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Create Barchart in Android Studio | I will keep the code simple and let's jump into the coding part.
Setting up build.gradle(Module: app) file
Add the following code in your file.
repositories {
maven { url "https://jitpack.io" }
} dependencies {
//...
//...
implementation 'com.github.PhilJay:MPAndroidChart:v2.2.4'
}
and click on the Sync option which pops up.
Building activity_main.xml file
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<RelativeLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
xmlns:tools="http://schemas.android.com/tools"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="match_parent"
android:paddingLeft="16dp"
android:paddingTop="16dp"
android:paddingRight="16dp"
android:paddingBottom="16dp"
tools:context="Android.in.barchart.MainActivity">
<com.github.mikephil.charting.charts.BarChart
android:id="@+id/barchart"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="match_parent" />
</RelativeLayout>
Coding MainActivity.java file
import android.support.v7.app.AppCompatActivity;
import android.os.Bundle;
import com.github.mikephil.charting.charts.BarChart;
import com.github.mikephil.charting.data.BarData;
import com.github.mikephil.charting.data.BarDataSet;
import com.github.mikephil.charting.data.BarEntry;
import com.github.mikephil.charting.utils.ColorTemplate;
import java.util.ArrayList;
public class MainActivity extends AppCompatActivity {
@Override
protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);
BarChart barChart = (BarChart) findViewById(R.id.barchart);
ArrayList<BarEntry> entries = new ArrayList<>();
entries.add(new BarEntry(8f, 0));
entries.add(new BarEntry(2f, 1));
entries.add(new BarEntry(5f, 2));
entries.add(new BarEntry(20f, 3));
entries.add(new BarEntry(15f, 4));
entries.add(new BarEntry(19f, 5));
BarDataSet bardataset = new BarDataSet(entries, "Cells");
ArrayList<String> labels = new ArrayList<String>();
labels.add("2016");
labels.add("2015");
labels.add("2014");
labels.add("2013");
labels.add("2012");
labels.add("2011");
BarData data = new BarData(labels, bardataset);
barChart.setData(data); // set the data and list of labels into chart
barChart.setDescription("Set Bar Chart Description Here"); // set the description
bardataset.setColors(ColorTemplate.COLORFUL_COLORS);
barChart.animateY(5000);
}
}
Play with entries.add() and labels.add() functions. You will understand how plotting is done.
Basically,
entries.add(new BarEntry(8f, 0);
Here 8f is the value and 0 is the index value which is mapping to
labels.add("2016");
which is at 0th index.
Source and Credits: https://github.com/PhilJay/MPAndroidChart which is A powerful 🚀 Android chart view/graph view library, supporting line- bar- pie- radar- bubble- and candlestick charts as well as scaling, dragging and animations.
Clone/Download the repository and play with the code. There is so many chart example available.
Thank You. | https://medium.com/@karthikganiga007/create-barchart-in-android-studio-14943339a211 | ['Kartik Ganiga'] | 2019-06-21 08:04:00.165000+00:00 | ['UI', 'Android', 'Charts', 'Development', 'Android App Development'] | 707 |
3 Mistakes Developers Make When They’re in a Hurry | Not Reading Enough Code
Have you ever seen a movie where a programmer stares at a screen for a couple of minutes and does nothing? Me either. Usually, they type something at a breakneck pace and the problem is solved. Unfortunately, our daily job is not so glamorous.
We need to read code — lots of it. And besides reading the code, we should understand what it does and why.
Random code from the internet
Not reading enough code comes in many flavors. When was the last time you were looking for some answers online, found a code snippet on Stack Overflow, and pasted it? I probably did it this week.
There’s a big chance the code from SO works. But do you understand what it does, why it does it, and what the limitations are? Is it secure? How does it deal with edge cases and your requirements?
Sometimes, you have to paste code and pray it works. Some things are too complicated to fathom in the limited time you have. But usually, you can understand the code in 15-30 minutes. You should be reasonably confident you know the code you put into the project. If you don’t, you may compromise the project’s security and maintainability in the long term.
Code in your project
How about reading your project’s code? It’s the same old story: You’re called to fix a bug in the code part you’re not familiar with. Fortunately, you have a hunch and try to fix it immediately. It works, so you push the changes and get back to your business.
That’s a huge mistake. If you’re not familiar with the codebase and don’t have tests, the chances your fix doesn’t break anything and handles all the cases are small.
You always need to understand things before you try to fix them. Just poking around with random adjustments won’t cut it. You may be lucky once or twice, but sooner or later, you’ll break something big.
Code in the libraries
How many libraries do you add by default when starting a project? Are you sure you need them and understand how they are implemented?
I’m not trying to make a case for not using libraries and frameworks. You should use verified and well-tested code wherever possible. Reinventing the wheel is a common problem and can do more harm than good.
What I want to say is it’s beneficial to understand the tools you’re using. Popular libraries are often excellent pieces of software, and you can learn a lot by studying their codebases. This will let you become a more skilled developer or you may realize you don’t need a certain library. Either way, you win.
You don’t have to analyze every library you use, but when you use something time and time again, it’s worth taking a look at how it works.
Reading good code makes you a better developer and helps you understand your products. You may believe you don’t have time to read code, but that’s not true. Familiarity with your product’s code will speed up your coding, and reading other code will let you grow as a developer. So, in the long run, reading code will save you time — not waste it. | https://medium.com/better-programming/3-mistakes-developers-make-when-theyre-in-a-hurry-29a8a46109dd | ['Szymon Adamiak'] | 2020-09-04 15:17:33.176000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Education', 'Software Development', 'Development', 'Learning To Code'] | 644 |
Hollywood To Go | Hollywood To Go
Courtesy of Jeremy Moore/Fine Art America
*Musical Selection: Rufus & Chaka Khan’s Hollywood*
He’s got dreams —
He tells his sister
He’s gonna make it.
His hands flailing in the
Air, outta control.
There’s nothing in his bones
Remotely close to talent,
But, he’s got dreams.
Who was she to trample on them?
Schoolboy fever, he spends
His free time creating art
No one buys, but he’s
Going to Hollywood —
City made of lights
And overpriced ecstasy.
“Eh, lemme hold somethin’!”
The words echo within his
Mind louder than a bullhorn
Can muster. Must be Sean.
He’s gotta brand new car,
Riding the flex, showing off
That candy-red paint.
Oh, they’ve all got dreams,
But his are more important.
He’s gonna escape the
Death grip of past due bills,
Stale coffee, and beaten up
Trash bins holding day-old-bread
With just enough mold to be
Considered dangerous for consumption.
They eat it anyway.
Of course, what do you do
When Hollywood is twenty years
Down the road in a glass
Globe with figurines
Standing around waiting to be
Shaken?
You take your chances. | https://medium.com/a-cornered-gurl/hollywood-to-go-7faaabcd81a3 | ['Tre L. Loadholt'] | 2017-04-23 21:50:07.985000+00:00 | ['Dreams', 'Audio Poems', 'Art', 'Hollywood'] | 277 |
It’s a challenge guys! | Damn, my people what do I say, it’s been more than a month that I have been feeling so lethargic and tired all the time, loosing concentrations, not focusing and stressing out, not following healthy diets, stopping my workouts and yoga’s. While I must say I have not even gone to balcony, too unaware about earth and nature. I miss nature, I miss talking with my stars, I miss my morning walks, and I have not even managed time todo them all.
I really want to start again. You know what it’s never late to start, it’s okay if you were off the track, now you get back again.
Our smallest to smallest habits shape us, and we don’t know how long we grow by building some smaller habits, whether it be’s waking up early or drinking a coriander seed water in the morning.
Create your life guys, your way of living: choose your dreams, today, yeas today!
That one day in my life, is going to become “day one”!
“Prasuma’s 35 days challenge”: Get ready guys,
Let’s create a challenge!
So, it’s 10:08 pm and I will be updating my blog every morning after I wake up, and it’s a challenge! Ohmygod, prashuma are you up for it?
Yeasssssssssssssssssssssss
The challenge has begun, tik tokkk!
I would be grateful if I carry forward any of my three healthy habits everyday, and my goal is to create a life. To create my day, to create the person I am going to be, cause everyday is your day one, sweethearts!
Wake up, create your schedule, your muscles, it’s time for your skin care, take a chill pill with nature and move your body, drink water and smile at your mirror. Get dressed up in your best fit and start your day with a beautiful portray of you, you would love to be in. You can do this guys!
I will be giving you all the reviews on my everyday experience, and I won’t let you guys down! Wish me luck guys!
I ‘am getting nervous, deep breathhhh, yeas, will see you all tomorrow, with my updates. Time to take my vitamins. Goodnight guys, tomorrow is going to be prettier.
-love love ❤
-PRASUMA | https://medium.com/@magaratiprasuma20/its-a-challenge-guys-cdae65fae19a | ['Prasuma Magarati', 'With My Flaws'] | 2020-10-13 16:50:56.723000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Morning Routines', 'Happy', 'Challenge', 'Life'] | 492 |
Global Startup News…Month In Review — February 7, 2020 | Friday, February 7, 2020
Global Startup News (GSN) is a curated resource, showcasing hard-to-find, early-stage technology companies and related startup industry news from around the world.
Chris Valentine
CEO and Founder
Adeo InterActive
Quote of the Month
“Don’t start a company unless it’s an obsession and something you love. If you have an exit strategy, it’s not an obsession.” — Mark Cuban
Featured Startup News
Global | Africa | Asia | Europe | North America
Oceania / Australia | South America | Weekly Spotlights
Global
The World’s Most Productive Countries — Labor Productivity
Source: You Tube
PwC Aviation Industry Forecast 2020 to be another year of strong performance for global aviation industry
Source: Irish Tech News
Europe
Data, Decrypted: What We Learned From Analyzing 6 Years of Startups at Slush
Source: Slush
The year of the French unicorns
Source: Tech Crunch
Dutch scaleup funding 2019
Source: Startup Juncture
New, extensive survey on the Icelandic innovation ecosystem
Source: Northstack
North America
Venture capital slowly seeps outside of Silicon Valley
Source: Axios
How Mormons Built the Next Silicon Valley While No One Was Looking
Source: Medium
The United States Of Venture Capital: The Most Active VC In Each State
Source: CB Insights
Asia
Israel Earns Its Name as the Startup Nation with Over 6,000 Startups
Source: Medium
Bahrain: The challenge of staying competitive
Source: Wamda
A Startup Nation: Why Israel Has Become The New Silicon Valley
Source: Apex
Africa
The biggest problems facing South Africa’s tech entrepreneurs right now
Source: Business Tech
African tech startup funding hits $491m in record-breaking 2019
Source: Disrupt Africa
The top 5 pan-African startup sector developments of 2019
Source: Disrupt Africa
East Africa: EAC Must Not Be Left Behind in Fourth Industrial Revolution
Source: All Africa
Rwanda: Five Major Tech Trends of 2019
Source: All Africa
South America
Investment in cloud and AI to increase in Brazil
Source: ZD Net
Oceania / Australia
How Australia can lead the electric vehicle revolution
Source: Startup Daily
Random Thoughts
Visualizing Unequal State Tax Burdens Across America
Source: Visual Capitalist
In the internet era, public libraries are more vital than ever
Source: Mashable
Australia is building a research submarine
Source: Startup Daily
Who We Are
Global Startup News
If you have any questions, please contact Chris Valentine at valentine@adeointeractive.com and follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/valentinechris | https://medium.com/@globalstartup/global-startup-news-month-in-review-february-7-2020-2fdfc0b1ef01 | ['Global Startup News'] | 2020-02-07 15:39:27.080000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Investors', 'News', 'Venture Capital', 'Entrepreneurship'] | 580 |
Walking Your Troubles Away | Walking Your Troubles Away
A regular stroll improves more than physical wellbeing
Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash
Most people know there are documented physical health benefits for seniors who take a daily walk. Often overlooked are the mental and emotional benefits.
Walking and/or other non-impact forms of exercise can help you live better, longer, and ward off mental decline, depression, and anxiety.
Walking and other exercises change the chemicals and cells in our bodies. Nerve cells communicate better in those who exercise regularly which leads to improvements in processing information. Researchers have found regular exercise stimulates brain cell growth and produces more protein in the brain which improves learning and memory function.
Take steps to improve emotional wellbeing
Walking daily has been shown to lower your risk of depression. Walking for Health is a non-profit in England that organizes walks for people seeking better health. It reports: “Physically active people have up to a 30 percent reduced risk of becoming depressed, and staying active helps those who are depressed recover.”
Walk to a better night’s sleep
About half of people over 65 have trouble falling asleep. Research indicates that walking can solve that problem.
In 2017 Morehouse University School of Medicine studied older adults with sleep problems. Roughly half of study participants experienced greater ease falling asleep and staying asleep after establishing a walking routine.
Physicians often recommend walking as a way for seniors to lose weight and boost physical and mental strength. Also, walking is easy to do and requires no special equipment.
Walk more, live longer
Taking 4,000 steps a day is considered a low level of physical activity. Often, doctors and trainers will recommend 10,000 steps a day as the optimum goal. However, a study last year that teamed researchers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that 8,000 steps a day were enough to reduce mortality risks in participants.
Those who walked 8,000 steps a day versus those who walked 4,000 steps had a 51 percent lower risk of dying over the next decade.
Those in the JAMA study who walked 12,000 steps daily had a 65 percent lower mortality risk than other participants.
Slow and steady wins the race
The same study found that the intensity or speed with which participants walked had no impact on their lifespans. So a casual stroll is just as effective as a power walk.
My dad was a testament to the slow and steady approach. He was diagnosed with Leukemia at age 70 and told he had about three years to live. Reading everything he could about cancer and consulting with a great oncologist, he developed a daily walking regimen. At first, it was a couple of blocks. His rambles grew to a couple of miles and never achieved great speed. He died thirteen years after being diagnosed, three months short of his eighty-fourth birthday.
No doubt genetics and dad’s positive attitude contributed to his longevity, but his daily walks also helped.
You are never too old
My father’s age illustrates another fact research bears out. It’s never too late to start an exercise regimen. A prime example is Fauja Singh. However, he did not walk. He ran.
After his wife and son died, Singh, in his 80s poured his grief into running. He built his endurance over a few years and ran his first marathon at 89. Continuing to build his speed and endurance, he recorded his best time — five hours and 50 minutes at 92. In 2004 and again in 2012, he was an Olympic torchbearer.
In 2011, Singh became the first person to run a marathon at age 100. By the way, Singh was not a great runner when he was a kid. Due to a birth defect, he did not even walk until he was five-years-old. | https://medium.com/crows-feet/walking-your-troubles-away-4a0fdf5270d3 | ['Max K. Erkiletian'] | 2020-11-12 15:55:47.762000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Mental Health', 'Aging', 'Exercise', 'Seniors'] | 805 |
It’s the energy, stupid! | It is dawning, even on economists, that the situation might be serious: recession is looming, banks are virtually bankrupt and negative interest rates are destroying the financial system as well as the very concept of savings.
However, most of them have still not figured out the real cause of this crisis and, by extension, the fact that this is not a just some part of the economic cycle but truly the end of an era.
To understand this, it is necessary to go back to basics, meaning economic models.
For centuries, these models have been ignoring the most basic laws of physics, a fact that did not seem to bother them that much. The lack of scientific training prevents most economists from understanding that every economic process is about transforming matter and that this transformation requires energy. Our modern world was born with the Industrial Revolution which was a scientific revolution but also a revolution of the way we exploited fossil sources of energy: coal, then oil. If we wanted to be rigorous, economic output, as measured by the GDP, should be a linear function of the energy used.
Oil output and growth (source: the Shift Project)
For over two centuries, a flash-in-the pan compared to humanity’s economic history, we have regarded natural resources oil, coal, but also wood, water, copper, zinc, sand, phosphate and a lot of elements found in the periodic table as infinite resources. Unfortunately, they are not and since the beginning of the industrial revolution, their stocks have been steadily declining.
Rather than admitting this fact and accepting that growth would mechanically experience a slowdown in the late 20th-early 21st centuries, governments decided to pretend that everything was fine and embarked on a flight forward whose dire consequences are catching up to us now. This flight took the form of debt, I’ll go back to this, and the increasingly costly exploitation of natural resources which are getting more and more difficult to obtain. As an example, fracking and shale gas enabled the USA to buy itself twenty years of respite but the activity itself is not profitable and can only exist because it is heavily subsidized by the US government.
When talking about energy, one should not look at the volume or the price but at something called “Energy Return On Investment” (EROI). EROI represents the amount of energy necessary to extract a given quantity of energy. The lower the EROI, the higher the cost of extracting the energy and the less profitable the activity is, as it is the case with shale gas. Even if a lot of fields of one given resource still exist, if it costs you more, energetically speaking, to get it out of the ground than what you get energetically out of it, it is useless. To summarize: as your EROI diminishes, the economy contracts in real terms and so does your discretionary income.
Truth be told, debating whether or not natural resources are declining is absurd because we are actually already suffering from the decline of the EROI and the reality of dwindling natural resources’ stocks. In fact understanding the decline of the EROI is the key to understanding the trajectory of the economy since the 1970’s.
In fact the first oil crisis in 1973 is actually a direct manifestation of the decline of the EROI (see graph). If a factory worker could raise a whole family on his salary and can no longer do so in 2019, it is ultimately because of the decline of the EROI. If the subprime crisis happened in 2008, it is ultimately because of the decline of the EROI ( overlending and junk bonds are just ploys to temporarly delay the inevitable contraction, see below)
The decline of the EROI is a physical hard fact: the energy we extract from the environment and use to make the wheels of great economic machine turn is getting scarcer and of a lower quality. As a result, the economy is contracting in real terms.
Our governments found a solution to sweep the problem under the rug: massive debt creation, i.e. transferring the cost of the adjustment to future generations. For decades, monetary creation has been used to offset the decline of the EROI and maintain the illusion of prosperity as well as supporting the economic take-off of countries such as China. Problem is, this strategy is no longer working.
Governments, banks and financial institutions are currently finding themselves between a rock and a hard place: massive monetary creation is currently destroying the global financial system thanks to the negative interest rates it triggered but at the same time, putting an end to this policy would bring about a global economic crash of epic proportions. One can only escape the decline of the EROI for so long and the system will find balance again but at a huge cost.
The collapse of the EROI does not mean the end of civilization or a return to the Stone Age.
If you are making $10 000 a month but still spend like when you were earning $20 000, you are by no means poor but you are living well beyond your means and it is the discrepancy between what you earn and what you spend that will make you bankrupt. The same logic applies to world economies.
All our productive systems, infrastructure but also standards of living are oversized compared to the energy “budget” we have and the huge inequalities brought about by globalization and the secession of the “elite” are only making things worse.
Instead of flying forward, we could have acknowledged the reality of declining energy stocks and gradually reduced our standards of living accordingly.
We could have:
-done away with the dogma of economic and demographic growth and stabilized our societies at sustainable levels
-let economies and population shrink naturally rather than trying to force them to grow through debt creation and immigration
-defined what we consider acceptable standards of living, public services and infrastructures and downsized accordingly, reducing waste, bureaucracy and public spending in the process
-discouraged the creation of massive amounts of household and corporate debt as well as excessive risk-taking from investors rather than supporting the lax monetary policies of Centrals Banks
-developed an economic system that recycles, repairs and produces locally rather than one who encourages mass consumption, goods renewal and import/export.
