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Run your business like a business | Run your business like a business
Sex workers have some of the best entrepreneurial skills out of anyone I’ve met; we deal with marketing, managing scheduling and logistics, screening, customer service, and finances. On top of that, many of us deal with difficult clients and challenging situations, things that face anyone running their own business but can be amplified in our industry.
If you’re new to the business or want to improve your existing enterprise, this article is for you. It’s important to treat sex work as a legitimate business, because the work we do is real work. But perhaps you need a bit of help in refining your approach. Here’s some advice.
1. Act like a professional
Professionalism in any field varies widely, and can involve specific conduct, manners and behaviours, or work style. While sex work requires professionalism for various tasks, don’t adopt a stuffy demeanour; after all, our business is one of providing pleasure, and there should be a great amount of fun in that!
Instead, assume some simple yet appreciated business practices that not only represent you as a serious business person, but will also make your working life a bit easier.
Answer emails in a timely manner. There are many approaches to tackling a growing inbox while getting to messages on time (check out this article by Fast Company if you’re curious). I invite you to think like your clients: when you contact someone about a product or service from any industry, what are your expectations on response? An hour? A day? A week? I’m surprised to learn of providers taking days or weeks to reply to an email requesting an appointment; I think this is absurd. If you want to improve your sales and build clientele, you must respond in a timely manner — within 24 hours. Doing so will show you care about your clients’ business.
Communicate like a professional. In addition to timely responses, use professional language and communication skills when replying to clients and other providers. Short-hand texting and writing are for amateurs. Go pro with good writing, even if that’s not how someone reached out initially. If you don’t know how, learn; Google is a thing.
Be mindful of optics. People tend to hold (most) professionals to a higher standard of behaviour. They shouldn’t be complaining heavily about their clients in public forums, trashing other coworkers, spreading gossip, etc. Neither should you. Warning about dangerous clients via twitter is one thing; constant complaining about every little thing to the wide world is poor taste. Air your grievances elsewhere — to friends, in private chat rooms, your cat, a diary, wherever. Don’t spread gossip, and don’t let your clients spread it either. If they start talking about another sex worker, don’t engage; politely steer the conversation away.
2. Adopt a brand
Your brand should reflect your personality, services, and image, and will include your overall look, attitude, how you present yourself on social media, and how you communicate with clients and other service providers. It should also be geared towards your target market (more on that below). Whatever your brand is, use it to your advantage at every opportunity — in emails, texting, social media, your website, your ads. Acting professionally is key in this business, and staying on-brand helps with this. It earns you the respect you deserve and helps others to see you’re serious about your work.
Adopting a brand also includes figuring out your value proposition. A value proposition is how you position yourself in your industry; how you’re different from your competitors, how you’ll solve your clients’ problems, and your ‘secret sauce’. It conveys who you are, what you offer, the benefits of your services, and why someone should choose you, in a simple, concise statement.
You can read more about adopting a brand and image in my article on getting started in sex work).
3. Think like your clients.
Two (of many) mistakes entrepreneurs make when launching a business are:
Not understanding who their target market is.
Not understanding the deep needs of their customers.
In the tech space there tends to be a lot of ideas floating around, with everyone building a solution to problems that may or may not exist. I’m shocked to find that many companies haven’t done any customer research to really investigate the pain points and deep needs of what their clients want. A lot of them really have the attitude of, “If you build it, they will come”.
When I work with startups, the first thing I want to understand is, do they know the client base they are targeting and can they identify their target market? A target market is exactly who you expect to serve, and it can’t be “everyone”, because “everyone” is not going to buy your product or services. Think about it; Porsche’s target market isn’t going to be 20-year old undergraduate students; it’s going to be established professionals who can afford to buy their car.
Similarly, you, my sexy entrepreneur, need to do some thinking around your clients — who they are, what they like, what problems they have, and why they might want your services. To do this, here are some questions to reflect on:
Who is your target Client? (Don’t say everyone) Personify them: give them a name, age, gender and a job description. Imagine them as a real person with real problems.
What is your Client’s objective? What are they really trying to do? What is their deep-seated need they are trying to meet by engaging with you?
What challenges are they facing in having their needs met? What are their pain points?
What is the economic and emotional impact clients face when not achieving their objectives and having their needs met?
Imagine the Client using your service. What are your services’ qualities or capabilities? Why are you different?
In what way do your capabilities affect the Client’s ability to achieve their objectives?
What is the Client’s benefit of achieving those objectives?
By working through these questions, you can start to develop your brand further and develop a value proposition you can use in your marketing. It also helps you gain a deep understanding of and empathy towards your clients’ needs and desires.
4. Market yourself effectively.
We know that marketing our services to the wide world is key in client discovery, but it’s important to direct your marketing efforts to channels that will provide a good return on investment — both financially and in quality of clients. Sex workers are unfortunately unable to take advantage of more traditional marketing techniques such as print media, ads on social media, or Google (although huge props to Winnipeg escort Sensational Serena for having the brass to put herself out there on a downtown billboard; that’s some serious marketing right there). Because of this, we need to be creative and use other techniques to facilitate discovery by clients.
Take advantage of free marketing. Use free marketing as much as possible, such as Switter, twitter or instagram. You could also write a Medium blog or send out a newsletter every month. This helps you develop your brand and interact with would-be clients and other providers.
Ad platforms must provide a return on investment. Some advertising platforms give better results than others, but this can be a mixed bag; while one provider may land several amazing clients in a city using Slixa, it might not be so effective for other finding other clients elsewhere. Knowing which platforms bring you the best clients is important, so keep notes on this. Ask your clients how they discovered you. You can do this on your screening form with a multiple choice question that lists places where you advertise. If your ad platform provides stats on your ad performance, use this. For example, I have two ads on Slixa and am currently testing which one works better for clicks and tracking to my site. I’ll run it for a couple weeks and pick the one that provides the most traffic.
Use analytics. You can use Google Analytics on your website to track information about traffic by setting up a google account and inserting the tracking code in your site header (ask a web dev professional or a tech-savvy friend if you don’t know how). Some website providers come with built-in analytics which you can also use.
Analytics can be helpful to give you a very specific breakdown of where your traffic comes from, user geography, what pages they view, their behaviour flow on your site, timing of visits, and a bunch of other stuff that may even be a bit too advanced for what you might want. This can help you direct your efforts to methods that bring you more traffic, and presumably more clients.
Provide content. This can be writing, cam work, porn, or other media. One of my favourite content creators is Veronica Sway, who creates fun, cheeky videos that are sexy and creative, and a great way to attract traffic and followers. Your blog can be another way to provide content; I’ve had many clients tell me they were convinced to book after reading my work. Content is an important way to get people to discover you, so create as much as your schedule and skill allows.
5. Do your due diligence.
In the tech, finance or consulting spaces, this is known as Know Your Customer, and allows a company to investigate the identity and suitability of a person or company. In sex work, we call it screening, and it’s an absolute must for your safety. I’ve written about this in previous articles, so I won’t harp on it here.
What I will say is that the more that escorts screen, the more it sets the industry standard that screening is mandatory, and creates a safer environment for everyone involved. If someone refuses to screen, move on. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
6. Study your competitors.
Market competition refers to similar businesses selling a similar product or service. In its simplest form, there is a limited supply of buyers and sellers within the space are trying to achieve the greatest market share and revenue. Perfect competition refers to all sellers offering the same service at the same cost to a limited number of buyers, and all information about the transaction is known to both sides.
Fortunately sex work is very much imperfect in a competition sense. While fundamentally sex workers and their clients have some common goals, there are many factors that dictate choices made among actors on both sides of a sex work transaction: personalities, looks, mood, resources, personal situations, services, reviews, timing, and more can impact the decision on a client booking you or someone else. However some basics can be agreed upon.
In a given location, other sex workers are going to be your competitors in some manner (unless a client is going for a specific look or niche that you don’t fulfill). Understand who you’re competing against. It’s not going to be everyone, but it might be everyone in your price point, niche service, or looks. You should study what they do well and what they do poorly, so you can learn the good and omit the bad. If they’ve reached a goal similar to yours, study their techniques and marketing; they’ve obviously been doing something right. The point is not to hate your competitors, but instead learn from them. That’s the key takeaway.
7. Nurture your relationships.
Competition notwithstanding, it’s important to develop and nurture good relationships in this industry, among clients and especially with other sex workers. Other sex workers can be your allies, friends, and biggest supporters. Besides, a group of us makes for one helluva sexy party.
That time we all stormed Veronica Sway’s bedroom for endless mirror selfies.
Trust me, you want other sex workers on your side when things go sideways, and who else understands the frustrations of time wasters better than a fellow sex worker?
Developing good relationships with clients is key for retention. There’s a finesse to this practice and every relationship with a client is different. I will casually text or email with some clients (after mutual agreement) and may have a free lunch date with long-time regulars. I do this because I genuinely enjoy it, and I know it will foster a better connection with them. Not everyone needs to do this, and how you manage your client relationship is entirely up to you. You may need to enforce boundaries from time to time, to maintain the distinction between business and pleasure. That’s ok. Do so politely and courteously.
There is a saying in business that it costs more to acquire a new customer than to keep them. If you spend a ton of money on advertising and only gain a couple new clients after a new and costly campaign, make sure they stick around for the long term. Nurturing these relationships is important to ensure you get the most lifetime value for your efforts.
Sadly, not all clients are awesome, nor do all cross your door beyond an initial meeting. That’s ok. It’s important to understand who will be a better client and who will waste your time (see my article on How to Identify a Time Waster). Once you know this, put more effort into better clients, and let go of bad clients who aren’t giving you value.
Please, don’t be shocked. No, not all clients are created equally. Those that provide a bigger return on investment should get more out of you than those who don’t. Return on investment doesn’t necessarily mean financial, mind you; people bring many things to the table and enrich our lives in many ways, and anyone you value should be treated well. The client booking three hours every few months because it’s within his budget is just as valuable to me as someone booking every week for a couple hours. (To the offended clients reading this: if you want better service, be a better client. It’s pretty easy.)
8. Give something back to the community.
Someone on my twitter feed posted that they’d never experienced so much support and inclusivity as they had in the sex work community, and this has been my experience, too. Being a good person is good business, and giving something back to the sex work community is a great way to show your appreciation for everyone involved. There’s a ton of ways to do this and they can range from writing articles for other sex workers, retweeting their schedules or tour dates, supporting sex-worker lead initiatives and groups, or hosting and attending events. Find something that works for you.
In short…
If you want better clients and better business, be a better business person. Put some time and effort into your work outside the boudoir and see where it can take you.
Catch me online!
Web: https://www.isobelandrews.com
Twitter: @lafemmeisobel | https://medium.com/@lafemmeisobel/run-your-business-like-a-business-c95ffb4e41f | ['Isobel Andrews'] | 2019-08-11 15:47:55.918000+00:00 | ['Sex Work', 'Business Strategy', 'Startup Lessons', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Marketing Strategies'] |
Meteor or meteorite or meteoroid? | Meteor or meteorite or meteoroid?
Professor Birb is in class with 26 students — the science class at Borbwards Academy. She is staring out the window with glassy eyes, perhaps thinking of her next meal. It’s been 5 hours since the last one.
Students Q: Professor Birb? What’s the difference between meteors, meteorites, and meteoroids?
Professor Birb in dreamscape
Prof. Birb: (turns to face the student, dreamily) Something like the difference between facts, knowledge, and wisdom.
Professor Birb’s tummy grumbles. She starts to fly out the window.
Student B: Professor, wait! Please, could you explain?
Prof. Birb: (sighs) I just told you a fact. If it entered your head, it’s knowledge. If it had really reached your brain, it would be wisdom. But clearly that didn’t happen. (shakes her head)
26 sets of clueless eyes stare at the round bird who is hopping around, holding her wings to her head muttering “I am teaching worm-heads!”. The professor stops.
Prof. Birb:
A meteoroid is an object in space — small as a dust grain, or big as an asteroid. A space rock, basically. If it enters the earth’s atmosphere, it’s called a meteor. If it reaches the ground, it’s a meteorite. “Oid” is out. “Ite” is in.
Now can I go out? (stamps her feet)
Student O: Ooo professor, then why are weather scientists called meteorologists?
Prof. Birb: (whispered) Maybe they are worm-heads too? (out loud) Meteorology comes from the Greek word “meteōron” meaning “of the atmosphere”. It referred to anything that fell out of the sky: rocks, rain, ice… anything. So me-teo-ro-logy became the study of weather. And before you confuse them, me-tro-logy is the study of weights and measures. Do NOT ask me this again.
Student A: Then what’s the study of meteors? (holding head with wings)
Prof. Birb: (glares) Meteoritics. I suppose they would have liked to have “meteorology”, but it was taken. (softly) Possibly all the food as well by now… (stares out the window)
The class is digesting the facts into knowledge, not many getting to the stage of wisdom. Professor Birb is pacing around grumbling “All because of the worm-heads!”.
Student C: Um, Professor? So which one of those killed the dinosaurs?
Prof. Birb: (stares, then rubs her wings) He he he hee. I have just the thing for you. (doodles on her notebook, and shows it to the class)
Professor Birb’s doodle
Professor Birb marches out the door. | https://medium.com/science-plus-plus/prof-birb-meteor-8f35ce27993d | ['Ashwini Petchiappan'] | 2020-12-17 11:19:25.883000+00:00 | ['Meteor', 'Professor Birb', 'Humour', 'Science', 'Dinosaurs'] |
Windows Exploitation: ASLR Bypass (MS07–017) | In this blog, I will be analysing a long forgotten Windows Animated Cursor Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2007–0038) on Windows Vista. It was a classic case of a random not being random enough. A bit of a backstory before we move on…
Few days back while scrolling Twitter, I found this amazing story about inception of ASLR from John Lambert, a cool guy from Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center.
(Follow him, and *shameless grin* follow me too)
And while you are at it, you just might want to look at this thread to understand why Windows Vista was not wrong, just ahead of time:
OK, no more threads. And yes, you have every right to hate Vista, or hate Windows. The reason why I started with the story of ASLR and then Windows Vista is that many people out there remember MS07–017 as a slap on the face of Windows Vista’s security when it clearly is not the case. Yes, researchers were able to bypass the protections (ASLR) in Windows Vista, but these protections didn’t even exist in XP in the first place! Advising users to roll back to XP was plain stupid!
With this misconception out of our way, let’s move forward and understand the vulnerability first. For that, we need to understand how ANI files work.
The ANI files
The vulnerability lies in the way ANI headers are handled in Windows. So what are ANI files? ANI files are animated mouse cursors that are used by Windows. These files follow the RIFF file format that was developed by IBM and Microsoft. I’m not going to delve into a lot of details of how RIFF works, will keep it limited to the knowledge we would need.
RIFF File Format
RIFF file format stores data in chunks. For ANI files, there are mainly two types of chunks- anih and LIST. anih (ANI Header) chunk stores the metadata about the file and LIST stores the actual data. Here is an example of an animated cursor:
ANI File Format
The bytes marked with-
Red: “RIFF” itself. Indicates the file follows RIFF file format.
Orange: The length of rest of the file
Yellow: “ACON”. The header ID. Indicates the file is ANI file.
Green: “anih”. Denotes the beginning of anih chunk.
Blue: Size of chunk. 0x24 or 36 bytes.
Purple: Rest of the anih chunk.
After the anih chunk, there is a LIST chunk (like anih chunk, its size is in next 4 bytes and the data thereafter) but we are interested in anih chunks only. If you want to know about what all data is stored in ANI header (the purple part), you can look at Structure of the ‘anih’ header chunk section here. Enough background for now.
The Vulnerability
Windows uses a function LoadCursorIconFromFileMap to use ANI files. It didn’t validate the size of anih chunks, anything above 36 bytes lead to an overflow, and Microsoft fixed this in MS05–002. In the patch, the function started validating the anih header size to make sure it is 36 bytes only. Unfortunately, it was only validating the first anih chunk.
LoadCursorIconFromFileMap function internally calls LoadAniIcon which loads all the chunks. LoadAniIcon function do not validate size of any chunk. So, if an ANI file is having two anih chunks, the first one being valid 36 bytes header and second one being fatty malicious one, will bypass the mitigations of MS05–002 and will result in overflow in LoadAniIcon function.
Proof of Concept code
The researcher who found this vulnerability released a PoC ANI file which replicates this overflow:
(You can use this python script to create this file yourself)
MS07–017 PoC ANI file
In this PoC we can observe two anih chunks. First one is perfectly valid healthy 36 bytes chunk. Second chunk is a fatty 88 byte (or 0x58 bytes) anih chunk which will lead to an overflow. For those of you who are wondering why we have random nulls in second chunk, read the comments in line 476–488 of the metasploit module of this vulnerability.
But how will we deliver this payload? We will have to make Windows load this ANI file for that. There are multiple ways of doing it but best case scenario would be to deliver this ANI file remotely to the system. That way we will have a remote code execution! We can make victim open a malicious webpage, webpages can define custom cursors. Or we can send an HTML formatted mail to the victim. All you have to do is create a webpage with following code:
<html> <body style="cursor: url('exploit.ani')"> </html>
Let’s see this PoC in action:
Great! PoC works. But a curious mind would question WHY. This is Windows Vista. The program must have been compiled with Stack Canary (GS flag). But nope, it wasn’t. Compiler chose not to. As it will turn out later, DEP is also disabled for Internet Explorer. If you want to learn more about why these protections were absent, have a look at Matt Miller’s analysis of this vulnerability.
The exploitation | https://medium.com/@notsoshant/windows-exploitation-aslr-bypass-ms07-017-8760378e3e84 | ['Prashant Kumar'] | 2019-03-03 20:56:39.907000+00:00 | ['Security', 'Aslr', 'Windows', 'Ms07 017', 'Exploit'] |
Why You Shouldn’t Carb Load Before a Race | Meal Ideas
Here are some good pre-race meal ideas that will provide you with a great source of carbs, proteins, and fats. Just remember, everyone’s body is unique, so find what works best for you.
Just because one of your fast friends likes pasta with tofu and veggies before a race, doesn’t mean you have to eat it too.
Maybe you can’t stomach proteins and fats before a race and you do have to rely mostly on carbs. But if you don’t experiment with foods other than pasta, you’ll never know what truly works best.
1. Oatmeal or Bagel With Peanut Butter and Fruit
For the past four years, this has been my personal go-to for races. I typically eat the oatmeal when I have morning races, and the bagel when I have evening races. I have a banana as my fruit of choice. This meal gives me just the energy I need, but it doesn’t weigh me down or make my stomach hurt during the race. Once I got use to eating this as my pre-race meal, I never went back to my old pasta eating ways.
2. Rice With Tofu and Veggies
This was one of the favorites among some of my teammates. Not everyone likes something sweet before a race, so if you prefer a savory meal, this is a perfect option. The tofu provides a wonderful source of protein, and the rice serves as the carbohydrate base. You can even add some avocado for a healthy fat.
Keep in mind that there are thousands of combinations of foods you can test out. Just remember to keep your pre-race meal balanced, and it will give you the energy you need to succeed come race day. | https://medium.com/runners-life/why-you-shouldnt-carb-load-before-a-race-3b523f0b5ec3 | ['Alyssa Atkinson'] | 2020-07-12 12:54:31.627000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Food', 'Fitness', 'Science', 'Running'] |
The Millennial Struggle | The Quest for Patience
patience through the winter
For many of us in this instant gratification era the Art of Patience is nonexistent. The need to feel like time needs to always be spent hustling or conjuring up the next big idea. Going viral is more desirable today than learning a trade that supports your long term future. Some say it’s lack of home training, I believe it’s corporations with an agenda. See for most many of our families were never properly educated on what is really needed to make it through to the next 50 years. They say it’s survival of the fittest and I say it’s survival of the slickest. The one who knows the inner working of the changing economy can control who knows what and how to evolve along side it. If they had taught most of us that a trade was more important and could be used anywhere in the world, most of us would have opted out of 4 year colleges and student debt. Many would have a clearer understanding of the society expectations and careers that best suite the individual.
Instead we’re taught to memorize quick notes for a multiple choice test that generally takes no effort to learn or study. Most tests were open notes through out school, a new form of cheat sheet stamped with the teachers approval. Take a test so you can fight for a position at a hand full of jobs after college. Anyone who didn’t want to be a Peace officer, Lawyer, Doctor,Firefighter etc, was more than likely told there’s no money outside these things. How would our folks and counselors know this if they’ve never done. Not only was this not true but these people lacked the insight and resources to even know their claims were false. If there’s anything this past 20 years has showed, it’s the fact that you can make money doing anything. Things that you could “ALWAYS” do before, it’s just no one knew.
At a young age they burn into your head money makes the world go around and there’s no way to succeed if you don’t take the obvious route. Our generation helped to give birth to the fact that “all money isn’t good money”. Many of us would rather work a job that is fulfilling and leads to security, the feeling that we’re not just another employee. Most of us feel this way because the generations before felt it too and just couldn’t find the voices to speak. Social growing pains are a thing we all go through together and must realize that each of us is a vital part of the wheel. Patience can make this process much easier, with ourselves and each other. Start by asking yourself if what you’re doing is and always has been, what you’ve always wanted to do. Or is it just a tool of survival.
Most of us honestly as millennial’s just want to be able to provide and teach our children what our parents weren’t taught. How to strive for your truest self and beliefs. How to know that struggle is apart of life but the right struggle for the right thing is always worth it. Patience can feel impossible with the world changing so fast and many clinging to old ways of society. The road of conformity is always the same but the narrow almost unseen path to you is always waiting to share with you the wonders of life. Have patience with each other and ask questions if you don’t understand something or someone. I believe in You! | https://medium.com/curious/the-millennial-struggle-ea2adf685a8b | ['Kurt Anderson'] | 2020-12-29 08:05:53.395000+00:00 | ['Awareness', 'Self Improvement', 'Patience'] |
Do not be yoked together with unbelievers, says LOVE. | The biblical understanding
In order to understand verses biblically, we have to understand a) the meaning of the words and b) the context. In this verse, the word “yoke” might be confusing. What exactly is “yoke”? What relationship does “yoke together” refers to — A business acquaintanceship? A friendship? A marriage? A romantic relationship?
“Yoke” is an apparatus used to bind two separate things together. It can be understand visually as we examine its usage in the agrarian societies:
A yoke was commonly used in farming to bind two animals together for work. For example, a farmer typically joined a pair of oxen, mules or horses together by a yoke around their necks. The pair then pulled a big plow attached behind them to turn the ground and cultivate the soil… the purpose of the yoke was to produce the work times two. (Black 2002: 38)
Thus, an unequally yoked situation would be when the farmer yoke the ox and a donkey together. They have different size, strength, food choices, living habits, etc. They are of two different worlds. Thus, the way they pull the plow would be different as one of them would have bigger stride, move at a faster pace or need to rest for longer periods. However, due to the way that a yoke is designed, when the pair does not work in togetherness, says the donkey moves ahead of the ox, the yoke is tightened. They will both be choked. Little did we know that this warning from God arises from ages ago, “Do not plow with an ox an a donkey yoked together.” (Deuteronomy 22:10 NIV)
From the above illustration, we can identify prominent characteristics for a yoked relationship. It is not easily broken. The pair have no choice but to do things together. Hence, it gives certain constrains to both parties as it does not allow independent action. For an unequally yoked situation as above, the pair has to comply with what the other one wants to do in an unwilling manner; as otherwise, they would be choked. Often, it ends up the stronger side being possessive and dominant while the weaker side becomes submissive. Furthermore and sadly, the relationship is often lasting. There are external forces (e.g. the farmer that puts on the yoke) that bounds the pair together and there is no escape.
It has been that hard for two different animals to yoke together, not to mention between two complex human beings with the extras of having the abundance of different thoughts, likes, personality and life experience. The bible says, “do not be yoked with unbelievers.” This means an unequally yoked human relationship with two people having different beliefs and values concerning Christ. Thus, it is not restricted only to a business relationship or a martial bonding, but whatever relationship that is not easy to break off, constrains your freedom and is lasting (i.e. having a signed contract).
After examining “yoke” in its literal meaning for the particular verse, we shall further explore the bible’s meaning of yoke though context — Paul’s intended audience and other bible usages. Some scholars has argued that this verse is not applicable to marriage, as in 1 Corinthians 7:12–13, Paul wrote, “If any brother has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her. And if a woman has a husband who is not a believer and he is willing to live with her, she must not divorce him.” On the other hand, the original text for the translated “do not be” in 2 Corinthians 6:14 has the connotation to “bring an end a condition now existing” (Warnock 1997). Thus, explaining it as a marriage relationship would mean that one shall separate, detach, divorce from their unbelieved spouse right away. The two verses are thus, in contradiction. Yet, as the God-breathed scriptures show no contradiction, we can only reason by saying that 1 Corinthians is not applicable to marriage. Or some others might try to smartly explain by saying that 1 Corinthians 7: 12–13 applies to cases where both are unbelievers when they got married, but one of them believed afterwards; whereas 2 Corinthians 6:14 applies to unmarried Christians. Thus, as dating shall be in vision for a marriage biblically, good Christians shall not date unbelievers. It sure make sense intellectual and the rule are clear now, however, have Christianity ever been about rules?
More insights can be drawn upon the usage of “yoke” in other bible verses. Unequal yokes are used to describe oppression (Deuteronomy 28:48), hardship (1 Kings 12:4–14, 2 Chronicles 10:4–11), submission (Jeremiah 27:8–28:2), bondage (lamentation 1:14) and legalism (Galatians 5:1) (Black 2002: 41- 43). All this negative and distasteful connotation to unequal yokes makes us realize that the biblical warning is less of a rule, but more of God’s love for us in not wanting to see us suffer. After all, God did not prohibit us to yoke, we just have to yoke wisely. A rightful and equal yoke can be seen in relationship of fellowships (i.e. companionship, friendship, brotherhood, partnership or willing service) as seen in 1 Corinthians 6:14 and in discipleship as seen in Matthew 11:28–30, where Jesus asks us to take up his easy yoke. In Respectable Sins, Jerry Bridges told us how “The Bible speaks not of God’s laws, as if many of them, but of God’s law as a single whole”. (Bridges 2007: 20) Thanks to the legal system of our society, we understand law as individuals law statements with respective penalties, we fail to see God’s single law and its meaning behind — to love as he first loved.
It is out of God’s love for us that he set up this seemingly rule of “not yoking together with unbelievers”, however, not often do we understand the profound love. We wish to experience. Sure that parents warn us about fire, but only have we truly felt it could we know how dangerous it could be, could we learn to keep away from it. Otherwise, we feel like puppets, being obedient and submissive to whatever orders, losing our identity. Furthermore, are Christians and non-Christians really that incompatible as water and oil? They say such relationships will blind us, limit us, destroy us and keep us from enjoying the fullness and abundance life God has created for us. They say such relationships will arise many disagreements as in ethical decisions, child-rearing approaches (e.g. shall we send them to Christian schools? Have grace around the table?), ways of using money (e.g. shall we give it to the church or missionary organizations?), etc. Yet, in reality, it seems that sometimes, there are more common ground in values and interests and fun with certain non-Christians then Christians whom we only have the same religious belief. Maybe as long as our non-Christian partner is loving and tolerant enough (as we can’t compromise our faith for the Lord), we can still have a great marriage? We can only dig deeper in these real life examples to search for more answers. | https://medium.com/@redandblue/do-not-be-yoked-together-with-unbelievers-says-love-a2112175c403 | ['Red'] | 2019-11-19 06:04:35.209000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Christian', 'Relationships Love Dating', 'Christianity', 'Christian Living'] |
Thieves magician | Before the invention and application of CCTV, theft was quite mysterious, and thieves seemed like the great magicians because we came to know about the crime only after it had happened. Now at least we can see a theft live on CCTV recording, after the incident.
In India, it is customary for a newlywed woman to wear and display the gold ornaments and for all women to wear the gold jewelry in a marriage function.
Shortly after our marriage, we traveled from Jhansi to Lucknow to attend a marriage ceremony. My wife carried her jewelry, which she had received as the marriage gift, keeping it in her leather suitcase to wear in the ceremony.
It was a wedding season, so the train was overcrowded. We traveled second class, and this was a daytime journey. We kept the suitcase on the upper berth. During the travel, a few passengers climbed and sat on the upper berth too. We did not suspect any foul play, but when, after reaching Lucknow, my wife opened the suitcase to make up for the ceremony, most of the jewelry was missing. There was no doubt in deciding that some thief had stolen jewelry on the train. | https://medium.com/@raviranjangoswami/thieves-magician-76435a5a32ba | ['Ravi Ranjan Goswami'] | 2020-12-11 14:50:00.614000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Thieves', 'Train', 'Magic'] |
How age regression has helped me | Age regression is when a person reverts back to younger mindset. This can be voluntary or involuntary. Now before I speak on my own personal experience with age regression I want to be clear that age regression and age play are two very different things. Age play is part of the BDSM community and is when a person pretends to be a younger age but in their mind they are aware that they aren’t that age. Age regression is not a kink and the person in their mind is not aware that they aren’t actually a younger age therefore cannot give consent to any sexual activity. As a child cannot give consent much like the child mindset cannot.
Now age regression has been used in therapy sessions to help people who have had childhood trauma. It was recommended by my current therapist but my first experiences with age regression were in 2019. I wasn’t aware at the time what was happening but I was aware that I liked the feeling of being looked after. I needed to be looked after. I now know that is because I didn’t have my needs met when I was a child. My dad was difficult to live with and was at times very verbally abusive and my mum- as much as she tried- wasn’t always able to meet my emotional needs either. My brain began to find other ways to cope and that resulted in age regression. It allows me to go into a mindset that is carefree. In that space I don’t have to worry about the pressures of my life. For much of my life I have struggled with severe mental health issues and I often felt that I never had the chance to be a ‘normal’ child or teenager. I missed a lot of years due to my health. This is my safe mindset. I call it ‘regressing’ when I go into that mindset. I can regress by myself but I also have my partner who is know as my ‘caregiver’ when I am in that mindset. It helps to have her there because I trust her and I know she is able to look after me.
Age regression can be very misunderstood and as with everything has a lot of stigma attached to it.
Usually when I regress I will watch children’s tv, cuddle my stuffed animals, colour, read or have someone read to me. Due to the stigma attached to this not many people actually know about my age regression only a couple of close friends and my partner. But the comfort I feel when I am regressed is worth that. In that mindset I am safe. I can still do adult things in my day to day life and I am not always in a regressed mindset but when I am it is comforting and helpful to me. I do have periods of time that after I regress I feel guilty as if I have done something wrong but I am learning that is because of the stigma. It is a valid way to cope and really any way is valid as long as it is healthy and working for you. | https://medium.com/@luciestepney/how-age-regression-has-helped-me-52bf6ee83490 | ['Lucie Stepney'] | 2020-12-26 20:02:45.716000+00:00 | ['Age Regression', 'Bpd', 'Trauma'] |
Non-Geek Guide to Continuous Software Delivery | How to continuously deliver?
The continuous delivery process starts with keyboard strokes of your engineering team and ends with the experience your customer has with the product. The goal of continuous delivery is to shorten the time and avoid mistakes between these two points in time. A well-oiled mature continuous delivery system takes deployment management burden off your engineering team, allowing them to focus on engineering and product build. As a consequence, a continuous delivery system decreases the on-boarding time for new joiners allowing them to start contributing within the first few days if not hours.
While there is a great variety of different continuous delivery approaches, you can split all involved activities and steps into the following:
source code management, automated and manual code quality control — including verification of your unique functional, performance, security and compliance requirements (PCI, HIPPA, etc.), stage-by-stage deployment with automated and manual acceptance testing, and production deployment and continuous monitoring.
Store your code in the code repository
The very first and most important step towards continuous delivery is a centralized place to store and share code. Code is the key (and sometimes the only) outcome of software engineering activities, and this code needs a place to live. This place is a common and shared environment that everybody on your engineering team knows and uses every day. You can think of a code repository as a Google Drive or Dropbox for engineers to share and work on the code. A great place to start your journey to build continuous delivery is to introduce a code repository in your organization if you happen not to have one.
The code repository of choice is most often git available through providers like github, gitlab or bitbucket to name a few [1]. These providers offer powerful free tiers that will serve you for a long time until you will see a need to pay for premium features. Check-in with the team if they have any preference or prior experience before choosing any specific platform.
The most common way to approach your code management is to have one code repository per product (or a piece of product) that has its distinct life cycle. For example, backend code will have one repository, a frontend website will have another, admin and a metrics dashboard will be in a third repository. Take it is a rule that every piece of code should have its repository — starting from frontend and backend code, and ending with database schema code, serverless functions, and infrastructure definition.
Setting up a code repository might seem like a waste of precious time especially in a startup environment. However, look at it as a high ROI investment and major mitigation for various operational risks. Consequences of not having centralized storage for code artifacts can vary from minor things like a decrease in productivity and slow knowledge sharing to more disastrous events like loss of your entire products should your engineers’ laptops break or get stolen.
The code repository is an integral part of any software development process and should be adopted by any technological company early its days. The code repository makes it possible for engineers to store and share code, track revisions, and incoming change requests.
Review, inspect and test every product change
All changes to your products are made by humans, and humans are prone to making mistakes — which is not bad, but rather how things are. And while we can all ask our colleagues and teams to write bug-free code — bugs still do slip through the cracks. To minimize the risk of getting bad product changes into our customers’ hands we can introduce a couple of additional hops that the change needs to jump through. First, we can employ computer programs (automated tests and various code analysis tools) to be impartial judges of the quality of changes we introduce. Second, other people on the team might be able to spot issues or deficiencies in the change the author overlooked (manual review process). Both of these steps ideally would be triggered automatically on every code change.
Most of code repository providers (including github, gitlab and bibucket) provide tools to build continuous delivery pipelines. A pipeline is a set of predefined steps that run automatically following a particular event (code commit, time schedule, manual trigger). An example of a pipeline definition could be “on every commit, build the product and run automated tests on it”. Configuring and streamlining pipelines will require some time and iterations but will quickly bring the reward of stable products and happy customers.
One of the options how the process of accepting new code change into repository can look as following:
Submit new code change. The author of a code change submits a change request to the code repository. At this stage, code is placed in a separate “sandbox” (also known as a pull-request, or change-request). This is done to prevent potentially harmful changes to making their way into the main code base unverified. Trigger automated tests. On changes submitted to the code repository, pipeline executes tests that validate basic functionality, compliance with code style, and security standards. If the pipeline fails, it notifies the author of spotted errors and waiting for the author to provide a fix. Open a code review request. At the same, either automatically after smoke tests or on author request, the code management system opens a code review request where teammates can check out the change candidate, leave comments, improvement suggestions or ask questions. Once all involve satisfied and approve a request — change can make it to the next stage. 1–2 people to look through the code is usually enough.
Once steps above are completed, your code is ready to be merged to the main codebase where it will slowly progress through a series of stages and additional verifications.
Early validation of changes avoids costly impact on your customers. Setting up gatekeepers prior code merged into the main branch helps ensure that at any given moment your main code base is stable and functional. One of the additional benefits of having such gatekeepers is to allow engineers to work on different changes simultaneously and not stepping on each other toes. Each new incoming change is an increment on top of a stable and tested product.
There are countless articles on how to build your manual review process as well as on how to build test automation. Below are some articles that I would recommend as a starting place to dive deeper into the topic:
Deploy changes stage by stage
Your code change is now ready and finally merged into the main codebase. It might be tempting to get and deploy your change right to production. However, you run a risk of having a product that has functionally correct but either fails to communicate with its downstream dependencies (database, other services), or due to miscommunication it is not what you expected to see. For these reasons, you can decide to introduce a multi-stage deployment that will first deploy your code internally — for you and your team to have a look, and then externally — for the public. In its minimal setup, it translates into two stages — a development stage and a production stage.
The development stage is an environment where your product is similar way and structure as in production, with a difference that it doesn’t process production data, and only you and your team have access to it. In the development stage you can run integration tests to verify integration with downstream dependencies (databases, metric aggregators, etc.), run automated user experience tests to automatically check that all buttons, links, and fields are functional and behave as expected, as well as to try out the product by clicking through it yourself — perform manual testing. In the case of the customer portal, for example, the development stage would be a website with restricted access, in the case of an app — development stage would be a draft version of an app available through beta testing tools (like TestFlight for iOS).
The production stage is the final stage where customers interact with your product. The goal of the whole continuous delivery process is to ensure that as little bugs as possible end up here. The production stage works on production data, integrates with other production services, and serves real customer traffic.
While at least two stages can be considered as a minimal setup, depending on the type of the product you build (SaaS APIs, licensed software, software for hardware components, customer portals, machine-learning algorithms, etc.) you might need to have a broader set of stages. Here is a non-exhaustive list of possible options:
Development stage — for your internal testing and validation
— for your internal testing and validation Testing stage — to allow your customers to integrate with it in their test environment (relevant for SaaS companies)
— to allow your customers to integrate with it in their test environment (relevant for SaaS companies) Performance Testing stage — to run load testing and measure the performance of a system similar in setup to production
— to run load testing and measure the performance of a system similar in setup to production Canary stage — to deploy release candidate and divert production traffic partially to it. This will allow you to get a sneak peek preview of how new change will behave in production without impacting 100% of your traffic [2].
— to deploy release candidate and divert production traffic partially to it. This will allow you to get a sneak peek preview of how new change will behave in production without impacting 100% of your traffic [2]. Production stage — your final stage that your customers are continuously interacting with.
All major code repository providers have pipeline solutions to enable you to configure multi-stage deployments. Some will have rich pre-defined workflows and integrations, others will give you just bare basics to build on top of them. In addition to code repository providers there are solutions focused solely on continuous delivery — for example, circleci, travisci, etc which can help you solve some unique problems like mobile testing, custom approval workflows, and others.
There is no-one-size-fits-all pipeline configuration, so work with your team to figure out what stages, transitions, and notification you need and how to best configure and run your unique pipeline.
Monitor, rinse and repeat
If you have your code change deployed automatically, but then you manually go to the browser and nervously check if production is still up and running you can say you have a Schrödinger’s Production (analogous to Schrödinger’s Cat [3]).
With almost any kind of product, you would want to continuously monitor its status, performance, and other metrics that are important for your business (conversion rates, latencies, resource consumption, etc.). Monitoring approach and a specific set of metrics will largely depend on the type of product you deliver (SaaS, IoT, mobile applications, etc.). The main point is that in order for you be able to proactively react to outages and issues with your product you would need some minimal set of health checks that will trigger alarm notifications to you and your team. Last thing you would probably want it your customers reaching out to you notifying that your product is out of order.
An example of a basic health check for your backend server is a periodic ping from a monitoring system to your production server that expects a successful response. For a mobile application, it could be analytics platforms that provide you an aggregated view of your customers’ activity. Big unexpected deviations in customer activity might be an indicator of issues the newly released version.
There is plenty of metric aggregators and other solutions that can help you streamline your monitoring. For example, datadog provides beautiful easy-to-configure dashboards with countless integrations for your cloud and mobile needs; or CloudWatch for those who’d like to stick to AWS. Again, when picking a tool, ask around and check-in with your team if they already have some experience with any of the monitoring platforms. This could potentially save you a lot of time finding and onboarding the right solution for your needs.
Having said all that, issues do get sneak into production unnoticed despite our best efforts. In anticipation of that, you might decide to give your customers a quick and easy way to report problems with your service — a feedback form, a “report problem” button, etc.
Visibility into your product operations is an essential part of continuously delivering stable and reliable software products. A well-configured monitoring system will bring you peace of mind and will save precious time should things go south.
Why do I need all that?
Let’s face it. Building products is hard, and what is harder is to keep the pace up when product complexity grows. Through research and analysis, it became apparent that leaving the quality of your code unattended can bring disastrous consequences to your team and to your business as a whole. Without proactive measures to continuously keep the code quality up the amount of maintenance effort grows, while the speed of delivery of new features goes down. Investing time to automate your testing and deployment processes as well as dedicating time to removing technical debt is rather a necessity than an option. Check out a nice talk by Asa Schachar on the topic of technical debt and how to proactively tackle it.
Companies and startups too often fall into the trap of fast delivery and short-cuts forgetting to balance speed with sustainability. You might have heard the phrase “if it works, don’t touch it” that usually becomes a motto of teams that didn’t prioritize continuous delivery and automated validation in their development process.
Investing time in the continuous delivery system will make your customers and your engineering team happier by increasing the stability of the product and increasing confidence in introducing new changes. Tailored and well-functioning delivery system will have your back even if you happen to make a mistake. | https://medium.com/swlh/non-geek-guide-to-continuous-software-delivery-aea670f99fba | ['Vasilii Trofimchuk'] | 2020-08-04 20:28:29.075000+00:00 | ['Business', 'Continuous Integration', 'Continuous Delivery', 'Software Development'] |
Upgrade to WSO2 API Manager 3.x — Quick trick for config migration | Upgrade to WSO2 API Manager 3.x — Quick trick for config migration
Source: simasolutionscorp.com
WSO2 recently announced the releases of API Manager’s 3.x series. These releases have a host of new features, a new look, and feel, and a new unified TOML based configuration model.
However, still, the widely adopted and recognized version of the WSO2 APIM is the 2.x series. So there is a lot of current users that need to migrate their environments to the latest 3.x series. One of the major tasks of the migration process is the config migration from older XML based config files to the TOML format. One would require knowledge of the changes done in the existing environment and search through the docs for the corresponding mappings. This will require significant WSO2 expertise.
But, don’t worry, we got it covered, there is an easy way to do this.
The critical thing to note is the old XML based config files are still there in the 3.x as well. What has been done is there is a mapper that get executed during the server startup and rewrite the default XML files based on the new deployment.toml config file. So you must do all the default config alterings in the deployment.toml file.
But, how does this mapping from TOML to XML is happening? There are set files with the .j2 extension (Jinja2 Templates) where the logic for TOML to XML conversion is defined. There is a .j2 file per each XML config file with the same name.
So the config migration is as simple as understanding these logics in the .j2 files. Here are the steps,
Identify the required configuration changes.
This can be done by doing a diff between <APIM_HOME>/repository/conf folders of the current deployment and a vanilla distribution of the same APIM version.
For each config change, identify the corresponding .j2 file and conversion logic from the .j2 for each change and do it in the deployment.toml file of the APIM 3.x distribution.
The .j2 files resides in the folder <APIM_HOME>/repository/resources/conf/templates/repository/conf, with same name as XML file.
Try to start the APIM 3.x and stop the server once the following line appears.
Server startup log until config re-write
At this point, all XML rewrites are completed.
Now verify your config change from the XML files that are in the conf folder of the 3.x series distribution.
You can repeat steps 3 and 4 until all the configs are done.
If something is missing from the .j2 files, most probably that is not required for the new version. If you really need it, you may add those via the .j2 files. There is a risk of them getting replaced via updates though.
Config migration is only a part of a full migration. It is advised to follow the official documentation, Upgrade Process for all the migrations.
If you have a WSO2 subscription, don’t forget to contact WSP2 support for a smooth migration assistance. | https://medium.com/@vinok88/wso2-apim-config-migration-made-easy-27e47317fc25 | ['Vinod Kavinda'] | 2020-12-15 09:42:34.502000+00:00 | ['Migration', 'Configuration', 'Upgrade', 'Wso2', 'Wso2 Api Manager'] |
How to Host Virtual Meetings that Inspire Action and Urgency | What percent of your time at work do you spend in meetings? Previous estimates were that middle managers spent 35% of their team in meetings, while senior leaders spent 50%. Now with virtual work, many leaders say as much as 90% of their time is spent in meetings. Or at least it feels that way.
Meetings have a bad reputation. Some of that is because there are simply too many meetings. But the rest of that bad reputation is earned, earned by meetings that don’t have clear goals, don’t have any urgency, and don’t foster any sense of purpose.
So, in your quest to make your own work-life, and the work-life of your peers more purpose- driven, meetings are the perfect place to start.
Here are four tips to host meetings that inspire action and urgency:
1. Set the context upfront
Tell people, in normal plain language, why the meeting matters and why you’d like them to attend.
If this isn’t a common practice in your organization, it might feel a little cheesy at first, and that’s ok. All you need is a simple sentence like, “In an effort to deliver the best product to our customers, it’s crucial we figure out some recurring supply chain issues. That’s what this meeting is about.”
People are busy and setting the context in advance of the meeting helps everyone focus. Attendees see why the meeting matters, instead of just another 1-hour of blocked time on their calendar.
2. Adjust the physical environment
If you’re trying to foster engagement, think about the elements of the meeting environment you can change.
Change your zoom background. If you’re talking about customers, show pictures of them during the meeting. Or, instead of a video meeting, suggest a phone meeting. (I know, I know, an engagement expert who suggests sometimes turning video off, hearsay! But listen, people are tired, and it’s hard not to get distracted by looking at yourself. A phone call can be a nice change and provide a boost in productivity!)
In some organizations, simply changing the PowerPoint template is enough to jolt people awake. These changes send a clear signal to the attendees: pay attention.
3. Avoid corporate-speak
Jargon like ‘synch on core priorities’ or ‘ensure strategic alignment’ are overused and can often cloud what could otherwise be a productive conversation.
If you’re trying to foster engagement in your meeting, speak in easy-to-follow language. A conversational tone is also more inviting, opening the doors for your colleagues to add insights and ask questions.
Constantly speaking like a squirmy corporate lawyer doesn’t make you appear smarter. It does the opposite.
4. Wait out the awkwardness
I say this to you as someone who has facilitated thousands of group sessions: Don’t be afraid of the silence.
If you ask the group a question, and there is an initial pause, it’s tempting to fill that moment of silence with your own words. Especially if you’re nervous. But oftentimes, people just need a minute to form their thoughts. Wait 10–15 seconds. Then rephrase your question if you have to. In the vast majority of meetings, someone will chime in.
Even if it takes a moment of discomfort, getting group engagement is crucial. A meeting without some kind of back-and-forth dialogue is not a meeting. It is a presentation. A presentation you may want to consider sending as a pre-recorded message.
As calendars continue to fill, the need for engaging and effective meetings is paramount. Using these four tips, you can ensure you’re winning hearts and minds (not just calendar time). | https://medium.com/@lisa-72523/how-to-host-virtual-meetings-that-inspire-action-and-urgency-23761e763e02 | ['Lisa Earle Mcleod'] | 2021-03-09 22:09:09.524000+00:00 | ['Tips', 'Virtual Meetings', 'Inspire', 'Zoom'] |
Deep Learning Explainability: Hints from Physics | Deep Learning Explainability: Hints from Physics
Deep Neural Networks from a Physics Viewpoint
Nowadays, artificial intelligence is present in almost every part of our lives. Smartphones, social media feeds, recommendation engines, online ad networks, and navigation tools are some examples of AI-based applications that already affect us every day. Deep learning in areas such as speech recognition, autonomous driving, machine translation, and visual object recognition has been systematically improving the state of the art for a while now.
However, the reasons that make deep neural networks (DNN) so powerful are only heuristically understood, i.e. we know only from experience that we can achieve excellent results by using large datasets and following specific training protocols. Recently, one possible explanation was proposed, based on a remarkable analogy between a physics-based conceptual framework called renormalization group (RG) and a type of neural network known as a restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM).
RG and RBMs as Coarse-Graining Processes
Renormalization is a technique used to investigate the behavior of physical systems when information about its microscopic parts is unavailable. It is a “coarse-graining” method which shows how physical laws change as we zoom out and examine objects at different length scales, “putting on blurry glasses”.
When we change the length scale with which we observe a physical system (when we “zoom in”), our theories “navigate the space” of all possible theories (source).
The great importance of the RG theory comes from the fact that it provides a robust framework that essentially explains why physics itself is possible.
To describe the motion of complex structures such as satellites, one does not need to take into account the motions of all its constituents. Picture by 3Dsculptor/Shutterstock.com.
RG theory provides a robust framework that explains why physics itself is possible.
For example, to compute the trajectory of a satellite orbiting the Earth we merely need to apply Newton’s laws of motion. We don’t need to take into account the overwhelmingly complex behavior of the satellite’s microscopic constituents to explain its motion. What we do in practice is a sort of “averaging” of the detailed behavior of the fundamental components of the system (in this case the satellite). RG theory explains why this procedure works so remarkably well.
Furthermore, RG theory seems to suggest that all our current theories of the physical world are just approximations to some yet unknown “true theory” (in more technical terms, this true theory “lives” in the neighborhood of what physicists call fixed points of the scale transformations).
RG theory seems to suggest that all our current theories of the physical world are just approximations to some yet unknown “true theory”.
RG works well when the system under investigation is at a critical point and displays self-similarity. A self-similar system is “exactly or approximately similar to a part of itself” in whatever length scale it is being observed. Examples of systems displaying self-similarity are fractals.
Wikipedia animation showing the Mandelbrot set and we zoom in (source).
Systems at critical points display strong correlations between parts of it that are extremely far apart from each other. All subparts influence the whole system and the physical properties of the system become fully independent of its microscopic structure.
Artificial neural networks can also be viewed as a coarse-graining iterative process. ANNs are composed of several layers, and as illustrated below, earlier layers learn only lower-level features from the input data (such as edges and colors) while deeper layers combine these lower-level features (fed by the earlier ones) into higher-level ones. In the words of Geoffrey Hinton, one of the leading figures in the deep learning community: “You first learn simple features and then based on those you learn more complicated features, and it goes in stages.” Furthermore, as in the case of the RG process, deeper layers keep only features that are considered relevant, deemphasizing irrelevant ones.
Convolutional neural network (CNN). The complexity level of the forms recognized by the CNN is higher in later layers (source).
An Exact Connection
Both physics and machine learning deal with systems with many constituents. Physics investigates systems containing many (interacting) bodies. Machine learning studies complex data comprising a large number of dimensions. Furthermore, similarly to RG in physics, neural networks manage to categorize data such as, e.g. pictures of animals regardless of their component parts (such as size and color).
In an article published in 2014, two physicists, Pankaj Mehta and David Schwab, provided an explanation for the performance of deep learning based on renormalization group theory. They showed that DNNs are such powerful feature extractors because they can effectively “mimic” the process of coarse-graining that characterizes the RG process. In their words “DNN architectures […] can be viewed as an iterative coarse-graining scheme, where each new high-level layer of the NN learns increasingly abstract higher-level features from the data”. In fact, in their paper, they manage to prove that there is indeed an exact map between RG and restricted Boltzmann machines (RBM), two-layered neural networks that constitute building blocks of DNN.
From the 2014 paper by Mehta and Schwab where they introduced the map between RG and DNNs built by stacking RBMs. More details are provided in the remaining sections of the present article (source).
