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How to clone a GitHub repository using SSH for Windows, Linux & MacOS | How to clone a GitHub repository using SSH for Windows, Linux & MacOS Nintendo Engineer Follow Dec 27 · 4 min read
Photo by Yancy Min on Unsplash
Some people, like me, prefer working with Git using SSH rather than HTTP(S), where you have to enter your Git credentials, which you may have forgotten or it could just be a secure monster of a password that’s not type-friendly.
Whatever the reason, if you’re just starting out in the wonderful world of source control, GitHub or both and want to start using SSH immediately, it can be quite confusing how to go about it. So this is my attempt at making it easy to follow and understand; let’s get to it!
Generating an SSH key
It’s much simpler than it sounds. Pull up a Command Prompt (on Windows) or a Terminal (on Linux/MacOS) at the home folder, which should be it’s default location anyway. Once there, type the following command and hit Enter/Return (you might need to put sudo in front of it on Linux/MacOS):
ssh-keygen
When you do that, you’ll see your OS asking you some questions, starting with where to store the generated public and private key pairs. I leave the default and just hit Enter. This will store the keys in the your-home-folder/.ssh/ folder.
Next you will be asked to enter an optional passphrase. This passphrase is used to encrypt your private key so potential attackers can’t use it even if they get their hands on it. I usually leave this blank, but if you decide to choose a passphrase, make sure it’s one that’s safe and that you will remember (preferably store it somewhere safe). It’s okay if you don’t see anything appear when you type, that’s by design to obscure the length of the password as well.
Next you’ll be asked to repeat the password (or leave empty again if that was your choice) and you’ll get a nice randomart image. Your keys have been created at this point. Let’s go take a look at them. If you’re in your home folder still, it’s easy to get into the .ssh folder, all you have to do is
cd .ssh
and hit Enter. Once here, type dir (Windows) or ls (Linux/MacOS and you’ll see two new files:
The one we’re interested in for use with GitHub is id_rsa.pub.
NEVER EVER share your private key with anyone or anything, that’s for you only. If you think your private key might be compromised, go through these steps again to overwrite your keys.
Now that’s out of the way, let’s copy the contents of this file to your clipboard, so we can use it on GitHub.
For Windows, type the following command and hit enter:
type id_rsa.pub | clip
For MacOS, the command is:
pbcopy < id_rsa.pub
For Linux, I suggest installing xclip:
sudo apt install xclip
and afterwards run:
xclip -sel c < id_rsa.pub
Good! Now we have our key on our clipboard and we can move on to the next section.
Adding your SSH key to GitHub
Log in to your GitHub account and go to your account setting by hitting the icon in the top right and clicking on Settings:
On the left, choose SSH and GPG keys and hit the New SSH key button in the top right
You will see some fields to fill in. Enter a fitting name for your machine and paste what you copied in the Key field:
Hit Add SSH key and you should see it added to your list now.
From now on you can clone repositories with your account using SSH!
Cloning a repository
The easiest part. Just go to any repository you can clone, hit on the Code button, select SSH and copy that URL to your clipboard with the handy button next to it.
Now open a Command Prompt (as administrator) or Terminal (for Windows users I would strongly recommend Git for Windows) at the folder where you want to clone this repository and run the following command:
git clone THE_URL_YOU_JUST_COPIED
and hit Enter.
You should see something similar for the repository you cloned (I used my Twitch Emote Extension repo).
That’s it! You have successfully cloned a GitHub repository using SSH. You can now clone as many more as you like, because the SSH key has now been registered to your account. Merry coding! | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/how-to-clone-a-github-repository-using-ssh-for-windows-linux-macos-78ad9a3959e | ['Nintendo Engineer'] | 2020-12-28 14:02:15.728000+00:00 | ['Github', 'Ssh', 'Git', 'Software Development', 'Programming'] |
My experience at Kyoto Startup Summer School in 2021 | The return of an international entrepreneurship program rebounding from the global pandemic.
First day of KS³ starting with great energy. Image courtesy of KYOTO Design Lab.
This year I joined Kyoto Startup Summer School (KS³), the flagship entrepreneurship program from KYOTO Design Lab. I would like to share some of the highlights of my experience as a participant hoping that it will be helpful to those interested in joining the program next year, or those who may be simply curious about it.
Online format
One important thing to keep in mind is that this year was the first time the program was conducted entirely online, after being cancelled in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. I appreciate the organizing team for making the program happen despite all the challenges, as many of us wouldn’t have been able to join otherwise.
The overall timetable was designed in a way that sessions were spread over a variety of time zones, and those who couldn’t attend live had recordings of lectures and panel discussions available the next day. Of course, attending live was the best option that allowed active participation in the discussions, but it was not always possible as a natural result of having participants from all over the world, which brings us to the next point; how international the program was.
International environment
With participants coming from more than a dozen countries, KS³ felt truly international and really lived up to my expectations. Joining discussions with like-minded entrepreneurs from all kinds of professional and cultural backgrounds was definitely a highlight for me. I believe this type of diversity is conducive to an environment where innovation can be sparked. For example, participants in Q&A sessions would come up with insightful questions that added value to the discussions and having them as teammates during hands-on workshops was equally enriching.
Quality of content
As for the content of the program itself, there was a healthy mix of complexity levels in the lectures and workshops. They were led by expert instructors in a wide range of topics like fund raising, pitching, crowdfunding, marketing, social entrepreneurship, hardware startups, artificial intelligence, robotics, and more. Since KS³ doesn’t require previous experience in a particular area of knowledge to join, certain sessions were adequate for people just getting started in the entrepreneurship world. However, even those lectures taking a deep dive into the latest technology trends had a style that was easy to understand for beginners, yet still captivating for experienced participants.
Takeaway
A key takeaway I got from the program was the confirmation that entrepreneurs are not only those who create a company. With proper guidance and mentoring, anyone can develop an entrepreneurial mindset regardless of their current role or career stage. Anyone can help promote innovation and create value within their school, workplace, city, or any other social structure they are part of.
“Entrepreneurs are not only those who create a company”
While KS³ has a strong focus on startups, much of the content that was taught can also be applied to other aspects of the participants’ career journey. Just to mention a couple of examples, we had a workshop on online-based brainstorming techniques that can easily be used in any job that requires working with remote team members. Another lecture focused on delivering effective startup pitches with many concepts and tips that can also be used to improve public speaking and presentation skills in almost any other professional context.
Closing thoughts
All things considered, despite having an intensive schedule that required strong focus and commitment from all participants, the program was a rewarding experience; I had the chance to not only explore a broad range of topics, but also to meet other talented participants with a similar passion for making meaningful and positive changes in society. For me, this was the biggest reward of being part of KS³.
My advice for future participants? Be ready to have your views challenged by peers coming from a multitude of different backgrounds and definitely make sure to free up plenty of time in your personal calendar for the duration of the program. It will most likely demand a lot of your energy and focus as it tries to live up to the expectations of being “Japan’s most international and intensive summer entrepreneurship program”. | https://medium.com/@ricardo-martinez/my-experience-at-kyoto-startup-summer-school-in-2021-d2f307d68063 | ['Ricardo Martinez'] | 2021-09-05 17:06:55.221000+00:00 | ['Entrepreneurship', 'Summer School', 'International', 'Experience', 'Startup'] |
Making Money With AdSense — How to Use Your Website to Make AdSense Money | There are thousands upon thousands of programs on the internet for making money, but there can be none as easy as Google AdSense. Google has an advertising program called AdWords that charges the advertiser every time a visitor clicks on their ad. These ads are put onto AdSense members’ websites and you earn AdSense money every time someone clicks on an ad on your site. You are essentially helping Google publish their advertising and they pay you out of the AdWords money they earn. Follow Same Process on How i Got $1000 Sent to my Cash App
Because the ads on your site have been matched to the content of your site, they are relevant to your visitors and actually add value to your site. Specialized technology allows Google to assess your website for context and content to make matching AdSense advertising a simple task. It is in everyone’s interest to have well-matched ads appear on websites; the targeted traffic will be more likely to click on ads of interest and increase how much AdSense money everyone will make.
When you apply to join the AdSense program the content of your site will be assessed for originality and valuable information. Google will also be looking for the quantity of your content — new and original content appearing regularly on your site. Because AdSense relies on the numbers, your content and your ability for making money with AdSense are linked. You need to show that you intend to be around for a while and that you offer valuable information to visitors.
For AdSense to make money, there has to be a lot of traffic to your site, and this is another area Google will want to check before you are approved for membership. Google want maximum traffic to see their AdWords ads and so the volume of traffic you receive is a deciding factor.
There is no information about how much the AdWords pays per click, but you could expect a wide price range from.02c to about $15. How much money AdSense makes you will depend on your content and traffic, but this is a very simple way to add to your internet income.
Follow Same Process on How i Got $1000 Sent to my Cash App | https://medium.com/@shadetech/making-money-with-adsense-how-to-use-your-website-to-make-adsense-money-67d90c67bfe | ['Adejare Shadrach'] | 2021-12-20 01:11:23.943000+00:00 | ['Make Money From Home', 'Makeup', 'Make Money Online Fast', 'Make Money Online', 'Make Money Blogging'] |
Why Should I Care If I Intimidate Men? | Why Should I Care If I Intimidate Men?
I’m not going to feign weakness to endear myself to someone.
Photo by Sarah Cervantes via Unspalsh
My strength and independence were grown out of necessity, not desire for them. I take care of myself and my life because there is no one else to do. If something needs fixing, I fix it. If something costs money, I find it. If my mind gets cloudy, I clear it.
I didn’t wake up one day and tell myself I wanted to be a strong, fierce woman. I woke up one day and I was one. I’m not sure when it happened.
Words don’t affect me nearly as much as they used to. I can’t be bothered with other people’s opinions of me, what I look like, what I wear or what I say. I do what I want.
I’ll be 46 years old in two weeks. This is a right I’ve earned. I’ve come by it honestly.
I’ve been told more than a time or two before that my singlehood is possibly connected to a feeling of intimidation I bring out in men. I’m too bold. I’m too strong. I’m too opinionated. That’s too bad. I’m not stepping backward for anyone.
I’ve found that many men will tell you they love a strong woman up until the moment you demonstrate said strength and then you realize they do not, in fact, love strong women.
I see men drawn to the role of the knight in shining armor. If there’s a lady who needs help, they rush to her side and then find themselves awash in her gratitude. She walks off with her knight and I go read a book.
I can’t pretend to be a damsel in distress just so I have a date on Friday night. I have more interesting things to do.
I don’t know how to be any other way and I don’t want to be any other way. I find it silly to feign helplessness just to stroke a man’s ego to make him think I can’t get by without his help. | https://vanessatorre.medium.com/why-should-i-care-if-i-intimidate-men-455a226fc009 | ['Vanessa Torre'] | 2020-02-20 05:12:49.197000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Relationships', 'Self', 'Love', 'Women'] |
The Fountain Of Youth App | We’re a Bad Influence because we INCITE change through inclusion, thought and creativity. We imagine a world where people can think critically, express themselves, and thumb their nose at the status quo, together.
Follow | https://medium.com/the-bad-influence/the-fountain-of-youth-app-8ce32d32c66d | ['Chris Hedges'] | 2020-10-22 18:37:56.167000+00:00 | ['Tsunicorn', 'Microfiction', '50 Word Stories', 'Aging', 'Regret'] |
Co-Sleeping: Should Your Child Sleep In Your Bed? | This post contains affiliate links, that could result in providing me with compensation
Co-sleeping is the practice where the child sleeps in bed with her parents. Not surprisingly, it is one of the most hotly debated and controversial topics related to pediatric sleep. Let’s see why.
Some people argue that co-sleeping is the right and natural way to raise a child because the practice fosters a stronger bond and a more secure attachment.
Conversely, others will tell you that co-sleeping is risky, ridiculous, or even dangerous and they don’t want it for their family.
So, which approach holds the truth?
First, it’s important to understand that co-sleeping is not magic. Although some proponents of the family bed would disagree, numerous couples have reported that their babies did not necessarily sleep deeper or longer because their parents were close by.
In fact, some parents found that their child slept longer and woke less frequently when they stopped co-sleeping and moved him into his own crib.
However, whether families choose to co-sleep or have their children sleep independently is a personal decision, and if both parents and child are safe, rested, and fulfilled, then co-sleeping is nothing to worry about.
If you decide do co-sleep, this commitment requires some very careful thinking about what you and your spouse feel is right for you as individuals, as a couple, and as a family.
Ask yourselves the following questions:
1. Do I enjoy the coziness of sleeping in close proximity, or do we both tend to stay active during sleeping — potentially disrupting the others?
Since the birth of my daughter on November 1st, she has been unable to sleep without someone holding her. It had become hard for me to even get any sleep. I found that she would only sleep on my chest.
She is now a month old and I have found that she’ll sleep better when she is lying next to me and not on top of me. I was able to follow her routine better and know when when it was time for feedings.
She has come quite predictable. She would fidget for a few minutes before she wakes up and I would go and prepare a bottle; by the time the bottle is made, she would just start to cry, and I’d already be right there.
There are times where I think about if I were to roll over on her, but it’s almost like I’ve been self aware in my sleep. I am a light sleeper and I tend to know when she is even breathing differently.
2. Does everyone in our family want to co-sleep, or are we leaning toward it because one of us feels strongly?
I am the stay at home parent so I tend to make the decisions about where she is going to sleep. It is easier for me to lay her next to me when it is time to go to sleep, because I am the one that will be with her most of the day.
I used to lay her in her crib after she falls asleep, but she will only stay sleep for roughly 20 minutes. My husband is usually up until 2am which will allow me to go to sleep around 9pm. When he is ready to go to bed, he will lay her next to me since I am the light sleeper.
His concern is my sleep, and we both agree that it was best to keep her in a position where me and the baby both will sleep. She will sleep about 2 to 3 hours when she is actually next to me.
3. Are we willing to commit to being quiet after our child falls asleep, or do we like to watch TV or talk in bed?
My daughter loves when I play music. Sometimes she will just lay in bed with her eyes open until she falls asleep. My husband on the otherhand will watch tv or play games which he has her.
He found it harder for her to fall asleep because of the noise. Throughout the day, I wouldn’t even turn on the TV. I would play music all day, and found that our sleeping habits have gotten so much better.
4. Will we enjoy being able to feed our baby more often throughout the night, or will having him next to us make it tougher to wean nighttime feeds?
Like I said before, I pretty much have her routine down. We are waking up 3 times from midnight to 9am. I have prepared myself to wake up at those times. Most of the time she will go right back to sleep after eating.
Between 3am and 6am she loves to stay up for about 20 minutes and we have our morning conversation and exercises; yes she is only 1 month old, but she already has a lot to say.
5. Does sleeping next to our child allow us to feel more connected to him?
Right now, I don’t feel that it helps me connect with her. It is more of a “help us both sleep” situation. She sleeps better when it feels like something is lying on her.
Throughout the day, she were having trouble sleeping where she would sometimes be up for 6 hours. She would be so tired but won’t actually want to go to sleep.
She wouldn’t cry unless I put her down, but just holding her for 3 hours while she goes in and out of sleep gets pretty tiring. What I started doing, was put a pillow across her legs to make it feel like I was there.
She started sleeping 2 hours at a time, and would just wake up for feedings then would go right back to sleep. This has allowed me to actually get some cleaning done.
As expected, co-sleeping has both advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages:
• Constant closeness whenever the child is awake. Many children and parents enjoy this feeling.
• Immediate action and support for any sleep-related problem
• The ability to nurse and respond to other nighttime awakenings without getting up
• More time to spend with the child
• Possibly better sleep for both the child and the parents, if the child was sleeping poorly to begin with
Disadvantages:
• Parents may sleep poorly if their children are restless sleepers
• Parents may end up sleeping in separate rooms, and they may become angry at their child or with each other
• Children’s and adults’ sleep cycles do not coincide
• Parents may have to go to bed at a very early hour with their children and be left with little time for their own evening activities
• Parents have little privacy
• There may be a slight increase in the risk to the infant from SIDS and related causes.
Conclusions
The decision to co-sleep should be yours, made by the parent — or parents — and based on your own personal philosophies, not on pressure from your child or anyone else. Another family’s good or bad experience with co-sleeping should not influence your decision: your child is unique and your family is not the same.
If you are looking for the best ways to put your baby to sleep, check out “The Baby Sleep Miracle”. It is the fastest…easiest… scientifically proven method to solve your baby’s sleeping problems… once and for all. | https://medium.com/@depetaledroses/co-sleeping-should-your-child-sleep-in-your-bed-991ba5bc471f | ['Stephanie Rose'] | 2020-12-09 16:32:29.609000+00:00 | ['Co Sleeping', 'Baby', 'Children', 'Sleeping', 'Kids'] |
The Man Who Poisoned America | Roger Ailes died a little over two years ago, in May of 2017. Ten months earlier, in July of 2016, he was forced out as head of Fox News, amid several accusations of sexual harassment, some dating back to the 1960’s, when he was producing The Mike Douglas Show.
In the recently concluded Showtime limited series, The Loudest Voice, shows how he built the network up from nothing. An empty storefront into the most watched cable news network, even three years after he was let go. What wasn’t covered was how it all started.
In the ever continuing series “It all goes back to Nixon,” here’s the latest chapter.
In 1967, Nixon was still in political limbo. He had lost the presidency in 1960 and the California Governor’s race in ’62, emoting the famous “you won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore” line. He campaigned, nominally, for Goldwater in ’64 and other Republicans in 1966.
His return from exile began not in front of the TV, where Nixon, even on his best days looked worse than Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend (“I was born with five o’clock shadow,” he once mused), but behind it.
Mike Douglas was a 1950’s crooner in the style of Andy Williams and Perry Como. In 1961, he was hired to start a daily talk show in Cleveland. After two years locally, the show was syndicated by Westinghouse Television, relocated to Philadelphia and eventually went nationwide by 1965. Its producer from ‘65–68 was Roger Ailes.
In 1967, Ailes was 27, five years removed from Ohio University in Athens. He was the wunderkind of television, as TMDS had gained an audience that made it the number one daytime talk show for most of its run. There was even talk of taking on Johnny Carson, but you just didn’t do that.
Nixon was, by the time he appeared on the show, plotting his political comeback. He saw cracks in Lyndon Johnson’s support as the Vietnam War continued to escalate. The Great Society programs weren’t getting much help in Congress and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act had made for the perfect storm for the perfect candidate.
Nixon and Ailes were brothers from another mother. Both were paranoid, resentful and fearful of a changing America. So, in the ‘Green Room,’ before his appearance, a rueful Nixon told Ailes “it’s too bad that politicians have to use this contraption to win elections.” To which Ailes replied, “if you don’t accept television and use it to your advantage, you’ll never win.”
Gwaker
Nixon was many things, but he wasn’t stupid. He was an opportunist of the first order who won his first Senate race by passing out pink flyers painting his opponent Helen Gahagan Douglas, as a communist sympathizer. So, in 1968, he hired Ailes as his “television producer.”
Ailes told Old Tanned, Rested and Ready not to debate Humphrey. He didn’t, unlike 1960, instead producing a series of scripted, ‘audience participation’ programs where an audience of ‘average Americans’ asked questions of the candidate. He spoke to ‘the silent majority,’ (sounds familiar, doesn’t it?) and played on the resentment and fear of everything from nuclear war to the cost of living to win. Most memorably, he is remembered for his appearance on the irreverent Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, where he tried to look, well, cool.
Following Ailes playbook, he won, barely. He garnered 301 electoral votes to Humphrey’s 191, but had third party candidate George Wallace won a few more states, he would have thrown the race to the House of Representatives, where, after the first ballot, it’s one man, one vote.
Had Nixon lost, Ailes more than likely would have gone back to producing more daytime television. Instead, he became a power player, especially from 1980 onward. He was a consultant to Reagan and in 1984, produced the “Morning in America” ad that propelled Ronnie to the largest electoral landslide in history.
There had been talk of a ‘conservative’ network as far back as 1970, but there just wasn’t the infrastructure nor money to pull it off. Paramount, flush with money from the syndication of Star Trek, was planning to start a fourth network in the late 1970’s, right when cable television was in its infancy. Never happened.
Instead, it took an Australian expatriate, scandal sheet propagator Rupert Murdoch, to start FOX, mostly on UHF channels, in 1987. It was irreverent (The Tracey Ullman Show, which begat The Simpsons), sensationalistic (America’s Most Wanted) and crass, giving us Al Bundy and family in Married With Children (the working title was ‘We’re Not The Cosby’s’ a dig at the number one show at the time).
Were it not for purchasing the rights to the National Football League’s NFC package beginning in 1994, FOX might not have been around much longer. Instead, Murdoch wanted to start a news channel to compete with CNN. He convinced Ailes, who had been working for America’s Talking, the predecessor to MSNBC, to leave and start a new venture from scratch. The rest, as they say is history.
In crafting a network in his own image, Ailes created a monolith of a network that vilified liberals, immigrants, the poor, disabled, blacks, gays and anyone who didn’t believe in God, the flag and hate Barack Hussein Obama. And Bill and Hillary Clinton. You can throw in Al Gore, John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi for good measure as well.
It was all a well-crafted facade. Ailes, who was a hemophiliac, was also an abusive manipulator and a voracious sex fiend who used his power and money to control everything. During his time at the network, he kept a woman in a luxurious apartment for his sexual needs. He’s not the first rich and powerful man to do this, history is replete with them, including the current occupant* residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
He also harassed women at Fox News. That it took Gretchen Carlson, a former Miss America, to sue him to bring him down and start the snowball that would take down other well-known men (and a few women as well) is perhaps a watershed moment.
But Ailes had already poisoned the populace for nearly 50 years. That FNC still rates and resonates with viewers even after his departure is proof that his influence is still strong. But there might be a break in the fever. In the wake of recent events, Chris Wallace and others have spoken out against the president* and his policies and he has called Fox ‘unfair.’ Oh, poor you.
In the past year, Murdoch has sold the entertainment and Fox Sports Regional channels to ABC and Sinclair, respectively. Sinclair is even more extreme than even Fox News and I don’t see them being a good bet to keep the FS-R’s for too long. Not sure what Disney/ABC plans to do, but I don’t see Bart and Homer around too much longer.
Ailes was an outsized person and personality. In the end, he was just a bully — and a perverted one at that. Had it not been for the Trickster, Ailes would have been just another producer. Had it not been for Murdoch, he might have lived out his life with $30+ million of General Electric’s money in upstate New York or Palm Beach. Instead, we have to deal with what he has spewed since 1968.
We have always been a country divided. Roger Ailes legacy lies in widening that division. | https://kentanderson-17716.medium.com/the-man-who-poisoned-america-3ef0169ecacf | ['Kent Anderson'] | 2019-08-16 02:08:36.208000+00:00 | ['Libidinous Asshole', 'Richard Nixon', 'Fox News', 'Divided America', 'Roger Ailes'] |
Gas Cost Comparison — Trading. How does trading on nahmii compare to a… | With the first of nahmii’s smart contracts for trades now on Ropsten, we can bring you an exclusive first look at what it will cost to trade on nahmii versus a typical centralised exchange.
The comparison we’re making today is a little more complicated than you might think, mainly due to how gas costs are calculated. To simplify things, we’re using a wallet that has performed each transaction at least once before (as Ethereum generally requires more gas the first time you perform a smart contract function call). Similarly, we’ll work with a typical ERC-20 token (we used TT1 on Ropsten).
Our comparison will look at each step in the process: deposit, one singular trade, account settlement and withdrawal. We’ll use Binance as the point of comparison, other exchanges may be cheaper or more expensive.
Deposits
Depositing ERC-20 tokens into nahmii costs approximately 275,000 gas, whereas the equivalent cost to deposit into Binance is 35,000 gas.
In USD terms, presuming a gas price of 2 Gwei and ETH overestimated at $300, that works out at:
nahmii deposit = $0.165
Binance deposit = $0.021
Trades
Both Binance and nahmii charge a flat 0.1% fee for maker and taker orders. Please note that nahmii’s fee structure will eventually be adjusted to have a differential between maker and taker, and it will also include substantial discounts for larger monthly trading volumes.
Account Settlement & Withdrawal
To withdraw funds from nahmii, users must first ‘settle’ their account by providing a valid transaction receipt. Withdrawals are therefore a three part process: first, a user starts the settlement process and triggers the settlement waiting period; second, the user confirms their settlement request once the waiting period has expired; third, the user requests a withdrawal from nahmii’s on-chain client fund.
Taken together, the total gas cost to settle and withdraw from nahmii is 1,500,000 gas.
Withdrawals from a centralised exchange are usually both slow and expensive. Binance charges different fees depending on the withdrawal currency (0.0005 BTC, 0.01 ETH). We can calculate an approximate average withdrawal fee by looking at a range of currencies, generally a withdrawal from Binance will cost in the region of $1.50–3.00. This approximation understates the withdrawal cost for some currencies (0.0005 BTC = $5 at $10,000 per BTC), while overstating the fee for others (1.4 USDT = $1.40 at $1 per USDT).
In summary, presuming a gas price of 2 Gwei and ETH at $300, that works out at:
nahmii settlement & withdrawal = $0.90
Binance withdrawal = approximately $2.25 (using the middle value in the range $1.50–3.00)
Summary
Adding the values together, we can see that the full deposit-trade-withdraw life cycle on nahmii is over 50% cheaper than using Binance ($1.065 vs $2.28). This only tells us half of the story though; there are many reasons to use nahmii over an equivalent centralised exchange.
Before nahmii, centralised exchanges were the only option for serious traders of cryptocurrencies. Decentralised alternatives, while more secure, suffered from terrible performance problems: high latency; unpredictable fees; slow order cancellation; delayed finality and miserable overall throughput. Now with nahmii, traders will soon be able to enjoy all the performance benefits of a traditional centralised exchange with the security and non-custodial features of decentralised exchange.
When a trader deposits funds into nahmii, they are not held by a centralised operator. Instead, funds are stored in nahmii’s ‘Client Fund’ contract; users, like nahmii’s operator, cannot withdraw from the Client Fund without first providing a valid transaction receipt. This non-custodial approach means that a user’s funds are always safe, even against a fully compromised operator. With nahmii, users are protected against the kind of security breaches that seem to happen regularly at centralised exchanges — users are responsible for their own security.
There are other benefits to using nahmii too; we have no minimum withdrawal requirements and will soon have much lower transaction fees, with significant discounts for high volume traders. Even better, we have plans in place to remove nahmii’s settlement period delay entirely — nahmii will have instant withdrawals available for a small fee in the near future! More blog posts coming on this soon.
For too long, traders have had to compromise between security and performance. That all changes when nahmii’s exchange goes live later this year; the future of trading is coming and that future is nahmii. | https://medium.com/hubii/gas-cost-comparison-trading-84b4afaeaa9d | ['John Derbyshire'] | 2019-07-16 10:05:19.612000+00:00 | ['Scaling', 'Trading', 'Ethereum', 'Cyptocurrency', 'Blockchain'] |
// Human Version// | Ever thought of the time that is rapidly passing, the things that you are losing, the lost peace of mind, the insomniac soul, the approaching success, the failed plan, the upcoming opportunities, the fake smile, the never ending desires and all about the hustle and bustle of life?
Ever voyaged through the inner sadness of the candid shots, the concealed scars behind the beautiful blush, the brokenness behind the happy status, the messy life behind the maintained newsfeed, the dummy reacts over senseless memes?
Ever wonder about where your life is towards?
Ever thought how your life is messing up, of how you are just losing yourself, of how you are just dying inwardly?
Ever thought of taking a pause from such social, but scary life?
Ever thought of taking a break from the busy routine?
There would be million times, million seconds and billions of moments when you wanted to just stop there, to not to step ahead, to not to get lost in the world of fake gestures.
But you didn’t opt for it, as you are not pleased but addicted to it.
It’s alright to socialize; it’s imperfectly perfect to scroll over social media but to an extent, to a limit.
Don’t let it rule your thoughts, your life and your mind. Don’t let it paralyze your soul, your ideas and your creativity.
So let’s login to your human version, And tune into your lively dimension.
©Aafia Muhammad Amin
-Passionate Dandelion
~Aafia Writes~ | https://medium.com/@aafiaamin/human-version-fa183d114ca9 | ['Aafia Muhammad Amin'] | 2020-12-15 15:45:23.976000+00:00 | ['Social Media', 'Content Writing', 'Humanity', 'Social', 'Addiction'] |
How Baby Boomers “Retire” (Keep Working) | How Baby Boomers “Retire” (Keep Working)
The new defenition.
Angie Barnes, The Q Works Group
“Can’t stop, won’t stop.” That seems to be the mantra for the tens of thousands of Baby Boomers “retiring” each day in America. Nearly 30% of retired Boomers are either currently employed or have been employed during retirement. Over 60% of those, say they are working because they want to, not because they have to. For a generation who has been at the grind for the past four to five decades, these men and women are facing their golden years unlike any generation before them due to a number of contributing factors such as:
Longevity: They are living longer and healthier lives than generations before. This allows them the ability to continue to work effectively and productively contribute to their communities. Finances: Economics have changed and many cannot rely on the savings and pension plans that their parents had. Many have been hit hard with the roller coaster that is the American economy of the past decade or so, which has greatly diminished their traditional retirement plans such as 401ks and IRAs. Personal Reasons: There are many non-financial reasons Boomers continue to work which include to stay mentally alert, to remain physically active, to have a sense of purpose, and to stay socially connected to others.
Additionally, lower stress levels and the ability to maintain higher quality relationships are reported by employed retirees compared to non-working retirees, providing more incentive for Boomers to keep punching the clock.
The definition of the word “retire” in and of itself is somewhat misleading, which may explain why 10% of Boomers surveyed predicted that they will NEVER retire! When we think of someone as retired, we assume they no longer work. When a third of “retired” people do work, the term loses its meaning for all intents and purposes. Over the past 40+ years, this generation has proven themselves to be highly goal-oriented, dedicated and possess the utmost, impressive work ethic. These characteristics promote a sense of purpose for Boomers to work as long as they are able.
Just because a worker reaches “traditional” retirement age, it is not wise to count them out just yet. Employers can greatly benefit from having Boomers in the workplace. They bring with them experience, leadership, and dependability. They may also be open to working part-time or filling gaps as needed, making perfect interim managers. They have the knowledge and work (and life) experience to step into mentoring and training roles. Baby Boomers have always been well regarded as being team players and loyal to the company they represent, which is not always the case with younger generations.
In a perfect world, we will all have the capacity and financial means to “retire” at some point. Spend our days with loved ones. Maybe do some traveling, gardening, catch up on the “Honey Do” list. Volunteer. But in the meantime, the Baby Boomers are determined to show the rest of us that there will be no sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch for them any time soon.
Go Boomers! | https://medium.com/agingboomer/how-baby-boomers-retire-keep-working-retirement-bfb831fa5a6b | ['Today S Boomers'] | 2017-04-03 01:54:54.806000+00:00 | ['Aging', 'Boomers', 'Retirement Planning', 'Retirement', 'Baby Boomers'] |
The Art of Accepting — Is it too difficult? | Acceptance , whether you have to accept someone else or your own self, this is difficult. Yes, it certainly is difficult to learn the art of accepting.
Theory of art of Accepting
Let me tell you it’s a two way traffic , more like a give & take relationship because to develop or learn the art of accepting, you have to first learn to let go & the one thing that should be abandoned in the process is your EGO
If you realize, acceptance is not difficult but to shed your ego is difficult, and that makes the entire process look high hill. Fortunately, it is possible to learn to accept.
Personal Experience
Allow me to share a small incident that happened with me recently. I was in talks with a prospective client to schedule an appointment to meet & discuss. After a few back & forth email exchanges, we decided on time, venue , agenda etc.
I reached the client’s place at scheduled time & was waiting at the reception. Barely 5 minutes later, their spokesperson was in front of me informing that meeting has been cancelled.
Why? The person I was meeting got busy in something that needed urgent attention — (read my article on Paid Reality). I left the place.
To cut the story short, I met the client today & had a wonderful meeting. During our conversation, I did mention about the meeting that got cancelled at the last minute, while being present at the venue last week. I categorically mentioned that had this cancellation happened a few years ago, I wouldn’t have come back & moved on to another prospective client.
Conclusion or Takeaway
But today, it’s different because now I had put myself in your shoes to understand your perspective. And surprisingly, she mentioned that she was unsure if I would ever come back. This all was possible because Mindfulness practice helps you reach that level.
A level, where you are developing the art of having a non-judgmental attention or simply put the art of acceptance .
Beginning of a new chapter
This is the beginning of art of accepting (a difficult task) things , people & above all your own self. Take a deep breath & respond to situations like this & don’t react. In most cases, reaction brings an adverse effect on your relationship with prospective clients, family, friends & with yourself too.
Hope you not only enjoy reading but are learning new perspectives as well. You can connect with me on Linkedin, if you wish to. | https://medium.com/@manishbhatia29/the-art-of-accepting-is-it-too-difficult-fa01ae132f5 | ['Manish Bhatia'] | 2019-11-19 15:53:34.907000+00:00 | ['Train Your Mind', 'Acceptance', 'Mindfulness', 'Meditation', 'Letting Go'] |
How to choose career path which suits you.. | Edit
It is time to take admissions. Exam Results are out and if you’re not sure which direction your career should go in, you’re thinking about making a career change, or you just want to feel more fulfilled in your career, these ten tips might help. We, SCM Design Institute (A Branch of Saraswati College of Engineering, Navi Mumbai) is one of the most credible educational institute from Navi Mumbai with some of the career building courses. We have all the branches of Engineering with new age professional courses like Fashion Design, Interior Design, fine arts. We also have a Digital Marketing Course which is a new way of leading life of young generation.
Ideally, everyone would know their true calling early in life and find happiness in their work, but it often doesn’t work that way. One survey (of professionals) found that they expected to change careers three times in their lifetimes; lifelong careers may not be the norm any more. World is changing every other day with new way of technologies and services and so is the human interest.
That said, we know there are better ways to choose a career than just following your parents’ footsteps or choosing randomly. Here are some ideas..
10. Think About What Excites and Energizes You
This one’s the first obvious step — we all want to enjoy and actually like our careers. (Perhaps the biggest sign you’re on the wrong path is if you dread talking about your job.) While passion isn’t the only requirement for being content in your career, many would say it’s still essential, if only because passion is what keeps you going even through the tough times.
9. But Also Keep in Mind What You’re Good At
Maybe you don’t feel that passionate about any specific career — or you love multiple areas and can’t decide on just one. Then it’s time to think about your personality and focus on the skills you have. “Don’t do what you love. Do what you are.”
8. Take a Test
Well, you say, what if you don’t know what you’re good at or even what you’re interested in? Career assessment tests in college or even high school help narrow down a field but if it’s been a while since you took those tests, there are other kinds of assessment tests you can take.
7. Try an Internship
If you have flexibility when it comes to salary, an internship could be a great way to test out an industry or type of career — and eventually get a full-time job(especially if you have no prior experience). Even if it doesn’t turn into a job or you find out it’s the wrong career for you, an internship can help build your network — from which you can get career and job advice. (Not all internships are just about picking up coffee. For example, Google internships, while hard to come by, put you to real work.)
6. Find a Mentor
A mentor could help you take your career to the next level and give you the insider insight to help you make sure you’re on the right path.
If there’s a career you’re interested in, you might also check to see if any companies or people in that line of work would let you shadow them for a few days to see what it’s really like.
5. Explore Unconventional Careers
We all know the popular careers available to us — doctor, lawyer, teacher, computer engineer, police officer, store owner, etc. If you feel uninspired by the typical choices, know that there are thousands of unusual jobs you might not have heard about, hidden, perhaps, in the Bureau of Statistics’ Occupational Handbook.
4. Ask Other People
Perhaps the best way to discover a new career is to ask other people about theirs — assuming you come into contact with people who don’t all work in the same field. Your LinkedIn network (or other social media sites, but especially LinkedIn) might be a good place to start mining for information. Also, don’t forget your local library’s reference librarian can point you to career resources.
3. Use the G+P+V Formula
The perfect career for you would most likely fit the G+P+V formula, which stands for Gifts + Passions + Values. Consider your strengths and passions, as we’ve noted above, and your values — what’s non-negotiable about the way you work?
2. Make a Career Plan
As with most things, your career will benefit if you have goals and a plan for it. Maybe you think you want to be a writer, but the next step after that, is editing. (Do you really want to do that?) Or maybe you want to transition from being an editor to a restaurant owner. (How are you going to get there?) Map out where you want to go, with concrete milestones, as if it were a four-phase project.
1. See Your Career as a Set of Stepping Stones, Not a Linear Path
Of course, all these plans and ideas are never set in stone. Your career is a marathon, not a sprint and it can turn out to be a very winding road indeed, knitted together from all of your experiences into, hopefully, a career worth having.
SCM Design Institute and Saraswati College of Engineering have set up a career counselling team where you can visit to the campus anytime and can discuss the modern ways of building careers. As a Educational Institute, we always aim to build our Nation with right educational recourses which need to be utilised by every dreamer.
Come and achieve your dream. | https://medium.com/@scmkhargar/how-to-choose-career-path-which-suits-you-5f70ddab9a11 | ['Scm Design Institute'] | 2019-06-17 05:25:48.463000+00:00 | ['Fashion Design Education', 'Career In Designing', 'Career In Fashion', 'Careers', 'Interior Design'] |
Building the Panama Canal | Building the Panama Canal
Via istockphoto.com
The French Connection
The Panama Canal was a Spanish idea. It was conceived by King Charles V of Spain in the early 1500’s as a way to reduce the sailing time from Spain to Peru. Today a bust of Charles V stands in Panama City commemorating his vision.
The first developer of the Panama Canal was a Frenchman, Ferdinand de Lesseps. He cut his teeth on canal building in Egypt where he successfully built the Suez Canal. In 1854 he convinced the ruler of Egypt, Said Pasha, to authorize him to construct a canal that would directly link the Mediterranean Sea with the Red Sea, substantially reducing the travel time between Europe and East Asia.
A plan by civil engineers was adopted in 1856 and Lessep proceeded full speed ahead. He refused to allow anything to stop him. He ignored negative opinions from England and France which claimed: (1) that the sea in front of Port Said (on the Mediterranean side of the proposed canal) was full of mud and would make excavating impossible, and (2) that the sands from the desert would fill in the trench as the digging progressed.
Despite a multitude of technical and diplomatic difficulties, the canal was finally completed and inaugurated in November 1869.
Building the Panama Canal — first attempt
After his triumph in Egypt, starting in 1881, Ferdinand de Lessep tried to repeat his success with an effort to build a canal across the isthmus of Panama. He failed dramatically due to a number of problems.
The Suez Canal was built entirely at sea level — no locks. The techniques developed at Suez wouldn’t work connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans because the change in ocean levels was too great. Lessup refused to build the canal with locks.
Panama’s climate was totally different from arid Egypt. Panama does have a dry season, but it also has a rainy season. The French would dig out swaths of land and put the dirt on the banks of the trench. Every rainy season, torrential rain would wash all the soil they’d dug out right back into the canal.
Malaria and yellow fever ran rampant in Panama in an uncontrolled epidemic. It is estimated more than 20,000 French workers died. Jules Dingler, Director General of the French canal company, arrived in Panama with his wife, son, daughter and her fiancé in 1883. Within a few months, his daughter died of yellow fever, followed by his son, his daughter’s fiancé and, finally, his wife. Broken in mind and spirit, Dingler returned to France. Within a month of their arrival in Panama in 1886, thirteen of thirty engineers died, presumably of yellow fever (more on the medical problems later).
Numerous political and financial scandals plagued the project. After $287 million in expenditures the French canal company liquidated in 1889.
Building the Panama Canal — second attempt
The United States bought out the project in 1904 paying $40 million, and, after extensive engineering studies, decided on building a canal with locks.
Engineers designed and built a railroad alongside the ditch. Excavated dirt was loaded into rail cars and trucked far away from the site and dumped so the rains wouldn’t wash it back into the canal.
Dr. Walter Reed and others attacked the medical problems. After putting screens on some of the workers’ quarters and not others, Reed noticed the workers housed with screening were much less likely to contract malaria or yellow fever. He concluded mosquitoes were transmitting the diseases. He appointed a chief sanitation officer who took measures to minimize the spread of the two deadly diseases, After two years of extensive work, the diseases were almost entirely eliminated. In spite of these efforts about 5,600 workers died of disease and accidents during the US construction phase. The canal was completed in 1914. In 1999 the US turned over control of the canal to Panama.
Three interesting facts
(1) Most people think the “mules” (little trains) on each side of the canal pull ships through the canal. Not true. Ships go through under their own power. The function of the mules is to keep the ships from hitting the sides of the locks by keeping ropes tied to the ships taut. (2) It costs about $250,000 for a 1000-passenge cruise ship to go through the canal and much much more for a fully loaded cargo ship. (3) Due to the curvature of the isthmus (it runs east/west), one must travel north to get to the Atlantic Ocean and south to get to the Pacific. | https://medium.com/@tfljal575/building-the-panama-canal-1df6c9069240 | ['Joseph Liebreich'] | 2020-12-13 17:42:46.149000+00:00 | ['Canal', 'Panama Canal', 'Excavation', 'Engineering', 'Construction'] |
Making Friends | Photo by Hannah Lim
“Go on then, Jim. Go and play.”
Jim glares at Flossie.
“Don’t look at me like that. Go on! Go run off some of that excess podge. And make some friends while you’re at it.”
Jim wanders off towards a group of potential friends nearby and loiters at the edges, waiting for someone to invite him into their fold.
Flossie approaches her own pack.
“He’s not very sociable, your Jim, is he?” says a fluffy Pomeranian.
Flossie shakes her head. “I thought bringing him to the park every day would help him socialise, but he doesn’t seem to have got the hang of it.”
The pair watch as another human holds out his hand towards Jim. Jim ignores the gesture. The other human shrugs and walks away.
“My Lucy will play with him,” says a grizzly Border Terrier. “She just loves other humans. Even the quiet ones.”
Right on cue, a grinning human bounds over to Jim with her arms outstretched and forces a hug upon him. Jim wriggles out of her clutches and runs away. Lucy isn’t dejected for long, but a few of her friends have noted the interaction and they aren’t happy.
“What the fuck was that, Jim?”
“Don’t be such a dickhead!”
“If you don’t like us then why do you even bother coming over here?”
“Piss off, and don’t come back!”
Jim picks up his pace and bolts away from the mob of bellowing humans.
“I wonder what they’re all shouting at,” says the Pomeranian.
“I know,” says the Border Terrier, “I wish we could speak their language.”
“I just wish they’d all get along,” says Flossie with a sigh. “They’re all human; you’d think that would be enough for them to be friends.” | https://medium.com/ellies-telling-tales/making-friends-879f2e73bb70 | ['Ellie Scott'] | 2018-10-02 16:23:55.123000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Friendship', 'Fiction', 'Speculative Fiction', 'Dogs'] |
Top 5 Family Medicine Job Opportunities in Dec 2020- By LikeHire | Family medicine education is broader in nature than internal medicine since it involves training in the care of children and procedures and services often provided by other specialties. This breadth of education equips family physicians to deal with a wide range of medical issues, and this broad skill set may be particularly valuable in communities or geographical areas where certain specialists and subspecialists may not be available.
Although the depth of training in adult medical issues may be less than in internal medicine, the emphasis on outpatient medicine, continuity of care, health maintenance, and disease prevention allows family physicians to function as primary care physicians for adults as part of a family unit depending on individual medical need. Get latest updates on Family medicine jobs from LikeHire.
Here is the list of 5 Top Family medicine Job Opportunities in Dec 2020 by LikeHire
1. Family Medicine Physician, South County Health, Wakefield, PA
Job Description
We are currently seeking a Family Medicine Physician to join three established providers at our primary care practice in the East Greenwich Medical & Wellness Center.
Our new physician will see patients within a patient-centered medical home model offering strong collaboration with a pharmacist and nurse case manager to support high-risk patient populations. The Center allows physicians to coordinate care with specialists within the group, which includes cardiologists, nephrologists, and general surgeons. Practice patients receive breathing, intravenous antibiotics, and other treatments, suturing and other procedures, and after-hours care by the adjacent Express Care, enabling seamless transitions of care. On-site diagnostic services include x-ray, ultrasound, and 3D tomosynthesis, as well as a lab draw station. On-site Ob/Gyn, dermatology providers and outpatient physical therapy round out the many opportunities for clinical collaboration and create a one-stop care opportunity for our patients.
2. Family Medicine Physician, McLeod Health, Florence, SC
Job Description
McLeod Health is GROWING and we are seeking BE/BC Family Medicine trained Physicians to join several of our practice locations in South Carolina. If you are interested in being a part of a well-established group only miles from the coastline of South Carolina, contact us today to see which location is a fit for you!
McLeod Health offers a competitive salary and health and retirement benefits package. We also offer a sign on bonus, relocation allowance, paid malpractice, CME allowance, and 30 days paid time off.
3. Family Medicine Physician, Oregon Medical Group, Eugene, OR
Job Description
At Oregon Medical Group (OMG) we are ever-expanding to meet the changing healthcare needs of our growing community. Over 170 providers are housed at ten locations within the Eugene/Springfield area. OMG is a physician led and managed group of physicians, advance practice clinicians, and healthcare professionals providing for the needs of the organizations 108,000 membership/patient base. We are an enthusiastic, interactive, and innovative group of like-minded providers and currently have an opportunity for Family Medicine Physicians who can align themselves with our mission to provide the highest quality, patient centered, cost effective, health-care to the community we serve.
4. Primary Care Physician,NYC Health and Hospitals, Queensbury, NY
Job Description
Aid an at-risk patient population and work with a comprehensive, multidisciplinary team as a full-time Primary Care physician in New York City. In this role, you will join NYC Health + Hospitals in their mission to serve the low-income and vulnerable communities who are recovering from COVID-19. These clinics are opening to address the disparity within communities of color that have experienced a disproportional number of COVID-19 cases and will be supported through New York’s NYC Care program, providing access to healthcare for all New Yorkers, regardless of citizenship or healthcare status. Be a part of healthcare history and serve others in need within the Bronx, New York.
5. Family Medicine — OB Optional, Einstein Healthcare Network, Detroit Lakes, MN
Job Description
PRACTICE SPECIFICS:
Full-time, 1.0 FTE opportunity (36 patient contact hours; 32 patient contact hours if doing OB)
Hours: Monday-Friday between 8a-5p
Based in Detroit Lakes, MN with potential outreach to Lake Park, Pelican Rapids, Frazee or Mahnomen Clinics
Procedures and OB services welcome but not required (100 deliveries a year)
Average Clinic Patients per day:16–22
Call is approximately 1:6 weekends (2 weekdays a month and 1 weekend every 8 weeks; hospitalist service in place)
We at LikeHire understand the opportunities don’t come daily and post-pandemic we all know the importance of the healthcare professional. We are connecting healthcare job seekers with employers looking to hire.
Note that you can also use LikeHire Healthcare Job Portal to apply to these job opportunities. You can search for jobs on LikeHire across 200+ healthcare specialties. It will also make you take an informed career decision.
Click here for more Family Medicine Jobs
Finding a new job is no child’s play. But we hope that this can help you.
Follow us for more Healthcare career updates on Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. | https://medium.com/likehirejobs/top-5-family-medicine-job-opportunities-in-dec-2020-by-likehire-b1277f40f666 | ['Team Likehire'] | 2020-12-23 13:19:48.235000+00:00 | ['Family Medicine', 'Healthcare', 'Medical', 'Jobs', 'Careers'] |
An Old Myth Exposed: “Star Wars” Nearly Destroyed the Movie Industry. | It’s an old accusation with new relevance as the first gen of “Star Wars” kids now have children and grandchildren of their own. Blockbusters abound in multiplexes everywhere, but why is that a bad thing?
The game-changer.
It was a cineaste’s nightmare.
Word was that blockbuster films would destroy the cinema’s more personal product. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg shouldered most of the early blame, particularly the former. Before “Star Wars,” you see, was “Jaws.” But, before “Jaws” … was “The Exorcist.” Before “The Exorcist” was “The Godfather.” Before “The Godfather” was “The Sound of Music.” Before “The Sound of Music” was “The Ten Commandments.” Before “The Ten Commandments” was “Gone with the Wind.” Before … Get the picture?
In other words, had blame been misplaced?
Of course it had.
Was the charge even accurate? Let’s explore …
The first transcendent Hollywood blockbuster.
Blockbuster filmmaking did not begin with “Star Wars.” But yet, if it did, so what? The business evolves. Then as now there was more than enough product in our local malls to keep families entertained for weeks.
