me.
It’s also had the more concrete effect of saving me money. Although I wasn’t breaking the bank on coffee and soda, I still saved around one thousand dollars this year by replacing them with water. That’s a significant chunk of change.
Two other minor improvements that I’ve noticed are better breath and whiter teeth. These are very hard to measure though, so it might just be in my head.
It’s also worth noting that this wasn’t an incredibly hard resolution to achieve. Although I miss the taste of coffee, it didn’t feel like any real struggle to give it up. I never had the type of cravings that I dealt with when quitting alcohol.
I worried that going without caffeine would ruin my concentration or my ability to get work done, but neither of those have been a problem. Although we often think of caffeine as a productivity booster, I’ve done just fine without it.
Overall, I think this experience was worth the time and moderate effort that it took. For anyone who thinks they might be drinking too much caffeine, I’d recommend giving it a try. You might not find all the answers, but you’ll at least gain a better understanding of the role caffeine is playing in your life. | https://medium.com/@benyaclark/my-year-without-caffeine-a9fae6f6a40d | ['Benya Clark'] | 2020-12-18 15:41:22.265000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Health', 'Coffee', 'Mental Health', 'Caffeine'] |
I Wish My Boss Had Empathy | I Wish My Boss Had Empathy
Screenshot of my resignation email (Source: By Author)
We all went into lockdown in 2020. My workplace became toxic because the managers weren’t yet ready to calm their egos.
My boss asked me the reason for resigning, and I told her the truth — the leadership in this workplace isn’t competent, and I mentioned a specific incident to support my statement.
There was another employee misbehaving with me openly in the official WhatsApp group. It happened twice. Prior to going WFH, I had already complained about the behavior of this employee to HR.
Apparently, there were no steps taken.
I also mentioned to my boss that I have issues of anxiety, and I have undergone therapy too. I don’t like confronting people repeatedly for the same issue.
To which she replied, “Oh oh oh, you should do yoga. You should follow XYZ on youtube for meditation. Your generation is not doing well, everyone is having a mental health issue.”
(Ok boomer?)
I didn’t expect compassion from her. But I also didn’t expect shame, pity, and unsolicited advice from someone.
I am self-employed now. If and when I hire someone to work with/for me, I know exactly what I won’t do. | https://medium.com/@dipanshurawal/i-wish-my-boss-had-empathy-cc147e8c5cdd | ['Dipanshu Rawal'] | 2020-12-16 15:10:25.798000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Corporate Culture', 'Jobs', 'Empathy', 'Life Lessons'] |
(HD) !!! 唐人街探案3 [Detective Chinatown 3] 2021 完整版 在线免费 | 继曼谷、纽约之后，东京再出大案。唐人街神探唐仁（王宝强 饰）、秦风（刘昊然 饰）受侦探野田昊（妻夫木聪 饰）的邀请前往破案。“CRIMASTER世界侦探排行榜”中的侦探们闻讯后也齐聚东京，加入挑战，而排名第一Q的现身，让这个大案更加扑朔迷离，一场亚洲最强神探之间的较量即将爆笑展开……
发布日期: 2020–01–24
运行时间: 136 分钟
类型: 动作, 喜剧, 悬疑
明星: Baoqiang Wang, Liu Haoran, Zhang Zifeng, Satoshi Tsumabuki, Tony Jaa
导演: Jie Du, Nathan Wang, Stanley Cheung, Chen Sicheng, Chen Sicheng
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In 1889, on November 1 in Gotha, Germany Anna Therese Johanne Hoch, who later would be known as Hannah Hoch was born. Being the eldest of five children, the girl was brought up in a comfortable and quiet environment of the small town. Her parents, a supervisor in an insurance company and an amateur painter sent her to Girl’s High school. However, at the age of 15 Hannah had to quit studying for the long six years to take care of her newborn sister. Only in 1912 she continued her education with Harold Bengen in School of Applied Arts, mastering glass design. As the World War I broke up Hannah returned to the native town to work in the Red Cross.
The first years after war the young woman recommenced her studying, getting to know graphic arts. 1915 was highlighted by an acquaintance with an Austrian artist Raoul Hausmann, which grew into the long-lasting romantic relationship and involvement in Berlin Dada movement. For ten years till 1926 Hoch worked in Berlin’s major publisher of newspapers and magazines. Her task was to design embroidering, knitting and crocheting patterns for the booklets.
Being on vacation with her beloved in 1918, Hannah discovered ‘the principle of photomontage in cut-and-paste images that soldiers sent to their families’ (National gallery of Art). This find affected greatly on her artistic production, and she created mass-media photographs comprising the elements of photomontage and handwork patterns, thus combining traditional and modern culture. Her prior preoccupation was to represent the ‘new woman’ of the Weimar Republic with new social role and given freedoms.
Hoch was the only woman in Berlin Dada, who took part in all kinds of events and exhibitions showcasing her socially critical works of art. Till 1931 she participated in exhibitions but with the rise of National Social regime was forbidden to present her creative work. Till her last breath in 1978 Hannah Hoch lived and worked in the outskirts of Berlin-Heiligensee.
The piece of art which is going to be analyzed in this research is ‘The beautiful girl’ designed in 1919–1920. It combines the elements of technology and females. In the middle of the picture one can clearly see a woman dressed in a modern bathing suit with a light bulb on her head which probably serves as a sun umbrella. In the background a large advertisement with a woman’s hair-do on top is presented. Maud Lavin describes strange human as ‘she is part human, part machine, part commodity’ (Lavin). The woman is surrounded by the images of industrialization as tires, gears, signals and BMW logos. A woman’s profile with the cat eyes, untrusting and skeptical, in the upper right corner is eye-catching as well. This unusually large eye symbolizes DADA movement — a monocle, which is present in almost every Hoch’s work. The colour scheme does not offer rich palette of tints, including mostly black, white, orange and red pieces. The photo is surrounded by the BMW circles which add the spots of blue.
An apt description of the piece is given in the book ‘Cut with the Kitchen Knife’ and states that it is ‘a portrait of a modern woman defined by signs of femininity, technology, media and advertising’ (Lavin). In other words Hannah Hoch focused on the woman of the new age, free and keeping up with the fast-moving world. The artist promoted feministic ideas and from her point of view urbanization and modern technologies were meant to give hope to woman to gain equality of genders. With this photomontage she commented on how the woman was expected to combine the role of a wife and mother with the role of a worker in the industrialized world. The light bulb instead of a face shows that women were perceived as unthinking machines which do not question their position and can be turned on or off at any time at man’s will. But at the same time they were to remain attractive to satisfy men’s needs. The watch is viewed as the representation of how quickly women are to adapt to the changes.
In a nutshell, Hoch concentrated on two opposite visions of the modern woman: the one from the television screens — smoking, working, wearing sexy clothes, voting and the real one who remained being a housewife.
The beautiful girl’ is an example of the art within the DADA movement. An artistic and literal current began in 1916 as the reaction to World War I and spread throughout Northern America and Europe. Every single convention was challenged and bourgeois society was scandalized. The Dadaists stated that over-valuing conformity, classism and nationalism among modern cultures led to horrors of the World War I. In other words, they rejected logic and reason and turned to irrationality, chaos and nonsense. The first DADA international Fair was organized in Berlin in 1920 exposing a shocking discontentment with military and German nationalism (Dada. A five minute history).
Hannah Hoch was introduced to the world of DADA by Raoul Hausman who together with Kurt Schwitters, Piet Mondrian and Hans Richter was one of the influential artists in the movement. Hoch became the only German woman who referred to DADA. She managed to follow the general Dadaist aesthetic, but at the same time she surely and steadily incorporated a feminist philosophy. Her aim was to submit female equality within the canvass of other DADA’s conceptions.
Though Hannah Hoch officially was a member of the movement, she never became the true one, because men saw her only as ‘a charming and gifted amateur artist’ (Lavin). Hans Richter, an unofficial spokesperson shared his opinion about the only woman in their community in the following words: ‘the girl who produced sandwiches, beer and coffee on a limited budget’ forgetting that she was among the few members with stable income.
In spite of the gender oppressions, Hannah’s desire to convey her idea was never weakened. Difficulties only strengthened her and made her an outstanding artist. A note with these return words was found among her possessions: ‘None of these men were satisfied with just an ordinary woman. But neither were they included to abandon the (conventional) male/masculine morality toward the woman. Enlightened by Freud, in protest against the older generation. . . they all desired this ‘New Woman’ and her groundbreaking will to freedom. But — they more or less brutally rejected the notion that they, too, had to adopt new attitudes. . . This led to these truly Strinbergian dramas that typified the private lives of these men’ (Maloney).
Hoch’s technique was characterized by fusing male and female parts of the body or bodies of females from different epochs — a ‘traditional’ woman and ‘modern’, liberated and free of sexual stereotypes one. What’s more, combining male and female parts, the female ones were always more distinctive and vibrant, while the male ones took their place in the background. Hannah created unique works of art experimenting with paintings, collages, graphic and photography. Her women were made from bits and pieces from dolls, mannequins of brides or children as these members of the society were not considered as valuable.
Today Hannah Hoch is most associated with her famous photomontage ‘Cut with the kitchen knife DADA through the last Weimer Beer-Belly Cultural epoch of Germany’ (1919–1920). This piece of art highlights social confusion during the era of Weimar Republic, oppositionists and government radicals (Grabner). In spite of never being truly accepted by the rest of her society, this woman with a quiet voice managed to speak out loud her feministic message.
Looking at Hannah Hoch’s art for the first time I found it confusing, because couldn’t comprehend the meaning. It was quite obvious that every single piece and structure is a symbol of the era, its ideas and beliefs. However, after having learned about her life and constant endeavors to declare about female’s right, little by little I started to realize what’s what. As an object for research I chose ‘The beautiful girl’ as, to my mind, its theme and message intersects with the modern tendency: a successful, clever, beautiful and free woman has to become one in no time, cause the world is moving faster and faster. I enjoyed working with this artist as her example is inspiring and is worth following | https://medium.com/@mekijandakembang/hd-%E5%94%90%E4%BA%BA%E8%A1%97%E6%8E%A2%E6%A1%883-detective-chinatown-3-2021-%E5%AE%8C%E6%95%B4%E7%89%88-%E5%9C%A8%E7%BA%BF%E5%85%8D%E8%B4%B9-6645710a703 | ['Meki Janda Kembang'] | 2020-12-26 17:54:49.677000+00:00 | ['Comedy', 'Detective Chinatown3', 'China', 'Full Version', '2021'] |
7 Quotes to Read When You’re Going Through a Quarter-Life Crisis | 7 Quotes to Read When You’re Going Through a Quarter-Life Crisis
Photo by kevin laminto on Unsplash
If you’ve recently graduated from university or are hustling through the unpredictable period in life known as your 20s, you may be experiencing the phenomenon known as a quarter-life crisis: a period of intense soul searching and stress occurring in your mid-20s to early 30s, according to The Muse. Though less popular than its counterpart, the mid-life crisis, more young individuals seem to be experiencing this phase. According to a study by LinkedIn, 75% of 25–33-year-olds have experienced quarter-life crises. These crisis periods are triggered by an overall feeling of unease in all areas of life — from careers to relationships.
Personally, I was one of the few that seemed to experience an early-onset quarter-life crisis. It felt like as soon as I flipped the tassel and received the mighty college degree, I was launched straight into a downward spiral of confusion. Every aspect of my life felt slightly…uncertain. Questions loomed around my job, relationship, friendships, the city I was living in, and more.
I remember feeling so alone during this period in my life. No one was relating to what I was experiencing, and nothing substantial was coming up on my Google searches about the subject. I now realize that we’re all on our own journeys, and people may experience this at different times in their lives. And when a quarter-life crisis does hit, depression, uncertainty, and frustration may arise.
As I started to come up on the other end of my own quarter-life crisis, I acknowledged the importance of mindfulness, self-motivation, and honesty with yourself. The result? I became a personal development junkie. Reading quotes by my favorite authors and thought-leaders helped guide me through the darkness, becoming one of my favorite past times. And while a zing of inspiration won’t necessarily launch you into instant happiness and mental clarity, quotes have the power to move you in the right direction.
Here are 10 quotes that helped me conquer my quarter-life crisis to live a more happy, and aligned life. I think they hold the power to help you, too. | https://medium.com/the-ascent/7-quotes-to-read-when-youre-going-through-a-quarter-life-crisis-cd287be2c286 | ['Kelsey Kryger'] | 2020-12-20 19:03:12.898000+00:00 | ['Self', 'Quotes', 'Personal Growth', 'Personal Development', 'Mental Health'] |
Recycled | Recycled
Recycled is focused on sharing old stories made anew. | https://medium.com/recycled/fire-fly-3a3839afd817 | ['Finding Fina'] | 2020-11-18 02:19:24.545000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Poetry On Medium', 'Life', 'Love', 'Poem'] |
TryHackMe — Advent of Cyber 2 — Day 16 | Good afternoon everyone,
Today we will be tackling the 2nd scripting challenge. You may have noticed I didn’t create a page for Day 15. This was a relatively simple task with basic python questions that was complete within about 5 minutes. It is easy enough to follow along with on their page or with a little googling.
Anyhow the intro for today:
“Oh no! Santa 🎅 has taken off, leaving you — the faithful elves behind! Can you help find Santa’s location? Luckily, the elves are OSINT masters and remember a thing or two. Specifically, they remember: Santa has a webpage at MACHINE_IP/static/index.html to help lost elves find their way home. Santa never told the elves what port number the webserver is on. Can you find out?! This webpage has a link somewhere on it, hidden away so anyone that isn’t an elf can’t find it. Santa’s Sled has an API we can talk too. The key for the API is between 0 and 100, and it’s an odd number. But be careful! After an unknown number of attempts, Santa’s Sled will ban your IP address. Deploy the machine that is running Santa’s Sled and allow a couple of minutes for the target (MACHINE_IP) to start up. Using your Python skills from Day 15 to find the correct key for the API.”
Alright, lets start with the nmap.
nmap -sC -sV 10.10.99.243
Question 1: What is the port number for the web server?
From the nmap, that’s pretty simple.
Question 2: Without using enumerations tools such as Dirbuster, what is the directory for the API? (without the API key)
Alrighty, lets take a look at the site look around. On the source code of the main page, we find this:
If we navigate to the page, and test a number for the API key, this is the result.
Now it does warn us about this on the task information: But be careful! After an unknown number of attempts, Santa’s Sled will ban your IP address.
So I’ll take a look around some more and see if we can find anything related to this. Searching around I couldn’t find any clues. So I just made a quick Python script to run through odd numbers appended to the URL and print out if we get a hit. Hopefully we don’t get banned trying.
And I got banned after my first try.. had some scripting errors that weren’t test for above.. and once again, I failed to read the documentation on the python library for requests
New and improved script, checks for the correct error and also breaks if we get banned again just so I don’t waste more time.
And we got a hit!
Once we navigate to that page, we get the answer to the last 2 questions.
Anyhow, that was a decent reminder to test before you place into ‘production’ and also a good review on some simple Python fundamentals.
As always, best of luck. If you enjoy my content, feel free to add me on LinkedIn and let me know you saw the blog.
Until next time,
-3lduderino | https://medium.com/@3lduderino/tryhackme-advent-of-cyber-2-day-16-2eadb75a333f | ['Trent Darrow'] | 2020-12-19 12:04:05.231000+00:00 | ['Python', 'HTML', 'Beginner', 'Walkthrough', 'Tryhackme'] |
Are our leaders serious? | Many human rights violations stem from the state and legislative levels. More often than not Governments engage in practices that infringe on Human rights by allowing all issues to be leveraged politically. This issue is focused on in an article titled “UN’s Bachalet slams ‘reprehensible’ political leadership during the pandemic, sees hope in new US administration.”. The article is a summary of a press conference in honor of Human Rights Day in which Ms. Bachalet spoke. She highlighted the inability of states to separate issues in light of the pandemic, spoke to her optimism. Regarding the new US administration and spoke up against human rights violations in a certain country.
Image 1: President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris
Ms. Bachelet is dumbfounded by political leaders who continually underestimate the pandemic and its effects. She cites the fact that these leaders refer to herd immunity in the wake of thousands of lives being lost as if this were not a steep enough price to pay. She uses a metaphor to speak to this as a knife into the “heart of trust”. To support this, she quoted a Latin American example, wherein the leaders of various countries acted oblivious to the lethal pandemic and called out the leaders of Brazil for their myopic response to what the science about the virus was saying. Myanmar and Uganda are just two of many countries that used the pandemic as an opportunity to restrict democracy and postpone elections.
On a more positive note, Ms. Bachelet speaks of the new US administration in high regard. She notes that they too have politicized the pandemic. However, the new leadership has proposed a set of promises such as rejoining the Paris Climate agreement and increasing refugee resettlement numbers, moves which Bachelet thinks will work to make. Human rights a priority. China and Ethiopia have also been home to human rights violations, which have troubled Ms. Bachelet, and even expressed her wish for her office to visit China to evaluate the human rights climate. Tigray is another country wherein there is an unimaginable disregard for human rights. In Tigray, lootings, abductions, sexual violence against women, and even the forced joining of young men into militias to fight against their own communities are reported.
Ms. Bachelet is a staunch advocate for Human rights, giving credence for her position as high commissioner of human rights in the United Nations. She believes that the effects of the pandemic transcends mere than just politics and must be treated at that same level of seriousness. Leaders convoluting the concept of herd immunity as a reason for their inept response to the pandemic is unacceptable. While herd immunity is real it is absurd to think that we must allow millions to die to achieve such. Here trust is compromised. There is a level of comfort and trust that the state's members must have in their Government. These whimsical implications and decisions by Governments compromise trust and threatens civil unrest. It was commendable that she was not entirely down on the political system and was able to find some form of Good. The US has one of the worst covid situations in the world. In part due to their lackadaisical response to the virus, however, if the promises made by the Biden administration come to pass, the future is definitely something to look forward to. Ms. Bachelet sees it necessary to visit countries which. Violate human rights, more specifically China.
As already established in my other blog posts, I will always champion human rights causes. I am in full agreement with everything Ms. Bachelet proposed. The single most important issue in our world is the well-being of its inhabitants and not politics. Politicians must be honest in their intentions when they campaign. There is no form of economic benefit in the world which is worth more than life itself. Additionally, I believe that Ms. Bachelet's plans to visit China are very commendable as this is a proactive way to see first-hand the existing conditions in China and devise a plan to fix them and create a better atmosphere with regards to human rights. To end today's blog, I will quote Ms. Bachelet when she said “the world could vaccinate itself against hunger, poverty, inequality, and possibly even climate change, if it took human rights seriously. ‘. This is not to be taken literally but rather to mean that if human rights are given the important status and attention which it so deserves a lot of the calamities which plague our world today will be eradicated.
Bibliography
· 2021, UN’s Bachelet slams ‘reprehensible’ political leadership during pandemic, sees hope in new US administration, https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/12/1079622 | https://medium.com/@tjmaxter254/are-our-leaders-serious-b2622a6ad2a2 | ['Tyler John'] | 2021-05-07 04:25:20.897000+00:00 | ['USA', 'Corruption', 'Politics'] |
It Gets Dark Before the Light | “Where thoughts go, energy flows.” — a spiritual proverb
You were told not to be stupid, but you were already smart.
They convinced you that you needed to create an identity, but you were born perfect.
They said that you needed to exceed the average. It was a lie. Average people don’t exist in the real world.
You were unique. You were sorry that you were different.
They said they loved you, but they didn’t know how. (They tried their best.)
They demanded that you fight their demons for them because they failed. You tricked yourself into believing they were your demons.
If you were a boy, you needed to make enough money, said the people who failed at love.
If you were a girl, you were too fat or your hair was too curly, said the sad people who failed at love.
You bought the clothes. You bought the makeup. You bought the house. You bought everything that anyone would ever want, just in case.
You thought you were kind. No one bought it.
The ground beneath your feet began to shift violently. Doubt began to seep. You stopped believing you were smart. The days became long.
You took every relationship that had shown you unconditional love and smashed it to pieces.
You sighed with relief. There was nothing left to screw up.
You were finally alone. You let yourself cry. You stopped struggling. Everything became very still.
You thought you would die but your heart kept beating. It didn’t care what you thought.
Your heart stopped apologizing. It became quiet. You were still breathing.
You saw the upside to the blackness of the night. If you fell, you knew you could get up. It was hard at first.
You stopped fretting and you started exploring. You practiced falling.
From the dark, there comes the light. Thank god for the dark. Merry Christmas, everyone, and a happy New Year.
Call to action
Hit the ❤ button if you liked this article! You’ll help others find it.
Sign up for my free weekly newsletter (packed with thoughts I don’t share anywhere else) at janehwangbo.com. | https://medium.com/personal-growth/it-gets-dark-before-the-light-1bff1d97d2d8 | ['Jane Hwangbo'] | 2017-04-06 21:52:13.265000+00:00 | ['Love', 'Life Lessons', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Life', 'Poetry'] |
ทำไมถึงควรใช้ non-root ใน container | Just say no to root (in containers)
I get asked all the time about the different security measures used to control what container processes on a system can… | https://medium.com/@tengteerawat/%E0%B8%97%E0%B8%B3%E0%B9%84%E0%B8%A1%E0%B8%96%E0%B8%B6%E0%B8%87%E0%B8%84%E0%B8%A7%E0%B8%A3%E0%B9%83%E0%B8%8A%E0%B9%89-non-root-%E0%B9%83%E0%B8%99-container-358cf9882ed3 | ['Teerawat Namsricharoensuk'] | 2020-12-27 14:28:07.902000+00:00 | ['Containers', 'Container Security'] |
Make Money With Python — The Sports Arbitrage Project | Time to Code
We’ll be scraping live data from 3 betting sites. We’ll start with live data from matches in the betting site ‘Tipico.’ For those who followed my previous web scraping tutorial, this will be a similar approach, but with advanced tools necessary to get live odds data.
Among the 3 betting sites, I considered this one the hardest one to get data from, so once you’re able to get live odds from this one, you’d be able to understand the code for the other 2 sites easily and also create your own betting site scraper.
Let’s start coding! The full code is available at the end of section 4.
Update March 21st, 2021:
I uploaded CSV output examples of the Tipico, Betfair, and Bwin scrapers to my Github, so you have an idea of how the output of section 1 (Scraping live betting data with Selenium) looks like. However, this data still needs to be preprocessed in sections 2 and 3 before finding surebets. There was a slight change of names in the dropdowns of the Tipico betting site. Initially, the name was, “Both teams to score?” but now it is “Both Teams to Score” The code below considers the new names.
1. Scraping live betting data with Selenium
Importing libraries
We need to import Options to change chromedriver’s default options; Select for selecting within dropdown menus and By , WebDriverWait , EC , time to wait for a certain condition to occur.
Changing Chromedriver default options
To keep scraping while doing something else on the computer, we need to use the headless mode. To do so, we write the following code:
Breaking down the code:
options = Options() creates an instance of the Options class
creates an instance of the Options class options.headless = True turns on the headless mode
turns on the headless mode options.add_argument(‘window-size=1920x1080’) opens the windows in a customized size on the background
opens the windows in a customized size on the background webdriver.Chrome(path, options = options) applies the changes we made in the chromedriver
applies the changes we made in the chromedriver driver.get opens the browser
opens the browser web represents the betting site’s URL, while path represents the chromedriver’s path in your computer
If you don’t want to work in headless mode, then write option.headless=False and use driver.maximize_window() instead of options.add_argument(‘window-size=1920x1080’) as shown in the full code.
Select values from dropdown menus
We need to select the betting markets we want to get data from. We do this with Select and the Xpath of the dropdown. To get the Xpath, do this:
Image by author
But first, keep in mind that every time you open some betting sites, a cookies banner is displayed. We need to get rid of them by clicking the ‘accept button.’
To click on the ‘accept button’ and then select on the dropdown menus, we write the following code:
Breaking down the code:
WebDriverWait(driver, 5).until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.XPATH, '//*[@id="_evidon-accept-button"]'))) makes the driver wait until the ‘ok button’ of the cookie banner is clickable. If this throws an error, then use ‘option 2’ instead. To get the Xpath, right-click on the ‘ok button’ and inspect as we did before for the dropdown menu.
makes the driver wait until the ‘ok button’ of the cookie banner is clickable. If this throws an error, then use ‘option 2’ instead. To get the Xpath, right-click on the ‘ok button’ and inspect as we did before for the dropdown menu. WebDriverWait(driver,5).until(EC.presence_of_element_located((By.XPATH, '...'))) makes the driver wait some seconds until the dropdown menu is located
makes the driver wait some seconds until the dropdown menu is located Select('...') selects dropdown menus
selects dropdown menus first_dropdown one of the three dropdowns that contain betting markets
one of the three dropdowns that contain betting markets first_dropdown.select_by_visible_text() selects an element inside the dropdown menu with the help of the betting market’s name.
I’m choosing ‘Both Teams to score’ and ‘Over/Under’ in particular because they represent betting markets that I consider easy to find surebets.