There are many other works in the literature connecting renormalization and deep learning, following different strategies and having distinct goals. In particular, the work of Naftali Tishby and collaborators based on the information bottleneck method is fascinating. Also, Mehta and Schwab explained the map for only one type of neural network, and subsequent work already exists. However, for conciseness, I will focus here on their original paper, since their insight was responsible for giving rise to a large volume of relevant subsequent work on the topic.
Before giving a relatively detailed description (see this article for a great, though much less technical, description) of this relationship I will provide some of the nitty-gritty of both RG theory of and RBMs.
Renormalization Group Theory: A Bird’s-eye View
As mentioned above, renormalization involves the application of coarse-graining techniques to physical systems. RG theory is a general conceptual framework so one needs methods to operationalize those concepts. Variational Renormalization group (VRG) is one such scheme which was proposed by Kadanoff, Houghton and Yalabik in 1976.
For clarity of exposition, I chose to focus on one specific type of system to illustrate how RG works, namely, quantum spin systems, instead of proceeding in full generality. But before delving into the mathematical machinery, I will give a “hand waving” explanation of the meaning of spin in physics.
The Concept of Spin in Physics
In physics, spin can be defined as “an intrinsic form of angular momentum carried by elementary particles, composite particles, and atomic nuclei.” Though spin is by definition a quantum mechanical concept having no classical counterpart, particles with spin are often (though incorrectly) depicted as small tops rotating around their own axis. Spins are closely related to the phenomenon of magnetism.
The particle spin (black arrow) and its associated magnetic field lines (source).
The Mathematics of Renormalization
Let us consider a system or ensemble of N spins. For visualization purposes suppose they can be put on a lattice, as illustrated in the figure below.
A 2-dimensional lattice of spins (represented by the little arrows). The spheres are charged atoms (source).
Since spins can be up or down, they are associated with binary variables
The index i can be used to label the position of the spin in the lattice. For convenience, I will represent a configuration of spins by a vector v.
For systems in thermal equilibrium, the probability distribution associated with a spin configuration v has the following form:
This is the ubiquitous Boltzmann distribution (with the temperature set to 1 for convenience). The object H(v) is the so-called Hamiltonian of the system, which can be defined as “an operator corresponding to the sum of the kinetic [and] potential energies for all the particles in the system”. The denominator Z is a normalization factor known as the partition function
The Hamiltonian of the system can be expressed as a sum of terms corresponding to interactions between spins:
The set of parameters
are called coupling constants and they determine the strength of the interactions between spins (second term) or between spins and external magnetic fields (first term).
Another important quantity we will need to consider is the free energy. Free energy is a concept originally from thermodynamics where it is defined as “the energy in a physical system that can be converted to do work”. Mathematically, it is given in our case by:
The symbol “tr” stands for trace (from linear algebra). In the present context, it represents the sum over all possible configurations of visible spins v.
At each step of the renormalization procedure, the behavior of the system at small length scales is averaged out. The Hamiltonian of the coarse-grained system is expressed in terms of new coupling constants
and new, coarse-grained variables are obtained. In our case, the latter are block spins h and the new Hamiltonian is:
To better understand what are block spins, consider the two-dimensional lattice below. Each arrow represents a spin. Now divide the lattice into square blocks each containing 2×2 spins. The block spins are the average spins corresponding to each of these blocks.
In block spin RG, the system is coarse-grained into new block variables describing the effective behavior of spin blocks (source).
Note that the new Hamiltonian has the same structure as the original one, only with configurations of blocks of spins in place of physical spins.
Both Hamiltonians have the same structure but with different variables and couplings.
In other words, the form of the model does not change but as we zoom out the parameters of the model change. The full renormalization of the theory is obtained by systematically repeating these steps. After several RG iterations, some of the parameters will be dropped out and some will remain. The ones that remain are called relevant operators.
A connection between these Hamiltonians is obtained by the requirement that the free energy (described a few lines above) does not change after an RG-transformation.
Variational Renormalization group (VRG)
As mentioned above, to implement the RG mappings one can use the variational renormalization group (VRG) scheme. In this scheme, the mappings are implemented by an operator
where λ is a set of parameters. This operator encodes the couplings between hidden and input (visible) spins and satisfies the following relation:
which defines the new Hamiltonian given above. Though in an exact RG transformation, the coarse-grained system would have exactly the same free energy as the original system i.e.
which is equivalent to the following condition
in practice, this condition cannot be satisfied exactly and variational schemes are used to find λ that minimizes the difference between the free energies
or equivalently, to approximate the exact RG transformation.
A Quick Summary of RBMs
I have described in some detail the internal workings of restricted Boltzmann machines in a previous article. Here I will provide a more condensed explanation.
Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) are generative, energy-based models. used for nonlinear unsupervised feature learning. Their simplest version consists of two layers only:
One layer of visible units which will be denoted by v
One hidden layer with units denoted by h
Illustration of a simple Restricted Boltzmann Machine (source).
Again I will consider a binary visible dataset v with n elements extracted from some probability distribution
Eq. 9: Probability distribution of the input or visible data.
The hidden units in the RBM (represented by the vector h) are coupled to the visible units with interaction energy given by
The energy sub-index λ represents the set of variational parameters {c, b, W}. where the first two elements are vectors and the third one is a matrix. The goal of RBMs is to output a λ-dependent probability distribution that is as close as possible to the distribution of the input data P(v).
The probability associated with a configuration (v,h) and parameters λ is a function of this energy functional:
From this joint probability, one can easily obtain the variational (marginalized) distribution of visible units by summing over the hidden units. Likewise, the marginalized distribution of hidden units is obtained by summing over the visible units:
We can define an RBM Hamiltonian as follows:
The λ parameters can be chosen to optimize the so-called Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence or relative entropy which measures how different two probability distributions are. In the present case, we are interested in the KL divergence between the true data distribution and the variational distribution of the visible units produced by the RBM. More specifically:
When both distributions are identical:
Exactly mapping RG and RBM
Mehta and Schwab showed that to establish the exact mapping between RG and RBMs, one can choose the following expression for the variational operator:
Recall that the Hamiltonian H(v) contains encoded inside it the probability distribution of the input data. With this choice of variational operator, one can quickly prove the RG Hamiltonian and the RBM Hamiltonian on the hidden layer are the same:
Also, when an exact RG transformation can be implemented, the true and variational Hamiltonian are identical:
Hence we see that one step of the renormalization group with spins v and block-spins h can be exactly mapped into a two-layered RBM made of visible units v and hidden units h.
As we stack increasingly more layers of RBMs we are in effect performing more and more rounds of the RG transformation.
Application to the Ising Model
Following this rationale, we conclude that RBMs, a type of unsupervised deep learning algorithm, implements the variational RG process. This is a remarkable correspondence and Mehta and Schwab demonstrate their idea by implementing stacked RBMs on a well-understood Ising spin model. They fed, as input data, spin configurations sampled from an Ising model into the DNN. Their results show that, remarkably, DNNs seem to be performing (Kadanoff) block spin renormalization.
In the authors’ words “Surprisingly, this local block spin structure emerges from the training process, suggesting the DNN is self-organizing to implement block spin renormalization… I was astounding to us that you don’t put that in by hand, and it learns”.
Their results show that, remarkably, DNNs seem to be performing block spin renormalization.
In the figure below from their paper, A shows the architecture of the DNN. In B the learning parameters W are plotted to show the interaction between hidden and visible units. In D we see the gradual formation of block spins (the blob in the picture) as we move from along the layers of the DNN. In E the RBM reconstructions reproducing the macroscopic structure of three data samples are shown.
Deep neural networks applied to the 2D Ising model. See the main text for a detailed description of each of the figures (source).
Conclusions and Outlook
In 2014 it was shown by Mehta and Schwab that a Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM), a type of neural network, is connected to the renormalization group, a concept originally from physics. In the present article, I reviewed part of their analysis. As previously recognized, both RG and deep neural networks bear a remarkable “philosophical resemblance”: both distill complex systems into their relevant parts. This RG-RBM mapping is a kind of formalization of this similarity.
Since deep learning and biological learning processes have many similarities, it is not too much of a stretch to hypothesize that our brains may also use some kind of “renormalization on steroids” to make sense of our perceived reality.
As one of the authors suggested, “Maybe there is some universal logic to how you can pick out relevant features from data, I would say this is a hint that maybe something like that exists.”
It is not too much of a stretch to hypothesize that our brains may also use some kind of “renormalization on steroids” to make sense of our perceived reality.
The problem with this is that in contrast to self-similar systems (with fractal-like behavior) where RG works well, systems in nature generally are not self-similar. A possible way out of this limitation, as pointed out by the neuroscientist Terrence Sejnowski, would be if our brains somehow operated at critical points with all neurons influencing the whole network. But that is a topic for another article! | https://towardsdatascience.com/deep-learning-explainability-hints-from-physics-2f316dc07727 | ['Marco Tavora Ph.D.'] | 2020-08-30 15:44:24.176000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Inside Ai', 'Data Science', 'Science', 'Machine Learning'] |
How do mobile wallets work?. Mobile phones are becoming a trend and… | Mobile phones are becoming a trend and all of the people whether they are old or young want to keep a mobile phone handy and use various applications to make their life easier and comfortable. Mobile phones manufacturers are also making efforts to make the phones user-friendly. The applications that are used in the mobile phones are made by various companies so that the user does not have to visit the offices and banks for various purposes and can use the mobile phone to complete their work. Mobile phones are becoming a first priority for people because all the tasks which are meant to be performed by moving from one place to another can be handled only from one tap like sending an official email from your mobile phone is just a matter of few minutes. Similarly, when you are carrying currency in your pocket and move out of your home to purchase some commodity you need to give some money to the owner of the shop and then you get the needed item. But today, you can keep your money in the mobile phone so that you do not have to carry anything else with you when you are out of the office or home.
Mobile wallets is the term used for various money related concerns. These are something which are exactly similar to your wallets. The things that you keep in your wallets are present in your mobile wallets now. Currency which is present in your wallet is kept in your mobile wallets and wherever needed can be transacted from one account to another as the same way you make a physical payment to the shopkeeper. An example of mobile wallets is an application in the mobile phone which is named as Paytm. You can use this application to make a payment for your electricity bills, water bills, book a flight or a hotel room in case you are moving out on vacation. Internet has become a very useful method for making such payments even if you are located out of the state or even out of the country. Paytm is regulated by the Reserve Bank of India so, the payments that you are making will be kept confidential and the information that you share while making the payment like your debit card number and CVV number are also kept away from frauds who are trying to hack the network of various banks. These mobile wallets provides a very useful way of shopping and even great discounts are added to your accounts if you purchase any item with your mobile wallet.
There are various kinds of mobile wallets which are introduced in the market and works with the specific module, which are:
1) Closed wallets: A closed wallet is a mobile wallet or an e-Wallet which is designed for making full or part payment for the services directly provided by the wallet issuer. A closed wallet cannot be used for making payments to any third-party service providers or for money transfer. For example, if I am an owner of closed wallet, I will provide Rs. 1100 of purchase on a payment of Rs. 1000 till the time the user buys from my shop and I will provide an incentive of Rs. 100 every time a user purchase.
2) Semi-closed wallets: Semi-closed wallets which have a specific contract with the issuer to accept the payment but do not permit cash withdrawal & which enables the procuring of goods & services which consist of financial services at a group of clearly recognized merchant locations/establishments. For example, MobiKwik is an application which uses semi-closed wallets as you can get your flight bookings and also your hotel bookings on a single go once you are planning a vacation. The semi-closed wallets use various merchants and do not depend on a single point of purchase like closed wallets.
3) Open wallets: Open wallets are the ones that allow you to buy goods and services, withdraw cash at ATMs or banks and transfer funds. These services can only be jointly launched with a bank. Money which you are carrying in the open wallet can also be taken out physically in the form of cash. M-Pesa by Vodafone India Ltd in partnership with ICICI Bank Ltd. Is an example as M-Pesa money can be used to buy goods and services and also withdrawn from ATMs.
Mobile wallets have now become a standard way to pay money to people and there can be many advantages of mobile wallets such as:
1) These wallets are used to make safe transactions. These applications and mobile wallets are only accessible once you have set up a password on your mobile phones for using these applications. These wallets are highly encrypted and various banks are running these applications through various merchants.
2) Paying through mobile wallets is very useful because you do not have to worry about change which becomes a hassle sometimes.
3) You can use these mobile wallets for many things like recharging your mobile phones on one go.
4) You get massive rewards in the form of cashbacks when using your mobile wallets for transacting money.
5) These mobile wallets are less time consuming in comparison to net banking which involves opening of several browsers for making a single payment.
There can be disadvantages of mobile wallets as everything has some pros and cons associated with it:
1) These wallets are only useful for mobile savvy people and work only with the high-speed internet connection and updated version of mobile phones.
2) These wallets are still not a substitute to debit cards and people prefer using their credit cards/debit cards/UPI for purchasing and payments.
3) These wallets are also limited to the amount of Rs.20,000 which means that you will not be able to keep more than this amount in the mobile wallet and it is useless for transactions involving high amount.
4) These wallets are also dependent on the battery backup of the smartphones and it is not necessary that these mobile wallets will be always available for making payments.
Conclusion: Money is an item which is used to purchase or sell a commodity and whenever you are using money, you need to take care of your cash while carrying it as it can be lost but carrying money in the mobile wallet is easier as there are less chances of losing your money and even if the mobile phone is lost the person who gets the mobile phone will not be able to access the money because these wallets are password protected.
You may also leave your opinions on mobile wallets in the response section about it being an advantage or disadvantage depending on their usability. | https://medium.com/@anurag98/how-does-mobile-wallets-work-424787da6694 | [] | 2021-04-21 07:23:51.668000+00:00 | ['Wallet', 'Mobile', 'Money'] |
CONQUERING THE TRIUND WITHIN | Often quoted as tiny paradise, Dharamshala is a place that makes you realize that to understand why some places are worthy laureates of their titles, they must be explored. The shrunken streets amidst the mountains are filled with picturesque graffiti paintings sending on random abandoned walls. Brooks trickle down the mighty mountains glimmering beneath the sun. Bazaars with thatched roofs offering Tibetan and Punjabi dishes alike. Who would’ve thought that these cultures could marry?
Perhaps it’s all in the place. On one end, Tibetan missionaries exhibit utmost patience and delicacy in making handicrafts. The pillars of vipaasna and equanimity stand like the ginormous pillars of Norbulingka monastery and the handicrafts exhibit the simplicity in intricacies. Perhaps the whole monastery is a serene exhibition of the principles of Buddhism.
Walking up a few miles to Mcleodganj , one reaches the remarkable temple of Galu Devi. This temple is a safe haven for those wanting to challenge the might of Triund. I remember visiting the temple with a faint heart. With a heavy voice I murmured “we might not be able to get there today either.” It had been 6 tiring and yet inspiring days at the Chinmaya mission’s camp to discuss Ram, in the heights of Mcleodganj. The camp ended with a Maha Yagna at the foothills of Himalaya. And then began our journey to conquer Triund. The first day, was a huge failure. The trek was closed because of heavy snowfall. And yet, we were happy to have witnessed snowfall for the first time in our lives. We went back to the ashram tired and dozed off almost immediately. I remember waking up the next morning with devesh bhaiya’s enthusiastic voice saying “I hope you’re both ready for today? Triund waits for us to conquer its summit. I looked at chaitanya and he looked back at me. We weren’t ready for this. We had doubts in our minds. There were virtually no chances. With the temperature almost kissing the zilch point. Devesh bhaiya couldn’t hold his grin and exclaimed, look the sun is out, there’s hope. We succumbed to the enthusiasm and half-heartedly started our uncertain journey. We climbed up to Galu Devi because we wanted to trek as little as we could. A little though, wasn’t too little. We climbed up 4 kilometers. And I had given up on my hopes. Honestly, deep down I wanted the trek to be closed. I had my muscles pulled and I couldn’t walk anymore. To my surprise the trek was open, I was afraid and happy at the same time.
I could do what I dreamt of and I didn’t have the strength or energy to do it. I walked about a hundred meters before deciding to give up. I had to walk 8 kilometers more. It seemed hilariously impossible. Chaitanya and Devesh bhaiya continued. About five minutes later, I wondered if this is what I came for. I planned for this for almost two months and there I was sitting down doing nothing. The middle-aged hikers almost taunted me with their raised eyebrows and unwelcoming grin. Also, I had to wait for my fellow trekkers to come down for about five hours and listen to their stories and regret it for a lifetime. It was clear. I couldn’t just sit. I started to walk. Not knowing how far I’ll reach. It was almost like fighting a lost battle. But I walked my ground. A little by little. One step at a time. I met two travelers who offered me water and I almost gulped down their entire bottle. The only bottle they carried for the two of them. My apologetic eyes looked up for considering showing great remorse but I was welcomed with a warm smile. “We often do this, don’t worry. We won’t be thirsty. My cousin and I often come here.” A glass of water and unexpected warmth, pushed me a little further, the beauty of divine valley, a little. And so, a little by little I pushed through. A little more each time. I could see Devesh bhaiya and Chaitanya at a distance or so I thought. And I yelled their names. But they sat right next to me and were surprised. I was welcomed with a hug. Their expressions said it all.
Devesh bhaiya and I
They didn’t expect me to make it so far. But I had. I had caught up with people that left me behind at the start. Perhaps, it’s never too late to start I said to myself. I was pumped with hope. A little more now. There were times I almost gave up again. I met fellow travelers who were descending after their triumph. They’d all lie to me. It’s just five minutes from now. Probably three. And it was about an hour that this continued. I was furious. Why would they lie to me? Finally, I could see the summit. I couldn’t move a step. Almost paralyzed. I almost forgot walking. I couldn’t stand either. It felt like I wanted to tumble down after having come all the way. Success seemed futile and I was caught up in a Kafkaesque circle. I dragged my way up. And reached the summit. I couldn’t believe I had done it. I still cannot wrap my head around how I trekked 8 kilometers when I never had the strength to walk a hundred meters? Chaitanya and Devesh bhaiya had already reached a few minutes before I did and they ordered Maggie for me too. The warm Maggie was nothing short of a deserved reward. I looked down from the summit. It felt like Triund applauded my victory with a little snowfall. Have I conquered Triund? Or have I conquered myself I wondered. Perhaps success begins right after our limitations. It’s a matter of those few steps when you feel you’d never make it but then you do. In a day, I had made memories to inspire me for life. I thought to myself as I munched on looking down at what was the most beautiful scenery I had ever seen. Perhaps that day, I deserved it.
At the summit | https://medium.com/@sahajshukla/conquering-the-triund-within-af1e84a00178 | ['Sahaj Shukla'] | 2020-05-02 08:06:12.361000+00:00 | ['Hiking', 'Trekking', 'Motivation', 'Triund Trek', 'Covid 19'] |
Zap Protocol Expands Token Access with New ZAP/USDT Pair on Bitrue | The Zap utility token, providing access to the decentralized Zap protocol, can now be acquired by exchanging Tether (USDT) through a ZAP/USDT pair on the Bitrue marketplace. This is the third Zap pairing made available on the Bitrue digital asset exchange, joining ZAP/BTC and ZAP/XRP markets.
Tether (USDT) is a cryptocurrency anchored to the price of the US Dollar and is the world’s largest stablecoin by market cap. With increasing attention on oracle and decentralized financial (DeFi) products, this new market will help meet the growing demand for truly decentralized products and services.
Bitrue
Bitrue registered in Singapore in 2018 and offers worldwide services to cryptocurrency investors with offices across the United States, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan. The exchange has long been pledging its commitment to the XRP community and ecosystem by constantly building XRP liquidity via a transparent and trusted marketplace. It has been one of the earliest exchanges to adopt XRP as a base currency. Since May of 2019, the Zap utility token has been available for users of Bitrue.
Bitrue provides the following examples as being what sets them apart from other exchanges:
-Senior management team from Capital One and website security experts represent the apex of their professions at the international level.
-Advance Multi-level clustering structure; cold wallet with security system.
-Worldwide offices. We have offices in US, Europe and Asia Pacific. We make our collective knowledge, experience and global network available to our users.
You can follow Bitrue using their official channels:
Website: www.bitrue.com
Email: [email protected]
Telegram: BitrueOfficial
Facebook: Bitrue
Twitter: Bitrue
Zap Protocol
The Zap Protocol is the first decentralized bonding curve curation market, providing access to data and other tokenized services, having launched onto mainnet January 01, 2019. The protocol provides numerous blockchain and smart contract templates so developers can easily integrate into a permissionless platform which allows them to seamlessly create decentralized applications (Dapps), products, and services.
The Zap protocol and its many use-cases — such as data monetization, tokenization of real estate, and decentralized competitions and other decentralized financial tools — leverage the powerful decentralized tool called a bonding curve. This uses a preset pricing function and algorithmic market making in order to create a fully liquid decentralized exchange to power the templates offering the various tokenized tools and services.
The Zap protocol’s interface and website are currently deep in development. Private access testing is set to begin in the coming weeks. After a successful testing phase and with the eventual release of the new front-end, there will be a continual roll out of releases stemming from current and soon to be announced partnerships.
You can keep up with the latest news by following the official links for the Zap Protocol:
Website: www.zap.org
(NEW!) Reddit: r/ZapProtocol
Twitter: @ZapProtocol
Facebook: @ZapProtocol
Discord: discord.gg/pvHzemX
Telegram: t.me/ZapOracles
Medium: The Zap Project
LinkedIn: Zap
GitHub: The Zap Project | https://medium.com/the-zap-project/zap-protocol-expands-token-access-with-new-zap-usdt-pair-on-bitrue-56c8eba7e59d | ['Stefan Furris'] | 2020-08-20 20:37:42.733000+00:00 | ['Smart Contracts', 'Ethereum', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Crypto', 'Blockchain'] |
How To Use Hashtags Effectively In Social Media Marketing? | Growing Fast in Social Media…
hashtags
Hashtags are a crucial part of social media marketing. It is a great way of labeling and finding social media updates. It makes your content discoverable and allows you to find relevant content from other people and businesses. The hashtag allows you to connect with and engage other social media users based on a common theme or interest. Indeed, hashtags help you to increase traffic on Twitter and Instagram.
Hashtags can increase awareness, getting your content seen by more people than just followers, and increase your social shares. By simply incorporating #hashtags into your social media content, you can expand your reach and increase your audience. Knowing how to use a hashtag is fundamental to your success on social media. Here you can find seven innovative ways to use hashtags in social media marketing.
1. Keep it simple and relevant:
When you are choosing a hashtag, it is important to make sure that you pick something that people are searching for and can easily remember. There are lots of hashtags scattered in the social media universe. Using a hashtag that is long and difficult to spell or pronounce, will probably not give you a good result. However, an unclear, never-used, or generic hashtag will also not get the results you want.
Your hashtag should be short, precise, and simple to spell. It should give your audience a clear idea about the topic of the conversation. The key is finding out to what topics your audience can relate to. You need to find the ones they are already talking about. The hashtag helps to categorize your content and let people follow a trend and even help you to engage with a community. You need to use a hashtag that is relevant to your content and company as well as simple to use.
2. Utilize trending hashtags:
A trending hashtag is a hashtag topic that has become very popular. Maybe you have heard people are talking about what’s “trending now”. Sometimes, it is referring to the hashtags that are currently popular or are the most talked about right now. Oftentimes, hashtags are centered on the major news topics of the world. When you see a trend that relates to your business, engage in it by using the tag. By using a trending hashtag in your content update, you can get your message seen by a much larger audience. More and more people can see your updates rather than just your fans and followers.
In addition, a trending hashtag is a great way to increase the brand’s visibility. Before you use a hashtag in your social media post, make sure it adds value to your existing conversation. If your post does not add value, it is likely to be ignored and lost in an ocean of posts. If you have a truly informative post, more and more people will re-share it and it will increase your overall brand awareness. Make use of the best social media automation tools to automate your posts with hashtags on social. After all, consistency is the key!
How to use trending hashtags:
Be the first in using trending tags to get more exposure for your content and brand
Find trending hashtags on Twitter & Google+
Hashtag analytics & monitoring sites
Hashtags.org
Trendsmap
Hashtagify
RiteTag
Use niche-trending hashtags to connect and build relationships with your targeted market.
3. Use hashtag on multiple social media marketing channels:
Hashtags are an important part of all social media platforms. Hashtags give your brand more exposure so you can spread the word about your product to a massive audience. In addition, when you use it multiple times on different channels, people will easily remember your hashtag. You can use the hashtag before the keyword in the mind and this way you will find useful content.
Twitter : Because of character count restrictions, please don’t use more than 2 hashtags per tweet for best engagement.
Because of character count restrictions, please don’t use more than 2 hashtags per tweet for best engagement. Facebook : Use 2 hashtags on Facebook try one popular hashtag and one custom hashtag for your brand.
Use 2 hashtags on Facebook try one popular hashtag and one custom hashtag for your brand. Instagram : It allows up to 30 hashtags, however, keep it to no more than 11 per post for the highest level of engagement.
It allows up to 30 hashtags, however, keep it to no more than 11 per post for the highest level of engagement. LinkedIn: There is no limit on the usage of hashtags. But it has been recommended to limit it to a maximum of 5. Otherwise, LinkedIn Algorithm could mark your posts as spam.
There is no limit on the usage of hashtags. But it has been recommended to limit it to a maximum of 5. Otherwise, LinkedIn Algorithm could mark your posts as spam. Pinterest: Use only 2 hashtags, it’s a category of search so use your unique hashtag to help pinners to find relevant content.
Read: How To Use Hashtags On Instagram To Grow Your Reach?
4. Search the hashtag before you use it:
Check each of the social media networks to make sure that your hashtag isn’t being used for the wrong reason. Also, ensure that you don’t choose something that can be interpreted in a different way. It is worth making sure that another brand isn’t using hashtag specifically for their own promotion as well.
When you are using hashtags properly, they help to create online conversation, increase brand awareness, and increase your sales as well. Before using a hashtag, always you need to search to see if other people are using it and what they saying. If you want your tweet to stand out, tweeting on a negative hashtag might not be the best way to do it. You can also use Twitter analytics tools to find out which hashtags you’ve used worked the best for you and which of them didn’t.
5. Don’t overuse hashtags:
Make sure to use a maximum of two hashtags for each post. Including too many will leave the impression that you are spamming your followers. Usually, you don’t want to use more than one or two hashtags per post, with one hashtag is the best choice. Additionally, it will be important to avoid using them in every single post that you make, as social media users are wary of businesses trying too hard to promote themselves. Use these organizational tools when it makes sense to use them and you’ll reap the rewards of a more engaged subscriber base.
Read: How to use Twitter for Business Marketing?
6. Be specific and unique:
As a marketer, you want to able to reach your community with the use of a hashtag, especially during special events and Twitter chats. However, if you want others to join in on the conversation you need to engage with each other, you have to use the hashtag that is more unique. You can’t use generic hashtags, such as #marketing or #seo, and expect people to re-tweet your post. Nowadays, people are using unique and specific hashtags and incorporating them with better social media marketing tips for better engagement with the audience.
Undoubtedly, hashtags are a powerful tool for brand marketing on social media. For getting great results, you need to use a hashtag that is carefully selected and tactically utilized.
Although the uses of hashtags differ depending on the channel, by following the best practices you can increase their performance. As a marketer, you also need to stay current on the ever-evolving features of social media, and constantly changing user preferences. Every new year brings innovations and new features. Try to keep yourself well informed of them.
7. Create brand engagement:
The key to a hashtag is the ability to connect your brand with many popular and incredibly visible topics. This will drive new viewers to your social media, and allow you to engage with them. When you use hashtags carefully, it helps you to expand your reach to targeted users, and improve customer relations. The more comfortable your followers feel with your brand the more likely they will interact with you on social media.
You don’t want to ignore them, but it’s not necessary to use hashtags while conversing with your followers. Also, you don’t need to use a hashtag in every post either.
However, it is vitally important to remember that you should not use them while responding to someone. Whether it’s a re-tweet or a reply, avoid using these characters when they are not required.
Keep the marketing to your posts and out of your customer dialogue.
Adding keywords within your hashtags isn’t enough to enhance your online presence. You need to ensure your hashtags are short, conversational, and unique. However, hashtags play an important role in the social media marketing strategy. | https://medium.com/@socialmediamarket/how-to-use-hashtags-effectively-in-social-media-marketing-faa3fb726f7b | [] | 2020-12-23 02:37:59.780000+00:00 | ['Hashtag', 'Business', 'Medium Brasil', 'Influencer Marketing', 'Social Media Marketing'] |
Before You Tell Your Spouse About Your Affair | If you’re having an affair, and you want to disclose the affair to your spouse before you are confronted, here’s an exercise that may help you prepare.
Use the following steps to help guide you before revealing the affair to your partner. You’ll want to handle this delicate conversation with respect, dignity and compassion. Remember, what you’re about to reveal to your spouse will undoubtedly hurt; you’ll need to show empathy and kindness.
Things to Think About Before Revealing Your Affair
Think about these five things below before you begin. If you don’t agree with these, you may not be ready to tell your partner.
One. You’re about to reveal something that will cause pain; nothing your spouse has done to you, up to this point, matters. Don’t make this conversation about revenge for things they’ve done to you in the past. This conversation is purely to disclose your affair. This isn’t the time to tell your spouse how you feel about them, or about your marriage. Do not do any finger-pointing.
Two. Your spouse is not an extension of you. They’ll make up a story about what this affair means to them that has nothing to do with you. Allow them their own reality. Don’t tell them what they should be feeling; allow them to express their feelings. Don’t let the words “you are wrong” come out of your mouth. (For how to deal with disagreement, keep reading.)
Three. Keep this conversation focused on the basic information about the affair. You don’t have to tell your spouse specific details about when, where, how many times, or even with whom you had the affair. That may come, in time, if you decide it’s best for them to know details.
Four. Make an appointment to talk to your spouse. Let them know you have something important to discuss. Make sure they’re available and open to discussion. You don’t have to tell them what you are going to share, but let them know you’ll need at least an hour of their time. After your disclosure, remind your spouse that this is not the end of the conversation. Tell them when you can talk next.
Five. Honor the “why” questions your spouse will have.
Get more guidance on this and more when you buy my new book, When You’re the One Who Cheats. | https://medium.com/@drtammynelson2/before-you-tell-your-spouse-about-your-affair-2bb6727351da | ['Tammy Nelson'] | 2019-02-27 18:16:17.092000+00:00 | ['Couples', 'Relationships', 'Infidelity', 'Cheating', 'Affairs'] |
The Snowman | It was one of those magical days.
The kids had a snow day and I decided to blow off work.
So, we spent the day outside. There were snowball fights and sledding after I spent approximately four hours shoveling.
The showcase of course was the Snowman.
We spent the afternoon on him. Three nearly perfect spheres of snow in three different sizes stacked on top of each other.
My wife brought out a baby carrot for the nose. I had no idea where to get coal so the kids dug in the yard to find some frozen gravel which became the eyes and mouth.
Then, all it took was some buttons, an old hat and scarf, and some well placed sticks.
The youngest had just seen Frosty the Snowman and was half convinced that he would come to life when we put the hat on.
She was disappointed when he didn’t.
And now we were in the house. The kids were playing some video game and I was dicking around on my phone like a modern Norman Rockwell painting.
There was even hot cocoa.
I went to let the dog in and happened to pass by the front window that overlooked the front yard.
A flash on movement caught my eye.
“Honey did you see that?”
“See what?”
“The snowman. I swear it’s head turned,”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“No I swear.”
“Whatever you say.”
I stood there watching the snowman for 15 minutes, and I swear it was turning its head slightly to see if I was still watching him.
But soon it was time for bed, and I forgot about the weird feeling.
Until the next day I was walking out to work and as I opened my car door I was hit in the back with a snowball.
I spun around and the street was quiet. It was 5:00 am the street was dark.
I waited but still nothing.
Later that day, I picked the kids up from school and there was a puddle of water in the kitchen.
At first I thought the dog had an accident, but realized it was just…water.
“Where’d this come from?”
But the kids just shrugged.
“Maybe Muffin spilled her water again?” one of them said.
“From other room?”
Again they just shrugged. At that age that was about the extent of their communication skills.
So I cleaned it up.
I looked back out front and the snowman was still there, but I swore he was in a slightly different spot.
Again, it slipped to the back of my mind as I had other things to do.
But that night, I felt cold air on my face.
I woke up and I heard the bedroom door shut.
I sprang up and when my feet hit the floor they were wet. I was standing in another puddle.
I sprinted downstairs to look out the window.
But the snowman was there. Though, I could swear there was the slightest trail in the snow.
I tried to wake my wife up but she was having none of it.
“Honey,” I whispered.
“I swear to god you say something else about the snowman I’m leaving you.”
“Ugh fine.”
“You’re crazy.”
“It’s alive babe.”
“Whatever go to sleep.”
The next day, nothing happened, and I was slightly relieved because there was supposed to be a warm spell. So my snowman worries were over.
I went to bed.
And I awoke to the same cold air I felt the other night.
And something being pushed on my face.
My eyes popped open to see what the snowman trying to smother with his scarf.
I tried to fight him off, but soon it went dark.
I woke up to more cold air.
So, so cold.
I realized I was standing in my front yard but when I tried to walk back in the house I couldn’t move.
I was able to see and turn my head slightly.
But the horror came when I saw that I was no longer in my body.
I was made of snow. My arms were sticks, and my nose a carrot.
It got worse as I saw my family leaving the house in the morning. I could see my old body moving just fine.
What happened?
But my body turned and I saw the same wicked grin that was on the snowman’s face the night before.
Oh god.
He switched our bodies.
I tried to move but nothing.
I tried to scream, to say anything, but there was only silence.
I was stuck in a frozen body as the sun rose and I could already feel my body starting to melt. | https://medium.com/the-inkwell/the-snowman-4ef92500f4b1 | ['Matthew Donnellon'] | 2020-11-28 04:17:24.882000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Short Story', 'Life', 'Books', 'Fiction'] |
Resolutions for the New Year: Of Strings and Images | Photo by Pablo Hermoso on Unsplash
We awakened this past Christmas morning to a disturbing newsflash — there had been an explosion in downtown Nashville, Tennessee. As the day went on, the story became more bizarre: the bomb was in an old RV. A recording was playing, warning people about the bomb and counting down. Between announcements, the recording played a Petula Clark hit from the 1960s, “Downtown.” The detonation occurred when the fewest possible people would be in the area . . .
At the moment, investigators are not certain about the motives of the bomber, who clearly set off the bomb in a way designed to avoid mass casualties. What we do know is that the bomb damaged an AT&T facility, perhaps because the bomber’s father was employed by a precursor to AT&T. That’s one possibility. Another is that the bomber was obsessed with conspiracy theories, one being the danger of 5G networks.
Fear of cellular technology and wifi has been around for as long as those technologies have been around — who can forget the prophecies of cooked, cancerous brains when cell phones first appeared? As a new technology, 5G is the latest suspect. In addition to that, the spread of 5G networks and the spread of the coronavirus were bound to get linked by conspiracy theorists.
Something on the order of fifty cell towers in the United Kingdom were destroyed this past April during the initial spread of the virus in the UK. This current outbreak — if you will — of the conspiracy theory appears to have begun in France in a right-wing blog titled Les Moutons Enragés, “the enraged sheep.” (Or “rabid” or “mad.”)*
The fact that Facebook began cracking down on sites propagating the theory only made the conspiracy theorists more suspicious — it enraged the rabid sheep.
The so-called logic in this particular conspiracy fantasy is that 5G technology causes radiation which spreads Covid-19. Perhaps — goes the speculation — the pandemic is all about those towers that are going up all over the world at this point. (Weren’t they building 5G towers in Wuhan when . . . )
Another conspiracy theory that the bomber may have bought into is about shape-shifting reptilian aliens who — so goes the theory — are disguised as world leaders such as the Obamas and celebrities such as . . . Justin Bieber.
And then there’s the “satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals” that QAnon devotees fear. I’m sure the list goes on . . .
To repeat, investigators don’t know at this point if the Nashville bomber bought into these conspiracy theories, but a lot of people do.
And that’s my question: Why do people believe fantasies such as these? For my money the Spanish philosopher George Santayana has the answer: “People become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.”
The believers in conspiracy theories (and dare I add philosophies, religions, and ideologies both right and left) just can’t see that they have been fed juicy, images that create their subservience to fantasy — killer cell towers; lizard people; pedophilic cannibals working out of pizza restaurants . . . these are compelling images.
We all do well to ask ourselves: Who or what is pulling my strings?
Because it’s not only right-wing conspiracy theorists who are believing the images planted in their minds. Human beings are prone toward both collective fantasy and individual delusion.
How to escape? The twentieth century French philosopher Pierre Hadot developed a neo-Stoic philosophy in a book titled The Inner Citadel: The Mediations of Marcus Aurelius. Number one on his list of ways to change our lives is:
Realize that your mental images and the voice in your head is not reality but your subjective judgments.
That is the essence of ancient Stoicism, and it is the essence of Taoism and Buddhism and some forms of Hinduism.
Pierre Hadot goes on with his Stoicism-inspired list like this:
Stop being a puppet on a string. Get into the moment. Assess where you are, now. What can you change and what can’t you change? Remember how short your time on earth is.
Not a bad way to start that list of New Year resolutions! May we all in the new year cease being puppets on strings.
FirstUnitarian.org
Huumanist.org
YouTube
Facebook | https://medium.com/humanism-now/resolutions-for-the-new-year-of-strings-and-images-691ed82f6c9d | ['David Breeden'] | 2020-12-31 15:10:39.297000+00:00 | ['Resolutions', 'Humanism', 'New Year', 'Conspiracy Theories', 'Conspiracy Theorists'] |
Setting up PostgreSQL for high availability and replication with Hot Standby | Objectives
Set up two VMs running Postgres
Configure the Primary server for replication
Back up the Primary server to the Standby server
Configure the Standby server to run in Hot Standby mode
Installation
Start the standby server and test it
You can follow the steps in https://www.postgresql.org/download/ to install postgres on both the master and standby servers. (Note: Postgres Version need to greater than 10)
You need to configure the firewall so that both the servers can communicate with each others using network port 5432.
Note down the IP Address of both the servers.
Setting up the master node
Creating Replication User
In the first step, we will be creating a user with replication role which will be used by standby node.
Login to psql shell
sudo -u postgres psql
Create a replication user which will be used by standby server to backup data from master node
create user repuser replication;
Run \du+ to check if the user was created successfully
Exit the shell.
Allow the standby to access the master node
In this step we will configure the master node to allow the standby server for replication.
Edit pg_hba.conf (/var/lib/pgsql/10/data/pg_hba.conf) and add following line at the end for all the standby nodes.
host replication repuser <Standby IP>/32 md5
Configure master node for configuration
After we have configured the master to allow access to standby server, now we need to edit postgres.conf to allow replication.
Make changes to following variables in postgres.conf
listen_addresses = ‘*’ (Or list of IP Addresses of Slave Nodes)
port = 5432
wal_level = hot_standby
synchronous_commit = on (If you want synchronous replication) max_wal_senders = 4
hot_standby = on
Restart postgres service (sudo service postgresql-10 restart) to reload the changes.
Setup the standby nodes
After we have configured the master node for replication, now we need to copy same configuration as well as all the data from master node.
Copy master data
Copy master data into slave nodes using
pg_basebackup -h <Master IP> -U repuser -D /var/lib/pgsql/10/data/
If you get an error “/var/lib/pgsql/10/data/” already contains data, empty the directory using
sudo rm -r /var/lib/pgsql/10/data/*
When the backup finishes, you’ll notice that the data directory is populated on the slave, including configuration files from the master.
Create Recovery.conf
When you implement a server in Hot Standby mode, you must supply a configuration file that contains the settings that will be used in the event of data recovery.
Create a recovery command file recovery.conf in the standby’s cluster data directory.
To add this file to the standby server, follow these steps:
sudo su postgres
psql
cd /var/lib/pgsql/10/data/
vim recovery.conf
Paste the following content
standby_mode = 'on'
primary_conninfo = 'host=<Master IP> port=5432 user=repuser' trigger_file = '/tmp/MasterNow'
Here is an explanation for each line :
standby_mode=on Specifies that the server must start as a standby server
Specifies that the server must start as a standby server primary_conninfo The parameters to use to connect to the master
The parameters to use to connect to the master trigger_file If this file exists, the server will stop the replication and act as a master
Start the postgres server sudo systemctl start postgresql-10 and enable it.
Testing replication
If the server starts without any error that means that replication was successful.
Open psql shell on both the servers:
On master shell run the following queries:
create sequence user_seq start with 1 increment by 1 no maxvalue minvalue 1 cache 1; create table users(
emp_id numeric primary key default nextval(‘user_seq’::regclass),
first_name text not null,
last_name text not null
);
insert into users(first_name, last_name) values ('Shubham','Patel'); insert into users(first_name, last_name) values ('Ashish','Shah');
On standby nodes run select * from users;
You should be able to see the entries from the master server.
You can also run following query on master node shell to get replication nodes: | https://medium.com/vphrase/setting-up-postgresql-for-high-availability-and-replication-with-hot-standby-b173aac742f7 | ['Shubham Patel'] | 2019-10-23 13:45:14.869000+00:00 | ['Postgres', 'High Availability', 'Replication', 'Ubuntu', 'Postgresql'] |
H1: Connecting Life Sciences | By Somesh Dash, Michael Miao, Army Tunjaicon, and Jules Maltz
Imagine that you are a student preparing for your final round interview for your dream job right out of college. What do you do to prepare for the interview? You almost certainly first check LinkedIn to learn more about your interviewer’s career, interests, and role. After all, better understanding your interviewer’s background will help you establish rapport and ask better questions, which should hopefully increase your chances of getting hired. Now imagine that you are a sales rep looking to identify the right prospect to cold email. What do you do to identify this person? You probably use a solution like LinkedIn Sales Navigator as there is nothing worse than wasting precious time and resources connecting with a prospect, only to find out that you are speaking to the wrong person. In the world of Life Sciences, identifying and connecting with the right healthcare professionals (HCPs) is a crucial part of the drug discovery process. However, Life Sciences professionals don’t have the luxury of relying on LinkedIn to find physicians to engage with. Data is notoriously fragmented, opaque, and siloed in the healthcare industry, and it’s near impossible to see all aspects of a HCP’s background (i.e. publications, clinical trials, speaking history, congresses, etc.) on a single platform. That is, until now…
H1is a healthcare company that connects all stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem to enable greater collaboration and discovery. H1 is the most comprehensive platform of its kind that aggregates real-time data on over nine million HCPs across 70 countries, 16K healthcare organizations, 160M peer-reviewed publications, 350K clinical trials, and 700 medical societies. H1 provides a mission-critical resource for Medical Affairs and Commercial teams in Life Sciences that helps accelerate the development of life-saving therapeutics and innovative medical devices. IVP is thrilled to co-lead H1’s $58M Series B with Menlo Ventures and is joined by Transformation Capital, Lux Capital, Lead Edge, Novartis dRx Capital, and Y Combinator as part of the round. Somesh Dash will be joining the board as a Director and Michael Miao will be joining as an Observer. IVP believes deeply in the future of Digital Health and we are excited to be a part of the H1 journey.
Here is why we invested.
Digital Transformation in the Life Sciences Industry
Roughly two-thirds of commercial launches for new drugs underperform initial sales expectations in the first year post-launch. A successful launch hinges on how well teams understand, educate, and build trust with key stakeholders to maximize the chances of successfully bringing a therapeutic to market. Medical Science Liaisons (MSLs) are tasked with identifying and engaging with Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) to ensure a commercial launch goes smoothly. The challenge that MSLs face is that data in the healthcare industry is extremely fragmented, inaccurate, and outdated. MSLs have to either manually sift through data sources like PubMed, ClinicalTrials.gov, Google, and academic publications, or hire expensive consultants to create static KOL lists that quickly become stale. H1 flips this problem on its head by offering an elegant and easy-to-use solution to help MSLs self-serve the information they need to identify and engage with the right KOLs. This accelerates time to market and increases the chances for a successful commercial launch.
Despite being a scientifically advanced and data-rich industry, Life Sciences has historically been very slow to adopt modern software solutions. This dynamic is rapidly changing as Pharmaceutical, Biotech, and Medical Device companies are increasingly embracing technology to drive efficiencies in the drug development process. It takes ten years on average for a new drug to complete the journey from initial discovery to commercialization and the average cost to develop each successful drug is close to three billion dollars. Drug patents typically only last twenty years and because it takes ten years to bring a drug to market, time is money. COVID-19 has caused major disruptions to the drug discovery and clinical trials process, which makes increasing efficiency through technology more important than ever. Life Sciences companies are beginning to invest heavily in resources that speed up clinical trials, efficiently target the right physicians, and speed up time to market during this critical window.
Strong Traction and Customer Love
H1 graduated from Y Combinator at the beginning of 2020 and already has 13 of the top 20 largest pharma companies as customers. The business’s early traction and capital efficiency are exceptional and a testament to the quality of the product and the size of the market opportunity. IVP spoke to a dozen customers as part of our diligence process and consistently heard that H1 is a game-changer for large pharmaceutical clients. Customers raved about H1’s high-quality data, global coverage, and world-class customer support. H1 sets itself apart from other solutions in the market because of its unique data acquisition strategy. Instead of purchasing claims data from third parties, H1 built a proprietary data acquisition engine that scrapes and aggregates data on HCPs from around the world. This gives H1 unique global coverage and allows for both quality control and frequent data refreshes.
H1 has seen strong product-market fit with Medical Affairs teams but we believe that this is just the beginning. The applications of H1’s underlying data set are boundless and we believe that the platform is extensible to all aspects of Life Sciences. Commercial and Marketing teams are already using the platform to identify KOLs and we believe that Clinical teams, Hospital Systems, and individual healthcare professionals will also become power users of the platform in the future.
Exceptional Founding Team
IVP loves backing exceptional entrepreneurs that are passionate about the problem they are solving. Co-founders Ariel Katz and Ian Sax both care deeply about accelerating the discovery of revolutionary therapeutics to help eradicate some of the world’s most daunting diseases. Ariel previously founded a company called ResearchConnection that helped students uncover research opportunities at universities. After selling ResearchConnection to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Ariel decided to take a backpacking trip to India where he met his soon-to-be co-founder, Ian Sax. Ian was previously running a company called Shore Group Associates that helps companies handle automated data collection at scale. The two immediately began working on projects that combined Ariel’s passion for increasing transparency in the Life Sciences industry and Ian’s expertise in aggregating massive data sets at scale. The two eventually came up with the idea of H1 and decided to dedicate all of their time and energy to scaling the company full time. They have since recruited a strong executive team and are well on their way to create a healthier future for all of us.
When the right founding team meets a massive problem that they are uniquely equipped to solve, incredible things happen. We are fortunate to be working with H1 and are excited to help Ariel and Ian build H1 into a generational company. Onwards!
Somesh Dash, Michael Miao, Army Tunjaicon, and Jules Maltz are investors at IVP, a later-stage venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, CA. | https://medium.com/ivpvc/h1-connecting-life-sciences-b0d95ff0e8ca | [] | 2020-12-17 17:28:19.217000+00:00 | ['Biotechnology', 'Key Opinion Leader', 'Pharamecuticals', 'VC', 'Lifesciences Industry'] |
Free-Tier AWS native CI/CD pipeline for dev using Docker on EC2. | Lack and constraint of resources is a wonderful thing. It creates a need to make things possible by leveraging limited options; Especially when dealing with startups who want to leverage cloud platforms such as AWS or companies who want to dip their toes in AWS (cloud in general) before considering their options.
Over the weekend I was approached by a family member who was interested in developing a very cool app using AWS as the cloud choice. However, there were no funds and it needed to be hands-off — of course, we know that hands-off really means higher costs unless you leverage open-source tools with a pinch of automation scripting. Lucky for him I had a working concept in my personal environment.
The pipeline is fairly simple and falls within the Free-Tier offered by AWS — Perfect for a DEV environment. Of course, this is considering the usage limit imposed by this tier. Keep in mind that for this scenario, I decided to skip Jenkins or Travis in order to keep the majority of the workflow in favor of AWS native resources.
AWS IAM handles repo access (From dev user and also from the designated serv account used by the EC2 instance — As of 12/20, CodeCommit does not allow API calls to clone/pull based on Role)
Code repository: handled by AWS CodeCommit
Push/Merge actions trigger an AWS Lambda function (AWS CodeBuild runs on $).
The AWS Lambda function parses the information and passes the parameters to AWS Systems Manager (SSM)
SSM does a run command (Shell Script) call to an active t2.nano EC2 amz2 linux (Docker host)
Script cleans local files and processes, pulls repo, and builds a new Docker image which then replaces the old container.
Again, this is a very basic example that jumps through hoops in order to keep things within the AWS Free-Tier. This example is a quick and easy way to setup a CI/CD pipeline for personal / small development projects. I do not recommend doing this architecture for team projects. | https://medium.com/@carlospgarciat/free-tier-aws-native-ci-cd-pipeline-for-dev-using-docker-on-ec2-a1ebcff7fdf8 | ['Carlos Garcia'] | 2020-12-10 16:36:15.268000+00:00 | ['DevOps', 'Cloud', 'AWS', 'Infrastructure', 'Docker'] |
The Empathy of Maintainable Code. This post is primarily intended for… | Photo by Sebastian Ahmed
Technology developments that involve coding, such as software, firmware, FPGAs or silicon, typically rely on a substantial amount of “internal” software. This is the software that constitutes “the machinery of development” as opposed to software that is shipped as part of an end-product (tools, scripts, automation frameworks, architectural models, studies and so on). This kind of software is typically not held to the same standard as production software and thus can suffer from the effects of lack of maintainability.
Unmaintainable code is a major source of technical friction and stagnation that holds back individuals and teams which ultimately results in business impacts.
The impacts manifest themselves in insidious ways and tend to be self-perpetuating.
In this post I put forward the notion that making internal code maintainable is an empathetic behavior.
In the world of technology, almost everything is code. Whether you are a front-end UX developer, embedded firmware engineer, data-scientist, DevOps engineer or designing silicon chips, everything is code. Code is the embodiment of ideas that defines products and all the infrastructure around their creation, including automation such as build systems, test frameworks and even documentation.
The need for maintainability applies just as much to an internal software as it does to product software.
If code ever needs to be updated, it meets the bar for needing to be maintainable.
What is unmaintainable code?
Credit: Google
In simple terms, I view unmaintainable code as
code which is “highly resistant to change”.
Unmaintainable code represents an exhausting proposition of a major time investment and inevitable frustration. Such code will put up a fight and likely win in its pursuit to stay unmaintainable. Likely, such code can only be modified by its original author (if they are still around), but even the author of such code will likely suffer (more on that shortly).