But let’s not take that for granted. For many decades, comic book fans, as a collective example, dreamt of movie product that embraced the imagination and scope of their beloved source material. The technology did not yet exist to realize the vision of the original works, however, and so audiences were to be fed low-budget efforts such as Roger Corman’s 1994 “The Fantastic Four,” a film never officially released but available on bootleg VHS at pop-culture conventions shortly after its completion.
The cast of Roger Corman’s “The Fantastic Four.”
The authentic controversy, as it were, began in 1978, the year following the release of the original “Star Wars.” The space saga was all the rage, and was well on its way to setting an all-time record domestic boxoffice record. For those who were not around in ’77, “Star Wars” hit like the proverbial ton of bricks. Jedi Knights, Mos Eisley, the Clone Wars — the latter as explained by Ben Kenobi to young Luke Skywalker when the future Jedi wielded his first lightsaber …
Suddenly, every “Star Wars” alien race, every “Star Wars” term was part of the national vernacular. The film’s global grosses weren’t too shabby either, but America had adopted a mythology for the ages and we could not wait for more.
Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver.”
And then … the shots:
“There will be no more ‘Taxi Driver.’”
We’ll never see “A Clockwork Orange” or its ilk again.
“Films like “All the President’s Men” and “Network” are dead.
“Popcorn movies are all that will be made now.”
Fast-forward to 1986. Spike Lee’s “She’s Gotta Have It” helped usher in the indie wave. “Sex, Lies and Videotape,” “Drugstore Cowboy,” “Slacker” and others picked up the pieces of the 1970’s more serious product, and new iconic writers and directors turned the industry tide. In the ’90s, we were introduced to newer auteurs, such as Paul Thomas Anderson (“Hard Eight” and “Boogie Nights”).
Hollywood kept up all the way, though, producing the best of both worlds. Today …
“Avengers: Infinity War”
We have it all.
2018's domestic boxoffice soared to a new record of $11.9 billion in the U.S. and Canada, and $42 billion globally. Marvel and “Star Wars” films continue to lead the charge (save, sadly, for “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” which has brought into question the long-term health of the “Star Wars” franchise that began, unfairly to this writer, with “The Last Jedi” backlash), and yet films like Clint Eastwood’s “The Mule” is considered a respectable Hollywood product, perhaps a tad formulaic but nonetheless, that is attaining healthy grosses.
Yes, we can watch fairly new films from the comfort of our living room now, via streaming and other methods. But, as television did not kill radio, Netflix and its ilk will not kill the movie-going experience.
And, most certainly, “Star Wars” didn’t kill a damn thing.
Now excuse me while I go stream “Roma” for the second time. | https://medium.com/writing-for-your-life/an-old-myth-exposed-star-wars-nearly-destroyed-the-movie-industry-e4bfe8a6b20e | ['Joel Eisenberg'] | 2019-01-03 13:52:59.507000+00:00 | ['Entertainment', 'Marvel', 'Movies', 'Classic Films', 'Star Wars'] |
Absurdity as a Rhetorical Resource or a Defense of Fast, Easy Judgements for Terrible Ideas | When I was an undergraduate I took a course called “Coaching and Officiating Basketball.” It was really rigorous. The professor, a former D3 national championship coach, taught everything from the meta-analysis of league-level rules through player drills. This was his chance to tell future gym teachers everything he knew. Flex-based offenses were the main theoretical approach, especially symmetrical and mirror patterns that would repeat forever, as some of the leagues these future teachers would coach in had no shot-clocks. A new coach at a small-town high-school could then install this sequence, functionally a single play, then focus on player development, defense, and situational basketball.
At the end of the day, almost every concept the basketball prof taught, was a process model. Good basketball was repeatable basketball. If an offensive process took ten seconds, you could run it three times during a normal college shot-clock. The team would wait for the process to run through, waiting for an obvious error, which is when the team would strike. Error recognition was the heart of the paradigm.
A lovely absurd abstract by Steve Johnson
Forced Errors in Practical Argument
In day to day argument, wining is hard. Policy debaters are often chided for their high rate of delivery. What is important to know is that this often abates in college, the debaters slow down. The critique of debater speed misses the empirics: from Karl Rove through Donald Trump, the strategy of the American right has been to rapidly shift positions, to flood-the-zone. Although these folks don’t speak quickly, they run the high school debate spread offense, many independent arguments that each are dangerous. The use of wider scale argumentative strategies, controlled word-economy, and just good old line-by-line are key skills.
There are three ways to win an argument: your evidence is better, their argument doesn’t respond, they didn’t answer. Just like high school JV debate, a lot of public life is about “dropped” arguments, the points that get missed to poor decision making or just simply not being good enough at arguing. One reason why so many debates on the lower levels are decided on drops is their ease for the judge. Deciding the actual application or non-application of a point is hard, reading a bunch of evidence is easier, but tends to miss the point.
When one is arguing with someone practically, submitting a stack of evidence really isn’t on the agenda and your judges are not taking copious notes. You need arguments that get to the stasis point easily. One of the most handy practical arguments is reduction to the absurd, if your argument is right then this other thing must be true, and it obviously isn’t true.
This does two important things:
A. it saves energy — if we all accept the absurd/obvious
B. it calls for rejection of a claim, not necessarily the embrace of one, meaning it has relatively low stakes
But shouldn’t we want to do things the hard way?
First, to be really clear, people are tired, it is sort of our main thing. Without getting into Herb Simon on attention, you actually can’t use your top-end strategies for every point, there neither time nor energy. This is also why debaters pick-and-choose, winning a handful of dispositive arguments is much more efficient.
Second, it is not stylish to dispute every point. It also may be aesthetically horrid to dispute every point at the highest level. Let’s say we are debating space policy and one of the affirmative points is that “the sun is a mass of incandescent gas.” Clearly, this is wrong, the sun is made of plasma. Does it matter for deciding how to finance orbital debris clearing? No, absolutely not. Other than for comedic value, you really don’t need to spend any time on this point. Disputing it would waste your time, energy, and credibility. I can hear it now: how does it hurt me to beat them on some point where I am right? Because you are supposed to as an arguer, have a sense of the larger strategic coordinates of the debate and the possible stasis (or decision) points ahead.
Third, you may want to avoid debating the ground level of a point because it should be obvious or beyond debate.
Yes, you want easy sorting arguments, they are very useful. Rejecting the absurd is an efficient, beautiful way to manage practical arguments. Does it do all the work of making public discourse function, no. What it does is filter out noise in the channel to the point where we can have our better debates about things that really matter. This is where folks get speed in policy debate exactly backwards — folks get spread out all the time in public arguments, speed dynamics allow you to develop strategies to compensate for that. And you see at the highest levels of college debate folks slow down again, the arms race ends when folks reach the level where they can easily and quickly dismiss or even invert terrible arguments.
Nope, that won’t hold a charge…
We need the obvious and the absurd
Initially, absurdity functions as a noise filter. When the gorilla suit dancer comes in folks ignore the obvious attention seeking (for the record in high school I danced back at the gorilla). Ignoring obvious distractors makes good sense and in a world with the risk of intermedia agenda setting (where another media channel might follow you), you don’t want to be he point where noise was loaded into the channel. The moment were it was clear that Trump lost the 2016 election was on Wednesday, when the family attempted to claim victory (as part of the stop-clock strategy) and the story was not covered as a form of quotation journalism. Once the intermedia leader-follower relationship breaks down, the great power of Trumpism will fade. Reactionaries depend on keeping you in a consistent state of activation, they need to keep you reacting to whatever they are doing. This is not to say that you can simply ignore them, there are times when you will need to react, but that the key to strategy here is picking your spot. And how do you effectively pick your spot — by simply saying something is absurd.
Argumentative aesthetics are real and useful. Among my favorite niche topics in rhetoric is the aesthetics of mathematics — the idea that mathematicians perceptions of the beautiful influence how the formal science of mathematics develops. Having aesthetic preferences does not invalidate math, aesthetics, like affect, are inevitable (all complete methodologies have an ontology, epistemology, axiology, and a rhetoric — aesthetics live in the rhetoric but all of these are co-productive). Some arguments are beautiful, others down right ugly. Although I am a hack for Boltanksi and Thevenot’s justifications model of argument, let’s stick to Toulimin for now. For the most part the most pleasing arguments have a reasonable number of assumptions, with concise/qualified claims, appropriate backing, and good delivery.
Ned Stabeler really got the argumentative aesthetics right, in his critique of the asinine request to only hold the certification of the votes of people of color. The moralizing tone of the second minute is fun, but it is built on the foundation of the first minute in rock solid argumentative aesthetics. Stabeler uses the technique advocated in policy debate where the other side’s claim is quickly summarized, tagged with “your argument” or “you say” followed by a concise counter claim and the relevant backing points. His word economy is excellent, the points are delivered with excellent diction and voicing. Most of all his use of backing. By accepting the measures used by the other side, then arguing that those measures support his claims, it would then flip the burden for the first side to deliver evidence that would defeat their own backing logic. The cycle repeats several times, allowing Stabeler to build ethos as he quickly dispatches their arguments before he turns to his own offensive argument. If you accept the logic against certification, then jurisdictions with higher variance should be rejected, of course the white suburb of Livonia had worse stats than Detroit, so you should reject that, but you won’t because either 2+2=5 OR the canvas board members are racists. Notice that Stabeler did not focus on the first half of the argument, the trap is waiting for the other side where they would be forced to argue for the absurd conclusion.
The power of reduction to the absurd is the ability to backstop arguments clearly and clear noise from the system. At stake is more than just a useful approach, but a shift in warranting in general.
Toulmin’s model supposes that an argument has a claim that is supported by data. There really are only a few kinds of warrants, a few of particular consequence: generalization, sign, causality, principal, analogy, and authority. Reduction to the absurd plays well with all of these. A generalization that can’t be generalized or a sign that didn’t open up your eyes. What matters is that there is enough agreement about backing that clear judgements about the absurd and the obvious can be reached.
At this point some folks might push back on this essay, arguing that the absurd and the obvious are figments of my imagination, and that what I am really talking about is episteme — the condition where the effects of power are functionally invisible. For the most part I am bored by this argument. First and foremost, in any discourse there will be aesthetics and a sense of agreed upon backing. There is no outside. Strategically reversing power relations (meaning that we see what power is and we use it to make a better world) is what communication research is all about.
Needling folks with constant skepticism is the same strategy employed against reduction to the absurd and all sorts of other argumentative strategies, even that lovely speculative strategy, big if true. This doesn’t lead to a world without power, it leads to a world where the horizon of warrants becomes the personal opinion and authority. Political psychologists have fairly well established at this point that there is a sizable block of folks who have a strong preference for authoritarianism. If the domain of argument from principle falls away the power of authority would grow unchecked. Authority warrants are anti-fragile: they gain power during disorder.
Why does any of this matter?
Reduction to the absurd, and rejection of the absurd are efficient and effective strategies for arriving at truth, or at least moving away from untruth. The absence of absurdity complicates or even shuts down various dialectical and rhetorical processes.
The last fifty plus lawsuits filed by the larger Trump organization are absurd. In my broader reading of these filings every one includes multiple absurd claims, from the merely lazy (that no one haw son the election without Florida +Ohio or that a poll watcher going to the wrong address is proof of fraud) to the brazen (the secret affidavit of “Spyder”). To this point the great force for our protection from the ridiculous has been the court system. In absurd discourses the ostensibly political Supreme Court would be waiting in the wings to overturn the outcome of the election. Deep inside the story of a stolen election is the idea that truth is fundamentally partisan, that if you just got the right judge, the facts wouldn’t matter. It is a troubling turn for public discourse that professional arbiters of truth, dialectical judges, are the key. If the public sphere is functioning at any reasonable level, reduction to the absurd should not be reserved fro the dialectical level of the system, but available rhetorically.
My final argument is that in a world where the absurd is not available as a category it may best be restored by earnest absurdity. The answer that there was no meaningful fraud in Michigan, Florida, and Pennsylvania is one thing. Defensive arguments are nice, but they depend on offense. What would be a strong offensive play here? Argue that Ohio and Florida were stolen from Biden. It isn’t too hard to dream up a few reasonable stats for this perspective or even just sit on the argument that the polls were right and provide the dispositive evidence that something was up. The point of an argument like this isn’t destroy the public sphere but to put down a marker, to force the other side to make an argument. I would bet, if you layout a 20 second case for a stolen Ohio through extreme voter suppression, the idea of the absurd will come flooding back. The absurd counter does two things: A. it is a test — is the person actually making new meanings or are they in psychotic in the Lacanian sense (meaning they are locked into a single version of reality where no new meanings are possible) in which case persuasion is impossible, B. if they pass the test, the absurd claim will get them to engage your claim, likely asserting that it is absurd — then the game is on… | https://medium.com/curious/absurdity-as-a-rhetorical-resource-or-a-defense-of-fast-easy-judgements-for-terrible-ideas-72c7756f2d0a | ['Dan Faltesek'] | 2020-12-17 22:09:24.697000+00:00 | ['Philosophy', 'Judgement', 'Fake News', 'Rhetoric'] |
LIVING INSIDE AN HOURGLASS: A study of people’s disquieting inability of perceiving the future | LIVING INSIDE AN HOURGLASS: A study of people’s disquieting inability of perceiving the future Val Mile Jun 1·29 min read
PART I: REALITY
#1 COMING TO TERMS WITH REALITY
“The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.”
— Nathaniel Branden
“We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.”
— Joseph Campbell
“Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.”
— Joseph Conrad
Which area of scientific research will humanity benefit from the most in the XXI century? The very first ever time I was asked the following question my initial reaction was to avoid answering it completely, because the way this enquiry had been constructed is simply not serious enough. Too abstract, too trivial, and awfully one-dimensional. So much so, in fact, it isn’t worth wasting one’s time on it, as there are more productive and exciting things one may spend his or her time on.
Having said that, however, I am obliged to admit I have always been inclined to think such matters over — as a form of intellectual sport I suppose — therefore down below I put my personal contemplations regarding this enquiry.
Prior to proceeding, it is my wish to point out — to emphasize, really — that any social issue (of even marginal significance to the general populace) is ought to be, A, well-defined, B, specific, and, C, as precise as it may possibly be. In other words, any social enquiry into the future of humanity — our lives, our health, the ecology, and the general well-being — absolutely must! — be, what one may call, on target.
Furthermore, taking into account the very nature of my essay, as well as my natural love for meticulousness and explicitness, I would have composed the above question in the following fashion:
By means of which science (exactly) are we (as peoples of the world) to overcome the future (social as well as environmental) challenges in (an inevitable) wake of limitations (perhaps even, complete dissipation) of Earth’s natural resources?
Formulating the above, I tried being as objective and straight-forward as possible. Nonetheless, if the above still happens to not strike a regular reader as prosaic and earthly enough, I’d be more than happy to elaborate and paraphrase — and perhaps even simplify:
What exactly do we plan on fuelling our transport with? What precisely are we going to power manufacture by? What about hospital equipment? Household appliances? Food production? Heating? Air-conditioning?
The list of things we depend on today is approaching singularity [1], and so far it seems to have no intention of slowing down. Reality is not a toy, and therefore it is not to be toyed with. It is to be analyzed, understood and adapted to. Without tears, sentiments and needless subjective judgements. As a matter of fact, there exists a certain level — a measure, so to speak — of acceptance one has to build up to in order of, first, handling reality and, then, perhaps starting adjusting to it. And that is precisely what humanity would sooner or later face. If we are to survive — we are to accept, handle and perhaps one day try reclaiming reality, in which we are to prosper. The inevitability of this is an axiom. Because we happen to live inside an hourglass. And for the past couple of centuries people have been eager to help its sands seep away faster, and faster still…
#2 THE ICELANDIC MODEL
“Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.”
— Aristotle
If I was to guess what an unconcerned bystander’s answer to the questions above would be, I’d say they are most likely to start talking about Iceland. And here is why.
Nobody is arguing technology has rooted its way into our daily lives so deep, there is no chance anyone is to willingly give up on them. The best possible solution therefore is to follow the Iceland’s footsteps.
Cute, little place. Picturesque. Clean, accurate, sensible and considerate. It is generally thought Iceland has figured a few environmental things out — striking a workable, functional balance in maintaining optimal living standards without excessive exhaustion and exploitation of Earth’s resources. How has this been achieved, one may inquire? And the answer is: through nation-wide hydrogen fuel policies and thermodynamic plants mounting the larger of the hot-water geysers Iceland is famous for. As a matter of fact, Iceland is the only world state lucky enough to extract its energy via smart industrial engineering and indigenous natural processes, instead of resorting to clean yet dangerous sources of energy such as the nuclear.
There is however a single evident logical miscalculation regarding the Icelandic energy managment model: in comparison to major world states and continents, Iceland really is tiny. Sure, their state is well-adapted and apt when it comes to energy supplying; however having a population that of a regular European province, whatever Iceland has going on for it in terms of power generation and consumption is obviously sufficient for just that — supplying Iceland. Therefore whatever it is they have going on would never work for the rest of the world because mathematics say so: the world is way too large (and discrete) for balancing out proportions and scales that happened to work out for Iceland. (Besides, where are we to find this many geysers to support even a fraction of, say, European electrical infrastructure?)
What will you do once the reality hits you like a crazy train, and yesterday’s fuel canisters are null and worthless? Which direction will you look in search of energy necessary to power up technology you are so used to spoiling your daily existence with?
Alas, the following questions remain as they were — unanswered.
#3 MOTHER NATURE IS NOT A DIPLOMAT
“Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
The above may sound grim and gloomy, however once I made use of this precious opportunity of frightening a reader I also get to expiate my guilt by providing them with a humble yet valuable note of the good news.
To some this news might seem overly trivialized, however, philosophically speaking, they are still good: humanity always seems to find a way.
I have absolutely no doubt with regard to Mother Nature’s love for us. I am confident She really does appreciate us as her very children. Nonetheless when it comes to Earth’s capacity for hostility and viciousness, it is not Her we ought to worry about — but us. It is us who ought to always keep survival in mind; it is us who always need to plan ahead — tactically, as well as strategically. Because surviving is neither a game nor a matter of choice. It is a duty that comes with the territory; a duty granted along with the burdens of intelligence and consciousness. And should Mother Nature — in all its fathomless and boundless wisdom — ever decide to toss a coin, we all know which way up that ducat [2] is most likely to land…
I am not a preacher. Neither am I a messiah or a twisted environmentalist freak. I am none other but a thinker. A wanderer. An educator. And perhaps even an amateur philosopher. And I happened to wander into this peculiar realm of environmental carelessness and irresponsibility ready to question and anatomize.
I really do think people have somewhat lost their edge. Their survival intuition. The sixth of the atavistic senses that dwelled within us for thousands of years, ensuring our adapting to the utmost belligerent environment we happened to be born in. Life has gotten way too cosy and way too comfortable for the survival gene to be rendered active unceasingly. No need for bonfires and watchtowers; everything is increasingly 24/7. Devices, gadgets, professional equipment, household appliances; home lights, street lights, traffic lights and city navigation; public transport, seaports, train stations and airports… These are just a few instances of the many faces of the Electric God we’ve been worshiping since its worldwide propagation. I risk sounding repetitive but — yes! — the list of things we depend on today is truly endless, and there is absolutely no chance this sort of dependence will remain at this level of availability forever.
There is, however, something to hope for and look forward to: no matter how rusty the human race becomes, good news shall forever and always remain as such — good. People are to get used to anything. (Dostoyevsky has been right all along.) Whatever this anything happens to be — whatever it is we must overcome, reconstruct, revaluate or get used to — is entirely up to us. Are we to get used to the disintegration of things and utter collapse? A painful yet manageable resetting of social datum-lines? OR Is it a complete realignment of civil, economic and technological frameworks? These are the critical issues remaining in dire need of a thought-out resolve.
#4 BURDEN OF IMMATURITY
“Some grown-ups never grow up.”
― Frank Sonnenberg
In spite of the aforementioned, modern society does seem to possess a common interest. A mutual desire, so-to-speak. Generations living at this day and age do seem to want pollution reduction and general ecological solicitude. Modern societies do seem to realize that nothing in Nature passes as overlooked and consequenceless.
As peoples and nations of the world, however, we are still unable to reach the leveling off of awareness on a global scale. In fact, the process of raising such awareness seems to run headlong into the classic obstacle of inability of convincing major world states to act on the environmental issues jointly. Simultaneously. Teamwise.
The first-world countries tend to scream their heads of — sometimes even louder than necessary — while the developing states demand what they refer to as space and time to catch up with the former. Economically as well as technologically.
Environmental issues are the issues of leading economies. The rest of us can’t afford the luxury of being bothered by the environmental problems, — China would claim repeatedly.
Eastern Europe seems to have given up on existence entirely: influenced largely by Christian Orthodoxy and — as bizarre as it may sound — classic literature, eastern Europeans’ philosophical worldview continues being exceedingly fatalistic, nonchalant and sometimes dangerously negligent.
South America — in light of their never-ending economic turbulence — seems to have adopted the Netflix & Chill approach to life nation-wide, with the Amazonian rainforests being reduced to nothing but lifeless flatlands as we speak. (Though they are not the only carefree ones: Russia isn’t far behind with its Siberian forests becoming a mere subject of boundless Chinese conquista. So far, it appears the world is in greater need of low-quality furniture and unequally-legged stools than clean air so I guess it all evens out.)
On a more serious note however, it appears as though Scandinavia is the only place on Earth that takes environmental issues seriously. Forest care, exhausts filtering, fume neutralization and waste recycling. It’s been a number of years now since the Swedes have been converting trash into cheap electricity. (And I am neither kidding nor exaggerating. There was a time when Sweden would purchase rubbish from Britain — to subsequently convert it into pure electrical power.) Sure, Scandinavians fish much. (And if there is anyone out there deserving a luxurious salmon meal it is — them.) Nonetheless it looks as though Scandinavians are the only people whose minds seem to have actually matured — with the rest of the nations stuck in a stasis of cyclical infantilism. Responsibility comes with the territory. I guess this would be the most accurate, most proper way of putting it. And this happens to be the very way Scandinavia has been heading since the age of enlightenment. And — by God — they’ve gotten good at bearing responsibilities and standing the grounds of their principles. Unlike the rest of the world — which seems to only put up a facade of being environmentally progressive and considerate?
Why is that, I wonder? Appreciation of customs? Conservatism? A desire for comfort and higher quality living? A taste for survival? Respecting Nature? OR A matter of cultural heritage? And the answer to these is, I believe, quite simplistic: yes, — it is a matter of culture. Culture is EVERYTHING! Culture is more than important. Never is culture to be underestimated! Countries do not give birth to the rational and farsighted — culture does! Culture is the soil out of which sprout those who possess the contemporaneous wisdom. Without culture the latter are destined to never develop the skill set for analysis and perception of present dangers and challenges.
Scandinavian approach to handling ecology and nature doesn’t come toll-free though. It is a common misconception that most forms of responsibility come natural. Alike many things in life responsibility, too, is a skill one may (and should) train. Consequently, the Scandinavian attitude towards environment comes at a high price — of not just hard work but of personal time, too. Environmental responsibility is something their children are being taught at school level — that no one is going to tend to the general healthiness of one’s land until he or she decides to tend to it on their own account. (Something other countries seem to miss out (or perhaps even ignore) entirely.)
Responsibility comes with the territory. So much is true. But the way one carries his or her responsibility originates somewhere in the background — within the culture you are raised in. People are merely clay sculptures, and our household upbringing is the hands that shape us into who we are — giving us texture, context and behaviour patterns. It is our cultural background, however, that provides us with bearings and reference points regarding things that are right and things that are wrong.
Alike illustrious German attitude towards hard work, the Dutch, the Swedes, the Norwegians, and the Finns strive for environmental harmony, efficiency and safety. The most mature, the most parent-like of nations. And should aliens ever make a decision of befriending Homo Sapiens, they ought to first contact someone with a bjorn or thor in their passport because anyone with a Johnson, Ivanov or Chan will probably mess everything right up.
Why is that? Why is our think-of-the-future gene dormant? Is it human irresponsibility? A case of senselessness? A case of naivety? OR Is it a burden of multicultural outlook on life? Personally, I am inclined towards the latter.
Culture is the key to it all, it seems. And while some of these cultures do plan ahead — do leave some space for consideration of the future and avoidance of arduous and worrisome long-term challenges — the rest of us are yet to develop such a skill set. Otherwise, we are destined to get hopelessly stuck in a mire of blind archaism.
Is it at all possible, to make a more efficient, more rational use of natural resources? Is it possible to avoid facing the ugly truths and losing sleep over cynical yet worrisome question: Will my children afford clean air? A frightening question of such nature does seem to occupy the minds of considerate adults, and yet we still fail at producing at least a simulacrum of a feasible solution to it. What’s even more disturbing is our mindless insistence on setting up still newer manufactures: factories, plants, industrial parks, production sites, assembly facilities, trading posts and shopping malls. In wake of disturbingly evident reports of diminishing natural environment we keep on erecting and launching these as though we are under some sort of a spell.
Kyoto protocol, Paris Agreement, Vienna Convention and numerous other international and intercontinental documents have well all been signed and authorized, and yet we continue — still do we zealously defend our right to set up more and more manufactures, the sole purpose of which is to produce more goods than humanity may possibly consume, need or want. And although this sort of behaviour is illogical and irrational, it still is — extremely human.
Why is that? Carefree upbringing? A natural tendency towards hedonism? Consumerism warship? Natural inability of perceiving the future? OR A logical side-effect of capitalism? Personally, I have never blamed capitalism. Never have I blamed a political system for below par results and outcomes. And there are two reasons why:
Other political systems seem to only produce an even greater amount of waste. (You think socialists ever gave a damn about Earth?) ; Although vague and opaque, capitalist states seem to have at least done their homework — producing a plan for battling environmental plights. (In contrast to other countries and political systems, which appear to have only put up a facade of being solicitous.)
Budgets, profits, surpluses and deficits. These — as well as a bunch of others — seem to be the only concepts of existence bothering the dormant neurons of Modern man.
Having absolutely no time (or desire, it seems) for considering the implications of our industrial era on the planet is a fact extremely hard to prove otherwise. Sure, there are a handful of activist cells out there trying to make a difference and raise awareness. However the issues with the activists are twofold: A, not only is this utterly insufficient, but, B, it really is a disappointment — a disgrace, really — this few people actually consider the future of our planet.
What in hell are the rest of us dreaming about? The flowery meadows of Mars? Excuse me for the disenchantment but A, they are non-existent, and, B, although most seriously-minded futurologists are excited about colonization of the nearest planets, most of them still claim — no matter what we do out there, no matter what we achieve, build or accomplish — nearby planets would never match the riches the Earth’s offering.
Territorial expansion is a real thing, I agree. A real deal, sure. However a sequoia tree is as good as dead should its roots start rotting away. Because, ultimately speaking, one’s origin is of vital importance. Losing one’s origin would mean one’s lifeline is no longer whole — it’s been dashed and made discontinuous. Let us not allow for that to happen. We can’t afford to let the Earth rot away as a languishing root, because humanity is a tree. Humanity is the aforementioned sequoia that has been growing for hundreds and hundreds of years. Let us not allow for something (or someone) to start hewing us down. Let us not become our own reckless lumberjack.
PART II: POTENTIAL
#5 FUTILE EXPECTATIONS
“Life’s under no obligation to give us what we expect.”
― Margaret Mitchell
I really do believe inability of perceiving the future ought to be classified as a form of mental disability. If there is anything humanity is able to learn from our short (yet weirdly rich) history is that ignorance and negligence — of whatever magnitude, scale or extent — always — and I repeat, always — come at a price too high.
I have always been keen on philosophy. It happens to be a great passion of mine. However when things are rough I do admit (to myself, that is) that philosophical wanderings and contemplations are what I’ve always called a full-stomach science. Why am I trying to imply by that?
Philosophical explorations and debates are wonderful. However these are good as long as one’s hunger been tended to. With a belly half-empty and aching, philosophical wanderings turn into a worthless chore rather than devotion. And if that is so regarding philosophy, economics should be considered a full-lung science. Because economics become irrelevant in the world where services are abundant and air is scarce.
Sure, the planet is tougher then we think. Sure, we are no match to Mother Nature. In its utmost wild and savage form, She is neither harmless nor frail. Should Earth make a decision of making humanity redundant and obsolete, there isn’t much we’d be able to counteract with. Oblivious as we are to how harmful and borderline suicidal our toying with Mother is, we are practically walking away from a fragile balance of living unharmed and to some extent happy in the hostile and aggressive medium that is — nature.
Why is that? Is it due to our genetic predisposition towards risk-taking? Built-in suicidal tendencies? Self-harm? Mindless bravado? An attempt to conquer the unconquerable? OR A case of not being able to learn from thousands of years of evolution? Romantic as we are, we always seem to make a grave mistake of believing that air is here to stay. Blind as we are regarding the fragility of our situation, it seems humanity is doomed to what some refer to as pernicious optimism. (In actuality, however, this isn’t optimism at all — but hopeful, childish and apparent absent-mindedness.)
Moving harmful manufacturing to Vietnam, China and India does not mean our children are to breathe safer, cleaner air. Atmosphere is a dynamic and sophisticated system of inner interdependence. A system too delicate to temper with. Alike everything else within our surroundings, it is an ecological subsystem, which — although seems resilient and stable — will always remain extremely breakable and brittle. Constantly moving and drifting, the levels of pollution it withstands today will sooner or later hit the critical spot, as its capacity isn’t as interminable as many imagine. By setting up harmful and hazardous manufacturing in desperate and less well-off states we are neither saving ourselves nor postponing the inevitable. Instead, we are slowly digging a pit that we’d stumble into — not this week but the next.
Hopeful expectations really are hopeful. However they are futile, too. And I refuse to believe that people are this inane. We explored, broke through and discovered; we outfought, overcame and triumphed; we built, ruined and rebuilt, and survived hitherto… I refuse to believe we are to be victimized by our own miscalculations and vice. I despise the idea of us having no brainpower to battle daftness and being incapable of learning valuable lessons; extracting wisdom and sapience. Humanity is neither genetically defected not suicidal nor stupid. Unnecessarily risky? Yes. Overly adventurous and endeavouring? Sure. Excessively confident and at times even mindless? True. But — by God! — are we not stupid. We ought to cease being hopeful and start being pragmatic and practical.
#6 SYSTEM DYNAMICS
“An important function of almost every system is to ensure its own perpetuation.”
“Purposes are deduced from behaviour, not from rhetoric or stated goals.”
― Donella Meadows
So, what are the main areas of scientific knowledge humanity may benefit from the most within the XXI century? Some claim it is genetic engineering. Some defend ecological research and green tech. Many believe in IT while others poll votes for medical science and food industry. Sounds familiar? I am sure it does.
Analysing the above, however, I see us stumbling into a common trap of what I’ve always referred to as everything yet nothing paradox. A logical paradox where each one of us advocates a particular science they consider most vital, and yet — as the discussion advances — always end up fighting for either of the four classics: energy, food, ecology, or the environment. The trouble with the big four, however, is their elementary quality:
Energy = powering transport and electronics;
Food = sustaining biological life;
Ecology = sunbathing and travelling;
Environment = growing yet greater amounts of food.
What exactly am I trying to point at here? See how these so-called scientific endeavors are really set up? These are merely the concepts of a bare minimum: a set of absolute basic needs people have always tried to satisfy. A purely natural Hierarchy of Needs. The very bottom layer of Maslow’s pyramid. Its sheer quintessence. And that is precisely why, when it comes to deciding what’s important and what isn’t, we may not — and never should — trust the general public’s judgments, because — when taken en masse — the general public is simply too shallow. Any form of such cross-examination or surveying is destined to be either tremendously biased or extremely fallible.
In my opinion, we — as a functioning society — always needed a very specific scientific discipline, the sole purpose of which was to not just educate — this is easily managed by universities and colleges — but to curve the cultural tangent we approach dealing with nature at. What do I mean by curving the tangent? The way we treat environment and exploit things that took hundreds of years to form and grow. And I believe such discipline exists, and its name is System Dynamics. A set of quasi-scientific analysis and management techniques used in understanding the behavior of a target system over a period of time. In my view, system dynamics is the main area of scientific application we may benefit from most in the current century.
Well-researched, well-documented and applied not just theoretically but in practice, this approach in resolving serious crises has proven to be quite effective. Moreover, the ultimate beauty of this discipline in the breadth of its applicability — system dynamics is the only antibiotic that works for virtually any sort of system. Be it a household, a candy factory or a tropical rainforest… Whether the issue is purely environmental or, say, social/financial/economic in nature, there won’t be many details which remained unnoticed being analyzed using system dynamics approach.
The trouble with this science, however, is pure prejudice. By most system dynamics are considered as a body of knowledge that’s been depleted research-wise. A washed-up science, so to speak, with majority of its theorems, models and principles identified, constructed and well-understood. Having most of its departments and applications more or less studied, this quasi-scientific discipline has been declared inessential and academically redundant. (And therefore, abandoned.)
I, nevertheless, — as well as a number of other academic enthusiasts and zealots — believe introduction of system dynamics into school and college curricula — particularly in context of ecology and environment — might become a pivotal point in environmental rationality and conservation. In fact, it is my sincere belief: the faster the Academia recognizes the benefits and advantages of system dynamics the faster the younger generations would realize the necessity of smart and, essentially, holistic management of natural resources. As a matter of fact, I believe the greener future lies in the hands of Academia and educational authorities. For they have the required tools, technology as well as organic reach into the general public to really make a difference in the way people interact with nature. Moreover, Academia possesses necessary legality to actually educate the general populace.
System dynamics is more than a science. In spite of what many may consider it to be, system dynamics is rather a set of skills and complex analysis techniques than anything else. As an undergraduate science faculty student I was taught critical and complex thinking by the professors. When I graduated and started studying system dynamics on my own account I realized how close the former skills are to the latter.
In similar fashion to any other strictly scientific field, system dynamics have: terminology for grasping; theorems, axioms, principles and laws to master; models to build, analyze and reflect on. However the most valuable aspect of what this technical, quasi-scientific discipline has to offer is a skill set to treat everything — absolutely everything — as a dynamic, sustainable and interconnected system; allowing any regular user to approach any — in our particular case, environmental — project with well-trained and well-practiced rationality, optimality and assiduity.
If there is anything we’ve learnt from decades of system dynamics application, it is that any system remains well-functioning, stable and resilient as long as the inflow/outflow of resources is mindfully maintained. Once the balance is off — once the shift in the levels of resource input/output occurs — the system tilts significantly. And we have absolutely no idea which way it is to tilt. We also have no idea if there is, in fact, such a thing as the right way.
(Having studied System Dynamics at University level, the concepts of the right/wrong way are considered irrelevant. If a system slowly becomes depleted of its potential — it is bad news. Should its resources start accumulating limitlessly, however, it doesn’t lead to prosperity either. Any system that appears to be overly prosperous is either extremely short-lasting or full of fundamental defects.)
The world is a system. An extremely fragile one. (I’ve tried my best to emphasize this point above.) And if the balance is not watchfully maintained, we are to suffer the consequences of the aforementioned system tilt. And the most disturbing is the following: none of us know when the shift is to occur. To predict such a shift is practically impossible because the world — as well as the environment — is a mathematically non-linear system. In other words, there are so many factors affecting the environment that any attempt in predicting what is to happen and when seems utterly futile.
None of us know when that critical carbon concentration — collapsing the system and poisoning the organics — would in fact be reached. Nobody is capable of predicting when or where such events are to take place. However they most certainly ARE to take place.
Remember the school experiment with water and salt? Where we pour pure H2O into a beaker and start adding NaCl (common salt) to it? A single spatula is fine: the salt dissolves completely. The second spatula is usually fine, too: once again the salt dissolves. So we carry on with the experiment… And suddenly there comes a moment when no matter what you do — no matter how strongly you stir and shake the contents of the beaker — the excess salt no longer dissolves. Instead, it precipitates at the bottom of the beaker and may not be removed.
The point I am trying to make is we have no idea when that excess carbon will turn our rains into acid, air — into a noxious gas, and organic life — into partially scarred tissue. (Plants would carry on living, sure, — in wake of having this much carbon in the atmosphere — however, over time, even flora is to lose a significant fraction of its biological diversity.)
PART III: PERSPECTIVE
#7 ALTERNATIVES: SKIMMING THE SURFACE
“Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives.”
― Abba Eban
Without the energy supply everything is to suffer: agriculture, transport, food production, waste treatment, information storage, communications. And we are still relying on crude oil and its chemical fractions as the main source of fuels. (Sure, there is a bunch of cars running on electricity, hydrogen and even alcohol out there, however the disproportion in types of fuel used is obvious and significant.) And in this part of the essay I am intended to analyze some of the major ones in terms of their general potentiality.
Hydrogen fuel. Produced by means of passing electricity through water — breaking the latter down into its hydrogen and oxygen components. Although reasonably safe and clean, there aren’t many places on Earth capable of running completely on hydrogen. Iceland is one of the major ones, and Iceland is, as I have already said, tiny.
Gasohol. Comprising of 90 to 10 (gasoline to alcohol [3]) proportion, it is yet another example of a less polluting fuel. As a matter of fact, there even was a debate held at some point regarding gasohol potentially becoming an acceptable alternative to the classic hydrocarbons. And although such fuel-consuming giants such as Brazil and India [4] do subscribe to using gasohol as a source of fuel, over the years gasohol has proven to be extremely inefficient. Raw materials used in production of the alcohol component are usually coal and organic wastes such as spoilt food, rotting food, left-over food and excessive (and therefore, cheap) grains, starchy plants and sugary crops. However the latter is a problem. A, the organic waste is not as abundant as many may think, B, poor countries are not inclined towards wasting food (even if it’s rotten), and, C, almost all sugary plants are given away to rum and confectionary production.
Next was the Biodiesel. Considered by many as a greener & healthier alternative to the traditional fuels due to its clean-burning, non-toxic, biodegradable properties, biodiesel is an alkyl (organic molecule, with carbon atoms sharing triple bonds with other atoms instead of the traditional single/double bonds) with an addition of either vegetable oil or animal fat. (Hence the bio- in the name.) However, alike most other biofuels, biodiesel has become a victim of its own success: the cost of the organic oils and fats used in production of these fuels has been on the rise lately — precisely because they are being used in fuel-production. A truly vicious cycle. Having stuck in a loop like that the future of many biofuels (including biodiesel) is bleaker than most experts tend to predict.
Unto the Nuclear Power now. Nuclear energy has been a very contentious issue in the United States, Russia, China, France and a bunch of other rapidly-developing parts of the world — Brazil, Pakistan, India, Iran. Ever since the Chernobyl Accident (April 26th, 1986), there has been a great deal of reconsidering and rethinking conducted regarding managment and disposal of radioactive materials as well as rates of erecting newer nuclear plants. The Chernobyl Nuclear Accident has served as an extremely harsh yet valuable lesson to all — resulting in complete renewal and update of the industry’s methods of extracting and managing the power which have now achieved levels of system safety and rigidity that ensure absolute fail-safe energy production. Consequently — in the wake of such progress — I suppose the world is only to expect an increase in the number of nuclear plants around the globe, expanding nuclear technology to yet newer territories.
The down side of nuclear technology expansion however, are its concomitant controversies and international discord. In other words, there’s been a great deal of controversies accompanying construction of nuclear plants in lesser developed states. Who is helping whom? Who is really in charge? What purposes exactly are these being built? Where were the materials obtained from? Why less technologically and scientifically sophisticated countries happen to participate in such sensitive industry?
Naturally, some of these concerns are organic: objectively speaking, when it comes to responsibility, different nations and cultures possess different views and mentality — no two countries are equally responsible. (Just as well, not all countries are after nuclear energy.) Nevertheless the atomic industry has been performing extremely well in both: nuclear power management and its delivery, suggesting the only thing — humanity seems more adequate, saner and more rational than World War III believers would care to admit.
There are a couple of disadvantages however.
In contrast to the renewable energy, nuclear power is of very high-density. What does that mean? All standard nuclear plants produce a wide range of energy — the major one being electricity — through the same technical process: alternant heating and cooling of radioactive rods in water, producing huge amounts of steam which, in turn, drives the electricity-generating turbines. Energy extracted from any sort of biomass per square meter is lesser in wattage (power, W) than that of nuclear power per same unit of area. Nuclear power generating process is technically finite. What exactly am I implying by finiteness? In terms of earthly abundance, uranium — a naturally occurring element used in manufacturing of the above rods — is plentiful. The greatest difficulty, however, lies in location of a uranium ore. And if the process of extracting this very ore has over the years been well-practiced and perfected, it is the locating of an ore with a specific atomic concentration that is, in fact, troublesome. (There is only 0.3% of natural uranium on Earth, which is fissionable — may be used in nuclear fission.)
Solar power. Over the past few decades a great deal of theoretical (as well as practical) research has been conducted in the field of extracting power directly from the Sun. A number of first-world countries — but most importantly a number of European and North American private sector companies — are demonstrating a great deal of interest in solar power production and management. The extent to which the more progressive of world states rely on this type of energy grows on annual basis, with better, more efficient and more damage-free technologies developed and deployed at even a greater pace.
In terms of future applications, space-based solar power systems perhaps possess the greatest potential. The solar energy is collected in space and then beamed directly to Earth where specialised plants convert it into pure electricity. Safe, efficient and space-saving — collecting unfiltered solar power near Earth’s orbit is one of the most — futuristically speaking — promising and realistic energy sources humanity may turn to in the long-run. Besides being simple and inexpensive, it is also extremely reliable: the giant thermonuclear rector we happen to see in the skies every single day has yet to miss a workday. (Honestly, I bet it would even show up for work should it develop a walking pneumonia!)
Wind power. Here is yet another great energy alternative. There, too, have been a number of debates regarding wind: service and maintenance expenses, noise pollution, weather-dependence, loss of excessive power and a certain degree of inefficiency… (And that’s not mentioning the horrifying size and vibrations of the monstrous turbines!) However, in wake of all that, wind power still seems a better source of energy than the classic carbon-based fuels, the extraction and exploitation of which always seems to lead to the same very outcome: greater levels of carbon in the atmosphere. (Terrible, terrible practice.)
Of course, there are those who are against installing more wind turbines — and some of the protesters may have a reasonable point or two — however, objectively speaking, there is also a number of things going in favour of wind farms. Among them are eco-friendliness, calculable efficiency, self-sustainability, job places and economical sense. Furthermore, whatever continent you pick there certainly are uninhabited territories ready to provide enough expanse to produce sufficient amounts of power without bother the locals or the nearby fauna.
Lastly, the waste management techniques are not to be overlooked, too. One of the few things Elon Musk (of Tesla & SpaceX corporations) mentioned — and this really did get stuck in my memory — is the inevitable degradation of technologies in the absence of systematic updates and upgrades. (What Mr. Musk meant was the absolute necessity of constant improvement of any sort of technology in order of avoiding its getting rusty and eventually disintegrating.) The same may be said about waste management. Filters, collectors, accumulators… — whatever is being used today in gathering and collecting of toxins and hazardous refuse requires constant modernization and streamlining. And not just on an industrial scale but perhaps on academic and engineering levels as well. It would perhaps even be a better idea for the general Academia to consider introducing university degrees in not just environmental conservation and management — alike what they offer today — but purely technical, purely applied disciplines — what I usually refer to as Applied Ecologic Design, the main purpose of which is to produce a generation of specialists capable of planning, designing, constructing and managing the medium-cleaning [5] facilities. (Something we are to surely need in the future.)
#8 HOURGLASS PHILOSOPHY & VECTORS OF LIFE
“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”
― Albert Einstein
French premier minister Dominique de Villepin [6] once said, — we have entered the post-oil era. I want to draw all the consequences of this and give a real impulse to energy savings and to the use of renewable energies! I couldn’t agree with monsieur de Villepin more. A new era demands a new approach to life. And the power of ushering in this new approach is in truly in our hands.
Hourglass ideology — allegorical term I referred to in the first part of the essay — is no longer applicable. Times change, and humanity is ought to catch up. It is a standard. A norm. The philosophy of existence on this planet needs serious revision. The understanding of us perhaps being alone (in the Universe) and not having another planet that would be as welcoming as Earth is essential. (Our planet sure is a hostile one; however its friendliness towards us is still unmatchable.)
There was a time when humanity didn’t need to worry about things like natural resources. Because everything was in abundance and the greatest threat was inter-species aggression and seizure of one’s territory. However, considering the paces of technological development and industrialization, an epoch of not giving a damn is passing as we speak. It really is time to care.
Destined to become obsolete the limitless consumerism philosophy is something people may no longer afford to practice. In contrast to the long-gone age of industrial breakthroughs, technological innovations and expansion of manufacture, we are swamped with goods and services we — in all objectivity and reality — may not possibly need. Sure, consumerism served its purpose. At a certain stage of social development such philosophy played an important role: providing jobs, stimulating economy, diversifying trade, serving society and inducing creativity. Of course, people require jobs — we do need to keep busy and productive; however productive does not necessarily mean effective and salutary. XXI century demands results. Efficient and mutually beneficial. The current century requires wholesomeness and salubriousness. Mindless, drone-like process of producing plastic cups for the sake of producing plastic cups should no longer be tolerated. Result over process — is the slogan the XXI century needs. And it is my honest, full-hearted belief that this may in fact be achieved: through system dynamics, rewiring of social philosophy, in-depth education and technology greenification. These are my personal big four.
Moreover, future faces great challenges due to world’s increasing population. People demand higher standards of living which directly imply: excess comfort, excess goods and higher quality services. Is this achievable? I believe it is. The cynics may argue that the rich are to get richer and the poor are to only get poorer. Judging objectively, however, the rich are mortal, too. The rich are progressive as well. Only uneducated believe that the rich are all about conservatism. There is absolutely no evidence in favor of believing that high-society successors are to remain as conservative as their predecessors. The elite will inevitably evolve, too. We are merely human — we are merely animals. And if there is anything professional primatologists really do preach it is the following: an individual chases ambition as much and as long as their respective society chases mutually beneficial coexistence. (There are, of course, exceptions; however they only serve as proof of the general rule.)
How long will this process take? Not a clue. How much sweat and blood is to be poured into our survival? Unimaginable. However, if not by will then by circumstance, humanity is to sooner or later face the harsh choices. Are we heading towards a brighter future OR a future a tint bleaker? Time in this lonely hourglass is running out, and with each one of its seemingly infinite iterations, it is only getting faster. As the sands upon which we erected our civilization seep away, Life finds a way [7]… The levels of pain of Life’s finding its way are partially up to us. The endurance of this pain, unfortunately, is up to us entirely.
Val Mile ([email protected]); first published March 2006; revised & updated March 2021
[1] A mathematical term used in describing non-linear systems and their respective solution behavior, i.e. solution’s escape (OR rather, explosion) into infinity
[2] A gold or silver coin used as a trade coin in Europe from the later Middle Ages
[3] Usually ethanol or methanol spirits
[4] It is also worth mentioning that Brazil’s and India’s fuel choice was most likely dictated by economical sense rather than ecological.
[5] By mediums author implies: air, water OR soil
[6] Prime-Minister of France 2005–2007
[7] The phrase uttered by Ian Malcolm, a character from Jurassic Park movie (1993, Stephen Spielberg) | https://medium.com/@vadimalmil/liiving-inside-an-hourglass-a-study-of-peoples-disquieting-inability-of-perceiving-the-future-e7b009da4fff | ['Val Mile'] | 2021-06-01 15:40:07.866000+00:00 | ['Systems Thinking', 'Science', 'Ecology', 'System Dynamics', 'Ecology And Environment'] |
Build a Rails-Like Migration Runner for Your Go Projects | 2. ‘migrate.go’
I’ve named the runner migrate.go , and it lives at cmd/migrate/migrate.go under the project root. Eventually, we’ll use make commands similar to Rail’s rake db:migrate to run this script with the appropriate arguments.
Let’s start with the main function:
On lines 3-13, we specify and parse flags that control where our program should look for the environment config file. In this case, I’ve set the defaults to point to environment.yaml in the root of our project.
Next, we check to make sure the script has been called with at least one argument: the command getting the Migrate package to run. Some of these commands (like (m* Migrate) Steps(n int) , for example), take arguments of their own, but we don’t check for that yet.
On lines 24-29, we load the environment file described by our flags. Behind the scenes, this is done by a package called Viper. More on that shortly.
With the environment successfully loaded, we’re in a position to run the migration with the specified command and any arguments that have been passed.
Let’s take a closer look at loadEnvVars and runMigration .
'loadEnvVars'
loadEnvVars takes the configName and configPath flags we parsed in main and returns a pointer to a viper.Viper .