Looking for ‘live events’ and ‘sports titles’
Before getting the data, we need first to look for live events. Also, to simplify the analysis, we’ll choose only ‘football’ in sports’ names. To do so, we write the following code:
Breaking down the code:
box represents the box that contains sports events. The site also contains upcoming events, which we don’t need for this analysis.
represents the box that contains sports events. The site also contains upcoming events, which we don’t need for this analysis. driver.find_element_by_xpath() helps us find an element within the website through the ‘Xpath’ of that element.
Unlike Xpaths from most elements we worked with before, the ‘live events’ element is trickier to get. For that reason, we need to be very specific. Then we use the contains option to match an element that contains Program_LIVE inside the testid within a div tag. Check the picture below to find Program_LIVE
Program_live — Image by author
sport_title represents the sport name of each section.
represents the sport name of each section. driver.find_elements_by_class_name() helps us find an element within the website through the ‘class_name’ of that element. To obtain the class name, just follow the same steps we used before for dropdown menus, but in this case, click on the ‘Football’ header and copy the class name ‘SportTitle-styles-sport’. Since we use ‘elements,’ we’ll obtain a list of sports names that we’ll loop through later.
Before we go on with the code, we need to understand the scheme that will help us scrape live data.
Scheme for scraping live games
The scheme for scraping live games is similar to the one used for scraping pre-match games. However, live games in the betting site Tipico include ‘double row events’ and ‘empty events’ that we need to exclude.
Sports title: Represents the sports section. The website has many sports available, but we’ll focus only on football since it’s the most popular sport.
Double-row event: Football live events in the first half (0'-45') have 2 rows. The first row contains odds for the full game and the second contains odds for only the first half. We’ll only work with the first row.
Single-row event: Football live events in the second half (45'-90') have only 1 row that contains odds for the rest of the game.
odds_event: Represents the odds available within a row. Each row has 1 ‘odds_event’ and each ‘odds_event’ has 3 boxes with the markets ‘3-way,’ ‘Over/Under’ and ‘Handicap’ by default.
Empty events: Live odds might be suspended for a couple of seconds because of many reasons. We won’t consider rows with empty events to simplify the analysis.
Find ‘empty events’
Unlike pre-match games, odds in live games change quickly and could be suspended for a couple of seconds at any time. When betting odds are momentarily suspended, the odds are either locked or empty. Locked odds are easy to scrape, but empty odds are harder. That’s why we need to locate those empty odds with the following code:
Breaking down the code:
for sport in sport_title loops through the sports list previously obtained
loops through the sports list previously obtained parent represents the ‘parent node’ of the sport element, while grandparent is its ‘grandparent node’ that represents the whole ‘football’ container inside live events
represents the ‘parent node’ of the element, while is its ‘grandparent node’ that represents the whole ‘football’ container inside live events empty_groups represents each football game with suspended or empty odds
represents each football game with suspended or empty odds granparent.find_elements_by_class_name() gives a list of all the empty odds with class name ‘EventOddGroup-styles-empty-group’ inside the football live section. You can get the class name by doing this:
empty_events represents each row or football game with at least 1 empty odds market (3-way, over/under, etc.)
represents each row or football game with at least 1 empty odds market (3-way, over/under, etc.) [empty_group.find_element_by_xpath('./..') for empty_group in empty_groups] is a list comprehension that loops through the empty_groups list to obtain the ‘parent node’ of each element, that is, the empty_events
is a list comprehension that loops through the list to obtain the ‘parent node’ of each element, that is, the except handles errors that could be encountered in the try block. We need this to handle errors when there isn’t any game with empty odds
Remove empty_events from single_row_events
We find single row events and remove all empty events inside with the following code:
Breaking down the code:
single_row_events represent the first row of double-row events or the unique row of single-row events. As we explained before, both represent odds for the full game and we focus on them because it’s more common to find surebets in odds calculated for the whole game. Find the class name of single-row events by inspecting any single row. You should find this class name 'EventRow-styles-event-row'
represent the first row of double-row events or the unique row of single-row events. As we explained before, both represent odds for the full game and we focus on them because it’s more common to find surebets in odds calculated for the whole game. Find the class name of single-row events by inspecting any single row. You should find this class name [single_row_event for single_row_event in single_row_events if single_row_event not in empty_events] list comprehension that excludes any empty games inside the single_row_events
list comprehension that excludes any empty games inside the try/except handles errors that could be raised when there isn’t any game with empty odds
Getting live odds
Each dropdown selected before will give odds for 3 markets that are extracted with the following code:
Breaking down the code:
for match in single_row_events loops through all the matches inside the ‘single_row_events’ list
loops through all the matches inside the list odd_events represent each event with odds available
represent each event with odds available match.find_elements_by_class_name(‘EventOddGroup-styles-odd-groups’) helps us find all the ‘odds_event’ within every match. To find the class name ‘EventOddGroup-styles-odd-groups’ just right-click and inspect the code behind ‘odds box’ as we did before for empty odds
helps us find all the ‘odds_event’ within every match. To find the class name just right-click and inspect the code behind ‘odds box’ as we did before for empty odds for team in match.find_elements_by_class_name(‘EventTeams-styles-titles’) loops through the elements with the class name 'EventTeams-styles-titles' within the ‘match’ node. Matches have 2 teams (home and away team); that’s why we need to loop through them and obtain their name with team.text. Then they’re stored with the append method in the teams list
loops through the elements with the class name within the ‘match’ node. Matches have 2 teams (home and away team); that’s why we need to loop through them and obtain their name with Then they’re stored with the method in the list for odd_event in odds_events loops over the total number of live matches on the betting site.
loops over the total number of live matches on the betting site. for n, box in enumerate(odds_events) loops through all ‘odds boxes’ inside a match. In the beginning, we changed the dropdowns to ‘3-way,’ ‘Over/Under’ and ‘Both Teams to Score,’ so they’re the odds we’ll scrape
loops through all ‘odds boxes’ inside a match. In the beginning, we changed the dropdowns to ‘3-way,’ ‘Over/Under’ and ‘Both Teams to Score,’ so they’re the odds we’ll scrape rows = box.find_elements_by_xpath('.//*') gives all the children nodes (odds) inside the box element.
gives all the children nodes (odds) inside the box element. n==0 means ‘only take values from the first box.’ In this case, the first box is the ‘3-way’ box and is stored in the x12 list
means ‘only take values from the first box.’ In this case, the first box is the ‘3-way’ box and is stored in the list rows[0] tells Python ‘only pick the first row on each odds box.’ With this, we ignored the second row in double-row events.
Goal-line Image by author
The same process is followed for n==1 (Over/Under) and n==2 (BTTS), but in n==1 we also need to store the ‘goals line.’ This represents the total number of goals that you need to win the bet.
For example, Over 2.5 goals mean at least 3 goals to win the bet. Let’s break down the code for n==1.
box.find_element_by_xpath('./..') gives the ‘parent node’ of the box element that contains the odds.
gives the ‘parent node’ of the box element that contains the odds. goals = parent.find_element_by_class_name('EventOddGroup-styles-fixed-param-text').text finds the goal line by giving its class name. Just right click and inspect the goal line (shown in the picture above) to obtain its class name. Then we obtain the data with .text
finds the goal line by giving its class name. Just right click and inspect the goal line (shown in the picture above) to obtain its class name. Then we obtain the data with over_under.append(goals+'
'+rows[0].text) appends the goals line data in a standard format. The over/under odds format will look like this 2.5
2.4
1.5
appends the goals line data in a standard format. The over/under odds format will look like this driver.quit() closes the Chrome browser
At this point, the scraping part is done! Now we have to make the data readable and do some pre-cleaning with Pandas. Then we’ll save the data with Pickle.
Breaking down the code:
dict_gambling is the dictionary that stores all the lists that contain the odds scraped
is the dictionary that stores all the lists that contain the odds scraped pd.DataFrame.from_dict(dict_gambling) turn the dictionary into a dataframe df_tipico, so we can read it and work with it easily
turn the dictionary into a dataframe so we can read it and work with it easily df_tipico.applymap(lambda x: x.strip() if isinstance(x, str) else x) cleans all the leading and trailing white spaces that the odds might have with the strip method.
cleans all the leading and trailing white spaces that the odds might have with the method. open('...', 'wb') opens a file named df_tipico in the mode ‘write bytes’ (wb). We save this in the variable output
opens a file named in the mode ‘write bytes’ (wb). We save this in the variable pickle.dump(df_tipico, output) saves the dataframe created in the file named df_tipico. We used the same name for both the file and the dataframe, but they could be named differently
saves the dataframe created in the file named We used the same name for both the file and the dataframe, but they could be named differently output.close() closes the file
Great! We finished scraping the first bookmaker. Bookmaker 2 and 3 are easier to scrape. The full code of bookmakers 1, 2 and 3 is at the end of this article.
Now let’s work with the data obtained to find a surebet automatically! | https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/make-money-with-python-the-sports-arbitrage-project-3b09d81a0098 | ['Frank Andrade'] | 2021-03-22 01:59:14.387000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Python', 'Web Scraping', 'Programming', 'Data Science'] |
Pull the trigger I am a fan of the trigger warning we need to re-sensitize. | Pull the trigger
I am a fan of the trigger warning
we need to re-sensitize.
evaluate why being raw is being soft and being soft is still inherently…
have you experienced a fleece blanket? why the fuck don’t we want to be warm, fuzzy and cozy.
i love being hardened. don’t get me wrong. i take pride in the asses I’ve beat because I don’t look like a force to be reckoned with. my greatest strength. my samson hair.
but…that’s not where progress and love lay. I love anger. it fuels my mania which I also happen to love.
it’s so strange. love is so volatile. I have always been above love. I had no plans for semen or a penis being part of the building of my family. I genuinely just saw myself emerging from a barn with 6 kids.
Where was I?
All some of us want to do is scream our deepest darkness into the light…and somehow that’s considered airing dirty laundry.
don’t tell me to be open so I can heal, only to close me shut and tell me I’m healing incorrectly. black women, we have been failed. won’t forget my african rehab nurse. walking with me and telling me africans don’t deal with “this”.
I can’t focus long enough to dive into everything.
Where was I?
Ah, yes.
DO NOT LIE TO ME AND EXPECT ME TO LIVE IN TRUTH. | https://medium.com/@lifeauxpert/pull-the-trigger-i-am-a-fan-of-the-trigger-warning-we-need-to-re-sensitize-a3b3b8a6936e | ['Jua Na Hekima'] | 2020-12-25 10:56:56.353000+00:00 | ['PTSD', 'Writer', 'Prose', 'Bipolar', 'Thoughts And Feelings'] |
Understanding and Implementing ISO 9001:2015 | Hello, welcome to my account! Happy Reading and feel free to give me some feedback. | https://medium.com/@vadhilarefi17/understanding-and-implementing-iso-9001-2015-76673b4eea6a | ['Vadhila Refi'] | 2020-11-19 15:51:18.182000+00:00 | ['Iso9001 2015', 'Quality Management', 'Industry', 'Quality Assurance'] |
MDX Embed for Storybook | Why build an addon
When Storybook shipped with MDX support, I realized I could expand the default MDX implementation by creating an addon. That would make it easier for the community to embed content and help me get contributions and feedback.
I piggybacked off Storybook’s parameter API to wrap all MDX docs in “Provider”-type component called MDXEmbedProvider . That saves me from having to import them one-by-one (you might have encountered this if you use styled-components et al).
The provider allows Storybooks docs pages to render the out-of-the-box embed components for services like CodeSandbox whenever it encounters them in a *.stories.mdx file. Checkout the example below.
// some.stories.mdx import { Meta, Story, Canvas,} from '@storybook/addon-docs/blocks';
import { SomeComponent } from '../some-where'; <Meta title="Components/SomeComponent" component={SomeComponent} />
<Canvas>
<Story name="usage">
<CodeSandbox codeSandboxId="react-new" />
</Story>
</Canvas> <Canvas>
<Story name="something">
<SomeComponent someProp="foo"/>
</Story>
</Canvas>
You can see from the above that to render SomeComponent” you need to import it into your .stories.mdx file while MDX Embed’s CodeSandbox component doesn’t require the import.
MDX Embed is written in React and the core components can be imported in any JSX file as well
When to use MDX Embed
First off, you can only use the addon if you’re writing stories or docspages in the MDX story format, not Component Story Format (CSF).
Both formats output the same level of detail, prop tables, code snippets, etc but MDX allows for a nicer writing experience. If you plan to write supporting documentation around your component MDX is for you. Use cases that it’s great for:
Long form content
Brand guidelines
Typography
Do’s and don’ts
Usage examples
What’s more, designers tend to prefer MDX because it’s more natural to write “Markdown” than JavaScript. That helps teams bridge that designer / engineer gap. MDX Embed is perfect for these use cases because richer docs makes it easier for folks to learn.
How to install
First install the addon from npm.
npm install mdx-embed storybook-addon-mdx-embed --save
Then register the addon in Storybook’s configuration.
// .storybook/main.js module.exports = {
...
addons: ['storybook-addon-mdx-embed']
};
Final thoughts
I’m happy to share MDX Embed with the Storybook community.
If you’re interested in open-source software, developing addons for a popular project can give you a head start. Launching a project is hard without an audience, you can reach a lot more users by standing on the shoulders of giants so to speak.
If you’re interested in developing a Storybook addon, I recommend checking out the links below.
The Storybook team are super brilliant, if you have any questions about how to get started developing addons they’ll be more than happy to help.
Get involved
To get the latest addons and Storybook news sign up to the Storybook mailing list. Check out Storybook on GitHub and join the Discord chat. | https://medium.com/storybookjs/mdx-embed-for-storybook-9a9f33891875 | ['Paul Scanlon'] | 2020-12-10 17:51:04.936000+00:00 | ['React', 'Features', 'Storybook', 'Mdx', 'Design Systems'] |
Our team is not made up of a bunch of friends and yours shouldn’t be either | Our team is not made up of a bunch of friends and yours shouldn’t be either Diamantino Pereira Campos Apr 12·3 min read
“I’m not a nice person, and I don’t care about you. I care about the technology and the kernel — that’s what’s important to me.” — Linus Torvalds
Would you discard one of the most brilliant minds in computer science because he lacks social abilities?
As a manager I’m sure that healthy relationships are critical for the success of our team. It’s just that I don’t think a welcome free lunch, a beer or a video game party should be the main strategy to build them.
Great teams aren’t made of individuals sharing the same hobbies or sense of humor, great teams are made of individuals trusting and respecting each other’s work. Being able to truly appreciate the bizarre sense of humor from some eccentric colleague is a plus, not a requirement.
Breaking down what’s a good work relationship
The basics for a good work relationship are trust, respect and self-awareness .
If such work environment exists people will feel comfortable to handle conflict instead of avoiding it in favor of superficial harmony.
How to create real connections
We choose our friends and learn to love our family but our coworkers happen to be people that someone else placed with us to… work on the same tasks as we do. These people happen to be the ones we spend the majority of our time with and we can’t escape from it.
This is an advantage that managers should use to create the best possible work environment. We should give just enough direction and set the right ecosystem to have people engage with each other naturally. In short, promote interactions, don’t impose them.
How? You may ask.
What do we have in common in the first place? We work for the same company, share the same duties and know the insights of the same project. Start by making sure that everyone knows each other’s role and expectations.
Be clear about what you expect from the team. For instance, and for simplicity sake, I’ll list 2 ways of managing work inside a team: having team members making decisions with the occasional misjudgment error (the “better ask for forgiveness than permission” approach) or having every action validated beforehand. Both are acceptable but make sure that everyone in team is following the same practice.
Promote collaboration, delegate responsibilities and make everyone comfortable enough to have contrary opinions.
Don’t get me wrong, you should organize lunches (you know, once we achieve herd immunity), paintball games and karaoke sessions but I suggest you to invest far more energy in creating a clear communication about what the team goals are and what role each individual will have to achieve them.
I do take time to understand the personal values and interests from everyone in the team. If someone does not want share them or, for some reason, we do not feel a friendly connection then we’ll still rely in our common goals and professional respect to have a healthy work relationship.
Takeaways
It’s great to have people knowing about each other and it’s better to have people loving to spend time outside working hours with their workmates, but I believe that closer personal relations should come naturally, after professional trust is established.
If you try to build relations in your team based on superficial connections, you’re taking chances that some bad joke may compromise them. | https://medium.com/@dipeca/our-team-is-not-made-up-of-a-bunch-of-friends-and-yours-shouldnt-be-either-c373cb81db62 | ['Diamantino Pereira Campos'] | 2021-04-12 20:50:13.940000+00:00 | ['Team Collaboration', 'Team Building', 'Team', 'Management And Leadership'] |
Anti-patterns in Enterprise Data Sciences | What is the market not telling you?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book “The Bed of Procrustes” noted that “people focus on role models; it is more effective to find anti-models — people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up.” While Taleb’s quote is commonly referenced across journalism and social media today, it isn’t as applicable to real life as we might think — at least not to real business life. Rather than seeking out contrarian voices, industry leaders tend to be overly influenced by mainstream thinking. Consider all the searches for those SEO-optimized webpages that perennially comprise page-one search results, reinforcing the same timeworn, made-for-PowerPoint sets of ideas over and over again. “Establish a data lake,” they instruct business users. “Invest in data sciences.” “Compute and experiment at scale.” And on and on. It is staggering to consider the number of companies fundamentally built on such “best practices”, their leaders devoutly believing that in doing so they will roll out inevitably trend-setting products and features and win the battle for customers.
Thinking in the fields of Data Sciences and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been no different. A quick search for “best practices in machine learning” returns more than over 200 million Google results. In fact, “machine learning” has been the poster child of enterprise success stories for the last decade. It has led to the astronomical rise in data scientist salaries and demand. With data being the new rocket fuel, data science has become the hottest career path of the new century. Fueled by the astronomical amounts of money raised by start-ups, these corporate stars boldly leverage Machine Learning to drive AI-based insights to the heart of the enterprise. In the 2019 MIT SMR and BCG Research Report, fully 90% of respondents agreed that AI represents a business opportunity for their company, while the lack of it was deemed a strategic risk. “What if competitors, particularly unencumbered new entrants, figure out AI before we do?” quoted one of the respondents.
There have been multiple forces pushing AI’s growth, including its ability to provide greater visibility into consumer behavior and demand, an increase in the accessibility of information, technological ease and progress in the AI field — along with a much better understanding of how to integrate Data Sciences and Analytics into everyday operations. Enterprises are also increasingly focusing on a lifetime-value-centric approach, which represents a departure from purely retrospective approach of understanding and rewarding customers. Instead, companies are embracing a more forward-looking approach that leverages predictive and prescriptive components of the analytics spectrum.
But as encouraging as this all sounds for AI enthusiasts, many statistics offer a very different perspective. For example, the MIT SMR and BCG research report also highlights that seven out of 10 companies surveyed have reported minimal or no impact from AI. Of all the companies that have made some investment into ML and AI, less than 40% can correlate business gains in the past three years to these same investments. If these tools are so transformational, if market dynamics are more or less equally exposed to every company, and if everyone has access to the best practices in processes, technology, and workforce management, then one has to ask: Why are there only a handful have great AI stories to tell the world?
A quick scan of industry reports points to hundreds of factors causing these poor returns on investment. With respect to AI, companies are said to be “not doing the right things” or “doing things wrong.” When one digs into these vague charges — when we put on our data scientist hats and boots and start digging into the nuances of how enterprise analytics run on the ground — a clearer picture emerges. Upon this closer inspection, some very interesting patterns emerge that are consistent across industry verticals, geographies, and business functions. These patterns are repetitive and easily reproducible across functions. Avoiding these patterns would seem to be an almost “natural” solution to persistent AI-related problems. Together, they comprise what might be called industry “worst practices” and emerge across different organizations as, in effect, “anti-patterns.”
Seen from the 30,000-foot level, these anti-patterns include:
· Misplaced reliance on “averages”
· Failure to pay attention to customer behavior across the buying journey
· Enterprise-data priorities that fail to develop feature-based strategies
· Lack of a “North Star” — a best-possible-outcome approach to experiment design
· A focus on evolving first instead of evolving fast
· An overemphasis on model building over model optimization
· A failure of inclusivity in AI and ML team building
Rather than stumbling on the nitty gritty mechanics of implementing AI and ML, companies more often fall victim to program-level design flaws and inefficiencies. These failures prevent many companies from ever realizing the full value of these costly and otherwise quite powerful technologies. But the good news is that these anti-patterns are, in the main, organizational problems that, once addressed, can unlock computing power and generate significant return on investment. Let us take a closer look at each of these worst-practice anti-patterns and how to avoid or correct them.
1. Using Outdated “Averages” to Guide Marketing Science
The etymology of “average” goes back to 700 BC, but the adoption of its more “action-oriented” definition began in medieval and early modern Western merchant-marine law contracts. These contracts had to do with cases in which a merchant sailing ship encountered stormy weather and had to jettison some cargo to make the ship lighter and safer. In that circumstance, the contract specified, merchants with goods onboard the ship had to pay an equal share of the value of all the goods lost overboard — rather than being libel only for the cost of their own goods thrown overboard. From that point on, this concept of “averaging” was adopted by British insurers, creditors, and merchants and popularized the idea of spreading losses across whole portfolios of assets. Soon thereafter, the concept of averaging applied to all manner of things both quantitative and otherwise.
In marketing sciences, averages have been used not only to ease consumption of quantitative details, but also to solve for technology constraints. Since organizations did not yet have the technological and operational capabilities to analyze customers and their behaviors at an individual level, they used the concept of averages to simplify their understanding of the marketplace, and then build and execute marketing plans on that understanding.
However, the difference between theoretical and practical implications of averages have diverged extensively in the past decade. Averages have very high usefulness across domains, but they do not do a good job of telling us the “why” and the “so-what” of what companies do. With the advent of varying dynamics in individual preferences and behaviors, the traditional approach of creating marketing segments and reporting average performance metrics has become passé. Open-source advancements in technology, operations, and interpretation provide rich mechanisms to understand and act on the basis of individual — not average — preferences. This ability to mass customize has becomes one of the core differentiators for companies that build scalable, real-time product and personalization capabilities. Meanwhile, those companies and their PowerPoint slides depicting segments and averages are quickly slipping into irrelevance.
A decade ago, it would have been unheard of to base business planning on individual-level insights or personalization. It is now standard procedure among leading enterprises. With appropriate data modelling and amid a plethora of algorithms, the ability to cluster the elements of individual journeys can empower us so much more that the use of “averages” to drill down into behaviors and understand the “why” behind that customer’s actions, interests and intent. Understanding buyer motivation reveals those critical intervention points that enable us to build personalized offers and experiences.
2. Not Differentiating Between Customers and Their Journeys
A lot has been written about The Golden Circle, a theory that places great value on an organization’s ability to understanding the “why” behind what they do. The concept’s originator, Simon Sinek, encourages leaders to look at each problem with the same lens — that of the fundamental purpose of the organization. Once that lens has been defined, strategic objective can be formulated, followed by tactical planning to build and then execute that strategy.
This progression seems simple. The problem is that the simpler things get, the more difficult they often are to correctly execute. With respect to marketing sciences, the adoption of the Golden Circle gets even muddier as we cut across the circles. This is not only because of nuances created by complex technology landscapes, or because the existence of so many algorithms can paralyze enterprises with indecision. It is also because of our inability to clearly define exactly what it is we want to understand about each customer.
In the myriad of digital customer interactions and brand expositions, behaviors metamorphose into highly dynamic facets, leading to different personas. A customer making a purchase on a mobile handset will go through different exploration trajectories, interact with different layers of the business ecosystem and exhibit altogether different behaviors than another customer who buys via their television. The characteristics of these journeys continue to diverge as the product categories do the same. For example, the path to purchasing a mobile handset will vary significantly from that of securing a home loan. This variation is only magnified by the use of different platforms.
Standard marketing-segmentation approaches look at the “average behavior” of a customer. In doing so, they fail to capture the subtleties around journeys, instead yielding segments that look good on PowerPoint charts but are rarely actually used to design marketing programs. Undaunted, many organizations keep working with these “average” segments, shaping their marketing strategies and building new offerings around them. When the campaigns and experiments are run, the results may seem good. But as we drill down into the data, the improvements and the benefits begin to fade.
Since business KPIs are easier to interpret in terms of customers (for example, new customers acquired in the last 3 months or increase in average spend per customer), the problem definition and measurement have to be done at the customer level. But there is no singular “level” because, as customers exhibit different behaviors, these varied personas emerge. Since targeting is done to alter a specific behavior, the development and execution must be done at a granular level of behavior per persona.
As an example, for a use case that deals with predicting the propensity of a customer to buy a new product, one of the objectives could be to move the customer to make a purchase, thereby increasing the measurable KPIs of product holdings and revenue. The development of the predictive model to achieve this must be designed around the observed persona-behavior level. For instance, all customers who are sensitive to price and promos and have low product awareness but a very high digital affinity will be a part of one behavioral segment. The targeting must also be done with respect to the customer journeys. If the customers in a behavioral segment spend more than 20 minutes online and browse a new product category and have a potential lifetime value exceeding $20,000, then the best model might trigger an EDM that offers a 10% discount during weekend mornings when they are most likely to be browsing.