This brings me to what I believe are the two key elements which truly make code highly resistant to change:
Lack of helpful source-level documentation
Lack of an automated, informative and extensible test-suite
Good software design, appropriate re-use of known patterns, libraries and language-specific coding practices are indeed fundamental (and possibly enforced by static code analysis or other tools — if they are run on internal software), but the reason I’m not going to cover these is because I believe that
even the most wonderfully crafted code may still be unmaintainable.
Also, consider the possibility that when the two points above are actually addressed, they result in better design and coding practices, because they motivate the author to do things better (test-driven development for example makes the designer think about their design much more comprehensively before they start to code). As such, odds are that when the above two elements are lacking, there is likely some badly designed and implemented code to go along with that void.
Why is unmaintainable code bad?
This could be a long list, but since we’re talking about empathy (caring about others), here is what the damage looks like:
Reduced opportunities for others to learn and grow . Modifying or extending an existing code-base is one of the best ways for either junior designers or designers new to a technology ramp-up quickly and be productive.
. Modifying or extending an existing code-base is one of the best ways for either junior designers or designers new to a technology ramp-up quickly and be productive. The original author becomes a bottleneck as the “go-to” person for every bug-fix or feature request. Initially they may revel in being “valuable”, but over time they may grow to resent their burden when every seemingly small request to modify the code comes to them. They in turn become stifled .
as the “go-to” person for every bug-fix or feature request. Initially they may revel in being “valuable”, but over time they may grow to resent their burden when every seemingly small request to modify the code comes to them. . Re-factoring becomes untenable. Re-factoring is a critical aspect of iteration based design because it actively works towards reducing the “resistance to change” — which makes it easier to quickly add value to the project.
This kind of friction causes stagnation which can even drive people to quit or seek permission to be moved to another team, which will further stifle the team they are departing.
The inability to change a design may also lead to a “fresh-start” scenario which will likely throw away valuable work. There may simply be no other choices, and unfortunately this remake will likely also be unmaintainable.
It should then become obvious that
unmaintainable code actually hurts people and teams, which ultimately hurts the organization.
Helpful source-level documentation
Photo and source-code by Sebastian Ahmed
“Code is more often read than written.” — Guido van Rossum (Creator of the Python programming-language)
This quote says so much, and it was in fact this mindset which drove Guido to make the syntax and semantics of the Python language to be human friendly.
Most people don’t like to write documents, I get that. One of the four tenets specified in the agile manifesto specifically places an emphasis on “working software over comprehensive documentation”, but it also states that the “things on the right” are still valued. Its emphasis, is in regard to delivering value to a customer as the primary objective. But, by no means, is the manifesto suggesting that a delivery is made at “all costs” to any documentation, especially the sort that creates long-term friction and damage we discussed earlier.
We are not talking about “comprehensive” documentation here. We are talking about key semantic information that is required to convey the assumptions and intent of source-code to another human being (not a compiler or interpreter). We are talking about code-comments (or “embedded documentation” as I prefer to look at it). This kind of documentation may cover the following:
Explanations of the design structure, e.g. classes, relationships and patterns if the design is OO based
Justification of the design including assumed use-cases and referenced requirements. Use of libraries.
Calling out programming patterns and why they were chosen
Key design assumptions and caveats that may not be obvious (e.g. “had to use a uint64_t here because the input is offset binary”)
References to relevant articles, tickets or other code-bases
Discussions about performance-centric code or design decisions (e.g. “Used a thread pool here because the API is I/O bound”)
Detailed descriptions-of or URLs-to major bug-fix tickets. Some obscure piece of code may have been the result of a very corner-case bug fix
Recommendations on how to extend the code, e.g. “guide on extending the Foo class”
Highlighting areas that are somewhat suspect or fragile, e.g. “This class uses a static variable and may not be thread-safe”. Tell the reader what landmines are hiding in this code.
Highlight areas that frankly you are not too sure about “This recursion seems to work, but has not been extensively tested and I am still not sure why I had to subtract 2 and not 1 at the last iteration”
This is by no means a complete list (hardly so), but this sort of information is helpful to anyone trying to modify the code. It may even go a long way in making a badly written piece of code maintainable because it will provide enough information to consider a re-factor.
This also takes some humility and that is indeed being kind, and it is being empathetic. The mental state of writing code should always be “will another human understand this? What information will help them?”.
This is different from user-documentation, it is maintainer-documentation.
All languages have mechanics to embed helpful documentation (including ways to render it to other formats such as HTML). It takes empathy to prioritize its importance.
Automated, informative and extensible test-suite
Drawing by Sebastian Ahmed
This is perhaps the most critical element for making code maintainable and yet it is not the code itself.
Nothing creates conditions for maximum fear of change more than the inability to easily test and iterate locally.
This is the key element that I believe is most often missed when dealing with “internal” types of software such as automation, infrastructure and models.
Such software is in fact very valuable because it represents the “machinery” of product development. Often, such code is written by developers of the product. Since it is not considered to be the actual product, it may be written in haste, with poor embedded “maintainer-documentation” and likely no test support.
Recall that “If code ever needs to be updated, it meets the bar for needing to be maintainable”.
So what does an automated, informative and extensible test-suite look like? Here are some suggestions to get started.
One simple command-line script should execute a full suite of tests. Finer run-controls should be available via command-line arguments, but by default, one simply runs a test-program/script as defined in a top-level README.md file or similar.
should execute a full suite of tests. Finer run-controls should be available via command-line arguments, but by default, one simply runs a test-program/script as defined in a top-level README.md file or similar. Any dependencies for running the main test-script should be easy to acquire and this should be explained in the README.md. Ideally the test-script pulls down the dependencies or dependencies are already included in the project under a “test” directory
for running the main test-script should be easy to acquire and this should be explained in the README.md. Ideally the test-script pulls down the dependencies or dependencies are already included in the project under a “test” directory The failure modes of each test need to be informative . Depending on the test-framework, each test should be well described and failures should steer the user to a particular function or piece of code with relevant information why the test failed
. Depending on the test-framework, each test should be well described and failures should steer the user to a particular function or piece of code with relevant information why the test failed The code-base should ideally be instrumented with asserts that are enabled during testing at the very least. Asserts provide localized information
that are enabled during testing at the very least. Asserts provide localized information Ideally a test-framework should be used. For example, if you are writing a Python script or program, using something simple such as unittest would suffice (although more advanced frameworks exist). If you have never used a unit-testing framework, I highly encourage you to look at these. They provide a significant amount of infrastructure to let you focus on the semantics of testing rather than the infrastructure.
should be used. For example, if you are writing a Python script or program, using something simple such as unittest would suffice (although more advanced frameworks exist). If you have never used a unit-testing framework, I highly encourage you to look at these. They provide a significant amount of infrastructure to let you rather than the infrastructure. If using a test-framework, this should make testing extensible. Make sure to embed documentation in your testing programs as well (i.e. “how to add a unit-test”). If someone is extending your code, they need to add a test for it. Make it easy to do by way of a starting point and examples. Having these tests also sets the standard for the next person.
Without such a testing infrastructure (which is not a large time investment especially when using a testing framework), you are essentially
asking another human to fend for themselves in the dark.
Providing a sufficiently comprehensive, informative and extensible test framework, gives the next person the necessary tools to have the courage and ability to improve and extend the code in a productive manner.
Summary
Providing automated tests and helpful source-level documentation is empathetic because it involves thinking beyond oneself. It is a pattern of “paying it forward”. Providing these key elements is a demonstration of leadership because it empowers others and enables you to tackle new problems.
If you are a leader, and your team develops internal software, make sure to expect this and give your team members the time to develop internal software in this way. It will allow your team to thrive and build a culture of empathy. | https://medium.com/swlh/empathy-is-maintainable-internal-software-8b7ee0b34ec0 | ['Sebastian Ahmed'] | 2021-01-05 20:07:55.452000+00:00 | ['Documentation', 'Empathy', 'Software Development', 'Testing', 'Silicon'] |
Medium — the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly | The Good
With the advent of the COVID19 pandemic, I came across this beautiful community called Medium. Before that, I used to actively use Quora and StackOverflow (for technical articles) for voicing my opinions.
The monetization process in Medium is fairly simple and helps and inspires writers like us to write better quality articles. The statistics page is pretty useful and can help budding writers understand the penetration of the article. And there are a lot of articles present on how to fine-tune your title, how to choose the featured image etc.
The Medium community is awesome. When I started writing, I spoke to a lot of existing writers and they were always ready to help. There are some social media communities where you can share your articles and ask for honest opinions and reviews. Some of the editors of pubs guide you to write a better article.
Reading is one of the best side effects of Medium as a writer. When I started writing on Medium, I realized I am reading more. I have read more books, more medium articles, and I am more on top of current trending news. All this, thanks to medium.
Look at some awesome reviews of medium articles. And you can relate to most of them and say, “Yes it's true. Medium is great”.
History Written Interestingly
I just read an article entitled “The Process Leading to the US Losing it’s Manufacturing” and I hung on to every word. Loved reading the whole article to find out the shifts, losses, gains, and the economic wars , if you will, between countries …
Articles & Authors Alike Publishing In MEDIUM are “Worth In Gold & Diamonds”
The articles are written under the concept of “Short & Sweet” and requiring only less than 10 Minutes to read & still be able to understand the main goal & objective of the article
The Bad
A unified and clean process for Publishing
As a writer, the process of publishing an article to a pub is very confusing at times. There are thousands of publications on Medium and the process of adding as a writer is not streamlined across all of them.
Some pubs have a separate page where you can send an online form. Some accept via emails, some via Medium comments, and I have seen one via Slack as well.
For a newcomer, this is a bit complicated, and I believe this is overcomplicating things. Ideally, there should be only one predefined way of adding yourself as a writer. That would take all the guesswork out of the process.
Maybe there is a reason Medium keeps this process confusing and complicated, maybe this curiosity helps attract more writers. I don’t know. The only thing I know is that multiple folks on separate forums have talked negatively about this.
More trending articles
As an avid reader, I personally feel this is very important. I just love reading trending articles. Whether on Twitter or general news, I love the things that are trending.
Currently medium has 6 trending articles on my home page.
Screenshot from Medium’s homepage
Which is very good. But I want more. I want the flexibility to see more trending articles. 6 articles finish fast, really fast.
An article is trending means that a huge part of the Medium population has already loved the article. And I do not need much validation of the article. I can just sit, relax, and enjoy these trending articles.
The Medium App
The Medium app is pretty basic. And I have seen multiple people complain about it.
Screenshot by the author of a question the author asked on social media
→ Response to comments are pretty tough to manage on the app
→ Copying link of stories and bio is a nightmare
→ General Usability is not that great
→ Editing a comment or story creates a lot of confusion. I by mistake published an article while trying to edit.
The Ugly
Comments as stories
As a writer, this is one of the most irritating issues with Medium. And it’s not only me, I have seen multiple folks on social media reporting it, there are some articles on Medium itself bringing up the issue.
Medium posts your comments are individual stories.
Image by the author
Imagine you have written 100 articles, and you wanted to look at one of your older articles. This feature makes navigation through your published stories near impossible.
The way I navigate is by going to the stats page, then scrolling to the story I want to see, then clicking on the story heading to navigate to the story. It is a multi-step process — thanks to this medium feature.
Steps to go to a particular published story — Image by Author
And I believe most of you would also be going through a similar ordeal every time you want to browse through a story.
I have also seen many readers and writers avoid commenting altogether to overcome this problem. Check out this post
From a logical point of view, I believe comments are intrinsically different from stories and should be treated differently. Comments are usually a couple of lines max, while a story in most cases is north of 1000 words. Comments are just responses to stories.
The solution could be as simple as adding a new tab to the stories page
Image by author
Let’s hope Medium changes this feature in the future.
Future of the Company
Medium has in the past shut down few offices and laid off a few folks. And Medium is a pretty private company, so they keep a lot of their numbers, business practices, roadmaps, etc a secret.
There are a lot of posts stating that Medium is not a very profitable company.
There are some reviews stating the influx of average and non researched articles on Medium. With monetization and dependency on its own editors and writers, is that a risk? Let’s look at this review on App Store:
Average writing from enthusiasts rather than experts IMO Most of the articles on this platform appear as summaries of greater works to me. It’s almost a collection of high school and college book reports with very little researched reporting, like a thesis, magazine, or news outlet. Most of the pieces come off as “something I wrote this morning” and not “I’ve been working on this for a year”
This creates a lot of confusion among the writers who are putting all their efforts into Medium. Medium is considered as “YouTube with text” by many, but can the business model sustain?
Although there is nothing to worry about right now, it forces us to ask the question — “What if the company shuts down?”. What will be the future of the writers who are publishing here? Maybe something to think about, eh?
Share your honest review of Medium. | https://medium.com/@cinto-sunny/medium-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-46a7d7af3d9b | [] | 2020-12-21 15:44:08.202000+00:00 | ['Médium', 'Reading', 'Experience', 'Writing'] |
‘Youth Leadership in Uncertain Times’ | As the world grapples with unprecedented challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, young people are demonstrating their continued leadership in their communities and countries. We can argue the fact that young people are some of the most affected by the pandemic’s socio-economic impacts. Nevertheless, youth are also among the most active in this global response to help alleviate the mammoth task of helping coordinate and manage the community emergency at grassroots level.
Not only are they on the frontlines as health workers, but they are also advancing health and safety in their roles as researchers, activists, innovators, and communicators. As such, decision-makers and potential donors must commit to ensuring youth voices are part of the solutions for a healthier, safer, and gender-equal world.
In the light of the pandemic, we have witnessed an irreversible necessity to evolve, overlap and merge different cultures — particularly in Cape Town, South Africa. As a peacebuilding organisation, we are increasingly searching for sensible ways to identify opportunities to help breakdown cultural barriers with the tact and sensitivity that will enhance intercultural collaborative success. Coaching and Peacebuilding with a cultural emphasis, we believe are essential to learning the specific skill sets needed to transcend cultural boundaries.
Our training involves the sharing of information across different cultures and social groups, including individuals with different religious, social, ethnic, and educationational backgrounds. It seek to understand the differences in how people from variety of cultures act, communicate, and perceive the world around them.
This training will be incredibly important to breaking down cultural barriers and building awareness of cultural norms, as well as enhancing self-awareness and communication skills amongst young adults. We are working to remove cultural barriers by teaching analysis and interpretation for cross-cultural interactions, including the impact of culture on conflict and communication at various levels.
PeaceJam South Africa
www.peacejam.org
www.mentoringpeacebuilders.org
#compassioninaction
#compassion
#empathy
#peacejamsa
#mentorinngpeacebuilderssa | https://medium.com/@southafrica_1183/youth-leadership-in-the-time-of-uncertain-times-bb5698719bb4 | ['Peacejam South Africa'] | 2020-12-21 17:44:49.742000+00:00 | ['Youth Development', 'Peacebuilding', 'Compassion', 'Empathy', 'Youth Empowerment'] |
I don’t think there is a chance in hell that SCOTUS accepts Texas’s lawsuit, but if they somehow… | If you liked this story, I invite you to peruse my publication: The Daily Kerfuffle.
“A celebration of American culture and politics. Because the world needs more hot takes about American culture and politics. Obviously.”
And if you like poetry, I also humbly offer my poetry publication:
I also have a poetry collection available for sale on Amazon:
WHY POETRY
We live in an age of entrenched
political loyalties, suppurating anger,
a frenzied media saturating us
with unrelenting sensationalism.
What poetry reminds us of,
sometimes with just whispers,
is the beauty that does exist
in the world and in ourselves
when we slow down enough
to see, hear, and feel it. | https://medium.com/the-daily-kerfuffle/i-dont-think-there-is-a-chance-in-hell-that-scotus-accepts-texas-s-lawsuit-but-if-they-somehow-e382bab9714f | ['Matthew Spira'] | 2020-12-13 01:08:53.868000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'America', 'Current Events', 'Texas', '2020 Presidential Race'] |
Deep Learning Using Raw Audio Files | Feed raw audio files directly into the deep neural network without any feature extraction.
If you have observed, conventional audio and speech analysis systems are typically built using a pipeline structure, where the first step is to extract various low dimensional hand-crafted acoustic features (e.g., MFCC, pitch, RMSE, Chroma, and whatnot).
Although hand-crafted acoustic features are typically well designed, is still not possible to retain all useful information due to the human knowledge bias and the high compression ratio. And of course, the feature engineering you will have to perform will depend on the type of audio problem that you are working on.
But, how about learning directly from raw waveforms (i.e., raw audio files are directly fed into the deep neural network)?
In this post, let's take learnings from this paper and try to apply it to the following Kaggle dataset.
Go ahead and download the Heatbeat Sounds dataset. Here is how one of the sample audio files from the dataset sounds like
The downloaded dataset will have a label either “normal”, “unlabelled”, or one of the various categories of abnormal heartbeats.
Our objective here is to solve the heartbeat classification problem by directly feeding raw audio files to a deep neural network without doing any hand-crafted feature extraction.
# Prepare Data
Let’s prepare the data to make it easily accessible to the model.
extract_class_id() : Audio file names have its label in it, so let’s separate all the files based on its name and give it a class id. For this experiment let’s consider “unlabelled” as a separate class. So as shown above, in total, we’ll have 5 classes.
convert_data() : We’ll normalize the raw audio data and also make all audio files of equal length by cutting them into 10s if the file is shorter than 10s, pad it with zeros. For each audio file, finally put the class id, sampling rate, and audio data together and dump it into a .pkl file and while doing this make sure to have a proper division of train and test dataset.
## Create and compile the model
As written in the research paper, this architecture takes input time-series waveforms, represented as a long 1D vector, instead of hand-tuned features or specially designed spectrograms.
There are many models with different complexities explained in the paper. For our experiment, we will use the m5 model.
m5 has 4 convolutional layers followed by Batch Normalization and Pooling.
a callback keras.callback is also assigned to the model to reduce the learning rate if the accuracy does not increase over 10 epochs.
## Start training and see the results
Let’s start training our model and see how it performs on the heartbeat sound dataset. As per the above code, the model will be trained over 400 epochs, however, the loss gradient flattened out at 42 epochs for me, and these were the results. How did yours do?
Epoch 42/400 128/832 [===>..........................] - ETA: 14s - loss: 0.0995 - acc: 0.9766
256/832 [========>.....................] - ETA: 11s - loss: 0.0915 - acc: 0.9844
384/832 [============>.................] - ETA: 9s - loss: 0.0896 - acc: 0.9844
512/832 [=================>............] - ETA: 6s - loss: 0.0911 - acc: 0.9824
640/832 [======================>.......] - ETA: 4s - loss: 0.0899 - acc: 0.9844
768/832 [==========================>...] - ETA: 1s - loss: 0.0910 - acc: 0.9844
832/832 [==============================] - 18s 22ms/step - loss: 0.0908 - acc: 0.9844 - val_loss: 0.3131 - val_acc: 0.9200
Congratulations! You’ve saved a lot of time and effort extracting features from audio files. Moreover, by directly feeding the raw audio files the model is doing pretty well.
With this, we learned how to feed raw audio files to a deep neural network. Now you can take this knowledge and apply to the audio problem that you want to solve. You just need to collect audio data normalize it and feed it to your model.
The above code is available at following GitHub repository
That’s it for this post, my name is Vivek Amilkanthwar. See you soon with one of such next time; until then, Happy Learning :)
References: | https://medium.com/in-pursuit-of-artificial-intelligence/deep-learning-using-raw-audio-files-66d5e7bf4cca | ['Vivek Amilkanthawar'] | 2019-04-11 09:51:34.607000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Deep Learning', 'Audio Classification', 'Kaggle', 'Deep Neural Networks'] |
Hope | Hope
Hope is my favorite emotion
I think you should be hopeful
You’ve been on my mind
Hope
All the thoughts
And all of the feelings
You’ve been part of my overwhelming feelings
You’re always on my mind
But things have changed
I’m a man of karma
I believe I’m making the right decision
You need to figure things out
I need some time apart
Please keep well
Hope
How are you doing?
Hope
I’ll let you know
Hope
Keep you posted
Hope
All of this is making me question a lot of things
Hope
You’d be my guy
Hope
I was rejected
Hope
You were too late
I care for you always
I hope we can be friends
I want to be friends but you can’t handle that
I don’t know what the future holds
My heart is fine and set
So in your head you think we’re going to be together?
I like the perseverance
But it’s not working on me
You had your chance but decided not to
You’re not who I want to be with
Please take care
Hope
You’re disturbing my peace
And for that you need to go
Hope
I’m happy and I’m love
Please don’t reach out
Hope
You’re going a little too crazy
We can meet at a coffee shop
Hope
You’re having a harder time than I thought
We can meet tomorrow
Hope
Go home
My heart
Hope
Last night was aggressive
I’m going to disappear for a few days
Hope
I want to leave a good impression and thoughts before we part ways
Hope
No
Hope
Also last night was my way of leaving you a good impression of me
I wanted to be honest how I felt
But I’m going to take a break for a few days
Hope
How’s your day looking?
Hope
Let me know about coffee
Hope
Good night friend
Hope
Actually we can cancel
Hope
I won’t bother you anymore
Hope
I see
Hope
If you want we can grab coffee tomorrow
Hope
I’m there if you need me
Hope
I want your friendship if you’ll allow me to have it
Hope
I could also block you
Hope
I could also not be friends with you
Hope
We need space for a bit
Hope
Well you do
Hope
Ok break is over
Hope
Let’s take a break from speaking for a bit
Hope
I’ll invite you to the wedding
Hope
I’m already someone else’s love
Hope
I’m staying strong with my decision
It just hurts me to see you hurt
To be honest I’m not over you
I can’t think of anything besides cuddling
I love you
You love me
You can’t get mad at me
Had you said something earlier
You’d be my guy
We can be friends
I want you to know where I stand
Also, I love the guy
Texts get lost in translation
You’re getting muted
No need to respond
I’ll reach out
You’re not getting blocked
We’re still friends
I’ve sorted out my thoughts
I’ll keep you posted
Ugh
Had some time to think things over
I’m sticking with my gut
I wish you the best
Write a poem
You’re making this tough
I hope when you find someone
You let them know sooner than later
I want you to be happy
It makes me unhappy that you’re unhappy
I’m happy
Very happy
I decline your offer
It’s a matter of taking a chance on a presented opportunity
Hope
You were my guy who made me happy
Hope
You still are the guy
Hope
Honestly it’s a matter of timing
Hope
I’m sticking with my decision
Hope
Also,
Closed.
Mouths.
Don’t.
Get.
Fed.
Hope. | https://medium.com/@hemolo/hope-7145ab73d33 | ['Kevin Costa'] | 2020-12-24 04:20:22.342000+00:00 | ['Therapy', 'Hemolo', 'Poem', 'Love', 'Hope'] |
3 Things to Do When Life Says NO to You | 1. Stop Crying & Start Exploring
Life is too short to waste in the past.
Rejection might close one path for you, but if you change your perspective, you’ll see that more paths are waiting for you. And if you are lucky enough, soon you’ll realize that the closed door was a gift from God.
“If God closes a door AND a window, consider the fact that it might be time to build a whole new house.” ~Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass
Don’t be shortsighted by failure. Consider every failure as your opportunity to try again.
Stop blaming the world around you and start working for a solution. If an opportunity knocks you, get back up, clear the dust, and try again.
2. Visualize the End
Matthew Syed, in his amazing book, Bounce, talks about possibility thinking.
“A common trait between all the successful athletes is that they visualize their end to every detail.”
Failure is just a phase. Don’t overthink about it. Instead, figure out what didn’t work. Plan an alternative strategy, close your eyes, and visualize the results in your mind.
When you see the end from your mind’s eye, it gives hope, resistance, and a soothing feeling. Indeed, it might be challenging to see the bright side when you are down there alone in the dark. But trust me, life is more about exploring the bright side rather than cursing the world around you.
When you stop thinking about all the negatives that can happen and start thinking about the positives, that’s when miracles happen.
Ignore the critics. Do whatever you can do and leave the rest to your imagination. Let the law of attraction do the rest of the work.
3. Seek Help from an expert
If you plan to go somewhere you haven’t been, you ask people who have already been there. That’s seeking advice. When you fail at something, there is a good chance that mediocre people will blame you or people around you and demotivate you to try again.
But understand that whatever you want to do has been done by someone. Seek out, experts. Read books. Watch videos. Improve your craft and try again. Nothing is impossible. Even the word impossible says that it is possible.
Don’t worry about failing. It’s part of the process. When you die, contemplate and see what went wrong. Ask for guidance, and try again harder.
Life is too short to cry and too big to try.
The successful people don’t fear defeat. They fear not trying again. They fear the regret that they’ll feel by not trying something.
Keep in mind that until you are alive, you are breathing for a reason. Don’t ever think that life is mistreating you because God is just making your life for a bigger purpose.
Get up, get doing, and never look back. | https://medium.com/live-your-life-on-purpose/3-things-to-do-when-life-says-no-to-you-74981700508b | ['Yousuf Rafi'] | 2020-12-13 15:02:30.927000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Failure', 'Life', 'Success', 'Hope'] |
The Trans People You’ll Never Know | The Trans People You’ll Never Know
And why they keep themselves hidden from you
Photo: Road Trip with Raj/Unsplash
We’re five years out from what Time magazine deemed the “transgender tipping point,” and in some ways, the world has fundamentally changed.
In the past five years, thousands of us have come out as trans or nonbinary and started living more authentic lives (myself included). There are far more out trans actors, musicians, writers, and performers than there ever have been before. Some of those out trans performers (particularly the white, thin ones) are getting celebrated for their bravery and beauty, getting high-profile acting roles and magazine covers.
Today, our existence is acknowledged (and milked for revenue) in commercials, toy lines, and TV shows. We are the subject of countless workplace diversity trainings and national political debates. In progressive cities all around the world, earnest cis people are having conversations about putting their pronouns in their email signatures and making bathrooms gender neutral for the sake of our safety.
Trans people used to be considered so rare that people acted as if we didn’t exist. But in the last five years, the number of trans-identified people has doubled, to roughly one in every 200 people. That makes being trans-identified more common than knowing how to code. If you’re reading this essay, the odds are good that you know at least one openly transgender person. If you live in a city and rub elbows with left-leaning people, you probably know several.
But this piece isn’t about the trans people that you know. It’s about the ones that you don’t.
If you’re a cis person, even a super well-meaning one, I guarantee there are several trans people in your life who have never felt safe opening up to you about it. Maybe they transitioned years ago, and now live stealth, letting people assume they’re cis. Perhaps they’re only out to a select handful of trusted loved ones, and you’re not on that list because of something ignorant you said long ago. Or maybe their transition is happening right before your eyes and you keep refusing to see it.
“When somebody finds out that you’re trans, they start treating you differently, even if they saw you as a guy the minute before.”
In the three and a half years that I’ve been out as nonbinary, I’ve spoken to dozens of closeted trans people who have decided to never come out. I know dozens more who have decided to censor or downplay parts of who they are, to keep their cis friends and family from exploding in confusion and rage.
It breaks my heart that so many trans people have chosen to live hidden. And it outrages me how often that is a completely logical choice. Most closeted trans people have a very accurate gauge on how accepting and supportive their families and communities would be. Many have weighed the pros and cons, and determined quite accurately that it’s better to just be quiet.
There are trans people all around you whom you’ll never get to know. Here’s why they’re hiding from you.
They’re not coming out
In her remarkable and bracing essay “I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out,” Jennifer Coates explores her decision to never live publicly as a woman. I can’t do the full essay justice in a few paragraphs — you really should read the whole thing — but here’s a passage where she begins to explain her choice:
“There are social and financial repercussions to transitioning that I cannot afford emotionally or financially. I don’t want to be treated like I have glass bones by well-intentioned cis friends. I don’t want to be told I am ‘so pretty’ when I hate my reflection. It doesn’t make me feel better. It makes me feel worse, and it’s almost impossible to get cis people to turn it off.”
The essay tracks Coates’ gender journey from childhood through her midtwenties, illustrating her life as a sensitive, feminist, self-aware woman who has been boxed in by other people’s transphobic expectations and bigotries. Throughout the piece, Coates conveys in beautiful, aching detail what it’s like to know who you are, but to realize that hiding that truth is the safest, smartest, healthiest choice.
Coates says her decision to remain closeted came with a spirit of acceptance and resolution. Like so many women, cis and trans alike, Coates has chosen not to define herself by her appearance. She could pursue a more feminine presentation, but she knows herself well enough to recognize she’d find this pursuit frustrating more than liberating. Instead, she’s decided instead to spend her life focusing on more important things:
“I wish I looked like that but I don’t and can’t. It sucks and it makes me feel really awful if I brood on it. That’s why I focus on my writing — I’d rather make things. Investing in and building things that aren’t my body helps me cope with the body issues I’ve been saddled with against my will.”
I’ve known a lot of trans people who have gone through similar decision-making processes as Coates. Privately they’ll share that they’re transgender, that they’ve known this about themselves for years — but when they imagine coming out, they cannot envision it ever going well. There is too much to lose. Too much violence to risk. Too many awkward, undermining conversations with close-minded people. Too many lost relationships.
“I know I make a handsome-looking guy, and I’m fine with people thinking that’s what I am,” my friend Lena once told me.
For some trans people, coming out is a beautiful and liberatory experience. I’m very glad I decided to do it. The improvements to my mental health have well been worth the struggles. But that just isn’t true of everyone. Not everyone has the buffer of privilege that I have — the whiteness, the thinness, the relative wealth. I have deep respect for people like Coates, who have weighed their transition options and chosen not to pursue them. And I know far, far more people like that than most cis folks could even imagine.
They’re not transitioning
My friend Lena is a manager at a tech company in Texas. In the past decade of her life, Lena has worked hard to overcome the intense depression, anxiety, and social isolation that used to plague her. She’s clawed herself out of the pit, developed healthy habits, and built a comfortable, successful life for herself. She has a lot of friends and is well-respected by her employees. Almost everyone in Lena’s life believes she is a man — but usually, that doesn’t bother her.
“I know I make a handsome-looking guy, and I’m fine with people thinking that’s what I am,” she once told me. “I go on dates with women I find attractive and who feel the same way about me. I have a good job where people look up to me. If I transitioned, it would change how people see me, and I could really lose a lot.”
Trans women are harshly discriminated against in the workplace, and they face a high risk of physical violence — especially in red states like Texas, where Lena lives. And with the Trump administration stripping trans people of legal protections at every possible opportunity, this is unlikely to get better anytime soon. In this context, Lena’s decision to remain male-presenting makes complete sense.
With close friends and romantic partners, Lena is up-front about who she is. She exclusively dates bisexual women, who find both her “male” appearance and her female identity to be attractive. All of Lena’s close friends use her female name, and refer to her with feminine pronouns. She wears feminine clothing, wigs, and makeup in the privacy of her home. But when she ventures out into the world, Lena lets people assume she is male.
“I do feel joy and peace when someone uses feminine words for me,” she says, “But people using male terms for me doesn’t hurt, per se. So it just doesn’t make sense to come out to everyone and to fight to be recognized.”
A gender transition is rarely a graceful and easy process. Whether a trans person uses hormones, surgery, or simply a new wardrobe to assert who they are, there are bound to be moments of discomfort and social awkwardness in even the best of circumstances. Far more often, there are serious social repercussions to changing one’s appearance in these ways.
Lena has decided that it’s better for her to just live as a woman in the private spaces of her life, and to continue existing at work as a man. Cis people often fail to realize it, but there are trans men, women, and nonbinary people like Lena in just about every workplace in the country.
They’re stealth
When he was fresh out of high school, Miles began the medical aspect of his gender transition. This was in the early 2000s, when public awareness of trans issues was far lower than it is now, and access to transition-related medical care was subject to gatekeeping by doctors and psychiatrists. Despite all that difficulty, Miles was ultimately able to get the hormones and surgery he needed. Once he did, his transition was a pretty smooth process.
“People were calling me ‘sir’ within a couple months,” he says. “And after a year anybody who met me just assumed I was a cisgender guy.”
Every time you say something ignorant about trans people, you make the closeted people around you far less likely to come out.
As soon as people started seeing him as a cisgender man, Miles decided to go stealth about the fact he was trans. He deleted all his old social media profiles and untagged all the photos of his prehormone self. When conversations with new friends touched on topics like childhood memories or early dating experiences, Miles left out any details that would reveal him to be trans.
“Sometimes people think it’s dishonest, which I find so annoying,” he says. “I just want to maintain the impression in people’s eyes that I’m male, which I am. When somebody finds out that you’re trans, they start treating you differently, even if they saw you as a guy the minute before.”
I’ve heard other trans people express the exact same sentiment. One friend of mine, Geoff, noticed that as soon as he told his professor that he was a transgender man, the teacher started slipping up and calling him she. Even though Geoff has a full beard, and looks stereotypically male to most people, respect for his identity waned the second his professor became aware of his history. So I can’t blame Miles for wanting to obscure his history from the people around him.
Miles sometimes feels conflicted about his choice to go stealth.
“I feel like I could educate a lot of people about trans issues if I told them,” he says. “I wish I could turn to all those people who are panicked about sharing a bathroom with a trans person and tell them, you’ve been using the same restroom as a trans guy for years, and it’s me, hello.”
For the time being, though, Miles has chosen to remain stealth. He doesn’t think he should have to lose respect and recognition in order to educate the cis people in his life. I’ve met a lot of cis folks who don’t even realize people like Miles exist; they think that they can spot a trans person easily every time, and they fail to understand that for many trans people, a lack of visibility can feel far safer than public recognition.
They’re tired of fighting for respect
Recently, I overheard two cis male friends talking about me after they thought I had left the room. When I had been in the same room as them, their pronoun use had been 100% correct, and their language was totally affirming and respectful. But as soon as I was out of sight, one of the guy’s carefully practiced gender respect fell apart, and theys and thems started being replaced with shes. To my dismay, the other man didn’t correct him.
“They,” I called out, from around the corner. “Not she.”
“Sorry Devon,” the man replied hastily. He was obviously startled. “Sorry. I’m only human. I make mistakes.”
I think both these men would describe themselves as allies to trans people. But if they both respected me as much as they pretended to when I was around, it wouldn’t have been hard for them to continue using my pronouns when I was no longer there to hear it.
I can already anticipate a few outraged cis readers scrolling down to the comment section, ready remark about how I ought to be more patient and understand that people make mistakes. I do understand that people make mistakes. I let a lot of things slide. Too many, really. You have no idea how much patience I give to the cis people in my life. You have no idea how rarely that patience ends up being rewarded.
When this cis friend started misgendering me, I initially held back. I waited a few minutes to see if he’d notice the slip-up, or if the other man would correct him. That didn’t happen. The guy just kept calling me she and it went totally unremarked upon. If I wanted to show self-respect, I had to jump in. So I did.
I don’t think a lot of cis people recognize just how exhausting exchanges like these can be. It takes a lot of mental energy to constantly monitor how people talk about you, ready at all times to jump in and stand up for yourself. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that if I want to be respected, I will have to fight for it. No amount of patience and politeness is gonna make people change.
What hurts the most is how defensive and sensitive cis people can be in the face of even the most careful, polite self-advocacy.
When people get corrected for using the wrong name or pronoun, they often get really squirrely. They beg me to forgive them, or they try to explain the mistake away. Sometimes they’ll prattle on and on about all the times that they did get the words right, and how hard they are working. Sometimes they just tell me that I need to be more patient. But what cis people really mean, when they ask you to be patient, is that they want you to wait for a day that will never come. If I don’t hold them accountable, no one ever will.
Because all of this work is tiring and emotionally diminishing, most trans people decide to choose their battles. We pretty much have to. We have to make decisions on the fly about who is worth trying to educate, and who will respond poorly or ignore us. This means that for every outspoken, assertive trans person that you have ever encountered, there are at least twice as many who have chosen to remain silent around you about any harm that you’ve done.
They don’t even know they’re trans
The last kind of unseen trans person that you encounter on a regular basis without realizing it is the trans person who doesn’t know that they’re trans. Even though trans and nonbinary people are more visible than ever before, there are still lots of closeted trans people who don’t have access to the support and information they need to embrace who they are.
I had to talk to a lot of trans people before I could truly accept that I was one. I had to read a lot of detailed, heartfelt personal accounts by nonbinary writers before I could recognize my gender dysphoria for what it was. And even once I had an inkling, I still needed a lot of support and encouragement to push through the self-doubt and guilt. My insecurities kept telling me I should just shut up about all this trans stuff and stop being so self-absorbed and annoying.
Some of us spend years in “egg mode,” putting up defenses and letting the fear of judgment keep us from proudly asserting who we are. Some trans people still spend their entire lives trapped behind that shell of denial and fear. I guarantee you’ve met some of these people. In fact, you may have unwittingly said or done something to drive them farther back into the closet. | https://gen.medium.com/the-trans-people-youll-never-know-e7aa0fa3666b | ['Devon Price'] | 2019-12-17 17:04:12.817000+00:00 | ['Transgender', 'Equality', 'Gender Equality', 'LGBTQ', 'Identity'] |
Topic Modeling in Python: Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) | Topic Modeling in Python: Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)
How to get started with topic modeling using LDA in Python
Introduction
Topic Models, in a nutshell, are a type of statistical language models used for uncovering hidden structure in a collection of texts. In a practical and more intuitively, you can think of it as a task of:
Dimensionality Reduction, where rather than representing a text T in its feature space as {Word_i: count(Word_i, T) for Word_i in Vocabulary}, you can represent it in a topic space as {Topic_i: Weight(Topic_i, T) for Topic_i in Topics}
Unsupervised Learning, where it can be compared to clustering, as in the case of clustering, the number of topics, like the number of clusters, is an output parameter. By doing topic modeling, we build clusters of words rather than clusters of texts. A text is thus a mixture of all the topics, each having a specific weight
Tagging, abstract “topics” that occur in a collection of documents that best represents the information in them.
There are several existing algorithms you can use to perform the topic modeling. The most common of it are, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA/LSI), Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (pLSA), and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at LDA, and implement our first topic model using the sklearn implementation in python 2.7
Theoretical Overview
LDA is a generative probabilistic model that assumes each topic is a mixture over an underlying set of words, and each document is a mixture of over a set of topic probabilities.
We can describe the generative process of LDA as, given the M number of documents, N number of words, and prior K number of topics, the model trains to output:
psi, the distribution of words for each topic K
phi, the distribution of topics for each document i
Parameters of LDA
Alpha parameter is Dirichlet prior concentration parameter that represents document-topic density — with a higher alpha, documents are assumed to be made up of more topics and result in more specific topic distribution per document. Beta parameter is the same prior concentration parameter that represents topic-word density — with high beta, topics are assumed to made of up most of the words and result in a more specific word distribution per topic.
LDA Implementation
The complete code is available as a Jupyter Notebook on GitHub
Loading data Data cleaning Exploratory analysis Preparing data for LDA analysis LDA model training Analyzing LDA model results
Loading data
For this tutorial, we’ll use the dataset of papers published in NIPS conference. The NIPS conference (Neural Information Processing Systems) is one of the most prestigious yearly events in the machine learning community. The CSV data file contains information on the different NIPS papers that were published from 1987 until 2016 (29 years!). These papers discuss a wide variety of topics in machine learning, from neural networks to optimization methods, and many more.
Let’s start by looking at the content of the file
# Importing modules
import pandas as pd
import os os.chdir('..') # Read data into papers
papers = pd.read_csv('./data/NIPS Papers/papers.csv') # Print head
papers.head()
Sample of raw data
Data Cleaning
Since the goal of this analysis is to perform topic modeling, we will solely focus on the text data from each paper, and drop other metadata columns
# Remove the columns
papers = papers.drop(columns=['id', 'event_type', 'pdf_name'], axis=1) # Print out the first rows of papers
papers.head()
Remove punctuation/lower casing
Next, let’s perform a simple preprocessing on the content of paper_text column to make them more amenable for analysis, and reliable results. To do that, we’ll use a regular expression to remove any punctuation, and then lowercase the text
# Load the regular expression library
import re # Remove punctuation
papers['paper_text_processed'] = papers['paper_text'].map(lambda x: re.sub('[,\.!?]', '', x)) # Convert the titles to lowercase
papers['paper_text_processed'] = papers['paper_text_processed'].map(lambda x: x.lower()) # Print out the first rows of papers
papers['paper_text_processed'].head()
Exploratory Analysis
To verify whether the preprocessing happened correctly, we’ll make a word cloud using the wordcloud package to get a visual representation of most common words. It is key to understanding the data and ensuring we are on the right track, and if any more preprocessing is necessary before training the model.
# Import the wordcloud library
from wordcloud import WordCloud # Join the different processed titles together.
long_string = ','.join(list(papers['paper_text_processed'].values)) # Create a WordCloud object
wordcloud = WordCloud(background_color="white", max_words=5000, contour_width=3, contour_color='steelblue') # Generate a word cloud
wordcloud.generate(long_string) # Visualize the word cloud
wordcloud.to_image()
Prepare text for LDA Analysis
Next, let’s work to transform the textual data in a format that will serve as an input for training LDA model. We start by converting the documents into a simple vector representation (Bag of Words BOW). Next, we will convert a list of titles into lists of vectors, all with length equal to the vocabulary.
We’ll then plot the ten most frequent words based on the outcome of this operation (the list of document vectors). As a check, these words should also occur in the word cloud.
# Load the library with the CountVectorizer method
from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import CountVectorizer
import numpy as np import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
sns.set_style('whitegrid')
%matplotlib inline # Helper function
def plot_10_most_common_words(count_data, count_vectorizer):
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
words = count_vectorizer.get_feature_names()
total_counts = np.zeros(len(words))
for t in count_data:
total_counts+=t.toarray()[0]
count_dict = (zip(words, total_counts))
count_dict = sorted(count_dict, key=lambda x:x[1], reverse=True)[0:10]
words = [w[0] for w in count_dict]
counts = [w[1] for w in count_dict]
x_pos = np.arange(len(words))
plt.figure(2, figsize=(15, 15/1.6180))
plt.subplot(title='10 most common words')
sns.set_context("notebook", font_scale=1.25, rc={"lines.linewidth": 2.5})
sns.barplot(x_pos, counts, palette='husl')
plt.xticks(x_pos, words, rotation=90)
plt.xlabel('words')
plt.ylabel('counts')
plt.show() # Initialise the count vectorizer with the English stop words
count_vectorizer = CountVectorizer(stop_words='english') # Fit and transform the processed titles
count_data = count_vectorizer.fit_transform(papers['paper_text_processed']) # Visualise the 10 most common words
plot_10_most_common_words(count_data, count_vectorizer)
Top 10 most common words
LDA model training and results visualization
To keep things simple, we will only tweak the number of topic parameters.
import warnings
warnings.simplefilter("ignore", DeprecationWarning) # Load the LDA model from sk-learn
from sklearn.decomposition import LatentDirichletAllocation as LDA
# Helper function
def print_topics(model, count_vectorizer, n_top_words):
words = count_vectorizer.get_feature_names()
for topic_idx, topic in enumerate(model.components_):
print("
Topic #%d:" % topic_idx)
print(" ".join([words[i]
for i in topic.argsort()[:-n_top_words - 1:-1]]))
# Tweak the two parameters below
number_topics = 5
number_words = 10 # Create and fit the LDA model
lda = LDA(n_components=number_topics, n_jobs=-1)
lda.fit(count_data) # Print the topics found by the LDA model
print("Topics found via LDA:")
print_topics(lda, count_vectorizer, number_words)
Final Topics found vis LDA
Analyzing LDA model results
Now that we have a trained model let’s visualize the topics for interpretability. To do so, we’ll use a popular visualization package, pyLDAvis which is designed to help interactively with:
Better understanding and interpreting individual topics, and Better understanding the relationships between the topics.
For (1), you can manually select each topic to view its top most frequent and/or “relevant” terms, using different values of the λ parameter. This can help when you’re trying to assign a human interpretable name or “meaning” to each topic.
For (2), exploring the Intertopic Distance Plot can help you learn about how topics relate to each other, including potential higher-level structure between groups of topics.
%%time
from pyLDAvis import sklearn as sklearn_lda
import pickle
import pyLDAvis LDAvis_data_filepath = os.path.join('./ldavis_prepared_'+str(number_topics))
# # this is a bit time consuming - make the if statement True
# # if you want to execute visualization prep yourself
if 1 == 1: LDAvis_prepared = sklearn_lda.prepare(lda, count_data, count_vectorizer) with open(LDAvis_data_filepath, 'w') as f:
pickle.dump(LDAvis_prepared, f)
# load the pre-prepared pyLDAvis data from disk
with open(LDAvis_data_filepath) as f:
LDAvis_prepared = pickle.load(f) pyLDAvis.save_html(LDAvis_prepared, './ldavis_prepared_'+ str(number_topics) +'.html')
Closing Notes
Machine learning has become increasingly popular over the past decade, and recent advances in computational availability have led to exponential growth to people looking for ways how new methods can be incorporated to advance the field of Natural Language Processing.
Often, we treat topic models as black-box algorithms, but hopefully, this post addressed to shed light on the underlying math, and intuitions behind it, and high-level code to get you started with any textual data.
In the next article, we’ll go one step deeper into understanding how you can evaluate the performance of topic models, tune its hyper-parameters to get more intuitive and reliable results.
Sources:
[1] Topic model — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_model
[2] Distributed Strategies for Topic Modeling. https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/46405/ParallelTopicModels.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y
[3] Topic Mapping — Software — Resources — Amaral Lab. https://amaral.northwestern.edu/resources/software/topic-mapping
[4] A Survey of Topic Modeling in Text Mining. https://thesai.org/Downloads/Volume6No1/Paper_21-A_Survey_of_Topic_Modeling_in_Text_Mining.pdf | https://towardsdatascience.com/end-to-end-topic-modeling-in-python-latent-dirichlet-allocation-lda-35ce4ed6b3e0 | ['Shashank Kapadia'] | 2019-09-05 22:20:58.102000+00:00 | ['Topic Modeling', 'Data Science', 'Python', 'In Depth Analysis', 'Towards Data Science'] |
The Next Era of Tech | Quantum Computing.
It seems like that is the BIGGEST buzzword after artificial intelligence. However, a lot of the resources I used to try to understand the concepts of quantum computing were difficult to understand quickly. After comprehending the concepts myself, I decided to create this article as an easily-comprehensible guide to understanding the next era of tech: quantum computing.
N.A. IBM System Q One. N.A. IBM. https://www.ibm.com/quantum-computing/.
What is Quantum Computing?
Today’s technology is based on classical physics. However, classical physics is limiting our technology’s capabilities, and causing computers to be less efficient. Quantum computers are based on quantum physics, particularly quantum mechanics, which explains the physical properties of nature on the scale of an atom. This allows computers to be more efficient and increase their capabilities.
You must be wondering, how exactly do quantum computers become more efficient? Let me explain…
Particles with Superpowers?!
Quantum computers introduce aspects from quantum physics that computers have never seen before:
Superposition
Allowing subatomic particles to be a wave and particle at the same time.
Entanglement
Allowing different particles to be affected simultaneously even if only one particle is directly affected by a cause.
Quantum tunnelling
Allowing particles to pass through barriers, such as transistors in a classical computer.
Kurzgesagt — In a Nutshell. “Quantum Computers Explained — Limits of Human Technology.” YouTube, commentary by Steve Taylor, December 8, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhHMJCUmq28.
Essentially, these superhero-like particles can be in two or more states at once, be psychics, and walk through walls. Using these aspects, quantum computers process information in a very different way compared to classical computers. A normal computer uses bits, a series of ones and zeros to understand information. However, a bit can ONLY be a one or a zero. A quantum computer uses qubits, which are able to exist in multiple states because of superposition. This allows them to be a 1 and 0 at the same time. How cool is that?
So read on…
Examples of Efficiency
As a result of qubits using properties such as the ones outlined above, quantum computers are MUCH more efficient at solving certain problems compared to classical computers. The capabilities of a classical computer are limited because computer parts can only be so small until quantum physics properties, such as quantum tunnelling, begin to affect the computer’s functionality negatively.
An example of this is an electron passing through a transistor using quantum tunneling in a classical computer. This can happen when computer parts become super small, and venture into the quantum physics realm.
Kurzgesagt — In a Nutshell. “Quantum Computers Explained — Limits of Human Technology.” YouTube, commentary by Steve Taylor, December 8, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhHMJCUmq28.
Instead, quantum computing is able to use the properties of quantum physics to its advantage. For example, a quantum computer is much faster at solving the travelling salesman problem than a classical computer. In case you aren’t familiar with the problem, it states that a salesman needs to visit a list of cities. Using the distance between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city and then returns the salesman to the origin city?
This problem can be solved by a classical computer, but it would take a really long time since the classical computer would take the approach of testing every single route individually. For instance, if given a list of 33 000 cities, a classical computer would take 15 years to solve the question. If the computer used a list of 85 000 cities, it would take 136 years to solve the problem. With a quantum computer, since qubits can be in different states at once, the computer could be testing multiple routes at once. This makes the process much more efficient.
Now here comes the good part…
Real-Life Applications of Quantum Computing
Drug Development
Simulating chemical compositions for different compounds is another problem that is difficult for a classical computer to perform efficiently. However, a quantum computer would be able to perform this task quickly. One of the companies working on drug development using quantum computers is ProteinQure. This company combines technologies such as AI and quantum computing to engineer medicine.
Cybersecurity
Today’s online security systems are based on the factoring of very large numbers, since this is a task that takes a lot of time for a classical computer to perform. These systems will be undermined by quantum computers because they are able to factor large numbers fairly quickly. However, don’t panic just yet! Today’s quantum computers are too error-prone to begin dismantling our security systems, but this is an area to look at for the future of cybersecurity.
Despite being able to dismantle our encryption systems, quantum computing can also contribute to creating stronger cybersecurity systems. Post-quantum cryptography, also known as quantum-resistant cryptography, is an area of study that is developing encryption systems that are secure against both classical and quantum computers. Post-Quantum is a company that is currently working on creating post-quantum cryptography encryption systems!
Weather Forecasting and Climate Change
Even with the technology used to predict weather forecasts today, sometimes the predictions can be completely wrong. Quantum computers are able to analyze lots of data that goes into weather forecasting, so they would be much more precise when predicting the weather. However, this is an application of quantum computing that is in the early stages of research.
Additionally, quantum computing can be incredibly useful in the fight against climate change. Quantum computers can build improved climate models, allowing us to react to the potential impacts of climate change faster. Moreover, quantum computing can help combat climate change by simulating complex molecules for carbon capture that are cheaper and more effective than current models. This is definitely an exciting and very impactful application for quantum computing!
