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How to type your weird objects with TypeScript.

In this topic I will be showing you some tricks that you can use to type some weird objects using only utility types so what are the utility types? TypeScript provides several utility types to facilitate common type transformations. These utilities are available globally. Issue1: Let’s say that we have an object that looks like an array and we want to type it! If you are familiar with TypeScript it’s obvious that we can type this object like the following! This is correct but what if we don’t know the length of our object! so if we add to our object a 4th index we will need to update our type as well :(. So how exactly we can fix this issue because our weird object always has different indexes! we will be using the first utility type Record which I will be explaining of course! Record<Keys,Type> Constructs an object type whose property keys are Keys and whose property values are Type . This utility can be used to map the properties of a type to another type. This is how Record type was created using generic types. K will be extending a string or a number or a symbol! but we will be using [P in K] which means [P in number for example] and our second argument T will be your value type. so that's exactly what we need! And that's it! our Type now will always accept objects that have keys as number and values as a string Issue 2 : Let’s try to type something more complex now! I will be taking this issue from StackOverflow as an example! So what we can see here is that the first key of our object can only be one of those 3 what I mean is with_boolean_prop or object_prop or muliple_options a second argument is also an object of string as a key and value as a boolean or an object with key options and a value with an array of strings. so we know exactly what to do now! We will start with typing the first key of our object with can be “with_boolean_prop” or “with_object_prop” or “with_muliple_options’ next, we will type options which is an array of strings. And the rest of the type will be done with Record of course! So what we did here is the first object key is of firstKeyType that we created, next is also an object of string boolean or string option type that we also created! and that's it our type is now correct! Conclusion : What we learned here is that u can solve any weird object typing using Record only! Q&A If something doesn’t work as expected or needs more details, just drop a comment below :) Happy coding!

https://medium.com/edonec/how-to-type-your-weird-objects-with-typescript-e69d60c22648

['Moatez Bejaoui']

2021-05-25 08:30:17.630000+00:00

['Typescript', 'Record Type', 'Objects', 'Values', 'Keys']

Dear Anna…

Dear Anna… Here I stand listening to your praises from different tongues. They seem to have forgotten the day you walked down the aisle and I stood at the end with tears flowing down in awe of the union to be sealed, or maybe they feel I didn’t know of certain qualities you possessed. Whatever the reason, my ears are bleeding and I wish to plug their mouths and shut them off. Sadly, that is not the worst, dealing with your compliments are fine enough. However the chants of “Olorun a wo, Olorun a da si", whispers of “Omo lo ma sin iwo o” or those with nerve to pat my shoulder and tell me “omo yii ni ko toju o”. How could you leave me with a child, Anna, I can’t even carry her properly. I’m still learning to change a diaper, just this morning, I accidentally put the milk in her nose, Anna. Please just wake up, fulfil your promises or don’t you remember? We agreed to see our grand children, when we have heads brimming with gray hair, after laughing at each other for crying over a sad movie and making fun of our toothlessness. We said we would hold hands and sleep to awake into a perfect light. You breached that contract, Anna. You cheated! You are making these people say things they shouldn’t bother thinking of. Please Anna, you even got your wish, our daughter looks like my twin, you now have two of us in the house just open your eyes. Oh! My love, stop lying still in that rose pink dress. Take my hand and come out of this box. You never liked confined spaces so I see no reason why you are lying like a log of wood. I laid our bed just the way you like it with three pillows on your side, all for you. Come lie beside me till the end of time.

https://medium.com/@Mo.Alfy/dear-anna-af7a9ee06ae5

['Olamide Mariet']

2020-08-07 11:43:54.681000+00:00

['Death', 'Tears', 'Baby', 'Yoruba']

Migration From WordPress to Jamstack

If you do some development, editing, or writing on the internet, you’ve probably heard of WordPress. To say it’s prolific is an understatement. Every time we talk about the market share of different frameworks, someone magics a new number out of the air for WordPress, a great point made by Sarah Drasner as she wrote about when Smashing Magazine moved from WordPress to Preact/Hugo at the beginning of this year. I’ve been quite public about my issues with WordPress-security/speed/bloat/UX. Not to take anything away from WordPress developers, or the folks who are maintaining it, but for an organization like ours-with engineers, writers, and user experience professionals available to pitch in-living with a platform that is widely accepted as being clunky and heavy for the benefit of a good backend always felt a bit counter-intuitive. So, similarly to Sarah’s post, I’m going to explore the whats/whys/wheres of this journey, since that meeting we had in Miami, early in 2020, before the world seemed to go to, well, COVID. Why? We were going through a rebrand, and the timing for us was perfect. Why invest in an agency to rebrand our WordPress site when we could produce a new site based on our brand from the ground up? We also had our content creation process split across three platforms. Our content was edited and reviewed as Markdown, moved to WordPress, and tracked on JIRA. As I mentioned above, we were well aware of the general concerns with the speed and security of WordPress. And on top of that, this WordPress site represented a piece of our infrastructure unknown to almost all our ops team. Vonage continues to work through consolidating the infrastructure of the API businesses it has acquired in recent years, and our Wordpress platform was an unnecessary remnant of that legacy. Reliability Our Developer Education team sits inside Developer Relations, itself inside the Product organization. So we’re not focused full-time engineers, and we don’t own large amounts of infrastructure. Netlify allows us to fire-and-forget our content. We can get past the complexity, maintenance, security, and reliability concerns that WordPress brings with it. With Netlify, as long as our site can build, it can deploy. Workflow As I mentioned already, we had a workflow split across three platforms. It could be frustrating and inaccessible, especially for external writers who didn’t have access to our content repository, like those in our Spotlight programme. One of the goals of this project was to find a way to simplify our workflow, hopefully impacting us as little as possible. Netlify CMS allowed us to do this. The editorial workflow Netlify CMS provided reflected our existing JIRA workflow quite closely, giving me hopes of automation (or, another opportunity to log into JIRA less). At the same time, the git-based storage of Netlify CMS also reflected our existing review process. Using Netlify CMS allowed for a significant amount of the process to be consolidated. Migrating the content from WordPress ended up being the most significant hurdle we’d face. We had the WP REST API available, so off I went making API call after API call to try and identify the best way to extract our content from WordPress. We edited content in WordPress as Markdown, so it must store it as such? I was getting excited to think that I would could some API calls to retrieve our Markdown and save it as Markdown files. But was it stored as Markdown? Due to the nature of unmaintained community-driven plugins, nothing ended up being that straightforward. Our WordPress stored posts rendered as HTML. Crayon, the old and abandoned syntax highlighter plugin, seemed to keep code in tables, with columns for line numbers and rows per lines of code. The last version of Crayon before deprecation cited moving to store code in <pre><code> tags much like other syntax highlighters. The goal of the last update was to make moving from it more manageable, as it would be compatible with converters or even other highlighters. But sadly, the plugin was so old, and the site so severely unmaintained we were facing an unrealistic obstacle updating everything to get the content out. The incredible irony of Crayon is that the maintainer had also had enough of WordPress and decided to move his site and focus to Jekyll, a Jamstack platform. We decided to review all our content manually. We don’t have the thousands of articles of Smashing Magazine, but we have over 500 pieces of content. I mentioned rebranding earlier. The decision allowed us to revisit every piece of content to update the branding, update SDK versions, request new artwork, and bring them into 2020 (the poor things). But, how do you plan to produce new content AND review all content in a matter of weeks? Well, you don’t. The plan would be to do the content review over a few months. The Plan Using rewrite rules, we would stop folks from being able to access the old site. They would be redirected to the same post on the new domain, where metadata would be imported as markdown files. The old site would be moved to a new “legacy” domain, with a link to it in each post we import. The new site would then provide a nice note to the effect of “We’re still migrating this content”, with a countdown to redirect them to the legacy link. As we migrate content, we edit the markdown file we already imported, removing the legacy link and adding the migrated content, slotting the content in the middle of the user experience. The goal is to limit the impact on the user and reduce the strain on the team to migrate all our content quickly. To limit the impact further, we prioritised our most read and most recent content for migration, migrating most of them before we went live. I’d had some experience working with Jekyll and a similar workflow in the past. Jekyll, configured correctly, is blisteringly fast to render. I’d guess it’s still right at the top for build speed when compared to other Jamstack platforms. It felt right to start there, with something I knew worked. I’d also been experimenting with Nuxt.js, because Vue.js is terrific and I’m a massive fan of Jamstack in general. Combing my two favourite things (Vumstack? Jamue?), I found Nuxt.js! Vonage also had a design system named Volta, based on Bootstrap, which applied all our branding guidelines, and was available as a Vue.js library. So I built two proof of concepts, one in Jekyll and one in Nuxt.js. Despite liquid templates being much easier to work with generally, I found myself prototyping Nuxt.js far more quickly due to Volta. With a frontend that already looked great with our branding and server-side rendering to make the site lightning quick, we were very excited about this Nuxt.js prototype. After a few weeks of tweaking and applying feedback, we had something close to what we have today. Nuxt.js was the way to go! Two weeks after our proof-of-concept was finished, Volta was deprecated by the design team! We replaced it using TailwindCSS, which allowed us to achieve design parity with Volta, but with more predictable breakpoints and a larger number of utilities for responsive sites. Conclusion The result for us has been transformative. We’re going to be able to deliver more content types, more quickly and more reliably. We now have a platform that supports all our immediate goals for 2021 and the future. It also looks AMAZING, If I do say so myself. Migration continues, but the go-live day had no hiccups. We smoothly transitioned folks to the new platform, with redirects in place to legacy if necessary. Thanks to server-side analytics, we’re seeing more accurate tracking than before, and we’ve got access to much more granular data to inform our writing goals for the future.

https://vonagedev.medium.com/migration-from-wordpress-to-jamstack-cbce71568f42

['Vonage Dev']

2020-12-10 14:58:12.391000+00:00

['WordPress', 'CMS', 'Jamstack', 'Content Platform']

Eight Awesome Story Songs

The Night That the Lights Went Out in Georgia Vicki Lawrence I had this one on an old K-Tel record from the 70s. This song basically scared the crap out of me as a kid. I’d keep lifting my headphones off, making sure some backwoods southern lawyer wasn’t outside my bedroom door. They hung an innocent man, so the judge had bloodstains on his hands, and that was enough to send me running back to the Osmond Brothers faster than you could say Crazy Horses. Some poor schmuck getting framed and hanged in some podunk town in Georgia was a bit much for this delicate little flower. Shannon Henry Gross If you like Old Shep, you’ll love Shannon. Is there anything more heart-wrenching than a beloved dog’s death? Cue violins and grab a box of tissues. This one’s a doozy, kids, even though it's an utterly shite song. I could never figure out what happened to Shannon, though. She “drifted out to sea?” What happened? Swept out by a riptide? Shark attack? Trying to escape her maudlin owner and his dopey songs? That's my guess. Hopefully, she found that island with a shady tree, far, far, away from that painful falsetto chorus. David Geddes Here’s a little ditty about a pregnant teen named Julie and her maniacal gun-wielding father. You definitely get the vibe that this kid was wearing a purity ring and attended those creepy Daddy/Daughter dances with her old man. In fact, Julie telling Daddy that she and Joey were “gonna get married — just you wait and see” probably threw him into a jealous rage. Hey Dad — got news for ya, pal. It takes two to Tango, so if you’re going to kill Joey, you should at least ground that hussy daughter of yours. Oh wait, you killed her dead. Never mind. Bo Donaldson A cheery and rather cheesy song about patriotism and the futility of war that is so infectiously bouncy it almost makes dying for the oligarchs sound appealing. Almost. My friends and I used to drink vodka and Kool-Aid, then “play” along to Billy, Dont Be a Hero on pots and pans in my parents' kitchen. That military drumbeat was irresistible. Good, wholesome, shitfaced entertainment. Can't tell a lie, though. The last line “I heard she threw the letter away,” still gets me right in the fee-fees. But don’t tell anybody. I would hate to lose my street cred. Pole? I dont need no damn pole Photo by Mervat Cher This was the first single I ever bought with my own money. It kinda made me wish that I’d been born in the wagon of a traveling show. Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves was another tale of an oopsie pregnancy, but in this scenario, the impregnator bounces, and Unwed Teenage Mother’s dear Papa was seemingly supportive. I’m a tad confused by Cher’s assertion that “Papa would’ve shot him if he knew what he’d done,” though. Hold up. Papa didn’t know what he’d done? Did a star rise in the East? Our friend Joey was at least willing to accept his responsibility. Julie’s dad, Mr. Anger Issues, should take note. Long story short, our heroine would dance for the money they’d throw, just like her mother, and most likely her own daughter as well. Hooray for generational poverty! Paper Lace Daddy was a cop on the east side of Chicago … I had no idea this was about a shoot-out between the Chicago cops and Al Capone’s gangsters. Yawn. This is the new millennium. Shit can go full-on OK Corral anytime or anywhere. The way Paper Lace spins it, you’d think it was a big deal. Clearly, this song was not composed during the era of almost daily school shootings. I miss those days. Jim Croce You may recall that bad, bad, Leroy Brown was the baddest man in the whole DAMN town. Ooooh. Profanity. That was exciting. As kids, my best friend and I repeatedly sang this just for the opportunity to say the word “damn.” Naturally, DAMN was about a thousand decibels louder than the rest of the song. Singing that shit loud and proud. Because that’s how we rolled. We were gansta. I know that today this jam would be considered a paean to toxic masculinity, but whatever. It rocks, so don’t mess around with Jim(Croce.) Terry Jacks I had a friend who loved this jam. Why, I have no idea. So, as a joke, I filled a 90-minute cassette with this song. Nothing but this maudlin, annoying song. Over and over. It was painful but worth it. I know he enjoyed it because his brother told me if he ever found out who made him that tape, he’d flatten them. I just nodded and smiled, while laughing like a hyena on the inside. I didn't want anyone to know I owned that record. Can you blame me?

https://rocknheavy.net/eight-awesome-story-songs-53f8b5a65fe0

['Kathy Copeland Padden']

2021-08-08 15:48:59.558000+00:00

['Songs', 'Music', '1970s', 'Culture', 'Humor']

JavaScript tutorial)

JavaScript tutorial JavaScript is a cross-platform, object-oriented language used to interact with web pages. There are also more advanced JavaScript versions such as Node.js, which allow you to add more functionality to a website rather than simply downloading files. Within the host environment, JavaScript can be linked to its native objects to provide system control over them. JavaScript contains a standard library of objects, such as Array, Date, and Math, as well as a basic set of language objects such as operators, control structures, and statements. Core JavaScript can be expanded for a variety of purposes by adding additional features; For example: JavaScript next to the client extends the base language by providing objects to control the browser and the Document Object Model (DOM). For example, client side extensions allow the app to place objects in HTML form and respond to user events such as mouse click, form loading, and page navigation. JavaScript next to the server extends the base language by providing resources related to JavaScript usage on the server. For example, the server side extensions allow the app to communicate with the database, provide continuous information from one request to another application, or create file fraud on the server. Details of some JavaScript String, Number, Math, array: charAt: charAt () method returns a character in a specified index. Example: <html> <head> <title> JavaScript String charAt () Method </title> </head> <body> <script type = “text / javascript”> var str = new String (“This is a string”); document.writeln (“str.charAt (0) states:” + str.charAt (0)); document.writeln (“<br /> str.charAt (5) states:” + str.charAt (5)); </script> </body> </html> Release: str.charAt (5) by: i 2. concat: The concat () method is used to combine two or more formats. This method does not change existing settings, but instead returns a new list. Example: const array1 = [‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’]; const array2 = [‘d’, ‘e’, ‘f’]; const array3 = array1.concat(array2); console.log(array3); Release:> Array [“a”, “b”, “c”, “d”, “e”, “f”] 3. includes: The includes () method determines whether an array inserts a value into its input, returns true or false as appropriate. Example: const array1 = [1, 2, 3]; console.log(array1.includes(2)); Release: > true 4. endsWith: The endsWith () method determines whether a thread ends with a string of threads, returns true or false as it should be. Example: const str2 = ‘Is this a question’; console.log(str2.endsWith(‘?’)); Release: > false 5. indexOf: This method returns an index within the String call item for the first occurrence of a specified value, starting a search from Index or -1 if the value is not found. Example: const beasts = [‘book’, ‘table’, ‘camel’, ‘knock’, ‘ball’]; console.log(beasts.indexOf(‘table’)); Release: > 1 6. trim: String.prototype.trim () returns a new thread overrun by white characters from the beginning and end of the series: Example: let str = ‘ JS trim ‘; let result = str.trim(); console.log(result); Return: “JS trim” 7. isNaN: The No.NaN () method determines whether a transferred value is NaN and that its type is a Number. It is the most powerful original version, the global NaNaN (). Example: function milliseconds(x) { if (isNaN(x)) { return ‘Not a Number!’; } return x * 1000; } console.log(milliseconds(‘100F’)); Return:> “Not a Number!” 8. parseFloat: The parseFloat () function is used to receive a string and convert it into a floating point number. If the string does not have a numerical value or if the first character of the string is not a number then returns NaN i.e., not a number. It actually returns the number of floating point separated by the point where it reaches a non-Number character. Example: <script> var v2 = parseFloat(“2.15”); document.write(‘Using parseFloat(“2.15”) = ‘ + v2 + “<br>”); </script> Return: Using parseFloat(“2.15”) = 2.15 9. floor: The Math.floor () function returns the largest value less than or equal to the given number. Example: console.log(Math.floor(5.95)); Return: > 5 10. splice: The splice () method alters the content of the same members by removing or replacing existing items and / or replacing new items. Example: const months = [‘Jan’, ‘March’, ‘April’, ‘June’]; months.splice(4, 1, ‘May’); console.log(months); Return: > Array [“Jan”, “Feb”, “March”, “April”, “May”]

https://medium.com/@rizvyahamed97/javascript-tutorial-862ac2f1ac2c

['Rizvy Ahamed']

2020-11-02 16:38:45.539000+00:00

['Math', 'Maps', 'Splice', 'JavaScript', 'Array']

Best 3d Animation Software for Free 2021 Complete Overview

Best 3d animation software is vital for life. Why so? In this article, you will learn this and many more about 3D basics. We will also recommend a list of top software to make 3D animated videos. Importance Of 3D Animations: Enjoyment is a basic right of every human being. A search for joy able things has been existing since the existence of mankind. It is a positive impression due to some positive reasons. Communities are made due to enjoyment, not hypertensions. Strong and happy memories are the result of a good time. All of today’s search is to spend a good quality time. One of the best means to spend quality time is to watch 3D animations. 3D animations whether in terms of video games or cartoons or some movie are an essential part of every person. Regardless of age, 3D animations have grown to such an extent that they are pleasing a person of any age. With the development of technology, software to make 3D animated videos also have been upgraded. The graphics today are sharper and cooler than ever. One unique benefit of 3D animations is that they are a trusted source of family gatherings. You don’t have to feel embracement in family gatherings when you decide to spend time on animated movies. Besides entertainment, 3D animations are playing a very significant role in the field of study, businesses, medicine, and advertisements. In conferences where a serious topic is going on, even there is a firm need for 3D animations in presentations and elaborations. You name their 3D animations, and they are part of life as nobody can ignore their importance and attraction. Difference between 3D And 2D Animations: 2D animation is known as flat animation because it is based on two-dimension, the x-axis, and the y axis. You can take the examples of legendary cartoons like Tom & Jerry, Rick and Morty, and many more. In 2D animations, there is an integration of 2D scenes. One scene is a little different from the other, when joined together, they appear like moving objects. But in 3D animation, the basic difference is that the objects and characters are produced in 3 dimensions, x, y, and z-axis. After manipulating and joining them, they produce an illusion of motion. There is another technique in practice that you scan the real things into a computer and then make their 3D projections. It gives you a more precise and actual presentation of the real object. Software to make 3D animated videos involve three basic steps: modeling, layout, and animation, and the last is rendering. Let us discuss the top software to make 3D animated videos. Regardless of paid and unpaid, we will focus on the performance of the software and will enlist the selected top few from all. The Mighty MAYA: Search it and you will come to the same result that Autodesk Maya should be enlisted at the top. Almost every expert on 3D animation recommends Maya as the best software to make 3D animations. Maya is an extremely versatile software with a number of options to get your job done. It can be operated on Linux, Windows 7 and above, and Apple Mac operating systems. Modeling and texturing can be done at an advanced level. Even you can have a lot of options to animate solid body physics and their clothing and styles as well. Lighting and rendering features are excellent. You can have a few limitations, but Maya does not have any. Performance comes at cost which can be considered as some drawbacks of Maya. Yearly subscription of Maya is about 1600 US dollars which is no doubt very expensive. Also, it is not easy to use and you may not find it user friendly at first. So, unless your nature of work and profit do not fit with the software, don’t use that. Recommended by a dissertation help firm, another one of the top software to make 3D animated videos is ZBrush. It is considered as the best sculpting software, and it has dominated the market in its specific field. It can be operated on old version of Windows also, such as, Windows Vista. In normal use, it can be operated on Windows 7 and above, MacOS 10 and above. This is widely recommended in sculpting organic data and precise classical models. Besides its specialty in sculpting, it is also used in regular 3D animations. Almost all usual jobs of modeling, texturing, and clothing can be done using it. 3D toy modeling is also favorite by using ZBrush. This software is also difficult to learn but much cheaper than Maya in terms of the price range. You can get its subscription for 40 US dollars per month which is very less as compared to Maya. Here is another tool which is considered as one of the top software to make 3D animated videos. This software has seen two critical stages. It was widely used after its releasing in 3D animation and after reaching the title of best production software, it fell down when it failed to update the older version. It has launched a successful update in 2020, and now completing the market because of its complete features for 3D animations. It is also a guide to learn 3D animations. This is the best feature of this software that modeling, texturing, and rendering is very easy in this software. It can be operated on Windows 7 and above, and MacOS 10 and above. Last but not the least, Blender is an open-source software to make 3D animated videos. It is popular in handling the visual effects, video games and graphics. Motion tracking is also available in Blender. It can perform all the basic functions of 3D animation such as, modeling, animating and rendering. Additional features include masking and textured brushes, bridge filters, and edge slides. It can have support of GPU as well. It can be operated on Windows, Linux and steam. With all of these facilities, it is good to know that it is absolutely free. Conclusion: 3D animation is an important part of various departments of life. Along with the importance of 3D animation, we have enlisted the top software to make 3D animated videos. If you are a professional, you can get these for an amazing experience of animations.

https://medium.com/@beingcounsellor/best-3d-animation-software-for-free-2021-complete-overview-584f3bcff101

['Being Counsellor']

2021-06-17 18:45:44.706000+00:00

['3danimation', '3d', '3danimationsoftware']

Celebrating the Life of Dr. Erik K. Winslow: An Extraordinary Educator Who Transformed My Life

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash My journey toward educational enlightenment was an ongoing challenge in an attempt to align my active learning style to the overused passive teaching approaches used in many classrooms. Moreover, significant portions of academic grades are derived from the scores received on testing checkpoints based more on memorization and regurgitation versus applied learning. This is a method to evaluate students’ progress, but it isn’t always a fair or an accurate indicator of knowledge acquisition. Therefore, students who want and need different approaches to learn material can become frustrated and subsequently/needlessly left behind. The resulting negative outcomes effect countless students, including an almost disastrous impact on my ability to be academically successful. It was always difficult for me to assimilate into a system that required a regurgitation of various facts, figures, and dates. Because I didn’t understand or relate to the relevance of this methodology, I wasn’t motivated to exert effort to memorize seemingly meaningless information. Notwithstanding, if someone explained the material in a way in which it connected with me, then it would have been much easier to learn versus a temporary storage of information to complete a checkpoint at a moment in time. This tortuous and unending cycle continued from junior high school throughout most of my master’s programs. This resulted in my continuous struggle to perform in a system that didn’t teach in a way that connected with me. In high school, I failed six of seven classes in the tenth grade, barely completed my second attempt at the same grade, and limped across the finish line to receive my diploma. During my undergraduate program, I continued to struggle because I wasn’t motivated to learn. I was pushed through a disjointed process that I didn’t understand and couldn’t identify. Nevertheless, I endured through a pattern of taking copious notes, minimal classroom interactions, lack of real-time engagement with the material learned, and sitting in several classes with students who I barely knew anything about them beyond their names. Therefore, I was forced to assimilate into a homogenous process that leveraged outdated, inflexible, impersonal, and mostly brainless activities that weren’t designed for me, my learning style, or my needs. An educator’s role isn’t to be some distant, unapproachable figurehead who doesn’t connect with the human element or struggles. Being a teacher isn’t just about the delivery of material… it’s about inspiring individuals (not groups of students) to become better versions of themselves. This process requires attention to detail, effective communication skills, good interpersonal skills, and a willingness to proactively identify potential struggles to intervene before situations deteriorate into further challenges. I understand these issues well, as I encountered and battled numerous professors who were insensitive, arrogant, and belittling characters who didn’t focus on the needs of their customers (the students) and the purpose for their professional existence. One time I had a documented car issue, which led to me being late for a final exam. After rushing to get there, explaining the reason for my absence, and showing the receipt for the work completed, I was denied an opportunity to take the exam. Another incident occurred after getting approved to submit assignments after the end of the semester due to a personal issue. Then, once the assignments were submitted, the professor (without warning or advance notice) downgraded my earned grade of an “A” to a “C.” Then, there was the time that my mother was sick, so I withdrew from a class. Shortly thereafter, she got better… so I requested to be reinstated into this class. I asked the professor to reply to my student and personal email addresses on the message. Their response was sent only to my student email account, which I didn’t check because there wasn’t a message in my personal email account. Later, I discovered that the professor unbeknownst to me reinstated my enrollment into this class. However, because I didn’t know it or submit any further work, the professor posted an “F” grade without any follow-up. The insensitivities and needlessness of each of these incidents further complicated my relationship with higher education and desire to earn a degree. Educators have enormous responsibilities and considerable powers that can (and do) negatively impact and change the trajectory of students’ lives with callous actions. Unfortunately, I had numerous experiences with individuals who were focused on punishment versus attempts to resolve bona fide challenges to help a (this) student achieve personal success. These repeatedly thoughtless actions almost had negative and long-term impacts on my educational journey, life, and future. Over time, I haphazardly avoided various hurdles during my quest for educational achievements that was driven by desire, drive, and often pure luck. Notwithstanding, I was a committed student. Yet, the misalignment and firmness of academic models with too much focus on uniformity in educational delivery almost prevented me from achieving my academic dreams. Students, teaching, and learning are dynamic, unique experiences. Therefore, these environments in which knowledge is transferred must be capable of engaging students by leveraging various methods and strategies that might be inconsistent with an educator’s preferred approach to material delivery. During my first graduate degree program at The George Washington University, I fortunately had a class with Dr. Erik K. Winslow. Immediately, I recognized that there was something different and unassuming about him. Dr. Winslow was personable, interacted with his students, and instinctively I knew that he cared about us, too. It was during this class that I finally felt that I was learning. The difference was that he wasn’t overly formal, was interactive, and kept me engaged. For the first time, I had a professor who leveraged an active teaching strategy that fully connected with my senses. This allowed me to really learn and immerse myself into the subject matter in a meaningful way. After these positive interactions, I took as many classes with him as my program allowed, which resulted in me adding another unofficial major in human resource management. At the end of my program, I stumbled while taking a financial investments analysis class that still gives me nightmares almost two decades later. I really struggled in this class. At the end of the semester, the professor declared that the final exam would take approximately four hours. I didn’t believe that an exam could take that long, so I didn’t study the way I should have to do well. This decision to not adequately prepare for this exam translated into me getting a “C” in this class, which caused my grade point average to drop below a 3.0. A few weeks later, I learned that my inaction had a significant impact, as I was academically dismissed from the university two semesters prior to my graduation. After all my academic challenges with learning and professors, I was exhausted and really didn’t want to try anymore. I tried my best and no matter the amount of effort I put in… I always had an issue that prevented me from being successful. For almost my entire life, I tried to make the educational system work for me (even though it didn’t), so I wasn’t sure if I had any more to give. During my academic suspension, I really examined the reasons that I wanted and needed to get my master’s degree. I knew that it was important, and I worked incredibly hard to get to this point. However, by the end of the next semester, my grade point average had to be above a 3.0 or I would be permanently dismissed from the university. If I returned to school and wasn’t successful, then I tried best. If I was admitted again and excelled, then I could earn my degree. Therefore, I reluctantly wrote a letter to apply for readmission mainly because I didn’t have anything to lose and a lot to gain. Furthermore, I refused to allow my circumstances or future to be left to chance. This refusal to give-up made me humble myself to ask one of my favorite professors, Dr. Winslow, for a reconsideration of a grade from the previous semester. Fortunately, after reviewing my assignments, he agreed to change my grade without knowing that his actions had a consequential impact on my ability to graduate, which I did in May 1997 and again in 2000 with my second master’s degree. Years later, I was compelled to let Dr. Winslow know about the enormous impact that he had on me, my life, and my journey to become an educator. Therefore, I sent him this thank you letter. December 31, 2011 The George Washington University School of Business Attn: Dr. Erik Winslow 2201 G Street, NW, Duques Hall Washington, DC 20052 RE: Thank You Dr. Winslow: Individuals do not stop often enough to thank someone for making a difference. During this holiday season, I am pausing to ‘thank you’ and let you know that your teaching and actions have had a significant impact on my life. Almost fifteen (15) years ago, a request was made to have a grade changed for one of your management courses that was taken the previous semester. The initial grade assigned was less than expected, but was not challenged immediately because it wasn’t a major concern; however, once my G.P.A. dropped below a 3.0 after receiving a ‘C’ in an extremely difficult finance course, the grade in your course was a concern, as I was about to be placed on academic probation. After your review of my assignments, a grade change was processed. The grade change did not bring my G.P.A. over a 3.0; however, this change did bring my G.P.A much closer to the required minimum G.P.A to remain enrolled in the M.B.A. program. After a semester of academic suspension, a letter was submitted and accepted for me to be re-admitted to the M.B.A. Program. Your actions prevented me from becoming extremely frustrated, permanently leaving the program, while also contributing to my desire to continue my educational pursuits (obtained a subsequent M.S. in Project Management from G.W.), and stimulated my passion to teach (as an adjunct faculty member at the Northern Virginia Community College for the past three (3) years). Your consideration during my time of personal challenge has impacted and benefited my students; if a student experiences academic challenges, the student is given additional consideration and an opportunity to excel as a direct result of the actions taken in my situation. Each time one of my students is struggling, my first consideration is related to the professors that used their power as a weapon versus an opportunity to create a ‘learning moment’. Then, my consideration is focused on the support you provided in my time of need. Your action is remembered and in return support is provided to any student that needs assistance to overcome their personal challenge(s). It has been my quest and my goal to help all students, especially the at-risk students, to achieve their educational objectives. Furthermore, the value of your contributions to my knowledge about the field of Management Science is priceless; however, the most important lessons you taught were about compassion, understanding, and that power can be used to help (instead of hurt) others. Moreover, your guidance that leaders sometimes need to break the rules and not be resistant to creating change has been very prominent throughout my career. The impact your teachings have had on my life has reached well-beyond the classroom, as many of the life lessons discussed in your classes were not realized until years later. In this vein, I hope that my tenure as a faculty member will lead to the same level of life enrichment for my students, as your teachings have provided to my life. Thanks again for all you’ve done and continue to do for me, my current students, and future students. Sincerely, Stacey (Sly) Young In response, Dr. Winslow wrote: Thank you for the letter. I was almost in tears as I read it. I do remember you and really felt at the time that you were a special case and would make a positive contribution if/when given a chance. thank you again and keep on trucking. About a month ago, I wanted to update Dr. Winslow about my many years as an educator, my accomplishments, and me now being a doctoral student. Unfortunately, I sadly learned that he died on January 28, 2018. Even though I can’t tell him personally, I must share our mutual successes publicly to inspire other educators to give a student a chance, as there might be struggles/battles they’re facing that can’t be imagined or understood. Educators must understand that even their smallest actions can have a lasting and potentially disastrous impact. If Dr. Winslow was alive today, I would send him this message. Dr. Winslow: I have some incredible news! I know that we discussed the possibility of me applying to G.W.’s Business School to get my doctorate degree. However, I really didn’t want to obtain another degree, unless there was a justifiable reason for it. Now, with over twelve years teaching at a community college and three years at a university, I now understand that teaching is my passion and something that I want to do for the rest of my life. Also, a terminal degree is required to obtain a tenured-track position at a university. Therefore, I’m happy to share that I am now a doctoral student at Marymount University. This program’s focus is educational leadership and organizational innovation. Additionally, in 2018, I received several recognitions for my work teaching inmates. First is the “Martin Luther King Innovative Service Award for Educational Excellence for African-Americans.” The second is the “Distinguished Service Award” for my contributions to my community. The third is the “Volunteer of the Month” award at a local jail. Never did I imagine that this once serial struggling student would transform his life to educate countless others. It’s interesting that these awards were received for teaching an incarcerated population, as I reluctantly taught at a jail after family and friends directed me to this population. I am grateful for these pushes because teaching in this environment has made me a better man and educator. Also, it emphasizes the importance of second chances to help others who might otherwise feel hopeless and need inspiration. This is critically important for me (and them) because the lessons taught are based on my lived-experiences overcoming numerous life challenges. Many years ago, in 1996, you gave me an incredible break by processing a grade change, which allowed me to complete my program and graduate in May 1997. Without your kindness and grace, I don’t believe that I would have received my first master’s degree. Your belief in me instilled an enormous sense of gratitude and desire to help/inspire others similarly to the way you did for me. I try to emulate your teaching style and casual presence in my classrooms, which allows me to connect with my students in meaningful ways. Moreover, like you, I have a considerable amount of classroom interaction that creates a family-style environment and personal experiences. Please know that I owe you so much that words can’t convey. I am extremely thankful for everything you taught me, you believing in me, and you training me to be a compassionate educator who understands the responsibilities entrusted in me. Furthermore, I realize that our power as educators must be used in ways that help, inspire, and transform individuals to uplift themselves to achieve their potential/greatness. The lessons you taught will be leveraged throughout my life to thoughtfully and purposely develop students similarly to the way in which you did for me. Stacey (Sly) Young Thank you, Dr. Erik K. Winslow, for everything!!! Because of you, I am a better man, professor, and in a few years… I will be… Dr. Stacey L. Young.

https://medium.com/@slyoungva/celebrating-the-life-of-dr-erik-k-winslow-an-extraordinary-educator-who-transformed-my-life-fc8ef63826a6

['S. L. Young']

2020-12-22 19:16:39.911000+00:00

['Teaching', 'Inspiration', 'Higher Education', 'Education', 'Teaching And Learning']

Combining Data Science and Machine Learning with the Aviation Industry: A Personal Journey through a Capstone Project (Part II)