-anticipated the energy transition by investing in nuclear energy not renewables, sustainable habitat not big city hubs and suburban sprawls and energy efficient petrol-engines not electric cars.
These adjustments will happen in any case but they will painful, chaotic and hasty rather than benign, anticipated and gradual. We are about to witness the greatest economic contraction in history and we are, all of us, economically, politically and psychologically unprepared to face it.
This is why you have to laugh out of the room and call a charlatan any politician who promise you growth and to increase your standards of living, same thing with an economist or an “expert” who does not know the first thing about the EROI and its implications for economic systems. Growth is not coming back and no silver bullet or miracle technology is going to come to save the day. It’s stone cold physics. The future will be about frugality and limits. It’s not going to be the end of the world but it’s going to be the end of a world.
Let’s make sure we take better care of the new one than those before us did with the old.
Further reading: Enery and the Wealth Of Nations, Charles A.S Hall, Kent Klitgaard.
Translated from French by the author
The original article can be found here | https://medium.com/@stanislasberton84/its-the-energy-stupid-5be417a2d3c6 | ['Stanislas Berton'] | 2020-03-18 19:00:47.115000+00:00 | ['Crisis', 'Economics', 'Energy', 'Oil'] | 1,502 |
A/B Testing Platforms: Build vs Buy | However, there are also many problems with existing 3rd party platforms. Usually they use their own event tracking, meaning that it’s impossible to test against your existing metrics or data warehouse (Growth Book, by the way, does let you do this). It also means yet another place you’re sending your user data, which might lead to you being out of compliance with the various privacy laws. The kinds of metrics you can test against are typically limited too, with most only supporting binomial events (yes/no, or clicked/didn’t click).
If you open up the platform for many of your team to start tests, you can end up with interfering tests and make the results meaningless. You also run the risk of running it like the wild west, where the tests make no sense, are out of your design style guide, or lack strategic direction.
Front end testing can cause pages to flicker as they load as the payload is injected into the page. Flickering text or buttons can cause the results to be meaningless, as it either slows the page down, or causes users to notice flashing parts more. Deeper code integration for back end testing is harder to implement as it can be a round peg into a square hole. Often the back and front end analytics are not talking to each other.
The biggest impediment to buying, as with most things, is the cost. Many A/B testing platforms charge in a way that increases the more you test. Since you want to be testing a lot, this can mean that things get very expensive. Other solutions, like Google Optimize, are free as long as you stay under their usage limits, but once you go over the limit, then it’s $150k. It is also quite limited in terms of the tests you can run. It’s not uncommon for a medium-sized site to have the cost of the A/B testing platform be equivalent to one quarter to half of a full-time developer’s salary.
Conclusion
To build vs buy can be a hard decision. A/B testing platforms have come a long way over the recent years, and are adding enough features that you should think really hard about building yourself. The costs of building and maintenance are probably much higher than you expect.
By the way, we built Growth Book based on our experiences with exactly this decision — and it addresses almost all the negatives addressed above (we are built for back end tests, and currently don’t support a front end admin). We tie into your existing data infrastructure, are built to make a seamless developer experience, and have tools to encourage a culture of experimentation. We have years of experience doing experimentation and building these tools. We offer all the advantages of building your own system, without the negatives of buying. Spend your time on products that add value for your users. Contact us and let us show how we do A/B testing better. | https://medium.com/growth-book/a-b-testing-platforms-build-vs-buy-dfb8604e77e | ['Graham Mcnicoll'] | 2020-11-23 15:27:55.557000+00:00 | ['A B Testing', 'Data Engineering', 'Data Analytics'] | 578 |
Making a Biden/Harris Listening Tour Meaningful | Making a Biden/Harris Listening Tour Meaningful
Photo by Manny Becerra on Unsplash
In the lead-ups to major elections, political listening tours have become as predictable as the sun rising in the east, wherein candidates scarf fried dough at state fairs and drop by diners for a chat over coffee with constituents. Once seen as mere political showmanship, these made-for-tv moments are now a leadership imperative. The brand of cultural reconnaissance these informal meet-and-greets produce confirms the beliefs of political scientists and journalists everywhere: the best way to find out what voters think is to…ask them what they think — and then listen to their response. An authentic listening tour seeks connection and is uniquely suited to clearing the air for a real exchange of ideas in the spirit of progress and unity.
Or at least, that’s the goal.
The reality of reaching out to those who don’t share our views is a bit messier, mostly through no fault of our own. That we are having trouble finding common ground at this moment in 2020 is an understatement. Post-election we are as deeply divided as ever, with huge swaths of the population in seeming disagreement on nearly everything — not just issues and ideas, but on basic facts. Radio silence is not the answer, but before respectful conversation can even begin, we the public need to work towards actively listening to each other in an atmosphere of respect. Finding common ground depends on us figuring out a way to recognize that there are basic facts in the world that we must agree upon, especially in the age of social media when facts and opinion are interchangeable.
The Social Dilemma, a documentary that aired on Netflix in 2020, illustrates that much of the divisiveness so prevalent today is due to content algorithms that “learn” about users and send them down idea-confirming rabbit holes — while also fueling a spiraling sense of negative self-esteem. This discrepancy in fact-based knowledge has been artificially created by social media companies that prioritize the monetization of user attention over objective communication, leading to out-of-control conspiracy theories and harmful misinformation.
False information spreads faster and farther than fact, according to a 2019 study published by researchers at MIT’s Media Lab, which found that falsehoods are 70% more likely to be retweeted on Twitter than the truth and reach their first 1,500 people six times faster than fact. A person who believes in a conspiracy theory will hang on to that knowledge until they see competing evidence that disproves it, but internet rabbit holes prevent this kind of natural correction. YouTube has been called out for the way its algorithms amplify extremist views, though the claim that the site’s recommendations facilitate far-right radicalization is disputed.
Just as radio interference blocks transmission, the static from the internet prevents us from communicating clearly with one another. On the internet, where many of us spend significant amounts of time, it is a challenge to find others willing to have an open discussion guided by curiosity and respect rather than indulge in indignance and bullying. How do we reach each other when there are such significant barriers to open communication? What does an exchange like this look like?
This social media-driven consolidation and strengthening of particular views — however “right” or “wrong” they may be — means that Biden and Harris have their work cut out for them. Fortunately, they are both great listeners — practiced in weighing the concerns and views of others, even when those views do not tidily align with their own. A listening tour would not only put their skills to the test, but, more critically, would allow them to model those behaviors for the rest of us.
By getting out there and meeting with all stripes of Americans face to face (or, in the near-term, over Zoom), the kind of genuine dialogue and mutual respect Biden and Harris personally take part in would be a positive step toward bridging the gaps among the rest of us. A Biden/Harris listening tour — if it has any chance of success or breaking through barriers — might want to take the environmental factors affecting how we got here into account. | https://medium.com/@dr-karynemessina/making-a-biden-harris-listening-tour-meaningful-6c1943087f70 | ['Karyne Messina'] | 2020-12-19 18:25:22.464000+00:00 | ['Biden', 'Politics', '2020', 'Psychiatry', 'Listening'] | 822 |
Why I Stopped Writing Poetry | I stopped writing.
Stopped putting pen to paper
Stopped listening to the raindrops of my soul
Because the paper was too bright,
Ink was too dark, the contrast
Harmonized with nothing and created
Rivulets of discord, raining down in space
And time.
I stopped because the shift became
Too strong and the words became
Like jello underfoot, melted into
A simple pot of pentameter
That I wanted to walk away from
Before it consumed me.
I wanted to get away from all the
Weirdness and all of the poets
Become something real and stagnant
And valuable in the world,
Not floating from tree to trainwreck
Pontificating softly on the dew-down
On the nape of my lover’s neck. | https://medium.com/@claire-boyce24/i-stopped-writing-poetry-2efff660d08e | ['Claire Boyce'] | 2020-12-23 21:21:24.468000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Poet', 'Poems On Medium', 'Poem', 'Poems And Stories'] | 161 |
Science Fiction Afternoon | Afternoons are so absent in ones life unless one is a child or one is very old. Yet they play such an important role in our lives every day, month, year.. and this afternoon was not the usual one. May be the sun rose a couple of degrees on the west or maybe the wind was blowing slightly to the East , everything was out of character this afternoon. One could have easily missed it, maybe the out of character-ness saved it and made it a little more memorable. Lunch was in order and the daily ritual had to start, a walk down the stairs, asking fellow colleagues to join and then walking into the food court to choose in on one food joint. But I realized I wanted to recharge my mobile phone and this was maybe this was too ‘out of character’. With a steely resolve I broke the ritual that afternoon and took the road straight to the small kiosk 100 meters away from the office.
In situations like these of out of character-ness, the mind goes into an overdrive and literally assumes your life has turned into a Sci-fi movie. It thinks — anything could happen now, an earthquake can happen right there, you could meet a dear friend out of nowhere or it could start raining suddenly. What would you tell your mind when it started raining that time and I had to quickly take shelter in a bus stop. Life is indeed a hidden Sci-fi movie. The bus stop started attracting more Sci-Fi minded people and then somehow it all became normal, the mind had calmed as if something very expected happened. But then out of nowhere the rainbow came out — the sun, the rain and the people all now in a trance. The mind giggled as it quietly said — ‘Did not I tell you, its all SciFi out here’. The out of character afternoon, the LSD trip laden mind and the rainbow gazing people gave me little hope that all that was happening was leading to something more.
The spell had to break as the realization of the limitedness of time took over. Time is a funny thing, like one stick moving around a circle once and then once more and then once more and it just keeps doing that. We attach our emotions, ambitions, aspirations and hope to it that maybe on one fine circle things would change, everything would either be set right or everything would fall apart. As funny as it sounds, it’s the same mind playing its Sci-Fi game, isn’t it? This time though, I did not feed the monster and I respected the stick moving around the circle and indeed it had moved quite a lot of times than it should have -according to my wish. I ran to the shop and asked the shopkeeper to ‘load currency into my mobile phone’. Another sci-fi equivalence, another unexplained mystery of modern-day life — a physical exchange of goods resulting in a meta-physical activation of signals. The humans present on either side of the exchange being content on the non-physical fulfillment. What comes next is even more magical. I had to make a phone call to someone. That was the whole point you see of breaking the mold of the usual afternoon. Everything happening that moment was normal to a third person. For my mind, each small thing was Sci-Fi, each thing seemed out of character. As I consciously played this different afternoon in my head, I smiled. Such smiles are only found in such afternoons and that’s why afternoons are special.
I clicked on a name and the device know who I wanted to speak to, it did the rest. Made me wait for a while — it was like some milli seconds -it was kind of a silence followed by immediate sound maybe to not disappoint you, maybe to tell you it is there doing the work for you. After some tones and sounds the ring came in. How would have Alexander Graham Bell felt when he would have made the first phone call, when he would have had this moment of silence and anticipation and voila! You listen to someone on the other side. For the mind, the invention of the telephone would have been something like ‘discovery of wheel’ on drugs. All of it happens in split second but a whole lot of it is still hidden and mysterious. What would have Alexander Bell felt in this moment — a weird anxiety or a fulfilling contentment. I guess he would have felt the same as my mind felt — the whole fucking this is a Sci-Fi movie.
Every single time, you and I know it, the time you listen the ‘Hello’ from the other side, there is a small shiver down the spine, a small shock. Some just outgrow the curiosity and kill the whole enigma but that day when I heard the voice on the other side I just exactly felt the same quiver, slowly growing every milli second until the next word was spoken. I spoke for briefly 10 minutes and then I pressed the cancel button.
The whole trip had ended, the conversation was over, the magic had faded. I glanced towards my watch and realized I had only 10 minutes to eat and I rushed to get some sandwich which I wolfed it down. I was on my way back, glanced at the bus stop which was rather empty now. The sun was hidden in the clouds and the wind started blowing maybe a touch harder which made me cold. I came back to my desk, giggled with my colleagues and started work. This was the perfect work as usual. The mind was calm, was rather absent as I took over the daily routine. The Sci-Fi movie had ended some while ago. It was not afternoon anymore, the dawn of the evening had nicely started to settle in. Things had moved on as they should have, but the mind will once again yearn for that afternoon. The out of characterness, the magic, the science fiction, all of it. | https://medium.com/@karthikiyer_89574/science-fiction-afternoon-879b0f438d3a | ['Karthik Iyer'] | 2020-01-14 20:34:54.255000+00:00 | ['Science Fiction', 'Magic', 'Personal'] | 1,186 |
Bitcoin Cash — could it have a renaissance | In August 2017 there was a hard fork of bitcoin. Bitcoin cash was born.
Each holder of bitcoin received an equal number of bitcoin cash tokens.
The reason for the fork was disagreement about the future direction of bitcoin. One factions wanted a larger block size to accommodate more transactions, faster transactions and less fees. The other faction wanted a different amendment known as Segwit.
After the split both sides tried to claim that their token was the “true bitcoin”.
We now know that the Segwit side won and their bitcoin core is regarded as the true bitcoin (BTC)while the spin-off is known as bitcoin cash (BCH).
For a while the prices of bitcoin and bitcoin cash were relatively close. One BTC would buy around 6 to 9 BCH.
The price of bitcoin (BTC) as measured by bitcoin cash (BCH) in August 2017 after the hard fork.
Since 2017 the price of BTC and BCH have been drifting apart. Bitcoin has moved up. The longer term ratio between the two coins can be seen in the chart below. As of today one bitcoin buys around 70 bitcoin cash.
Today one bitcoin buys you 10x as many Bitcoin cash as it did shortly after the hard fork in August 2017.
Is bitcoin cash too cheap?
In dollar terms, the BCH price is still in the range it traded at shortly after the fork and it is well below the peak of over $4000 achieved in December 2017. e BTC, on the other hand, is well above its December 2017 peak of nearly $20k.
Currently the BCH price is around $700. It has gone nowhere while the price of bitcoin, ethereum and most altcoins have been soaring.
BTC is the original that everyone has heard of. However fans of BCH describe it as a “better bitcoin”. BTC and BCH, are, effectively they same thing except that BCH has a larger block size, faster transactions and lower costs per transaction.
Both BTC and BCH have a maximum fixed supply of 21 million and both go through a “halvening” every four years. With BTC and BCH being so alike, why has BTC performed so much better? The answer lies simply in human psychology. The crowd decided which was the true bitcoin, and bought that.
BCH solves many of bitcoins problems. It’s much more accessible to people trading smaller amounts.
As retail investors and users get more into crypto, many will discover that BCH won’t wreck them on fees, and that could boost BCH greatly.
Source: bitcoinfees.cash BCH fees are less than 100th of those of BTC
BTC is still the king of crypto. It still holds the crown.
However, with BCH so cheap, some of the money which missed the BTC boat may be looking for alternatives. BCH is so similar to BTC, that investors may just turn there. BCH has enough legitimacy and recognition that it could really take off with retail investors, which could then pull in some institutional money.
Is BCH starting to recover some of its lost ground?
Take a look at the recent chart of BCH against the USD. The price has started rising. It looks like interest in owning BCH is now growing.
The price of bitcoin cash is starting to rise
Whilst BCH seems to be breaking out in USD terms it hasn’t yet in BTC terms. In the chart below, which prices BCH in BTC terms, we can see that that BCH still has not broken out of its long term downtrend. When it does, it will really fly.
The price of BCH expressed in BTC terms shows that BTC is still the top-dog
Conclusion
Although the bullish signs are not yet confirmed, particularly when we look at the last chart, things are stirring. I think it is worth taking some of the money off your other cryptos to stock up on BCH while it is still cheap. | https://medium.com/@discreet-wuzzy-cat-574/bitcoin-cash-could-it-have-a-renaissance-909dd04b5e5c | [] | 2021-02-14 18:05:26.978000+00:00 | ['Btc', 'Bch', 'Bitcoin Cash', 'Bitcoin', 'Crypto'] | 780 |
Most VR Is Total Bullshit | Most VR Is Total Bullshit
How tech companies turned an instrument of human potential into one of exploitation
A visitor plays with a virtual reality VR set at Sony’s PlayStation brand booth during the Ani-Com & Games event in Hong Kong. Photo: SOPA Images/Getty Images
“This is going to change everything,” Timothy Leary told me as he took off his bulky headset and pulled an electronic glove from his right hand. It was the early 1990s, at a rave club in San Francisco. The famed psychologist and popularizer of psychedelic drugs had ventured into virtual reality for the first time, and he was reeling. At last, a technology capable of taking humanity to the next stage of consciousness and communication.
In those early days, virtual reality was respected. Feared, even. Full immersion was a portal to the great unknown — a reality that could become indistinguishable from real life, and maybe swallow you up. Experiencing virtual reality (VR) was to going online like what LSD was to smoking marijuana: the full on, total experience of digital autonomy. Liftoff. But VR in those days wasn’t about immersion so much as expression. We imagined creating simulations of our dreams for others to experience; expressing ourselves to our friends with no words at all; or constructing worlds with completely different rules through which we could model new social norms.
If the current iteration of virtual and augmented reality really does take off this time, I fear it will be as an entertainment, yet another diversion from the supposedly untenable reality of being human. The technology companies leading the charge seem eager to leave that dangerous, creative potential of VR behind, making it less about what people might do with such powerful tools, and more about what they — and other corporate brands — can do to us or sell us, once we’ve jacked in to a reality they control. Less like the fulfillment of the internet’s great democratic promise, and more like the final stage of television.
We are using the ultimate reality-programming device to program ourselves.
Make no mistake, there really was a time when the context around virtual reality was countercultural and psychedelic. The only place you could really find out about it was in alternative culture magazines (yes, print magazines) like Mondo 2000 — voice of the “cyberdelic” renaissance. And this same divide between the technology’s creative and commercial potentials was already at play.
In the Bay Area, there were two main personalities behind VR. Jaron Lanier was considered the more corporate player (in spite of the dreadlocks), simply because he could talk about developing VR for applied purposes like architecture. And then there was Eric Gullichsen, a psychedelic explorer and good friend of Leary’s who hung out at the “Mondo House” (the Victorian mansion in Berkeley where Mondo 2000’s editors lived and cavorted with their subjects) and made his own version of VR called Sense8.
Sure, Jaron’s VR workstations could render faster and at greater resolution, but there was something special about Eric’s rig. It was crude, sometimes duct-taped together, and consisted mostly of simple goggles and a billiard ball to navigate. It was small and cheap enough that he could bring it over to the Mondo House and everyone there (sometimes including me) could try it out, moving around and creating things. Visually, his virtual world was about as complicated as Asteroids, but you were really there. It felt like an opening to something truly infinite.
VR, in those early days, seemed like the gateway drug for a whole new way of engaging with life. It would be a technology for enacting what science fiction author William Gibson called “the consensual hallucination” — a shared space conjured up by the thoughts of everyone within it. We called it “virtual reality” because we truly saw it as a test run for virtual reality.
We cyberpunks actually believed — and maybe we all still should — that this ability to collectively dream things into existence could be learned and practiced in real life.