Viper is a high-powered configuration package for Go applications and, as such, it’s overkill for a script like this. However, I’m planning to use Viper elsewhere in my project, so it made sense to pull it in here too. If you’d prefer something lightweight, consider envconfig, GoDotEnv, or simply parsing the environment file yourself.
On lines 12-14, we configure Viper to read from a file called environment.yaml located in the project root. Notice that I didn’t create a flag called configType — I’ve hardcoded yaml because I know my config files will always be YAML. You may decide differently.
viper.ReadInConfig causes Viper to read the env vars contained in the source file and create a *viper.Viper . When we want to access an environment variable, we query this struct with methods like (v *Viper) Get(key string) instead of running os.Getenv .
But we’re not done! Viper has loaded the whole environment.yaml file, including configuration for test , production , and any other group you might have stored in there. That’s why the first thing loadEnvVars does is to look for the target environment with os.Getenv("FB05_ENV") . We pass this value to viper.Sub to return a *viper.Viper that contains only the subset of environment variables that match our target environment.
What happens to this *viper.Viper when loadEnvVars returns? You’ll notice that I don’t declare any new variables in when I call env, err = loadEnvVars(*configName, *configPath) on main:25 . env is actually a global variable declared outside of main : var env *viper.Viper . That way, it’s accessible anywhere in the script, just like os.Getenv .
‘runMigration’
This is a chunky one. Hold tight:
First up, we use the Migration package to create a new *migrate.Migration . There’s some complexity in the setup here because you have to register different subpackages of Migrate by blank importing them depending on where your migrations are stored and which DBMS you’re using.
I’m storing my migrations locally, and my drug of choice is PostgreSQL. So my imports look like this:
The first argument to migrate.New is the source : the location your migration files are stored in. Mine are at db/migrations under my project root.
The second is the database URL, and this is the reason why loading environment variables before running your migrations is so valuable:
Imagine having to type this out every time you wanted to run a migration. Imagine having to run your migrations by hand in production. These are the problems this miniproject sets out to solve.
After creating the *migrate.Migration and validating that any numeric arguments provided are indeed numbers, we switch using the specified command and trigger the corresponding Migrate method.
I won’t repeat the documentation here, but as an example, (m *Migration) Up() migrates the database forward through every up migration in your migrations folder, while (m *Migration) Down() does the reverse. That’s something to bear in mind if you’re coming from Rails — there’s no single change method here. Each migration must have separate up and down SQL files to apply and reverse the change, respectively.
A simple up migration might look like:
While the corresponding down migration would look like:
(If you hadn’t already guessed, I’m building an old-school Facebook clone). | https://medium.com/better-programming/build-a-rails-like-migration-runner-for-your-go-projects-b72f551597a3 | ['Angus Morrison'] | 2020-09-02 16:05:57.525000+00:00 | ['Ruby', 'Golang', 'Ruby on Rails', 'Programming', 'Go'] |
Essentials you need to know about Import Documentary Collections | If you are accustomed with the international trading world, you might come across the term import documentary collection several times. If you are in Thailand or any other place and want to enjoy the best documentary collection service, getting in touch with a reputed Non Banking Financial company will help. There are several service providers offering Import Documentary Collections in Thailand. Before anyone of them, approaching them, let’s know about it precisely.
What is import documentary collection?
It is a process where exporter’s bank collects amounts from the imported banks exchanging documents. In this trade transaction, exporters allow their financial institution to act as an agent for payment of shipped goods to the importers. It can be categorized into two parts. Documents against payment (D/P) and Documentsagainst acceptance. The former one needs to pay the amount at the draft sight. Whereas the next one needs the importer to make payment on the particular future date.
After mutual understanding and completing the payment, the exporters deliver the goods to the location where the merchandise will be exported from. After completing this process,the documents are prepared and sent to the financial institution. In the next stage, the exporter’s institution forwards the document to the importer’s bank. Then importer clears payment and receives document from them.
If you want to complete this process in a flawless manner, it is always better to contact a trustworthy NBFC. Want to know why. Here are the answers.
Reasons to contact a NBFC for import documentary collection
First and foremost, NBFC s accept all types of currency all over the world. Hence, you can enjoy an easy and hassle-free transaction. Another fact by that a NBFCcan help is the always remain updated about the dealing process. Generally, when the document is reached to the exporter’s bank, they send an electrical message.
An eminent NBFC you can contact
Feel free to contact Merchant Trade Guarantee Corporation Company Limited, if interested about a hassle-free documentary collection procedure. They are experienced in Import Documentary Collections in Thailand. Click on merchanttradecorp.com to know more. Other articles posted online will help you to know more in this regard. | https://medium.com/@merchanttradecorp/essentials-you-need-to-know-about-import-documentary-collections-27cb088fbfcf | ['Merchant Trade Guarantee Corporation Company Ltd.'] | 2019-07-22 11:05:52.553000+00:00 | ['Trading', 'Thailand', 'Documentary Collections', 'Finance', 'Financial Services'] |
What It Means When Foreign Shareholders Divest From Vietnamese Banks | What It Means When Foreign Shareholders Divest From Vietnamese Banks
In 2017, the Vietnamese banking sector was impacted by divestitures by several foreign investors. Standard Chartered PLC and HSBC Holdings in April and June confirmed plans to divest their shareholdings in Asia Commercial Joint Stock Bank (ACB) and Vietnam Technological and Commercial Joint Stock Bank (Techcombank), respectively. Meanwhile, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) reached an agreement to sell its entire Vietnamese retail banking business to Shinhan Bank Vietnam Ltd in April.
Three divestments in a single year raised questions. Most importantly, why have the foreign banks divested and what are the implications for the Vietnamese banking sector as a whole?
At the first glance, the Standard Chartered, HSBC and ANZ divestments seem reasonable within the context of their Vietnamese businesses. Both HSBC and Standard Chartered have established wholly-owned subsidiaries in the country, meaning that their ACB and Techcombank stakes were no longer necessary for exposure to Vietnam’s banking sector. Furthermore, because local Vietnamese banks are now competitors, the Techcombank and ACB investments could represent potential conflicts of interest. In ANZ’s case, its business focus in Asia has reportedly shifted to institutional banking. Hence the divestment of its retail banking business in Vietnam can considered as in line with its change in strategy.
However, the divestments also highlight issues within the local banking sector that affect foreign shareholders. In its Vietnam Quarterly Macroeconomic Report published in June 2017, the Vietnamese Institute for Economic and Policy Research (VEPR) stated that poor governance in local banks made the sector less attractive for investors. One common governance issue cited was concentration of ownership. In some banks, a few key executives retain significant ownership and hence control. The ownership structure of Techcombank exemplifies this issue; the combined stake held by Ho Hung Anh (chairman), Nguyen Dang Quang (vice-chairman), Nguyen Canh Son (vice-chairman) and four companies related to these executives is 26.03%. The three executives are known acquaintances, as they studied and did businesses in the former USSR in the 1980s and 1990s before returning to Vietnam. In contrast, ownership of each foreign investor is capped at 20% and total foreign shareholdings in local banks is capped at 30%. As such, foreign shareholders are not guaranteed sufficient influence over the management of local banks. In fact, Vietnamese newspaper Dan Viet in July 2017 reported an unconfirmed claim that insufficient control was one of the reasons that HSBC divested its stake in Techcombank. An unnamed source close to the matter claimed that HSBC was frustrated with its inability to challenge Techcombank’s decision not to pay dividends for six consecutive years from 2010. Moreover, Techcombank planned to raise charter capital by offering more equity, further diluting HSBC’s stake.
Techcombank chairman Ho Hung Anh and vice-chairman Nguyen Dang Quang are key executives of Masan Group Corporation, which has 15% ownership in Techcombank. Source: Datarama Platform
In addition to governance challenges, potential risks arising from bad debt were also specified by VEPR as a cause of the decline in attractiveness of Vietnam’s banking sector. This argument is supported by Credit Suisse’s Vietnam Banks Sector Review issued in February 2017. According to Credit Suisse, bad debt resolution remains slow because of the lack of necessary regulations, debt trading platforms or alternative solutions such as securitisation.
Credit Suisse also highlighted weak recapitalisation a serious unresolved long-term problem within the Vietnam’s banking sector. Recapitalisation is vital for banks to meet local capital requirements, which according to Credit Suisse, remain tied to the Basel I Accord. The Financial Market Overview Report 2016 issued by Vietnam’s National Financial Supervision Commission (NFSC) showed a decreasing trend in the sector’s Capital Adequacy Ratio (CAR) between 2012 and 2016. The average CAR was 11.3%, but the NFSC noted that adjusted CAR would fall significantly if the research methodology fully complied with the Basel II Accord. In January 2017, the State Bank of Vietnam delayed the implementation of Basel II by three years. Credit Suisse stated that the delay might relieve the current pressure on recapitalisation, but would increase the size of necessary future recapitalisations. A possible solution for successful recapitalisation for local banks would be to offer more equity to incumbent and/or new foreign investors.
Conversely, divestments by foreign investors could have a critical impact on the capital adequacy of Vietnamese banks. Firstly, if local banks repurchase their shares from the foreign investors, capital of the local banks will decline, resulting in more recapitalisation pressure. Secondly, without foreign investors, local banks will depend on raising local institutional and individuals investors. However, according to Vietnamese business newspaper Thoi Bao Kinh Te Saigon, not many local investors have the sufficient financial capability to acquire large stake in the bans. Local investors also lack confidence in the banking sector because it is not in good shape and still restructuring. Hence, massive investments in banks are not unlikely. Recapitalisation will not be successful if bank cannot raise capital from local and foreign investors.
Moreover, foreign shareholders are established financial institutions which have expertise and experience which Vietnamese banks can leverage on. In fact, HSBC used to send its own employees to Vietnam to assist Techcombank in improving the bank’s operation and governance. In October, Pham Doan Son, vice-chairman of Vietnamese bank LienVietPostBank disclosed that the bank was negotiating to sell stake to a foreign shareholder. The vice-chairman emphasized that the he expected the foreign partner would help LienVietPostBank to develop governance and organizational strategies. Clearly, expertise shared by foreign shareholders are also important to the developments of local banks
It is as yet unclear whether the divestment of foreign shareholders is a temporary phenomenon or a worrying long-term trend. But it is clear that the departure of the foreign shareholders is not beneficial. Local banks are likely to require capital from fresh foreign investors to meet international standards on capital adequacy. More importantly, the loss of expertise shared by experienced foreign partners is a blow to the local banking sector. Such expertise is critical for the sector to implement the improvements in the governance so sorely needed.
Written by Datarama Analyst Hieu Nguyen. | https://medium.com/@dataramatech/what-it-means-when-foreign-shareholders-divest-from-vietnamese-banks-1358c5ed0798 | [] | 2017-11-16 03:12:28.084000+00:00 | ['Banking', 'Vietnam', 'Ownership', 'Investment'] |
Add a Count of Ineptness | Terry H. Schwadron
Jan. 16, 2021
As if the impeachment document needed a second charge, here came the report in The Washington Post yesterday that even as Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar announced this week that the federal government would release COVID vaccines held in reserve, no such reserve existed.
That’s right. The Trump administration move to suddenly speed delivery of vaccines was based on a lie: They didn’t have any more in stock. HHS already had been shipping out what was available at the end of December, taking second doses directly off the manufacturing line.
That means that state officials who were counting on doubling the available vaccines health are confronting the fact that there’s no more in the delivery pipeline than what’s still being produced. The states had announced broader inoculation sites based on the promised delivery — adding a healthy dose of confusion to a much larger number of seniors, high-risk patients, first responders and teachers.
So, naturally, Azar blamed the states for not understanding what he had said, for not moving faster and generally for making him look like an idiot, Why did he make an announcement of sending more if he didn’t have it? Then again, Azar offered a letter to resignation to Trump yesterday — without resigning until the inauguration, using a letter that tried to distance himself from Trump without directly saying so.
It also is a setback for Joe Biden, who was busy trying to announce his renewed push campaign for 100 million doses in 100 days. He’s moving ahead towards opening federally underwritten mobile clinics putting federal employees in the field to offer injections, but the reality he faces is there is less vaccine immediately available than he had thought.
Cue the obstinance of Donald Trump in forestalling cooperation with the incoming group.
The amount supposedly held in reserve was for second-dose shots. Concern about rising numbers forced HHS to reconsider, and to announce release of the reserve. The sole saving grace here is that supply of vaccines is ramping up, and with arrival of a more aggressive Biden administration team, will continue to do so.
Nevertheless, in ites closing days, Trump’s HHS lied in a time of pandemic, and rather than calming the pandemic waters, is roiling them.
In the world I live in, that is a near-criminal offense, but certainly an impeachable one. In addition to everything else, Donald Trump should face a choice of being as the outgoing head of a government is inept or unwilling to do its job.
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www.terryschwadron.wordpress.com | https://medium.com/@terryschwadron/add-a-count-of-ineptness-c5f4a3065838 | ['Terry Schwadron'] | 2021-01-16 12:32:29.933000+00:00 | ['Promises', 'Trump Administration', 'States', 'Vaccine', 'Coronavirus'] |
Relationship between Cyber Security and Risk Management | Cybersecurity threats are an everyday problem, it is something that we can’t ignore, and it should not be a concern only for the IT department, this is something that puts at risk all the employees and sensitive information of the client and company. Risk management is the concept where strategies, technologies, and users are educated to safeguard from the severe cyber-attacks that can make the company vulnerable at the hands of the attack. So, the relationship between them is that risk management helps to safe and well-informed from any kind of cyber-attacks, it follows guidelines that help to find risk areas, applies measures and actions that help to resolve the risks and mitigates solutions to keep the company protected. It helps to improve the cybersecurity framework, it saves us from lawsuits that any client may file due to security concerns, saves us from financial and operational risks. In certain situations, such as low-risk incidents do not have much impact on the company but in case of high-risk incidents where probability might be equivalent to zero but in these scenarios, we don’t stand to take a chance, in these cases risk management helps us to mitigate solutions. As an IT manager, I will use the concepts in the management of IT risks within your company as follows -
“A Risk Breakdown Structure (RBS) approach was proposed for managing the risks of CPS. Countermeasures were proposed based on the risk matrix method and classified. Risk values were introduced in an information security management system (ISMS) and quantitative evaluation was conducted for detailed risk assessment.” I will implement best practices and approach to secure our systems so that we can immediately detect any potential issues, it will help us to be more forthcoming. In this way, we can take care of vulnerabilities and make sure that they do not become a threat. “Using a risk-based approach to apply cybersecurity standards and practices allows for a more comprehensive and cost-effective management of cyber risks than compliance activities alone.” 1. Security is a team effort, I will make sure that all the team members are aware and involved in decision-making and escalating risk, as information sharing is integral to curb such risks from becoming a threat. 1. We can also try to create a risk center that helps to bring all the operational functional, risk control, and adds more visibility at the company level, it will help to divide work and branches out with different employees in the company.
Risk management training is very integral in all companies and they are being given to employees during hiring week which is a good practice, so new employees can understand the protocol and it can eventually become a habit that they can follow. Companies are appointing a reporting person who will address all issues related to cybersecurity involving risk management and keep those issues resolved, the appointee will be vigilant and try to take measures to avoid such incidences. They will work with the team and address issues, plan a mitigation plan, and provide all employees with training. Assigning a point of contact in the team for other members helps to create a communication flow during any crisis as well as keep a mitigation plan ready to keep organization aware from cyberattacks, it keeps systems and networks well maintained and safe. The assigned individual also helps to follow guidelines to identify risk areas, take immediate action to resolve issues and take precautions so that such occurrences reduce in the future.
Conclusion
Before setting up risk management in place, companies need to identify the areas that need to take care of and based on that a priority needs to list as there is no single solution that will help to solve all the problems, depending on the problem we need a solution to work on the potential risks. It should follow a step by step approach so to add additional protection for the important information, financial and health-based companies need to be more careful as any type of attack can be more harmful in terms of reputation and can reduce the amount of business drastically. A cybersecurity framework needs to be added in the business at various steps in the workflow which helps to mitigate risk factors and manages it in a better way. Cybersecurity management helps to secure organizations from vulnerabilities by applying administrative approaches and solutions to make sure organizations’ information is protected. | https://medium.com/@smiling-swati20/relationship-between-cyber-security-and-risk-management-2cf181eb6dfa | ['Swati Verma'] | 2020-06-01 16:38:29.201000+00:00 | ['Cybercrime', 'Information Security', 'Cybersecurity', 'Risk Assessment', 'Risk Management'] |
影を光にする | Bobby sat still in the dark and wished he could go into the shadow country, the way he always dreamed he could. He’d go there and play with the butterflies and the fuzz-edged, blunt-toothed dogs and giraffes, and they’d stay and he’d stay and Mommy Gwen would never be able to get in, ever.
暗闇の中で力なく座りこんでボビーは、影の国に行きたいと願った。いつもそう夢見てきた。あそこなら蝶々や毛むくじゃらで牙も恐くないイヌたちやキリンたちと遊べるし、グウェン義母さんも絶対追ってこられない。
Shadow, shadow on the wall, Theodore Sturgeon | https://medium.com/@mdrdri/shadowonthewall-47ad25159252 | [] | 2020-12-25 12:33:43.383000+00:00 | ['Book', 'Quotes'] |
From Vision to Version (Part 2) | In the first post from this series I defined terms such as “vision,” “strategy,” and “tactics,” then explored the benefits of having a well-defined and communicated product vision. I also provided some tips for how one might go about gathering inspiration and then articulating a vision of their own. In this post, I will illustrate how to use some of these tips by demonstrating how they played into the creation of the current product vision at Getsafe.
Initial Explorations and Thoughts
I started working for Getsafe in October 2018 as a newcomer to the insurance industry. Needless to say, I had a lot to learn about insurance as a domain as well as about Getsafe in general. Thus, I spent the first month or two on the job trying to gain as much context as possible in order to formulate some opinions of my own. Here’s a summary of my learnings from these explorations.
The customer lifecycle is super, super long.
The timing of insurance purchases generally correlate with the occurrence of major life events, which means that on average people will only need to buy a new insurance product every few years. This presents some pretty interesting challenges for customer engagement as the long timeline between purchases means that we will need to be very creative about how to stay relevant and top-of-mind. We also need to make sure that our products and services can evolve with the lives of our customers.
Insurance was meant to be personalized.
A very interesting aspect of today’s insurance is that it is possible to lose money by selling more product. This is because today, insurance as a business relies on making sure that the amount of money collected from customers exceeds the amount of money paid out in claims in aggregate over time. The word “aggregate” is key here because at the moment the industry does not yet have the means to make sure this equation always holds at an individual level, meaning that companies simply make money on the “low risk” customers and lose money on the “high risk” customers.
Insurance can be a part of every lifestyle.
Many companies supplement revenues from their core business with commission from selling insurances. For example, retail shops often sell insurance for the goods that people buy at the store. Banks often cross-sell homeowners insurance policies when customers are applying for a home loan. From the perspective of an insurance company, this means that there is likely an opportunity to vertically integrate and position insurance products as a part of a lifestyle instead of purely standalone.
How people buy insurance can become more natural.
At Getsafe, every new employee spends a part of their first week mapping out the customer acquisition journey from initial discovery to completing their first purchase. When I went through this exercise, the customer acquisition journey looked something like this:
Customer realizes they need insurance. Customer explores options via various tools. Customer gets quotes from some of these options. Customer selects one option. Customer purchases insurance.
What stood out to me here was that the first step of the journey required customers to somehow realize they need insurance. This feels unnatural because insurances do not occur to me as something that people generally wake up each morning and just decide they need. Insurances do not directly address any fundamental human needs in the way that food fulfills hunger or friends create a feeling of belonging. To me, it feels like the customer acquisition journey ought to have a “step #0” that starts somewhere before the needs of insurances are fully realized by the average consumer.
Insurance has a noble origin.
As I learned more about Getsafe and the insurance industry, I started asking myself a very fundamental question:
Why does insurance deserve to exist?
So I started researching the origins of insurance. To my pleasant surprise, insurances have a relatively noble beginning, serving as the instrument by which any given community can empower its members to recover from disasters. Unfortunately, this narrative has gotten lost because today we generally view insurance companies as sleazy, sales-driven businesses that profit from the fear within individuals. The sense of communal benefit and protection is nowhere to be found in the average person’s perception of why insurance exists. This represents a very large gap between that initial starting place and where things are today, and I think our mission to reinvent insurance should also include helping people understand how it fits into their lives and why it is good for them and their community.
Turning Inspiration Into Concrete Statements
To add up these learnings, here are three statements that start to concretely articulate how the inspiration from above could inform our product vision.
Imagine a world where…
…Getsafe provides products and services that directly address human needs. There should be a reason for people to wake up in the morning and want to use one of our products or services.
There should be a reason for people to wake up in the morning and want to use one of our products or services. …Getsafe engages with people before they realize they need insurance. We want to be a part of the journey to help them understand how insurances may fit into their daily lives.
We want to be a part of the journey to help them understand how insurances may fit into their daily lives. …Insurance feels more like a companion rather than a pile of paperwork. Getsafe should bring insurance back to its roots and re-create a sense of community around it.
The Product Vision at Getsafe
With these concrete statements, we can start to tell a story about the world that we would like to create. Here is a high-level pitch for what we are trying to achieve at Getsafe.
Bridging Insurance With Human Needs
“Peace of mind” is a basic human need, and here are some ways that the average person might articulate this fundamental desire:
I need to…
…plan for the future.
…have a backup plan.
…stop worrying.
…feel safe.
…be ready for the “what-ifs.”
…know my family will be OK.
As an insurance company, providing the appropriate coverage to our customers is one way that we can try to address “peace of mind” for them. Unfortunately, insurance is really complicated, and most customers need help understanding what they need, when, and why. Traditionally, insurance agents have tried to bridge this gap by setting up long appointments to interview the customer about their needs. For us as an insurtech, how can we use technology to do this better? How can we seamlessly bridge “peace of mind” with insurance products such that it feels completely natural to our customers?
The Insurance of Tomorrow
Technology has become ubiquitously embedded within the daily lives of people. In today’s on-demand economy, consumers gravitate toward real-time access and instant gratification. This trend provides the optimal environment for next-generation insurance products to incubate because it affords us ample opportunity to inject ourselves into the everyday lives of people. With a mobile-first approach, our app lives inside the pockets of our customers and travels with them wherever they go. As long as we are providing tangible benefits to our customers, we have the opportunity to position insurance as a life companion, rather than a necessary evil. We foresee the evolution of the “insurance experience” in two phases:
1. Insurance as an App
Over the last two decades, technology has dramatically changed how people interact with many products and services. This same movement toward digital and on-demand is now finally gaining traction within the insurance industry. For Getsafe and our insurtech peers, this means that we have the opportunity to define what the “insurance experience” ought to feel like in this new world. As an example, customers can now purchase and cancel insurance policies in real-time, without scheduling an appointment or filling out a long contract. We will build technology to transform interactions that have traditionally been complex into one that is frictionless, fast, and fair (i.e., claims).
2. Insurance as a Lifestyle
Since insurances are complicated and usually irrelevant to daily life, we believe that insurtechs will aim to achieve far more than the digitization of insurance products. We believe that in order for the industry to truly progress, insurance products must become more ubiquitous in the everyday lives of consumers. It should be clear to our customers how we enable them to live the lives they’ve always wanted to live. They should not perceive insurance products as something that they need to buy but hope never to use.
Three Customer Groups
Given the above premise, we’ve articulated three distinct customer groups to keep in mind as we develop products and services:
Customers of insurance products: i.e., “I need bike theft insurance.”
i.e., “I need bike theft insurance.” Getsafe employees: i.e., “I work for Getsafe.”
i.e., “I work for Getsafe.” Average consumers: i.e., “I own a bike.”
Each of these customer groups have drastically different goals, so naturally we now also have three major product areas that we work on in parallel:
Insurance products : Create the next-generation insurance experience
: Create the next-generation insurance experience Internal tools: Maximize operational efficiency
Maximize operational efficiency Lifestyle scenarios: Bridge the gap between human needs and insurances
Here is an illustration that I often draw on the whiteboard when pitching our vision to various internal and external stakeholders. It is simple, yet it accurately describes how I see the relationship between each of the three product areas. Getsafe will reinvent insurance by creating a new insurance experience that caters to the digital, on-demand needs of customers. We will scale our operations by developing internal tools. Ultimately, we will also create products and services that bridge human needs to insurance products.
Conclusion
If you’ve gotten this far, thank you for reading! I sincerely hope you’ve found both of these articles useful and that you’ve been able to find some tips to apply to your daily work. Feel free to drop any questions or comments below, and please follow us if you’d like to keep tabs on what we’re up to.
Don’t be a stranger,
Patrick | https://medium.com/hellogetsafe/from-vision-to-version-part-2-6d7205df3cbb | ['Patrick Tsao'] | 2019-05-06 19:23:37.238000+00:00 | ['How To', 'Product Management', 'Vision', 'Insurtech'] |
Helping accountants work remotely with clients. | Video calling
As an accountant, you might have to communicate with your client on what’s the status, discuss some questions and provide some clarifications etc., You can already do this with Facetime. But, if you have to do more on this call like explaining by showing documents, something on your screen, the audio and video quality, so you don’t miss any details — you would have to use a professional video calling or meeting software.
Zoom has been a pretty standard choice of meeting software by a lot of technology folks and can help you here with your needs. You can just get this software, start a meeting and provide the link to your client via chat or text message. Both can get connected easily and can start talking and share screens when necessary.
Google always had video calling at the customer level. You can call your friends and parents and talk with them. Then Hangouts was introduced in Google suite, where you get email, drive, spreadsheets and more to incorporate in a more enterprise environment. If you are an indie accountant or an accounting firm and already using Google Suite, then this would be the right choice.
Google Hangouts is now called Hangouts Meet in GSuite. You can schedule on the calendar and include a hangouts link directly. This makes it much easier to schedule calls.
Hangouts have good options to share screen and highlight things. This can be flexibly used on Mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and desktop with one account.
Cisco WebEx is a video conferencing software used widely by corporates for meetings between teams and resources located globally. This has been one of the first enterprise-level video conferencing software allowing various things to be performed, like sharing the screen, taking the ball to present something and more.
With more adoption, they are expanding into small business space with plans suitable for everyone. Give it a try if you are interested in enterprise-grade support.
Sharing screen
Apart from this if you have to share screen to show your client on what has to be done and what are the final numbers that are going on the tax filings or to highlight something you can use tools like Google hangouts a zoom meeting where you can share your screen and show it to your client and highlight some parts of it
Sharing documents
Most of the tax filing software will allow you to share documents. An important thing which you’re doing person could be getting the documents verified with your client, getting the signatures and asking for more information or explaining more information. You can leverage Google Drive or Dropbox to share documents. To collect e-signatures, you can leverage DocuSign.
To be continued…
To summarize, there are plenty of tools to help accounting professionals to work remotely and still communicate with clients. These situations that we are in with COVID-19 is definitely pushing us to innovate and get things done despite the challenges. Let us know what you are practicing and how you are handling clients remotely in the comments below.
We at BearTax help traders and accountants to calculate and generate capital gains documents to file taxes on cryptocurrency trading and investments. Signup for our newsletter and informative content below.
This was first published on our blog at BearTax. | https://medium.com/@beartax/helping-accountants-work-remotely-with-clients-d088ff1046fd | ['Vamshi Vangapally'] | 2020-12-17 03:08:01.576000+00:00 | ['Remote Working', 'Zoom', 'Taxes', 'CPA', 'Accounting'] |
Why Piracy is Still Relevant In 2020 | Let’s get the memes out of the way first: “You wouldn’t download a house.” is correct. I don’t think anyone will, ever. It may be hard to put drywall through a fibre-optic cable, after all. But the messaging of the advertising campaign that created this meme, years and years later, still is a point of contention among many. “Piracy. It’s a crime” was part of the campaign that released the public service announcement, and one had to watch them before the movie played on the DVD retail disk. The message it conveyed is in the title itself, and it was straightforward: you will be caught pirating, and will be penalised for theft.
Piracy has since evolved with time and has utilised newer, more novel methods to circumvent any legal barriers it may be blocked by. However, it has to be noted that it has been somewhat complicated for the law to reach pirates and pirated content — not because pirates are extremely good at their job, because a lot of people pirate without paying mind to the intricacies of the laws of their regions, but due to the laws against pirated content still being uncertain in enforcement. Significant incidents of piracy done by selected groups and individuals are yet brought to light and justice, though. However, regular content consumers are among us and are still present in droves, who do not pay too much attention to trifles like legalities and such. And, in my opinion, it is not a great look to raise a hue and cry over it either. Let me explain this position of mine, as it can be somewhat controversial. I shall present some arguments based on real-life incidents, news and experiences that all lead one to question whether the “legal” way is the best after all, or not.
“Why can I not own anything?”
A familiar sight for someone in the early 2000s. Physical media was crucial in making legitimate purchases of software or anything digital the most viable and most autonomous method of acquiring it.
In the days of “Piracy. It’s a crime”, one could own actual copies of anything they would also seek to pirate. Music for your new iPod? Yes, download it off of iTunes and save it on there! Windows XP? Yes, Microsoft sells you a copy of that. A copy of Toy Story? Get a DVD and play it on your PlayStation 2 (because it could run that!) right away! And in all these instances, once you had bought these things, you had the option to keep them safe with you, and in any manner you desire (keep it in a folder in your hard drive or store the physical media). This method of storing your “owned property” thus was legal, and you had everything you ever bought, forever. You couldn’t be arbitrarily denied access because of some technical issue, as you have a disk, an MP3 file or the executable files you need to get whatever it is you bought. Like an item of clothing, except that it gets old in a very different manner, but you still have access to it, forever. That’s a traditional approach to how economics work, and it applied to software and digital content as well.
To explain the scenario at the present moment, I would like you, dear reader, to note how many subscription-based services you are hooked to right now. Not the gym membership, the ones you do use. There’s Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify/Apple Music, and Disney+. These are just the usual suspects. The actual number goes way higher. A lot of content creators or even casual users may know of Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe’s subscription service for their apps like Photoshop and Premiere Pro. All these are places that let you pay them a fee each month, and you could then use their services. In all the services above, you don’t get to own anything — you pay money to get nothing. Of course, you get to use the service offered, and you will get to do so in perpetuity if you pay the cost every month. But once you stop that, it’s not ours anymore. Hell, with Adobe CC, you don’t even get to access your unsaved work saved in Adobe’s proprietary file formats. We probably do not understand the detriments of it well enough. Creators of Venezuela do, though:
Venezuelan Adobe CC users got this straight from Adobe, and there was no respite for them, except for, of course, pirating the software they need from then on. Credit: u/User_26 on r/piracy (Reddit)
Because of an Executive Order issued by President Trump in 2019 against Venezuela’s government, Adobe was forbidden to do business with Venezuelan creators. This is the first problem with current “legal” methods or a case for Piracy: You don’t own anything, and so, it will be taken away from you. It is a certainty, especially with the uncertainties of our world presently. It seems a dire measure, but for many people who pirate content even if they can stream the same content for free on Netflix or its alternatives, it is something they look at quite carefully and then choose to pirate.
Another instance here, and this may be a tad famous as well, is the show The Office. The US version has been on Netflix in the United States and is the primary “legal” manner to watch the show for all people in the US. Hence, many people use Netflix to watch the show. But due to a deal between Netflix and NBC, the distributors of the show, ending this year, Netflix will no longer have The Office on it anymore. It will move to NBC’s platform, making Netflix users lose access to the show, even if you have it downloaded on your devices and connect to the Internet. The subscription model can make you lose access to content in ways that are beyond your control. This makes it a more wasteful (you now buy two or more services to get your content) and a more consumer-unfriendly (stuff just, goes) approach to paying for something.
Apple removed “The Grinch” from their library in December 2019, and people who had bought the movie had their purchase revoked without any compensation or refund or a replacement. Apple also released a different version of the same film, available to be purchased for the same price, again, for the people who owned the previous version as well.
The prevalence of this model has risen in the past decade due to the increasing ubiquity of always-connected devices and online payments. It has allowed publishers and distributors to keep profiting from the same consumer(s) month after month, whilst a traditional purchase model is a one-time transaction. This benefits the distributors of content, and the consumer ends up paying a lot more in the long term. Indeed, it has made a lot of content more readily available, but for a high amount of users, it ends up being wasteful. No one will go through Netflix’s entire library, while one would indeed check out their movie purchases over a period made on Blu-Ray. Thus, the subscription model has the upside of being convenient and in some instances, cheaper, but it has several downsides, and one of them is lack of control. It does have the allure of being competitive, as multiple services now compete to produce, curate and publish original content, but what is competition in a stalemate for a consumer? With each new service, you lose access to more and more of the content you used to be able to access. That is not a competition, but a deadlock for the subscriber. You have to buy the other service as well for the content you need. Sure, you can stick with one, and buy another for a shorter period to run through their library that’s relevant to you and then stop your commitment. But the complicated nature of it is the reason why this whole model thus becomes unfriendly for the viewer, with the alternative being paying too much money for something so non-essential. And this is the only choice a user may have. The “choice between different services” is, therefore, a falsehood.
This lack of control and choice has been addressed by pirated content in heaps. The (extremely expensive) Adobe software suite regularly tops the charts of top torrented downloads on piracy websites. Popular TV shows from all periods keep getting repackaged with each re-release at a higher quality, in an extremely compressed form, and for newer ones, with each episode in a matter of minutes. And since torrenting is peer-to-peer networking, it is potent against censorship and restrictions. No one can block this sort of file transmission completely. And this brings us to the next section in this case for piracy:
Why can I not get it? I bought what you bought too!
Taking the example of The Office (US) again, I just mentioned that it is available for viewing on Netflix in the United States. But because of the nature of these deals between streaming services and distributors being region-specific, not all places have (or had) the show on Netflix. In the UK, for instance, The Office (US) was available on Netflix in 2013 but was removed by October 2015. After that, it was unavailable to be streamed legally in the UK till 2018, when Amazon Prime picked it up. For three years, the show was somewhat arbitrarily made unable to be watched legally because of agreements and such between corporations we are mere consumers for. All Netflix users in the UK who wanted the show were just robbed of it, while Netflix US still had it. A Netflix US subscriber could open their Netflix app while in the UK and find out that they no longer have the show to view themselves. This inconsistency is confusing at best, and maddening at worst.
How streaming partnerships get handled these days is a source for news articles, and many outlets do keep a close eye on what is “leaving” a platform and what is “coming” to one. The extent to which this locking out is done affects the popularity of a series or movie in a given region as well, which could contribute to a lot of revenue for the producers, or could rob them of it quite easily. One wouldn’t, for example, go out of their way to gain access to a series that has already concluded and is available on some streaming platform to watch if that platform is relatively unpopular or expensive. Had it been on a more popular platform, was promoted well in the service, and was maintained well with subtitles and (if applicable) all episodes available, it would have caught on much better.
Greyed-out music files on Spotify’s India’s version. These all have been saved to the users’ library, and hence they had indeed listened to those songs before at some point when they were available on Spotify, but are now gone and unavailable to listen. Credit: @bufftrad on Twitter.
An example that is quite familiar to me personally has to do with Spotify. In India, Spotify launched relatively late, a few years after Apple Music, its straight competitor in many ways, and several after other Indian services had already made headway in the market. In early 2019, I purchased a month-long subscription to Spotify India, after using the free US version of it via a VPN for more than 15 months, hoping to continue using it from then on. But frustratingly, I found that around 40% of my music library was unavailable to listen, and all those tracks were greyed out, impossible to be downloaded or accessed at all. Keep in mind; I had been listening to this music for 15 months now, on the same app. After some investigation, I found out that all music from the Warner Music Group (WMG) has been restricted in India for all their Spotify users, because of complications in a deal between them. I used the Indian version for a month and then went back to the free US version, and gave it another shot in early 2020, to see if this problem is past Spotify India, but it wasn’t. Only later in 2020 has it been resolved, and now India gets WMG music to listen to. Notable artists people were mentioning were absent included Charlie Puth, Ed Sheeran, Linkin Park and Daft Punk. It took Spotify more than a year to get WMG’s library to India, after delaying the release of the platform itself for more than a year before that as well, and it is only now that users can get the same thing as what they could if they would buy the subscription in the US.
And this all is to say nothing of the removal of singular tracks and albums that are frequent occurrences worldwide on all platforms for one reason or another related to copyright and legal barriers. This has only contributed towards increasing the absolute ubiquity of workarounds for these issues, as they can provide one with the exact thing they were trying to pay for, but weren’t getting it. For example, as I alluded to before, I use a VPN to log into Spotify in the US to get my music “fix”, and it has worked for me very well. Pirated music used to be downloaded as MP3’s once, but streaming media has reduced that extensively. It has also reduced music piracy by a tremendous amount by being more straightforward and cheaper for casual listeners. Still, as mentioned just now, even that can be a hassle for them due to “Legalese”. And thus, the second argument for piracy in 2020 is that unless you have a platform-independent method for retrieving content you have purchased, there is the possibility of it going away due to something beyond your control. And that, inherently, is not ownership at all. Piracy lets you achieve that, and many people embrace it for this reason.
“I Just Don’t Get it Here (Without Dumping Half of What I’d Pay to Eat This Month)!”
This is all about the question of availability. Can you even get this anywhere? Alternatively, if you do, is it reasonable to buy?
Take the case of anime and manga. Japanese animated shows and comics are top-rated westwards as well, and many such series or movies have a dedicated following outside of Japan. But due to several reasons, most likely the overhead costs of doing such a thing, not many make it across the Pacific and to the rest of the world after that. Not for lack of trying, though. Netflix has made many moves to acquire rights to many anime works to bring them to overseas catalogues, while dedicated services like Crunchyroll also have their libraries for anime. But they usually have not kept up with demand or have an incomplete library of episodic programmes. This lack of supply amidst a surprisingly consistent demand is far worse with manga. Very few mangas have official English translations and the ones made my fans frequently get taken down and targeted by the publishers because of copyright issues.
KissAnime and KissManga were shut down in August 2020 after Japan enacted stricter laws against copyright content. But a lot of the people served by the sites were not Japanese and were left with no platform to get anime and manga content at all. This was from their official Discord server, and it is indeed sad to see.
These lead us to another reason why piracy has to swoop in: Cases where there is simply no other option. You may be willing to pay, you may be willing to pay via PayPal even when support for it in your country is sketchy at best, but who do you even pay? Manga is a great example to understand this. “Fan Translations” are reproductions and distributions of content protected under copyright, which gives publishers the authority to go ahead and fight against it being present on the Internet without their express authorisation. But, when they do that and act against these translations, they do not replace them with a version that is legal and does the same job. Manga translations are rarely published officially. Thus, what publishers end up doing is getting rid of the one method of content distribution many people are reliant on, and then failing to replace it. One egregious thing about this is that if the argument to do something like this has to do with reduced profits, then why is there no option for the legal purchase of the content they just took down? You, as a consumer, may WANT to give them your money for something you may enjoy, but they will not sell it to you. Then why is piracy bothering them at all? There is little to no overlap between consumers who would potentially buy something but are forced to pirate and the consumers who COULD buy your products at all.
We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24/7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country three months after the U.S. release and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable. -Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve, Inc. (source)
A fair amount of software publishers and indie game developers view piracy favourably, as it gives all potential users a chance to try their software out, before deciding whether they would pay money to them or not. It is a bit similar to having a lenient “Free” version of the same app and providing a user with the chance to pay if they like the thing enough. Granted, the conversion rate of such users will not be a glamorous figure, but it will be the same or worse if the software is not usable at all without being purchased. Sometimes, piracy is just a minuscule amount of exposure for developers without the means to back their creations with aggressive marketing. This also holds for something like manga and anime. These niches were explored by many through piracy, and if there is no suitable alternative to pirating it, there will be much less interest in them, if at all. | https://medium.com/swlh/a-case-for-piracy-3e8add29f369 | ['Yatharth Sood'] | 2020-09-11 13:01:37.254000+00:00 | ['Netflix', 'Computers', 'Technology', 'Piracy', 'Software'] |
Giftpack Marketing Giftern 行銷實習 — 我體驗到的另外一個世界 | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/giftpack-taiwan/giftpack-marketing-giftern-%E8%A1%8C%E9%8A%B7%E5%AF%A6%E7%BF%92-%E6%88%91%E9%AB%94%E9%A9%97%E5%88%B0%E7%9A%84%E5%8F%A6%E5%A4%96%E4%B8%80%E5%80%8B%E4%B8%96%E7%95%8C-1ab37d426ac2 | ['David Chen'] | 2020-12-23 00:32:12.180000+00:00 | ['Digital Marketing', 'Giftpack Ai', 'Giftern', 'Internships', 'Giftpack'] |
13 Reasons to Learn ASP.NET Core in 2021 (Infographic) | ASP.NET Core is a new open-source framework from Microsoft and it allows you to build modern, cross-platform, high-performance cloud based, web apps and services. Millions of developers are using ASP.NET Core world wide to developer state of the art web applications and high performance cloud services. If you have not develop anything using this framework and you are confused then this infographic will give you plenty of reasons to start learning this framework in 2021. | https://medium.com/@ezzylearning/13-reasons-to-learn-asp-net-core-in-2021-infographic-46a6fbd0e9f7 | [] | 2021-01-11 17:47:18.571000+00:00 | ['Learning', 'Infographics', 'Aspnetcore'] |
Cowrywise Saving Circles: An African Story | Cowrywise Saving Circles: An African Story
Not the regular story
There is an African story that doesn’t invite the gods from the sky or the spirits from under the earth; one that is incessantly retold across various cultures without losing its essence. The story of how we made sense of little cowries and how we still achieve great feats from the compounding of little. This is the story of circles.
A story with power
As humans and social beings, we have always lived in families, clans, and tribes. We began sitting in circles around fires for protection, shelter from the elements. The circle is both an image and metaphor of completeness and equality. There is both protection and democracy within its confines as people face each other without visual hierarchy. This facilitates intimacy- Linda Lenzke.
Beyond protection and democracy within the confines of circles, we also find both continuity and support. Through circles, we have been provided with bonding threads that have helped us stitch together fabrics of sustainable growth. The story of circles provides evidence for the truth of little drops making up the glittery and ever refreshing Nile, and many other little steps that amount to unimaginable greatness.
Here’s how it has been told
In the eastern parts of Africa, where the finest herbs and tea are grown, the story is told under the title, Harambee (not the baboon 😊). In Swahili, it means “all pull together”. Harambee is deeply rooted in the fabric of the Kenyan culture that it even sits as the motto on the nation’s coat of arms. It is a culture that invokes the spirit of self-help amongst Kenyans. Under Harambee, they come together to raise funds for development activities, making the path towards community goals more feasible.
If we move on to the glorious safaris of southern Africa, we get to hear the same with a different title — Ubuntu. The Ubuntu tale is quite an interesting one.
An anthropologist bought lots of candy and sweets in the city. He put everything in a basket with a beautiful ribbon attached. He placed it under a solitary tree, and then he called some African kids together. He drew a line on the ground and explained that they should wait behind the line for his signal. And that when he said “Go!” they should rush over to the basket, and the first to arrive there would win all the candies. When he said “Go!” they all unexpectedly held each other’s hands and ran off towards the tree as a group. Once there, they simply shared the candy with each other and happily ate it. He asked them why they all went together, especially if the first one to arrive at the tree could have won everything in the basket — all the sweets. A young girl simply replied: “How can one of us be happy if all the others are sad?” (Source: The Spirit of Ubuntu)
In this tale, we find the most beautiful impact of togetherness. It has the ability to democratise access to happiness, and in happiness we find the peace to make progress as a society.
Bringing it back home, we have told these story under the titles of Ajo, Esusu and the likes. These circles have helped pool funds for Nigerians, and with these pools, many have been able to attain financial goals that seemed quite impossible. Here, we see the power of circles unlock doors to experiences that would have stayed locked if we tried as individuals.
Here’s how we are retelling the story
As a team committed to rewriting Africa’s wealth story, by bridging the wealth gap, we always employ strategies that work for Africans. Hence, when we started work on creating a new story for circles that will help people build wealth together, we set our mind on telling a complete story. A story that tells experiences of democratized wealth, group motivation, shared happiness and above all a secure and rewarding growth.
Taking these into consideration, we designed the Cowrywise Circles, a group savings and investments feature; one that will allow for collections and challenges. The choice to break it down into these two paths is in line with the earlier choice to tell a complete story.
Sticking to challenges alone would have told the story of motivation, where people come together to save and invest and then withdraw funds back into their bank accounts. A great story but that wasn’t enough for us. The collections path served as the best paragraph to finish the story.
With collections, people get the opportunity to access experiences that might have been impossible if they tried as individuals. For example, we have a number of poor homes across Africa that we would love to support as individuals, but the impact we would love to create can only be felt if we gather our cowries with those of others.
Collections provide the perfect answer to making this happen securely and rewardingly. With collections, we can create Circles that will help people invest towards various projects that will help rewrite the wealth story of many households.
With Circles, we can all be part of something bigger whether we have large or little funds. How else do you think Circles can be used? Drop a comment with your ideas below.
To join our story today, you can simply download the app today. If you need more information on how to set up your group savings and investments plan, you should check out our guide here. | https://blog.cowrywise.com/cowrywise-circles-an-african-story-694087eae456 | [] | 2019-07-14 16:14:09.498000+00:00 | ['Africa', 'Mutual Funds', 'Investing', 'Saving Money', 'Nigeria'] |
백준 1463. 1로 만들기-DP | in In Fitness And In Health | https://medium.com/hyeon-hwang/%EB%B0%B1%EC%A4%80-1463-1%EB%A1%9C-%EB%A7%8C%EB%93%A4%EA%B8%B0-dp-679e6e76c053 | [] | 2019-08-24 12:10:21.374000+00:00 | ['Dynamic Programming', 'Algorithms', '백준', 'Dp'] |
Get up Faster? Five Tips That Will Help You | Get up Faster? Five Tips That Will Help You
Now that it is so cold outside in the morning, it is extra lovely to stay in your bed a little longer. Bryan Dijkhuizen Follow Dec 10, 2020 · 3 min read
Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash
Tap that snooze button one more time and again … Eventually, you get out of bed too late, and you have to hurry. Another bad start to your day. These tips will help you get up faster in the morning.
1. Sleep with curtains open
We all want blackout curtains to keep the bedroom dark. But that makes it harder to wake up in the morning. It’s best to wake up with natural light!
You have unique lamps for this that you can set so that the light comes on gradually in your bedroom, to wake up as naturally as possible. | https://medium.com/illumination/get-up-faster-five-tips-that-will-help-you-6f17a865800a | ['Bryan Dijkhuizen'] | 2020-12-10 10:45:26.581000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Life Hacking', 'Life', 'Self', 'Psychology'] |
Leaders Series: Evelyn Hytopoulos at PolySwarm | Leaders Series: Evelyn Hytopoulos at PolySwarm
Issue 50 — May 8, 2018
Evelyn Hytopoulos is Chief Economist & Data Scientist at PolySwarm
Evelyn is a mathematical economist by training and joined the weird and wonderful world of cryptocurrencies and blockchain tech in January of this year when PolySwarm, a new blockchain network, approached her to help refine and implement their economic incentive model. She brings a wealth of experience to her work, and is excited to see cryptocurrencies integrated into purchasing and transacting habits as platforms and applications mature and evolve.
How did you first get involved in the cryptocurrency ecosystem?
As many people regretfully did, I first heard about someone buying pizzas with Bitcoin in 2010 and proceeded to disregard the topic for years. Fast-forward to 2017: cryptocurrencies and new uses for blockchain technology are springing up all over and many of my friends are already elbows deep in the industry.
Watching the growth of companies in the space, it became clear that many of them were at risk of reaching a choke point that stunts their growth without proper market design and calibration. As an economist with a background in macro- and micro-level market analysis and in working with incubators and scale-up tech companies, making a move to the blockchain industry was a no-brainer.
The need for individuals with economic skills in the space is huge. So when PolySwarm approached me in January to take hold of the market design outlined in the whitepaper and further develop and refine it into one that would perform efficiently and effectively, I jumped at the opportunity.
What did you do before you got into crypto?
Prior to getting into crypto/blockchain, my professional career carried me across four continents to work with private and public sector organizations both small and large. As an economist working in evaluation and research, I have a track record of using technically rigorous econometric evaluations to enable business growth, process optimization, increased value for money, market development, and much more through data-driven decision-making. Industries that I have worked in include tech, finance, education, health, international development, investment, law, and public policy.
What problem is your company, PolySwarm, solving? Why do you feel passionate about this?
PolySwarm is the first decentralized marketplace where security experts build anti-malware engines that compete to protect you. Think Bitcoin, but instead of mining, a global community of anti-malware experts converge and work together to best detect today’s threats.