As a result of these initial scores, Figure 7 and Figure 8 above have been created to analyze the residuals within our model for training and testing. Each figure tells us that our model was appropriately chosen as the residuals do not show any clear patterns and also decently reveal an even spread of points above and below the horizontal red line. The horizontal red line represents the idealized regression of our model while the scattered points represent the difference in value of each consecutive prediction and label. Discovering a pattern in the residuals with our own eyes would indicate that we can use a better model to describe the system — logically, if you recognize a pattern in your errors, then that means you should recognize that there is a way to reduce that error by incorporating such pattern into your model. If all the residuals in both graphs showed uneven spread — where a significant amount of points exist in one threshold separated by the horizontal line over the other, or where residual show a pattern of slowly spreading out further and further from the horizontal line — it means your model could still be tweaked to account for evening out the residuals. Conclusions, Study Summary, and Thanks… It’s safe to start with stating that the study showed signs of a moderate success. From a variety of constraints — such as limited air travel in the new regime change, problems integrating API data together, unbalanced data, time constraints, data access restraints, and more — we were able to come out with a “proof-of-concept” study to show how a machine learning model can be used to predict the minimum cost threshold of airline tickets in this new regime. On the contrary, it is still appropriate to mention that the limitations of our model can make this attempt pointless in a business perspective due to how niche the study had become, where some corners had to be cut, and how practical/reliable the models will be. However, almost all models will face general limitations due to niche barriers, which leaves us hopeful to say that our model is just like any other models used to predict the same label (it can only get better). Through this study, a lot was covered, and it may be difficult now to fully gather together what was taken from both of the articles written here. To summarize, we as data scientists were approached by a business to answer the question, “What is the minimum cost threshold an airliner can charge their passengers per flight and how can we make a model that discovers this?” We were given a month time to have a working proof of concept. We achieved these goals, to some degree. Through the process, we learned about regime change and how the Covid-19 pandemic has played an instrumental role in our data collection phase. We learned about the limitations of using different APIs and what sort of cleaning must be done for data. We discussed how we can overcome data domain issues and create data out of our collection methods by using unique ways to increase data and add diversity to it. We learned about bootstrapping to expand our data and machine learning methods such as Linear regression, cross validation, KNN regression, and Decision Tree regression. We learned about ensemble machine learning such as Bagging regression and Random Forest and simultaneously discussed the data imbalance occurring from the trends we uncovered. We ultimately created a model with cross validated mean absolute error of $173 — all done without heavy hyperparameter tuning. To me, this capstone project served as a very personal journey to prove myself in the world of data. I wanted to use what I knew about the aerospace industry and combine it with data analytics to ultimately showcase a project worth investing more time and resources into. With a more stable regime, more access to data, and more time, this project has the capability to scale to help a real-world business. Writing this series has been a joy as I wanted to really express what I know to the world and also help someone learn from the study. Machine learning is a popular field to talk about, but it is often hard to find real-world practical implementations models. Many times, machine learning is left back with research as its uses for studies become too personalized around a specific problem. Ultimately I want the people, who took their precious time from their day to read this article, to come out of this series learning something new and thinking on ways to better analyze data and to apply machine learning to societal problems. I greatly appreciate your time and give my sincerest thanks. Do not stop teaching yourself and do push on to bigger and better things while you still can in this world; cherish what you learn as you go on. Cheers! BONUS: Learning How Thermodynamics can be Used to Predict Pricing My background is in engineering and I did as best as I could to reflect that here, but I know there is more which could have been done to better integrate engineering concepts into the study. In truth, this capstone project was initially inspired by a project I had done in my undergraduate studies with Hofstra University. One of my final design projects was meant for my Thermal Engineering course, which is the field that studies thermodynamic principles on machines. In this senior design project, I analyzed a trans-Atlantic flight I flew on earlier that year and collected data regarding that flight’s speed and altitude from FlightAware.com. At the time, it was much easier to get this data ported into an Excel spreadsheet, without the need for scraping — and this was before I knew how to use Python, how to web scrape, or how to play with APIs. From this data alone, along with some idealized assumptions, I was able to successfully perform a comprehensive idealized jet propulsion engine analysis on the plane’s engines and determine many important properties of the air traveling through the turbofans. I wanted to include this section as a bonus for one to ponder on when thinking about this study, as it is the “lost link” still wished to be integrated into the project, but could not have been implemented due to the FlightXML API constraints in the study and the lack of flight data due to Covid-19. Instead, I will give a walkthrough description of the project performed back in my undergraduate course in 2018, as an example to show what extra data could have been generated to potentially help better our model. On October 17th, 2018 I flew on flight BA115 (British Airways flight 115) to travel from London Heathrow Airport to JFK International Airport. The goal of such previous project was to perform and analysis on the thermodynamic cycle states of the engines. FlightAware.com was used primarily to access accurate speed and altitude measurements of the individual flight, as the plane logged such information over time to nearby radio checkpoints along the route. From FlightAware.com, it was also discovered that the plane flown was a B747–400, which is a quad-jet aircraft and is a variant of the B747 series — notoriously considered the most notable aircraft design in all of history of human flight. Above are two images of the October 17th flight flown in 2018. Unfortunately, it is not possible to access the graphic above from FlightAware.com anymore as basic access users only have access to 3 months of data history. As a result, take the referenced source for the above graphics with appropriate consideration that it may not be reflecting the same exact path described in the study, but is similar enough for our intended purposes. From FlightAware.com, I was able to retrieve 660 data points of speed, altitude, direction, time, and more of flight BA115. From this data, it was determined that the flight time lasted eight hours and fifteen minutes (29,700 seconds equivalent) and the total distance flown was 5,922.386 kilometers. The weather of that particular day showed clear skies throughout the entirety of the flight, eliminating the need for massive environmental constraints. Ideal Jet Propulsion Cycle referenced from (Cengal Y.A. & Boles M.A., 2002. Thermodynamics: An Engineering Approach. McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. New York, NY. 483–487) In analyzing thermodynamic machines, graphics such as the one above are used to understand the different property states occurring through the machine’s life cycle. The one above showcases the relationship between entropy and temperature within the jet engine’s idealized lifecycle. Entropy (commonly defined as the variable “S” in theoretical thermodynamics…unlike our graphic denoting a lowercase “s” for “specific entropy” on the horizontal axis) is a measure of “how much energy is not available to do work in a system”. It is often closely associated with chaos or a measure of how a system becomes more disordered over time. The units of entropy are measured in Joules/Kelvin. Engineers, must understand what entropy is, but will more often use specific entropy in their analysis where its units are measured as kiloJoules/(kilograms*Kelvin) or more easily defined as entropy per mass. Specific entropy is often used to analyze a certain form of mass existing within a system, hence the inclusion kilogram units in the denominator. Specific entropy can change dependent on different states within a system — often for water, empirical steam tables are referenced to analyze the specific entropy of water to provide a better understanding of a system. For our case, we will be analyzing air, where such tables are not readily needed. Reverting back to our diagram above, the T-s diagram (Temperature vs entropy diagram) indicates how energy of air within the plane’s engine is analyzed during its lifecycle with pressure held constant across some processes. In entropy states one through three, pressure is increased through isentropic compression. Here, air travels first from the engine’s inlet, through the diffuser and then through the compressor. In process three to four, the air then travels through a burner/combustion chamber from the compressor. The air itself is heated up at constant pressure, resulting in higher entropic value, which simultaneously increases the heat transfer per unit mass (denoted as the variable “q”). The air currently is prone to a higher energy release. In process four through six, the air undergoes isentropic expansion where pressure is released in the journey from the combustion chamber, through the turbine, and through the nozzle exit. Such pressure release ultimately thrusts the aircraft forward with immense force, constantly. Ideal Jet Propulsion Cycle referenced from (Cengal Y.A. & Boles M.A., 2002. Thermodynamics: An Engineering Approach. McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. New York, NY. 483–487) Throughout the study, several different assumptions and underlying initial conditions need to be addressed for its analysis. First, it was important to treat air as an ideal gas, meaning that air properties will behave normal to standard temperatures and pressures. From Appendix A.1 in the fourth edition of Engineering Thermodynamics by M. David Burghardt and by James A. Harbach, the specific heat of air constant pressure used in the study was 1.005 kiloJoules/(kilograms*Kelvin) and the Boltzmann constant used was 1.4. Both of such numbers will be important for our mathematical formulas used in learning about engine properties. Specific heat is a measure of how much energy must be added to a property to raise its temperature. Specific heat can change depending on surrounding factors, which is why it is important to denote what is held constant in such factors when relying on the ideal gas law (which is why we assumed air to be idealistic in our analysis). Specific heat can be affected by changing volumetric and pressure values which is why we only analyze such measures for ideal purposes by holding one of the independent variables constant. In our case, our engine will undergo a constant pressure process, which is why we will use the specific heat number for constant pressure for air as is the deterministic nature of the study. The Boltzmann constant is a number measuring the proportion of a property’s energy to thermodynamic temperature. The operating conditions of the engine were assumed to be steady state, which means that system state variables were to remain constant. Self-made whiteboard image. The plane was theoretically assumed to be a stationary object where recorded speed of the aircraft was factored as the air free-stream velocity (denoted as “v­­” subscript “∞”) to equal/represent the velocity of the aircraft (denoted as “v” subscript “aircraft”). Such assumptions allows us to state that the free-stream velocity can act as each jet engine intake. Furthermore, the kinetic and potential energy in the system were negligible except at the inlet and exit conditions, plus the atmospheric temperature, pressure, and air density were to be averaged values between zero and 15,000 meters altitude. From the UK Civil Aviation Authority Engine Type Certification Data Sheet №1048, it was uncovered that four Rolls Royce RB211–524H jet engines are typically used on a B747–400. For this study, only one engine will be analyzed and such findings from the individual engine analysis will be assumed across all four jets mounted on the airplane. A uniform diameter is assumed for the jet shaft with a length of 2.19 meters. The turbine work was assumed to be equal to the compressor work. The velocity of the air leaving the diffuser was assumed to be equal to zero meters per second. The thrust generated from bypassing air was to be neglected. The combustion chamber temperature was assumed to be 2,273 degrees Kelvin. The compression ratio, the ratio of total volume to clearance volume in a piston, was found to be 32.9:1. Generalized Analysis: Where Thermodynamics could have Merged with Machine Learning With all such assumptions and initial conditions factored in, the below follows the mathematical analysis performed to analyze the ideal jet propulsion cycle. All of such analysis is stemming off the concepts learned from my undergraduate studies and following the teachings of Dr. Burghardt himself, who wrote the heavily used textbook mentioned earlier as Engineering Thermodynamics. Through such analysis, we will primarily observe engine states by remarking a measure known as enthalpy, or enthalpy per unit mass for our system. Enthalpy is a measure of energy transfer between a system and its surroundings. Throughout our analysis, understanding this enthalpy will help us uncover all of the property states needed to tell us more about what is going on with our engine. This is where the magic occurs, in my opinion. In a rather elegant way, we scientists have the ability to know what is going on at every stage of our engine by simply measuring how much energy is moving within the engine — and we don’t even have to physically be on the airplane to do this. It was my intention to use such analysis to perform very comprehensive EDA for our initial machine learning study and include an analysis for the different engines present for different planes found out in our study — ultimately building a highly accurate tool able to give a better cost estimate of the journey analyzed. From such known data, we could find a way to factor important features such as measured average air temperature/pressure states, measured engine efficiency, measured thrust output, and measured propulsive thrust power. Expanding further on this could allow us to analyze air-fuel ratios, changing fuel mass over time on a flight, and maybe help us know how passenger payload can play a role in savings. To start before observing some MATLAB generated plots on these dependent variables, we will first go over the generalized analysis taken. Self-created LaTeX.

https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/combining-data-science-and-machine-learning-with-the-aviation-industry-a-personal-journey-through-f063895fbd47

['Christopher Kuzemka']

2020-11-05 17:53:54.124000+00:00

['Data', 'Machine Learning', 'Aviation', 'Engineering', 'Python']

3 Simple Keys for Overcoming Negativity in Your Life

Having constant negative thoughts pouring through your mind will quickly put a damper on your creativity, and tends to get in the way of realizing your true potential. While we all know that being more positive and optimistic in our lives will help us find success, but many struggle to make the change from a negative to a positive mindset. Here are three simple keys to help you overcome negativity and change your life. Recognize When You Are Using Negative Thoughts Often, when we are being ridiculed, facing disappointment, or not wanting to put in the effort, we’ll use negative thoughts to protect ourselves. When we think negative thoughts, like “It won’t work,” or “I can’t do that,” we are permitting ourselves to play it safe. When you catch yourself thinking negatively and talking yourself out of action, take a step back and remind yourself that the most successful people have also faced failure. If you are talking yourself out of something that you want, take the time to make a list of why you want it. The list of positives will help to change your focus and keep you moving forward with less fear. Use Black and White Thinking Many people will tell you to just “think positive.” However, it isn’t always that easy. When you find yourself stuck in a cycle of negative thinking, or are terrified of a negative outcome, positive thoughts often ring as untrue. When you find yourself worrying about a negative result, take a piece of paper and pen and write down the worst thing that can happen. Then, write down the best thing that could happen. Then, think of some middle ground outcomes. When you create a variety of potential outcomes, you will become less emotional, which will help you think more clearly. Become an Observer of Your Thoughts Doesn’t it always seem much easier to see and solve someone else’s problems than your own? You can recognize when your sister is getting all worked up over nothing, or that losing sleep over a meeting isn’t going to help. However, when it is your mind dealing with negative thoughts, it’s a lot tougher to see and stop. When you decide you want to be more positive, you need to become more conscious of what you are thinking. When you can step back and analyze things as an observer, you will see a shift in your focus, and you’ll be more mindful of how you are looking at the situation. Being able to focus more on positive thoughts will make you happier and more optimistic about your life. This will allow you to experience more joy and well-being. If you want to learn more about the tips and techniques I use to maintain a positive mindset and how I get out of my own way, contact me! Until then… nothing but positive thoughts!

https://medium.com/@barbaraascott/3-simple-keys-for-overcoming-negativity-in-your-life-b50507fba0fe

['Barbara A. Scott']

2020-12-20 17:33:20.796000+00:00

['Positive Thinking', 'Negative Thoughts', 'Mindset']

GTB Day 2019

4th of July. Not only U.S. Independence Day, but coincidentally also “GTB Day” in London. For one day a year we celebrate a different kind of independence in our London office: the chance to try something new, away from the everyday. GTB Day has been a tradition in the London office for the last six years. Starting in 2013, GTB Day gives team members an opportunity to try new brainstorming and ideation techniques, challenge linear thinking, and create new inter-team bonds. Each year we work with a different brand, approaching them for a brief and dedicating the whole agency to the experience. This gives everyone a chance to work with new people, try out different types of roles, and mix it up. “It’s very important that you meet and get to know people you haven’t met before, take the chance to do something you don’t normally do.” -Paul Confrey, President GTB EMEA This year our partner brand was Enervit, one of the world’s oldest sports nutrition companies. The agency split into 21 teams, across three briefs, with each team being led by our best young talent. We kicked off the day with Smirk Experience founder Sam Carrington, a comic who showed us techniques on how to communicate like a stand-up; with open palmed body language, raised eyebrows, and never ending with a question. We then broke up into our teams and dived into the briefs. The teams were given half a day to answer three mega briefs. Short on time, the team leaders were trained to use a GTB variation of a User Experience ideation exercise known as the Crazy 8 method of rapid ideation. After only a few hours, it was time to present. Each group chose a team member who is not usually ‘front of house’ to present and were given eight minutes to deliver their idea in front of a judging panel. The winning idea for each of the three briefs went through to the final round and was presented to the entire agency. This year the winning team won by a landslide, receiving 48% of the popular vote. After a competitive day of creativity and collaboration we feel more prepared to work within tight deadlines and have created valuable new bonds and friendships in the agency. The confidence created by these bonds are the driving force behind us creating better work for our clients, and most importantly for ourselves. Check us out on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for more GTB happenings.

https://medium.com/gtb-tweets/gtb-day-2019-efb9515dbaee

[]

2019-08-07 13:03:17.146000+00:00

['Marketing', 'Gtb London', 'Gtb Day', 'Wpp', 'Design']

5 Tips to Buying Bitcoin in Australia

Bitcoin — The Cryptocurrency Craze You may have heard about the cryptocurrency craze that is spreading the world over. Bitcoin is a kind of cryptocurrency that can now be used to buy almost anything online. It is just one of the currencies that can be used for the purchase of items online. The value of the bitcoin is so high that it is more valuable than gold. In Australian terms, the bitcoin is now valued at over three thousand Australian dollars. For this reason, there are many people interested in buying bitcoin. In this article, we shall discuss a number of tips that can help people in Australian to buy this currency and benefit from its value. As such, this tutorial on cryptohead.io will come in handy to guide you on how to acquire the bitcoin in Australia and benefit from the craze of this cryptocurrency. Here are 5 tips for buying bitcoin in Australia: What are Bitcoins? Probably this is the first question that we need to ask ourselves even before we think of buying this currency. Well, this is a digital currency that was begun in 2009. This currency can be used in many countries and it has no form of centralized control-no wonder the value increase! How can the bitcoin be of benefit to the buyers? Well, the fact that the bitcoin shares more attributes with gold and its ability to be transferred easily means that people will prefer this currency. The bitcoin market is thriving in Australia and as such, more people are getting interested in buying this currency. Getting your first bitcoins in Australia So, how does one go about the process of buying the bitcoins in Australia? Is it affordable to buy the bitcoins in the first place? Well, the cost of the bitcoin could easily put off most people. However, you need to know that you can buy the bitcoin as fractions. You can even buy $10 worth of bitcoins and as such, the price should not put you off. Once you set up a bitcoin account, there are many exchanges in Australia where you can buy your bitcoins. Some of the larger bitcoin exchanges in Australia include the Bitcoin Australia, CoinJar, CoinTree and CoinLoft among others. Storing your bitcoins You can store your bitcoins in wallets. This is mostly available to the people who have purchased large amounts of bitcoins. You need to secure your wallet. In this regard, you should never store your bitcoins on an exchange. Based on the level of your investment, you can choose the various levels of wallet options. Those with small amounts of bitcoins can store them in apps such as Xapo for the iPhone and Mycelium for the android phones. Where and how do you spend your bitcoins? This is another issue that needs clarification. The bitcoin can be used to purchase items online and offline. The fact that more retailers are accepting the bitcoin as a means of payment means that you have more places to spend your coins. It is now possible to buy coffee, book a holiday and shop online in a hassle free manner that involves no third parties. Is the Bitcoin taxed? Well, for the people who own sizeable amounts of bitcoins, this could be bad news for them. The ATO, the Australian Taxation Office will be taxing bitcoin transactions. Well, the bitcoin has been taxable since 2009 and as such, it is probable that the Australian government could tax bitcoin users in arrears-since 2009. Buying bitcoin has its risks and challenges. But the excitement, potential rewards, and conveniences of this emerging currency make owning it a compelling idea. Please let us know if this article is helpful to you. We’d appreciate your comments.

https://medium.com/the-startup-magazine-collection/5-tips-to-buying-bitcoin-in-australia-88ff424623d7

['The Startup Magazine']

2018-01-17 16:43:22.833000+00:00

['Bitcoin', 'Australia', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Investment', 'Fintech']

How Would You Feel If You Saw an Angry Mob in the Google Parking Lot Dragging Google Executives from Their Teslas and Marching Them Towards a Guillotine?

How Would You Feel If You Saw an Angry Mob in the Google Parking Lot Dragging Google Executives from Their Teslas and Marching Them Towards a Guillotine? Ira Israel Jun 6, 2019·5 min read Could the United States of America be heading toward a violent revolution like the French Revolution of 1789–1799? What is the tipping point that would cause you to do whatever necessary to protect and feed yourself and your family? How does it make you feel when you learn that billionaires such as Warren Buffet are taxed at much lower rates than their secretaries? How much has our animosity toward the 1% grown since the (first and feckless) Occupy movement? How many days without food, water, electricity and indoor plumbing would you and your family have to weather before you jumped your neighbor’s electrified white-picket fence and broke down the front door to steal supplies? What would you do if she tried to defend her property? We have always been a nation of rebels. We have always rebelled against authority. We are the only nation to call throwing 342 chests of tea into the ocean a “party.” Today I believe that the reason most Americans despise government is because we primarily consciously interact with it in seemingly punitive manners: parking tickets and taxes. Subconsciously we all know that the government is responsible for schools, libraries (remember them?), roads, police, fire departments, armed forces, the FDA protecting us from poison food, the EPA protecting us from poison water, and those ghastly entitlement programs such as Unemployment Insurance, Disability Insurance, and Social Security, not to mention the governmental direct and indirect subsidies supporting the Affordable Care Act as well as the United States Post Office, etc. Yet consciously since Ronald Reagan we mistrust government. We believe it to be corrupt. Too big. Wasteful. That Washington is a swamp. That we must starve the beast. Today I received an unsolicited email from Google offering 6 months of something called “ Google One” for free. “Great,” I thought, “I would LOVE to try a new product from such an iconic industry leader that I’m sure will vastly improve the quality of my life.” Then I clicked on the link to check out what Google One did. Then I clicked on another link to find out how much it would cost after the initial free 6 months. But nowhere could I find this information in any of the links. I actually had to go to google.com and google “How much does Google One cost” to find out the price of Google One!!! Google’s parent company Alphabet had revenue of $136.8 billion last year so I’m sure they will not be heartbroken if I don’t sign up for their $1.99 monthly subscription service. That’s not the point. The point is transparency. The point is trust. A million years ago when I was at university, Rolling Stone and other magazines would send students 6 months of magazines for free because they knew that one foible of human consciousness was laziness. They knew that a sufficient percentage of students would not find it to be worth their precious time to cancel their subscriptions at the end of the free trial periods. And by ‘sufficient,’ I mean gazillions. Gyms work the same way. And now apparently almost every website on the Internet including Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Headspace, the New York Times, and now Apple and Google as well as myriad Life Coaches and other hucksters want to get us hooked on subscriptions that ‘sufficient’ numbers of consumers will be too lazy to ever cancel. Can you guess what the average monthly (almost imperceptible, subconscious for most people) automatic outflow from consumers’ linked credit cards and checking accounts is including health insurance, car insurance, cable or satellite television, and mobile telephone plans? According to venturebeat.com it is $857 per month. You don’t feel a thing. It’s utterly painless. And wildly convienent. Until it isn’t. What about the average monthly American Dream mortgage payment? In Los Angeles, where I live, in 2018 the average monthly mortgage payment according to qualifiedmortgage.org was $4045 per month. What about the average monthly credit card payment? What about the average monthly student loan repayment-payment — especially for millennials Gen Z-ers? Social inequality was one of the main causes of the French Revolution. As real income continues to decline and rich corporations hand out 6 month free trial subscriptions like crack cocaine on Bronx street corners two years before AOC was born, when will the average American household go underwater and be forced deeper and deeper into higher and higher interest debt they can never repay? Thank your gods there are no more debtor’s prisons! As the rich get richer and the poor get poorer could the United States of America be on a similar trajectory to that of France 1789? What would be your tipping point? We all have one. What perfect storm of underemployment, debt, tsunami/hurricane/earthquake/fire, 9/11, stock market crash, disappearing retirement fund, price-gouging, food shortage, fuel shortage, facist insurrection would cause you to ride your bicycle to the nearest Sporting Goods store and smash the window rifling for kerosene, batteries, fish hooks, hunting knives, seeds and ammunition? Hunger games always seem to put the sport back into survival. Or before that storm washes ashore will we freely elect some enthusiatic young economic savior such as Adolph Hitler who promises to rescue us from collapse? Never! It couldn’t happen here! We’ll just let them eat cake and wash it down with 64 ounce high-fructose grape-flavored Slurpees from 7–Eleven.

https://medium.com/@iraisrael/what-would-you-feel-if-you-saw-an-angry-mob-dragging-google-executives-from-their-teslas-in-the-830a85de79bc

['Ira Israel']

2019-06-07 15:25:02.441000+00:00

['Tipping Point', 'Tea Party', 'Google', 'Government', 'Revolution']

7 Winning Tactics for Medical Technology Marketers

The medical technology industry remains a unique branch in the overall medical field. Global Medtech industry spans companies that help in disease prevention, diagnosis and that prognosis has positive outcomes. This feat can be seen in Medtech companies in the areas of orthopedics, cardiology, and diagnostic imaging. It is now imperative for health service providers, doctors and caregivers in the medical field to have an online presence, as 72% of internet users search for health information or medical related content online. Professionals in the medical field must become active in the digital space or they run the risks of losing recognition. The social media channels, websites, YouTube are platforms to promote personal or corporate brands and to increase sales of medical information. Like other digital brands, medical technology marketers must understand their target audience, how they want to be engaged and where they want you to reach them. Though, the content marketing rule is the same across all industries, Medtech is however a few years behind the rest of the online marketing world. The medical industry faces a lot of regulatory issues, which slows marketing ability; the time to make research , develop products and pass them for quality control makes the field a bit different from the regular B2B tactics. Furthermore, professionals in the medical field need extra time to evaluate new products and their fit for usage, as such Medtech must tweak their tactics to fit the unique attributes of their field. Medtech marketers need to develop user personas that are engaging and trigger buyer emissions, across all marketing channels. This is because consumers don’t just buy a product, without an emotional connection. However, here is a list of seven tactics any Medtech marketers can use for successful product marketing. 1. Curate Customer and Professional Testimonials You can use positive reviews of satisfied patients or professionals in the field who have used your products or services to draw leads. You can list this either on your website, landing page, or social media platform. Listing reviews from professionals or users will show new patients that your products are worthwhile and will solve their problems. You can also focus on thought leaders within the health community, to influence your leads and convert them to paying customers. One way you can also get success as a Medtech professional is to present these testimonials in video format, as visual content is known to convert more leads than written posts. 2. Pay special attention to the future generation of medical professionals It’s only natural that young medical professionals are fixated to what they learnt in medical school or during their health community rotations at teaching hospitals. Hence, you launch a peer to peer counselling campaigns, by presenting medical educators or facilitators at medical school with your content and they pass this information to their students in the classroom. It then becomes very convenient for the students to use these technologies after graduating from medical college. This type of marketing is highly effective, as the target audience will be more interested in your products as it is coming from a validated source of knowledge. 3. Publish in leading medical publications One of the ways medical professionals stay abreast of new development in their field is by attending professional events or reading online publications. You should publish your contents in medical journals that have both digital and print versions, as this will ensure that your content is seen by professionals who need this information. This marketing approach might come with a huge cost, it has however proved to be of immense value as published articles always find wide acceptance from the general public. 4. Present at trade-shows and professional events Medical trade shows are great opportunities for professionals in the medical field to stay relevant, and keep abreast of latest innovations and breakthroughs. It is the platform where they will learn about your MedTech, hence, it is important that you attend these events to get the necessary awareness for your product. These events are always huge seeing in attendance medical policy formulators, journalists, publicists and thought leaders in the field. You don’t want to miss these events as that is where you will meet the persons, that will decide the scalability of your product. There are endless marketing opportunities from attending trade shows, so you need to decide which is the best for your product marketing. 5. Use Social Media Social media remains the top communication tool in the world today, across all industries and professions. It takes less than 20 seconds to share a tweet, and about the same time to upload a video on Instagram. Medical professionals can spare a few minutes in their busy schedule to share their product benefits on these platforms, and can get over a million people to engage with their content in minutes. There also channels designed specifically for medical professionals to connect, network and consult for health services. You can use the opportunities these platforms offer to share your products with colleagues, medical influencers and other persons on the medical supply chain. 6. Partner With Relevant Associations to Create a Buzz Medical associations have a significant influence over practitioners and patients, as they are held in high esteem because of their long-term credibility. These associations have databases of product end users, who can become your customers. Partnering with them will be the smartest marketing move you will have to make, as they will offer long term and extensive reach for your products. 7. Create Patient Communities Most content creators in other professions have a strong end user community. You can also replicate this tactic for your MedTech marketing, through dedicated blog posts, newsletters, and YouTube videos. Providing valuable content for a defined audience, around your solution will help leads and end users learn about your product offering, latest medical trends, and tips for healthy living. These patients can in turn share your content with medical professionals, and get the best advice for better living.

https://medium.com/@aladeniking/7-winning-tactics-for-medical-technology-marketers-bd3eec937e5d

['Aladeloba Babatunde']

2020-09-02 14:03:23.687000+00:00

['Health', 'Medtech', 'Medical', 'Medtech Industry', 'Social Media']

Vite Bi-weekly Report

Recent Milestones Vite Labs Plans to Integrate Chainlink Oracle Oracles are important for Vite’s ecosystem development. High-quality oracles ensure reliable, diverse and decentralized off-chain data feeds. Chainlink is one of the longest-running and best-known oracle technology providers. After integrating Chainlink oracle, Vite will bridge the on-chain and off-chain data gap, more efficiently integrate decentralized systems with traditional centralized systems, further expand the function of the Vite gateway, and lay the foundation for building and improving applications such as decentralized derivative trading, VitePlus, VitePay, crypto ATMs, blockchain-enabled IoT, and more. Technology Series On May 27, we released the technical article Design and Implementation of ViteX Back-End Service. This article explains built-in smart contracts within ViteX, from three angles: design, performance and system reliability. Vite Community Star Election On May 20th, we released the Vite Community Star Global Election Campaign. The selected “Community Stars” will be displayed on the new version of vite.org. Vite Mentions on Twitter Soared Per XTrading, Twitter mentions of Vite increased by 331% over the last month. This growth rate ranked #2 among all cryptos tracked. Data on ViteX As of June 1, 18,042,819 VITE have been burned, accounting for 1.8% of total issuance. 138,435,458 VITE are staked on ViteX exchange, accounting for 13.83% of total issuance. 7,110,327 VX has been released, of which 6,563,963 VX is being staked for dividends. To-date, 58.4 BTC worth of dividends have been distributed. The pool of undistributed dividends stands at 32 BTC. System Developments Vite App Vite App V3.7.0 has been finished developing. On May 28, we submitted iOS version to the App Store for review. On May 29, we submitted Android version to Google Play for review. V3.7.0 mainly solved the following problems: Rewriting the transaction detail page in native code. In previous versions, when users viewed the detailed information of Vite transaction records, it jumped to H5 page of the block explorer, which took a long time to load, and cannot copy fields such as address and transaction hash. In V3.7.0, when users click on transaction record, the transaction details will be displayed directly in the App. The user can also copy address, transaction hash, and other fields with a smoother experience. Optimization of the exchange page. After the V3.6.0 was released, users provided us with suggestions for improving the exchange page experience. We have optimized it in V3.7.0. These optimizations include: No prompt of quota consumption will be displayed before the order is placed or cancelled. Users will be asked to confirm the pending order about price and quantity after clicking “buy” or “sell” in order to avoid mis-operation of placing an order. Display of order positions have been added to the candlestick page and the trading page. Maximum quantity limit has been added at the amount of buying/selling. A prompt of “insufficient balance” will no longer be displayed. “+” and “-” buttons have been added to the price and quantity input area, which is easier for changing price or quantity. A prompt of effective market-making order ranges has been added. Renamed Comment in English. Recently, there were feedbacks about where to fill memo when transferring VITE to Binance or OKEX exchange. Therefore, we renamed Comment to Memo for the habits of our community. We have fixed some bugs in V3.7.0. For example: the missing of candlestick subscription data; incorrection of price automatically filled when the order page is switched to buy/sell. ViteX Exchange On May 27, Vite Mainnet successfully completed its fourth hard fork. ViteX built-in contract has also been upgraded. As of now, Vite Mainnet is stable and has a normal block production rate. New functions have all been effective. After this upgrade,ViteX order operation logic from clients and API will remain consistent, and the result of order matching will also be deterministic. In the previous version, the candlestick data needs to be calculated locally on the client side, resulting in data out of sync among different clients. In the new version, we have optimized the candlestick service by calculating data on the server side to secure data consistency. In addition, the official ViteX Python SDK and Java SDK have been developed and will open source soon. Official Website Upgrade After the community vote, the design style of the new official website has been determined. At present, we are revising according to the selected design style, and optimizing the content of the website. Activities On May 22, our BD Director Isda, core developer Jie, and Marketing Manager Christy participated in the “Pizza Day Carnival” organized by Jinse Finance and Huobi, and commemorated the “festival” with many Chinese blockchain practitioners Our COO Richard hosted Messari’s advisor Qiao Wang and Bitcoin maximalist Jimmy Song on a new episode of The Blockchain Debate Podcast. The topic was on corporate bailout and capital market rescue. This is on the back of unprecedented amount of quantitative easing from the US Fed. The crypto-native narrative is that such actions would enable growth of bad debt fueled by excessive liquidity and rob the people of their wealth by increasing prices of goods and assets. As such imprudent monetary policies created the need for crypto, this debate topic is apt for the crypto community. As previously mentioned, this podcast is one way for us to expand our brand recognition and network with industry thought leaders. All episodes are available at: https://blockdebate.buzzsprout.com You’re also welcome to follow Richard (https://twitter.com/gentso09) and the podcast (https://twitter.com/blockdebate) on Twitter. On May 21, our COO Richard conducted an AMA in Vite telegram group, answering over 20 questions from the community including suggestions for product improvement and marketing plans. Our development team has made targeted developments on these improvement suggestions. The AMA record can be viewed here: https://forum.vite.net/topic/3856/vite-labs-leadership-ama-may-21-2020-leave-your-questions-here/1

https://medium.com/vitelabs/vite-bi-weekly-report-dc7142fd922b

['Khun Sir']

2020-06-05 08:06:28.686000+00:00

['Vitex', 'Project Updates', 'Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Vite']

Elon Musk’s SpaceX collaborates with GEC to sell space art through cryptocurrency

Elon Musk’s SpaceX collaborates with GEC to sell space art through cryptocurrency Infoshots.in Jun 17·2 min read Dogecoin, the popular meme cryptocurrency, was chosen as the unit of account between SpaceX and GEC, giving Doge a claim on the first unit of space commerce, however, it is not the only space currency. The announcement of the DOGE-1 mission — a collaboration between Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the futurist Geometric Energy Corporation (GEC) — was hailed as the start of the cryptocurrency space race. Dogecoin, the popular meme cryptocurrency, was chosen as the unit of account between SpaceX and GEC, giving Doge a claim on the first unit of space commerce. However, it is not the only space currency. The initial press release mentioned a number of organisations involved with GEC, several of which are cryptocurrency projects. So, how do these fit in? The answer is space art. With the astronomic rise in projects tying art to cryptocurrency, it seems that the GEC is looking to test what happens to the value of art — or advertising — when it is strapped to the side of a CubeSat and fired towards the moon. The article mentioned additional payload space to be dedicated to art in the form of space plaques provided by Geometric Labs and Geometric Gamin Corporation, and since then, four new cryptocurrency projects underwent a low-key release, and rumours began to circulate that the tokens were related to the Doge-1 mission. Their names are Rho, Beta, Kappa and Gamma. Later a fifth project, Xi, was launched. They have yet to be officially associated with GEC, but a set of websites for the tokens appeared unannounced. Are these tokens part of the space art, and can they be directly tied to GEC? A little digging into the websites and the code for the tokens themselves appear to confirm it. The websites of the tokens claim they are indeed part of the mission, and that each token will be involved in how the art is displayed on the side of the CubeSat, opening up the possibility that the art could be programmable, changeable or even streamed back to Earth. Pointblank is collaborating with GEC to build the CubeSats for the mission, and have recently tweeted the hashtags for some tokens. The Pointblank website contains in its source files a picture of one of the tokens. The man behind GEC is Sam Reid. He launched a new TG group centred around the tokens. This is effectively the missing piece: GEC have now laid claim to the tokens.

https://medium.com/@contactinfoshots-in/elon-musks-spacex-collaborates-with-gec-to-sell-space-art-through-cryptocurrency-e328ee1cab0e

[]

2021-06-17 11:29:49.878000+00:00

['Elon Musk', 'Spacex', 'Dogecoin', 'Bitcoin']

How do I clear more space on Mac and delete the incomplete download from App Store

first of all, take a look at your file system and how much space they occupy. type this command in a terminal: Remove the indesirable files du -sh * then remove the files that you don’t need rm -rf <directory-name> or rm file-name Remove The caches. type this command in a terminal: cd ~/Library/Caches clear the purgeable area create a huge file that will force macOS to clean purgeable files to free you space. type this command in a terminal: dd if=/dev/zero of=~/hugefile bs=15m It will create a file called hugefile in your home folder This command takes a long time to allocate the memory, you can also stop it when it’s 5~10GB and duplicate the file CommandD to create copies and speed up the process. Then, you just need to delete the files, obviously. rm hugefile That’s it :) … ˆ-ˆ

https://medium.com/@esfolk/how-do-i-clear-more-space-on-mac-and-delete-the-incomplete-download-from-app-store-47191fc32587

[]

2020-12-18 17:51:25.871000+00:00

['Mac Disk Space', 'App Store', 'Cache', 'Mac', 'Xcode']

My 7 Years of Journaling has transformed my Life

I was curious and a voracious reader since my childhood but used to be victim of overthinking, fear and over sensitivity and was a submissive and average child until I started journaling when I was in 6th standard. I started writing my day to day life, my secrets, my ambitions, my dreams and expectations, all at one place. The day I first wrote in my diary was the best day of my life. It was like a seed which I never knew would soon turn into a tree full of ever giving fruits, I never knew what transformations it can bring in my life and what hidden potential can I unlock. That was the day when I actually started sprouting and destining my future achievements. Though I had won prizes in standard 1 and 4 but those were not actually my achievements but of my teachers and family. It was 2012 as far as I remember, when I achieved for the first time after starting-off with journaling. I was bestowed with a General Knowledge book for securing first position in essay writing competition. That day onwards, I started growing mightier, better at public speaking, debating, painting, writing, studying. I made more detailed journals with a calendar, habit tracker, daily targets, monthly target, my goals and eventually, prizes and medals started flowing into. I topped 7th standard, received title of ‘Most Creative Student’ in standard 8th. Secured first position in public speaking, debating, hand lettering, painting, Dancing and third position in acting in 9th standard. I topped CBSE 10th standard board with a 10 CGPA. Secured 1st rank in district level poster making competition. And in 12th standard CBSE boards, I topped my school with more than 97% score. And now, I’m writing this blog, studying in India’s best college for Commerce. “…….And, it doesn’t stop here, there would surely be many more achievements than these, as long as I have my diary”

https://medium.com/@sgarvit628/my-7-years-of-journaling-has-transformed-my-life-d8bba25b5802

['Garvit Saini']

2020-09-17 12:13:56.451000+00:00

['Journaling', 'Diary', 'Habits', 'Experience', 'Study']

How to resign

How to resign I wanted to leave Monzo on the best possible terms. Here are the steps I took and why I think they were important. Natasha Vernier Apr 6, 2020·7 min read I recently resigned from Monzo having worked here for nearly four and a half years. I say here — I am still here! I have loved my Monzo journey and wanted to find a way to leave that maintained my relationships and didn’t end in me sneaking off to interviews, rushing in late to meetings and taking secret phone calls in the stairwell. I spoke to a friend who has experience running startups, and we came up with a plan for how I could resign in the best possible way. These are the steps I took, and why I think they are important. Speak to your manager, and other people you trust and respect at your company, before handing in your notice Talk openly about notice periods and make it work for both sides Ask for opinions on what you should do next Ask for introductions If needed, try to hire your replacement Start the handover before you leave Work out what you want from the time you have left Speak to your manager, and other people you trust and respect at your company, before handing in your notice Oftentimes, things that are causing you unhappiness or frustration at work are eminently solvable. It might be that you want more context, more clarity, a different role, more (or less) responsibility, or more money. And probably, your manager or other people in the company don’t know you want these things. So as a first step, speak to your manager, and other people that you trust and respect, to find out if changes can be made to make your work life happier. When I was thinking about leaving Monzo I had long conversations with my manager and with the CEO. I told them both the reasons I was thinking about leaving, what frustrated me, what I adored about Monzo, and what some of the things I thought I could do next were. We talked about all the possible roles within the company that I could do and whether more money or less responsibility would entice me to stay. Having these conversations meant that I knew what I could be doing within Monzo, and also had confidence in some of the things that I could go and do elsewhere. I also knew that I would be able to maintain the relationships with some of the people I respected most if I did leave. But most importantly, I knew that neither more money nor a different role would make me want to stay. So before you make that final decision, talk to the people you trust within the company. Understand all of your options and be honest with yourself and them about what it really is that is driving the change. Talk openly about notice periods and make it work for both sides You’ll probably have a contracted notice period of 1 or 3 months, but, like everything, you can negotiate it if it works for both sides. If you are committed to continuing to work hard, then it’s unlikely your company would say no to you working 4 months rather than 3, or alternatively, if you have been open with your manager about why you are leaving, they are likely to be supportive if you want to leave after only 2. Either way, work out what it is you want and ask for it. My contracted notice period was 3 months but at the time of handing my notice in I didn’t have a job to go to. I also wanted to try to hire my replacement so that the team wouldn’t be without a leader for any prolonged period of time. After being totally upfront about this with my manager, we agreed that I would work at least 3 months, but likely longer, and that as soon as I had a job we would agree my last day. As it turns out, I will end up working 4 months and have hired my replacement who will start a month and a half after I leave. This set up was much better for me — it gave me the headspace to find a new job I really wanted, rather than scrambling for something to pay the bills — and it worked out better for Monzo too — the team won’t be without a leader for very long at all. Ask for opinions on what you should do next It’s likely that those you work closest with know what you are, and are not, good at. They will know how much stress you can handle comfortably, whether you thrived in a smaller or larger company, whether you were good at building something from zero to one, or later on in the development cycle, and whether you get excited about B2C or B2B products. So I recommend that you speak to people about what might come next. Ask their opinion, talk through potential roles, and be open to new ideas. When I was looking for new roles I did this with my manager, some peers I work closely with, and some team members. It definitely helped me realise that going to work at another Fintech of a similar size to Monzo would not be the right step for me now. I was better when Monzo was smaller, and I have learnt so much about building something from scratch that I want to put into practice. Ask for introductions It’s likely that the most valuable things you’ll take away from a startup experience like Monzo are relationships. And if the people you work with know that you are looking for something new, it’s likely they will want to, our at least be willing to, introduce you to their contacts. Introductions can lead anywhere — you might learn something new or discover a new career path. This might not be where your next role will come from, but it’ll certainly help you narrow your options. I knew of a couple of interesting startups which I asked our CEO to introduce me to. Some lead to coffees and some lead nowhere, but if nothing else it was a sign of his faith in me that he’d make those introductions in the first place. I also got a really interesting introduction from an engineer in my team which I was pretty sceptical about to begin with, but which turned out to be highly valuable. In the end, my new role didn’t come from these introductions, but they definitely helped me work out what I wanted to do next, and as a bonus I made 5 or 10 good contacts that I’m sure I’ll speak to again. If needed, try to hire your replacement If your company is going to hire a direct replacement for your role, then no one knows what’s required in the role more than you do! I’m going to write an essay about how I approach hiring at some point, but the short version is — try to hire someone you’d want to work for. I wrote the job description, reviewed the applications, and then had an initial coffee with people who I thought would be a good fit for the role. I also suggested the interview set up and the people who should be involved. We managed to get down to two excellent candidates within a few months, and made an offer soon after. Despite a long notice period, because we kicked this off as soon as I handed in my notice, there will only be a month and a half between me leaving and my replacement starting. Start the handover before you leave Depending on what your role is and how long you are working, it can be helpful to begin your handover well before you actually leave. It can be really difficult to work out what knowledge you have that no one else has, or even what conversations you have been in that other people need to know about. The quickest way to find out is to let other people start doing parts of your role; any knowledge gaps will become apparent pretty quickly. At the time of writing, I have three weeks left at Monzo. As of last week I have split my main responsibilities between two members of the team. I am still going to the same meetings and keeping on top of the work, but I am trying to let them chair meetings, set agendas and answer questions. If they need to ask me something, I’ll still be here, but we will hopefully work out what the most important knowledge gaps are before my last day. Work out what you want from the time you have left Something that I have been really struggling with is working out how much to still be involved in direction setting. If I were staying at Monzo, there are some things I’d really fight for, but given I am leaving soon, is there any point? Of course I am still working hard and doing what’s right for the team, but other people will be running things soon enough, and my opinion just won’t matter any more. I worked out before I handed in my notice that one of the main reasons for leaving when I am leaving is that I want to maintain the relationships I have with my colleagues. For other people in different roles it might be that you want to optimise for releasing one last product, getting a project finished, making a cost saving, or learning a new skill. For me, these last four months are all about relationships. And so as I work my notice that is what I keep reminding myself about. The most important thing is to maintain those relationships. I am trying to do what is right and keep the ship moving, but if it will damage a relationship, I am trying to step back quickly and remember what it is I want from the time I have left.

https://medium.com/@natashavernier/how-to-resign-a2c014efea90

['Natasha Vernier']

2020-04-13 13:46:30.274000+00:00

['Tech', 'Startup', 'Business']

Update MongoDB data as like as where clause

{"_id": **, "status": "SOLD"} {"_id": **, "status": "SOLD"} I need those to be {"_id": **, "status": "INACTIVE"} {"_id": **, "status": "INACTIVE"} How? The answer should be updateMany try { db.COLLECTION.updateMany( {status: "SOLD"}, {$set: {current_value: "INACTIVE"}} ); } catch (e) { print(e); } Here, first field {status: “SOLD”} is the condition as “where” clause. Then I had to use “$set” to the desired one. I hope you understand.

https://medium.com/@fahadahammed/update-mongodb-data-as-like-as-where-clause-d5c44970f6b4

['Fahad Ahammed']

2020-10-12 09:59:28.284000+00:00

['Mongo', 'Mongodb', 'Mongo Shell', 'NoSQL']

Introduction to Spring Core with Annotations.