Like other early digital technologies, VR suggested that we could build a world where pretty much anything one imagined could be realized. As I chronicled in my book about that period, Silicon Valley firms had trouble finding employees who could handle the implications of programming new worlds. They began to seek out users of psychedelics, warning employees about upcoming drug tests, and giving them more latitude in dress and hours than corporations were accustomed to granting staffers back then. They needed the “heads,” as they were called, because aside from children, who were also open-minded enough to be great computer hackers, these were the only people comfortable with hallucinating things into reality. And I don’t mean this metaphorically. We cyberpunks actually believed — and maybe we all still should — that this ability to collectively dream things into existence could be learned and practiced in real life.
So when Leary slipped on the VR goggles at that rave in San Francisco, it felt as if two worlds were coming together, perfectly and inevitably. Meanwhile, a crowd had gathered around several large monitors to see what the counterculture legend would do in there. A showman, he was up to the challenge. We saw him move through the virtual spaces, engage with a torus (think of a geometric donut), and shatter a few walls. Leary would “ooh” and the crowd would “aahh” as if watching over his shoulder. He was playing the roles of both explorer and carnival barker — Christopher Columbus meets P.T. Barnum.
When the show was over, though, he got serious. “I was wrong about space migration,” he told me, referring to his book Exo-Psychology. “Humanity is not going to migrate into outer space. We’re going in there. That’s what’s next. It’s digital acid.”
Terence McKenna, the ethnobotanist and entheogen trailblazer, was similarly intrigued. He used to tell me that virtual technologies would someday soon allow humanity to rebirth itself into a new reality, “to get to the place where information can detach itself from the material matrix,” as he told me in a 1991 interview, “and then look back on a cast-off mode of being as it rises into a higher dimension.” He believed that, thanks to VR, we would eventually be able to migrate out of bodily and temporal existence, becoming something like the “machine elves” people sometimes see on a DMT trip, at once inhabiting the environment and creating it. He spoke about how squid communicate by dancing and spraying ink. “In virtual reality, Douglas, you will literally be able to see what I mean.”
“Humanity is not going to migrate into outer space,” Timothy Leary declared after trying VR. “We’re going in there. That’s what’s next. It’s digital acid.”
Of course, the regular world still didn’t even know cyberspace was a thing. This was back in the days when even the notion of ubiquitous personal computers seemed far-fetched. I took it as my personal responsibility to explain virtual reality to the world, and to make sure they understood it would soon change everything. I even made it onto Larry King Live. I felt like a herald of the inevitable cyberfuture.
Alas, we in the cyberdelic fringe were too confident that our understanding of the net and virtual reality would become universal. As Leary used to say about an acid trip, one’s “set and setting” — by which he meant one’s mindset and context — determined the journey. By the early 1990s, Wired magazine came along and gave the new technology a completely different set and setting — reframing the digital revolution as a market phenomenon. VR headsets were among the most popular “gadgets” featured in the front of the book. Once the right one caught on, the editors were convinced, VR would replace TV and the telephone as America’s primary communication and entertainment interface. Far from threatening the foundations of capitalism, digital and immersive technologies would be the catalyst for a “long boom” of infinite, exponential growth.
No wonder, 25 years later, we are all in the midst of a bad trip characterized less by imagination and creativity than surveillance, control, and extractive corporate capitalism.
The VR revival seems fixated on augmented reality, where instead of going into a whole new world, we see imagery superimposed over this one. It is a marketer’s dream technology: novel enough to be interesting, grounded enough to prevent true exploration, and perfectly suited to the task of labeling every object in the world with a price tag.
The current VR hype doesn’t offer us access to new worlds so much as new ways to package consumer entertainment. It’s Facebook’s Oculus Rift, gaming, movies, Bible stories, and of course porn. Most VR today is little more than 360-degree video, a slightly more immersive version of business as usual. This non-interactive entertainment is to real interactive VR what Game of Thrones is to Dungeons and Dragons or Windows is to the command line. The fact that the technology has become easier to navigate and more lavishly rendered is hardly a consolation prize. It’s a prison.
It’s a paralyzing, sensory overload reminiscent of the Gruen transfer people experience when entering a shopping mall. The high ceilings and confusing architecture make customers forget their original intentions, and become more susceptible to impulse purchases or overt manipulation.
That’s why when I listen to developers talking about even their most ethical, well-intended applications of immersive VR, I often come away troubled. They say things like “this Syria immersion will make people feel more compassion for victims of war.” Or, “this climate simulation will force people to respond to the global crisis.” The users are the objects being acted upon. The VR is just a platform for propaganda. Once you’re employing technology to get people to do something, you’re back in television land.
Enthusiasts love to cite studies indicating that VR can help make people more empathetic than older media. The idea here is that putting on goggles and seeing the world through the eyes of, say, a homeless person will inspire more action than simply seeing the suffering person in a photo or on TV. It matters more if it feels like the bad stuff is happening to us. If true, that’s a sad commentary on our ability to empathize with someone else’s hardships. Besides, the same sorts of empathy claims were made about TV in the 1950s, and remained true only as long as TV was a novelty medium.
People raised with these virtual worlds at their disposal will come to prefer them to reality, anyway, just as they are coming to prefer porn to the messiness of sex.
VR does appear to have value in medical or therapeutic contexts. I’m glad we have virtual experiences that can help retrain an obese person to eat less. Gulf War veterans suffering from PTSD have benefited from VR that recreates the conditions of their trauma. But we mustn’t fool ourselves into believing that these applications are delivering the Promethean power of digital fire to the masses. They turn their users into the passive recipients of content, rather than the active constructors of a reality.
And so the race is on to build a VR landscape of, say, the Serengeti, where the animals and savanna look as authentic as they do in Disney’s new CGI version of The Lion King. Never mind the climate crisis threatening the real savannah. People raised with these virtual worlds at their disposal will come to prefer them to reality, anyway, just as they are coming to prefer porn to the messiness of sex. And as members of the Frankfurt School tried to warn us, once a culture prefers the simulacrum to the world, fascism can’t be far behind.
No, the true promise of VR, or any new medium, rests in its ability to help us ask new questions — to challenge realities rather than reinforce them. Some decidedly less celebrated VR practitioners are still pushing in this direction. Not surprisingly, the experiences they’re offering don’t require a whole lot of technology. Amelia Winger-Bearskin and Sarah Rothberg, for example, built a simple piece for the Oculus Rift called Your Hands Are Your Feet that makes your hands look and act like your feet. That may not sound like much — not compared with 360-degree renderings of entire landscapes — but it’s a deep, “proprioceptive” challenge that changes the way you think about your body.
Similarly, Genderswap by The Machine to Be Another, challenges your experience of gender. You sit, clothed or naked, in VR gear, connected to someone of a different gender. So when you look down at, or touch, your body, you see the other person’s being touched instead.
Some developers are even working to realize Terence McKenna’s vision of total, squid-worthy communication in VR. The Meu messenger platform by Radix Motion, lets people depict their emotions through body movements that translate into explosive imagery, haptics, vibrations, or sound.
Even a VR application as simple as Google’s Tilt Brush (basically, MacPaint in VR) lets users create virtual worlds around themselves. This is a more fundamentally advanced experience of technology than wandering around in the latest hi-res 3D futuristic dystopia.
By focusing on immersive simulation over active creation, most virtual reality technologies undermine the innate human abilities that they could be fostering. “It is worth pointing out that we have been making virtual realities for a very, very long time,” Terence McKenna reminded us at the dawn of VR. “When you sit the children down around the fire and begin to tell the old, old stories and pictures rise out of the flames — that is virtual reality.”
We must use technology to stoke those collaboratively creative flames, instead of extinguishing them. | https://gen.medium.com/most-vr-is-total-bullshit-81a08431df38 | ['Douglas Rushkoff'] | 2019-08-27 23:15:56.373000+00:00 | ['Tech', 'Gadgets', 'Virtual Reality', 'Business', 'Future'] | 2,826 |
Give a new lease of life to src/test/java | Before I start a quick question to all of you; So how many of you were excited to switch to new functional paradigm of programming in Java? I was very excited when I started learning the more declarative way of doing things. I liked the idea of telling what to do and not baby sit and tell how to do everything. I promised myself there is no going back to the old procedural style anymore. I was very happily replacing my old code with new found streams and lambdas. Until after writing all the new code and I sat to write test cases. That’s when euphoria faded away and I realised that I am back in the procedural world minutes after promising myself there is no going back.
My simple test case was I need to verify that my method under test is returning 3 persons and I need to verify their names, gender and age. With the tools in hand I only came up with following code:
List<Person> result = getPersons();
assertEquals(3, result.size());
for(Person person: result) {
If(person.getName().equals(“Harry Potter”)) {
// do 4 assertions for Harry Potter — Name, Gender, Age, hasMoney
}
If(person.getName().equals(“Ron Weasley”)) {
// do 4 assertions for Ron Weasley
}
If(person.getName().equals(“Hermione Granger”)) {
// do 4 assertions for Hermione Granger
}
}
Or I thought of using Streams and filters but then test case quickly became as complex as the code being tested.
And then I learned about AssertJ the fluent assertions library and boy I was impressed in first look. I can use fluent assertions to write my test code and no more procedural code. It was very easy to write the previous test in much better looking code with AssertJ.
List<Person> result = getPersons();
assertThat(result).isNotEmpty()
.hasSize(3)
.extracting(Person::getName, Person::getAge, Person::getGender)
.contains(
tuple(“Harry Potter”, 11, “Male”),
tuple(“Hermione Granger”, 12, “Female”),
tuple(“Ron Weasley”, 13, “Male”)
);
Clean, Precise and more importantly declarative. If you are still not impressed carry on reading. | https://medium.com/@puneet-wadhwa/give-a-new-lease-of-life-to-src-test-java-1573e74b2974 | ['Puneet Wadhwa'] | 2020-11-18 21:53:36.002000+00:00 | ['Junit', 'Unittest', 'Clean Code', 'Assertj', 'Java'] | 466 |
How To Capture Your Complete Writing History | Your writing history tells the personal story of how you overcame all the obstacles, and achieved literary success. It will only be a long interesting tale if you don’t quit, and instead, keep writing and spend a little time recording the ups and downs of the journey.
Every successful writer ends up running a business. But not every writer knows how to make it efficient and profitable.
It’s a long road between your first article and all the money you dream of making. Most writers do a lot of experimenting, stumbling, quitting, restarting, and living through their own particular version of hell on earth before a road of success unfolds behind them.
A writer's life should develop with at least a bit of order. That means creating a filing system that can grow with the business, and the discipline to maintain that semblance of organization.
Making money is not the first thing you should worry about. That will grow over time, and systems to look after income already exist. But what do you do with everything else? There are a couple of tools you can use. | https://medium.com/the-brave-writer/how-to-capture-your-complete-writing-history-39254629be88 | ['Barry Desautels'] | 2020-05-22 02:50:25.799000+00:00 | ['Writing Prompts', 'Writer', 'Writing', 'Writing Tips', 'Writing Life'] | 212 |
Five life-changing paintings everyone should see before dying | Guernica (1937) — Pablo Picasso, The Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid
Guernica by Picasso — Oil paints on canvas
Maybe one of the most memorable and symbolic pieces Picasso has ever created, Guernica, is a masterpiece, both in size and in content. The cubist style of the 3,5 by 7,7m canvas brings a different dimension to the meaning and consequences of war, portraited as a brutal, inhuman, chaotic, and painful event that affects militaries and civilians.
This painting is heavily inspired after the bombing of the city of Guernica by Nazi forces in 1937. The magnitude of this tragedy incited Pablo to denounce what had happened to the Spanish people during and after the attack. Through the simultaneous composition of different elements, Picasso was capable of capturing, in a complex layout, the falling out of one of the most agonizing genocides in Spanish history.
At the upper left corner and the middle of the canvas, we can see respectively a bull and a horse, which are both elements of national significance to the Spanish culture. The drawing of these animals with deformed bodies and distorted expressions reverberates with the feeling Picasso had that the military caste was sinking Spain in an ocean of pain and death.
However, Guernica managed to extrapolate the barrier of one country and became in the following years an international declaration of war against war and a manifesto against violence. The soldier lay dead on the floor, reinforces this message by holding a broken sword in one hand and a white poppy in the other. Universally flowers are known for representing a peace offering, translating the painter’s desire of the end of war and brutality.
Fun fact: Dora Maar, Pablo’s girlfriend at the time, photographed the progress of the painting, which allow us today to have an insight into the thought process behind one of the most elaborate artistic protest of the century. In case you are interested, the site of the Museo Reina Sofía has a timeline of the entire painting and its repercussion around the world, along with the photos mentioned before. | https://medium.com/art-direct/five-life-changing-paintings-everyone-should-see-before-dying-6f94ed8105bb | ['Beatriz Freitas'] | 2020-08-02 08:27:13.716000+00:00 | ['Art', 'Painting', 'Museums', 'Artist', 'Culture'] | 432 |
Personal Day | My previous brush with a doctor didn’t go so well.
My mother-in-law was having a tough time with her hips. So much so that she was scheduled for hip replacement surgery. Only, when they had her open, they discovered that the source of her pain and reduced function wasn’t arthritis. It was a tumor, right on the structure of her hip. I was standing next to my wife, who was standing next to her mother, who was lying on a hospital bed, when the doctor relayed that little tidbit. I wanted to shout “How the hell didn’t that show up on the X-rays or the MRI?”. But I didn’t. What would that accomplish? She, and her daughter, and me I guess, were already scared and sad enough. She would have had the same surgery anyway. But still.
So a few weeks later, when I get a headache lasting five days and counting, I get worried. I take a personal day, the whole day, and go to the doctor’s myself. My doctor.
The nurse takes my temperature, blood pressure, weighs me, asks me if I am depressed, asks me if I feel threatened at home. I open my mouth, roll up my sleeve, stand on the scale, say the words “No” and “No”.
What’s the reason for my visit? “I’m worried about my weeklong headache”, I answer, and tell the nurse about my mother-in-law. She nods, with a concerned look, and runs several tests and probes involving blood, light, sound, and radiation. Lucky me, the clinic has all the equipment right there. About an hour goes by.
My doctor, Dr. Brioni, opens the door after knocking but not waiting for an answer, and walks in. He’s looking at some paper on a clipboard as he shakes my hand. He looks up at me, still shaking my hand, and speaks.
“Not every headache is a tumor, you know.”
“Thankfully”, I answer.
“Everything else checks out. So you’re good”, he says.
“So I’m good?”, I answer.
“You’re not good?”, he asks.
“Well…” I say, “I’ve still got this headache.”
“Most people,” Dr. Brioni tells me, “when they find out it’s not a tumor, their headache goes away. They stop worrying so much, and their headache just goes away.”
“Hey, that’s great”, I say. “When can I expect that to happen to me?”
“For most people,” he starts, “it’s instantaneous. For others, well, I suspect it’ll vanish on your way home.”
We’ve both been standing this whole time. He writes one or two things on the paper on the clipboard, then puts it in the holder on the back of the exam room door. He turns to shake my hand again.
“Good to see you again. You’re all set. See Kelly on your way out.”
“Thanks, Doctor. Good to see you too.”
He opens the door and walks through. He looks to the right down the hallway and nods to someone I can’t see. “I’m going to leave this door open” he says to me without looking, and heads left. My total time in his presence today is about ninety seconds. Two minutes, tops.
All the way home I think about the would-be consequences of my would-be tumor. The effect on my wife, my children, my place in the world. I just now turned a corner at work, with high hopes and high possibilities.
I notice things on the way home, like people looking at their phones while driving, people piling into liquor stores, the big billboard flashing the lottery jackpot. What are they looking at more important than the road? What are they celebrating? What car would I buy first if I won the jackpot? What about the smaller prizes? That’s still quite a lot of money, a real windfall. How would I spend that? Hey, my headache’s gone! The Doctor was right. I guess ninety seconds is enough! I smile, smile the rest of the way home.
I pull into my driveway and walk through the front door of my house. My wife looks at me anxiously, and reluctantly asks me how it went.
I say “Not every headache is a tumor, you know.”
She smiles, and her eyes well up. “Hey”, I say, holding her close, “it’s OK. It’s all OK. Doctor Brioni says ‘Hello’, by the way”, I lie. She wipes her eyes with a tissue that’s already in her hand. The kids are still at school, and I’m glad we didn’t mention anything to them before.
“Let’s go get a lottery ticket”, I say. “Just to see. Just to see.” | https://medium.com/@kurtreno/personal-day-fd18080211ee | ['Kurt Reno'] | 2020-12-19 01:31:09.422000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Short Fiction', 'Short Read', 'Doctors', 'Personal Day'] | 985 |
This Is an Actual Video of Frank O’Hara | It was filmed the night before he died (he was run over by a dune buggy on Fire Island, which I think he would have found funny, had it happened when he was old and tired instead of young and vibrant and talented beyond measure.)
You should read a Frank O’Hara poem every day of your life, and two on Sundays. You should start with “The Day Lady Died,” about Billie Holiday. Go read it now, and we can talk about it a little.
(via) | https://medium.com/the-hairpin/this-is-an-actual-video-of-frank-ohara-987cb3a8cdee | ['Nicole Cliffe'] | 2016-06-02 01:47:38.376000+00:00 | ['Genius', 'Poetry'] | 103 |
7 Steps to Recover From A Breakup | 7 Steps to Recover From A Breakup
Let it hurt.
Cry, scream, breakdown.
Do whatever it takes to get your emotions out. The more it’s bottled up, the harder it’ll be to move forward.
When I first broke up with my ex, I thought it was necessary to be strong for myself. I felt like I had to keep it together, but the anger boiled and bubbled as the months progressed. Eventually, I found myself hysterically crying and angry. I couldn’t control my feelings. However, when I let all my erratic emotions out, I finally felt able to move on.
It’s equally important to know when to stop letting it hurt. Give yourself a week or a month to soak in the grief of your breakup but, don’t destroy yourself in despair.
Revamp your space.
The most hurtful part of breakups is remembering the spaces you and your loved one once shared. It becomes hard to navigate in those spaces because everything reminds you of your relationship.
My advice is to revamp your space, redecorate it! It could be as simple as rearranging furniture or maybe purchasing new bedspreads and pillows. By revamping your space, you reclaim it as your sanctuary. Your space should be a safe and comfortable place to reside. You’re starting a new chapter of your life, and you’ll be making new memories in your space; consider it the necessary preparation to begin anew.
Watch romantic comedies.
I know, this one is weird but, let me explain.
After a breakup, it feels like your whole world is caving it. You can’t see that your breakup might be part of a bigger story. However, romantic comedies like Friends and How I Met Your Mother allow you to see life's bigger picture.
Characters go through dozens of breakups, and they thought each partner was “the one.” But every breakup shapes the characters slightly differently. By the later seasons, characters have learned new things about themselves, they’ve sought different opportunities in different places, and they’ve dated new and interesting people. Eventually, you forget who Joey was dating in season 2.
Like shows, we go through multiple seasons of life; some are great and some not so wonderful. Your relationship was a season, and like those characters, you’re still growing, and you’ll have so many more opportunities to find love.
So watch those romantic comedies and find solace knowing this pain is part of a season.
Make a vision board.
Sometimes in relationships, we push aside things we want to do because our partner isn’t on board. Now is the time to dust off those old dreams and become excited about them again.