In doing so, PolySwarm incentivizes rapid innovation in the $8.5B/yr cyber threat intelligence space with precise economic instruments that reward a global community of security experts for timely and accurate malware identification.
Today’s anti -virus and cyber security market is dominated by single-vendor offerings which often miss emerging threats. PolySwarm brings enterprises, consumers, vendors and geographically-diverse security experts together into a single marketplace for more complete threat detection. Experts craft and maintain competing software “micro-engines” that quickly identify the latest threats, attempting to outperform their competition. PolySwarm’s “Proof of Work” is threat detection accuracy: the market rewards experts who are best able to defend enterprises and end users.
What’s been the most interesting or inspiring experience you’ve had in the crypto thus far?
The excitement and drive in the crypto/blockchain space is infectious, and perhaps the most inspiring thing is the collaborative spirit and willingness of people to share insights and lessons learned with other companies. Advisors bring a mechanism for cross-pollination of ideas, with everyone’s goal being the growth and stability of the industry as a whole. This is especially true among the women in blockchain, who continue to build a strong community with stellar credentials and expertise.
What are some ideas you’re excited about, and why do you think they’re transformative?
As an economist, one of the most exciting developments with blockchain and cryptocurrencies is the use of smart contracts to program money. This is and will continue to be an important disruption of the traditional market structure, as smart contracts enable more flexibility in market design, create greater efficiency in transactions, and essentially eliminate existing barriers to entry for actors across the world.
What changes do you think cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology will accelerate in our world?
One of the things that I think will revolutionize many people’s lives in the near future is the use of blockchain technology to enable easier access to electronic money in the developing world. In past years the primary solution to this problem was thought to be mobile banking. However, mobile banking relies on traditional centralized banking structures and remains stifled by high fees and the need for a direct transfer of funds between individuals and these institutions. With blockchain-enabled exchange of virtual money, we will see more peer-to-peer exchanges, greater ease of access, and more efficient transactions in these parts of the world that will ultimately have significant positive impacts on economies.
In the next several years, we will continue to see changes in the way that blockchain companies are designed and the way they are received in the public eye. This evolution will continue until the applications and services side of the market not only has a high degree of usability but also is simple enough for consumers to understand. It is at this point that the industry will be integrated into purchasing and transaction habits in the economy, standing next to traditional companies.
Thanks to Evelyn for participating! Connect with her on LinkedIn.
Note: The writer of this piece and editor of this publication (Meltem Demirors) holds PolySwarm ($NCT) tokens. You can view her token holdings and disclosures here. | https://medium.com/the-future-collective/leaders-series-evelyn-hytopoulos-at-polyswarm-d9c596767ffe | ['Meltem Demirors'] | 2018-05-08 20:59:14.766000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency', 'ICO', 'Blockchain', 'Bitcoin'] |
Deploy A Data Lake With MongoDB Atlas And AWS S3 (Step By Step) | This is a tutorial to guide you through the process of creating and connecting to a Data Lakes
Before we get started with the nitty-gritty details, let me share some background to help set the context. If you are in a rush, feel free to skip the next 4 paragraphs and jump right to the Pre-requisites
MongoDB Atlas Data Lake is a low-cost solution that is easy and fast to set up for querying data stored in Amazon S3 allowing analytics applications to make use of archived data.
Bear in mind Atlas Data Lake solution is still in the Beta phase and is slower than Amazon Redshift with S3 native solution. For those who are familiar with MongoDB, this will open the door for other hybrid innovations for an affordable cost,I don’t see it as a production-ready solution at this time.
Even though MongoDB is an easily configurable solution, the gap in the help/ user guide set me back a few times when I started out and I had to end up contacting MongoDB support. They were ready to offer assistance pointing me to some helpful resources online that I’m sharing at the end in case you are interested in. Now that I’ve successfully configured DataLake, I’m creating this step-by-step user guide to help my fellow data professionals who are googling like me to learn😊.I hope this helps. I look forward to hearing your questions and comments if any too.
Prerequisites
To create a data lake, you’ll need:
At-least one AWS S3 bucket.
Access to the AWS Management Console with permission to create IAM roles.
Load sample data in S3 Bucket
Here I created bucket “my-data-feed” and loaded the sample weather data from the below link
https://atlas-data-lake.s3.amazonaws.com/json/sample_weatherdata/data.json
Create Mongo DB Atlas Account
Open a new tab in your browser to create an Atlas account. Keep the AWS console open in another tab for we will come back to it in the middle of Data Lake configuration.
Create a MongoDB Cloud Account.
a. https://www.mongodb.com/cloud
All you need is your work email.
Create A Data Lake
Click “Configure a New Data Lake”
Name your Data Lake.
Connect the S3 bucket created in step 1.
I prefer to store my query result in S3. This makes it easy to access result set and schedule queries.
Here is the important part to note. I used External ID to connect my S3 bucket to the data lake rather than AWS CLI.
Copy the “Your unique External ID” and “Atlas AWS IAM User ARN”. Keep this info handy as we will need this in the next step.
Now its time to jump to AWS console you have open in the other tab
Create IAM Role AWS
To obtain the role ARN from the AWS console:
Click the Services dropdown menu on the upper left-hand side of the console.
Under Security, Identity, & Compliance, select IAM.
Select Roles from the left-hand navigation panel.
Create a new Role
Select another AWS account.
Type in the Account ID and the External ID
External ID = “Your unique External ID” copied in the previous step
Account ID = Atlas account ID with AWS. Highlighted below
Now it is time to attach the policy to S3. I would suggest you assign full access to test the functionality. Once you are comfortable with the configuration and flow you can change the policy to read-only.
Filter the policies by S3
Select either Read Only or Full Access
Now click on the newly created role and copy the Role ARN.
Data Lake Configuration
Jump back to the Data Lake configuration tab. Paste the ARN you copied in the previous step
Now, you’ve successfully created the Data Lake and have it connected to S3. So, you can now proceed to configuration.
Copy the following storageSetConfig command to your preferred text editor and update your account and region information as commented in the script. Replace
<S3_FolderName> with the folder name you have in S3. collectionName() Method will get all the subfolders. For region code check AWS link “https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/rande.html”
use admin;
db.runCommand( { "storageSetConfig": {
"stores": [{
"name": "s3store", // Creates an S3 store
"provider": "s3", // Specifies the provider
"region":"", // Update with the bucket region code
"bucket": "" // Update with your bucket name
}],
"databases": [{
"name": "sample", // Creates a database named sample
"collections": [{
"name": "*", // Creates a collection for each directory //
"dataSources": [{
"storeName": "s3store", // Links to the S3 store above
"path": "//{collectionName()}"
}]
}]
}]
}})
Download MongoShell from the below link.
https://downloads.mongodb.org/win32/mongodb-shell-win32-x86_64-2012plus-4.2.6.zip
Extract the downloaded file and add the extract location to system PATH for easy access.
Open your Command prompt (Windows) and copy-paste the below the line. Change the <username> to your MongoDb account username.
mongo "mongodb+srv://cluster0-cah4i.mongodb.net/test" --username <username>
You will be prompted for the password.
In the Mongo Shell paste the storageSetConfig command you have updated from above step.
Upon successful configuration, the mongo shell outputs the following:
{ "ok" : 1 }
Verify your database and collection mapping.
Run the following command to display the mapped database:
showdbs
Upon successful configuration, the mongo shell outputs the following:
sample (empty)
The (empty) in the output is expected.
Switch to the sample database:
usesample
Run the following command to display the mapped collections:
show collections
SampleQuery
If you loaded the weather sample data in step 1. Here are the sample queries to find instances in the weather collection where pressure is higher than 900 millibars. Sort by timestamp and limit the number of documents returned:
db.weather.find({"pressure": {$gt: 900}}).limit(5).sort({ "ts": 1})
Congratulations! You just set up an Atlas Data Lake, created a database and collections from data stored in an S3 bucket, and queried the data using MQL commands.
Links:
https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/tutorial/deploy-shard-cluster/
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/s3/ | https://medium.com/@sarathi-tech/deploy-a-data-lake-with-mongodb-atlas-and-aws-s3-step-by-step-33f7aa2f27ca | ['Sarathi Balakrishnan'] | 2020-12-17 17:36:17.841000+00:00 | ['Cloud Storage', 'AWS', 'Cloud', 'Data Lake', 'Mongodb'] |
Day 1,402: Trump skips G20 meetings about pandemic preparedness in favor of pitching and putting | The Group of 20 summit is occurring virtually this year in light of the coronavirus.
The summit, which features 19 of the world’s largest countries and the European Union, focuses on economic considerations and global coordination in achieving goals, as well as terrorism, health issues and more large-scale issues.
Donald Trump, who could attend just steps from his bed this year, managed to last just 13 minutes after the 8:00 am start time before he began tweeting baseless allegations about election fraud.
While the conference continued, discussion issues facing the world, Trump left to play golf. Saturday’s visit was Trump’s 303rd such trip to one of his private courses in less than four years. (For comparison, Barack Obama played 333 times during his eight years in office and didn’t line his own pockets in the process.)
While other world leaders were talking about COVID-19 and how to avoid the next one, Trump was lining up putts.
By 10 a.m. ET, the President had departed the White House on his way to his namesake golf club outside Washington, DC. He was there when the “side event on Pandemic Preparedness” got underway, featuring remarks from French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, South Korean President Moon Jae-in and several other world leaders. Trump did not participate.
Trump has totally checked out of a job he never had any interest in doing in the first play. Even with the world’s eyes watching, he couldn’t care less.
1,402 days in, 60 to go | https://medium.com/@trumptimer/day-1-402-trump-skips-g20-meetings-about-pandemic-preparedness-in-favor-of-pitching-and-putting-ec96e1ff6929 | [] | 2020-11-22 04:52:33.650000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Covid 19', 'G20', 'Donald Trump', 'Foreign Policy'] |
About Coin Hunter | I must admit when I first stumbled across bitcoin many years ago I didn’t think much of it. I was studying a bachelor of business majoring in extended finance at the time and was very interested in the world economy and how events like the GFC came to be. Bitcoin continually popped up as I read about how central banks created an elastic money supply and how governments seized citizens assets in times of crisis, yet every time bitcoin was mentioned in my research, I would read a small sentence or two about bitcoin and write it off as non essential — 2017 proved just how wrong I was.
Cryptocurrencies have become one of the most polarising topics I have witnessed to date. One could easily be led to believe that cryptocurrencies only purpose is to purchase illegal goods and that anyone buying cryptocurrencies is either a criminal or is a gambler that is “better off taking their money to the casino”.
The reality is that nothing could be further from the truth. Unfortunately, there is a lot of misleading information that currently surrounds cryptocurrencies. And not to say that all the negative things you hear about cryptocurrencies are untrue but from the sentiment and understanding amongst ‘no-coiners’, it is clear that the information that they are being fed is wrong, whether that is done so intentionally or not is a question for another day. This is one of the core reasons we decided to start CHRG — to ensure that individuals who were learning about the cryptocurrency space had a reliable source to turn to for education and research.
We built CHRG because the problems that we faced had not been solved yet, our team have spent countless hours learning this space from scratch, watching countless hours of youtube videos, thousands of Reddit posts, medium posts, blog posts etc. etc. Filtering through the good, the bad and the ugly to ensure that we were on the right track not just regarding investing in the right coins but also how to use this new technology. Along the way, we have built an incredible network of contacts that genuinely are revolutionising our future.
I have seen many friends come into this space and then quickly exit — “too hard”, “Not enough time” and I sympathise entirely with this. It is too hard, it is too technical, and it is too time-consuming, but that’s the problem and the opportunity for CHRG and investors alike.
At CHRG we firmly believe that distributed ledger technology will impact almost every industry that currently exists and it is only just getting started. We want to provide you with a service that will first and foremost educate you but also save you considerable time.
Our mission is to ensure everyone has the right tools and insights to invest in the cryptocurrency markets with confidence.
We have been extremely busy building the foundations of the Coin Hunters group, and we have a lot of plans in store that we will be rolling out to members as we grow. However, if there is one thing that we want you to take away, its that CHRG will become your Trusted source for cryptocurrency research and education.
And although we can’t guarantee any kind of returns, what I can tell you is that distributed ledger technology is only just in its infancy and that there is still a very long way to go regarding the technology potential. This is still only a small space, and there are vast sums of money sitting on the sidelines because it’s….. “too hard, too complicated”.
Whether you are here for the gains, tech or philosophy, — perhaps all — Coin Hunter hopes to be apart of your crypto journey. | https://medium.com/coin-hunter/about-coin-hunter-3f3e460c1fac | ['Mark Roddy'] | 2018-08-13 23:40:58.358000+00:00 | ['Cryptocurrency Investment', 'Coin Hunter', 'Introduction', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin'] |
Tips On Training Your GANs Faster and Achieve Better Results | Input Noise:
The generator takes in noise as input and to my surprise, the size of the noise vector also affected the results. Initially, I was using 100 as the size of noise vector but when I changed it to 128 and 256 my results got better and the training speed also increased.
Batch Size:
The biggest mistake that I was doing initially when I started was to use a very big value for batch size. While training your GAN use a batch size smaller than or equal to 64. Using a bigger batch size might hurt the performance because during the initial training the discriminator might get a lot of examples to train on and it might overpower the generator, which would have a negative effect on training. For me, using batch sizes of 8 and 16 worked out best.
Loss Functions:
Loss function plays a huge role in the training process and researchers have been experimenting with various custom loss functions to be used in GAN training. I started out with a simple binary_crossentropy loss function which gave out decent results. Then I tried out the Wasserstein loss function which is used in the WGAN paper and this slightly improved the results. During the contest, most of the participants seemed to use the RaLS (Relativistic Average Least Square) Loss function, but despite many efforts, I could not get it working in Tensorflow. The takeaway from this point is trying out different loss functions can help.
Over Training might Hurt:
While training your network you might be tempted to train your GAN for as long as you possibly can, but overtraining might degrade the quality of the generated samples. Most of the contest participants reported that the best images were produced in between the training loops and not towards the end. In the contest the MiFID (Memorization-informed Fréchet Inception Distance) metric was used to evaluate the generated samples, so I monitored this metric and used Early Stopping to achieve the best results.
Mode Collapse:
Most of the times the data we have is multimodal, which means it has multiple modes where each mode represents data which share similar features.
A very common problem while training GANs is Mode Collapse in which the Generator produces images belonging to only a few modes of the data and ignores all other modes, hence the generated images are very similar and lack variety. There are a few suggested ways to solve this problem but I could not try all of them out. Experimenting with the Learning Rate of both Generator and Discriminator helped me to overcome this problem. So while training your GANs you should monitor the generated samples to see if your model is suffering from this problem.
Other Tips:
There is also this GAN Hacks repository which enlists many other techniques that you can use and most of them helped me to converge faster and achieve better results. Some more components that you can experiment with:
The architecture of your GAN is the most important thing. You can take inspiration from various famous GANs and implement your own version of it. Although most of the GANs use ADAM optimizer for training, don’t be afraid to try out the good old Gradient Descent optimizer. For the activation functions, instead of using the simple ReLU you can try out its other variants such as Leaky ReLU, ELU (Exponential Linear Unit) or PReLU (Parametric Rectified Linear Unit). You can also use various image augmentation techniques while training.
During the training of various GANs, I also found out that they were very sensitive to the changes and most of the times even a small change anywhere changed the results drastically. Despite the extensive research going on in the field of Deep Learning, many topics still remain a black box. I realized this during the contest, most of the things that I was implementing and testing, I could not find any reasonable explanation for most of them. That is why the configurations that worked for me are not guaranteed to work you as well but these are some of the topics that you can focus on while training your GANs because these things helped me to achieve good results. The configurations of all these features will depend on the type of problem that you working on and also the data you have. | https://medium.com/intel-student-ambassadors/tips-on-training-your-gans-faster-and-achieve-better-results-9200354acaa5 | ['Tushar Mittal'] | 2019-08-23 17:21:52.568000+00:00 | ['Gans', 'Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Deep Learning', 'Generative Adversarial'] |
What “dream big” means? | “Just dreaming big isn’t enough at all.”
We all have got dreams or goals.
An advice: If you want to dream or set a goal please dream or set the biggest one.
But hold on a second, before dreaming big or setting a big goal let yourself know few things.
The bigger you dream ofcourse bigger will be the success but bigger success is directly proportional to the hard work. Biggest dream=Hardest work Ask yourself, are you ready for putting your all in your goal as setting a big goal is always an easy thing but working hard as the goal needs becomes difficult at some point.
If you are really ready for putting your all in your goal no matter what then congratulations you have already pursued it half.
Things don’t always go the way we want but how do we react to it is always in our control. Alright you set a goal, ready to do anything to pursue it but then things go the way you never predicted.
What we are supposed to do then? Ofcourse we feel shattered as we put our all in that but still we don’t get what we want. What we need to do then is “Pause”. Think again where we went wrong, check, go back and make things correct. It is a reality, we do think we have put our all in something we want but still we don’t get that, it is because there must have been something where we went wrong which only need to be checked and to make it correct again.
But oftenly we don’t think this way, we are always like after such hard work, I don’t want to do it anymore or this is something I can never do or maybe this isn’t meant for me. At that time we need to remember that no matter what , how many times I fail I want to do it as this is the thought which actually driven me to do this or to start working for this dream. Now as I have started working for this dream/goal how am I supposed to stop. I WON’T STOP UNTIL I ACCOMPLISH MY GOAL.
“Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”
As now again we have risen up with double the power, more determination and ofcourse with more experience ( an advantage of the failure which is always negelcted I don’t know why but failure is always an opportunity to do better next time)….
When we start again we are supposed to deliver more than expected. We are supposed to achive more than we think. We are supposed to work harder. And once we get what we want then its time to triple the hustle.
As success has no full stop and your second success should be greater than the first one.
Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most important of all is love what you are doing. | https://medium.com/@sandyparihar540/what-dream-big-means-1299686a17eb | ['Sandhia Parihar'] | 2020-12-24 09:21:31.672000+00:00 | ['Failure', 'Success', 'Goals', 'Dreams', 'Work'] |
The only 2020 trend report a designer needs | UX-, UI-, Product-, Interaction-, Motion-, Service-, Brand- and Innovation-Designers, listen up, it is that time of year again. I am not talking about Christmas or New Year’s Eve. I am talking about trends for the next year. For the next decade. For the future.
Are you bored at work or at home?
If you are bored and do not know how to use your time, you might read all reports all across the internet. Else you might:
Finally finish your portfolio
Build lego houses with your children, nephew or niece, …
Exercise, do yoga or meditate
If you are not bored and would rather spend your time with something else, I will summarise all the trends — read: things that agencies want to sell or companies want to buy — for you and deduct the top three trend categories.
19 reports merged into one
The methodology is pretty simple. First I read a report. Then I add it to my table. Of course the table is no way near complete. Anyway, feel free to add links into the comment section with additional reports. So without further ado, here is the whole table. | https://uxdesign.cc/the-only-2020-trend-report-a-designer-needs-89719857d91c | ['Maximilian Schmidt'] | 2020-01-14 10:11:02.922000+00:00 | ['Design', '2020', 'Experience', 'Technology', 'Trends'] |
Varnished Muse | Varnished Muse
Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash
The little night light
you always bring with you
the one in the shape of the city
it flickers and doesn’t
seem to like any one glow
But you were silent about it
not deigning to speak
from the depth of your wooden coffin
the feet so tired of being called on
to walk between strife
and the dropping of erratic balls
Carried from place to place
in dying hands
from the lit nucleus of the water tower
to old Nellie’s house at the entrance
I’d given up
I thought, being able to wrest
you away from your little remnant
of a town
but you reached out after all
and shut it off | https://medium.com/scrittura/varnished-muse-b2ec1ec097f4 | ['J.D. Harms'] | 2020-12-11 15:29:21.357000+00:00 | ['Musing', 'Imagination', 'Image', 'Poetry'] |
#DrewsViews: Five Signs You Should Take a Break | Mental health should always come first, but since the spring semester is really starting to pick up, more and more I’m seeing my friends get burned out. I think it’s often overlooked in activism circles and social justice group discussions, but overburdening yourself and becoming overwhelmed and burned out is a real problem for young people today. While it can be easy to forget about your own wellbeing while focusing on issues you care about, or just living your life, burn out can catch up with you at any time if you aren’t careful. Here are my top 5 signs that might indicate that you are nearing burn out and need to take a break.
1. Passion running out
You should feel passionate about whatever you are working on, especially in activism. If your passion or motivation has run out, you might want to take a step back and rest so that you can rekindle your passion and come back reenergized!
2. Fatigue, both mental and physical
If you feel constantly exhausted, even after a good night’s rest, to a point where you want to slack on your responsibilities, you might want to take a break!
3. Irritability
If you find yourself snapping at the people around you, raising your voice more often than usual, or getting easily overwhelmed and frustrated, you might want to take a day off.
4. Dread
This goes along with the others but I think it is distinct enough to warrant it’s own number. If you find yourself dreading completing whatever task you need to complete, more than you normally procrastinate, you might want to take a break. Similarly, if you don’t want to go to bed for fear of waking up to your responsibilities, or dread waking up at all, then you probably should check in with yourself and see what you need different.
5. People telling you to take a break
You might think this one is self explanatory, but I can’t tell you the number of people in my workplace and friend circles who we all know are overloading themselves, but they refuse to admit it. If your friends are worried about you, asking if you are okay, or expressing concerns for your wellbeing, you might need to take a break more than you realize. Put your trust in your friends and listen to them. | https://medium.com/matthews-place/drewsviews-five-signs-you-should-take-a-break-7e7dda9b874d | [] | 2020-02-17 15:46:01.194000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Mental Health', 'Advocacy', 'Burnout', 'LGBTQ'] |
Traveling is not all that different | Photo by Mihis Alex from Pexels
When I think about traveling, I find that these are the times spent with family and friends where we create the fondest of memories. The overall experience, whether it being stuck with each other for numerous hours, or being intrigued by the places we come across. That in mind, I saw how this view was put into play after being shown the vimeo Ed Ruscha: Buildings and Words. Almost instantly, I recognized a similarity between Ed Ruscha and the endeavors of the Joad family in Steinbeck’s novel Grapes of Wrath. They both take on long journeys, enduring roads trips from Oklahoma to the West, i.e. California.
From the vimeo, we learn how Ruscha recorded his travels from East to West by taking photos of gas stations. These photographs collectively produced a book, but also acted as a diary. To Ruscha, they were personal, and yet his books grew popular because it looked as though anyone could take the photo. I find that there is a sense of irony to that. When I think of a diary, it’s supposedly intimate and personal. On the other hand, a book is shared among the public — common to all the readers. In that sense, I find that this parallels the story behind why the Joads left for California. The Joads were forced off their land, and thus impacted their lives on a personal level. They no longer had a home, and were given the direction to migrate to California in search of more opportunities. However, this story of seeking opportunity in the West was shared among many families from the East. Everyone soon had reason to go to California, which shows how their experiences weren’t as unique. The references generalizing Ruscha’s work, saying that “anyone could take the photo”, matches how the Joads’ experiences were common, in that it happened to “anyone”. The idea of a diary and the personal impacts of the Great Depression correlate as does the idea of a book, and the large group of families who also had means to migrate. Nicknames such as “Okies” and “migrant men’’ in Steinbeck’s novel further illustrate how much of a large group were migrating. These names portray them to be an ever growing community, as opposed to grouped individuals.
Uniting these ideas from both of these sources made me reflect on how I am an immigrant myself. Traveling far distances, and leaving my home of many years, all sparked my sudden intrigue for this connection. While preparing to move, I felt as though everything revolved around making our last moments memorable. My friends and my extended family all came to visit us, commemorating the times we’ve spent together. It was during these times where this move felt so “personal”. Only a week after moving to California, was when I realized how common this was. Another family, just like mine, had migrated from the UK to California, and now attended the same school as I did. We had classes together, and bonded through our similar experiences after migrating. This all ties back to what I had united between Steinbeck’s novel Grapes of Wrath and the Ed Ruscha vimeo. | https://medium.com/@amoursthoughts/traveling-is-not-all-that-different-814d52b603ea | ['Gwynneth Amour Sumagaysay'] | 2021-03-08 04:29:03.534000+00:00 | ['Migration', 'Grapes Of Wrath', 'Ed Ruscha', 'Traveling'] |
How to Customize the Control Center on iPhone and iPad? | Control Center gives the user complete access to control many stuff and features on the iPhone and iPad. You can easily access your timer, flashlight, Bluetooth Speakers, camera, and more. You can also customize all the features located in your Control Center on your iPhone and iPad.
Additionally, you can assign and add several other things like Cellular Data, Flashlight, Screen Orientation, Volume Adjustments, Screen Brightness, Music Playback, Magnifier, QR Code Reader, and more.
If you don’t know how to edit and customize your Control Center right on your iPhone and iPad, then follow these straightforward steps:
Adding Controls to Control Center
Here is how to add several controls and utilities to your Control Center panel:
First of all, open the Settings app directly on your iOS device.
Then, scroll down the page and press the option Control Center.
Scroll down and reach the More Controls tab.
After that, hit the plus (+) signed icon located just after the particular control to add to the Control Center.
Organizing Controls
Below are the instructions to follow in order to organize controls in Control Center:
First and foremost, open the Settings page on your screen.
Then, press the section Control Center to launch on your screen.
After that, hit the three-lined icon (hamburger) located next to the respective control. Then drag the same to a new position where you want.
Customizing Control Center on your iPad and iPhone
You can easily customize and organize the order of the controls or features you like to get in the Control Center panel. Here’s how:
Open the Settings app on your iOS gadget.
Next, scroll down the page and then hit the option Control Center.
Hit any of the controls by tapping the hamburger icon located at the right-hand side section to place it up or down over the listing.
Now, you have to drag the control to its new location on your list.
You can tweak the Control Center settings until it appears the way you like.
Removing Controls From Your Control Center
Follow these steps if you want to delete a control right from your Control Center:
Firstly, you have to hit the gear-shaped Settings icon to launch the respective page.
Once the Settings page successfully launched on your screen, then scroll down and then hit the tab “Control Center.”
Now, choose the particular control you like to remove right from the section “Included Controls.”
Then, hit the Remove tab there located just after the particular control available for removing the same from your Control Center. You can also remove a control by tapping the “-” shaped icon available next to a control.
Enabling Hidden Features of Control Center
After understanding how to customize the Control Center, now let’s know how to turn on the hidden features of Control Center on your iPhone and iPad:
Switching Between Wi-Fi Networks
You can easily switch between any of the existing Wi-Fi connections right from the accessibility of your Control Center page. In this case, you don’t need to open the Settings page on your screen or tap the Wi-Fi settings each time if you want to switch from one Wi-Fi to another.
This hidden feature of your Control Center is available on your Wi-Fi toggle bar. If you want to toggle Wi-Fi networks to On, follow these steps:
Initially, you need to press and hold the Wi-Fi toggle to launch the grouping section.
Then, press and hold down your desired Wi-Fi icon to open the complete listing of all the available networks on your screen.
Note: You can easily jump directly to the Wi-Fi settings screen using a one-tap shortcut at the lowermost section of the listing.
Screen Recordings
Your iPhone will provide you the ability to record what’s happening on your device. The functionality is built-in in your OS. Therefore you don’t have to depend on any third-party apps for the same:
Here are the straightforward steps to know how to record your screen with an in-built tool “Screen Recording”:
Get started by turning on the Screen Recording by reaching the Control Center section. To do the same, you need to open the Settings app.
Then, hit the Control Center.
After that, press the Customize Control tab.
In case you are unable to view that your Screen Recording is successfully enabled in your list, then hit the mini green-colored “+” icon located just after the same.
Start recording your device’s screen by launching the Control Center section, followed by hitting the Screen Recording tab. Then, your device starts counting down from 3, and once the recording becomes active, a clock will show up with a red-colored background at the upper-left edge of your screen.
Enable or Disable Do Not Disturb Feature
“Do Not Disturb” is one of the best and great ways to avoid being frustrated by pesky and unwanted calls, emails, or messages. iOS enables the users to create their schedule for turning off or ON the DND. Sometimes users need to enable DND over their device, especially while attending meetings, seminars, or visiting a doctor or consultant.
You can easily set DND in several time slots like
For an hour
Until tomorrow morning
Until you leave your current location, etc.
One can easily customize the Control Center by managing and making changes in several controls or features. Users can easily add many controls to the Control Center for their convenience. iOS provides an easy way to add or remove your desired controls, enabling hidden features, and more.
Everleig is a Blog expert and has been working in the technology industry since 2003. As a technical expert, Everleig has written technical blogs, manuals, white papers, and reviews for many websites such as sharedny.com
Source: Customize the Control Center on iPhone and iPad | https://medium.com/@addisonwalker922/how-to-customize-the-control-center-on-iphone-and-ipad-66f344fced69 | ['Addison Walker'] | 2020-12-25 09:43:36.492000+00:00 | ['iPhone', 'iPad'] |
What Are The Advantages Of A Wireless Mouse? | This question has been asked a lot of time on every social media platform that which mouse is the best? wired or wireless mouse? & What are the advantages of a wireless mouse.
No doubt wireless mouse is quite comfortable and easy to use compared to a wired mouse and if you are a laptop user then a wireless mouse is just perfect for you because no loves to entangle those irritating wired every time.
Advantages of A Wireless Mouse
1. Comfortable
Not only in mouse, but comfort is also king in each and every gadget we buy to use for the long term especially computer peripheral. Our device should be ergonomically optimized when it comes to computer peripheral because it makes each and every task more easy, comfortable, and faster to execute.
In this case, the wireless mouse can help you to get rid of that irritating wires which can trouble you while working or gaming. The best part about a wireless mouse I love the most, they don't add any extras wires mess in our table.
2. Portable
Talking about portability, a wireless mouse is quite portable as you can try yourself too. Wireless mouse is just perfect travel companion which can be easily adjusted in your outer pocket or laptop bag so that you can easily and quickly remove it to complete your task without wasting your time in entangling the wires.
3. Reliable
Reliable tactility can help you one-up your enemies with speed and precision, and with up to 30 months of battery life, you’ll never have to worry about your wireless mouse dying on you during the last and final mission. Isn’t it cool?. A USB wireless mouse offers far more flexible response than you could get from the built-in touchpad your laptop comes equipped with.
4. Convenient
You don’t have to be seated near your computer or any device while using your wireless mouse because you can operate your laptop or tv through any distance at your home or office easily. This means the wireless mouse is way more convenient compared to a wired mouse.
Wireless mouse is convenient to use.
Source: Product Reviewer | https://medium.com/@productreviewer/what-are-the-advantages-of-a-wireless-mouse-a811bd5d59b1 | ['Product Reviewer'] | 2019-09-24 17:42:05.273000+00:00 | ['Enterta', 'Technology', 'Computers', 'Gaming'] |
Haftar’s LNA powers blame Turkey for abusing the ceasefire arrangement by providing arms to the Libyan government | On Monday, the powers of Libyan warlord General Khalifa Haftar, which control the nation’s eastern domain, captured a business vessel with a Jamaican banner. The further examination uncovered that the vessel, which was setting out toward the port Misrata in western Libya, had a place with Turkey and did nine Turkish countries of all-out 17 group individuals.
The vessel was captured on the record that Turkey may be attempting to send arms help to Western Libya’s Government of National Accord (as it did previously), regardless of the UN forced arms ban and détente understanding between the fighting sides. Western Libya is administered by universally perceived GNA, headed by Libyan Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj. Libya has been battered by incessant and since quite a while ago extended scenes of common battle among LNA and GNA powers battling against one another to oversee the nation.
On Monday. Ahmed al-Mismari, representative for LNA said that the held onto vessel, called Mabruka, was “being examined for its infringement of sea laws and guidelines”. He added that the vessel was taken in authority after it abused worldwide guideline by intersection into Libyan regional waters with no earlier data or authorization. He added that when the vessel entered a limited military zone, it was then halted and taken to Ras al-Hilal port.The subtleties of the investigation of the merchandise conveyed by the vessel were not revealed. “The boat’s group is made of nine Turks, seven Indians and one Azerbaijani mariner. It is being explored for its infringement of oceanic laws and guidelines,” Mismari included an articulation.
Turkey reacted to its vessel capture attempt on Tuesday with a solid judgment towards LNA powers, saying that the vessel should be delivered and permitted to continue its excursion to western Libya and cautioned of outcomes in any case. “Focusing on Turkish interests in Libya will have grave results, and these components [who target Turkish interests] will be seen as real focuses on,” the Turkish unfamiliar service said in an explanation. Turkey formally joined Libyan common battle in January this year, exploiting the nation’s weakness similarly as it incased of Syria. Turkey conveyed its military powers and Syrian volunteer armies in Libya to help Sarraj’s GNA, in spite of the UN-forced arms ban. The mediation of unfamiliar entertainers in Libya quickened the contention between the fighting groups.
As indicated by the US Geological Survey, the eastern Mediterranean is one of the most extravagant energy asset on the planet with the locale holding roughly $700 billion worth gaseous petrol. Out of that save, Turkey — regardless of complaints from European countries — has been boring for flammable gas off the northern shore of the partitioned island of Cyprus. With Libya, being decreased to a simple state of Erdogan, it would permit Turkey in getting to and penetrating considerably more, assist it with getting one of the significant energy exporter in the locale.
Turkish vessel held onto happened a long time after the consenting to of truce arrangement between the different sides. The détente bargain was settled to end the contention through exchanges. UN has additionally been attempting to set up to a steady government in the nation by holding races in the coming months. Libya has been war-perplexed since the exit of its long-term despot Muammar Gaddafi, whose organization was overturned by LNA powers. | https://medium.com/@ahmadtan740/haftars-lna-powers-blame-turkey-for-abusing-the-ceasefire-arrangement-by-providing-arms-to-the-6fbdb3616301 | [] | 2020-12-10 10:39:30.618000+00:00 | ['Lna', 'Fayez Al Sarraj', 'Libya', 'Khalifa Haftar', 'Turkey'] |
Essentials books for software developers | Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash
A professional software developer must know the fundamentals of the art and science of computer programming very well. One of the ways to get to know and deepen the fundamentals is through the classic books of the area. These books do not focus on specific details of a technology, these books present concepts that can be applied in all technologies. For this reason, these books have become timeless.
The books I selected present in an organized way the experience acquired by the authors during decades of work and research in software development. Learning from professional references in the field is a wise choice. Books with the 📌 symbol are highly recommended.
Let’s go to the list!
📌 The Clean Encoder — Robert C. Martin
📌 Clean Code — Rober C. Martin
📌 The Pragmatic Programmer — Andrew Hunt
Clean Architecture — Robert C. Martin
Domain Driven Design — Eric Evans
Refactoring — Martin Fowler
The Mythical Man-Month — Frederick P.
There is no correct order to read. My suggested reading order for books on writing quality codes is:
Clean Code -> Refactoring -> Domain Driven Design.
Do you have recommendations from other books that are not on the list? Send me in the comments!
Thank you very much for your reading and see you in the next post! | https://medium.com/@leanderson-andre/essentials-books-for-software-developers-ee1a499764d | ['Leanderson André'] | 2020-12-15 02:59:47.807000+00:00 | ['Books', 'Software Development', 'Programming', 'Lists', 'Books Recommendation'] |
Namaste | Inside, we are all the same,
pure and divine.
But on the outside, we carry a name,
That has egoistic tags.
I honor your identity,
because that’s my humility.
I consider you not above me,
not beneath me.
I respect the inner beauty of your soul,
because within you resides,
the same virtues
that I possess.
Let me love you,
and show you
your real self,
by my
gentle gesture
of Folding Hands.
It isn’t a tradition
or a legacy
that I carry forward.
But, it’s an idea
and an ideology,
that I like to follow,
and treat everyone equal,
just the way
the beloved Almighty does! | https://medium.com/spiritual-secrets/namaste-cb376a9e7d70 | ['Darshak Rana'] | 2020-09-18 16:39:37.588000+00:00 | ['Spirituality', 'Equality', 'Respect', 'Poetry', 'Spiritual Secrets'] |
How do I write a script for the MATLAB code? | How do I write a script for the MATLAB code? shubham ·Dec 21, 2020
MATLAB
Scripts are the simplest kind of program file because they have no input or output arguments. They are useful for automating series of MATLAB commands, such as computations that you have to perform repeatedly from the command line or series of commands you have to reference.
READ MORE : | https://medium.com/@iteshubham/how-do-i-write-a-script-for-the-matlab-code-3a26f4131e99 | [] | 2020-12-21 08:50:40.354000+00:00 | ['Coders', 'Matlabcoding', 'Coding Style', 'Programming Languages', 'Matlab'] |
Text Classification with NLP on Kaggle Twitter Data | A 4-person team NLP Pipeline proposal on the “Real or Not? NLP with Disaster Tweets” Kaggle Competition
“Real or Not? NLP with Disaster Tweets” Kaggle Competition Home Page
0. Introduction
Overview
This paper will be based on the Kaggle competition Real or Not? NLP with Disaster Tweets. It’s an introductory challenge to serve as practice for Natural Language Processing with focus on Text Classification. The competition creators gathered 10875 tweets that are reporting an emergency or some man-made/natural disaster — the selection process is left unspecified.
Dataset
There are three provided files:
- train.csv — the training set
- test.csv — the test set
- sample_submission.csv — the framework for official competition submissions
The training dataset contains these columns:
- id: a unique numeric identifier for each tweet
- text: the actual content in the tweet
- keyword: keywords from the tweet manually selected by the competition creators (may be blank)
- location: the location the tweet was sent from (may be blank)
- target: values are hand classified by creators as either 0 for non-disaster or 1 for disaster
The test set is similar to the training data set except for not having a target column.
The sample_submission contains the id and a target column for all the tweets that competitors will have to populate with their proposed models.
Goal
The challenge of the competition is to create a model that can most accurately predict the test set and achieve a high F1 Score (read more at https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.metrics.f1_score.html).
This team however hoped to use this challenge as their final academic opportunity to apply as many of the skills they’ve learned in a Practical Data Science Tutorial while exploring additional Data Science fields and methods they were interested in.
Thus, the team decided to create an NLP pipeline for this challenge, split it into four parts, and self-allocate as you will see in the Team Roles section below.
Important Note: Everyone worked on different sections of a pipeline, and those sections naturally vary in magnitude of required effort. Thus, while the team consolidated efforts to create output that fed or flowed into each other’s section, each member individually explored into aspects of the data or task that were not necessary for the pipeline. Explore their individual contributions through the articles linked below.
Team Roles | https://nathan-torento.medium.com/text-classification-with-nlp-on-kaggle-twitter-data-46b1ab5e05a3 | ['Nathan Torento'] | 2020-12-19 06:19:30.159000+00:00 | ['Text Classification', 'Tweet', 'NLP', 'Nlp Pipeline', 'Kaggle Competition'] |
DreamTeam Contributors Report Q3 2019 | Dear Contributor,
The end of the third quarter of 2019 ushers in the third edition of the DreamTeam Contributors Quarterly Report. In our last Quarterly Report, we mentioned that the primary focus of Q2 was to evaluate the DreamTeam platform and feature KPI’s, highlight areas of opportunity, and outline possible strategic pivots. As a result, our metrics have never been higher. In Q3, DreamTeam focused on the development of our strategic pivots, adding support for a fourth game, updating our current platform features, and more. Keep in mind, if you don’t follow our monthly Development Reports, DreamTeam is working on a huge update that, at the current moment, cannot be publicly discussed. Let’s take a look at what we can discuss that has changed, in the last three months, on DreamTeam, the infrastructure platform for players, teams, tournaments, and sponsors.
Traction
With refined KPI’s and the removal of a few bottlenecks, DreamTeam’s metrics have never been higher. In Q3, we’ve seen a month-over-month increase in registrations, conversation rates, ARPU, and monthly active users. Even though we’ve seen a spike in our numbers, we are continuing to run a few A/B tests. For now, let’s take a look at some of the Q3 numbers:
6 major updates
1 new platform game
5500 users engaged with for feedback
1.7M emails sent
Product Development
In the past three months, DreamTeam’s added support for its fourth platform game, added and updated Apex Legends and Fortnite features, and launched performed a long list of A/B tests to help improve user acquisition and retention numbers.
Modules
In Q3, DreamTeam launched the following new platform module: the DreamTeam Playground. The feature was designed to help push a Player’s skills further without needing to have opponents readily available.
DreamTeam Playground: contains a series of packs that test existing skills and teach new tactics. Users simply click on a pack, choose a challenge, complete it, and DreamTeam will automatically give the user a pass/fail score. If they pass, they move on. If they fail, they have to try again.
Platform Features
The primary focus for platform features in Q3 was communication: the CS:GO and LoL DreamTeam Chat feature became a larger part of the recruitment process and the Apex Legends and Fortnite LFGs were updated with the following changes:
New Post Algorithm — Our LFG no longer displays posts based on when they were posted. Although doing that is helpful, it isn’t really what is most important to players who use our LFG feature. The DreamTeam LFG now displays posts based on who is currently online first.
Our LFG no longer displays posts based on when they were posted. Although doing that is helpful, it isn’t really what is most important to players who use our LFG feature. The DreamTeam LFG now displays posts based on who is currently online first. Quick Skill Understanding — Each post displays the DreamTeam Rating. The DreamTeam Rating uses a complex algorithm to calculate a player’s overall skill based on stats and play experience.
Each post displays the DreamTeam Rating. The DreamTeam Rating uses a complex algorithm to calculate a player’s overall skill based on stats and play experience. Filter System — Players can now quickly filter LFG posts according to different players’ needs.
Players can now quickly filter LFG posts according to different players’ needs. Sharing Capabilities — Players now have the ability to share whom they are looking for with players across Facebook groups and Twitter.
Q3 also saw the addition of Apex Prime and Prime Gold memberships as well as Fortnite Prime memberships. Apex Prime and Prime Gold include:
Profile and Stats — Players’ names are displayed in gold. Players can customize their profiles, view performance graphs, and analyze more in-depth stats.
— Players’ names are displayed in gold. Players can customize their profiles, view performance graphs, and analyze more in-depth stats. Challenges — Access Prime Challenges with higher prize pools and more places paid and Prime Gold members no longer have participation limits.
Access Prime Challenges with higher prize pools and more places paid and Prime Gold members no longer have participation limits. LFG — Places players at the top of the LFG list for four hours and Prime Gold members no longer have LFG post limits.
Places players at the top of the LFG list for four hours and Prime Gold members no longer have LFG post limits. Support — Live 24/7 chat support (PRIME GOLD).
Fortnite Prime includes:
Profile and Stats — Players’ names are displayed in gold. Players can customize their profiles, and analyze more in-depth stats.
— Players’ names are displayed in gold. Players can customize their profiles, and analyze more in-depth stats. Challenges — Access Prime Challenges with higher prize pools and no participation limits.
Access Prime Challenges with higher prize pools and no participation limits. LFG — Places players at the top of the LFG list for four hours and no LFG post limits.
Places players at the top of the LFG list for four hours and no LFG post limits. Support — Live 24/7 chat support.
Game Features
DreamTeam continues to not only add new games but continues to update existing game features. Q3 was a very busy quarter in terms of both.
Fortnite
In Q3, Fortnite was added to the DreamTeam family. Fortnite is a free-to-play Battle Royale game played by 250 million gamers around the world. Because of the success, Epic Games has had with Fortnite, DreamTeam will be able to reach tens of millions of young and dedicated gamers and provide them with
Profiles with Stats — Every Fortnite Player Profile displays stats, a breakdown of game modes played, a player’s latest achievements, and a list of similar players. Profiles also allow Players to connect various social media links.
— Every Fortnite Player Profile displays stats, a breakdown of game modes played, a player’s latest achievements, and a list of similar players. Profiles also allow Players to connect various social media links. Game Mode Stats — Displays which game modes a player excels at based on stats.
— Displays which game modes a player excels at based on stats. Latest Achievements — A player’s Challenge achievements are shown in the latest achievements section.
— A player’s Challenge achievements are shown in the latest achievements section. Similar Players — The Player Profiles display similar players. This is the easiest way to find players of the same skill. Players can add each other in Fortnite in order to play together.
The Player Profiles display similar players. This is the easiest way to find players of the same skill. Players can add each other in Fortnite in order to play together. Challenges — Each day, DreamTeam hosts two challenges. Each challenge has a specific goal to reach: get the most kills, have the highest win ratio, etc. Players can join one challenge per day for free and they have 24 hours to try to place in the top 3 places on the Challenge’s Leaderboard. The top 3 places receive a cool DT Challenge badge for their profile and a cash reward sent directly to their PayPal account.
Each day, DreamTeam hosts two challenges. Each challenge has a specific goal to reach: get the most kills, have the highest win ratio, etc. Players can join one challenge per day for free and they have 24 hours to try to place in the top 3 places on the Challenge’s Leaderboard. The top 3 places receive a cool DT Challenge badge for their profile and a cash reward sent directly to their PayPal account. Leaderboards — DreamTeam Fortnite Leaderboards allow users to see the world’s best players in ten different categories.
DreamTeam Fortnite Leaderboards allow users to see the world’s best players in ten different categories. LFG — Looking for a group. Connects a player’s stats to each message and displays the player’s DT Rating in order to help players find the best player faster.
Apex Legends
Addition of Season 2 — Players can see their Season 2 stats and stats for any individual legend, including the new Legend Wattson.
— Players can see their Season 2 stats and stats for any individual legend, including the new Legend Wattson. Updated Player Profiles — The Apex Profiles have been redesigned. We now highlight the following three important Player statistics on every Player Profile: the player’s Apex rank, the player’s Apex level, and the player’s DreamTeam rank.
— The Apex Profiles have been redesigned. We now highlight the following three important Player statistics on every Player Profile: the player’s Apex rank, the player’s Apex level, and the player’s DreamTeam rank. Challenges — Each day, DreamTeam hosts two challenges. Each challenge has a specific goal to reach: get the most kills, have the highest win ratio, etc. Players can join one challenge per day for free and they have 24 hours to try to place in the top 3 places on the Challenge’s Leaderboard. The top 3 places receive a cool DT Challenge badge for their profile and a cash reward sent directly to their PayPal account.
Each day, DreamTeam hosts two challenges. Each challenge has a specific goal to reach: get the most kills, have the highest win ratio, etc. Players can join one challenge per day for free and they have 24 hours to try to place in the top 3 places on the Challenge’s Leaderboard. The top 3 places receive a cool DT Challenge badge for their profile and a cash reward sent directly to their PayPal account. Leaderboards — DreamTeam Apex Leaderboards allow users to see the world’s best players in nineteen different categories.
DreamTeam Apex Leaderboards allow users to see the world’s best players in nineteen different categories. LFG — Looking for a group. Connects a player’s stats to each message and displays the player’s DT Rating in order to help players find the best player faster.
Looking for a group. Connects a player’s stats to each message and displays the player’s DT Rating in order to help players find the best player faster. Apex Legends Streaming Widget — A tool for streamers to display selected stats live.
Blockchain Development
Implementation and Integration of the DreamTeam Token to the platform remains one of the key priorities for our Blockchain and Payments team. Over the last few months, DreamTeam has taken the following steps towards the acceptance and support of the DREAM Token.
DreamTeam Tokenomics 2020
At the end of Q3, we began to work on our new Tokenomics model, which will provide our users and contributors with the best understanding of how our Token will be integrated into the platform. The release of the new document is planned for the beginning of Q4.
Delegated Transactions
In Q3, we developed a unique feature for the DREAM Token — delegated transactions, meaning that token holders don’t need to pay transfer fees in Ether anymore. This drastically simplifies the usage of the DREAM Token and leads to smoother adoption, as users don’t need to manage two currencies (DREAM and Ether) nor do they need to buy Ether from exchanges.
Delegated transaction support is a feature that makes the DREAM Token stand out, as there’s a special required functionality that has to be pre-programmed into the token smart contracts. Read more about this feature in our blog.
Events
DreamTeam continues to participate in events around the world in order to meet with blockchain opinion leaders, talk about DreamTeam and the DREAM Token, and expand our database of useful contacts. In Q3 2019, our Blockchain Developer spoke at the BlockchainUA Conference where he talked about the new feature developed for the DreamTeam Token — Delegated Transactions. Our team representatives also took part in the conference for networking and meeting with industry experts. Also in September, DreamTeam took part in the national round of EASAwards and won in 2 categories “Best Blockchain Startup” and “Best Fintech Startup”. DreamTeam has moved on to the regional round to compete with countries from the Euroasian region.