In this quick article, we will discuss Spring core annotations that are used in Spring DI and Spring IOC. As we know Spring DI and Spring IOC are core concepts of Spring Framework. These Spring core annotations we will explore from org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation and org.springframework.context.annotation packages. Before starting let’s see exactly what the concept of IoC is, IoC is also known as dependency injection (DI). It is a process whereby objects define their dependencies (that is, the other objects they work with) only through constructor arguments, arguments to a factory method, or properties that are set on the object instance after it is constructed or returned from a factory method. The container then injects those dependencies when it creates the bean. This process is fundamentally the inverse (hence the name, Inversion of Control) of the bean itself controlling the instantiation or location of its dependencies by using direct construction of classes. Now, Let’s dive into Spring Core Annotations! @Autowired We can use the @Autowired to mark a dependency which Spring is going to resolve and inject. We can use this annotation with a constructor, setter, or field injection. Constructor Injection: @RestController public class CustomerController { private CustomerService customerService; @Autowired public CustomerController(CustomerService customerService) { this.customerService = customerService; } } Setter Injection: @RestController public class CustomerController { private CustomerService customerService; @Autowired public void setCustomerService(CustomerService customerService) { this.customerService = customerService; } } Field Injection: import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired; import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController; @RestController public class CustomerController { @Autowired private CustomerService customerService; } @Bean @Bean is a method-level annotation and a direct analog of the XML element. The annotation supports some of the attributes offered by, such as init-method, destroy-method, autowiring, and name. You can use the @Bean annotation or in a @Component annotated class. The following is a simple example of a @Bean method declaration: import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean; import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration; import com.companyname.projectname.customer.CustomerService; import com.companyname.projectname.order.OrderService; @Configuration public class Application { @Bean public CustomerService customerService() { return new CustomerService(); } @Bean public OrderService orderService() { return new OrderService(); } } The preceding configuration is exactly equivalent to the following Spring XML: <beans> <bean id="customerService" class="com.companyname.projectname.CustomerService"/> <bean id="orderService" class="com.companyname.projectname.OrderService"/> </beans> @Qualifier This annotation helps fine-tune annotation-based autowiring. There may be scenarios when we create more than one bean of the same type and want to wire only one of them with a property. This can be controlled using @Qualifier annotation along with the @Autowired annotation. Example: Consider EmailService and SMSService classes implement a single MessageService interface. Create a MessageService interface for multiple message service implementations. public interface MessageService { public void sendMsg(String message); } Create implementations — EmailService and SmsService. public class EmailService implements MessageService{ public void sendMsg(String message) { System.out.println(message); } } public class SmsService implements MessageService{ public void sendMsg(String message) { System.out.println(message); } } It’s time to see the usage of @Qualifier annotation. public interface MessageProcessor { public void processMsg(String message); } public class MessageProcessorImpl implements MessageProcessor { private MessageService messageService; // setter based DI @Autowired @Qualifier("emailService") public void setMessageService(MessageService messageService) { this.messageService = messageService; } // constructor based DI @Autowired public MessageProcessorImpl(@Qualifier("emailService") MessageService messageService) { this.messageService = messageService; } public void processMsg(String message) { messageService.sendMsg(message); } } @Required The @Required annotation is method-level annotation and applied to the setter method of a bean. This annotation simply indicates that the setter method must be configured to be dependency-injected with a value at configuration time. For example, @Required on setter methods to mark dependencies that we want to populate through XML: @Required void setColor(String color) { this.color = color; } <bean class="com.javaguides.spring.Car"> <property name="color" value="green" /> </bean> Otherwise, BeanInitializationException will be thrown. @Value Spring @Value annotation is used to assign default values to variables and method arguments. We can read spring environment variables as well as system variables using @Value annotation. Spring @Value annotation also supports SpEL. Let’s look at some of the examples of using @Value annotation. Examples: We can assign a default value to a class property using @Value annotation. @Value("Default DBConfiguration") private String defaultName; @Value annotation argument can be a string only, but spring tries to convert it to the specified type. The below code will work fine and assign the boolean and integer values to the variable. @Value("true") private boolean defaultBoolean; @Value("10") private int defaultInt; Spring @Value — Spring Environment Property @Value("${APP_NAME_NOT_FOUND}") private String defaultAppName; Assign system variables using @Value annotation. @Value("${java.home}") private String javaHome; @Value("${HOME}") private String homeDir; Spring @Value — SpEL @Value("#{systemProperties['java.home']}") private String javaHome; @DependsOn The @DependsOn annotation can force the Spring IoC container to initialize one or more beans before the bean which is annotated by @DependsOn annotation. The @DependsOn annotation may be used on any class directly or indirectly annotated with @Component or on methods annotated with @Bean . Example: Let’s create FirstBean and SecondBean classes. In this example, the SecondBean is initialized before the bean FirstBean. public class FirstBean { @Autowired private SecondBean secondBean; } public class SecondBean { public SecondBean() { System.out.println("SecondBean Initialized via Constuctor"); } } Declare the above beans in java based configuration class. @Configuration public class AppConfig { @Bean("firstBean") @DependsOn(value = { "secondBean" }) public FirstBean firstBean() { return new FirstBean(); } @Bean("secondBean") public SecondBean secondBean() { return new SecondBean(); } } @Lazy By default, the Spring IOC container creates and initializes all singleton beans at the time of application startup. We can prevent this pre-initialization of a singleton bean by using the @Lazy annotation. The @Lazy annotation may be used on any class directly or indirectly annotated with @Component or on methods annotated with @Bean . Example: Consider we have below two beans — FirstBean and SecondBean. In this example, we will explicitly load FirstBean using @Lazy annotation. public class FirstBean { public void test() { System.out.println("Method of FirstBean Class"); } } public class SecondBean { public void test() { System.out.println("Method of SecondBean Class"); } } Declare the above beans in java based configuration class. @Configuration public class AppConfig { @Lazy(value = true) @Bean public FirstBean firstBean() { return new FirstBean(); } @Bean public SecondBean secondBean() { return new SecondBean(); } } As we can see, bean secondBean is initialized by Spring container while bean firstBean is initialized explicitly. @Lookup A method annotated with @Lookup tells Spring to return an instance of the method’s return type when we invoke it. @Primary We use @Primary to give higher preference to a bean when there are multiple beans of the same type. @Component @Primary class Car implements Vehicle {} @Component class Bike implements Vehicle {} @Component class Driver { @Autowired Vehicle vehicle; } @Component class Biker { @Autowired @Qualifier("bike") Vehicle vehicle; } @Scope We use @Scope to define the scope of a @Component class or a @Bean definition. It can be either singleton, prototype, request, session, globalSession, or some custom scope. For example: @Component @Scope(value = ConfigurableBeanFactory.SCOPE_SINGLETON) public class TwitterMessageService implements MessageService { } @Component @Scope(value = ConfigurableBeanFactory.SCOPE_PROTOTYPE) public class TwitterMessageService implements MessageService { } @Profile If we want Spring to use a @Component class or a @Bean method only when a specific profile is active, we can mark it with @Profile. We can configure the name of the profile with the value argument of the annotation: @Component @Profile("sportDay") class Bike implements Vehicle {} @Import The @Import annotation indicates one or more @Configuration classes to import. For example: In a Java-based configuration, Spring provides the @Import annotation which allows for loading @Bean definitions from another configuration class. @Configuration public class ConfigA { @Bean public A a() { return new A(); } } @Configuration @Import(ConfigA.class) public class ConfigB { @Bean public B b() { return new B(); } } Now, rather than needing to specify both ConfigA class and ConfigB class when instantiating the context, only ConfigB needs to be supplied explicitly. @ImportResource Spring provides a @ImportResource annotation is used to load beans from an applicationContext.xml file into an ApplicationContext. Example: Consider we have applicationContext.xml spring bean configuration XML file on the classpath. @Configuration @ImportResource({"classpath*:applicationContext.xml"}) public class XmlConfiguration { } @PropertySource The @PropertySource annotation provides a convenient and declarative mechanism for adding a PropertySource to Spring’s Environment. To be used in conjunction with @Configuration classes. For example: In this example, we are reading database configuration from the file config.properties file and set these property values to DataSourceConfig class using Environment. import org.springframework.beans.factory.InitializingBean; import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired; import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration; import org.springframework.context.annotation.PropertySource; import org.springframework.core.env.Environment; @Configuration @PropertySource("classpath:config.properties") public class ProperySourceDemo implements InitializingBean { @Autowired Environment env; @Override public void afterPropertiesSet() throws Exception { setDatabaseConfig(); } private void setDatabaseConfig() { DataSourceConfig config = new DataSourceConfig(); config.setDriver(env.getProperty("jdbc.driver")); config.setUrl(env.getProperty("jdbc.url")); config.setUsername(env.getProperty("jdbc.username")); config.setPassword(env.getProperty("jdbc.password")); System.out.println(config.toString()); } } @PropertySources We can use this annotation to specify multiple @PropertySource configurations:

https://medium.com/@dasari-swaroop-kumar/introduction-to-spring-core-with-annotations-f98a90c0eeb8

['Dasari Swaroop Kumar']

2020-12-12 18:40:13.205000+00:00

['Annotations', 'Spring Framework', 'Spring', 'Java']

Muddy

I see them. Of course I do. I know how one is expected to interact. The joy that one is supposed to feel and yet, I do not feel it. / I see it. Of course I do. As large as a stain on a white blouses and I still refuse to engage. I will not even permit tiptoeing. Not unless it is impossible to avoid, but even then it must be performed with trepidation and visible annoyance. / It is too late. She has run off. The little cute child with matching waterproofs, is out of reach. Unstoppable. There she goes. There it is, that big splash that hits even the side of her well protected ears. The murky water slowly making fun of her white elephant hat. I’m waiting for the mother to screech….But she doesn’t. I look around the foggy landscape for a sign, perhaps the child’s mother has not noticed yet? “Was that fun?” she asks in a sweet honeysuckle tone. The girl giggles her response. Of course she does. She is two years old. What does she care if the muddy water is on her skin, or in her ears, or stuck to her hair? What uses does she have for being clean? In that moment; the one with the giggle and the splash, the one that I can still see now sparking up like fireflies, I acknowledge a grave mistake. One that I alone have made. / I think of that perfectly wonderful, well prepared and well mannered mother often. The one with the loose hair sitting around a relaxed expression and I feel completely jealous.

https://medium.com/@dyspla/muddy-4a532f8461c8

['Lennie Varvarides']

2020-12-28 17:02:30.687000+00:00

['Play', 'Storytelling', 'Poetry On Medium', 'Motherhood', 'Childhood']

A Gift Overdue

To understand and practice the power of gratitude by identifying people in your life who have helped you in the most difficult times of your life. I believe that a genuine compliment is the least expensive yet one of the most powerful gifts you can give someone. Compliments belong to other people, why keep them with you? In order to pay this gratitude I wrote a letter to my mother which is pasted above who always have been there for me and played a very vital role in shaping me, helping me in my tough times. This letter has been my very first experience, I must say it wasn’t that much tough to write to the ones you love so much and want to say thanks to them, yeah it gets little bit emotional but I think that’s okay, its okay to feel things as its a natural thing. Its doesn’t need to be fancy or something just keep it simple but real and honest and i think is the most beautiful thing which I tried to do so, hope to get a good response from my mom, as she always think that whenever she leaves the home I get emotional, yeah its true because i love her so much, the experience was overall great, it was filled with feelings, love and emotions. I feel blessed to have a beautiful and kind heart mother which has a strong impact on my life who taught me how to be kind to others. I think more people should try to do such kind of things because it makes you connected with the ones you love and compliment is least a gift you can give to someone to make them feel special and loved. Happy reading…

https://medium.com/@saim.umer137/a-gift-overdue-694ae75bdec3

['Saim Umer']

2020-02-21 13:45:47.419000+00:00

['Letters', 'Gifts', 'Compliments', 'Gratitude', 'Moms']

I Am A Writer With A Mental Illness

This might not be new to you because there are many people who have some type of mental issue going on. I am unique because of the color of my skin. See I am an African American woman and in my culture mental illness is not talked about in fact it is plain out ignored. I felt different and I knew something was wrong but I suffered through it because talking about it only would of shamed me. Presently I don’t care about the shame that comes from my culture when I talk about being mentally ill and African American. It took a nervous to bring me to this point, and now it is my hope that I will be able to help others speak their truth. My mental disorder is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, PTSD, and Depression — fancy titles to say that I worry all the time and I get overwhelmed when things are not perfect. I take Zoloft which is a God send for me; I take 200 mg per day and Atarax 25mg as as need when I start feeling overwhelmed. I see my therapist every two weeks, I am lucky in that respect because a-lot of people that look like me can’t afford to see a therapist once, which is a problem that needs to be addressed.I am using my gift of writing to try to help solve this problem and my gift of talking as well. The stigma of mental needs to be changed and today is a good day to start. tawana.blog.home

https://medium.com/@tawanakwatson/i-am-a-writer-with-a-mental-illness-1daac0205f36

['Tawana Watson']

2019-11-25 23:27:58.518000+00:00

['Minority Mental Health', 'African American Woman', 'Ocd', 'Mental Illness', 'Writers Life']

Should your condo association require a move-in, move-out fee?

Although I’d spent about one thousand dollars on this couch, this wasn’t really anybody’s fault. I purchased the couch at a time that I had minimal interest in moving and had it out with the neighbors. Once the lease wasn’t renewed, I had no choice but to find a new place to go — after living in this apartment for eight years. Still though, I wouldn’t have batted an eye if I’d have had to pay for move-in damages trying to get my couch up the steps. How COVID-19 is changing the way new residents move In my childhood neighborhood, as soon as furniture was left outside, it would be gone in a matter of hours. Sometimes it would be snatched up so fast by junk dealers, collectors and passersby to the point where you’d wonder whether you remembered to sit it outside in the first place. If you don’t live in one of those neighborhoods where recycling and repurposing are common, property owners may end up with a dumpster area that looks like an episode of “Sanford and Son.” As charming as Fred Sanford is, nothing brings the property value down (besides bad maintenance) quite like a building loaded with junk. And in a COVID-19 environment where waste management companies are notifying customers that they no longer pick up any kind of loose furniture or electronics, you cannot always count on trash pickup day to do the job. So that leaves property managers and condo boards with a few options — pay the special pickup rate for waste management companies to get rid of abandoned furniture, pay a junk truck company to haul it away or try your luck on recycling/repurposing sites such as Craigslist or Freecycle. Giveaways on Craigslist, Freecycle: With Craigslist or Freecycle, you are more likely to find homeowners and tenants who actually want the leftover furniture and/or household supplies. But if you’re trying to socially isolate, posting items on these sites can put you at risk of interacting with a lot of strangers all at once. Freecycle doesn’t allow curbside pickups, so you’d be stuck with leaving furniture in your home or the condo board would have to wait it out by sticking leftover junk in the basement. (Put a time limit on this though because you don’t want a bunch of owners and tenants all leaving their junk all over the basement for weeks, claiming it’s going into storage or being sold online or a yard sale for a vague amount of time.) Whether you give it away for free or for a reasonable price, that’s up to the owner of the items. But this is an easier and cheaper way to do it versus pickups. Just make sure to wear gloves and masks, and keep a six-foot distance. I did not think I could drive a U-Haul truck, but my brother convinced me I could and so I did. (Photo credit: Shamontiel L. Vaughn) Garbage pickup or junk truck pickup: It is completely unfair for owners to be left footing the bill for one tenant moving out. If condo associations don’t already charge a move-in/move-out fee, then the owner of that unit or the tenant renting that space should be required to pay for any leftover furniture that needs a special pickup. Or, pay the movers to deliver it to a charitable organization. (Note: Some charitable organizations will only take gently used to almost-new furniture.) But whatever you do, don’t just let tenants or owners get in the habit of leaving half their home in your parking lot — free of charge. Once one person sees (s)he can do it, this will become a pattern. Of course, tenants and owners don’t always do this maliciously. As stated above, in my childhood home, leaving furniture in the alley was the equivalent of giving it away in less than 24 hours. In some neighborhoods though, this isn’t always the case. Know where you live to understand how quickly that furniture will go. And in COVID-19 times, people just aren’t as open to taking someone’s leftover furniture in. Never mind bedbug or roach risks; now residents have to disinfect everything to avoid adding onto 12.99 million people infected with this virus sweeping the United States (and even more worldwide). Should a move-in/move-out fee be mandatory? On the surface, it would make sense to just charge the fee so then tenants and/or owners who are leaving or coming can freely separate what they want and what they don’t want. They’ve already paid for pickup so they don’t have to worry about someone coming out to wag a finger at them for leftover items. But how unfair is it for tenants or owners who have either given away leftover items or sold them to have to pay this same fee? Unless they damaged the steps, the doors or some other communal or internal area in the process, this added expense is unnecessary.

https://medium.com/homegrown/should-your-condo-association-require-a-move-in-move-out-fee-ae09720675a

['Shamontiel L. Vaughn']

2020-11-29 02:20:49.185000+00:00

['Landlords', 'Tenants', 'Property Management', 'Condominiums', 'Condo Board Association']

A Streaming Birthday Celebration for Michelle Pfeiffer

Welcome to Field of Streams, Cinapse’s weekly guide of what’s playing on your favorite streaming services. What’s new on Netflix and Amazon Prime? What do we recommend on Kanopy, Hoopla, and Shudder? We’ve got it all. From monthly roundups, to curated top 5 lists, to reviews of our favorites available now… it’s here. We built it for you, so come and join us in the Field of Streams. Michelle Pfeiffer turned 62 last week and anyone who knows me, knows that I could not let her birthday go by uncelebrated, even in the midst of a pandemic. Since we all happen to be trapped in our homes (or at least, those of us who are smart and can), every streaming platform is seeing an abundance of activity as the majority of the public look for entertaining movie options to help pass the outbreak. It’s only fitting then that I pay tribute to my favorite actress with a collection of some of her most iconic and/or beloved films around her birthday; all of which can currently be easily found for everyone’s streaming pleasure. Each title represents a watershed moment for the actress in one way or another and all the movies here show how even during times of uncertainty, there’s always La Pfeiffer to help get us through. Scarface (Hulu) Every other actress in Hollywood chased the role of Elvira in Brian DePalma’s ultra-violent 1983 remake of Scarface, but few went as far as Pfeiffer. The stories of her securing the role (the struggling actress repeatedly flew in multiple times on her own dime for audition after audition and accidentally cutting leading man Al Pacino with a plate when she got too far into character during the final callback) have been well-documented. Also well-known, are the lengths to which Pfeiffer transformed herself for the part, which included slimming her already thin frame even further by taking on a strict diet of Marlboro’s and tomato soup to help her achieve the physicality of a coke addict. The move may have backfired when the film’s schedule stretched to six months, but all the risks paid off. Pfeiffer’s work as the drug lord’s wife in Scarface is one of the earliest high points of her career. She not only holds her own amongst the predominantly male cast, but also shows more of a connection with her character than she’d displayed in previous screen turns. Her moments opposite the show-stopping Pacino shows an actress so in tune with her character and the world she belongs in, making it impossible to ever dismiss her.

https://cinapse.co/a-streaming-birthday-celebration-for-michelle-pfeiffer-3285d46a5200

['Frank Calvillo']

2020-05-07 16:33:49.345000+00:00

['Birthday', 'Streaming', 'Movies', 'Field Of Streams', 'Michelle Pfeiffer']

Distance Learning Is Not For Everyone\Distance Learning Study Tips

Photo by Jeswin Thomas on UnsplashDistance Learning Is Not For Everyone Title: Distance Learning Is Not For Everyone Summary: Distance learning is a great advance forward in making education more accessible to millions of Americans who would simply not have the time or resources to obtain a college degree or technical certificate. It allows people from all over the country, even in remote or rural areas to plug into technology that lets them learn, at their own speed and on their own time. But distance learning is not for everyone and some people need the familiar surroundings of a real classroom… Article Body: Distance learning is a great advance forward in making education more accessible to millions of Americans who would simply not have the time or resources to obtain a college degree or technical certificate. It allows people from all over the country, even in remote or rural areas to plug into technology that lets them learn, at their own speed and on their own time. But distance learning is not for everyone and some people need the familiar surroundings of a real classroom and a real teacher in order to learn. Thatís because our traditional education model features three key components that have proven to be effective in helping to educate large numbers of people. Those components are human teacher expression and explanation, student note-taking based on the teacherís presentation, and peer communication between the students that is facilitated by the teacher. Photo by Usman Yousaf on Unsplash None of these elements are present in distance learning and as a result it becomes a foreign way for students, old or young, to receive and process the information in order to learn. In order to be successful in distance learning we must find a way to overcome the fact that these traditional elements are missing in our online education. Some people can do that and others cannot. Other barriers to distance learning include having the ability to be self-motivated and to do all of the necessary work including studying in order to be successful. If you canít study or complete assignments without the monitoring and occasional nudge from a teacher then distance learning may not be for you. Similarly if you donít have the discipline to participate in all online events and to protect your time and space from interruptions and distractions you will find it very hard to go through a distance learning program. Distance learning may not be for you as well if you already have a busy life that involves a lot of time and responsibilities. You can try and study as you watch over your children at the pool, but sooner or later one of your kids will by accident or design pull you away from your studies. You can try and do a distance learning program while working 60 hours at the office, but eventually something will give, and thatís likely to be your homework assignment. Distance learning really is a giant step forward in using technology to improve our lives and education. Just remember that it may not be right for you, at least right now. Photo by Amir Taheri on Unsplash Title: Distance Learning Study Tips Summary: Distance learning is a fabulous new way to get an advanced education. It allows you to work at home on your own schedule and it allows you to set your own pace for learning. But remember, you still have to do all of the work. Itís just like that old saying, easy does it; but do it!! In order to be successful in achieving your distance learning goals you will have to develop a sense and source of personal motivation and you will also need good study habits. Just as successf… Article Body: Distance learning is a fabulous new way to get an advanced education. It allows you to work at home on your own schedule and it allows you to set your own pace for learning. But remember, you still have to do all of the work. Itís just like that old saying, easy does it; but do it!! In order to be successful in achieving your distance learning goals you will have to develop a sense and source of personal motivation and you will also need good study habits. Just as successful students almost always have good study habits, so too is your online success directly tied to good studying in your distance learning program. Here are a few tips to help you get started off on the right foot. Set up a study schedule and stick to it. If you need to do two hours of study for every online hour then schedule a fixed time when you will do your studying. Pick a time when you are least likely to be interrupted, it can be early in the morning before the rest of your family wakes up, or it can be later in the day when everyone is gone to work or school. Donít pick just before dinner when everyone is unwinding and catching up on their day or listening to their favorite, and very loud, music. You need the peace and quiet in order to concentrate. Some people study in the basement or even the garage. It doesnít matter where it is as long as it is convenient, quiet, and conducive to your studies. Plan your study time when everyone else is busy with their own activities. It might be when the kids are gone to sports or dance class or when your spouse is at their bowling night out. It might be Saturday morning while the kids watch cartoons or your wife is sleeping in. It helps if other people are busy because they wonít be able to interrupt your studying. Another tip for successful studying in your distance learning program includes creating a space for yourself within your home where you actually enjoy spending time. Some people like to study on the back porch on nice days or in front of a cozy fire on colder nights. As long as you are comfortable it is a good place to study. Try and protect that space by telling all of your family that this area is off limits during your study time. Make up a small sign that says ìStudent at Workî or even ìQuiet, Pleaseî. You may have to tell them a few times, especially your kids, but sooner rather than later they will get it and respect your need for this study time and space.

https://medium.com/@mohitchawlaji/distance-learning-is-not-for-everyone-distance-learning-study-tips-b401ced838ef

['Mohit Chawla']

2020-12-27 11:46:06.130000+00:00

['Jobs', 'Self', 'Mohit Money', 'Career', 'Mohit Chawla']

Portfolio Spotlight: Sam Kang, VP of Media & Acquisition at Sunday

Portfolio Spotlight: Sam Kang, VP of Media & Acquisition at Sunday From Google to Dollar Shave Club to Sunday, Sam Kang has found a niche blending marketing with brand. Jenna Birch Follow May 22 · 3 min read Sam Kang cut his teeth on search marketing in the early part of his career, which is where he grew the direct response and performance marketing chops that led him to Google in 2013. Strangely enough, he had the exposure to grow far more than DR skills while at the search giant. “At Google, I was helping to sell YouTube, and my client at the time was Disney,” he recalls. “So, I actually learned a lot about branding while at Google.” After a few years as a principal account manager there, the opportunity to join Dollar Shave Club presented itself. Kang says he “relishes the feeling of having to live and die by my decisions, which have a meaningful impact on the business,” making the startup environment uniquely suited to his personality. Besides, DSC was doing something interesting, Kang says, and he wanted to be a part of it. “At the time, they were trying to solve for the tension point between direct response and brand; the CMO at the time, Adam, called it ‘branded response.’” The company’s first commercial encompassed a singular blend of both brand and direct response marketing that excited Kang. “In a meaningful way, it established what the tone of the brand was, how we talk to our customers, how we treat them, and — from a very DR perspective — drove home the point that the razors are quality, but at a very affordable price point,” he says. “That video alone really encapsulated what ‘branded response’ could be.” Obviously, the approach proved successful for the early DTC pioneer. Kang spent four years at Dollar Shave Club. When he’d reached the point where his team was well-equipped, he wanted a new challenge. With some relevant parallels to DSC, Sunday was just that. “It was a much earlier-stage startup, but with a massive incumbent, a space that’s been ignored for a while, and a category that’s not deemed to be sexy, like apparel, beauty, or cars,” he says. “It’s fertilizer!” When you really dig into overlooked categories, Kang says, you tend to find many avenues of potential. “I also saw and felt the passion Coulter had, and understood what he was trying to accomplish with Sunday,” he explains. “In terms of the products, there was an environmental aspect, and having become a recent father of two girls, Sunday sort of took a different flavor [than DSC]. “I don’t want my girls running around in a lawn that might have toxic chemicals in it. I want them to grow up in an environment that feels healthy and safe.” Over the past year, Kang’s been inventive about his approach to marketing Sunday. “Sunday is unique in terms of the product; there’s nothing else like it out there,” he says of the fertilizers filled with custom, sustainable nutrients. “Just by default, we lead with innovation. What’s out there just isn’t good enough. It’s not good enough for our families, it’s not good enough for the planet, and we can do better.” In this way, Kang says, the product speaks for itself once it’s in the hands of the consumer. With a family-centric, care-driven message driving growth, he hopes Sunday will reach many more homes in the months ahead. Learn more at getsunday.com.

https://medium.com/forerunner-insights/portfolio-spotlight-sam-kang-vp-of-media-acquisition-at-sunday-3ebd5da24621

['Jenna Birch']

2021-05-22 17:33:12.631000+00:00

['Startup', 'Talent', 'Forerunner Portfolio', 'Consumer', 'Sunday']

If You Give a Mom a Virtual School Schedule

If You Give a Mom a Virtual School Schedule She’ll probably ask for more coffee… We’re starting at WHAT time, now? (Image credit: Daria Nepriakhina, Unsplash) If you give a mom a virtual school schedule, she’s going to ask for a cup of coffee. When you give her the coffee — oh, you’re busy? No worries, she’ll get it herself, it’s not like she’s got anything else going on — she’s going to need a bigger mug. Once she dumps the dirty paintbrush water out of the bigger mug because no one ran the dishwasher last night but it’s fine, really, she’ll open her work calendar. When she checks her work calendar, she’ll notice that Morning Meeting is scheduled at the same time as Required Staff Meeting. Which is also Yank Sodden Pull-ups Off the Toddler Time. And every other Wednesday is Wacky Hat Day? She’ll probably start crying. When she starts crying, she’ll notice that her laptop camera is on, and that the lighting in the dining room/office/school room/art room/sandcastle-building area is terrible. When she realizes that the lighting is terrible, she’ll decide she needs a ring light. She’ll start researching one. When she has researched enough to make a simple decision much harder, she’ll probably want to take a nap. She’s going to need more coffee. When she gets up to get more coffee, the toddler will assume she’s not working. He will ask her to play with him. She’ll probably start crying. When she starts crying, the toddler will bring her his dump truck to make her feel better. The dump truck will make her cry harder. The dump truck will also remind her that today is trash day. She’s missed the last two trash days, and Pull-Up Mountain is developing fault lines. She’ll race outside in her online meeting shirt and striped pajama bottoms just in time to flag down the trash truck. The trash truck driver will smirk and say, “Someone’s a little off schedule these days, huh?” while he waits for her to lug the trash bin to the big grabby hook. She probably won’t wish that the big grabby hook would go rogue and maybe cause just a little bit of mayhem, not enough to hurt anyone, of course, but just to make things reaaaaaallllly inconvenient for a while, and who’ll make jokes about being “a little off schedule” then, huh? Not her. Because when they go low, she goes high. God, she wishes she was high. She probably needs more coffee. And chances are, by the time she gets back to her mug of cold coffee, it will taste like Crayola paint in every color of the rainbow. She will drink cold rainbows while she looks at the color-coded virtual school calendar. She’ll decide to bake some cookies.

https://medium.com/frazzled/if-you-give-a-mom-a-virtual-school-schedule-4e75c2b9654

['Audrey Burges']

2020-09-08 12:06:01.124000+00:00

['Humor', 'Schools', 'Miscellany', 'Parenting', 'Satire']

Our Bodies, Our Choice: Why WHPA is the Hero Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice Needs

We’ve said it a billion times before and we’ll say it again, just so we’re clear: abortion is a safe, essential component of basic health care and a basic human right. Period, full stop. And, as the Supreme Court recognized nearly 50 years ago in Roe v. Wade, it’s your constitutional right to obtain an abortion — regardless of who you are, how much money you make, or where you live. Brazenly disregarding the very structural foundations of our nation, extremist state officials are ignoring this law of the land to advance their own ideological agendas. Let’s say you live in Texas where, at least 24 hours before the procedure, your provider will give you a state-mandated, medically inaccurate lecture about fetal pain and the negative physical and psychological effects of abortion (including discredited links to breast cancer and infertility). You may live in Missouri, currently one of six states with only one abortion clinic but poised to become the first to no longer offer the procedure since before Roe. Here, without exception for cases of rape or incest or for victims of child abuse, physicians cannot perform an abortion until they have notified a minor patient’s parent and received written consent. All patients must wait 72 hours between receiving state-mandated biased counselling and actually obtaining an abortion. Or maybe you live in Louisiana and are required to obtain an ultrasound at least 24 hours prior to your abortion. During the ultrasound, your provider is legally compelled to show and describe the image to you — but don’t worry, lawmakers were kind enough to allow you to look away. Now, let’s imagine for one horrifying minute that the blatantly unconstitutional restrictions that have been signed into law, passed, or introduced this year actually go into effect. In 2019, at least 30 state legislatures have considered abortion bans; some laws prohibit the procedure after six weeks, before most people even know they are pregnant, while others automatically outlaw all (or nearly all) abortions should Roe be overturned. Alabama’s outright abortion ban — which includes language directly comparing abortion to the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity — extends to every stage of pregnancy and makes performing the procedure a felony punishable by up to 99 years in prison. And in Texas, Representative Tony Tinderholt introduced a bill threatening people who have an abortion and their providers with the death penalty. This is just a snapshot of the wave of draconian abortion restrictions sweeping the nation. As if this trend wasn’t terrifying enough, the original abortion ban (the Hyde Amendment) already pushes care out of reach for countless patients despite tireless efforts to end the discriminatory policy. Hyde will continue to disproportionately impact low-income people, people of color, young people, immigrants, and LGBTQ individuals regardless of whether these new restrictions ever take effect or whether those that have already been implemented are eventually invalidated. And somehow, this is nothing new. Anti-abortion zealots have been openly designing laws to challenge Roe since 1973, claiming that they hope to return the power to regulate abortion throughout pregnancy to the states. However, the rise of “fetal personhood” legislation tells a different story. Georgia’s six-week ban specifically proclaims that “unborn children are a class of living, distinct person” to whom the state should provide “full legal recognition.” This language enables so-called “pro-lifers” to argue that the Supreme Court should extend the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause to fetuses and enact a nationwide abortion ban declaring that “life” begins at conception. As an advocate, as an American, as a human, I am sick, I am outraged, and I am appalled; I am dozens of other adjectives that describe a person who is absolutely disgusted by our current reality, by the criminalization of pregnancy, and by forced births. But I am not done fighting for my community, for those most impacted by these unconscionable restrictions, and for a future of equal access to abortion for everyone, everywhere. I am inspired by those who have come before me and by those who have dedicated their lives to the reproductive health, rights, and justice movement. For over 125 years, the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) has worked to make change happen and to pursue justice for all. Our 90,000 members and supporters won’t be bullied, shamed, or punished and we won’t back down until every single person can make their own decisions about their body, family, and future. We certainly won’t stand idly by while barriers to health care jeopardize any individual’s autonomy, health, or economic security and we won’t allow lawmakers to violate one of our country’s founding principles — cemented in the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause — by enshrining one religious view of “life” into law. Our Jewish values compel us to call for a federal law to end these dangerous, medically unnecessary restrictions and to secure full access to safe and legal abortion as basic health care. The Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA, HR 2975/S 1645) is that law. The bill would create a new tool for safeguarding access to high-quality care and securing constitutional rights by protecting patients and providers from political interference. WHPA permits health care providers to deliver abortion services without limitations that are more burdensome than those imposed on medically comparable procedures, do not significantly advance patient health or the safety of abortion, or make abortion more difficult to access. Importantly, the legislation also establishes a new test for courts to apply when considering whether a requirement impedes access to abortion services in violation of WHPA. Together with the EACH Woman Act’s (HR 1962/S 758) permanent end to Hyde, WHPA has the power to decimate major barriers to comprehensive abortion care and to recognize fully the promise of Roe: that pregnant individuals would not only have the right to choose abortion, but would also be able to freely access the procedure. We must turn our outrage into action and push Congress to put patient health first. It’s time to show up and fight back for reproductive rights, for human rights, and for equality and justice for all.

https://srussell-91514.medium.com/our-bodies-our-choice-why-whpa-is-the-hero-reproductive-health-rights-and-justice-needs-edbe228d63c7

['Shannon Russell']

2019-06-06 17:28:06.104000+00:00

['Abortion', 'Women', 'Reproductive Justice', 'Reproductive Health', 'Reproductive Rights']

Sign-in with email in 5 minutes using FirebaseUI

Let’s code a bit 👨🏼‍💻 Go over to your ViewController.swift file and import the FirebaseUI framework at the top: Add the FUIAuthDelegate to your ViewController class, right after UIViewController: Now, let’s set up a button, from which we will be able to present the Firebase authViewController. Copy and paste the code below into your ViewController and call setupSignUPButton() inside the viewDidLoad method. This creates a simple button with a blue background color that sits at the bottom of our app’s screen. Let’s give our button an action: replace the current objective-c function with the code below to make the pre-made authViewController pop-up: Super simple, right? Here, we are simply asking to present the built-in authViewController which contains the sign-in method from different providers. So far we have only added emails inside the array, but you can add Google and Apple’s sign-in methods, and many more!

https://medium.com/swift-productions/sign-in-with-email-in-5-minutes-firebaseui-bc4b563811c1

['Sullivan De Carli']