Theoretically, the three separate tasks of defining, building and executing on a predictive model may seem easy. But the missing linkage between these stages is not only one of the most common anti-patterns observed across enterprises, but also the one that can have the biggest impact on topline.
3. Not Moving from “Data strategy” to “Feature strategy”
The notion of “Big Data” surged around the beginning of last decade, with major publishers and influencers speaking about the need for organizations to get on this wave early and strong. Those who failed to do so, it was said, faced the prospect of long-term failure. This message was incessantly pushed across all touchpoints (albeit in varied conventions and formats) and led to many new analytics offerings including Hadoop, Spark, and Deep Learning. Analytics and technology services companies consulted to help companies assemble the right technology and analytics stacks, and to understand how to develop the “right” data strategy. This resulted in many companies dumping their data assets into a pool, creating never-ending block diagrams and connecting processes to showcase all the rich information they had. The effort could take anywhere from 6 months to several years as new roles were created, governance became a highly regulated process, and everyone became so excited about all the benefits to come. But they weren’t excited for long.
All the major companies today have already adopted Big Data analytics in some form or the other and set up a Data Lake as a part of their initial, foundational exercise. Few knew what to do with these large bodies of data, with a very limited portion of these enterprise data assets being used in any significant way. In the process, several roles were terminated, people either transferred to different divisions or simply became lost amid burgeoning roles and hierarchies.
And yet, even amid all this turmoil, small teams of data scientists at some companies kept working on their standard use cases, leveraging data from the data lake to generate “features” and “signals” to help them understand the “why” behind what they were doing. These companies that increasingly focused and built capabilities around a “feature strategy” saw their data lakes continually updated and leveraged, while other companies saw the value of their data assets dwindle away.
This concept of a “feature strategy” includes thinking about the “why” before dumping assets into the pool. This is a process of developing use cases that drive growth, and of analyzing the capabilities required to build engines to support these use cases. This, in turn, leads to the creation of specific features and data assets to fuel these engines. It also includes building and inferring customer journey properties and augmenting use cases with information beyond traditionally used averages and derivatives (rations and deltas). Over time, the top-down approach of feature strategy also provides a way for businesses to make the case for increases in “better data,” as opposed to simply more “big data.” In the process, it becomes possible to measure the benefit of individual data sources and fields and to track their adoption by different teams and functions.
For anyone seeking advancements in their analytics journeys, it is crucial to move away from data lakes to what might be referred to as continuously evolving “data rivers.” At the same time, now is the moment to move from a data strategy to a feature strategy that sheds new light on not just creation, but consumption.
4. Missing a “North Star” in Experiment Design
Significant advancements have been made in experiment design and Omni-orchestration that reach across multiple journeys, devices and touchpoints. But very little has been done to optimize what to measure or what “implicit feedback” means in the design process. There are two key factors adding to the confusion. First is observer bias and self-serving bias in experiment design, wherein companies shape their experiments to align with an expected outcome. An example of this might be the way an automobile company chooses features, build models and designs audiences to sell a familiar design. The second factor is the mindset of data science teams that prompts them to maximize the lift over baseline but not necessarily minimize the difference between the best that is possible and where they are at that moment in time.
Traditional experiment-design methods have been devised and leveraged solely as “comparative frameworks” to understand the incremental value (A versus B), and not differential value (“what is the most I can make from an experiment”). For example, if a campaign shows 300% improvement over baseline, does it mean the campaign has done well? Definitely. But does it also mean that the business done as well as it could? Maybe. We are better off maximizing the benefit over what we can see versus what we cannot see. In a healthy experiment design, getting a lift over baseline (or, control or holdout) is the basic measure of success. But for the purposes of acquiring feedback and enabling continuous improvement, it is critical to have a gold standard — a North Star that guides your experiment design.
The fact is that, when it comes to possible improvement, a lot is often left on the table. Two related thought experiments are gaining traction in the industry. Both tend to create a paradigm shift in how experiments are approached. The first experiment is the idea of reinforcement learning. This is a more technical idea that has an established process and strives to balance exploration and exploitation to minimize, over time, the differential between “the best a design can do” and the “current state of the design.”
The second thought experiment requires a change in mindset, pushing teams to think of the performance of their experiments with respect to this clearly defined, aggressive notion of the “North Star” goal. In this framework, even if a predictive model yields good market results (that 300% over the baseline model), the experiment will be deemed an approximate failure if the delta relative to the North Star is too large.
This approach to measuring success is, of course, highly debatable. But it does serve to enforce appropriate focus on the design and rationale for experimentation, thereby increasing the integration of business and sciences in large-scale marketing campaigns. If organizations need a good experiment-design framework, the mandate should be to build a strong scientific foundation, put rigor around the rationale for the definition of “North Star” within the organization, create a set of measurement levers around that North Star, and use cutting-edge practices such as reinforcement learning to achieve that gold standard.
5. Not Considering That a Fast Mover Often Trumps a First Mover
The ability to establish a trend within a product landscape has always been a much sought-after skill among both established and startup companies. To help companies grab the high ground, there are more than 7,000 established platforms and vendors in the Martech space alone (as indicated by chiefmartec in their 2019 report), and the list is expected to grow anywhere from 5–7% annually. Even though these service-provider offerings are growing and increasingly focused on gaining first-mover advantage, it is a different playground altogether for those seeking this service.
Marketing science is a process involving several components and some companies have set the foundation for designing and scaling them. But the key is not to aspire to be first mover, but to get the process right and learn to evolve quickly. Each trend in the market is like a living organism: It changes every day, adapting to its ecosystem and modifying itself to stay relevant.
Customer 360, for example, was on the receiving end of the hype in the mid-2000s and, to this day, remains for many a must-have. Even so, companies both big and small continue to struggle with the tremendous breadth of this concept — and with correctly implementing it. Building, using, and continuously evolving a customer 360 is comprised of three separate, organically improving processes. Companies that stop once their 360 is built and in use — but neglect to continue evolving it to match an ever-changing customer landscape — soon likely find themselves lagging behind. More than building a data product itself, it is important to focus on speeding up its usability, reproducibility and usage. Emphasis must be on demystifying the offerings for all those involved, and on building a common vocabulary within the organization.
6. Not Predicting and Investing in Winners
Ask data science teams across organizations about the validation approaches they take when building machine learning products and solutions and they’ll probably start talking about techniques like cross-validation, RMSE, loss metrics and so on. Very rarely will they emphasize business metrics such as profit, reduction in cost to acquire new customers or digital transition rates. This focus on technology is in not ubiquitous, nor is it technically wrong. It does, however, raise the issue of optimization-driven development. Companies are dedicating a great deal of resources to automate the process of model development and insight generation, achieving this by parallelizing the crude effort required for steps such as model selection and feature engineering. But once the model is built, very rarely do they put additional effort into optimizing the “consumption” of the model.
To illustrate this point, let’s say that a company builds five different propensity models, one for each of the five products they sell. The goal is to identify the next best product for their customers, and to end up with similar propensities across all products. In most of our observations, people tend to use plain heuristics and rule-based mechanisms to identify the “best 1 out of 5” products that should be recommended. Rarely do data sciences team apply the lens of business optimization over these raw propensities to identify this “best” offering. If, instead, they took the raw likelihood of purchase and leveraged information about operational costs and margin associated with each product, they could recommend the product that would best optimize lifetime value or profitability.
Similar conditioning is observed in the construction of marketing campaigns. Since the cost of marketing is very low, the thinking goes, there is no need to bother with optimizing the targeting mechanism. Companies either target the masses through a series of drip-marketing tactics, or use a model heuristic (top 1 or 2 deciles) to run experiments and measure performance and benefits. Frankly, such approaches are lazy and inefficient, leading to content fatigue (too many touchpoints), poor benchmarks (too many or too few people) and the rewarding of inappropriate audience segments. Propensities without optimization (for model, audience, offerings, etc.) is a grave mistake for organizations that envision building large-scale data products.
7. Getting Inclusivity Wrong
In India, there is a concept of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (originally from Sanskrit: वसुधैव कुटुम्बकम्). This phrase appears in Maha Upanishad, a foundational Hindu text. It consists of several words: “vasudhā,” or earth; “ēva,” or indeed; and “kutumbakam,” or family. The phrase literally means “the world is one family” and has several interpretations across Indian heritage and beyond. It also has relevance in the world of business, in the context of enterprise-analytics setups that host several teams, functions and roles. In this context, it applies to the entire process from creation to consumption of analytics.
Over the last decade, there has been a sharp rise in the amount of literature and products expounding on the importance of the collaborative, automated and cross-functional development of analytics. This approach was first popularized as “agile development.” Now we witness the rise of automated machine learning. At the same time, self-service BI/analytics platforms have come a long way. And everyone is debating, misusing, or confusing everyone else about the differences (or, lack of) between Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Technologists have started strengthening their claims (and businesses have started believing them) that large-scale problems, whether well-defined or not, can be solved simply by incorporating the latest and hottest solution or platform.
The kernel of value, however, resides with enabling the consumption — and not just the delivery — of the insights derived from these tools. A team’s ability to consume this information is only as good as its ability to facilitate the exchange of information. From an external point of view, this seems like a minor problem. Internally, people tend to debate that the gap between a fantastic creation and mediocre consumption is simply due to an interstice within the organization. What these same people fail to realize is how deep this interstice really is, believing that it is the result of technology gaps rather than design fallacies.
This all leads us back to Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam and the topic of inclusivity. Companies that excel at innovation inculcate the practice of “analytics inclusion,” defined as the inclusion of processes, people, and collaboration that drives better information visibility across all stages of development. In such a paradigm, the data scientist is kept in loop about the broader vision and business outcomes, and senior management is kept in the loop about the data and processes. One might doubt that senior executives having anything significant to add to questions of data or models. But the purpose of inclusivity is not necessarily to problem solve, but to extend visibility across all layers. It doesn’t always mean more people must be involved across processes, but it does always tend to open new communication bridges and create environments in which people are able to ask more and better questions, identify the owners and the hits and misfits, and lead to designs that represent the objectives of key people across the organization.
Solving Anti-Patterns May Not be Sexy, But It Delivers Results
Building data products and large-scale experimentation workbenches is a difficult but clearly solvable task — if people are equipped with the correct toolkits and aware of worst practices and how to avoid or correct them. They must learn to step away from the concept of averages, and leverage new data capabilities to work at the level of individual customers. They must learn to focus on the behavior of customers as they move through the buying journey. They must learn to acquire not just more data, but better data — the right data. They must hold their experiment designs to a higher standard, learn to evolve quickly, optimize for long-term value and profitability, and think clearly how proper team composition is intrinsic to overall success.
Moving away from these anti-patterns requires a change in mind-set and culture, and it can take a lot of effort to alter long-standing corporate cultures. The changes may not be as “sexy” as some of the things that come up in Google searches or are touted in the current analytics-space market and, as a result, may be met with resistance by people who are swayed by the latest shiny object. Nonetheless, with appropriate, consistent top-down messaging within the organization, the successful implementation of these changes invariably becomes the core differentiating element. Fixing these anti-patterns enables large-scale data and analytics integration in the company. In this day and age, that must be a guiding bottom line. | https://medium.com/bcggamma/anti-patterns-in-enterprise-data-sciences-455c45a36ca | ['Piyush Sagar Mishra'] | 2020-02-24 15:05:18.046000+00:00 | ['Antipattern', 'Data Science', 'Analytics'] |
Dealing with social anxiety… | Growing up throughout my life I had never experienced true anxiety, until grade 6 in my primary school.
At the start of my year in grade 6 I became the target of bullying and became exposed to some of the scum of the world. Being either physically hurt or emotionally tore me down before the end of the day.
All of this lead to an unfair mindset I placed myself in believing that whatever they thought of me, how little they thought of me as. That everyone else thought of me like that as well. I would constantly feel watched by everyone around me be it someone I knew or not, and I started to always feel judged upon by those people when really they weren’t paying me any attention.
This threw a real curve ball at me in life and only brought me problems with even living the life a teenager should live, I couldn’t order food, I couldn’t go to stores, some days i couldn’t even leave my own house without panicking.
This deteriorated me mentally and physically, sometimes not even being able to eat because of the anxiety I had. Until I met a mate and he dragged me out of my hole and made me realize not everyone looks at someone the way I had thought, even if someone did they were just a horrid person.
My mate gave me the idea of forcing myself into more social situations after I had learned how people really thought and looked at me, this was my make it or break it point. I would struggle at some times trying to make myself comfortable being uncomfortable, but after a year of working on it, I finally am able to have the mindset and ability to not care about what people think and don’t like about me, because at the end of the day I realised it didn’t change who I was as a person and that’s really what matters.
Now I struggle sometimes with a little bit of anxiety rising but not constant, everyone will keep a little bit of it, sadly it isn’t a fully recoverable disorder for most. Thank you for your time I hope this inspires others to take a look at helping themselves with an issue that doesn’t have the right to get in the way of your life. | https://medium.com/@casandan.ct/dealing-with-social-anxiety-37cff1fb7e80 | ['Connor Stone'] | 2021-01-16 12:31:05.475000+00:00 | ['Sad', 'Storytelling', 'Life Lessons', 'Help', 'Disorders'] |
10 Skills To Master for an Enduring Polyamorous Relationship | Despite what many believe, polyamorous relationships are not merely an excuse to cheat. Polyamory can be defined as a type of relationship based on the belief that it’s both possible and valuable to have more than one partner. As Tristan Taormino states in her book Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships, polyamory is based on the desire for “maintaining multiple significant, intimate relationships simultaneously.”
As amazing as this may sound, it’s not always easy to dive into polyamory, especially when you are new to this lifestyle. Here are the 10 skills you need to master for a healthy and enduring polyamorous relationship:
1-Own your feelings
No one is making you feel jealous, you are the only one who makes yourself feeling such emotions. This is probably the most difficult skill to learn. The truth is that if you want to have an enduring polyamorous relationship you should stop blaming others for what you are feeling.
The good news is that if you are responsible for your emotions you can act on those feelings. As Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy, brilliantly point out in their book The Ethical Slut:
The problem is that when you blame someone else for how you feel, you disempower yourself from finding solutions. If this is someone else’s fault, only that person can fix it, right? So poor you can’t do anything but sit there and moan.
A bit brutal, but true.
2- Faithfulness
It may seem paradoxical but faithfulness is an important skill to have in polyamorous relationships. No, faithfulness has nothing to do with sex. It’s about caring for your partners and be able to be fully trusted by them. If you have a primary relationship, discuss with your partner what makes it so and be sure to stick to the rules. Trust is fundamental in this lifestyle.
3-Commitment is key
With polyamorous relationships come lots of work. Unlike what many believe, this type of relationship is not free from rules. Polyamory is based on mutual agreements between partners, so be ready to discuss for hours about rules and limits. Unless you are 100 percent fully committed to this type of life it will be very hard to find the right balance. Serena Petrella affirms in her book Ethical Sluts and Closet Polyamorists:
Your relationship will (only) work if you work on it — and if you work on yourself at the same time”
4-Knowing yourself
During your polyamorous relationship, you may discover new sides of yourself. It will be a constant self-exploration and your limits and boundaries will shift. Make sure to constantly interrogate yourself to discover whether your feelings have changed. Always keep your partners informed on whether new emotions such as jealousy arose.
5-Know your limits
Be sure to set limits for yourself. For instance, if you have a primary relationship, how many times are you allowed to meet with other partners? Do you always have to use protection with them?
Try to imagine situations which involve moral dilemmas and reflect on how you will act in these cases. For instance, are you willing to see someone whose partner doesn’t know about you?
6-Ask for reassurance
You partners cannot read your mind. Don’t wait for hours hoping they will understand that you are upset and getting angry if they don’t. It’s your job to ask for reassurance when you need it. As Dossie and Janet affirm:
Silent suffering and self-deception have no place in this lifestyle
How would you feel if your partner would ask you for reassurance? Probably happy to be able to help him and reassure him, right? It takes a lot of courage to ask, but it is necessary and it will make both you and your partner happy.
7-Communication
Communication has a fundamental role in polyamory. Most importantly, you need to be able to communicate properly. Franklin Veaux and Eve Rickert give some useful examples in their book More Than Two. Here are some practices that will help you communicate effectively:
Open listening: listen carefully to what your partner has to say and before replying repeat what you think your partner said. This will show your partner that you were listening and understood properly.
Direct communication: always say what you mean without hidden meanings, subtexts or tacit expectations.
Non-violent communication: focus on your own feelings rather than on what other people made you feel. Sentences such as “I felt rejected” are always to be preferred to “I felt that you rejected me”.
8-Affection
In a polyamorous relationship, you can never give your partners for granted. You always have to remind them about your love for them, especially after a date with one of your other partners.
Fortunately, you can do so in many ways! Flowers and little presents are a good choice and a simple ‘I love you’ is always welcome. This has also a positive side for you as your partners will never end up giving you for granted, even after years of relationship.
9-Honesty
To have a healthy polyamorous relationship you need to be honest not only with your partner but first and foremost with yourself. Once you understand your emotions, whether jealousy or love for someone, make sure to tell your partners. As Christin Klesse point out in his article Notion of Love in Polyamory:
[Honesty] is the starting point for establishing a relationship culture in which the permanent re-negotiation of boundaries becomes possible
Only if there are no secrets between partners it will be possible to effectively discuss and create new agreements.
10-Go easy on yourself
You may want a polyamory relationship more than anything in the world. You might have been the one proposing it in the first place. Still, sometimes you will be upset. Don’t worry, we have all been there. You can’t fight jealousy by shaming yourself. Remember that also people in polyamorous relationships feel jealous and have all kind of negative feelings. What’s important is to learn from them rather than hide them. | https://medium.com/the-pink/10-skills-to-master-for-an-enduring-polyamorous-relationship-1da4bad2f3d7 | [] | 2020-12-23 07:21:12.549000+00:00 | ['Relatioship', 'Polyamory', 'Life', 'Nonmonogamy', 'Love'] |
FIVE THINGS TO START RIGHT AWAY FOR A BALANCED MIND | Work-life balance, Mind-body balance are some fancy terms we hear these days . Infact the greatest struggle is striking a balance among all aspects like career, relationship, emotional well-being ,fitness etc. But we can’t stress enough how all of these are equally important.
Well, here are 5 easy ways to have a balanced mind. All you need is some little effort, patience and zest to enjoy doing these stuffs.
Engage yourself creatively:
Get those creative juices flowing!
Always we’re stuck in a vicious cycle of meetings and projects. Lockdown can stress things out because everything is now virtual . But hey, it also gives you an opportunity to experience a new side of yours . Here are some few ways to help you out.
· Pick up a new hobby: It might be designing ,photography ,editing or embroidery . It might be anything you wanted to try for long . Try to master it . Elevate the skills using internet. Express your talent through social media. You can even try freelancing with these art forms if you’re expertise in it.
· Get back to your lost hobbies: Many of you must’ve gone to dance , music or drawing classes in childhood . Practice your basics . Get back to your old days . It might be a good stress busters.
· Engage collectively for good : Find people who vibe with you and get into social service . Or get playing to those olden games like Antakshari or Musical chair with your squad. This can keep your mind engaged and distressed.
So what are you waiting for ? Get those creative juices flowing
2. Take a break:
Chill-pill is a must !
Never sit in one place for too long. Take occasional breaks . It can be as long as weekend getaway to as short as a quick nap . Taking break and having some “me” time can increase productivity when you work next time.
Read a book, Walk around, do a little dance,or meditate to energise yourself . Plan weekend getaways and make it a point to spend some time with nature . You’d find yourself rejuvenated .
Make sure you’d spend your break time away from gadgets .
3. Exercise:
Never stop hustling! Run ! Run! Run!
A wise old saying says,”If you take care of your body for 1 hour, then for the rest 23 hours your body takes care of you”.
One of the most important points people stress is to exercise . It not only impacts your physique but also mind .
Start with a 30 min slow walk or jog if you’re a complete beginner. Slowly increase your pace.
Pace and peace.
Graduate into workouts , zumba or yoga . It aids in Hormonal balance and help you burn those bad fats that gets accumulated everyday . This inturn can keep your mind away from unwanted stress .
Make this a habit and you’d look forward to this time of the day !
4. Indulge in healthy diets:
A healthy mind in a healthy body!
Do you know how important is diet to have a healthy and balanced mind?
Studies say that unhealthy diets like foods rich in refined sugar are harmful to your brain. It promotes oxidative stress and inturn aggrevate the symptoms of depression.
Risk of depression reduces around 35% for those who have traditional diet.
Diet need not be complex. Few simple things can make you feel better.
Diet need not be complex. Few simple things can make you feel better.
· Mindful eating and potion control in every meal can do wonders to you. Indulge everything in limited amount .
· Avoiding fried, proceesed and sugary foods . It is said that foods like these can make you lazy, increase your anger and feel stressed.
· Drink lots and lots of water . Atleast 3Litres per day . Water can flush out excess toxins and make you feel fresh. Try various drinks like Honey water ,cumin water , cinnamon water etc. It can aid in fat loss and keep your body light .
· Try new healthy recipies and replace your regular meals with healthy ones. Eg: Replace coffee with black coffee. It can improve the function of brain
· Make a point to have some nuts everyday. Having assorted nuts can keep your brain active and it’s the healthiest snack.
· Indulge in more of fresh fruits and veggies.
5. Occasional Digital detox:
Ditch those gadgets for sometime!
We’ve been caught into digital world and we’re obsessed with it. Keeping our hands away from gadgets is a task. But it can affect our health . It can keep you stressed and feel over-worked.
So its ideal to digital detox once a week . Or make a point to avoid screentime for some time in a day . Take this as a challenge and gradually reduce .
You’d see more articles coming up on this in following weeks .
These might seem big but trust me , you can bring this into your routine one by one and feel the change by yourself .
Hope you’d love this !
Lets strive for a healthy and balanced mind and spread more positively.
Cheers :) | https://medium.com/@chanakyamentalhealthservices/five-things-to-start-right-away-for-a-balanced-mind-d614e594c54c | ['Chanakya Mental Health Services'] | 2020-10-25 07:12:37.113000+00:00 | ['Balanced Life', 'Lifehacks', 'Mental Health', 'Life Hacking', 'Easy Living'] |
Twice as Many Appointments in Mali | Umu Bouare isn’t the only hairstylist in her village, but she has to be the most likable. Sitting on the quiet, well-shaded porch of her home, she welcomes customers in with an infectious smile; it’s no surprise that she has multiple appointments each day.
For women in this community, coming to see Umu isn’t just about having their hair styled for an event or a feast — they also come to relax.
“I do their hair and we talk together,” Umu explains, laughing.
“Because of the water taps, we have time to earn money and do other things — even take a rest. We didn’t think this day would ever come.”
That’s the part of her job she loves: the social aspect.
Sure, it provides income that she can use to buy clothes, food and shoes for her family, but the real highlight is the chance to connect with other women in the community, to make them feel beautiful. | https://medium.com/charity-water/umus-story-99e7f6ce7a0e | ['Charity'] | 2015-02-25 18:58:56.804000+00:00 | ['Clean Water', 'Africa', 'Hair'] |
It’s very early. | It’s very early. Toronto had one poor quarter and got bit by a huge shooting night. Let’s see in a few weeks :) | https://medium.com/@wheatonbrando/its-very-early-a46c8a13eb91 | ['Brandon Anderson'] | 2020-12-26 07:29:16.746000+00:00 | ['NBA', 'Future', 'Culture', 'Sports'] |
How Augmented Reality is Revolutionizing the Mining Industry | Mining Industry consists of the discovery, valuation, exploitation, processing, and marketing of useful minerals, such as coal, iron, or precious metals. This industry locates minerals and removes them in the most economical and efficient way possible for use by various industries. As it happens often in any sector, the mining industry is also facing major challenges that have a big impact on the entire operating process. To overcome difficulties, businesses in this field are always looking for ways to address these challenges and ensure a competitive position in the international market arena.
Augmented Reality is quickly becoming one of the must-have technologies for the mining industry and already many enterprises are already using it to improve productivity and work safety. This technology enables remote distance support that provides headquarter experts with the ability to visually guide and collaborate with site operators. Site operators are able to remotely solve unexpected issues by bridging the physical and virtual worlds.
Trending AR VR Articles:
Optimization of the mining process by reducing costs, improving efficiencies, increasing productivity, and enhancing safety are just some of the many benefits that this technology offers. Moreover, what is most important is that remote assistance can be easily incorporated into current work environments by maximizing employee engagement and minimizing the costs of implementing new tools.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the Augmented Reality applications in the mining environment.
Critical Inspection
Since mining is a very delicate industry, the effectiveness of processes for inspecting various problems that may arise and possible defects is critical in all subsequent processes. Remote Assistance makes it possible for remote experts to virtually inspect all machinery as well as the surrounding environment. All this inspection is made possible by Augmented Reality, which integrated into smart glasses through the zoom-in/out feature shows every detail including dangerous areas without endangering the site operators.