No matter how big a dream may be, you now have all the time in the world to make that dream come true. No one is invalidating you, and no one is arguing with your decisions. So, travel the world, cut your hair, start your business, or go back to school.
The best way to reconnect with yourself is to make a vision board. When you see your dreams and goals laid out beautifully on a board, it motivates you to work towards them. It’s a constant reminder that you’re investing in yourself, and you’re worth every single penny.
Your vision board should mark the beginning of something new. It doesn’t matter if you’re halfway through the year or a quarter way through the year. I encourage you to make one! A break up is an opportunity to start fresh, it may not be a new year, but it marks a new you.
Defy your ex.
I’m a sucker for watching Christmas movies from my childhood but, I could never watch Barbie the Nutcracker around my ex. He found it so stupid, and whenever I brought it up, he would shoot the suggestion down. But, this holiday season, I’ve watched it eight times, and I’m still counting. It’s a movie that makes me happy, and now no one shames me for watching it.
If you ever felt shamed for having a particular hobby or interest, that should validate how incompatibility you and your ex were. Someone meant for you will accept everything you are and be supportive of your interests. They’ll want to know the different sides of your personality: the good, the bad, and the quirky.
Defy your ex and reclaim your interests.
Find a medium to de-escalate your pain, like journals.
Journals are great ways to release your emotions throughout your healing period. There will be moments where you’ll have to confront a particular item, memory, or space that your ex and yourself once shared. Those moments will revive painful feelings, but a journal is a lovely place to de-escalate your pain.
When you’re on an emotional high, it’s hard to simmer back down. But through writing, you eventually release those emotions until you return to a neutral, calm state.
There are also other ways to release that energy. Physical activities such as painting, jogging, or yoga are perfectly viable ways to re-center yourself. I can only speak from experience of what’s worked for me. However, every person is different, so find an outlet that best works for you!
Learn patience.
Healing is a process, it takes time, and it’s non-linear. Some days will be more challenging than others. Your emotions will bubble up, and you’ll want to breakdown all over again. But, unlike your first explosion, these explosions will be minuscule. You’ll have the power to control yourself, and the grief won’t debilitate you. Then you’ll be able to get past the memory that elicits that pain.
Acknowledge your emotions, confront them, and release them. | https://medium.com/@simplyy/7-steps-to-recover-from-a-breakup-169c70035e27 | [] | 2020-12-15 15:22:59.501000+00:00 | ['Breakups', 'Relationships', 'Self', 'Psychology', 'Love'] | 1,161 |
Mixed-Race Musings | Mixed-Race Musings
Re-inspired by Mariah Carey’s and Lenny Kravitz’s healing and validating autobiographies — and why I love Barack Obama
I’m currently (and excitedly) working on a story to perform for The Moth. The story below was my initial direction, but we decided to try something different. Still, this piece means a lot to me because mixed-race identity is complicated when it comes down to it. In some spaces, I’m too preppy. In others, I’m Harriet Tubman. But the truth is, I’ve always defined myself.
I’ve spent a lot of my time on this earth trying to make people happy. From an early age, I learned that bringing people happiness was a good, celebrated thing. I remember the moment that my pre-school teacher said I was “one of the good kids.” I was just four years old, but I felt myself standing a little bit taller because I knew in my little life, I must have been doing something right. And in tandem with being good, I also wanted to “do good.” I put this in action during a kindergarten play in Queens Village, NY where I grew up. I was totally on-brand as a “sunshine” kid, and my classmate and I were supposed to come on stage and banish the clouds away by singing our sunny day song. Except, my classmate got stage fright and ran off the stage before we could finish. Eyeing my sobbing classmate and seeing my parents in the audience, I thought as quickly as I could to save the day. I sang both of our parts and yelled, “Don’t worry, I’m coming!” as I ran off to console my classmate. The crowd broke into applause and awws, and putting the production, and my classmate before me, made me feel like I saved the day.
Growing up in Queens, I was pretty much shielded from the racism that I’d learn about later in my life, thanks to my parents. Queens is the most diverse county in the world, and I got to grow up with a little bit of every culture. My best friend growing up was Irish; I listened to dancehall (thanks to my neighbors blasting Shabba Ranks and Patra next door) as much as I would Janet Jackson and the stories from my Teddy Ruxpin. It seemed like my first gen friends spent their Saturday mornings learning about the language of their cultures. I didn’t seem to encounter much racism, but even in this unusual Queens safe space, I was not shielded from colorism.
My mother is Black and Honduran, with dark skin and a bright smile — a smile that’s pretty much identical to mine. And my dad is Puerto Rican, what people today might call a white-presenting Latino. And together they had me, a composite of both of their sketches that caused wide-eyed stares, unexplained awe, and on the flip side, unexplained frustration. My parents split when I was very young. So I spent most of my time being shuttled around from elementary school and kids’ birthday parties to high school and eventually being shipped off to college, with my mom shepherding me the entire way. And even though we have that identical smile, that didn’t seem like enough for people to place me as her daughter. She was either my “nanny” growing up or my “friend” as I got older because it seemed odd to people for a dark-skinned woman to be the mother of a light-skinned child. I would smile politely and correct them at a young age, almost trying to will them into seeing that yes, this was my mother, and yes, I could belong to her. When I would visit my dad at Yankee Stadium, where he worked for years, it was clear that I was his daughter. But if any of my Puerto Rican and Italian cousins would join us while meeting new stadium people, they’d greet my cousins as my dad’s kids and then surprisedly recover when he introduced me as his child.
I set down my own gauntlet that no, I wasn’t going to become that “uppity light-skinned girl” that some family elders warned my mother I would likely become. That I wasn’t part of the problem. Because I wouldn’t let myself exist too loudly.
As I got older and my peers were assembling their own ways of dealing with differences, I was introduced super early to awkward comments. “So your father isn’t white, huh? He definitely looks white,” I’d hear.
So I started to just deny deny deny. I’d deny everything about my identity. If someone asked me if my hair was real, I’d tell them, absolutely not! This hair? Oh, I got it from the beauty supply shop, it’s #189. What are you? I’m a person. Where am I from? Queens. At 13, I thought this was brilliant. It was my way of being an ironic quippy kid, but really, the underlying goal was not to offend anyone with my identity. I set down my own gauntlet that no, I wasn’t going to become that “uppity light-skinned girl” that some family elders warned my mother I would likely become. That I wasn’t part of the problem. Because I wouldn’t let myself exist too loudly.
I had grown up with this being my normal that I didn’t even think to be angry about it. I’m an introvert by nature, and I never liked being the topic of conversation, especially when my existence was the topic.
Fast forward to college. I had been accepted to NYU, a school I didn’t feel like I was even good enough for, even though I had a stellar GPA coming out of high school. This practically Ivy League institution was a reach school in my mind, and I only applied with the encouragement of my guidance counselor — my plan was to go to a SUNY school that I’d likely get a scholarship to, and be as little a burden on my parents as possible. I was pre-med, partly because I was genuinely interested in medicine to heal people, and partly because I knew it would make my parents happy. And as a lifelong do-gooder, making them happy was priority #1.
But the West Village was definitely no Queens Village. I finally got why people kept asking if my mom was my nanny when I was young. Most of the Black women I’d see in Washington Square Park were pushing the strollers of white children or children many shades lighter than them. This was a dynamic that was so new to me, but not to many of my classmates. I noticed that only a few kids looked like me in any of my classes. Although I was usually one of the few actually from New York City in class, I was made to feel othered. But what’s different about college kids is that they broke it down scientifically, with actual percentage rates. And if they could break down stats, that means they had to be unequivocally right.
I tried to do the dance and keep up with my impossible balancing act while being overwhelmed with an intense pre-med track and double majoring in journalism. I got quieter and quieter in every aspect of my life. Aside from making friends with one classmate who is still my very best friend, Jing Jing Mei, who quickly set the bar of how she would be treated by telling our classmates, yes, she is from Brooklyn, and no, she did not have a recommendation for a dry cleaner. I stayed to myself in the library, with massive headphones on — listening to the ’80s soul music, hip-hop, and soca that made me feel like I was back home.
But this building pressure to not offend anyone by existing, wanting to declare a new major, and just hearing myself think and figure out who I truly wanted to be in this world became unbearable. In a literature class focusing on Caribbean identities, the dam broke. I’d mentioned that with my own Bahamian roots, I had related to the mindset of one of the protagonists of a book we were examining. A classmate told me that he found that to be surprising since the Black experience couldn’t actually be mine. “Come on, you’re light as Aaliyah. No one’s seeing you as this character.” I was stunned, but my first reaction wasn’t anger or a quippy comeback. It was fear. By identifying with this character, was I claiming an experience that wasn’t mine? Do I have the right to claim any of the boxes I’d been trying so hard to cram myself in, not to upset anyone, my entire life?
I felt so much shame. I wanted to immerse myself with stories about mixed-race identities. I wanted to bury myself in the pages of stories of people who may have been feeling the same shame and uncertainty. And I wanted to see how they made it right.
Right before Father’s Day in my junior year, I discovered Barack Obama’s first book, Dreams From My Father, on a random Barnes & Noble discount display. I didn’t think much of the author, considering I had picked up the book in the early 2000s when he was a Chicago senator, and there was no talk about a presidential run for the virtual unknown. My quest to “find the right way to describe myself” quickly transitioned into seeing my exact shame and insecurity projected back to me within his words. He talked about being the only child of a white mother and an African father, and how growing up in Kansas, he tried to learn about the blackness he couldn’t get from his mother and grandparents by watching Soul Train. He talked about being the “only one” in classrooms all over the country, and even in Thailand. He spoke about his present-day views when younger family members are targeted for being Black by police. He didn’t let some percentage rule change the way he identified as a Black man.
This book caused a gradual shift and lifted my insecurity boulder for the second half of my time at NYU. But I never challenged that classmate, and still, I rarely spoke up in class. I found myself spending less time in the chem lab and more time writing papers ferociously, and infusing them with as much culture as I could. My culture. The culture of the mixed kid from New York City, who deserved to walk NYU’s campus, and to tell her authentic New York story with no shame. I wrote about my Puerto Rican grandmother and how she used a meal to keep her family both nourished and united. The history within her cast iron pots passed down from generation to generation. I wrote about the authenticity of Notorious B.I.G., who, yes, entered the drug game just to feed his daughter, in a Bed Stuy that’s nothing like the gentrified oasis that has removed Brooklyn residents like him. They exist, and I exist, and New York City belongs to us. I wrote and wrote with the fire that I guess I was supposed to have as a Leo but never permitted myself to embody.
I told my parents that no, I did not want to be a doctor. I did not want to cram myself into this life I knew everyone wanted for me. I wanted to spend my life writing stories I was afraid to speak before so that young people could discover my words and know that no, they are not crazy for being so confused in a world that puts so much value in locking us in boxes no one, whatever race, should be forced to fit in.
Since then, a thing happened. Obama became president. I learned that we have the same birthday, and I would follow his steps as a kind and impactful leader and have them subtly guide mine as I became a working journalist. Just recently, we could also add Meghan Markle to the August 4 club, a biracial woman who’s self-made with a strong sense of identity and an even stronger mission for a better world. As she deals with scrutiny in a world not used to being confronted with her existence, I remind myself that speaking up with my pen lifts her up, and those like her.
I spent many years in knots about who I should be, until I started to untangle them and realized that only I write my own script. | https://jada.medium.com/mixed-race-musings-7dcb76e4e63c | ['Jada Gomez'] | 2020-10-16 17:10:39.754000+00:00 | ['Identity', 'Mixed Race'] | 2,500 |
Boosting Supply Chain Resilience in the High-Tech Industry — An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. | Co-authors: Jeff Howell (Global Vice President of the High-Tech Industry Business Unit) & Manfred Kopisch (Director, Solution Management, High Tech Industry Business Unit)
Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1735 “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” when advising Philadelphia about protecting towns from fires. Nearly 300 years later, these words still apply to any area where abrupt disruptions can have disastrous effects on a system.
Covid-19 is the latest in the string of major supply chain disruptions the high-tech industry experienced in the last decade. External macro events including, for example, tariff wars or natural disasters are a recurring element of risk that will continue to happen. In the example of COVID-19, it exposed the vulnerability of many organizations’ supply chains and raised the topic of supply chain resilience to the boardroom. The consequences of supply chain disruption range from increased personnel costs, severe productivity losses to poor customer experiences. To minimize those risks, companies must understand their supply chains vulnerabilities as well as appropriate mitigation strategies available.
In August 2020, SAP’s High-Tech Industry Business Unit led by Jeff Howell started to pool the strengths of industry experts across multiple domains, customers, partners and various SAP solution experts. Supported by SAP AppHaus, part of SAP’s Customer Innovation organization, they developed an innovative new vision: a dashboard that provides a supply chain resilience score based on five different risk factors. Additionally, the solution suggests risk avoidance strategies, which are tested by simulations and ultimately increase the company’s supply chain resilience.
Following a human-centered approach
Following SAP’s Human-Centered Approach to Innovation, the initial challenge was to design a tool for making supply chains more resilient while at the same time easy for the end user to consume and react to the information. To turn the vision into reality, Jeff brought together various experts from different Lines of Business (LoB’s) who ran through different design thinking workshops, creating personas, conducting end user research with customers and partners and extracting supply chain management challenges. The outcome was a conceptual prototype of a supply chain resilience dashboard. Like a credit score, this dashboard provides a single score that expresses resilience based on five risk factors:
Component Risk: Identifies critical and highest at-risk components
Disruption: Assesses suppliers’ potential for disruption based on location, regulatory, geopolitical or other issues
Workforce: Assesses suppliers’ current workforce capacity and ability to expand
Agility: Rates suppliers’ ability to serve based on capabilities: find alternate sources, alternate capacity
Visibility: Rates suppliers’ capabilities to provide visibility to customers and secure visibility of their suppliers.
The prototype leverages frontier technologies provided by SAP Business Technology Platform and data provided by SAP Ariba, SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain, SAP Supply Chain Collaboration for High Tech and Qualtrics. The dashboard provides maximum transparency on supply chain resilience and allows detailed insights into every factor to make informed decisions. By simulating recommended actions within the system, the end-user can evaluate a quantitative-based assessment of the cost-benefit tradeoffs.
A day in the life of a supply chain executive leveraging the solution
Resilience in the supply chain planning process
The developed prototype envisions companies incorporate resilience into their supply chain planning process. They anticipate supply chain risks, respond using machine-based recommendations, minimize disruptions, maintain business continuity and ultimately increase customer service, market share and financial performance.
This visionary prototype was made possible by the commitment of the cross-LoB and industry experts, customers and partners. The SAP Customer Innovation AppHaus team led the effort with critical thinking and facilitation skills, creativity, speed and determination.
If you would like to join us on the innovation journey and, as a customer, collaboratively develop the Proof of Concept further, please contact us. Tell us what you think and share your comments below. | https://medium.com/@eric-klebeck/boosting-supply-chain-resilience-in-the-high-tech-industry-an-ounce-of-prevention-is-worth-a-1745cdac79e8 | ['Eric Klebeck'] | 2020-12-17 16:05:08.974000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Supply Chain Disruption', 'Supply Chain', 'Sap', 'Innovation'] | 771 |
Google Cloud Pub/Sub Ordered Delivery | The Google Cloud Pub/Sub team is happy to announce that ordered delivery is now generally available. This new feature allows subscribers to receive messages in the order they were published without sacrificing scale. This article discusses the details of how the feature works and talks about some common gotchas when trying to process messages in order in distributed systems.
Ordering Basics
Ordering in Cloud Pub/Sub consists of two properties. The first is the ordering key set on a message when publishing. This string — which can be up to 1KB — represents the entity for which messages should be ordered. For example, it could be a user ID or the primary key of a row in a database. The second property is the enable_message_ordering property on a subscription. When this property is true, subscribers receive messages for an ordering key in the order in which they were received by the service.
These two properties allow publishers and subscribers to decide independently if messages are ordered. If the publisher does not specify ordering keys with messages or the subscriber does not enable ordered delivery, then message delivery is not in order and behaves just like Cloud Pub/Sub without the ordered delivery feature. Not all subscriptions on a topic need to have the same setting for enable_message_ordering. Therefore, different use cases that receive the same messages can determine if they need ordered delivery without impacting each other.
The number of ordering keys is limited only by what can be represented by the 1KB string. The publish throughput on each ordering key is limited to 1MB/s. The throughput across all ordering keys on a topic is limited to the quota available in a publish region. This limit can be increased to many GBs/s.
All the Cloud Pub/Sub client libraries have rich support for ordered delivery. They are the best way to take advantage of this feature, as they take care of a lot of the details necessary to ensure that messages are processed in order. Ordered delivery works with all three types of subscribers: streaming pull, pull, and push.
Ordering Properties
Ordered delivery has three main properties:
Order: When a subscription has message ordering enabled, subscribers receive messages published in the same region with the same ordering key in the order in which they were received by the service. Consistent redelivery: If a message is redelivered, then all messages received after that message for the same ordering key will also be redelivered, whether or not they were already acknowledged. Affinity: If there are messages with an ordering key outstanding to a streaming pull subscriber, then additional messages that are delivered are sent to that same subscriber. If no messages are currently outstanding for an ordering key, the service delivers messages to the last subscriber to receive messages for that key on a best-effort basis.
Let’s examine what these properties mean with an example. Imagine we have two ordering keys, A and B. For key A, we publish the messages 1, 2, and 3, in that order. For key B, we publish the messages 4, 5, and 6, in that order. With the ordering property, we guarantee that 1 is delivered before 2 and 2 is delivered before 3. We also guarantee that 4 is delivered before 5, which is delivered before 6. Note that there are no guarantees about the order of messages across different ordering keys. For example, message 1 could arrive before or after message 4.
The second property explains what happens when messages are redelivered. In general, Cloud Pub/Sub offers at-least-once delivery. That means messages may be sent to subscribers multiple times, even if those messages have been acknowledged. With the consistent redelivery guarantee, when a message is redelivered, the entire sequence of subsequent messages for the same ordering key that were received after the redelivered message will also be redelivered. In the above example, imagine a subscriber receives messages 1, 2, and 3. If message 2 is redelivered (because the ack deadline expired or because the best-effort ack was not persisted in Cloud Pub/Sub), then message 3 is guaranteed to be redelivered as well.
The last property defines where messages for the same ordering key are delivered. It applies only to streaming pull subscribers, since they are the only ones that have a long-standing connection that can be used for affinity. This property has two parts. First, when messages are outstanding to a streaming pull subscriber — meaning the ack deadline has not yet passed and the messages have not been acknowledged — then if there are more messages to deliver for the ordering key, they go to that same subscriber.
The second part pertains to what happens when no messages are outstanding. Ideally, one wants the same subscribers to handle all of the messages for an ordering key. Cloud Pub/Sub tries to do this, but there are cases where it cannot guarantee that it will continue to deliver messages to the same subscriber. In other words, the affinity of a key could change over time. Usually this is done for load-balancing purposes. For example, if there is only one subscriber, all messages must be delivered to it. If another subscriber starts, one would generally want it to start to receive half of the load. Therefore, the affinity of some of the ordering keys must move from the first subscriber to this new subscriber. Cloud Pub/Sub waits until there are no more messages outstanding on an ordering key before changing the affinity of the key.