2020-12-03 09:18:52.853000+00:00

['Swift', 'Firebaseauthentication', 'Firebase', 'Programming', 'iOS App Development']

The Essence of Minimalism is Far More Reaching than Just Dispensing

WHAT HAS CHANGED THIS THANKSGIVING This Thanksgiving year is significantly different than in recent years. As of the end of September 2020, over 97,000 U.S. Businesses have gone under due to the pandemic, Black Friday shopping events have been changed online and spread out earlier and longer, and medical professionals in hospitals will have it especially stressful and with nonstop action away from their own families to deal with patients that are part of the rising COVID-19 cases (see this interesting article by Katie Kindelan, 23 Nov 2020, ‘Nurses, doctors use social media to plead for public to take COVID-19 seriously’). If we consider actively the plans and the purpose for keeping all that white noise on in our everyday lives, we might come to realize or be reminded that we know it not only can poorly shape our understanding or impressions we have of our presumed circumstances (sometimes really for the bad like false panic), but it can derail us from our ultimate psychological health as well as distract us from who we were to become as the best___________[you fill in the blank]. It’s certainly necessary to keep a pulse on large impactful happenings, like Supreme Court rulings, domestic and global debates, and obvious existential threats, but it’s all too natural but unproductive to allow anything else that is unnecessary or unhelpful intruding into our consciousnesses all the time just as if they were those piercing ‘emergency’ push notifications we don’t turn off of our smartphone apps, and then subsequently end up engaging with all the info bombardment as either an uncontrollable addict or as a complete stone wall (an all or nothing impulse due to overwhelm or disdain). Rather, when we decide to choose to actively ignore unnecessary noise and search out our own purposes or our individual questions, be they towards our goals or about our curiosities behind national and global maladies, and learn to navigate within the noise, there is a whole other level of living and awareness that doesn’t have to be filled with imposed uncertainty and panic and imposed emotions of others. HOLLYWOOD HINTED IT FOR US There is this prevailing concept that we intuitively believe and which has already been presented forthright, though fictionalized, in the American science fiction film, The Matrix (1999), that the general public is somehow captive and even possibly blinded by those who control and produce the perception of the world around us. And by doing so, we (like those of the protagonist camp in the film) become under direct psychological control unbeknownst to ourselves and among the general farmed population. In the movie, it is perhaps arguably speculative or fictional science, but metaphorically, it has analogous elements to real life in that if we let those ‘forces’ (media, hype, etc.) dictate how we should feel and live, what we should buy, who we should love, what we should do, and ultimately let it constrain us on exactly the form, the shape, and the path of each of us to merely exist, it can interfere detrimentally to what we could have had individually for our own peaceful and fulfilling lives. THINK FOR OURSELVES It’s not wise to ignore fundamental science or national politics that can directly affect us: COVID-19 is real — see this ICU doctor’s social media post plea showing what our last moments look like, and the threat exists of a weakening democracy during this pandemic: Experts from 66 countries said the virus had “led to a proliferation of disinformation coming from the government” in their nation. Assessing accurate information had become more difficult due to crackdowns on freedom of speech — in at least 91 of 192 countries studied, there were restrictions on news media. — Taylor, Adam. ‘Democracies are backsliding amid the coronavirus pandemic’, 2 Oct 2020, The Washington Post. But the necessity also exists that one must take control of our own personal destinies without the instructions or collective nagging of influential advertisements, corporations, and suggestions made by those whom you either don’t personally know or by your making some quick (and possibly inferior) judgment about the information they are providing without having a complete grasp or understanding as to ulterior motives (who ultimately benefits from it?) or if the information were factual without searching it out for yourself first. We are forced constantly to make incomplete conclusions, including panicking, when we haven’t sedately considered a wider perspective or pursued facts that may ultimately challenge our own presumptions before making a firm decision on a matter or of a person. Ironically, as a related aside, that is also what writing directly does for me as well by forcing me to research evidence and background, context to the crux of the argument I wish to make, and in so doing sometimes I find I must adjust my original argument or even add to it in different ways because of the natural evolution of consuming newly found information that widens my original viewpoint. THE VALUE AND VENTURE OF THE INTERNET The internet has provided us a way to share almost seamlessly anything from anybody no matter their beliefs, credentials, profession, passions, etc. It’s wonderful in the sense that there are less gatekeepers to talents, creativity, and ideas from all over the globe. But the clear danger here is our own lack of or vulnerable personal filtering with vetted knowledge, science, education on a particular topic, and our own weaknesses to emotional persuasion — which is a skill we were taught in our primary schools to apply in making a convincing argument or advertisement to sell a product or an idea (and the subtle ones are quite ingenious like these mentioned here). Scammers (or mega sales!) use the sense of urgency to get our attention to make a decision in their favor, in the similar fashion that a push notification or a bit of viral tweet or Facebook post targets your attention in order to compel you to think or act in a certain way. The Matrix movie was proposing that the awareness of the ‘lie’ (the false world created by those in control around the characters) was a galvanizing force for the majority of the rebels (though the affect was not the same for all — as for the character Cypher who wanted to betray the group to the antagonists). But in exactly the same way in which if we are aware of or understand the ploys being deployed at us, it can 1) become an impetus for protesting (as we’ve witnessed globally this year) but 2) it can also naturally become a sport of not wanting to be outwitted or duped (and sometimes for humor or fun with no hard feelings if the ploys are not for life or death and not for serious keeps). But while certain ploys are indeed beyond the line of sport and propriety or principles (democratic or otherwise), it’s quite something else if we were to fall for something and unknowingly live in an engineered circumstance not of our making, intentionally constructed to sway us away from our own best selves or our goals. ‘THE MATRIX’ WORLD The flip side of awareness seems to be this ability of our media and the system to elicit sentiments and behaviors out of us that many times could be viewed as cold, clueless, and cannibalistic. As evidenced in our consumerism, celebrity culture, and greed, we can appear selfish, narcissistic and callous in the face of any news or events of pitfall, downfall, and doom not directly affecting ourselves, our lives, or our loved ones, and we can be bitterly unforgiving in our comments and thoughts regarding people’s opinions, appearance and life choices. As I am not completely immune to these sentiments and reactions either, my conclusion has been to strip away these alarming distractions from the media and practice a kind of mindfulness, returning to one’s core self and values and coalesce my beliefs with an existing spiritual teaching or way of life that brings out compassion, patience, love, and fearlessness in living in a manner of my choice that isn’t necessarily accepted as mainstream or popular. I take inspiration from bits of news found when I seek out my own interests and came upon this story of an opportunity taken by this small business owner whose business went under from the pandemic and since he was also living by the FIRE (Financial Independence and Retiring Early) code, he took it upon himself and created two non-for-profit organizations, Helping Hands, to donate coats, and With Kindness (in D.C.), to run a 24/7 food drive, all for the needy this winter). This was clearly something that this person chose to do (most wouldn’t imagine giving even more when their business closes down), and he obviously wasn’t prevented by distractions of media or unnecessary pressures other than those of his own and made it happen with the resources, family, and friends he has. This exudes that practice of minimalism in thinking — focusing on the meat of what matters to him and taking whatever steps without distraction to achieve his goal. Yes, this leads us on a path of self-improvement, maybe self-reflection, but ultimately to enlightened versions of ourselves.

https://medium.com/betterism/the-essence-of-minimalism-is-far-more-reaching-than-just-dispensing-83d0e5f51730

['The Secret Aspirant']

2021-01-27 07:03:16.824000+00:00

['Minimalism', 'Self Improvement', 'Thanksgiving', 'New Year Resolution', 'Life']

An Introduction to Time-series Analysis Using Python and Pandas

So… what’s a time series and what makes it special? From the initial data exploration, it was clear that we are dealing with what is known as a time series. Time series is just a fancy way of saying we are dealing with data points indexed in time order. Usually, when dealing with time series we look for some special characteristics in our data to be able to make predictions based on it. Specifically, we look for a time series that is stationary. Stationarity of a time series We can say that a time series is stationary when its mean and variance are not a function of time (i.e., they are constant through time). Stationarity is important because most of the statistical methods to perform analysis and forecasting work on the assumption that the statistical properties (mean, variance, correlation, etc.) of the series are constant in time. How to test the stationarity of a time series? Stationarity can be assessed in two ways: Visually inspect the data points and check how the statistical properties vary in time. Perform a Dickey-Fuller test. Let us take a visual approach first and see how it goes. By plotting the standard deviation and mean along with the original data points, we can see that both of them are somewhat constant in time. However, they seem to follow a cyclical behavior. Although the visual approach can give us a clue, applying the Dicky-Fuller Test (DF-test) can provide a more precise way to measure the stationarity of our series. Results of DF-test I will not go through much detail on how the DF-test work, but let’s say all we need to care about is the numbers we see in “Test Statistic” and “Critical Values”. We always want the former to be less than the latter. And the lesser the value of Test Statistic the better. Our series is stationary given that the Test Statistic is less than all the Critical Values, though not by much. In case you ever need it, below goes the code I used to evaluate the stationarity. def test_stationarity(timeseries): # Determining rolling statistics rolmean = timeseries.rolling(12).mean() rolstd = timeseries.rolling(12).std() # Plot rolling statistics: orig = plt.plot(timeseries, color='blue',label='Original') mean = plt.plot(rolmean, color='red', label='Rolling Mean') std = plt.plot(rolstd, color='black', label = 'Rolling Std') plt.legend(loc='best') plt.title('Rolling Mean & Standard Deviation') plt.show(block=False) # Perform Dickey-Fuller test: print ('Results of Dickey-Fuller Test:') timeseries = timeseries.iloc[:,0].values dftest = adfuller(timeseries, autolag='AIC') dfoutput = pd.Series(dftest[0:4], index=['Test Statistic','p-value','#Lags Used','Number of Observations Used']) for key,value in dftest[4].items(): dfoutput['Critical Value (%s)'%key] = value print(dfoutput) What if our time series was non-stationary? There are some techniques one can apply to stationarise a time series. The two I am more familiar with are: Transformation: apply transformation which penalizes higher values more than smaller values. These can be taking a log, square root, cube root, etc. This method helps in reducing the trend. Differencing: take the difference of the observation at a particular instant with that at the previous point in time. This deals with both trend and seasonality, hence improving stationarity. Pandas and numpy provide you with very practical ways to apply these techniques. For the sake of demonstration, I will apply a log transformation to the dataframe. # Transform the dataframe: ts_log = np.log(data_df) # Replace infs with NaN ts_log.replace([np.inf, -np.inf], np.nan, inplace=True) # Remove all the NaN values ts_log.dropna(inplace=True) Bonus track: We can even apply a smoothing technique over the transformed data set to remove the noise that may be present. A common smoothing technique is to subtract the Moving Average from the data set. This can be achieved as easy as: # Get the moving average of the series moving_avg = ts_log.rolling(12).mean() # 12 months # Subtract the moving average of the log-transformed dataframe ts_log_moving_avg_diff = ts_log - moving_avg # Remove all the NaN values ts_log_moving_avg_diff.dropna(inplace=True) test_stationarity(ts_log_moving_avg_diff) Clearly, we can see that applying log transformation + moving average smoothing to our original series resulted in a better series; in terms of stationarity. To apply differencing, Pandas shift() function can be used. In this case, first order differencing was applied using the following code. ts_log_diff = ts_log - ts_log.shift() plt.plot(ts_log_diff) Log-transformed data set after differencing Let us perform a DF-test on this new resulting series. ts_log_diff.dropna(inplace=True) test_stationarity(ts_log_diff) With the log transformation and differencing the test statistic is significantly smaller than the critical values, therefore this series is too more stationary than the original series. Wrapping up… When we face a predictive task that involves a time series, we need to analyze said series and determine whether it is stationary or not. To determine the stationarity, we can either plot the data and visually inspect the mean and other statistical properties or perform a Dickey-Fuller Test and look at the Test Statistic and Critical Values. In case the series happens to be non-stationary, we can apply techniques such as transformation or differencing to stationarise the series. After all this analysis and preparation, the next step on the project was to forecast with the time series, but that’s a topic for another post :)

https://pub.towardsai.net/an-introduction-to-time-series-analysis-using-python-and-pandas-222fe72b191a

['Oscar Arzamendia']

2019-05-30 18:29:10.910000+00:00

['Data Science', 'Pandas', 'Time Series Analysis', 'Featured', 'Python']

Cost-Effective Marketing Advice for Nonprofits

In the COVID-19 Special Edition Customer Engagement Report from the Merkle Group, it was revealed that most industries are increasing their marketing spend. However, there was one glaring exception: nonprofits. According to the Merkle Group report, just 17 percent of nonprofits are increasing their marketing spend compared to over 50 percent of organizations in other industries. While many nonprofits have traditionally walked a tight line with limited budgets, this year has been markedly difficult. Event revenue is suffering and members are experiencing a world that disconnects them from community events organized by nonprofit organizations. But marketing is still essential for nonprofits. Not only does marketing amplify your mission, but it raises awareness, encourages donations, and attracts volunteers. Our team has worked with many nonprofits and our goal is to show organizations how to simplify their marketing efforts with clear, effective strategies. With that said, here are several options that won’t break the bank: Search Engine Optimization Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is how your brand increases its presence and ranking online. From fixing broken links to identifying keywords, SEO has become a foundational component for effective marketing. Searchability as a nonprofit builds credibility, increases web traffic, and impacts long-term ROI. Being able to adapt on a dime and curate optimized content with relevant keywords, (valued highest in your posts title, url, meta-description tags, image file names, and first 100 words of a paragraph) will drastically improve your page rank, relevance, and brand authority. We broke SEO strategy down in a previous blog post, but as a quick refresher, here are a few key takeaways: Content Audit: If you want to illuminate your own path in a media landscape that is still finding its footing, it can be helpful to analyze and allocate all existing content to understand what resonates with your current audience. This includes studying your website, social media channels, and email marketing campaigns. Flex Expertise: People want to know that there are real human beings behind every brand. Show them who you are, what you offer, and how you are going to help them through tough times. Feed consumers a message and nurture leads organically from there. Pivot Publishing: To keep pace with other companies also pushing out their content, explore new channels and avenues to expand into. Live streams, webinars, and personalized workshops from the safety of someone’s computer will show that you still care about educating them and providing a service while staying ahead of current trends. Much of the way nonprofits communicate with their audience has shifted from offline to online platforms — especially during COVID. And that means that purely digital ways of reaching potential customers or members are more important than ever — paying attention to search could result in massive traffic upticks. Social Media Micromarketing Why wait for people to start talking about your brand when you can build the channel for them to do so? When it comes to nonprofit marketing, social media is an excellent tool. You can reach donors and volunteers on a more personal level and don’t need to commit a massive amount of time to grow your audience. There are a few keys to a successful nonprofit social media account. You want to remain active and open with your audiences to routinely communicate your mission. Not only should your social media moves tie back into your larger brand communications and digital strategy, but it should work to build a community for your audiences. We also strongly recommend actively watching social media algorithms and staying educated on new updates to major social platforms. If you’re wondering what to post, sharing a story, relatable news, or an engagement poll are all great options. To inspire empathy, consider mixing in visual content like video. You can also develop custom hashtags promoting user-generated content, building a community through a private Facebook or LinkedIn group, and creating a Slack channel open to users who want to chat among themselves about the brand. This allows users to connect and generate buzz without a member of your team having to be actively involved. Another option is to leverage community advocates or people who have a vested interest in the advancement of your mission. It can be anyone who exemplifies what you want your brand to represent. Users respond well to others who are passionate about your mission and your work. Vibrant Emotional Health is a great example with their “Stories of Hope” page, amplifying the stories of individuals that Vibrant has helped. These advocates are everyday people showcasing the benefit of Vibrant’s work through their own eyes. List Segmentation List segmentation in email marketing means that you’re able to deliver more relevant content at optimal frequencies to your email subscribers. This comes in handy given that email is a tipping point for permission marketing, meaning that your supporters are giving you permission to interact with them on a deeper level than social media or your website. In searching for public support, a common outreach tactic is to cast a wide net and get as much communication out there to as many people as possible. While this is a helpful advocacy approach in some situations, this may reduce alignment between brand and member. Instead, nonprofits can use segmentation to develop targeted communications and advocacy approaches. Here are a few ways to segment your email lists: 1. Past volunteers Share updates on new opportunities or give past volunteers first access to events at your organization. 2. Event attendees If someone previously attended, they’re likely to attend again. You’ll communicate with these supporters in a different way than you would talk with audiences who have yet to join you for anything. 3. Lapsed users These are users who signed up for your email list but haven’t taken action since that sign-up. 4. Demographic segmentation Centered on age, gender identification, or location — this is helpful to bring in new data and insights to your organization while catering your message to meet specific audience needs. 5. Geographic location Useful if you have nationwide affiliates. And if you run local programs, you’ll also want to speak to users in your neighborhood differently than those who subscribe to your list but live on the other side of the world. 6. Donors Like event attendees, these are going to be people more invested in your work. Also, consider segmenting between current donors and lapsed donors. Once your lists are segmented, you can start using gated pages, or content that is hidden behind a form. Companies often use gated pages to generate leads while providing the user with a piece of valuable content. Leverage Marketing to Promote Your Cause Your organization might not operate for profit, but it can still value from the traffic, funds, and awareness that effective marketing strategies bring in. Not only will these tactics help promote your organization, but they’ll free up more time to dedicate to your cause and constituents.

https://medium.com/beyond-definition/cost-effective-marketing-advice-for-nonprofits-50931423525e

['Beyond Definition']

2020-12-17 15:38:17.264000+00:00

['SEO', 'Marketing', 'Search Engine Marketing', 'Strategy', 'Nonprofit']

Send America to Counseling

Send America to Counseling If America were a person, would it be that hard to see her biggest faults? Photo by tom coe on Unsplash Imagine America as a person, the same as you and me. To avoid confusion, let’s assume for this exercise that America is a “she/her” Given that America is now a person, try to attach a personality to her. I imagine we all would come up with different answers, yet I believe our person generally has a lot of mental health issues. We don’t need to address identity here; for this piece, let’s focus on the psychological aspects of America, the person. At this point, one can assume there is a consensus that if America were a person, she would need professional help. Given that, let’s now assume that we’re the therapist and America is our patient. Here’s what I see in the patient: The person I have in my head is struggling a great deal. She suffers from constant internal conflict. Making any decision is quite a struggle for her. Each situation is met with different choices, each option with significant influence within her and with different motivations. Regardless of context, whatever decision she makes, is a painful, exhausting, and generally destructive process for her and those around her. But often, she struggles to make any decision at all, as the conflict within her rages on. Signs of Bipolar Disorder have shown before, but it’s likely just Depression that she’s suffering from. The past four months, in particular, have been overshadowed by numerous depressive episodes. Yet, the Bipolar tendencies linger just below the surface, as any number of “triggers” can send her into a deep depression or a manic rage in an instant. Her ego is perhaps her most significant weakness of all, yet she’s oblivious to it. Her insecurity is off the charts and her deeply-embedded fear throughout many walks of life, only adds constant fuel to the fire that is her ego. She’s often defensive, prideful, vengeful, controlling, & dishonest, among other things. Criticism is never met well with her, yet she’s quick to get caught up in the victim mentality, in which all negativity in her life is to the fault of others and never herself. Her ego clouds her judgment always, lending herself to irrational decision making before rational thought processes. She’s unaware of this, as she moves on in life with a whole lot of confidence and arrogance. America, she’s emotional to the core. Emotion is at the heart of her being and pushed her deep into a life lived with much ignorance. The abundance of ignorance only increases the role fear plays in her life, again only functioning to fuel the ego. She’s still unaware of how out of control her fear is and how responsible it is in many of the negative instances in her life. This irrational fear drives her to hatred, as she struggles to cope with entities she not only does not understand but is utterly afraid of. One must get through to America, as her hatred, as seen numerous times in her life, will soon spill over into destruction. Such destruction she has survived before, but for how much longer? And how many people must she takedown in her destructive path until she’s pushed to change? Despite the destruction that those in her path have been met with, America still has much beauty. She’s seen it before, she knows deep down it’s there, but that beauty is beginning to fade in the distance. Damage to herself, among many others, may not be salvageable. But her future is. We cannot merely excuse past behavior like it never happened, but we can forgive. Only if, however, America’s willing to change herself. It seems as of late the willingness is there, but change requires much more than desire. First, she must get her curiosity in the form of genuinely wanting to learn. To do so, however, requires honesty with oneself, something America often struggles to do. Beyond these three factors, America must also display genuine openness. America must realize she doesn’t have all the answers, and even if she believes she does, to still be open to hearing and considering different perspectives. If she can take these factors and add focus as her final ingredient, she has a fighting shot at making real change. Her ego has been out of control too long; it’s time she checks it at the door. Doing so will open up so much in her life and enrich the lives of those around her. She could also benefit from some cognitive reframing, as she often fails to see other perspectives in situations. Such lack of perspective causes every negative occurrence to get further out of control and often leads to a chain reaction of additional adverse events in her life. America needs some help. She needs education. She needs to be humbled. She needs to understand the impact of her actions. But above all, she needs to be willing to admit she’s wrong and make an effort to change. Let us all be the therapist that America so desperately needs. But in doing so, let’s make sure we hold ourselves to high standards as well. For if we’re to be a therapist that helps save America, then we must do our absolute best to rid ourselves of emotion and bias, no matter how hard it is to do so. America has enough passion to go around, let us not match fire with fire or hatred with hatred. As the therapist to our lost America, we must act in the best interest of the patient. This is not to say that our patient doesn’t need guidance and education as to the best way forward. Though our patient’s actions can significantly influence our life as her therapist, we must provide her with the best care, free of as much emotion and bias as possible. Despite our emotional ties and history with this patient, we must still treat her as if she were any other patient. America the beautiful isn’t gone for good, but her beauty becomes more hidden seemingly every day. She needs to meet us in the middle, perhaps further than that, but let’s help her on her journey. Let’s allow America to see the beauty she still has, before the endless scars she bears. She has a lot to make up for and make right, but she first needs to be reminded that she’s worth fighting for.

https://medium.com/an-injustice/send-america-to-counseling-9dd0a3d5c190

['Garrett Rutledge']

2020-07-09 16:44:04.359000+00:00

['Change', 'Mental Health', 'Unity', 'America', 'Culture']

Keep your graphs and charts honest by avoiding these common data visualization pitfalls.

Whether in school or in the workplace, the majority of us have had to either read or create charts and graphs at some point in our lives. This graphic representation of data, called “data visualization” or “data viz,” has been our go-to method for understanding how numbers correlate to one another for centuries. In fact, the first-ever line and bar graphs were developed as early as 1786, when William Playfair released The Commercial and Political Atlas. Playfair wanted to compare the total amount of exports to the total amount of imports in Scotland over a single-year period (from 1780 to 1781), broken down by source/destination. To chart total numbers, identify locations, and differentiate imports from exports, he realized that a combination of bars and scales would do the trick. The result was the first recorded bar graph in history, pictured above. At the time, Playfair was navigating uncharted waters, but today, charts and graphs are extremely commonplace. Over the years, tools such as Excel, Tableau, and PowerPoint have made it extremely easy for us to quickly visualize data sets and share them widely. Given this, you might be surprised to learn that mistakes in data visualizations run rampant in the world of visual content. For instance, it’s common to assume that comparing numbers to one another always requires a bar chart, while showing percentages always requires a pie chart. Or sometimes it’s assumed that a bar chart can have multiple scales, or worse, no scale at all. We have taken charts and graphs for granted. Because they’re so easy to produce, we automatically assume they’re accurate. But tools such as Excel and PowerPoint just visualize the numbers we input; they don’t consider the context of those numbers to determine their best graphical representation. To identify the right visualization to use, we must first consider the story we are trying to tell, just as Playfair did. We must consider how the associated numbers correlate to one another and to the context in which the data was collected. Without this information, the potential that the data will be improperly visualized grows exponentially — an issue that can greatly hinder the success of any visual content strategy and the reputation of the brand that publishes that incorrect data viz.

https://betterhumans.pub/keep-your-graphs-and-charts-honest-by-avoiding-these-common-data-visualization-pitfalls-6d2d717a3f0

['Amy Balliett']

2020-11-05 23:57:00.823000+00:00

['Infographics', 'Information Design', 'Data Visualization', 'Charts', 'Graphic Design']

Pokebot 3. Setting up for Slack, AWS and Serverless.com

This is the third part of an 8 part tutorial building an event-driven, serverless Slack Bot. You can start the series here Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash In this section If we don’t have them already we need to set up accounts for Slack and Amazon Web Services (AWS). We also need to install the serverless.com toolset which will enable us to easily configure and deploy our lambdas. Lastly we’ll deploy the first version of our gateway lambda and get it talking securely to Slack. Installation and configuration is never easy so this part may be a tad lengthy but I’ve made each step as explicit as I can so you should have little problem completing it. It’s worth getting setup properly before fun starts. Install the serverless.com cli tools We could just code straight into the AWS console which is fine for standalone lambdas (AWS even gives us some basic testing tools) but this becomes increasingly difficult as the number of lambdas in an application grows. I prefer to code on my laptop, deploy multiple lambdas at once (more typical in a larger application) and to store my code in source control. Serverless.com provides us with a set of tools that are ideal for this. The tools are cloud provider agnostic and they let us build and configure our code in any language supported by the cloud provider we are using. They can be used on a laptop or as part of a CI/CD pipeline. This isn’t a tutorial on CI/CD so in our case we’ll be working from a laptop. When I first dipped my toe into lambda coding the serverless tools go me from know-nothing to a (simple) deployed app in less than a couple of hours. I can’t recommend them highly enough. node and npm The serverless.com cli tools are installed using the the node package manager, npm so if you don’t have node installed then we need to install it. I’m not really a javascript person so I started with the excellent nodenv which lets me install and manage multiple versions of node without having to know much at all. I started writing this tutorial using bash, installed nodenv using homebrew and configured my bash profile thus (this also works for zsh). brew install nodenev nodenv init # in .zshrc or .bashrc export PATH=”$HOME/.nodenv/bin:$PATH” eval “$(nodenv init -)” curl -fsSL # test the nodenv setup:curl -fsSL https://github.com/nodenv/nodenv-installer/raw/master/bin/nodenv-doctor | bash Half way through writing I changed to a newer Mac that used zsh not bash and discovered another excellent tool — oh-my-zsh which sets up many of the common command line installations and profile configurations I need such as git & rbenv — but seamlessly & way better than I could ever do for myself. Out of the box oh-my-zsh gave me many baked-in installations such a git and rbenv but for nodenv I had to install a custom oh-my-zsh plugin zsh-nodenv. Install the tools To install the serverless.com tools we’ll need to setup a local version of npm so we may as well start by creating a folder for our Pokebot app and installing a local version of npm using nodenv. I used node 15.0.1 mkdir ~/devel/pokebot cd ~/devel/pokebot # install node nodenv install --list nodenv install 15.0.1 nodenv local 15.0.1 Now we can use npm to install the serverless-cli tools npm install -g serverless Set up our Amazon Web Services account If you don’t have an account already then create a free cloud account on AWS. We’ll be deploying our application to this account. AWS gives you a lot of usage for free so it’s very unlikely you’ll be incurring any costs. Create our deploy user First we need to create an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user that has the permissions to deploy our code . The serverless tools don’t just deploy lambda code they set up an entire stack of resources using AWS Cloudformation that are needed to run our lambdas. Our deploy user will need to have the permissions to create whatever resources, roles and permissions our serverless application needs. Login to the AWS console and choose the service IAM: Select the Users section and click ‘Add User’ IAM User Console Create the pokebot-deploy user, we only need programmatic access. IAM Add User Our deploy user will need permissions to create quite a few resources in the Cloudformation stack so let’s assign our user to the admin group. Remember this user is only for creating resources our lambdas won’t be running as this user. You can leave the next stage, “tags” empty, click Review and the Create User. This will take you to a screen like this: Now we have a user we will need to setup aws credentials on our laptop so when we deploy stuff using the serverless-cli tools they can programmatically access the AWS platform as our pokebot-deploy user. Start by clicking the Download.csv button to download the access token for this user. If you don’t already have an ~/.aws/credentials folder/file then create one. You’ll find the access key id and secret access key in the new_user_credentials.csv that you downloaded just now. If, for some reason, that hasn’t worked you can always return to your user in the AWS console, choose the ‘security credentials’ tab and create a new access key. add the following lines to ~/.aws/credentials [pokebot-deploy] aws_access_key_id=abc123def aws_secret_access_key=123abc456 Create the Slack App A single slack account can have multiple workspaces. I have a workspace for school-hours work, a workspace I use to collaborate with colleagues on out-of-hours projects and a workspace for a CTO group that I belong-to. You’ll need a slack account and workspace to create the pokebot. If you don’t have an account browse to https://slack.com during account creation you’ll be asked to create a workspace. Typically a workspace is where you communicate with your team mates but you can create one just to develop the bot. NOTE: If you already use slack your account already has a workspace — typically the slack workspace where you work but you may not have permissions to develop a bot in this workspace. Just log-in to slack and create your own workspace to develop your pokebot. Once you’ve created your Slack workspace you’ll be able to browse to api.slack.com where you should see “Your Apps” in the top right. If you don’t see ‘Your Apps’ but something like ‘Go to Slack’ then you need to sign-in to slack and return to api.slack.com. Choose “your apps” and “Create New App” Let’s start coding the Gateway lambda… Our Slack App needs to know where to send events and for this we need an https endpoint. We’ll do this by building and deploying the very first cut of our gateway lambda. This first cut won’t do much but the first time we deploy our lambda AWS will give us an https endpoint that we can use to configure Slack. So lets start coding. Make sure we are in our application folder we created after installing nodenv e.g. cd ~/deve/pokebot Then initialise serverless.com using a template that is suited for ruby on aws: sls create -t aws-ruby running the ls command we can see that sls create (sls is an alias for serverless) has created a ruby file handler.rb and a serverless.yml file which we’ll use to configure our lambda. configure and code the gateway lambda Our application comprises of several lambdas that we will be creating in this folder so first rename handler.rb to gateway.rb mv handler.rb gateway.rb We also need to amend the default code. The puts will log the incoming event from aws so we can see that in Cloudwatch logs. We’ll just return the plain text ‘hello from pokebot’ so we can test our lambda in console. require 'json' def handle(event:, context:) puts event { statusCode: 200, body: 'hello from pokebot', headers: {"content-type" => "text/plain"} } end Configure the serverless.yml. The default files has a lot of commented out options which I have ignored in the example below for simplicity: Set the service name, a service can be one or more lambdas. Our service is the pokebot so that will be out gateway, controller and responder lambdas. It’s worth grouping them into a single service as they are likely to have a lot of shared configuration that we can put DRYley into the serverless.yml service: pokebot # our application name frameworkVersion: ‘2’ # serverless framework Set profile, environment and the AWS region you wish to use (in my case eu-west-1 as I live in the UK — I know eu-west-1 is Ireland but at the time of writing the UK data centre, eu-west-2, didn’t provide all the services I need and besides, I’m half Irish) provider: name: aws # Amazon Wen Services runtime: ruby2.7 profile: pokebot-deploy # the profile in ~/.aws/credentials stage: development # dev, staging production or whetever…. region: eu-west-1 # aws region Rename our function from hello and configure it so that it responds to an HTTP POST (this will give us our endpoint) to the path /gateway. functions: gateway: handler: gateway.handle # the handle method in gateway.rb events: - httpApi: method: POST path: /gateway now let’s deploy our lambda sls deploy It will take a few minutes because Serverless is doing a lot more than uploading our lambda code, it’s creating an entire AWS Cloudformation stack. The output in our console will look something like this: Serverless: Excluding development dependencies... Serverless: Creating Stack... Serverless: Checking Stack create progress... ........ Serverless: Stack create finished... Serverless: Uploading CloudFormation file to S3... Serverless: Uploading artifacts... Serverless: Uploading service pokebot.zip file to S3 (2.52 KB)... Serverless: Validating template... Serverless: Updating Stack... Serverless: Checking Stack update progress... .............................. Serverless: Stack update finished... Service Information service: pokebot stage: development region: eu-west-1 stack: pokebot-development resources: 11 api keys: None endpoints: POST - functions: gateway: pokebot-development-gateway layers: None Serverless: Packaging service...Serverless: Excluding development dependencies...Serverless: Creating Stack...Serverless: Checking Stack create progress...........Serverless: Stack create finished...Serverless: Uploading CloudFormation file to S3...Serverless: Uploading artifacts...Serverless: Uploading service pokebot.zip file to S3 (2.52 KB)...Serverless: Validating template...Serverless: Updating Stack...Serverless: Checking Stack update progress.................................Serverless: Stack update finished...Service Informationservice: pokebotstage: developmentregion: eu-west-1stack: pokebot-developmentresources: 11api keys:Noneendpoints:POST - https://123xyz123.execute-api.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/gateway functions:gateway: pokebot-development-gatewaylayers:None Note the endpoints: part of the response — this is the url that AWS has given us to run our lambda. Let’s use curl to test that by calling our lambda. Our endpoint is a POST so we need to send it some throwaway data. curl -d "{\"foo\":\"bar\"}" https://123xyz123.execute-api.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/gateway # should return hello from pokebot what did sls deploy just build for us ? cloudformation Back in the AWS Management Console go to Cloudformation, Stacks and open the stack pokebot-development. Note that the name of this stack doesn’t contain the name of our lambda ‘gateway’ because the stack is for the entire pokebot service. The Pokebot Stack in Cloudwatch You’ll see that serverless has created a bunch of resources including an execution role, cloudwatch logs and s3 bucket to store uploaded code, the cloudformation template file created as well as our lambda. lambda Now browse to the lambda service in the aws console: You’ll see we have a lambda called pokebot-development-gateway containing our code. If you scroll down you’ll see that the lmabda can have things like env variables and layers. We’ll be using our serverless stack to build those further on. cloudwatch logs Now browse to cloudwatch logs: Then the /aws/lambda/pokebot-development-gateway log group Click on the log stream and you will see something like this:

https://medium.com/@redj-ai/pokebot-3-setting-up-for-slack-aws-and-serverless-com-703214e4a3b9

[]

2020-12-20 18:43:34.106000+00:00

['Tutoriál', 'Event Driven', 'Slack', 'Bots']

Tinder Data Adventures: What Happens If You Ask Tinder About the Data They Store on You?