Maintenance and Repair
The use of AR Remote Assistance ensures the maintenance and repair of machines in the most efficient way possible. In the event of a breakdown of any machine, all the information necessary for its repair is served directly to the site technicians. Through detailed information and enriched with pictures or pdf files, site technicians can follow step by step the process of how to fix a certain part. All this is done in a simple and fast way since the use of smart glasses enables hand-free performance.
Drilling Applications
Visual guide assistance through AR makes it possible to significantly increase the accuracy and efficiency of drilling. When applying AR to aid drilling practices, it allows the transmission of necessary information by remote experts. Drilling operators also have a wider field of information by improving the accuracy of their work during this difficult process. Increasing accuracy during this process enables the reduction of potential damages and the avoidance of various risks.
Real-time Operator Assistance
Mining operations are usually quite difficult due to different environmental or climatic conditions. AR visual aid makes it possible for experts to warn site operators of potential dangers that threaten them. This real-time information improves collaboration and significantly increases response time. Workers are less exposed to various risks and are more engaged in their tasks, thus increasing the productivity of their work.
Site Operators Training
The mining industry has the highest mortality rate at work among all industries. Given the riskiness of this sector, the workforce must be highly experienced and have sufficient knowledge. Through the use of AR, even inexperienced workers can know exactly what steps to follow in each situation, which will allow them to perform virtual moves before their eyes and gain the necessary knowledge for later situations. This will help improve workforce quality but also reduce the high costs of training by enabling workers with more skills, knowledge, and confidence to do their job.
In addition to what we mentioned above, there are many other applications of Augmented Reality in this sector. To start with improved maintenance through virtual instructions, enhanced collaboration to better engagement and training of employees by knowledge sharing beyond borders. As a tool that provides AR Remote Assistance, VSight Remote goes further to provide real-time guidance and assistance during critical situations. The utilization of VSight Remote conducts greater efficiency on maintenance, repair tasks of equipment, and on the entire systems of the mining industry. VSight as a provider of effective solutions for the unskilled workforce and showing real benefits can be considered as a catalyzation to many enterprises that are still skeptical about Augmented Reality. Now is the time for the leaders of these enterprises operating in this field to start exploring the adoption of this technology quite beneficial and having the real results that every business aims for.
Don’t forget to give us your 👏 ! | https://arvrjourney.com/how-augmented-reality-is-revolutionizing-the-mining-industry-7740f1a80272 | ['Linda Malecaj'] | 2020-12-10 16:00:26.219000+00:00 | ['Smart Glasses', 'Mining', 'Industry', 'Augmented Reality', 'Remote Assistance'] |
BITCOIN PEGGED(PBTC) on DeFiBOX | Hello Readers!!!
EOS Blockchain is a very large blockchain network and as we Bitcoin is the father of all cryptocurrency. Defibox has launched for quite a while now and we’ve had different coins for instant swap on Defibox.
Any coin that must have a successful swap on Defibox must be compatible with the EOS Blockchain, all eos wallet must entertain this coin.
Bitcoin is a coin that can only be on its own network, and if it must be on some other Blockchain I know, then it has to be a pegged.
PBTC (BTC- Pegged) is a BTC- Pegged on EOS network, used on EOSFinex, this was brought to Defibox by PNetworkDeFi.
Users of Defibox can now swap their BTC-Pegged into any coin and also swap other coins to PBTC.
PBTC liquidity pool on defibox has over 50 PBTC with different people provided liquidity to the pool.
Swap.defi has the highest stake in the pool with so many other stakeholders.
In Conclusion, PBTC is now available on DeFibox for swaps.
THANKS FOR READING
I am Bee 🐝 | https://medium.com/@funskid/bitcoin-pegged-pbtc-on-defibox-7fb824cbcced | ['Princess Aniky'] | 2020-10-25 16:00:24.515000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Eos', 'Defibox', 'Defi', 'Newdex'] |
Fighting COVID-19 with Folding@home and Multi-GPU rigs | Years ago, I played with distributed computing like SETI@home and even bought a Playstation 3 for Folding@home. So began an obsession with building, overclocking, and breaking computers. I have many hours collaborating with others on password cracking, ethereum mining, and deep learning matrix multiplying rigs. Imagine my surprise when Folding@home released a statement about Corvid-19:
Folding@home team has released an initial wave of projects simulating potentially druggable protein targets from SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19)
Let’s get on this!
While very simple to do, I wanted to make an even easier reference for those using Ubuntu with multiple rigs. It took me a few hours, I want it to take you a few minutes.
Install all the things
If you have a monitor or are running windows, these commands are not for you. Everything I did from the command line via ssh into all my headless instances.
When you get a prompt for a username, team, and pass. It doesn’t matter what you choose. These are identifiers so that you can prove you did the work. If you have a favorite “team,” feel free.
wget
wget wget https://download.foldingathome.org/releases/public/release/fahclient/debian-testing-64bit/v7.4/fahclient_7.4.4_amd64.deb wget https://download.foldingathome.org/releases/public/release/fahcontrol/debian-testing-64bit/v7.4/fahcontrol_7.4.4-1_all.deb wget https://download.foldingathome.org/releases/public/release/fahviewer/debian-testing-64bit/v7.4/fahviewer_7.4.4_amd64.deb sudo dpkg -i --force-depends fahclient_7.4.4_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i --force-depends fahcontrol_7.4.4-1_all.deb
Multi GPU Configuration
If you have multiple GPUs, you should change your configuration to take advantage of them. This config file is also where you can alter your name and pass.
sudo vi /etc/fahclient/config.xml
You can use the following code and change as needed. Bolded changes highlight how I set GPU to true, slot id =0 is a GPU and added slot 2.
<config>
<!-- Client Control -->
<fold-anon v='true'/> <!-- Folding Slot Configuration -->
<gpu v='true'/> <!-- Slot Control -->
<power v='full'/> <!-- User Information -->
<team v='XXXXXX'/>
<user v='XXXXX'/> <!-- Folding Slots -->
<slot id='0' type='GPU'/>
<slot id='1' type='GPU'/>
</config>
Once complete you will need to reboot the service
sudo /etc/init.d/FAHClient restart -v
Hopefully, everything will work, but let’s verify.
Verifying your work
After it restarted, you should be able to check out the log to see it working.
sudo /etc/init.d/FAHClient log
It should look something like this. We can see the project chosen along with two work units (WU01 and WU00). It did take some time before I received a work unit from the server for each of the GPUs. I have Nvidia GPUs, and when checking, I used
nvidia-smi
We can see that two processes labeled FahCore_22 are running. Both are at 99%+ utilization. So everything appears to be in order.
Work complete
When work complete, everything is sent over to Folding@home. It might take a little while to get another work unit from the server.
Great success! | https://medium.com/@JamesDietle/fighting-covid-19-with-folding-home-and-multi-gpu-rigs-7c0894f39242 | ['James Dietle'] | 2020-03-15 04:56:57.164000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Coronaviruses', 'Folding At Home', 'Ubuntu'] |
Learn to code smarter: How to become a senior software engineer quickly | Learn to code smarter: How to become a senior software engineer quickly Shanea Follow Nov 13 · 6 min read
When I first taught myself to code, I noticed a gap. Even though I’d been teaching myself to code for five years, I didn’t have the skills necessary to reach the next level. I was technical… but not technical enough.
It wasn’t just me who noticed this skill gap either. After years working to become a Product Manager at Google, I finally had the opportunity to interview for the role. However, after passing five internal interviews, I was told by the hiring manager that I would never pass the technical ladder transfer interviews. The job was given to someone else.
After all my hard work, I felt defeated. My insecurity– that I wasn’t technical enough– was staring at me in the face. Despite all the hours I’d spent building mobile apps and learning how to develop in Java, Javascript, and Python, I wasn’t skilled enough to snag my dream job.
I wanted to be a better software engineer and product manager, so I got a (second) bachelor’s degree, this time in Computer Science. Because I’d been in the job market before this degree, I gained unique insight into how Computer Science is taught, as well as how those lessons directly translate into our roles as engineers.
Now that I have a Computer Science degree, have put in the hours as a technical product management executive, and have founded my own tool for developers, I understand what was preventing me from exceling. Although I’m happy about where I’ve landed, this knowledge shouldn’t be locked in a Computer Science degree.
Today, I’m sharing how you can learn to code smarter so that you can become a senior software engineer quickly. Even if you have a ways to go, this knowledge will help you become better than you were yesterday.
Why become a senior software engineer?
First off, what’s so great about becoming a senior software engineer? Why go through the trouble? In my experience, senior software engineers are trusted to solve harder problems and handle more complexity. Although this can be challenging, it also gives you the opportunity to build something that’s rewarding and impactful. It gives you a seat at the table.
Not only that, but being a senior software engineer gives you the chance to mentor and provide insights to others. Often, it may lead to managing your own group. And, let’s not forget about the senior software engineer salary. On average, senior software engineers make 92% more than junior ones, according to PayScale.
For me, becoming a senior leader changed the trajectory of my career. While I was completing my degree, I landed a senior role at eBay. Not only did I get the role I wanted, but I was also able to skip the junior level. In doing so, I instantly tripled my salary. In that first year, I took seven separate products from ideation to launch, giving me enough experience to get into even higher level roles.
How to become a senior software engineer quickly
If you want to advance in your engineering career, you shouldn’t have to go get a second degree. That’s a big (and expensive) commitment that requires years of your time. Becoming a senior software engineer quickly requires you to read, understand, and have a big picture understanding of programming languages.
How can you ensure you have an in-depth understanding of code? You’ll need to read a lot of code, get a lot of code reviews, and give a lot of code reviews. Spending time with code and gaining feedback from others will help you gain the depth of knowledge you need to move forward.
But giving and receiving code reviews isn’t enough to put you on the right track. Ultimately, you need to gain the ability to build large mental models. This all boils down to loading up more complex systems in your head.
Engineering requires us to hold abstract systems and concepts in our heads via a skill called spatial reasoning. Spatial reasoning is the ability to “generate, retain, retrieve, and transform well-structured visual images” (Lohman 1996). It’s what we do when we visualize shapes in our “mind’s eye.”
In engineering, we use spatial reasoning to create a mental picture or a mental model of how our systems should look. We hold it in our heads. You follow a function call from one file to another. You imagine how data at runtime flows through that picture you created. You transform that picture by flipping it and manipulating it daily.
To get to senior engineer, you need to hold larger and larger systems in your head. You need to add more and more to your mental model. You need to build up a database of things you have seen before.
This is what takes so much time, and it’s what you need to conquer to go from junior to senior engineer.
A few tips for building these models
Turns out, I have terrible spatial reasoning skills. This challenge is so visceral to me that I’ve built an entire company around it. CodeSee’s mission is to help developers and development teams master and maintain their understanding of large scale codebases.
Codesee.io helps dev teams all speak the same language. It takes these large scale systems that engineers have traditionally held in their heads, and it creates a visual map along with all of the data that PMs can understand and that shows how all the pieces fit together. This map shows everything from the line of code that gets run to the higher level system architecture.
Here are a few recommended tips for building mental models, all of which are built into the CodeSee platform.
Write things down. Some say that good writing is good thinking, and I agree. Being able to write down what’s going on in your code will clarify your thoughts, help you see the big picture, and ensure that you’re able to communicate your ideas to others. Make sure you write things down in a scalable way that you can search from, build onto, and is available when you need it. Practice spatial reasoning skills. Spatial reasoning does not come naturally to me, but I’ve practiced these skills to become an expert. Every time I write a bit of code, I work to build a mental model in my head. Draw a picture instead of holding something in your head. Drawing a simple picture or diagram can help you plot out your ideas and situate them contextually. Similar to writing things down, drawing a picture helps you solidify your thoughts and share them with others. Reason about the data. Every system is made up of code and data. If you are only looking at the code, you’re missing half of the picture. Ask yourself: Where is the data stored? What does it look like? Where does the data start, go and end up? How is the data transformed along the way? Read a lot of code. This is what most people advise, but it’s really important. I put reading of code into my calendar, and I go to Stack Overflow and other open source codebases. The best advice I’ve heard here was from a language teacher: Read it once, ignoring the things you don’t know. Read it again, noting the things you don’t know. Then, look up everything you don’t know. Finally, read it again.
No matter your background or experience, it’s possible to go from a junior to senior software engineer– just as long as you have a solid, big picture understanding of programming languages.
Shanea Leven is the Founder and CEO of a developer platform called CodeSee. CodeSee helps developers master understanding of codebases. We visualize in real-time how a software system works and fits together, so developers — and anyone else — can onboard more easily, plan more reliably, and ship features faster and better. Shanea has spent many years as a technical product leader building platforms for developers at Google, Docker, eBay, Cloudflare and various startups. She is also the chair of Executive Women In Product. | https://medium.com/codesee-io/learn-to-code-smarter-how-to-become-a-senior-software-engineer-quickly-8f19903f419d | [] | 2020-11-13 23:48:36.071000+00:00 | ['Engineering', 'Coding', 'Software Development', 'JavaScript', 'Programming'] |
On the Third Day | On the Third Day
Photo by Ivan Lenin on Unsplash
The white-bearded old man a regular
lumbering between Varella and Collins Avenues at SR 16
pockmarked face
bloated and ruddy with rosacea
faded camouflage fishing hat, oversized maroon sweatshirt,
too-long denim shorts holding up his big belly
not lumbering, but simply stumbling through his territory
between Family Dollar and Dollar General-
near the building touting “GUNS” in all caps,
Advance Auto Part, Seed Sod Sold Here store as well as
Rabbit Hill Self Storage, unkempt lawns blanketed in front of shabby homes where windows permanently covered by weathered 2x4's
in perpetual anticipation of the next Florida hurricane
Is He just an afterthought?
I almost rolled into him once as I turned right on Collins Avenue where
I teach — a Title 1 school in the oldest City in America, St. Augustine-
I did
as I recklessly typed notes on my phone
peering at the slowly-stumbling Him
paling polaroid in my mind.
In his former life did he man the counter
at the store called GUNS,
mow lawns in the scorching Florida heat, or
did life eventually get the better of him?
Is his first love and two kids, now grown,
wondering where he is
picket fence now grey and grass greener elsewhere
or are they relieved to have him out of their hair?
Oh, I’ve got it!
Of course
a PIRATE, that’s what he was
like the actors that serve at
the family pirate ship and ghost tours
that frequent Dunkin Donuts
took me by surprise the first time I saw them
before school getting my mornin’ fix of java
looking like they really did just
mutiny off of this historic Florida coast
raiding the Castilla de San Marco
17th century Spanish fortress
maybe he played the role too well
too much rum
to act in these PG events
couldn’t even hold down that part
he was type cast for.
Failure spewing from his mouth
eventually he plodded through the downtrodden streets
of Old St. Augustine, past the Ponce de Leon’s
Fountain of Youth and Ripley’s Believe it or Not! tourist traps
landing at the corner of Collins and SR 16.
For two days straight I studied him
as I neared my school
frantically recording images -
on the third day
as I rolled by, He just lifted his hat
stared through my eyes and waved
that saved me
If He could be okay, so could I.
Ann Marie Steele | https://medium.com/scrittura/one-the-third-day-c9c66767d6ca | ['Ann Marie Steele'] | 2020-12-30 01:40:53.205000+00:00 | ['Disenfranchisement', 'Poverty', 'Free Verse Poetry', 'Life Questions'] |
Repeating Dream Sequences | deeper still
you have the drive
to toe the path
mossed over
a bramble ambushed
perhaps by hooves
looking out
a potential clearing
but light only deceives
here is where you expect
to find
what holds the enchantment
in this story
what brilliance will
you turn into
what kind of wisdom
will people seek you for
alone, still seems right
but you misstep
and mistake the mist
for a change in weather
a light jacket
a stolen roll in the pocket
a slip of paper
with numbers
the tree
will emerge
they said
you just have to keep going
but it will emerge
repeating dream sequences
a waterfall, swimming hole
a tunnel, a haunted room
these settings are familiar
still alone, you walk through
them forward and back
a haunted room on the fourth floor
a tunnel under a touchable moon
a swimming hole, a rope swing
a waterfall, a path behind it
still the tree
remains hidden
a waterfall, a tiny brook
a swimming hole, a second place medal
a tunnel, where lovers meet
a haunted room, a slice in the wallpaper
and still no number tree
even in the circle
you drop the pack
and wait
rest and hear what
calls on the wind
a bird of prey
drips from rain
something scatters
and breaks your heart
again | https://medium.com/the-pom/repeating-dream-sequences-5a5fae8c38c0 | ['Samantha Lazar'] | 2020-12-12 16:08:38.938000+00:00 | ['Magical Realism', 'Fantasy', 'Short Story', 'Poetry', 'Magic'] |
The Internet of Things: How It Can Shape the Future | Your thermostat adjusts itself to reach optimal temperature based on data about the weather outside. Your alarm clock rings in the morning and triggers the light in the room. Your printer orders a new cartridge when it's running low on ink. Although these interactions seem like they’re straight out of a sci-fi movie, they might soon become reality due to the Internet of Things.
Concept Art for IoT
The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to devices and objects connected to each other through the Internet.
These connected devices share data to communicate meaningful information. Intel predicts that the number of smart devices in the world will increase from 15 billion in 2015 to a jaw-dropping 200 billion by 2020. Potential uses of the technology are explored below.
IoT in the home
Application for Homes
The smart thermostat, alarm clock, and printer mentioned in the introduction are just a few possibilities for IoT in homes. In fact, Nest, an IoT company acquired by Google, currently produces smart thermostats, cameras, doorbells, alarm systems, and locks. These products can all be controlled from the user’s phone, making it much simpler to have an overview of everything going on in their home. Appliances such as smart refrigerators, which can scan what products are stored inside of them, and smart toasters also exist. As exciting as they seem, these products are only the tip of the iceberg. Once smart devices are invented for every aspect of the home, the full potential of IoT can be realized as the interconnected devices create a true smart home.
IoT in cities
Application for Cities
If you’ve ever been to New York City or Los Angeles, you understand how bad of a problem of traffic congestion is. A motorist in the Big Apple wastes an average of 133 hours in traffic every year. The answer to this problem is — you guessed it — IoT. Data collected from various sources (sensors, vehicle GPS, cameras) can be analyzed by city officials to understand traffic patterns. These insights can be utilized to help officials set traffic signals to the appropriate time. Additionally, traffic data can be sent to drivers’ phones to alert them about which areas to avoid. The same data can also help alert emergency services when accidents occur. Another hassle to drivers, parking, can also be made simpler with IoT; sensors in parking lots can provide real-time data about which spots are available.
IoT in the workplace
Application for Companies
IoT can be implemented in a variety of ways to impact companies. Smart locks can provide greater convenience and security than traditional locks. Furthermore, smart locks can indicate when and — if combined with biometrics — who has accessed company locations. The application of smart lighting/thermostats benefits both the environment and the company’s pockets by greatly increasing energy savings. Voice assistants can help employees by linking to management systems, notes, and calendars. Supply chain logistics is one of the areas where IoT’s effect will be felt the most. IoT enables companies to more accurately track the movement of materials, finished products, and delivery vehicles, ensuring everything is accounted for at all times. RFID (radio frequency identification) scanners help the consumer by streamlining the purchasing process and help the company by providing data regarding inventory tracking.
Privacy is an urgent issue
Privacy
Privacy is perhaps the most important issue for IoT to grapple with. Since anything connected to the internet can be hacked, IoT companies must ensure that cybersecurity is a priority. Complying with privacy laws is another thing IoT companies must be strict about. The deeply personal nature of IoT integration in homes only raises the stakes. What if a complete stranger knew what food was in your fridge? Had the ability to change the temperature in your home? Could spy on you using the very security systems built to protect you? Would you feel safe? These questions highlight the inherent risk that comes with gathering so much data. In order for IoT to become a revolutionary technology, tech companies must first gain the trust of consumers.
As prices become lower and functionality increases, the Internet of Things moves closer to becoming the disruptive technology of the future. | https://medium.com/@roshan.adusumilli/the-internet-of-things-how-it-can-shape-the-future-3a4f6cb24072 | ['Roshan Adusumilli'] | 2019-09-25 00:03:07.158000+00:00 | ['Consumer Electronics', 'Privacy', 'Disruptive Technologies', 'Internet of Things'] |
How supply chain mapping affected the Indian organization in Covid-19? | How supply chain mapping affected the Indian organization in Covid-19?
On 24 March 2020, our Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the nationwide lockdown for 21 days. After that, the whole thing got changed. From the farmer to the businessman, all people affected. Many of them were struggling to get the basic amenities and the companies were struggling for their raw materials. Soon whole supply chain got disrupt. The companies which knew the exact source (i.e. location) of their materials, secured some time to think about alternatives but most of the companies did not know. That’s why many companies shut their plants within one month.
Here supply chain mapping (is a kind of web or layout in which we connect companies and their various suppliers to account for the exact source of materials.) played an important role. By using supply chain mapping, an organization can understand from where the whole supply gets affected. After knowing the affected place or supplier, we can analyze the root cause of supply and can make a decision.
In the beginning, China was the first country that affects the most by COVID-19. Also, we know that China is the largest automotive manufacturer in the world. Due to this, the global supply chain of the automobile industry disrupted. India is one of the largest importers in the world because of which many Indian companies were facing problems to get their raw material or parts by which their production of vehicles plummeted. But some companies knew that situation and used their supply chain map to know about how many parts are coming from China either directly or indirectly. Now you are thinking that every company knows about their supplier so what is the new thing in supply chain mapping?
We know that company recorded the information about the supplier but that is a direct supplier. In supply chain mapping, we created a series of suppliers one behind the other, and make a web. So, we can better understand the exact source of the supplier. In the future, if any problem will occur from the supplier side (can be a direct supplier or indirect supplier) organization can make the decision in advance in such a way that their future supply will not affect. That’s why many leading companies mandate the suppliers to participate in their supply chain mapping efforts.
In the COVID scenario, companies knew about their supplier but they did not know about the supplier of the supplier because of which they are unable to locate the root cause of the problem. Small companies that were taking the material from the Indian manufacturer, was thinking that their supply will not disrupt but they forgot or unable to map the supplier who is supplying the material to their original supplier. At this time, the supply chain played an important role in which we can locate the indirect supplier. Supply chain mapping tells us which things are affecting the most.
As a result, an organization that did not use supply chain mapping in COVID shut its plant early as compared to those organizations that used the supply chain mapping. | https://medium.com/@rinkeshjha8/how-supply-chain-mapping-affected-the-indian-organization-in-covid-19-e1ec190f72d8 | ['Rinkesh Kumar Jha'] | 2020-12-19 04:08:25.584000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Supply Chain', 'Mapping', 'Supply Chain Management', 'India'] |
Factorials and How to Compute Them | I am sure you all remember the surprise you had the first time you saw a “5!” or “7!”, that exclamation mark, and the realization that this was formal mathematical notation…
We define the factorial of a positive integer number n, denoted as n!, to be the product of all integer numbers from 1 to n. More formally, for any positive integer n ≥ 1, we have
n! = 1 * 2 * … * n.
Conventionally, we also define 0! = 1.
For example, we have:
0! = 1
1! = 1
2! = 1 * 2 = 2
3! = 1 * 2 * 3 = 6
4! = 1 * 2 * 3 * 4 = 24
5! = 1 * 2 * 3 * 4 * 5 = 120.
By observing the above expressions, we see that for any positive integer n ≥ 1, we have that
n! = n * (n-1)!.
In words, we just gave a recursive definition of the factorial function. Combined with the base case of 0! = 1, this is an equivalent definition of the factorial of a number.
The two equivalent definitions already suggest algorithms for computing the factorial of any number n, as they are constructive. Moreover, the algorithms implied by the definitions are very straightforward and easy to implement. So, one might, reasonably, ask whether we are done.
The goal of this article is to discuss the task of computing the factorial of a number, which seems so simple and self-explanatory that a lot of people might have never bothered thinking about.
Note: When analyzing the running time of algorithms whose main tasks are elementary operations between numbers, we have to be slightly careful in order not to oversimplify the computational model under which we analyze such algorithms. It is often the case that we assume simple models where each operation (addition, multiplication) takes 1 unit of time to complete, and then the main part of the analysis is to count the number of steps needed. This is extremely useful when it comes to graph algorithms, for example, where the number of steps is the bottleneck of the algorithm. A standard such model is the Random-access Machine (RAM) model of computation. In most cases, this works just fine. But, we should not abuse such simplifications. If we are dealing with numerical algorithms, as we do here, it is often much more meaningful to keep track of the actual size of the representation of a number, and take into account the time needed to perform each elementary operation. And this is what we will do here.
Before actually posing the question of the running time of the algorithms that we have for computing n!, let’s first think about the following question.
Given a positive integer n ≥ 0, how many bits are required to write down (in binary format) the number n! ?