Some of the Cons of Current Quantum Computers
Even though quantum computing is part of the next era of technology, there is still a long way to go for these computers to become more mainstream. These are just some of the cons of quantum computers that need to be solved to move forward:
They need to be kept really cold (-273°C) to slow down the particles to prevent collisions that could alter outcomes.
They make a lot of noise. Click here to listen to IBM’s quantum computers.
They have tons of errors at the moment.
There’s definitely still a lot of potential for improvement for quantum computers!
Key Takeaways
Classical physics is limiting our technology’s capabilities, and causing computers to be less efficient.
Quantum computers introduce aspects from quantum physics, allowing them to be more efficient.
These aspects include superposition, entanglement, and quantum tunnelling.
Quantum computers use qubits instead of bits and apply the principles of quantum physics outlined above to be efficient.
Real-life applications of quantum computing include drug development, cybersecurity, weather forecasting, and climate change
Quantum computers are definitely leading the way into the next era of technology. Leave a comment down below regarding your opinions on quantum computing! When do you believe quantum computers will become more mainstream and well-known? | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/the-next-era-of-tech-6f7323333e40 | ['Ramandeep Saini'] | 2020-07-30 15:22:36.921000+00:00 | ['Climate Change', 'Healthcare', 'Technology', 'Quantum Computing', 'Cybersecurity'] |
Download Google Chrome Offliner Instaler | Download Google Chrome Offliner Instaler
Google Chrome Offliner Installer is one of the browsers made for surfing on a modern website. This is also a browser with users the most current. Google chrome Offliner Installer is available for Windows 10/8/7, MacOS, Linux and other operating systems. When you do the installer on your Windows, You instantly get the installer online. This means that the settings which You download will connect to Google’s Servers with an active Internet Connection. This is one thing that is difficult for the people who will be really slow and Internet Connection is not stable, then from it we make the link an alternative for you who want to download google chrome Offliner Installer.
What are the Advantages and disadvantages of doing the Installation Online and Offline for Google Chrome
The advantages of online installer is that You will get the latest version of Google Chrome. Shortage of online installer may be the installation process is long and if you want to install on a computer that is more than 1 ( stout) then you will, depending on the speed of the internet connection. When You use the online installer to install Google Chrome on many computers, this also waste the bandwidth of the internet connection. The latest version of Google Chrome sometimes is not necessarily more stable than the previous version. In this case, the offline installer is more appropriate.
Users of the internet not many know how to get offline installer of Google Chrome. Google actually provides offline installer of Google Chrome and allow users to download it. Offline installer Google Chrome contains a whole setup file and no longer required an internet connection when install it. If You want to Google Chrome offline installer , You can download through the link below:
Download Instaler Google Chrome
How to download (download) the installation of the offline Google Chrome quite easily. Click one of the links above to download the version of Google Chrome is desired. Site in download page Google Chrome open, click the Download button and kemubol Accept and Install.
Reda Also
Download Telegram For Desktop | https://medium.com/@browserdowload/download-google-chrome-offliner-instaler-28d1da55a4f | ['Delia Anastasya'] | 2021-03-19 04:14:41.115000+00:00 | ['Windows', 'Sofware', 'Google Chrome', 'Download Google Chrome', 'Chrome'] |
Shopping using Credit and Debit Cards? Two Must Have Mobile Apps For You | October to December is the season of shopping in India as these months wrap the key festivals like Diwali and Christmas. Shopping in urban India and to a larger extend in semi-urban India (tier 2 cities) is now happening via either credit cards or debit cards and in some categories via mobile payment apps — thanks to the government initiatives. This has increased fierce competition among the Indian banks to gain the credit card or even the debit card market share. Infact the use of credit cards and debit cards is currently at all time high in India. Similarly there is a nail biting competition among the payment apps like PayTM, Amazon Pay, Google Pay, etc to gain market share.
Competition is always healthy and even so more for the end consumers. In this case, the consumers are benefiting by the laundry list of offers the banks are offering on their cards (both credit and debit) via their merchant network. These offers from banks vary from Lifestyle to Electronics to Dining and many others which are both online as well as instore offers. Now the question is — how do we as consumers make the most of these offers from the banks on credit/debit cards and also benefit from the spends we make using our credit and debit cards ?
What happens in real life is that most of us know that there are deals and offers on our credit and debit cards but have no idea of what the deals are, where to look for and surely not at our fingertips (especially to know what are the offers when we are at the purchase window in a shopping mall or in a restaurant). Moreover in urban Indian , most people have more than one credit or debit cards in which case the problem becomes even more difficult as they have no idea as to which card should be used in which place to get the most benefit. So we really lose on those lucrative offers that are there on our cards. This is Problem No 1.
Let us move on to our next challenge. If a person makes use of credit cards for shopping , he/she typically is aware of the credit card points one gets which can be redeemed for gifts or vouchers. But what pains is that when you pay the hefty credit card bill you do not get incentivized in any form (other than building a good credit score — which by the way is important :). But this is Problem No 2.
Lets move to the next inhibitor that we card shopper have. If you are using credit cards , one thing that always irritates a person is that he/she has no idea of what are the benefits associated with his cards in terms of airport lounge access, movie tickets, etc. One is only aware of this information when he/she buys the card and then later on it is gone. This is Problem No 3.
Now, after some research here are two apps that every shopaholic in India who uses cards should have on their mobile phones which will help him/her to save and gain.
RUSSH
This is a cute app available both on Android and iOS that shows all the in-store offers on your credit and debit cards . What is cool is that it shows it over a google map allowing you to search for deals associated with cards in a given location or a city. It shows deals from Dining, Lifestyle, Electronics and Others. I used the app couple of times to discover the Dining deals associated with my card and saved 20% on my bill using my debit card without the need for Zomato Gold or other things. Additionally it shows the benefits associated with a credit card like airport lounge access, movie tickets, rewards points information at finger tips. I use to always struggle at airport lounge wondering of my card has access or not. This app helps solves that problem. The best part of the app is that it DOES NOT require any credit or debit card details. All you have to do is select the type or card or bank and you are all set.
If one wants to search for deals only associated with credit and debit card then the app allows you to do a search in the deals listing screen over a bank name. What would be cool is to have a filter that shows only deals associated with my cards. Writing to the app team , they said that it is coming soon– which is cool :-). The other thing it says is that it will show even Online Deals associated with the cards and that is going to come soon- that will surely be handy.
So in a nutshell, I will recommend this app to be in your pocket phone if you are a credit or debit card user. It will help address our Problem 1 and Problem 3 — save and gain on deals that you have been missing and are eligiable for.
Link to website: www.russh.in
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.russh
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/russh/id1471083101?ls=1
Coming to our Problem 2: In the season of shopping and travelling we get huge credit card bills (this is not applicable for debit card usage). Would it be nice to get rewarded for paying or credit card bills. This is where my next app recommendation comes handy.
2. Cred
Cred is a cool looking app that allows you to pay credit card bills and get rewarded for the same. Is that not what we want. You are required to register your credit card with this app (well yeah — this is a requirement for this app unlike RUSSH app) and then you pay your card bills monthly using this app via your bank gateways or so. You are awarded with Cred reward points which you can redeem for some cool gifts or dining via the Cred app.
Now their dining benefits are not yet equally spread across different cities but that will hopefully even out over a period. Also I will recommend that if you pay your credit card bills via Cred app then do it 2–3 days prior to your last day of payment as the app takes couple of days to reflect the payment on the card — you don't want to get penalized if something goes wrong or goes late.
Website: https://www.cred.club/
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dreamplug.androidapp&hl=en_IN
iOS: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dreamplug.androidapp&hl=en_IN
So in summary, post my research RUSSH and CRED are two apps that I will recommend every Indian buyer who uses credit or debit cards for payments to have it on your phones. If you are still a person dealing in cash, then it is time for your to modernize :-).
RUSSH is one app that you will tend to use it more frequently especially every time you are on a shopping speer or looking for a dine out place, while Cred you will use it every month of your credit card payment cycle. Hope you all shopaholic like me sitting out there benefit from these recommendations Cheers. | https://medium.com/@thinknaive/shopping-using-credit-and-debit-cards-two-must-have-mobile-apps-for-you-14341a6aa655 | ['Sandeep Patil'] | 2019-11-02 17:33:05.002000+00:00 | ['Payments', 'Discounts', 'Offers', 'Credit Cards', 'Deals'] |
How to remove Android Application from the recent list | There are two methods for removing the app from the recent list of app.
1. Using Manifest file
2. Programmatically
1) Manifest File
As we know Manifest file is used to declare all activities using the activity tag in XML. So if you want to remove the app from the recent list in Android then you are at the right place. We will discuss both methods in this article. In your activity tag, you have to mention three attributes which are listed below.
1. android:excludeFromRecents=”true”
2. android:taskAffinity=””
3. android:launchMode=”singleInstance”
2) Removing the app from the recent list programmatically in android
We can use finishAndRemoveTask method to remove the activity from the recent app list. | https://medium.com/@codingwithsaud/how-to-remove-android-application-from-the-recent-list-263627a732fc | [] | 2020-12-05 08:56:11.472000+00:00 | ['Android App Development', 'AndroidDev', 'Sofware Engineering', 'Technology', 'Remove App Recent List'] |
Extended routing strategies help cut costs and boost services — home location. Part 3. | Businesses can improve the efficiency of their delivery and service operations through route planning. By adjusting routes based on factors such as distance, time, and other scheduled stops, transportation expenses can be reduced, while providing reliable scheduling for customers and drivers. For optimal results, routing strategies need to be flexible and responsive to the many dynamic components of logistics management, from traffic to delivery stops. Through extended routing strategies, businesses have additional options to deliver more quickly, more accurately, and at a lower cost.
Routing that applies a driver’s home location
Depending on the locations of your warehouse, your customers, and your drivers, you may find the most optimal delivery route is not a typical round trip. Extended routing strategies enable businesses to get products to their customers more quickly, by looking to leverage driver location at various points along with the delivery timeframe.
For example, a driver can start working from a home location and be paid for the distance and time spent on the way from home to a warehouse. This is an example of inbound routing.
The second example of an extended routing strategy is when a driver loads a truck in the evening prior to a route starting in the morning, drives home, and starts from there. Another option, which is often used by companies that provide services to customers on a service route, start and finish their runs without stopping at an office.
Each of these options has benefits for a business in reducing the time for deliveries and minimizing costs. Manually planning and managing these different methods is a challenge. Through automated route planning and optimization software, businesses can quickly plan and implement each of these types of routes, calculating distances and times with accuracy.
Extended route planning strategy
Choosing an extended route planning strategy gives more options, whether a business needs a dynamic or fixed routing design.
Track-POD is an advanced delivery and route planning software solution that helps businesses efficiently arrange multiple deliveries with ease. With tools for optimizing drivers’ runs with multiple stops in one click, Track-POD generates the fastest routes to deliver more in less time. Track-POD’s optimization capabilities mean businesses can determine the best route based on a driver’s starting point, destination, and waypoints. By considering vehicle capacities, time windows, and mileage, Track-POD helps businesses deliver quickly, accurately, and at the lowest cost.
For more information on how Track-POD can help your business take complete control of the delivery process, learn more here. | https://medium.com/@trackpod/extended-routing-strategies-help-cut-costs-and-boost-services-home-location-part-3-69b75e3187d | [] | 2020-12-10 14:30:36.854000+00:00 | ['Logistics', 'Proof Of Delivery', 'Delivery', 'Business', 'Software'] |
Multisignature Wallet for ETH and ERC20 Tokens | We have created an extended version of Multisignature Wallet dApp. This wallet is applicable not only for Ether, but also for ERC20 tokens. Try it now in our Marketplace.
New Multisignature Wallet creating
If you need to use Ether and ERC20 tokens in your wallet — this solution is for you. If you need a wallet only for Ether, it’s better for you to create an older version of the Multisignature Wallet dApp, because it needs less Gas for creation.
New Multisignature Wallet interface
For using your ERC20 tokens in your multisignature wallet you need to send them directly to the Wallet address and then add them in the Wallet interface by entering the token’s smart contract address.
Adding tokens and tokens list
The mechanism of sending multisignature transactions with tokens is the same with sending Ether. One of the wallet’s owners creates a transaction, and then it must be approved by neccessary number of owners, then transaction is able to be sent.
Token sending transaction
Try it now on https://dappbuilder.io/builder
Or watch the code on https://github.com/DAPPBUILDER/dApp-Builder
Stay in touch for for updates via | https://medium.com/ethereum-dapp-builder/multisignature-wallet-for-eth-and-erc20-tokens-d0cc2e0a4c82 | ['Dapp Builder Team'] | 2018-09-27 12:11:03.288000+00:00 | ['Token', 'Ethereum', 'Development', 'ICO', 'Blockchain'] |
Pinned, Punched and Prayed over for Being Gay | Twenty-three year old Sean Cormie just wanted to please his mom
She’d been urging him to join her in church since he came out to her as gay last spring. He hesitated for months, but finally relented two Sundays ago.
“I wanted to go to church to make my mom proud and make her happy,” he said.
He hesitated because he didn’t believe that he and his new boyfriend would be truly welcome. When he finally did attend a service at the First Assembly of God in Blackwell, Oklahoma, his worst fears were realized.
Congregants surrounded him to “pray away the gay” as his boyfriend was forcibly pushed out of the sanctuary. Members began to speak in tongues and pray over Cormie. They eventually physically assaulted him, somebody (allegedly a church elder) punching him in the face, leaving him partially conscious with a black eye and other injuries.
They hold me down, pin me down, and I’m crying, and the Holy Spirit just comes through me, and they keep speaking in tongues, praying over me. I was just crying ‘mercy, mercy.’
Cormie told KFOR TV in Oklahoma City that, “I couldn’t believe it, a church of all places would show hate and not love.” He believes being gay is a sin, but he says he can’t change who he is. It turns out his church isn’t OK with that.
He filed a police report about the assault, and now he’s receiving anonymous, threatening phone calls urging him to drop the matter. He won’t, saying he wants to publicize his assault and see the church face consequences for its actions.
His partner Gary Gardner told KWTV of Oklahoma City that the two men want First Assembly shut down. “If they’re going to treat people like that, they don’t need to be open.”
The church response
Pastors Bill and Tami McKissick posted a terse announcement on the church Facebook page last week.
This began as a family matter that escalated. Our church would never condone restraint of any person unless they were engaged in violent activity. There is much more to this incident, and we are cooperating fully with law enforcement to hopefully bring all of the facts to light as a rush to judgment is not in anyone’s best interest.
Neither pastor has apologized despite multiple requests on Facebook. Neither has condemned the violence. Neither has urged church members to accept gay people, to treat them kindly, or to refrain from judgement and violence. Their only public position is that the public have engaged in a “rush to judgement.”
Pinned to the floor, prayed over, and beaten
Regardless of why church members shoved Gary Gardner out of the church, and regardless of why they pinned Sean Cormie to the floor, prayed over him, and punched him, somebody in a leadership position ought to be speaking out — not to defend the church, but to encourage people not to use Christian belief systems as a weapon of hate. Somebody ought to be urging love and tolerance.
The Pastors McKissick are clearly not those people
They’ve elected public silence, aside from their statement suggesting the church isn’t responsible. Some church-member witnesses have (on the church Facebook page) urged the pastors to speak up and condemn violence and inhospitality. Neither pastor has responded to those requests, despite that a gay man was beaten almost unconscious during a church service by members of their church, including by at least one elder of their church.
What does this say about homophobia?
First of all, I’d like to note that Sean Cormie’s own dissonant position strikes me as sad and tragic. He believes same-sex relationships are sinful, and he just wants to be tolerated for that — as a sinner. I can’t imagine living with that kind of painful burden. When I first read about how he feels, I had to wipe away a sympathetic tear.
Somebody should be telling Sean that he’s perfect just the way he is. He is not in need of repair, whether through prayer and speaking in tongues, or by any other means. Whether one views “nature” or a conscious God as Sean’s creator, he was certainly created gay. He certainly experiences sexual attraction to other men because of his innate biology. He can’t change that (which he admits), and he’s no less deserving of intimate, loving human relationships than anyone else on earth.
Secondly and tragically, the church leadership’s lack of remorse and moral guidance in the face of violent homophobia speaks volumes. You’d think that Sean’s beating would represent a teaching opportunity for church and community leaders. You’d think that people would be raising their voices high and loud in defense of love-based morality. You’d think Christian leaders would be preaching about Samaritans and neighbors.
No, instead church leaders are silent, except to complain about “a rush to judgment.” Public reaction in Oklahoma has been muted. Yes, some people have condemned the violence, but I’ve been unable to find much evidence at all of people condemning the homophobia underlying the violence.
This is what you get for dissonant teaching
Teaching that people are depraved or are abominations (as church members told Sean) but that one must “respect” them anyway smacks of the absurd. “Love the sinner, hate the sin” is and always has been an invitation to cruelty, rejection, and violence.
We saw that play out this past summer with the anti-gay riots and beatings in Catholic Poland, and we see it playing out now in Oklahoma. Sean’s beating says something that ought to be obvious to decent people.
Teaching that LGBTQ people are immoral is wrong. Churches must purge their doctrines of those foul beliefs. If they won’t stop indulging hateful judgmentalism, then people of good will must abandon those churches.
Would YOU attend a church that teaches that people like Sean, Gary, and I are sinners because we’re gay? Given the inevitable consequences, I wonder how you can morally defend that. | https://medium.com/james-finn/pinned-punched-and-prayed-over-for-being-gay-9959fe68f2a9 | ['James Finn'] | 2019-09-18 08:11:37.460000+00:00 | ['Religion', 'Equality', 'Christianity', 'LGBTQ', 'Bullying'] |
Stacked Autoencoders. | Stacked Autoencoders.
Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash
Dimensionality reduction
While solving a data science problem, did you ever come across a dataset with hundreds of features? or perhaps a thousand features? If no, then you don’t know how challenging it can be to develop an efficient model. Dimensionality reduction for those who don’t know is an approach to filter the essential features from the data.
Having more input features in the data makes the task of predicting the dependent feature challenging. A large number of elements can sometimes cause the model to have poor performance. The cause behind this could be the model may try to find the relation between the feature vector and output vector that is very weak or nonexistent. There are various methods used for reducing the dimensions of the data, and a comprehensive guide on the same can be found on the link below.
https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2018/08/dimensionality-reduction-techniques-python/
Principal Component Analysis (PCA)
PCA is one of the popular approach used for dimensionality reduction. PCA can help you to find a vector of the most relevant features. This new set of features are called principal components. The first main component is extracted so that it explains the most variation in the dataset. The second central component, which is unrelated to the first, attempts to explain the remaining variation in the dataset. The third principle component tries to explain the interpretation that the previous two principal components can’t explain, and so on. Although this approach helps us in reducing the dimensions, PCA is only efficient when the relation between the dependent features and independent features is linear. For a deeper understanding of PCA, visit the link below.
https://towardsdatascience.com/a-one-stop-shop-for-principal-component-analysis-5582fb7e0a9c
Autoencoder
Autoencoders are used to reduce the dimensions of data when a nonlinear function describes the relationship between dependent and independent features. Autoencoders are a type of unsupervised artificial neural networks. Autoencoders are used for automatic feature extraction from the data. It is one of the most promising feature extraction tools used for various applications such as speech recognition, self-driving cars, face alignment / human gesture detection. The architecture of the Autoencoder is shown in the figure below
As seen in the figure above, an autoencoder architecture is divided into three parts: The encoder, bottleneck, and decoder. The encoder picks the crucial features from the data, while the decoder attempts to recreate the original data using the critical components. By retaining just the characteristics needed to reconstruct the data, the autoencoders decrease the data dimension. Autoencoders are a type of feed-forward network that may be trained using the same procedures as feed-forward networks. The output of the Autoencoder is the same as the input with some loss. Thus, autoencoders are also called lossy compression technique. Moreover, autoencoders can perform as PCA if we have one dense layer with a linear activation function in each encoder and decoder.
Stacked Autoencoder
Some datasets have a complex relationship within the features. Thus, using only one Autoencoder is not sufficient. A single Autoencoder might be unable to reduce the dimensionality of the input features. Therefore for such use cases, we use stacked autoencoders. The stacked autoencoders are, as the name suggests, multiple encoders stacked on top of one another. A stacked autoencoder with three encoders stacked on top of each other is shown in the following figure.
Image by author
According to the architecture shown in the figure above, the input data is first given to autoencoder 1. The output of the autoencoder 1 and the input of the autoencoder 1 is then given as an input to autoencoder 2. Similarly, the output of autoencoder 2 and the input of autoencoder 2 are given as input to autoencoder 3. Thus, the length of the input vector for autoencoder 3 is double than the input to the input of autoencoder 2. This technique also helps to solve the problem of insufficient data to some extent.
Implementing Stacked autoencoders using python
To demonstrate a stacked autoencoder, we use Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) of a vibration signal. The FFT vibration signal is used for fault diagnostics and many other applications. The data has very complex patterns, and thus a single autoencoder is unable to reduce the dimensions of the data. The figure below is a plot of the FFT waveform. The amplitude of the FFT is transformed to be between 0 and 1.
Image by author
To get a better visual understanding, we reshape the signal into a 63*63 matrix and plot it (As it is a vibration signal converted to the image, take it with a grain of salt). The figure below is the image representation of the vibration signal.
Image by author
I know it isn’t easy to see a lot in this image. However, we can still see a few features in the picture. The bright white shot approximately at (0,15) is the peak seen in the FFT of the vibration signal.
Now we start with creating our Autoencoder.
batch_size = 32
input_dim = x_train[0].shape[0] #num of predictor variables learning_rate = 1e-5
input_layer = Input(shape=(input_dim, ), name=”input”) #Input Layer
encoder = Dense (2000, activation=”relu”, activity_regularizer=regularizers.l1(learning_rate))(input_layer) #Encoder’s first dense layer
encoder = Dense (1000, activation=”relu”,
activity_regularizer=regularizers.l1(learning_rate))(encoder) #Encoder’s second dense layer
encoder = Dense (500, activation=”relu”, activity_regularizer=regularizers.l1(learning_rate))(encoder) # Code layer
encoder = Dense (200, activation=”relu”, activity_regularizer=regularizers.l1(learning_rate))(encoder) # Decoder’s first dense layer
decoder = Dense(500, activation=”relu”, activity_regularizer=regularizers.l1(learning_rate))(encoder) # Decoder’s second dense layer
decoder = Dense(1000, activation=”relu”, activity_regularizer=regularizers.l1(learning_rate))(decoder) # Decoder’s Third dense layer
decoder = Dense(2000, activation=”relu”, activity_regularizer=regularizers.l1(learning_rate))(decoder) # Output Layer
decoder = Dense(input_dim, activation=”sigmoid”, activity_regularizer=regularizers.l1(learning_rate))(decoder)
The autoencoder designed above has two dense layers on both sides: encoder and decoder. Notice that the number of neurons in each decoder and encoder are the same. Moreover, the decoder is the mirror reflection of the encoder.
As we see, the FFT signal has 4000 data points; thus, our input and output layers have 4000 neurons. When we go deep into the network, subsequently, the number of neurons decreases. Finally, at the code layer, we have only 200 neurons. Thus this autoencoder tries to reduce the number of features from 4000 to 200.
Now, we build the model, compile it and fit it on our training data. As the autoencoder’s target output is the same as the input, we pass x_train as both inputs as well as output.
autoencoder_1 = Model(inputs=input_layer, outputs=decoder) autoencoder_1.compile(metrics=[‘accuracy’],loss=’mean_squared_error’,optimizer=’adam’) satck_1 = autoencoder_1.fit(x_train, x_train,epochs=200,batch_size=batch_size)
Once we have trained our first autoencoder, we concatenate the output and input of the first autoencoder.
autoencoder_2_input = autoencoder_1.predict(x_train) autoencoder_2_input = np.concatenate((autoencoder_2_input , x_train))
Now the input for autoencoder 2 is ready. Thus, we build, compile and train autoencoder 2 on our new dataset.
autoencoder_2 = Model(inputs=input_layer, outputs=decoder) autoencoder_2.compile(metrics=[‘accuracy’],loss=’mean_squared_error’,optimizer=’adam’) satck_2 = autoencoder_2.fit(autoencoder_2_input, autoencoder_2_input,epochs=100,batch_size=batch_size)
Once we have trained our autoencoder 2 we move towards training our third autoencoder. As we did for our second autoencoder, the input to the third autoencoder is a concatenation of output and input of our second autoencoder.
autoencoder_3_input = autoencoder_2.predict(autoencoder_2_input) autoencoder_3_input = np.concatenate((autoencoder_3_input, autoencoder_2_input))
And now, lastly, we train our third autoencoder. As we did for the last two encoders, we build, compile and train on our new data.
autoencoder_2 = Model(inputs=input_layer, outputs=decoder) autoencoder_3.compile(metrics=[‘accuracy’], loss=’mean_squared_error’, optimizer=’adam’) satck_3 = autoencoder_3.fit(autoencoder_3_input, autoencoder_3_input, epochs=50, batch_size=16)
After training our stacked autoencoder, we achieve an accuracy of approximately 90%. This means that our stacked autoencoders can recreate our original input signal with about 90% of accuracy.
The image of the original and recreated signal is shown below. | https://towardsdatascience.com/stacked-autoencoders-f0a4391ae282 | ['Rajas Bakshi'] | 2021-06-29 14:09:13.644000+00:00 | ['Feature Engineering', 'Data Analysis', 'Dimensionality Reduction', 'Data Science', 'Deep Learning'] |
How Startups Outsource Their Tech Without Going Broke or Getting Screwed | How Startups Outsource Their Tech Without Going Broke or Getting Screwed
A takedown of the traditional technical build proposal
Should you spend $50,000 to build out your tech?
This is not as uncommon a question as you might think. As crazy as it sounds, quite a few entrepreneurs have access to that kind of money. Or at least they think they do.
What most entrepreneurs don’t have is a technical background. Thus, most entrepreneurs are forced to rely on someone else to build out their tech. Not only that, most entrepreneurs are forced to trust someone else to build out their tech without charging them a fortune for shoddy work and layers of unnecessary billable hours.
Here’s how to make sure that doesn’t happen to you.
Trap #1: Don’t spend money you don’t have
Believe me, I’ve seen dozens of different ways for a $50K tech spend to evolve from “crazy idea” to “just might work,” whether it’s with credit cards, loans, friends and family, or the old standard of giving away 10% of the company to get an MVP built.
In fact, a couple weeks ago, an entrepreneur asked me to review a proposal for $2.3 million worth of tech build — before the entrepreneur’s startup was even incorporated. I was surprised, but not shocked, and a little mad at the tech firm, whom I did not know.
But ultimately, the fault was with the entrepreneur, in the sense that they asked for all the wrong things at the wrong time. When an entrepreneur has money, or access to it, or they believe they do, that problem can wind up hurting a lot of people, including the firm that agrees to build the tech.
Trap #2: Don’t spend all the money you DO have
Very few technical firms are sketchy, but most of them will build what you ask them to build. Most. Some are even altruistic. I’m reminded of a conversation I had with one of my tech-firm-founder friends:
“I won’t take $50,000 from a startup if that’s all they have,” she said. “Because I’ll end up building beautiful tech for them and it’ll just sit there and do nothing because they don’t have money to spend on sales, marketing, even changes to the tech when they realize they’ve built something only half of their customers are using.”
Think about all of your funding as a budget. Your tech should never be more than 50% of that budget — and then — that 50% should include your original spend to build, plus the costs of maintaining, supporting, upgrading, even wholesale changes to that build once it comes into contact with your customers.
So your original spend to build should probably be something like 25% of your company budget.
How do you work under that tight constraint?
Trap #3: Don’t build everything at once
Most of the tech proposals I see are out-the-door pricing for the build of an entire product. Then usually the firm either walks away or tacks on a program to support exactly what they built.
This will get your startup to launch, but not much further.
You don’t need a full feature set, but you need to deliver value.
Most entrepreneurs design their product from beta all the way to version two and beyond. Me included. I design all kinds of infrastructure, administration, even reports and bells and whistles. This design is necessary, and the better-built products usually wind up coming from the better-designed products.
But even the best design doesn’t need to be built all at once. Not every feature needs to be live the first time the product gets put in front of the customer.
Without getting too much into Minimum Viable Product theory, what needs to be there is the bare minimum that gets the customer to experience the most value in the shortest time.
That’s usually a subset of the full product. And since almost all technical architecture is open and flexible these days, your technical resource doesn’t need to validate every future feature or process. They just need to know what’s coming and how it’s designed so they don’t wall off that future functionality.
You don’t need scale, but you need options.
Building for a million users when you have no users is like spending a million dollars when you have no revenue.
No matter how many customers you eventually plan to have, you don’t need accommodate all of them out of the gate. Again, we’re at a place where most technical tools and coding strategies have the flexibility to expand built in.
So much like open feature design, you need open scale design. In other words, your technical resource should be smart enough and forward-thinking enough to not do anything that would prevent scale down the road.
You don’t need to rebuild any wheels.
The reason why there are multiple no-code options for building apps these days is because a lot of code has been packaged into reusable and universal chunks. A lot of those chunks are offered by third parties, more robustly and inexpensively than anything you and your technical resource can build.
If there is a third party offering for some of your non-critical functionality, use that third party, at least temporarily. Focus your initial build on the technology that is critical for the customer finding value in your product.
Trap #4: Don’t look for a provider, look for a partner.
Now that you’ve got your design broken up and prioritized, this is a golden opportunity to vet whatever firm or individual is going to build your tech.
Do they understand how a startup should operate?
Do they get that you’re going to spend in small increments, go away and test, and then come back with changes?
Are they willing to take the risk of inconvenience to their billing cycle for the reward of your success?
You don’t need Agile, but you need to be agile
The proposal I mentioned earlier was a series of a dozen two-week sprints, back-to-back, each for a different feature of the product. As is the case with Agile development, each two-week sprint would end with a review process that would trigger the next sprint.
This is where I got a little mad. What exactly did that tech firm imagine would happen in those reviews?
Actually, I knew the answer. The review would be a checklist with the entrepreneur to make sure the firm had built exactly what the entrepreneur asked for. This is for the tech firm to justify their next billing cycle.
But it doesn’t matter what the entrepreneur thinks of the tech. What matters is what the entrepreneur’s customers think of the tech. The entrepreneur needs time to validate this.
You need to manage the project.
Never, ever pay for a project manager or any other kind of administrator that comes from the firm itself. The firm’s job is to build what you want and get it done on time. If you don’t trust them to do that, and if you don’t trust yourself to be able to manage that, hire a third party to manage the firm.
Trap #5: Don’t go into the selection process uneducated
If you’re buying a new or used car, you don’t necessarily need to know mechanical and electrical engineering up and down. But you should know what undercoating is and whether or not you need it.
There are a million documents on the web that explain technology and what it does. Most of them are boring and complicated, but some aren’t.
You should know, at a minimum:
How cloud availability and SaaS works.
What a tech stack is and what some of the differences are from stack to stack.
The popular coding languages, databases, and backends and a little about why you’d choose what.
How security, privacy, and backups work.
You should always ask other entrepreneurs which firms they have used and why. You should always talk to the clients listed on the websites of the firms you’re considering.
Trap #6: Don’t pay by the hour
If you pay by the hour, you’ll always be questioning the firm’s methods, and whether you’re asking for something simple or complicated. You’ll subconsciously nickel-and-dime your product to death.
Pay by the project, or better yet, pay by functionality. If you’ve designed your product thoroughly, even if it’s just words on paper, they’ll be able to price it out. This means you’ll be able to prioritize functionality for your customers, and you’ll be able to come back and make the inevitable changes to functionality as the product hits the market.
Trap #7: Protect yourself
I get this question a lot — How do you prevent the firm from taking your idea and your tech and doing it themselves. The answer is: You can’t.
Make sure you’ve got an NDA in place with the firm, and make sure you own the source code and that you have unfettered access to it.
A startup succeeds on their execution, not the idea, not the tech, and not the implementation of that tech. If you really think the technical firm can out-execute you on your own idea, or if you think they’ll just sell your tech to someone else, don’t do business with them.
Like I said, there are plenty of good, altruistic tech firms out there.
Hey! If you found this post actionable or insightful, please consider signing up for my weekly newsletter at joeprocopio.com so you don’t miss any new posts. It’s short and to the point. | https://jproco.medium.com/how-startups-outsource-their-tech-without-going-broke-or-getting-screwed-6960005a588 | ['Joe Procopio'] | 2020-08-24 14:16:06.031000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Business', 'Productivity', 'Startup', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
Gelato #33 | Gelato is a slightly Indica dominant hybrid (55% Indica/45% sativa) strain created through a cross of the infamous Sunset Sherbet X Thin Mint Girl Scout Cookies strains. This dank bud is infamous for its insanely delicious flavor and hugely powerful effects. They are fueled by a THC level that hits its low point at 20% on average. Gelato has a flavor that’s said to be much like a sweet sherbet, with fruity blueberry and orange flavors. The aroma is sickly sweet, with a lavender citrus berry bouquet that has a woody effect. And the nugs are broken apart and smoked. Although it has a tasty flavor, Gelato is definitely best loved for its effects. Gelato near me.
Gelato
This strain’s elevation of mood can also offer temporary relief from the troubling symptoms associated with anxiety, depression, and PTSD. This is potent, even for more experienced cannabis users newcomers should reduce their consumption accordingly. That said, because of its lack of intense cerebral effects, this strain is not likely to put users into a deeply paranoid mindset. These buds are small but they have the thick and dense structure characteristic of many Indica varieties. This is a strain with immediate visual appeal bright orange view stand out against forest green leaves that are accented by shades of deep purple.
Gelato Near Me
This Strain is a hybrid crossed from taste-engineered parents Thin Mint Girl Scout Cookies and fruity Indica Sunset Sherbet. With a balanced, mellow high and a universally appealing flavor profile, this is a great strain for social use. San Francisco creators Cookie Fam Genetics have released multiple numbered phenotypes of Gelato. Phenotype #33 has picked up the nickname Larry Bird in reference to the legendary player’s jersey number. This strain has an Indica-leaning high and carries a THC composition that ranges from 20% to 25%.
Gelato 33
Gelato, aka Larry Bird, is a hybrid marijuana strain made by crossing Sunset Sherbet and Thin Mint Girl Scout Cookies. The effects of Gelato produce a euphoric high accompanied by strong feelings of relaxation. Consumers say the physical sensation comes on strong. But many find themselves still mentally agile enough to stay productive and creative during the day. Gelato gets its name from the fruity, dessert-like aroma it smells like. | https://medium.com/@mikegarton14/gelato-33-1f75607bb1da | ['Mike Garton'] | 2021-06-17 13:11:39.055000+00:00 | ['Cbd', 'Marijuana', 'Cannabis Medical', 'Weed', 'Cannabis'] |
Being “Data-Driven” Isn’t Compatible with Being Innovative | Data is a drug for the decision makers of the 21st century.
“We’re a data-driven company”, they tell you proudly.
But a company, which seeks change and wants to make a difference by challenging the status quo, doesn’t make strategic decisions that are driven by data.
A long-term, game-changing strategy can’t be based on reports and predictive data. They won’t tell you what to do next and how to do it.
Worse, when data is a click-away, your competitors are likely to make similar decisions, since they look at the same data sets.
Data is reassuring. But it has a short-term use.
Data drives optimisation, and only informs strategy. And so, at some point in the decision-making process, opening the door to a game-changing strategy requires a leap of faith.
900,000 Mobile Phones in 2000?
“900,000 subscribers”. This is the prediction McKinsey made in 1980 when AT&T asked the consulting firm to forecast mobile phone penetration in the U.S. by 2000.
The report predicted less than 1% of the actual number of mobile phone users in 2000, 109 million. Based on this report, AT&T decided there was not much future to these “toys”.
Three elements explain the big fail:
1. The technology. It is difficult to predict the pace at which technology is going to evolve. As The Economist highlighted in 1999:
“The most obvious reason why mobile phones are becoming so popular is that quality is going up at the same time as prices are coming down.”
Lower price and better quality are two evident drivers that increase demand. But predicting with confidence how both will evolve on the long-term is nearly impossible. Most technologies improve exponentially. And they rely on tipping points that are unpredictable.
2. The users. Reports lack empathy. It is difficult to uncover unmet needs in numbers. Mobile phones have become part of users’ lives. No report could have shown that. But getting in touch with users could have.
3. A non-linear adoption. Another reason is the development of mobile phones in countries that didn’t have landlines. Instead of waiting for their countries to build expensive infrastructures, people simply started using mobile phones. Such a change from the traditional model of “fixed-lines then mobile” is also hard to capture in numbers. But once you visit one of these countries, it just makes so much sense.
Being data-driven and only relying on this report cost a lot to AT&T. According to Professor Angel Lozano:
“A decade later, to rejoin the cellular market, AT&T had to acquire McCaw Cellular for $12.6 billion. By 2011, the number of subscribers worldwide had surpassed 5 billion and cellular communication had become an unprecedented technological revolution.”
The executive team of AT&T wasn’t brave enough to make a leap of faith. They preferred to hide behind the data, even though in 1980, it wasn’t possible to predict with confidence how mobile phones would impact the market 20 years later.
Being data-driven and depending on reports aren’t compatible with real innovation. Being innovative requires audacity and curiosity — two qualities that give an experimentation mindset.
Leading Innovation in the Clouds
Let’s take another good example:
Amazon.
For the last 22 years, the company has never stopped being innovative. Even though it’s also the archetype of a company that uses a lot of data, Amazon never fell into the analysis paralysis trap.
How did the company become the leader in cloud services? In 2016, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is by far the biggest cloud services platform. [1] But back in 2003, when the idea emerged, Amazon was still mostly focusing on selling books.
As AWS CEO, Andy Jassy, told TechCrunch:
“In retrospect it seems fairly obvious, but at the time I don’t think we had ever really internalized that.”
Developing a cloud services platform when you’re an online retailer is not an obvious strategy.
In 2003, Jeff Bezos and his executive team couldn’t make a decision driven by data — nobody had built a cloud services platform before. No data, no report could tell them how this new business model would go.
Instead of hiding behind data, the team made the brave choice of embracing a game-changing strategy. They started experimenting with a business model that was unheard of — providing third-parties with computer power/storage.
What led to the innovative AWS wasn’t a data-driven strategy. AWS was the result of a brave, long-term, and data-informed strategy. [2] They’re not afraid to take leaps of faith.
Notes about Being Data-Driven, Data-Informed, and Innovation
[1] AWS’s job is to make the life of developers easier and cheaper. It helps people and businesses from individual developers to companies like Airbnb run and scale their digital services, without having to bear the burden of fixed cost. Amazon owns and maintains the physical servers and sells the computer power/storage.
In 2016, Amazon has a bigger market share than Microsoft, IBM, and Google combined.
[2] Amazon understands that predictive data is useful. Data helps Amazon make relevant recommendations to its customers, and therefore, sell more things to them.
But the company also understands that data has limited value. It cannot drive strategic decisions. For that, Jeff Bezos and his team relied on a simple formula:
“We’ve had three big ideas that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.”
London Business School professor, Julian Birkinshaw, explains:
“The pace of innovation at Amazon is made possible by Bezos’ belief that most problems can be solved through invention, through bringing smart people together to find a better way. The old-fashioned view of strategy — that you figure out what your core competencies are and build everything around those — is turned on its head. Here, you’ve got the exact opposite: ‘We can always learn to do new stuff — if there’s a customer need we can buy and find the skills to do it.”’
The Amazon team isn’t stuck in a river of thinking, focusing on existing capabilities. They’re willing to reinvent themselves, hire the right people, and build new capabilities, if this can help them serve their customers better. | https://medium.com/boostcompanies-archive/being-data-driven-isnt-compatible-with-being-innovative-78aa9522548 | ['Guerric De Ternay'] | 2017-08-19 08:03:29.890000+00:00 | ['Digital Strategy'] |
The Anscombe Society One Year Later | by Rooney Pitchford
In the wake of President Obama’s landmark announcement of his support for same-sex marriage, the Review sat down with the co-presidents of the Stanford Anscombe Society (SAS), the conservative and often-controversial student group centered around traditional marriage values, to catch up on the group’s success and direction in their second year on campus.In an interview, the society’s sophomore co-presidents Judy Romea ’14 and Ben VanBerkum ’14 expressed positivity in the face of widespread opposition on campus, which they believe is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the SAS’s agenda.
“If you’re going to emphasize this in your article, emphasize: we are not anti-gay people,” said Romea, who was careful to set rumors straight regarding the mission of her organization, which took massive heat for its inaugural event late last academic year, a talk entitled “Marriage Without Adjectives” by Jennifer Roback Morse, a former Hoover Fellow. The event was ridiculed for its apparently homophobic and anti-female sentiments.
So, when offered a chance to set the record straight, the SAS co-leaders had much to say with regard to what the group does advocate rather than what they oppose, also expressing that they believe the public’s attention to what is perceived to be the group’s homophobia puts a bad name on a positively oriented organization. Communication, they say, is the focus of the group.
“People don’t really want to truly live the way everybody expects college students should live, you know, and here is a group that will try and talk about it, and that’s why we’re important,” said Romea, emphasizing that, while much of the press’s focus remains on the controversial nature of their inaugural event, the SAS’s events are communication-oriented.
On May 17, the society joint-hosted the first annual Pro-Life and Pro-Family Reception with the Stanford Students for Life. About 40 people attended the event, which featured hors d’oeuvres and a talk by Sherif Girgis, a Rhodes Scholar who is pursuing higher degrees at two different Ivy League institutions.
Earlier in the year, the SAS hosted Stanford graduate Charlie Capps, who spoke regarding his scholarly work in the field of social psychology, especially with regard to marriage’s role in societal success. The talk was mainly focused on “how to have a conversation with another Stanford student” regarding issues of family values.
Having hosted two successful and constructive events this year, Romea and VanBerkum expressed positivity for the future. When asked whether the group is operating on its desired level or whether large-scale growth remains necessary, the two restated their emphasis on communication as the main role of the SAS.
“There are a lot of people… more than the people who show up at our meetings, who agree with us,” said VanBerkum. “[If] people can see that, then our job is being done.”
Still, the SAS walks a fine line. While Judy and Ben have high hopes for a future of student communication on the Farm, their calculatedly philosophical approach to the issue of same-sex marriage has the potential to create enemies all across campus.
“We define the family as a man and a woman and their kids, united through marriage,” said VanBerkum.
Traditional marriage values, which include “prudence and fidelity” along with a heterosexual partnership, serve as the foundation for a successful marriage, in the eyes of the SAS. In turn, families provide the “fundamental building blocks of society.”
Functional society’s dependence on successful family units is a measured fact of social psychology, according to VanBerkum, who spoke highly of Capps’s explanation of that fact during his speech at Stanford.
“There are things that are shown to be better for the raising of children,” he said, which include the raising of children by their committed, biological parents.
With regard to same-sex adoption, Romea said that the SAS “lumps it together more with single parent adoption,” a situation which they believe should be avoided when willing heterosexual couples are available to raise children in need of parents.
Additionally, the two commented on the gray area that results when traditional marriage values are questioned. If the definition of marriage is reduced to two caring partners who live together for a common good, Romea suggested, then two college roommates could fulfill marital obligations.
As Americans continue to call the definition of marriage into question, so too may change the definition of “anti-gay.” To a growing group of Americans, the restriction of marriage to anyone based on orientation may already fall under that umbrella. For now, though, the SAS is a budding campus organization with an emphasis on communication and “the dignity of the human being.” | https://medium.com/stanfordreview/the-anscombe-society-one-year-later-90065cc48b93 | [] | 2016-12-12 01:03:35.555000+00:00 | ['LGBTQ', 'Marriage Equality'] |
My Problem with the M1 | My Problem with the M1
It feels familiar to deciding on a Mac verus iPad.
Update: If you do need Windows running on a Mac, this problem is still true. As explained in my review of the MacBook Air I found a solution to remote into my Windows machine at work without needing Windows at all, so my specific problem is no more. The M1 (and iPad) just got that much better for me.
After Apple’s announcement I was heart-set on purchasing a MacBook Air, that is the MacBook Air with the Intel processor. Costco has a sale on an Intel i5 version, with 8 GB RAM and a 512 GB SSD, and I decided this was the perfect machine for me.
Not only was it on sale but I already came to the conclusion, based off me starting from scratch and rethinking my setup, that the MacBook Air would be the computer for me going forward.
I will give a more in-depth of why I am choosing the MacBook Air in its own review but the problem I am facing now is if I should actually go with the M1 version of the MacBook Air and not the Intel.
The reason you would choose Intel is because of the ability to run Windows, either through Bootcamp or Parallels, on a Mac. Now with the M1, it may be possible to run an app like Parallels that runs an ARM version of Windows 10 in the future, but who knows when that will happen.
The question for me was: is running Windows 10 on my Mac really that important?
My work provides a Windows 10 laptop for me to use while at home or out of town if I need to get work done remotely. When I am on vacation or traveling for work, though, only having to carry one machine around with me is preferred. So if I can just take my personal machine and use it for work when I need, is ideal.
Having the ability to remote into work from my personal machine is a bonus, and have loved that possibility on Macs since I got my first MacBook. With the M1 currently not having the ability to run Windows 10, I figured I should snap up an Intel version of the MacBook Air while I can, until I watched and listened to all the reviews of the M1.
The fact that these machines are completely silent makes me remember the 2015 MacBook, with the single USB-C port, and how much I loved that machine. That MacBook may be coming back but regardless the fact that the new MacBook Air has this is a pretty sweet upgrade.
Then with everyone talking about the insane performance and superb battery life I started to question my choice in going with Intel. Also, as someone who is picky about my display, the better P3 Wide Color Gamut on the MacBook Air also intrigued me.
So, should I go with the future of MacBooks and get something that will provide the convenience of more power and battery life for the future? Or do I stick with something that I know and will provide me the ability to remote into work when I need — allowing me to have a more minimal carry while traveling?
This whole situation sounds exactly like my decision on choosing between the iPad Pro and Mac. Whether it is the iMac, MacBook Pro, or MacBook Air when trying to decide between an iPad and one of Apple’s macOS machines there are sacrifices that you have to make and feel that is resurfacing between the M1 MacBook Air and Intel MacBook Air.
The main reason why it was difficult for me to go iPad Pro-only was losing macOS and the ability to run Windows if I needed. So, when traveling, it required me to take both my work laptop and iPad if I wanted my personal machine with me.
Now, with COVID and thinking this through more, I am not only not traveling at all but the only reason why I like to use a MacBook to remote into work is because I hate my work laptop. It is not like I get that much of a better experience working from my MacBook, work is work.
So, the whole reason for me to get an Intel Mac is starting to not be as important anymore. Getting a little more philosophical about this situation, I really should be keeping work and personal hobbies separate. Having separate machines for this should be seen as a plus not a negative.
Intel MacBook Air
Since writing this post on my Intel MacBook Air, the fans have not come once. When setting up the MacBook Air and running Chrome for a couple of hours though, I thought that the computer might take off. Not having to worry about that but have even more performance just seems magical, and it why I think the M1 is the direction I will go.
Going with the M1 will provide a computer that is future proof. Not only is it going to work for me for years but I will also feel like I am living in the future. I am sure Windows 10 will come eventually, Parallels has already said the new version for M1 is in development, and not being able to work from the MacBook Air is not the end of the world.
Does it feel like I am choosing an iPad over a Mac? Kind of. Especially since I will also be able to use many iOS and iPadOS apps on the MacBook Air with the M1 chip.
With no fan, double the battery life, and who knows how much more performance, choosing the M1 over the Intel just makes sense financially and practically since I am planning on using this laptop as my main machine for a long time. I am looking forward to being a part of the future and can’t wait to see if it lives up to all the hype. | https://medium.com/techuisite/my-problem-with-the-m1-c3f096a3501 | ['Paul Alvarez'] | 2020-11-29 02:59:40.654000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Apple', 'Mac', 'Gadgets', 'Windows 10'] |
The Portfolio Entrepreneur | In a discussion with my friend Eric Siu of Single Grain, I raised this concept of the Portfolio Entrepreneur.
“Basically the idea around the modern entrepreneur having multiple projects (or a portfolio of projects). More below:
Some Benefits:
-Multiple projects =multiple perspectives = more well rounded entrepreneur
-Multiple income streams de-risks the entrepreneur.”
Detractor might be that it decreases focus. (Investors don’t like it either btw.)”
Yes, focus is important for all startups and this is very much the Silicon Valley startup founder path. But for those who are not going down the Venture Capital Go Big or Go Home funding route aka Bootstrapping, I think “Portfolio Entrepreneur” route is probably the way to go.
One of the best thinkers and practitioners in this area is Tiago Forte of Forte Labs.
“Portfolio thinking recognizes that having multiple parallel projects provides many opportunities for synergy. They don’t have to interfere with and impede each other — they can actually combine into something greater than the sum of its parts. Each one can make the others easier, more fun, and more profitable.”
Source: The Rise of the Full-Stack Freelancer
This portfolio of products and services can ultimately be of benefit not just to yourself but to prospective clients and customers. It’s a Win-Win.
Tiago goes on to say better than I can.
“If you only have one offering, then the value of, say, building a new website only flows to one node. If you have 5 offerings, that single website adds value to all 5 nodes with a single effort.
Since my portfolio is a network, it exhibits network effects: each offering added increases the value of all the others.
I believe this is actually the most profound benefit of a portfolio approach to work: it is fundamentally unbounded when it comes to personal growth, creativity, and learning. Changing direction is just a matter of adding or removing an item from your portfolio, not making a dramatic, wrenching career change. This offers the possibility of a deeper sustainability than even a well-paying job can provide.”
Diversification is King in a Fast Changing World like the one way we live in today. We have no idea how fast things change (or break). Customers/clients stop paying. Governments get toppled, or currencies or banks die. Just look at the pandemic and the atrociously incompetent responses across the globe in the USA, United Kingdom and European Union which are supposedly the best equipped to handle pandemics.
The wealthiest people have at least 7 streams of income. This is definitely something all of us can learn from, emulate and build towards. Being more “Anti-Fragile” is a good thing and something i think we all can agree on in 2020 and beyond.
For those interested in doing this, I would recommend this following book. “The 10% Entrepreneur Book” by Patrick McGinnis. It’s something I wish I had started doing much earlier in my career. Don’t make the same mistake I did, it’s not too late.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/ | https://medium.com/@marvinliao/the-portfolio-entrepreneur-3a554001e80e | ['Marvin Liao'] | 2020-12-12 09:40:42.503000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Founders', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Startup Lessons', 'Silicon Valley'] |
BTCST AMA #1 Recap | Note: This is a 10 minute deep dive that will hopefully answer many of your questions.