Tinder Data Adventures: What Happens If You Ask Tinder About the Data They Store on You? Dora Szucs Follow Dec 5 · 4 min read Online-dating is still blooming in these days with millennials spending up to 10 hours a week on dating apps. While searching for their true love (or let’s be honest: their next hookup), they generate a huge amount of data by opening the app, uploading images, filling out bios, swiping on other users and chatting with their matches. As you suspect, this data does not disappear during the process but gets stored by Tinder instead. Since released in September 2012, Tinder became one of the most successful dating apps (source). As a registered user on Tinder, you have the right to know what data is gathered and stored about you - and Tinder shares this information with you on request. While most users haven’t heard of this feature, requesting the full history of your data from Tinder is fairly easy despite the small obstacles Tinder sets up in the process. How do you request your data from Tinder? Tinder’s help page gives you guidance in process of requesting your data and directs you to the web interface, where you can manage your account. The process is quite easy, you log in the same way you would normally do in the app (via phone number, Facebook or Google account) and input an email address where you want to receive your download link. If you need some further help, you can use this step-by-step tutorial or watch the following tutorial video: Receiving the data takes around 2–3 days and comes in a zip file containing a file of literally everything you’ve ever entered or done on in the app. You might be very excited now, but note that there is no way of getting your data immediately, so you must be a little patient before you can explore your Tinder history. What does the file you receive from Tinder contain? After receiving your download link and returning to Tinder’s website, you’ll end up downloading a zip file called (myData.zip), which contains a folder with media files (images and videos) of your current profile index.html, a poorly constructed HTML page that helps you read your raw data as is data.json, the file that contains all your little Tinder secrets. Data.json is the file in the center of our attention. It contains information that you entered on Tinder or allowed access to: your gender, name, sexual orientation, bio, city, IP address etc. (It does not contain your password, as apps and websites never store passwords as plain text!) It also marks the day of your registration and for each day since that special date, the file contains how many times you swiped per day into any direction, how many matches you had, how many times you opened the app etc. While your old matches often disappear (or unmatch you), this file holds these matches forever. The longest portion of your data is the part, where your chat messages appear. Note that Tinder only gives you your personal information and no information from other users, thus your matches are only identified by numbers and the data only contains your messages of every chat and none of the messages that other users sent you. Ok, I got my data... But what do I do with it? The file you receive might look intimidating at first glance, especially if you have no background in statistics or computer science and are not used to encountering large unreadable datasets. While the html-file (index.html) contained in the zipped data folder provides some help formatting the raw data, it does not provide any analysis on your dating behaviour. Your raw data (data.json, left) compared to the formatted data (index.html, right) sent to you by Tinder on request. To analyse your dating habits based on your historical data, find out how picky, attractive and active you are, you can use the data visualisation site called Tinder Insights. Tinder Insights takes care of the analysis of your data and generates beautiful infographics personalised to your gender and dating history. Besides summarising your data, Tinder Insights also tells you, which opening messages lead to your longest conversations, when are you the most active and how you compare to other Tinder users in terms of being picky and attractive. A male user’s activity on Tinder since registration generated with Tinder Insights. Before uploading your raw data on any less known data analysis platforms, take a second to review their privacy policy, as you might end up sharing sensible information about your dating life and sexual orientation with untrusted sources alongside with your personal data. Tinder Insights has a transparent privacy policy, which guarantees that all personal data is immediately deleted from your upload, thus no personal information, photo, chat message or similar data ever reaches Tinder Insights’ servers. Furthermore, by using Tinder Insights, you anonymously contribute to a database of behavioural data (swipe counts, match counts, app opens etc.) that will help future single people learn more about online dating. How many of your right swipes end up being matches? Tinder Insights lets you compare your success on dating apps with other male and female users. Still the deep dark secrets of online dating will further reside on Tinder’s (or the owner of nearly all existing dating apps, Match Group’s) hands. But the option to request your data and tools like Tinder Insights help us learn more about ourselves in the dating world and hopefully make us more conscious in the future while searching for love. Or whatever we are searching for.

https://medium.com/swlh/tinder-data-adventures-what-happens-if-you-ask-tinder-about-the-data-they-store-on-you-f66404b90943

['Dora Szucs']

2020-12-17 22:15:48.714000+00:00

['Online Dating', 'Tinder', 'Data Science', 'Privacy', 'Data Visualization']

It’s Not What Happens To You That Matters, But How You Respond To It

It’s Not What Happens To You “I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.” — Stephen Covey It is not what happens to you that matters but how you respond to it that shapes your future. We’ve all had bad things happen, some more than others, yet that doesn’t diminish the events of the past. Perhaps you retreated into yourself to find solace and meaning on why the events took place. Stop! Stop trying to make sense of what happened because we spend unnecessary mental and emotional energy trying to figure out life. To rationalise life logically is a battle we seldom win. What makes me certain of this you ask? Having coached hundreds of people over the past decade and through my own ordeals, I’ve come to realise that making sense of what happens is a futile battle that only results in pain and disappointment. The mental and emotional energy is better spent trying to find solutions instead of contextualising its meaning. Can you relate to this or at least be willing to change the way in which you respond to your ordeals? Life is not what happens to us, but how we respond and grow from the experiences that shapes our destiny. Does this make sense that you are not what happens to you but who you become because of it? The events of the past took place based on your level of awareness. Put simply, if you want to do large-scale renderings using the latest Adobe Illustrator program on an 80’s built computer, the program will require more resources than what the computer can process. However, if you upgrade your hardware, it can perform these functions easier. Our troubles and disappointments occur because our level of awareness does not match the experience taking place. So if our significant other breaks up with us, it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with us, only our growth at the time was not a match to maintain the relationship. If we lose our job or our health suffers, it is because our level of consciousness is not at the level to sustain those things. A popular aphorism states: “To grow thyself, know thyself.” As we grow in consciousness, we develop the ability to give more of ourselves and attract circumstances consistent with our level of consciousness. It is why the rich and wealthy are; rich and wealthy. They’ve develop a wealth and prosperity consciousness owing to years of self-improvement and personal growth. It is why those who are fit and healthy maintain healthy lives because they’ve developed a consciousness to sustain that way of being. And this is a very important principle because if we improve ourselves, we undoubtedly see the results manifest in our lives. I hope this idea resonates with you because it is important if you want to overcome feeling trapped in your circumstances. The message is that nothing happens to us which we don’t allow, irrespective of whether we are conscious or unconscious of it. The latter is problematic because if we are oblivious to our motives, we make automated decisions not congruent with our greater self. Considering this, I invite you to reflect on your own life, particularly the past. Have there been times when your career, health or relationships suffered because of what you were certain of? I recall more than a dozen examples of what I knew with certainty, was incomplete. Often, what we think we know about life can lead us down a trail of self-destruction. It is when we let go of preconceived ideas of how life should be that we experience life becoming itself. Life knows what it needs to become and if we are attached to how it should unfold, we limit its potential to occur. It is in releasing and renewing that we discover the essence of our life’s narrative. The lesson here is that your circumstances whether past or present do not make up who you are, but adds a narrative to who you will become. This, my friends, determines the future you’re destined to live. Call To Action Do you want to lead a remarkable life? Are you committed to taking action despite your fears and doubts? Have you had enough of not achieving the success you seek? If so, download your FREE copy of my eBook NAVIGATE LIFE right now, and start your amazing journey of greatness today!

https://medium.com/the-mission/its-not-what-happens-to-you-that-matters-but-how-you-respond-to-it-2a93fd4ffeed

['Tony Fahkry']

2020-05-24 02:42:48.581000+00:00

['Life Lessons', 'Inspiration', 'Life', 'Personal Growth', 'Personal Development']

Domain Driven | Design | Thinking

Immediately sweet | Cooking for energy Domain Driven | Design | Thinking Where enterprise architecture and agile development meet Size matters, when it comes to your companies’ digital presence. The bigger you become, the more you’ll have to split your solutions up into individual pieces you can allocate ownership for. Not the first time I reference Conway’s law ;-). This big team / solution of individual pieces introduces new complexities that you won’t have when the scale is limited. Complexity as an inhibitor for innovation The bigger your application is, the more bombastic RFC’s might seem. Each change seems to make a tremendous impact. Because a new subject easily touches a lot of the solution you already have. Because everything seems relevant. Because as soon as a project hits more than one team the communication overhead blows up and the time invested in alignment appears to be a hard to slay hydra. But also because you might be stuck in a mindset, with tools, that worked in the past but perhaps not in this situation. You need help to make things small, discover all aspects of the problem and apply validated learning over the most valuable parts of the hypothesis. You need to know which are the right things to build to get the biggest bang for your buck. Lean methodology rightfully hovers around the place where the user interacts with the solution. Investing a truckload of time in solid architecture just doesn’t make sense if you didn’t validate if the user actually needed it. Simplicity as an inhibitor for quality The smaller you validate what works and what doesn’t, the more you risk becoming blind for the bigger picture. You can start implementing fixes on so many levels, not addressing the real issue behind it. I hope you will find a hobby in creating band-aid solutions, because that’s what you’ll end up doing if you don’t address the cause underneath. We tend to skip this step. Thinking about the problem behind the problem. Why? It’s hard to remember you’re draining the swamp when you’re up to your neck in alligators. Fixing the issue, simply seems good enough since we have so many more issues. What’s often forgotten is that the stream of issues is endless unless you address the real causes. Simply put, the amount of issues will go down if you invest a bit deeper to fix what lies underneath. When the swamp is drained, there will be no more alligators. The conundrum So on the one hand you need to see an issue for what it is, and validate it as small as possible to progress into the most valuable direction, and on the other hand you have the urge to solve things structurally. Those are two seemingly contradictory statements. Seemingly, because they are actually not mutually exclusive. It’s really simple. Let me explain why. Thinking about where a business logic belongs, doesn’t say a thing about which logic you will develop first. The equilibrium This is a problem for bigger online solutions with more teams. So I take the liberty to assume that there is budget and manpower behind the solution. Bigger companies simply can afford the ‘luxury’ of splitting one-man-armies into very specific roles. There’s less need for jack-of-all-trades kind of people, than there is a requirement for deep knowledge of one specific field. In order to establish an equilibrium you will need to have at least the following complementary skills on board. UX Designer Leads Solution Architects Product Managers Product Owners Why complementary? Well, they aren’t the folks that actually build the end solution, but they are required to steer the solution into the right direction. Let me explain how. The UX design Lead The UX design lead guides the design process. Together with the UX designers, testers, some front-enders and even clients they can — by leveraging design thinking during a design spike — formulate if there should be a solution at all where we should start building what the problem actually looks like what probable future steps of implementation might be The Solution Architect The solution architect also guides a design process, but it’s an abstract one. He will assess which business areas the digital solution will touch and formulates a landscape in which these area’s can be recognised. By leveraging Domain Driven Development practices, he makes sure that each problem and request can be solved in terms that business understands and can take ownership in. Each solution that teams come up with, can — and should — be mapped against this landscape. This ensures that no matter the angle the end-user interacts with the system, the solution will always behave the same. Because business logic is encapsulated in the service architecture, rather than a fix on the frontend. The Product Manager The product manager should feel completely comfortable with the technical roadmap the solution architect drew. From his perspective this is a drawing which frogs he has, so he can understand how to keep them in the bucket and how to distribute the load on his team evenly. Keep in mind that the drawing is nothing more than an abstract view on the capabilities the organisation already has. In that sense they should always feel familiar. The input of the solution architect helps him to understand which team (which PO) should work on the subject, and how the domain interacts with other domains. The Product Owner In order to be able to do this, it’s crucial to understand the difference between the functional domain and the feature. The feature resembles the ticket or epic the team of the PO is working on. The domain is the area the PO is responsible for. The domain outweighs the feature. Whenever a feature harms the domain, it should be rejected. We own products, not problems. So the product is where the heart should be. Domains deteriorate in time. The software gets outdated or the world around us changes. It’s the responsibility of the Product Owner to make sure his domains needs are catered for. Not only for at this moment but also for the future. In that sense, it’s the PO’s responsibility to invest in ironing out any short term solutions that where implemented as well as setting the domain up for future potential. Opposite ends attract Where we started out with two seemingly opposing ways of thinking, we ended up understanding that they are actually two sides of the exact same coin. The one should not go without the other, and they both serve the same goal of structurally doing the right things at the right time. So whenever you start your new project, please consider both ends. Don’t build anything that you aren’t certain of it should be built to begin with (Certainty comes from validated learning, not your gut). Take a design thinking approach. Don’t implement features, but build capabilities for domains. Build an architecture that resonates with your business, and practice Domain Driven Development. This story is a combined effort between me and Jelmar van Voorst.

https://medium.com/jumbo-tech-campus/domain-driven-design-thinking-47301c143865

['Tim Meeuwissen']

2020-04-08 13:35:34.665000+00:00

['Development', 'Technology', 'Domain Driven Design', 'Programming', 'Design Thinking']

Future Price Prediction Beyond Test Data Using Vector Auto Regression

Predictive analytics and time series data Future Price Prediction Beyond Test Data Using Vector Auto Regression Simple steps to multi-step future prediction Image by author Vector Auto Regression (VAR) comes with an advantage in easy implementation. Every equation in the VAR has the same number of variables on the right-hand side, the coefficients {α1, α2, …, β11, β21, …, γ 11, γ 21, … } of the overall system can be easily estimated by applying (OLS) regression to each equation individually. We could estimate this model using the ordinary least squares (OLS) estimator computed separately from each equations. Since the OLS estimator has standard asymptotic properties, it is possible to test any linear restriction, either in one equation or across equations, with the standard t and F statistics. The VAR models have the advantage over traditional machine learning models in that the results are not hidden by a large and complicated structure (“black box”), but are easily interpreted and available. Testing of Granger causality helps to know whether one or more variables have predictive content to forecast and Impulse-response function and variance decomposition are normally used to quantify the effects over time. I already have written in the past about VAR and how multivariate time series can be fitted to generate prediction covering both. Here, I will discuss simple steps to predict unknown future using VAR. stock = ['^RUT', '^GSPC', '^DJI', '^IXIC' ] start = pd.to_datetime('1990-01-03') df = web.DataReader(stock, data_source = 'yahoo', start = start); print(df.tail()); Here, we have data from Russell 2000 (^RUT), S&P 500 (^GSPC), NASDAQ Composite (^IXIC) and Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI). Let us separate Adj Close columns for all variables. data = df['Adj Close'] data.tail() Let us visually compare these series in one chart after applying normalization. We can see high correlation among all the variables selected here. This makes a good candidate for multivariate VAR. scaler = MinMaxScaler(feature_range=(0, 1)) sdf_np = scaler.fit_transform(data) sdf = DataFrame(sdf_np, columns=data.columns, index=data.index) plt.figure(figsize=(12,6)) plt.grid() plt.plot(sdf) plt.legend(sdf.columns) plt.show() Our goal here is to predict expected future prices of ^RUT and a motivation for the selection of DJI, GSPC and IXIC is their high correlation with RUT. We can also diagnose the correlation by measuring the average linear correlation over the rolling window in a function of rolling window size; here I have taken window size of 5 and 20 days for visual display. blue, orange, red = '#1f77b4', '#ff7f0e', '#d62728' # color codes plt.figure(figsize=(12,4)) plt.grid() cor1, cor2, cor3 = list(), list(), list() # average correlation for increasing rolling window size for win in range(5, 20): # Days cor1.append(data['^GSPC'].rolling(win).corr(data['^RUT']) \ .replace([np.inf, -np.inf], np.nan).dropna().mean()) cor2.append(data['^DJI'].rolling(win).corr(data['^RUT']) \ .replace([np.inf, -np.inf], np.nan).dropna().mean()) cor3.append(data['^IXIC'].rolling(win).corr(data['^RUT']) \ .replace([np.inf, -np.inf], np.nan).dropna().mean()) plt.plot(range(5, 20), cor1, '.-', color=blue, label='RUT vs GSPC') plt.plot(range(5, 20), cor2, '.-', color=orange, label='DJI vs RUT') plt.plot(range(5, 20), cor3, '.-', color=red, label='IXIC vs RUT') plt.legend() plt.xlabel('Rolling Window Length [Days]', fontsize=12) plt.ylabel('Average Correlation', fontsize=12) plt.show() In the context of variables or features selection, we need to decide which variables to include into the model. Since we can not and should not include all variables of potential interest, we have to have a priori ideas when choosing variables. ADFuller to test for Stationarity We need to get rid of trend in the data to let the model work on prediction. Let us check the stationarity of our data set. def adfuller_test(series, signif=0.05, name='', verbose=False): r = adfuller(series, autolag='AIC') output = {'test_statistic':round(r[0], 4), 'pvalue':round(r[1], 4), 'n_lags':round(r[2], 4), 'n_obs':r[3]} p_value = output['pvalue'] def adjust(val, length= 6): return str(val).ljust(length) print(f'Augmented Dickey-Fuller Test on "{name}"', " ", '-'*47) print(f'Null Hypothesis: Data has unit root. Non-Stationary.') print(f'Significance Level = {signif}') print(f'Test Statistic = {output["test_statistic"]}') print(f'No. Lags Chosen = {output["n_lags"]}') for key,val in r[4].items(): print(f' Critical value {adjust(key)} = {round(val, 3)}') if p_value <= signif: print(f" => P-Value = {p_value}. Rejecting Null Hypothesis.") print(f" => Series is Stationary.") else: print(f" => P-Value = {p_value}. Weak evidence to reject the Null Hypothesis.") print(f" => Series is Non-Stationary.") # ADF test on each column for name, column in data.iteritems(): adfuller_test(column, name = column.name) It is clear that our existing data set is non-stationary. Let us take 1st order difference and check the stationarity again. nobs = int(10) # number of future steps to predict # differenced train data data_diff = data.diff() data_diff.dropna(inplace=True) print('Glimpse of differenced data:') print(data_diff.head()) # plotting differenced data data_diff.plot(figsize=(10,6), linewidth=5, fontsize=20) plt.title('Differenced data') plt.show() From the plot, we can assess that 1st order differenced has made the data stationary. However, let us run ADF test gain to validate. # ADF Test on each column for name, column in data_diff.iteritems(): adfuller_test(column, name=column.name) Our data is stationarized to fit into regression model. Vector Auto Regression One model is specified, the appropriate lag length of the VAR model has to be decided. In deciding the number of lags, it has been common to use a statistical method, like the Akaike information criteria. var_model = smt.VAR(data_diff) res = var_model.select_order(maxlags=15) print(res.summary()) results = var_model.fit(maxlags=15, ic='aic') print(results.summary()) Future predictions Now that the model is fitted, let us call for the prediction. # make predictions pred = results.forecast(results.y, steps=nobs) pred = DataFrame(pred, columns = data.columns+ '_pred') print(pred) Similar observations can be obtained with the below lines of codes. In both cases we get the output but on differenced scale because our input data was differenced in order to stationarize. Invert transform data to original shape pred = DataFrame(pred, columns=data.columns+ '_pred') def invert_transformation(data_diff, pred): forecast = pred.copy() columns = data.columns for col in columns: forecast[str(col)+'_pred'] = data[col].iloc[-1] + forecast[str(col) +'_pred'].cumsum() return forecast output = invert_transformation(data_diff, pred) print(output.loc[:, ['^RUT_pred']]) output = DataFrame(output['^RUT_pred']) print(output) Above are the future 10 days prediction; let us assign future dates to these values. Assigning future dates d = data.tail(nobs) d.reset_index(inplace = True) d = d.append(DataFrame({'Date': pd.date_range(start = d.Date.iloc[-1], periods = (len(d)+1), freq = 'd', closed = 'right')})) d.set_index('Date', inplace = True) d = d.tail(nobs) output.index = d.index print(output) So, here we can see future prediction. Let us draw a plot to visualize with the historical data. fig = go.Figure() n = output.index[0] fig.add_trace(go.Scatter(x = data.index[-200:], y = data['^RUT'][-200:], marker = dict(color ="red"), name = "Actual close price")) fig.add_trace(go.Scatter(x = output.index, y = output['^RUT_pred'], marker=dict(color = "green"), name = "Future prediction")) fig.update_xaxes(showline = True, linewidth = 2, linecolor='black', mirror = True, showspikes = True,) fig.update_yaxes(showline = True, linewidth = 2, linecolor='black', mirror = True, showspikes = True,) fig.update_layout(title= "10 days days RUT Forecast", yaxis_title = 'RUTC (US$)', hovermode = "x", hoverdistance = 100, # Distance to show hover label of data point spikedistance = 1000,shapes = [dict( x0 = n, x1 = n, y0 = 0, y1 = 1, xref = 'x', yref = 'paper', line_width = 2)], annotations = [dict(x = n, y = 0.05, xref = 'x', yref = 'paper', showarrow = False, xanchor = 'left', text = 'Prediction')]) fig.update_layout(autosize = False, width = 1000, height = 400,) fig.show() Here, we see how close VAR can predict future prices. Key takeaways VAR is easy to estimate. It has good forecasting capabilities; VAR model has the ability to capture dynamic structure of the time series variables and typically treat all variables as a priori endogenous. However, fitting standard VAR models to large dimensional time series could be challenging primarily due to the large number of parameters involved. We have covered here as how to find the maximum lags and fitting a VAR model with transformed data. Once the model is fitted, next step is to predict multi-step future prices and invert the transformed data back to original shape to see the actual predicted price. In the final stage, plotting the historical and predicted price gives a clear visual representation of our prediction. I can be reached here. Note: The programs described here are experimental and should be used with caution for any commercial purpose. All such use at your own risk.

https://towardsdatascience.com/future-price-prediction-beyond-test-data-using-vector-auto-regression-eedb7e0c04e

['Sarit Maitra']

2020-11-14 14:23:39.613000+00:00

['Predictive Modeling', 'Vector Auto Regression', 'Linear Regression Python', 'Ordinary Least Square']

Reflecting on Reflection

Reflection, my new found skill which I had frequently subject myself to, learning on the fly despite my dispassion. Thinking about thinking. Common questions that crop up; Is this good? What does good look like? What do other’s think? Is my image the same in their mirror? If I am being honest, I hadn’t ever seen the benefits of reflection. Why waste time on the past when there is the future? Perhaps it is my upbringing, perhaps it’s my culture combined with an environment that has made me this way. This is how I felt until I came to the UK. In the beginning, it was a real challenge to fully understand and empathize with what tutors were trying to convey to me. Through practice and due diligence, I redesigned my own thought process to include and allow reflection to take place. I have found it to be enlightening. We were given a personal opinion and aspirations exercise where each of us would highlight their strengths and weaknesses as well as hopes and desires within the professional world. Once we completed our own slide, we had to inspect what others presented and leave feedback comments or acknowledgements. This was to aid us in choosing a topic for the ‘finale’. I found it difficult thinking about myself so much, an image the Droste effect flashed with all the different possible versions of myself as seen by other people — looping forever as I reflected upon my reflection. I got over it and typed out who I thought I was. The whole exercise was a comforting eye opener. My classmates agreed with me on my strong points and gave me helpful insights in regards to my weaknesses. It was interesting examining each person’s card, we were all equally exposed and this made the experience all the more important. I felt strong empathy for everyone and felt a lot closer to the entire MA Service Design roster. From that day, I feel that reflection is definitely a powerful and useful tool. One may never ‘master’ reflection, but I feel if you are truly honest when you look at yourself, then the image will smile back at you.

https://medium.com/@sunxiaoran/reflecting-on-reflection-caa2dbff0c82

['Xiaoran Sun']

2021-06-17 12:53:04.137000+00:00

['User Experience', 'Reflections', 'Service Design']

How To Draw Beautifully Animated Graphs in SwiftUI — Part 3

How To Draw Beautifully Animated Graphs in SwiftUI — Part 3 Adding the background and composing the final View For the final part of our project, we need to add some data to control the colors of each background and each CapsuleBar . Add these two arrays that contain the colors of each dataset: private var dataBackgroundColor: [String: ColorRGB] = [ "Data1": ColorRGB(red: 44 / 255, green: 54 / 255, blue: 79 / 255), "Data2": ColorRGB(red: 76 / 255, green: 61 / 255, blue: 89 / 255), "Data3": ColorRGB(red: 56 / 255, green: 24 / 255, blue: 47 / 255) ] private var dataBarColor: [String: ColorRGB] = [ "Data1": ColorRGB(red: 222 / 255, green: 44 / 255, blue: 41 / 255), "Data2": ColorRGB(red: 42 / 255, green: 74 / 255, blue: 150 / 255), "Data3": ColorRGB(red: 47 / 255, green: 57 / 255, blue: 77 / 255) ] Now that we have our colors, we need to add a background to our main view. Encapsulate our previous views in a ZStack in the body variable of the ContentView , so that we can put our color in the background: var body: some View { ZStack { Color(.sRGB, red: self.dataBackgroundColor[dataPicker]!.red, green: self.dataBackgroundColor[dataPicker]!.green, blue: self.dataBackgroundColor[dataPicker]!.blue ).edgesIgnoringSafeArea(.all) .animation(.default) VStack { Text("Let's Graph!") .foregroundColor(.white) .font(.largeTitle) .fontWeight(.bold) .padding() Picker("", selection: $dataPicker) { Text("Data1").tag("Data1") Text("Data2").tag("Data2") Text("Data3").tag("Data3") }.pickerStyle(SegmentedPickerStyle()) .padding() } } } We’re just missing the graph now, which we’ll create by adding the CapsuleGraphView to our ContentView VStack : VStack { Text("Let's Graph!") .foregroundColor(.white) .font(.largeTitle) .fontWeight(.bold) .padding() Picker("", selection: $dataPicker) { Text("Data1").tag("Data1") Text("Data2").tag("Data2") Text("Data3").tag("Data3") }.pickerStyle(SegmentedPickerStyle()) .padding() CapsuleGraphView(data: data[dataPicker]!, maxValueInData: data[dataPicker]!.max()!, spacing: 24, capsuleColor: dataBarColor[dataPicker]!) } As you can see, we’re passing our data to the CapsuleGraphView that will display them. You can try out our graph right now! Press play on the Live Preview and enjoy.

https://medium.com/better-programming/how-to-draw-beautifully-animated-graphs-in-swiftui-part-1-9f8c26011071

['Mattia Righetti']

2019-11-12 13:16:15.381000+00:00

['iOS', 'Apple', 'Swift', 'Programming', 'Swiftui']

FRENCH TECH MOSCOW — WINTER MEET UP

22 December 2020 from 5pm to 7pm French Tech Team is organising a business meet up! First online network event to meet the French Tech Community in Moscow. Free event and registration before Friday 18.12. If you are a French Startup, Russian Startup, Corporate Staff in innovations, Investor, Policy maker, or Community builder and want to build up your network? Or you are simply interested in discovering Russian or French new technologies? This event is dedicated to you to meet your peers or start new business relationships. The objective is an effective networking event. You meet during 10 to 15 minutes sessions with the companies you decided to meet. Event lasts 2hours maximum according to your meeting schedule. Everything will happen online in a matchmaking mode. Follow the 3 steps to efficient meetings: Register now before Friday 18th December. Monday 21st December, a link will be send to you in order to choose and prioritise whom you want to meet. A detailed time schedule is sent to your email. Start your meetings on Tuesday at 5pm by clicking on your first meeting link. Contact us for more info: Moscow.FrenchTech@gmail.com or simply register here: http://qrco.de/wintermeetup or through QRcode If you want to follow up all French Tech Moscow news, events and activity and be informed up front please connect to our Telegram group https://t.me/joinchat/AAAAAFVG5RZsn-ZYosH2AQ

https://medium.com/@frenchtechmoscow/french-tech-moscow-winter-meet-up-5a448e1b5e43

['French Tech Moscow']

2020-12-15 10:52:52.075000+00:00

['France', 'Russia', 'New Tech Startup', 'Meetup', 'Frenchtechmoscow']

NFL Week 14 — Sunday Picks & Plays

1:00 PM ET BALTIMORE RAVENS at CLEVELAND BROWNS (-2.5) ; O/U 42.5 Model Z Projection: CLE -5, 51.53 Total Straight Up Pick: Cleveland Browns Spread Pick: CLE -2.5⭐ O/U Pick: Over 42.5⭐ Zack’s Plays: - Peoples-Jones 50+ Receiving Yards (+188) - Peoples Jones to score & CLE to win (+423) - Landry 60+ Receiving Yards (-114) - Hooper over 3.5 receptions (-110) Zack’s “Quick” Rundown: Tough to back this Ravens team as it feels like they’ve lost a handful in a row, but in reality, they’ve won 3 of their last 5. One of those wins came against their opponent this week, the Browns in Cleveland just 2 weeks ago. I like the Browns at home in this spot though. They’re the better team when healthy. 1:00 PM ET JACKSONVILLE JAGUARS at TENNESSEE TITANS (-8.5) ; O/U 43.5 Model Z Projection: TEN -4.5, 51.58 Total Straight Up Pick: Tennessee Titans Spread Pick: TEN -8.5⭐ O/U Pick: Under 43.5⭐ Zack’s Plays: - Foreman 60+ Rushing Yards (+100) - Foreman to score (+130) - Foreman to score 2x (+900) - Robinson over 52.5 Rushing Yards (-110) - Lawrence over 215.5 Passing Yards (-110) Zack’s “Quick” Rundown: This Titans team has a lot of work to do if they want to stay in playoff contention while they hope Derrick Henry and AJ Brown heal up soon. Should be able to do that against this Jaguars punching bag at home. By the way, make an effort today to watch TEN RB D’Onta Foreman. He’s had to deal with injuries over the past few years of his young career, but he runs hard and looks ready good. I like a big game out of him today. 1:00 PM ET LAS VEGAS RAIDERS at KANSAS CITY CHIEFS (-10) ; O/U 47.5 Model Z Projection: KC -5.5, 52.24 Total Straight Up Pick: Kansas City Chiefs Spread Pick: LV +10⭐ O/U Pick: Under 47.5⭐ Zack’s Plays: - Mahomes over 36.5 Pass Attempts (-110) Zack’s “Quick” Rundown: I like this healthy Chiefs team against most teams right now, but 10 points is too many in a division game against an underrated Raiders team. Being without Waller hurts for sure and I get the spread, but it’s too many for me. These Raiders corners are very underrated according to PFF Hobbs 7th, Hayward 14th and Mullen who is in line to return this week, so it’s tough for me to make many plays this week. 🎁SPECIAL GUEST PICKERS🎁 Colby Cheneval: Hill 100+ Receiving Yards (+198) 1:00 PM ET NEW ORLEANS SAINTS (-5) at NEW YORK JETS ; O/U 43 Model Z Projection: NO -10, 49.01 Total Straight Up Pick: New Orleans Saints Spread Pick: NO -5⭐ O/U Pick: Over 43⭐ Zack’s Plays: - Kamara to score 2x (+400) - Nick Vannett to score (+460) - Taysom Hill to score 2x (+1300) - NO -3 1st Half Spread (-110) - NO over 23.5 points (-110) Zack’s “Quick” Rundown: The poor Jets will be without 3 of their 4 primary offseason acquisitions this week (WR1 Corey Davis, WR3* Elijah Moore and RB1 Michael Carter), but did they really have a chance this week anyways? Yes it’s Taysom Hill who is more of a fantasy QB than a startable NFL QB, but Kamara is back so the Jets shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll take the Saints by 5+ but with low confidence because star DLineman Cam Jordan is out. 🎁SPECIAL GUEST PICKERS🎁 Colby Cheneval: Kamara to score 2x (+400) Keith Sullivan: NO -5 (-110) 1:00 PM ET DALLAS COWBOYS (-4.5) at WASHINGTON FOOTBALL TEAM ; O/U 48 Model Z Projection: DAL -10, 53.23 Total Straight Up Pick: Dallas Cowboys Spread Pick: DAL -4.5⭐⭐⭐ O/U Pick: Over 48⭐ Zack’s Plays: - Elliott over 61.5 Rushing Yards (-110) - DAL -4.5 (-110) Zack’s “Quick” Rundown: I’d be curious to see what teams I get wrong the most (I’m too lazy to actually go back and look), but I’d assume Washington is one of those teams. They have no business being 6–6 and in a playoff spot. Dallas does though. Their defense is getting healthy, and so is their offense. I’ll go Cowboys with medium confidence. 🎁SPECIAL GUEST PICKERS🎁 Colby Cheneval: DAL -4.5 (-110) Greg Giombarrese: WSH +5.5 (-110) Keith Sullivan: WSH ML (+215) 1:00 PM ET ATLANTA FALCONS at CAROLINA PANTHERS (-2.5) ; O/U 41.5 Model Z Projection: CAR -4.5, 46.96 Total Straight Up Pick: Atlanta Falcons Spread Pick: ATL +2.5⭐ O/U Pick: Under 41.5⭐ Zack’s Plays: - Hubbard 70+ Rushing Yards (+140) - Patterson under 14.5 Carries (-110) Zack’s “Quick” Rundown: This Panthers team is a mess. Cam “me, me, me, it’s all about me” Newton at QB, no McCaff and now Joe Brady got canned. This might be the first time I’ve done this all year, but I’ll take the Falcons straight up. 1:00 PM ET SEATTLE SEAHAWKS (-8.5) at HOUSTON TEXANS ; O/U 40.5 Model Z Projection: SEA -9, 49.15 Total Straight Up Pick: Seattle Seahawks Spread Pick: SEA -8.5⭐ O/U Pick: Under 40.5⭐ Zack’s Plays: - Brandin Cooks over 56.5 Receiving Yards (-110) - Metcalf over 59.5 Receiving Yards (-110) - Wilson over 237.5 Passing Yards (-110) Zack’s “Quick” Rundown: I will not pick Davis Mills in a football game. Also in an under the radar move, the Texans released one of their best defensive players, Zach Cunningham, this week. The Seahawks are laughable, but the Texans are hilarious. 🎁SPECIAL GUEST PICKERS🎁 Colby Cheneval: Wilson over 1.5 Passing TDs (-130) 4:05 PM ET DETROIT LIONS at DENVER BRONCOS (-10.5) ; O/U 42.5 Model Z Projection: DEN -16.5, 51.37 Total Straight Up Pick: Denver Broncos Spread Pick: DEN -10.5⭐ O/U Pick: Over 42.5⭐ Zack’s Plays: - Javonte Williams to score (-115) - Jerry Jeudy to score (+185) - Jerry Jeudy 80+ Receiving Yards (+320) - Josh Reynolds over 43.5 Receiving Yards (-110) - Okwuegnunam to score (+460) Zack’s “Quick” Rundown: Every time you think the Lions might have momentum (if you want to call it that), the Injury report pops up. RB1, RB2, CB1* and possibly TE1 will all be out. 10.5 is a lot, but surprisingly, Teddy B and the Broncos have gone over 20 points more than you think (6/12). I think they blow out the Aidan Hutchinson’s in Mile High. 4:05 PM ET NEW YORK GIANTS at LA CHARGERS (-9) ; O/U 43 Model Z Projection: LAC -5, 52.95 Total Straight Up Pick: LA Chargers Spread Pick: NYG +9⭐⭐⭐ O/U Pick: Over 43⭐ Zack’s Plays: - Barkley to score (+145) - Barkley to score 2x (+145) - Barkley 80+ Rushing Yards (+235) - Ekeler 80+ Rushing Yards (+235) - Parham to score (+500) - Mike Williams over 65.5 Receiving Yards (-110) Zack’s “Quick” Rundown: I thought about forgetting about the past and just reevaluate these teams like it’s Week 1, then I remembered that Daniel Jones is out again so it’s either Jake Fromm or Mike Glennon under center. Both teams have their CB2 out (Asante Samuel and Adoree Jackson) and both have top receivers out (Keenan Allen and Kadarius Toney). I’ll take the Chargers to win for sure, but that 9 is scary. I’ll go Giants +9 with a Saquon breakout game against this baaaaad Chargers run D. 🎁SPECIAL GUEST PICKERS🎁 Keith Sullivan: LAC -9 (-110) 4:25 PM ET SAN FRANCISCO 49ers (-1.5) at CINCINNATI BENGALS ; O/U 48.5 Model Z Projection: SF -0.5, 50.54 Total Straight Up Pick: Cincinnati Bengals Spread Pick: CIN +1.5⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ O/U Pick: Over 48.5⭐ Zack’s Plays: - CIN +1.5 (-110) - [2X BET] CIN ML (+114) Zack’s “Quick” Rundown: Tough one here at first glance, but I think the wrong team is favored. Feels like a trap, but I feel best about this Cincy spread more than any other game this week. The Niners are missing players all around again, and could be without Deebo again. Fully healthy I think this is the right spread, but they’re not. Bengals Fort Knox as Craig would say. 🎁SPECIAL GUEST PICKERS🎁 Kyle Brockman: Mixon to score 2x (+500), Chase to score 2x (+800), Samuel to score 2x (+850) Greg Giombarrese: SF -1.5 (-110) 4:25 PM ET BUFFALO BILLS at TAMPA BAY BUCCANEERS (-3.5) ; O/U 53.5 Model Z Projection: TB -2, 50.50 Total Straight Up Pick: Tampa Bay Buccaneers Spread Pick: TB -3.5⭐⭐⭐ O/U Pick: Under 53.5⭐ Zack’s Plays: - TB -3.5 (-110) - Josh Allen under 295.5 Passing Yards (-110) Zack’s “Quick” Rundown: Game of the week here. Like I said last week, this Tampa defense has got healthy and I don’t think people realize it yet. The cornerback group was the one weakness of this team and they’re back. Now, they will be without Safety Jordan Whitehead, so not fullllly healthy. Great game, but I still feel really good about Tampa here. Bill v Brady Super Bowl coming. 🎁SPECIAL GUEST PICKERS🎁 Kyle Brockman: Fournette Over 36.5 Receiving Yards (-110) Greg Giombarrese: BUF +3.5 (-110) 8:20 PM ET CHICAGO BEARS at GREEN BAY PACKERS (-12) ; O/U 43 Model Z Projection: GB -13.5, 47.44 Total Straight Up Pick: Green Bay Packers Spread Pick: CHI +12⭐⭐ O/U Pick: Over 43⭐ Zack’s Plays: - CHI ML (+460) - CHI +12 (-110) - AJ Dillon over 69.5 Rushing + Receiving Yards (-110) - Adams 100+ Receiving yards (-110) - Valdes-Scantling 70+ Receiving Yards (+360) - Rodgers over 260.5 Passing Yards (-110) Zack’s “Quick” Rundown: I must be losing my mind at this point in the season, because for some reason I think the Bears can win this game. I think Justin Fields can be the guy for the Bears this year and beyond, and his initiation is to win one in Lambeau in December. I’ll take the the doubt digit points the Packers are giving and even sprinkle some moneyline. 🎁SPECIAL GUEST PICKERS🎁 Kyle Brockman: Rodgers over 2.5 Passing Touchdowns (+148) Keith Sullivan: Rodgers over 2.5 Passing Tocuhdowns (+148)

https://medium.com/@zack-nicol11/nfl-week-14-sunday-picks-plays-a34c9fe8960d

['Zack Nicol']

2021-12-12 15:13:20.762000+00:00

['Footbal', 'Sports Betting', 'Fun', 'Nft']

My Best 3 Books For This 2020. Stories that made me happy, sad, angry…

My Best 3 Books For This 2020 Photo by Sebastein Marty on Pixabay.com Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know. — Alberto Manguel Here are my top 3 reads of 2020 along with the story, a reason to give it a try, and highlights of each. 1. Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire Photo grabbed at Goodreads.com a. The story Well, Harry Potter, the boy who lives is probably, one of the most famous wizards in the wizarding world created by J.K Rowling. In this installment of this wonderful saga, Mr. Potter was unexpectedly chosen by the goblet of fire to be a “champion” or a representative of Hogwarts for the Triwizard tournament. Harry participated and went through different hoops and fires to win( literally). Unfortunately at the last leg of the competition something grave happened that changed Harry forever. b. Reason to give it a try It has always been my Christmas tradition to make it a point to read and watch any Harry Potter installment, I can’t help it! I’m such a potter head hahaha!!! I still read bits and pieces of it throughout the year, but when this season starts I finish my chosen installment from the entire saga and watch the whole movie franchise. For this year’s pick, I chose the Goblet of Fire, which by the way happens to be my favorite from both the movie and book. So, why Christmas? I have always envied how the magical people of the “Harry Potter-verse” celebrate their holidays! “It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.”-Albus Dumbledore In my opinion, this book was the most fun read to read and at the same time, this is the installment where he had to grow-up. This is where he faced Voldemort for the first time physically and had the realization of the things he is capable of. He saw his friend died, which made a huge impact on him which can be seen in the “Order of Phoenix”. This is where Harry’s childhood ended… c. Highlights Cedric Diggory’s death for me would always be tragic and would always be the highlight of the Goblet of Fire. But my favorite part in the book would be where Harry first watched the Wizard World Cup. For me, this is where I together with Harry, truly realized how big the magical world is. I remember when I first read and even get a glimpse of it in the movie — It was breathtaking, like opening your Christmas presents from Santa and seeing exactly what you asked for; it was that magical. I mourned and empathized with Harry when Cedric died, I felt how he felt because just like him — I know what it feels to lose someone you love or care and it does really take a toll on you. After witnessing death after death it does change you and there would always be a small voice of guilt inside your head. “If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.” — Siruis Black d. Final thoughts If you are into magic then I recommend this book to you, but please start with “Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone” first, or else you will miss all the “falling in love” with magic for the first time “moments”. Don’t get me wrong I know magic ain’t real, but if there is a wizard school out there I’m very much willing to attend that institution, even if I have to be Mr. Flinch hahaha!

https://baos.pub/my-top-3-books-for-this-2020-65460a6b3adc

[]

2020-12-26 15:42:33.416000+00:00

['Books', 'Life Lessons', 'Books And Authors', 'Book Recommendations', 'Reading']

Over 100 Students and Educators in Puerto Rico Receive Financial Literacy Certification