Ordered Delivery at Scale
One of the most difficult problems with ordered delivery is doing it at scale. It usually requires an understanding of the scaling characteristics of the topic in advance. When a topic extends beyond that scale, maintaining order becomes extremely difficult. Cloud Pub/Sub’s ordered delivery is designed to scale with usage without the user having to think about it.
The most common way to do ordering at scale is with partitions. A topic can be made up of many partitions, where each stores a subset of the messages published to the topic. When a message gets published, a partition is chosen for that message, either explicitly or by hashing the message’s key or value to a partition. The “key” in this case is what Cloud Pub/Sub calls the ordering key.
Subscribers connect to one or more partitions and receive messages from those partitions. Much like the publish side, subscribers can choose partitions explicitly or rely on the messaging service to assign subscribers to partitions. Partition-based messaging services guarantee that messages within the same partition are delivered in order.
A typical partition setup would look like this:
The green boxes represent the partitions that store messages. They would be owned by the messaging servers (often called “brokers”), but we have omitted those servers for simplicity. The circles represent messages, with the color indicating the message key and the number indicating the relative order for the messages of that color.
One usually has a lot fewer partitions than there are keys. In the example above, there are four message colors but only three partitions, so the second partition contains both blue and red messages. There are two subscribers, one that consumes from the first partition and one that consumes from the second and third partitions.
There are three major issues a user may have to deal with when using partitions: subscriber scaling limitations, hot shards, and head-of-line blocking. Let’s look at each in detail.
Subscriber Scaling Limitations
Within a set of subscribers across which delivery of messages is load balanced (often called a “consumer group”), only one subscriber can be assigned to a partition at any time. Therefore, the maximum amount of parallel processing that can occur is min(# of partitions, # of subscribers). In the example above, we could load balance across no more than three subscribers:
If processing messages suddenly became more expensive or — more likely — a new consumer group was added to receive messages in a new pipeline that requires longer processing of the messages, it may not be possible to gain enough parallelism to process all the published messages. One solution would be to have a subscriber whose job is to republish the messages on a topic with more shards, which the original subscribers could consume instead:
The downside is that now both of these topics must be maintained or a careful migration must be done to change the original publisher to publish to the new topic. If both topics are maintained, then messages are stored twice. It might be possible to delete the messages from the first topic once they are published to the second topic, but this would require the migration of any subscribers receiving messages from the original topic to the new topic.
Hot Shards
The next issue is a hot shard — the overloading of a single partition. Ideally, traffic patterns across partitions are relatively similar. However, it is possible that there are a lot more messages or much larger messages hashing to one partition in comparison to messages hashing to other partitions. As a result, a single partition can become overloaded:
What can be done to deal with this hot shard? Typically, the solution is to add partitions. However, maintaining order during a repartitioning can be very difficult. For example, if we add a new partition in the case above, it could result in related messages going to completely different partitions:
With this new set of partitions, purple messages now publish to the first partition, blue messages to the third partition, and yellow and red messages to the fourth partition. This repartitioning causes several problems. First of all, the fourth partition now contains messages for keys that were previously split among the two subscribers. That means the affinity of keys to subscribers must change.
Even more difficult is the fact that if subscribers want all messages in order, they must carefully coordinate from which partitions they receive messages when. The subscribers would have to be aware of the last offset in each partition that was for a message before adding more partitions. Then, they need to consume messages up to those offsets. After they have processed messages up to the offsets in all the partitions, then the subscribers can start to consume messages beyond that last offset.
Head-of-Line Blocking
The last difficult issue is head-of-line blocking, or the inability to process messages due to the slow processing of messages that must be consumed first. Let’s go back to the original scenario:
Imagine that the red messages require a lot more time to process than the blue ones. When reading messages from the second partition, the processing of the blue message 2 could be needlessly delayed due to the slow processing of red message 1. Since the unit of ordering is a partition, there is no way to process the blue messages without processing the red messages. One could try to solve this by repartitioning in the hopes that the red and blue messages end up in different partitions. However, the processing of the red messages will block the processing of others in whichever partition they end up. The repartitioning also results in the same issues discussed in the Hot Shards section.
Alternatively, the publisher could explicitly assign the red messages to their own partition, but it breaks the decoupling of publishers and subscribers if the publisher has to make decisions based on the way subscribers process messages. It may also be that the extra processing time for the red messages is temporary and doesn’t warrant large-scale changes to the system. The user has to decide if the delayed processing of some messages or the arduous process of changing the partitions is better.
Automatic Scaling With Ordering
Cloud Pub/Sub’s ordered delivery implementation is designed so users do not need to be subject to such limitations. It can scale to billions of keys without subscriber scaling limitations, hot shards or head-of-line blocking. As one may expect with a high-throughput pub/sub system, messages are split up into underlying partitions in Cloud Pub/Sub. However, there are two main properties of the service that allow it to overcome the issues commonly associated with ordered delivery:
Partitions are not exposed to users. Subscribers acknowledge messages individually instead of advancing a partition cursor.
By taking advantage of these properties, Cloud Pub/Sub brokers have three useful behaviors:
They assign subscribers to groups of ordering keys that are more fine-grained than a partition. They track publishing rates per key and scale to the appropriate number of partitions as needed, maintaining proper ordered delivery across repartitioning. They store the order of messages on a per-ordering-key basis so delivery is not blocked by messages for other keys in the same partition that have not yet been processed.
These behaviors allow Cloud Pub/Sub to avoid all three major issues with ordered delivery at scale!
Ordered delivery doesn’t come for free, of course. Compared with unordered delivery, the ordered delivery of messages may slightly decrease publish availability and increase end-to-end message delivery latency. Unlike the unordered case, where delivery can fail over to any broker without any delay, failover in the ordered case requires coordination across brokers to ensure the messages are written to and read from the correct partitions.
Using Ordered Delivery Effectively
Even with Cloud Pub/Sub’s ability to deliver messages in order at scale, there are still subtleties that exist when relying on ordered delivery. This section details the things to keep in mind when building an ordered pipeline. Some of these things apply when using other messaging systems with ordered delivery, too. In order to provide a good example of how to use ordering keys effectively, the Cloud Pub/Sub team has released an open-source version of its ordering keys prober. This prober is almost identical to the one run by the team continuously to verify the correct behavior of this new feature.
Publishing in Order
On the surface, publishing in order seems like it should be very easy: Just call publish for each message. If we could guarantee that publishes never fail, then it would be that simple. However, transient or permanent failures can happen with publish at any time, and a publisher must understand the implications of those failures.
Let’s take the simple example of trying to publish three messages for the same ordering keys A: 1, 2, and 3. The Java code to publish these messages could be the following:
String[] messages = {"1", "2", "3"};
for (String msg : messages) {
PubsubMessage message = PubsubMessage.newBuilder()
.setData(ByteString.copyFromUtf8(msg))
.setOrderingKey("A")
.build();
ApiFuture<String> publishFuture = publisher.publish(message);
publishFuture.addListener(() -> {
try {
String messageId = publishFuture.get();
System.out.println("Successfully published " + messageId);
} catch (Exception e) {
System.err.println("Could not publish message "+ msg);
}
}, executor);
}
If there were no failures, then each publish call would succeed and the message ID would be returned in the future. We’d expect the subscriber to receive messages 1, 2, and 3 in that order. However, there are a lot of things that could happen. If a publish fails, it likely needs to be attempted again. The Cloud Pub/Sub client library internally retries requests on retriable errors. Errors such as deadline exceeded do not indicate whether or not the publish actually succeeded. It is possible that the publish did succeed, but the publish response wasn’t received by the client in time for the deadline, in which case the client may have attempted the publish again. In such cases, the sequence of messages could have repeats, e.g., 1, 1, 2, 3. Each published message would have its own message ID, so from the subscriber’s perspective, it would look like four messages were published, with the first two having identical content.
Retrying publish requests is complicated even more by batching. The client library may batch messages together when it sends them to the server for more efficient publishing. This is particularly important for high-throughput topics. In the case above, it could be that messages 1 and 2 are batched together and sent to the server as a single request. If the server fails to return a response in time, the client will retry this batch of two messages. Therefore, it is possible the subscriber could see the sequence of messages 1, 2, 1, 2, 3. If one wants to avoid these batched republishes, it is best to set the batch settings to allow only a single message in each batch.
There is one additional case with publishing that could cause issues. Imagine that in running the above code, the following sequence of events happens:
Publish is called with message 1. Publish is called with message 2. Publish for message 1 transiently fails. Publish is called with message 3.
The result could be that messages 2 and/or 3 are successfully published and sent to subscribers without 1 having been sent, which would result in out-of-order delivery. A simple solution may be to make the calls to publish synchronous:
String[] messages = {"1", "2", "3"};
for (String msg : messages) {
PubsubMessage message = PubsubMessage.newBuilder()
.setData(ByteString.copyFromUtf8("1"))
.setOrderingKey(msg)
.build();
boolean successfulPublish = false;
while (!successfulPublish) {
ApiFuture<String> publishFuture = publisher.publish(message);
try {
String messageId = publishFuture.get();
System.out.println("Successfully published "+ messageId);
successfulPublish = true;
} catch (Exception e) {
System.err.println("Could not publish message "+ msg);
}
}
}
While this change would guarantee that messages are published in order, it would make it much more difficult to publish at scale, as every publish operation would block a thread. The Cloud Pub/Sub client libraries overcome this problem in two ways. First, if a publish fails and there are other messages for the same ordering key queued up in the library’s message buffer, it fails the publishes for all those messages as well. Secondly, the library immediately fails any subsequent publish calls made for messages with the same ordering key.
How does one get back to a state of being able to publish on an ordering key when this happens? The client library exposes a method, resumePublish(String orderingKey). A publisher should call resumePublish when it has handled the failed publishes, determined what it wants to do, and is ready to publish messages for the ordering key again. The publisher may decide to republish all the failed messages in order, publish a subset of the messages, or publish an entirely new set of messages. No matter how the publisher wants to handle this edge case, the client library provides resumePublish as a means to do so without losing the scaling advantages of asynchronous publishing. Take a look at the ordering key prober’s publish error logic for an example of how to use resumePublish.
All of the above issues deal with publishing from a single publisher. However, there is also the question of how to publish messages for the same ordering key from different publishers. Cloud Pub/Sub allows this and guarantees that for publishes in the same region, the order of messages that subscribers see is consistent with the order in which the publishes were received by the broker. As an example, let’s say that both publishers X and Y publish a message for ordering key A. If X’s message is received by Cloud Pub/Sub before Y’s, then all subscribers will see the messages in that order. However, publishers do not have a way to know in which order the messages were received by the service. If the order of messages across different publishers must be maintained, then the publishers need to use some other mechanism to coordinate their publishes, e.g., some kind of locking service to maintain ownership of an ordering key while publishing.
It is important to remember that ordering guarantees are only for messages published in the same region. Therefore, it is highly recommended that all publishers use regional service endpoints to ensure they publish messages to the same region for the same ordering key. This is particularly important for publishers hosted outside of GCP; if requests are routed to GCP from another place, it is always possible that the routing could change if using the global endpoint, which could disrupt the order of messages.
Receiving Messages in Order
Subscribers receive messages in the order they were published. What it means to “receive messages in order” varies based on the type of subscriber. Cloud Pub/Sub supports three ways of receiving messages: streaming pull, pull, and push. The client libraries use streaming pull (with the exception of PHP), and we talk about receiving messages via streaming pull in terms of using the client library. No matter what method is used for receiving messages, it is important to remember that Cloud Pub/Sub offers at-least-once delivery. That means subscribers must be resilient to receiving sequences of messages again, as discussed in the Ordering Properties section. Let’s look at what receiving messages in order means for each type of subscriber.
Streaming Pull (Via the Client Libraries)
When using the client libraries, one specifies a user callback that should be run whenever a message is received. The client libraries guarantee that for any given ordering key, the callback is run to completion on messages in the correct order. If the messages are acked within that callback, then it means all computation on a message occurs in order. However, if the user callback schedules other asynchronous work on messages, the subscriber must ensure that the asynchronous work is done in order. One option is to add messages to a local work queue that is processed in order.
It is worth noting that because of asynchronous processing in a subscriber like this, ordered delivery in Cloud Pub/Sub does not work with Cloud Dataflow at this time. The nature of Dataflow’s parallelized execution means it does not maintain the order of messages after they are received. Therefore, a user’s pipeline would not be able to rely on messages being delivered in order. To ensure that one does not use Pub/Sub in Dataflow and expect ordered delivery, Dataflow pipelines that use a subscription with ordering keys enabled fail on startup.
Pull
For subscribers that use the pull method directly, Cloud Pub/Sub makes two guarantees:
All messages for an ordering key in the PullResponse’s received_messages list are in the proper order in that list. There is one outstanding list of messages per ordering key at a time.
The requirement that only one batch of messages can be outstanding at a time is necessary to maintain ordered delivery. The Cloud Pub/Sub service can’t guarantee the success or latency of the response it sends for a subscriber’s pull request. If a response fails and a subsequent pull request is fulfilled with a response containing subsequent messages for the same ordering key, it is possible those subsequent messages could arrive to the subscriber before the messages in the failed response. It also can’t guarantee that the subsequent pull request comes from the same subscriber.
Push
The restrictions on push are even tighter than those on pull. For a push subscription, Cloud Pub/Sub allows only one message to be outstanding per ordering key at a time. Since each message is sent to a push subscriber via its own request, sending such requests out in parallel would have the same issue as delivering multiple batches of messages for the same ordering key to pull subscribers simultaneously. Therefore, push subscribers may not be a good choice for topics where messages are frequently published with the same ordering key or latency is extremely important, as the restrictions could prevent the subscriber from keeping up with the published messages.
In summary, ordered delivery at scale usually requires one to be very careful with the capacity and setup of their messaging system. When that capacity is exceeded or message processing characteristics change, adding capacity while maintaining order is a time-consuming and difficult process. With the introduction of ordered delivery into Cloud Pub/Sub, users can rely on order in ways they are accustomed to in a system that still automatically scales with their usage. | https://medium.com/google-cloud/google-cloud-pub-sub-ordered-delivery-1e4181f60bc8 | ['Kamal Aboul-Hosn'] | 2020-10-19 14:48:55.184000+00:00 | ['Pub Sub', 'Google Cloud Platform', 'Distributed Systems', 'Google Pubsub', 'Data Analytics'] | 4,750 |
8 Things to Know About Running and Your Breasts | Breasts: They don’t do anything to help your running. They just hitch a ride and get in the way — requiring their own special equipment and in some cases, causing discomfort.
In a 2013 study of female runners at the London Marathon, 32 percent said they experienced occasional pain in their breasts. Of those, 17 percent sometimes cut back on their training because of breast pain.
But the news is not all bad. Researchers continue to study breast motion during sports, bra technology is improving all the time, and evidence is growing that running is one of the best things you can do to protect yourself from breast cancer.
Here’s what scientists know — and what runners should, too — about taking care of your pair.
1. The body is not naturally kind to the breasts.
“Depending on the size, they can be very heavy,” says Andrea Cheville, M.D., physical medicine and rehabilitation researcher and director of the Cancer Rehabilitation Program at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. “The body doesn’t support them very well. There’s not much to keep them stable and immobilized.” Just your skin and a few ligaments.
Other parts of the body are luckier. “If you think of something like the abdominal fascia, it’s just incredibly strong,” Cheville says. “You can run and your insides don’t jiggle around, because we have a strong, fibrous envelope. But that’s not true of the breasts. They have essentially no support. And yet they have pain receptors. And when the limited support elements are stretched, that hurts.”
2. They move more than you think.
Michelle Norris, senior research associate in the department of sport and exercise science at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K., studies breast movement and tests breast support products in the lab.
To do so, she and her colleagues have women running on a treadmill bare breasted (bless those ladies), and then in low or high support bras. They use 3-D motion capture to look at the range of movement of the breasts.
“We have some very willing participants — and we owe them a lot,” Norris says.
In the lab, Norris and her colleagues have found that breasts move in a figure eight pattern. Not just up and down — that vertical movement is what most runners think of — but side to side and forward and backward as well. “[Breast is] just a mass of tissue, not a muscle,” Norris says. “It is not rigid structure. It can move in all three dimensions when we run.” And it does.
When you add all that movement in three planes together, Norris says, breasts — unsupported — move about 15 centimeters during running. (Different labs report different numbers, depending on the cup size of the cohort they’re testing.) About 50 percent of the movement is in the vertical, and then 25 percent is side to side movement, and the other 25 percent is anterior-posterior motion.
Regardless, that’s about six inches of motion with every stride.
(R)UNWIND WITH RW: The perfect way to recharge your running life? Register for one of our 2017 Runner’s World Women’s Getaways!
3. A good bra is a must-have.
With all that movement, female runners need support.
Shop carefully, the experts urge. Try on a lot of different bras. Get the best fit possible. Look for a specialty running store with a knowledgeable female salesperson. Buy a high support bra for running.
How to Find the Proper Sports Bra
by Runner’s World US
Play Video
Some women prefer compression, others prefer encapsulation models. Doesn’t matter. The best bra is the one that you’re happy to wear.
“We’re all about bra fit here,” Norris says. “It is one of the most important facets for any woman in sport. We always say that it should be one that fits you extremely well and one you’re comfortable with.”
If you get one that hooks in the back, you should be able to wear it on its loosest fastening. As it goes through the wash and becomes looser, you can go to the tighter fastenings.
RELATED: Find Your Perfect Sports Bra
4. Your pace does not affect the motion.
Here’s what surprised Norris, a runner herself, from the research in her lab: It doesn’t matter what speed you’re going, your breasts move the same amount. “I would have thought that the faster I run, the more my breasts might move. That’s not actually the way it goes,” she says. “If you’re running at 10 kilometers per hour (about 10:00 pace), they’re actually moving at their maximal displacement. If you’re running at 14 kilometers per hour (about 7:00 pace), they’re not going to move any more than that.”
The lesson for runners: Don’t think if you’re going for a long, slow run, you can use a bra that is less supportive. You need a high support bra all the time.
5. Are they shrinking?
Athletes new to a running program often notice a curious reduction in breast size. What’s happening?
Running in essence doesn’t shrink your breasts, Norris says. But the breasts are composed of fat and fibrous tissues. “So if a person is training and eating well and they’re reducing their overall body fat, it’s reasonable to think they could also decrease their breast size because they’re decreasing fat in their breasts,” she says. “It works more like decreasing their overall body fat instead of spot reduction.”
6. Pain should be taken seriously.
There are different kinds of breast pain — most of which are easily explained. But you shouldn’t ignore it. “Breast pain is pain,” Cheville says.
A lot of breast pain during exercise is from inadequate support — your bra falling down on the job. (See №4.) And, Cheville says, for large-breasted women, adequate support can be tough to find.
RELATED: The Best Sports Bras for Sizes DD and Larger
Many women are extra sensitive in their breasts in the days leading up to menstruation. It’s highly variable from person to person. If the pain is severe enough, you might want to pick a workout with less impact. “Recognize that this too will pass, and while you’re tender, take it easy,” Cheville says.