Media
In Q3, the Media team continued to support all of the DreamTeam product launches and updates, including the task bundles for Playground, added new maps to the Practice Games map pool, updated Apex profiles, created a widget for Apex streamers, added Apex challenges, and the launched Fortnite. Also, we prepared a content strategy for Q4 aimed to increase traffic and the number of registrations.
The Media team produced the following content for all DreamTeam owned media channels:
Created, posted, and promoted 48 unique articles for Apex, CS:GO, and Fortnite.
Created 11 new videos for DreamTeam’s CS:GO YouTube channel and 3 for the Apex YouTube channel.
DreamTeam’s owned media stats:
2.6 million people reached
900,000+ YouTube views
In terms of registrations, DreamTeam reduced content production starting in August, yet was still maintaining a 0.03% conversion rate due to changes in promotion and Fortnite’s launch.
PR
DreamTeam continues to work on creating different kinds of content to keep our key audiences up-to-date on the DREAM Token as well as DreamTeam news and product updates. In Q3, we were mentioned in 15 articles including Gamedev.net, Altcoin Buzz, The Bitcoin News, Ain.Ua and others. Our CEO was also interviewed by CoinCentral and CardRates. We updated our contributors with the latest DreamTeam news and released three DreamTeam Digests and three DreamTeam Development Reports.
Customer Support
The Support team received a high customer satisfaction rate of 84% and was also able to maintain a solid average first-response time of 20 minutes. In Q3, we sent 683 customer surveys and received a response rate of 17%. Overall, we received 99 positive and 21 negative satisfaction ratings. With the Q3 Apex Prime release, the Support team started to provide 24/7 live chat support for Prime users.
The past three months have been amazing in terms of features added, positive feedback received, and user engagement. In case you missed the Q2 DreamTeam Contributors Report, you can read it here.
About DreamTeam:
DreamTeam — infrastructure platform and payment gateway for esports and gaming.
Stay in touch: Token Website|Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn |BitcoinTalk.org
If you have any questions, feel free to contact our support team any time at [email protected]. Or you can always get in touch with us via our official Telegram chat. | https://medium.com/dreamteam-gg/dreamteam-contributors-report-q3-2019-9e50ce350446 | [] | 2019-10-21 14:32:05.434000+00:00 | ['Gaming', 'Esports', 'Blockchain', 'Quarter Reports', 'Token Economy'] |
How To Create A Terrific Wedding | Finding the best work at home company https://justpaste.it/4nigb opportunity can be hard, particularly when there are so many options out there. It can be difficult to find a great place to begin. Plus, with a lot of other things included, it can frequently leave you feeling overwhelmed, causing you to leave to a rocky start.
The very first thing that you require to do is find another wedding band at the earliest. Nevertheless, this might not constantly be possible, particularly if you have extremely few days left to the special day. You can be sure that the very best bands are scheduled well in advance. You might therefore have no option however to work out an offer with the band you have actually already booked. You should start by finding out what the problem is so that you can work around it.
The island has 365 sandy white beaches, world class seafood, an endless quantity of numerous people and amusing activities have actually fallen for Antigua as quickly as their feet touched its warm and soft sand. This paradise has tropical high-end for any budget plan, and no matter what you need, you will find it in Antigua. Friendly individuals, wonderful weather and stunning ocean breeze and stellar nights make this the supreme location to get married.
If you were seating on paper, when producing your seating plans with a wedding planner app for iPhone or other mobile gadget the same guidelines use as. Here are a couple of hints that you ought to keep in mind when organizing your seating charts.
31" long/Outshell: 100% Polyester/50% Polyester filler/50% Down/50% Feathers/lining 100% Polyester. This is a fantastic stylish product that looks terrific and feels terrific and will keep you nice and toasty this winter.
In fact, in preparing this terrific occasion, you should be fun and delighting in the process of preparation. For a great start, you have the ability to browse for any wedding books that will help and guide you prepare your event. These books can also influence you in figuring out the celebration theme, styles, designs, or colors of your party. You might likewise get some tips that will be so valuable for you.
Last however definitely not least, get organized. Have lists and timelines prepared so you have actually something structured to follow. When to do what without forgetting a couple of crucial things, there is so much to do that it's practically impossible to keep in mind. When it boils down to making a choice, choose your gut and do not 2nd guess yourself after the decision has been made. What's done is done, there is no room for remorse. All you can do is concentrate on the next task. | https://medium.com/@cethindfb3/how-to-create-a-terrific-wedding-b54ce726f400 | [] | 2019-09-14 20:15:20.651000+00:00 | ['Weddings'] |
Hello everyone! | Hello everyone!
Am back again but this time definitely as a better version of myself. It did take me a little long time for me to realise and sink in to the reality that “am more powrful than I ever could imagine”.
Thanks to my lovely buddy coaches and the fellow coaches of Incredible you program..!!
I’ve always been a big fan of self belief . Self belief is about knowing our worth and not giving up on things that matter to us the most.
In today’s world it is very very important to know your strength and have the right clarity. Ultimately your strength and the clarity is what would drive you towards achieving your outcomes.
Talking about outcomes, we all want to achieve our outcomes but during this time we forget to take those little actions which gets us closer towards achieving out goals or dreams.
I recently came across this big change in me that is if I consistently or continuously do things regularly my subconscious mind without my knowledge works for my betterment .
So what I have learnt in recent time is that,you need to set outcomes for yourself. When I say outcomes ,your outcome has to be realistic, measurable and most importantly need quite a lot of focus to work on them.
Make sure you define your outcomes and then set a time to achieve those. You may have many outcomes but you can always prioritise your outcomes.
So how does one work on outcomes?
Well the answer is to have a right plan towards it. You may want to join zoomba class. But when and how will you join?
So you need to work on getting the roadmap to attending zoomba class.
What can you do, here is an example :
You’ll plan your schedule Enroll for the class Plan your day Plan your eating habbits
You could add what is important to your outcomes which basically is called “POWER LEAPS”.
Just like the word itself “ power leaps” play a very important and powerful role in getting you closer and closer to your outcomes and finally achieving them.
Cheers ….!!keep smiling and keep believing in yourself…!! The outcome is always guaranteed. | https://medium.com/@sarithams514/hello-everyone-1cee3d3712e2 | [] | 2020-12-21 08:12:15.744000+00:00 | ['Power Lead System', 'Goals', 'Outcomes', 'Dreams', 'Self Believe'] |
The Daily Routine You Need: (especially students) | From the name of ALLAH who is the most gracious and most merciful.
In this blog I am gonna talk about how you can you make your day impactful in a good way.
Successful people
Waking Up:
The best time to wake up is 4:00 am
Scientifically and religiously.
Many Rich, successful, great and powerful human beings wake up at 4:00 am. They start their routine by doing exercises or just simply jogging.
Then study for half or an hour. Scientist -s have shown studies that studying in the morning helps you remind and understand it easily because sleeping helps you in the cleansing of brain, and after you wake up your brain is fresh because it removes the unwanted memory like what clothes you wore a week ago etc. Then have a healthy breakfast like eggs, pancakes, tea and honey etc.
After you finish your day at school or college just relax for an hour or two. Then play video games like Puzzle, strategy or riddles and just an ice shooter like COD but games like COD(Call of Duty) Fortnite etc can be addictive so don’t play more. As we know in our country Pakistan is suffering a little from mobile online games like PUBG Mobile and Free Fire but we shouldn’t ignore the fact that it has a future so don’t be AntiGaming.
Afternoon:
Playing games like Football and Cricket or Tennis are very beneficial because it covers the 1 hour daily exercise that is needed for your body.(also drink at least 6 glasses of water daily)
After the after noon you can watch TV.
In TV you can watch science programs on Discovery or National Geographic etc. You can watch shows and sports channels.
After that eat your dinner early at 8:00 to 8:45. Then study for an hour or more but do not stay up for late. You should get asleep by 10:00 because you have to wake up early. Also staying up late at night for studying is not that beneficial and your home work can’t be revised easily and nor good for health.
.most important.
Pray 5 times a day if you’re a Muslim.
And recite the Holy Quran daily after Fajr or asr.
THANK YOU FOR READING❤️💖👌👌 | https://medium.com/@Nooruliman/the-daily-routine-you-need-especially-students-b1ee7630ff88 | ['Noor Ul Iman'] | 2021-06-18 09:43:54.109000+00:00 | ['Trending Topic', 'Recommendations', 'Health', 'Healthy Lifestyle', 'Routine'] |
145 Media Mentions and Interviews, 13 Conference Panels and Workshops: links for my public engagement work in 2020 | 145 Media Mentions and Interviews, 13 Conference Panels and Workshops: links for my public engagement work in 2020
Local news, online misinformation, revenue opportunities, and the impact of COVID on journalism and journalism education… just some of the topics I touched on in the past 12 months
This post follows on from several earlier round-ups, bringing together my work from the past year in terms of applied research, media business and revenue models, changing journalistic practice and social media and tech in the Middle East,
COVID-19 meant all my travel this year was virtual. But Zoom made it possible to engage in events hosted by the United Nations, Facebook, WAN-IFRA and others, enabling me to speak at sessions originating in Brussels, Cardiff, India, Oxford (UK), Singapore and elsewhere.
I contributed to a wide range of discussions, covering everything from distributed newsrooms, through to the rise of content-led commerce, the future of journalism education, online misinformation in the Middle East and the impact of COVID-19 on journalism and tech.
Alongside this, during the past year, I was lucky enough to be interviewed by outlets like Agence France-Presse (AFP), The Arab Weekly, Editor & Publisher, Poynter, Quill Magazine (Society of Professional Journalists) and Wired, as well as local outlets like the Bend Bulletin, KLCC, KOIN 6 News (Portland), the Malheur Enterprise and OPB.
Meanwhile, my research and journalistic work — covering everything from media business models to tech and social media in the Middle East, future of local journalism, and wider media trends — was highlighted by organizations such as the American Press Institute, CNN Reliable Sources, Digital Content Next, journalism.co.uk, Media Voices podcast, Nieman Lab, Techmeme, Vogue Business, WAN-IFRA (World Association of Newspapers) and Wired.
Here’s a round-up of those activities:
Events/Conference Speaking
World Learning: Panel on “Journalism and COVID-19, Impacts of the Global Pandemic,” Zoom, (write-up, video on YouTube), 14 October 2020
City Club of Central Oregon: Chair, Panel on “Journalism in Crisis: The impact of COVID-19 on the American Media,” Bend/Virtual, (watch on YouTube, Facebook) 18 June 2020 | https://medium.com/damian-radcliffe/145-media-mentions-and-interviews-13-conference-panels-and-workshops-links-for-my-public-dedbeeafd258 | ['Damian Radcliffe'] | 2020-12-28 19:46:59.078000+00:00 | ['Media Criticism', 'University Of Oregon', 'Covid 19', 'Trends', 'Public Speaking'] |
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Its somewhat ironic that a movie about time travel can’t be reviewed properly until your future self rewatches the movie.
It’s bold of Nolan to make such a thoroughly dense blockbuster. He assumes people will actually want to see Audrey more than once so they can understand it properly, which some may not. This movie makes the chronology of Inception look as simplistic as tic-tac-toe.
Ergo, it’s hard for me to give an accurate rating, without having seen it twice, as I’m still trying to figure out whether everything does indeed make sense. If it does, this movie is easily a 9 or 10. If it doesn’t, it’s a 6.
It’s further not helped by the fact that the dialogue in the first 15 minutes of the movie is painfully hard to understand / hear. Either they were behind masks; they were practically mumbling; the sound effects were too loud; or all of the above. The exposition scenes are also waayyy too brief for something this complex — a problem also shared with Interstellar actually.
(Interstellar had this minimalist exposition problem explaining Blight, where if you weren’t careful, you’d miss this one sentence / scene in the entire movie explaining that Blight was a viral bacteria:
“Earth’s atmosphere is 80% nitrogen, we don’t even breathe nitrogen. Blight does, and as it thrives, our air gets less and less oxygen”).
I guess it’s a Nolan quirk. Hopefully, a revision of the film audio sorts the sound mixing out. I do like the soundtrack, but it’s too loud initially.
I liked all the actors. You think John Washington can’t act at first, but he can, and he grows on you as the film progresses. And Pattinson is his usual charming self. Elizabeth is a surprise treat. And so on.
Its worth a watch either way. See it with subtitles if you can. And definitely don’t expect to fully understand whats going on the first time around.
Its one hell of a complicated film. It will be very hard for an average viewer to gather all the information provided by this movie at the first watch. But the more you watch it, more hidden elements will come to light. And when you are able to put these hidden elements together. You will realize that this movie is just a “masterpiece” which takes the legacy of Christopher Nolan Forward
If I talk about acting, Then I have to say that Robert Pattinson has really proved himself as a very good actor in these recent years. And I am sure his acting skills will increase with time. His performance is charming and very smooth. Whenever he is on the camera, he steals the focus John David Washington is also fantastic in this movie. His performance is electrifying, I hope to see more from him in the future. Other characters such as Kenneth Branagh, Elizabeth, Himesh Patel, Dimple Kapadia, Clémence Poésy have also done quite well. And I dont think there is a need to talk about Michael Caine
Talking about Music, its awesome. I dont think you will miss Hans Zimmer’s score. Ludwig has done a sufficient job. There is no lack of good score in the movie
Gotta love the editing and post production which has been put into this movie. I think its fair to say this Nolan film has focused more in its post production. The main problem in the movie is the sound mixing. Plot is already complex and some dialogues are very soft due to the high music score. It makes it harder to realize what is going on in the movie. Other Nolan movies had loud BGM too. But Audio and dialogues weren’t a problem
My humble request to everyone is to please let the movie sink in your thoughts. Let your mind grasp all the elements of this movie. I am sure more people will find it better. Even those who think they got the plot. I can bet they are wrong.
Audrey is the long awaited new movie from Christopher Nolan. The movie that’s set to reboot the multiplexes post-Covid. It’s a manic, extremely loud, extremely baffling sci-fi cum spy rollercoaster that will please a lot of Nolan fan-boys but which left me with very mixed views.
John David Washington (Denzel’s lad) plays “The Protagonist” — a crack-CIA field operative who is an unstoppable one-man army in the style of Hobbs or Shaw. Recruited into an even more shadowy organisation, he’s on the trail of an international arms dealer, Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh in full villain mode). Sator is bullying his estranged wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki) over custody of their son (and the film unusually has a BBFC warning about “Domestic Abuse”). Our hero jets the world to try to prevent a very particular kind of Armageddon while also keeping the vulnerable and attractive Kat alive.
This is cinema at its biggest and boldest. Nolan has taken a cinema ‘splurge’ gun, filled it with money, set it on rapid fire, removed the safety and let rip at the screen. Given that Nolan is famous for doing all of his ‘effects’ for real and ‘in camera’, some of what you see performed is almost unbelievable. You thought crashing a train through rush-hour traffic in “Inception” was crazy? You ain’t seen nothing yet with the airport scene! And for lovers of Chinooks (I must admit I am one and rush out of the house to see one if I hear it coming!) there is positively Chinook-p*rn on offer in the film’s ridiculously huge finale.
The ‘inversion’ aspects of the story also lends itself to some fight scenes — one in particular in an airport ‘freeport’ — which are both bizarre to watch and, I imagine, technically extremely challenging to pull off. In this regard John David Washington is an acrobatic and talented stunt performer in his own right, and must have trained for months for this role.
Nolan’s crew also certainly racked up their air miles pre-lockdown, since the locations range far and wide across the world. The locations encompassed Denmark, Estonia, India, Italy, Norway, the United Kingdom, and United States. Hoyte Van Hoytema’s cinematography is lush in introducing these, especially the beautiful Italian coast scenes. Although I did miss the David Arnold strings that would typically introduce these in a Bond movie: it felt like that was missing.
The ‘timey-wimey’ aspects of the plot are also intriguing and very cleverly done. There are numerous points at which you think “Oh, that’s a sloppy continuity error” or “Shame the production design team missed that cracked wing mirror”. Then later in the movie, you get at least a dozen “Aha!” moments. Some of them (no spoilers) are jaw-droppingly spectacular.
Perhaps the best twist is hidden in the final line of the movie. I only processed it on the way home.
And so to the first of my significant gripes with Audrey. The sound mix in the movie is all over the place. I’d go stronger than that… it’s truly awful (expletive deleted)! Nolan often implements Shakespeare’s trick of having characters in the play provide exposition of the plot to aid comprehension. But unfortunately, all of this exposition dialogue was largely incomprehensible. This was due to:
the ear-splitting volume of the sound: 2020 movie audiences are going to be suffering from ‘Audreyis’! (LOL);
the dialogue is poorly mixed with the thumping music by Ludwig Göransson (Wot? No Hans Zimmer?);
a large proportion of the dialogue was through masks of varying description (#covid-appropriate). Aaron Taylor-Johnson was particularly unintelligible to my ears.
Overall, watching this with subtitles at a special showing might be advisable!
OK, so I only have a PhD in Physics… but at times I was completely lost as to the intricacies of the plot. It made “Inception” look like “The Tiger Who Came to Tea”. There was an obvious ‘McGuffin’ in “Inception” — — (“These ‘dream levels’… how exactly are they architected??”…. “Don’t worry… they’ll never notice”. And we didn’t!) In “Audrey” there are McGuffins nested in McGuffins. So much of this is casually waved away as “future stuff… you’re not qualified” that it feels vaguely condescending to the audience. At one point Sator says to Kat “You don’t know what’s going on, do you?” and she shakes her head blankly. We’re right with you there luv!
There are also gaps in the storyline that jar. The word “Audrey”? What does it mean. Is it just a password? I’m none the wiser.
The manic pace of Audrey and the constant din means that the movie gallops along like a series of disconnected (albeit brilliant) action set pieces. For me, it has none of the emotional heart of the Cobb’s marriage problems from “Inception” or the father/daughter separation of “Interstellar”. In fact, you barely care for anyone in the movie, perhaps with the exception of Kat.
It’s a talented cast. As mentioned above, John David Washington is muscular and athletic in the role. It’s a big load for the actor to carry in such a tent-pole movie, given his only significant starring role before was in the excellent BlacKkKlansman. But he carries it off well. A worthy successor to Gerard Butler and Jason Statham for action roles in the next 10 years.
This is also a great performance by Robert Pattinson, in his most high-profile film in a long time, playing the vaguely alcoholic and Carré-esque support guy. Pattinson’s Potter co-star Clemence Poésy also pops up — rather more un-glam that usual — as the scientist plot-expositor early in the movie.
Nolan’s regular Michael Caine also pops up. although the 87-year old legend is starting to show his age: His speech was obviously affected at the time of filming (though nice try Mr Nolan in trying to disguise that with a mouth full of food!). But in my book, any amount of Caine in a movie is a plus. He also gets to deliver the best killer line in the film about snobbery!
However, it’s Kenneth Branagh and Elizabeth Debicki that really stand out. They were both fabulous, especially when they were bouncing off each other in their marital battle royale.
So, given this was my most anticipated movie of the year, it’s a bit of a curate’s egg for me. A mixture of being awe-struck at times and slightly disappointed at others. It’s a movie which needs a second watch, so I’m heading back today to give my ear drums another bashing! And this is one where I reserve the right to revisit my rating after that second watch… it’s not likely to go down… but it might go up.
(For the full graphical review, check out One Mann’s Movies on t’interweb and Facebook. Thanks.)
As this will be non-spoiler, I can’t say too much about the story. However, what I can is this: Audrey’s story is quite dynamic in the sense that you won’t understand it till it wants you to. So, for the first half, your brain is fighting for hints and pieces to puzzle together the story. It isn’t until halfway through the movie that Audrey invites you to the fantastic storytelling by Christopher Nolan.
Acting is beyond phenomenal, and I’d be genuinely surprised if neither Robert Pattinson nor John David Washington doesn’t receive an Oscar nomination for best actor. It’s also hard not to mention how good Elizabeth Debicki and Aaron Johnson both are. All around, great acting, and the dialogue amps up the quality of the movie.
The idea of this movie is damn fascinating, and while there are films that explore time-travelling, there’s never been anything quite like this. It has such a beautiful charm and for the most part, explains everything thoroughly. It feels so much more complex than any form of time-travelling we’ve seen, and no less could’ve been expected from Nolan.
Oh my lord, the score for this film fits so perfectly. Every scene that’s meant to feel intense was amped by a hundred because of how good the score was. Let me just say though, none of them will be found iconic, but they fit the story and scenes so well.
In the end, I walked out, feeling very satisfied. Nevertheless, I do have issues with the film that I cannot really express without spoiling bits of the story. There are definitely little inconsistencies that I found myself uncovering as the story progressed. However, I only had one issue that I found impacted my enjoyment. That issue was understanding some of the dialogue. No, not in the sense that the movie is too complicated, but more that it was hard to make out was being said at times. It felt like the movie required subtitles, but that probably was because, at a time in the film, there was far too much exposition.
Nevertheless, I loved this film, I’ll be watching it at least two more times, and I think most of you in this group will enjoy it. I definitely suggest watching it in theatres if possible, just so you can get that excitement.
(4/5) & (8.5/10) for those that care about number scores.
At first, I want to ask Christopher Nolan one question, HOW THE HELL YOU DID THIS? Seriously I want to have an answer, How did he write such as this masterpiece! How did he get this complicated, fabulous and creative idea? What is going on in his mind? The story is written and directed perfectly, the narration style was absolutely unique. I have no idea how can anyone direct such as this story, that was a huge challenge, and as usual Nolan gave us a masterpiece that we’ll put beside (Memento), (Inception) and (Interstellar) The movie is so fast-paced in a good way, there was no boring moment. The chemistry between John David Washington and Robert Pattinson was great and funny and both of their performance was really good. Elizabeth Debicki performance was the best in the movie because she had the chance to show her acting abilities and she cached up that chance and showed us an A level acting.
The music wasn’t unique and distinct as the music of Interstellar for example and I think this movie needed the touch of Hans Zimmer, I’m not saying that Ludwig Göransson failed but Hans Zimmer in another level.
If there was something I’d say that I didn’t like it in the movie would it be that Nolan discarded any set up or characters backgrounds except Elizabeth Debicki dramatic story but it wasn’t that bad for me, I didn’t care about that, the exciting story didn’t give me the chance to focus on it. But the actual problem was the third act, it was really complicated and I got lost and I convinced myself to discard the questions that were in my head and enjoy the well-made action sequences and Elizabeth Debicki performance.
I think this kind of movie that gets better with a second and third watch.
I honestly don’t quite know where to begin with Audrey. I love Christopher Nolan’s work but I have never seen a more complicated film (and I understood Memento). After nearly three hours, I came away from Audrey not knowing myself, my mind reduced to nothing more than piles of ash.
Was there time travel involved? Hmm, there was definitely something about time inversion. I mean, does Nolan even understand what he wrote? Look, I give credit to the director because he’s one of the few directors left who knows how to create a compelling and intelligent blockbuster. Audrey is full of Nolan trademarks — the gratuitous Michael Caine cameo, a loud, really loud score, complete with stunning cinematography and slickly inventive action set-pieces.
This time around however, Nolan has finally managed to ‘out-Nolan’ himself: the palindromic plot, whilst creatively ambitious, is simply far too complicated for its own good. Audrey is overlong, overstuffed, pretentious and too exhausting to comprehend in its entirety — it makes Inception and Interstellar look like Peppa Pig by comparison.
I’m aware of the technical wizardry and creative mastery in this film and lord knows I’ll have to watch this again. For those who want a puzzle, Audrey at least provides a unique cinematic experience. But to actually enjoy solving it Nolan wants you to work very very hard | https://medium.com/@watch-audrey-2020-online/watch-hd-1080p-audrey-full-2020-full-m-o-v-i-e-s-online-e99f2b7ed93b | ['Watch Audrey Online'] | 2020-12-15 00:50:25.551000+00:00 | ['Documentary', 'Movies'] |
Tips to help Digital Marketers, Social Media Managers, and Business Owners Stay Sane During the Holidays | Photo by Cofohint Esin on Unsplash
I know it’s almost the end of the holidays, but as we are in the home stretch, I wanted to write a quick post to help me and (anyone else who may benefit) get through the holidays (at least mostly) in one piece.
Our stores may not be “full of people” anymore (thanks, COVID!) but that hasn’t stopped a lot of shoppers from buying. If you had to suddenly start offering “curbside pickup”, or increase (or start) your digital store inventory, then you’ll know what I mean.
In addition, many of us are now working from home and having to deal with the lack of personal contact, family or roommate interruptions, and working in a space that wasn’t designed for it. It’s tough, to say the least, when we get thrown into a situation we’re not used to. So, I’ve put together six tips you can use to get you through the rest of the holiday season (and beyond).
#1: Take a Deep Breath
Take a deep breath. Seriously. I know this sounds like the most vague advice ever, but it really works. It’s also backed by science. Check out this article by the Mayo Clinic for more information.
What happens in times of stress? Well, usually, we react. And not always in a good way. This is called the stress response, and is often the reason why we snap or react negatively in a stressful situation. By taking a moment to really breathe properly, we give our brains some much-needed oxygen. This, in turn, slows the heart rate and lowers or stabilizes blood pressure. That turns a stress response into a relaxation response, and allows us to make clearer decisions in the moment.
Of course, that’s not always easy to remember when a tricky situation literally tackles us. That’s why practicing is important. I like to pair my deep breathing practice with yoga for some added flexibility benefits, and I’ve found that a session will instantly calm me down.
It’s also not always practical to break out the downward-dog in every situation, but remembering to practice deep breathing in times of stress helps us hone the relaxation response rather than the stress one.
#2: Remember That it’s a “Season”
Every time I got overwhelmed during this holiday season, I had to remind myself that it is just a “season”. It’s not going to last forever. It may feel like it lasts forever, but before you and I know it, it’s going to be the New Year and we’ll be worried about our New Year’s resolutions (and how long we can honestly keep up with them).
I’ll be honest. Christmas is my favorite holiday. I love the decorations, the cheesy holiday movies, the feeling of family togetherness as we all gather together to exchange gifts, and the food. What isn’t my favorite, though, is the insanity that this holiday brings along with it. There is no other holiday that sparks so much commercial insanity. No wonder we’re all running around during this time of year like chickens with their heads cut off!
Even though the pandemic has made it so that a lot of us aren’t running around at the moment, it is still stressful. Dealing with pandemic related stress and depression during the holidays is no joke. But it will end.
#3: Switch it Up
If you normally do a lot of digital work (e.g. social media posting, email blasting, community nurturing) then take time everyday to get away from that screen. Go walk around, play with your kids or pets, do some jumping jacks or some sun salutations, or just get up and walk away for a moment. Sometimes, it’s so easy to try to push through and ignore your hunger, thirst, cricked neck and tired eyes. But I always feel better when I take small breaks throughout the day, no matter how busy I am.
My personal switch is to get up and move around. Lately I’ve been cleaning. Which sounds like a drag, I know. I don’t particularly like cleaning, but nothing quite beats the satisfaction of working your butt off and seeing that beautifully clean result. Some days, it’s the only concrete progress that I can point to. I also make it more fun by listening to music, dancing around and singing. Maybe that’s not your style, but injecting more fun into your life can’t hurt.
If you are already on your feet, and you want to check out of “real life” for a moment to find out what’s happening on your personal social media accounts, that’s okay, too. Hey, cat cute animal videos are still a thing, and we can all use a smile or a chuckle or two. Just don’t let yourself get sucked into social media and start “doomscrolling”. I promise it’s a thing, and it’s addictive and terrible.
No matter what, take a few minutes every day to switch what you’re doing. Your mind and body will thank you later.
#4: Take Time for You
You are important to the process. So, don’t forget to make sure that you are as ready as you can be. That means taking care of yourself, even when you don’t feel like you have the time.
I’m one of those people that doesn’t have a set way that I unwind. I’m very much a creature of “whatever I’m in the mood for”. Some nights it will be a video game, another night I might curl up with a good book or fanfiction, while another I decide to indulge in several episodes of a favorite show while sipping a glass of wine or two, or I could decide to bake or cook a fancy meal while listening to some of my favorite tunes or a podcast. Maybe you are the same way. Maybe you’re not. Whatever you do to unwind, though, try to schedule in some time this holiday season.
You may not feel like you have the time, but if you mess something up because you were stressed and tired, you’ll likely feel even worse later. Nobody likes to get hit with a guilt double-whammy. So, do yourself a favor and give yourself the gift of “you” time.
#5: You Don’t Have to be Perfect
As I said before, this is almost over. Which means that my motivation to make everything perfect has taken a nosedive and is about ready to crash into the earth. At the beginning of the season, I had big plans to launch a new eBook, get more client work, put up a ton of Christmas decorations, bake and cook holiday goodies, do fun things with my son and best friend, finally decorate my bedroom, rake the billions of leaves that have piled in our yard, clean the fireplace, winter clean the house, and get the crochet Christmas presents done early. Needless to say, it was a huge list. Now, I’m pretty much down to: fulfill client work that absolutely has to be done, finish crocheting all the Christmas presents I way too ambitiously planned to do, and spend as much time with my son and best friend as possible. And that’s okay with me.
I read something recently that put this all in perspective for me. We get to decide how this year ends. For me, it’s not about perfection. It’s about getting as much out of the time I have left in it as possible. In order to do that, I’ve got to let go of some things which are just not as important.
So, if you feel the same way, then please join me in making the end of the year the best that it can be without it being perfect.
I hope these tips help you enjoy the rest of the holiday season with less stress and a little more sanity. | https://medium.com/doing-the-digital-work/tips-to-help-digital-marketers-social-media-managers-and-business-owners-stay-sane-during-the-d992376e706e | ['Cassie Witt'] | 2020-12-17 20:27:50.573000+00:00 | ['Digital Marketing', 'Holidays', 'Stress Management', '2020'] |
How to master any skill | It was 2015 and my first day to teach a class of 50 adult students. On this particular day, I was hoping to deliver good public speech. After all, I’ve been practicing in front of a mirror on how to stand in front of people for months. I’ve been studying good public speakers who are eloquent and graceful on any public stage. At the end of the day, I was hoping my students would stand up and clap for my public speaking ability.
What that day ended up with was far more interesting.
My first public speaking failed spectacularly. I knew a great speaker when I saw one. But when I stood in front of people and started speaking, it was hard to pull it off, even for a minute or two. I had the taste of what good speaking tastes like but not the skill.
That day, I almost gave up. Even though public speaking is a skill I wanted to master, my wavering voice disappointed me. As I walked out of my first failed class, shoulders slumped, I convinced myself I will never be as good as those expert speakers I watched meticulously.
If you’ve ever felt like your skill will never match those experts you aspire to be, you understand what I’m talking about. If, for example, you’ve ever felt like you can never write a good sentence like good writers, you’re with me. You start writing consistently and you’ll begin to notice when you read great work. But when you try to do great writing yourself, you fail to produce something great.
It’s easier to recognize a masterpiece than it is to create it.
You want to write good sentences, but your sentences are not good enough. They are trying to be good enough, but they are not there yet. Your terrible sentences feel like they are crawling — not even walking — towards a masterpiece.
Maybe developing writing skills is not your thing. Conjure up in your mind any skill you are trying to master. Painting. Drawing. Content creation. Video making. Customer handling. Leadership.
What do you do when what you’re making disappoints you? What do you do when your skills are not good enough?
Most people can’t get past this terrible feeling of disappointment. They quit at this stage. They stop working on their skill.
In my case, I learned something unforgettable at the end of my horrible day. While I was crying in my bedroom replaying my failed speaking attempt, a friend gave me a printout that changed my life. This printout was an insightful paragraph from the host of a popular national public radio show.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners and I really wish somebody had told this to me.”
Ira Glass is the host and executive producer of the popular National Public Radio show, This American Life. The show had led to a wide range of opportunities (book deals, feature films, and appearances on popular TV shows).
Such a huge success did not happen overnight.
When Ira Glass was a 19-year-old intern, he had a taste for journalism and storytelling. He knew what good journalism looked like when it was done well. But it took him 17 years of hard work before he could start to do it well himself. 17 years to master journalism skills.
Most of what we hear or read about mastering a skill misses something.
Most people forget this crucial part of mastering any skill. The brave part where a person shows up every day to practice a particular skill despite his heart cracking in its entirety — because his work is disappointing him.
What makes this person show up when his skill level is so low?
Many articles and books tell us to show up for our work. But I’ve never read an article that helps me to deal with my feelings of utter disappointment when what I’m making is not good enough. How do I keep working on my skill when disapproval for my own work barges in my door and glares at me? How do I silence the insidious voice that whispers to me, your skill will never be good enough?
I’ve never read any good insight on how to deal with disappointment until my savior friend gave me the printout of this paragraph on that horrible day,
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners and I really wish somebody had told this to me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is still this gap. For the first couple of years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has the ambition to be good, but it’s not that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.” — Ira Glass
When I read Ira’s insight, I was lying on my bed mourning the loss of my public speaking dreams. When a particular paragraph reminds you of your own life, you stop and think. That moment felt like Ira was talking to me. I probably read the paragraph 50 times.
When the message sank in, I got up from my bed and dried my tears. Ira’s words gave me the courage and determination to never give up on my public speaking skills.
I told myself, my public speaking skill is not good enough now. But one day, it will be.
This is true for any skill you’re trying to master.
The gap between being an apprentice and being a craftsman is the enemy that stands in our way of becoming an expert on any skill.
The apprentice has the taste but not the skill. The craftsman has taste and skill.
Think about it. Let us say you want to master painting. You’ve been studying the works of a famous painter you admire. The paintings your idol produces is mouth-watering. You can’t take your eyes off his pieces. You recognize a good painting when you see his work. You want your paintings to be as good as him. So you start painting.
But…
Your work disappoints you. You can’t even look at your paintings. In your mind’s eye, you saw people lining up to buy your paintings because they were that good.
You want your skill to taste as delicious as your ambitions.
Except the reality is so far from your imaginations.
You have a long road ahead of you. A wider gap exists between the skill you have now and where you want your skill to reach.
This gap becomes the enemy.
When you find your current skill tastes bitter, misery and discouragement creep in. Your skill level at this stage is so low that you start thinking you will never match your taste with the skill you need. You start retreating from working on your skill development. You end up abandoning your skill in the middle of a road.
Instead of giving up, think of the thing that got you into the game.
What got you in your skill development in the first place? We need to think about the love and strong reason that urged us to walk in the direction of developing a particular skill.
We need to remind ourselves of why we are in the game when we are at our lowest. Never forget what got you there in the 1st place. You still belong, even if you don’t feel like it right now. Even if your talent is questionable.
Think about your love, passion, purpose, and taste when you fail to produce something good.
When producers failed to notice him, Ira Glass reminded himself of why he wanted to be a good journalist. Nothing boosted his self-esteem like his compelling reason to pursue journalism. “I love storytelling. That’s why I need to keep working on my skills.” This reminder gave his thirsty skill much-needed water when his skill was walking all alone in a desert. Reminding myself of why I wanted to be a public speaker gave me the courage to stand in front of people the next day after my failure.
Do yourself a favor. When what you’re making disappoints you, remind yourself of why you’re pursuing a particular skill. You love making videos. You love cooking. You love creating sentences. You love talking to clients. You love architecture. You love designing clothes.
Oh yes. You’re working on something because you love doing it and want to produce something good.
Remind yourself of your compelling reason when what you’re producing is not good enough.
This is the strategy I apply to my writing as well. When I feel the sentences I’m creating are not as good as Ryan Holiday’s (he’s my favorite writer). When doubt creeps in with its insidious voice, “Will I ever write such delicious sentences like Ryan Holiday?” I remind myself of why I’m writing in the first place. I’m writing because I love creating words and want to produce good sentences one day.
When you feel your skills will never be as good as your ambitions, think of the thing that got you into the game.
And one more thing…
You’ll never score a goal if you hold a beloved ball and dream about scoring a great goal.
To score a goal, you need to dribble the ball. One dribble at a time. And if you have never dribbled a ball in your life, you have to learn how to. And practice what you’ve learned.
The same is true for mastering any skill.
You need to commit to the process. Reminding yourself of why you’re pursuing a particular skill is not enough. Just like holding a beloved ball and dreaming about scoring a magnificent goal is not enough. You need to dribble the ball. Do the same for any skill you love pursuing. Even when the level of your skill disappoints you, show up. Put in the work. Be consistent. The small improvements you make day after day are sharpening your skill. In time, your skill will be good enough.
In “All You Need Are a Few Small Wins,” Ryan Holiday writes,
“Creating anything of consequence or magnitude requires deliberate, incremental and consistent work. In the beginning, these efforts might not look like they are amounting to much. But with time, they accumulate and then compound on each other. Whether it’s a book or a business or an anthill or a stalagmite, from humble beginnings come impressive outcomes.”
Never stop dribbling your ball.
No one could stop me from continuing to dribble my ball (my public speaking and writing skills). Ira worked on his journalism skills for 17 years before he became a popular host for a successful Radio show. I worked on my public speaking skills for 5 years. Today, I’m a sought-after public speaker in Ethiopia. I still have the printout of Glass’s insight on mastering any skill. It helps me to fight my way to master any skill.
What about you? What skill do you want to master? Writing? Painting? Taking photos? Video making? Giving online classes? Content marketing?
Will you keep showing up even if it takes years to master a particular skill? | https://medium.com/@bandaxen/ira-glasss-advice-to-help-you-fight-your-way-to-master-any-skill-611d02f464a2 | ['Banchiwosen Woldeyesus', 'Blogger Ethiopia'] | 2020-12-14 13:50:23.507000+00:00 | ['Advice', 'Talent', 'Skills', 'Skills Development', 'Psychology'] |
The Evolution of My Children’s Ultimate Night Time Prayer to Jesus | Our version of the nightly pray time with our children very quickly went of the rails. What started off as The Lord’s Prayer, a nightly ritual we began when our little ones were only toddlers, quickly mutated and grew as my kids grew. Each night as my wife began to recite the words, my kids always found it fun and hilarious to interrupt, butting in with little questions and additives that usually had us cocking our head to one side in laughter and/or confusion. I have been wanted to put these words into writing for many years now. What you will find below is the Leo Family Version of the Lord’s Prayer. I often joke with my wife that we need to have someone created some kind of scroll with this embroidered on it, or perhaps have it sewn into a blanket. Okay, maybe not a blanket. Perhaps a very large quilt. You see, the prayer had grown quite long.
The evolution of the Lord’s Prayer in my home was due entirely to my children. When my wife led the prayer at night, my two youngest children, as early as three years old, were yelling out things to my wife that she needed to include in the prayer. These items were repeated, often with a sigh of acquiesce, and they were instantly inscribed into her memory. If ever she left out a part or two (which rarely happened), my two little angels were sharply quick to correct her. The true copyright of our prayer belongs to my children Tyler and Connor. I dedicate this article to them. May they teach the Leo Lord’s Prayer to their children and keep it for generations to come. :)
The Leo Family Prayer
Our Father, which art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name.
Thy Kingdom come.
Thy will be done in earth,
As it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
As we forgive our debtors,
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
the power, and the glory,
For ever and ever.
Amen.
Please bless me, Matt, Chris, Tyler, and Connor.
Keep us all well and safe.
Put circles of protection,
By the power of the blood of Jesus
Around each one of us,
Our home, our vehicles,
The vehicles we ride in,
And the people that drive the vehicles we ride in.
Let us all sleep well through the night,
And have good dreams and no bad dreams
And keep away all:
Allergies, asthma, exema, aches and pains,
Acid reflux, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea . . .
Headache, earache, itchy or watery burning eyes,
Stuffy nose, runny nose,
sore throats, swollen throats,
sneezing, coughing.
Keep all of our body parts,
Inside and out,
Free and clear of any
Sickness, disease and injury.
Keep away all of the Flus,
A, B, Swine, Bird, and Thunder,
And anything else that can make us sick.
Bless Grammy and Pappy,
Grandma and Pop Pop,
All of our Aunts, Uncles, and Cousins,
Keep them all well and safe
And put circles of protection,
By the power of the blood of Jesus
Around each one of them,
Their homes and their vehicles.
We love you Lord.
In Jesus name we pray,
Amen.
Side note 1(2012) : To this day, my wife and I still have no clue what in the world Thunder Flu is, but rest assured, we are safe from it, as the Lord, our God, knows to shield us from it. It still makes me chuckle when I think back to when Connor insisted it be included. Even from an early age, I knew that boy was going to grow up to become a comedian one day. In any event, we have so much bad stuff covered.
Side Note 2(2020): It is quite possible that this “Thunder Flu” is indeed in all actuality the Covid-19 virus, which means that my kids had some pretty right-on premonitions of this coming down the pipe, years in advance. So far, the blessing are holding.
If you liked this article and it made you chuckle please consider giving it a clap and perhaps even a tip. Share it on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and/or Instagram. Look at my profile for more interesting articles written by wordsmith, Matthew Leo.
© 2020 Matthew Leo | https://medium.com/drying-inkstrokes/the-evolution-of-my-childrens-ultimate-night-time-prayer-to-jesus-c983f18d9ff | ['Matthew Leo'] | 2020-12-16 00:08:57.547000+00:00 | ['Blessings', 'Lords Prayer', 'Prayer', 'Humor', 'Covid 19'] |
Four Things I Wish People Knew Before They Started Their Airbnb Business | #1 Interior design spelled backward is neat and neutral.
I’ve observed that you do not have to have the newest, grandest building on the block to have a successful Airbnb rental. In fact, you could have a cottage, nestled in nature, that is somewhat rustic on the outside and still be booked up months in advance. But, if the insides are tired, don’t even bother listing your space.
Keep your interior design simple, fresh, and impersonal. Avoid personal photographs on the walls as you want the guest to feel at home, not in your home. Also, art is subjective, and unless you are making a statement and appealing to a specific niche of people, less is more.
When it comes to the walls, white paint allows for natural light to ricochet off the enclosed areas. Consider adding mirrors to make the space feel larger. They also help the light bounce around the room which is particularly helpful during the photography phase if you are taking the pictures of the Airbnb yourself.
Don’t get me wrong, you don’t need to create an all-white museum here- feel free to add pops of color that match the tone of your surroundings. But generally speaking, neutral items could be the safer choice, as they are often easier to replace than colorful one-of-a-kind additions.
Photo by Hutomo Abrianto on Unsplash
Whites may be difficult to clean, but the atmosphere it adds to any space, even small spaces, makes it difficult to not consider it. I have seen an Airbnb use accent walls that introduce a pop of color, so if the majority of your walls are white, but you add one dark, or one colorful wall, but tie it all together with neutral furniture, then you should be ok.
Also, note that small spaces can be made to feel larger by using furniture that looks light and that you can see through rather than blocking out visual space. And, if your room, apartment, or home is older, freshen up the interior with elements of modern touches. A new lamp, crisp carpets, and plants all add to what could be a dull room. And, on the topic of plants, if you are planning to purchase fake plants, get input from family and friends to see if they pass as an addition to your room because fake can often cheapen up space if not picked correctly.
Don’t forget to focus on the key rooms which, from my research and personal preference are the bedrooms, kitchen, and bathrooms.
Let’s talk about the bedroom quickly, personally, I cringe if the linen on the bed is not of great quality. It’s a giveaway that you are trying to save a buck if you choose cheap linen. At least for the main bedroom, invest in a bedding that you would want to pay to sleep in. If you have sleeper couches or options for additional sleeping arrangements, it’s understandable that those options may not be A-grade, but don’t skimp on the main bedroom- it’s not worth it. After all, many people spend most of their time adventuring in the surrounding around your space, and when they are at the Airbnb, most of their time there may be sleeping or resting. Allow that part of their stay to be memorable.
Pro-tip: Because so many people are now working from home, a mid-week space has become increasingly popular because rates may be lower. I’ve seen some Airbnb’s incorporate a work-from-home nook into their homes. Ignore this if you’re wanting people to stay for a short time only, but this extra little touch increases the value of a space that I would personally rent. | https://bettermarketing.pub/four-things-i-wish-people-knew-before-they-started-their-airbnb-business-fd40d3f0c600 | ['Marguerite Faure'] | 2021-09-08 12:03:39.167000+00:00 | ['Side Hustle', 'Startup Lessons', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Startup', 'Airbnb'] |
Streamlit vs. Dash and Beyond: An introduction to web dashboard development frameworks for Python | Streamlit vs. Dash and Beyond: An introduction to web dashboard development frameworks for Python Alireza Ghasemi Jun 21·11 min read
A lot of data scientists do not have a computer science/software engineering background. Those who do, do not necessarily enjoy writing a web application, or any sort of front-end UI to present their work to the outside world. And even those who indeed enjoy some “pure” software engineering from time to time, may not be very fond of spending too much data science budget on adjusting CSS directives to make buttons and charts look decent on multiple devices. After all, a data science project is obviously targeted around a data-driven question, and it is always encouraged to minimise the extracurricular costs, at least at early stages and for demos, proofs of concepts, etc…
That is the raison d’etre of a family of software frameworks very close to web application frameworks, but distinct enough to merit a separate category. These frameworks work like web application frameworks in that they enable developing web UIs and full-stack web applications, but differ in the sense that they are very much optimised and tailored for specific use cases involving data visualisation, AI, and machine learning. They also differ from more “classic” BI solutions such as PowerBI and Tableau, in that they really aren’t “No-Code” like the latter, nor do they claim so. We will refer to these kinds of frameworks as web dashboarding solutions in the rest of this article, although other names may also have been used for them in the industry.
Our goal in this article is to have a look at two major frameworks in this category, the recently introduced Streamlit, and the older and more established Dash from Plotly. We believe these two frameworks represent the two ends of the spectrum of simplicity-flexibility, and can hence cover the vast majority of use cases appearing in data science projects. We also mention a few other contenders in this space, mostly for the curious reader to follow up later. We focus on Python, as it is by far the most common programming language in the data science community. Both Streamlit and Dash are native in Python, while at least Dash supports R and Julia as well.
Streamlit
Streamlit was introduced in October 2019 by a team of developers led by former Google X lab members. There was a lot of enthusiasm in the data science community around Streamlit which continues today. This is mostly owing to its promise of simplicity, which is to a large extent fulfilled, and its continuous improvement with new features since its early days.
Streamlit: Introduction and Widgets
Streamlit is interesting for its simplicity, providing a decent-looking web application on top of a data science or machine learning backend (or anything else for that matter), in literally a few lines of code. This is achieved by its very unique UI model which avoids explicit event handling or functionalness, as is common in other Ui frameworks. Instead, Streamlit introduces a linear-flow, imperative execution model for the UI code, where each UI widget corresponds to a variable in the Python code and a change in the state or the value of the widget causes, roughly speaking, the re-execution of the code from the point where the widget is defined. With this linear execution model, it becomes very easy to add a web UI on top of a computation backend, possibly as simple as changing parameter definitions with Streamlit widget definitions (text, date range, radio and checkboxes for categorical variables etc…) and then running the script via the streamlit command instead of the Python interpreter. The following figures, taken from the Streamlit gallery depict this: You see the Python code assigning variables to the outcomes of a few checkboxes and radio buttons, and the resulting UI. This example can be found on the awesome-streamlit website.
Plotting in Streamlit
Obviously, the major part of a data dashboard is occupied by charts, plots, and data visualisations. The richness of the plotting API and support for various types of charts is a distinguishing factor for dashboard development solutions. Streamlit has native support for most of the popular Python plotting libraries, including Matplotlib as the simplest one (where a plot is simply a static image), going all the way up to interactive plots created with Plotly, Bokeh, and Altair. This wide choice allows us to continue using our own preferred plotting library exact same way we did before, except the last step where we draw the plot object using Streamlit. The two figures below show an example code using Plotly Express and the resulting interactive plot, from an example dashboard in the awesome-streamlit website:
Sidebars, tabs, and containers
Recently, as a major feature, Streamlit extended the linear execution in a still controlled way. This is achieved by making it possible to group certain widgets into containers, which can then exhibit different behaviour, depending on the type of the container.
The most straightforward type of containers is a horizontal layout, which lays widgets horizontally on the screen instead of vertically. This comes especially useful for widget groups that are naturally and semantically correlated to each other, such as radio buttons and semantically-related checkboxes.
Expanders. or accordions in some other UI frameworks allow hiding certain widgets and plots in a cluttered screen and let the user show them per will. This is obviously useful in a screen that can be divided into multiple sections of related widgets. With expanders, the user has the ability to focus only on a subset of visualisations at the same time.
Finally, in the past few months, Streamlit introduced forms as a way to circumvent its traditional execution model. Forms allow to “trigger” the execution of the Python code for a group of widgets, not by modifying any of them, but only through the press of a special submit button, hence avoiding unnecessary and possibly time-consuming re-runs. This way of “binding” a group of variables together also solves a major limitation of Streamlit’s execution model, where for example one cannot read the same variable using two widgets (e.g. a Date be entered either as text or through a special Date field, based on users’ convenience). The figure below shows an example of using expanders and horizontal layouts.