We know that the number of bits needed to write down any positive integer number is equal to the logarithm with base 2 of that number (of course, if the logarithm of a number is not an integer, we have to round up the logarithm to the next integer, but this is inconsequential). So, the number of bits needed to describe n! is (essentially) log n!. We will now estimate log n! up to constant factors. For reasons that will become clear later, we assume from now on that n ≥ 64; this is without loss of generality, as 64 is a constant, and thus, for smaller values of n, we simply need constant space and time to compute the corresponding factorial.
We have
log n! = log (1 * 2 * … * n) = log 1 + log 2 + … + log n ≤ n * log n.
Moreover, we have
log n! ≥ log (n div 2) + log ((n div 2) + 1) + … + log n,
where n div 2 denotes the quotient of the integer division. We now claim that
log (n div 2) + log ((n div 2) + 1) + … + log n ≥ (n/3) * log n.
To see this, note that in the left-hand side of the above inequality there are at least n/2 terms, and each one of them is at least log (n/2) - 1 = log n - 2. This implies that
log (n div 2) + log ((n div 2) + 1) + … + log n ≥ (n/2) * (log n - 2).
We conclude that
log (n div 2) + log ((n div 2) + 1) + … + log n ≥ (n/2) * log n - n.
Finally, we have that n ≤ (n/6) * log n; note that this holds for every n that satisfies log n ≥ 6, or equivalently, for every n ≥ 2⁶ = 64, which we have already assumed. Thus,
(n/2) * log n - n ≥ (n/2) * log n - (n/6) * log n = (n/3) * log n.
To summarize, we just proved the following fact.
For every n ≥ 2⁶, (n/3) * log n ≤ log n! ≤ n * log n.
The above fact implies that we need Θ(n * log n) bits to write down the number log n!. In particular, this means that any algorithm that computes the number log n! will necessarily have to take time Ω(n * log n), since this is the time required just to write down the output.
Analyzing the performance of different algorithms
The two equivalent definitions of factorials that we saw in the beginning already suggest two algorithms, one iterative and one recursive, which are essentially equivalent in terms of running time.
The original definition of factorials suggests the following algorithm.
1) If (n < 2)
return 1; 2) Let t = 1; 3) For i = 2, ..., n:
t = t * i; 4) Return t;
The above algorithm does n - 1 iterations, and each iteration multiplies two numbers. Moreover, for every i ≥ n div 2, the value of t is already big enough so that the number of bits required to represent it is Θ(n log n). Thus, for at least n/2 iterations, the algorithm (for each such iteration) multiplies a number with Θ(n log n) bits with a number with Θ(log n) bits. Clearly, such a multiplication will necessarily take time Ω(n log n), since the length of the output is at least that much. It also takes time at most O(n log² n), if we use the fastest known algorithms for multiplication of integers. We conclude that the above algorithm has running time at least Ω(n² log n).
The recursive definition of factorials also suggests a very simple recursive algorithm.
FACTORIAL(n): 1) If (n < 2)
return 1; 2) Return n * FACTORIAL(n-1);
It is easy to see that the above algorithm will perform the same operations, and in the same order, as the previous, iterative, algorithm. Thus, its running time is again roughly Θ(n²), ignoring some logarithmic factors.
Divide-and-Conquer delivers again
We will now describe a simple idea that drastically improves the running time. The starting point is the recursive algorithm we discussed in the previous section. The main issue that slows done that recursive algorithm is the fact that it performs Ω(n) multiplications involving numbers of size Ω(n log n). In other words, the “splitting-into-subproblems” strategy that it applies leads to a recursion tree that is a long chain of costly operations. So, one can ask whether there is another way of splitting into subproblems, such as the recursion tree is more shallow. This leads to the following idea.
For i < j, let Π(i, j) denote the product of the consecutive numbers from i to j. Clearly, for any integer n > 1, we have n! = Π(1, n). Moreover, for any integer t that satisfies 1 ≤ t < n, we have
Π(1, n) = Π(1, t) * Π(t + 1, n).
The above expression implies that we have many choices for partitioning our original problem into subproblems, with the recursive definition of the previous section just using one of these choices, namely t = n - 1.
Our goal now is to focus on the more general task of coming up with a fast algorithm to compute Π(i, j), for any i < j. Again, for any integer t that satisfies i ≤ t < j, we have
Π(i, j) = Π(i, t) * Π(t + 1, j).
Thus, we can write down the following algorithm-scheme for computing the number Π(i, j).
CONSECUTIVE_PRODUCT(i,j): 1) If (i == j)
return i; 2) Select integer t from the set {i,i+1,...,j-1} using some rule; 3) Return CONSECUTIVE_PRODUCT(i,t) * CONSECUTIVE_PRODUCT(t+1,j);
We will use a very simple rule in Step (2). We will always set
t = i + (j - i) div 2.
In words, we pick t to be roughly the midpoint between i and j.
Let’s now think about the encoding length of the number Π(i, j). We can write
Π(i, j) = i * (i + 1) * … * j ≤ j * j * … * j.
The above product has j - i + 1 terms. This means that the encoding length of Π(i, j) is at most
This implies that after the recursive calls of Step (3) have ended, the final multiplication performed at Step (3) takes time at most
O( (j - i) * log j * log (j - i) + (j - i) * log j * log log j ),
which is at most C * (j - i) * log² j, for some universal constant C > 0. Thus, if T(i, j) denotes the running time of the above algorithm with the rule we specified, we have
T(i, j) ≤ T(i, i + (j - i) div 2) + T(i + 1 + (j - i) div 2, j) + C * (j - i) * log² j.
For reasons that will become clear later, we call the term C * (j - i) * log² j the contribution of the 1st level of the recursion.
There is one last observation that we have to make. Let’s try to unravel the recursive steps. Since we split evenly into subproblems, after one level of “unraveling”, the problems Π(i, i + (j - i) div 2) and Π(i + 1 + (j - i) div 2, j) will have further been decomposed into the following problems, whose arguments roughly are
(i, i + (j - i)/4), (i + (j - i)/4 + 1, i + (j - i)/2), (i + (j - i)/2 + 1, i + 3 * (j - i)/4), (i + 3 * (j - i)/4 + 1, j).
The contribution in the running time of the problems Π(i, i + (j - i) div 2) and Π(i + 1 + (j - i) div 2, j), can be split into the time needed to complete the aforementioned 4 recursive calls, plus the final additive term, which corresponds to the final multiplication, which, for each of the above 2 subproblems, is the equal to
C * (j - i)/2 * log² (i + (j - i)/4)) ≤ C * (j - i)/2 * log² j.
Thus, if we add them together, we get that the 2nd level of the recursion has total contribution of at most
C * (j - i) * log² j.
Continuing in a similar fashion, we can completely unravel the recursion and end up with a recursion tree. Moreover, since we are splitting evenly into subproblems, the depth of the recursion tree will be O(log (j - i)), and each level, for similar reasons as the ones explained above, will contribute at most C * (j - i) * log² j to the running time. Pictorially, the recursion tree looks as follows.
The recursion tree, where n = j - i + 1, i.e., it can be thought of as the distance between the two arguments.
Thus, we end up with a total bound on the running time of
T(i, j) ≤ O( (j - i) * log (j - i) * log² j ).
Plugging in i = 1 and j = n, we conclude the following.
We can compute n! in time at most O(n * log³ n).
The above running time is a significant improvement compared to the quadratic (with respect to n) running times that we got when analyzing the two simple algorithms of the previous section. Up to logarithmic (in n) factors, this is an almost linear-time algorithm and is clearly almost optimal, as the time needed to just write the output is Θ(n log n).
Conclusion
In this article, we discussed a seemingly very simple question about how we can compute the factorial of a number. The Divide-and-Conquer approach discussed above is a significant improvement over the naive algorithms, but it is still not optimal. There is a slightly more involved algorithm that gives running time
O(n * log²n * log log² n),
by Peter B. Borwein and can be found here.
There is also a nice website maintained by Peter Luschny with implementations of several known algorithms, which can be found here.
References | https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/factorials-and-how-to-compute-them-cb77ae8b497d | ['Haris Angelidakis'] | 2020-10-04 20:07:37.840000+00:00 | ['Math', 'Science', 'Mathematics', 'Education', 'Algorithms'] |
Lying in Roses | ALL CREDITS TO PHOTOGRAPHER/ARTSIT
The First Thorn
As I sit here in this dimly lit room, and hear the rain so gently , but yet so roughly tapping on the window, I am reminded of him. His smile, his laugh, his funny, but yet weird jokes. I’ve managed to get through a couple of days pretending to make it look like I am okay around him. Today I cracked every so slightly, and told him I still cared about him (through text) and I of course, as expected, did not receive a response of any sort. It hurts knowing that he may not care about me anymore. It hurts knowing……it was probably so easy for him to move on. He seems so happy, and seems like he is doing just fine without me. Don’t get me wrong I am extremely happy for him. I only want the best for him. I just wish he would think of me as “the best for him.”
I don’t know if anyone I have talked to about this, thus far, knows how it feels to give your heart to someone, and then just crushing it, leaving you in pieces. As an almost 13 year old with insomnia, and social anxiety, I have been through situations where people just drop me and leave me, because I am too much. I do wonder if this is my fault, and if I was just too much for him to handle. Seeing him smile makes me want to cry. Seeing him frown makes me want to comfort him, even though I know I can’t anymore. If I could show him a visual representation of my heart, I wonder if he would feel bad at any point. I think the worst part about this is that…..I still love him. I would still do anything for him. I still see all the good in him.
As soon as he told me we should break up, I think I broke in a way I didn’t think was possible. I didn’t think it was possible to hate, and love someone at the same time. I still get butterflies around him. I still feel like hugging him all the time. Then I remember…..I can no longer do that, and I start to tear up. I wish there was a way of reading his thoughts. I wish there was a way I could just have all my questions answered. It may not be what I want to hear, but they would, ultimately, put me at peace. Maybe I’ll try asking him tomorrow. But then again that’s what I always say. Trust me, if I could talk to him for hours, I would. I would want to know what exactly is bothering him, and what exactly caused him to make the decision to break me in the way he did. It hurts when I see his Instagram name pop up on my screen, and I instantly think of the words, “I love you, but we should break up *heartbreak emoji*.” At the beginning there would be time-frames, where I forgot he broke up with me. There have been times where I almost texted him for advice. There have been times where my mind forgot everything that just happened, and I would think about what he was going to do tomorrow morning. Whether or not I would be getting a kiss or a hug. Then the cruel reality would come in, and I would then mentally fall to the floor, and have a breakdown about him.
Rain
It was a lovely ride
The carousel went slow
I was loved for the first time
I wasn’t sure how far it would go
Not knowing how to breathe
After those few subtle words
How could I explain how badly I was hurt?
My first love
My first heartbreak
How painful it was
My tears rolled off my face
Like how the rain was falling from the sky
When we hugged for the first time
Your scent was sweet
Like chocolate strawberries
And your words made sense
For the first time
My life made been correct
I wasn’t alone
But fairytales don’t last
I wish I would’ve known
Realizations
It’s been ten months. Ten months since I wrote that. Self discovery has happened in those ten months, but self destruction has come with it. But with every falling apart there is a putting together. I’ve lost friends along with beliefs and dreams. I have gained morality, and realized that this world might be falling apart at the seams, but we will always describe it as beautiful and wholesome. Our minds are built to think the worst, but are programmed for the best. Realizations that things don’t last forever, but in my augmented reality that I call my mind and imagination they can. I have walked through hell, and managed to keep my wings and gain a found appreciation for my darker personas. I am a demon and an angel in one system. One body. One functioning set of cells and membranes all together. I have thought of things that I would’ve never imagined. You must be broken to be rebuilt into a better person and that will happen more than once. No matter the circumstance, no matter the life and privilege, being broken comes with life. I am the person I want to be. And I would like to take a moment to thank the people who broke me, and left me in ruins. Because, I surpassed who I was when I met you, thank you for making me realize that I am independent, and that I don’t need you. A moment to thank the people who left me when I was vulnerable. You made me realize that the weakest are the strongest. A moment, to thank everyone who made me cry. You made me realize I don’t need to waste my tears on anyone who doesn’t deserve it. And a moment to thank my past self. You are the most perfect person I will ever have the pleasure of encountering. You will forever be apart of my heart and my mind. You held your own hand when no one else could, and I will remember the sacrifices you made to get me here. She is deserving of happiness. She is the exact same person I am today. Me.
It’s 3:48 A.M
Is love real? I feel like that is a common question in this realm of the universe (are there different realms?) I’ve always had an understanding of the concept of love. I’ve had an understanding of a lot of things since I was very young. I’ve always had the same thoughts. Same voices in my head. Here’s the thing, they say you don’t know what love is until you experience it. WRONG! I’ve had the same mind-set on love since I was about seven. My mind has always had the thought that there is no set definition of love. And your definition will change as you get older. Like for example, people say when you’re younger you don’t know what love is and how to experience it. Well, I believe that when you fall for someone at a young age, at that place and time, you are indeed head over heels. They are experiencing the same emotions that any adult could feel. Our emotions are not programmed differently, we are not robots. So when you get older you might not think of that and have it fit your definition of love, but in those memories you were in love. It was how you felt back then, and nothing can change that. I believe that you could fall in love at any age. Well starting from the age you know how to process thoughts and emotions. So yes, young love does exist, and it is an experience that you should treasure for your whole lifetime on this earth. Fresh, new, exhilarating emotions that send you screaming on your floor (either happiness of anger, whichever one fits.) I remember my first love experience. I was twelve years old. My first heartbreak was the one I explained at the beginning of this jotting down of my thoughts.. My personal not so personal journal
Euphoria
Happiness is rare
I must say
But when it happens
I don’t dare disarray
I have everything in order
My emotions are in check
My eyes are dry
And I am not a defect
I don’t think of myself as an epidemic
Without a cure
A walking tornado
That is muttering words
Smiles and laughter
While watching the sunset
But once those cotton candy skies are gone
Is our euphoria real?
I have to Coexist
I haven’t had the heart to add anything to this document/ journal in a long time. School is just a matter of days away and I don’t know what to do. Everyone is dealing with their own “teenage crap”, me being one of them. Last time I wrote anything here, I was full of happiness and euphoria. Now. Now I feel like I relapsed on a drug and rehab is no longer an option. We learn from our trauma. We as a surviving human organism should take our trauma and dissect it. Learn what it means to have trauma and why it exists. I, however. Feel like I have done that enough times to know what I am feeling, when I am feeling it. But yet. I sit here. Not knowing what to feel, or how to feel it. Heartbreak can come in all forms. Me, knowing multiple of them. But this. This is a new discovery. Breaking up with someone because you felt they would be better off without you, and not just saying that. Covering it up with detailed things that were planned as the day finally came to a close. I wrote more than I ever had in a text. When all it took was one sentence. I blame myself for everything. At the same time. He didn’t respond to the words I so desperately, yet so carefully put together to give him peace of mind. I know this is a very cliché thing for me to put in here, but I don’t think I was fully prepared for the relationship. You’ve heard the excuse about a million times I take it. But this was something different.
I wanted him to see through it. Ask me if I was okay even though, in retrospect, I should have been asking him, even though I knew I would not get the honest response I was looking for. He may never find out the truth. But I do very much want to tell him. Even though some of the things I wrote, and some of the things that I think are very true. He will never know the full extent of what I was thinking. I wanted it that way, sort of like a payback to him. I never knew how he was feeling, and he will never know how I was feeling. Bittersweet, right? Fight fire with fire. Give him a taste of his own medicine. But. As the days continued. Every second, a new ounce of guilt was added to my body. It was as if my subconscious was yelling at me to take it back. To take it all back. They are screaming, involuntarily. And by “they" I mean my subconscious that I have split into the good and the bad, have been screaming at each other. No, I am not insane. I am wild, yet in touch with reality, imagination. It helps me sort out my emotions in a healthy way. Every time I take a moment to think. I drift into my headspace. I drift to the keepers of my emotions. Them. Constantly nagging at me about what I did wrong and what I did right. And me. The keeper of my being. Decides who I want to listen to, and when. Who I want to believe. Who is the stronger one? Who… I become.
That’s the thing about the universe. It has upon millions of ways, millions of paths your life could take. And you hold that responsibility within you. You decide. How you respond to situations that will define your being in the universe. And my response… was to run into the wildfire I started in my head. In my memories. And try to put it out. Because I knew I was the only one who could really do that. Who could really salvage everything. No one else can legitimately get in my head. And that’s why each individual tends to feel alone. No one knows what’s actually happening. How organized your mind is, or how messy. So. Yes. I feel regret and sorrow if I actually hurt him in any way. But just like he will probably never find out about this. I will actually never find out how he was feeling, or is feeling. If he is hurt. If he needs comfort. But. He said the three magical words that either break it or make it for the human race.
The three words that either scare people away or bring them closer to your heart. What’s the phrase? “Dumb kids in love”? I’d like to believe that’s what we were. And don’t you dare say teenagers don’t know what love is. Because we do. We may not know how to show it correctly, but we do know how to love. How to cherish. Because when it comes down to it. We are the only people that understand each other. We are experiencing the same things at the same time. We may have an absence of knowledge in our heads. But we are not missing anything else but that. Knowledge will grow with us. Our bodies will produce new cells every 7 years. We will survive in this god forsaken place, with or without each other. Because every human has a survival instinct. And unless that is stripped from us, and we feel helpless enough to give up everything we have done to stay alive so far. We will no longer have the will to keep going. We were in love? I don’t know how to answer that correctly. We? Maybe. Me? Yes. We find ourselves not believing in the concept of “love” when we are younger. We were never really given a set definition because it’s the hardest thing to explain. The hardest emotion to dissect and take apart. It is different for everyone. Everyone has their own fairy tale to tell. It’s just a matter of listening. It can also be the hardest thing to execute. Making someone truly fall in love with you. Now. I can say I failed at that with this one. I tried my damn hardest. But. In the end. I didn’t try hard enough.
September 2nd
I’ve heard the phrase “love is overrated” or “I’ll never love again” too much the past week. Two of my friends. Two of them have said that and meant it. Both of them are male. One of them is recovering from a heartbreak. The heartbreak was severe. Well “severe”. He is being a bit over dramatic about the whole thing, but I am trying to help him as best as I can. The other one is my best friend. I’m telling him not to get overly attached to anyone new. He’s moving to Florida next year, and I just don’t want him getting heartbroken before he leaves. I want him to enjoy his time here. But it is inevitable. He’s emotional. And I love that he is. He is so genuine it makes my heart stop. So I want the best for him. I have cried about the fact that he is moving and that he will most likely visit once every blue moon. But I have come to the realization that everything will be okay. But hearing people say these horrible things about something that should be all around enjoyed by everyone. School is on September 5th and it’s currently 10:56 P.M. on September 2nd. I’m anxious. I’m panicking. I’m pacing. I’m still in middle school. It’s gonna be my last year of middle school. 8th grade. This time next year I will know what high school I am going to. I will have experienced my first high school orientation. I will be separated. I will be fresh bait. It scares me.
Everyone I know is a bit on edge about the new school year. We get a dance at the end of the year. I wonder if I will be dancing with anyone. Or holding my own hand like I am currently doing. I’m taking you guys on a journey. Taking you through what our generation is dealing with. The truth. And right now. I’m filled with anxiety. There seems to be a lot of that in this generation. Maybe it’s our “advanced” mindsets. By “advanced”I mean that we know too much at a young age. We know what a lot of things mean when society says we shouldn’t. That creates anxiety in us. We are scared of people. And all we have is each other. The only people we can trust are each other. We talk to each other and see each other more than our biological family. And at the end of the day, we call each other family. We are a dysfunctional generation. And we will keep believing it the more everyone says it. We just want to be loved.
We.
With every breath
With every mistake
We don’t feel like we belong
We don’t feel how we should around everyone
We will only understand each other
We will cry in each others arms
We will walk ourselves through our storms
Cause we strive to be adored
We will be around each other at our worst
And brag when we are on our best
Because it is rare
That we are not overly obsessed
We experience heartbreak early on
We will forever tear up on certain songs
Teenage drama is embedded in our minds
It’s just a matter of time…
Apocalyptic
I was laying in bed last night, not able to sleep because I was mortified. Not because I heard a noise, or because I thought there was an intruder in my house. Not because my neighbors were yelling so loud I thought one of them was gonna snap. But, because the world almost ended. An asteroid almost hit earth, and every single living thing would be demolished, and be a memory or a story to whatever comes next. Everything would’ve been gone is a split second. Given, it is estimated that at this moment in time we have about 17 months to save our planet, before apocalyptic things begin to happen. Which was also a thought that I had. The show “The 100” had also crossed my mind. It is possible that the human race could survive in space, until the earth was survivable again. Or we found a new planet to inhabit. But all of that comes with complications. Would there only be a couple thousand people chosen to be sent off to space and live? That’s a very little amount of the human race that would get the chance to live. Would how relevant you are, matter? Would famous people have a guaranteed life? Because, that is a bit unfair if you ask me.
Late night thoughts always seem to get to me. When I was younger I used to imagine that my memories were stored in this city, and it was a tainted red city. All different shades of red, and to this day I do not know why (probably something to do with my anxiety or along the lines of that if I am being honest here.) But, I am having panic attacks because of the world almost ending. It’s scary to me.
Love Bound.
October 18th, 2019. I fell head over heels with this guy. Curly hair, light hazel eyes. When the sun hit them, they were like stained glass. We watched the sunset together this one time. The sky faded to this light pink and the clouds were swirling around each other. He hugged me and time stopped. He told me he adored everything about me and I believed him. It was so perfect. He was so perfect. Too perfect. He then started fading. He told me he was bored with the same routine. I tried changing. He told me he wanted something different. I changed. He was tired of my feelings. I hid them…. You know where this is going. He didn’t want me to change, he said, he wanted me to better myself. How? How can I better myself when this is as good as I can get? How do I exceed my limits? How can I be deserving of your love? Your time? How can I be worth it?
November 12th, 2019. I woke up wanting to be with him. Feeling lost in the dark without him that day… he told me was going to be out. “Have fun” I thought.. But those were just the bitter words my naive mind made out. I looked in the mirror. I saw my heart on the floor. All I wanted at that moment. In those seconds.. Was for him to show up at my doorstep and tell me everything was fine. That we were going to be fine and that this is a bump in the road, not the void of emptiness that I knew we were falling down. The void that doesn’t have a happy ending. The void that when we hit the ground, I am alone again. I sat in my bathroom and cried on the floor. I watched and felt myself break because I knew what was happening… I got too attached too quickly. It’s something I despise about myself. I find out that we have something in common and it’s like I am in love with you. By 8:00 P.M. I felt empty. Numb. Out of my mind. I felt helpless. More helpless than Eliza and Alexander. More tragic than them and their story. For once in my life, I didn’t want out, I wanted in.
November 17th, 2019. It was a Sunday. I had school the next day and I was excited to see him. We barely talked about that day, but at 7:43 P.M. I asked a question. “Are you or have you lost feelings for me…?” he responded with, “I’m sorry.” I reassured him that I was fine and he didn’t have to worry. “These things happen, we can’t control our feelings.” 13 days. It’s been 13 days. Healing is a process that I wish I could speed up. I’m tired.
Leaps in Time.
My memory is known to be a good one. I can remember dates, and even certain times. Like my friend’s birthday. June 13th, 2006, 8:15 A.M. I remember things fairly easily. The same thing doesn’t apply for when I was younger. I have maybe 15–20 memories from the ages of three to nine. I don’t remember anything else. It might be because something happened that traumatized me so bad that I didn’t want to remember it and it’s in the depths of my memories. Today, it’s like I had a flashback from something, and it just all added up. My grandmother always used to tell us to make sure the stove was off. She would drill it into our heads. I found out why when I was twelve years old. She told me that when I was seven, and my sister was twelve, she had left us alone in the house to go get something down at the corner store. She said she had left the stove on, and when she got back, there was smoke coming out the windows and she could hear my sister screaming for help. She asked me if I remembered.. I said no. Today, I was staring at a fire, and a memory came rushing back to me. I was standing at the window in my room, looking outside. When I turned around, there were people in hazmat suits rushing into my house through the front door. I don’t remember feeling scared, but just numb. No one was with me, and the house was foggy. I remember the smell of burning, and smoke. It was sunny out that day, and it was a Saturday.
The next thing I remember is being lifted up by someone and being escorted to the hospital. That’s it. That’s all. I don’t remember anything past that. I don’t remember anything before. That’s how it is for most of my memories. The only thing I really remember clearly is the sounds of my parents constant arguing and me having to stay awake listening to them argue about stuff. I remember my dad going out for a drink, and my mom having an anxiety attack at 1 A.M. because we didn’t know where he was, and when he got home, he would be mad that I had been crying. I remember falling on my steps and hitting my lip, and being taken upstairs and hydrogen peroxide being poured on my open wounds and screaming. I remember those clearly. But nothing else. Nothing else clicks. Of course, a few things that are important to me click. Like meeting my best friend when I was three. Meeting someone who taught me what love was when I was seven. My first kiss. My first time crying in front of my friends (I was in first grade and I was in the bathroom). My mind seems to have bleeped out a bunch of stuff. I wish I remembered.. I wish I knew who I was back then. I wonder if she would be proud of me. I hope she is.. | https://medium.com/@kayxzen05/lying-in-roses-95d6386d9a09 | [] | 2020-12-26 23:18:22.233000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Heartbreak', 'Reality', 'Poetry', 'Mental Health'] |
Trimming Tricks of the Trade: Minimize Parentheticals | Here is another way to help with your page count.