If you want to power through, it’s fine to use an over-the-counter anti-inflammatory. And watch the salt intake, which can lead you to retain water during the perimenstrual time, adding to the swelling in your breasts, she says.
Any unusual pain, see a doctor. “A small breasted woman who has new onset pain, that’s harder to explain and more concerning,” Cheville says. “She should probably see a clinician.”
7. Discomfort can kill your motivation.
Recent research out of the Portsmouth lab has shown that breast comfort affects a woman’s willingness to run. It can be hard enough to get motivated to drag yourself out the door for a few miles. Without being conscious of it, you could be letting your breasts sabotage your workout plans. Says Norris: “If you pick up the wrong bra, you’re not going to go.”
8. Breast cancer strikes in runners less frequently than in sedentary women.
Recent studies have established a clear link between exercise and reduced rates of breast cancer, Cheville says.
“Primary prevention means it keeps you from getting it in the first place,” she says. “Secondary prevention means it keeps it from coming back. For breast cancer, there’s pretty solid evidence for both primary and secondary prevention with exercise.”
A 2014 study showed running beats walking for breast cancer survival rates. Vigorous exercise was better than moderate exercise for the women in the study.
All the more reason to hit the road — with a good bra, of course. | https://medium.com/@sarmadmayo007/8-things-to-know-about-running-and-your-breasts-66cdd86252de | ['Sarmad Mayo'] | 2020-12-17 19:09:06.146000+00:00 | ['Exercise', 'Running', 'Weight Loss', 'Weightloss Foods', 'Lose Weight'] | 1,602 |
A Guide to O3 Wallet (Mobile) | After you download the O3 Wallet app from App Store, Google Play or our official website, open it and you’ll see the interface in the image below (I’m using iOS to demonstrate, but it should look similar on Android):
Grant your consent to our User Agreement by checking that box and we’re good to go.
How to import an existing wallet
1.1 In the interface above, click ‘Import Wallet’, and you’ll be prompted to choose which chain you want to view your wallet on.
1.2 Now you should be directed to the interface below. Enter your Private Kay/Encrypted Key with password, or use an NEP6 File to import your wallet.
1.3 When the steps above are completed, you can begin using your wallet.
1.4 Alternatively, if your wallet is already configured, you can choose import additional wallets with ease. To import a wallet you will first click the settings icon, as shown in the. interface shown below, to invoke the ‘Manage Wallet’ tab. From there, click ‘Import Wallet’ to start the process.
2. How to create a new wallet
2.1 In the welcome page, click ‘Create Wallet’.
2.2 You’ll be directed to the interface below. Enter a name for your wallet and set a password. When you’re done, click ‘Create’.
2.3 After that, you’ll be prompted to backup your keys carefully. The QR code and the wallet address will also be shown to you in the interface below. Once your wallet is backed up, it will be ready for use.
2.4 Alternatively, if you are already using a wallet and wish to create a new one, you can click the marked area in the interface shown below to invoke the ‘Manage wallet’ tab, and then click ‘Create Wallet’ to start the process.
3. How to manage a wallet (This includes funtions like backup public address/keys and remove wallet from the app)
3.1 Click the marked area in the interface shown above to invoke the ‘Manage wallet’ tab or go to ‘Me’ -> ‘Manage wallet’.
3.2 In the interface shown below, choose the wallet you want to manage (there’s only one in the image) and click the three dots on that wallet tab.
3.3 In the interface ensued as shown in the image below, you can perform a series of actions to your wallet like edit the wallet’s name and password, view wallet address/keys, and export the wallet. | https://medium.com/o3-labs-o3-wallet/a-guide-to-o3-wallet-mobile-489415aa820e | ['Caroline'] | 2021-04-12 11:00:21.968000+00:00 | ['Mobile', 'O3', 'Wallet', 'Guides And Tutorials', 'Cryptocurrency'] | 509 |
Solving Business Problems with Analytics: Workload Evaluation (1.3) | Recap (You can skip this section to the next heading if it’s still fresh)
We determined that to solve all these problems, we must first start with the information we have available to us. We know that we have some employees, and we know that we have some volume of work to accomplish. Okay, easy enough so far. The most important thing we need to do is to determine how to measure the total work volume that is required of us. Each of these problems is dependent on the solution to this one; This must be our starting place.
How do we measure the total work volume? Well, this is going to require that you research the potential variables in the real world. Every manager you talk to will probably have a different answer to this, so collect all the features you can for this evaluation. For our example, we came up with some general ones to use: purchases, invoices issued, and purchase dollar value. We need to evaluate and make a determination of the best of these measurement for each scenario. Then, we will have to normalize these measurements and add them together to get the total work volume. Since we are trying to measure work, the best measurement will have the most linear relationship to the effort of accomplishing the unit of volume. While effort is a really hard thing to measure, we can infer this value by looking at its cost; The cost of effort is time in an organization. Therefore, to evaluate the best potential measurement of work volume we will evaluate the correlation coefficient for each volume measurement, and the highest value will be our choice.
ρx,y = co-variance(x,y)/(σₓ*σᵧ)
Where x = effort, and y = volume
effort = 1+((x-μ)/σ)
volume = sum(units)
volume_category = {category|max{ρ(effort,vol_measure):∀vol_measure}} normalized_units = ∑{units/max(units)|volume_category}
_________________ relative_volume = effort * normalized_units
So now that we have our total work volume measurement, everything else falls into place naturally. The next hurdle is to determine how much work to expect from a single contributor.
To evaluate this we take the average total work volume divided by the average time required to accomplish that work to give us a measurement of work efficiency. To determine how much to expect from the average contributor, we’ll take the average of our efficiency measurement and return the average volume contribution where the efficiency is within a standard deviation of the population mean.
avg_volume = avg(relative_volume)/employee
avg_efficiency = avg_volume/avg(time)
_________________ exp_vol_contribution = avg_volume <--- avg_efficiency - σ < avg_volume < efficiency + σ
Now that we know how to measure total work volume and the expected contribution of an employee, we can answer the rest of our questions pretty easily.
To evaluate the employees required, we just take our total work volume and divide it by the expected contribution. To evaluate our current workload capacity, we take our current employees and multiply it by the expected contribution.
req_contributors = relative_volume/exp_vol_contribution
capacity = exp_vol_contribution * count(employees)
We can now answer each of the questions we’ve been presented with. Now to see this solution in practice we will first have to generate some test data. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/solving-business-problems-with-analytics-workload-evaluation-1-3-30d2bf287891 | ['Mark Styx'] | 2020-03-05 17:56:37.038000+00:00 | ['Communication', 'Business', 'Analytics Life Cycle', 'Workload Management', 'Data Science'] | 674 |
Three Next Gen Battery Technologies that could power the world. | The world needs more power, ideally in a structure that is clean and sustainable. Our energy saving procedures are right now molded by lithium-ion batteries — at the next gen of such innovation — yet what would we be able to anticipate in years to come?
We should start with some battery basics. A battery is a pack of at least one or many cells, every one of which has a positive electrode (the cathode), a negative electrode (the anode), a separator and an electrolyte. Utilizing distinctive synthetics and materials for these influences the properties of the battery — how much energy it can store and yield, how much power it can give or the times it tends to be discharged & recharged.
Battery organizations are always testing to discover sciences that are less expensive, denser, lighter and all the more dominant. A research clarified three new battery innovations with transformative potential.
LITHIUM-SULFUR
What is it?
In Li-ion batteries, the dynamic materials are layered between the lithium particles in stable host structures during charge and release. In lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries, there are no host structures. While discharging, the lithium anode is expended and sulfur changed into an assortment of chemical compounds; during charging, the reverse procedure happens.
WHAT ARE ITS ADVANTAGES?
A Li-S battery utilizes exceptionally light active materials: sulfur in the positive terminal and metallic lithium as the negative electrode. This is the reason its hypothetical energy density is phenomenally high: multiple times more noteworthy than that of Li-ion. That makes it a solid match for aviation applications.
WHEN CAN WE EXPECT IT?
Li-S technology needs further research and development work to improve its life expectancy and to continue to increase specific energy density. It isn’t relied upon to be prepared for applications requiring long battery life for somewhere around five years.
SODIUM-ION
WHAT IS IT?
The way that sodium-ion (Na-ion) batteries work is like lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries; as the name recommends, the fundamental distinction is the substitution of lithium by sodium. An assortment of sodium-based materials can be utilized as the battery’s positive terminal, which is definitive with regards to performance — longer life or cycling limit with regards to precedent.
WHAT ARE ITS ADVANTAGES?
Na-ion batteries offer various preferences. The primary one is that they are less expensive than Li-ion batteries (by up to 35 percent per cell). Be that as it may, this innovation won’t almost certainly contend with Li-particle as far as vitality density — neither by weight nor volume — and must be utilized for stationary applications where this is anything but a noteworthy prerequisite. These might incorporate putting away abundance power produced by sustainable power sources, for example, sun-based or wind control.
WHEN CAN WE EXPECT IT?
Many of the cell components and manufacturing processes are the same as for current Li-ion batteries. The main development is focused on electrode materials. Na-ion batteries might be ready to enter production in three to four years’ time.
SOLID-STATE
WHAT IS IT?
Solid state batteries represent a change in outlook as far as innovation. In present-day Li-ion batteries, ions move to start with one electrode then onto the next over the liquid electrolyte (additionally called ionic conductivity). Taking all things together solid state batteries, the fluid electrolyte is supplanted by a strong compound which enables lithium ions to move inside it. This idea is a long way from new, however in the course of recent years — because of serious overall research — new groups of solid electrolytes have been found with high ionic conductivity, like a liquid electrolyte, enabling this specific technological hindrance to be resolved.
WHAT ARE ITS ADVANTAGES?
The main tremendous favorable position is a checked improvement in wellbeing at cell and battery levels: inorganic strong electrolytes are non-combustible when warmed, in contrast to their fluid partners. Second, it allows the utilization of imaginative, high-voltage high-limit materials, empowering denser, lighter batteries with improved security execution and a better time span of usability because of decreased self-release. As the batteries can display a high capacity to-weight proportion, they might be perfect for use in electric vehicles.
WHEN CAN WE EXPECT IT?
Several kinds of all-solid-state batteries are likely to come to market as technological progress continues. The first could be solid-state batteries with graphite-based anodes, bringing improved energy performance and safety. In time, lighter solid-state battery technologies using a metallic lithium anode should become commercially available.
To know more:- http://www.bhairavisurgical.com/ | https://medium.com/@pratik.ad2brand/three-next-gen-battery-technologies-that-could-power-the-world-e0b9076b60be | ['Pratik Urkande'] | 2019-05-25 09:54:38.093000+00:00 | ['Generation', 'Technology', 'Energy', 'Market', 'Battery'] | 925 |
Male Exclusive Blood Sacrifice in Maya Religion | The Calendar as a daily blood sacrifice
MAYA MYTHOLOGY & RELIGION
We know the Mayan calendars, the 260-day Count, The Tzolk’in, 20 days repeated 13 times and numbered from 1 to 13 in 20 successive counts. It is really mentioned once but at the same time the clear allusion to the four directions and the center leading to the reference to one of the oldest Mayan glyph, probably even older than Mayan and coming from very far in time, the “quincunx” that can be found in some other glyphs like that of the eighth day Lamat/rabbit or that of the eighteenth day Etz’nab/Flint.
It is very difficult to penetrate such symbolism because there is no one today that knows about it directly, as an heir and descendant of such religious beliefs and practices. And I am not sure it is correct to believe the center is a point especially if we take into account the interpretation of “quincunx” as being a representation of a pyramid. The center is a vertical line with a zenith, the Sky referring to the Heart of the Sky, to Quetzalcoatl, and with a nadir Xibalba, the territory of the Xibalban Lords of the underworld from whom the newly created human species has to free themselves.
The most intriguing question is that of the self-sacrifice, sacrifice and blood culture and civilization that justify rites and rituals of blood offerings or heart offerings. Even the divine or quasi-divine ancestors of the Maya tribes go through a ritual of sacrifice, especially Hunahpu and Xbalanque, the latter sacrificing the former by dismembering, beheading and then heart extraction, just before calling him back to life. And this is a trap to lure the main Xibalban Lords, One and Seven Death, to demand the opportunity for both of them together to go through such a sacrifice, from which they will not be resuscitated.
This book then is essential and this edition is richly illustrated and it has a great corpus of notes, bibliography, and index. At the same time, I am surprised by the list of the 20 days that does not correspond to the one I standardly work on, that or Michael D. Coe and of the Codex Borgia. I also regret that the list is given in two languages, Quiché and Yucatan, and not in English. Actually, Michael D. Coe does the same but only in Yucatan Maya. On the other hand, Bruce E. Byland, in his presentation of the Codex Borgia only gives the English translation for the names of the day. Only Maya requires some research with a dictionary to know what the names mean. Only English requires another type of research to know what they are and mean in Maya, because most glyphs when they are not phonetic syllables, have several meanings clustered together. And we cannot always know what is meant though Maya is definitely for me a synthetic third-articulation language moving from a totally glyphic writing system to a syllabary writing system. And some words can correspond to several different glyphs and are thus different in writing from what they are in oral practice, as far as we can reconstruct it.
So, enter this book, in this edition or another. There are several on the internet in free open access. Here are some personal remarks on this book.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
DENNIS TEDLOCK, Translator — POPOL VUH,
The Definitive Edition Of The Mayan Book Of The Dawn Of Life And The Glories Of The Gods And Kings –
A TOUCHSTONE BOOK — 1965–1996
Some compare this book to the Christian or Jewish Bible. I guess some compare it too to the Quran. Such comparisons are unfair to this book because they cast it into a mold that has little to do with the Mayas and Mayan religion, mythology or culture.
We could definitely compare some motifs or patterns in the story with those of the Bible or the Quran, but the patterns only have the meaning the general architecture in which they are cast provide them with and this meaning is not the same in the three books concerned here.
First of all, this book does not state at any time there is only one God. There are many Gods in this story even if maybe Quetzalcoatl is the main one, even if we could consider this is the beginning of the emergence of monotheism in this book, but really nothing but a sketchy beginning, especially when we know Quetzalcoatl is dead, he was sacrificed for the Maya world to stabilize and develop, though it is not clear whether it is a self-sacrifice or a formal heart-rending sacrifice performed by a priest of some kind. Note this sacrificed God, not son of God, of course, is supposed to come back from the East.
The second element is about the creation of the world, or rather the creation of the human species. The least we can say is that the creator who is maybe one, maybe several, was or were very sloppy and had to start all over again several times. These gods are not almighty far from it. But the most surprising element is that God appears to have many qualities, or names, and at times these qualities or names are seen as separate maybe even over several entities. Over the total watery world, “in the dark, in the night” (translation problem or fair translation? The dark is a clear characteristic that is defined easily as the absence of light, but the night is nothing but the other side of the day, night implying day from which it has been discriminated: so how can it be before daylight has been provided to differentiate day from night),
“only the Maker, Modeler alone, Sovereign Plumed Serpent, the Bearers, Begetters are in the water, a glittering light. They are there, they are enclosed in quetzal feathers, in blue-green.” (p. 64)
This is a beautiful story but is the Maker one or many? But is darkness defined as opposed to already existing light? But how come quetzal feathers exist before the creation of life? And the next sentence is even more mysterious:
“Thus the name, ‘Plumed Serpent.’ They are great knowers, great thinkers in their very being.” (p. 64)
We then come to an essential element of the cosmic vision of the Mayas. Their cosmos, their universe is vertical and going up you get into the sky and you consider the Heart of the Sky which is the Sovereign Plumed Serpent again. We will find later an underworld, Xibalba, and the emergence of humanity will come from a rebellion of the first humans against the lords of this underworld with the support of the Gods of the Sky, of the Heart of the Sky. And this Heart of the Sky has many names:
“named Hurricane. Thunderbolt Hurricane comes first, the second is Newborn Thunderbolt, and the third is Sudden Thunderbolt. So they were three of them at Heart of Sky who came to the Sovereign Plumed Serpent.” (p. 65)
This ternary pattern is typical of all religions before Judaism (a binary vision: “God and his Spirit” of Genesis) and Islam (God is one and only one and Mohammed is only his Prophet). Judaism emerged from various religions whose pattern was ternary. Christianity reintroduced the trinity but we can wonder if it was a reintroduction by Jesus himself or if it was a rewriting of the Jewish reference of Jesus to his Father and the Holy Spirit (only two, and father is a normal metaphor for God in Judaism), a rewriting introduced later by some disciples, apostles or not. What is interesting is that this book cannot be reduced to a single numerical pattern. Note however that Hurricane refers to the wind and in the Maya tradition, there are four winds corresponding to the four cardinal directions. We will find them later represented as a crossroads of four roads with four colors, “red, black, white, yellow,” (p. 95). Traditionally they are red for east, black for west, white for north, and yellow for south, and along with the upwards (Sky) and downward (Xibalba) directionality of the center, then heart, brings the cosmic vision to six, though traditionally again this center is reduced to a point, and then the four directions and the center form a “quincunx,” the oldest glyph found in Mesoamerica, similar to the eighth day, Lamat/Rabbit, and the eighteenth day, Flint/Etz’nab, of the Tzolk’in calendar. It is also an aerial view of a pyramid. The full six-directional vision is that of a textile shuttle, and note this vision will be recaptured by William Blake though Blake will redesign it inside out and outside in. But that’s another story.
Note here that the “heart” is really sacred, divine, and that must bring in our minds two remarks. Blood is sacred and divine and blood is the best offering to this Heart of the Sky with self-sacrifice generally by puncturing one’s penis with a jade sacrificial knife. No women can do that. Women are side-tracked. At best you can also puncture your tongue or your ears, but that is a second choice. This simple fact is a sign of a post-Ice-Age agricultural society that has pushed women out of the picture, or at best on its side. The second remark is that the heart itself is sacred and divine and the best act of subservience and obedience to the Gods is to offer one’s heart to him or them with ritual sacrifice. This centering cult on self-sacrifice and sacrifice is the very starting point and center of the vision. God is not seen as going along with his Spirit, but as the heart of the sky and we have to take this word literally. And this multiple-facetted god is redefined again this time as a nonary entity: “Hurricane, Newborn Thunderbolt, Sudden Thunderbolt, Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth, Maker, Modeler, Bearer, Begetter.” This male figure is all-male up to its seventh characteristic. But his last two features are female. A male cannot bear or cannot beget any child. Note though, in spite of what some may think, this Plumed Serpent is not the first creator in this cosmos because he is himself a newborn and to be born he has to come from a bearer, and this bearer has to be impregnated with the future newborn. Of course, we are working on a translation but these are intriguing and there is no possible comparison with the Bible. In the Bible, God is introduced as existing in the watery dark world along with his spirit without any mention or allusion to any origin at all. Here the main multiple-facetted god has been born to existence and is himself the bearer and begetter, hence he is both the newborn and the bearer, or shouldn’t it be the bearer and the newborn. He is the mother, the father and the son all in one multiple facetted God we are dealing with here.