Developing custom components
In cases where the original set of widgets and visualisation possibilities of Streamlit are not enough for a certain use case, they introduced the possibility of developing custom components, which are mixtures of Python and Javascript/Typescript code. Annotations and parsing tree visualisers for NLP, graph visualisation, and some popular web components such as the Ace editor are currently among the custom components that are available. Please see https://streamlit.io/gallery?type=components&category=featured for further information.
Custom customs allow ideally infinitely extending Streamlit, without compromising its basic promise of simplicity and its model. Still, however, there may be certain use cases for which there is an explicit need to access and modify underlying web-specific elements or have the flexibility to mix client-side JavaScript code with Python. In such cases, Plotly Dash, which we introduce below, is a great choice.
Plotly Dash
Plotly Inc., the developers of the very popular plotting library of the same name, launched Dash in 2017, partially inspired by the R package Shiny. It was marketed as a “low-code” solution for creating web applications for data visualisation, and went further to be widely used for creating UI for ML apps and arguably become the “industry leader” in this space.
Dash works on top of the Python web framework Flask, the web UI library React.js and the Javascript plotting library Plotly.js. It is available for Python and R.
Dash follows a dual business model, where the open-source software is available via pip without any limitations with an MIT license, while an enterprise edition is also offered to customers who need features such as authentication, CI/CD, and technical support. Anyways, Dash open source is not a “light” version in any sense and contains everything that is required for creating a web-based dashboard.
Widgets and plots
Dash is different from Streamlit in the sense that it is more loyal to the event-based nature of UI development, whereas Streamlit completely hides this from the user. The structure of a Dash app is composed of a layout, where various components, such as input widgets and plots, are positioned, and callbacks, where the changes in the input widgets trigger interactivity and change in the output. As we mentioned above, Streamlit replaces the whole idea of callbacks with a much simpler, and also more limited, concept of persistent state.
The components that are positioned in a layout can be chosen from the standard component library of Dash, or a variety of other component libraries provided by third parties. These third-party libraries usually provide support for well-known web widget libraries, making a Dash app “look and feel” more like a typical web one. Dash Bootstrap Components is the most famous one, wrapping around the famous Bootstrap framework.
Regarding plotting, Dash natively only supports Plotly graphs, which cover a lot of common plotting needs of data-driven apps, from simple charts to machine-learning-specific plots such ROC curves. For the specific use cases where another plotting framework has to be used, Dash supports it by accepting a Graph object to plot. Graph objects can be constructed and returned by a lot of other Python plotting frameworks.
Embedding Javascript and CSS
A lot of Dash core components accept a style property that can be filled with arbitrary CSS styling. This allows a lot of flexibility in modifying the appearance of apps, making the look and feel follow a company-wide guideline or best practices in frontend programming. This is a feature that makes Dash stand out against Streamlit, where it is still very difficult, if not impossible, to apply arbitrary styling to an app.
Javascript code can be embedded into a Dash app too, enabling for example LaTeX rendering and collecting page analytics. This is again impossible in Streamlit. In general, the static assets of a web application such as CSS directives, Javascript code, and images, can be collected into a specific assets folder, and later be used in the Python code. Even event handlers can be written completely in Javascript, in which case they will be executed client-side. This helps in avoiding heavy computation loads on the server. See https://dash.plotly.com/clientside-callbacks for more information.
Accessing the underlying Server
As we already mentioned, Dash is built on top of the Flask web server in the backend, with Plotly.js and React.js in the front-end. Although no knowledge of these frameworks is necessary to use Dash, they are still available for the advanced user and can be customised to match very specialised use cases. As an example, the underlying React components corresponding to Dash components can be accessed and filtered directly, instead of relying on what is exposed via the Dash wrapper.
A much more important use of this feature, and something that is again absent in Streamlit, is to access the underlying Flask server object. The server object can later be arbitrarily optimised, for example, to match certain deployment criteria, or one can write REST endpoints served by the same server object, hence serving both the REST API of a service and its web UI by the same service. This is extremely useful when the API is supposed to be accessible from outside the Dash UI app, for example by other software or mobile applications.
Other Python Dashboarding Solution
With the steady success of Dash and the enthusiasm over Streamlit, a few other frameworks were introduced in recent years, mostly by the development team of another famous data science product (similar to Plotly for Dash). Here we just briefly mention them, leaving more investigations to the curious user to see whether one can find a unique feature in these other frameworks which is lacking in Dash and Streamlit.
The most worthy to mention among these is probably Voila from Jupyter. The target of the Voila framework is the seamless (and painless) deployment of a Jupyter notebook as a normal-looking web application. In that sense, it can become indispensable in a certain target market: When one has to, for other reasons, develop a notebook, they can also deploy the notebook as a web application at a very low cost. Voila uses a series of convenient defaults, such as hiding code cells, and works with major notebook interactivity solutions such as ipywidgets, although some other third-party notebook add-ons are not fully supported. Still, it serves well for at least non-complicated use cases of serving a notebook as a web application. More information can be found at https://voila.readthedocs.io/en/stable/.
Finally, we would like to close the discussion by mentioning two other solutions, each backed by the vendors of a well-known data science package. Wave is a web application framework recently introduced by H2O, vendors of the well-known distributed machine learning framework of the same name. It features collaborative contents as a unique capability compared to the other frameworks mentioned in this article. Apart from this, Wave enjoys, quite predictably, perfect harmony with the rest of the H2O framework and ecosystem, and is, therefore, a viable options especially for teams who already use H2O in their pipeline.
Another dashboarding solution is Panel from HoloViz. With HoloViz itself being specialised in the data visualisation industry, Panel enjoys being part of a rich ecosystem of packages for visualising and analysing diverse modalities of data, from geospatial point clouds to medical image stacks. This allows users who work on such modalities to integrate their workflow in a more seamless manner and develop custom dashboards in a fraction of time, compared to more general frameworks. More information can be found at https://holoviz.org/.
Dash vs. Streamlit: When to use which one?
As mentioned above, Dash and Streamlit lie on two opposing ends of an imaginary spectrum between simplicity and flexibility. We believe together they can cover most if not all of the use cases arising in data-driven app prototyping.
In order to decide between these two solutions, the following table may help. Depending on the specific criteria and requirement, one solution may be a better match.
(Very) minimal overhead effort: Streamlit
Need for CSS customisation: Dash
Effortless responsiveness: Streamlit(?)
REST Endpoints: Dash
Rapid Multiple Tabs / Sidebar: Streamlit
Low-latency UI: Dash
Regarding responsiveness, although Streamlit makes some effort to render widgets consistently across multiple devices, it still fails in some corner cases, especially with the newer container features. A Dash app on the other hand can become perfectly responsive like any other web application, but that requires significant work from the developer to implement responsiveness, as nothing is guaranteed out of the box.
This is actually the case in almost all rows of the table: There is almost no limitation on what can be done with Dash; it’s just a matter of implementing provided one has the corresponding web development knowledge. In almost all cases, Dash can be considered a superset of Streamlit in functionality. That means everything that can be implemented in Streamlit, can also be implemented in Dash, but not necessarily as fast and with the same effort.
References | https://medium.com/elca-data-science/streamlit-vs-dash-and-beyond-an-introduction-to-web-dashboard-development-frameworks-for-python-fec59d835784 | ['Alireza Ghasemi'] | 2021-07-19 21:30:57.538000+00:00 | ['Dashboard', 'Dash', 'Streamlit'] |
Pirate Obituaries | I recently discovered a treasure trove of pirate obituaries. The strange thing about these death notices was that they were all written in haiku. Who knew buccaneers were such poets?
These 17-syllable obituaries paint a much different picture of pirate life than you may be used to. It turns out there were a lot of ways for a pirate to meet their end.
I have taken the liberty of poorly sketching a few of my favorite pirate obituaries on index cards.
Image by Jason McBride
“Cannon Fodder” Carl
Thought his nickname was bad luck
Turns out — he was right
Image by Jason McBride
Presumed lost at sea
Paul was 4th to the liferaft
Only room for 3
Image by Jason McBride
Some die by the sword
Others perish from gunshots
Thomas choked on lunch
Image by Jason McBride
Zebediah Jones
Only had 1 fault — he snored
Was killed in his sleep
Image by Jason McBride
Bart’s gold talisman
Protected him from Voodoo
But not syphilis | https://medium.com/weirdo-poetry/pirate-obituaries-8e1f6960d94 | ['Jason Mcbride'] | 2020-11-08 14:17:54.279000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Satire', 'Pirates', 'Haiku', 'Comics'] |
Computer Vision: A Leap Towards an Accident-free World | Source- Internet
The Problem: Human Error
Article by: Himanshu Abhyankar
According to a 2019 study by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA), somewhere between 94% and 96% of all car accidents are caused by human error.
What if I told you that each year, traffic accidents account for 2.2% of world deaths. That stacks up to roughly 1.3 million a year — 3,287 a day. On top of this, some 20–50 million people are seriously injured in auto-related accidents every year, brooding right? during this blog, we are going to facilitate your understand the importance of computer vision and also the future ahead.
From distracted driving to drunk driving to reckless driving to careless driving, one poor or unattentive decision may well be the difference between a typical drive and a life-threatening situation. the basis cause? Human error.
But what if we could neutralize the human error from this equation? What if there was the simplest way to watch bad driving and forestall those actions likely to cause accidents, even before the accidents occur?
Computer Vision is a lively solution. This technology makes it possible to mitigate human error within the auto industry, assisting drivers at the wheel with tools and features that keep them from committing serious mistakes and accidents. the longer term scope extending to autonomous vehicles and self-driving transportation.
Computer Vision: The Concept
Source- Internet
In it’s simplest form, computer vision is what allows computers “see” and process visual data.
Visual data is very difficult for computers to grasp. That’s where the genius of computer vision comes in. With support from artificial intelligence, computing, neural networks, deep learning, parallel computing, and machine learning, computer vision helping to bridge the gap between computers seeing and computers comprehending what they see.
To cut it short, computer vision is that the science behind advancements like self-driving cars and Facebook’s facial and image recognition technologies. Then again how is it different from human vision? How does it neutralize human error? | https://medium.com/@himanshu-abhyankar-vitp/computer-vision-a-leap-towards-an-accident-free-world-a598044959e9 | ['Himanshu Abhyankar'] | 2020-12-24 11:33:48.455000+00:00 | ['Self Driving Cars', 'Future', 'Technology', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Computer Vision'] |
Here’s How to Break Into the Management Consulting Industry | About once every two weeks, I get a request from someone in my network to talk about making a transition to management consulting. I’m always excited to get these emails and to share with others why I think this is a great profession.
After having hundreds of these conversations, participating in recruiting efforts for all sorts of candidates, and being immersed in consulting recruiting as both a candidate and recruiter, I thought it would be helpful to write a primer for those who are interested in breaking into the industry.
My hope is that those who read this can get a high-level understanding of the ways in which someone can enter the consulting industry as well as some actionable steps they can take if they want to continue with their search.
Note: I work for a large management consulting firm and am writing this from my experience while working at my firm. While I do believe that there are many commonalities in the industry and between firms, please recognize this is written from my own personal knowledge and research, and may not be reflective of every single person’s experience or every single firms’ recruiting policies. This is a good starting point, but I urge you to conduct follow up research.
TLDR: The most common times to join a management consulting firm are out of undergrad and out of business school. If you’re a millennial and missed the boat on this, consider getting as much experience as possible in a specific industry and function give you credibility, and network the hell out the process to find a way in.*
There are 3 main ways to transfer into the management consulting industry**. They are:
Join out of Undergrad
Join out of Business School
Join from Industry
Out of Undergrad
Top Management Consulting firms pluck the best and brightest talent from top colleges and universities across the world. Consulting is based on the leverage model, where more junior staff tend to bill more hours but charge less whereas more senior staff (partners and directors) charge more per hour but bill less hours. The best way to make the leverage model work is to get lots of hard-working and intelligent talent, combine it with more senior and experienced practitioners to fill in the gaps, and deliver quality work to clients at the highest margin possible. As such, young and inexpensive analysts are critical to this, and consulting firms flock to the top colleges and universities to grab it.
One important and note that should be acknowledged: the structure of the leverage-model also feeds an up-or-out performance rating system. This means that most employees are stacked ranked against each other to determine year-end ratings (which drive performance based comp as well as promotions) Traditionally, a certain percentage of employees who rate poorly each year are asked to leave (out) while the ones at the top progress or get promoted (up)
Where do firms hire?
Generally, most firms will have established relationships with a “core” group of schools that year in and year out they turn to in order to hire top talent. Core schools are strongly entrenched, sometimes from long standing, prestigious hot beds for talent of all types (Ivy League) and sometimes because a school delivers top notch students in a few relevant areas (Information Systems, Accounting, etc.) Most firms hire in batches, and relying on a core group of schools enables a consistent flow of talent***. These core schools have alum who work at the specific firm who help firm recruiters and leadership identify top talent and attract them into the firm. Additionally, consulting firms will also take some resumes from non-core schools — the opportunities for students/candidates from non-core schools are not as abundant as those from core schools, so unfortunately, if you are from a school that is not a core school for a specific consulting firm you are interested in, you’re going to have an uphill but not impossible battle.
Other areas include: prestigious volunteer, non-profit, or social sector programs (ex: Peace Corps, Teach For America)
What Do Firms Look For?
Intellectual Horsepower — As an undergrad with no work experience, you won’t know all the answers to problems, but they want to know that you have the ability (and work ethic) to figure out solutions
— As an undergrad with no work experience, you won’t know all the answers to problems, but they want to know that you have the ability (and work ethic) to figure out solutions Ability to Learn — As a new hire, you’ll be asked to do a variety of tasks and roles. Furthermore, you can get a multitude of different projects. They want to know that you’re capable of handling whatever they throw you, and that you’re willing to learn and adapt
— As a new hire, you’ll be asked to do a variety of tasks and roles. Furthermore, you can get a multitude of different projects. They want to know that you’re capable of handling whatever they throw you, and that you’re willing to learn and adapt Client Readiness — Firms will put 22–23 year olds in front of clients and senior executives, but only if they feel comfortable with doing so. They’ll evaluate your poise and polish, as well as your ability to develop and manage relationships with leaders who are more senior than you
Firms will put 22–23 year olds in front of clients and senior executives, but only if they feel comfortable with doing so. They’ll evaluate your poise and polish, as well as your ability to develop and manage relationships with leaders who are more senior than you Leadership — You might be tasked with leading a team or in some cases your client. As someone who is younger, they want to know you have the leadership ability to handle this. They’ll examine any leadership experiences you’ve had, whether it’s through a club, business or campus activity.
— You might be tasked with leading a team or in some cases your client. As someone who is younger, they want to know you have the leadership ability to handle this. They’ll examine any leadership experiences you’ve had, whether it’s through a club, business or campus activity. Business Acumen/Interest — Consulting is about solving business problems and identifying business opportunities. As such, they’ll want to know you have some basic understanding of business concepts along with an eager interest in learning more. This does not mean you have to study business formally, but at least be versed and engaged with various relevant topics
Key Steps to Take
Identify if you are a core school — If you are an undergraduate student, figure out if your school is a core school for any firm you are interested in. If companies are coming to campus, attend their events, which tend to be meet and greets, sponsored panels, case competitions, and coffee chats.
— If you are an undergraduate student, figure out if your school is a core school for any firm you are interested in. If companies are coming to campus, attend their events, which tend to be meet and greets, sponsored panels, case competitions, and coffee chats. Reach out to Alum — Start connecting with alum, particularly those who are close in age to you and who have recently graduated from your school. They are closest in you to age and can relate to what you are going to, and are used as gatekeepers early on in the recruiting process to help sort through the pile of candidates. Getting on their good side is a favorable thing. LinkedIn will be your best friend (if it is not already) and don’t be afraid to use it to find alum to connect with. If you don’t know how to reach out to network here is a good primer to start
Start connecting with alum, particularly those who are close in age to you and who have recently graduated from your school. They are closest in you to age and can relate to what you are going to, and are used as gatekeepers early on in the recruiting process to help sort through the pile of candidates. Getting on their good side is a favorable thing. LinkedIn will be your best friend (if it is not already) and don’t be afraid to use it to find alum to connect with. If you don’t know how to reach out to network here is a good primer to start Non-Core Hustle — If you go to a school that is a non-core school for a firm and you want to work there, you’re going to have to find another way to get on their radar. The best way to do that is to network and build relationships with people at the firm.
Out of Graduate School
Almost all Management Consulting firms pluck talent from the Top MBA Programs around the world. Recent MBAs are a great way for these firms to replace the former undergrad hires who move on after 2–4 years to pursue their own MBAs or other opportunities. These two streams of campus hires are the backbone that allows the firms’ leverage models to keep chugging along. Consulting favors those who are willing to accelerate their career and MBA programs are some of the best environments to find these types of people. Often times, people go to business school, work for a consulting firm for a few years, and use that as a launching point into a higher level job with an organization that might have taken much longer had they not gotten advanced degree/worked in consulting. This is an oversimplification of how it works in reality (a post for a different day) but for many this at is the ideal dream.
There is a formal process that most firms follow when they recruit top MBA students to their firms, and if you’re in business school you probably are familiar with this. For those of you who are a few years into your professional career and are looking to make a change to management consulting, getting an MBA and transitioning into consulting is a very popular and well-worn path (nothing is guaranteed, but many have and will continue to do this) Consulting firms hire MBA’s for their generalist business acumen, work ethic, propensity for career acceleration, and their willingness to pick up and learn. In some cases, a firm will hire you because of your past experience in a particular industry or function if you demonstrate significant acumen in that field, but it is not always necessary.
Consulting firms like diversity of thought, and do look to other Master’s programs to hire, such as JD’s, MD’s, etc. If you are in one of these programs, know that consulting is an option, but it probably will not be as high abundance of opportunities as other jobs in your given Master’s program.
What do Firms look for?
Analytical Horsepower — They’ll look at your ability to analyze data and information and solve complex problems while being able to articulate the solutions in a confident and concise manner
— They’ll look at your ability to analyze data and information and solve complex problems while being able to articulate the solutions in a confident and concise manner Demonstrated Business Acumen — They look for people who have a well-rounded business knowledge about various functions and disciplines. You can be put on a myriad of projects solving different business problems so they’ll look for people who are comfortable talking to various business issues and functions
— They look for people who have a well-rounded business knowledge about various functions and disciplines. You can be put on a myriad of projects solving different business problems so they’ll look for people who are comfortable talking to various business issues and functions Leadership — Consulting is a team sport, and they’ll want to know you have the ability to lead in times of struggle and in times of prosperity, as well as your ability to lead and influence when you have formal power and when you don’t
— Consulting is a team sport, and they’ll want to know you have the ability to lead in times of struggle and in times of prosperity, as well as your ability to lead and influence when you have formal power and when you don’t Client Readiness — Building and managing relationships is a critical skillset for consultants. They’ll want to feel confident that they can put you in front of clients
— Building and managing relationships is a critical skillset for consultants. They’ll want to feel confident that they can put you in front of clients Previous Experience — Any knowledge or skills from your previous work experience that could be relevant and helpful to your time as a consultant
An Important Note: Like any thoughtful individual or organization, consulting firms like to de-risk and increase the chances of success when at all possible. One way to do this is to hire people who have multiple markers of past success/credibility that lead the firm to believe they will be successful as a consultant. For example, if you have a degree (and did well) in a very hard/quantitative field of study, that is a marker of success. If you have significant industry or functional experience (ex: Healthcare, Supply Chain/Operations) that could be considered a marker of success. The point of sharing this is that many people who attend business school assume that anyone can make the transition from whatever they did into consulting, and while this does happen for some people, it is not as simple as going from a musician to a management consultant (sorry musicians, still love you.)
Key Steps to Take
MBA Students — Follow the recruiting process that your school has outlined.
— Follow the recruiting process that your school has outlined. Potential Grad School/MBA Aspirants — In addition to determining if getting a graduate degree is right for you, start looking out for and networking with people who have A) worked in consulting B) have an advanced degree and C) did something similar before business school to what you are doing. Talk to them about how they were able to make the transition and get a sense of what their process looked like. Also, read some primers on the basics of consulting. Here’s a good place to start. Finally, do some due diligence on schools. Figure out what schools are a fit for you, but then, figure out how those schools fare in placing MBA students at firms you desire to work for. You’ll want to make sure you end up at a school that will give you a shot at those companies you are targeting. Poets and Quants has a lot of great material
Industry Hire
A great consulting team leverages the collective intelligence of its team. Everyone brings something to the table, and everyone has skills and expertise that is valuable. Hiring people from “industry,” and who have a specific area of expertise, deep experience in a particular field****, or just those who are incredibly knowledgeable on a topic or issue is critical to the success of a consulting team. Furthermore, since most firms tend to organize themselves in some way by “industry” or “sector” it makes sense to hire experienced practitioners in those given industries and sectors.
Consulting firms are structured and operate in very opaque ways, especially when you are an outsider looking in. It will make more sense when you are on the inside (I guarantee it will still be confusing) As such, it’s critical to have some inside help. The more you can tap into your network of people you know who already work at specific firms you are targeting, or, if you can build relationships with people at those firms, the better your chances are. Since industry hires tend to be at higher levels and also targeting those with more experience, the postings and roles are generally speaking, on average more targeted and specific as opposed to the more generalist approaches that firms take with undergrad and graduate recruiting. This means that you’ll want to make sure you are applying to roles that are a good fit for your background (ex: if you’ve worked 10 years in healthcare, apply to roles in the healthcare practice at a firm instead of the retail practice)
What are some examples of good experience/expertise?
Functional Expertise — Ex: 20 years in Supply Chain and Operations
— Ex: 20 years in Supply Chain and Operations Industry Expertise — 15 Years in the healthcare industry
— 15 Years in the healthcare industry Capability/Topic Expertise — 10 years of IT Security work along with industry certifications
What Do Firms Look For?
Deep Industry or Functional or Capability Expertise — They’ll look for deep knowledge and expertise, ideally in an industry or function from your past work experience
— They’ll look for deep knowledge and expertise, ideally in an industry or function from your past work experience Familiarity with Consulting/Client Service Engagement Model — If you work in consulting, this should not be an issue, but if you don’t work in consulting they’ll want to see that you are familiar with the kinds of engagements/projects and the way that consulting firms work, which tends to be a bit different than working in “industry.”
— If you work in consulting, this should not be an issue, but if you don’t work in consulting they’ll want to see that you are familiar with the kinds of engagements/projects and the way that consulting firms work, which tends to be a bit different than working in “industry.” Leadership and Project Management — Industry hires tend to be more experienced and thus closer towards manager type roles. As a result, they’ll look for you to have capabilities and experience in leading and managing teams and projects and engagements
— Industry hires tend to be more experienced and thus closer towards manager type roles. As a result, they’ll look for you to have capabilities and experience in leading and managing teams and projects and engagements Sales and Business Development — Consulting boils down to two things: Selling projects and delivering on those projects. As a result, they’ll look for people who have experience or knowledge of business development, relationship management, proposal/pursuit/RFP experience
Key Steps to Take
Know Your Experience — Determine what your expertise is and what you bring to the table. Is it industry, capability, functional, or something else?
— Determine what your expertise is and what you bring to the table. Is it industry, capability, functional, or something else? Due Diligence — Start researching firms that are aligned to your area of expertise, and start looking for open postings
— Start researching firms that are aligned to your area of expertise, and start looking for open postings Network — Reach out to your network to find people who work at specific companies you are interested in. Most firms give some sort of referral bonus for referring employees, so if you can end up somewhere you can also help a friend in the process.
Conclusion
There are three main ways to break into consulting (as discussed above) but as always, your mileage may vary. While the bulk of the recruiting goes through these channels there will always be alternative ways into firms. Consulting is a relationships-based business and that applies to recruiting and identifying talent. If you believe you have the capabilities, experiences and competencies to be a consultant at a management consulting firm, doing your homework, hustling, and building the right relationships can put you on the right path to future career opportunities.
Resources
General
MBA
Footnotes
*For my millennial friends, I realize you may be wanting to make a career switch — my recommendation is to start by using your industry or function and determining on a scale of 1–10 how much expertise you have in that particular industry or function. From there, I would look for firms that are hiring for your specific industry or function. The reality is that while you are good at your job, you are going to be competing against people who have double or triple the experience as you do. This does not mean you cannot make the move, it does make it a bit more competitive and thus you’ll have to work a little bit harder to find some opportunities.
**One exception to some of these rules is for those who are interested in various forms of Technology and IT consulting. If you have experience in these fields and especially in hot skillsets (Salesforce, various coding languages, etc.) there are going to be lots of opportunities for you in various forms of technology consulting.
***Goldman Sachs recently decided to do modify how it recruits and expand beyond just its core schools for it’s summer analyst recruiting. They realized that there was no correlation between their students from core schools and long term success at the firm. As such, their first round interviews will be conducted via video interview, which will enable a wider talent pool from them to hire from and more students from non-core schools who would normally not had the chance to interview with Goldman a shot at a summer internship. Prestigious companies in consulting and banking are known to be fast followers so this is early stages but I would expect others to follow suit within the next few years. This should mean that more students will have a shot at an internship at Goldman Sachs, which I think is a good thing for all parties involved
****I use the term “deep experience” in this section. While I don’t think it would be fair for me to put a number on the years of experience, I would say, generally speaking, it’s usually on the side of more rather than less. As a result, my millennial friends with anywhere from 2–6 years’ experience you may find it a bit tougher to find opportunities than perhaps some of your more experienced peers. This does not mean you cannot find roles that fit your background (there are some) nor does it mean you can’t transition into consulting, it just means it’s a bit harder to do. As a consultant, you are the sum of your knowledge and your experiences, and when you have less age you just have less experience.
*****Special Thanks to Nick for his advice and guidance in writing this piece | https://medium.com/mbaschooled/heres-how-to-break-into-the-management-consulting-industry-80ee83669c64 | ['Al Dea'] | 2016-07-23 23:05:55.950000+00:00 | ['Mba', 'Education', 'Recruiting', 'Consulting', 'Careers'] |
RSA Cryptography: The Math and Logic Behind Secure Data Transmission | THE MORE “GENERAL” EXPLANATION
Take a look at attached diagram above, Figure 2.
We have two people, Bob and Alice. Alice wants to send Bob a piece of confidential information (represented by the box). However, hackers are lurking around, so Alice uses public key encryption to ensure that Bob gets hold of the information safe and sound.
Bob sends Alice his lock. Think of this as a virtual fingerprint that Alice will attach to the piece of information so that only Bob is authorized to access it. Bob has the corresponding key to unlock his lock; he is the only person with that key.
Alice then receives his lock, and attaches it to the parcel of information. She then encodes it and sends it off to Bob.
Bob receives the information, and uses his key (that corresponds to his lock), in order to access the information.
Without public key encryption, the lock and key mechanism that Bob and Alice uses will not be present. This leaves the information parcel as a “free for all”, meaning that any attacker can easily intercept the parcel and access it.
(Katz et al., n.d.) | https://medium.com/quantum-outreach/rsa-cryptography-the-math-and-logic-behind-secure-data-transmission-437c62ae2b4f | ['Quantum Outreach'] | 2021-04-02 23:08:27.085000+00:00 | ['Rsa', 'Cryptography', 'Technology', 'Science'] |
Pagan Christmas | I wrote this in 2006. Each year I post it, and while it’s been 14 years now, it’s all the more relevant this year: this year when we have all been through so much. This year when we have faced down a global pandemic, political unrest and a social and cultural awakening long in coming (and I hope long-lasting).
A year when we were all isolated and longing for connection. When we were spurred into taking hard looks at ourselves and forced to admit we could be better. Do more.
Where a lot of his faces feeling helpless against so much that is so big, and yet not hopeless and got to work.
Now, when I feel it’s more important then ever to recognize we each have the power to create great, ever-lasting change.
Now, when I want you to feel the magic and possibility — - to feel empowered and joyous and loving. Open and inspired for change.
Hopeful.
We need that so much. We all need it now more than ever.
And so I want to share with you how my tiny Pagan family celebrates Christmas. Not Yule or Solstice — but why we participate and revel in this oh so Christian season. With all our hearts….
This all started with a conversation we were having on how we would. explain to our someday-kids what Christmas was, and then, most. confusingly, why we celebrate it. I mean, Sam and I are Pagans. I am a Witch. There is. no denying it, no shying away from it. And that is how we plan to raise. our children. There will be no Easter for them, no All Saints Day. How. will we explain the sudden onslaught of Christian winter-time tradition. in our home?
Because, well, there it is. It’s not blatant, or. overly wrought, but it’s there nonetheless. Sure, instead of a crèche we. have a Rudolph scene complete with not one, but FOUR Bumbles and three Jedis. There are the trees, the ornaments, the lights, my eight hour playlist of Christmas carols … everything.
Not to mention, of course, there will be a Christmas morning. Fully resplendent with hot chocolate, homemade cinnamon rolls, filled stockings and presents under the tree.
How. to explain? Sam mentioned it might be a tad confusing. I scoffed at. him. He mentioned perhaps we could scale back a little. I almost refused. to continue speaking to him.
I mean, I LURVE me some holidays. And while our “true” holiday is Solstice, which our family celebrates in full rigmarole and joyous occasion — I simply will not give up Christmas morning. Or the carols. (All the other stuff I. could keep, as it was all stolen/borrowed/repurposed from Pagan traditions to begin with anyway. But the “Silent Nights,” “Holy Holies” and “God Rest Ye’s” — there’s no real getting around that.)
Yet to me, the explanation is quite simple.
I’m not celebrating the birth of our savior, god’s only son. I’m not celebrating all that entails, and by the look of the general marketplace, neither are a lot of other people.
I am, however, celebrating the birth of a child and the hope that surrounded that child. Christmas, to me, is about the sheer wonder and amazing tenacity a large part of the world showed (shows) over the birth of one, small, helpless babe.
I love the story. I always have. A. small family, not royal, not famous, not rich, expects a child. Under circumstances that aren’t ideal. They do their best to prepare; they do their best to be safe. And while they are trying desperately to keep it. together — to make a home, a safe respite for their small surprise blessing — something else happens. The news inexplicably spreads. Kings lift up their scabbards, robes, and scepters and begin traveling to where they believe the baby will be. Small groups of shepherds herd their flocks to be near; people gather. All kinds of people from all kinds of places. Backgrounds, beliefs and alliances are set aside. They simply gather with hope in their hearts, anticipation in their souls.
They believe that this small babe will change the world. Make it better. Make it brighter, bring them light.
They don’t know how, or why. Just that this will happen. And they want to. play a part. They want to honor this symbol of hope, this symbol of light. This child. They want to kneel before him, before his family, on that dark night. They know not what else to do.
But somehow, in the story, that is enough; that they believe in the hope of this child. That the world can be made better, different, more lovely. Peaceful. Hopeful. Beautiful.
By this, the smallest of creatures.
(Who among us, even today, wants to believe differently?)
People’s hearts were turned that night. And stayed turned for centuries. All because one small child was born. Because people believed that was all it took.
One. Small. Child.
Savior or no, I still believe that’s all it takes. The hope that one small, helpless, lone being can change the course of a world gone wrong; can turn hearts and minds to a. better place. To make a better place.
Sure, most people celebrate Christmas because their savior was born that night. I. celebrate because a CHILD was born that night. That thousands were — and are, and will continue to be — born that night, this night, and all the nights to follow. And with each comes the blessed hope that things will be made Right. Better. Peaceful.
Our world can change its course, and with every night star, every birth, every gathering — that hope should be renewed. Should be recognized, acted upon, celebrated.
Because, each of us, in our time, was that child. We were that hope. We are that hope. We perpetuate it.
This world will change. It will become the place those kings and shepherds dreamed of. The one angels from the stars announced and promised. We. just need to have that kind of belief, that kind of hope in our hearts. Christmas is a time, I believe, to remember that. This Christmas especially.
If once, centuries ago, the world stopped for a mere night in the awe of hope that one small child would bring light to a darkening place — than perhaps we should too. Perhaps the idea that one small, ordinary person can change our world, our lives, isn’t such a crazy notion.
Perhaps the thought that we can do so isn’t so crazy, either.
That’s what I tell my kids at least. That they were born one day, to a small family that desperately only wanted to do right by them — give. them a safe, happy home. And that this family believed, with everything in their hearts, that their child would make this crazy, tossed up, frightening world a truly brighter and better place.
That we each can.
And every Christmas season I recognize that. That each child is born beneath. bright, clear stars — with the power to bring kings to their knees and make angels sing. And that is worth recognizing, celebrating, honoring.
At least I think so.
Merry Christmas, from your very own witch. xo | https://medium.com/@mistybellstiers/pagan-christmas-35359b39c0e2 | ['Misty Bell Stiers'] | 2020-12-14 15:14:42.912000+00:00 | ['Witch', 'Christmas', 'Magic', 'Pagan'] |
What Makes For a Senior-Friendly Destination? | A travel segment that far too many places tend to neglect are Seniors.
Seniors have the time and money to spend on holidays, and take their families with them. So why is it that not many hotels or destinations pay enough attention to them?
When it comes to Senior-Friendly Destinations, these locations should be able to not only be visited but also enjoyed thoroughly by elderly people.
Accessibility
A main feature of a senior-friendly destination is that they are easy to get to and move around by those who find it difficult to, or are unable to, walk. In such places, there are usually elevators up and down, and shuttle services from rooms / facilities that are located far away. Stairs would be minimal and always accompanied by the option of a ramp for wheelchair-bound customers.
(I was at Amaya Lake, one of the most unique Dambulla hotels I have been to, and I was pleasantly surprised by how suitable it was for elderly people. Indeed, there were many elderly people having a really nice time there.
Activities
Something that a lot of people overlook, or simply neglect to think about at all, is that not only should Seniors be able to get to and move around the place freely, but there should also be plentiful things for them to do on-site.
Activities offered should be relaxing, such as a leisurely walk through nature (with resting areas at regular intervals), or a lovely meal experience (e.g. high tea by the lake overlooking mountains). Any background music playing in public areas should be soft and soothing.
Climate
Senior-friendly destinations have milder climates to suit elderly people, who do not thrive in climates that are too cold, too warm or too wet.
Hotels & Rooms
Hotel rooms allocated to seniors should not be too far away from main areas, but far enough to be peaceful and quiet, away from the hustle and bustle of activity. The room temperature should be easily adjustable to suit their wishes, and the beds should provide good support and low enough to get on and get off easily from.
The property should also be clearly depicted in the form of maps with directions clearly marked so that elders can go from place to place without much confusion.
And perhaps the most crucial requirement of all are the smiling faces of the staff who would have enough patience to be happy enough to answer the questions (sometimes repeatedly) to seniors and explain things clearly. | https://medium.com/@anuradhasilva1234/what-makes-for-a-senior-friendly-destination-da655ba2e98d | ['Anuradha Silva'] | 2019-11-15 11:21:41.423000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Family Vacation', 'Travel Tips', 'Elders', 'Senior Friendly'] |
Scholarships:Your dream to pursue education | World Education Services in 2020 reported that only 6% of Pakistani students continue their studies after 12th Grade. There are so many reasons for this alarming situation i.e. lack of fundamental facilities in educational institutions, the under-qualified teaching staff and high tuition fees. Moreover, Pakistan spent only 2.9% of its GDP on education in 2017. Factors like poor economy, budget shortfall and inflation, severely affect the education sector and other sectors of the country as well.
However, the good news is that there are many scholarships for the students both at national level and international level. Funding agencies love to support the needy and talented students financially. Government of Pakistan has also initiated many programs in collaboration with Higher Education Commission of Pakistan (HEC) i.e. Ehsaas scholarship program, Aghaz e haqooq Baluchistan, faculty development program, overseas scholarship program and many more. Financial assistance is a necessity for many students, particularly those planning careers that require many years of education beyond the undergraduate level. Scholarships have unique benefits and are the most desirable form of financial aid. But without proper guidance and insufficient information we cannot get the scholarship. Recently, Pakistan has been excluded from Commonwealth Masters Scholarships, United Kingdom and Orange Knowledge Program, Netherlands. The funding agencies said that it is due to Covid-19 situation and lack of funds. Whatever the reason is, I believe if our students and youth are guided properly they are capable of doing wonders. For example, in 2020 Pakistan was the top country in terms of number of applicants and remained 3rd in the world for number of scholarships awarded. This was possible because of proper mentor-ship and guidance by the seniors.
Pakistan was 3rd in the World for number of scholarships awarded.
During one of my sessions, I asked my students about the challenges they’re facing while applying for scholarships. Most of them mentioned that the biggest challenge they’re facing is preparing the documents and other prerequisites of scholarships. There’s a lack of information. No one is guiding the youth. They have no idea from where they should start. For example some of them were unable to write their personal statement, some were facing issues while contacting the university professors while others found it difficult to write essays as a part of their scholarship application.
Student has all the information but has no idea about the initial step.
This interaction with students helped me to get closer to my goal (mentoring the students and youth). Discussing with them helped me to identify more problems and challenges faced by the students. I started collecting more and more information about the scholarships. And I am in a good position to convince my group members for starting this project as our mega project. Although its a tiresome but essential job and I’m up for this challenge. | https://medium.com/@mohsin169/scholarships-your-dream-to-pursue-education-34bd11d4d11b | ['Mohsin Raza'] | 2020-12-24 18:53:54.857000+00:00 | ['Scholarship', 'Mentorship', 'Scholarships For Students', 'Amal Academy'] |
KUBERNETES USE CASE— ADFORM | What is Kubernetes?
The name KUBERNETES originates from Greek, meaning helmsman or pilot.
Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. It has a large, rapidly growing ecosystem. Kubernetes services, support, and tools are widely available.
Google open-sourced the Kubernetes project in 2014. Kubernetes combines over 15 years of Google’s experience running production workloads at scale with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community.
Key Features of Kubernetes:
Given below are the key features of handling Kubernetes in organizations:
Scalability: Kubernetes helps scale without putting the burden on the company’s operation team. Flexibility: Kubernetes also provides ample flexibility during the tasks and grows alongside to deliver you consistent applications — no matter how complicated your task is. Automation: It helps in putting containers automatically in place of their exact resource requirements. It even takes care of other constraints without compromising with availability. Furthermore, it provides the best effort for workloads for driving save resources and utilization. Self-Healing: Kubernetes even replace, restart and reschedule containers that are failing whenever their nodes die. It even kills contains that are not responding on time. Run Anywhere: Kubernetes also gives you proper freedom for enjoying the benefits of on-premises, public or hybrid cloud infrastructure, as well as enables you to move workloads effortlessly anywhere they are needed. Self-Discovery and Load Balancing: This system even provides containers with unique IP addresses, along with a single DNS , load balance and name for different sets of containers. Automated Rollouts and Rollbacks: This system even rolls out progressively to make changes in your application or its overall configuration. Meanwhile, it monitors the health of your application for ensuring it won’t harm any process while working. If something goes unplanned, Kubernetes can automatically roll-back the unwanted change for you. Batch Execution: Besides replacing the failing containers, Kubernetes even manages your continuous integration workloads and batch execution, if desired.
Architecture of Kubernetes :
What is Kubernetes used for?
Kubernetes is used to create applications that are easy to manage and deploy anywhere. When available as a managed service, Kubernetes offers you a range of solutions to meet your needs. Here are some common use cases.
Increasing development velocity :
Kubernetes helps you to build cloud-native microservices-based apps. It also supports containerization of existing apps, thereby becoming the foundation of application modernization and letting you develop apps faster.
Deploying applications anywhere :
Kubernetes is built to be used anywhere, allowing you to run your applications across on-site deployments and public clouds; as well as hybrid deployments in between. So you can run your applications where you need them.
Running efficient services :
Kubernetes can automatically adjust the size of a cluster required to run a service. This enables you to automatically scale your applications, up and down, based on the demand and run them efficiently.
CASE STUDY : ADFORM
Challenge
Adform’s mission is to provide a secure and transparent full stack of advertising technology to enable digital ads across devices. The company has a large infrastructure: OpenStack-based private clouds running on 1,100 physical servers in 7 data centers around the world, 3 of which were opened in the past year. With the company’s growth, the infrastructure team felt that “our private cloud was not really flexible enough,” says IT System Engineer Edgaras Apšega. “The biggest pain point is that our developers need to maintain their virtual machines, so rolling out technology and new software takes time. We were really struggling with our releases, and we didn’t have self-healing infrastructure.”
Solution
The team, which had already been using Prometheus for monitoring, embraced Kubernetes and cloud native practices in 2017. “To start our Kubernetes journey, we had to adapt all our software, so we had to choose newer frameworks,” says Apšega. “We also adopted the microservices way, so observability is much better because you can inspect the bug or the services separately.”
Impact
“Kubernetes helps our business a lot because our features are coming to market faster,” says Apšega. The release process went from several hours to several minutes. Autoscaling has been at least 6 times faster than the semi-manual VM bootstrapping and application deployment required before. The team estimates that the company has experienced cost savings of 4–5x due to less hardware and fewer man hours needed to set up the hardware and virtual machines, metrics, and logging. Utilization of the hardware resources has been reduced as well, with containers notching 2–3 times more efficiency over virtual machines. “The deployments are very easy because developers just push the code and it automatically appears on Kubernetes,” says Apšega. Prometheus has also had a positive impact: “It provides high availability for metrics and alerting. We monitor everything starting from hardware to applications. Having all the metrics in Grafana dashboards provides great insight on your systems.”
Adform made headlines last year when it detected the HyphBot ad fraud network that was costing some businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars a day.
With its mission to provide a secure and transparent full stack of advertising technology to enable an open internet, Adform published a white paper revealing what it did — and others could too — to limit customers’ exposure to the scam.
In that same spirit, Adform is sharing its cloud native journey. “When you see that everyone shares their best practices, it inspires you to contribute back to the project,” says IT Systems Engineer Edgaras Apšega.
The company has a large infrastructure: OpenStack-based private clouds running on 1,100 physical servers in their own seven data centers around the world, three of which were opened in the past year. With the company’s growth, the infrastructure team felt that “our private cloud was not really flexible enough,” says Apšega. “The biggest pain point is that our developers need to maintain their virtual machines, so rolling out technology and new software really takes time. We were really struggling with our releases, and we didn’t have self-healing infrastructure.”
The fact that Cloud Native Computing Foundation incubated Kubernetes was a really big point for us because it was vendor neutral. And we can see that a community really gathers around it. Everyone shares their experiences, their knowledge, and the fact that it’s open source, you can contribute.
The team, which had already been using Prometheus for monitoring, embraced Kubernetes, microservices, and cloud native practices.
A proof of concept project was started, with a Kubernetes cluster running on bare metal in the data center. When developers saw how quickly containers could be spun up compared to the virtual machine process, “they wanted to ship their containers in production right away, and we were still doing proof of concept,” says IT Systems Engineer Andrius Cibulskis.
The first production cluster was launched in the spring of 2018, and is now up to 20 physical machines dedicated for pods throughout three data centers, with plans for separate clusters in the other four data centers. The user-facing Adform application platform, data distribution platform, and back ends are now all running on Kubernetes. “Many APIs for critical applications are being developed for Kubernetes,” says Apšega. “Teams are rewriting their applications to .NET core, because it supports containers, and preparing to move to Kubernetes. And new applications, by default, go in containers.”
Releases are really nice for them, because they just push their code to Git and that’s it. They don’t have to worry about their virtual machines anymore.
This big push has been driven by the real impact that these new practices have had. “Kubernetes helps our business a lot because our features are coming to market faster,” says Apšega. “The deployments are very easy because developers just push the code and it automatically appears on Kubernetes.” The release process went from several hours to several minutes. Autoscaling is at least six times faster than the semi-manual VM bootstrapping and application deployment required before.
The team estimates that the company has experienced cost savings of 4–5x due to less hardware and fewer man hours needed to set up the hardware and virtual machines, metrics, and logging. Utilization of the hardware resources has been reduced as well, with containers notching two to three times more efficiency over virtual machines.
All of these benefits have trickled down to individual team members, whose working lives have been changed for the better. “They used to have to get up at night to re-start some services, and now Kubernetes handles all of that, Even the security teams have been impacted. Security teams are always not happy,” says Apšega, “and now they’re happy because they can easily inspect the containers.”
The company plans to remain in the data centers for now, “mostly because we want to keep all the data, to not share it in any way,” says Cibulskis, “and it’s cheaper at our scale.” But, Apšega says, the possibility of using a hybrid cloud for computing is intriguing: “One of the projects we’re interested in is the Virtual Kubelet that lets you spin up the working nodes on different clouds to do some computing.”
“I think that our company just started our cloud native journey. It seems like a huge road ahead, but we’re really happy that we joined it.”
Thanks for Reading😇😊 | https://medium.com/@priyanka-bhide173/kubernetes-use-case-adform-17c334fe9998 | ['Priyanka Bhide'] | 2020-12-25 15:06:01.028000+00:00 | ['Case Study', 'Kubernetes', 'Orchestration'] |
Tequila Don Julio and West Elm Team Up for the Ultimate Summer Sweepstakes | Peachy Paloma Created by Mixologist Makeda Gebre
Summer isn’t dependent on the destination, it’s a mindset. No matter what the location, you’re doing summer right as long as you have great company and delicious cocktails. This summer, Tequila Don Julio has partnered with global design company West Elm to help create the ultimate summer entertaining setup!
Now, consumers can enter the Summer On With Don sweepstakes for the chance to win $5,000 from West Elm towards building out their dream at-home oasis this year, and a once-in-a-lifetime all expenses paid trip to Tequila Don Julio’s home in Jalisco, Mexico next year.
To enter, head to SummerOn.DonJulio.com or via Instagram by tagging #SummerOnWithDon, #Sweepstakes, and @DonJulioTequila to show how you’ve invited Tequila Don Julio into your home, for the chance to visit our home, the home of tequila, next year.
Lifestyle and Travel Influencer Zack Kalter Creates a #SummerOnWithDon At-Home Oasis from Los Angeles, CA
Not only that, but 20 runners up will also be chosen to receive $500 toward creating their at-home paradise this year, along with limited edition Tequila Don Julio merchandise.
For each entry, Tequila Don Julio is donating $1 to Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation to support continued COVID-19 relief in the bar and restaurant world. Giving back while entering to win prizes with the click of a button? Like we said, Tequila Don Julio and West Elm are here to help everyone Summer On. | https://medium.com/@tjbdaily/tequila-don-julio-and-west-elm-team-up-for-the-ultimate-summer-sweepstakes-d9be87faa2f6 | ['Tony Bowles', 'Contributing Columnist'] | 2020-08-07 17:03:08.288000+00:00 | ['Cocktails', 'Summer'] |
A brief guide to pick the right outdoor furniture | Outdoor areas are both calming and entertaining, particularly when you need a break from housework. As a result, selecting excellent and long-lasting outdoor furniture is just as crucial as selecting interior furniture. It, too, is deserving of the same level of care and concern, and it might provide you and your family with just as much enjoyment.
Because Hotel patio furniture is typically more exposed, there must be additional considerations to be made when adding new furniture to your yard or outside space.
The weather has been the most important consideration while selecting patio furniture. Periodic changes in weather must not be a problem for the Modern outdoor furniture. As a result, consider the following questions:
· Is it hot and humid outside?
· What is the frequency of rain?
· Do you live in a location with a lot of humidity?
It’s crucial to think about how big your outdoor area is. When choosing patio furniture, keep the open areas between pieces in mind so you may move about freely. If you possess a little space, a bar table is a great alternative to an outside table.
Choosing components that can be used for numerous purposes adds a lot of value. Why purchase two items when you can get one that fulfils two functions?
Relaxation is the purpose of outdoor places. As a result, you should ensure that the patio furniture you choose is comfy for you. Consider purchasing or making your own cushions if the chairs and couches do not come with them. Pick high-quality Luxury patio furniture and materials that will withstand all types of weather without fading or moulding. During the monsoon season, it’s a good idea to keep your pillows somewhere dry.
It’s critical to look after your patio furniture if you want it to last. It’s also a good idea to choose items which can be cleansed quickly with a moist cloth or simply hosed off. | https://medium.com/@barmar1268/a-brief-guide-to-pick-the-right-outdoor-furniture-c16f860d05 | [] | 2021-11-30 10:01:01.169000+00:00 | ['Modern Outdoor Furniture', 'Luxury Outdoor Furniture', 'Furniture Design', 'Furniture', 'Hotel Patio Furniture'] |
Lessons From Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” | Lessons From Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea”
Understanding the value of struggle
The first time I read “The Old Man and the Sea”, I found it a chore and a nuisance, and it took me a week to slouch through the 100 pages. That’s because I didn’t have a clue about life — I was a 16-year-old kid with an almost exclusive focus on the trivial.