Q 1: It seems like the gas fee calculations must be done based on iteration through the entire history of transactions, rather than relying on the snapshot balance in BTCST or unclaimed BTCB.
Does this mean that the fees will increase the more you stake/unstake and claim, and/or increase as the total effective staked BTCST increases from all other staking holders?
A 1: Fees for claiming and unstaking will increase the longer (number of days) you stake, and the more staking holders there are. It has very little to do with how many BTCSTs you have staked. It also has very little to do the total amount of effectively staked BTCSTs, and if you claimed or unstaked, it will count records from your last claimed or unstaked day.
Ady: So, there are many questions about high fees when claiming BTCs / un-staking BTCSTs. We want to add that if you are seeing a strangely high fee, it can be the result of the settings of your own wallet. See if you can “Edit” the fee setting of your wallet. Change the value for “GWEI” to 20. The fees should become more normal then.
Q 2: For the physical machine, it will be broken after time. For example, after 4 years, the Ant Miner 14TH ~ 140 BTCST will need replacement to keep the same hash rate. How do you make sure after a period of time 1 BTCST is still equivalent to 0.1 TH?
A 2: BTCST is standardized in TWO senses. First, 0.1 TH/s. Secondly and more importantly here, the efficiency of each BTCST is standardized to 60 W/TH. If total network difficulty and Bitcoin price change in a way that makes hash rate standardized to 60 W/TH no longer profitable in a few years, we will take the fair market salvage value of the underlying machines and convert that into newer generations of machines. At that time, holders of BTCST will get automatic efficiency upgrade. We will announce details of this change when necessary. In any event, we do not expect this to become relevant until a few years from now.
Q 3: My question is the following: have you already contacted other mining companies, and if so, when do you expect them to join the project and also will each company that joins mean another 1m tokens per partner?
A 3: We are pleased to announce today that 5 miners representing about 12% of the entire BTC global hashrate have started to work with BTCST as tokenization miners. These miners include Atlas Mining, one of the largest single-entity miners in the world; BTC.TOP and Easy2Mine, two of the top 15 mining pools in the world; Genesis Mining, the largest cloud mining company in the world; and Hengjia Group, one of the largest mining conglomerates based in Sichuan, China. These partnerships prove that these miners share our vision. We are excited to work with these new partners to improve our operations and bring new ideas and create new values to our communities.
Q 4: It would be cool to be able to stake your BTCST to mine other coins, should we expect that as a possibility in the future?
A 4: Yes of course, this is a possibility in the pipeline. We actually research on this before our mainnet deployment. You may see these features in a couple of weeks. We will be working with PancakeSwap on this. So stay tuned.
Q 5: The roadmap tells us what you have planned until June 2020, with this being crypto that’s a very short roadmap! What are the plans for the future, and do you hope to do more than just staking with BTCST?
A 5: To be more cautious, we have decided to slow our tokenization steps. Instead of 1000 PH/s, we are now tokenizing only 50 PH/s for the month of February. Any further tokenization will be carefully planned to make sure the ecosystem can remain healthy.
Q 6: What are the benefits of mining Bitcoin through BTCST over regular BTC mining with a miner?
A 6: BTCST is better because of the liquidity — you can enter/exit whenever you want, and because of the boost factor — in most cases you make MORE than direct mining. With direct mining, you cannot enter/stop mining easily. There are a lot of expenses and time commitments. With BTCSTs, you can buy/stake, or sell/unstake at any time. The liquidity is a lot better. Also with our boost factor, your BTC rewards are enhanced because you will earn a part of BTC from BTCST holders who do not stake! Read more about our boost factor here: https://btcst.medium.com/btcst-note-on-mining-rewards-calculation-eb469c8144dd
Q 7: BTCST is currently the first project that provides Bitcoin mining liquidity, but it makes me think that the system is too simple, just stake BTCST and earn BTC daily.
Will there be more ways we can use BTCST? Such as possibly a governance system where the community can vote or propose new ideas with the number of BTCST as voting power? Or would you establish a main governance token in the future?
Perhaps you can include a lot more mining such as ETH, and other tokens that can be mined with GPU’s, then create a main token which can be easily swapped to the variety of mining token selections.
Ex. <Main Governance Token>
- Use: To vote on community or core team proposals.
<Platform>
- Track your holdings of different crypto you are mining.
- Swap Governance Token or other tokens to Hashrate for a specific crypto
Just asking if there are plans for this in the future. Since I feel the plan is way too simple to be the sole plan of BTCST.
A 7: Yes, we have plans for giving BTCST itself governance functions. This is planned for Q2 this year. When we have a more detailed plan, we will let you know.
Ady: I also know that Alex and the team are planning to have BTCST holders vote on how to develop ETHST. BETH (Binance ETH) on BSC is a natural fit for us. But of course, we must consider how the switch to PoS for ETH 2.0 can impact us. So please stay tuned. Very exciting things are coming!
Q 8: Does the Bitcoin Standard Hashrate Token team have a mining farm to back up the large amount of Hash Rate that each token represents? How do you keep BTCST pegged to 0.1 TH/s?
Does Bitcoin Standard Hashrate Token serve as an alternative for users who do not have the ability to purchase mining machines? Would they perform as well when staking BTCST?
A 8: Standard Hashrate Group and its tokenization miners own a network of some of the largest mining facilities in the world. Locations and capacities of these facilities are completely disclosed to Binance Mining Pool as part of due diligence. Binance Mining Pool also audits the hash rate sufficiency from the project. This is NOT something that’s possible to fake.
Q 9: There are many who say that BTCST is quite similar to Grayscale. So what’s the difference between BTCST and Grayscale? Are BTCST and Grayscale a perfect complement to each other?
A 9: BTCST is like the hash rate version of Grayscale. Grayscale uses GBTC to wrap around BTC to give it institutional liquidity. This has generated very strong liquidity premium to the price of GBTC. We now see that BTCST is giving very strong liquidity premium to BTC hash rate. We hope to achieve with BTCST what Grayscale has successfully done for BTC.
Ady: Yes, it is very important to see that BTCST’s vision is to be the mining industry version of Grayscale. We are not “selling cloud mining contracts.”
Q 10: What is the best way to summarize the longevity of the token to keep the interest of people invested? How do you keep stakeholder interest and not get scared away by thinking the tokenized hashing power is over priced compared to real hashing power?
A 10: Our community should understand that BTCST, unlike some competitors, is NOT selling cloud mining contracts. Our model is the Grayscale Trust for mining contracts. With mining machines or cloud mining contracts, you cannot easily exit. But with BTCSTs, you can enter and exit within seconds. So the two are not comparable.
Q 11: How will the release of 10 million tokens next month affect the boost factor and overall rewards?
A 11: Based on feedback from our community members, we have revised our tokenization plan. We are now tokenizing only 50 PH/s for February. Future tokenization is pending. We will update the community when we have more information, but our goal is to tokenize only when we are confident to keep the ecosystem healthy.
Q 12: Why would you call BTCST a leveraged Bitcoin token if BTCST is independent of derivatives?
A 12: The price of BTCST will perform as a leveraged BTC token. This is because the price of hash rate / mining machines performs like so, meaning when Bitcoin rises, the mining rigs’ value also rises. This is a well known fact in the mining machine market, so BTCST is a BTC leveraged token because of the very nature of the assets (mining machines) that back it. Also, because BTCST is independent of derivatives, BTCST does not have liquidation risks. This is a huge value add for investors and traders alike. | https://medium.com/@btcst/btcst-ama-1-recap-77763db00301 | [] | 2021-01-27 09:19:06.873000+00:00 | ['Btcst', 'Bitcoin Mining', 'Ama', 'Bitcoin', 'Btc'] |
6 ways to conserve water at home | To bring a change you first start at your own home. There are so many simple ways that you can adopt to play your part in saving water reserves. We bring you 6 simple ways to reduce water usage at your homes.
Turn off the tap while brushing your teeth
By doing so, you can save upto 6 litres of water per minute.
2. Take short showers.
Showers use water anywhere between 6–45 litres per minute. Try using aerated showerheads that combine air and water together or install a regulator in your shower which can determine the upper limits of water flow.
3. Even better, try taking a bath instead of showers
Baths consume much less water than showers. Also you can try using a bucket. Both of these methods will reduce water consumption in households.
4. Install dual-flush toilets
Toilets contribute to about 1/5 of indoor water use. Consider upgrading your single flush toilet to a dual flush system to save up to 80L of water per day.
5. Water your plants with greywater
A greywater system can help you save drinking water by watering your garden with water from the bath, shower or washing machine. A greywater system in a 4 person house can provide around 40, 000L of water per year to use on your garden.
6. Steam your vegetables
Do steam vegetables instead of boiling them. This can save water and help preserve more of the nutrients in your food. Microwaving would use even less water than steaming.
Save water, its an essential resource. | https://medium.com/@save.drop/6-ways-to-conserve-water-at-home-d070bbb99fda | ['Tap The Tap'] | 2020-12-19 11:48:13.365000+00:00 | ['Water', 'Water Shortage', 'Water Conservation', 'Water Scarcity', 'Climate Change'] |
Designing Skywallet, the $30 Trezor killer | Designing Skywallet, the $30 Trezor killer
Our new hardware wallet is designed to be sleek, secure, and easy to use.
By Development Lead Frank
After months in the making, we’re excited to announce that prototypes for Skywallet, our new hardware wallet, are finalized and ready for mass production. When you store or access your cryptocurrency, you are your own bank, so the process should be simple and intuitive. Your hardware wallet is your bank vault and it should feel like a premium and secure device. We’ve spent months iterating over designs and incorporating user feedback in order to make Skywallet the best hardware wallet experience on the market. How did we get here?
Prototype V1
Development started back in July and was worked on through September. We looked at the state of other hardware wallets in the market and wanted to create a new kind of wallet that’s accessible to everyone, not just power users. That meant creating an affordable and easy-to-use device. Our first prototype was a simple rectangular model with rounded corners, a UI screen, micro USB 2.0 port, and two buttons. The shell for the first batch was made using 3D printers, which work by melting plastic filament and setting it layer by layer, line by line.
3D printing allows you to quickly go from computer-aided design to physical prototypes, so that you can go back to the drawing board and make rapid revisions if needed. 3D-printed parts are essentially pieces of plastic with visible threads and unfinished surfaces, so once we were satisfied with the shape we moved on to making the second model. The second round of models was made using a computer numerical control (CNC) machine. CNC machines work by carving aluminum plates, producing prototypes that more closely resemble the final product.
User Testing & Challenges
In testing the prototype we found problems with the button feedback. The pressure from the feedback felt flat, and we wanted users of Skywallet to feel a satisfying click sensation when working with the device. To get that ideal button feedback our designers set the buttons on a separate layer from the case, allowing for a deeper press. We also realized that the buttons were not placed optimally for a user-friendly experience. The placement of options in the UI screen software did not match the physical locations of the buttons. We improved this in the next phase by moving the buttons under the screen for better finger-eye coordination and more intuitive operation.
Up to this point, carving prototypes was slow and cumbersome, and that’s when we realized that to continue updating our hardware we needed better equipment. Our team purchased a more robust, heavy-duty CNC machine that could carve out models faster and with better precision. With these lessons learned and changes made we reached the second prototype phase.
Prototype V2
The second prototype was developed in September and resulted in a fresh new form factor, a balanced square shape with rounded sides and the buttons placed under the screen.
After 3D printing the first set of models we knew we had a winning design that would not feel out of place in an Apple store, with a hardware wallet that draws your eyes and compels you to pick it up. While other wallets feel like a timer or USB stick, Skywallet rounded sides feel good to hold in your hand and the satisfying click of its buttons add an extra dimension of tangibility to the abstract cryptographic values it stores for the keys.
The second model was carved from aluminum plates using our new CNC machine before being sandblasted and applying anodic oxidation coloring. We prototyped several colors and the options at release will be white, black, and metal gray.
The third and final models were made with plastic injection molding, a manufacturing technique where a mold is made and filled with molten plastic. Injection molding has cost advantages over CNC milling for mass production and allows us to aim for our approximate $30 price tag. Our manufacturing partner can assemble Skywallet at a rate of 2 units per minute.
Features
Skywallet’s final design consists of a UI screen, two buttons and a micro USB 2.0 port. It’s packaged in a minimalist, stylish box and comes with an instruction manual, micro-USB 2.0 to USB cable, and a keychain.
We believe in a future where hardware wallets are as ubiquitous as cell phones, and the build quality should match the value that’s stored inside. Skywallet’s zen styling replaces the clunky hardware wallets crypto power users are used to now and casual consumers are afraid to touch. This is a hardware wallet you can gift to friends and family and you can be sure they’ll use it. It’s fun and easy to use and has a premium feel to it at an affordable price.
Skywallet Software
Skywallet uses recovery phrase generation as its security feature. If you’ve used other hardware wallets the process of generating and securing a recovery phrase will be familiar to you. If this is your first time using a hardware wallet it’s intuitive enough that you’ll be using it in minutes. Initially, the wallet will integrate with your existing Skycoin desktop wallet application. By the end of the year it will be compatible with Bitcoin and other major coins.
Upcoming Challenges
Launching hardware comes with challenges not faced in software, such as manufacturing, warehousing, and logistics. We’re working closely with our manufacturing partner to ensure that costs are kept under control as we aim for a $30 price tag. We want hardware wallets to be accessible to everyone, no matter the amount of crypto they hold, while maintaining industry-leading quality. Our logistics department is still finalizing its export strategy and deciding whether to work with a network of partners and distributors or selling it directly to consumers. We also need to decide between a worldwide launch or focusing on a few key markets first while expanding gradually.
Launch Date
We aim to begin mass production and ship out the first units in Q3 of 2019. Join our mailing list to be notified when Skywallet is ready for ordering and stay tuned for our Skywallet launch story. | https://medium.com/skycoin/designing-skywallet-the-30-trezor-killer-b00ca2254dce | [] | 2019-07-27 04:23:13.947000+00:00 | ['Net Neutrality', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Ethereum', 'Distributed Ledgers'] |
The best smart switches and dimmers: Lighting is the foundation of the smart home | People who invest in the future are realists | https://medium.com/@shelly00400987/the-best-smart-switches-and-dimmers-lighting-is-the-foundation-of-the-smart-home-6ef85817f4b7 | [] | 2020-12-24 01:00:05.126000+00:00 | ['Security Cameras', 'Services', 'Home Tech', 'Cord'] |
iPhone X in 2020 | Should you still buy it? | Are you considering buying a new iPhone but can’t decide if you should invest in the new iPhone 11 or get Apple’s 2017 iPhone X? Well, you’re in the right place to find the answer.
First of all, Apple has already discontinued the iPhone X from its stores and website, but you can still buy it from Apple’s verified resellers or your phone carrier.
I’ve purchased the iPhone X 256GB in silver a month ago (April 2020) for 920€ (1 003USD) and so far I am highly satisfied with the performance. I’ve upgraded from the 2016 iPhone SE so it has been a huge step forward for me. I went from a 4" display phone with an A9 Bionic chip and storage of underwhelming 32GB to an edge to edge 5.8" OLED display machine running A11 Bionic chip.
I was impressed with the phone design and that was actually the reason why I’ve got the X instead of the new 11. First of all, I had to get used to the absent home-button and a missing headphone port, which after all wasn’t that big of a deal because I’ve got used to the swiping gestures pretty fast and since I own a pair of AirPods the missing jack port wasn’t a big problem as well (also Apple includes their classic EarPods with a lightning connector in the box).
Features that I was the most excited about were the dual camera and the Face-ID.
I’ve tested the portrait mode on both back and front cameras and I was really impressed by the results. There were many effects I could choose from before and also after taking the picture, although it doesn’t have the depth adjusting feature like its “older sibling” iPhone Xs. The shots were looking really great and crisp compared to my old iPhone SE as long as I had a good lighting, but in the dark it gets kind of grainy and the portrait mode doesn’t do that much of a great job as well. However, I’m really enjoying the camera and I think for an average user it’s more than enough.
The first day, it was a really weird feeling that I was no longer using my finger to unlock my phone, but my face instead with the “Face-ID”. The setup was easy and quick. So far, it has been giving me a great reliable response. It recognizes you in the dark, wearing a cap or sunglasses and adapts to your face changes over time. Personally, I find using the Face-ID easier and more complex than the old Touch-ID, which wasn’t as responsive if you didn’t tilt your finger the right way or it was wet.
There is so much more to this phone and I could talk about it all day long but we have to come to the conclusion. Do I recommend you buying the 2017 Apple’s iPhone X even though there are 6 newer models that you could get maybe for even a better price? Yes. If you prefer the X's design over the 11’s or XR’s and if you want a great, fast, reliable phone with a crispy camera, then definitely yes.
Thank you so much for reading my article, I hope you found it helpful or entertaining in any kind of way. I would be greatful for any kind of feedback from you. Make sure to share it with your friends and contact me for any other questions.
Bye.
David Paris | https://medium.com/macoclock/iphone-x-in-2020-should-you-still-buy-it-cfed714978c2 | ['David Paris'] | 2020-05-26 05:25:08.433000+00:00 | ['Apple', 'Review', 'iPhone', 'Tech', '2020'] |
Put That On Your Playlist: Player’s Ball (Reprise) | Song: Player’s Ball (Reprise)
Album: Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik
Honourable mention: ? (Stankonia)
— — —
Look, we’re not proud about it either but we manage to slide in part of Player’s Ball, this song that first introduced the duo to the rest of the universe, on this playlist. We’re definitely well aware that this version pales in comparison to the original — the latter stands as the greatest Christmas song of all time — but there’s really nowhere for us to slot the original. Are we supposed to disregard our love for stealth Aquemini MVP Slump? No entirely not, we’re not.
This exercise isn’t perfect. But at least we have (part of) Player’s Ball.
— — —
Beat: 7/10
Lyrics: 7/10
Overall: 7/10 | https://medium.com/amanmusthaveacode/put-that-on-your-playlist-players-ball-reprise-f75787c688a9 | ['Charles Blouingascon'] | 2020-12-11 12:23:17.783000+00:00 | ['Hip Hop', 'Outkast', 'Rap', 'Culture', 'Music'] |
Embracing Mystery | Embracing Mystery
For the sake of love
Photo by Mads Schmidt Rasmussen on Unsplash
I’ve placed my hand on the shoulder of a blind woman
And watched her jump for joy as her sight returned
I’ve seen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches multiplied
Having enough to feed a whole school of poor children
I’ve watched a disease that discolored a woman’s face
Fade away and completely disappear before my eyes
I’ve seen all of this and more
And yet…
I still doubt that God will heal
I still recoil from prayer
I still wonder if it all was real
Mystery remains.
I’ve prayed for someone to be healed
With fervent faith and firm belief
And seen nothing happen
I’ve prayed for someone to be healed
With rolling eyes and a heart full of doubt
And seen healing happen
There is no formula for walking with Jesus
There are no steps that give us power
There is no hierarchy of greatness
There are no rules with simple answers
Mystery remains.
I’ve known Muslims who pray to Jesus
I’ve known Buddhists who walk with Jesus
I’ve known Atheists who carry the heart of God
I’ve known Hindus that heal in the name of God
Maybe there is no line or box
Of who is in and who is out
Maybe things are not as they seem
And everyone gets to play on the same team
Mystery remains.
I’ve seen the power of love
A power for this world
But not of this world
I’ve seen the power of humility
A power that doesn’t grasp for certitude
But rather embraces love in the unknown
What if true power looks like sacrifice?
What if true power looks like love?
May we embrace the mystery
And learn love above all else | https://medium.com/interfaith-now/embracing-mystery-3855523b7248 | ['Breanna Lowman'] | 2020-09-11 16:01:00.345000+00:00 | ['Christianity', 'Poetry On Medium', 'Faith', 'Spirituality', 'Poetry'] |
What is Online Shopping? | Online Shopping is the activity or action of shopping for merchandise or services over the net. It suggests that going surfing, landing on a seller’s web site, choosing one thing, and composition for its delivery. The customer either pays for the great or service online with a credit or charge account credit or upon delivery. The term doesn’t solely embody shopping for things online however conjointly looking for them online. In alternative words, I’ll are engaged in online searching however failed to get something.
Online searching has been around for twenty-five years. It’s grownup in quality considerably. Today, we are able to purchase nearly something online. In fact, retail specialists say that online searching can shortly overtake ancient shopping in financial terms. Online searching is an element of E-Commerce that stands for Electronic Commerce.
Online searching happens once a client buys through a digital platform. An associate in nursing example of such a platform is Bikerringshop.com, an internet store from Pakistan. You don’t have to board this country to urge one among the merchandise this store sells. International coverage is one of the most important advantages of online searching.
We Like Shopping For Things Online:-
We like searching online. The most attractiveness is that we are able to realize and get things we tend to need while not ever eager to leave the house. During the amount leading up to Christmas, online searching is especially appealing. It’s appealing as a result of shoppers will avoid those long lines (British: queues) with angry shoppers.
According to OxfordDictionaries.com, online searching is:
“The action or activity of shopping for merchandise or services over the net.”
Which Retailers Offer Online Shopping?
Today, most stores offer online searching facilities. In alternative words, they need a web site that enables shoppers to get from them on the net.
The distributor either delivers to the shopper’s home, office, a neighbor, or a close-by store location.
Many people do their weekly food market grocery searching online.
Some corporations, in fact, solely sell online. They need no physical search that folks will visit.
For example, Amazon.com sells nearly all of its merchandise online through its e-commerce platform.
Newegg, Ocado, and TigerDirect conjointly focus totally on online searching facilities.
Online searching includes each shopping for things online, in addition to simply viewing things online. In alternative words, it includes ‘online buying groceries.’
How Will Online Searching Work?
Above all, you may want an online association, a debit or MasterCard, and a secure Arcanum. You conjointly ought to have an Associate in a Nursing email address or movable variety. Most retailers can permit you to form up your Arcanum. Confirm it’s an Arcanum that no-one may guess. Avoid your birth date and people of relatives. Ideally, you ought to embody a mix of letters, numbers, and better and lower cases.
You then scroll through the things the distributor is providing. Generally, they’re going to have a class list, like furnishings, equipment, gardening, etc. Most retailers even have a research facility. This implies that you simply will write the name of the item you get to see whether or not they have it.
Online Searching Paying:-
When it’s time to pay, the distributor can elicit your card details. They’re going to need the name on the cardboard, the long 16-digit variety, the ending date, and a 3-digit variety at the rear. You conjointly ought to offer details of the card’s asking address.
When giving your card details, confirm their net address starts with ‘HTTPS’ and NOT ‘HTTP.’ an online address that starts with HTTPS’ suggests that it’s a secure page, and appropriate for handling payments.
Online searching is nice for purchasing things that are identical. As an example, printer toner, bathroom tissue, or screen liquid for your automobile are things that don’t vary. However, fruit and vegetables are totally different. They will be mature or not ripe enough.
Most retailers permit you to remit merchandise. In fact, in some countries, you get a ‘grace amount.’ this implies that the law permits you to remit merchandise at intervals an explicit amount.
Therefore, online searching is additionally smart for things that you simply ought to assume, like shoes or garments. As a result of you’ll send them back.
A Daraz Pakistan survey found that physical retailers face a serious challenge. Their challenge is a way to satisfy connected shoppers. Connected shoppers expect to be ready to flex between physical and online stores.
When we purchase a book online or register for Associate in the nursing e-learning course, we tend to are paying for data. In fact, data commerce or K-commerce may be a large international trade.
The distributor either delivers to the shopper’s home, office, a neighbor, or a close-by store location.
Many people do their weekly food market grocery searching on-line.
Some corporations, in fact, solely sell on-line. They need no physical search that folks will visit.
For example, Amazon.com sells nearly all of its merchandise on-line through its e-commerce platform.
Newegg, Ocado, and TigerDirect conjointly focus totally on on-line searching facilities.
Online searching includes each shopping for things on-line, in addition as simply viewing things on-line. In alternative words, it includes ‘online buying groceries.’ | https://medium.com/@mzia1050/what-is-online-shopping-57b1c578b9c9 | ['Madeeha Zia'] | 2019-10-19 06:24:35.725000+00:00 | ['Online Shopping', 'Ecommerce', 'Online Business', 'Uk Shopping Search', 'Pakistan'] |
Presearch Nodes now run on Raspberry Pi! | Presearch supports low cost entry to running a node by enabling you to run a node on a 64 bit Raspberry Pi!
Why is this important?
Enabling Presearch Nodes to run on Raspberry Pi devices has been one of the most requested updates from our Beta node operators.
With the launch of support for Raspberry Pi, people from all over the world can now operate a Presearch node that runs 24/7 from their home with low energy usage and very inexpensively (for under $50).
If you’re unfamiliar with what Raspberry Pi is (no, it’s not the pie your grandma makes), it’s a cheap computer that has tons of functionality, making them the perfect device for running Presearch Nodes easily and inexpensively.
Downstream effects of decentralization
While we strive to be as decentralized is possible, when you decentralize one thing, it creates points of centralization downstream. For example, if AWS or other centralized cloud providers were to go offline, the Ethereum network would be significantly impacted, since 30% of Ethereum nodes have historically run on AWS and another 40% on the top 10 cloud hosting providers.
This is true for many of the Layer 1 protocols. Although the mechanisms on top of the centralized providers are decentralized, full decentralization is difficult when downstream, there are huge points of centralization.
If the US government forced Amazon to not allow any sort of cryptocurrency node on top of it, many blockchains would be in trouble. Many of the Presearch nodes within our network of community node operators run on top of this infrastructure as well. There are decentralized VPS providers, but being able to run a node from your home is one of the best ways to combat centralization. While there still will inevitably be points of centralization, it’s one less point, and increases the resilience of the project.
A large obstacle for decentralization of nodes is to make the nodes as lightweight as possible so that they can be run on as many devices as possible, as closely to each searcher as possible, resulting in lower latency and greater ubiquity. Being able to run a node on a low-cost, low-energy device is a huge step in this direction, and we’re proud to now offer this option to our community of thousands of node operators who now run more than 15,000 Presearch Nodes.
You can run a node detached from ANY hosting provider and run your own node using your own electricity and internet connection. With Raspberry Pi devices now supported, your node can be always on, with minimal energy usage, and no need to tie up your primary computer!
Want to try setting one up?
Head to https://docs.presearch.org/nodes/raspberry-pi for device setup instructions, and how to start install and start your Raspberry Pi Presearch node today!
Links
Interested in checking out our different platforms?
Run a node: https://nodes.presearch.org
Keyword Stake: https://keywords.presearch.org
Info site: https://presearch.io
Search with Presearch: https://presearch.com
Or join our community channels:
Telegram: t.me/Presearch
Telegram (News): t.me/PresearchNews
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TeamPresearch
Twitter (News): https://twitter.com/presearchnews
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/presearch.io
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/Presearch/videos
Email: [email protected]
Interested in partnering? Send us an email at — [email protected] | https://medium.com/@presearch/presearch-nodes-can-now-run-on-raspberry-pi-4b31a756e9e0 | [] | 2021-09-15 23:17:34.862000+00:00 | ['Privacy', 'Ethereum', 'Bitcoin', 'Node', 'Raspberry Pi'] |
Symfony / Doctrine — update a record using models | The Doctrine manual is really, really confusing in places. If you want to do something as simple as updating a record, the examples suggest that you use Doctrine_Query::create() . This doesn’t make a lot of sense, because we only want to manipulate the model, we shouldn’t have to even look at a query. Assuming you have the primary id of the record in question, you can do the following to easily modify a record:
[sourcecode language=”php”]
$myobj = new Doctrine::getTable(‘modelname’)->find($request->getParameter(‘my_id’));
$myobj->property = ‘New Value’;
$myobj->save();
[/sourcecode]
This is really straightforward, but if you don’t include the find() inline with the getTable() call, you’ll get an obscure “Unknown method saveTableProxy” error, which there seems to be no documentation for anywhere on the internet. It only took a couple of hours of trial and error to get this figured out.
In general, I’d still recommend Doctrine as an ORM, but the lack of consistent and clear documentation, with dreadfully obscure object methods, make for a very steep learning curve. | https://medium.com/sudogem/symfony-doctrine-update-a-record-using-models-3b5b2c5583cc | [] | 2017-05-17 17:27:44.315000+00:00 | ['Symfony', 'PHP'] |
Last Week in Crypto — 12 Nov 2018 | Last Week in Crypto — 12 Nov 2018
Brought to you by Blockmanity
We are at our 4th week. A lot happened in crypto last week. Bitcoin Adopter Gavin Newsom got Elected Governor of California. Dogecoin Creator was also in the news with a Crypto Paradox. Apple Censored a Bitcoin Podcast.
Here goes…
Early Bitcoin Adopter Gavin Newsom gets Elected Governor of California — by Shrikar
Democrat Newson won against Republican John Cox by a landslide. 51-year-old Newsom had been trying his luck to become governor for a decade and has finally succeeded to become the governor of California state.
Gavin was the first governor to accept Bitcoin back in 2014 to show his support to the technology. Read More » | https://medium.com/blockmanity/last-week-in-crypto-12-nov-2018-f44116a0eaa1 | ['Rishabh Bose'] | 2018-11-20 17:05:46.136000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency News', 'Blockmanity', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Crypto'] |
Should We Forgive Someone Terrible in Life Once They Have Died? | Should We Forgive Someone Terrible in Life Once They Have Died?
Image Courtesy of Unsplash; Simon Gibson, photographer
I have been told I am not enlightened enough to believe otherwise, but to my mind blindly forgiving everyone in death is disingenuous.
For example, I will not forgive a killer, defined in this context as one whose singular intention is to take an innocent life in offense, as opposed to self-defense. That individual is irredeemable to me. Mental illness is a complex topic, and it can certainly be argued one is not in their “right mind” if they set out to deliberately claim a life. I don’t disagree. We can also blame upbringing and environment.
Regardless, intentional killing, potentially rife with reasons or excuses, is unapologetically a personal line.
Accidental killing, or manslaughter, I consider on a case-by-case basis.
I put officers of the law in these boxes as well.
Would you forgive a terrorist, foreign or domestic, a serial killer, one who beats their spouse or one who tortures animals? Extreme examples, none of which justifies the concept of blind, or blanket, forgiveness.
I would not mourn their deaths, so please refrain from justifying how proper it is for everyone to forgive in all cases.
It’s not. | https://medium.com/illumination/should-we-forgive-someone-terrible-in-life-just-because-they-have-died-8ec32e8c7dca | ['Joel Eisenberg'] | 2020-11-24 00:22:59.300000+00:00 | ['Death', 'Life', 'Crime', 'Culture', 'Forgiveness'] |
One of the Greatest Love Stories of Ancient Rome | One of the Greatest Love Stories of Ancient Rome
How Hadrian made his lover a god
Emperor Hadrian with the bust of his lover Antinous in the foreground. Photo by Jim Kuhn (CC BY-SA 4.0).
When thinking about love stories in Ancient Rome, the first story that comes to mind is the love story of Cleopatra and Mark Antony. This great love story was repeatedly told throughout history, even Shakespeare wrote a play about it. However, there was another great love story from the Roman Empire’s imperial period which has not been forgotten. It is about an endless love between two men: Hadrian and Antinous.
Hadrian was born on January 24th, 76, either in near present-day Seville or Rome. During his rule, his goal was to further strengthen and unite the Roman Empire by investing a lot into infrastructure and restraining from further military actions, thus promoting prosperity throughout the vast Empire. He concentrated military efforts in defending the Roman Empire by building fortifications such as the world-famous Hadrian’s Wall.
A tolerated love
To strengthen the bond of the different regions of the Empire with Rome, Hadrian traveled extensively. However, he did not travel alone. Upon meeting the young athletic and extremely handsome Antinous, the two were inseparable. His companion and boyfriend fit perfectly into Hadrian’s love for the Greek way of life and culture. The two began a relationship with the emperor being totally smitten, displaying “an obsessive craving for his presence” (Town&Country).
Given the circumstances, one could think that this must have been viewed as a scandalous affair. However, this was only partly true. Just like it was custom in Ancient Greece, Roman nobles also had young male lovers. For the relationship to not be considered scandalous, specific guidelines had to be followed: the older, more powerful man always had to be “on top,” and no feelings between the lovers were allowed. Antinous was a young Greek slave, his love affair with the emperor was as per the guidelines, and therefore, the relationship was tolerated by Hadrian’s peers, right?
Well, not really. Since Hadrian’s marriage to Vibia Sabina remained childless, he did not entirely fulfill his marital duties. This could have proven devastating for the succession. Additionally, there was the fact that the two men shared real and genuine feelings. According to historian Royston Lambert, Antinous was “the one person who seems to have connected most profoundly with Hadrian.” It is also known that Hadrian liked to write erotic poems and autobiographies about his young lovers, so it must be assumed that he also bestowed this honor upon the young Antinous.
The longer and the more often the two of them traveled together, the more rumors the two attracted. Not least to avoid these problems, Hadrian decided to leave Rome and start traveling again, even though he was suffering from an unknown illness. Thus, he could turn his back on the rumor mill of Rome and give himself entirely to his lover. On their travels together, the two of them indulged in their love of hunting, and, according to accounts, Hadrian saved his lover’s life on one of the hunting expeditions. This love story lasted for years, and Hadrian took his lover to state dinners and royal ceremonies until it ended abruptly.
The unexplained death of Antinous
While the two were sailing on the Nile, a severe incident occurred: for reasons unknown, Antinous fell into the river and drowned. There are several theories about his untimely death. Although an accident cannot be excluded, other theories are conceivable and perhaps even more comprehensible. The idea that Antinous sacrificed himself to heal Hadrian’s unknown illness seems far-fetched. It is also unlikely that Antinous drowned himself to not endanger his beloved’s reputation as a great emperor. From today’s perspective, it is more likely that Antinous fell victim to an insidious conspiracy concocted by the court’s highest circles.
The cult of the deceased and the legacy of the powerful
To say Hadrian’s reaction to the death of his boyfriend was heart-broken wouldn’t give all of his efforts for the world to remember his real love credit. After reportedly breaking down and weeping publicly, he ordered a city to be built in his honor and named a star after his great love. But that is not all! To really pay tribute to his lover, Hadrian made him a god.
Antinous’s death in the Nile played a central role in the mythology Hadrian built around his godliness. In Egyptian mythology, his death could also mean that the river god had taken him and made him a deity. Because many Egyptians already saw the young man as a deity without Hadrian having to proclaim this, a cult could be built up and cultivated around him. Hadrian used this fact to declare his Antinous a god in October 130. This quickly met with approval, and in many places, temples were built in his honor. It is also said that Hadrian commissioned up to 2000 statues.
The statues of Antinous all share similar features, making them relatively easy to identify. As the Roman Empire moved away from paganism and towards Christianity, worshiping deities was forbidden. Many of the statues were destroyed over the centuries that followed. Still, about eighty sculptures have survived to this day, showing Antinous with a swollen chest, a slightly lowered face, and fabulous Greek curls. It was Hadrian’s love for him and his features that have surpassed the test of time.
Thanks to this great love, today, we still know who Antinous was. Moreover, we still remember what they had: one of the greatest loves of the Ancient world. | https://medium.com/history-of-yesterday/one-of-the-greatest-love-stories-of-ancient-rome-771410485da2 | ['The Unlikely Techie'] | 2020-11-20 06:02:29.113000+00:00 | ['Lovestory', 'Love', 'Queer', 'Ancient History', 'History'] |
The Seven Personal Skills to Develop Before Moving Abroad! | An here it begins…
If you had told me when I was a child that one day I will live overseas as a permanent resident, I would not have believed you. I cannot recall what I wanted to do with my life when I grow up but definitely, living abroad was not part of my plan. I think it even came unexpectedly as a moment of enlightenment — I would like to try to do something more challenging and continue my education abroad. My chosen destination was Germany for a simple reason — this country offered a wide variety of studying programs and there are plenty of famous research centers to choose from. In addition to that, it was also the easiest choice for me because of the language and cultural specificity that perfectly complied with my personality.
After a couple of months of non-stop searching and email “ping-ponging” I have found a program that would leave me satisfied with my choice. As soon as I graduated from university and got my master’s diploma, I confidently headed to the university’s exit marching towards my enlightened future and unique opportunity to pursue a Doctoral degree abroad! It was like a scene from a movie; you are in front of two massive doors, the next moment they open and you are moving into a room full of light… I do not exactly remember whether there was a choir of angels singing… but that is how it felt!
First thing’s first…
Needless to mention here, I had big expectations. And here comes the first rule: do not have any expectations when you are starting a new project and especially when moving abroad. The higher the expectations you have and the bigger the difference between your expectations and the reality, the higher the disappointment you will have. You can also add on top of that the different play rules you definitely need to follow, people’s perceptions, their level of education and world vision, cultural differences, language barriers, and all that jazz related to cliches that you might have not been aware of (and of course, nobody here prevented you, right?). I fully understand why so many people make a decision to come back after a trial, and I do not blame them for that!
Take it or leave it…
When it comes to moving out, you also have to be to some extent an adventurous person. Living overseas is a risk and taking them and feeling comfortable at the same time is not everyone’s cup of tea. It is definitely a get-out-of-your-comfort-zone opportunity and you should also appreciate this. It is like taking a cold shower after doing your daily workout. I love it! You might hate it, but you can still develop a feeling of being okay to do that for a health benefit! Psssst! Do not tell anyone: if you have never experienced moving abroad, you will get used to the new environment and might even enjoy it once you are settled down.
Do I actually need all these?
And here we are coming to the next important point: why you are here. Is it for studying, pursuing your dream career, or maybe you were looking for life experiences and were hungry for a change? It is your dream that should work for you as a lighthouse beacon light, enlightening your way through, full of uncertainties and issues. Trust me, you have to be prepared. Be persistent; it will make your dream undestroyable!
Passions, passions, and again… Passions!
We are all different and our personalities formed not only under rules imposed by cultural constraints but also under criteria that are going far beyond that. The latter includes the family environments we have risen in, our personal experience, gender, age, location, and a language that also shapes the way we think. The list may continue…
Globalization also plays a key role in diminishing the borders between cultures that led to a big cultural mix. No matter what, you should respect the fact that we are all different. That rule always keeps me on the safe side and spares me from having conflicts, in both my personal and professional life. It also taught me to stop judging quickly and appreciate the opinions that differ from mine. Points of you other than yours can help you to have a look at the problem from another perspective and, who knows might even help you find an answer to some of your questions more quickly.
Appreciate the difference…
Being flexible is another skill I have improved while traveling around. Weather, food, and local rules are all different. Appreciate the fact that all these won’t be like at home, and be prepared for that as well.
Who can be a better friend for me than myself?
You need to be comfortable to be in your own company… at least in the beginning, till you find new friends. The harsh reality is that no one is actually waiting for you there. The only person you can rely on is yourself. That is why it is important to be (or at least be okay for some time) on your own and enjoy your own company.
“see the world through other people’s eyes,”― Brian Grazer
Last but not least: it is inner personal curiosity. It is always interesting to learn more about the history of the country you plan to live in, boost your language skills, and learn more about another culture and customs, isn’t it? The more you learn about the country and its rules, the more you get the feel for another culture and become confident living there.
I would like to finalize this story with one interesting example from my past experience. I needed to present the preliminary results of my research in front of a scientific audience, a majority of which were Germans. Despite my nervousness and anxiety that occurred from the previous sleepless nights from working on the presentation (speaking of time-management, right?), I delivered it well. But when I was done with that, there was one surprise waiting for me. I expected hand claps or at least silence in the worst case… but, instead, I received a crushing air noise, which was triggered by about 70 people’s knuckles knocking on the tables. That was one of the cultural loud-shocking lessons I needed to learn that evening…
In the end, it is your personal experience. It is always nice to learn something new. Do not be stressed if you decide to move abroad. It is all good. Just enjoy your journey and you will never know what one opportunity can lead to…. but this a topic for another story… | https://medium.com/@helloimportunel/the-seven-personal-skills-to-develop-before-moving-abroad-9eb5e3715531 | ['Margot Benouard'] | 2020-12-22 14:55:54.292000+00:00 | ['Challenge', 'Moving Abroad', 'Living Overseas', 'Personal Development', 'Self Improvement'] |
Think You Need Microservices? Think Again | Microservices have been everywhere for the past few years. YouTube is using them. Facebook is using them.
But should you use them?
Spoiler alert: Microservices probably isn’t the best solution for your cloud architecture. In this article, we’ll explain why.
Let’s start with the basics.
What Are Microservices?
The two most popular paradigms are monolithic architectures or microservice architectures.
For years, a monolithic architecture has been a dependable way to compose systems. These systems have multiple components all under the same service. They leverage internal libraries and don’t require much network activity.
The other, newer, sexier option is microservices. Rather than a single service, microservices have many components, each with its own specific process. Each component has distinct lines of responsibility and is separated from one another.
Here’s an example:
When you log into your email, a few things must happen.
You visit a webpage You submit your login and password Your device connects to a database A server grants your access A new webpage loads with your email interface
In a microservice architecture, each of these steps would be contained within their own process. In order to complete the full task (logging you into your email), each of these components much communication over the wire. This breaks up your environment into tiny pieces of information and requires multiple connections to function.
Why Are Microservices So Popular?
We hate to see it.
It’s because the big boys are doing it.
We often hear things like,
“Microservices is scalable! I want to scale.”
“Microservices is reliable! I need reliability.”
“YouTube is using microservices and they are soooo cool!”
Tech giants like Facebook and YouTube are using this architecture because they’re operating at a scale larger than 99% of companies that exist.
They need a system that can process 6,000 user requests per second. They have two billion users.
But Here’s The Problem
Simply stated: Microservices are over-hyped.
The fact is that most software architectures won’t ever be difficult or complex enough to require microservices.
Most companies (read: your company) can handle a simple architecture. Rather than breaking out systems, you can copy systems.
Here’s What You Should Do
We repeat: Your niche software application probably doesn’t need the same architecture as YouTube.
However, like all things, it depends on your unique use case.
While you’re the subject matter expert of your domain, don’t underestimate the power and simplicity of a well-maintained monolith. Once you start using microservices, you put yourself into a design paradigm that you can’t easily get out of.
If your application requires certain functionality that isn’t easily internalized, such as NLP or a machine learning process, you would be a good candidate for separate service, while still maintaining the sanctity of a monolith application.
Overall, well designed monolithic architectures are simpler and easier to maintain. And when it comes to architecture, the simpler the better. | https://wintersieck.medium.com/think-you-need-microservices-think-again-b48b3e0caf33 | ['Allan Wintersieck'] | 2020-10-23 18:46:39.032000+00:00 | ['Microservices', 'Software Architecture', 'Software Engineering', 'Cto'] |
The Scientific Basis of Socialism | Socialism is the political rule of the proletariat, it is social appropriation of socialized production. Socialism is the control of the means of production by the proletariat as a class. Socialism is where the proletariat has successfully captured state power, built its own state, and begun the process of abolishing classes. But what is the basis of socialism? Why will socialism develop? What makes socialism viable?
Historic and modern utopian socialists would answer that the moral superiority of socialism is what gives it advantage over the bourgeois order, that socialism will prevail as the victory of so-called justice. Many even, incorrectly, claim Marx opposed capitalism and supported socialism, as a perfect, utopian society, on the basis of morality or justice, whether they are lauding him or disparaging him. Typically, they misattribute the ideas of Sismondi, Owen, and Lasalle in making these claims about his analysis of capitalism. I digress, these utopian socialists and the critics of Marxism claim that socialism’s basis is on morality and justice. This, however, can be recognized as deluded idealism by any materialist. Justice and morality exist in the realm of ideas, and particular social definitions of them do not merely fall from the sky into the minds of people. Rather, people’s conceptions of them are formed through experiencing the material world, its social relations, its tendencies of development, etc. Any perception of something as just or unjust, moral or immoral, is either a reflection of the dominant ideology of the bourgeoisie, or merely an indirect manner of expressing one’s laboring class interests. To claim justice or morality as the basis of socialism, besides, is greatly harmful to revolutionary practice, and is inaccurate regardless. As Friedrich Engels says in Anti-Dühring:
If for the imminent overthrow of the present mode of distribution of the products of labour… we had no better guarantee than the consciousness that this mode of distribution is unjust, and that justice must eventually triumph, we should be in a pretty bad way, and we might have a long time to wait… The most important thing in this is that the productive forces created by the modern capitalist mode of production and the system of distribution of goods established by it have come into crying contradiction with that mode of production itself, and in fact to such a degree that, if the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution of the mode of production and distribution must take place, a revolution which will put an end to all class divisions. On this tangible, material fact… and not on the conceptions of justice and injustice held by any armchair philosopher, is modern socialism’s confidence of victory founded.
Here Engels puts us on the correct path toward identifying the true basis of socialism. Socialism does not come about due to metaphysical expressions of opposition to bourgeois order, but due to very material developments and interests which carve out the preconditions for socialist society. The tendencies of capitalist development themselves represent a trajectory toward socialism. This is not a logical contradiction. In Reform or Revolution?, Rosa Luxemburg identifies that:
The scientific basis of Socialism rests… on three principal results of capitalist development. First, on the growing anarchy of capitalist economy, leading inevitably to its ruin. Second, on the progressive socialization of the process of production, which creates the germs of the future social order. And third, on the increased organization and consciousness of the proletarian class, which constitutes the active factor in the coming revolution.
Let us elaborate on these three trajectories of capitalism one-by-one in order to better understand the basis of socialism.
The anarchy of capitalist production is very clear to see for even those untrained in socialist analysis, including bourgeois economists. In bourgeois political economy, the fact that major crises happen every few years is merely taken as a given, and seen as a fact of reality. Few bourgeois economists see the inevitability of crises under capitalism as a sign of its inviability, or of its nature as a finite mode of production. Further, few find success in identifying the cause of these crises. Thankfully for us, Marxism offers us an explanation of these crises, and identifies that they are inherent to capitalism, they cannot merely be done away with through reform. As Marx identifies in the third volume of Capital, capitalist development is inevitably defined by a decline in the rate of profit, although the absolute quantity of profit may increase. The foundation for this is in the very technological development of productive forces, which reduces the labor time needed for the production of a commodity, and thus cheapens both the commodity’s value and labor-power itself, while greatly increasing the productivity of the latter. Due to this development, fewer workers are hired in production, as the larger labor armies of the time before the new technological development, along with their higher cost, are no longer needed. The same productivity can be met with fewer workers. However, with the reduction in the size of the labor force also comes a reduction in the quantity of surplus-value relative to the total cost of production. Surplus-value, as value created beyond necessary labor time (time needed to reproduce the value of the worker’s wages), is directly tied to wage laborers. An increase in constant, particularly fixed (means of production), capital relative to other factors of production (technology used in production), does not increase surplus value, as machines or raw materials cannot have unpaid labor time, their “pay” is in their purchase or maintenance. Only a worker can have unpaid labor time, and fewer workers means less labor time. Thus, as the cost of production grows with its growing scale, the rate of profit, an expression of the quantity of surplus-value reaped relative to the cost of production, falls. In the aforementioned third volume of Capital, Marx expresses the significance of this thusly:
The rate of profit, i.e. the relative growth in capital, is particularly important for all new off-shoots of capital that organize themselves independently. And if capital formation were to fall exclusively into the hands of a few existing big capitals, for whom the mass of profit outweighs the rate, the animating fire of production would be totally extinguished. It would die out. It is the rate of profit that is the driving force in capitalist production, and nothing is produced save what can be produced at a profit. Hence the concern of the English economists over the decline in the profit rate. If Ricardo is disquieted even by the very possibility of this, that precisely shows his deep understanding of the conditions of capitalist production. What other people reproach him for, i.e. that he is unconcerned with ‘human beings’ and concentrates exclusively on the development of the productive forces when considering capitalist production — whatever sacrifices of human beings and capital values this is bought with — is precisely his significant contribution. The development of the productive forces of social labour is capital’s historic mission and justification. For that very reason, it unwittingly creates the material conditions for a higher form of production. What disturbs Ricardo is the way that the rate of profit, which is the stimulus of capitalist production and both the condition for and the driving force in accumulation, is endangered by the development of production itself. And the quantitative relation is everything here. In actual fact, the underlying reason is something deeper, about which he has no more than a suspicion. What is visible here in a purely economic manner, i.e. from the bourgeois standpoint, within the limits of capitalist understanding, from the standpoint of capitalist production itself, are its barriers, its relativity, the fact that it is not an absolute but only a historical mode of production, corresponding to a specific and limited epoch in the development of the material conditions of production.
Capitalism is not an eternal system. It has not existed forever (contrary to those who define capitalism as mere commodity exchange), and it will not continue to exist without cessation. The tendency of the rate of profit to decline, and resulting crises, represents the border of capitalism. While capitalism can desperately tear for new markets, this cannot satisfy its need for infinite expansion in a finite world. In the 19th and 20th centuries, capitalism engaged in global imperialism in order to dominate new markets where profit rates would be higher and consumers outside the production of the home country could be found, or made. Today, the imperialist world order continues to hold hegemony, although capitalism has fewer and fewer markets to expand into. The end product of capitalist production is found to be in an ever larger quantity as capitalism grows through the realization of surplus-value. However, within a fully capitalist society, with only the proletariat and bourgeoisie, there is no one to purchase these products, and thus enable the realization of surplus-value. The workers can only buy the equivalent of the wages paid to them by the capitalists, and thus their consumption merely represents a recovery of value lost for the collective bourgeoisie in their payment. The bourgeoisie can only consume the equivalent of the component of surplus-value which goes into their consumption fund, although their expenditure of surplus-value on insurance, maintenance of the means of production, and the expansion of the production process can be counted as well. The bourgeoisie cannot, as a class, consume beyond their collective appropriated surplus-value in order to realize a greater quantity of surplus-value. If they merely consumed their own product, or each other’s product, this would not lead to expanded reproduction, merely simple reproduction. Further, the existence of liberal professionals (artists, actors, academics, etc) or religious figures cannot represent the consumption of this surplus-value, as their incomes are merely either payment from surplus-value appropriated by the bourgeoisie or payment from the wages of the proletariat. So, where does capitalism turn to for the realization of this surplus value? Rosa Luxemburg identifies, in The Accumulation of Capital, the functions of capitalism which “resolve” this, as well as the continuing tendency toward crises and limits of capitalism:
Capitalism arises and develops historically amidst a non-capitalist society. In Western Europe it is found at first in a feudal environment from which it in fact sprang — the system of bondage in rural areas and the guild system in the towns — and later, after having swallowed up the feudal system, it exists mainly in an environment of peasants and artisans, that is to say in a system of simple commodity production both in agriculture and trade. European capitalism is further surrounded by vast territories of non-European civilization ranging over all levels of development, from the primitive communist hordes of nomad herdsmen, hunters and gatherers to commodity production by peasants and artisans. This is the setting for the accumulation of capital. We must distinguish three phases: the struggle of capital against natural economy, the struggle against commodity economy, and the competitive struggle of capital on the international stage for the remaining conditions of accumulation. The existence and development of capitalism requires an environment of non-capitalist forms of production, but not every one of these forms will serve its ends. Capitalism needs non-capitalist social strata as a market for its surplus value, as a source of supply for its means of production and as a reservoir of labour power for its wage system. For all these purposes, forms of production based upon a natural economy are of no use to capital. In all social organisations where natural economy common ownership of the land, a feudal system of bondage or anything of this nature, economic organization is essentially in response to the internal demand; and therefore there is no demand, or very little, for foreign goods, and also, as a rule, no surplus production, or at least no urgent need to dispose of surplus products. What is most important, however, is that, in any natural economy, production only goes on because both means of production and labour power are bound in one form or another. The communist peasant community no less than the feudal corvée farm and similar institutions maintain their economic organization by subjecting the labour power, and the most important means of production, the land, to the rule of law and custom. A natural economy thus confronts the requirements of capitalism at every turn with rigid barriers. Capitalism must therefore always and everywhere fight a battle of annihilation against every historical form of natural economy that it encounters, whether this is slave economy, feudalism, primitive communism, or patriarchal peasant economy. The principal methods in this struggle are political force (revolution, war), oppressive taxation by the state, and cheap goods; they are partly applied simultaneously, and partly they succeed and complement one another. In Europe, force assumed revolutionary forms in the fight against feudalism (this is the ultimate explanation of the bourgeois revolutions in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries); in the non-European countries, where it fights more primitive social organizations, it assumes the forms of colonial policy. These methods, together with the systems of taxation applied in such cases, and commercial relations also, particularly with primitive communities, form an alliance in which political power and economic factors go hand in hand.