Via The Unknown Screenwriter
#2: MINIMIZE PARENTHETICALS
Any of you who have taken my screenwriting classes know I urge writers to use parentheticals sparingly. Not only because they’re typically one or two words — what a waste of a line! — but also because far too often (A) they are intended to direct the actor (which actors don’t like) or (B) what they are conveying is already implied in the dialogue.
In other words, most parentheticals are not only space-wasters, they are unnecessary.
One way to lose parentheticals is to put their content in scene description. Here’s an example:
INT. XRAY DEPARTMENT — DAY Scattered mobile x-ray units create a high tech maze. Eve
balances a cellphone against her ear as she clutches a
stack of CT films. Pushes toward a light box. EVE
(into the phone)
I’ve had them stat page Dr.
McCarthy three times. I have a
post aneurism resection with
seizure.
Here’s a little edit which transplants the parenthetical into scene description:
INT. XRAY DEPARTMENT — DAY Scattered mobile x-ray units create a high tech maze. Eve
balances a cellphone against her ear as she clutches a
stack of CT films. Pushes toward a light box. Into phone: EVE
I’ve had them stat page McCarthy
three times. I have a post
aneurism resection with seizure.
[Note: I also handled the orphan in the side of dialogue, saving a line there, too].
The worst parentheticals are those that take up more than one line. Paddy Chayefsky, one of the greatest screenwriters ever, loved parentheticals. Here’s an actual example from NETWORK:
HOWARD
(reaching for the bottle of
booze on HUNTER’S desk to
refill his glass)
— let’s do the Lennon deportation
at the end of three —
Three whole lines for what could be one line of SD:
He reaches for the booze on Hunter’s desk, refills his glass.
Chayefsky started as a playwright at a time when they used parentheticals extensively. But for us mere mortals where page count is critical, there is no excuse to use a parenthetical unless (A) it is absolutely essential and (B) the action it describes is counter to what the dialogue indicates. Such as:
HOWARD
(picks up gun)
Angry? Why would you think that?
So do this: Every time you think about using a parenthetical, ask yourself if you’re willing to waste an entire line for one word? Because, in essence, that is what you are doing.
Tomorrow another Trimming Trick of the Trade.
Part 1: Lose the orphans
[Originally posted 11/25/2008]
Comment Archive | https://gointothestory.blcklst.com/trimming-tricks-of-the-trade-minimize-parentheticals-67924df76b73 | ['Scott Myers'] | 2021-06-08 13:02:23.729000+00:00 | ['Screenplay', 'Creative Writing', 'Screenwriting', 'Writing', 'Writing Tips'] |
A Belated but Sincere Thank You to James Earl Jones | Gazpacho is very popular in Arizona.
Photo by Ibrahim Boran on Unsplash
Dear James Earl Jones,
I just took my kids to the new Lion King movie, and I have to say, it was just great to hear your voice again! While I did recently rewatch The Sandlot, I don’t mean this in the way that you might think. Believe it or not, you and I shared a meal together on a Friday night in Scottsdale, Arizona in the year 2000.
It’s been almost 20 years since then, but I can see my awkward, nervous, sweaty teenage self as if it was yesterday. Since a lot of time has passed, and you’ve had lots and lots of dinners since then, let me describe to you what I remember about that night and how I even got there in the first place.
In the spring of my final year of high school, I got a big fat packet in the mail notifying me that I had won a college scholarship. As a winner, I was invited to fly (expenses paid!) from my tiny farming town in upstate New York to a fancy banquet at a resort in Arizona.
I can remember running to the barn to find my parents and then combing through the details, looking for the catch. We found none, and I spent the next few weeks trying to scrape up some decent travel clothes and cleaning the dirt out from under my fingernails.
When I got to Arizona, it felt like I was on a new planet. My only travel experience in life involved a four hour drive on the NYS Thruway to visit my uncle, so when I got to take a shuttle to the hotel and then ride in a golf cart to my room where my bags were already waiting, I was already sideways with delight.
The event was sponsored by the Academy of Achievement, and its official title was “The Banquet of the Golden Plate.” Even though it sounds made up, I swear it is real. I think the goal of the event is to select a group of talented and successful adults — like you — and honor them by allowing them to hang out and chat with teenagers from around the country for a few days. Sounds fun!
Upon arrival, we were given instructions to quickly change and then go to dinner. I changed into what was one of my nicer outfits, which was a too-short blue skirt with buttons and a new white t-shirt. True, it was the type of t-shirt that comes in a 3-pack, but since I had never worn it, I thought it would pass.
I followed the map to the dinner location and…oh boy, I was over my head. Shrimp cocktail — wait, was I supposed to actually eat the tail?! The boys in jackets, and the girls in classy, tasteful dresses that I couldn’t even imagine trying on. The excitement and bravado I felt upon arrival melted as a hard knot of embarrassment grew in my stomach.
To put it in perspective, consider this: If you put all of the times I had eaten at a restaurant in my life on a pie chart, it would be 98% Pizza Hut and then one Friendly’s and one percent for the weird diner in my town.
So there I was, with my Pizza Hut manners and my Pizza Hut clothes at a Morton’s Steakhouse affair.
And as if a hundred well dressed, unimaginably cool and casual teenagers weren’t enough, the room was also swirling with a hundred or so highly accomplished adults. And some of the former group were actually engaged in animated, happy looking conversations with the latter group!
My mind was blown and I wanted to disappear. Instead, I found a table with mostly empty seats and sat down. A few minutes later, you walked over and said, “Do you mind if I sit here?”
What?!? Mufasa?!? Of course you could sit next to me!
So there I was, little me, sitting next to you — James Earl Jones!
I’m not sure if it was you or me (nope, I’m sure it was you) but our table then quickly filled up with other wildly successful but also very nice and very chatty adults. Their conversations were fast paced and dizzying and I tried to seem like I was interested, but not eavesdropping.
Under the table I dug my nails into my thighs and beads of sweat formed on my forehead. Which finally brings me to my point. At this much later date, I would like to thank you for the following three things.
I want to thank you for taking a few minutes and being so nice to me. You asked me where I was from and we chatted for a few minutes about growing up on a farm. I know that it was less than a five minute exchange, but I have thought about what that meant to me over the years. It wasn’t that I was starstruck, but when I was feeling small, someone big (Mufasa!) took a moment to rebalance the scales for me a little bit. I hope you still do that and although I’m not famous or well known, I try to do it when I can also.
I want to thank you for teaching me about gazpacho. Prior to that night, the only first course I knew about was breadsticks with butter garlic sauce. When a dapper waiter brought me a beautiful little dish of tomato soup, I slurped it up only to find that it was icy cold. Half complaining, half observing, I blurted out “My soup is cold!” You gently leaned over and explained that it was Gazpacho, it was supposed to be cold, and it was very popular in Arizona. I don’t know if that last part is fact, but I have repeated it many times and always attributed it to you.
I want to thank you for eating my dinner roll. Towards the end of my meal, when I still had my roll and yours was gone, you asked if you could have it. I was happy to share, but the thing is, when I flew back to my hometown, our local newspaper reporter interviewed my about my trip. I shared this trivial little detail, and several days later, an above-the-fold article appeared titled ‘James Earl Jones Eats Local Girl’s Dinner Roll.’ I have a happy full life now, but from time to time when my parents are feeling nostalgic, they’ll rock back in their chairs and make a request: “Emily, tell us about that time…”
No need to write back. Unless you want to set the record straight about Gazpacho and Arizona.
All the best,
Emily | https://emilylime99.medium.com/a-belated-but-sincere-thank-you-to-james-earl-jones-fd66cff36657 | ['Emily Kingsley'] | 2019-08-21 03:21:27.884000+00:00 | ['Gratitude', 'Human Parts', 'Life', 'Reflections', 'Humor'] |
How the Moral Premise works in a Story (Infographic) | PAIN POINT: Many writers get lost in a story and are looking for a MAGIC BUTTON to fix it.
Overview
Think of the Moral Premise (MP) as the “SPIRIT” or “BRAIN” of your Story, working behind the scenes to ensure several things happen:
All parts are organized correctly
All parts are balanced correctly
All parts work together as a cohesive whole
All parts maintain proper balance at all times
As the Spirit of your Story, the MP imbues “LIFE” and “ENERGY” into your story and allows your story to BREATHE PROPERLY.
And by breathing properly, I mean your Story maintains balance properly.
How does this look?
I’m glad you asked, let’s go VISUAL.
In the VISUAL WORLD, you’re going to see the following:
What is the Moral Premise?
How do you use the Moral Premise?
How do you work out your Story Events?
What is the Moral Premise?
The short version is the MP is what other people call Theme.
The medium version is the MP is defined as a Natural Law of Storytelling that enables writers with a tool to sculpt your story with microscopic precision.
Here’s the long version.
The MP is a high-level statement of a Story’s message or statement of values. It is a naturally occurring law of storytelling, often Spiritual in Nature, and it is written using a general form (Vice leads to undesirable consequences; but Virtue leads to desirable consequences). It was codified in the 2006 Book, The Moral Premise, written by Stanley D. Williams.
The MP’s General Form is shown below:
Vice leads to undesirable consequences, but Virtue leads to desirable consequences.
So Vice means “Negative” and Virtue means “Positive.”
In addition, the MP has 2 thresholds that the Characters have to cross.
Finally, the NEUTRAL ZONE is the lowest level of Values in the Story and this logic bewilders new writers.
How can the Neutral area be worse than the Greater Vice area?
Here’s how.
The Greater Vice is on a WHITE background, which means it can be seen.
The Neutral Area is black and represents TOTAL DARKNESS, a deadly area for Characters.
In our reality, we define this area as ignorance.
For example, a character can BELIEVE he is helping another character and totally “IGNORE” everything else to fulfill this agenda.
As a character STUCK in the Neutral Zone, he has NO CLUE about who/what is good or who/what is bad and BLINDLY FOLLOWS his own agenda, which is void of all Morality.
How do you use the Moral Premise?
The Moral Premise is a MAJOR STORY TOOL that allows you to create, design, analyze, fix, discuss, explore, and effectively sculpt any story.
So, in our example, we are writing a standard screenplay with 4 Sequences.
Here’s what the Moral Premise looks like for a story.
Using the Moral Premise in a Story
As we see, our story has 3 Worlds (Ordinary World 1, Special World, Ordinary World 2).
Below that, we have the 4 Sequences.
On the left, we have the emotional compass (Virtue, Neutral, Vice, and Greater Vice).
We use the Emotional Compass to VISUALIZE the Character Arc.
In our example, the black circles represent the Character Arc of the Protagonist and the golden circles represent the Antagonist.
SEQUENCE 1
The Protagonist has a “Positive” Emotional Story Perspective.
The Antagonist has a “Negative” Emotional Story Perspective.
SEQUENCE 2
The Protagonist has a “Positive” Emotional Story Perspective.
The Antagonist has a “Negative” Emotional Story Perspective.
SEQUENCE 3
The Protagonist has a “Enhanced Positive” Emotional Story Perspective.
The Antagonist has a “Enhanced Negative” Emotional Story Perspective.
SEQUENCE 4
The Protagonist has a “Enhanced Positive” Emotional Story Perspective.
The Antagonist has a “Enhanced Negative” Emotional Story Perspective.
Working out your Story Events
See how easy it is to work out your character arc, visually, beforehand?
That’s right, no more meandering around aimlessly cause you were taught by THEORY.
With the Character Arc as a FOUNDATION, you can now add Story Events wherever you see fit:
One Event per Story (1 Total)
One Event per World (3 Total)
One Event per Sequence (4 Total)
See how easy and wonderful this is?
If you need more information, you can check out my other blog on STORY EVENTS (link).
Now that you can SEE your Character Arc, you can build your story VISUALLY.
As a result, you can finish faster and write BETTER and STRONGER STORIES.
KEY POINT — The purpose of storytelling is EXPRESSION.
Working out the other Story Elements
Armed with Characters and Events, you can NOW work out the other elements:
Drama
Dilemma
Plot Points
Revelations
Reversals
Reveals
Beats
Now before you get too TURNT UP, isn’t this wonderful how easy and straightforward this is?
KEY POINT — Working VISUALLY is more evolved than Theory.
Advanced Notes
Can you see that the Protagonist remains on the Virtue side of the MP?
If you want to add tension, you can push the Protagonist to BEGIN THE STORY on the VICE side of the MP.
This would allow the Protagonist to have a LARGER RANGE in her Character Arc, thus making the story more powerful.
You have a lot of flexibility in the Protagonist’s Journey.
However, look at the Antagonist’s Journey.
This is typical of most stories and of most Antagonists in our lives.
Sequence 1 — They ALWAYS begin with a bad POV (Vice).
Sequence 2 — Over time, rather than listening to you or anyone else, they go down their path, getting worse along the way.
Sequence 3 — Their mind is so messed up now, they start attacking random and innocent people. You can personify this CHARACTER using a Stakes Character.
The key element is they cross a “THRESHOLD” from being Bad (Vice) to REALLY BAD (Greater Vice).
Think of this moment, in Sequence 3, as the Antagonist like a “RABID DOG.”
Sequence 4 — The Antagonist, now set on this path, does something UNTHINKABLE — they get worse! This is why, in most stories, the Protagonist and the Antagonist USUALLY have a one-on-one battle. We’re moving away from those kind of stories, but I pointed it out so when you study Movies, you’ll know WHY things happen WHEN THEY DO.
As you look at the Journey, notice how the Protagonist becomes more MORAL and the Antagonist becomes more AMORAL.
At the story’s end, it’s easy to see why being MORAL works and the Protagonist made the RIGHT CHOICE and the Antagonist made the WRONG CHOICE.
Conclusion
Does it make sense now?
Look at all the wonderful ways you can mix and match your story for dramatic effect and not GET LOST IN THE DETAILS.
I know Storytelling seems hard, but that’s because you haven’t been doing Storytelling, you’ve been doing STORY THEORY.
Enough of that foolishness!
I’m here to help you SEE THE STORY and now, you can SEE why my tagline makes sense. (Showing What No One Sees
Let the other people get bogged down in confusion, arguing and endlessly debating about THEORIES!
As your Visual Coach, I’m here to SHOW YOU the Truth and allow you to create better and stronger stories.
Key Points
Key Point — The purpose of storytelling is EXPRESSION
Key Point — Working VISUALLY is more evolved than Theory.
Key Point — THEORY is Foolishness and a waste of your time.
Resources | https://medium.com/@miquielbanks/how-the-moral-premise-works-in-a-story-infographic-470787cb3d33 | ['Miquiel Banks'] | 2020-11-21 16:43:22.288000+00:00 | ['Screenwriting', 'Infographics', 'Moral Premise', 'Miquiel Banks', 'Story Structure'] |
WHY FACEBOOK BECAME META?| META’S USE FOR BEST DIGITAL MARKETING PRACTICES AND BUSINESS INDUSTRY | WHY FACEBOOK BECAME META?| META’S USE FOR BEST DIGITAL MARKETING PRACTICES AND BUSINESS INDUSTRY Erik Elsamark ·Dec 23, 2021
Meta
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Keywords: Keywords for Meta Blog: CEO Mark Zuckerberg, apps and technologies, more comprehensive, transcending, metagaming, metaverse, social connection, Augmented reality, AR, VR, MR, Spark AR, meta for business, Meta builds technologies, The Facebook Company Is Now Meta, tornadoes that devastated communities, find communities, grow businesses, virtual reality, virtual reality, smart glasses, Metaverse Creators, Immersive Content,3D world, digital marketing, social media marketing, video marketing, best digital marketing company in the USA, app designing company, web site designing company, SEO.
www.alliedtechnologies.io | https://medium.com/@erik99elsamark/why-facebook-became-meta-metas-use-for-best-digital-marketing-practices-and-business-industry-7fb92e0bb881 | ['Erik Elsamark'] | 2021-12-23 21:55:35.380000+00:00 | ['Metaverse', 'Meta', 'Instagram Marketing', 'Facebook Ads', 'Facebook Marketing'] |
The Top Online Data Science Courses for 2019 | After over 80+ hours of watching course videos, doing quizzes and assignments, reading reviews on various aggregators and forums, I’ve narrowed down the best data science courses available to the list below.
TL;DR
The best data science courses:
Criteria
The selections here are geared more towards individuals getting started in data science, so I’ve filtered courses based on the following criteria:
The course goes over the entire data science process
The course uses popular open-source programming tools and libraries
The instructors cover the basic, most popular machine learning algorithms
The course has a good combination of theory and application
The course needs to either be on-demand or available every month or so
There’s hands-on assignments and projects
The instructors are engaging and personable
The course has excellent ratings — generally, greater than or equal to 4.5/5
There’s a lot more data science courses than when I first started this page four years ago, and so there needs to now be a substantial filter to determine which courses are the best. I hope you feel confident that the courses below are truly worth your time and effort, because it will take several months (or more) of learning and practice to be a data science practitioner.
In addition to the top general data science course picks, I have included a separate section for more specific data science interests, like Deep Learning, SQL, and other relevant topics. These are courses with a more specialized approach, and don’t cover the whole data science process, but they are still the top choices for that topic. These extra picks are good for supplementing before, after, and during the main courses.
Resources you should use when learning
When learning data science online it’s important to not only get an intuitive understanding of what you’re actually doing, but also to get sufficient practice using data science on unique problems.
In addition to the courses listed below, I would suggest reading two books:
Introduction to Statistical Learning — available for Free — one of the most widely recommended books for beginners in data science. Explains the fundamentals of machine learning and how everything works behind the scenes Applied Predictive Modeling — a breakdown of the entire modeling process on real-world datasets with incredibly useful tips each step of the way
These two textbooks are incredibly valuable and provide a much better foundation than just taking courses alone. The first book is incredibly effective at teaching the intuition behind much of the data science process, and if you are able to understand almost everything in there, then you’re more well off than most entry-level data scientists.
QUICK TIP
Use Video Speed Controller for Chrome to speed up any video. I usually choose between 1.5x — 2.5x speed depending on the content, and use the “s” (slow down) and “d” (speed up) key shortcuts that come with the extension.
Now to an overview and review of each course.
1. Data Science Specialization — JHU @ Coursera
This course series is one of the most enrolled in and highly rated course collections in this list. JHU did an incredible job with the balance of breadth and depth in the curriculum. One thing that’s included in this series that’s usually missing from many of data science courses is a complete section on statistics, which is the backbone to data science.
Overall, the Data Science specialization is an ideal mix of theory and application using the R programming language. As far as prerequisites go, you should have some programming experience (doesn’t have to be R) and you have a good understanding of Algebra. Previous knowledge of Linear Algebra and/or Calculus isn’t necessary, but it is helpful.
Price — Free or $49/month for certificate and graded materials
Provider — Johns Hopkins University
Curriculum:
The Data Scientist’s Toolbox R Programming Getting and Cleaning Data Exploratory Data Analysis Reproducible Research Statistical Inference Regression Models Practical Machine Learning Developing Data Products Data Science Capstone
If you’re rusty with statistics and/or want to learn more R first, check out the Statistics with R Specialization as well.
2. Introduction to Data Science — Metis
An extremely highly rated course — 4.9/5 on SwichUp and 4.8/5 on CourseReport — which is taught live by a data scientist from a top company. This is a six week long data science course that covers everything in the entire data science process, and it’s the only live online course in this list. Furthermore, not only will you get a certificate upon completion, but since this course also accredited, you’ll also receive continuing education units.
Two nights per week, you’ll join the instructor with other students to learn data science as if it was an online college course. Not only are you able to ask questions, but the instructor also spends extra time for office hours to further help those students that might be struggling.
Price — $750
The curriculum:
Computer Science, Statistics, Linear Algebra Short Course Exploratory Data Analysis and Visualization Data Modeling: Supervised/Unsupervised Learning and Model Evaluation Data Modeling: Feature Selection, Engineering, and Data Pipelines Data Modeling: Advanced Supervised/Unsupervised Learning Data Modeling: Advanced Model Evaluation and Data Pipelines | Presentations
For prerequisites, you’ll need to know Python, some linear algebra, and some basic statistics. If you need to work on any of these areas, Metis also has Beginner Python and Math for Data Science, a separate live online course just for learning the Python, Stats, Probability, Linear Algebra, and Calculus for data science.
3. Applied Data Science with Python Specialization — UMich @ Coursera
University of Michigan, who also launched an online data science Master’s degree, produce this fantastic specialization focused the applied side of data science. This means you’ll get a strong introduction to commonly used data science Python libraries, like matplotlib, pandas, nltk, scikit-learn, and networkx, and learn how to use them on real data.
This series doesn’t include the statistics needed for data science or the derivations of various machine learning algorithms, but does provide a comprehensive breakdown of how to use and evaluate those algorithms in Python. Because of this, I think this would be more appropriate for someone that already knows R and/or is learning the statistical concepts elsewhere.
If you’re rusty with statistics, consider the Statistics with Python Specialization first. You’ll learn many of the most important statistical skills needed for data science.
Price — Free or $49/month for certificate and graded materials
Provider — University of Michigan
Courses:
Introduction to Data Science in Python Applied Plotting, Charting & Data Representation in Python Applied Machine Learning in Python Applied Text Mining in Python Applied Social Network Analysis in Python
To take these courses, you’ll need to know some Python or programming in general, and there are actually a couple of great lectures in the first course dealing with some of the more advanced Python features you’ll need to process data effectively.
Dataquest is a fantastic resource on its own, but even if you take other courses on this list, Dataquest serves as a superb complement to your online learning.
Dataquest foregoes video lessons and instead teaches through an interactive textbook of sorts. Every topic in the data science track is accompanied by several in-browser, interactive coding steps that guide you through applying the exact topic you’re learning.
Video-based learning is more “passive” — it’s very easy to think you understand a concept after watching a 2-hour long video, only to freeze up when you actually have to put what you’ve learned in action. — Dataquest FAQ
To me, Dataquest stands out from the rest of the interactive platforms because the curriculum is very well organized, you get to learn by working on full-fledged data science projects, and there’s a super active and helpful Slack community where you can ask questions.
The platform has one main data science learning curriculum for Python:
Data Scientist In Python Path
This track currently contains 31 courses, which cover everything from the very basics of Python, to Statistics, to the math for Machine Learning, to Deep Learning, and more. The curriculum is constantly being improved and updated for a better learning experience.
Price — 1/3 of content is Free, $29/month for Basic, $49/month for Premium
Here’s a condensed version of the curriculum:
Python — Basic to Advanced Python data science libraries — Pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib, and more Visualization and Storytelling Effective data cleaning and exploratory data analysis Command line and Git for data science SQL — Basic to Advanced APIs and Web Scraping Probability and Statistics — Basic to Intermediate Math for Machine Learning — Linear Algebra and Calculus Machine Learning with Python — Regression, K-Means, Decision Trees, Deep Learning and more Natural Language Processing Spark and Map-Reduce
Additionally, there’s also entire data science projects scattered throughout the curriculum. Each project’s goal is to get you to apply everything you’ve learned up to that point and to get you familiar with what it’s like to work on an end-to-end data science strategy.
Lastly, if you’re more interested in learning data science with R, then definitely check out Dataquest’s new Data Analyst in R path. The Dataquest subscription gives you access to all paths on their platform, so you can learn R or Python (or both!).
5. Statistics and Data Science MicroMasters — MIT @ edX
MicroMasters from edX are advanced, graduate-level courses that carry real credits you can apply to a select number of graduate degrees. The inclusion of probability and statistics courses makes this series from MIT a very well-rounded curriculum for being able to understand data intuitively.
Due to its advanced nature, you should have experience with single and multivariate calculus, as well as Python programming. There isn’t any introduction to Python or R like in some of the other courses in this list, so before starting the ML portion, they recommend taking Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python to get familiar with Python.
Price — Free or $1,350 for credential and graded materials
Provider — University of Michigan
Courses:
Probability — The Science of Uncertainty and Data Data Analysis in Social Science — Assessing Your Knowledge Fundamentals of Statistics Machine Learning with Python: from Linear Models to Deep Learning Capstone Exam in Statistics and Data Science
The ML course has several interesting projects you’ll work on, and at the end of the whole series you’ll focus on one exam to wrap everything up.
6. CS109 Data Science — Harvard
Screenshot from lecture: https://matterhorn.dce.harvard.edu/engage/player/watch.html?id=e15f221c-5275-4f7f-b486-759a7d483bc8
With a great mix of theory and application, this course from Harvard is one of the best for getting started as a beginner. It’s not on an interactive platform, like Coursera or edX, and doesn’t offer any sort of certification, but it’s definitely worth your time and it’s totally free.