The second time I read the same book, I read it in a single breathless afternoon. Then I spent days thinking about it. I was a 33-year-old man. This time I identified with the book’s protagonist, for two reasons. The first is that I understood the value of struggle by this time. The second is that we will all, one day, be that old man, rowing all alone into the open ocean. This fact easily escapes the teenage mind.
What can we learn from the old man, then?
On luck
Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.
The old man wakes up early for eighty-four days in a row and doesn’t catch a single fish. His reaction? On the eighty-fifth day, he wakes up even earlier and goes out even further on the ocean.
To rely on luck is a fool’s game. To rely on resilience is the opposite. It is good to be lucky, but a man can’t decide to be lucky. He can only decide to keep trying and to keep stacking the odds in his favor.
On respect
I wish I could feed the fish, he thought. He is my brother. But I must kill him and keep strong to do it.
When the old man finally hooks his great fish, he doesn’t treat it with contempt. He shows no signs of relief or gloating. He treats the giant fish as his arch-enemy, his dark shadow beneath the waves. His resolve doesn’t cast negative feelings towards his foe.
There are few ideas so widely spread throughout the world’s traditions, and yet so rarely implemented by man, than loving your enemy. It takes effort to understand that hate, contempt, and ridicule don’t hurt your enemy; they only hinder your actions and blur your focus. Your opponent invariably profits if you are blinded by negative emotions.
On suffering
After he judged that his right hand had been in the water long enough he took it out and looked at it. “It is not bad,” he said. “And pain does not matter to a man.”
The old man doesn’t dismiss his pain in bravado or shallow self-encouragement. He does it matter-of-factly as if re-stating an epiphany he reached a long time ago.
The ability to stoically endure hardship produces increased confidence, belief in one’s abilities, and the respect of one’s peers. Nobody wants to hear you complain, and you shouldn’t stand for your own complaints either. People who know they can endure a lot are more willing to take on a difficult, but rewarding, challenge.
On competition
I must hold his pain where it is, he thought. Mine does not matter. I can control mine. But his pain could drive him mad.
The old man is not stronger, faster, or more stubborn than the fish. His advantage lies in controlling his pain, and his emotional responses.
Many battles are won by outlasting the competitor. You can win a boxing match by being able to take more punishment. You can defeat a competing company by being willing to go longer without turning a profit. Willingness to sacrifice is an excellent predictor of success.
On preparedness
You should have brought many things, he thought. But you did not bring them, old man. Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.
If he did not bring everything he needed, so what? The only purpose of registering what you did wrong is to do it right the next time.
In the present, we can only put in our best effort to succeed with what we’ve got. There is a time for planning, and mid-battle is not that time. Mid-battle is the time for sharpness and intensity and singular focus. | https://medium.com/live-your-life-on-purpose/lessons-from-hemingways-the-old-man-and-the-sea-9c864f1fd61 | ['Jovan Cicmil'] | 2020-09-22 19:02:18.300000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Motivation', 'Psychology', 'Books', 'Business'] |
Wikipedia Web Traffic Time Series Forecasting-Part 2 | Hello all, this is the 2nd part of our series, the series includes-
In the previous blog, we saw detailed analysis of the data. Now, it’s time to start some feature engineering and building models.
Table of Content-
Baseline Model Feature Engineering Modelling Deployment Future Work References
1. Baseline Model-
First, we will make prediction only based on medians of the data and we will use it as our baseline model.
Now, we will use median of data to make predictions, for each page we have taken median for each weekday and used it to make predictions for the next 62 days accordingly.
Above code will calculate median for each weekday for every page.
We have calculated medians for each page for each weekday, now we will make predictions for Kaggle and make a csv file based on the format for sample_submission file.
After making submission on Kaggle for the above predictions, here are our results.
For this submission, we are currently at 312th position out of 1095 total teams.
This model also performed decent, now it will be a challenge for us to build good features and beat this score by a significant margin.
2. Feature Engineering-
Lets start with some feature engineering !. We will create features for last 15 days of data and through feature engineering techniques we will try to use the rest of the to create features for the last 15 days. As we saw that there was high correlation for 7 days lag, so the first feature we are creating is the week day feature. Other than this , we will create 3 features which has total visitors on the previous 3 days, threedays1 will have traffic for (d-1)+(d-2)+(d-3) days, threedays2 will have traffic for (d-4)+(d-5)+(d-6), similar for threedays3. Another feature will be weekday which contains as the name suggests day of the week.
Above code creates all the features that we have discussed.
As we know that language, type of access and type of client do we have an impact on traffic, so using these as a features can be useful.
lang_feat - It will contain the language feature.
spider_feat - we are adding 1 for spider data and 0 for non spider data.
access_feat - we are adding 0 for all access, 1 for desktop and 2 for mobile.
As we are creating data for last 15 days, so for each page above features will be repeated 15 times.
Now, we will create features based on Fourier transformation. As we saw during analysis that there were some unnecessary peaks at the start, so, after removing some initial values, we will take top 3 peaks and use them as features.
We have created all the features that we have discussed till now, we will use these to train model but we will create some additional features also and we will test if they are any helpful. As we creating features for last 15 days, so through these additional features we will try to use the rest of the data as well.
monthly_trend - This will contain average of medians of traffic on past1,2 and 3 months and these values are also medians of 2 days before and 2 days later during that month.
2. quarterly_trend - Similar to monthly_trend, just work on values on past 120,230 and 340 days values.
3. yearly_trend - This also works as above two feature, just for 1 last year.
Summary and key take aways from our work till now.
First, we loaded the required libraries and files.
Handling Missing values :
We used linear interpolation for filling missing values that were not missing for many consecutive days. For filling consecutive missing values, we used 0.
Data Analysis:
We saw that most of the traffic was on English language pages.
There was a very high correlation for 7 days.
There was very less traffic by bots as compared to actual human.
February has most number of visitors.
Weekdays and weekend doesn’t actually make much difference.
Last three months of the year has more number of visitors on an average than other months of the year.
On average, English language has the most number of visitors.
Feature Engineering :
We used rolling window technique to generate features, from every time series we used 15 days of data. These are the features that we generated-
Day of the week
Number of visitors on d-7 days
Total visitors on last 3 buckets of 3 days.
Language of the page
Client of the page (All access, mobile, desktop)
Spider or actual human traffic
Top three peaks from Fourier transformed data.
We created some extra features also which will be tested to see if they improve any performance. These are the extra features-
Monthly trend (Average of data on 30,60,90 days ago)
Quarterly trend (Average of data on 120,230,340 days ago)
Yearly trend(Average of data from 365 and 730 days ago)
Making data model ready-
Now, we will start to build model based on the features that we have created. First we will convert all the categorical features into one hot encoded features and normalize all continuous feature.
Now, we will split our data into train and test. We will split our data into 75 and 25.
We have already discussed that for evaluating our model, we will be using SMAPE, as there is no inbuilt function for that in python we have to implement that and we will use custom metrics for evaluating our model.
Let’s start with model building.
3. Modelling-
Linear Regression-
These are not good results, linear regression is performing even poor than median submission. We should try more powerful algorithm and see how they performs.
Decision Tree-
0.49,results are good in comparision to Linear Regression but overall these does not seem capable of getting us in good position on leaderboard. Besides, we can not expect that we will be able to produce same results on leaderboard also.
Random Forest-
These results are far better than Decision tree and if we can reproduce the same score on leaderboard then we will be in Top 3 but keep in mind that we are using certain features for this prediction that we don’t have future data and we have to make prediction sequentially in order to make predictions and use these predictions as a feature for future predictions, the errors in our predictions will increase exponentially as we will try to predict for more farther dates. So, we have to get much better score here from the score that we expecting on leaderboard because leaderboard score will greater than this, we just have to be sure that leaderboard score doesn’t get much worse.
XgBoost-
These are very good results but let’s see if we can reproduce these in competition also.
During Feature engineering part we created some extra features to try and check if they can provide better results, now we will use those features as well and train all of the previous models again.
Now, our data is ready with some new features. Now, let’s see how our model performs on this.
smape on DT with best hyperparameter is: 0.38592385
smape on random forest is: 0.3600751026560188
smape on xgboost is 0.3320209381486345
Of all the models, XgBoost performed best but new features did not prove to be much useful.
Making predictions for Kaggle-
Now, we will create all the features for predictions that we created during feature engineering, all the additional features that we created did not prove to be much useful in case of xgboost, so will not use those features for kaggle predictions.
Here are the results-
This is exactly what i was fearing, error indeed increased exponentially as we predicted for more farther dates, this score is worse than our median submission. Now, we have to think of something else.
Deep Learning to the rescue-
Now, we will try LSTM as well. Like before, we will not use any feature that uses predicted data as it will create problems.
As we have more than 145k time series, we are using only 50% of data to train the model.
For evaluating our model, we will use Mean Absolute Error(MAE) on log1p of data. This is pretty similar to SMAPE on original data. After final predictions we will use expm1 on data to convert it back to original form.
Along with the time series, we will use the three features as well that we can extract from the page name
Above code creates all the features that we need for our model, now we will label encode all the categorical features , reshape them in proper shapes to fed it to the model and split data into train and test.
Now, our data is ready and we can start building our model architecture. Model will have 4 input layers(one for each feature), time series data will go through LSTM layer and all the label encoded features will go through an embedding layer and then we will flatten the output so that we can concatenate all these layers . After that we will use dense layer and an output layer.
Code for above discussed model will look like this-
Now, let’s take a look at the architectural graph of our model-
After training the above model, performance looks like this for the last few epochs-
Here is the performance of the model over all the epochs-
Blue line represents loss on validation data while Orange represents loss on training data.
As we have already discussed that MAE on log1p of data is somewhat similar to SMAPE, so we should get pretty good score on leaderboard also.
After making predictions and submitting the file on Kaggle, here are our results-
The score is good and it takes us in top 5% on leaderboard and 53/1095 position.
Comparision of all the models that we tried-
We can see that Tree based model was unable to perform good, their scores were worse than median model but LSTM proved to be a good choice maybe the reason is that they are specialised in seq-seq prediction.
4. Deployment-
What good a model is if it doesn’t reach customers. Most of the case study blogs skip this part but we will leave no stone unturned. We will be using flask for deployment and Heroku for service.
In the modelling section, we were training models in such a way that they will predict for the next 64 days but here we need prediction just for one specified date. So, i have trained LSTM in such a way that it takes data for last 5 days as input instead of 200 days and predict for next day. The code would be pretty similar but in case you still want to see my code you can check my github repository. Now, we have to build a pipeline for the preprocessing, feature engineering and prediction. We can’t ask user to enter the traffic for last 5 days and the page name itself to make prediction. So, we would be taking index and date as input, index will correspond to a particular page name as mentioned in the dataset and according to the date for which he wants to make prediction data will be fetched from the csv file. Heroku gives us a limit of 500 MB and the Tensorflow module alone will take more than 300 MB so we can’t use our complete dataset for that. So, instead of 145k pages we will be using 10k pages only for model deployment.
Let’s get started with the pipeline!
Output will look like this-
Ok, so now we are done with the pipeline and now it’s time to use flask to deploy and we also have to build HTML pages( I will keep it very simple).
Let’s understand what this code actually does.
At first we are importing all libraries and data pipeline from a python file. After that we are defining different app route in order to render different HTML pages, in the predict function we are getting input from the HTML page, after getting these input, it’s all about the data pipeline that we have already discussed.
Now, lets proceed to Heroku. So, Heroku is free and pretty easy to use, we will use Github to deploy our model on Heroku. So basically there are two extra files that we have create Procfile(without any extension) and Requirements.txt
Procfile contains the name of the file that needs to be run first and requirements.txt contains names of all the modules that needs to be installed. Now, we just have to choose ‘connect to github’ on Heroku and search our github repository and click deploy. If all the code is correct, model will be deployed and a link will be generated for your app.
After doing all the above steps, here is our app. It may take some time to open the link, have patience.
Here is one video showing the running demo of our project.
5. Future Work-
Different type of smoothing and transformation of data can be tried in order to improve the results. Attention mechanism based models can be tried in order to use information from distant past to improve the results. As we discussed in Existing approaches, there are few simple statistics based method which proved pretty good, these methods can be used to provide extra features to the models to improve the results.
6.References-
2. https://www.kaggle.com/c/web-traffic-time-series- forecasting/discussion/43727
3. https://cs.adelaide.edu.au/~zbyszek/Papers/p51.pdf
4. https://blog.octo.com/en/time-series-features-extraction-using-fourier-and-wavelet-transforms-on-ecg-data/
5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrExsjcvF4o&t=830s
6. https://www.appliedaicourse.com/course/11/Applied-Machine-learning-course
If you have any query, feel free to comment down or you can also contact me on Linkedin. You can find my complete project here. | https://medium.com/swlh/wikipedia-web-traffic-time-series-forecasting-part-2-eac1f8eb1bb5 | ['Tushar Aggarwal'] | 2020-12-03 05:35:08.043000+00:00 | ['Time Series Analysis', 'Time Series Forecasting', 'Heroku', 'Flask', 'Machine Learning'] |
How can Parents Prepare Their Children to Deal With Bullying on Youth Sports Teams? | Indian boarding schools say that when you sign your youngsters up for sports, you expect them to have fun, get some exercise and learn new skills. But nothing is more heartbreaking than discovering that your kid’s sports activities are being overshadowed by bullying. Whether it’s the coach bullying your kid or one in all his teammates, the experience is often devastating.
For instance, your young athlete could lose confidence and begin performing poorly. He conjointly could play tentatively and constantly worry about what others think about him. Youngsters will lose all enjoyment of sports and drop out altogether once bullying on the sports team occurs.
Nowadays sports are very important for each and every student's life that's why boarding schools in Dehradun organize sports competition where all the schools in Dehradun
compete for each other in different kinds of sports not only Dehradun some famous and reputed schools in Uttarakhand also participate in this competition
Bullying in a sports team can take a variety of forms. Some common examples include:
Targeting team members who don’t perform as well as others.
Intimidating the foremost promising players so as to eliminate the competition for the best positions and the limelight.
Targeting, discouraging and coercing new team members and forcing them to prove they belong on the team.
Ganging up on team members as a result of a “leader” on the team doesn’t like them.
Targeting someone as a result of they get more attention and praise from the coach or because they seem to be the coach’s favourite.
Harassing team members after they make a mistake during the game.
Threatening team members regarding doing well in games and practices as a result of they could steal the limelight.
What you’ll do to prevent bullying on teams
If your youngsters are dealing with bullying in sports, here are some things you will do to facilitate in bringing an end to the situation.
Learn everything you can about bullying. Start by reading regarding the various forms of bullies, the danger factors for becoming a bully and the way to identify the warning signs. The more you recognize about bullying behavior, the better equipped you’ll be to assist your kid.
Listen to your kid. Once discussing bullying incidents, your kid must be that one is doing the talking. Find out what’s happening and the way the bullying makes him feel. Take care you also ask what he wants to do regarding it. The goal isn’t to take over but to permit youngsters to become advocates for themselves.
Empower your kid. Offer your youngsters tools for dealing with bullying like walking away, telling an adult, or telling the bully during a firm voice to stop. As an example, your kid might say: “I have had enough of your drama. I want to have fun. Stop now!”
Also, caution your youngsters to not be apologetic for his or her skills in the sport. Equip them with ideas on the way to handle these tough things. Teach them a way to defend themselves against bullies and how to stand up to a bully.
Telling a bully to prevent takes courage, however, generally, it’s the best action youngsters will take when handling bullies on the field.
Commit helping resolve the difficulty; however, listen to your child’s desires. It’s forever an excellent plan to ask for your child’s opinion before you go straight to the coach. Generally, your kid is going to be afraid of retaliation, and you need to be sensitive to the current concern once addressing the difficulty. Work together to come up with the right solutions.
Turn the bullying into a chance to strengthen self-advocacy skills. Encourage your kid to speak to the coach regarding the bullying (rather than doing it for him). Once you teach your youngsters to advocate for themselves against bullies instead of having you step in and provide protection, your youngsters can develop self-confidence.
Reach out the coach. Ask the coach to meet with you to discuss the bullying. By holding a face-to-face meeting, you’re demonstrating that you are committed to seeing this issue resolved.
You may conjointly wish to provide documentation of all bullying incidents to demonstrate what’s happening. It’ll even be useful just in case the situation escalates, and law enforcement or other outside sources need to be contacted.
Ask the coach how bullying is going to be addressed. Take care coach knows that your goal is for your kid to feel safe on the sports team again. Ask what precaution steps the coach plans to take to make sure your child’s safety. Ensure the coach realizes that though the bullying stops, merely being around the bully should still cause your kid stress and anxiety. Find out how this case is going to be handled.
Follow up with the coach to make sure that the bullying has been resolved. If the bullying has not been resolved, or if the coach isn’t taking the situation seriously, you may wish to consider going above the coach’s head.
If this still doesn’t resolve the issue, you will need to take away your kid from the situation. Is that the bullying severe enough that you will involve law enforcement? Can your kid play on a different team? Giving your youngsters choices instead of insisting that they “tough it out” is often the simplest approach. | https://medium.com/@ecoleglobale101/how-can-parents-prepare-their-children-to-deal-with-bullying-on-youth-sports-teams-26f03696c49 | ['Ecole Globale'] | 2021-02-09 12:08:39.362000+00:00 | ['Sports Betting', 'Schools In Dehradun', 'Ecole Globale', 'Bullying'] |
The Truth About Living a Happier Life | I’m a summer kid. I love the sun. The heat. The blue sky and long days. Walking around in swim trunks or shorts all the time. Driving out to a lake and taking a dip every 30 minutes to avoid melting away in the burning heat.
If you asked me, it could be hot and sunny all year round.
There’s only one thing I hate about summer. The nights. Where I live, it’s way too hot to sleep, at least for me. I usually spend most of the night lying stretched out and naked on my bed, with a fan on high, trying to get at least four or five hours of sleep a night. So yesterday, I finally bought an air cooler. Low energy consumption, quiet, enough to cool down my room to a temperature I can sleep in. Perfect. This summer is gonna be the best summer ever. Hot and sweat-breaking during the day, but still sleeping like a baby at night. Ahhh.
Alright, so why in the world am I telling you about my air cooler? Did I run out of topics to write about? No. I tell you about my air cooler to shine light on one of the most basic, yet most overlooked principles of life: Life is about balance.
Marginal returns and marginal costs
To show you why this is so crucial, we have to put the cart before the horse for a moment.
If you don’t focus on balance in your life, you’ll drift to the extremes. And extremes beget extreme side effects. Weather, politics, religion, work. Extreme heat brings extreme drought. Extreme political convictions bring intolerance and radical behavior. Extreme religious beliefs bring extreme behavior towards people of different faith. Extreme working hours bring extreme stress.
At the same time, your marginal returns get smaller. Your marginal returns are the benefits you get from moving further into a certain direction or doing more of a specific thing, e.g. working more. When you are only working 20 hours a week, another five on top will make a large difference in terms of money earned and experience gained — it’s a 25% increase after all. But if you’re already packing an 80-hour week, taking on another five won’t boost your experience or paycheck as much — the marginal return is smaller, especially compared to what you already have.
On the other hand, if you’re already located in an extreme, exploring a little bit of the other side will have large returns with very low costs. Cutting down your work hours from 85 to 80 won’t make much of a difference, but your family will appreciate the extra time they get to spend with you. If you stick to your diet seven days a week and track your calories correct to a dot, a cookie every now and then won’t hurt you — but boy, will it taste good.
Image crated by me | https://medium.com/mind-cafe/the-truth-about-living-a-happier-life-708e5d1f21e6 | ['Moreno Zugaro'] | 2020-04-24 16:30:06.236000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Life Lessons', 'Life', 'Advice', 'Happiness'] |
To those about to ship, we salute you! | This blog is the culmination of more than 20 years of experience as a consultant and UX leader, in a variety of environments: from Silicon Valley startups to giant multi-national corporations, government, and non-profits. Although specific methods for getting the most from your DesignOps practice are often quite different, the practice usually delivers three key benefits:
Processes to streamline delivery from conception to code, so that you can innovate with confidence. Continuous validation with customers, so you can ensure you maximize delivered value. Collection of interface guidelines implemented by Dev as a set of reusable components, so you can ship faster.
I’m proud of what I and my teams have delivered over 20+ years. But at the end of the day, no matter how good our deliverables are, no matter how well-validated the designs, nor how streamlined our processes — they are not the product.
The *Product* is the Product.
Thus,
As a team, the emphasis of UX activity must be on SHIPPING. Shipping working code that delivers the most valuable functionality to the customer with the minimum effort.
I call this approach “UXecution”.
I will be sharing all of the time-tested, practical tips, hacks, and secrets I collected in my 20+ years of work to shipping faster and with less pain, and for making your DesignOps resourceful, efficient, and above all: effective and practical.
I will discuss:
How to put together the ideal UX team
How to work in creative harmony with Devs and PMs
Why it’s important to be, to paraphrase Einstein, “As lazy as possible but no lazier”
That aiming at perfection is folly, but aiming for an ideal solution is both an attainable and worthy goal.
You will save months of aggravation by not making useless updates to prototypes, creating reports no one reads, and polishing recordings no one listens to. You will also learn how to use your hallmark UX skills of observation, passion, and empathy to embrace both your customers and everyone in your organization as Experience Partners involved in an elegant cross-functional dance of product delivery.
All of the techniques in this blog build in the knowledge of myself, my team-mates, partners, and clients, who proved time and again that these techniques will help you ship consistently and quickly while maximizing the value delivered to the customer.
But don’t take my word for it — try them for yourself. See what works for you, what makes sense in your own organization, and watch new doors open with less effort than you ever thought possible. Now it’s up to you, the reader, to use these techniques and keep improving your own UXecution.
To those about to ship, we salute you!
Don’t miss a post! Sign up below — | https://medium.com/uxecution/to-those-about-to-ship-we-salute-you-1b62f24302ae | ['Greg Nudelman'] | 2020-12-21 14:03:10.062000+00:00 | ['UX Design', 'UX', 'Design Process', 'Designops'] |
Building an Ethereum Dapp With GraphQL | In this post we will build an auction platform like eBay where users can post items for sale. For the sake of brevity, our example will only fire a single query that lists the auctions that are available on our platform. Since we can send any kind of query to our schema, you can easily plug into your favorite GraphQL framework and work how you want.
Ethereum and GraphQL
When you first heard about GraphQL, it’s very likely that it was as a query language for a remote server’s API. In the decentralized world, there is no central server like there is in traditional architectures. That does not mean, however, that we cannot take advantage of all of the amazing tooling that the GraphQL community has produced.
By defining a schema that exists only in our client, we can use GraphQL as an abstraction layer over our collection of contracts. This allows us to query the current state of our platform as if it was a traditional server and resolve queries against the blockchain.
Our Contracts
The code for this post lives on GitHub. The platform is made up of two different contracts. One is called AuctionHub which maintains a list of addresses that point to instances of another contract called Auction . That second contract only has a single public field: the name of the item for sale.
Let’s begin by deploying some contracts so we have something to query in our UI. Clone the demo project and install the project dependencies. Just a heads up: this might take a bit.
git clone [email protected]:AlecAivazis/ethereum-graphql-demo.git \
&& cd ethereum-graphql-demo \
&& npm i
Once it’s done, start a local ethereum blockchain we can test against:
npm run testnet
Notice the list of accounts under Available Accounts . We'll need one of them later. In another terminal, compile the contracts:
npm run build:contracts
This should generate two files for each contract under contracts/* . The *.bin files are the compiled version of each contract and the *.abi are json files that describe the contents of the contract (attributes, methods, etc.).
The demo project comes with a script that will bootstrap a few contracts and print the address of the hub. Before you can run it, you have to update the wallet address that you want to use when creating our test contracts here. Once that is updated, you can create the demo contracts with:
npm run init
If everything went according to plan, you should see the address of the hub that we just deployed. Take note of this address. We’ll need it later when defining our schema. With our contracts deployed, we are now ready to start querying them with GraphQL.
Building Our Client
The repo already contains a very basic UI that that we can just use without worrying too much about how it works. Just know that if you update the queries that your components are firing, or the GraphQL schema, you have to re-run the compiler with npm run relay for the changes to take effect.
Defining the Schema
The first step to building our client-side GraphQL layer is the same as in the traditional world: define a schema that represents our domain. This representation should apply regardless of the persistence and execution details of your product. Whereas before the schema acted as an agreement between the server and client, in our decentralized world, this schema encodes the internal API between our UI and contracts. It can even act as the hand-off between separate teams responsible for blockchain and UI development (if that separation makes sense for you).
Let’s see how this works. Start by adding a file named schema.js under the src/ directory with this content:
If you have experience with the graphql-tools package then this should look familiar. What we've done here is define a GraphQL schema that let's us query for all of the auctions in our system.
Specifying Resolvers
On its own, a schema is not enough to resolve queries. We also need to tell the runtime how to resolve the requested fields. This is done by defining an object whose keys are the type name and whose values are another object with functions to resolve each field:
As you can see, we’ve told the runtime that resolving the itemName field on the Auction object type requires invoking the itemName method on the instance of the auction contract. This returns a promise with the the value of a constant method which will give us the string we want. Similarly, we resolve the list of all available auctions by looking at the auction hub we created earlier and returning an instance of the auction constract for each address stored in the hub.
By doing this, we have completely abstracted away the existence of the hub from the user interface. If we do in fact have separate teams working on the UI and the blockchain infrastructure, the UI team doesn’t have to understand how to find each auction. All they have to do is fire a query like { allAuctions { itemName } } .
Querying Our Schema
With our schema in place, we are now ready to start wiring up the user interface and our contracts. In Apollo (the graphql framework used by the demo project), you can provide something called a “link” which is responsible for handling the queries. If you open up src/client.js in the the demo project, you’ll see that it already contains a lot of the boilerplate necessary to define a custom link. There is however, a core piece missing — the actual logic to resolve the query. Let’s add that now:
As you can see, resolving our queries does not involve firing a network request as it would in the centralized case. Instead, we just pass the query string and variables to the graphql function which uses the resolvers that we defined earlier to handle queries.
With those two files in place, we should now be able to run our client and see a list of the auctions in our platform. Start the development server with:
npm run relay && npm run dev
and navigate to http://localhost:8000. If everything goes right, you should now see a list of items — one for the three auctions we created in the init script.
Why is this Better?
By now you might be asking yourself if going through all this effort was worth it. If you have experience working with web3 then you know that the imperative API can become extremely duplicative without some kind of domain specific abstraction layer. Take for example the code necessary to grab a list of every auction in our platform (copied from above):
There are a lot of questions to answer when trying to figure out the best way to abstract this logic into something reusable. Some parts of this are specific to our Auction/Hub breakdown. Other parts are boilerplate that you will find any time you want to build up a list of something. Once we do have it broken up how do we wrap up the logic in a way that makes our UI easy to consume? While there is no silver bullet to all of these questions, each solution has its pros and cons. By using GraphQL as a data-layer for your smart contracts, you can provide a robust integration for your UI components that abstracts the details of the retrieval logic behind a declarative API. This does, however, come at the cost of an extra logical layer in your application.
Once you have gotten over effort of encapsulating your contracts in a single schema, you can take advantage of all of the awesome tooling that the graphql community has produced. On top of that, this model also enables an extremely smooth story for a semi-decentralized approach where information comes from sources both on and off the chain. We can stitch our schema with remote services and build a unified abstraction that lets us build our interfaces without worrying about where the information is coming from. I have used a similar approach in one of my dapps to integrate with a popular oauth provider.
Conclusion and Next Steps
In this post, I showed you how to build a client-side GraphQL schema that resolves against smart contracts running on an ethereum blockchain. We then wired the schema to our user interface so we could easily query the state of our contracts. This provided a nice abstraction for our UI to query our contracts without worrying about how to retrieve the requested data.
To keep things focused, we only went over how to resolve a single query against the blockchain. However, there is a lot of things that can be added on top to make the developer experience and your application plus ultra. Some of those include: | https://itnext.io/building-an-ethereum-dapp-with-graphql-e8987ede4e7f | ['Alec Aivazis'] | 2021-03-01 19:00:46.674000+00:00 | ['Ethereum', 'Ethereum Blockchain', 'GraphQL'] |
Ingesting Data from Files with Spark, Part 1: CSV | ARTICLE
From Spark in Action, 2nd Ed. by Jean Georges Perrin
__________________________________________________________________
Save 37% off Spark in Action, 2nd Ed. Just enter code fccperrin into the discount code box at checkout at manning.com.
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This is the first in a series of 4 articles on the topic of ingesting data from files with Spark. This section deals with ingesting data from CSV.
CSV is probably the most popular data-exchange format around. Due to its age and wide use, this format has many variations on its core structure: separators aren’t always commas, some records may span over multiple lines, there are various ways of escaping the separator, and many more creative considerations. When your customer tells you “I’ll send you a CSV file,” you can certainly nod, smile, and slowly start to freak out on the inside.
Fortunately for you, Spark offers a variety of options for ingesting those CSV files. Ingesting CSV is easy and schema inference is a powerful feature.
Let’s have a look at more advanced examples with more options that illustrate the complexity of CSV files in the outside world. You’ll first look at the file you’ll ingest, and understand its specifications. You’ll then have a look at the result and finally build the mini-application to achieve the result. This pattern repeats for each format.
Figure 1 illustrates the process you’re going to implement.
Figure 1 Spark is ingesting a complex CSV-like file with non-default options. After ingesting the file, the data is in a dataframe, from which you can display records and the schema — in this case the schema is inferred by Spark.
In listing 1 is an excerpt of a CSV file with two records and a header row. Note that CSV has become a generic term: nowadays, the C means more “character” than comma. You’ll find files where values are separated by semicolons, tabs, pipes ( | ), and more. For the purist, the acronym may matter, but for Spark, they all fall into the same category.
A few observations:
The file isn’t comma-separated but semicolon-separated.
I manually added the end of paragraph symbol ( ¶ ) to show the end of line. It isn’t in the file.
) to show the end of line. It isn’t in the file. If you look at the record with id 4, there’s a semicolon in the title, which breaks the parsing, therefore this field is surrounded by stars. Keep in mind that this is a stretch example to illustrate some of Spark features.
If you look at the record with id 6, you’ll see that the title is split over two lines: there’s a carriage return after Language? And before An .
Listing 1 Complex CSV file (abstract of books.csv)
id;authorId;title;releaseDate;link ¶
4;1;*Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: The Illustrated Edition (Harr
[CA]y Potter; Book 2)*;10/4/16;http://amzn.to/2kYhL5n ¶
6;2;*Development Tools in 2006: any Room for a 4GL-style Language? ¶
An independent study by Jean Georges Perrin, IIUG Board
Member*;12/28/16;ht [CA]tp://amzn.to/2vBxOe1 ¶
Desired output
Listing 2 shows a possible output. I added the paragraph mark to illustrate the new line, as long records aren’t easy to read…
Listing 2 Complex CSV file (abstract of books.csv)
Excerpt of the dataframe content:
+---+--------+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+-----------------------+¶
|
id|authorId|
title|releaseDate| link|¶
+---+--------+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+-----------------------+¶
…
| 4| 1| Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: The Illustrated Edition (Harry Potter; Book 2)| 10/4/16|http://amzn.to/2kYhL5n|¶
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| 6| 2|Development Tools in 2006: any Room for a 4GL-style Language? ¶ An independent study by...| 12/28/16|http://amzn.to/2vBxOe1|¶ //#B
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only showing top 7 rows Dataframe's schema:
root
|-- id: integer (nullable = true) ❸
|-- authorId: integer (nullable = true) ❸
|-- title: string (nullable = true)
|-- releaseDate: string (nullable = true) ❶
|-- link: string (nullable = true)
❶ See that our release date is seen as a string, not a date!
❷ The line break that was in your CSV file is still here.
❸ The datatype is an integer: in CSV files, everything is a string, but Spark makes an educated guess!
Code
To achieve the result in listing 2, you’ll have to code something similar to listing 3: first get a session, then configure and run the parsing operation in one call using method chaining. Finally, show some records and display the schema of the dataframe.
Listing 3 ComplexCsvToDataframeApp.java
package net.jgp.books.sparkWithJava.ch07.lab_100.csv_ingestion; import org.apache.spark.sql.Dataset;
import org.apache.spark.sql.Row;
import org.apache.spark.sql.SparkSession; public class ComplexCsvToDataframeApp { public static void main(String[] args) {
ComplexCsvToDataframeApp app = new ComplexCsvToDataframeApp();
app.start();
} private void start() {
SparkSession spark = SparkSession.builder()
.appName("Complex CSV to Dataframe")
.master("local")
.getOrCreate(); Dataset<Row> df = spark.read().format("csv") ❶
.option("header", "true") ❷
.option("multiline", true) ❸
.option("sep", ";") ❹
.option("quote", "*") ❺
.option("dateFormat", "M/d/y") ❻
.option("inferSchema", true) ❼
.load("data/books.csv"); System.out.println("Excerpt of the dataframe content:");
df.show(7, 90);
System.out.println("Dataframe's schema:");
df.printSchema();
}
}
❶ The format we want to ingest is CSV
❷ The first line of your CSV file is a header line
❸ Some of our records are splitting over multiple lines, note that you can either use a string or a Boolean, making it easier to load values from a configuration file
❹ The separator between values is a semicolon (;)
❺ The quote character is a star (*)
❻ The date format matches the month/day/year format, as commonly used in the United States (see below)
❼ Spark infers (guesses) the schema (see below)
As you probably guessed, you need to know what your file looks like (separator character, escape character, and so on) before you can configure the parser. Spark won’t infer those, this is part of the contract that comes (or, as in most of the times, you have to guess) with your CSV files.
The schema inference feature is a pretty neat one; but, as you can see here, it didn’t infer that the releaseDate column was a date. One way to tell Spark that it’s a date is to specify a schema.
And that’s where we’re going to stop for this section. Stay tuned for part 2. If you’re interested in some more general information about the book, check it out on liveBook here and see this slide deck.
About the author:
An experienced consultant and entrepreneur passionate about all things data, Jean Georges Perrin was the first IBM Champion in France, an honor he’s now held for ten consecutive years. Jean Georges has managed many teams of software and data engineers. | https://medium.com/@manningbooks/ingesting-data-from-files-with-spark-part-1-csv-21b00e3cd270 | ['Manning Publications'] | 2019-04-26 10:16:31.394000+00:00 | ['Spark', 'Data Processing', 'Apache Spark', 'Data Science', 'Data Streaming'] |
Can Artificial Intelligence (AI) Help Deal With The Problem Of Toxins and Toxic Waste? | Can Artificial Intelligence (AI) Help Deal With The Problem Of Toxins and Toxic Waste?
NOTE: This was curated by Medium and chosen for further distribution.
Photo from Danish Technological Institute of Robots with Artificial Intelligence Sorting Hazardous Waste. Copyright Fair Use Provision.
Artificial intelligence probably won’t help much with stopping the production of nuclear and chemical toxins, except if used to monitor industries that tend to pollute.
It’s the job of governments to regulate polluting activities and then enforce those regulations. However, as far as cleaning up the chemical and nuclear toxic waste that already exists, there’s a role that AI (i.e., robots) can play by taking over from humans the arduous and dangerous hazardous waste clean-up tasks. AI-enhanced robots can do this work much more efficiently and safely by using AI-enhanced.
A primary focus should be on batteries.
“Technological items often have one thing in common: that they use some form of battery. Batteries are used in our smartphones, laptops, remote controls, etc. — useful but dangerous, and just as dangerous when discarded.” — Danish Technological Institute
We’ve all been guilty of carelessly tossing used batteries into regular trash receptacles, with the batteries then winding up in landfills. The batteries then slowly release their deadly toxins into the soil, and those toxins can then seep into the environment and negatively affect our health.
“Toxic materials are poisonous byproducts as a result of industries such as manufacturing, farming, construction, automotive, laboratories, and hospitals which may contain heavy metals, radiation, dangerous pathogens, or other toxins. Toxic waste has become more abundant since the industrial revolution, causing serious global issues. Disposing of such waste has become even more critical with the addition of numerous technological advances containing toxic chemical components. Products such as cellular telephones, computers, televisions, and solar panels contain toxic chemicals that can harm the environment if not disposed of properly to prevent the pollution of the air and contamination of soils and water. A material is considered toxic when it causes death or harm by being inhaled, swallowed, or absorbed through the skin. The waste can contain chemicals, heavy metals, radiation, dangerous pathogens, or other toxins. Even households generate hazardous waste from items such as batteries, used computer equipment, and leftover paints or pesticides. Toxic material can be either human-made and others are naturally occurring in the environment. Not all hazardous substances are considered toxic. With the increase of worldwide technology, there are more substances that are being considered toxic and harmful to human health. Some of this technology includes cell phones and computers. Such items have been given the name e-waste or EEE, which stands for Electrical and Electronic Equipment. This term is also used for goods such as refrigerators, toys, and washing machines. These items can contain toxic components that can break down into water systems when discarded. The reduction in the cost of these goods has allowed for these items to be distributed globally without thought or consideration to managing the goods once they become ineffective or broken.” — Wikipedia
This problem is human-made and should be stopped at the source by humans taking responsible actions to dispose of batteries and other toxic materials.
And suppose we discard this kind of toxic material in a manner that results in potential danger to our health. In that case, we must take proactive measures to eliminate or at least reduce that danger. That’s where the use of AI comes in. Using AI for such tasks can provide a great benefit to all of us.
Many people, including some experts in the field, have expressed concern that AI could develop in a way that presents an existential threat to humankind. Some see those concerns as justified, while others see them as an overblown exaggeration, sort of a Chicken Little “the sky is falling” worst-case scenario.
In any case, AI is not going away and is here to stay. So we must implement proper safeguards and ethical standards for developing and using AI and vigorously monitor how we use it. But we must also take the best advantage of what AI has to offer, including helping us deal with the severe problem of dangerous toxins and hazardous toxic waste.
NOTE: The author is a retired corporate executive who spent over 35 years working in the information technology (IT) and services industry. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration from Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan, and a Master’s Degree in Management from Webster University, St. Louis, Missouri.
_________________
Thanks for reading. (Copyright Terry Mansfield. All rights reserved.)
_________________
*Recommended resources for writers:
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These are Terry’s most popular pieces on Medium:
— — — —
*Aff | https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/can-artificial-intelligence-ai-help-deal-with-the-problem-of-toxins-and-toxic-waste-b3378522fdc7 | ['Terry Mansfield'] | 2021-08-26 20:13:14.013000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Battery', 'AI', 'Tech', 'Artificial Intelligence'] |
Fit for Work app helps construction firm report covid-free sites | Tottenham Court Road Station during the first UK lockdown, 2020
Through different forms of lockdown this year, construction firms have needed to work extra hard to keep projects moving. UK construction supply chains initially had to wait for, and then adapt quickly to C-19 guidance outlined by the government and construction leadership councils.
When the first UK lockdown was ordered in March 2020, subcontractors like Design Rationale Limited (DR)— a specialist in architectural metalwork and glazing - needed to put mitigation measures in place to protect their workers on site and to reassure the main contractors that work was safe to continue.
Fit for Work app used to check into site safely
Enhanced C-19 compliance with app on site
DR began rolling the Fit for Work app out in May to enhance health and safety, monitoring and compliance. The company needed real-time visibility on what was being reported at site level so that C-19 information could go straight ‘up the chain’ as things happened. Early detection was key to minimising disruption as sites reopened after lockdown.
The app has ensured staff engage with the latest H&S information and C-19 measures at the beginning and end of their shift, using their mobile phone to report key information (like PPE availability and temperature checks). By using the app’s location and facial recognition technology, DR have been able to record the location of workers at the start and end of each shift, providing vital contact-tracing information should they need it.
Smart thermometer being used with the app to check for signs of C-19
Visibility gives project managers peace-of-mind
As construction sites began to reopen through June and July, DR were able to get work going again with enhanced safety measures in place. Mark Hitchcock, Project Manager at DR says: “The App has 2 great features from my perspective…
“1 — our teams need to work closely together on site (within the 2m working area) so I want to be 100% sure that the guys are healthy before the shift starts. The app gives me piece of mind that our teams are in a safe working environment…
“2 — the facial recognition and GPS lets me know which of the guys are working at which sites. We have teams spread across multiple sites so its impossible as a PM to be in all of the places at once. The app supports me in my role.”
Tottenham Court Road Station, London — completed
Digital PPE for the modern workforce
For DR and many other organisations, daily checks are now part of the culture. The app has been helping to keep good sanitation front and centre in the fight against the virus. DR staff have been happy to use it, knowing that it is there to keep everyone safe. The app gives each worker reassurance and responsibility as they check in and out of sites.
DR have used it to create a more engaging process that is building a culture of H&S. In addition to the health and safety benefits, the app can provide time-stamped location, ID verification and project data that can feed into existing systems to streamline payroll, invoicing, payments and incident reporting.
In a challenging year for H&S, DR have been able to complete work at Tottenham Court Road and Farringdon stations, and have also received an award in recognition of their commitment to improving safety and efficiency. | https://medium.com/@fit-for-work/fit-for-work-app-helps-construction-firm-report-covid-free-sites-8b4aaf7c537e | ['Fit For Work'] | 2020-12-23 15:54:38.472000+00:00 | ['Apps', 'Health And Safety', 'Covid 19', 'Technology', 'Construction'] |
Introducing IPNS-Link | IPNS-Link : Bob and Grace access Alice’s localhost and a blocked or geo-restricted website
On August 20, 2021, the domain ipfs.io was suddenly taken down by its then registrar, causing a massive denial of service. Many years ago, in 2014, No-IP experienced a similar domain takedown. These incidents clearly demonstrate the peril of centralization - when there’s only one gateway to your website, you are always at the mercy of the gatekeeper. Won’t it be way better, if your website had multiple, independent gateways, not controlled by the same entity? For static websites, there’s already a solution using IPFS. If you haven’t heard of IPFS, it’s a global peer-to-peer network that collectively creates a content-addressed file-system. Once you add your static website files to this filesystem, any node in the network will be able to access them. A node that is reachable from the internet can also run a web-portal using which anyone from the internet can access any file added to the IPFS network. These web-portals are called IPFS-gateways. Currently, there are lots of IPFS-gateways, run by different people, all of which are good enough to view your static website.
But what about a dynamic website, a web-app for which you need to run server-side code? Enter IPNS-Link. FYI, IPNS is a subsystem of IPFS, which basically provides filenames for the content-addressed files in IPFS.
To illustrate how IPNS-Link works, let’s consider the following.
Alice runs her http-server on her old PC or Raspberry Pi, which may not even have a public IP address. To expose her site to the internet, all she needs to do is run an app on her Linux device and point it to her local server (e.g. localhost:8080 ). The app gives her a UUID as the public address of her site, that she distributes to her desired audience. When Bob wants to access her site, he simply has to choose any one of the independent HTTPS-enabled gateways and put Alice’s UUID there. If he doesn’t want to use a 3rd party gateway, he can always run his own IPNS-Link-gateway locally and use that to access Alice’s site with utmost privacy.
Note that this not only achieves the goal of having multiple independent (hence, decentralized) access points for Alice’s site, but also makes web-hosting hassle-free for Alice! She didn’t need to buy a domain name, manage TLS/SSL certificates, acquire a public IP address or set up DDNS in case the IP was dynamic. Also, everything she can’t control, viz. everything other than her server and content, is decentralized.
If you have used ngrok, IPNS-Link is a decentralized alternative, and more
Even if Alice chose to go the conventional way of domain names and all, exposing her site using IPNS-Link would give her censorship-resistance. If blocked or geo-restricted by regional authorities, Alice’s audience can still find their way to her site using any public or private IPNS-Link-gateway.
No matter where Alice’s server is on the internet, given her site’s UUID, a gateway can always locate her server, connect to it and access the site. Even if she has to port her entire site to another machine for some reason, she can keep the UUID intact! This is useful if she uses a hosting service without having her custom domain. The hosting provider would assign a subdomain to her site, which would become invalid whenever she changes her provider. With IPNS-Link, migrating to another provider is seamless.
UUIDs are pretty-long though, they’re boring, look like gibberish and are typo-prone. DNSLink is a way to manage those but it involves centralization, viz. an authoritative DNS provider. Custom URL shorteners are even more centralized. Hmm 🤔 We think we came up with something. You might soon be able to map your UUIDs to human-friendly *.ipns names, in a semi-decentralized way, if we ever get the funds to run an unstoppable service. Wish us luck.
IPNS-Link is designed with convenience and efficiency in mind. If used properly, it can reduce your hosting costs, and improve latency for your users. All this is possible by harnessing the potential of IPFS. But this is a topic for another article.
So, what’s the status of the IPNS-Link project currently? Well, we are still cooking, but you can already have your first taste — the prototypes are there, or, if you will, the MVP. Follow this quick-start tutorial to expose your website with IPNS-Link, and test your site’s accessibility with our public gateway at ipns.live. Need help? Just shoot an email. You can also read more about the project here.
How do you like it? Join the community to share your feedback and be a part of this. If you think IPNS-Link will do humanity any good, spread the word and share this post. And hey, do you code? Yeah? We need you, pal.
Care to spare? Please donate.
Happy Hosting! | https://medium.com/@ipns-link/introducing-ipns-link-36a14c87a4aa | [] | 2021-11-17 21:51:55.846000+00:00 | ['Ipfs', 'Web Hosting', 'Website', 'Censorship Resistance', 'Decentralization'] |
How to earn money online in Survey Sites | Note: This article contains affiliate links that promotes an online website that can help readers earn money online. I will receive a compensation if purchases are made using the affiliate link
Survey sites are convenient platforms to earn money online. They only require your email information to register and become qualified to start earning money. Survey sites are appealing because it does not require any technical skills. And to start earning money online using this method, you only need your computer and internet connection and you can start right away.
A lot of people are drawn to this method of earning money online because it is very accessible. Survey sites pay users after completing a survey that is targeted to the demographic of the user. A lot of these websites are legit and you can visit Prizerebel.com and Featurepoints.com to start earning money online using this method. And from these websites you can earn around $ 13 per day for 8 straight hours of doing surveys.
The number of tasks you need to complete in survey sites to earn that amount of money would be around four 15 minutes surveys per hour or around 32 surveys per day.
But earning money online using survey sites is just one method and there are several ways available that can help you. The same as survey sites, you will only need an internet connection and a computer.
Here are two ways that can help you earn money online:
Online Transcription Websites
Online transcription websites are websites that accept projects for transcription from business owners and employ workers to transcribe these projects. The transcription jobs offered are either transcribing a video to text, an audio to text and audio or video to text translated to a different language. One of the best platforms to start a career as a transcriptionist online is Gotranscript.com.
Gotranscript is an online transcription and translation agency that was founded in Scotland in 2006 and now has more than 20,000 customers worldwide. The advantages of joining Gotranscript is you get to enjoy a work from home set-up, you will have a reliable source of income, and you have the opportunity to grow as a transcriptionist. Gotranscript values their workforce and they will provide you with feedback that will help you grow your career.
Gotranscript also offers the freedom whether you will accept transcriptions that you can work on full time or projects that you can work on part time. From their website, their highest earning transcriptionist earns as much as $1215. And you can reach that level of income in Gotranscript as your career as an online transcriptionist grows. | https://medium.com/@drinkinglogic/how-to-earn-money-online-in-survey-sites-32fd8c00dcdd | ['Erl Sua'] | 2020-12-07 05:45:18.338000+00:00 | ['Earn Money Online Tips', 'Earn Money Online', 'Transcription Companies', 'Earnmoneyonlinefast', 'Fiverr Gig'] |
Watch LAFC-Tigres Concacaf Champions League final | Full disclosure — I’m currently working as a Python Engineer, and therefore you can consider me biased. But I want to unravel some critics about Python and reflect on whether the speed concerns are valid regarding day-to-day work using Python for data engineering, data science, and analytics.
Is Python too slow?
From my perspective, such questions should be asked based on a specific context or use case. Is Python slow in crunching numbers compared to compiled languages such as C? Yes, it is. This fact has been known for years, and that’s the reason why Python libraries for which speed plays an important role, such as numpy, leverage C under the hood.
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But is Python that much slower than other (more difficult to learn and use) languages for all use cases? If you look at the performance benchmarks of many Python libraries optimized to solve a specific problem, they do decently well compared to compiled languages. For instance, look at the FastAPI performance benchmark — obviously, Go as a compiled language is much faster than Python. Still, FastAPI beats some of Go’s libraries for building REST APIs:
Web Framework Benchmarks — image by the author
Side note: the above list does not include C++ and Java web frameworks, which had even higher performance.