While capitalism continues to seek new consumers through imperialism, and by divorcing people from direct access to the means of subsistence, it cannot escape its limits, or its crises resulting in the failure to realize surplus-value. Capitalism has overproduction because it does not hold the social elements to sustainably promote the consumption, and therefore the realization, of its surplus-value. As capitalism develops further, and continues to socialize production (which ensures the spread of crises), crises become more pronounced, and tend further and further toward total collapse.
The contradiction of socialized production and private appropriation is the characteristic of capitalism which produces the strongest tendency toward socialism. If capitalism did not do this, but somehow continued to result in crises, socialism would be far less likely than complete social disintegration. But because this is a tendency of capitalism, socialism is made strong in the trajectory of historic development. Friedrich Engels describes this tendency in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:
Then came the concentration of the means of production and of the producers in large workshops and manufactories, their transformation into actual socialized means of production and socialized producers. But the socialized producers and means of production and their products were still treated, after this change, just as they had been before — i.e., as the means of production and the products of individuals. Hitherto, the owner of the instruments of labor had himself appropriated the product, because, as a rule, it was his own product and the assistance of others was the exception. Now, the owner of the instruments of labor always appropriated to himself the product, although it was no longer his product but exclusively the product of the labor of others. Thus, the products now produced socially were not appropriated by those who had actually set in motion the means of production and actually produced the commodities, but by the capitalists. The means of production, and production itself, had become in essence socialized. But they were subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of individuals, under which, therefore, every one owns his own product and brings it to market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of appropriation, although it abolishes the conditions upon which the latter rests. This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production its capitalistic character, contains the germ of the whole of the social antagonisms of today. The greater the mastery obtained by the new mode of production over all important fields of production and in all manufacturing countries, the more it reduced individual production to an insignificant residuum, the more clearly was brought out the incompatibility of socialized production with capitalistic appropriation.
With socialized production, all of the elements of society become reliant upon large scale production. For their incomes, they must either own the means of production (or the land which these owners rent), or they must sell their labor-power as participants in the process of socialized production. To access the means of subsistence, they use these incomes to buy commodities which are the end result of this socialized production. Capitalism divorces the laborer from accessing the means of subsistence directly through primitive accumulation, thus forcing them to become proletarians and consumers of the product of capitalistic production. And yet, although production is socialized, and the development of monopolies creates large, centralized combines which constitute a truly high development in social production, appropriation of this production is private, it falls to the capitalists. They own the means of production, and thus appropriate the surplus-value created in the production process and command production. This is a contradiction of the characteristics of production. As this trait of capitalism becomes more pronounced as monopolies grow larger and greater and greater swathes of society are drawn in closer and closer into dependency on social production, the development of socialism becomes stronger daily as a necessary resolution to this contradiction. Socialism is the social appropriation of social production. With production already centralized and socialized by capitalist development, socialism is favored in historic development.
Capitalist development forms the class of the proletariat by dispossessing non-capitalist classes from their means of subsistence. In order to force them to sell their labor-power in order to access the means of subsistence, capitalism must remove any access to the means of subsistence outside of capitalist economy. This means accumulating small property and commons. By daily growing the propertyless class of the proletariat, capitalism digs its own grave. Because it owns no private property, and only its own labor-power, the proletariat holds little stake in capitalist society. While the peasant has their own small property, and thus tends to prefer to avoid revolutionary change, save for instances where they are threatened by imminent proletarianization or pauperization, the proletariat quite literally has nothing to lose but its chains. However, the proletariat’s consciousness and organization does not merely arise spontaneously, due to a sudden enlightenment. As Luxemburg says in Reform or Revolution?:
It is not true that Socialism will arise automatically from the daily struggle of the working class. Socialism will be the consequence of (1), the growing contradictions of capitalist economy and (2), of the comprehension by the working class of the unavoidability of the suppression of these contradictions through a social transformation.
The proletariat’s consciousness grows as it witnesses the contradiction of socialized production and private appropriation, the increasing industrial reserve army of the unemployed created by the development of technological productiveness, the increasing frequency and severity of crises, and so on. It is those sections of the proletariat who are in a position to most clearly identify the contradictions of capitalism, and inflict the greatest damage upon bourgeois order, who become the most revolutionary (for example, the colonized proletariat in North America). But merely identifying these as inherent to capitalism does not alone lead to socialist development. The proletariat adopts political organization by its own tendencies of centralization (as a result of the centralization of production and of populations into cities) and discipline. The most advanced proletarians form a vanguard party, and become the leaders of their class in political action. Mere spontaneity cannot fulfill the need for successful organization, and spontaneous movements sputter out without such organization and centralization. With a vanguard, there is salience, strength, and viability. Organizational unity can be found, and a group of professional revolutionaries is created, who can dedicate all their time to the study of theory and implementation of revolutionary practice, rather than pursuing a tactic of workers partaking in revolutionary access in their free time. With the vanguard is found the height of proletarian political organization, and the form which has thus far seen the greatest success in the victory and survival of socialist revolutions.
Now, as an aside, I will deal with the very common conception of communism as a utopian fantasy. Marx is often portrayed as seeing communism as the fulfillment of a perfect system, one which he sought because he felt it was morally good. This is an incorrect perception. Marx took a much more scientific view of communism. He did not see communism as absolute equality, but the abolition of class distinctions. Yes, he did define communism as a stateless, classless, moneyless (or, more accurately, sans-commodity production) society. However, what he identified as the basis for communist development was nowhere near the popular perception. In The German Ideology, he writes of the subject:
Finally, from the conception of history set forth by us we obtain these further conclusions: 1) In the development of productive forces there comes a stage when productive forces and means of intercourse are brought into being which, under the existing relations, only cause mischief, and are no longer productive but destructive forces (machinery and money); and connected with this a class is called forth which has to bear the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages, which ousted from society and forced into the sharpest contradiction to all other classes; a class which forms the majority of members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness, which may, of course, arise among the other classes too through the contemplation of the situation of this class. 2) The conditions under which definite productive forces can be applied are the conditions of the rule of a definite class of society, whose social power, deriving from its property has its practical-idealistic expression in each case in the form of the state and, therefore, every revolutionary struggle is directed against a class which till then has been in power. 3) In all previous revolutions the mode of activity always remained unchanged and it was only a question of a different distribution of this activity, a new distribution of labour to other persons whilst the communist revolution is directed against the hitherto existing mode of activity, does away with labour, and abolishes the rule of all classes with the classes themselves because it is carried through by the class which no longer counts as a class in society, which is not recognized as a class, and is in itself the expression of the dissolution of all classes nationalities, etc., within present society; and 4) Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place, a revolution; the revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.
With the development of productive forces in an even way (abolishing the antithesis of town and country, imperial core and periphery, etc) comes the abolition of scarcity, and thus the end of the basis of commodity production. The proletariat, as a propertyless laboring class, can destroy the bourgeoisie, as the bourgeoisie is not necessary for the production process (by contrast, the bourgeoisie cannot destroy the proletariat, as the latter is its source of labor). With the destruction of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat, of the colonial system by the colonized, of the gendered division of labor by its victims, comes the end of classes, and thus class antagonism, which is the basis of the state. With no more cleavage in social interests, what benefits one benefits all the same, with no resulting detriment to another. Thus, the state, existing to promote social cohesion in an antagonistic context, and to enforce the rule of the dominant class, withers away. Capitalism lays the foundation for both socialism and, eventually, communism. Capitalism’s main role is developing productive forces. Socialism’s main role is the abolition of class distinctions, which represents a tendency toward the eventual withering away of the state. With these developments comes communism. It does not emerge from conceptions of morality and perfection, which are simply reflections of material existence, but from real tendencies in historical development. | https://medium.com/@nodrivers/the-scientific-basis-of-socialism-751543af548 | [] | 2020-04-15 19:18:03.583000+00:00 | ['Marxism', 'Socialism', 'Communism', 'Politics', 'Philosophy'] |
THE LAW OF ATTRACTION: How to manifest the life you want! | Did you know that you have attracted every single thing you have in your life up until this very moment?
How to manifest your dream life?
Every single moment of your life has brought you to this present moment. You are constantly attracting things into your life without even realizing it.
The “Law of Attraction”- put into simple terms, says that you will attract into your life what you focus on. Whether it be negative or positive.
To be taught how to manifest really means, how to manifest intentionally. You are already at all times manifesting without pause. You are constantly attracting things into your life based on your thoughts, , your feelings, and your level of vibration.
If you are always focusing on the good in life, giving off good energy and feelings, you are attracting that into your life and vice versa. If you are constantly feeling negative, you will continue to attract negative things into your life. When you understand this and learn how to maneuver it, you can MANIFEST ANYTHING YOU WANT INTO YOUR LIFE.
“Law of attraction” says: I will attract what I want into my life.
“Manifestation” says: I will attract what I am into my life.
Humans are magnets that constantly attract what they are into their lives.
The trick is to become what you want and the person you want to be in your mind and it will come into the physical world.
Every single thing in this world is made up of energy. Everything is constantly vibrating in the frequency of the energy we’re giving off.
Whatever frequency you’re vibrating at is what you attract into your life similar to a magnet. If you are in a bad mood, you will not be able to attract positive things in your life because you are not at the same frequency.
When you learn how to read your vibration and become more happy and fulfilled from within, then you will raise the frequency of your vibration and easily attract what you want into your life like a magnet.
Whatever you are focusing on in your life, the universe is granting you. Everything that your’e constantly thinking, saying, and writing is constantly coming into existence.
Have you ever heard of the phrase “Waking up on the wrong side of the bed”? After one thing goes wrong, there becomes a snowball effect and everything else immediately after starts going wrong too. Once you are in this bad mindset, more bad things will continue to come to you. That’s why it is important to let go of a negative thought, and continue to raise your vibration so that you can attract things of a high vibration into your life. Let go of the past and the future, and live in the present moment and manifest the things you want by already having them in your mind.
Methods to manifest:
Step 1: You have to ask the universe what you want. Write it down in the present tense. Place your order with the universe.
Affirmations- positive statement in the present tense
An example of this method is:
If you are trying to manifest self confidence say to yourself, “I am so happy and grateful now that I am so self confident”
3 by 33 method, pick an affirmation every single day and write it 33 times for 3 days.
Step 2: BELIEVE- Believe that it is already yours. You have to have unwavering faith. The universe will start rearranging itself to make what you want to happen happen for you. Without thinking how or when, you must believe in yourself and in the present moment and be trusting without a shadow of a doubt. Replace feelings of doubt with faith.
Step 3: RECEIVE: When your’e manifesting, you have to experience the emotions as if you have that very thing right now. Start feeling wonderful about it. Feel the way your would feel once it arrives in the physical. Your body will start to build emotion and put yourself in the frequency of what you want and YOU WILL HAVE IT.
Step 4: VISUALIZE: Envision what you want in the present moment. Close your eyes and take a deep breath and imagine yourself with everything you desire.
Step 5: EXPRESS GRATITUDE: write 10 things you are grateful for. When you are in a happy place in your life, the universe will rearrange itself and attract more things that bring you happiness. | https://medium.com/@nicolepery/the-law-of-attraction-how-to-manifest-the-life-you-want-dd8da081bcbe | [] | 2020-12-24 05:16:01.391000+00:00 | ['Manifestation', 'Life Advice', 'Dreams', 'Manifest', 'Law Of Attraction'] |
All Clothes Shopping is Not Created Equal | Or why guys don’t understand why shopping is so hard
Photo by Becca McHaffie on Unsplash
Imagine, if you will, that three different people set out to get a single pair of pants.
First, we have Lindsey, a young mom, just out to get some pants for her toddler.
One bright summer day, Lindsey decides that it is time for her 18 month old to get some new pants, as even though he is considered an average sized child at the doctor, he is outgrowing the size listed as 18 months.
She hates kid’s sizing and considers it to be even less helpful than women’s sizing. How is it possible that at one store the size up is 18–24 months, as opposed to just 18 months, but at other stores it is 24 months and at some places the size goes from 18 months to 2t?
She is so frustrated over the fact that mathematically 24 months is age 2, so should be equal to 2t clothing, but no, in a move that defies logic, the size 2t months is typically (but not always) larger than size 24 months.
It is all maddening.
Not to mention the time that she was hunting for size 24 months shorts, which she found, in two different styles of shorts. She held them up against each other and saw that there was an inch difference in the waist, even though they were “the same size” at the same freaking store.
She brought them both, since her son wasn’t currently with her, and went to the cashier, ready to rant.
“How is this even possible? Are kid’s sizes this worthless? You have two pairs of shorts, the same size, with an inch difference at the waist! It is not even possible to know what size my child will be. Besides, there is no way that both of these will fit. That big of a difference means that one will fit, and one will fall off!”
The cashier calmly replied, “They are different styles, so they are sized a little differently.” The end of that day was exactly as Lindsey expected, one of them fit just fine, and the other falls off her son for now, and she hopes he will grow into the waist size before his legs grow too much for the length to be correct.
On this day, Lindsey finds hope and peace in the best kid’s clothing invention ever- adjustable elastic.
She knows that Ancient Blue is one of the stores that as long as she gets the 18–24 month size with a button on the front, not just an elastic waist, that there will be a beautiful little button on both sides of the waist that she can use to change the elastic on the inside, and size them herself to fit her son. She goes to the store, picks out the color she wants, size 18–24 months with the adjustable sizing and walks away happy.
Next we have Brittany, a tall, yet slim woman who is looking for a pair of jeans.
One bright summer day, Brittany decides that she could use a new pair of pants.
First, she considers ordering online, but realizes that comes with a huge hassle if they don’t fit, as they so often don’t. Then she has to think about all of the different sizing options available in the stores around her. The numbers on the pants are more of a guideline than a size, since each store determines the cut of that particular size their own unique special way.
Which basically means it’s guesswork.
“Last time, I got a size 8 from Bullseye, but their waist was a bit too small,” she thinks to herself. “I fit into the size 6 at Fast, but the thigh area was a bit too snug.”
She has never found the perfect jean, but settles on going to Ancient Blue, reasoning, “Size 8 was way too big last time, so maybe size 6 will fit me now.”
She gets herself to the store, and starts looking around the jeans section at Ancient Blue, and first tries to decode all of the different cuts that exist.
“Shapely? Superstar? Significant Other? What do these even mean, and what do they have to do with my size of pants?”
Since none of these terms really explain in any significant way how the jeans will actually fit on Brittany, she decides that she just has to take a mountain of jeans with her to try on. She goes to each of their three main styles, and starts hunting for both size 6 and size 8, since she isn’t sure which one will fit her best this time, or in what style.
Before she can even find the size, she is struck with yet another choice, small, regular or long, with their very non-specific length descriptions. Of course, women only require three different lengths of pants- we only come in three different height sizes after all.
She has been down this road before, knowing that her long legs will require a long to avoid looking like capris.
“Okay, first, I am going to try to find both size 6 and size 8 long in the Shapely style.” She starts digging through the stack, which doesn’t seem to be arranged in any particular order, and finds a size 8 long, but only a regular size 6. Even though she realizes that she is unlikely to like the way that the regular 6 will fit, she hopes that perhaps today will be different.
In the next style, Significant Other, she starts the hunt again. She finds both sizes in long, but only in the jeans with the holes in them, and she was hoping for jeans that she could dress up for work as well, so pre-ripped jeans are not even an option.
She starts to dig through Superstar, and comes up with a size 6 long, but only a size 8 regular.
With a big sigh, she trudges off to the dressing room, not even sure that any of the options in her hands will fit her.
In the Shapely style, she is ecstatic to find that the size 6 fits her perfectly… except for the length. The size 8 in Shapely is still too big, so the fact that the length would work doesn’t help anyone.
She looks at the last pair of jeans, the size 6 long Superstar, and has a surge of hope.
“This is it, this is my pair, this will be the perfect jeans for me!”
The moment of truth. She pulls them on. Alas, even though she can get them fastened, barely, they are way too tight. The style has changed the sizing so much that even though the Shapely 6 long would have been perfect, it didn’t exist at the store, and the only 6 long they have in a style that would work for office or home doesn’t actually fit her.
Brittany is defeated.
Her lunch hour is over, and she still doesn’t have a pair of jeans. She will have to decide later if she wants to order the Ancient Blue online or if she wants to try this whole quest another day at another store, since women’s sizing is more of a guideline than an actual size.
Last we have John, a typical male searching for a basic pair of pants.
One bright summer day John decides he wants a new pair of pants.
He looks for the nearest store to his work that sells pants. He is size 32/32, so he locates the color he wants, picks up the pants without trying them on, since he knows they will fit, makes his purchase and goes home. | https://medium.com/the-haven/all-clothes-shopping-is-not-created-equal-69cf9ada0cde | ['Lisa Olsen'] | 2019-12-15 21:59:51.778000+00:00 | ['Clothing', 'Humor', 'Fashion', 'Clothing Brand', 'Shopping'] |
How to Mitigate the Stress of Flying While Trans | The airport security process brings scrutiny onto the bodies, belongings, and identity documents of all passengers. Such an intense focus on how people look, what they are carrying, and how their appearance compares to their documentation can be stressful for many people.
This invasive process has a particular impact on trans people — especially trans people who also belong to other groups that commonly come under suspicion in the airport security process, such as some Middle Eastern or South Asian trans people.
Source: 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey
Discrepancies between how trans people look and what shows up on their identity documents or on the results of a body scanner can lead to harassment and discrimination.
Simply preparing for the possibility of such mistreatment is a stressful process that many transgender people go through before getting to the airport; that said, most of the time, transgender people can proceed through security without incident.
Regardless, it never hurts to know how to mitigate any potential issues and to be prepared to respond to problems at the airport. | https://medium.com/transequalitynow/how-to-mitigate-the-stress-of-flying-while-trans-7b63b36da669 | ['National Center For Transgender Equality'] | 2017-12-25 12:31:01.496000+00:00 | ['Security', 'Travel', 'LGBTQ', 'Airports', 'Transgender'] |
The Best Way to Handle an Angry Customer Tweeting About Your Brand | Your customer service plan matters now more than ever. With customer interactions increasingly occurring online, companies can benefit — and benefit customers — by offering fast, flexible, and timely support options via platforms like Twitter. And a bit of upfront planning goes a long way toward a smooth execution.
The old saying is if you have nothing nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything at all. Sadly too many people on the Internet forget about this golden rule. This means your company is always vulnerable to things like Twitter trolls.
Twitter has provided companies with a means to instantly engage with customers. Now businesses hear every piece of social dialog related to their brand. But as you probably know, it’s not always nice. In fact, a Provide Support Infographic explained some critical stats:
Upset customers need 12 positive experiences to make up for one bad interaction
73% of businesses do not address customer complaints on Twitter
88% of consumers believe unaddressed complaints on social make them less likely to buy
Social media has given customers a voice. No longer are they limited to private conversations with a customer service representative. They can simply turn to their phones and share their experience with the entire world — all with a few taps of their fingers.
Sharing or even starting customer service experiences on social media is quickly becoming mainstream, and that’s not surprising. In fact, about 67 percent of consumers in the U.S. already turn to social media for customer support.
What’s their weapon of choice? You guessed it! Twitter.
Its real-time, conversational nature makes Twitter the new 1–800 number for customer service.
But how can a company effectively leverage the power of customer service on Twitter?
Let’s take a look.
Steps to Handle Customer Complain on Twitter
In any cases, responding quickly and appropriately to negative social comments can help you increase customer loyalty and retention. As for an angry customer, it’s necessary to be more careful.
Here are some way that can help you deal with this situation:
Respond Quickly: As a starting point, try to reply within 1 hour. This doesn’t mean you need to have all the answers right away. Customers typically want you to acknowledge their issue so they know you‘re looking into it. Take Conversations Offline: All communications on social media are in the public eye, and often when dealing with negative comments, this can prompt others to join in. The best course of action is to take the conversation offline so you can talk to the person one on one. This prevents the situation from escalating, and also helps calm the customer, because you’re working with him or her to resolve the problem. Personalize Your Responses: When customers reach out to you with a negative social comment, they’re typically looking for you to acknowledge and help resolve their problem. If you respond with an automated reply, you’re sending a message that you haven’t taken time to understand the issue and don’t value the customer’s input. Follow Up: Once you’ve responded to a complaint on social media, don‘t assume that you‘ve resolved the issue. Follow up to make sure you've fully met the customer‘s needs. A personal approach lets customers know you value their opinion and put their needs first. It’s typically best to follow up with the customer within a couple of days. This helps you identify early issues and keeps the interaction top of mind. It’s also a good way to-gather feedback about the customer‘s overall experience with your company. Don’t Delete Negative Comments: Deleting negative social media comments won’t make them go away. In fact, if you delete and ignore them, customers will likely keep on commenting and venting their frustration until you’ve addressed them.
Conclusion
The first and foremost thing is — that the person is angry, when they tweet at you. You need to have them cool down. Reach out to them in every possible manner. When a customer is angry, they want attention and they want it NOW! Not later, not after one hour, not tomorrow, but NOW. If you can be NOW — then you’re good to go. If not, then find someone who can be NOW.
After your first contact is made, you NEED to 100% believe what you are going to say next “I will move heavens and earth, I will try to help you out as much as I possibly can and then some”. If you cannot, you’re the wrong person reaching out to.
When a person is pissed and tweeting, he/she does NOT want a junior to tell him in an automated monotone scripted voice how he/she can be of help? What they want is someone Senior and Seasoned to let the Customer know “Hey!!! Hey!!! Buddy!!! You got our attention! — I’m so-and-so, whatever it is — let me assure you from this point onward, it will only get better”.
Have no shame in saying you are sorry to the customer — again and again. Genuinely!
You give that angry, frustrated, mouth-frothing, foul-mouthed customer some NOW Service and Attention. You can take that very same person and turn the situation around that is win-win for all. | https://medium.com/digital-marketing-stack/the-best-way-to-handle-an-angry-customer-tweeting-about-your-brand-dcc6bb6b468f | ['Uchechukwu Ajuzieogu'] | 2020-12-15 21:17:52.566000+00:00 | ['Customer Success', 'Twitter', 'Business', 'Social Media', 'Customer Service'] |
Basketball Stories That Have Almost Nothing To Do With Basketball | Freshman year we were blowing out a team, so they put the scrubs — me — in the game. For some reason, the other team continued to intentionally foul. I just happened to have the ball every time they fouled, so I ended up taking twelve free throws in just a couple minutes. I made eight of them, and considering a few years before I’d only scored eight points the entire season, this was one of the most prolific games of my career.
Immediately after the game, my mom drove me to visit my sister at college by myself for the first time. It was also the first time I drank alcohol.
“If Mom asks what we did, tell her we saw a movie,” my sister told me after Mom drove away. She was on the diving team and wasn’t supposed to drink during “dry season.”
“What movie did we see?” I asked, already paranoid about an interrogation.
“I don’t know. Big Fish.”
Then about a dozen of us crammed into someone’s dorm room, and I had four Coronas and an entire bottle of Boone’s Farm Melon Ball, which I haven’t consumed — or even seen — since that night. On a trip from the dorm room to the bathroom, I passed out on the floor. The next day I swore to myself I’d never drink again. My mom drove me home and never asked what we did. A decade later I saw Big Fish and loved it. | https://humanparts.medium.com/basketball-stories-that-have-almost-nothing-to-do-with-basketball-2955fa829d9c | ['Ben Kassoy'] | 2015-09-10 15:28:28.210000+00:00 | ['Storytelling', 'Humor', 'Sports'] |
Who rules philanthropy? | Who rules philanthropy?
White people, mostly.
The board of directors of Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies oversees more than $7 billion in assets
The Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, which consists of two foundations with assets of more than $7 billion, is based in Eden Prairie, MN, a well-to-do suburb of Minneapolis. When Minneapolis was shaken by protests after George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, died at the hands of police, the Cargill Philanthropies, like so many others, felt a need to respond.
“The senseless killing of George Floyd is evidence of the underlying inequities and racism that continue to exist in our community and our country more broadly,” the philanthropies said.
Margaret Cargill Philanthropies promised to look at “equity and inclusion” in its grant-making and later directed more than $2 million to communities of color in the Twin Cities.
It did not, however, add any people of color to its all-white board of directors. The five board members are an insular group: An accountant, a financial advisor, an investment manager, a lawyer and an Episcopal bishop, most with ties to Margaret A. Cargill, an heiress whose wealth funded Cargill Philanthropies. Ms. Cargill died in 2006.
Cargill Philanthropies is by no means the only large foundation with an all-white board. Of the 40 biggest private, grant-making foundations, a dozen — that is, 30 percent — appear to have no BIPOC board members. [BIPOC stands for Black, Indigenous and people of color.] It’s hard to be certain because no one collects data on the racial makeup of foundation directors, and most foundations approached for this story did not reply.
The problem starts at the very top with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is by far the largest private foundation in the US, with assets of $51.1 billion. “Our employees should reflect the rich diversity of the global populations we aim to serve — in race, ethnicity, gender, age, cultures and beliefs — and we support this diversity through all our employment practices,” the foundation says.
This diversity does not extend to the board. The foundation trustees are Bill Gates, his wife Melinda Gates and billionaire investor Warren Buffett, Gates’ longtime friend and a major donor to the foundation.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) Foundation has an even smaller board. It is structured as a charitable trust with a single trustee: Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook. This gives Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, the foundation’s co-CEO, absolute control over the foundation’s $3.1 billion in assets.
Recently, Chan wrote:
I stand with my Black colleagues. I stand in solidarity with the Black community and all those risking their own health and safety in the fight for justice, equity, and inclusion. And I stand with our Black grantees and partners. Black Lives Matter. But without action, words don’t mean much.
Indeed.
This pattern — expressions of concern, coupled with an unwillingness to share power — is all too common in the foundation world.
“Racial justice is long overdue,” writes Janet Haas, M.D., the board chair of the William Penn Foundation, where the ultimate power is held by an all-white corporation made up of Haas family members.
Other big foundations with segregated boards include the Helmsley Charitable Trust, the Walton Family Foundation, the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the Richard King Mellon Foundation, the Wyss Foundation, the Carl Victor Page Foundation (founded and funded by Google co-founder Larry Page) and the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation.(1) All have assets of at least $2.3 billion, according to Candid.
On the website of the Walton Family Foundation: Many Black faces. On the board: None.
“There is no excuse”
“Any organization that has an all-white board in 2020 has to ask itself, ‘why is this so?’,” says Edward Jones, the vice president for programs at ABFE: A Philanthropic Partnership for Black Communities, an industry group that has been pushing diversity in philanthropy for — wait for it — nearly half a century.
“There is no excuse,” Jones tells me. “If it is because of a policy, then change the policy. If it is because of your self-segregation or social proximity, then widen your circles. If it’s because of plain, old prejudice, then that speaks to a much bigger problem.”
“There’s nothing stopping a foundation from committing to a more diverse board, other than having the will to do so,” Jones adds.
Aaron Dorfman, the president and CEO of the National Committee For Responsive Philanthropy, which has pushed foundations for decades to diversify, says: “It’s outrageous that there are still so many all-white boards in philanthropy.”
By email, Dorfman explains:
First, diverse boards make decisions that are better attuned to community needs. If you actually want your philanthropy to succeed in tackling thorny problems, you would be wise to include as trustees people who have lived experience closest to the problems and direct experience working with impacted communities. Second, diverse boards help strengthen democracy in America rather than undermine it. Foundation dollars should be considered partially public dollars because of the preferential tax treatment donors and foundations receive. If the leaders of mega-foundations don’t share power voluntarily in their philanthropies, eventually, Congress might force their hands.
This is no idle threat. Legislation signed in September by California Gov. Gavin Newsom will require public companies headquartered in California to appoint directors from underrepresented communities to their boards. There’s no reason why diversity mandates could not be expanded to foundations, or imposed by other states or the Congress.
Legislation ought not be required, if only because there are compelling reasons to diversify boards — and to do so in ways that go well beyond race. Groups perform better when they are composed of people with a variety of life stories and experiences, studies show. This Harvard Business Review story explains Why Diverse Teams are Smarter.
Lawyers and bankers
Leaders of community-based nonprofits, for example, aren’t often represented on foundation boards, but they could be. they could offer insight gained from years of trying to attack social problems, as well as helpful critiques of how foundations operate, says Phil Buchanan, president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy.
“If you look at the professional backgrounds of some boards, their backgrounds are so similar — the schools they attend, the places they work,” Buchanan says. “It isn’t that lawyers and investment bankers can’t contribute, but boards should not be only lawyers and investment bankers.”
Others have made this argument, to little avail. The Chronicle of Philanthropy took a close look at the boards of 20 big foundation in 2017 and described them as “insular, well-heeled, and out of touch with average Americans.” More trustees had a Harvard degrees than lived in flyover states.
Vincent Robinson, founder and managing partner of The 360 Group, an executive search firm for foundations and nonprofits, says most boards fill vacancies from their own networks. They should cast a wider net, he suggests.
“I just looked at the MacArthur genius awards,” Robinson said. This year’s group of academics, artists and scientists is notably diverse. “What about one of these people?”
What do the foundations say about all this? Here some responses:
Cargill Philanthropies: “Our boards have actively sought to increase the diversity of voices in governance over the past several years,” Leanne Huber, communications director said. Cargill’s investment committee includes two people of color, she noted, and the board just last month added Kathy Annette, a Native American woman, as a program advisor to the board.
Gates Foundation: From an unidentified PR person: “The Gates Foundation does not have a board. You can find information about the foundation’s executive leadership team here.”
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Foundation: Racial issues have become a hot topic at CZI, which recently published a report on its efforts to diversify. A spokesperson told me: “Our staff and program leadership are the owners and decision-makers around where we make grant investments, in accordance with our strategy.”
William Penn Foundation: “While the Corporation, which is composed of family members, is legally responsible for the foundation and appoints its directors, the foundation’s board of directors has sole discretion and authority over the foundation’s annual grant-making of over $117M per year,” a spokeswoman says. The board includes two people of color.
P. Russell Hardin, the president of the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation, was the only foundation executive to respond to my questions. By email, he said:
You are correct that all five of our trustees are white men. Like most foundations, ours began with a board of the donor’s most trusted advisors. As with most foundations, the donor and his inner circle were white. Mr. Woodruff died 35 years ago, and we still have one trustee who goes back to Mr. Woodruff. However, recognizing the need for younger and more diverse trustees, our board has adopted a retirement age for all future trustees. As our very small board evolves, be assured that diversity will be a priority.
Hardin also replied to a question I asked all the foundations: Does diversity matter and, if so, why?
My own personal opinion is that diversity among trustees helps broaden perspectives in the boardroom. Even in a boardroom like ours where the conversation already is focused on the needs of the disadvantaged (and particularly black Atlantans), diverse perspectives might offer a different lens on priorities, problems and strategies.
There’s some evidence to support this view inside philanthropy. Several of the biggest foundations stand out for the diversity on their boards and among senior leaders: Ford, W.K. Kellogg and Open Society. Not coincidentally, they have been consistent, major funders of racial-justice work, long before now.
The W.K. Kellogg Foundation board of trustees
By contrast, Cargill Philanthropies is notable for its absence from a coalition of foundations, most from Minnesota, that formed in response to the killing of George Floyd.(2) Known, inelegantly, as the Philanthropic Collective to Combat Anti-Blackness & Realize Racial Justice, the BIPOC-led coalition intends to support Black-led social change in Minnesota and use participatory grant-making to allocate its money.(3)
No regrets
Integrating foundation boards isn’t hard. Foundations of all sizes that were once tightly controlled by families have diversified. The National Center for Family Philanthropy has resources that explain how to bring in community board members.
“We’ve heard time and time again that no family foundation has regretted bringing on non-family board members,” says Nick Tedesco, the president and CEO of the family foundations’ group. “Philanthropy is often a top down exercise. What you are looking for with independent board members is creating more of a bottom up practice.”
Because so many problems— poverty, inadequate schooling, disease, climate change and others— fall hardest on communities of color, bringing people of color onto boards is imperative, Tedesco told me, via Zoom.
“All philanthropy ought to be informed by the communities it sets out to serve,” Tedesco said. “Ceding power to people of color on your board is a good place to start. It is a question of impact. It is a question of equity.”
True enough. So please, philanthropists, until you diversify your boards, spare us the rhetoric about black lives matter.
—
(1) I made my best effort to determine the race of board members. When asked, most foundations ignored my emails asking them about the makeup of their boards. I was unable to contact The Susan Buffett Thompson Foundation, which says on its website that it does not respond to inquiries, and the Carl Victor Page Foundation, which does not have a website. I stand ready to correct errors, if any.
(2) Leanne Huber of Cargill Philanthropies explains: “We did not sign on to the Philanthropic Collective statement because of the advocacy elements that call for specific policy and system changes. MACP does not directly participate in advocacy or public policy, due to guidance from our founder.”
(3) Participatory grant-making is the ultimate way to engage nonprofits and their constituents in the process of giving away money. It unnerves donors because it requires them to give up control — which is precisely the point. | https://medium.com/nonprofit-chronicles/who-rules-philanthropy-2aa6b154569b | ['Marc Gunther'] | 2020-10-20 12:04:16.397000+00:00 | ['Race', 'Racism', 'Nonprofit', 'Philanthropy'] |
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❏ About Movies ❏
Film, also called movie, motion picture or moving picture, is a visual art-form used to simulate experiences that communicate ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere through the use of moving images. These images are generally accompanied by sound, and more rarely, other sensory stimulations.[1] The word “cinema”, short for cinematography, is often used to refer to filmmaking and the film industry, and to the art form that is the result of it.
The moving images of a film are created by photographing actual scenes with a motion-picture camera, by photographing drawings or miniature models using traditional animation techniques, by means of CGI and computer animation, or by a combination of some or all of these techniques, and other visual effects.
❏ Google Play Movies & TV ❏
Google Play Movies & TV is an online video on demand service operated by Google, part of its Google Play product line. The service offers movies and television shows for purchase or rental, depending on availability.
Google claims that most content is available in high definition, and a 4K Ultra HD video option was offered for select titles starting in December 2016.
Content can be watched on the Google Play website, through an extension for the Google Chrome web browser, or through the available for Android and iOS devices. Offline download is supported through the mobile app and on devices. A variety of options exist for watching content on a television.
❏ Platforms ❏
On computers, content can be watched on a dedicated Movies & TV section of the Google Play website, or through the Google Play Movies & TV Google Chrome web browser extension.[12][13]
On smartphones and tablets running the Android or iOS mobile operating systems, content can be watched on the Google Play Movies & TV mobile app.
Offline download and viewing is supported on Chromebooks through the Chrome extension, and on Android and iOS through the mobile app. Computers running Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS operating systems cannot download content.
In order to view content on a television, users can either connect their computer to a TV with an HDMI cable, use the Google Play Movies & TV app available for select smart TVs from LG and Samsung as well as Roku devices, stream content through the Chromecast dongle, through the YouTube app on Amazon Fire TV devices, or through Android TV.
❏ Formats and Genres ❏
A film genre is a motion-picture category based (for example) on similarities either in the narrative elements or in the emotional response to the film (namely: serious, comic, etc.).[citation needed] Most theories of film genre borrow from literary-genre criticism. Each film genre is associated[by whom?] with “conventions, iconography, settings, narratives, characters and actors”. [2] Standard genre characters vary according to the film genre; for film noir, for example, standard characters include the femme fatale[3] and the “hardboiled” detective; a Western film may portray the schoolmarm and the gunfighter. Some actors acquire a reputation linked to a single genre, such as John Wayne (the Western) or Fred Astaire (the musical).[4] A film’s genre will influence the use of filmmaking styles and techniques, such as the use of flashbacks and low-key lighting in film noir, tight framing in horror films, fonts that look like rough-hewn logs for the titles of Western films, or the “scrawled” title-font and credits of Se7en (1995), a film about a serial killer.[5] As well, genres have associated film-scoring conventions, such as lush string orchestras for romantic melodramas or electronic music for science-fiction films.…Netflix is a streaming service that offers award-winning TV shows, films, anime, documentaries and more on thousands of devices connected to the Internet Marketing Online One Way Streaming. | https://medium.com/@meveja1707/google-docs-legionnaires-trail-2020-full-hd-google-drive-mp4-1080p-online-3f39933c76e9 | ['Renis Ganteng Sa Alam Dunya'] | 2020-12-18 16:59:02.209000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'TV Series', 'Movies', 'Life', 'TV Shows'] |
The Impact of COVID-19: How Should You Invest? | Image From The New York Times
A Post-Pandemic World
Since the start of COVID-19, governments around the world have been engaged in strict mitigation measures to curb the spread of disease. We have all experienced social distancing and lockdowns. And many of us have spent the past year worried for our loved ones and uncertain about the future. What is the impact? How will the economy look like? And how should you invest your money to find stability in a crisis?
Expect Low Growth for the Next Few Years
Even with the unprecedented monetary and fiscal responses from governments worldwide, the IMF projects a deep recession in 2020. In the near term, global growth is projected at -4.4 percent in 2020 and 5.2 percent in 2021. After the rebound in 2021, growth is also expected to slow to 3.5 percent in the medium term, implying limited progress toward catching up to forecasts prior to the pandemic. This is corroborated by the analysts at S&P 500 global ratings who project similar numbers though they are slightly more bullish in the medium term.
IMF World Economic Outlook: Impact on GDP forecasts
S&P 500 Global Ratings: Impact on GDP forecasts
IMF World Economic Outlook: comparing pre COVID-19 projections to present day
What Are the Assumptions in the Forecasts?
1. A Vaccine Bailout
Our reading of expert medical opinion is that a vaccine could be available and distributed around mid-2021, which we currently incorporate into our baseline. Multiple clinical trials are underway, and the medical consensus is that we could have one or more vaccines approved by the end of 2020. Those vaccines would then need to be distributed and administered, both of which are potential complications. In terms of the economic impact, a vaccine would greatly diminish the restrictions on activity and eliminate a key source of uncertainty hanging over consumption and investment. IMF World Economic Outlook: A Long and Difficult Ascent
2. Scarring Resulting in Supply Shocks
Since the onset COVID-19, governments and public health authorities implemented mitigation measures such as social distancing. This has resulted in shutdowns of entire sectors of the economy causing bankruptcies across industries especially in airlines and hotels. It remains to be seen whether this will entail the redeployment of resources away from sectors where activity will be constrained by distance.
3. Fiscal Stimulus and Policy Support
A total of 6 trillion direct tax and spending measures announced and implemented worldwide has maintained disposable income for households and projected cash flows. Moreover, central banks around the world have been fast to conduct quantitative easing by buying government bonds. This coupled with the lowering of the Fed Funds Rate to 0.25% has injected much needed liquidity into the financial markets and prevented a recurrence of the financial catastrophe in 2008–2009.
Expect High Uncertainty
However, given the nature of the pandemic and the subsequent global fallout, expect high uncertainty while governments and central banks navigate the increasingly complex environment.
The uncertainty surrounding the baseline projection is unusually large. The forecast rests on public health and economic factors that are inherently difficult to predict. A first layer relates to the path of the pandemic, the needed public health response, and the associated domestic activity disruptions, most notably for contact-intensive sectors. Another source of uncertainty is the extent of global spillovers from soft demand, weaker tourism, and lower remittances. A third set of factors comprises financial market sentiment and its implications for global capital flows. IMF World Economic Outlook: A Long and Difficult Ascent
Expect Low Inflation
Even with huge government stimulus and loose monetary policy from central banks, demand has still been low given the inherent uncertainty in the crisis. While interest rates are low, companies are still less willing to take on debt as it would place them under unnecessary risks. Thus, the effects of weak aggregate demand have outweighed the impact of supply interruptions, resulting in low inflation. Similarly, the market forecasts low inflation in the medium term as seen by the Five-Year, Five-Year Inflation Swaps.
IMF World Economic Outlook: Impact on Inflation Levels
IMF World Economic Outlook: 5-Year, 5-Year Inflation Swaps (indication of the market’s projection of future inflation)
What Could Cause Inflation to Rise?
The huge and unprecedented fiscal stimulus from governments worldwide, coupled with the release of pent-up demand (due to pushing back of spending) can lead to rising inflation levels. Nevertheless, given the supply side shocks and the fact that economies will be operating with much slack, it is unlikely to materialise. Moreover, central banks have much leeway to raise interest rates to dampen any excessive demand side pressures.
How Should You Invest?
You Should Invest in a Diversified Portfolio of Assets
In an environment of high uncertainty, you should invest your money in a diversified portfolio. As always, diversifying your investments within asset classes and between asset classes is the best way to maximise returns with respect to risk taken . Ray Dalio does an excellent job of explaining the power of diversification in this video: Ray Dalio Breaks Down His Holy Grail.
You Should Invest in ETFs Not Individual Stocks. Look Out for Expense Ratios
In the little Book of Common Sense Investing, John C.Bogle advocates for the use of low cost index funds in a portfolio to ensure safe, stress-free returns. The power of ETFs is especially significant in an uncertain environment where the revenues of companies are difficult to forecast. As such you should invest your money in ETFs that track broad-based indexes like the S&P 500. Additionally, avoid high expense ratios: while the numbers can look small, a 0.3% expense ratio can be significant when the markets are only providing a 3% return (High P/E ratios).
Markets are at an all-time high, Expect Low Returns From Investments
In the months following March, the stock market has rebounded to all-time highs while COVID-19 is still ongoing. Thus, investors are paying far more for each dollar of earnings. This is driven mainly due to 3 reasons:
IMF World Economic Outlook: Impact on Price/Earnings Ratios of Major Economies
IMF World Economic Outlook: Impact on Price/Earnings Ratios of Major Economies
1. Huge Policy and Fiscal Response
A total of 6 trillion direct tax and spending measures announced and implemented worldwide has maintained disposable income for households and projected cash flows. Moreover, central banks around the whole have been fast to conduct quantitative easing by buying government bonds. This coupled with the lowering of the Fed Funds Rate to 0.25% has injected much-needed liquidity into the financial markets and prevented a recurrence of the financial catastrophe in 2008–2009.
2. Positive Vaccine News
The recent news from both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s Vaccines achieving 90% and 94.5% effectiveness in preliminary analyses has renewed hopes and optimism regarding a vaccine bailout.
3. Low Bond Yields and Low Inflation
With bond yields and inflation levels as low as it is now, investors worldwide have been flooding to equity markets in search of yield. This is in part because of the lowering of expected returns from equities due to a low risk-free rate (10-year treasury rate). Thus, investing in bonds will reduce portfolio yield and can also subject you to interest rate risk.
IMF World Economic Outlook: Impact on Ten-Year Government Bond Yields for Major Economies
You Should Invest in Gold as a Hedge Against Uncertainty
Given how unattractive bonds are right now, most investors will be taking up a position in equities. Thus, taking a small portion of your portfolio and putting it in gold can act as a good hedge in the event of bearish news and uncertainty. However, given the recent surge in gold prices, you should exercise some caution when investing your money in Gold as the prices may already reflect the undying uncertainty.
You Should Invest Globally to Hedge Against Country and Currency Risk
With the Federal reserve pumping huge amounts of liquidity into the markets, expect continued downward pressure on the USD. Moreover, with the Chinese economy recovering much faster than its counterparts, expect outflows from major economies into China. You should also invest your money in Chinese assets to gain some exposure to China.
Things to Look Out for That Will Drive the Recovery
1. Fiscal Stimulus
The current situation in US congress where Republicans have control of the senate while democrats take control of the house could lead to arguments over the stimulus package as we have seen over the past few months. This can be detrimental when companies and people most in need cannot receive aid timely. Thus, in the event fiscal stimulus is held up in congress, any Investments in US equities can be affected significantly. Look out for any updates of fiscal responses from governments worldwide and check out this database from IMF that details the responses: IMF Database of Fiscal Policy Responses to COVID-19
2. Future News Regarding The Progress of a Vaccine
With much of the forecasts riding on a medical bailout by mid-2021, watch out for any positive news regarding the production of a vaccine. Currently, Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines having 90% and 94.5% effectiveness in preliminary analyses, the forecast of a vaccine bailout by mid-2021 seems likely. As such, investors should watch out for any news regarding the ability to scale up production and distribute it effectively. Moreover, a key point to look out for would be any news regarding improvements in refrigeration storage capabilities as this will significantly impact the ability to distribute the vaccine. As of the time of the post, Moderna’s vaccine can be stored in refrigeration temperatures for 30 days while Pfitzer’s can only be stored in temperatures below -70 degrees Celsius which would be a logistical nightmare for distribution. As such, Positive news of vaccine storage capabilities and approvals by federal regulators can be positive for equity investments depending on economic recovery. Check out this article from the Washington Post: What You Need to know about the Moderna and Pfitzer Coronavirus Vaccines.
Final Notes on How You Should Invest
9 Economic Scenarios from McKinsey & Company
How you should invest during COVID-19 is dependant on your views on the effectiveness of government response and the state of the vaccine. With much of the stock market riding on positive news regarding the vaccine and fiscal stimulus announced by governments worldwide, take note of any negative news that can impact projections. At the end of the day, holding a diversified portfolio that hedges agains uncertainty and currency debasement while tempering your expectations of high returns will do you well during this pandemic.
Or head to our home page to read our other articles: TheFinanceBrief
Resources | https://medium.com/discourse/the-impact-of-covid-19-how-should-you-invest-your-money-the-finance-brief-6602a837b22b | ['The Finance Brief'] | 2020-11-30 14:09:52.260000+00:00 | ['Investing', 'Politics', 'Business', 'Covid-19', 'Finance'] |
Leveraging the “Final Vocabulary” of your Users | Most product managers have been in this position at some point. Maybe we thought we understood the problem we were solving, but as time passes the issues just keep multiplying. It’s a mess, but I think it stems from something deeper. We have never really been taught how to understand the problems of the users we are trying to help
You can have the world’s best engineering team, but without understanding a user’s world view, you have nothing worthwhile to build.
I’ve been pondering this subject a lot recently, and think I have some ideas that can help. By the end of this article, I hope to provide you with the mental tools for thinking about user problems that I believe will not only improve our chances for building more successful products but also becoming better people in the process.
Product management or Product Translator?
In many ways, the job of a product manager is the job of a translator. The language our user speaks may be the same as ours, but understanding how they express that language it is where the critical details lie.
In many ways, we are trying to learn this language while educating others (engineers, designers, etc.) on how to speak and use it. This is demanding of us at the best of times, so its understandable we unintentionally take ‘mental shortcuts’ to get the job done.
These shortcuts take the form of a personal filter we use to navigate the complicated world around us. Usually, this filter helps us function and form decisive action, but it’s also a curse — limiting our ability to understand and empathise with others.
“But I’m not like that?” I hear you cry. Nobody thinks they could be so polarised in thought as to lose sight of the bigger picture. But often we are so focused on solving the most complex issues head-on, we miss a deeper understanding of the simple problems.
The ‘Final Vocabulary’ of the product manager
I have started to rethink how honestly non-biased I am when speaking with any given person. What are the components that make up my biases? The American philosopher Richard Rorty provides a toolset of sorts for understanding this, one central idea he described is an individual’s Final Vocabulary’.
Everyone has a final vocabulary. It’s the set of words we use to understand the world around us and our place within it. It’s called ‘final’ because the things that make it up are often, very final.
People (like you and I) can reach a stage of life where we believe our view is sufficiently developed that no further effort is required. We have all the stories, narratives, metaphors and discourses we need to justify our actions and thinking (thank you very much).
Given enough time and skill to argue for your world view, you would be hard-pressed to agree that anyone else’s world view is better than yours. And here, is where we arrive at the challenge of understanding others.
Understanding the user and building the real product
How can we understand a user’s problem if we can only describe it from our own perspective? What information are we missing? What pain points are hidden?
This ‘final vocabulary’ of ours shapes our speech and behaviour. Our language is the functional limit, and in turn, forces us to limit our thinking. Understanding this is the key to overcoming these limitations.
We essentially need to go into every interaction with an acceptance that our final vocabulary is as fallible as anyone else’s. At any time we might need to rethink and update it.
For a product manager, this can be counter-intuitive. We are actively rewarded for decisive decision making, which is an exercise in reason. But breaking out of our final vocabulary requires us to expand our imagination.
If we want a better understanding of our user’s, it’s a talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well that will help us innovate. It enables us to describe and think differently about the problems we encounter.
How do I change my ’Final Vocabulary’?
Let’s start at the beginning. Everything you were taught on how to treat your intellectual development, was wrong.
Plato’s allegory ‘The Cave’ is an excellent place to start. You know the one. We spend our whole lives watching an imitation of life with its shadows projected on the wall, and the truth of the world is only revealed when we step out into the light.
In much the same way, we are taught that only after we have studied, fraught, argued, worked or read a thousand books will we have finally done the ‘work’ for the truth of the world to be revealed to us. In this process, Rorty argues we are not finding the truth of existence, but rather are just making our final vocabulary.