This chaotic creation starts a series of pairs of humans. In a group of four, Xpiyacoc, Xmucane, Hunahpu Possum and Hunahpu Coyote. The mason and sculptor who invoke the first two, ask them to count days and to count lots, meaning to attach fate and the future to the days of the calendar. But at once they enter that very future. Xpiyacoc and Xmucane are declared to be respectively the grandfather and the grandmother (note the text gives the other order first and then specifies the order the way I have just given it. They invoke then the other two, Hunahpu Possum and Hunahpu Coyote with a long series of pairs of words ending with “Grandmother of Day, Grandmother of Light. Yet these people were manikins, woodcarvings and “there was nothing in their hearts and nothing in their minds.” (p. 70) So the decision was taken to destroy them. And yet Seven Macaw survives in his vanity: “I am their sun and I am their light, and I am also their months.” (p. 73) That’s when the manikins were destroyed by a flood, the famous flood that is the rising of the water after the Ice Age: 120 meters altogether submerging the coastal platform that had been open, inhabited and covered with vegetation for more than 20,000 years. It pushed humans away from the eastern coast (a fundamental migration stated in this book, and later on recalled as an initiating rite to the rising sun, to dawn as a metaphor for the development of modern humanity.
Seven Macaw survives, but not for long. I will jump now to the second part, the story of Seven Macaw and his descendants. This Seven Macaw has a wife, Chimalmat and they had two sons, Zipacna and Earthquake. Let them define themselves
“Here I am: I am the sun,” said Seven Macaw. “Here I am: I am the maker of the earth,” said Zipacna. “As for me, I bring down the sky, I make an avalanche of all the earth,” said Earthquake.” (p. 77–78)
That’s when Hunahpu and Xbalanque come into the picture. The first encounter with Seven Macaw makes Hunahpu lose one arm, ripped off by Seven Macaw. Then the two boys invoke a grandfather and a grandmother, Great White Peccary and Great White Coati, to approach Seven Macaw. He and his wife die because the grandfather and grandmother take care of his broken jaw and teeth and they deprive him of his metal. His wife dies too.
Zipacna during that time is bathing on the coast when 400 boys come along. He helps them carry a log but they are suspicious. So they make him dig a deep hole and they bury him in it though they are mistaken as for his death and he kills them all. But he then encounters the two boys and these trick him into chasing a crab in some cave or crack in the mountain and he is turned into stone. During that time Earthquake is enjoying his earth-quaking power. He comes across the two boys who pretend they are going hunting in the mountains. He joins them and they get some birds. The two boys prepare one for him with gypsum on top. Earthquake eats it but after that, he cannot walk anymore and the boys bury him. That’s how Hunahpu and Xbalanque defeated Seven Macaw and his two sons.
What is interesting here is the pattern of two sons against two sons. The first pair have a father and they are a triad of bad people, the mother being totally marginal. The second pair invoke two grandparents when necessary but they are not really part of this quartet because the grandparents are there to kill Seven Macaw, thus saving the mission of the two boys. We assume they are twins. But it is not said that clearly.
That binary pattern is going to continue. Xpivacoc and Xmucane have two sons, One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu. One Hunahpu has two sons too, One Monkey and One Artisan. Seven Hunahpu has no children, he remains a boy. One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu just throw dice and play ball every day in pairs, we assume with One Monkey and One Artisan. The triple God Hurricane-Newborn-Thunderbolt-Sudden-Thunderbolt sends a falcon as a messenger. The four of them go on playing but along the road to Xibalba, the underworld. They are met by One Death and Seven Death, two lords of Xibalba. This underworld is governed by twelve Lords that go in pairs. By their names and by their functions they are entirely dedicated to killing people and making them suffer. The six pairs are One and Seven Death; Scab Stripper and Blood Gatherer; Demon of Pus and Demon of Jaundice; Bone Scepter and Skull Scepter; Demon of Filth and Demon of Woe; and Wing and Packstrap (who make people die in the road, meaning by sudden death). One and Seven Hunahpu go on to Xibalba, whereas One Monkey and One Artisan stay behind. The latter pair will be defeated by Hunahpu and Xbalanque later.
The Lords of Xibalba send four messengers, four owls: Shooting Owl, One-Legged Owl, Macaw Owl and Skull Owl. One and Seven Hunahpu accept to follow them. They are submitted to extreme tests, when they arrive, in the Dark House, Rattling House, Jaguar House, Bat House, Razor House. They had received a lit up cigar and torch and they were supposed to bring them back at the end in the same original state they had received them, which of course they could not do. So they were sacrificed and buried. One Hunahpu’s head is hanged in a tree along the road.
Then we have the story of Blood Moon, a maiden whose father is Blood Gatherer. She gets pregnant from the skull/head of One Hunahpu by just talking to it. Her father who is connected to the Lords of Xibalba wants to know the father. She refuses to tell. She is sent to sacrifice by her father. The Military Keepers of the Mat have to do the sacrifice, but Blood Moon reveals the identity of the father to them. So they cheat and she finds refuge with the grandmother of One Monkey and One Artisan. Blood Moon explains her situation to the woman who is now her grandmother-in-law. After a first refusal, she accepts the grandchildren who are Hunahpu and Xbalanque. These get into some rivalry with their brothers, One Monkey and One Artisan. The two older ones climb in a tree but can’t get down. The two younger ones tell them to let the tail of their loincloth hand behind and they are turned into monkeys and they skip away in the forest. The mother-in-law asks the younger ones to call the older ones back by playing the song Hunahpu Monkey. They come back three times but the grandmother laughs each time. They try a fourth time to call them back but they do not come back. They became animals. Hunahpu and Xbalanque, while trying to cultivate a garden unsuccessfully, capture and torture a rat who tell them they have to recuperate what belongs to their father One Hunahpu. And that is the last leg of this binary story. Their descent to Xibalba and their vengeance. Having learned from their predecessors the tricks of the Lords of Xibalba, they can respond, mostly with magic, to the various houses
Their grandmother sends them a message via a louse that is swallowed by a toad that is swallowed by a snake and that is swallowed by a falcon who delivers those it has swallowed to the two boys who can thus get the message. This quaternary pattern is emphasized by the swallowing process and then by the delivering spitting out or vomiting. Before leaving, they plant two ears of corn in the middle of the grandmother’s house for them to dry to show their death in due time. They cross the two rivers Pus River and Blood River on their blowguns. They came to the crossroads of the four roads, Black Road, White Road, Red Road, Green Road. There they summoned a mosquito spy who went first to bite the people he met there in order to make the Lords of Xibalba who were there speak their names. The first two people were wooden manikins and they did not respond, but then the twelve Lords responded to the bites and from one to the last they reveal their names. So when the boys meet them they can greet them by names, the twelve of them. They refuse to sit on the cooking stone slab presented as a bench. Then they defeat every house they enter. Dark House first where they accept to deliver, after letting themselves be defeated in the ballgame, four bowls full of red petals, white petals, yellow petals, and whole flowers before the end of the night. Then Razor House where they pacify all the knives and call for the ants which get into One and Seven Death’s garden and steal the petals and the flowers they deliver in four bowls as requested.
In Cold House, they simply shut the cold out and survive. In Jaguar House they pacify the jaguars by giving them a pile of bones. In the Midst of the Fire, in a house of fire, they are only toasted and simmered, not burned. Inside Bat House they sleep in their blowguns. Hunahpu though sticks his head out to see if dawn is coming and a bat snapped his head off. Xbalanque then summons all the animals and ask them to bring their food. They bring rotten wood, leaves, stones, earth, and then unspecified food till the last one brought by the coati: a squash that becomes the simulated head of Hunahpu with brains provided by the Heart of Sky, Hurricane. To finish the simulated head a possum makes four streaks that make the early dawn red and blue. In the ball game then the rabbit is supposed to lure the Xibalbans away after Hunahpu’s real head is kicked into the game as if it were a ball that, after two rebounds, ends up among the ball bags. The rabbit runs away after the ball supposedly, the Xibalbans run after him and Hunahpu can recuperate his real head. The squash becomes the ball and the game can start again and they make equal plays on both sides. But two knowers are called in, Xulu and Pecam who describes the death of the two brothers in an oven. The two brothers walk hand in hand into the oven and die there together. Their bones are ground and spilled in the river.
“They just sank to the bottom of the water. They became handsome boys; they looked just the same as before when they reappeared.” (p. 132)
And yet on the fifth day they reappear. Seen in the river as two catfish first, then they become two vagabonds dressed in rags. They dance, the Dance of the Poorwill, the Dance of the Weasel and Armadillos, Swallowing Swords and Walking on Stilts, performing miracles. They mutually sacrifice themselves one for the other, and yet get back to life. The Lords of Xibalba invite them and ask them to perform a show for them. To entertain the Lords, the two vagabonds sacrifice a dog that comes back to life after dying. They set fire to the home of the lord, with all the Lords inside. They are not burned and the house is reconstructed. Then they perform a human sacrifice, hold up the human heart and then bring the person back to life. Then Xbalanque sacrifices Hunahpu. Legs and arms are cut off. The head is decapitated. The heart is dug out and presented in a leaf to the Xibalbans. Xbalanque dances and orders his brother to come back to life and he does. That’s when the trap works. One and Seven Death ask them to sacrifice them both. Which they do but this time the two Lords do not come back to life. Then all the Lords submit and accept their defeat. And the two vagabonds reveal their names, Hunahpu and Xbalanque. They reveal their fathers’ names, One Hunahpu, killed by the Xibalbans who then lose their greatness and brilliance.
During that time the ears of green corn they left in their grandmother’s house dried up when they died in the oven but then the corn plants grew again.
“Then the ears were deified by their grandmother, and she gave them names: Middle of the House, Middle of the Harvest, Living Ears of Green Corn, and Bed of Earth.” (p. 139)
Note the binary quartet. That’s the mention of a Maize God who is in fact associated to the resurrected father of the two brothers, a father who is one but as a member of a pair since he is One Hunahpu and is associated to Seven Hunahpu. This One-Seven pair that appears too in One and Seven Death, is mysterious, except that 1 + 7 = 8, bringing us back into the binary pattern 2–4–8. But this final renascence is concluded by a last miracle:
“And then the Four Hundred Boys climbed up, the ones who were killed by Zipacna.” (p. 142)
We have to note that this 400 is the only mention of the vigesimal counting base of the Mayas in the form of 20 x 20 = 400. The writing of numbers by the Mayas would clearly show this complexity. So in a way we have to consider the resurrection of the 400 Boys is the institution of Mayan mathematics which is also the basis of the Mayan Calendar. Note here the second figure of this calendar, 13, has never appeared in this story. The closest was the set of twelve lords in Xibalba emphasized when the two brothers met the Lords for the first time by the revelation of their names by the mosquito and then by the twelve personal greetings addressed to them. But thirteen remains a mystery. It will only appear in the next part as the “thirteen allied tribes” but it will never be clear specified who they are in the next sections of this book.
I will stop here because in the next sections it is rather the history of the establishment of the Maya nation or empire and we are no longer dealing with a myth but rather a mythologized real history. In this historical description, the Quiche (should be Cauec) Lords are attributed fourteen generations with nine lineages, great houses, and nine rulers. The Greathouses’ generations are counted up to eleven with two addenda that are not clear, and nine declared lords of the great houses but only eight listed, though a note clarifies this discrepancy as being the result of the translator cutting off the sixth lord because he is identical to the fourth (Chief of the Reception House) though the note says that this sixth lord should have been Chief Yeoltux Emissary, thus bringing the number of lords back to the announced number of nine. The third lineage is called again the Lord Quichés (which is correct) and have nine lords but no generations at all. In the same way, the next chapters present four Founders or four humans who are the fathers of the Maya people: Jaguar Quitze, Jaguar Night, Not Right Now and Dark Jaguar, who have four wives, respectively, Red Sea Turtle, Prawn House, Water Hummingbird and Macaw House. But these four main lines in the Maya people only have three gods for the first three lines: Tohil, Auilix, and Hacauitz. Dark Jaguar does not have a god. And this Dark Jaguar will more or less be sidetracked little by little and the four original humans only give three separate lineages: Jaguar Quitze and the nine great houses of the Cauecs, Jaguar Night and the nine great houses of the Greathouses and Not Right Now and the four great houses of the Lord Quichés. Note this list (p. 149) is in contradiction with the listing of the generations that calls the first lineage the Quiché lords. But one thing is clear. The fasting and penance doing of the Lords are based on the twenty days of the calendar, here translated as “scores” and they fast and do penance during multiple scores of days:
“For nine score days they would fast, and for nine they would do penance and burn offerings. Thirteen score was another of their fasts, and for thirteen they could do penance and burn offerings before Tohil and their other gods. They would only eat zapotes, matasanos, jocotes; there was nothing made of corn [it would be better to say “maize”] for their meals. Even if they did penance for seventeen scores, then for seventeen they fasted, they did not eat. They achieve truly great abstinence. This was a sign that they had the being of true lords. And there weren’t any women with them when they slept.” (p. 192)
If you follow the progression we have 9 scores, then 13 scores and then 17 scores. 9 is not as such part of the calendar but 9 is present in many sections when speaking of the houses and their lords. 13 is the number of scores (the basic sets of twenty days) of the Tzolk’in calendar. But 17 is nothing at all: I did not find it anywhere in this book. The second calendar is the Haab and it counts 18 scores of days plus five. So this book remains mysterious and does not solve some problems. We can see the Mayan counting system emerging and we can see the Tzolk’in calendar emerging but many other numerical elements are mysterious.
I will conclude with the last sentence of Part Three:
“And so they [the Four Hundred Boys] came to accompany the two of them [Hunahpu and Xbalanque], they became the sky’s own stars.” (p. 142)
And that conclusion makes Hunahpu and Xbalanque be like the sun and the moon, at least in symbolic treatment. The illustrations are absolutely amazing and beautiful.
Quincunx, Four cardinal directions and the center
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU | https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/male-exclusive-blood-sacrifice-in-maya-religion-82319e95dd2d | ['Dr Jacques Coulardeau'] | 2018-09-02 21:46:07.587000+00:00 | ['Maya Religion', 'Quetzalcoatl', 'Human Behavior', 'Submission', 'Maize God'] | 6,141 |
THE MAJOR CAUSES OF FAILURE. | THE MAJOR CAUSES OF FAILURE.
HOW MANY OF THESE ARE HOLDING YOU BACK ?
Life's greatest tragedy consists of men and women who earnestly try and fail!
There are thirty major reasons for failure and principles through which people accumulate fortunes . A description of the thirty major causes of failure will be given . As you go over the list , check yourself by it, point by point, for the purpose of discovering how many of these causes-of-failure stand between you and success.
1). UNFAVOURABLE HEREDITARY BACKGROUND.- There is but little, if anything ,which can be done dor people who are born with a deficiency in brain power. This philosophy offers but one method of bridging this weakness- through the aid of the MASTER MIND. Observe with profit, however, that is the ONLY one of the thirty causes of failure which may not be easily corrected by any individual.
2). LACK OF A WELL-DEFINED PURPOSE IN LIFE.- There is no hope of success for the person who does not have a central purpose, or definite goal at which to aim. Ninety-eight out of every hundred had no such aim.perhaps this was the MAJOR CAUSE OF THEIR FAILURE.
3). LACK OF AMBITION TO AIM ABOVE MEDIOCRITY.- We offer no hope for the person who is so indifferent as not to want to get ahead in life and who is not willing to pay the price.
4). INSUFFICIENT EDUCATION.- this is a handicap which may be overcome with comperative case . experience has proven that the best-educated people are often those who are the known as "SELF MADE", OR "SELF EDUCATED". IT takes more than a college degree to make one a person of education Any person who is educated is one who has learned to get whatever he wants in life without violating the rights of others.Education consists, not so much of knowledge effectively and persistently APPLIED. Men are paid,not merely for what they know,but more particularly for WHAT THEY DO WITH THAT WHICH THAY KNOW.
5). LACK OF SELF-DISCIPLINE- DISCIPLINE comes through self-control. This means that one must control all negative qualities. Before you can control conditions, you must first control yourself. Self-mastery is the hardest job you will ever tackle. If you do not conquer self, you will be conquered by self.you may see at one and the same time both your best friend and your greatest enemy, by stepping in front of a mirror.
WE WILL DISCUSS NEXT STEPS IN THE NEXT BLOG. | https://medium.com/@piyushsingh199921/the-major-causes-of-failure-2f39385506bb | [] | 2020-12-20 16:17:24.521000+00:00 | ['Positive Thinking', 'Success', 'Daily Blog', 'Brain Training', 'Self Improvement'] | 524 |
Is Mouth Taping Good for Our Dental Health? | Mouth taping is a practice that has increased in popularity in recent months, helped in part by the social media application TikTok. Users across the platform have been encouraging their followers to use mouth tape when sleeping, due to apparent benefits like an improvement in sleep and general oral health. However, there is limited scientific evidence to justify its use. Furthermore, many dental professionals have questioned its effectiveness, and warned of potential side effects.
Mouth taping is hardly a new practice, but it is something that has risen in popularity in recent months. For example, mouth taping has been promoted heavily on the social media app TikTok.
Many users on the video-creating site have suggested that taping the mouth shut before sleeping guarantees an improvement in sleep quality and other oral health benefits.
However, research on the subject is far from conclusive, and many well-known health professionals have raised concerns about the practice. For example, some have suggested it is actually dangerous.
TikTok has been blamed for the rise in impressionable youngsters engaging in so-called “dental hacks”, such as using bleach on teeth. However, these hacks can actually be unsafe.
Regular open-mouth breathing while sleeping can cause obstructive sleep apnea and snoring. Consequently, a dry mouth, bad breath and other dental problems can result.
The desire is to breathe through the nose when sleeping. Breathing through the nose allows contaminants to be filtered out [1]. Furthermore, it also helps to increase our intake of nitric oxide levels, which has a range of benefits, including brain function and blood oxygen levels [1].
There are a huge range of videos on TikTok that show users literally taping their mouth shut before sleeping. They then wake up the next day, speaking of their breath being fresher and resulting oral health.
Mouth taping does seem to help against dry mouth, which is something that many people suffer with. Because dry mouth is lessened, people are less at risk of oral health problems like cavities and gum disease [2].
However, despite the proposed benefits of mouth taping, the research into its effectiveness is limited. In some cases, it hasn’t proven to be effective.
Many users on TikTok have spoken of an improvement in symptoms of Sleep apnea, which is a potentially serious condition where breathing is affected during sleep.
A pilot study treated 30 patients with sleep apnea with an oral patch [3]. There were positive results. In fact, the researchers concluded that mouth taping was effective at decreasing snoring, which benefited sleep apnea [3].
Another well-known study looked at how mouth taping affected asthma. The researchers suggested that mouth taping could be an effective approach to asthma control [4].
The study participants had a four week period of regular sleeping monitored. They then underwent a two week period of mouth taping. Again, their sleeping was monitored [4].
But there was no noticeable difference overall, with the researchers concluding that mouth taping “had no effect on asthma control” [4]. Users on TikTok have suggested that asthma control is one of the biggest benefits of mouth taping. However, this research suggests otherwise.
However, regardless of the supposed effectiveness of mouth taping, it is worth considering what dental professionals say about mouth taping. A group of professionals created a fact-sheet that reviewed mouth taping [5].
One of the main concerns with mouth taping is that it cannot be guaranteed that some people will get enough air into their nose while sleeping. Therefore, this could cause serious breathing problems [5].