Curriculum:
Web Scraping, Regular Expressions, Data Reshaping, Data Cleanup, Pandas
Exploratory Data Analysis
Pandas, SQL and the Grammar of Data
Statistical Models
Storytelling and Effective Communication
Bias and Regression
Classification, kNN, Cross Validation, Dimensionality Reduction, PCA, MDS
SVM, Evaluation, Decision Trees and Random Forests, Ensemble Methods, Best Practices
Recommendations, MapReduce, Spark
Bayes Theorem, Bayesian Methods, Text Data
Clustering
Effective Presentations
Experimental Design
Deep Networks
Building Data Science
Python is used in this course, and there’s many lectures going through the intricacies of the various data science libraries to work through real-world, interesting problems. This is one of the only data science courses around that actually touches on every part of the data science process.
7. Python for Data Science and Machine Learning Bootcamp — Udemy
Also available using R.
A very reasonably priced course for the value. The instructor does an outstanding job explaining the Python, visualization, and statistical learning concepts needed for all data science projects. A huge benefit to this course over other Udemy courses are the assignments. Throughout the course you’ll break away and work on Jupyter notebook workbooks to solidify your understanding, then the instructor follows up with a solutions video to thoroughly explain each part.
Curriculum:
Python Crash Course
Python for Data Analysis — Numpy, Pandas
Python for Data Visualization — Matplotlib, Seaborn, Plotly, Cufflinks, Geographic plotting
Data Capstone Project
Machine learning — Regression, kNN, Trees and Forests, SVM, K-Means, PCA
Recommender Systems
Natural Language Processing
Big Data and Spark
Neural Nets and Deep Learning
This course focuses more on the applied side, and one thing missing is a section on statistics. If you plan on taking this course it would be a good idea to pair it with a separate statistics and probability course as well.
An honorary mention goes out to another Udemy course: Data Science A-Z. I do like Data Science A-Z quite a bit due to its complete coverage, but since it uses other tools outside of the Python/R ecosystem, I don’t think it fits the criteria as well as Python for Data Science and Machine Learning Bootcamp.
Other top data science courses for specific skills
Deep Learning Specialization — Coursera
Created by Andrew Ng, maker of the famous Stanford Machine Learning course, this is one of the highest rated data science courses on the internet. This course series is for those interested in understanding and working with neural networks in Python.
SQL for Data Science — Coursera
Pair this with Mode Analytics SQL Tutorial for a very well-rounded introduction to SQL, an important and necessary skill for data science.
Mathematics for Machine Learning — Coursera
This is one of the most highly rated courses dedicated to the specific mathematics used in ML. Take this course if you’re uncomfortable with the linear algebra and calculus required for machine learning, and you’ll save some time over other, more generic math courses.
How to Win a Data Science Competition — Coursera
One of the courses in the Advanced Machine Learning Specialization. Even if you’re not looking to participate in data science competitions, this is still an excellent course for bringing together everything you’ve learned up to this point. This is more of an advanced course that teaches you the intuition behind why you should pick certain ML algorithms, and even goes over many of the algorithms that have been winning competitions lately.
Bayesian Statistics: From Concept to Data Analysis — Coursera
Bayesian, as opposed to Frequentist, statistics is an important subject to learn for data science. Many of us learned Frequentist statistics in college without even knowing it, and this course does a great job comparing and contrasting the two to make it easier to understand the Bayesian approach to data analysis.
Spark and Python for Big Data with PySpark — Udemy
From the same instructor as the Python for Data Science and Machine Learning Bootcamp in the list above, this course teaches you how to leverage Spark and Python to perform data analysis and machine learning on an AWS cluster. The instructor makes this course really fun and engaging by giving you mock consulting projects to work on, then going through a complete walkthrough of the solution.
Learning Guide
How to actually learn data science
When joining any of these courses you should make the same commitment to learning as you would towards a college course. One goal for learning data science online is to maximize mental discomfort. It’s easy to get caught in the habit of signing in to watch a few videos and feel like you’re learning, but you’re not really learning much unless it hurts your brain.
Vik Paruchuri (from Dataquest) produced this helpful video on how to approach learning data science effectively:
Essentially, it comes down to doing what you’re learning, i.e. when you take a course and learn a skill, apply it to a real project immediately. Working through real-world projects that you are genuinely interested in helps solidify your understanding and provides you with proof that you know what you’re doing.
One of the most uncomfortable things about learning data science online is that you never really know when you’ve learned enough. Unlike in a formal school environment, when learning online you don’t have many good barometers for success, like passing or failing tests or entire courses. Projects help remediate this by first showing you what you don’t know, and then serving as a record of knowledge when it’s done.
All in all, the project should be the main focus, and courses and books should supplement that.
When I first started learning data science and machine learning, I began (as a lot do) by trying to predict stocks. I found courses, books, and papers that taught the things I wanted to know, and then I applied them to my project as I was learning. I learned so much in a such short period of time that it seems like an improbable feat if laid out as a curriculum.
It turned out to be extremely powerful working on something I was passionate about. It was easy to work hard and learn nonstop because predicting the market was something I really wanted to accomplish.
Essential knowledge and skills
Source: Udacity
There’s a base skill set and level of knowledge that all data scientists must possess, regardless of what industry they’re in. For hard skills, you not only need to be proficient with the mathematics of data science, but you also need the skills and intuition to understand data.
The Mathematics you should be comfortable with:
Algebra
Statistics (Frequentist and Bayesian)
Probability
Linear Algebra
Basic calculus
Optimization
Furthermore, these are the basic programming skills you should be comfortable with:
Python or R,
SQL
Extracting data from various sources, like SQL databases, JSON, CSV, XML, and text files
Cleaning and transforming unstructured, messy data
Effective Data visualization
Machine learning — Regression, Clustering, kNN, SVM, Trees and Forests, Ensembles, Naive Bayes
Lastly, it’s not all about the hard skills; there’s also many soft skills that are extremely important and many of them aren’t taught in courses. These are:
Curiosity and creativity
Communication skills — speaking and presenting in front of groups, and being able to explain complex topics to non-technical team members
Problem solving — coming up with analytical solutions for business problems
Python vs. R
After going through the list you might have noticed that each course is dedicated to one language: Python or R. So which one should you learn?
Short answer: just learn Python, or learn both.
Python is an incredibly versatile language, and it has a huge amount of support in data science, machine learning, and statistics. Not only that, but you can also do things like build web apps, automate tasks, scrape the web, create GUIs, build a blockchain, and create games.
Because Python can do so many things, I think it should be the language you choose. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter that much which language you choose for data science since you’ll find many jobs looking for either. So why not pick the language that can do almost anything?
In the long run, though, I think learning R is also very useful since many statistics/ML textbooks use R for examples and exercises. In fact, both books I mentioned at the beginning use R, and unless someone translates everything to Python and posts it to Github, you won’t get the full benefit of the book. Once you learn Python, you’ll be able to learn R pretty easily.
Check out this StackExchange answer for a great breakdown of how the two languages differ in machine learning.
Are certificates worth it?
One big difference between Udemy and other platforms, like edX, Coursera, and Metis, is that the latter offer certificates upon completion and are usually taught by instructors from universities.
Some certificates, like those from edX and Metis, even carry continuing education credits. Other than that, many of the real benefits, like accessing graded homework and tests, are only accessible if you upgrade. If you need to stay motivated to complete the entire course, committing to a certificate also puts money on the line so you’ll be less likely to quit. I think there’s definitely personal value in certificates, but, unfortunately, not many employers value them that much.
Coursera and edX vs. Udemy
Udemy does not currently have a way to offer certificates, so I generally find Udemy courses to be good for more applied learning material, whereas Coursera and edX are usually better for theory and foundational material.
Whenever I’m looking for a course about a specific tool, whether it be Spark, Hadoop, Postgres, or Flask web apps, I tend to search Udemy first since the courses favor an actionable, applied approach. Conversely, when I need an intuitive understanding of a subject, like NLP, Deep Learning, or Bayesian Statistics, I’ll search edX and Coursera first.
Wrapping Up
Data science is vast, interesting, and rewarding field to study and be a part of. You’ll need many skills, a wide range of knowledge, and a passion for data to become an effective data scientist that companies want to hire, and it’ll take longer than the hyped up YouTube videos claim.
If you’re more interested in the machine learning side of data science, check out the Top 5 Machine Learning Courses for 2019 as a supplement to this article.
If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments below.
Thanks for reading and have fun learning!
Originally published at learndatasci.com. | https://medium.com/free-code-camp/top-7-online-data-science-courses-for-2019-e4afdc4693e7 | [] | 2019-05-02 20:18:44.339000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning', 'Technology', 'Data Science', 'Programming'] |
When Your Mother Threatens Suicide | When Your Mother Threatens Suicide
Growing up with a mentally ill parent
Photo by Naomi August on Unsplash
It was raining extra hard the morning I woke my mother up to drive me to school. I normally walked eleven blocks to get there, but the huge sheets of rain coming down would have me looking like a drowned rat if I dared to try.
“You can walk,” my mother grumbled, putting her pillow over her head.
“Mom,” I whined, “it’s pouring down rain.”
“So?” My mother’s voice was muffled by the pillow.
I stood over her thinking for a minute. What was wrong with her? What kind of mother lets her daughter get soaked on her way to school? Unfortunately, I said that last part out loud.
“FINE!” my mom yelled as she jumped up and pushed me aside and went into the bathroom.
I didn’t really care that she was mad as long as I could get to school fairly dry. I already knew at the tender age of fourteen that my mother would try to make me feel guilty about asking for a ride. Once we were in the car, she was dead silent. I don’t know if she was waiting for an apology from me.
Once we pulled up to the school, my mother turned to me with angry tears in her eyes.
“I just can’t take it anymore,” she cried. “You have no respect for me at all. I want to go home and kill myself, and I’m going to write ‘YOUR FAULT’ on the floor with my own blood.”
I looked at her completely stunned. Would my mother really try to kill herself? Well, there was that one night she drove into a lake on purpose. What about the time when her married boyfriend broke up with her and she lightly cut a wrist to win him back? As I walked into my first class, my eyes were hot and wet. When I got to my desk, I put my head down so nobody would see me cry.
“What’s wrong?” One of my classmates appeared by my side. I shook my head as if it was nothing. Even though my mother could be killing herself right that minute, I said nothing. I knew better than to tell anyone about my mother’s personal business.
I glanced across the classroom and saw Sean Cardwell trying not to look at me, and I remembered the real reason I’d wanted to go to school so bad that morning. The night before, Sean had called me and asked me to go out with him. I liked him. He was smart and funny and kind of cute, but I didn’t know if I was old enough for a boyfriend yet. I told him I’d give him an answer the next morning at school in person.
I felt embarrassed that he saw me crying at school. Maybe he thought I was crying over him and that I didn’t have the bravery to reject him in person. None of that was true. My answer to Sean would have been yes, and then I would have had my first boyfriend. Instead, I cried and worried over my mother the entire day.
When I got home from school and my mom got home from work, she acted like nothing ever happened, so I did the same.
I never knew what to expect from my mom from day to day. Her moods shifted with the wind, sometimes happy but more often sad and mean. Everyone in our family was so proud of her getting her life together and being a single mom to a teenager. I wanted to laugh in the face of everyone who said that.
My mother spun her story for anyone who would listen, and in it, she was always the victim of a daughter who constantly mouthed off and ignored her. Only I knew the truth about what was going on in our little apartment, but I also knew nobody would have believed me.
I was the black sheep, the truth-teller, and such a thing wasn’t allowed in our family. My grandparents’ alcoholism, my mother’s mental illness, and the fact that I was technically a bastard were all swept under the rug. Those things weren’t talked about until I began to speak up and lay our secrets bare. For my trouble, nobody in the family has spoken to me since my mother died in 2018. I tell myself good riddance so it doesn’t hurt so much, but it’s hard not to have an extended family sometimes.
I’ve come to a place of forgiveness for my mother. It took me time to realize that she likely did the best she could raising me in the shadow of mental illness. I’ve made mistakes with my children during episodes of severe depression, although I work hard to repair any damage right away, and those times are few and far between.
When I think of my mother now, I try to remember the good times. Once she kept me out of school to see the movie Cinderella in a theater. I get my love of reading from her, and it has helped get me through my darkest days. It still makes me cry whenever I hear her favorite song by Earth, Wind, and Fire. We were so similar and yet so different, and it makes me feel somewhat sad yet proud to be connected to her.
I think of her now being at peace and happy. It’s what I always wanted for her, although I had a hard time expressing it when she was here. She’s my mother, and I love her. | https://medium.com/the-virago/when-your-mother-threatens-suicide-5a65b83375fd | ['Glenna Gill'] | 2020-08-31 18:46:42.411000+00:00 | ['Suicide', 'Motherhood', 'Women', 'Mental Illness', 'Self'] |
Accommodation-based programmes for individuals experiencing or at risk of homelessness | The provision of accommodation must be central to any discussions about ending homelessness. But there are many ways to provide accommodation, and in order to ensure positive outcomes for people who are experiencing homelessness, we must have robust evidence on what types of accommodation intervention are genuinely beneficial to the people receiving them.
By rigorously synthesising the outcomes of existing research in one place, Accommodation-based programmes for individuals experiencing or at risk of homelessness: a systematic review and network meta-analysis provides the best way to consider the evidence on what works and what doesn’t. We have assessed and synthesised all the available evidence, excluding studies that don’t meet quality criteria.
The key finding in this review is that interventions offering the highest levels of support alongside unconditional accommodation were more effective than programmes that provided low, or no support. In the main, interventions with support programmes tailored to the individual reported better housing stability and health outcomes.
But perhaps more importantly, the evidence in this review shows that basic interventions (those that only satisfy very basic human needs such as a bed and food) may harm people: they had worse health and housing stability outcomes even when compared to no intervention. If we are to genuinely improve people’s lives, we must design provision with clear standards of support instead of focusing on very basic needs that may not be the best use of limited funds.
Whilst the results in this systematic review are promising when it comes to the impact of housing paired with unconditional support, we must recognise the context in which these studies were conducted. Twenty-five out of twenty-eight of these studies are from the USA, two from Canada and one from the UK. The effectiveness of an intervention depends on the conditions in which it is delivered, and we know that the socio-economic and political environment in the US is vastly different to the UK.
As we find ourselves in the midst of a pandemic which has significantly worse financial and health impacts for people who are already disadvantaged, we must move rapidly, and focus resources on what works. In order to design and deliver quality accommodation based interventions, it is vital that we produce more rigorous evidence in the UK so the sector can deliver services that are truly of benefit to the people receiving them.
At the Centre for Homelessness Impact we are committed to helping the UK end homelessness with evidence. By making evidence accessible, filling gaps in our collective knowledge and supporting the implementation of best practise, we will equip practitioners and policymakers with the tools they need to make lasting positive change. We hope you find the insights in this systematic review useful. | https://medium.com/@ligiateixeira/accommodation-based-programmes-for-individuals-experiencing-or-at-risk-of-homelessness-d4717d7ec87b | ['Dr Ligia Teixeira'] | 2021-02-20 15:09:37.207000+00:00 | ['Housing', 'Homeless', 'Poverty', 'Data', 'Homelessness'] |
Timeshare Vs Hotel: Which is Right for Your Family? | The conversation surrounding the benefits of timeshare vs hotel is always ongoing. The pros and cons of timeshares or hotels each really depend on every individual and family. Vacation styles, budget, location, frequency of travel, and length of stay are all important factors to consider. In this showdown, we weigh the difference between timeshare vs hotel when it comes to these major factors.
What exactly are the benefits of a timeshare compared to a hotel? For one, planning for vacations can be difficult, which is where a timeshare can come in handy. Vacation ownership can save you money! If you already have your lodging sorted out, then you can budget for the rest of your vacation needs. You can focus on saving for flights, vacation activities, and more. Plus, with that extra money in your pocket, you can plan on fully stocking the kitchen in your timeshare suite! So, how do you decide when it comes to timeshare versus a hotel? Weighing the pros and cons of timeshares and hotels is a great place to start.
The benefits of timeshare resorts and the accommodations they offer are the spacious, home-like units. Complete with multiple bedrooms, living areas, and complete kitchens, timeshares give owners a home away from home. What’s more, many timeshares encompass everything you could want in a vacation. With all of the incredible amenities, you might not even want to leave your resort.
In-Unit Kitchens and Dining
Unlike a hotel, timeshares have full-size kitchens, not just a microwave and mini-fridge. This is a big factor for families considering a timeshare over a hotel. If you’re just looking for a complimentary breakfast on your way out the door, maybe a hotel would be okay for you. Foodies might love exploring every dining option in the areas surrounding their hotel or resort, but sometimes a home-cooked meal just can’t be beaten. Especially when you’re traveling with a large family! Cooking in your timeshare’s kitchen some nights can be very helpful with staying within your budget.
Amenities
One of the pros of timeshare resorts that is often one of the cons of hotels is access to extensive amenities. Timeshares are designed with luxury and excitement in mind, so many have:
Spas
Multiple swimming pools, water features, lazy rivers, water slides, etc!
Amusement parks
Golf courses
Excursions
Snow skiing and water-skiing access
Casinos
Boating
Restaurants
Bars and pool-side bars
Vacation Exchange
A great thing about owning a timeshare is the chance to become a vacation exchange member. RCI (formerly Resort Condominiums International) and Interval International are two of the largest exchange companies for timeshares out there. Vacation exchange is as simple as signing up for a membership, depositing your week or points, and then swapping for a new location/week. You don’t get access to this type of vacation exchange with hotels.
As we mentioned before, timeshares come with large kitchens and living spaces. Those accommodations that come with timeshares shouldn’t be downplayed. Imagine a standard hotel room. Typically you’ll have a bed, a TV, a bathroom, and maybe a small table. Now, imagine your timeshare suite being three times larger than that! On average, that’s how much larger a timeshare suite is.
Additionally, you can enjoy separate locking bedrooms for extra privacy and relaxation. Not to mention, you won’t have to worry about over-packing-timeshares often come with washers and dryers in your room so you can wash all of your clothes like you would at home. This is one of the major pros of timeshares and cons of hotels, especially if you have a family.
One of the biggest benefits of timeshares is that they can save families money. If you’re able to find a timeshare you love on the resale market, this becomes even more so. Many timeshare resales are priced lower than they are from a developer. With a timeshare, you can guarantee your family vacations for years to come. While timeshare is not an investment, if you buy a timeshare outright, you’ll only then have to pay maintenance fees every year. Not to mention, there are timeshare financing options available to you.
Check Out Timeshares for Sale Now
Timeshare vs Hotel: Locations and Flexibility
When you’re looking for the pros and cons of timeshare vs hotel, location is a huge factor! When you own a timeshare, you can choose where you want to vacation from hundreds of incredible resorts. This is especially true when you own with a vacation club. The best part of being a vacation club member is the flexibility and resort locations! Each year, you are able to decide which resort you want to visit! You don’t have to stay at your “home resort” each year! With a vacation club, like the ones below, you are able to experience new destinations every year while still experiencing the incredible perks of owning a timeshare!
Disney Vacation Club is a great choice for the entire family. Their resorts are all within close proximity to major vacation destinations across the country. More than ten of the DVC resorts are within minutes of Walt Disney World. There are shuttles, monorails, and gondolas to transport guests straight from their accommodations to the fun. There are also DVC resorts on some of the country’s best beaches! Disney’s Hilton Head Resort will put you right in the center of the relaxing Lowcountry of South Carolina. Disney’s Aulani Resort provides guests with an authentic Hawaiian getaway, with a touch of Disney magic.
As you enter a DVC resort, you will be greeted by a cast member saying “welcome home!” Disney strives to make every DVC member feel right at home at their resorts and we think they really accomplish that goal. Disney Vacation Club members can submit an order form to have groceries delivered to their resort, giving you more time to spend with family and make memories.
Marriott Vacation Club is another top timeshare brand that offers beautiful resorts around the world. If you’re looking to stay in Orlando, you’re in luck! Marriott’s Cypress Harbor has that “Old Florida” charm about it, with gazebos, porches, and stunning pathways through the resort property. Close to all the attractions of Orlando, vacationers can also enjoy this resort, complete with full kitchens in every unit.
Marriott Vacation Club has over 50 resorts around the globe that have all of the incredible amenities that come with owning a timeshare. The difference between staying at a Marriott timeshare vs a Marriott hotel is accommodation size and sense of community. Being a Marriott Vacation Club member means that you can really experience the brand’s world-class hospitality all over the world!
Holiday Inn Club Vacations is a great option for those looking to buy a timeshare. HICV focuses on family-friendly vacations in fun destinations. If you’re looking to head to Orlando, Orange Lake Resort is a popular choice! With its winding lazy river, mini-golf, and seven restaurants, it’s clear to see why. Another great destination for family vacations is Gatlinburg, Tennessee and Smoky Mountain Resort puts you right in the center of the fun! This resort sits right at the foot of the Smokies, so guests are just minutes away from beautiful outdoor activities. Plus, there are tons of other attractions, like Dollywood, just minutes away from the resort!
Whether you want to have fun in the sun or go on an adventure in the mountains, Holiday Inn Club Vacations can provide the getaway of your dreams.
Planning Your Next Trip?
Read up on more popular vacation destinations, vacation ownership clubs, and all the inside information on all things timeshare. | https://medium.com/@Fidelityresales/timeshare-vs-hotel-which-is-right-for-your-family-6a0c23d101aa | ['Fidelity Real Estate'] | 2022-01-05 14:26:59.211000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Hotel', 'Resort', 'Timeshare', 'Family Vacation'] |
Setting up Environment Variables in Python Django | Hello, so today I’m writing and explaining about Environment Variables in Django. You might be wondering what is Environment Variables. Well, the Environment variable exists outside of your code as part of your server environment. It can help you by both streamlining and making more secure the process of running your scripts and applications. Things like our secret keys in our settings.py, our database credentials in our settings.py, our secret API keys, and so on are always kept in our environment variables. We use environment variables for improved security and smoother workflows.
Note: Environment Variables is not only applicable to Django, you can use pretty much the same exact thing in any of your python based projects whether it is core Python or Flask. You can do this procedure in any of your Python-based projects.
Now you already have basic information on what Environment Variables are, let’s jump right into it.
Step 1:
We are going to create a ‘.env’ file. What is a .env file? The .env file is a file that actually contains some secrets concerning our project. Like I said above Secret keys, Database Credentials, email passwords, etc are kept in the .env file. So now in your Django project directory, create a file named ‘.env’ (PS: Do not include any extension, just ‘.env’).
So now, you can keep your secret and sensitive keys here. Here I’m going to take my app’s Secret Key and email password from settings.py to the .env file
.env FILE:
SECRET_KEY=s*og6c!d4cubukcksn$iksdw(m!%!4t7m+8q!62^f)s9d1=p8t2op EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD=1AM@pA$sWoRd
Now to the next step
PS: Do not store your sensitive keys such as the SECRET_KEY as a string. Unlike in our settings.py file, we store our Secret Keys as strings, but here in the .env file DO NOT store it as strings. Also, make sure there is no space before the equal to ‘=’ sign and after it. E.G
IN OUR Settings.py FILE:
SECRET_KEY=” s*og6c!d4cubukcksn$iksdw#(m!%!4t7m+8q!62^f)s9d1=p8t2op ”
IN OUR .env FILE:
SECRET_KEY=s*og6c!d4cubukcksn$iksdw#(m!%!4t7m+8q!62^f)s9d1=p8t2op
Step 2:
Now we are going to install a python package called Python-decouple. Decouple helps you organize and separate settings from your code so that you can change parameters without having to redeploy them. So we are going to use this package to implement the .env file in our Django project.
So now go ahead and install the package from your Terminal or Bash:
“pip install python-decouple”
Step 3:
Now the next thing is the actual usage. In your settings.py,
1. Import the config object:
‘from decouple import config’
2. Retrieve the configuration parameters; now I kept my secret key and database password in the .env file, so now I’m going to retrieve it.
SECRET_KEY = config (‘SECRET_KEY’) EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = config (‘EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD’)
Now maybe in your case you did keep other sensitive keys like the Debug status, Email Host, Email keys, API secret keys, and so on, I will show you here how to retrieve them.
DEBUG = config (‘DEBUG’, cast=bool) EMAIL_HOST = config (‘EMAIL_HOST’, default= ‘localhost’) EMAIL_PORT = config (‘EMAIL_PORT’, cast=int) NAME_OF_API_SECRET_KEY = config (‘NAME_OF_API_SECRET_KEY’)
Note: We passed another argument after DEBUG in the Debug config. The argument we passed is cast. The purpose of passing the argument is to inform config the type of data that is passed in. So ‘cast=bool’ tells config that the data we are passing is a Boolean value. The same goes with EMAIL PORT also.