Over 100 Students and Educators in Puerto Rico Receive Financial Literacy Certification EVERFI Follow Apr 23, 2018 · 3 min read During Financial Literacy Month, EVERFI & Puerto Rico Department of Education celebrate partnership to bring new digital curriculum to K-12 students and teachers on the island 120 teachers and students from escuela Alfredo Dorrington in Hormigueros, Puerto Rico received certifications after completing EVERFI’s online financial literacy curriculum as part of the Puerto Rico Department of Education’s Integral Program for Financial Education, an in schools initiative which aims to develop healthy personal finance skills and habits in students. In celebration of Financial Literacy Month, EVERFI and Department of Education staff, joined teachers and students as they shared the lessons they recently learned through the course. “Bringing innovation to the island to prepare students for the future is a personal priority of mine because it is where my family’s story begins as the birthplace of my father,” said Ray Martinez, EVERFI President of Financial Education. “In the midst of recovery from Hurricane Maria and financial hardship, we are honored to celebrate the teachers and students who have worked diligently to complete this course. Through our partnership with Puerto Rico’s Department of Education, we are committed to empowering every public elementary and high school student with the skills needed for a strong and healthy financial future. In January, Puerto Rico Department of Education announced leading education technology innovator EVERFI, Inc. as its official provider of digital financial education for public elementary and high schools. The announcement took place during a meeting held in Bayamon, Puerto Rico with Senator Carmelo Ríos Santiago, Secretary of Education Dr. Julia Beatrice Keleher. “One of the requirements for this program is to empower all teachers, as well as the school directors, administrative personnel and program directors, to teach about personal finances,” said Puerto Rico Education Secretary Julia Keleher. The partnership with Puerto Rico Department of Education makes EVERFI’s digital financial curriculum available to every elementary and high school in Puerto Rico. EVERFI’s on-the-ground implementation team will aim to activate a minimum of 25 schools in the first year, expanding to more schools in subsequent years. Students will learn important skills such as credit, saving techniques, budgeting, retirement planning, different account types and more. Expanding education opportunity remains a cornerstone mission for Puerto Rico to give more students access to critical life subjects that will prepare them for success outside the classroom. Just 19 states require K-12 students to take a financial education course according to the Council for Economic Education’s Survey of the States 2018 report. This initiative seeks to bring researched-based, interactive financial literacy courses to Puerto Rico students, many for the first time. EVERFI and the Department of Education recently launched Vault-Understanding Money course in Alfredo Dorrington for elementary school students and its @Work course for Alfredo Dorrington’s high school students. Additionally, EVERFI has trained more than 350 teachers on how to implement the courses and their contents. In the coming weeks and months, EVERFI will host additional teacher trainings as the course is made available to more schools and students. EVERFI’s “Vault” course in spanish EVERFI’s Vault-Understanding Money course immerses elementary school students in real-life, interactive scenarios to develop financial concepts, such as income and careers, credit and money management, saving and budgeting. EVERFI’s @Work course is a higher-level course aimed at high school students and adults who are actively making financial judgments. @Work proactively prepares individuals for wise money management decisions, such as family budgeting, investing, credit, borrowing and other topics needed in adulthood.

https://medium.com/edtech-for-the-real-world/over-100-students-and-educators-in-puerto-rico-receive-financial-literacy-certification-aef1627d9eab

[]

2018-04-23 18:37:57.756000+00:00

['Financial Inclusion', 'Education', 'Technology', 'Finance', 'Puerto Rico']

Best Stocks in 2021: Stocks and Opportunities [Infographic]

Infographic There is a strong possibility of economic recovery in 2021. But the new year doesn’t promise less uncertainty than 2020, so investors should remain cautious, as always. Use these companies to think about opportunities and decide if you invest your money or not. Important Tip! Always research and understand a company before you buy its stock. Here are some highly promising companies that you can buy their stock in 2021. Tesla Tesla has enjoyed growth in 2020 and there is a bright future for the Palo Alto electric car maker. Its shares price has skyrocketed more than 650% on a year-to-date basis (one of the top growth stocks of the year). The company will capitalize on the growing electric vehicle (EV) market in the coming years. Some industry experts believe that the demand for EVs around the world, (particularly in China), would help Tesla to grow its future revenue. Tesla’s strategy to establish itself as a leading player in the EV market will benefit the company in the coming years. So, for those who want to be a part of its success, this is the right time to invest in this high-value stock. 2. Nvidia Nvidia stock value has increased by more than 125% this year (2020). The financial performance of the company has surpassed analysts’ expectations. The California-based company specializes in manufacturing graphics processing unit chips, which are used in artificial intelligence (AI) and the gaming industry, among others. AI spending is expected to hit $110 billion by 2024. Also, the gaming industry is booming at a rapid pace. Nvidia will benefit from the boom. 3. Disney Walt Disney performed well this year but most of its theme parks stayed closed (Pandemic) and affected its revenue. But Disney+ streaming platform has performed very well this year. One year after its launch, the video-on-demand streaming service has over 86 million subscribers (Amazing Growth). The progress of its streaming service will help the company to boost its revenue. 4. Zoom Zoom Video Communications stock’s value has skyrocketed nearly 500% so far this year. Millions of people signed up for its online video-conferencing platform (pandemic effect). The Zoom video platform has a simple and user-friendly interface, which is one of the key reasons behind its recent success. Some people think that its growth may slow down as the pandemic ends. But video meetings, virtual learning, and online interactions are not going to end anytime soon. Zoom is expected to do well in the coming quarters considering the recent stock momentum and revenue growth. 5. Alibaba Alibaba Group Holding was performing well this year until it experienced a couple of major setbacks. Alibaba is facing scrutiny from the Chinese government (it’s about monopolistic practices). However, the company’s growth rates still look strong. It is leading the Chinese e-commerce market with a controlling share of 56%. Second in China is JD.com, which holds nearly a 17% share of the market. Alibaba also beat analysts’ expectations in its latest quarterly report. Its second-quarter revenue jumped 30% on a year-over-year basis, marking the strength of its business despite the Covid-19 pandemic. Alibaba stock is expected to go up after addressing the challenges it is facing right now. 6. ServiceNow ServiceNow stock’s value grows about 96% on a year-to-date basis, as demand for its products and services remained elevated during the year. The software company also reported better-than-expected results in its latest quarterly report. Its subscription billings for the third quarter came in at $1.08 billion. Also, its big customers, with an annual contract value of more than $1 million, increased 25% ServiceNow will continue to perform well in 2021. Most analysts have a “Buy” rating for the stock with an average price target estimate of $ 575 per share, suggesting that the company’s share price will go up in the coming quarters.

https://medium.com/@johntsantalis/best-stocks-in-2021-stocks-and-opportunities-infographic-60740a2c2054

['John Tsantalis']

2020-12-27 04:49:05.253000+00:00

['Success', 'Earn Money Online', 'Best', 'Stocks', '2021']

PostgreSQL GROUPING SETS

How to use grouping sets in postgres I prefer running postgres via docker # create these directory on your home docker/volumes/postgres & docker/volumes/temp $ docker run --rm --name pg-docker -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=docker -d -p 5432:5432 -v $HOME/docker/volumes/postgres:/var/lib/postgresql/data -v $HOME/docker/volumes/temp:/datastore postgres $ docker exec -it pg-docker bash $ root@d7a21c8e5498:/# psql -h localhost -U postgres -d postgres psql (12.1 (Debian 12.1-1.pgdg100+1)) Type "help" for help. Create a table and use grouping sets. postgres=# CREATE TABLE sales ( brand VARCHAR NOT NULL, segment VARCHAR NOT NULL, quantity INT NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (brand, segment) ); INSERT INTO sales (brand, segment, quantity) VALUES ('ABC', 'Premium', 100), ('ABC', 'Basic', 200), ('XYZ', 'Premium', 100), ('XYZ', 'Basic', 300); postgres=# select GROUPING(brand)::boolean isbrandGrouped, GROUPING(segment)::boolean isSegmentGrouped, brand,segment, sum(quantity) from sales group by GROUPING SETS ((brand,segment), (brand), (segment), ()) ; isbrandgrouped | issegmentgrouped | brand | segment | sum ----------------+------------------+-------+---------+----- t | t | | | 700 f | f | XYZ | Basic | 300 f | f | ABC | Premium | 100 f | f | ABC | Basic | 200 f | f | XYZ | Premium | 100 f | t | ABC | | 300 f | t | XYZ | | 400 t | f | | Basic | 500 t | f | | Premium | 200 (9 rows) References https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/queries-table-expressions.html#QUERIES-GROUPING-SETS

https://medium.com/@qalead/postgresql-grouping-sets-ee5a6f24f90e

['Natarajan Santhosh']

2019-11-26 21:37:24.980000+00:00

['Postgres', 'Grouping And Sorting']

RSL CG5 loudspeaker review: High-end sound with a budget price tag

California-based RSL has been delivering monitor speakers that defy their size and price for 50 years. The company has manufactured speakers that are the darlings of some Hollywood record producers. RSL’s newest flagship lineup, the CG5, is the successor to the highly acclaimed CG4, and it consists of two models: A two-way monitor, the CG5 (reviewed here) and an MTM monitor design called the CG25. The CG5’s sonic performance, build quality, and price point ($800 for the pair) left me awe-struck. Read on why you just might want a pair of CG5 under your Christmas tree. RSL’s HistoryRSL (the acronym stands for Rogersound Labs) is a well-known brand in die-hard audio circles, but it’s far from being a household name. Founder Howard Rogers started selling speakers factory direct from his store in North Hollywood in 1970. This approach allowed Rogers to use high-quality components while keeping prices low by cutting out the middleman. [ Further reading: The best surge protectors for your costly electronics ] RSL got a big break when a Warner Brothers Records producer purchased a set of RSL speakers and told his friends about them. Soon, RSL speakers started popping up in record companies throughout Southern California. Rogers developed and patented his Compression Guide speaker technology in the 1980s, and it remains the hallmark of all modern RSL speakers. Theo Nicolakis / IDG Top view of the CG5’s rounded front baffle. Fast forward and Howard’s eldest son, Joe, now helms the company with his dad, maintaining the same focus on bang for the buck and an emphasis on personalized customer service. You can audition any RSL speaker with a free, 30-day in-home trial. The company offers free shipping in the continental United States, and there’s no restocking or return shipping fees in the unlikely event you decide you don’t like the speakers. Now that is a true no-risk trial. Build quality beyond their price pointThis is my third review of RSL speakers. My first was the CG4 series in 2015, followed by the CG3 series in 2017. Each time, I’ve come away shaking my head in disbelief with the build quality and sound of the RSL setups. This time? It’s déjà vu all over again. Theo Nicolakis / IDG The CG5’s gorgeous gloss finish is fingerprint resistant. Unboxing the CG5, I was immediately struck by the CG5’s solid build quality. The 16-pound weight is your first clue. The CG5 is like one of those elements on the periodic table whose physical mass is far greater than its physical size would imply. The speaker is physically deeper than it is wide, measuring 7.625 x 10.75 x 12.625 inches (WxDxH). When looked at face-on, these dimensions make the CG5 speaker look smaller than it actually is. Spouse-challenged audiophile households rejoice. The front baffle’s side edges are rounded, giving the speaker a subtle, cool-looking aesthetic that tricks your eye into thinking that speaker is smaller still. Theo Nicolakis / IDG Detailed view of the curved, metal grille. The grille has velvet-like pads that prevent any scratching or marring of the speaker’s beautiful high-gloss finish. The included metal grilles are magnetic, with velvet-like pads that prevent the grilles from marring the CG5’s gorgeous finish. Simply place the grilles in the general vicinity of the front baffle and they snap instantly and firmly into place. Mentioned in this article Naim Audio Uniti Atom Read TechHive's review$2,995.00MSRP $2,995.00See iton Naim Audio The speaker’s cabinet is fabricated from .75-inch thick panels on all sides. I gave the CG5’s cabinet a couple of good knuckle raps that only reaffirmed a solid, sturdy, enclosure. This is no flimsy speaker. When it comes to building a speaker, it’s not just the drivers and cabinetry that contribute to a speaker’s sound. The crossover network is vital. It handles that all-important division and hand off of frequencies between the drivers. The crossover network is where some speaker manufacturers choose to cut costs. Not RSL. RSL’s crossover network is made up of high-quality parts, including a polypropylene capacitor and an air-core coil for high performance and power handling. Theo Nicolakis / IDG Top view of the CG5 with the magnetic grille. The CG5’s build quality is matched by its aesthetics. My GC5 review pair came in a beautiful white gloss finish (they’re also available in a high-gloss piano black). Despite the gloss, all of RSL’s finishes are fingerprint resistant, and I didn’t detect any smudges no matter how many times I handled these speakers. Design, adjustments, and Compression GuideThe CG5 are a two-way design consisting of a 1-inch, translucent, silk dome tweeter and 5.25-inch, aramid-fiber cone woofer. The tweeter is crossed to the woofer at 2,500Hz. The CG5’s frequency response is rated at a respectable 54Hz-35kHz ± 3dB. In layman’s terms, the CG5’s frequncy response resembles a true monitor speaker. I mention that because the CG3 and CG4, by contrast, only went down to 100Hz and really needed a subwoofer’s help even for music. Tweeter adjustmentThe CG5 comes with a Tweeter Adjust dial on the speaker’s rear panel just above the binding posts that allows you to attenuate the tweeter. The Tweeter Adjust dial’s default position is set to “Low” when you first unbox the CG5. I immediately noticed a warmer and slightly unbalanced sound that put bass notes slightly forward with the Tweeter Adjust in the “Low” position. Theo Nicolakis / IDG The Tweeter Adjust dial comes in the default low position. I found the sound warmer but slightly unbalanced in the low position. The “Reference” position produced the most neutral sound at the expense of some warmth. Turning the dial to the “Reference” position evened out the tonal balance and gave the speaker a slightly analytical quality at the expense of some bass emphasis and warmth. At no time did the CG5’s smooth, non-fatiguing quality suffer. You can adjust the dial to your preference. As I’ll detail more below, the CG5 does a fine job rendering its rated audio band cleanly and authoritatively. Indeed, the RSL CG5 does a superb job with bass frequencies in its range. If you intend to use the CG5 with movies or content with deep bass, you’ll want to add a subwoofer to the mix. On tracks such as James Blacke’s “Limit to Your Love,” and Dido’s “Northern Skies” the speaker’s frequency limits came through. I’d strongly recommend pairing the CG5 with RSL’s Speedwoofer 10S, whose superb performance still says with me three years after I first reviewed it. Theo Nicolakis / IDG Detailed view of the CG5’s driver. Compression Guide technologyRSL’s patented Compression Guide outwardly manifests itself as a horizontal, rectangular opening along the speaker’s front baffle. It’s inside the speaker cabinet where the magic really happens. RSL RSL’s patented Compression Guide technology. RSL’s Compression Guide design divides the interior of the speaker cabinet into high and low pressure zones. Resonances are reduced as sound waves travel through these pressure zones, leading to tighter bass. Compression Guide technology works astoundingly well, delivering a smooth, distortion-free sound that you must hear to appreciate. Silky smooth soundAll the aforementioned is well and good, but how do these $800-per-pair speakers sound? I set up the CG5 on solid wood 30-inch speaker stands in my Dolby Atmos/DTS:X/Audo-3D home theater setup, where I typically have RBH Sound SVTR Tower Reference Speakers and SVS Ultra speakers powered by my Denon X8500H receiver, Monoprice Monolith 7-Channel amplifier, and Oppo UDP-203 universal disk player. For this review, I decided to use the outstanding Naim Uniti Atom that I’ve had on loan and used with my recent JBL L82 Classic and Focal Chora 806 speaker reviews. It’s not that Denon’s flagship X8500H wasn’t up to the task—on the contrary—but given that RSL only shipped a stereo pair, I wanted to prove you can have a superlative two-channel music setup with a minimal physical footprint. Theo Nicolakis / IDG Detailed view of the GC5’s patented Compression Guide outer port. I fed the Roon-ready Naim Uniti Atom from my Roon Nucleus with content comprised of high-res music files, ripped CDs, and content streamed from Tidal. Smooth is the word that struck me when I fired up the CG5—and that impression never changed. The CG5 deliver an extremely smooth, non-fatiguing sound that will let you get lost in music or movies for hours. The CG5 reveled in Lisa Gerrard’s haunting vocals in “Elegy” from Immortal Memory. Synthesizer notes were smooth and free of compression or distortion. Indeed, it didn’t matter if I cranked up the volume, the CG5 just purred along. As is typical with high-quality monitors, imaging was solid, with vocals dead center and instruments placed firmly in space and time. Recalling classics from Patricia Barber was case in point. Unlike higher-end speakers, the CG5 couldn’t quite conjure the uncanny dimensionality around a sonic image. Theo Nicolakis / IDG The CG5’s back panel has a threaded opening for optional wall mounting. RSL’s CG5 speakers excelled at revealing musical layers. For example, on Sarah McLachlan’s “Elsewhere,” you’ll find that some speakers smear the harmonies in the refrain. You can tell there are multiple vocals, but you can’t quite focus on individual voice. Not here. Through the CG5, I could distinguish each vocal track in distinct space and time. In my setup, the CG5 created a wonderfully large, deep, and wide soundstage. The CG5 also exhibited a noticeably relaxed presentation, recessing the image well behind the speakers’ baffle. Depanding on whether or not you prefer a forward or relaxed presentation will be key to determining whether or not you like these speakers. Bass lines were respectable, though I want to emphasize that the quality of the bass lines within that frequency range was outstanding. The CG5 gushed chest-thumping bass on Natasha Bedingfield’s “King of the World.” On Sade’s “Soldier of Love,” the CG5 delivered bass lines with a good, tight, clean, detailed attack. The same was true on Katie Melua’s “Love is a Silent Thief” and Dido’s “Northern Skies:” Clean and controlled. I wasn’t quite sure how the CG5s would handle the intense, pulsating bass punch on James Blake’s “Limit to Your Love.” Needless to say the CG5 was an unbelievably cool customer, thwacking me with chest-punching bass while maintaining precise, detailed control. Of course the CG5s couldn’t reproduce the foundation-rattling, subterranean bass Blake’s classic is capable of. Overall, the CG5 was very good, though not outstanding with dynamics. Theo Nicolakis / IDG The CG5’s back panel has a Tweeter Adjust and five-way binding posts. But don’t you dare interpret the CG5 as a polite speaker. Pulling out some Van Halen—in tribute to Eddie Van Halen—proved these babies can rock—hard. The CG5 brought forth all the best qualities of Eddie’s immortal, “Eruption,” revealing nuances of the grand master at his craft. The CG5 unrelentingly pumped out the raw rock grit and edge of “Tattoo.” And the CG5 reveled in the inceased power when I turned up the volume to immerse myself to Van Halen’s rock anthem classic, “Dreams.” Treat yourself to a pair for ChristmasEvery RSL speaker I’ve auditioned has left me impressed, and the CG5 are no exception: Impeccable build quality; an intoxicatingly alluring, smooth sound; and superb top-to-bottom performance are just the opening act. The more time I spent listening to the CG5, the more I loved them. For $800 a pair, the CG5 will give you pure sonic bliss far exceeding their price. Pair them with RSL’s Speedwoofer 10S subwoofer and you’ll have a high octane, sonic setup that will excel at both a two-channel and full-on home theater assault. You’ll be the envy of the neighborhood. While there are lots of speaker options priced less than $1,000, the CG5 rank among my favorite. Whether it’s an upgrade to your current setup or a dive right into sonic bliss, take RSL up on their free in-home trial in time for Christmas. You won’t be disappointed. Enthusiastically recommended. Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details.

https://medium.com/@jennife64330211/rsl-cg5-loudspeaker-review-high-end-sound-with-a-budget-price-tag-394d454c9e52

[]

2020-12-24 22:56:43.523000+00:00

['Internet', 'Audio', 'Entertainment', 'Consumer']

Top 10 Best Camera Phone Under 10000 with 4GB Ram

It’s 2021 and phones have become a very important part of our lives. A good camera and Ram is a must have and makes our phone using experience very nice. Thankfully getting the best camera phone under 10000 with 4GB ram has become easier than ever. In order to make your choice easier we have jotted down the list of best camera phones under 10000 with 4GB Ram. SAMSUNG GALAXY J6 Samsung is known for providing premium phones at very affordable prices. With a sleek design, the Super AMOLED (OLED) 5.6 inch display Samsung Galaxy J6 is among our top choices when it comes to the best camera phone under 10000 with 4GB ram. This phone has a reliable battery life and has a 13MP rear camera with 8MP front camera.

https://medium.com/@leonineinfo/top-10-best-camera-phone-under-10000-with-4gb-ram-6b7bc08a1e89

['Avon Dk']

2021-03-16 06:01:00.054000+00:00

['Best Camera Phone', 'Phone Under In 10000', 'Phone Under 15000', 'Smartphones', 'Phone Under 10k']

Iran shares evidence of a supposed government agent, Kylie Moore-Gilbert being enlisted by Israeli insight

After the arrival of British Australian academician, Kylie Moore-Gilbert, who was held by Iran on surveillance charges, the Islamic Republic legitimized her capture sharing data identified with her binds with previous Bahraini MP and the Israeli military. Iranian state-run news source delivered an almost 10-minute section including a few of Gilbert’s pictures, which indicated that she was venturing out to Israel on her big day and with loved ones. The report on Kylie Moore-Gilbert, by Iranian media, asserted that she was enlisted by the Israeli knowledge office to keep an eye on Tehran, and was even positioned at Cambridge University, and had contacts with a few previous Israeli armed forces officials. The report additionally indicated her photos of visiting Jerusalem and different destinations in Israel, incorporating an instructional course in Hafia. “According to her preparation and to dodge any danger, she went to all spots where travelers visit and settled on decisions from those territories and took photos,” the report said. “She was advised to shroud her movements to Israel and furthermore her contacts with Israelis.” Besides, the Iranian Broadcasting network additionally included copies of her identification and those of her Israeli spouse, to come to an obvious conclusion. The 33 years old scholarly was delivered from Iranian bondage after almost 800 days in return for three Iranian residents who were carrying out punishment in Thailand for their inclusion in the 2012 Bangkok impact. The Iranian detainees were blamed for endeavoring to slaughter Israeli negotiators yet didn’t succeed. The impact just exploded their leased condo and leaving five individuals harmed. Moore-Gilbert and the Australian government over and over kept the Iranian charges from getting spying as unjustifiable. Some even accept that Tehran’s most recent mission to legitimize her capture appeared after the Australian specialists squeezed the settlement that the Islamic nation had no proof of supposed violations and has never introduced any openly. She was captured while was leaving Iran in the wake of going to a meeting in 2018. She was likewise connected to Jasim Husain, a previous Bahraini MP, who was blamed for showing Moore-Gilbert Arabic and Farsi, and helped her to keep an eye on Shia banishes in Iran. Husain negated the allegations and told the Guardian, “The story is unconvincing to anybody with fundamental information.” Husain, who was removed from Bahrain in 2016, was an individual from the Al-Wefaq party and spoke to Bahrain’s minimized Shia people group. He stated, “I knew about her outing, she was going there for a gathering, at that point setting off to some vacationer destinations, at that point participating in some examination.” In his sentiment, it was Moore-Gilbert’s gathering with Shia ousts from Bahrain, in Iran, which put her on the radar and was viewed as a danger to the nation’s security foundation. Husain stated, “Analysts ordinarily get the opportunity to do an essential examination as opposed to auxiliary… Kylie can do no difficulty to anybody, not to mention a nation. She is appropriately quiet, a genuine scientist, a scholarly, somebody who adores the Middle East.” He added, “[These groups] think Kylie and I attempted to sabotage them, to keep an eye on them and give data to an insight network. It is absolutely false — zero percent valid.” After Moore-Gilbert’s capture, Husain felt frightened for his security too. He stated, “A few people accept this jabber,” he said. “I feel badgering, I can’t carry on with my life ordinarily, go out to networks. I must be ready, cautious — and that is in my own nation.”

https://medium.com/@blackwilliam879/iran-shares-evidence-of-a-supposed-government-agent-kylie-moore-gilbert-being-enlisted-by-israeli-4fffb294abc5

['William Black']

2020-12-04 06:32:39.311000+00:00

['Australia', 'Iran', 'Kylie Moore Gilbert', 'Israel', 'Tehran']

The best reasons to pick a website builder that isn’t WordPress

The most serious weakness in WordPress is security, and the chief culprits in this matter are the plugins. Plugins in WordPress are optional extra functions that don’t come with the core package, and you can find and download them through the CMS or on the web. The main problems with WordPress plugins are that they can be made by basically anyone — which pose a risk in terms of quality and safety — they can slow down your site’s performance if they are too many, and multiple plugins with conflicting sets of codes can disrupt each other and your digital experiences. Also, as WordPress usage is so widespread, there exists a lot of malware, viruses, and malicious methods directed explicitly towards WordPress architecture. According to recent research by Sucuri , WordPress sites account for 83% of infected sites on the web. Other examples of security issues in WordPress is the hacking of the GDPR compliance plugin, using popular plugins to install virus plugins in the back door, and instances where popular plugins have gotten their Github users hacked — with the next launch full of viruses.

https://medium.com/@okideha/the-best-reasons-to-pick-a-website-builder-that-isnt-wordpress-5c16f0e8a8ce

['Okugbe Idehaloise']

2020-02-18 23:05:26.355000+00:00

['Website Design', 'Website Development', 'WordPress', 'Wix', 'Website']

Refresh JWT Token with ASP.NET (Core) (C#)

I’ll be going straight to the point on how to implement a Refresh token for ASP.NET (Core) so this story assumes that you have already implemented JWT Tokens. There are a lot of articles on that one 😄 What are Refresh Tokens? In a nutshell, you can think of refresh tokens as: A token that can be used to receive a new access token (in our case, JWT Tokens) without having to re-send credentials. So how do we implement one? Before that, please take note that the following changes must be done to your existing login endpoint (for me, it’s under /api/Auth/login ) : Modify your return object in your login endpoint so that you return the following: { "accessToken": "<JWT Token>", "accessTokenExpiration": "<A value that tells up to when is the access token valid." "refreshToken": "<Refresh Token>" } “accessToken” — This is basically your JWT token. “accessTokenExpiration” — This is optional. But this represents a value that tells your client up to when is the access token valid. It’s up to you if you want to return a double to indicate the minutes. I usually use DateTimeOffset for this one. “refreshToken” — This is where you will place the Refresh token that the client can use in order to receive a new JWT Token. 2. Modify how you generate your JWT Token by ensuring that an identifier for the user is included in your JWT Token via Claims or via or Subject: Note that you need to add a Claim that you can use to easily identify the user based on the JWT Token. I usually use Claim ClaimTypes.Name for this one. 3. In your login workflow, make sure that the “Refresh Token Flow during Login” and “Using a Refresh Token”(see below). Refresh Token Flow during Login This flow can be placed before or after generating a JWT Token. Generate a random token: The idea behind the value of the token is that it has to be as random as possible and is something that can’t be easily guessed. You can use your own implementation on generating the random value but for example above I used System.Security.Cryptography.RandomNumberGenerator . Some suggests that you can use GUID for this one but others say that GUID has a pattern. In the end, it’s up to you to decide what to use. 2. Store your Refresh Token along with it’s expiration in your database / repository. This is a very important step. Remember that our refresh tokens are really random and is really hard to guess? Well, we have to find a way to validate if the given refresh token to us valid or not. So how do we do that? Store your refresh tokens somewhere. Here’s an overview of the whole flow: You may be wondering why am I using a “list of Refresh Tokens”. The reason for that one is that if your app allows for a user to be logged in into multiple devices, then each of those device will have its own refresh token. Using a Refresh Token Now that we have given a refresh token to the client, the next question would be how do we use them right? Create a new endpoint that allows AnonymousAccess: We need this to be anonymous since we might be receiving an invalid JWT token but a valid refresh token. The response is similar to the one returned by the login endpoint. 2. Retrieve the ID of the user from the JWT Token (this would also tell us if the JWT Token is valid or not) 3. Now that we have retrieve the id of the user, we can now retrieve the stored refresh tokens from that client and verify if the refresh token is valid or not: 4. Once you have validated that the refresh token is valid, you can now generate a new JWT Token with a new expiration and a new refresh token as well and return them to the client. 😄 Things to consider:

https://medium.com/@kedren.villena/refresh-jwt-token-with-asp-net-core-c-25c2c9ee984b

['Kedren Villena']

2019-06-07 01:51:14.406000+00:00

['Programming', 'Csharp', 'Jwt', 'Aspnetcore', 'Dotnet']

How to solve a conflict when empathy and goodwill fall short

I’ve always had a keen interest in people’s behaviour. How are societies organized? How do we interact with one another? What drives our day to day behaviour? Why do we react to what happens to us the way we do? Subjects like history, literature and sociology were among my favourites, to understand different points of view. In August 2019, I had the immense opportunity to join more than 20 bright minds on a trip to Israel and the Palestinean territories. The goal: to expose us to diverse perspectives around the conflict. Through gatherings, discussions and reflections, Insight Journeys provided us with the possibility to form an opinion of our own around an intricate discord that combines history, religion, politics, multiple agents and as many interests. The Old City of Jerusalem. Photo Credit: Fundación IO. Before this trip, I had a very narrow idea of the available resolutions for a conflict. In my experience, you could either approach a conflict open to reach common-ground or close yourself to it. And, in my very close perspective, that depended upon the intentions of the parties involved. If the parts were open to reaching common-ground, they would probably reach it. And if any of the parties refused to find common ground, then the conflict would become a zero-sum game. However, as soon as our journey began, I realised there is (at least) a third option that had never crossed my mind. What happens when the parties involved are willing to reach common ground, but they can’t empathise with each other to the level of understanding what a possible (and fair) solution could be? Each day we would go over a different narrative via debates, listening to speakers or visiting impactful places. And, as the days went by, I grew more and more intrigued by what could be the outcome of this situation. What was happening that made the idea of a peaceful resolution so remote? The program unfolded, we got exposed to even more perspectives, and I began to struggle with my emotions. All the viewpoints seemed partly right and partly wrong. I could empathise on different points with everyone we met. I didn’t know what was justice anymore. After discussing my feelings with other participants, I reached a small and simplistic theory of what was going on. Each time we met someone, they analysed the conflict on a different level than the one before. As a result, the discussions were always on multiple layers making it extremely hard to reach common ground. In other words, even if you believe you are approaching conflict with goodwill and being empathetic, you may be standing on layers so different, that they may never meet. So, what is empathy? Are there different levels to it? How could you possibly try to understand what others are going through when your frames of reference are so different? What can you proactively do to take this into account and fight your bias? I still do not have a complete answer, but here’s a list I am working on: Accept you may not be able to comprehend what others are experiencing and be humble about it. Accept that in no moment in time, you are aware of all your biases. Give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Empathy is a ladder take it step-by-step. You may not be able to understand fully what the other part is experiencing, but you can go through your personal experiences and look for the ones that made you feel (even in a small way) similar to how the other may be feeling. Thought of another one? Let me know!

https://medium.com/@francodangelo/how-to-solve-a-conflict-when-empathy-and-goodwill-fall-short-44b31af5ac7a

["Franco D'Angelo"]

2020-10-20 17:46:28.282000+00:00

['Journey', 'Conflict', 'Palestine', 'Peace', 'Israel']

Color theory can be boring

Nature or artists usually do not stick to color theory to create an interesting color scheme. Jazz bands really start to swing when the drummer goes slightly off beat. If you restrict yourself to complementary colors, your choices are limited and the look of your presentation resembles those of many others who use the same approach. Instead, get inspired by art (try Art Authority) or a or a colorful sea creature, or a photograph (check out Steve McCurry’s blog) and upload the image to a color extraction tool such as Adobe Kuler. It will make you work more original, plus it adds a little personal secret to your presentation, your favorite painter or that memorable place that is hidden in the slides somewhere.

https://medium.com/slidemagic/color-theory-can-be-boring-2c1053f3cb93

['Jan Schultink']

2016-12-27 08:41:14.446000+00:00

['Colors', 'Presentation Design', 'PowerPoint']

Just wondering…

Can I hold on a little longer? Suffer just a little more? Wonder just a little deeper? Because sometimes your answers don’t make sense, as you ask me to wait a little more because soon you’ll be all mine. Its just that you’ve lived in a cage for so long you need that time to break out. But Im still confused. Confused about your ideas of us and where we end and where do we begin? And if I’m being honest, its just that I’m a little scared… that maybe time will never be on our side.

https://medium.com/@alinefranco-71932/just-wondering-9f7eaaa87e28

['Aline Franco']

2020-12-15 23:25:47.416000+00:00

['Love', 'Poetry', 'Sadness']

123.Movies! The Croods: A New Age 2020 Full-Stream(ONLINE)

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Start your HBO Max free trial and get instant access on your favorite devices. Commercial Free. Exclusive Originals. Critically Acclaimed Docs. Emmy® Award-Winning Shows. This brings me around to discussing us, a motion picture release of the Christian religio us faith-based . As almost customary, Hollywood usually generates two (maybe three) films of the variety movies within their yearly theatrical release lineup, with the releases usually being around spring us and fall respectfully. I didn’t hear much when this movie was first aounced (probably got buried underneath all of the popular movies news on the newsfeed). My first actual glimpse of the movie was when the film’s movie trailer was released, which looked somewhat interesting if you ask me. Yes, it looked the movie was goa be the normal “faith-based” vibe, nonetheless it was going to be directed by the Erwin Brothers, who directed I Can Only Imagine (a film that I did so like). Plus, the trailer for I Still Believe premiered for a relatively good us, so I continued seeing it a lot of us when I went to my local cinema. You can sort of say that it was a bit “engrained in my own brain”. Thus, I was a lttle bit thinking about seeing it. Fortunately, I was able to see it prior to the COVID-9 outbreak closed the concert halls down (saw it during its opening night), but, due to work scheduling, I haven’t had the united states to accomplish my review for it…. until now. And what did I think of it? Well, it had been pretty “meh”. While its heart is obviously in the right place and quite sincere, us is a little too preachy and unbalanced within its narrative execution and character developments. The religious message is obviously there, but takes too many detours and not focusing on certain aspects that weigh the feature’s presentation. As stated, I Still Believe is directed by the Erwin Brothers (Andrew and Jon), whose previous directorial works include such films like Moms’ PARTICULAR DATE, Woodlawn, and I COULD Only Imagine. Given their affinity attraction religious based Christian movies, the Erwin Brothers seem just like a suitable choice in bringing Jeremy Camp’s story to a cinematic representation; approaching the material with a particular type of gentBookmark this siteleness and sincerity to the proceedings. Much like I Can Only Imagine, the Erwin Brothers shape the feature around the life span of a popular Christian singer; presenting his humble begiings and all of the trials and tribulations that he must face on the way, while musical songs / performaBookmark this sitence taking importance into account of the film’s narrative story progression. That’s not to say that the movie isn’t without its heavier moments, with the Erwin, who (again) are familiar with religious overtones themes in their endeavors, frame I Still Believe compelling messages of love, loss, and redemption, which (as always) are very fundamental to watch and experience throBookmark this siteugh tragedy. This even speaks to the film’s script, which was peed by Erwin brothers playing double duty on the project, which has lots of heartfelt dramatic moments which will certainly tug on the heartstrings of some viewers out there together with provide to be quite an engaging tale of going right through tragedy and hardship and finding a redemption arc to get out of it. That is especially made abundantly clear when working with a fatal illness that’s similar from what Melissa undergoes in the film, which is very universal and reflective in everyone’s world, with the Erwin Brothers painting the painful journey that Melissa takes along with Jeremy by her side, who must learn to cope with pain of someone you care about. You will find a “double edge” sword to the film’s script, but I’ll mention that below. Suffice to say, the movie settles quickly into the familiar pattern of a religious faith-based feature that, while not specifically polished or original, can be quite the “comfort food” for some; projecting a healthy message of faith, hope, and love. Personally, I didn’t know of Jeremy Camp and the story of he and Melissa Heing, so that it was a significant poignant journey that was invested unfolding throughout the film’s proceedings. As a side-note, the movie is a lttle bit a “tear jerker”, so for those who prone to crying of these dramatic heartfelt movies….get your tissues out. In terms of presentation, I Still Believe meets the indusry standard of a religious faith-based motion pictures. Of course, theatrical endeavors like these don’t really have big budged production money to invest in the film’s creation. Thus, filmmakers need to spend their money wisely in bringing their cinematic tales alive on the big screen. Compared to that effect, the Erwin Brothers smartly utilized this knowledge in the movie’s creation; budgeting the various aspects of the background and genetic theatrical make-up that feel appropriate and genuine in the film’s narrative. So, all of the various “behind the scenes” team / areas that I mention (i.e. production designs, set decorations, costumes, and cinematography, etc.) are relatively good as I must say i don’t have much to complain (whether good or bad) about them. Again, they meet up with the industry standard for a faith-based movie. Additionally, the musical song parts are pretty good as well. As mentioned, I really didn’t know anything about Jeremy Camp, therefore i couldn’t say what songs of his were good, but the songs that are presented in the film were pretty decent enough to certain highlight points through the entire movie. Though they are somewhat short (assuming not the whole song has been played), but still effectively good and nice to listen to. Might have to have a look at some of the real songs one day. Lastly, the film’s score, which was done by John Debney, fits perfect with this movie; projecting the proper amount of heartfelt tenderness in a few scenes and inspirational melodies of enlightenment in others. Unfortunately, not all is available to be pure and religiously cinematic in the movie as I Still Believe gets weighed down with several major points of criticism and execution in the feature. How so? For starters, the movie feels somewhat incomplete in Jeremy Camp’s journey. What’s presented works (somewhat), but it doesn’t hold up, especially becausae the Erwin Brothers have a hard us in nailing down the proper narrative path for the film to take. Of course, the thread of Jeremy and Melissa are the primary central focus (and justly so), but pretty much everything else gets completely pushed aside, including Jeremy’s musical career rise to stardom and several of the various characters and their importance (more on that below). This also causes the film to have a particular pacing issues through the entire movie, with I Still Believe run us of 6 minutes (one hour and fifty-six minutes) feeling longer than it ought to be, especially with how much narrative that the Erwin Brothers skip from (i.e. several plot chunks / fragments are left unanswered or missing). Additionally, regardless if a viewer doesn’t know of Jeremy Camp’s story, us does, for better or worse, follow a reasonably predictable path that’s quite customary for faith-based movie. Without even reading anything about the real lives of Jeremy and Melissa ahead of seeing the feature, it’s quite evidently as to where the story is heading and what will ultimately play out (i.e. plot beats and theatrical narrative act Bookmark this siteprogression). Basically, if you’ve seeing one or two Christian faith-based film, you’ll know what to expect from us. Thus, the Erwin Brothers don’t really try to creatively do something different with the film…. instead they reinforce the idealisms of Christian and of faith in a formulaic narrative way that becomes quite conventional and almoBookmark this sitest a little lazy. Addititionally there is the moBookmark this sitevie’s dialogue and script handling, which does become problematic in the movie’s execution, which is hampered by some wooden / forced dialogue at certain scenes (becoming very preachy and cheesy at us) plus the feeling of the movie’s story being rather incomplete. There’s a stopping point where the Erwin Brothers settle on, but I felt that there could’ve more added, including more expansion on his musaic career and many other characters. Then there may be the notion of the film being quite secular in its appeal, which is pretty understandable, but relies too heavy on its religious thematic messages that can be a bit “off-putting” for some. It didn’t bother me as much, but after seeing several other faith-based movies just before this (i.e. I COULD Only Imagine, Overcomer, Indivisible, etc.), this specific movie doesn’t really rise to Cursed in Love and falls prey to being rather generic and flat for the majority of its run us. Obviously, us, while certainly sincere and meaningful in its storytelling, strules to discover a happy balance in its narrative and execution presentation; proving to be difficult in conveying the complete “big picture” of its message and Jeremey Camp’s journey. The cast in us is a mixed bag. To me,none of the acting talents are relatively bad (some are better than others…. I admit), but their characterizations and / or involvement in the film’s story is problematic to say the least. Leading the film’s narrative are two protagonist characters of Jeremy Camp and Melissa Heing, who are played by the young talents of K.J. Apa and Britt Robertson respectfully. Of the two, Apa, known for his roles in Riverdale, The Last Summer, and The Hate U Give, may be the better equipped in character development and performance as the young and aspiring musical talent of Jeremy Camp. From the get-go, Apa includes a likeable charm / swaer to him, which make his portrayal of Jeremy immediately endearing from onset to conclusion. All the scenes he does are well-represented (be it character-based or dramatic) and certainly sells the journey that Jeremy undergoes in the movie. Plus, Apa may also sing, which does lend credence to numerous of the scene’s musical performance. For Robertson, known on her behalf roles in Tomorrowland, Ask Me Anything, and The Space Between us, she gets hampered by a number of the film’s wooden / cheesy dialogue. True, Robertson’s performance is well-placed and well-maered in projecting a feeling of youthful and dewy-eyed admiration in Mellissa, especially since the hardships here character undergoes in the feature, but it’s hard to get passed the cringeworthy dialogue written for her. Thus, Robertson’s Melissa ends up being the weaker of the two. That being said, both Apa and Robertson do have good on-screen chemistry with each other, which certainly does sell the likeable / loving young relationship of Jeremy and Melissa. In more supporting roles, seasoned talents like actor Gary Sinise (Forest Gump and Apollo ) and musician singer Shania Twain play Jeremey’s parents, Tom and Terry Camp. While both Sinise and Twain are well suited for their roles as a sort of small town / Midwest couple vibe, their characters are bit more than window dressing for the feature’s story. Their screen occurrence / star power lends weigh to the project, but that’s just about it; offering up a few nuets to bolster a few particular scenes here and there, which is disappointing. Everybody else, including actor Nathan Parsons (General Hospital and Nadia: THE TRICK of Blue Water) as musical talent and mutual friend to both Jeremy and Melissa, Jean-Luc Lajoie, young actor Reuben Dodd (The Bridge and Teachers) as Jeremy’s handicapped younger brother, Joshua Camp, and his other younger brother, Jared Camp (though I can’t find out who played him the movie), are relatively made up in smaller minor roles that, while acted fine, are reduced to little more than just underdeveloped caricatures in the film, which is a shame and disappointing. Live streaming is the delivery of Internet content in real-time much as live tv broadcasts content over the airwaves with a television set signal. Live internet streaming requires a sort of source media (e.g. a video camera, an sound interface, screen capture software), an encoder to digitize the content, a media publisher, and a content delivery network to distribute and deliver the content. Live streaming doesn’t need to be recorded at the origination point, though it frequently is. Streaming is an alternative to file downloading, a process in which the end-user obtains the entire file for this content before watching or hearing it. Through streaming, an end-user can use their media player to start out playing digital video or digital audio tracks content before the complete file has been transmitted. The term “streaming media” can connect with media apart from video and audio, such as live closed captioning, ticker tape, and real-time text, which are all considered “streaming text”. ⭐ THE STORY ⭐ After graduating from Harvard, Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) forgoes the standard opportunities of seeking employment from big and lucrative law firms; deciding to head to Alabama to defend those wrongfully commended, with the support of local advocate, Eva Ansley (Brie Larson). One of his first, and most poignant, case is that of Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx, who, in 63, was sentenced to die for the notorious murder of an 3-year-old girl in the community, despite a preponderance of evidence proving his innocence and one singular testimony against him by an individual that doesn’t quite seem to add up. Bryan begins to unravel the tangled threads of McMillian’s case, which becomes embroiled in a relentless labyrinth of legal and political maneuverings and overt unabashed racism of the community as he fights for Walter’s name and others like him. ⭐ STREAMING MEDIA ⭐ Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a provider. The verb to stream refers to the process of delivering or obtaining media in this manner.[clarification needed] Streaming refers to the delivery method of the medium, rather than the medium itself. Distinguishing delivery method from the media distributed applies specifically to telecommunications networks, as most of the delivery systems are either inherently streaming (e.g. radio, television, streaming apps) or inherently non-streaming (e.g. books, video cassettes, audio CDs). There are challenges with streaming content on the Internet. For example, users whose Internet connection lacks sufficient bandwidth may experience stops, lags, or slow buffering of the content. And users lacking compatible hardware or software systems may be unable to stream certain content. Live streaming is the delivery of Internet content in real-time much as live television broadcasts content over the airwaves via a television signal. Live internet streaming requires a form of source media (e.g. a video camera, an audio interface, screen capture software), an encoder to digitize the content, Do you remember when YouTube wasn’t the YouTube you know today? In 5005, when Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim activated the domain “www.youtube.com" they had a vision.a media publisher, and a content delivery network to distribute and deliver the content. Live streaming does not need to be recorded at the origination point, although it frequently is. Streaming is an alternative to file downloading, a process in which the end-user obtains the entire file for the content before watching or listening to it. Through streaming, an end-user can use their media player to start playing digital video or digital audio content before the entire file has been transmitted. The term “streaming media” can apply to media other than video and audio, such as live closed captioning, ticker tape, and real-time text, which are all considered “streaming text”. ✓ COPYRIGHT CONTENT ✓ Copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to make copies of a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself. A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States. Some jurisdictions require “fixing” copyrighted works in a tangible form. It is often shared among multiple authors, each of whom holds a set of rights to use or license the work, and who are commonly referred to as rights holders.[citation needed] These rights frequently include reproduction, control over derivative works, distribution, public performance, and moral rights such as attribution. Copyrights can be granted by public law and are in that case considered “territorial rights”. This means that copyrights granted by the law of a certain state, do not extend beyond the territory of that specific jurisdiction. Copyrights of this type vary by country; many countries, and sometimes a large group of countries, have made agreements with other countries on procedures applicable when works “cross” national borders or national rights are inconsistent. Typically, the public law duration of a copyright expires 50 to 500 years after the creator dies, depending on the jurisdiction. Some countries require certain copyright formalities[5] to establishing copyright, others recognize copyright in any completed work, without a formal registration. It is widely believed that copyrights are a must to foster cultural diversity and creativity. However, Parc argues that contrary to prevailing beliefs, imitation and copying do not restrict cultural creativity or diversity but in fact support them further. This argument has been supported by many examples such as Millet and Van Gogh, Picasso, Manet, and Monet, etc. The resources provided may be financial (e.g. granting a loan), or they may consist of goods or services (e.g. consumer credit). Credit encompasses any form of deferred payment.[2] Credit is extended by a creditor, also known as a lender, to a debtor, also known as a borrower. Typically, the public law duration of a copyright expires 50 to 100 years after the creator dies, depending on the jurisdiction. Some countries require certain copyright formalities to establishing copyright, others recognize copyright in any completed work, without a formal registration Millet and Van Gogh.