Our development should not be seen as a linear goal to the truth, because when it comes to humans, there is never a single truth. Your view was still created by you, a human being and ultimately is as fallible as anyone else’s.
Understanding this is the challenge we need to overcome.
Applications in the product lifecycle
So what I a good test for demonstrating an understanding of the problem? Well, written, user stories.
I’ve learned that when I write these stories, I’m trying to do so from the user’s perspective. When I can’t, I know there is a problem. A limitation in my view and understanding. My preferred story structure is the Role — Feature — Reason format, also known as the Connextra format:
As a role I can capability, so that receive benefit
Another version of writing a user story:
As a particular user, I want to be able to perform/do something so that I get some form of value or benefit.
Think about it. As product managers we are effectively translating a given set of user stories to a range of audiences all the time: pitching to managers, collaborating with UX, quantifying with analytics, transcribing into user stories for engineers etc. Performing this task well not only requires us to understand the vocabulary of our user’s, but also our stakeholders.
A user story should give your team a different perspective that helps them understand the intricacies of what’s needed to ship quality features. They effectively grow your teams ‘final vocabulary’, and a shared ‘final vocabulary’ will form the base of better collaboration and problem-solving. | https://uxdesign.cc/how-product-managers-should-understand-users-4ed139e575b6 | ['Adrian H. Raudaschl'] | 2020-10-31 20:36:17.535000+00:00 | ['Product Management', 'Management', 'User Experience', 'Design', 'Work'] |
A Killer Workspace Can Lead to Success but Mine Looks Like a Murder Scene | Let me help you appreciate the sheer wonder and complexity of my workspace.
First, the desk
Why yes, now that you ask, my desk is made out of an old melamine shelf I found left behind in the garage by the landlord. One leg is a not quite fancy enough for Ikea shelving unit trash picked years ago. This leg doubles as a well-organized linen closet. I assure you I used to neatly and attractively roll and arrange those towels. Then I discovered Medium, started writing a lot, so now who has the time.
The other leg is an empty fan box I hadn’t gotten around to recycling. Good thing too as it was almost the same size as the linen closet. I just had to cut it down a bit. I used a bunch of packing tape to attach it to the shelf and add some stability. I’m pretty crafty that way.
The tech
Yes, that is a MacBook you see to the left of the screen. Why in God’s name am I using this abomination of a workstation if I own a laptop? Fair question.
The laptop is the one we bought our soon to graduate from college daughter when she was in high school. She dropped it about a year ago and now you can only see part of the screen. Still works great though with an external monitor. Honestly, this is a huge step up from the circa 2010 Mac Mini I had been using.
Do you like the corded keyboard and mouse? I think those are an especially nice touch. Does the mouse cord look stretched too tight to actually use? Don’t worry. I don’t actually use the keyboard in that position. I hold it on my lap.
The Seating arrangement
The desk height is all wrong for typing. Plus if I scoot my chair under the desk I invariably stub my toe on the big black transformer and I’m too close to the monitor for comfortable viewing.
Plan A was to put the monitor on the window sill but the perch was too precarious. Instead, I just sit cross-legged in my chair and keep the keyboard on my lap. I still needed somewhere for the mouse though.
I had to raid the bedroom for a spare bedside table which was the perfect height to serve as a mousepad and surplus surface space for important things like my tea mug, notebook, and random bits of junk mail I’ve used as scratch paper.
I could keep things neater if I put them in that handy drawer but that’s where my husband’s underwear lives. A place for everything and everything in its place, right?
It used to be better
I used to have a real desk. Granted it was a simple put-it-together-yourself flat pack desk that we have owned for over a decade and used in three different houses on three different continents. Still, we paid $50 for that thing brand new. It is big enough to hold a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and tea mug all at a comfortable work height.
I miss that desk. It has moved across the hall into the room that used to be our guest room and now serves as my daughter’s dorm room away from college. Which is how I lost my desk.
Her need to complete online coursework from an ocean away trumped my need to write in comfort. Never mind the fact that she does most of her work in bed using the new laptop that replaced the broken screen one I now use.
My current setup is functional if not exactly ideal. Much like all the arrangements we’ve made to switch from being empty nesters to suddenly having adultish children forced back home for unnaturally long periods of time due to the pandemic.
For the most part, I’m cherishing this extra and unexpected bonus time with them.
But I do want my desk back soon. | https://medium.com/the-haven/a-killer-workspace-can-lead-to-success-but-mine-looks-like-a-murder-scene-f1c208f0fc72 | ['Mary Devries'] | 2020-12-22 18:37:14.693000+00:00 | ['Work From Home', 'Life', 'Writing', 'Humor', 'Self Improvement'] |
“evermore” — The Next Stage in the Evolution of Taylor Swift | “You didn’t even see the signs”, sang Taylor Swift, in “exile”, a cut off her 8th studio album “folklore”, released July 2020. Less than five months later, those words rang true, when completely out of the blue, Taylor dropped the news that she’s surprise-dropping another album in under 24 hours. As is usually the case with Taylor, the signs were there, but not even the most eagle-eyed fans thought 2 out-of-the-blue albums in 6 months were going to happen. It just happened too Swiftly (I’m sorry, I had to, it was too obvious. Please don’t stop reading.)
“not a lot going on at the moment”, Swift captioned this instagram post. What it, in fact, meant was: I’m finishing another album.
So while most of us in 2020 were busy trying to hold our lives together and binge watch whatever Netflix suggested, Main-pop-girl turned indie-folk-queen Taylor created two impeccable bodies of work, complete with her signature lyricism, gentle vocals and an exploration into some refreshing new sounds. (Not to mention a documentary on the making of folklore, as well as an acoustic version of the album. Oh, and she’s re-recording all of her back catalog)
So along came evermore, her official 9th studio album. With it, Taylor seeks to extend the world she created with “folklore”, sticking to the sounds that so clearly worked, gaining another Billboard Top 200 #1 album, Billboard Hot 100 #1 single and a plethora of awards (including the Rolling Stone songwriter of the year award, and 6 Grammy nominations). So the question is: how does folklore measure up to her previous work? Make yourself warm, grab your blankets and cardigans, cozy up with a cup of tea and let’s dig in.
Comparisons to folklore are, inevitably, there, but “evermore” certainly stands its ground as “folklore”’s sister project, as Taylor called it. The topics covered, the stories told and the writing are a little more mature. We’re moving from teenage love stories told throughout folklore, onto topics like broken engagements (champagne problems), infidelity (ivy) and even, very unexpectedly, murder (no body, no crime). Heartbreak, Taylor’s best songwriting companion, is still prevalent on the album in songs like closure, happiness and tolerate it. Considering she’s currently in what appears to be a very happy relationship, Taylor went on to let her imagination take over and invent fictional characters and narratives to write about. And it worked like a charm. It’s nothing short of mesmerizing, the way she perfected her craft writing about her personal experiences and stories, to the point where she can seamlessly apply it to fictional ones.
For this endeavor, Taylor kept working with The National’s Aaron and Bryce Desner and long-time collaborator Jack Antonoff. Also appearing in the credits is mystery collaborator “William Bowery”, unveiled to be Swift’s very own boyfriend, Joe Alwin. The National, Bon Iver and Haim take on a featuring role on 1 track each, and add a little bit of dynamic to the tracklist.
The entirety of the album is very atmospheric and it really draws the listener into the mystical world that Taylor created. However, similarly to Folklore, a casual listener, not delving into the lyrics, could be thrown off by the simplicity and gentleness of the music presented to them. It takes a focused listen to truly appreciate what Swift delivered. Each track is quite fantastic in its own way, but several songs stand out for various reasons.
Willow, the album opener and lead single, gives us a beautiful inviting melody over guitar strings, while singing about a complicated relationship with a lover, and surrendering to them completely (“Life was a willow and it bend right to your wind”)
Another absolute standout comes in the form of “no body, no crime (feat. HAIM)”. Written solely by Swift, performed alongside the Haim sisters, the song is a murder-mystery in the form of song, and can easily be proclaimed as one of her best. Musically, on the other side, it’s a twang-y, western, country track. The genre lends itself very nicely to the narrative nature of the lyrics, where we encounter a series of revelations of infidelity and murder. One of Taylor’s best songwriting qualities is her usage of repetitiveness to advance the storyline of the song. With each chorus, the lyrics change ever-so-slightly, to bring a new part of the story to life.
“I think he did it, but I just can’t prove it” / “she thinks I did it, but she just can’t prove it” / “They think she did it, but they just can’t prove it”
Dorothea: A tale of old lovers, one of whom went on to be a big-city success, while the other stayed in the small hometown, and wishing they could be reunited. The song acts as a letter to a missed love, offering comfort and familiarity to a famous Dorothea, who’s now featured on covers of magazines. It’s a beautiful track, full of nostalgia and hopefulness, backed by a wonderful combination of piano and guitar.
The BPM increases ever-so-slightly on “long story short”, a cute, fun story about finding love, and the road that leads there, including multiple mistakes
“long story short, it was a bad time” / “long story short, it was the wrong guy” / “long story short, i survi-ived”
As any Swiftie knows, the Easter eggs, curiosities and links between songs are very common in Taylor-world, and one of the most prominent examples of this, comes in the form of “marjorie”. Track 13 on the album (famously, Swift’s favorite number) is an ode to Taylor’s late grandmother, opera singer Marjorie Finlay. Featuring some lessons learned from her family member, and musical inspiration, Taylor preaches “Never be so kind you forget to be clever, never be so clever you forget to be kind.” Now where is the easter egg, you might ask? Looking back at folklore, taking a peek at track 13, you can find “epiphany”, inspired by experiences of Swift’s veteran grandfather.
There’s no doubt whatsoever that the album hides more secrets, which fans are rushing to uncover (Is there a trilogy in the works?), but until that happens, evermore is an absolute recommendation for anyone willing to sit down and experience a great body of work from a true artist who’s pushing herself to new horizons, over a decade into her career. | https://medium.com/@marko-milanovic/evermore-the-next-stage-in-the-evolution-of-taylor-swift-66797f951b68 | ['Marko Milanovic'] | 2020-12-14 21:07:41.880000+00:00 | ['Evermore', 'Pop Music', 'Album Review', 'Taylor Swift', 'Country Music'] |
Running Airflow with Docker on EC2 + CI/CD with GitLab | I’ve been learning data science for a year, yet until several weeks ago I still found myself completely clueless on the engineering side. Data analysis and artificial intelligence are stuff on the top of the pyramid, which requires strong data pipeline foundation. With this post, I will share my lessons learned while trying to built a simple data pipeline using Airflow, an open source orchestration tool. This orchestrator is deployed on top of Amazon EC2, utilizing GitLab’s CI/CD to ease up development process. Okay, one by one, let’s talk about definition of each terms.
Airflow
Based on its website, Airflow is a “platform created by the community to programmatically author, schedule and monitor workflows.” Airflow usually used by Data Engineers to orchestrating workflows and pipelines. Let’s say a Data Engineer need to move data from a source to another destination four times a day (e.g. to keep the freshness of the data). Instead of doing that task manually, they can automate the script to run on a particular schedule using Airflow. Airflow can also be used to manage dependencies, monitor workflow executions, and visualize workflows.
Airflow needs to be installed in a machine. Instead of using local computer, it is better to install it in a cloud-based host to improve reliability.
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2 (stands for Elastic Compute Cloud) is a rented cloud-based computers offered by Amazon Web Services. EC2 will serve as the host, which Airflow will be deployed on. EC2 is just a computer, like our local laptop/computer, but the machine will be up 99% of the time and managed by AWS team. We can ‘tunnel’ our way inside the command line interface of EC2’s machine by using SSH. Later on, we will learn how we can use SSH and git to deploy codes from a remote repository to EC2.
Docker
Airflow won’t be installed directly on EC2 local machine, but installed inside a Docker container. Docker is a set of platform that creates virtual OS called containers. We use Docker to reduce setups, as all setups will be managed by the maintainer of the Docker images (in this case, Airflow contributors). A Docker image contains application code, libraries, tools, dependencies and other files needed to make an application run. We will pull an image from Docker image registry, build it, start the container, and run Airflow inside.
GitLab
GitLab will be used as our repository and DevOps lifecycle tool. There are practically countless way we can utilize CI/CD in GitLab, but for the sake of simplicity we will only use the ‘CD’ part. Every time user merge any branch into the main branch, the deployment script will be triggered. Deployment pipeline consists of SSH tunneling into our EC2, pulling main branch from GitLab repository into EC2, write several variables to a file, and rebuild + restart the Docker container.
Before diving into the details, check this repository, which contains the complete codebase and summary of the steps that we will take to successfully create a continuous deployment pipeline of Airflow. Okay, let’s start! | https://towardsdatascience.com/running-airflow-with-docker-on-ec2-ci-cd-with-gitlab-72326d4baeb4 | ['Ammar Chalifah'] | 2021-09-04 14:16:58.754000+00:00 | ['Docker', 'Data Pipeline', 'Ec2', 'Airflow', 'Gitlab'] |
Digitalising traditional property sales | How we helped Tomorrow Tech with the DIAS project
Because knowledge is power, the DIAS team started by researching the sales procedures and the legislative changes of property law. The team wanted to make sure that the technological solution they were building would cover every aspect of property transactions, and would be safe and easy to use.
Once the team had done that, two of our full-stack developers, Herkko and Tommi, quickly joined the Tomorrow Tech team in building the smart contract process, using Corda blockchain framework, Clojure and Kotlin. Focusing on the backend, we started in the project in the spring of 2018 and the first POC version test sales were done by the end of that year.
Resolving the challenges of a project in flux
Tomorrow Tech’s vision was to create user-friendly, reliable technology that all the parties involved in apartment selling process could quickly start using.
The team experimented with new technologies and concepts, finding that many elements of the solution needed to be changed and re-planned before working solution was found. There were plenty of daily challenges too, and we even witnessed the whole service move from one cloud platform to another in just 24 hours.
Talk about a fast day at the office, but that’s what happens when you get excited about a new project.
An overall improvement of the effectiveness of apartment sales
The first transaction using DIAS happened in 2018, and the current plan is to launch the platform during the summer of 2019.
Needless to say, we’re proud of the positive results and love the new platform has received. With our help apartment sales will be faster, more secure and convenient. Banks will be freed of the tedious manual labour attributed to paper certificates, and all deals are cryptographically certified in the future. Both the buyer and seller can relax, safe in the knowledge that all documentation is recorded.
At present, transactions almost always require the old in-person meetings between stakeholders and buyers, but this will gradually go out of style, making buying property in Finland an easy and secure experience for everyone involved.
“Kodan developers helped us to create real value out of something that was new for us all.” - Sami Honkonen, CEO at Tomorrow Tech
—
For more information about the case, contact our CEO Marko Loukkola: [email protected] or +358 (0)44 552 5952.
For more Kodan: www | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
— | https://medium.com/the-kodan-blog/digitalising-traditional-property-sales-2ff6b600b7eb | ['Ville Yli-Knuutila'] | 2019-05-17 08:55:14.248000+00:00 | ['Information Technology', 'Finland', 'Case Study', 'Blockchain', 'Technology'] |
2020: the year of the Collector | A few of my 2020 pickups, not everything can be MJ’s!
It has been an incredible year for collectors. The growth we have seen over the past year is simply unprecedented in the hobby and it shows no signs of slowing down. As I look back at what I have been able to add to my collection during this year, I can say it has been an incredible journey, and unexpected in a lot of ways. Leading the charge this year was basketball cards. The sports world was rocked by 3 important events this year, 2 of them directly affected the basketball card market: Kobe’s passing and the Last Dance Documentary. Both events turned the spotlight on basketball like never before. Factor in the lockdown most of us experienced starting in March, and you have a perfect storm for growth. A lot of us had more time to spend with our hobby. Others rediscovered their long forgotten childhood cards, while a new group of collectors emerged in the midst of it all. If you would have told me back in January the year would end up on such an incredible high note for collectors, I wouldn’t have believed you.
And it's not just sports. Pokemon, one of the world's leading trading card games also saw another explosion in popularity. Pokemon has been present since the late 90’s. To this date, it is a cultural phenomenon that has touched the last 4 generations with no signs of slowing down. 80’s kids like myself were teens when it started, so even if we saw them has childish at some point, we all knew who Pikachu and Charizard were. Those of us that also delved in the trading card game scene, like Magic the Gathering, were bound to be in contact with the trading cards at some point. In my case, I also have younger brothers that got into the game and the Pokemon fever, so it was natural for me to learn the game, the cards, and everything there was to know about Pokemon back then. Little did I imagine it was about to become one of the most recognized franchises in the world 20 years later. While I have been involved in the trading card game at all levels (player, tournament organizer, and judge), I did not imagine the collectivity of the game would reach these unprecedented heights.
While the recent growth in the industry means a lot of our collections have gained substantial values, it has also brought a bit of frustration. Several collectors I speak daily with have all expressed at one point or another how they are getting priced out of the cards they were chasing. Want lists have started to shrink significantly every time a new record price is set at auction. The sentiment, “I can no longer afford the cards I like,” is starting to resonate slowly among collectors. While this is frustrating, the best way to combat this is to properly set up a plan and budget for the upcoming year. You can always hustle and grind, but not everyone has the time to do it that way. After some consideration, here is the plan that I believe works for me, and I hope it can help others make their own collecting plans for 2021.
Make a list, and check it twice:
The first thing I do each December is check my list of cards that I still want to add to my collection. I make sure I have crossed out all the cards I have added during the year, and then prioritize the remaining cards in the list. Given how much prices have gone up, this process took a bit more time than usual. I want to add cards that are significant to me. After landing the #1 card in my want list this year (MJ Star 101 XRC Rookie card), I have decided to go for my next grail card.
Revise your collections:
Collections are ever evolving. Cards that we liked last year, maybe don’t have the same feeling now. See if there are some cards you can move to fund the new purchases. I have to admit I am incredibly bad at this! I’m a completionist at heart. I like crossing off stuff from my lists, and once a card comes into my PC it’s incredibly hard for me to move it. I did take a step in the right direction this year as I have started to move every single card that is not related to my PCs. And, even those got some major cuts. My autographed PC was reduced to 1/3 of what it was. I realized the original goal of it was no longer fun for me, so I revamped the focus and got rid of all the other cards I didn’t need. If you find some cards that you can move, go for it.
Make a plan and stick to it:
Whether this means saving some cash from your weekly paycheck, selling those extra cards you no longer feel you need to have, or having less of those $8 lattes; make a plan and stick to it. Budget for the cards you want and consider the current price jumps that will continue to happen. This is especially important if you are chasing blue chip players (MJ, Lebron, Brady, etc.). Those cards you may consider “overpriced” now, will just become more expensive by this time next year. Make your plan and follow it, it’s all about maximizing your purchases and above all paying a price you are comfortable with. Educate yourself on the products and the sales. Learning the stories behind the cards will help you understand the prices they are selling for.
Appreciate what you have:
Your collection is unique, it’s an extension of who you are, what you like, and what you cherish. Be grateful for it. Enjoy what you have and don’t feel bad if you can’t add cards at the same rate as years before. Adapt and above all continue to have fun. There is more than one way to enjoy the hobby.
Network:
I can’t stress how important this is. The more people you reach out to the more chances you have of finding those cards you want. Get yourself out there, reach out to fellow collectors, content creators, to anyone that will listen and get to know them. They may hold the key to finding that card you have wanted for so long.
Let’s make 2021 an even more incredible year in the hobby, not because of the cards, but because of all the amazing people behind the cards.
You can find me on IG @frankie3500 | https://medium.com/card-ladder/2020-the-year-of-the-collector-b96c9fe7c8ff | ['Francisco Gonzalez'] | 2020-12-24 06:08:14.731000+00:00 | ['Collecting', 'NBA', 'Collectibles', 'Sports Cards', 'Sports Cards Investing'] |
Portrait Painting Tips | Often, amateur artists are afraid to start creating a portrait, thinking that it is very difficult to achieve similarity with a model, and their skills are not enough. In this article, we share some helpful tips from the professional artist-teachers of ARTLIFE ACADEMY to help you deal with fear and allow you to finally start drawing.
The first tip
First of all, it is important to decide on what technique you want to create a portrait, whether you will draw from life or using your imagination (and possibly a photo of the model).
For example, the American artist Joseph Lee works in the genre of abstraction, applying bold large strokes. His portraits are emotional but lack detailed. And the Spanish pastel painter Vicente Romero Redondo, on the contrary, creates emphatically realistic portraits, similar to photographs. Therefore, the desired technique will depend on how you create the portrait.
Artwork by Joseph Lee
The second tip
When creating a portrait, always go from general to specific. First, study the proportions and draw an oval of the head. It is important to pay close attention to the general structure of the head and determine its main characteristics because in many respects the degree of similarity of the drawing with the original depends on this.
The third tip
Moving on to the facial features, you can use a tool such as a grid. A grid is applied to the image to be enlarged (drawing or photograph). The same number of squares, but enlarged, must be transferred to the surface for drawing a larger size. After that, you can easily transfer the strokes to the desired cell, observing the proportions. Once you have thoroughly studied the general structure of the head, you can move on to analyzing the features of the details of the face: nose, mouth, eyes, and ears.
Vicente Romero Redondo at ARTLIFE FEST
If you are drawing from life, follow these steps:
First step
Take a close look at the model, determine the correlation between maximum height and maximum width, placing points on the most prominent parts of the face (both horizontal and vertical). Draw an oval of the head and, according to the rule of perspective, draw a central axis (it bends in three quarters in the image) and horizontal lines dividing the face into several parts.
Second step
Place the details of the face precisely: eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. Note that dividing the face into three parts is arbitrary. Try to define individual proportions and stick to them to achieve similarity. This stage is very important, it lays the foundation for the subsequent development of the drawing. Look at and try to sketch the basic anatomical details (bones, muscles, etc.).
Third step
Imagine the head as a collection of planes that form its surface. This makes it easier to distinguish which areas are the darkest and which are the lightest. Clearly outline both the lit and the shadowed ones, and you get a three-dimensional image. Try not to make too straight strokes, so that the drawing does not come out hard.
Fourth step
Now we are dealing with shadows, which we have already thought about in the previous step. Now we highlight the largest, deepest, and most important ones. You will notice that the shadows on the face vary greatly in depth and form a complex pattern. To simplify the image as required by this step of work, close your eyes to a state in which you see only two tones: highlights and areas in shadow.
Fifth step
At this point and, if necessary, in the next steps, continue to work out the shapes of the face, paying attention to the halftones (which we omitted in the previous stage and included in the general shadow). Bring out the most significant details, such as eyes and lips, by darkening or lightening them. Change the intensity of the stroke by increasing or decreasing the pressure on the paper.
Sixth step
At this step, the drawing retains the lines made in the previous stages. Don’t wash them, it’s better to just soften and blend the tones. It is impossible (and useless) to reproduce all the shades that you see in life in a drawing. Therefore, do not overdo it when doing the final touches and drawing in minor details. A good drawing is always the result of thoughtful selection and judicious simplification.
Artwork by Gank Pansuay
More helpful tips and a step-by-step guide to creating a portrait await you at online classes at ARTLIFE ACADEMY now with a good discount of -15%!
American artist Joseph Lee will tell and show you how to create abstract portraits using large, expressive strokes, teach you not to be afraid to use different materials (acrylic, oil) in your work, and convey the emotions of the model without drawing facial features.
An artist from Thailand Gank Pansuay will show how to create bright female portraits with acrylic and oil, how to reliably convey a dark skin tone, achieve a blurry effect, and use the author’s technique of depicting hair as one of the main semantic elements of the picture.
And Spanish pastelist Vicente Romero Redondo will teach you how to create a portrait from life step by step, achieve portrait resemblance to a model and use all the advantages of pastels to create a realistic and emotional male portrait.
Learn to create portraits using different techniques without leaving your home with the International Online Academy of Art ARTLIFE! | https://medium.com/@artlifeacademy/portrait-painting-tips-21ab431f9762 | ['Artlife Academy'] | 2020-12-17 12:56:19.930000+00:00 | ['Contemporary Art', 'Drawing', 'Artlife', 'Improve Yourself'] |
One Day In The Rain | “Are you sure we’re going the right way?”
“Pretty sure,” I said.
“That doesn’t sound super confident.”
“It wasn’t meant to.”
“We’re lost aren’t we?”
“What makes you say that?”
“You’ve been staring at that map for 15 minutes.”
“Maybe I just wanted to spend more time out here with you.”
“I highly doubt that.”
“You don’t think I want to spend time with you.”
“Oh please, I know you can’t get enough of me,” she said smiling, “but I’m pretty sure you’re lost.”
“I can’t be lost. I grew up here.”
“That was twenty years ago.”
“Still.”
“And Patrick said you hardly left the cabin when you came here.”
“Patrick doesn’t know everything,” I said. Although Patrick was right of course. I never spent much time on our grandfather’s grounds. I spent most of it in the lodge playing video games.
“We can’t be that lost. I’m sure if we just walk in any direction we’re bound to hit something.”
“Well, the property sits next to a nature preserve so if we go the wrong way there’s ten thousand acres of unmanaged land. We could be walking for days.”
“Oh.”
“But it’s okay. I’m not lost I promise.”
I was though. I thought I could take a shortcut so we went off the trail. That was turning out to be quite the mistake.
“You’re sure?”
“Oh course, I am. But it might be best to just stay put. Someone will come looking for us eventually.”
“So you are lost.”
“Yes.”
“I knew it.”
“I know.”
“I’m never going to let you live this down.”
“Oh I know, but I think we have bigger problem,” I said as I watched a rain cloud approaching.
“Oh great.”
Before she could say anything else, the skies opened up.
“Come on,” I said. We ran through the woods getting soaked in the process.
Times like this is when I knew she was the one. Anyone else would have been mad, but she basically danced in the rain.
“This feels great,” she said, “When’s the last time you got caught in a rainstorm?”
“Can’t remember,” I said and watched spread her arms and look to the sky letting the drops hit her.
“But we should find a place to wait it out. Hypothermia isn’t nearly as romantic as it sounds.”
“Who thinks hypothermia is romantic?”
“Snowmen probably.”
She laughed and we caught a lucky break. I could see an old barn through the trees.
The barn door barely wanted to move but with enough force I pried it open. Half the room had caved in due to disrepair but there was enough left to give us shelter from the rain. We sat on an old bench.
“Get those clothes off.”
“Excuse me?” she said with a smirk.
“We’ll dry off quicker without them.”
We shrugged out our wet layers and I wrestled a steel barrel into place. Luckily I had a lighter in my pocket and I had a small blaze going to dry us off.
“That’s better,” I said, feeling the fire’s warmth.
She laid her head on my shoulder, “Yeah, this isn’t so bad.”
I rigged up an improvised clothesline so our stuff could dry.
She was close enough to hear my stomach growl.
“I wish we’d had made it back to the cabin,” I said.
“Oh,” she said and picked up the little satchel she carried on our day hike. “I thought an impromptu picnic would be great.”
“I love you.”
“I know.”
We ate quickly since we were both starving.
“This is great,” I said.
“Just wait it gets better,” she said and pulled two small containers of wine from the bag.
“You really do think of everything.”
“What would you do without me?’
“I honestly have no idea.”
“I’ll take that.”
It was starting to get dark and the rain wasn’t letting up. “I don’t think we’re making it back tonight,” I said as we put on our clothes.
“There are worse places to be.”
Luckily, there was enough stuff between old army blankets and some hay bales to rig up a bed.
“Not exactly five stars but it’ll do,” I said.
‘It’s perfect.“
The fire died down and we fell asleep holding each other.
The next morning we awoken to the barn door opening.
“Rise and shine,” a voice called out. I opened my eyes to see my older brother Patrick there.
“Went out looking for ya when you didn’t come back last night. Thought I might find you here.”
“How’d you know we’d be here?” she asked.
“Me and him found this old barn the other day when we were out. Come I got the side by side I’ll give you a ride.”
“You knew where this place was?” she asked looking at me.
I smiled, “I told you I wasn’t lost.” | https://medium.com/the-inkwell/one-day-in-the-rain-d729c990aa9f | ['Matthew Donnellon'] | 2020-12-08 05:14:11.357000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Fiction', 'Short Story', 'Love', 'Life'] |
One Potato, Two | Written by
Almost famous cartoonist who laughs at her own jokes and hopes you will, too. | https://marcialiss17.medium.com/one-potato-two-ad9ab027accd | [] | 2020-06-27 13:07:39.907000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Comics', 'Relationships', 'Diversity', 'Cartoon'] |
Mob Mentality and Anger Issues | Camaraderie and Joint Commitment
If you are angry and need to vent, there is always a willing audience to watch, listen and probably join you. There is a certain energy that is emitted from like-minded people who are angry.
It is slightly electrified and empowering. There is camaraderie and a sense of joint commitment to a united purpose. Mob mentality is so compelling because it is the ultimate emotional validator. People agreeing with your anger and encouraging your outrage feels good. It self-perpetuates and grows with great haste.
Contradicting Social Expectation
Another reason anger and mob mentality is so compelling is that it contradicts one of the basic tenets of social expectation; the idea that we should all behave and conduct ourselves stoically to avoid appearing “overly emotional.”
It is liberating to bust out of that confinement, particularly when you are doing so with likeminded people. That group decision to “act out” and misbehave from the cultural norm is, in and of itself an act of rebellion. Add in the passion about a belief in a particular cause and kablam, you’ve got legit mob potential.
Power of Social Media
Now more than ever before it is easy to find your people and rally the rage. Social media outlets are ubiquitous and loaded with specialized groups dedicated to topics of all sorts. Even without joining a particular group on social media, it is simple to express and propagate anger.
The use of status updates, opinion posts, sharing viral videos and dozens of other platforms express beliefs and feelings and garner support, all from the comfort of one’s own keyboard.
What is the risk of anger and rage?
Even though anger is a normal emotion in the wide spectrum, excessive anger for a prolonged period of time has physical, sociological and emotional consequences. Long-term chronic anger contributes to high blood pressure, higher rates of cancer, arterial tension and other negative health outcomes.
Cortisol increases with anger, which results in decreased serotonin levels; lower serotonin levels means decreased experiences of pleasure and joy in life. Depression results from low serotonin levels.
Chronic Anger
Chronic anger issues interfere with interpersonal relationships, disrupting the power balance and causing undue stress. Let’s face it, it’s hard to be around someone who is angry all the time. It’s exhausting. Unchecked long-term anger can result in avoidance of social situations; it wreaks havoc on immediate family, who often tip-toe around the angry person for fear of “setting them off.”
Justified Anger
There is a big difference between justified anger that spurs on social and personal change, and chronic anger that lacks direction and is a toxin to health and interpersonal relationships.
We need to listen to our anger and pay attention to the messages it sends us; it can be a powerful impetus for change if we allow it to shape us in positive ways. Anger isn’t the enemy, it’s what we do with it that counts. When we learn to embrace anger as a messenger for necessary change it becomes our friend and ally against personal and societal injustice. | https://medium.com/@drteyhousmyth/mob-mentality-and-anger-issues-141bb1ff2931 | ['Living With Finesse Dr. Teyhou Smyth'] | 2020-07-13 19:01:29.313000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Work Life Balance', 'Anger'] |
How to Track Unprocessed Objects in S3 | Solution with SQS
Introduce an SQS queue to the setup. I’ll call this queue raw-data-object-creation-event-queue . A message event will be sent to this queue whenever a new object is created in the raw-data bucket.
To accomplish this, set up an event listener at raw-data bucket and listen for All object create events happening. In case an object is created (ie. uploaded at this bucket), send a notification event at the SQS queue created. | https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-track-unprocessed-objects-in-s3-5a7d3b32352d | ['Dardan Xhymshiti'] | 2020-07-07 23:43:33.532000+00:00 | ['AWS', 'Programming', 'Data Sceince', 'Data Engineering'] |
How Doing Stand-Up Comedy Can Help Your Writing | January 28, 2015. A hundred pairs of eyes were on me as I stood on stage at Goodnights Comedy Club, blinking into the miniature sun of a spotlight. Me, a 42-year-old librarian and English professor. Father of two. Owner of seven cats and a corn snake. Plus my wife had crabs — hermit crabs, in an aquarium.
Jerry Seinfeld. Ellen DeGeneres. Robin Williams. Lewis Black. Jay Leno. Chris Rock. These are people who had stood where I was standing.
How did this happen?
I have loved stand-up comedy since I was a teenager staying up late on weekends to watch A&E’s An Evening at the Improv. I often imagined myself up there, cool as iced tea, my eyes sweeping the crowd, my hands on the mic or spreading wide to welcome laughter.
In my youth, I might have made it happen. But now? Not with a wife and crabs to support.
Then I learned about Goodnights Comedy Academy, a course for beginning comics meeting one night a week for four weeks and culminating in a “graduation” performance in front of a real audience. I paid $300 and got a slot in the next class. There were three other students: a twentyish IT guy named Justin; a thirtysomething waitress named Brandy; and a mid-fifties folk singer named Jonathan.
And there was the instructor, Charlie Viracola. He was also in his fifties, maybe 5’6”, and wore the uniform of urban smartasses: long sweater, cargo pants, and a beanie. He lived in Los Angeles but grew up in Raleigh and had a history with Goodnights: he was the club’s first act when it opened in 1983.
He also had serious comedy cred, with appearances on Craig Ferguson, Dennis Miller, and Conan, plus half-hour specials on Comedy Central and Showtime. He has performed internationally, and he did the largest USO show in history at Fort Hood, Texas.
On the first night, Charlie had us stand at the microphone and talk about ourselves, including our favorite comedians. Mine were Bill Hicks, Jerry Seinfeld, Steven Wright, Dennis Miller, and Woody Allen.
Charlie nodded. He knew most of them personally.
We spent the rest of that night coming up with an opening joke. All night. On one joke. That may seem like over-preparation, but I quickly learned that, in stand-up, there’s no such thing. “The good comedians,” Charlie said, “recreate spontaneity. That’s what comedy is. You write everything down and prepare like hell so that, when you’re on stage, it sounds like you’re making it up right then.”
My classmates had no trouble coming up with their first joke. Then it was my turn. I got up, stood at the mic, and said . . . nothing. My brain had no information. Everyone looked at me, waiting for some sound to emerge.
Seeing that I was, in stand-up parlance, “eating shit,” Charlie stepped in. “So you’re a librarian,” he mused, walking around the room. “How about this? ‘My name is Anthony, I’m a librarian, and I’m probably the only comic you’ll ever see who would prefer you to keep quiet.’”
Perfect. And it just came to him, like the smell of rain on the morning breeze.
Man, I was going to suck at this. | https://pisancantos43.medium.com/how-doing-stand-up-comedy-can-help-your-writing-a8eb5da85f28 | ['Anthony Aycock'] | 2020-09-15 23:57:51.757000+00:00 | ['Comedy', 'Humor', 'Education', 'Writing'] |
How to add more simulator in Xcode 12 ? | Today’s I came across an issue while upgrading Xcode 11 to 12. Not able to find an option to add devices which support iOS older versions like 12,13 etc. Because Xcode 12 came with iOS 14 default version. When we selected to add a new Simulator then the iOS option was coming only iOS 14 no other option to add. While doing google found one StackOverflow question which was having same issue. But all of the answers do not look straight forward.
So, I tried the simplest thing which generally all apps have an option to search inside the app. Below are steps to do the same.
Open Xcode 12 app Go to menu -> Xcode -> Preferences
3. Go to component tab shown like below picture 👇🏻
4. Then start installing whichever iOS version would like to install. Once its install iOS version
5. To add a simulator. Go to -> Xcode menu -> Open Developer tool -> Simulator
6. Simulator menu -> File -> New Simulator. It will show a list of iOS available for the device.
7. Select Device name -> Select Device model -> iOS version -> Create Simulator.
References : stackoverflow.com/questions/64075441/xcode-..
Hope this helps you. Thanks for reading this blog. If any feedback feel free to reach out to me. | https://medium.com/@avinashsdalvi/how-to-add-more-simulator-in-xcode-12-70773860a512 | ['Avinash Dalvi'] | 2020-12-23 04:20:38.870000+00:00 | ['Mac', 'iOS', 'iOS App Development', 'Xcode 12', 'Xcode'] |
How We Google About Emma Watson | Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images
When Harry Potter was named the boy who lived, the only wizard whom Voldemort’s spell could not break, few were then wondering whether there would be life at all for the whole cast of the franchise once the blood-splattered rivalry with death-eaters is over.
Today, the cast member that has grossed the biggest fortune outside the franchise is not the boy who lived but the girl, Emma Watson. UN speaker. Co-star with Tom Hanks. Even Belle from Disney. How can we explain Emma Watson’s transformation after Harry Potter? What do Americans and British see in her today and how is her image currently being constructed?
The main tool for research I have used is Google Trends, a search engine that allows researchers to evaluate the behavior of digital users. When are we most Googling about Emma Watson and why?
I — Mudblood Granger, Royal Blood Watson
Unwittingly, the first part of my research into Emma Watson ended up focusing on her regal allure. Typing on Google the search terms ‘emma watson and…’, I was proposed by the engine’s algorithm several co-actors such as Daniel Radcliff and Tom Hanks — but a more interesting guess was Prince Harry.
A brief search concluded that rumors had risen in 2015 around a potential romantic relationship between the Harry Potter alumni and the Duke of Sussex — gossip the CNN eventually played down after reporting on a decisive tweet by the actress on the issue.
A myriad of photo collages of the two public figures nevertheless surfaced online, a match that may not surprise Harry Potter fans in particular. If some of them were disappointed that the brilliant and beautiful Hermione Granger ended up with commoner Mr. Weasley instead of his wealthy and more famous counterpart Harry Potter, the Prince Harry rumors would have surely finally provided the bright witch with her prince in shining armor — who often ends up bewitched by the nerdy girl in the library anyway.
Further research into Watson’s relationship with the royal family has however revealed that digital users and the media alike may not necessarily find in Emma Watson a mere contender or extension to royal blood — there is something royal about her allure as well.
In 2018, Elle magazine released an article entitled “Meghan Markle and Emma Watson Twin at Wimbledon.” Google Images is also filled with collages of the two actresses, who seem to share more than their respective humanitarian work.
According to Google Trends, users googling ‘emma watson and meghan markle’ mostly originate from the US and the UK — Canadians, particularly, were less interested in the match, despite the One Young World summit in Ottawa that had first reunited and rewarded the two actresses-turned-activists in 2017.
This may be in part because of the change of narrative around the duo. Whereas the two may have been tipped to becoming an Angelina Jolie figure, the humane actress who can undoubtedly be imagined in some grimy African wilderness picture on a volunteering mission, both Markle and Watson may now be following the footsteps of a more sanitized humanitarianism; a Princess Diana figure, whom the world doesn’t mind seeing venture into a dangerous, landmine-filled world as long as they keep their elegant white gloves on.
It is also worth noting that the currency of this royal exchange seems to exclusively clock between pound and dollar — more Americans on average were interested in the search term ‘emma watson and prince harry’ than Canadians or Australians and though British users in general surpass Americans, which is understandable, the number of Americans googling about a double British match is nevertheless impressive.
The specific interest of America in Emma Watson’s regal image can be further argued with another search term that Google’s algorithm has suggested: ‘emma watson tattoo.’ Most of the links listed on Google for this search originate from the UK: BBC, Sky, Independent, even Elle’s UK website.
Transposed onto Google Trends, the interest in Emma Watson’s tattoo is very popular in several countries — all the big English speaking countries are in the top 10 states that have googled this term, with the top 5 including New Zealand (1st), Australia (3rd) and the UK (4th). Ireland was ranked 6th and Canada 8th — which leaves an unlikely country behind, the United States (10th).
The fact that Emma Watson’s tattoo is less interesting to Americans than the rest of the world is telling — especially since the tattoo itself came in the context of the Oscars and the Me Too movement.
It may not be Emma Watson’s activism and the meaning of the tattoo that turns off an American audience, for they have grandly welcomed this bold trait from the actress, but it may perhaps be the tattoo itself that bothers them; ink on skin that isn’t as easily washed off in America given its construction of Emma Watson’s image.
Elegant and royal, a book-smart ‘lady’ that snubbed the tattooed jock in Hogwarts because she followed her heart for a common but kind-hearted and un-tattooed Ron Weasley — this must be Emma Watson; a rebel, granted, with her short hair, but a classy ‘petite dame’ rebel at least, not a short-haired ‘Kristen Stewart’ rebel with a questionable sexuality.
II — British Enough, American Enough
The second half of my research focused on the constructed national identity of Emma Watson — an elusive label that can be argued on several fronts. The search ‘emma watson accent’ is fairly popular on Google, powered by appearances on MTV and David Letterman in which the British actress demonstrated how American her tongue can be. Two of her films ‘Perks of Being a Wallflower’ and ‘Regression’ have seen her use that American accent.
According to Google Trends, the search ‘emma watson accent’ has been more Googled in America than the UK, Canada and Australia — combined. Reversely, the search ‘emma watson american accent’ was fairly popular in the latter three countries, especially in the United Kingdom.
The difference is interesting because whereas Americans could be charmed by Watson’s British accent or proud/judgmental about her American enunciations, the other English countries, especially the actress’s native one, are interested in her versatility. Emma Watson becomes this rare bird whose cooing is unrecognizable — her crossing the Atlantic may have made her too foreign for a British audience but equally foreign enough for an American one.
The allure of Emma Watson’s ephemeral identity is also boosted with the fact that she was born in France and lived her first five years there. Several interviews online see her speaking partially in French since 2010 — and an article in 2017 even mentions her desire to master French as part of her New Year’s resolution.
This fascination with Emma Watson’s Frenchness should nevertheless be nuanced. Indeed, the average of British users googling ‘emma watson french’ significantly surpasses the average of Americans doing the same. This difference is interesting because it may partially be rooted in the damage or recompense that this extra label holds to Watson’s constructed identity.
For Britons, Emma Watson’s Frenchness is certainly charming and this charm is as old as the history of French-British relations, especially when the Norman conquests made ‘speaking French’ an aristocratic prerequisite — again, an association with the royal.
The idea that Americans would snub this extra royal label that would have furthered an image of royalty that they have themselves exported about Emma Watson is interesting and perhaps is linked to a multiplicity of identities that a European country like the UK is more accustomed to.
For Americans who enjoy seeing Emma Watson as part of their ‘special relationship’ with the UK, a French dimension may indeed be confusing. Though notions of nobility are more rooted in French culture than British, which the Brits may be more aware of than Americans, it seems Americans have a more British understanding of nobility, one manifested not in foreign Versailles halls but in familiar Tudor courts and gowns, something British TV and film productions have already well packaged to an American audience.
For the latter, an Americanized Emma Watson reminding us for her ‘noble’ roots whenever she flips back to a British accent is perfect — a triad involving France and words we can’t pronounce is too complicated.
Finally, Emma Watson’s success as a transatlantic phenomenon in the eyes of an American audience is also rooted in her Americanized education. According to Google Trends, the search term ‘emma watson brown’ remained more consistently popular in the US than ‘emma watson oxford’ in the UK — despite the actress’ enrollment in both institutions. This may be in part due to Oxford’s stellar alumni, which the British media is accustomed to, but the American pride in having Emma Watson study at Brown can also be factored in.
Of course the idea that Emma Watson studies at all is fascinating to any Harry Potter fan, reminding them of the bright Hermione Granger. Nevertheless, the enthusiasm that several articles around Emma Watson’s Brown education — reporting on her enrollment, gossip from her classmates, and her graduation — betrays a clear intention to the celebration.
Indeed, it should be no surprise that Emma Watson would shortly after her graduation appear in The Circle, an enigma-solving kind of movie that sees her co-starring with Tom Hanks. One could argue that the 62-year old American actor is the perfect co-star precisely because he fills the role of Brown University, a veteran force that takes in a young British girl under its wing to solve something.
This idea of Emma Watson going through an American education both at Brown and under Hanks only solidifies the American image of this elegant and ambitious young woman who is ready to forego her roots — though noble they are — to attain the hard-working American ethic.
This is a mastery that even Harry Potter himself could not unlock with his wits of wizardry, perhaps because his excessive Britishness is hard to pair up with a serious Tom Hanks or since his allure falls short of regal status, which then can never spark any juicy rumors that Kate Middleton or any other royal extension is thinking of ditching their prince for him. Emma Watson, however, will surely feature in some gossip tabloid if she is ever spotted in the same gala dinner as Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
In conclusion, Emma Watson has arguably undergone a magical transformation since Harry Potter. This change in her perception is aided by her role as Hermione Granger, with whom she shares the brain and the heart, but it is also boosted by her elusive appearance that cannot be boxed into a national identity or persona.
This ephemerality will surely be much debated throughout the years as Emma Watson herself continues to experiment with different roles both as a public and private individual. If she is still able to control the perceptions projected onto her in the future, especially when they are at odds with the narratives crafted for her, she may indeed still have the safety net she has inherited from Ms. Granger — the stellar student who sometimes breaks the rules. | https://medium.com/@rayyandabbous/how-we-google-about-emma-watson-f49b1650c583 | ['Rayyan Dabbous'] | 2020-12-17 16:43:33.623000+00:00 | ['Celebrity', 'Internet', 'Pop Culture'] |
Quality Education & The Social Impact Bond | Sustainable Development Goal 4 is Quality Education — ensure inclusive and equitable quality education, and lifelong learning opportunities for all. According to the UN, progress towards this goal was already slow prior to the COVID-19 crisis. School closures kept 90% of all children out of school as a result of pandemic control actions, reversing years of progress in education. The forecast then was that a staggering 200 million children will still be out of school by 2030. The UN goes on to report that inequalities have been amplified by the pandemic. In the poorest countries, the school completion rate is 34% compared with 79% in the richest countries. Remote learning remains out of reach for at least 500 million children. And, only 65% of primary schools have basic hand-washing facilities, a factor key to controlling the virus.
The targets identified for SDG4 Quality Education, which have been agreed at the UN level, are:
To make sure, by 2030, all children complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education leading to relevant and effective learning outcomes
By 2030, to ensure that all children have access to quality early childhood development so they are ready for primary school
To ensure all men and women have equal access to affordable further and higher educational options, including university
Substantially increase technical and vocational skills for youth and adults to enable decent jobs and entrepreneurship by 2030
Eliminate gender disparities in education, and ensure equal access to education for the vulnerable, including those with disabilities, indigenous peoples, and children living in vulnerable situations
Make sure a substantial proportion of the global adult population are literate and numerate
Ensure all learners leave education with knowledge and skills to promote sustainable development
Build and upgrade education facilities so they are safe and effective learning environments for all
Expand the number of scholarships available to developing nations
Make sure there is a substantial increase in the number of qualified teachers around the world.
ESG Investing
Just how much potential is there for investment in this arena? According to the Centre for Public Impact, a BCG Foundation, the concept of the social impact bond was developed by the UK’s Young Foundation. Its aims are to combine philanthropic giving with a financial return to meet a social need. Real world examples show how investment in quality education can make a real difference. They also highlight actions that could be made in this field. For example, in 2019 the global energy leader Iberdrola Group made investments of Euros 8.8m in this SDG. In an earlier announcement, they cited the fact that 758 million adults would not be able to read the press release.
There are a number of key ESG actions and solutions that can be implemented to meeting this goal. In addition to making impact investments, and commitments to education through social bonds, organisations can also:
Take care of the workforce — providing them with plenty of CPD/ learning/training possibilities to allow them to continue to learn and grow
Create traineeships / internships that allow students to gain access to a corporate environment
Provide childcare / flexible working to allow parents to make sure their children get a quality education
Deliver innovations and solutions for improved education, or improved access to education
Cross-co-ordinate with government entities and educational institutions to work towards this goal on a national and global level.
Of course, this is by no means an exhaustive list. Metrics for meeting this goal within workplaces include GRI Sustainability Reporting Guidelines 404–1 (average hours of training by gender and employee category). Though there are plenty of other metrics that can be used.
Both through investment in the broader world, and in the workplace, institutions with responsible investing targets can help in major ways in meeting the target of this SDG. | https://medium.com/@equilibriumprorisk/quality-education-the-social-impact-bond-50b4246de8b7 | ['Paul Equilibriumprorisk'] | 2020-07-19 23:12:00.358000+00:00 | ['Sdgs', 'Esg', 'Inequality', 'Social Change', 'Education'] |
What Making Doughnuts Reminded me About Marketing | Or How to Learn Two Things at Once in One Article
I’ve taken up any number of unexpected new interests in this year of pandemic-related lockdown, but deciding to make doughnuts has proven among the more challenging to master. I’ll get into why shortly, but the important part here is that my mind wandered. I’ve been on a “re-examine accepted best practices to see if they still work” kick lately so that’s where my thinking went. And that’s what this article touches upon.
By the way, if you’d like to give this a try yourself, I used this recipe from The New York Times. You’ll have to supply the think-work yourself, though.
First, Some Cooking Tips
Yeah, I’ll get to the marketing-related stuff shortly, but please pay attention to these points. They’re important:
You’re going to be dealing with a lot of hot oil. If for some reason you have a fire, do not pour water onto it. Smother the fire if you can, remove it from its heat source, and pour a lot of baking soda or salt on it to smother it. Or use a Class B fire extinguisher. The recipe I linked above makes a whole mess of doughnuts. That’s good, because you’re going to ruin a lot of them before you get the formula right. Don’t get frustrated. Last point, the recipe above makes plain doughnuts. So if you want to dress them up somehow, like with a chocolate topping or glaze or cream filling, plan ahead.
Now for the good stuff.
Time and Temperature are Everything
Cooking can be a violent enterprise. It is common for cooks to crank the gas way up on their stove tops and really sear or caramelize whatever they’re cooking. But don’t be fooled: a good cook is always in complete control of temperature. And when you’re making doughnuts this is doubly important because of how fragile the dough is.
So when you go to heat your oil you may be inclined to crank the heat as though you’re making french fries. Resist this urge. Instead, set the heat to low. If you have numbers on your dial, the 1–2 range (maybe more 2 than 1) are where you want to be. When you drop the dough into the oil, you’re looking for the color on the underside to change to a golden-brown. Then you flip the doughnut. This should take at least 20–30 seconds, per side. If it happens faster then your oil is too hot. If your oil is too hot, the outside of the doughnut will cook but the inside will still be raw. That’s nasty.
A good cook is always in complete control of temperature
Another thing to be mindful of is the concept of carryover cooking, which is that things continue to cook for a little while after you remove them from their heat source. If you were to bite into one of these doughnuts after taking them out of the oil you would be in for an unpleasant surprise, as I found out. But this is important because that minute your dough spent in the oil may not have been enough to fully cook the dough inside. That’s why you want to let the doughnuts sit for a few minutes before cutting into them.