If you use GIT, do not forget to git ignore your file. You can do this by including the ‘.env’ file in your ‘.gitignore’ file. | https://medium.com/@beejaybot/setting-up-environment-variables-in-python-django-5455f002b1eb | [] | 2020-12-05 11:13:45.956000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Python', 'Django', 'Codingbootcamp', 'Web Development'] |
Why Every Blogger Should Learn About Digital Marketing | Being a blogger takes a lot of guts. You share your story, and build an online community based on your experiences. As a Digital Marketing Specialist, I often receive questions that correlates to, ‘What exactly is Digital Marketing?’ This post isn’t intended to provide you a crash course on the subject, nor does it intend to change the way you blog. In essence, Digital Marketing is the method of strategizing your brand with the intent and purpose of growing your audience.
Did you ever wanted to expand your follower count but just didn’t know how? Digital Marketing is a method to meet business goals through effective marketing campaigns. Some key knowledge includes SEO (Search Engine Optimization), social media advertising, content marketing, email marketing, PPC (Pay-per-click) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing). There are plethora of online resources you can read on your own time. The purpose of this article is to assist you in choosing the best strategy for your brand. Here are some of my recommendations that are budget friendly and resourceful:
1. Applying SEO Into Your Content
Most bloggers don’t have an exact business model (unless you own an e-commerce store). Blogging is usually about creating an open community where your audience may reach out and sponsor you. However, it’s very important for new visitors to find you on Google search engines. When writing, you would need to include ‘keywords’ into your content. Keywords are popular and trending words people search online. I recommend checking out Moz and SEMrush for SEO services. You can see some keywords that are high in volume search and currently trending on the web.
2. Understand Your Audience
Believe it or not — experienced marketers also make the mistake of forgetting their main audience. If you ever want to achieve a dedicated follower who may enjoy your content, it’s best to consider the type of readers who may come across your content. For example, are you considering reaching out to millennials? In WordPress, you can install Google Analytics or WordPress Analytics so that you can have a better insights of the demographics. You can also view the time length and durations of the viewer’s screen time.
3. E-mail Marketing
Want to directly reach out to your followers but don’t know how to present yourself? E-mail marketing is an effective tool in getting the message across. Tons of brands use e-mail marketing softwares such as MailChimp, Constant Contact or HubSpot. I currently use MailChimp for their basic free services that will provide you free e-mail template designs. If you know some coding, you can also hard code your designs to make your email unique, personal and engaging.
4. Brand Yourself but Show It Off
Most of the time, the key to a good effective marketing campaign is you! Complimenting your strategic content marketing campaign with an added personality will make you stand out from the group. However, it’s important to be consistent in the way you brand yourself. For instance, a study blogger would primarily post about books, stationaries, and updates on academic performance. There isn’t one formula for effective branding, but other methods include color psychology and the design of a website.
5. Consider Investing in Paid Advertisements
For many bloggers, staying within a tight budget can be challenging. A good marketing strategy would be getting the best return of investments for your campaigns. Depending on your current size of your follower count, you can start branding yourself through Google Adwords and social medias. Google Adwords are really for serious business owners who’s attempting to increase sales and establishing a professional client relationship.
For influential bloggers, the main goal is to promote content. The best way to achieve that is through various social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. If you run an e-commerce store, you can select a advertising campaign that would increase more sales. Meanwhile, an influential blogger would prefer increasing his or her brand awareness by likes and shares. Overall, paid advertisements are effective in reaching out to the right audience and at the right time.
Digital Marketing is an effective strategy to keep in mind. It’s all about generating leads, retaining your audience, and nurturing them so they can grow. It takes time to devise a system that works for you, and there’s no one method that will always work all the time. You may need to keep changing your marketing strategy based on the changing algorithms. Therefore, it is important for you, the blogger, to keep yourself updated on the trending features of Google, SEO/SEM, social media, and mobile technology. | https://medium.com/marketing-and-entrepreneurship/why-every-blogger-should-learn-about-digital-marketing-807924324307 | ['Alice Chong'] | 2020-06-03 07:46:28.375000+00:00 | ['Entrepreneurship', 'Writing', 'Creative Writing', 'Digital Marketing', 'Writing Tips'] |
calligraphile | 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/a-cornered-gurl/calligraphile-8d769d0d8d9a | ['Tien Skye'] | 2020-11-27 11:37:23.578000+00:00 | ['Calligraphy', 'Mindfulness', 'Tanka', 'A Cornered Gurl', 'Poetry'] |
Introduction to UI & UX Design | User Interface Design
Refers to the aesthetics of a product, focuses on visual aspect of a product that draws the attention of users to it and direct the users on each steps to take when using the product. A process by which designers build the interface of digital product focusing on the colors, fonts and typography. It is made up of components that allows users to interact with a product or services.
User Interface (UI) Design focuses on anticipating what users might need to do and ensuring that the interface has elements that are easy to access, understand, and use to facilitate those actions.
User Experience Design
Refers to the experience of users when interacting with a product or service. The main aim of user experience is ensure a particular product or service is easy to use and perform all the necessary functions to satisfy the customer.
User experience design is the process of anticipating user needs and wants and proffering solutions to it. It focuses on overall effectiveness of a product to bring about customers satisfaction.
The main aim is meeting users need before, during and after product development. UI design is all about how the user interacts with an interface, how they get from one screen to another.
Difference between User Interface & User Experience Design
User Interface
Deals with users experience and interaction.
Applies to any product or services.
Focus on tools.
Desirable.
What to make.
User Experience
Deals with the aesthetics of a product.
Applies to only digital product.
Focus on interaction.
Credible.
What to achieve.
Design Tools
Design tools are software, media, objects, etc. that helps with creating design elements to communicate a message or build a brand. Examples include Figma, Miro,Adobe XD, Whimsical, Sketch etc.
Design tools are software, media, objects, etc. that helps with creating design elements to communicate a message or build a brand. Examples include Figma, Miro, Adobe XD, Whimsical, Sketch etc.
Figma
Figma is a cloud-based design tool that allows users to work together on the same file in real-time. Figma is a digital design and prototyping tool. It is a UI and UX design application that you can use it to create websites, apps, or smaller user interface components that can be integrated into other projects.
Advantages
Ease of use and compatibility.
Easy to share files.
Numerous plugins available.
Cloud based website designing tool.
Disadvantages
Require large amount of RAM.
Files cannot be accessed offline.
Components are a little bit challenging to master and effectively use.
Miro
Miro is a design tool that blends aspects of several different categories of software into one. It’s part diagramming and flowchart software and part presentation app.
Advantages
Excellent collaboration and presentation tools.
Strong support for integration with other apps and service.
Easy to use.
Rich features.
Quick orientation before people can effectively interact.
Built-in video chat.
Disadvantages
Little offline functionality.
Can’t show a video to participants, video can only be viewed by individuals.
Aligning and spacing elements is also a bit difficult.
Adobe XD
Adobe xd is a vector-based tool for designing and prototyping user experiences for web, mobile, and even voice.
Advantages
Easy, flexible wireframing.
Simple but powerful interaction.
Good app for prototype demo.
Time-saving features like symbols and grids.
Disadvantages
Scrollable masks can be confusing when scrolling through preview pages.
Easier templated elements without hunting for plugins.
The app does not support timeline animation, so its animation capability is elementary
Missing horizontal scrolling.
Sketch
Sketch is a visual design tool of use for application prototyping, coming with a wide variety of extensions, plugins, and an active user community.
Advantages
Easy to learn and use.
Sketch Libraries ability to sync across multiple Sketch file.
integration with other design software.
Autosave and multiple artboards.
You can design elements like icons and reuse them.
Disadvantages
Limited measuring tools.
Requires creating a lot of custom keyboard shortcuts to be super-efficient.
Doesn’t let you create permanent color palettes. | https://medium.com/@feyisayoamoo/introduction-to-ui-ux-design-cfc40e5e27cb | ['Feyisayo Amoo'] | 2021-06-16 00:22:31.474000+00:00 | ['UX Design', 'UI', 'Ui Ux Design', 'Figma'] |
African civil society is busy ensuring accountable Covid-19 relief | A U4 webinar has highlighted how, despite lockdowns, civil society can still play an anti-corruption role, monitoring Covid-19 emergency support. By turning to online collaboration, citizens can track how governments and agencies distribute and spend funds. This ensures help reaches those most in need, rather than being siphoned off or hoarded. Cases from The Gambia, Nigeria, and South Africa also show how online coordination can actually improve how civil society works.
Gambia Participates is part of the ‘Follow the money’ campaign, which tracks how several African countries spend Covid-19 funds. The campaign works to strengthen local awareness and uncover how funds are misused or don’t arrive at the intended destination. (Photo: CODE/KC Nwakalor, Copyrighted)
In a webinar in June 2020, U4 focused on African civil society organisations (CSOs) and the conditions they face for monitoring accountability under Covid-19 regulations. Many countries have implemented lockdowns and movement restrictions, and these have hindered ordinary working conditions for civil society watchdogs. We suggested that citizens would instead turn online to collaborate and share information. In this way, civil society would be able to play a key role in monitoring the spending of hastily distributed funds.
Citizens can turn online to play a role monitoring the distribution and spending of Covid-19 funds
At the time of the webinar, the number of infections was peaking in Nigeria. Meanwhile other countries, such as The Gambia, had hardly seen any cases. Both countries had plans for the distribution of protective gear and medical equipment; for hiring frontline workers for contact tracing and testing; as well as plans for food and financial support for those in need. National and international donations were flowing into economies, with the corresponding high risk for significant losses to corruption. In several countries, civil society groups had joined forces to coordinate and educate themselves and their communities. They did this using online tools to coordinate local support and spread advice on how to be protected from the disease.
Tracking the ‘coronavirus millions’
The Gambia has moved in recent years towards more openness and democracy. Yet, according to the Open Budget Survey 2019, it still ranks low for budget transparency. Corruption is widespread, with the country ranked 96 out of 198 on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI).
When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, international and local emergency funds were released. The CSO Gambia Participates, in collaboration with Research and Strategic Studies (CepRass), set out to track how the ‘coronavirus millions’ were being spent. For example, the government allocated 512 million dalasi (about US$10 million) to an emergency fund in March 2020. The fund was assembled from various ministries, agencies, and departments. Gambia Participates questioned how 40% of the funds had been spent on new vehicles, 60% on hotel costs, allegedly for quarantine purposes, and only 12% on sanitary items. Its field research found that hospitals designated to be Covid-19 treatment centres were ill equipped. They lacked personal protective equipment (PPE) or even overhead (infrared) thermometers. The CSOs also found ‘ghost names’ on lists of frontline workers who would be entitled to a special risk allowance.
The investigation concluded that Gambian health workers needed training, procedures to work from, and, importantly, an infrastructure to work within. Further, it urged the government to reveal details on how funds were being spent. Gambia Participates is actively working to expose government spending and to spread understanding of state budgets and taxes. By creating explanatory videos on social media in multiple languages, it hopes to educate new audiences in the essentials of a government budget, thereby increase awareness of government spending.
Inflated prices and unverifiable companies
The Nigerian chapter of the International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR) found that overhead thermometers had become a lucrative business at the peak of the outbreak. From a normal price for bulk purchases of US$50 each, the thermometers were now traded at four times the price to the government. ICIR also found companies not formally registered on the national business registry receiving government contracts in emergency procurement processes. The reason for this was implied to be the urgency of the pandemic. Their investigation report, which analysed data from the Nigeria Open Contracting Portal (NOCOPO), revealed contracts for more than US$1.4 million to unverifiable companies. The sums involved were very large, such as the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) approval of US$3.4 billion in emergency support to Nigeria to combat the Covid-19 pandemic. There is still a long way to go before each million is accounted for.
Citizens ‘follow the money’
Connected Development is the Nigerian non-governmental organisation (NGO) behind the online community iFollowTheMoney. The concept is to engage ordinary citizens to monitor government services. They then provide evidence of fraud or corruption when projects are not delivered as described.
The concept is to engage ordinary citizens to monitor government services
During the pandemic, iFollowTheMoney’s focus has been to follow up on promises to finance or provide medical services and equipment to combat the spread of Covid-19. It also monitors promises to support victims of lockdowns and job losses. A networking platform keeps the larger community together. At the same time, mobile messaging groups enable information exchange and support for local chapters in cities and states around Nigeria. When the federal government provides grants for a local intervention, network members can follow up and document how the grants are spent or if they arrive at all. In some cases, the network uses the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act to demand details on how funds are supposed to be spent.
Rather than being distributed, food supplies provided by the Nigerian federal government to support families in urgent need have been piling up in warehouses around Nigeria. Local governors have met the accusations of hoarding with the explanation that the supplies are being stored as a reserve for a possible second wave of the pandemic. During the #EndSARS protests against police brutality in October 2020, news went viral on social media about the stockpiles of emergency relief. Several warehouses packed with undistributed aid were looted by angry crowds. Nigeria’s Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC) is now investigating the looting and the allegations of hoarding.
Collaborative networks to force change
In South Africa, more than 400 CSOs have joined forces to support the response to Covid-19. The C19 Peoples Coalition uses social media and messaging apps to update and inform its members. The coalition provides guidelines on how local community responses to the coronavirus can be organised. The ‘Community Action Network (CAN) Starter Pack’ includes advice on important aspects of building and maintaining community groups.
The Movement for Change and Social Justice in South Africa has its roots in fighting the spread of HIV. Before the lockdown, it used to mobilise at funeral gatherings. These could be easily attended by more than 1000 people. Now the movement has moved to social media, which has changed the way it works for the better. According to an article in The Conversation, organisations previously worked in silos but now have ‘bundled their expertise and resources to form collaborative networks’.
Corruption Watch is also part of the C19 network and monitors procurement and aid distribution closely. After ongoing pressure, the South African government has published the list of all contracts awarded under the emergency procurement regulations.
Online support for watchdog role
Civil society organisations are essential to ensure fair and trustworthy distribution of support to the most vulnerable in countries with low trust in government institutions. They provide neighbourhood assistance, distribute food packages, or share information on precautionary measures based on their local competence and networks.
CSOs are also crucial as watchdogs to monitor how donations and government spending are distributed and for what purpose. Mismanagement and stolen assets have been identified in many countries. Support packages have also been used in countries as a political tool. In such cases, emergency supplies maybe marked with political party logos and distributed in the same manner as campaign material.
Online coordination and knowledge sharing have improved collaboration between organisations
In both these roles, CSOs profit from online coordination and knowledge sharing. This is particularly the case when governments are restricting physical meetings as a measure to control the spread of Covid-19. Because of civil society’s emerging online networks, some countries see an increased interest in collaboration between organisations that previously worked in their own silos. | https://medium.com/u4-anti-corruption-resource-centre/african-civil-society-is-busy-ensuring-accountable-covid-19-relief-ab8e864978c0 | ['Per Aarvik'] | 2020-12-15 08:42:14.509000+00:00 | ['Nigeria', 'Corruption', 'Covid 19', 'The Gambia', 'Civil Society'] |
Simulation of Commission Design: 커미션 시스템 설계 Part 2 | Interested in RL adaption to the real world. Building simulation models to validate the token economies with agent-based RL.
Follow | https://medium.com/decon-lab/simulation-of-commission-design-%EC%BB%A4%EB%AF%B8%EC%85%98-%EC%8B%9C%EC%8A%A4%ED%85%9C-%EC%84%A4%EA%B3%84-part-2-9f349de80ea2 | ['Jeffrey Lim'] | 2019-03-15 01:40:25.141000+00:00 | ['Reinforcement Learning', 'Simulation', 'Token Economy', 'Agent Based Modeling', 'Blockchain'] |
Starvation Mode | Its not uncommon for the body to feel hungry, parched, or unsatisfied. Your body starts to crave something to fulfill it. Most people tend to go into hunger mode.
Hunger stems from the brain just like any other desire you have. The brain tells the body what to do. But does the brain send messages to other parts of the brain?
When your body hits starvation mode, the individual is hungry, but that signal to tell your body to go eat isn’t connecting with the signal sent from your brain that your hungry. Once this brain feels this battle that it doesn’t want to face, it lets other obligations get in the way.
You start to think of the activities you have to do and the work you haven’t done. Those signals start sending to the body before the go eat signal sends because it just makes the brain work less. Who doesn’t want to do less work?
Exactly.
You don’t even realize your body is in starvation mode initially because that signal has been blocked out by everything else. Might feel like you have terrible spasms in your stomach. Sort of like a common stomach ache. Only when the signal has lasted a few days or more. Think of starvation mode as just not eating for more than 6 hours.
HEY! IT HAPPENS!
Some go as far as not even caring about the pain, which leads to disease. But for someone whose not into random uncomfortable pain, you’ll notice quickly that something is not right.
Now it is time to put in the work and start a form of discipline that most people find unfair.
You have to eat.
Yes that’s right, you have to eat.
Please understand that anyone can get this feeling, especially college students, parents, or just people who experience stress often. Maybe things get in the way that you forget to pack a lunch with you for 4 days in a row. Maybe a break up or the kids are not behaving well this week. Things are just simply going out of control. Any experience of stress could turn this bodily mode, on.
NOW PAY ATTENTION!!!
It’s now 2020 and we want you to have a clear 20/20 visual of your world. So it’s time to put that starvation mode light …
How to stop Starvation Mode?
Alarms are the best at getting a signal across. Use your phone as a way to remind you to eat. Set it for a breakfast time, lunch time, & dinner.
7:00 am — Breakfast and wake up
12:00 pm — Lunch/Break
4:00pm — Dinner
We recommend approaching it slowly, especially if you are starving to the point that your body is looking different.
Aiming for the 3 main courses an individual needs to eat, is a calm bodily initiative. You will notice how your body feels once it has be fulfilled and when it hasn’t. In other words, if you haven’t noticed before the feeling your body expresses when the INSIDE is bothering you, you will now. Feeling full of feeling empty, is a great start to listening to your body since you can NOT visually see what’s inside. We know, it’s messing up your 20/20 vision goals. But we not letting that stop us 🙅🏾♀️.
Listening to your body reduces all kinds of issues and listening early doesn’t hurt. So try your best to pay attention. That fruit salad with whip cream is calling your name! | https://medium.com/@theboddess/starvation-mode-8b20efcb0164 | ['Briauna Y.'] | 2020-02-13 16:40:00.754000+00:00 | ['Bodybuilding', 'Body Positive', 'Stress Management', 'Body Image', 'Anorexia'] |
Panic at the Disco (and the supermarket, the office, the airport …) | Fear is a very useful emotion when we are in grave danger and we need to take action. However, prolonged periods of heightened panic are detrimental to our emotional and physical health, increasing the likelihood of stress-related illness and lowering our immune system. In addition, studies show that heightened anxiety undermines our ability to make healthy decisions, leaving us floundering in poor choices precisely when we need to be at our most rational and wise.
I live in Singapore and, during the 2002/03 SARS outbreak, I came to appreciate the incredible efficiency and no-nonsense approach the government employs when it comes to public health and safety. Even so, when the Singapore government raised the COVID-19 threat alert to Orange, this past February, I must admit — although still fairly relaxed — I did feel my anxiety levels rising.
Even more worrying for me was the moment my homeland, New Zealand, declared a compulsory 14-day self-quarantine period for incoming travellers — effectively isolating me from my son and a bevy of other loved ones currently living in Aotearoa.
The current COVID-19 pandemic is just one example of the way world events can threaten our sense of security, and heighten feelings of helplessness and unease. Although fear and concern are natural and understandable reactions to these world events, there are steps we can take to ensure cautious concern does not escalate into unnecessary (and unhealthy) panic:
Understand your negativity bias. At times like this, it’s wise to acknowledge that your brain has a propensity to overestimate danger and over-focus on perceived threats. This ‘negativity bias’, as it’s known, often compels us to exaggerate perceived danger — to the detriment of reality and our own health and well-being. In short: don’t believe everything your brain tells you to fear and be consciously open to more optimistic viewpoints and solutions.
Be mindful of news sources. Like your own brain, the media also has a distinct inclination toward negativity. Be mindful of sensationalised media stories and filter your information diet carefully; understand that data and advice coming from the World Health Organisation is likely to be immeasurably more accurate than a random Facebook post.
Educate yourself on relevant language and concepts. Knowledge is power, and it’s also a great way to feel more in control in times of uncertainty. Research the things that matter — the terminology, the vital statistics, the possibilities. Get the facts from those closest to the research; avoid rumour, opinion and information from questionable sources.
Activate your sense of agency. Look for solutions. How can you minimise the impact, or help contribute positively to the current situation? Take responsibility for the steps you can take as an individual that will help the community as a whole. Empower yourself by taking positive action when, and however, you can.
Become the observer. The Greater Good Science Center offers a simple exercise that can help you gain a healthier perspective in times of fear. Focus on what you are fearful of, and then spend around three minutes talking through the experience using the third person (eg. I might think to myself “Kim is feeling fearful because world events seem out of her control. She is looking for greater personal and economic certainty”). Write your reflections down if it helps you process the situation clearly. This simple practice provides you with an opportunity to reflect on the situation objectively, without being overwhelmed by your emotions.
Finally, be kind to yourself by reducing every day drama and stress. Allow yourself to step away from friendship, workplace or family dramas. Let grudges go and keep unnecessary emotional stress to a minimum. Instead, seek out more occasions for mindfulness, self-nurturing and peaceful reflection. This will ensure your baseline stress levels remain as low as possible during this time of inevitable stress and uncertainty.
As natural creatures, living on a dynamic and complex planet, it is inevitable that we will live through times of uncertainty and heightened concern. At times like this, it’s vital to embrace subtlety and nuance. Fear and concern are part of an emotional spectrum, and although apathy is not appropriate when the public health is at stake, neither is unbridled fear and panic. What’s required of us all during these moments is level heads, clear eyes and a committed realignment to caution, compassion and communal well-being. | https://medium.com/inspiration-exe/panic-at-the-disco-and-the-supermarket-the-office-the-airport-6ad00b32a893 | ['Kim Forrester'] | 2020-03-15 12:07:51.743000+00:00 | ['Wellness', 'Mental Health', 'Personal Development', 'Society', 'Wellbeing'] |
In Her Blood: One Woman’s Brave Journey Into The World’s Biggest Problem | There comes a time in every woman’s 20s when she gets the most tempting opportunities from life- this is her prime and the biggest shark wants to snap her up for a fancy job, some good looking wealthy man wants her all for himself, and she’s sparkling at the altar of adulthood, with the energy of a waterfall. Let’s say she does take that job at a big company and marries that man, nobody holds their breath, everyone is technically happy. In short, her life is sorted.
Supriya Sharma’s parents want nothing more for her. Her quietness, intelligence, and radiance makes her too precious a daughter for them to gamble with. She’s got a job she’s great at, and she stands on her own two feet. With so much going well for her, they just want her to go on with her life that they know is safe for everyone. If they could help it, they would have her stay at home in Jammu, but Supriya’s talents need a larger platform and she took them out to the world with her.
In Hyderabad, Supriya’s blood hums with the pace of the city. It’s got all the space she wants and all the chill she needs. When she reaches her desk in the office, a small smile turns up on the corner of her lips as she slides her bag off her shoulder. Even though she’s made a few best friends in the ten months she’s been in this job, she keeps to herself during the day and gets her work done in a steady, rhythmic pace. All this time when she wears her everygirl veneer and does nothing out of the ordinary to attract attention, she is up to something that not many people know.
The people who think in terms of moving pictures would be disappointed to find that Supriya isn’t a secret spy agent, neither has she built AI technology that can take over the world. Supriya’s secret is one that not many people will ever need to know, but those that do chance upon it, find out because she saved the lives of their loved ones- Supriya devotes her time to find blood donors for patients battling for their lives.
Far removed from the eyes of her peers, she runs a small service called MyBlood and helps out families that put up a fight for their beloved. At first, her parents were entirely disconcerted by the prospect of their daughter taking calls from strangers and emotionally investing herself with them. It wasn’t until someone in their own family was in a medical predicament and she stepped up to help with her significant resolve and resourcefulness, that they fully understood the impact that Supriya was capable of having on the world.
Many of the things that Supriya does may not come across as completely logical. Since joining NowFloats last year, she has coordinated with various partners to help them reach out to small local businesses and strengthen the common man’s income. A job that doesn’t sound fancy might not make a lot of sense to anybody else her age. What nobody has noticed, however, that what she does from the love of her heart and what she does for a livelihood share the same philosophy- make the unheard man found, give him fresh blood to live, make his life better. That is just who she is.
Ask her WHY, ask her HOW she makes the time to carry the world’s weight on her shoulders. Why would a young and successful girl be any less care-free than she deserves to be? She looks at you like it’s a non-negotiable concept. She opens her mouth to answer, “The thing is…,” her voice snags in her throat, her breath gets caught in her chest, she blinks fast. “The world is such a selfish place,” she says “I just want to make it a little better for everybody.”
You can’t treat everyone to the things of the world. They’ll only shine in the unknown side of humanity- you let them find it and then you be grateful that you found them. And no matter who they’re with, everybody goes a great way ahead. | https://medium.com/nowfloats/in-her-blood-one-womans-brave-journey-into-the-world-s-biggest-problem-d96c8814f46 | ['Abhineeta Raghunath'] | 2016-09-09 07:29:40.615000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Motivation', 'Discovery'] |
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