Another issue with mouth taping is the dangerous potential side effect of Chronic Obstructive Pulonary Disease (COPD). Because mouth taping can cause upper respiratory obstruction, this can lead to a strain on the heart and eventual COPD. COPD can be life threatening [5].
Moreover, the fact-sheet also pointed out that for those with allergies, sleep apnea or septum problems, mouth taping could obstruct breathing ability [5].
The dental professionals also pointed out that sleeping with the mouth open isn’t “abnormal” [5]. The lack of conclusive evidence is also concerning for many dental professionals.
Social media can result in impressionable youngsters engaging in risky behaviors. The practice of mouth taping is an example of this. While it can be effective for some, there are a range of side effects.
For those that are encountering sleep problems, there are better methods available, such as sleeping on your side, having a regular bedtime routine, taking allergy medications, quitting smoking, decreasing caffeine intake and avoiding alcohol where possible.
It is important to say that some people will derive benefit from mouth taping. While it is a personal choice, those ready to engage in mouth taping should do so with caution. Overall though, dentists largely advocate against its use.
1) Many people struggle to sleep properly. But instead of trying radical approaches like mouth taping, why not visit your local dentist to see if they can suggest any improvements in sleep hygiene or oral health?
2) There can be underlying dental conditions that cause problems with sleep. By visiting your Calgary dentist for a regular check-up, any issues will be able to be identified and then treated.
3) Do you have children? If so, it is worth checking in with them on supposed “dental hacks”, so that they don’t act in a way that will cause them significant problems.
is a dental clinic based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. We provide our patients with a warm welcome, a comfortable experience and advice whenever needed.
We recommend that our patients attend our Calgary-based dental clinic twice a year for a regular dental check-up. When problems are detected, we have many treatments available. For instance, these include cavity fillings and . We also have some cosmetic treatments too!
Importantly, we recommend brushing your teeth at least twice a day and flossing regularly. Moreover, eating healthily and trying to avoid sugary foods and drink is helpful.
In addition, all of our services at our Calgary dental clinic are in line with the . Alberta Dental Fee Guide
We would love you to visit our dental clinic in Calgary! You can find out more about us by visiting our website . https://taradaledental.ca
[1] Shapiro, N. (2019). . Last accessed: 17 Keep Your Mouth Shut, But Should You Tape It?. Available: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ninashapiro/2019/10/18/keep-your-mouth-shut-but-should-you-tape-it/?sh=347fd2e266e9 thDecember 2021.
[2] Naftulin, J. (2021). . Last accessed: 17 TikTokers are taping their mouths shut while they sleep, claiming it helps snoring and dry mouth. Doctors say the practice can be risky . Available: https://www.businessinsider.in/science/health/news/tiktokers-are-taping-their-mouths-shut-while-they-sleep-claiming-it-helps-snoring-and-dry-mouth-doctors-say-the-practice-can-be-risky-/articleshow/88285456.cms thDecember 2021.
[3] Huang, T-W., & Young, T-H. (2015). Novel porous oral patches for patients with mild obstructive sleep apnea and mouth breathing: a pilot study. Otolaryngology — Head and Neck Surgery. 152 (2): p369–373.
[4] Cooper, S., Oborne, J., Harrson, T., & Tattersfiekd, A. (2009). Effect of mouth taping at night on asthma control-a randomised single-blind crossover study. Respiratory Medicine. 103 (6): p813–819.
[5] Orofacialmyology.com. (2017). . Last accessed: 17 Concerns about Lip Taping in Orofacial Myofunctional Therapy. Available: https://orofacialmyology.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/concerns-about-lip-taping-in-orofacial-myology-myofunctional-therapy.pdf thDecember 2021. | https://medium.com/@taradaledentalgl/is-mouth-taping-good-for-our-dental-health-7b52f8ce9c8d | ['Taradale Dental'] | 2021-12-22 01:19:48.571000+00:00 | ['Dentistry', 'Oral Health', 'Dental Care', 'Dental'] | 1,660 |
Convicted Terrorist Kills 4 In Austria; Watched By Intelligence Agencies | November 2nd 2020, 8pm local time
As people tried to enjoy their last night before a curfew went into effect due to the COVID-19 pandemic, an Islamist terrorist attack targeting six locations in Vienna, Austria killed four people and injured over twenty others. Within minutes, police officers shot and killed one assailant and the attack came to a halt. Police sealed off most of Vienna and urged the public to shelter in place. Public transport was shut down and police scoured the city searching for any accomplices.
In the hours following the attack, Interior Minister Karl Nehammer made it clear that at least one other suspect connected to the attack was at large. Nehammer said, “According to what we currently know, at least one perpetrator is still on the run.” It remains unclear why Nehammer was convinced of a secondary suspect linked to the attack at this stage of the investigation. The possibility of additional suspects persisted into the next morning when Austrian Chancellor Kurz declared, “ We will find and hunt down the perpetrators, those behind this and their associates and mete out a just sentence. And we will pursue all those who have anything to do with this outrage with all available means.”
That day, Austrian police raided 18 properties and arrested 14 people in a massive manhunt. According to Interior Minister Nehammer all of those arrested in Austria have a migration background. Vienna police chief Gerhard Puerstl added that some were dual citizens of Bangladesh, North Macedonia, Turkey or Russia. Additionally, four of the suspects arrested in Austria following the attack also have criminal convictions for terrorism-related offences. Two of those terror convictions involved attempted ‘honour killings’ — whereby a Muslim kills a member of a family over a percieved shame or dishonor brought upon the family.
Meanwhile, police in Switzerland arrested two men near Zurich with links to the attack in Austria. According to a report, the suspects, aged 18 and 24, were arrested in the city of Winterthur and are citizens of Switzerland. According to reports, the justice minister said the two were friends with the gunman and attended a meeting with him in Vienna in July.
The deceased gunman was identified as Kujtim Fejzulai, age 20, with dual North Macedonian and Austrian nationality. A man identified as Fejzulai’s grandfather told a local television channel in North Macedonia that his grandson would visit his ancestral home, the tiny mountain village of Cellopek, every year.
The terrorist organization Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack in Vienna through its Amaq News Agency.
Additionally, a picture was published on Telegram of Kujtim Fejzulai identified as “Abu Dagnah Al-Albany”. Albany would normally be used to refer to someone with Albanian origins.
IS’ Amaq News Agency also posted a video of Albany in which he pledged his allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Quraishi. He was speaking Arabic in the video.
By age 18, Fejzulai was known to Austrian intelligence agencies initially because he was one of ninety Austrian citizens who had attempted to travel to Syria to fight with the Islamic State in their war against the Syrian government. Fejzulai attempted to cross the border from Turkey into Syria in 2018 but was deported back to Austria. Fejzulai was sentenced to 22 months in prison in April 2019 for being a member of a terrorist organization. Shockingly, due to his age, it was revealed that Fejzulai had been released from jail less than one year before the deadly attack after serving only eight months of a 22-month sentence. “He was released early exactly because he gave the impression that he had engaged with deradicalisation programmes and was prepared to integrate himself into society,” Nehammer told a news conference.
According to reports, little is known about his life after that, except that he took part in a de-radicalisation program, which was still ongoing when he launched his attack.
It was revealed that, in July 2020, Slovakian intelligence had provided information to Austrian intelligence that Kujtim Fejzulai attempted to purchase ammunition but was unsuccessful. After receiving the tip from Slovakia, Austrian intelligence reportedly conducted ‘necessary checks’ and followed up with Slovakian intelligence.
Months before the attack, Austrian law enforcement conducted surveillance on Fejzulai for days and witnessed him meet with foreign Islamists in Vienna before inexplicably stopping their surveillance within days.
It was revealed that there was a connection between the attack and people in Germany who are currently “monitored around the clock” following the attack. The suspects in Germany had stayed in Austria in July and met Fejzulai in Vienna. Austrian intelligence monitored the meeting and Fejzulai for days, observing how he and acquaintances picked up the four visitors from Germany and Switzerland at Vienna airport and showed them around the city. “A meeting took place in Vienna among the people you addressed from Germany and Switzerland but there were also people present at the meeting with the later assailant who were arrested in the context of the investigation,” said Director General for Public Security Franz Ruf.
Vienna police chief Gerhard Puerstl said, “These facts together with the findings that emerged from the information from Slovakia could have led to a different outcome regarding the assessment of the threat posed by the perpetrator.” But Austrian intelligence allegedly broke off their operation just as Fejzulai travelled to Slovakia. Why that operation was halted is unclear.
Following the revelations, Nehammer called for the formation of an independent commission to examine the errors made preventing Austrian intelligence from preventing the attack. “It’s up to the commission to clarify whether the process went optimally and in line with the law,” said Nehammer.
Austria’s National Security Council signed off on setting up the commission later that day.
In a surprising development, the head of the Vienna Provincial Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counter-Terrorism (the main domestic intelligence agency for the city of Vienna) announced he would be stepping down while an investigation was carried out. “Obvious and from our point of view intolerable mistakes were made,” said Nehammer.
While we can not expect every terrorist plot to be prevented, we can expect to hold our public officials responsible for their failures and potential acts of negligence (or worse) which have continued to result in the deaths of hundreds of citizens across Europe in recent years. | https://medium.com/@abarnare/convicted-terrorist-kills-4-in-austria-watched-by-intelligence-agencies-bfbbab8a4168 | [] | 2020-11-27 23:42:33.243000+00:00 | ['News', 'Terrorism'] | 1,315 |
Easily Deploy JavaScript Apps to GoDaddy — Part 1: Deploy Script | work smarter, not harder
I’ve been running an Angular app to help Peralta Community College students find classes for the past few years. Recently I decided to renovate it. It was fun but I ran into pain and misery when deploying my changes. The site is hosted on a GoDaddy shared server which I have FTP access to. Every time I made a change I would need to upload the file to the right directory, overwrite the existing file, and hope that I included all the changes. This was an error prone process that led to a great deal of frustration and false bugs. So, I wrote a script that will bundle, minify, and package the app then upload it to GoDaddy with just a Bash script and a few Gulp tasks.
In this article, I demonstrate the deploy script and in a future article I will share the Gulp tasks.
Summary & Code
Hosting your app on GoDaddy or another hosting provider that gives SSH access? Do you want to deploy your app without the hassle of dealing with SFTP/FTP? If you already have SSH access and a key on your computer, try this deploy script.
What You Need
GoDaddy hosting with CPanel access or any hosting provided that gives you SSH access
OpenSSH — comes with macOS and Linux; Windows needs some setup
SSH Access and Credentials
GoDaddy makes it easy to enable SSH access. Follow these steps.
Afterward, go to the Godaddy dashboard by exiting the cPanel and going back to the GoDaddy main site, then clicking Dashboard on the top left.
On the right side of the dashboard, click Server :
GoDaddy Server Info
Then click Manage under SSH access . Copy the SSH username, host, and port number. You will need that information for the Bash script.
SSH Server Credentials
Create an SSH Key
You can also create your own SSH key using GoDaddy’s CPanel. I found this easier and faster than creating my own key locally and uploading it to the server.
From the dashboard click cPanel Admin on the top right.
cPanel Admin
Then scroll down to the Security tab and click SSH Access .
Click Manage SSH Keys , then click Generate a New Key . Name it deploy_key . Do not put a password on the key. Doing so will force you to enter the password every time you use the key, which complicates our script. For our use case, the default options are fine.
Add the SSH Key
Once the key is created, click View/Download from the Manage SSH Keys page. Then click download and save it here ~/.ssh —this folder might be hidden, but it should be in your root folder, nonetheless.
You need to change the permissions of the SSH Key to be stricter. Run this command which restricts read and write access to the key: chmod 600 ~/.ssh/deploy_key
Create a Deploy Script
In your project directory, create a Bash script and name it deploy.sh .
This script will do the following:
connect to the server via SSH: ssh -i ~/.ssh/deploy_key username@app.com <<EOF
delete the existing deployment: cd build && rm -rf *
disconnect from SSH: exit
upload the new deployment using SFTP: scp -r -i ~/.ssh/DEPLOY_KEY ./build/* USERNAME@APP.COM:/build/
All together the script looks like this.
#!/bin/sh
echo "deploying..." ssh -i ~/.ssh/deploy_key USERNAME@APP.COM <<EOF
cd build
rm -rf *
exit
EOF scp -r -i ~/.ssh/deploy_key ./build/* USERNAME@APP.COM:/DESTINATION/ echo "deploy finished"
You will need to change the username and address, USERNAME@APP.COM as well the destination folder, DESTINATION . You can get the username and address from the SSH Setup on GoDaddy’s dashboard, documented in the steps above. The destination folder needs to be the folder you are serving your app from currently. Back up this folder before running this script because it will delete everything in it!!! I didn’t run into issues, but you might have a few files and folders in the destination folder that you might want to keep.
Make the Deploy Script Executable
Run this command in the directory where the deploy script is: chmod +x deploy.sh
Your done! You can run script via terminal from the same directory: ./deploy.sh
What’s next?
I will be publishing an article on how to bundle and minify JS and CSS in the coming weeks. If I have the time, I will also share how to deploy different builds. | https://medium.com/@m-t-a/easily-deploying-javascript-apps-to-a-server-part-1-the-deploy-script-4664278c99df | ['Michael T. Andemeskel'] | 2021-01-12 05:10:36.930000+00:00 | ['Deployment', 'Bash', 'Godaddy', 'Ssh', 'Deployment Automation'] | 938 |
How to Be a Good Team Leader | I published this article on the Workfront blog on March 23 but wanted to make it available here. Enjoy!
Learning how to be a good team leader could be the most important skill you master in your career, especially if you aim to climb the corporate ladder. No matter how talented you are in your functional area of expertise, you’ll never rise through the ranks without strong management skills.
And yet there isn’t a single, sequential pathway to the top. Good managers come in all shapes and sizes, with varying philosophies about leadership, employee motivation, team building and more. The idea might best be expressed by borrowing a famous quote about motherhood:
“There’s no way to be a perfect manager, but a million ways to be a good one.”
Whether or not perfection is your goal, start by incorporating these five foundational tips. You may never need to draw upon the 999,995 other ways to be a good team leader.
1. RECRUIT THE RIGHT TALENT
“Be as thorough as possible in recruiting and hiring the right people and then creating an environment where no one wants to leave,” says Chris Thomas, president of the Intrepid Agency in Salt Lake City, Utah. “This may seem idealistic, but at the same time the value of strong teams cannot be overstated.”
You can’t build a strong team if employees are ill-suited to their positions, whether that’s due to a mismatch of skills, interests or temperament. If your internal HR department has recruiting tools available, use them. All too often, when an employee doesn’t work out, the problem can be traced back to missing steps in the interviewing and recruiting process. References weren’t checked. Not enough candidates were interviewed. Managers decided to “go with their gut” rather than appropriately weighting the talents, skills and knowledge needed for the position, and then searching for those specific attributes.
2. FORGE GENUINE RELATIONSHIPS
This one’s easy. Genuinely care about each of your team members as individuals, and allow them opportunities to develop their strengths. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) has found that the following consistently rank among the top five aspects of job satisfaction, alongside compensation, benefits, and job security: Opportunities to use skills and abilities Relationship with immediate supervisor The work itself
Likewise, in the bestselling book, First, Break all the Rules, authors Marcus Buckingham and Curt W. Coffman found that “the manager — not pay, benefits, perks, or a charismatic corporate leader — was the critical player in building a strong workplace. The manager was the key.” Start by genuinely caring, and the rest will follow.
3. VALUE VISIBILITY
To be an effective manager of people and processes in any field, you need to have insight into three essential things:
What each member of your team is working on
Where projects stand in terms of completion
The available bandwidth of each individual and your team as a whole
Without this information, it’s impossible to have a true picture of what your team has already accomplished, what they’re working on now, or how much bandwidth everyone has. You won’t be able to manage team productivity or forecast future work. You can easily fall into the traps of burning out your top performers and failing to notice or address underperformance, both of which contribute to poor team morale. Today’s project management solutions can provide the transparency you need to overcome these pitfalls.
4. ENFORCE EXPECTATIONS CONSISTENTLY
Once you have visibility into individual and team performance, you have to be willing to set clear expectations and hold everyone on the team accountable. One of the biggest detractors to team morale is when managers allow poor productivity or destructive behavior to continue without consequences. Buckingham and Coffman’s 1999 book (mentioned in tip two above) introduced what is now called the Gallup Q12 Employee Engagement Survey, which has been used by businesses worldwide for more than 15 years to gauge workplace satisfaction. By translating the first six questions in that survey into action items, you’ll find the six core essentials in creating a strong and vibrant workplace:
Set consistent expectations for all of your people
Treat each person differently (based on their strengths)
Match roles to talents and abilities
Challenge your people
Care, acknowledge, and recognize individual accomplishments
Terminate an employee when necessary
5. REWARD AND RECOGNIZE
Be specific and immediate with your praise. This is the best way to ensure employee contributions are noticed, individuals and teams feel valued, and productive behaviors are reinforced. When you notice outstanding behavior, speak up in the moment — whether verbally, via a sticky note, or using a recognition feature in your work-management solution.
Official, company-wide employee recognition systems can also help create a healthy team culture. If you have such a program available to you, use it.
Becoming a good team leader takes time and practice. You won’t be an inspiring and charismatic leader overnight. But if you’ll start by incorporating these five tips into your management practice, you’ll have a strong leadership foundation to build upon. | https://medium.com/@marcuskvarner/how-to-be-a-good-team-leader-abb40b24278a | ['Marcus Varner'] | 2020-12-08 12:17:53.873000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'People Management', 'Manager', 'Management And Leadership', 'Motivation'] | 1,024 |
American Idol Rewind | To all you lovely Idol fans and even those who have just heard the name Daughtry, Yamin, McPhee or Hicks; they will be on AIR to help count down the final weeks of this season!
Every Saturday this May, AMERICAN IDOL REWIND will premiere an all-new episode featuring exclusive interviews with the season 5 top four, as well as never-before-seen footage from one of the most extraordinary years in Idol history. Relive the rise of a rock star, the beginning of the “Soul Patrol” and the birth of “McPheever”!
On Saturday, May 1st, 2010: an unimaginable elimination defined season five like no other with Chris Daughtry’s shocking exit from the competition, and three were left standing- Elliott Yamin, Katharine McPhee, and Taylor Hicks.
On Saturday, May 8th, 2010: AMERICAN IDOL REWIND unveils a one-hour Chris Daughtry special focusing on his electrifying rise from one of thousands of Idol auditioners in Denver to international rock superstar.
On Saturday, May 15th, 2010: There are three contestants left in the competition, and only two spots in the season five finale — it came down to just a few votes, but unfortunately one Elliott Yamin is sent home.
On Saturday, May 22nd, 2010: Only one can be named the American Idol, and Taylor’s amazing victory is one that no one will ever forget- hear from Idol insiders as they break down the competition and share the secrets that led to an American Idol with grey hair.
AMERICAN IDOL REWIND is nationally syndicated-check their local listings or www.tvguide.com/listings to find out where to watch in your area. Encore episodes air on TV Guide Network. | https://medium.com/a-teen-view/american-idol-rewind-9214fd457df2 | ['Arin Segal'] | 2016-11-04 00:41:17.875000+00:00 | ['Music', 'Rewind', 'American', 'Idol'] | 375 |
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