And now, the marketing tie in: Your education and your experiences instill in your some assumptions, they build up your instincts. These will serve you well. But there are times when the tried-and-true and the “never fails” will fail. Don’t just assume that what worked in the past will work again. Don’t spend your life on autopilot.
Mixing Milk and Yeast is Tricky…or is it?
The recipe linked above calls for mixing warm milk and yeast and stirring it until you get a little foam. If you’ve made bread in the past year like so very many other people trying to avoid catching a life-threatening virus, you’ll know that you want to see your yeast get foamy to know it is alive (did you know yeast is a living organism?) and working.
When I mixed the milk and yeast as directed, I didn’t get any foam. I let it sit a good ten minutes, too. Fearing that perhaps the milk had been too warm and killed the yeast, I added another serving of yeast. I didn’t stir this time and just let it sit. Again, nothing happened. Odd! I tossed the mix and started from scratch, being very deliberate about everything I was doing this time. And, again, I got the same result.
At this point I said to hell with it and proceeded to make the dough. It did, indeed, rise admirably, so despite the lack of foam the yeast did its job.
And now, the marketing tie in: Sometimes your instructions are wrong or just not detailed enough. Perhaps your stakeholder doesn’t give you enough guidance to do your job, or your metrics are incomplete. It’s at this point where you need to take stock of your options. Do you ask questions? You should. Do you go digging for more data?
In my case I decided to be much more careful in how I mixed the milk and yeast, but had I reviewed the comments on the recipe I would have seen that some people added sugar to the mix (yeast loves sugar) and they get their foam. I can only imagine how light and fluffy their doughnuts turned out!
My Last Doughnuts Were Better Than my First Doughnuts
My first, ooohhh, dozen doughnuts were all failures. The heat was too high and I left them in too long so they burned, or turned out crunchy, man, or were just plain uncooked inside. With each one, though, I slowly learned more. I learned to keep count for how long the doughnut cooked on each side, and how long I would let it sit before cutting it open to see if it was done. When I had finally found the right mix of time and temperature the cooking could begin in earnest. It took about an hour to learn to make the doughnuts and another hour to make the rest properly.
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because in marketing we know the process of testing and elimination as A/B testing.
And now, the marketing tie in: A/B testing works. We know it works because it’s how life on Earth functions: You test variables and select the most successful outcome. You’ve gotta be methodical about it or your results will be garbage. And your earlier results will pale in comparison to the later ones.
And yeah, A/B testing is time and sometimes budget intensive. Just like those dozen failed doughnuts I made were. But the long-term benefit is real: In the future I won’t have a dozen edible doughnuts from this recipe, I’ll have two-dozen. And the cook time will be considerably lower.
Okay, go Make Doughnuts
Tell me how they turn out. And please, be careful around that oil. | https://medium.com/@eriksr/what-making-doughnuts-reminded-me-about-marketing-14bb252ee9e2 | ['Erik Sebellin-Ross'] | 2021-03-22 03:29:54.439000+00:00 | ['Business', 'Best Practices', 'Doughnuts', 'Marketing', 'Baking'] |
Great article.Congrats.I see you provided good details about react native.Thank you so much. | Great article.Congrats.I see you provided good details about react native.Thank you so much. | https://medium.com/@alex-d-38708/great-article-congrats-i-see-you-provided-good-details-about-react-native-thank-you-so-much-f8d3e6f93d67 | ['Alex Duncan'] | 2020-12-26 23:26:56.344000+00:00 | ['React Native'] |
Oppose Deletion of Mining Overlay in Southeast Lee County | In 2010, Lee County adopted new policies to direct various land uses in the Southeast Lee County Density Reduction/Groundwater Resource area (DR/GR) to the most appropriate and compatible locations. These policies balanced protection and restoration of environmental resources, such as flow ways, wetlands and listed species habitat, with more intensive uses, such as residential development, agriculture and limerock mining. Indeed, concern about the potential for mines being located throughout the DR/GR was a main impetus for creating these Lee Plan policies. The policies were the result of a multi-year public process that included experts, residents, business owners, and other stakeholders. The outcome resulted in, among other things, policies to direct mining in the DR/GR to the “Traditional Alico Road Corridor,” because it was acknowledged that limerock mining is an intensive and impactful activity that is not compatible with many residential and environmental areas. These policies were adopted into the Lee Plan in Goal 33 and Map 14 and provided balance between environment, neighborhood and resource extraction.
Unfortunately, Lee County is now proposing to eliminate these same policies, thus opening the entire DR/GR to the threat of limerock mining. The Conservancy is very concerned about the impacts these proposed changes may have on this environmentally sensitive area of Lee County. Mining is impactful, and once blasted, land can never be returned or recovered to its natural state. The DR/GR is a uniquely important area for wildlife, conservation, residential uses, agriculture, and water recharge. More and more residential uses have been approved for the DR/GR, increasing the need for water recharge as well as increasing the probability that future and proposed mines will negatively impact residents, water recharge areas, flowways, and wildlife. This means that the existing policies to direct mining in the DR/GR are more important than ever to retain.
Lee County’s responsibility is to protect the interests of Lee County citizens. Map 14 and its supporting policies do this by directing an impactful activity such as mining to a specific area while allowing for a process that engages private landowners and the public if a new mine needs to be added, as well as requiring a needs assessment to verify that additional limerock supply is necessary.
Map 14 has been one of the successful ways Lee County has protected and managed competing and incompatible interests and uses in the DR/GR. The Conservancy is urging the Lee County Commission to retain Map 14 and associated Goal 33 policies. | https://medium.com/the-policy-team-conservancy-of-southwest-florida/oppose-deletion-of-mining-overlay-in-southeast-lee-county-433325bf58f7 | ['Conservancy Of Swfl'] | 2019-06-17 18:02:24.598000+00:00 | ['Environment', 'Mining', 'Florida'] |
Meet Our Marvellous Mumpreneurs|Becky Roberts | Meet Our Marvellous Mumpreneurs|Becky Roberts
Meet Becky, our next Marvellous Mumpreneur. She tells us the inspiration behind starting her business and what services she offers mums to be and mums in the local area.
1. Describe your business or the service you offer.
“My Business is called Blossom and I offer pre & postnatal support to women and their families. My services include: Hypnobirthing, Birth & Postnatal Doula, Breastfeeding Support, Baby Massage & Beyond.”
2. Tell us about your inspiration for starting your business.
“I started Blossom when I was on Maternity Leave with my son. I had taken part in hypnobirthing myself when pregnant and my birth was the right birth for me and my son. It was still 25 hours, with an epidural and was an assisted delivery. But to me it was perfect. Having spent most of my entire working carer in and around children / babies & families the frequent recurrence of birth horror stories and how families were only having one as they’d never want to go through birth again or none at all to avoid the terror, made me really sad.
Birth is a natural, normal event and nobody should be scared, anxious or avoid doing it because of a horror story they’ve heard. So, with this in mind, and how mentally I was excited to experience labour and never had ‘the fear’, I thought every women should have this opportunity. Every women should feel calm, relaxed and in control to the lead up and during their labour and birth.
I then trained in Hypnobirthing and Blossom, blossomed! Once I qualified in one area, I wanted to keep adding strings to my bow. I was very fortunate with my experience as I have so many family members close by. However, for some this isn’t the case. I then had this idea that I wanted to provide all families with the same support I got. Antenatally, postnatally and then months / years down the line. So no one was alone. No one was faced with having to do it all without a helping hand. Blossom, blossomed once again and I now run a service when I offer continuity of care, for birth, bump and beyond.”
3. Who is your business aimed at?
“Blossom is aimed at local women and their families. Antenatally to postnatally.”
4. What’s your favourite thing about Aylesbury?
“My favourite thing about Aylesbury is that it’s home. I’ve lived in and around Aylesbury my whole life. There are memories in every corner. It’s where I had my first job, made great friends, met the love of my life, brought my first house, birthed my child and started my business. But you will find me having a cheeky cocktail at Temple Street Wine Bar or The Craft Yard.”
5. Do you have any events coming up or can you recommend any?
YES! So I’m always running Baby Massage classes. They run in blocks of 4 which you can find dates / venues and times on my website. www.blossom-uk.com. I also have a Baby Massage DROP IN and shop session happening on the 30th March 2019. (Details to follow soon.) This 2.5 hour event will give all families who have taken part in Baby Massage before (doesn’t have to be with me) an opportunity to refresh their minds, learns some new strokes and spend one hours dedicated time with their little one. After the massage session, there will be tea, coffee and cakes (all home made!) as well as a chance to shop from some other local businesses. I will be advertising all this through social media.
6. Do you have any special offers for our followers?
At the moment I currently offering all hypnobirthing clients FREE tickets to The Baby Show London ExCel. There are 6 pairs of tickets ready to give away.
We would like to thank Becky for sharing her inspirational story with us. You can contact Becky for more information or to book her services via:
Website: https://blossom-uk.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_preandpostnatal_mama/ @the_preandpostnatal_mama
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BlossomBeckyRoberts/ @Blossombeckyroberts
Photos by Carlie Banks | https://medium.com/@AnAylesburyAffair/meet-our-marvellous-mumpreneurs-becky-roberts-c6ee91b3e5ed | ['An Aylesbury Affair'] | 2019-02-25 10:08:55.141000+00:00 | ['Birth', 'Mum', 'Mumpreneur', 'Hypnotherapy', 'Aylesbury News'] |
4 keys to improving your Design | Let’s begin with you, are you a creative person? I think you are. Do you know why? because you’re a human who has knowledge and awareness of your daily needs and wants, and how you serve yourself; by thinking, finding solutions for your problems and requests.
Creativity isn’t a gift from God is a Continuity of practice, is a to cross your Cognitive bounds to reach the next level of thinking and creation. Let’s do it.
If you’re a designer you know your priority is the users or consumers, so you know that you’re designing for humans, not aliens and we are aware of how we think and how we behave thank you psychology. if you read books or you have ideas about their subject you know Atomic habits by James Clear one of the world’s leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results. what I learned from this book that tiny changes are the most impact on our lives our works our thinking. this practical strategy has principles 4 principles Cue-Craving-Response-Reward so how I use this method in my design.
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. — HERBERT SIMON, recipient of Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics and the A.M. Turing Award, the “Nobel Prize of Computer Science”
What is the first thing you begin your design with, get a good first impression, A big Headline, or a strong CTA that is the aim of the first page, so when you grab your users attention you build that curiosity to explore, the next step is to give more to grow that craving for knowledge simply to behave and what is the shape of that behavior is to respond by buying your product or using your services and this is the reward. | https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/4-keys-to-improving-your-design-9ea35ce100 | ['Othmane Agoumi'] | 2020-12-26 20:10:07.325000+00:00 | ['UX Design', 'Creativity', 'UX', 'Habits', 'Branding'] |
The Magical Fat Burning Hormones. The organs and the hormones that are… | The organs and the hormones that are engaged with digestion are straightforwardly connected to your endeavors to consume fat for weight reduction. Figuring out how to actuate these significant fat consuming hormones while stifling the fat making hormones is critical to fruitful weight the board.
There are six fat consuming hormones and three fat making/putting away hormones. This post will zero in on the six hormones that are engaged with consuming fat. The fat making/putting away hormones will be explored exhaustively in our next post.
The six fat consuming hormones are: Human Growth Hormone, Insulin-Like Growth Factor/IGF, Glucagon, Adrenaline, Thyroid Hormones/T3 and T4, and Testosterone. More insights concerning each follows:
The Fat Burning Hormones
Human Growth Hormone: Human development hormones is a fat consuming hormones that is created in the pituitary organ which is situated in the cerebrum. It is a significant complex chemical that is engaged with the structure of slender muscle, ligament, and collagen. The wellbeing and strength of joints and muscles is enormously reliant upon development hormones.
Development hormones is additionally associated with assisting with managing glucose levels in the middle of suppers as it works working together with different hormones of digestion. In this administrative job, development hormones animates the utilization of fat as fuel for the body. It is otherwise called an enemy of maturing hormones that is set off into it by protein and extreme exercise. It is even dynamic when you are sleeping.
Insulin-like Growth Factor/IGF: Made by the liver, this fat consuming hormones is liable for furnishing the body with fuel in the middle of dinners when the stomach is vacant. It is set off into it by the presence of development hormones. When initiated, it causes the arrival of put away sugar and fat. Nibbling in the middle of suppers quiets the fat consuming impacts of this hormones. At the point when the liver isn’t in a sound state, creation and arrival of this hormone is influenced. The pancreas is then needed to deliver and to deliver expanded measures of insulin which hinders the body’s capacity to consume fat.
Glucagon: Produced by the pancreas, this fat consuming chemical is engaged with the control of glucose when the levels drop which is for the most part in the middle of dinners. It works working together with insulin to keep up with stable degrees of glucose. While insulin brings down glucose, glucagon expands the degrees of glucose depending on the situation. This is finished by using glycogen which is a long chain starch polymer of glucose moieties that is put away in the liver. It gets its fat consuming assignment since it likewise directs blood glucose levels using put away fat because of drained glycogen stores. Dietary protein and extreme exercise triggers this chemical right into it. At the point when overabundance protein is eaten insulin levels rise, when this happens glucagon is smothered.
Adrenaline: Adrenaline is otherwise called epinephrine. Of the four chemicals that are created by the adrenal organs, adrenaline is the fundamental chemical answerable for having fat let out of fat cells. It is known as the acute stress hormones given its delivery in unpleasant circumstances. Adrenaline works related to the apprehensive and insusceptible frameworks in assisting the body to manage unpleasant occasions. At the point when delivered it increments mental sharpness, pulse, circulatory strain and digestion. It is set off by exercise and stress.
Thyroid Hormones/T3 and T4: Both of these thyroid delivered chemicals are principally liable for controlling digestion. They act to build the basal metabolic rate (BMR) by managing the digestion of proteins, starches, fat, and nutrients. Their part in deciding the speed of digestion is by and large identified with how fat or slim somebody is. Cutting calories and/or skipping dinners restrains the activities of these vital digestion managing hormones. At the point when their activities are repressed, the pace of digestion is straightforwardly influenced.
Testosterone: This hormone is most popular as the essential male sex chemical, liable for the male sex drive and male qualities. It is delivered fundamentally by the gonads. The adrenal organs and female ovaries likewise produce testosterone in limited quantities. For examination purposes guys produce multiple times the measure of testosterone as females. Females anyway will in general be more delicate to this hormones. Testosterone is fundamental for acceptable wellbeing and prosperity. It is likewise a fat consuming hormone which is engaged with controlling the degrees of instinctive fat and absolute cholesterol that exist inside the body. It additionally assumes a part in glycemic control. Set off by work out, its belongings are hindered by estrogen.
Outline
Knowing and seeing how these six fat consuming hormones are set off is significant to your weight reduction and longer-term weight the board endeavors. The reason for this post is to just acquaint you with them and to make you mindful of their job in digestion and the muscle versus fat’s consuming cycle. The conversation about these six fat consuming hormones will proceed.
The following post will survey exhaustively the three fat making/putting away hormone. Trust that you will go along with us once more.
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Wanting you To enjoy all that life has to offer in Health and Happiness
YOUR DREAMS ARE AS REAL WHEN YOU MAKE THEM… Have faith IN YOURSELF! | https://medium.com/@sanjay-workmail09/fathe-magical-fat-burning-hormones-234bc53bd424 | ['Alex Paul'] | 2021-10-19 17:15:49.400000+00:00 | ['Fat', 'Burn Fat', 'Hormones', 'Fat Burn Extreme', 'Fat Burning Foods'] |
Navigating Consumption-Based Pricing with Mike Scarpelli, CFO of Snowflake | Back when I started out in venture in 2015, companies like Workday and Zendesk were changing the game of enterprise sales with their subscription pricing models. Now, we find ourselves talking with many of our Lightspeed portfolio companies about whether or not they should incorporate usage-based pricing.
With usage-based pricing, a customer’s cost is directly proportional to their consumption of the product or service. A number of recent public companies — Snowflake, Twilio, Agora, JFrog — have successfully leveraged this pricing model.
Given the general interest in this subject, I’ll be sharing a series of interviews over the next several weeks with executives in the Lightspeed network who have scaled usage-based companies, starting with Mike Scarpelli, CFO of Snowflake.
Last year, Snowflake had the largest software IPO in history. One part of their appeal to customers is that Snowflake only charges for the volume of data stored and compute resources consumed. The company grew revenue by 124% and posted a 168% net revenue retention (!). This is hands-down best in class when compared to any public software company today.
Mike Scarpelli, CFO of Snowflake
Anoushka: Mike, you have built your career working with iconic software companies including EMC, ServiceNow, and Snowflake and have seen both SaaS and consumption-based pricing. How should a business evaluate usage-based pricing?
Mike: Over time, I believe most software will be delivered in a usage-based model. But it will take some time. As a CFO, what I constantly hear from customers is that they only want to pay for what they are using. No one wants shelfware. Yet today, I negotiate with software vendors all the time who increase deal sizes each year even when our company is not utilizing its seats or licenses.
A usage-based model can work very well for any software that has a lot of transactions and compute. If the software product is an HR tool that people are looking at once a quarter for bonus allocations, then a usage-based model doesn’t make sense. However, there could be many SaaS businesses that can be priced on a consumption basis instead. For example, reps are constantly pinging and updating their Salesforce CRM — this could be a priced on usage-based model. Service Cloud, where customers are logging tickets, could be usage-based. For our customer-facing applications at ServiceNow, customers wanted a usage-based model. However, they did not know how to forecast their growth in usage, making budgeting a challenge.
Anoushka: Is there a “why now” that makes you believe most software will be delivered in a usage-basis over time?
Mike: We now have the ability to really track compute resources per query that any customer is running. If you went back 5–10 years ago, this would be much more challenging. In the days of on-premise software, you were buying the hardware. It did not matter how much compute you were using. You had to do everything on a license or per-seat model.
The cloud vendors have already adopted the model. If you want to compete with the big guys, you will need to evolve your pricing strategy.
Anoushka: What are the challenges of moving to a consumption-based pricing strategy?
Mike: For the business, you need to build an ability to predict your customers’ future consumption to forecast your business on a quarterly and annual basis. At Snowflake, we forecast usage on a customer-by-customer basis and have predictive modeling around future use. There is no out-of-the-box module or product for doing these calculations. We built this system in Snowflake. Our ERP does the invoicing and then the calculation that goes into usage all gets billed within Snowflake. We reforecast revenue daily at Snowflake.
With usage-based pricing, a customer often can’t forecast their own usage growth. Thus, it becomes much more challenging to figure out how to budget for the software. A per-seat license model can be much easier to budget for. Your software needs some type of capability that lets customers model out their growth in consumption
Finally, governance is important. You want to make sure only the people in your customer’s organization who should be using the software are using it. Customers want alerts to see if certain groups’ consumptions are spiking so they can plan around it.
Anoushka: How has this pricing model impacted Snowflake from a team and organizational structure?
Mike: It changes your compensation plan for sales reps. You can’t pay everything on new deals. You have to pay on consumption. Every one of our reps has a big consumption quota. We fundamentally want our reps to be involved in customer success.
We don’t believe companies should have a separate customer success function. The first thing we did when Frank joined Snowflake was we blew up was the customer success function. You are either going to do support, sales or professional services. Customer success is not accountable for anything.
You may hear some pushback from your salespeople and you will also have some portion of your salesforce focused on landing new accounts. However, a bigger percent of your commission dollars are going to be tied to consumption.
In the SaaS world, your FP&A group can develop a forecast in a silo in isolation from salespeople. The days of FP&A doing forecasting in this manner are gone. Our revenue and FP&A team is aligned with sales and our sales reps. The group has a regular cadence review of our top 50 to 100 customers. Our FP&A group spends a lot of time with salespeople to understand every element of our large accounts and the trends happening with consumption.
Anoushka: What are the core KPIs you think about? Have these changed at all given Snowflake’s usage-based model?
Mike: In the SaaS world, billings is the key metric you look at. Snowflake lets customers pay quarterly, monthly or on-demand so we don’t focus on billings at all. We focus on remaining performance obligation — for all your booked business, how much is going to roll up into revenue. It is the best leading indicator for our investors. Naturally, we care about revenue and revenue growth as well. Investors also want to believe there is leverage in your model. It is important to show a path to higher gross margins and pounding that with investors as that continues to grow for us
Anoushka: How have you managed pricing and pricing discounts which becomes very important for scaled customers in a consumption model?
Mike: You target the margins you want to meet. There are different discount bands based on the size of the deal. We spent a lot of time around this. As a new company breaking into new geographies and verticals, you need to do discounting for those customers. As you become mature, customers talk and you need to be very disciplined around your discounting. You need to make sure to treat your customers like for like because they all talk.
We have become much better disciplined around discounting like for like customers. We put in place a sales finance function to ensure discounting discipline and to help customers model their spending based on the discount. We also put in place a deals desk function that can quarterback a deal process to ensure salespeople are not spending their time pinging various internal groups.
Anoushka: Any final thoughts?
Mike: Many startups today espouse the belief in growth at all costs. I totally disagree with that. Growth is important but too many young companies waste money on things that there is no ROI. You need to spend the money wisely.
*This interview is part of a series of posts exploring usage-based companies. Interviews have been edited slightly for clarity. | https://medium.com/lightspeed-venture-partners/navigating-consumption-based-pricing-with-mike-scarpelli-cfo-of-snowflake-4c76548b2f40 | ['Anoushka Vaswani'] | 2021-05-14 21:04:59.225000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Startup', 'Venture Capital', 'B2B', 'Software'] |
How to Hide API Keys of Your JavaScript Projects? (Secure & Easy Way / No .ENV File) | While developing SPA project, we sometimes need to use API keys. Although it is possible to hide these API keys with .ENV file importing method, you must find another method on production process because of the fact that:
.env files’ content are visible to client when they investigate your .js files.
.env importing is used for when you want to hide api key on Github 🙂
Quick fix for this problem:
You can try to create a new express.js project to get request from your client then forward this request this to 3rd party endpoint with API key (on backend side).
After it gets response from 3rd party endpoint, your express.js backend project must forward this response to you.
Here you can find my solution and steps: | https://medium.com/@muumdev/how-to-hide-api-keys-of-your-javascript-projects-secure-easy-way-no-env-file-3b19afafa606 | ['Murat Umutlu'] | 2020-12-21 22:27:37.685000+00:00 | ['Nodejs', 'Expressjs', 'Security'] |
Redux vs. Storeon: An App to App Comparison | Actions & Reducers (Redux)
As we saw at the folder level earlier, with Redux we split up our reducers into separate files, then combined them in an index.js file under /reducers , and exported the result to be used by our store.
Let’s take a closer look at how our reducer for counting is setup in Redux:
count.js (Redux reducer for our counting state)
To give you some context, all we basically have are a few actions to increment and decrement the counter, as well as an action to let the UI know when the counter is “loading”.
What does the reducer for Storeon look like?
Well… if I show you, it will spoil everything, so bear with me while I show you the Redux action creators for updating the counter:
async action creators (Redux)
If you are familiar with Thunk middleware, this is nothing special.
We dispatch our “loading” actions called INCREASING and DECREASING . Then we call our fake api (passing in # of seconds to wait), and dispatch our INCREMENT or DECREMENT actions when the promise resolves. Then we call an action called LOG_HISTORY , which we’ll take a look at soon.
If you are use to Redux, this may seem like a simple enough process.
Events & Modules (Storeon)
Storeon will be new for many of you, so I’m going to break it down into bite sized pieces. We will start by creating a module to handle our counter state.
basic module and state initialization
When working with Storeon, you work with events and modules. Modules are how we organize different pieces of state logic, and the events we setup inside of those modules define how we interact with that state from the outside world.
We begin by creating and exporting our module called countModule . Storeon will pass the store object to each of the modules we pass to createStore , as I showed earlier. The store object is how we setup events, and dispatch actions. Storeon has a few built in events, such as @init , which is where we setup our initial state. See the docs to read about the other built in events.
Okay, so there isn’t enough here yet to make a good comparison between Redux and Storeon. Let’s add a couple of events that will act as “reducers” in Redux terms:
Our first action events!
Right below our initialization event, we create two new events named count/increasing and count/increase . Basically, this is like our “loading vs. loaded” actions. We use a path naming convention [module-name]/[event-name] to avoid name clashing, since storeon references events by a unique string (like Redux reducers).
You might have noticed that there aren’t any “reducers” and “actions” in the exact same sense as Redux. Well, with Storeon, there isn’t a strict separation of the two in the way we use them in Redux.
In our UI, if we called store.dispatch('count/increase') , our event would be triggered, and the state would be updated.
This is great, because now we have both our “action” and “reducer” in one place, making it much easier to follow!
Events vs. Action Creators
Let’s make an event that calls these “reducer” like events we just created, then calls an api, and finally updates our counter. Here’s a screenshot with our Storeon event on the left, and our Redux action creator equivalent to the right: | https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/redux-vs-storeon-an-app-to-app-comparison-8066c63ad97f | ['Kris Guzman'] | 2020-03-27 17:36:02.290000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Web Development', 'Software Development', 'React', 'Programming'] |
Introducing Mixin Network’s architecture and cross-chain technology | The Next Economy Conference 2018 held by COINJINJA in Tokyo, Japan On September 15th. Cedric Fung, founder and CEO of Mixin Network, was invited to the summit and delivered a keynote speech about: Better Lightning Network via PoS and DAG.
At the meeting, Mixin focused on how the Mixin Network architecture can achieve better lightning network. In the keynote speech, Cedric shares the same idea with Lightning Network to improve Bitcoin by moving transactions off the Bitcoin blockchain and onto the Mixin Network, which is a distributed ledger network powered by PoS and DAG.
Mixin is composed of a single theoretically permanent Kernel, many dynamic Domains and different multi- purpose Domain Extensions, to formulate an extended star topology.
Mixin Kernel is a high performance distributed ledger and its sole responsibility is to verify asset transactions. That said, the single permanent Mixin Kernel is also a distributed network just like Bitcoin network as a whole.
Although Mixin Kernel verifies asset transactions, it doesn’t produce any assets. All assets flow through the Kernel by Mixin Domains.
Each Mixin Domain is also a distributed ledger, whose job is providing assets to the Mixin Kernel. The assets may be those on Bitcoin, Ethereum or any other blockchains, or even central organizations like banks.
While each Mixin Domain is a component to provide assets for Mixin Kernel, the Kernel itself is also a component in the Mixin Domain to verify and govern its assets.
Unlike most existing gateway based solutions, Mixin Kernel and Domains are all public available distributed ledgers, with no central authorities.
From the Kernel to Domains, the Mixin Network is all about assets and transactions. The Mixin Domain Extension is where the magic happens, whether for Ethereum contracts, EOS contracts, a distributed exchange on somewhat trusted instances, or anything else.
We started this project from November 2017 and the network has processed about 100 million transactions, all transactions are free and confirmed within seconds. As this writing, the Mixin Network has a “huge” 1000 BTC capacity.
Similar to what Lighting Network is for the Bitcoin blockchain, Mixin is a public distributed ledger to allow any public distributed ledgers to gain trillions of TPS, sub second final confirmation, zero transaction fee, enhanced privacy and unlimited extensibility.
The summit aims to strengthen the exchange of global blockchain technology between developers and promote the development of global blockchain. Bringing together the world’s best blockchain developers and projects to prospect and advance the development of blockchain applications.
At present, many entrepreneurs of traditional projects have approached Mixin Network, and most of these entrepreneurs have more mature products. The Mixin Network will fully embrace developers and provide full support.
Mixin Network Booth
Follow Us:
English Mixin Telegram: https://t.me/MixinCommunity
Gitter: https://gitter.im/Mixin-Network
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/mixin/
Medium: https://medium.com/mixinnetwork
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Mixin_Network
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MixinNetwork/
GitHub:
Mixin Network： https://github.com/MixinNetwork
OceanONE： https://github.com/MixinNetwork/ocean.one | https://medium.com/mixinnetwork/introducing-mixin-networks-architecture-and-cross-chain-technology-a8742b1f4af8 | ['Yasmine Moustatia'] | 2018-09-26 08:58:10.492000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Conference', 'Technology News', 'Mixinnetwork', 'Community'] |
What if these everyday applications were tweaked a bit? | During my first lesson in Human Computer Interaction many years ago, our professor mentioned that we will never see the world the same way every again. It is true, absolutely true! Since then, I can’t go around without thinking about how something might be quite hard to use for some people and it could be so much easier if it was changed this way or that way. Today, I sit to write about some such thoughts of mine. I have seen my near and dear ones struggle with and get frustrated by some of the things you are about to read about. Dear readers, I would love to know what you think about them.
IKEA unavailable articles:
I love Ikea and I have been a regular customer for a long time now. But, when you are shopping from Ikea online and you have spent a lot of time deciding what to buy, it is really frustrating to find out at the very end that some products are actually not available. While you are skimming through product lists or looking at details of the products, sometimes there is no indication that the product might not be available. | https://uxplanet.org/would-these-tiny-tweaks-in-everyday-applications-be-helpful-ce3325ad95a8 | ['Manpriya Guliani'] | 2020-12-27 12:14:52.153000+00:00 | ['UX Design', 'User Experience', 'Visual Design', 'Interaction Design', 'User Research'] |
How to Win and Influence Customers — Lessons from Dale Carnegie | How to Win and Influence Customers — Lessons from Dale Carnegie
by Aida Khayatian
Back in 2018, I joined Opex (a division of Llamasoft) as a consultant. I knew that interacting with clients would be a huge part of my job, but I had limited experience with this kind of work. In time, I learned what I needed to know to get along by trial and error, observing my colleagues, and trying to learn from others indirectly by reading about working with clients.
One particular source in that latter category stood out: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. This book had a hugely positive impact on my customer relations abilities, and I still fall back on its principles on a regular basis. As a result, I’ve written this article to share with you some tips to help you more effectively deal with a client, whether that’s to sell your products or services or to just create and maintain a positive relationship with potential customers.
The Dale Carnegie Sales Approach
According to Harry A. Overstreet, a psychologist cited in Carnegie’s book, “the best piece of advice which can be given to would-be persuaders, [is to] first arouse in the other person an eager want.” For a customer-facing employee, this is the process of convincing your potential customer that what you’re talking to them about is valuable.
This persuasion can take many forms. An important distinction between effective and ineffective (and also ethical and unethical) sales efforts is whether the salesperson is attempting to genuinely influence the customer to give them consideration, or simply trying to manipulate them into a purchase. Sheer manipulation means twisting logic or facts to sway the potential customer’s opinion — selling the product or service without considering the facts or the customer’s real needs. Even if the salesperson is successful, when clients realize they’ve been swindled, any trust in the salesperson will evaporate.
By contrast, a better long-term approach to arousing Carnegie’s “eager want” is through honest influence. The only way to influence people effectively and ethically is to understand them and their needs, and then show them how to get what they want.
Truly understanding your clients’ needs helps you understand how your product or service benefits them and communicating this effectively is the essence of sales. Asking yourself the following questions can help you understand your potential customers’ needs:
Why should they want to buy what I’m selling?
How would the product or service help them?
What might they find undesirable about the product, and why? How can I overcome these hurdles?
Only after salespeople understand a potential client’s needs can they sell effectively. Below, I’ll discuss how Carnegie suggests that we understand others and show them that we can help solve their problems.
Understanding Your Customer’s Point of View
Early on in my time here, I worked with a client to develop a custom product. The tool was designed to help the client to make better, faster decisions for their supply chain. During product testing, the client brought up some questions about its features and assumptions, I responded with mathematical reasoning. I could tell immediately that the client did not connect with my answer. Fresh out of grad school, I’d failed to contextualize the response, answering with math despite the fact that my client had fifteen years of experience and likely no longer viewed his work in purely mathematical terms. Luckily, my manager quickly stepped in to explain my answer using supply chain concepts instead of mathematical logic, and the client was able to relate to his answer easily. That was when I realized the importance of understanding your customers’ points of view to effective and cooperative conversation.
Reading this book taught me some effective techniques for understanding customers’ points of view. Some of the major methods are as follows:
Become genuinely interested in your customer. Learn about their business to better understand how you can serve them. If what you’re selling isn’t a fit, so be it; understanding this sooner rather than later saves time and effort. If you can help them, focus on learning how you can best do so.
Rather than trying desperately to make the customer interested in your product, encourage them to talk about themselves. One way to do this is by sincerely and honestly admiring their achievements. For example, before meeting with a client, do a quick online search to discover key facts about and important milestones for them and their organization. After doing so, you’ll be able to remark on what you sincerely admire about their business should a pertinent opportunity arise. This will encourage them to talk — we all like to talk about our own successes! You can then ask about the challenges they overcame to get this point, which can further elucidate their needs or overall strategy.
When someone is talking, listen actively. Active listening includes:
Listening with exclusive attention to the person
Letting them know you’re listening with appropriate eye contact
Listening sympathetically, patiently, and with an open mind
Giving responses that are truly relevant to what was said
Confirming that you have heard them correctly
Doing these things sounds easy (and it is), but these tips are often ignored by people in all kinds of conversational contexts. Active listening not only helps you retain information more easily, but also usually results in increased trust.
Showing Customers How You Can Help
When talking with clients, find common ground and focus on points of agreement. Try not to spend much time on subjects on which you and the customer disagree. Respect their opinion, even if you don’t see eye to eye. Never outright tell customers that they’re wrong; if they’re off-base on a matter of pure fact, find a way to correct them diplomatically if necessary, but don’t kill a sale by focusing on a disagreement. Maintain the conversation in a friendly way by emphasizing that both parties want the customer to be better off, and that the only differences are about means, not ends.
Let me share an example from the book. A company that sells electric motors encountered a customer complaint about their motors being too hot. The customer was considering terminating the business relationship, but the company believed to be the complaint to be ill-founded: they had done extensive testing and felt strongly that their motors met temperature standards. Instead of arguing with the customer, the sales rep started conversation with series of questions emphasizing shared beliefs and goals: “You should not buy motors if they are running any hotter than standards, isn’t that so?” The client agreed. The sales rep then asked about the temperature of the room in which the motor is located, and then continued: “If the room is 75 degrees and the motor is 72, would not the motor get hotter because of the room temperature?” The customer agreed — hard to argue with basic thermodynamics. By gently and positively asking about the situation in an honestly inquisitive, perspective-agnostic manner, the company was able to reassure the customer that their motors worked as expected. By avoiding argument and looking at the problem from the customer’s point of view, the company was able to keep the account.
Make the customer feel like they’re actively buying the product. While nobody likes being sold to, people like to buy. Ask them to give you their ideal design. Describe your product in detail, and tell them that while it may not be a perfect fit for their organization, you’re eager to improve it. Then ask them to give feedback on how the product can be more useful to their business. Listening intently to this feedback will further build trust between you and the potential client, and it might even give you some fantastic ideas. If their feedback results in changes to the product/service, it’ll sell itself because it’s based on the client’s very own ideas and needs.
You may not have the exact same experiences using similar products or services to solve the problem they face, but try to share your own experience with the same (or related) challenges. Finding commonality with your customer will help them appreciate that you have a practical understanding of their problems and know what it takes to find a solution. This will help build trust between the two of you, making all future discussion easier and friendlier.
Takeaway
These principles from Carnegie’s book can improve the way you relate to your current and future clients. The best way to positively influence your (potential) clients is to understand their perspective and find ways to show them you can help. Keep their needs at the forefront and you’ll see success in no time!
_________________________________________________________________
If you liked this blog post, check out more of our work, follow us on social media (Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook), or join us for our free monthly Academy webinars. | https://medium.com/opex-analytics/how-to-win-and-influence-customers-lessons-from-dale-carnegie-aa877a0b9f8e | ['Opex Analytics'] | 2020-09-25 14:07:29.476000+00:00 | ['AI', 'Customer Service', 'Customer', 'Analytics', 'Data'] |
Ethereum API Services. BlockSDK APIs supports Ethereum API. | BlockSDK API supports Ethereum API.
Ethereum is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, after Bitcoin. And Ethereum is the most actively used blockchain in the world.
Ethereum has shown that it continues to grow with the launch of Eth2.
Currently, Ethereum 2.0 has emerged as the fourth-largest proof-of-stake network due to its total value locked to staking within approximately six weeks after the Eth2 deposit contract was activated.
If you want to use such a huge blockchain, you need some knowledge of it. But BlockSDK doesn’t.
If you use BlockSDK, you don’t need to know the details of blockchain technology.
BlockSDK provides an easy-to-use REST API that allows you to easily access blockchain technology.
You just need to look at the BlockSDK library and use only the functions you need.
Ethereum API —Get BlockChain
Through Ethereum API, Ethereum Blockchain information can be loaded.
The GET request expects a response such as:
{
“height” : 9098547,
“bestblockhash” => “0x235145654e2034d0852a9e8cd9bc6e3eea8a7179aec0723cd12db7d18e5f06b4”,
“prev_hash” =>
“0xb4cbec945d9dcf8a870d4ae5b156758f6b7824ed6da9a69130431cad7200a92e”,
“unconfirmed_count” : 1234,
“low_gwei” : 1,
“medium_gwei” : 2,
“high_gwei” : 3
}
Ethereum API — CraeteAddress
createaddress is a way to create an ethereum wallet. BlockSDK helps you create an ethereum wallet very simply.
Ethereum API — SendToAddress
Funds received via SendToAddress can be moved to another wallet. BlockSDK can monitor the wallet using webhook service. When funds are received, BlockSDK will move the funds to the target wallet/address and then notify you by sending a call to the URL you specify.
BLOCKSDK supports many Ethereum API
Blockchain information inquiry api Block information inquiry api Transaction information inquiry api Address generation api Wallet creation api Transaction creation api Webhook transaction, block chain event receiving api ERC-20 Token api Providing customer-specific custom API development 1:1 real-time chat development support Cryptocurrency service development consulting
You can start all these benefits for free
The API you want isn’t in the BLOCKSDK?
Feel free to contact us and we will immediately add a custom API.
e-mail : [email protected] , [email protected]
Go to Website
BLOCKSDK Github
Ethereum Rest API Docs | https://medium.com/@blocksdk/growing-ethereum-and-api-services-a734ad6e2959 | [] | 2021-01-06 03:46:21.472000+00:00 | ['Ethereum Blockchain', 'Ethereum Api', 'Ethereum', 'Eth'] |
Whitewashing Saudi Arabia | The picture to the left was taken for an interview with Arab News in 2005 and appeared alongside an article entitled: Photographing Saudi Arabia (https://www.arabnews.com/node/265479).
I was 23 at the time and my dream was to produce powerful visuals that would depict the closeness of Saudi families, their friendships, the tremendous hospitality and generosity, the respect shown towards elders and their sense of humour. Humane facets of Saudi culture, which were seldom recounted in the often negative Western media coverage of the kingdom.
“Sebastian Farmborough is a young British photographer who is fascinated by Saudi Arabia.” Indeed I was, but the enslavement and gross injustice that I have experienced over the years have really worn me down.
There are some beautiful, decent people here. Unfortunately, they are not the ones in control.
At least previous governments were more honest in their approach. When questioned regarding corruption; Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to the US stated: “So, what!” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoklqunA16s).
Today’s government is far more concerned with its image and instead of actually trying to improve the country for the sake of everyone, it seeks to deceive. It announced to the world that it would abolish the kafala system on 14th of March 2021 (https://www.arabnews.com/node/1825046/saudi-arabia) This has yet to happen.
Saudi Arabia’s own media has always been rather skewed towards the generation of a grandiose image of itself and its accomplishments, sometimes even bordering on the satirical. However, what is new, is to see articles of a similar nature appearing in mainstream international media. They are coupled with a bombardment of advertising, which strives to attract tourists. Personally, when I see it, I find it repugnant, because anyone living here knows the reality and many tourists will themselves wonder off the path and discover it.
Is this the government’s plan? Human rights abuse with the left hand, a tourism drive with the right? How long can that last?
Why is mainstream international media yet to expose Saudi Arabia’s failure to abolish the kafala system? God knows how many people continue to suffer on a daily basis because of it. I find it deeply disappointing that they have in this way, left us to the wolves. I believed that our media had greater ethics, but it would seem I have been rather naïve.
I know so many people who are being or have been abused by their employers. It is hard to fathom the true scale of the abuse. The problem is far greater than most would imagine, because the majority of the victims are too afraid to speak out, do not have the language to do so or choose not to as they know how impotent labour laws are and how uninterested the authorities are in enforcing them.
I was foolish enough to have been taken in by Saudi Arabia’s Vision2030 and to have believed that it was going to usher in actual, meaningful change. Yes, fresh faces and new blood have emerged, but the core is still rotten and their corrupt and inhumane practices persist.
Thanks to the kafala system, successive sponsors have stolen two and a half years of my life. What right should another human being have to prevent a person from working? I completed my contract, my wife is Saudi, we have made a home here. Why on earth am I still being prevented from earning a living and providing for her? Why would the Labour Office give greater consideration to a sponsor, who has routinely broken their own labour laws, rather than the employee that has always abided by them?
Where is the humanity in this ‘modern’ Saudi Arabia? And during a pandemic too. In all honesty my sponsor Abdulaziz Mohammed Alawad deserves to be in prison for the 18-month ordeal he has put my wife and I through.
My experience of Saudi Arabia is that the innocent are treated as criminals and the criminals as innocent. This inverted society encourages corruption, because it is rarely curtailed or punished. Quite the opposite in fact, it is bountifully rewarded. Perhaps justice in a land like this is just too much to ask.
People are often amazed to hear that someone British might find themselves in such a position, our embassy is perceived as being strong, but the nationality is irrelevant. Under the kafala system this can happen to any foreigner living in the kingdom.
Why has the kafala system not been abolished?
Why did the Saudi government lie to the world about doing so?
Why has that lie not been publically criticised by mainstream international media?
Now 40, I sincerely regret dedicating a substantial portion of my life to highlighting the positive aspects of Saudi culture. I have unwittingly assisted in the government’s whitewashing of widespread human rights abuse and should really have found a much more deserving cause.
https://sebastianfarmborough.com/ | https://medium.com/@sebastianfarmborough/whitewashing-saudi-arabia-8e984b40b56f | ['Sebastian Farmborough'] | 2021-08-18 10:13:44.969000+00:00 | ['Kafala', 'Middle East', 'Slavery', 'Saudi Arabia', 'Photography'] |
A mind map for gaining clarity in UX research | UX is a discipline where there is a lot of uncertainty.
UX Researchers are surrounded by so much information that sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between what is valuable and what is noise. There are a variety of design methods that can be applied to acquire users’ insights, yet they are so diverse that it’s hard to pick only some. And to make things worse, stakeholders don’t understand the role, and you have to be extra confident to help them trust you.
Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all. - Julian Barnes
I present below a mapping method that has the goal of helping the understanding of the big picture, connecting it with the methods used, and filtering the results achieved. Each step is accompanied by an example, to get a more specific taste of it. I’ve used it myself before as a way to improve my capabilities of solving problems and explain to my peers what I was doing in a simpler way.
Map everything
But first of all, let’s talk about the basics: visualizing everything in the same place.
Having your entire strategy mapped is like taking a lantern with you when it’s dark outside and there’s no other lightning source. Initially, you only see a few of your surroundings. Gradually, bit by bit, you start realizing where you need to go next.
Walking blindly, with no lantern, is not necessarily wrong — but it has a high chance of getting you to the wrong places.
Learn to take control of your path and bring your “research“ lantern with you.
I like to use the Miro tool to visualize the mapping strategy because it has a friendly interface and it’s easy to use, with pre-determined diagrams. However, you can use many others; I found Capterra a nice platform to explore potential mapping tools.
The only requirement is to have your entire strategy in one place. I do recommend an online tool (and not writing on paper) so you can easily modify the content and possibly share it with any interested stakeholder.
Identify the problem
Now it’s time to start populating your map.
You are in this role because you have problems to solve. Write them down.
Identify the “Big Problem” that prevents people from accomplishing their goals.
Find the questions worth answering
The next step is to find the questions worth answering connected to the problem.
When searching for the right questions, find the right ones based on the context of the problem and the information available.
For example, I first think about assessing the current state: How satisfied are users with the current setup? This helps me understand where things stand and the amount of effort needed to solve the problem.
What are their frustrations? What makes them happy now? I wouldn’t want to change something that is already working.
Lastly, I think about the maximum effort users are willing to do to accomplish the action. What are the time and resources users are willing to invest in?
Find the methods and metrics worth exploring
Connect each question with the methods and their appropriate metrics. Ensure you ask yourself WHY you are using a particular method and metric every time.
Is your question expecting a YES/NO answer, a categorization of users, a level of satisfaction? Then probably a questionnaire would be a good addition. Are you interested in gathering ideas and qualitative insights from users? Then lean towards experimental approaches or participatory evaluations.
What is important here is to have more than one method. I recommend three for triangulation.
“The term triangulation refers to the practice of using multiple sources of data or multiple approaches to analyzing data to enhance the credibility of a research study.” (Source)
Using more than one method helps you realize if the results of the research converge in the same direction. A useful resource covering methods and when to use them in the design process is Martin Maguire’s Methods to support human-centred design. | https://uxdesign.cc/a-mind-map-for-gaining-clarity-in-ux-research-601beb724e82 | ['Magda Mihalache'] | 2020-08-14 12:06:10.083000+00:00 | ['User Experience', 'Research', 'Clarity', 'UX Research', 'Mapping'] |
Don’t be a wuss! | Stop being such a whiny pissant! Buck up and be a man! The man your family needs you to be.
wuss — pronounced /wo͝os/
INFORMAL
noun
noun: wuss; plural noun: wusses
a weak or ineffectual person (often used as a general term of abuse).
“Afraid someone will see you wearing a mask? You’re such a wuss!”
verb
verb: wuss; 3rd person present: wusses; past tense: wussed; past participle: wussed; gerund or present participle: wussing
fail to do or complete something as a result of fear or lack of confidence.
“He’ll probably wuss out because he’s too scared to talk to her.”
I really worry about the future of men in this world, particularly this country. The things I’ve witnessed in recent months have shown me that far too many “men”, and I used that term only from a gender perspective, lack any sort of emotional maturity. They’re easily swayed by mass media and online social platforms into believing that being a defiant asshole and puffing out your chest is a trait that defines what it means to be a man.
My father always told me, “Be your own man.” He instructed me on how to follow what is right as opposed to what is popular. He also taught me how to deal with the situation at hand and either change it or accept it. Whining simply shows how weak you are. A strong man steps up to the plate. A weak man complains that the plate is even there. A strong man realizes that if a woman says “no”, then it’s either not meant to be or he’s not trying hard enough. A weak man rationalizes his rejection by calling her a stuck up bitch and whining that he cannot get any women to notice him. A strong man recognizes those less fortunate, physically or mobility challenged, or a young mother with kids simply having a rough day and assists them or makes accommodations. A weak man thinks only of himself and puffs out his chest when challenged for his off-putting behavior.
I see far too many weak men nowadays.
A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I were out running some errands when we decided to stop into the local Wendy’s fast food restaurant to grab a bite to eat. Since it’s the middle of a global pandemic, you either had two choices…drive-thru or the front counter. The dining room was closed. This particular restaurant had just been remodeled and we simply wanted to see the inside so we donned our masks and headed for the front counter. We placed our order and moved back away from the counter to allow others to order and to maintain social distancing. Easy enough, right?
A large man and what appeared to be his elderly mother entered and proceeded to the front counter. The young girl at the register calmly informed the man that she wasn’t allowed to serve him if he wasn’t wearing a mask. He began to berate this kid in front of everyone, reducing her to tears and prompting others to get involved. His mother was truly embarrassed (she had a mask on). As things began to get a little ugly, I stepped forward, halving the distance between him and my wife, in support of the restaurant manager and another customer, should things come to blows. All the while thinking to myself, “all this because he’s too much of a wuss to wear a mask for five minutes while he places his order.” Having gotten a refund and been asked to leave the premises, as he walked past me, I channeled my father, gave him “the look” and said, “Seriously? Over a little tiny mask? Wuss.” He turned away but managed to flip off the entire restaurant as the door closed behind him. That was a prime example of a small weak man. His emotional maturity leading him to believe that being a defiant and whiny individual would gain him favor among the masses when in truth, the opposite usually happens. There wasn’t a single person in that scenario who was on his side, not even his elderly mother.
How do we teach our sons the difference between stoicism and being a wuss without sacrificing their values or beliefs? The first is to help him identify the difference between “values” and “beliefs” as well as how they arrive at them. Let’s use the situation at Wendy’s as our backdrop. Teach him that a strong man would realize that asking a restaurant employee, especially a kid, to allow an exception in defiance of state law, could potentially put that establishment at risk in many ways. To put them in that position in the first place is incredibly selfish. Second, we could help him realize that making a small sacrifice to be able to get the food that he wants and then be on his way is really not a big deal nor does it warrant any type of silly political statement or “whiny rights violation” protest. Third, we can help instill in him the ability to recognize the difference between core values and simply following the crowd, either online or in real life.
How could the person in the Wendy’s scenario have acted as a strong man without sacrificing his beliefs? Let’s play this out as it “should” have happened.
Our young lady at the register: “Hello sir, I’m sorry, but I’m unable to take your order unless you’re wearing a mask.”
Man: “I’m sorry, I left my mask in the car. I’ll go get it.”
OR
Man: “I’m sorry, however, my mother has a mask on. Can she order for both of us and I’ll step back?”
Girl at the register: “Sure that’ll be fine.”
Man: “Thank you. Mom? Can you place our order? I’d like a….”
The man then retreats to a safe distance and awaits his order.
Some folks in the restaurant might be slightly upset at his unwillingness to wear a mask, but his calm confident demeanor holds off all comments and his objective is achieved with minimal sacrifice. Others in the restaurant admire his courteous behavior and make a personal exception for his mistaken (or deliberate) non-compliance.
Don’t be a wuss! People, and more often, women, are not impressed with whiny defiant behaviors. Swearing in public, cussing out a cashier, rudeness, or silly brooding stares do not make you appear tough as you may think. It has the opposite effect.
A strong confident man will deal with conflict in a calm manner. He will look you in the eye and calmly explain why something is wrong or needs to be addressed. Yelling and whining will get you nowhere. Calmly stating your expectations with a confident air while maintaining your cool will nearly always yield favorable results. In the end, you’ll succeed with admiration and appreciation from others around you. That is the strength of a man… | https://medium.com/@lifelessonsfromadad/dont-be-a-wuss-dce882d60b04 | ['David Trask'] | 2020-12-10 13:02:05.494000+00:00 | ['Dads', 'Men', 'Life Lessons', 'Relationships', 'Fatherhood'] |
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