Similarly, when comparing Dask (written in Python) against Spark (written in Scala) for data-intensive neuroimaging pipelines [2], the authors concluded:
Overall, our results show no substantial performance difference between the engines.
The question we should be asking ourselves is what speed do we really need. If you run an ETL job triggered only once per day, you may not care whether it takes 20 seconds or 200 seconds. You may then prefer to make the code easy to understand, package, and maintain, especially given that the compute resources are becoming increasingly affordable as compared to the costly engineering time.
Code speed vs. practicality
From a pragmatic standpoint, there are many different questions that we need to answer when choosing a programming language for day-to-day work.
Can you reliably solve multiple business problems with this language?
If all you care about is speed, then don’t use Python, period. There are much faster alternatives for all sorts of use cases. Python’s main benefits lie in its readability, ease of use, and a wide range of problems that can be solved with it. Python can be used as a glue that ties together a myriad of different systems, services, and use cases.
Can you find enough employees that know this language?
Since Python is so easy to learn and use, the number of Python users is constantly growing. Business users, who were previously crunching numbers in Excel, can now quickly learn to code in Pandas and thus learn to be self-sufficient without constantly relying on IT resources. At the same time, this eliminates the burden of the IT and analytics departments. It also improves the time to value.
These days, it’s easier to find data engineers who know Python and can maintain a Spark data processing application in this language, rather than those who could do the same in Java or Scala. Many organizations are gradually switching to Python for many use cases simply because of the higher chances of finding employees who “speak” that language.
In contrast, I know companies who desperately need Java or C# developers to maintain their existing applications, but those languages are difficult (take years to master) and seem unattractive for new programmers who can potentially earn more in jobs that leverage much easier languages such as Go or Python. | https://medium.com/@pgo508947/full-disclosure-im-currently-working-as-a-python-engineer-and-therefore-you-can-consider-me-1cc8a7e5ce71 | ['Panda Go'] | 2020-12-22 12:41:04.695000+00:00 | ['Birds', 'Future', 'Goals', 'Mood', 'Sadness'] |
The Process to Deliver a Software or Web Application Into Production | I have worked for different companies which allowed me to experience different strategies when it comes to take an idea and release it to the public as a final product. Whether you are part of a small or big project, I believe any developer would benefit a lot from understanding the entire process of what it takes to deliver software or application.
Analysis
The first thing that triggers a product or software development is the idea or a solution for a specific problem. After that, you normally look at the market for existing solutions if any. If you find one you take a closer look at them to see if they lack something you can contribute to or if you can just go ahead and build something better to compete in the market.
I call this part “research the idea” and in a software development cycle it is called analysis and it is the step where you define the scope and the project itself. You measure the risks, define a timeline that will take you to the final result, define or anticipate issues or opportunities, and plan for things as well as come up with the requirements for the project. This step may even determine if the project should go forward or not as well as how.
Documentation
This phase is to come up with a way to document the project solution and requirements and it must contain everything needed during development and provide few checks: Economic, Legal, Operations, Technical, and Schedule, more or less.
You must define the costs related to the development of the project, go over copyright and patents to avoid any legal conflict around the idea and product. The delivery schedule is a big one especially if you have a sales, marketing, and social media team and they need to create content and be ready for launch to promote the product.
Design
The design phase is not just about designing the interface of the product itself but anything related to it. It can be the overall system architecture, how the data look like, where it will be stored, and how the data flows in the system. You also define the functionality of each module and all related logic as well as how these modules talk to each other and yes, you also design the interface of the software as well.
Coding
After the design phase is the coding phase where you analyze the idea the documentation, requirements, and specifications and start coding things by following a coding plan, the product schedule, timeline, and roadmap. Anything that turns out to be more complex and deviates from the original plan should be communicated. Things may change as a result.
I often see plan B being applied where you find an MVP version of the feature or the delivery and implement that and come back to it later on where you further improve the feature after much detailed research. The show must go on and it is hard to remove a wagon after a train is in motion.
The coding is done maybe by following an agile development model where features are delivered in sprints, are planned in sprint plannings, and get daily Engineer updates in daily stand-ups. The development team keeps a backlog of features and bugs to distribute among them and address them per sprint which usually takes 2 weeks.
Testing
When the code is done it is the testing phase. I am not talking about unit tests as those should happen during the coding phase whether you use a Test Driven Development technique or not. The test phase is for QA and E2E(sometimes). These tests do not happen after 100% of the things are coded. They happen as different parts are completed.
Anything that is found to be faulty or deserves improvement is sent back to be fixed by the engineers. The goal is to not introduce new features but to check that what was coded follows the requirements and does what it is supposed to do. The E2E is created to automate the user flow in a step by step pattern to mimic how the user would use the product.
Deployment
If everything is coded, tested, and seems to be right it then gets deployed but it does not mean that developers and testers job is complete. The QA then tests things in production as the production and development environments are different and again, anything found to be broken is also sent to be fixed by the developers.
At this point, the user will start interacting with the product and sometimes things come up and this is when customer support comes in. These people understand how the product works because they got trained as things were being built or at the end.
These people will guide the users, through the product in case of any problem or if the user is stuck in some issue that is preventing them from using the product where anything perceived to be a problem is turned into issues that are sent to the developer’s backlog to be checked by the engineering team and gets fixed if necessary.
The customer support may even be the developers as well. Some companies use the concept of having developers “on-call” for any user-related issues. Normally small companies do that and these engineers stay on call even during non-business hours.
Maintenance
After launch, there is the maintenance phase, the final phase of the cycle. This phase includes bug fixes like those reported after launch, software upgrades, and any new feature enhancements. The development cycle is circular so if any new thing, version, or complex update needs to be done it goes from phase 1 again until it is delivered.
Observation
One thing to notice is that the coding phase is often small. There is a lot of planning and support time dedicated to delivering a product. I worked in companies where we took 2 and a half years to deliver a product as well as others that took 3, 6, or 9 months depending on the product type. No matter the time it takes to deliver software, they all follow or try to follow a software development cycle.
Red Flag
A red flag would be a place where the coding time is the largest phase and normally these are startups that experiment, test, and come up with requirements as things are being coded and designed. These environments tend to be very stressful to work at as things may change as you are coding them, meaning, you start a sprint with a set of requirements and by the end of the sprint the design and requirements may change which may mean that the developers need to allocate extra time to address these changes.
Conclusion
It should not matter the size of the project, whether it is a side project or a freelance project. You should always try to follow a plan and get good it. The steps will narrow your focus and allow you to deliver a product in junks which will keep you on track and satisfied as you go.
I implement these steps fully or partially in my deliveries which allows me to finish a side project, give a detailed plan, pricing, and timeline for a freelance project client, communicate well with the VP, managers, and project owners at work.
Watch me code and create things by visiting beforesemicolon.com or subscribing to my YouTube channel. | https://beforesemicolon.medium.com/how-to-deliver-a-software-or-web-application-into-production-4bf309be4493 | ['Before Semicolon'] | 2020-12-27 18:28:23.396000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Software Architecture', 'Technology', 'Software Engineering', 'Programming'] |
Darcy | I can see
You are the same as me
The same on every level
That same bright light of infinite
Held in a separate vessel
I can see
The answers in your eyes
Intelligence beyond our dreams
Perspective may suggest we’re different
This world is rarely as it seems
To live a life
In human form
Just one of many sacred shapes
The shapes all morph as one together
Beyond the veil of ancient gates
To live a life
To live another
On, and on, and on
We’re all the light,
We’re all the mother.
Bonded, by beyond. | https://medium.com/literally-literary/darcy-fc4c46ba623d | ['Adam Millett'] | 2020-09-10 05:31:01.105000+00:00 | ['Philosophy', 'Metaphysics', 'Love', 'Life', 'Poetry'] |
“Best Before” | — an anecdote of potpourris.
“Best Before”
Answer me this: am I sick?
Photo by Gantas Vaičiulėnas from Pexels
Best before: 2023.12.25
That’s an odd number. 25–12–23. Why that day? Why that specific number? That doesn’t even make any sense, what’s so special about it? Is it because it’s Christmas?
December 25, 2023. That’s a crazy number, I’d be 23 then! Maybe the rest of the label tells a hint.
Gardenia-Scented Body Wash.
Why did they call it gardenia? It is flowery, but is this what an entire garden would smell like? I never had a garden big enough to tell which scent goes to which flower.
Is gardenia a flower? Does this have anything to do with the Christmas thing? No, this doesn’t have anything to do with the Christmas thing. Why did I buy gardenia; I don’t even know what that is.
Best before: 2023.12.25
December 25th, 2023. My birthday is just a week before that. Did they set the date to be near my birthday? Did they know I was going to buy this specific bottle? No that doesn’t make any sense at all. I’m just paranoid. Why would they choose me?
Are they choosing me, though? But why would they reveal themselves through a body wash? Who are “they”? Maybe this is a test. If I call the customer support and reveal the answer, I’ll win a gold medal. Wait they don’t give medals anymore, do they?
“Best before.”
Three years from now. Why then? If the bottle is tainted somehow, it wouldn’t be any good — even after a year. What’s in this bottle that makes it go bad within three years? I’m not a chemist, if I read the label I’ll only know water. But why three years?
It would be nice I guess if people were born with a “best before” label tattooed on them. We all know what they say, it’s best for us to just live our lives as best as we can, appreciate everything we have before our time runs out, and that somehow it’s always better to not know when you’re gonna go. | https://medium.com/a-cornered-gurl/best-before-3a0be8fbc98f | ['Lita Tiara'] | 2020-07-10 10:31:01.409000+00:00 | ['Nonfiction', 'A Cornered Gurl', 'Short Story', 'This Happened To Me', 'Life'] |
How to convert teak wood into doors | How to convert teak wood into doors
APRIL 7, 2020
how to convert teak wood into doors
How to convert teak wood into doors
As a stuff or material wood is already exists in nature before humans start to think about crafting.Nature gifted us so many things like metals ,coal ,petroleum, wood etc now we know how to utilize or use them as materials.One of those material is wood. Wood is a composition of tissues of plant and trees which carries water and minerals for them.Mainly wood has two classes hardwood and softwood which sub divided in small categories like hardwood has oak wood,teak wood,balsa wood,beech wood where as softwood has spruce wood and pine wood.Both hardwood and softwood produces by trees and plants which are gymnosperms and angiosperms.So i am not writing about botany here let me describe how i convert round logs of teak wood in designers doors.so many types of wood available from many different countries we choose teak wood for making doors some time we make doors on pine to but as per seen in above image this is made on c.p teak wood kindly read following points for further knowledge.YOU CAN SEE THIS YOUTUBE LINK TO CHECK FINAL LOOK OF THIS DOOR IN VIDEO
HERITAGE OF DOORS
In doors heritage main door frame is made by solid teak wood and door is joined in that way in which you can see the grains of teak wood it gives good vibrations to on lookers as per you seen in above image this door photo is raw or without polish after polish this door give a vintage look like door of ancient times.
how to convert teak wood into doors
MARKED WOOD
For our doors we only choose marked teak wood round log best in quality size grains and with minimum moisture.
how to convert teak wood into doors
SAW MILL
After selecting size of teak wood log we start to make desired size like we need 2 inch width from 5 by 5 inch log then we cut that log as per dimensions.
ZERO MOISTURE
After cutting as per our dimensions we start to seasoned our log planks because some moisture always remain in tree log and we need zero moisture for good carving and engraving on wood.
how to convert teak wood into doors
UNITEarea of a circle used at house
Voyage of designer door start when zero moisture log planks unite with each other by finger joint In between joint we also apply resin glue to interlock the joins without any gap visible to naked eyes.
DIMENSIONS
After accomplish the process of joining we give a visit to your place for cross check the precise dimensions of door frame in millimeters.
how to convert teak wood into doors
MODELLING
When we are satisfied with dimensions we start to design a 3d model on software which is choose by client or given reference image some time we made design from scratch to enhance the grace of your home interior.we confirmed that design from client after that we go ahead in next process.
how to convert teak wood into doors
ENGRAVING
Some software make design and some software use to control cnc machines for engraving in which we describe the specification of size ,design, tool, cycle time ,spindle speed, depth of cutting etc.Normal door will take minimum 8 hours to complete one side of door. cnc machine engraved as per command given to machine and this work continuous without any pause.Beauty of doors comes out when engraving done on given stock.CHECK THIS YOUTUBE LINK TO SEE LIVE ENGRAVING https://youtu.be/8EoBDWTqfSw
VARNISH
Final step is to give smooth look on the engraved area by sand paper some varnish is done manually and some on machine after varnish or sanding final look give a gracious look whoever see it some client do pu paint and some do natural lacquer as per client wish we proceed further.thats all for this article i feel glad if this article help you in any ways do not forget to leave a comment and share with others too
follow me on insta @rmndeepg or on fb @rmndeepg
you can mail me direct @[email protected] | https://medium.com/home-interior/how-to-convert-teak-wood-into-doors-78b2bf16fff5 | [] | 2020-04-08 07:06:27.161000+00:00 | ['Art', 'Design', 'Doors', 'Designer', 'Blog'] |
The ROI of design-led change. Why senior leaders and commissioners… | The ROI of design-led change
There’s a saying that change is the only constant. But a constant challenge we face is making change transformational for organisations. This is true across local authorities, central government and health & care providers.
Too often, we see organisations focus solely on their technology or services, without considering the business model of organisations. However, it’s the combination of the three which create the best method for delivering improved user experiences and outcomes, as well as more cost-effective and future-facing operating models.
Increasingly, we understand the need to articulate the impact we have, which is why we published our impact dashboard earlier this year. We’re also asked what the return on investment (ROI) is for design-led change.
Why is investing in design better than traditional change management?
What do we mean by design-led change?
You can look at change management through different lenses. It could be an organisation restructure, buying new software (technology) or rethinking how to provide a particular service. Taking a design-led approach to change means that all three of these lenses are seen together. We call this an integrated design approach.
Designing services is about delivering the best possible outcomes and end to end service experiences for people; products & technology is about supercharging services through the best of breed digital technologies; organisations is about working with organisations to review processes, build capabilities, rethink structures and deliver new or improved ways of working. The three of these, when seen together, can unlock new perspectives and enable us to frame problems and work in very different ways.
Reframing the problem means that we focus on solving the right problems, in the right places. Combined with research to understand user needs, data and existing assets, we can then start to prioritise opportunities and different options. This creates the space for prototyping, giving the organisations we work with the ability to focus on developing solutions iteratively.
Constant testing of ideas and learning allows us to validate where we are right and, more importantly, learn about how we might be wrong when designing how future services could work. It means that when a new product, service or organisational structure goes live or becomes operational, then we already have a high degree of confidence in how it will work at scale; including costs, levels of support required and how it meets the needs of users.
Why is this important?
Design-led change isn’t just about hiring more designers. It’s about how an entire organisation can work.
This isn’t easy. Adopting unfamiliar ways of working, often in organisations that are beginning to understand what it means to be a 21st-century organisation, can feel very uncomfortable. At least to start with. But, you’re embedding an approach that has cheaper, iterative testing and learning at its heart. This ensures that you implement and scale the right solutions and the right strategies for your organisation around technology and service delivery.
Design is also a way of increasing creative output and thinking across an organisation. Creativity applied to ways of working should mean generating a stronger and more diverse set of ideas and opportunities. This is about being open to exploring new ways and alternative models of how to deliver services to meet user needs. It can mean making use of new technologies and new ways of delivering services or meeting the changing expectations people have for how services should work.
In the same way that design-led change isn’t just about hiring designers, it also shouldn’t be thought of as a specialist or localised resource (like a design team). Creativity and thinking about design as a state of mind is more a competence that should be part of the fabric of every 21st-century organisation.
Unlocking the potential of design
I spend a lot of time working with senior leaders to help them understand more about why the way we approach change is important, what it means for them, and being a sounding board for questions or concerns. To do this I often ask the question: “What is keeping you up at night?” And, “Is organisation effort focussed on addressing this?”
I try to get under the skin of where decisions happen, what information people are comfortable with and used to, and how a design-led approach can be the first step of a bias to action becoming the default mindset in an organisation. This might mean bringing together the quantitative and qualitative data we gather through user research or engaging with democratic decision-making alongside our agile rhythms. These things help ensure that we agree on a shared lens and perspective about design being the right way to approach change.
A concern I often hear is that there isn’t time to slow down and reframe the problem or do more research and learning before delivery. The answer to this is that design helps ensure you don’t only improve services, but embed continuous improvement at the heart of the process. This way we’re always working towards transforming services and organisation. It also means shortening feedback loops and introducing a way of managing the risk of delivering the wrong solutions. Or, solutions that aren’t joined up in a way that delivers services that work for both users and organisations.
In summary
A design-led approach to change costs time and money, but its value will outweigh the investment in this way of working. To summarise, the key benefits explored here have included:
user focus using research and continuous learning to understand user needs, data and assets.
using research and continuous learning to understand user needs, data and assets. reframing to solve the right set of problems
to solve the right set of problems creativity to generate a stronger and more diverse set of ideas and opportunities
to generate a stronger and more diverse set of ideas and opportunities cheaper/iterative testing and learning in order to design, implement and scale the right solutions
in order to design, implement and scale the right solutions continuous improvement using shorter feedback loops and hypothesis-driven design
We know that moving to any new model for managing change isn’t easy. But we also believe that design-led change is an important step for organisations to take. We’re seeing more and more organisations with the ambition, vision, and leadership to not just imagine a better future, but who are being intentional about designing it.
If you want to learn more about how FutureGov is working with public services to reimagine them for the 21st century, subscribe to our FutureGov newsletter and Statecraft. | https://blog.wearefuturegov.com/the-return-on-investment-of-design-led-change-14487abe6ca5 | ['David Ayre'] | 2019-06-17 11:28:18.935000+00:00 | ['Organizational Change', 'Local Government', 'Change', 'Leadership'] |
“A verdade é que a verdade nunca esteve no topo da agenda do Homo sapiens.” | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/ted-uneb/a-verdade-%C3%A9-que-a-verdade-nunca-esteve-no-topo-da-agenda-do-homo-sapiens-2fb30b70a306 | ['Vitória Alves'] | 2020-12-07 15:28:01.848000+00:00 | ['Fake News'] |
Insignificant, Yet Important | Photo from Alfah via freepik.com
“Whatever you do in life will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it because you can’t know. You can’t ever really know the meaning of your life. And you don’t need to. Every life has meaning, whether it lasts one hundred years or one hundred seconds.” Mahatma Gandhi.
This quote from Mahatma Gandhi is profound in many ways, it teaches us that the insignificant is important, and who we are and what we do have an impact on people around us and on the world at large; we have more influence than we think.
The insignificant is important because small choices + consistency + time = significant results.
Have you heard about the concept of compound effect? The compound effect is the strategy of reaping huge rewards from small, seemingly insignificant actions. Darren Hardy wrote a whole book on this fascinating subject. Success is doing half a dozen things really well, repeated five thousand times. Your life is a result of your moment-to-moment choices and the compound effect is the operating system that has been running your life whether you know it or not.
Photo from Alfah via freepik.com
Small changes done consistently each day can add up to a big reward further down the line. The doubling penny example illustrates this point quite well. If I offer you $1 million dollars right now or a penny that would double in value each and every day for the next 30 days, which would you choose? Most people would jump at the opportunity to grab $1 million and make a run for it. However, if you spend a little time thinking it through, you would be better off choosing the second option. If you double a penny every day for the next 30 days, you will end up with $5.3 million dollars. Sure, you may be thinking nobody knows where I would be in the next 30 days, I may be dead, so might as well grab $1 million now. The chance is, you will be perfectly fine and alive in the next 30 days and if you opted for the second choice you would be sitting on $5.3 million dollars. Not insignificant!
The insignificant is important because no man is an island
Every life matters because we operate within a chain of existence where everything we do or don’t do affects our environment and the people we interact with. Every person you come in contact with is somehow impacted by your presence.
Today you wake up happy and in a good mood, ready to make the most of the day ahead of you. You go out of your building, cross path with a stranger, and decide to hold the door for that person to let him in the building; that gesture will likely trigger a positive reaction from that person who will smile back, say thank you, and wish you a pleasant day. Good manners go a long way and can create a positive ripple effect. So now we have two happy people out and about with a smile on their faces.
At the end of a stressful day in the office you come back home, you are tired and in a bad mood. You walk towards your building, cross paths with a stranger by the front door, and lash out at that person for being in your way. Your lack of civility will have a ripple effect on that person’s mood and you may have just ruined the rest of their evening. So now we have two unhappy people out and about with a grumpy expression on their faces. Those examples show that you have the power to make someone‘s day a great day or a shitty day.
Photo from Alfah via freepik.com
The majority of people go about their daily life without considering the impact their words or actions could have on someone else. Our impact on others is largely unconscious. We do things without considering the repercussions or even realizing that our actions and words matter. We dish out our opinions on social media without a second thought about the possible ripples effect that our comment may cause to someone. We wrongly believe that our words and/or actions don’t matter that much because who are we to think that we have the power to shape the world around us?
This belief is wrong. Each and every one of us has a great deal of power over our environment, there is no doubt that we can have a positive or a negative impact on this world through the choices we make every day. You do not need to be famous or wealthy or write a book to be influential. Assuming that you don’t live under a rock, you will be surrounded by family, friends, colleagues, random people you come in contact with all the time, and this in itself gives you some kind of influence.
Do not underestimate the impact you have on others. The impression you leave on this life and on others is your legacy, and this in itself is a big deal. Be intentional about the way you live your life, because that is your legacy.
“Please think about your legacy because you are writing it every day.” Gary Vaynerchuk
It’s the little things that count. Way too often, we just stop. We stop trying, stop caring, stop moving. For sure accomplishing great deeds of valor is a worthwhile pursuit, but at the same time, we should not underestimate the power of doing small acts that are just and right, a touch of a hand, a smile, a kind word, and doing them over and over again, no matter what; those are the things that count.
Insignificant, yet important! | https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/insignificant-yet-important-1d96b8473d66 | ['Joanne Reed'] | 2021-03-05 09:43:17.741000+00:00 | ['Motivation', 'Inspiration', 'Success', 'Impact', 'Self Improvement'] |
Upload csv files to Postgresql (AWS RDS) using python’s Psycopg2 | In this tutorial I’m going to explain how to upload large cvs files from a remote location (client) to a remote postgresql server. This process is a great solution for your data science projects (ETL specifically).
PostgreSQL — Python
Create table to run our test
I suggest creating your field with varchar(n) to avoid type errors while trying to upload your CSV file.
2. Create a demo CSV file
Is important:
not having extra columns (null values are fine)
not having extra blank rows at the end
Having complex data types set in your database that do not match the incoming data. (For this I suggest (If possible) setting your fields to varchar and then doing the necessary transformations)
Example of my demo file:
Plain CSV file from a books dataset (Contains 11k+ rows)
Notice that my CVS file contains a header. (it’s ok with out it as well)
3. Preparing our code
Here you can see my clean “insert_demo” table under the business_intelligence schema.
installing and importing libraries
Next I use pandas just to verify my CSV’s shape
Here I just verified my CSV’s size. You can notice we have 11,127 rows and 3 columns
Creating our insert function
A function is not necessary but I prefer to keep everything as functions for portability and team work.
The copy function receives the following parameters:
cursor: c
file_path: “./exampleData/books.csv”
table_name: “insert_demo”
cols_tuple: tuple_demo = (“colname1”,”colname2", “colname3”,…)
Creating our variables for file path, table name and columns.
3. Function for establishing connection
Here we establish our connection using psycopg2’s connect function. We should pass to the function the following parameters:
user, password, host, port, database
Once we get the connection object we extract our cursor object which will help us to execute our commands.
Once we get our cursor, we can call our copy_query function and pass it down along with our file path, table name and columns tuple.
After calling our function which will execute psycopg2’s copy_from function. Which is the method that loads data from a remote location into postgres.
It’s important to commit our connection in order to save changes into the database permanently.
Close connection and add a exception handler
Make sure to close cursor and connection
Results:
SUCCESS!!
SUCCESS!!
AND DONE :)
Feedback is appreciated!
Happy Coding! | https://medium.com/@alexcodes/upload-csv-files-to-postgresql-aws-rds-using-pythons-psycopg2-613992fcd7b | ['Alejandro Madrazo'] | 2020-04-19 01:42:03.255000+00:00 | ['Postgres', 'Data Science', 'Computer Science', 'Python', 'Postgresql'] |
The art of unraveling | I thought I was falling apart, but really I was just tangled up
Photo by Joanne Adela Low from Pexels
“Mom, look what the cats did!” I awoke this morning to my son thrusting a ball of tangled yarn in my face. I groaned. Their most recent excursion into my craft room had turned a skein into an irreversible mess of knots, and the cheap, acrylic box store yarn was definitely not worth the time and sanity to even attempt to save it.
But this time was different. Today they had gotten into my beautiful, soft, hand-dyed wool that I was saving for future inspiration. It could be turned into anything. A beautiful scarf for a gift, a slouchy hat for me, maybe those socks I had been meaning to learn how to knit. But now it had no potential. It was just a disaster.
After venting my anger, I resigned myself to the situation. I could either throw it away or try to save it. I turned the tangled mess over in my hands, trying to make sense of it. As I attempted to pull it apart I saw knots forming and tightening. I knew if I forced it there would be no saving it.
I sat back and assessed the situation. I needed to find the end. I started pulling it through the first several knots but soon realized that the loose end was becoming entangled into new knots. So, I started wrapping it into a ball. Small and hard to grasp at first, but more manageable as I kept winding. When I came to a knot, I gently teased it loose and passed the growing ball through. | https://shannon-n.medium.com/the-art-of-unraveling-a6f3a33d5415 | ['Shannon N'] | 2019-10-17 15:56:41.109000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Healing From Trauma', 'Abuse Survivors', 'Self Love'] |
New Features of Scikit-Learn | Photo by Tamanna Rumee on Unsplash
3) Successive Halving Estimators
Two new estimators for hyperparameter tuning are introduced namely HalvingGridSearchCV and HalvingRandomSearchCV. They can respectively serve as alternatives for GridSearchCV and RandomizedSearchCV, the in-built hyperparameter tuning methods so far in scikit-learn.
The basic idea is that the search for the best hyperparameter starts on a few samples with a large set of parameters. In the next iteration, the number of samples increase (by a factor n), but the number of parameters is halved/reduced (halved does not only mean a factor of 1/2 (n=2) but can also be 1/3 (n=3), 1/4 (n=4), and so on). This halving procedure continues till the final iteration. Finally, the best subset of parameters is the one that has the highest score in the last iteration.
Similar to the existing two methods, the “successive halving” can either be performed randomly (HavingRandomSearchCV) or exhaustively (HavingGridSearchCV). The following example demonstrates the use case of HavingRandomSearchCV (you can similarly use HavingGridSearchCV). For a comprehensive explanation of how to choose the best parameters, refer here. | https://towardsdatascience.com/new-features-of-scikit-learn-fbbfe7652bfb | ['Ankit Gupta'] | 2021-01-08 00:09:06.692000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Python', 'Machine Learning', 'Scikit Learn', 'Data Science'] |
You are my Religion | Mention faith in the same breath as secularism and people get confused.
And yet, I’m an atheist with faith, the unwavering kind. But the difference is that I’m an ardent believer in us, humans, rather than in representations of us often referred to as deities.
Because we have reason and intellect, because we are curious and questioning, because we are real and tangible, I place my faith in us. This means that I believe in the limitless potential of the human spirit and value human prowess above all else, be it science or art.
Human intelligence is the closest thing I have to religion because this asset we all share makes miracles big and small happen every single day. We survive, we rise above adversity, we heal, we rebuild lives, and we change.
Our capacity for evolution and self-actualization only knows self-imposed limits. If we do not set any then our life is wide open, a blank page on which we’re free to weave any thread our imagination can conjure up. | https://asingularstory.medium.com/you-are-my-religion-e66471896138 | ['A Singular Story'] | 2020-12-14 12:45:39.273000+00:00 | ['Self', 'Love', 'Spirituality', 'Culture', 'Religion'] |
MOAC signed a cooperation agreement with IntelliShare on July 19th. | What is Intellishare:
The core of blockchain is to lock the values. The IntelliShare uses the blockchain technology to perfectly create such a self-organized, self-expanding business ecosystem, thus, forms an ecological environment that delivers and locks the values for Mesh Network. IntelliShare has constructed a distributed, self-expandable Mesh network validation system that uses each single node to confirm under common protocols.
On the basis of the confirmation of distributed information data, the multi-dimensional ecological applications will be further built around the commercialization of Mesh networks, from the information-confirm to the value-exchange, from the confirmation of distributed single nodes to the promotion of the entire distributed community, and from the identification of single structure to the identification of accurate structures , combining the underlying blockchain distributed ledger system, thus, provide a distinctive and versatile Mesh commercialization system.
IntelliShare officials:
Source:
Where to Find Us
Website: https://moac.io/
GitHub: https://github.com/MOACChain/moac-core
Twitter: https://twitter.com/moac_io
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/MOAC/
Medium: https://medium.com/moac
Steemit: https://steemit.com/@moac-official
Telegram(International): https://t.me/moacblockchain
Telegram(Developers): https://t.co/8m3m9RD5ix
Telegram(China): https://t.co/73rU9sHWLH
YouTube (Event Channel):https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBU405W7vfOPBicLwW9-QOA
Youtube (Technical Channel) :
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_U54wsGNrm_Yivj5bH9i7Q?view_as=subscriber
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/moacchain/
Weibo:https://weibo.com/u/6563458350 | https://medium.com/moac/moac-signed-a-cooperation-agreement-with-intellishare-on-july-19th-bd11b0eb3cab | [] | 2018-07-23 07:47:14.387000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Crptocurrency', 'Moac Annoucements', 'IoT'] |
Video Marketing — Strategy and Challenges That Gets Results | Is video a component of your marketing plan? If it isn’t, it must be! Why? Consumers have grown accustomed to being advertised to through videos, and many increasingly demand it from brands they recognize and trust.
It took me a long time to get used to video, especially the ones that required me to be in front of the camera! However, there are many different ways to make videos, so if you’re afraid of being in front of the camera, don’t worry; you don’t have to be a video star to get started.
The truth is that having a well-written product description, a snappy sponsored ad, or a beautiful landing page is no longer enough to appeal to a large portion of your target audience. According to a Wyzowl survey, 8% of respondents claimed that watching a brand’s video influenced them to buy a product or service.
Perhaps you’re nodding your head in agreement that video marketing is a priority for you. That’s fantastic! But do you have a strategy in place based on your ideal consumer profile, or are you just slamming stuff out there in the hopes that something sticks?
Video Marketing Benefits
Here are a few video marketing benefits to persuade you that a well-thought-out strategy is worthwhile:
You can spread the word about your product or service.
- It’s a clever technique to engage/entertain your website/social media audience.
- It aids in the simple explanation of your goods or service to others.
- If you provide excellent recommendations and advice, you will increase customer retention.
- It’s time to take advantage of this crucial but frequently disregarded, marketing strategy.
Here are three stages to putting together a video marketing strategy that can boost engagement, leads, and sales.
Read more about Video Marketing | https://medium.com/@seohaste/video-marketing-strategy-and-challenges-that-gets-results-f908ef92fe78 | [] | 2021-12-31 12:39:43.994000+00:00 | ['Videomarketingstrategy', 'Marketingplan', 'Videomarketingchallenges', 'Videomarketing', 'Videomarketingbenefits'] |
Build No-code Automated Machine Learning Model with OptimalFlow Web App | How to deploy Web App:
Step 1: Install OptimalFlow:
If you didn’t install OptimalFlow’s latest version, you should do that from PYPI, simply using PIP. To install OptimalFlow’s latest version, run this command in your terminal or prompt:
pip install --upgrade optimalflow
Step 2: Download Web App’s source code:
There’re 2 ways to download its source code:
Method 1 Get it from OptimalFlow GitHub. Download all codes and sub-folders within the folder ‘webapp’.
Method 2 — Get from OptimalFlow’s package. You could find it in your Python core folder. Here’s the example where you can find the ‘Webapp’ folder.
Step 3: Start a server port:
Move the downloaded ‘Webapp’ folder to the place you want to store it. Using your Terminal or Prompt enter its directory and run the app.py (ignore ‘py’ here when you are not playing it in VS Code)
And you will see the output similar to the picture below:
Done! You can now open your browser (recommend Chrome), and type 127.0.0.1:500 to open the web app on your laptop.
Build Pipeline Cluster Traversal Experiment(PCTE) Workflow:
When you’ve done the deployment steps, and start running the server, you will see the web app in your browser like the picture below:
To build a PCTE Automated Machine Learning Workflow, you need to enter the parameters for each OptimalFlow’s module: autoPP, autoFS, and autoCV.
But before that, you need to move the dataset you want to build model into the ./input folder. You will see a sample dataset called “breast-cancer.csv” there.
After doing that, we could select the dataset by clicking the button under “Load Dataset”:
Then, you need to finish the settings for autoPP, autoFS, and autoCV step by step.
Please NOTE: be careful to the setting “sparsity” and “cols” values in autoPP parameters panel, if the combination of the feature preprocessing can’t meet the restriction values you’ve set, OptimalFlow will not able to continue running the following modules. More details could be found in autoPP’s Documentation.
Next, you need to finish set parameters in autoFS module, i.e. set how many top features you want to select, and what algorithm you want PCTE to go through. More details about autoFS module here.
For the autoCV module’s settings, you could click the autoCV ‘Set Parameters’ button, and enter the tuning strategy and algorithms comparison scope you want OptimalFlow to automatedly test. More details about autoCV module here.
Finally, when you finished all setting steps(the progress bar should be fulfilled 100%), you can click the ‘Build PCTE Workflow’ button, to run the Omni-ensemble Automated Machine Learning operation. This function is based on autoPipe module, more details about autoPipe is here.
Here are the sample outputs when the process’s done. You will find the Top 5 Optimal models with evaluation metrics there. More details and use cases about OptimalFlow modules and notebook samples could be found in Documentation.
LogsViewer:
You could view the logs information related to each module in ‘LogsViewer’ page. Please note, you could only use it after the previous automated machine learning process’s done.
Visualization:
You could also review the visualization outputs from the ‘Visualization’ page. For the classification problems, it will present ‘Pipeline Cluster Traversal Experiments Model Retrieval Diagram’ and ‘Pipeline Cluster Model Evaluation Dynamic Table’. And for the regression problem, it only will present ‘Pipeline Cluster Model Evaluation Dynamic Table’. All visualization outputs are based on Plotly, so you could play with them by dragging or scrolling. You will find more details on the example page.
Updates:
SearchingSpace
In OptimalFlow’s next version 0.1.11, you could edit the estimators’ Searching Space via the Web App. | https://towardsdatascience.com/build-no-code-automated-machine-learning-model-with-optimalflow-web-app-8acaad8262b1 | ['Tony Dong'] | 2020-10-09 13:51:46.698000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Automl', 'Data Scientist', 'Web App Development'] |
Joan Didion and Susan Sontag documentaries | Briefs (1)
Photograph by Thomas Leuthard
I’ve recently seen two amazing documentaries about Joan Didion (2017) and Susan Sontag (2014). The first invites the viewer to reflect upon the importance of our own life, not in a sense of hyper-individualizing your bubble of thought and care but breaking the inner and captive feeling of sadness to overcome very difficult situations that weren’t meant to happen. Or at least you never asked nor envisioned them to happen so you weren’t in control. I admire both writers, as far as I know, they exerted with audacity the art of writing from an authentic non-binary perspective (maybe at some point they became blurred for some as part of the pop or New Wave American cultures) and championed messages not to forget about history or our vulnerabilities among so many others.
After Didion’s documentary, I had a deep breath about the physical distance from the people I care about. In any way, we can’t compare losing someone forever with being far from them another year or so through this pandemic experience. Also, from a few years ago loneliness meaning has deeply changed for me as I am (or feel more) aware of most of my changes happening physically and psychologically. Beyond what most of the cinema evokes about the pain of being lonely, and taking into account that we are all social and political beings, beyond what motivates couples to take a step further but later found themselves signing divorce documents, there is a particular and sometimes unaware movement to forget about ourselves. Have we been invited to do so? Like a vague jump into the unknown for no reason (sometimes the reason is love but ends up being a contradiction). Not in a sense of forgetting about the others and concentrating upon oneself but rather the opposite channeled through the advocacy to help the people you can. That happened to Sontag during the Yom Kippur’s war or expressing herself about the outrageous Holocaust itself, knowing that she had the opportunity to help others by influencing them with words, even when some may find that irrelevant.
What I was motivated to do was to start writing more, even when it is not scientific nor elaborated, because sometimes hiding into a position of “let’s wait 3–12 months until you have that article published” that may extend the distance between the object and the researcher to a further audience, instead of what we want to express now. I am not saying the research process to publish is useless (I love it and patiently wait for it) but there is also a time to open up our minds even to watch how ideas evolve in ourselves through time. This is another way to talk more, isn’t it? So I hope you may find intriguing ideas from those documentaries, write to me if you fancy it! and let see if we find time to read both authors soon.
Until next time,
Alain | https://medium.com/@alainzaragoza/didion-and-sontag-bf646211a6cf | ['Ludwig Alain Zaragoza Alvarez'] | 2021-01-13 21:02:41.834000+00:00 | ['Documentary', 'Happiness', 'Sunday', 'Loneliness', 'Mental Health'] |
Do Your Parents Know How to Plan Retirement? | Do Your Parents Know How to Plan Retirement?
My parents were self-employed. And, growing up, I had always assumed that they making the right financial decisions. As I got older, it dawned on me that they weren’t.
After a series of financial setbacks, they were forced to sell off some business assets. But, more detrimental, they began living paycheck to paycheck just to make ends meet. Clearly, that meant they weren’t able to save for their retirement.
It turns out, that my parents weren’t an anomaly. In fact, according to Pew Research, roughly “13 percent of self-employed workers in single-person firms reported participating in retirement plans at their current jobs, compared to almost three-quarters of traditional workers.”
But, this just isn’t a problem for the self-employed. It’s a crisis that most Americans are facing. The Fed’s 2018 Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households found that 25% of U.S. adults have no retirement savings. And, only 36% percent of non-retired adults believe that their retirement savings are on track.
So, if you haven’t asked yet, it’s time to ask your parents if they have a plan for their retirement? The sooner you find out, the sooner you can rectify this problem so that they can actually enjoy their Golden Years without being a burden on the rest of your family.
Your parents probably aren’t prepared.
No disrespect. But, a lot of our parents aren’t prepared for retirement. I’d even go out on a limb and say that they don’t even know how to make a retirement plan.
Why would I make such an assumption? Well, data from Northwestern Mutual’s 2019 Planning & Progress Study shows that 56% of American adults don’t know how much they’ll need to retire. But, to fair, that’s not completely their fault.
“For the retirement generation before, there were defined-benefit plans such as a pension,” said Edward Gottfried, group product manager at Betterment for Business. “This is the first generation where 401(k)s could make the bulk of retirement savings.”
Don’t bank on Social Security.
What’s more, Social Security is expected to be depleted by 2035. Even if they are able to receive Social Security Payments, they still fall short.
“One of the big issues with Social Security is that it only provides a similar standard of living for those in the lowest quartile of income earners in the U.S.,” says Mark Hebner, founder and president of Index Fund Advisors Inc., and author of Index Funds: The 12-Step Recovery Program for Active Investors. “In other words, unless your household is earning less than $30,000 a year, most people will need to rely on some sort of personal savings in order to maintain their current standard of living in retirement.”
But, therein lies another problem. Americans are behind on savings. A 2017 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports that the average retirement savings for those between age 55 and 64 were $107,00 — that would be a $310 monthly payment if invested in an inflation-protected annuity.
As if that weren’t enough, medicare will not cover assisted living. In fact, it will take care of only 100 days. After that, the senior is on the hook — which was a median $4,051 a month in 2019.
That’s a lot of information I just tossed your way. But, the fact is, many of us just aren’t aware of how bleak the retirement outlook is. If you’re aware of this, then your parents can start taking steps in developing a retirement plan.
Don’t assume, just ask.
“Before you assume, learn the facts. Before you judge, understand why, before you hurt someone, feel. Before you speak, think. Those who judge will never understand, and those who understand will never judge.”
I dig that quote. It’s served me well in maintaining healthy relationships. It’s also apropos when it comes to your parents and their financial future.
What I mean is that just because there’s a retirement crisis doesn’t mean that it applies to your folks. But, the only way you’ll truly know is if you just ask them.
Naturally, this is an awkward and uncomfortable conversation. However, it’s one that you’re going to inevitably have to initiate.
“It can happen naturally. As naturally as premeditated can be,” said Cameron Huddleston, who wrote the book “Mom and Dad, We Need to Talk.” It can even be as simple as just asking them outright, “Mom and Dad: What does retirement look like for you?”
One way to do make this happen would be if you’re visiting them for a weekly dinner. You could mention how you’re planning your retirement to steer the discussion in this direction. Just remember to not come across as overbearing or judgemental.
What questions should you ask?
However, it’s often best to plan this talk in advance so that you can ask the right questions. Wells Fargo has a list of the following questions that you might want your parents to answer:
What are your plans for retirement? Are you confident you are on the right path?
What are your planned sources of retirement income?
Do you have any sources of debt? If so, what are they?
What type of insurance coverage do you have (life, long-term care, Medicare)?
If you were unable to live in your current location, where would you want to go?
Have you considered if you could maintain a household alone if necessary?
Are you now working with an investment planning professional?
You should also meet with your siblings and significant other to get everyone on the same page. You even may want to be accompanied by a financial expert who can provide educated and unbiased support.
“Problems become exponentially more complicated if kids don’t communicate well with each other and don’t present a unified plan about how best to support Mom and Dad, socially, environmentally and potentially financially,” suggests Sally Hurme, an elder law attorney and author of “Checklist for Family Survivors: A Guide to Practical and Legal Matters When Someone You Love Dies.
Help your parents plan retirement.
When my siblings and I sat our parents down about their retirement, they at first a little defensive. However, we remain calm and reassured them that we we just wanted them to be able to actually enjoy their retirement. There were no other motives.
Once cooler heads prevailed, we asked them if they would be willing to share with us document like bank accounts, wills, trusts. Additional information included:
Health and long-term care insurance policies.
Investments, pensions, Social Security.
A durable power of attorney, health care proxy, living will.
Debt repayment, such as their mortgage and any other outstanding debt.
With this information in toe, we could begin helping them create a budget in order to maximize their savings. From there, we were also able to pinpoint and eliminates unnecessary expenses so that they can bolster their contributions.
Additionally, if your parents are still able, recommend that they delay retirement — even if it’s just a year or two. If it’s no longer possible for them to work full-time, ask if they are willing to work at least part-time. When my mom retired, she began babysitting for my brother and sister a couple of days each week as a supplement income.
Moreover, see if they qualify for assistance programs. While this varies from state to state, there are a number of programs that can help seniors with housing, home repairs, heating and energy, transportation, meals, and prescription drugs. I would head over to the National Council on Aging’s website for a full list of programs that your parents might be eligible for.
Keep the conversation going.
Let’s say that you were able to successfully help your parents cut back on discretionary purchases. You even found some assistance programs that are saving them money on utilities or medical expenses. With the money that they’re saving, they now able to put that towards their retirement.
But, just because they have a plan for retirement doesn’t mean that you should take your foot on the pedal.
“Ideally, this will not be a one-time discussion,” notes Wells Fargo. The good news is that this topic will become more comfortable if it’s recurring. During these talks, “continue to provide your parents with information and ideas to help them manage their finances. Ask regularly about their plans and concerns, and tell them you’re available if they’d like help addressing certain issues.”
What’s more, pay attention to warning signs like:
Missed payments or late notices.
Being careless with their money.
Donating too much of their income.
Falling for potential scams like email phishing scams or sharing personal information over the phone.
Mental deterioration, such as becoming too forgetful.
There’s no need to panic if you spot any of the above. Instead, you want to be mindful of any financial or health problems so that you address as soon as possible. In some cases, that may require someone to literally take over your parent’s finances.
Don’t derail your own retirement plans.
Finally, make sure that you aren’t putting your retirement in jeopardy. Make sure that you have retirement a plan and are sticking to it. If not, then how can you be in a position to help your parents?
And, that also means not lending them money if you don’t have it. Take care of your priorities and build your own savings before anything else. Then, if you’re comfortable and have the means, you can assist them financially. | https://medium.com/due/do-your-parents-know-how-to-plan-retirement-20c2dd109dc0 | [] | 2020-12-19 00:11:43.005000+00:00 | ['Planning', 'Retirement', '401k'] |
A Birth on Highway 4 — A Truly Meaningful Way To Start One’s Day | A United Hatzalah volunteer helping deliver a baby on the street (Illustration)
On Monday morning, one of the most inspiring medical emergencies that can happen took place on Highway 4 just outside of the city of Ashkelon in southern Israel. A husband and wife were on their way to the hospital in order to deliver their fourth child. The woman was in active labor. As this was e fourth birth, time was of the essence as it was unclear how long the labor would last. While the hospital was not too far away in terms of distance the traffic was another thing entirely.
The baby decided that its time had come to enter the world while the parents were still on the Highway. Her husband pulled the car over to the side of the road and called for help.
United Hatzalah volunteer EMTs live a life where they are always on call and ready to respond to any medical emergency as soon as the siren goes off on their personal communication devices. Any time of day or night, these volunteers, who form a nationwide network of more than 6,000 fully trained medical first responders, will drop whatever they are doing and rush to help someone in need of medical attention, and they do it for free.
While many of them have been responding for years, most of them have never shared in the joy of assisting in the delivery of a baby. On Monday, two volunteers, both of whom are veteran responders, got their first opportunity to do so.
Laura Zohar and Chagit Bitton, who were both in close proximity to the birth-in-progress while it was taking place, rushed over to the location given to them by dispatch and found the woman in the advanced stages of labor inside the car.
Bitton relayed: “I was home in the town of Nitzan when I received the call. I work from home these days so I am there a lot. It took me less than 4 minutes to arrive and find the car with the woman giving birth. When I arrived at the vehicle, the woman was in the advanced stages of labor and I had enough time to prepare the surrounding for the baby’s arrival and then receive the baby. I instructed the mother to give a few last pushes and then I received a beautiful baby girl into my hands. I cleaned the baby and allowed the father, who had been coaching his wife up until I arrived, to cut the umbilical cord. The birth went smoothly thank God. The baby was healthy and had an APGAR score of 10. The ambulance arrived ten minutes after the baby was delivered. Once the mother and baby were on the ambulance on the way to the hospital, I headed back home with a great feeling.”
Zohar also spoke about the incident: “When I arrived, Chagit was already finishing with the delivery. I helped clean the child and make sure that everything was okay. I wrapped up the baby and brought it into the ambulance to the staff there. After that, we assisted the mother and helped her through the rest of the process, and brought her to the ambulance as well. They were then transported to Assuta Hospital in Ashdod in good condition. This was the first time I have ever assisted in a delivery, aside from helping my sister in the hospital when she had her children, but I was more of a spectator for that one.”
Bitton concluded: “I was s pleased that I was able to arrive quickly and assist the family. I’ve been volunteering for a few years now, and this is the first time I was present to assist in delivering a baby. To do so in the middle of the highway is even rarer. This family will certainly have an interesting story to tell. For me, this was a truly meaningful way to start my day.” | https://medium.com/the-edge-of-heaven/a-birth-on-highway-4-a-truly-meaningful-way-to-start-ones-day-d85f0279737c | ['Raphael Poch'] | 2020-09-15 06:26:33.597000+00:00 | ['Birth', 'Women', 'Israel', 'Baby', 'First Responder'] |
10 Game Jam Strategies | 10 Game Jam Strategies
Image by Anete Lusina on Pexels
Game development is a lot of fun. But finishing a game is extremely time consuming and difficult. This is why game jams like Ludum Dare are great.
When you only have 48 hours to create a game completely from scratch, you will actually finish a game and it feels very rewarding.
You go through the complete process from the idea through the implementation to the final product, including all aspects of game development like coding, graphics, art, sounds, balancing, polishing, and more.
I haven’t finished a real game yet. But I have finished all of my eight Ludum Dare entries. Here are some tips and strategies for participating in a game jam that have helped me place 18th of 630 in the last Ludum Dare. | https://betterprogramming.pub/10-game-jam-strategies-92c88c81f834 | ['Christian Behler'] | 2020-12-18 16:37:03.116000+00:00 | ['Game Design', 'Hackathons', 'Software Development', 'Programming', 'Game Development'] |
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