https://medium.com/@rachelford45/123-movies-the-croods-a-new-age-2020-full-stream-online-e9739e7c4381

[]

2020-12-23 02:00:20.543000+00:00

['Cartoon', 'Animation', 'Covid 19']

Lean Business Scorecard: Desirability

Almost every Design, Product and Startup-focused book in existence starts by setting out the importance of focusing on the needs of customers first and foremost, so why, if there is so much material out there that explains that businesses fail for this reason, do people get this consistently wrong? There are 2 reasons for this. Our lack of awareness of subconscious biases, and and Our lack of mitigating strategies to outsmart them Falling victim to biases The first reason that we fail to truly understand and address our customer’s needs is that most of us love to jump straight to solutions when confronted with a challenge. We go around spending all day dreaming up solutions. We obsess over them. It’s known as Solution Bias. It means we risk not understanding our customers or their problems and start coming up with solutions based largely on assumptions. The second reason we struggle to find Product-Market fit is that once we get an idea of a solution into our heads, we then have a tendency to seek out information that supports our ideas and we tend to avoid or reinterpret information that could contradict what we think. We fall victim to something called Confirmation Bias. Solution Bias and Confirmation Bias are very dangerous when combined. Together, they are powerful subconscious forces that shape our behaviours and stop us from seeking out evidence that would actually be useful to build a business. It’s these two biases that give people a false sense of confidence in their ideas and cause them to waste money chasing ideas no key wants or needs. Many ‘Stealth’ Startups — even those with millions in funding and billion-dollar valuations — have fallen victim to this way of thinking. Months and sometimes years are spent without any form of customer testing. Then, when the “big reveal” takes place, they are met with a lukewarm “so what?”. By obsessing over the solution rather than the problem, you end up ignoring evidence that could contradict your assumption and you lose sight of your customers, what they are trying to achieve and the biggest challenges they face. The Desirability section is therefore the most important and biggest part of the entire Lean Business Scorecard — use it as a reliable and repeatable strategy to hack your hardwired biases and help yourself first obsess over the problem before setting out the value your solution offers. Obsessing over the Problem Instead of falling in love with the Solution, we should always start by falling in love with every aspect of the Problem and looking for evidence that we are solving the right problem or challenge for our target audience. Once we’ve cracked the problem, it’s only then we examine the solution for signs that it has achieved Product-Market Fit. A solution can only achieve a market fit if the problem it solves truly needs addressing Let’s look at the Problem section of the Lean Business Scorecard This part of the Desirability scorecard has 3 sections. The Problem Section of the Desirability Scorecard Problem Overview In this section of the Scorecard, I’m looking to understand Who your target audience is is What their job to be done is, and is, and The challenge or problem that is getting in their way Your target audience are the group of people who will be paying you something of value in return for the value your product or service provides to them. For example, in the case of a company like Airbnb, it’s people with homes and apartments to rent out AND people who want to travel away from home. Their job to be done — an idea coined by the late Clayton Christensen — is what they are trying to accomplish. Note that it is rarely, if ever, your customer’s job to be done to use your product and service. Instead, your customer buys or ‘hires’ your product or service to help them get their job to be done completed successfully. For Airbnb, people with homes and apartments like to get away and travel to different places, both for work and pleasure. The job to be done is not to ‘use Airbnb’ but to to ‘get short term rental income’ whilst they ‘get away to a different city or country’. Their current challenge is something that gets in the way of their job to be done. It could be something that confuses or frustrates them. It could be something they are completely unaware of. In our Airbnb example, people who travel away from home often only have the option of an expensive hotel to stay in that offers a homogenous experience with little connection to the local culture. They yearn for more. Business ideas that lack Product-Market fit usually do so because they lack a Market of people with a common Job to be done that also have a big enough problem or challenge in their way. To bring these ideas to life and learn how to use the Problem section of the Scorecard, let’s do a teardown of one of Airbnb’s earliest pitch decks (or at least a reproduction of one) to see how much evidence they had in 2008. Problem Teardown Take a moment to scan through the slides below (and please ignore the competitive advantages section, it’s a reproduction after all).

https://medium.com/@robinow/lean-business-scorecard-desirability-ede59c82da78

['Robin Wong']

2021-09-12 08:30:08.099000+00:00

['Design', 'Desirability', 'Business', 'Lean Startup']

Deploy a Simple Jenkins on AWS Using Terraform

Deploy Jenkins as server General variables are presented in this file, please pay attention to some properties which need to be replaced by your configure AWS CLI variables. See more information in AWS CLI Command Reference. There are several properties which are need setups: access_key and secret_key: Access keys that are used as part of the credentials to authenticate the command request. jenkins_key_name: Name of key pair file that will be useful to connect via ssh to our instance. If you need to make a key pair please handler by the section My security credentials getting in your AWS account. Notice in this example we used key-pair.pem which is located in the Template folder in this project, replace this file and his name in the project with your credentials. amis: This property can be a list and has the AMI instance id which is easy to find in Amazon Machine Instances, if you want to change this AMI instance please watch out if your AMIhas systemctl installed because Amazon Linux doesn’t support systemclt or service command according to its version based on CentOS / RHEL, so to avoid spending a lot of time searching an AMI instance with his systemctl already configured, try to use the AMI instance which is configured in this project. Once all properties have been configured, execute command line terraform init to initialize the working folder, terraform plan to watch all deploy plan, and once you have check it please execute command line terraform apply to deploy your infrastructure.

https://medium.com/deploy-a-simple-jenkins-on-aws-amazon/deploy-a-simple-jenkins-on-aws-a60d93f8b83b

['Marvin Ortiz Balliachi']

2020-10-27 05:35:15.006000+00:00

['Tutorial', 'Terraform', 'Jenkins', 'Pipeline', 'AWS']

TNDL: Woe is me! For I am like those who gather summer fruits, Like those who glean vintage grapes; There is no cluster to eat. Of the first-ripe fruit which my soul desires.

MICAH 7 Sorrow for Israel’s Sins 7 Woe is me! For I am like those who gather summer fruits, Like those who glean vintage grapes; There is no cluster to eat Of the first-ripe fruit which my soul desires. 2 The faithful[a] man has perished from the earth, And there is no one upright among men. They all lie in wait for blood; Every man hunts his brother with a net. 3 That they may successfully do evil with both hands — The prince asks for gifts, The judge seeks a bribe, And the great man utters his evil desire; So they scheme together. 4 The best of them is like a brier; The most upright is sharper than a thorn hedge; The day of your watchman and your punishment comes; Now shall be their perplexity. 5 Do not trust in a friend; Do not put your confidence in a companion; Guard the doors of your mouth From her who lies in your bosom. 6 For son dishonors father, Daughter rises against her mother, Daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; A man’s enemies are the men of his own household. 7 Therefore I will look to the Lord; I will wait for the God of my salvation; My God will hear me. Israel’s Confession and Comfort 8 Do not rejoice over me, my enemy; When I fall, I will arise; When I sit in darkness, The Lord will be a light to me. 9 I will bear the indignation of the Lord, Because I have sinned against Him, Until He pleads my case And executes justice for me. He will bring me forth to the light; I will see His righteousness. 10 Then she who is my enemy will see, And shame will cover her who said to me, “Where is the Lord your God?” My eyes will see her; Now she will be trampled down Like mud in the streets. 11 In the day when your walls are to be built, In that day [b]the decree shall go far and wide. 12 In that day they[c] shall come to you From Assyria and the [d]fortified cities, From the [e]fortress to [f]the River, From sea to sea, And mountain to mountain. 13 Yet the land shall be desolate Because of those who dwell in it, And for the fruit of their deeds. God Will Forgive Israel 14 Shepherd Your people with Your staff, The flock of Your heritage, Who dwell [g]solitarily in a woodland, In the midst of Carmel; Let them feed in Bashan and Gilead, As in days of old. 15 “As in the days when you came out of the land of Egypt, I will show [h]them wonders.” 16 The nations shall see and be ashamed of all their might; They shall put their hand over their mouth; Their ears shall be deaf. 17 They shall lick the dust like a serpent; They shall crawl from their holes like [i]snakes of the earth. They shall be afraid of the Lord our God, And shall fear because of You. 18 Who is a God like You, Pardoning iniquity And passing over the transgression of the remnant of His heritage? He does not retain His anger forever, Because He delights in mercy.[j] 19 He will again have compassion on us, And will subdue our iniquities. You will cast all [k]our sins Into the depths of the sea. 20 You will give truth to Jacob And [l]mercy to Abraham, Which You have sworn to our fathers From days of old. Footnotes Micah 7:2 Or loyal Micah 7:11 Or the boundary shall be extended Micah 7:12 Lit. he, collective of the captives Micah 7:12 Heb. arey mazor, possibly cities of Egypt Micah 7:12 Heb. mazor, possibly Egypt Micah 7:12 The Euphrates Micah 7:14 Alone Micah 7:15 Lit. him, collective for the captives Micah 7:17 Lit. crawlers Micah 7:18 Or lovingkindness Micah 7:19 Lit. their Micah 7:20 Or lovingkindness…

https://medium.com/yahweh-elyon-yeshuas-teachings/tndl-woe-is-me-e1693b2417ee

['J. K. Woods']

2020-10-17 00:08:38.093000+00:00

['Spirituality', 'Christianity', 'Religion', 'Love', 'Bible']

Dragon Warriors

I grew up on Fogo Island. It has eleven communities. They were settled by the Irish and English hundreds of years ago along strict Catholic and Protestant lines. I was born and raised in Tilting, an Irish Catholic community of about 300 people. Tilting, like every other community on the island, was exclusively white and rigidly conservative. In Tilting, the priest traditionally had tremendous authority. When my mother was young, if she was outside after dark and the priest saw her, he could order her to go home with the same authority as a parent. That authority had waned by my childhood, but it was still considerable. I was raised in a two-parent household, the youngest of two boys. My brother Jeff was three years older than I. Dad was an alcoholic until I was 6 or 7, then he smoked weed into my adulthood. He was angry, bipolar, and I was terrified of him (most of the time). Mom was heavily involved with the church. When my mental health problems surfaced when I was a child, Mom’s response was to place a Smucker’s bottle full of holy water in my room and take me to the priest (for the record, I would have preferred a doctor). Based on what I learned from various mental health professionals throughout my life, a child faced with emotional or physical abuse can turn out in a couple of ways. For some, it means becoming ultra-responsible and independent early on in life, to give no reason for a parent to abuse them (in other words, it’s harder to hurt someone who doesn’t need you). For others it can lead to lifelong behavioural and mental health issues. Jeff became the former, I became the latter. Dad didn’t say anything bad to or about Jeff because Jeff was independent. He engaged in traditional activities like hunting and fishing that Dad grew up with and understood. For me, in this traditional environment, playing video games, reading books, and watching science fiction were all activities which resulted in bullying. From my peers and my father (even though Dad loved Star Trek and was a voracious reader).

https://medium.com/@petergpenton/dragon-warriors-a2b0c0f698f7

['Peter G. Penton']

2021-03-18 03:11:41.644000+00:00

['Grief And Loss', 'Sibling Relationship', 'Abuse', 'Mental Health', 'Newfoundland']

How I Chose a Dowry-Free-Marriage

Dowry is a tradition of giving gifts during marriage by a bride’s family to a groom and his family. In the Indian subcontinent, this tradition has taken an ill shape because dowry is a burden for most of the parents whose daughter is yet to be married. A bride’s family demand dowry in the form of money, immovable assets, vehicles, and jewelry. Dowry is unlawful, yet the net value of dowry in any marriage can range from a few hundred dollars to millions of dollars. It is calculated by using education, family status, and monthly income of the groom as a variable of the equation. A girl’s education, talent, and profession hardly play any role in lowering dowry amounts. This custom has been affecting the structure of society for a long time. Dowry is not only a means of financial exploitation, but it can also be the beginning of never-ending domestic violence in the life of a woman. It still exists, and it is spreading everywhere. While some take it as an opportunity to demand, others accept dowry as a gift. I was firmly against such practices. So I was determined that no such customs will prevail in my marriage. To have a dowry-free-marriage was one of my lifetime dreams. Our marriage was an arranged marriage. We first met, got engaged, and married within 15 days. Neither of us knew each other, and our families did not know each other either. I was clueless and helpless because everything was happening so quickly. To have a dowry-free-marriage was one of my lifetime dreams. In my journey to fulfill a dream of a dowry-free-marriage, I never knew my steps would be an ice-breaker-step to grow a seed of love in the heart of a woman I was about to be married. I never knew this step would build the first layer of foundation in our relationship. I divide this post into three main sections as The effects of dowry in the Indian-subcontinent. The hurdles I encountered in choosing a dowry-free-marriage. Our relationship after the wedding day. A dowry is an evil tool of a society In the Indian subcontinent, I have grown up hearing and reading many stories of abuses and domestic violence against women. One reason behind such cruelty is dowry. As per different research conducted in South Asia, on average 8000 dowry death cases in India are registered every year. Dowry deaths refer to the bride’s suicide or murder committed by her husband or his family soon after the marriage because of their discontent with the amount of dowry paid. Although there has been no proper research in accumulating dowry deaths in South Asia, this number can cross 10,000. The domestic violence that leads to dowry death happens mainly because of two reasons. The bride’s family couldn’t or didn’t settle the full amount of dowry as demanded by the groom during the marriage. Even after the bride’s family settles the dowry amount demanded by the groom, the groom’s family of the groom keeps demanding a fresh amount and property to fulfill their needs. Upon not receiving an additional dowry, they use violence as a method to extract their demand. So we can redefine dowry as a degraded social custom of demanding gifts by a groom’s family during or after a marriage ceremony. Dowry is a state of illness It happens not only in the uneducated and socially backward family, but it also occurs in highly educated communities. The dowry death of Sunita Yadav, a forty-three-year-old woman, is one of the registered dowry-deaths in 2019. It happened in Province 2 of Nepal. The groom was a doctor, and he was demanding a house to run his clinic. Her family claims she was beaten to death by in-laws for not bringing enough dowry. Nepal’s province 2 (also known as Madhesh) is a territory where dowry is embraced by most of the inhabitants. Dowry is a pseudo-social status Outside province 2 of Nepal, People who are aware and educated have stopped demanding or talking about dowry in the last thirty years. But the fear of domestic violence linked to dowry has not been eradicated yet. Thus the bride’s family willingly offers marriage gifts as a modern form of dowry. They think marriage gifts will prevent their daughter from domestic violence and social isolation in years to come. Many brides’ parents take loans to fulfill the groom’s demand. Apart from that, marriage gifts are also an indicator of the social status of two families. To show off higher status, the bride’s family tries to compete with others by giving many gifts, including furniture, electronics and appliances, and a two/four-wheeled vehicle. In this process, a girl’s family is the one to suffer the most. They spend most of their earnings on the marriage of their daughter. Many bride’s parents take loans to fulfill the groom’s demand, burdening themselves with massive debt for years to come. I wanted a marriage with no dowry A social activist within me had hated the tradition of dowry. I wanted no one to talk about our social status in our marriage; I wanted to see no gifts around. Because I wanted to keep speaking against dowry in days to come, I wanted to marry with no dowry. We never endorsed dowry. But the marriage gift of large monetary value for social showoff was highly likely to occur. I had to fight against such tradition. In the arranged marriage where none of the things were going my way, I knew that a dowry-free-marriage was the one that could give me some peace. But things were not so easy in reality. My parents hadn’t asked for a dowry in our marriage. So the chance of the first form of dowry was not in the picture. But the marriage gift of large monetary value was highly likely to occur. How do I stop the second form of dowry dominating my marriage? How can I know what was going on in the mind of my in-laws? We as a family didn’t know each other. Thus any communication could have been misunderstood and take an ugly turn. So, to execute my plan, I had to communicate my wish to my in-laws. I told my parents too. Everyone objected to my decision. We, as a family, didn’t know each other, and we never knew what they would infer from my decision. I had to make this life-altering decision eight days before our marriage. I knew if I had to communicate it, I needed to do it as soon as possible. What if they misunderstood my communication as our expectation of dowry/marriage gifts? My parents and relatives warned me not to talk about dowry at all. It was not because we expected, or we needed any form of gifts. It was because it would be too weird to talk about such things with strangers. What if they took it the opposite way? They might misunderstand my communication as an indirect way of demanding or expecting dowry/marriage gifts. My parents told me that as we had asked nothing in or any form of dowries, it would be entirely their free will to give or not, and I should respect them whatever their decision might be. However, as I mentioned above, because of social stigma factors, the chances of getting heavy gifts were high. At any cost, I had to convey my wish. I kept repeating to my parents that I couldn’t afford to have a wedding where a bride would bring lots of dowries with her on the wedding day. They wanted me to stay silent. No one in my family understood my dream of a dowry-free-marriage. They were not wrong to suggest that my laws might judge my character. I needed someone to have faith in me, and I needed peace in my heart. I shared this with my local pastor. He told me that if I thought it was a good move and if it gave me peace, I should not care about anyone, and I should communicate it to my future father-in-law. Without thinking much, I telephoned and told my future-father-in-law that I would be happy to have Ranjita as my wife, and I would need nothing else. I told him, “No dowry please”. The moment of simultaneous peace and conflicts While a part within me was in peace to share my desire, I was also nervous about the consequences. What if my in-laws misunderstand my words and cancel led our wedding? I shared it with my parents. Everyone was furious about this. Somehow the wedding day arrived. On that day, as per my wish, they gave no expensive gifts. To their satisfaction and peace, they gave a set of essential furniture. I understand that they also needed to be in peace. Apart from the strangeness among the two of us, everything went smoothly. Life after the wedding day A month after our wedding day, I narrated the story/ incidents to my wife. I asked her if her father shared those conversations of “no form of dowry, please.” I wanted to know their family reaction, and I also wanted to know her thoughts. She told me her father discussed my wish with their family, and they respected it. They didn’t misunderstand or misjudge me. Instead, it helped me. They were happy to have me as their son-in-law. My parents were happy because my communication helped in fulfilling my dream to the maximum possible extent. This step of mine also worked to break the ice of strangeness for me in her heart. She had least expected me to advocate social issues so strongly at the critical phase of our relationship. My step had built a bridge of trust. Yes, it was enough to plant a seed of love for me in her heart. Because of my act, I am in peace, and I can advocate dowry free marriages for years to come. Things were not in my favor, but I had to execute it at any cost. It was challenging but fruitful. Till the journey of the third marriage anniversary, I believe both of us have handled it with care, and our marriage is successful today.

https://medium.com/swlh/how-i-chose-a-dowry-free-marriage-9d5e1e0e0758

['Suraj Ghimire']

2020-10-08 21:30:32.608000+00:00

['Women', 'Equality', 'Culture', 'Relationships', 'World']

The Future of Customer Service

Customer service standards have shifted dramatically over the past decade, thanks to a combination of more competition in the market and an abundance of increasingly-accessible technology. All businesses understand that the customer experience is a powerful differentiator, and it absolutely will impact who customers buy from, how long they stay loyal, and even what they’re willing to pay. We know that customer service is essential to a business’s long-term success, but what exactly does the future of customer service hold? In this post, we’re going to take a look at how the pandemic has impacted customer expectations and what we expect for the future of customer service. How the Pandemic Has Impacted Customer Service Expectations were already high of customer service before the pandemic struck, with 54% of consumers from all over the world saying that their customer service expectations had risen year-over-year in 2017. The pandemic, however, had a significant impact on customer service. With lockdowns and social distancing requiring many businesses to operate online or remotely, customer service representatives via phone, email, and live chat became the face of brands. There weren’t in-person salespeople to build relationships or solve issues. Some businesses struggled with this, as call volume went up significantly, especially when supply chains and standard operating procedures were disrupted and impacted customers. One study found that “difficult” customer calls increased from 10% to 20% once the pandemic ramped up. This was partially due to unsolvable problems caused by the pandemic, though it didn’t help that customer anxiety and frustration as a whole had increased dramatically, too. Perhaps the most significant change, of course, was that many customer service agents were now working from home for the first time. As of right now, many still do. What We Think the Future of Customer Service Looks Like COVID-19 has clearly presented some challenges to the customer service industry that will likely shape it moving forward. We’ve also had an emergence of new technology, which in turn can alter consumer behavior. All of these factors are going to change the face of customer service in 2021 and beyond. Let’s take a look at what we believe the future of customer service will hold. Increased Accessibility Across Multiple Communication Channels If this year has taught us anything it’s that accessibility through multiple communication channels is a must. Have a Facebook Page for your business? Customers will message you there, and expect a response within 24 hours. They’ll also call you, email you, send messages through your site, and use just about any communication platform available to them. You need to have customer service agents manning all of them, but remember that even as more communication channels branch out, phone will still be central. Most customers prefer to talk to someone on the phone for urgent, important, or secure purposes. You don’t want to risk missing these calls or keeping people waiting for 45+ minutes on hold while their anxiety levels go up, so having strong support for your phone lines will be crucial. Businesses Will Prioritize Meaningful Connections with Customers Customers want to do business with brands that care about them. And while customers can be fickle, easily tempted to try the competition for a slightly lower price or a single less-than-stellar experience, one of the few things that can establish true loyalty is legitimate relationships. Small, human-to-human moments between a customer and a customer service agent can be a gamechanger, even if they’ll likely never talk to that agent again. Think about the last time you had a major customer service disaster. Maybe, for example, you had ordered an expensive $200 weighted blanket for your daughter’s birthday, only it arrived damaged two days before the big day. You don’t want an apathetic customer service agent to say “well we’ll refund you, sorry for the inconvenience.” Hearing someone on the other end of the line who genuinely seems to care, and who works to find a solution is what you want– and it’s what will keep you around as a customer. Personalization Will Allow Higher-Quality Service While we train our customer service teams to handle every foreseeable scenario, the reality is that each individual customer is unique, and every concern is unique. Someone who receives that weighted blanket in tatters will only want their money back, while others wouldn’t settle for anything less than a new blanket overnighted to them the next day so it can arrive on-time as a gift. Some may want quick action taken, while others may have questions about the quality of the product overall. Personalization in customer service means that your customers are being treated as individuals. And when your team has the ability to act as if each customer is an individual and not just adhering to strict scripts, everyone benefits. Personalization will continue to be a powerful force in the future of customer service, aided by stronger CRM tools to track customer histories to better find ideal solutions faster. Reliance On Third-Party Tools & Services to Offer Faster, Better Service A few weeks ago, I had to make a call to follow up with Discover about an issue with fraud on one of my cards. I’d already called before and was dreading needing to rehash the entire scenario over again. I didn’t have to. Even though I spoke to a new customer service agent, they pulled up my file and the case, and we were able to jump right back in. They were able to offer a solution that worked specifically for me, based on the situation. As a customer, I felt cared about, and a stressful situation was resolved quickly and easily. And they were able to do this because they had a strong CRM, which allowed them to take adequate notes during the first call that they could source during the second. And even better, the team members were clearly trained to use them. Third-party services like high-quality answering services are also becoming more popular, especially as customer service demands continue to increase. Customers are tired of waiting on hold when they’re used to fast responses through live chat, so having an answering service that can pick up every call in three rings or less can be a game-changer for your business.

https://medium.com/@patlive/the-future-of-customer-service-d71f6ce62afe

[]

2020-12-23 14:49:38.463000+00:00

['2021 Trends', 'Customer Service', 'Future Of Work', 'Customer Experience']

Jainism & Politics

By: Naman Shah If your experience is similar to mine, we’ve met Jains at all ends of the political spectrum — from far left, to far right, to plain apathy. Religion and politics are two domains where our values, and sometimes our emotions, can be expressed both collectively and through institutional forms. Yet, if we as Jains share a set of core values — Ahimsa (non-violence), Aparigrah (non-possessiveness), and Anekantavada (multiplicity of views) — then why do our politics differ so dramatically? I’d like to share some thoughts on common questions which we all grapple with, though with the disclaimer that I’m still figuring this all out. “If we as Jains share a set of core values — Ahimsa (non-violence), Aparigrah (non-possessiveness), and Anekantavada (multiplicity of views) — then why do our politics differ so dramatically?” Is political activity a moral matter? Similar to religions, political parties are built upon a set of values. In religion, these values are of a clear moral nature. In politics, those same moral values are often present and furthermore, are expressed as social action. We can, as individuals, act in consistency with our values, however we don’t live on isolated islands. What I do affects others and vice versa. So it is politics that give us the means to manifest our moral values at a community level. Therefore, both forms of action are critical. Aren’t politics more complicated than religion? Yes, but this does not absolve us from going deeper. Where politics differs from religion is that it incorporates other forms of values in addition to the moral. These range from the aesthetic/cultural, what do we want our public spaces to look like, to the technical, what form of X policy better achieves Y goal, and quite often, the personal interest, which tax policy will benefit me the most? The segregation between such considerations and moral values is, of course, not always so neat. Regardless, people who share the same moral values can differ along these lines. For example, if as Jains we believe in non-violence and we know poverty is a profound form of structural violence, we should insist on poverty reduction as a component of our politics. But whether poverty is best addressed through targeted social programs, a universal basic income, or a specific fiscal policy can be reasonable grounds for difference. If we ensure in our politics that moral values trump the aesthetic and the personal interest, and guide the technical decisions, we can improve the consistency between what we profess and how we infuse those values into the world we live in. “If we ensure in our politics that moral values trump the aesthetic and the personal interest, and guide the technical decisions, we can improve the consistency between what we profess and how we infuse those values into the world we live in.” Shouldn’t religion be politically neutral? Impossible. Neutrality as a form of non-engagement is, in effect, an endorsement of the status quo. Neutral as a form of equivalence, that different forms of politics represent the same range of our moral values, is a logical fallacy that we’ll discuss below. Don’t all politicians/parties break our values? There is a somewhat understandable tendency towards cynicism in politics: “It doesn’t really matter, they’re all the same.” And yes, all political groups are imperfect, being human like us, coupled with the challenges of representing and coordinating within a diverse group of people. But some good actions minus some bad ones does not become an equation that equals out to zero. Unfortunately, we’re left with the difficult task of assessing trade-offs and working with the best available political forces where we can still improve society even if it doesn’t result in perfection. The lack of clarity can be frustrating. Stated differently, aren’t there multiple viewpoints? So how we do what constitutes the ‘best available’? This is an old critique of Anekantavada, but we know the answer — multiplicity of viewpoints is not the same as simple relativism; there is an ultimate truth which must be worked towards. Why critique anyone and not just focus on doing good? Doing good is wonderful. It’s hard to argue with that. What we miss is sometimes the good can come from, or even be an attempt to actively hide, much larger costs. Think about the oil companies which donate a few million but spend hundreds more lobbying to prevent regulations that would reduce the billions in harm they cause in the first place. Or the parable of the engineer trying to build a bridge over a river where people are drowning without addressing the person who is throwing them in just ahead. Sometimes what’s more or as important is to do less harm to begin with. We shy away from this because it can involve conflict and threatens privilege, often including our own. This is too abstract, what are some examples? Looking at political leaders such as Trump or Modi, I cannot reconcile their positions with our core moral values. Both casually mention using nuclear weapons, boast gleefully about killing enemies, and openly pursue policies that discriminate against minorities, creating an atmosphere of fear and devaluation. Some might defensively term these opinions or accusations, but even in our post-fact era, these acts are in plain view if one bothers to look. While their opposition leaves much to be desired, and may have committed similar offenses at one point in time, their political alternatives do not repeatedly and systematically denigrate our most cherished beliefs. As YJP prepares to meet with one of these two in the near future I hope we will advocate for our key values of non-violence and tolerance. That would be worthy of an interaction with a Jain organization. By engaging with politics we are individually and collectively empowered to impact both our soul and our world.

https://medium.com/@YJProfessionals/jainism-politics-605d1935ccee

['Young Jain Professionals', 'Yjp']

2019-09-24 21:21:25.602000+00:00

['Politics', 'Young Jain Professionals', 'Jainism', 'Values', 'Impact']

Wemo WiFi Smart Outdoor Plug review: This plug’s performance problems kill it from the start

Wemo WiFi Smart Outdoor Plug review: This plug’s performance problems kill it from the start Jamie Jan 10·3 min read Here’s the tl;dr on Wemo’s new outdoor smart plug: Skip it. Here’s why. Wemo is a longstanding and respected name in the smart home space, but the new Wemo WiFi Smart Outdoor Plug simply doesn’t do the brand—or existing Wemo users who want to extend their smart home into the yard—any favors. Let’s start with the hardware, which feels solid but is lacking in features. This review is part of TechHive’s coverage of the best smart plugs, where you’ll find reviews of competing products, plus a buyer’s guide to the features you should consider when shopping for this type of product.The 2.4GHz Wi-Fi device boasts two outlets, but they can’t be individually controlled by hardware or software: Both are either on or off. Its IP44 weatherization rating indicates you’ll want to keep its captive rubber plugs installed when either socket is not in use, as its protected only from particulate matter larger than 1mm (i.e., there isn’t enough dust protection to prevent failure). It’s better protected from water and should withstand being sprayed with a garden hose. (You can read more about IP codes in this article.) A small LED illuminates on the single power switch when the device is active, but LED can’t be disabled. Belkin/Wemo The Wemo WiFi Smart Outdoor Plug’s pigtail allows it to dangle from the outlet and avoid blocking the outlet above it. [ Further reading: The best smart switches and dimmers ]On the bright side—for iPhone users, at least—this smart plug is compatible with Apple’s HomeKit ecosystem (Android software is also available). iPhone users are directed to begin setup in the Wemo app, then wait to be transitioned over to the iOS Home app to complete the setup process by scanning the HomeKit QR code on the back of the device. Christopher Null / IDG If you buy a Wemo WiFi Smart Outdoor Plug, be ready to encounter this error message frequently. When I first attempted to set up the plug with an iPhone, this part of the setup stalled out, with Home repeatedly giving me an “Accessory Not Found” error, even after resetting the device. I ended up enlisting Wemo’s support staff to find a fix, and eventually a factory reset did the trick, allowing the setup process to complete. There was no clear answer on what wasn’t working the first time around, but Wemo’s technicians did note that resetting this particular device can be difficult, and that perhaps my earlier attempts to do so hadn’t succeeded (despite LEDs flashing in a particular pattern, suggesting the contrary). Once the device was set up, I was able to interact with it normally—that is, turn it off and on—through the Wemo app, at least some of the time. Unfortunately, I found the plug to be distinctly prone to dropping off my Wi-Fi network without warning, sometimes taking a few seconds and sometimes a few minutes to recover and be accessible again. (The switch was more reliable when accessing it via the iOS Home app, which I’d recommend using as a primary interface if you end up purchasing this device.) The frequent disconnects on the device seem to have a worse side effect than simply creating lag when trying to interact with the device: They also kill the Wemo app’s scheduling system entirely. I never once got a rule or automation created in the Wemo app to work with this plug, although I don’t have trouble with other Wemo devices. Scheduling within the iOS Home app was also successful. As always, your mileage may vary depending on the specifics of your infrastructure, but I’d argue that there are other outdoor plugs in its $40 price range that will give you far fewer headaches. Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details.

https://medium.com/@jamie93123333/wemo-wifi-smart-outdoor-plug-review-this-plugs-performance-problems-kill-it-from-the-start-4083e3bd9ef9

[]

2021-01-10 09:08:06.090000+00:00

['Chargers', 'Gear', 'Services', 'Consumer']

The Ultimate Guide to Staying Injury Free as a Runner

Wouldn’t it be nice to have an injury-free 2021? What if we could achieve all of our running goals for the year while avoiding the roadblocks? While I can’t promise anything, I’m confident that we can make strides towards this lofty aim if we get serious about injury prevention. We often hold an outlook that getting hurt while running is ‘bad luck’. While there can be an element of randomness and misfortune, we must realize that we hold the fate of our health and wellness in our own hands. I’ll live and die by the philosophy of primary prevention, both for the running community and our world as a whole. If we want better health outcomes, we must put in the preliminary work to avoid injuries and diseases before they strike. It should be noted that this is easier said than done. There are accessibility and education barriers that often cause us to fall short of optimal living. To break down the walls and provide clarity, I’ve constructed a simple ten-step guide to becoming injury-free from running. Of course, this won’t cover every single detail, but it’s a start to prioritizing science-backed strategies that work. Our anatomy, environments, and situations are all different, so please don’t view this as a one-size-fits-all program. Instead, identify what tips resonate with you and begin to implement them into your training. If all goes well… injury-free running awaits!

https://davidliira.medium.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-staying-injury-free-as-a-runner-497928e66a90

['David Liira']

2020-12-30 14:22:27.403000+00:00

['Lifestyle', 'Fitness', 'Science', 'Running', 'Health']

LEAN UX

It is a methodology for changing user behavior and influencing business outcomes. One of the thing about lean UX is it makes to think you about outcomes. An outcome for your business might be to increase revenue, it might be to increase the number of subscribers, it might be to increase the number of paid users and so on on your product. How you get that is an unknown. What lean UX is about ?? It’s about filling in that gap of how you get them. You don’t start up thinking about solutions, you don’t start of thinking about features. What you do is you start up thinking about outcome you want to influence. Let’s take a example. One outcome you might want to influence for your business would be increasing the number of subscribers. What you do is you then say ok and go with increasing the number of subscribers, the outcome we want to create is increasing the number of subscribers. How do we get them ? May be that’s more flexible pricing plans, may be it’s one month’s free trial, may be it’s making the product easy to use and so on so that more people will continue to use your product and they recommend that to their friends and may be because they recommend to their friends more people will come and use it. There is always different way you can address the problems, there is always different ways you can think about the problems. But the core thing about Lean UX is what is does is it’s gets you to think about the problem, it gets you to think about a outcome you want to achieve. How the Lean UX process works Before you get started with Lean UX, keep in mind what Gothelf says: Lean UX is a mentality. A mindset must be accepted by everyone in your organization in order for it to be effective. “This reframe necessitates an attitude of humility throughout the business. It necessitates that teams and managers apply their knowledge, talents, and creativity in the same way that scientists do: they suggest their best answer and then test to see whether they’re correct.” For Lean UX to be effective, all members of your organization must be on board and understand it. The system can be broken down into four processes: Outcomes, assumptions, hypotheses Design Creating the MVP Research and Learning Outcomes, assumptions, and hypotheses Whereas typical software development approaches concentrate on features and deliverables, Lean UX emphasizes the product’s outcomes and how they help (or do not benefit) the user. To achieve positive results, Lean UX turns the focus away from what designers believe is necessary of a product and onto their assumptions. Assumptions are just your beliefs or expectations about your users based on what you know. Business outcomes. This is what it looks like when it’s all said and done. What evidence do you have that your product was a success? Users. The people for whom you’re designing a product. What are their names? What does their persona entail? User outcomes. This is what your customers are looking for in a product like yours. What are their aches and pains? Features. How will you improve your product in the future to ensure that your users get the results they want? Design This is the point at which you start designing your product. This could also be the moment to put your hypotheses to the test. Adapted from Lean UX: “For instance, if you’re working on a new project, you could evaluate demand by developing a landing page that counts how many people sign up for your service.” It’s also not enough to lock your designers in a room progressively filling with water and force them to build a product before drowning (too specific?). Always keep in mind that you must collaborate when designing. For example, cross-departmental teams must collaborate to draw and construct wireframes, and everyone must feel comfortable providing input on everything. Designers should think of themselves as meeting and conversation facilitators. As your designs advance, you can format your meetings and talks in a variety of ways. Check out chapter four of Lean UX for additional information. This effort is incorporated into the minimal viable product. MVP (Minimum viable product) What is the simplest way for us to learn more about our hypothesis? That is the question that your minimum viable product seeks to answer (MVP). An MVP is the most basic expression of your product, as we’ve already discussed. The goal is to get a basic product out there and test how your target market reacts to it. MVP is defined as “a version of a new product that allows a team to acquire the largest amount of validated learnings about customers with the least amount of effort” in Eric Riess’ book The Lean Startup. Research and learning Validation is the focus of this stage of the process. Are you heading in the right direction? Is your product meeting the needs of your customers? What should be changed? Research and learning requires two things to be effective in Lean UX: Continuous. Every sprint should include “small, informal, qualitative research” methodologies (from Lean UX). Collaborative. To “build shared understanding,” teams must operate cross-functionally rather than in silos (from Lean UX). The idea is for your company to obtain information quickly but thoroughly. This is only possible if you conduct frequent and collaborative research.

https://medium.com/@sandeshrijal00/lean-ux-3efb1863bf9e

['Sandesh Rijal']

2021-06-17 06:45:08.013000+00:00

['Ux Writing', 'Ux Strategy', 'UX', 'UX Design', 'UX Research']

Increasing payment acceptance with Fraud Detection System

Crossposted in Midtrans blog, with some modifications, personal notes, etc. A good chunk of years in my career is spent dabbling on payment risk and fraud detection system — and of the piece of the puzzle that is still ongoing to be solved is to change the stigma of Fraud Detection System. Over the years Fraud engine is always treated as a necessary evil, but also the first culprit to blame when talking about ‘what causes our payment acceptance to drop.’ In Midtrans, we employ our own Fraud Detection System called Aegis, developed in-house back in 2014 by our own fraud analysts, data scientists and risk engineers to help protect our merchants from fraudulent payment attempts and keeping their platform secure. Being a fraud analyst ourselves, we understood all the pain points of the generic fraud systems in the market back at that time. Unlike most fraud systems in the market which was designed either for engineers or the marketing team; we built it with Fraud Analysts in mind — designed to facilitate instant rule deployments without any coding/SQL skill needed to operate in order to cater for on-the-spot fraud attacks. We invested a lot over the years in building our blocklist database in order for it to become the richest payment blocklist database in Indonesia, where we continuously combine fraud reports from banks, partners, our own fraud honeypots, or reports from our merchants. Over the years, we augment Aegis with machine learning risk score designed to be used as part of rules — which enables us to adapt the fluid nature of machine learning products when certainties and quick adjustment is needed, along with relationship network signals, and even more investment in our rule creation in order to facilitate ultra-flexible rule designs. With Aegis, Midtrans have managed to help keep our merchants secure 24/7 only with a team of 4 — ever since its launch in 2014, we have kept our rejection rate to be consistently lower than the industry average, while keeping our fraud rate under 0.1%. As part of Midtrans’s fraud prevention mechanism strategy, Aegis utilizes the following datapoint and mechanisms in real-time manner : Payment signals we derive from our own SDK and checkout page, Signals uniquely used by each merchant in their business sent to Midtrans via our metadata capability in our API, Fraud data reported by banks, partners, merchants or gathered via Midtrans’s own fraud honeypots; Network relationship signals generated by our machine learning fraud engine, Sherlock During the recent double-digit date promotion campaigns held by our merchants, we’ve decided to do something different this year. Specifically for 10.10 and 11.11, learning from our previous year’s experience & data on the campaigns, we worked closely with our merchants to understand better the mechanics of the promotion being held during the said time to derive a behaviour analysis during promotion time. Double-digit date campaigns are akin to Black Friday or Singles Day —the combined purchasing volume in the narrow time window is so massive; hence the purchasing behaviour can’t exactly be compared against regular promotion’s transaction behaviour. Based on the information, we analyzed a few buyer personas with their purchasing behaviour, such as (but not limited to) : Promo Hunters : Buyer whose main goal is to hunt for promotions; typically they are resellers, bulk buyers, or buyers whose main income is to profit from the promotions. They might also use bots or have a team on standby to hunt for promos, : Buyer whose main goal is to hunt for promotions; typically they are resellers, bulk buyers, or buyers whose main income is to profit from the promotions. They might also use bots or have a team on standby to hunt for promos, Promo Fraudsters : Similar to promo hunters, but these buyers use illegal source of funds e.g. stolen credit cards, cashing out wallets from social engineering attempts, etc. Their behaviours might resemble promo hunters at times, Similar to promo hunters, but these buyers use illegal source of funds e.g. stolen credit cards, cashing out wallets from social engineering attempts, etc. Their behaviours might resemble promo hunters at times, Genuine Buyers : Regular buyers who are the main target of the promotion where we might see an upward shift in their purchasing behaviour compared to usual, Regular buyers who are the main target of the promotion where we might see an upward shift in their purchasing behaviour compared to usual, Professional Blackhats : Fraudsters whose MO might not necessarily be related to the ongoing promotion as they are looking for a quick way to cash out their illegal funds for a longer period of time. Not all regular velocity rules that we use in Aegis work well during this campaign period as the behaviour of genuine users who are doing purchasing-spree during unconventional hours and fraudsters who attempt to game the system are starting to overlap. We developed a separate rule & score set for each individual persona and overlapping personas, on top of our regular setups specifically optimized to handle bursts of transactions during the time frame, along with global rules to catch suspicious behaviour shared across personas within that specific platform or even cross platforms. All of these rule setups are monitored by our team of fraud analysts to adjust the metrics on-the-go during the campaign time based on the real-time live feed of the setup’s performance. This initiative paid off; in the domain where minuscule changes can ripple into a big impact, we managed to save an additional 3.7B IDR while reducing the decline rate by 50.8%, with an increase in fraud less than ~0.1% observed within a couple of weeks post-campaign. Key takeaways are that when utilized properly, Fraud Detection System can actually improve your acceptance rate while keeping your payments secure, despite the common misconception of it being the main cause of the payment’s decline. A small caveat to end this post — a fraud detection system is only as good as the data that it has. No matter how sophisticated the technology is, any Fraud system worth its worth is still powerless if it’s not powered with the necessary data pool. Note that at the end of the day, ensuring that your business is passing the important data points and signals to your fraud system are already half the battle won.

https://medium.com/midtrans/increasing-payment-acceptance-with-fraud-detection-system-2cb2d46bbd98

[]

2021-03-18 12:42:22.241000+00:00

['Payments', 'Payment Gateway', 'Payments Technology', 'Fraud Detection', 'Fraud Prevention']

HILT — Dependency injection new library

Dependency injection plays a vital role in good app architecture. Why? I have answered this question in my previous article. Hilt provides a standard way to use DI in your application. It provides containers for every Android class in your project and automatically manages their life cycles. Hilt is built on top of the popular DI library Dagger in order to enhance the compile-time correctness, runtime performance, scalability, and Android Studio support that Dagger provides. Almost 75% of the applications on Play store use Dagger. Hilt was created on top of Dagger to make migration easier. Since many Android framework classes are instantiated by the OS itself, using Dagger in Android apps would mean having an associated boilerplate. Unlike Dagger, Hilt is integrated with Jetpack libraries and Android framework classes which removes most of the boilerplate. This means one can focus on the important parts of defining and injecting bindings without worrying about managing all the setup and wiring of Dagger. It automatically generates and provides: Components for integrating Android framework classes with Dagger that you would otherwise need to create by hand. with Dagger that you would otherwise need to create by hand. Scope annotations for the components that Hilt generates automatically. for the components that Hilt generates automatically. Predefined bindings and qualifiers. Hilt in your project Adding dependencies: Add plugin to your project build.gradle file: buildscript { ... dependencies { ... classpath 'com.google.dagger:hilt-android-gradle-plugin:2.28-alpha' } } 2. Add these dependencies in your app build.gradle file ... apply plugin: 'kotlin-kapt' apply plugin: 'dagger.hilt.android.plugin' android { ... } dependencies { implementation "com.google.dagger:hilt-android:2.28-alpha" kapt "com.google.dagger:hilt-android-compiler:2.28-alpha" } Hilt in your application Just as with manual dependency, here we create dependencies container class to get dependencies. These dependencies are used across the whole application, they need to be placed in such a way that all activities can use them. In the application class. The Application class needs to be annotated with @HiltAndroidApp to add a container that is attached to the app’s life cycle. Open application class and add the annotation to it: @HiltAndroidApp class LogApplication : Application() { ... } The application container is the parent container of the app, which means that other containers can access the dependencies that it provides. By following steps we ensure our app is ready to use Hilt. Inject dependencies into Android classes @AndroidEntryPoint Hilt can provide dependencies to other Android classes using this annotation: @AndroidEntryPoint class ExampleActivity : AppCompatActivity() { ... } Hilt currently supports the following Android classes: Application (by using @HiltAndroidApp ) (by using ) Activity Fragment View Service BroadcastReceiver Hilt only supports activities that extend FragmentActivity (like AppCompatActivity ) and fragments that extend the Jetpack library Fragment , not the (now deprecated) Fragment from the Android platform. Hilt does not support retained fragments. If you annotate an Android class with @AndroidEntryPoint , then you also must annotate Android classes that depend on it. @Inject we use this annotation to obtain dependencies from a component. @AndroidEntryPoint class ExampleActivity : AppCompatActivity() { @Inject lateinit var analytics: AnalyticsAdapter ... } Note: Fields injected by Hilt cannot be private. Attempting to inject a private field with Hilt results in a compilation error. One way to provide binding information to Hilt is constructor injection. Use this annotation on the constructor of a class to tell Hilt how to provide instances of that class: class AnalyticsAdapter @Inject constructor( private val service: AnalyticsService ) { ... } @ Module Sometimes a type cannot be constructor-injected. This can happen for multiple reasons. For example, you cannot constructor-inject an interface. You also cannot constructor-inject a type that you do not own, such as a class from an external library. In these cases, you can provide Hilt with binding information by using Hilt modules. This annotation helps you to provide instances of certain types. Sometimes a type cannot be constructor-injected. This can happen for multiple reasons. For example, you cannot constructor-inject an interface. You also cannot constructor-inject a type that you do not own, such as a class from an external library. In these cases, you can provide Hilt with binding information by using Hilt modules. This annotation helps you to provide instances of certain types. @Binds This annotation tells Hilt which implementation to use when it needs to provide an instance of an interface. The annotated function provides the following information to Hilt: 1. The function return type tells Hilt what interface the function provides instances of. 2. The function parameter tells Hilt which implementation to provide. interface AnalyticsService { fun analyticsMethods() } // Constructor-injected, because Hilt needs to know how to // provide instances of AnalyticsServiceImpl, too. class AnalyticsServiceImpl @Inject constructor( ... ) : AnalyticsService { ... } @Module @InstallIn(ActivityComponent::class) abstract class AnalyticsModule { @Binds abstract fun bindAnalyticsService( analyticsServiceImpl: AnalyticsServiceImpl ): AnalyticsService } @Provides It’s mostly used to provide third-party library instances.(classes like Retrofit, OkHttpClient , or Room databases) @Module @InstallIn(ActivityComponent::class) object AnalyticsModule { @Provides fun provideAnalyticsService( // Potential dependencies of this type ): AnalyticsService { return Retrofit.Builder() .baseUrl("https://example.com") .build() .create(AnalyticsService::class.java) } } @Qualifier A qualifier is an annotation that you use to identify a specific binding for a type when that type has multiple bindings defined. package com.example.android.hilt.di @Qualifier annotation class InMemoryLogger @Qualifier annotation class DatabaseLogger @InstallIn The Hilt module class should also be annotated with @InstallIn to specify the scope of the module. For example, if we annotate the module with @InstallIn(ActivityComponent::class) , then the module will bind to the activity lifecycle. Hilt provides a few more components you can use to bind dependencies to Android classes — have a look: Screenshot from android developer official website The application context binding is also available using @ApplicationContext .

https://medium.com/healthify-tech/hilt-dependency-injection-new-library-54a1255fa668

['Karishma Agrawal']

2020-08-24 06:48:04.195000+00:00

['New In Android', 'Dependency Injection', 'Dagger Hilt', 'Android App Development', 'AndroidDev']

Mum-of-six who died from Covid and wants to see her kids

Mum-of-six who died from Covid and wants to see her kids lalukosai Jan 27·6 min read A mum-of-five shared a heartbreaking final post from a Covid ward asking for loved ones to pray for her recovery. Karen Hobbs, 40, shared her fears that “she might not make it” before she tragically suffered a cardiac arrest and died on January 19 in an induced coma. The “beautiful” and “loving” mum, from Cardiff, fell ill with coronavirus before Christmas and was taken to hospital on December 27. The former easyJet air stewardess was previously “fit and healthy” before she quickly deteriorated. Her family say they are unsure how she caught the virus as she rarely left home during the pandemic, reports Wales Online. They have spoken out a week after her death to urge people to stick to lockdown rules. Describing the days before Karen was admitted to hospital, Rachel, Karen’s sister, said: “For the first couple of days she was at home. 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https://ameblo.jp/sfewasgd/entry-12652723770.html https://ameblo.jp/sfewasgd/entry-12652723869.html https://ameblo.jp/sfewasgd/entry-12652723973.html https://ameblo.jp/sfewasgd/entry-12652724082.html https://slexy.org/view/s20kYwG17E https://paiza.io/projects/_JuCqoigZ-JUyapCC6O24A https://paste.feed-the-beast.com/view/bad17948 http://paste.jp/0487c89f/ https://blog.goo.ne.jp/genjichir/e/de069b78c52e0b66eb202d62f676315e https://blog.goo.ne.jp/genjichir/e/ad456e6805afb35e7132748b151ef605 https://blog.goo.ne.jp/genjichir/e/5bda67c1d3883edccf355c5ae8f60ded https://blog.goo.ne.jp/genjichir/e/be899a3bcea5026ed3d27784520f8bc9 https://blog.goo.ne.jp/genjichir/e/757e40a8cb377a187ed0c78b403d3f81 https://blog.goo.ne.jp/genjichir/e/125c3b95370349d75ff887b195bd0bd3 https://blog.goo.ne.jp/genjichir/e/9b0fd7e7df2e5dd53b760b4e842d132e https://ameblo.jp/sfewasgd/entry-12652811981.html https://ameblo.jp/sfewasgd/entry-12652812014.html https://ameblo.jp/sfewasgd/entry-12652812046.html https://ameblo.jp/sfewasgd/entry-12652812066.html https://ameblo.jp/sfewasgd/entry-12652812089.html https://ameblo.jp/sfewasgd/entry-12652812110.html https://ameblo.jp/sfewasgd/entry-12652812130.html https://ameblo.jp/sfewasgd/entry-12652812145.html https://ameblo.jp/sfewasgd/entry-12652812167.html https://ameblo.jp/sfewasgd/entry-12652812185.html https://ameblo.jp/sfewasgd/entry-12652812207.html https://ameblo.jp/bonigos/entry-12652891688.html https://ameblo.jp/bonigos/entry-12652891831.html https://ameblo.jp/bonigos/entry-12652891934.html https://ameblo.jp/bonigos/entry-12652892033.html https://ameblo.jp/bonigos/entry-12652892143.html https://ameblo.jp/bonigos/entry-12652892224.html https://ameblo.jp/bonigos/entry-12652892283.html https://ameblo.jp/bonigos/entry-12652892328.html https://ameblo.jp/bonigos/entry-12652892392.html https://ameblo.jp/bonigos/entry-12652892517.html https://ameblo.jp/bonigos/entry-12652892615.html I thought she was going to collapse because of her cough and her breathing. “You see it on the TV when they’re on the oxygen and everything but it’s different when someone is in front of you doing it. “It’s probably the worst thing I’ve ever witnessed.” In a series of haunting updates, posts shared by Karen on Facebook give a glimpse of life in intensive care after being rushed to the University Hospital of Wales. On December 28, one post reads: “Well I got sent home from hospital last night only to have to ring an ambulance as I couldn’t breathe again so back in hospital…it’s far to say Covid has well and truly kicked my butt!” A further post two days later adds: “The lady in the bed opposite me has just died in front of me — from Covid. Poor, poor lady, the nurses worked so hard to get her back but she couldn’t be helped. “Let that serve as a warning to anyone who still thinks it’s okay to break the rules.” On New Year’s Eve, Karen described how she was “struggling to reply” to people’s well wishes, adding: “I can’t manage to keep sitting and texting.” But it was not until an update on January 2 that Rachel and her family realised how serious her sister’s condition was. A post shared online by Karen said: “Being place into an [induced] coma and warned that I might not make it, please everyone pray for me that I wake from this and come home to my kids. Terrified is not the word!” Recounting Karen’s last days, Rachel, 41, said: “We were called in the week before she passed. “We all went in that Tuesday and the consultant came in and explained a little bit about what was happening and how ill she was. It was multiple organ failure they called it. He basically said ‘we do think she’s going to die’. “We were just stunned. We thought she would be okay.” Together, Rachel, brother Chris and Karen’s ex-partner Pete were able to visit Karen in person one last time. For her family the days that followed still haven’t sunk in. Speaking one week later Rachel described how she had been planning to move in with Karen and her children Dylan,14, Niamh, 11, Amelia, nine, Sam, eight and Olivia, four, in order to help the family get back on their feet when she was discharged. In her memory, staff at the intensive care department have given each of Karen’s children a hand print and a lock of her hair as well as a memory box. Rachel said: “She was just in a coma. She looked quite peaceful, she wouldn’t have known anything about it. “Then the kids went in to see her, they were really upset. They had a child psychologist there, explaining it to them. “We were just gobsmacked. We just thought she’ll go in and come out in a few weeks and she’ll get better. “It hasn’t sunk it. I didn’t think it would be her, a fit and healthy person.” For Karen’s family her passing is particularly hard to process given the Pentwyn mum’s determination to stick to lockdown rules. While in any other circumstances Rachel would have been able to see her sister and do her make up one last time for the funeral, such wishes are no longer possible. Rachel added: “She didn’t go out, she did her shopping online. In lockdown I used to go around and just wave to the kids from the garden or stand outside and she’d open the window and I’d stand away and talk to her through the window. “The only other place she would have gone is to the school and back but other than that she would be in the house. “[People breaking the rules], it makes you mad. My poor sister is now gone and she was the most careful person. Then you have people out willy nilly.” Paying tribute to her “funny”, straight-talking sister, Rachel added: “She was a proper mum. She would sit there and colour for hours, she’d play games.

https://medium.com/@lalukosai/mum-of-six-who-died-from-covid-and-wants-to-see-her-kids-8cb8e09f3a49

[]

2021-01-27 06:05:39.654000+00:00

['Kids', 'Death', 'Coronavirus', 'Covid 19', 'Moms']

As Free as the Breez: Building Lightning to Make Bitcoin Mobile

By now, Clarke’s third and most famous law has firmly entered the tech vernacular: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. But that’s not the end of the story. First comes that thrilling moment when we marvel at the new technology, when we remember how its functions used to be impossible and are now effortless, and we appreciate the magic. That honeymoon phase might last for a few months. Then we come to rely on the magic, forget what life used to be like without it, and get annoyed when it doesn’t work perfectly. Alas, the fate of all technological magic is to become a utility. Smartphones have certainly followed this trajectory. Such devices used to be part of the furniture in our utopian visions, appearing in primitive form as the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the tricorder from Star Trek, and some of the iconic future tech from 2001: A Space Odyssey. After having lived with “real” smartphones for 13 years now, they’ve become part of the furniture of our mundane reality. Not being able to reach any function within three taps? What is this? 2006? This is every bit as cool and marvellous as a flying car, but it’s so easy to take for granted. (Image: PickPik) Don’t get me wrong. This is a triumph. It’s something to be proud of … as well as a burden. Any new mobile tech must match the brilliant, magical UX we’ve come to expect on our smartphones, or nobody will use it. Progress is a one-way street. From an engineering perspective, users’ expectations are a constraint. Any solution must work within its constraints, or it’s not a solution and we go back to the drawing board. The good news is that we’re engineers, and deep down in our cold, binary hearts, we love constraints. They push us to optimize, to chase after ever more efficiency and stability. Building a Lightning client to run on a quantum computer cooled nearly to absolute zero is for amateurs. If you want a real challenge, try building one that will work on any number of off-the-shelf devices running different versions of iOS and Android. Oh, and keep it standard, secure, private, fast, non-custodial, and easy to use. Since building a mobile Lightning client is such a challenge, and since we’re occasionally asked how we make Breez so functional and simple, we thought you might like a peek under the hood. Here are some of the obstacles to operating a mobile Lightning client like ours and some of the particular solutions we’ve deployed to overcome them. Integrating & optimizing Neutrino, whatever the CPU says While there are significant differences, and in spite of the zealotry displayed in their respective fan communities, Android and iOS have something in common: they are the hall monitors of our mobile devices. No app is allowed to do anything without their permission. “You just used network connectivity, so you’ll have to wait until next period.” “Where’s your hall pass to access CPU cycles?” These guys are the life of the party. The value of this supervision is to make sure that the combination of Candy Crush and TikTok doesn’t melt a phone in a user’s hand. Fair enough. But it also presents an almighty challenge when it comes to running a Lightning node on a mobile device. Lightning nodes were originally designed without CPUs or networking constraints in mind. For example, a Lightning node needs to constantly sync with the blockchain in order to validate channel states. Nodes also need to keep the network graph current and constantly broadcast channel information to peers. The first obstacle is how to access the requisite CPU time while running as a background task, and it’s an obstacle because Breez uses Neutrino. Any non-custodial bitcoin service needs to stay current with the public ledger, and Neutrino is simply the most private means of doing so. Breez was also the first Lightning client to integrate Neutrino. Please hold your applause. The challenge was and remains that Neutrino requires the latest blockchain filters to be downloaded and updated almost constantly, which takes connectivity and CPU cycles. Breez schedules a regular background task to fetch new chain data, but iOS and Android treat background tasks like extended family: some are always welcome and others are politely ignored, though it’s hard to say which or why. CPU access is determined by a mystifying combination of battery status, power supply, other concurrently running apps, and proprietary algorithms. Expecting users to wait until the CPU gets around to processing Neutrino’s requests before they can use the Breez client is unacceptable. Users don’t wait and shouldn’t have to. To help our Lightning client function optimally in the world of CPU constraints and user expectations, we have invented a few helpful processes. We’ve retooled Neutrino to allow it to work independently of lnd. As a result, we reduce the amount of code and data competing for that precious CPU. We’ve optimized lnd to allow outgoing payments even when the client is not synced, which is important because sending funds is the standard use case for most of our users (i.e. those not using our killer point-of-sale mode). Sending funds while out of sync does not compromise their security, although receiving funds while out of sync might. We sync Neutrino only from the last available mined checkpoint. It’s like catching up with a friend’s news since your last meeting, not rehashing your entire mutual history at every encounter. This results in less data to move and crunch, making Breez faster and lighter. We save the requisite Neutrino filters to disk, which allows them to be quickly referenced locally instead of having to download them anew in every instance. Of course, they are also automatically deleted when no longer needed. We’ve implemented a wetware failsafe. Should Neutrino fail to access the CPU for three days — for whatever reason — the app notifies the user that Breez is 72 hours out of sync, and it needs some attention and action on the user’s part. This probably just means that the user needs to actually open the app, prioritizing its demands on the CPU’s time. Routing, graphing, pruning & zombies In order for a node to route a payment through the network, it requires a map: the network graph. Although there are promising proposals to liberate routing from the network graph, source routing remains the only way to route payments privately (such that only the user knows the payment destination). In the current implementation of lnd, nodes broadcast their channels’ status every 24 hours. That’s fine for servers, which have enough uptime to ensure that they will receive most of these updates. Mobile nodes, however, spend most of their time offline, so they are likely to miss many broadcasts. Eventually, these out-of-date channels are considered “zombies”. Just like Hollywood’s zombies, it’s much easier to become one than to recover from zombiehood. Hang in there guys! Help is on the way! (Image: Incirlik Air Base) The problem is that payments can’t be routed over zombie channels, so Lightning “prunes” them (“pruning zombies” — what a metaphor, I know, but we’re engineers, not poets). However, the default mode of identifying zombies is biased against mobile nodes, potentially infecting many innocent, upstanding channels with the zombie virus and cutting them off from the network. Our solution was to change how we treat these channels. Instead of assuming that they’re zombies and pruning them right away, we assume they’re valid and modify what data the mobile nodes query from the full nodes. These small tweaks mean that, in some cases, thousands of zombies were cured, resurrected, and returned to the graph of active, valid channels. We also had to consider how to keep the graphs on our users’ mobile nodes up to date. Their downtime is the root of this challenge, after all. To keep them current, the app will initiate a fast graph-sync procedure in case the graphs on the user’s light client fall a few days behind. As a result, the app is ready to broadcast payments using up-to-date graph information within seconds of opening instead of the minutes it usually takes for graph updates to be received over the Lightning channels. As the network scales, source routing based on a complete graph will become increasingly impractical. Just imagine the labyrinth of channels available if even 10% of all people start to use Lightning regularly. Therefore, it’s important that we keep our eyes on alternative routing algorithms, like ant routing and trampoline payments, as well as their effects on privacy. Syncing the wetware It’s not only the CPU’s attention we need. Sometimes we need access to the users’ attention as well. For example, the payer and payee of a Lightning invoice need to have their clients open at the same time in order for the payment to go through. As a result, Lightning payments are more like telephone calls, where communication only works if both sides engage simultaneously, than like messaging, which allow asynchronous conversations. The minimum requirement, therefore, for a functional non-custodial app is some means to get both parties’ clients online at the same time. To achieve simultaneity, we developed Connect To Pay. It works great. Connect To Pay basically lets the payer send the payee a message that the payment is coming, informs the payer once the payee has opened their client, and then lets her input and transfer the desired sats. Watch the video. It’s about as intuitive and difficult as putting on socks. Modelling the UX on the telephone call is good as far as it goes, and our feedback indicates that normies worldwide love it. But remember the good ol’ days? Back when we used to sit in airplanes and cinemas, which are times and places when using your phone is not possible or just rude? And having to wake up just to accept a payment seems suboptimal. One day soon, receiving payments over Lightning will look like this. I’m so excited I could almost have a nap! (Image: Wikimedia) That’s why we’ve invented Lightning Rod. Once it goes live, Lightning Rod will allow the payer to initiate a payment without requiring the payee’s immediate attention. The payee will be able to receive the payment at her convenience. The secret is to use hodl invoices to give the payee more time to accept the payment before the HTLC runs out and the transaction expires. Just like a text message or an email, the payment will wait safely and validly until the payee is ready to deal with it. Why all this trouble? Getting things right is demanding. There are few real shortcuts in life, which is an old idea. One parable in the Talmud that was only recorded about 1800 years ago expresses it like this: What is the incident with a young boy? One time I was walking along the path, and I saw a young boy sitting at the crossroads. And I said to him: On which path shall we walk in order to get to the city? He said to me: This path is short and long, and that path is long and short. I walked along the path that was short and long. When I approached the city I found that gardens and orchards surrounded it, and I did not know the trails leading through them to the city. I went back and met the young boy again and said to him: My son, didn’t you tell me that this way is short? He said to me: And didn’t I tell you that it is also long? Devising, coding, testing, debugging, integrating, and explaining all of these innovations is the long (short) path. There is a shorter (longer) one: an intern with spreadsheet. Yes, we could simply call ourselves a custodial service, take possession of our users’ funds and pay an intern as little as possible to shift balances around on a spreadsheet. Even at 12 Red Bulls per day, it would be cheaper and easier than having competent, passionate people coding all this. Many users would not notice the difference in the UX. But that easier path doesn’t lead to our destination. We’re aiming for a bitcoin economy. Bitcoin needs to remain not just decentralized, borderless, neutral, immutable, and publicly verifiable, it also needs to be private. We don’t assume that you’re okay with us knowing about your transaction history. And we don’t really want to know. But we do know that privacy, which we love, hinders censorship, which we deplore. That’s why Lightning immediately inspired us. We recognized its potential: it’s 100% bitcoin, but it provides the speed and economy bitcoin needs to go mobile. To go global. To go universal. The problem was just that Lightning wasn’t yet finished. It was only a framework, albeit a brilliant one. We knew that many people would have to invest countless hours to add functionality and bring the UX to where it needs to be, and all without sacrificing the principles and convictions that make bitcoin worthwhile. You see, some apps just “implement” Lightning or not even that — they just take custody and do who knows what while calling it “Lightning”. Not us. We in the Lightning community are building Lightning, identifying problems, concocting solutions, and giving that knowledge away to our users and even to our competitors. Because Lightning is about making bitcoin mobile, not just giving people another reason to play with their phones.

https://medium.com/breez-technology/as-free-as-the-breez-building-lightning-to-make-bitcoin-mobile-4f3d2cca22eb

['Roy Sheinfeld']

2020-07-24 07:04:54.887000+00:00

['Privacy', 'Light Client', 'Lightning Network', 'Bitcoin', 'Routing']

Rdoc.info

For the past few months I’ve been trying to roll out a 1 or 2-day micro-app every month. Because, why not — it’s fun and refreshing. In February there was tweetdreams, March was Mogo madness (in use at offrails.org), and in April we spent a few days tossing this together. The this that I refer to in the previous paragraph is Rdoc.info, a simple web service that generates documentation for Ruby libraries that are hosted on GitHub. You can add a new project and it’ll clone the repo from the hub of Git, use YARD to generate rdocs, and then host them for you. So you can read them. Online. Because it loves you. If you’re the project owner, it’s even better; just add the following simple post-commit hook to your project’s settings in GitHub http://rdoc.info/projects/update and it’ll automatically regenerate documentation for you whenever you push to the remote. So yeah, unlike a random Twitter vanity application, it’s like, actually useful and stuff. I’ve shown this to a few friends and they’ve had some good suggestions for how to make it more useful. Jeff, in particular, had some really great ideas that we’ve been looking into (more on that later, hopefully). Anyway, I’ve doc’d feature ideas in the project’s GitHub Issues list, and although we plan to get to them sooner or later, I wanted to release it first as-is, in the spirit of “release early, release often”. If you want to help out, the project has been open-sourced in the usual place.

https://medium.com/zerosum-dot-org/rdoc-info-7557c6dcb873

['Nick Plante']

2017-11-07 16:30:22.870000+00:00

['Github', 'Documentation', 'Ruby', 'Software Development', 'Open Source']

Content Means Nothing Without Context

One of the first things I did as a writer was to put together a series of three articles showing people how to use Google to answer nearly any question. It was a massive guide. I was proud of it, and I got some positive feedback from the few readers I had at the time. It must have gone to my head, because I instantly turned that praise into my next mistake: I decided to publish the guide as a book. I spent a week laboring over it, expanding it, improving it, making screenshots — the whole nine yards. I designed everything myself (another mistake) and self-published it on Amazon. The result? Crickets. Even at my low hourly rate at the time, I’m still waiting for that one to recoup its investment. There were many reasons why my book was a flop, but the main one, I think, is that I broke the cardinal rule of creating in an online world: Content is king, but context is God. You can’t just tweet out your article and expect to get an extra 1,000 shares. You can’t just transcribe a video and hit ‘Publish.’ What does well as an article won’t automatically sell as a book. Like the kings of history, our work can only do well insofar as it is empowered by the context around it. If a people stopped believing its king was God’s messenger, they chopped his head off. That’s exactly what happens to our content if we distribute it across dozens of platforms like a firehose, not thinking about the culture and context of each one: It dies immediately. Why do we do this in the first place? “Because I said so.” Influencers, trend reports, pseudo-experts, they all tell us the same thing: “Nowadays, you gotta be everywhere. Be on Instagram. Be on Facebook. Make a TikTok account. Hell, that one’s new — make two!” Bullshit. The only thing that happens if you promote yourself anywhere and everywhere is this: Image courtesy of the author, based on Greg McKeown’s Essentialism If you look at the history of how most influencers become towering giants on multiple social media platforms, you’ll see that they worked really hard on one of them — until they exploded and eventually took their giant crowd elsewhere. It’s really easy to get 100,000 Twitter followers if you have 1,000,000 on Youtube. But to go from 0 to 100,000 on both at the same time? That’s really hard. Each platform has its own, unique context. If we ignore it, we’ll drown. Twitter is built around wit, around humor, sass, information density. Medium offers long-form, transformative reading experiences — people spend hours there, but only if they love words. Instagram is visual. It doesn’t require words at all, but it’s also superficial. This doesn’t mean you can’t share your work around the web, but it’s a reminder to acknowledge context wherever you go. If you share an article on Twitter, quote the top highlight. Deliver a 2-sentence pitch on why I should read it. Or turn it into a tweet storm and give me the whole thing! Whatever you do, don’t walk naked into a pub. Read the room, or we’ll shoo you out the door.

https://medium.com/better-marketing/content-means-nothing-without-context-a032b06ed53f

['Niklas Göke']

2020-05-27 20:15:15.036000+00:00

['Social Media', 'Marketing', 'Creativity', 'Content Marketing', 'Writing']

Ubcoin announces partnership with Qbao Network to Deliver Value for Digital Communities

Ubcoin Market, mobile Ebay-like marketplace which brings together non-institutional sellers and buyers and facilitates payment in cryptocurrency, begins a comprehensive partnership with a Singapore-founded company Qbao Network. Qbao Network is a complex solution which integrates functions of a multi-currency cross-chain crypto wallet, token exchange, digital asset management and many others. Ubcoin is planning to fulfill integration with most parts of Qbao Network infrastructure and grant Qbao Network users special possibilities within Ubcoin Marketplace. Ubcoin PTE LTD and Qbao Network signed the memorandum of understanding to commence joint activities. The overall goal of mutually beneficial cooperation is to grow respective user bases and deliver enhanced customer value from new offerings of functionality for both platforms. Ubcoin is global peer-to-peer Ethereum-based marketplace for exchanging real goods to cryptocurrency and back. Ubcoin will be part of the Ubank mobile app that is pre-installed on Samsung smartphones in 10 countries with 2.5 mln active users. Ubcoin is closing soon its token sale (ubcoin.io) and is preparing to be listed on Asian crypto exchanges. Qbao Network serves global blockchain world by providing users with a complex cross-chain, decentralized, secured and easy-to-use digital asset solution. Qbao Network is a one-stop application that meets the needs of people in digital currency payment and settlement, digital asset management, digital asset trading, online consumption, identity authentication, news, and social communication. Expected ways of cooperation: 1) Qbao Network crypto wallet users will receive a certain amount of UBC tokens and will be able to use them on the Ubcoin Marketplace for buying products; 2) Ubcoin Market will become available in the Qbao Network DApp store; 3) Joint crypto payment and token rewarding program solutions; 4) User communities for Ubcoin Market customers are expected to be created on the Qbao Network social media network; 5) Digital asset management program of Qbao Network becoming available for Ubcoin Market clients; 6) Encrypted communication technology considered for integration to Ubcoin Market; “Together with Qbao Network we will actively seek additional mutually beneficial opportunities for technological and business cooperation. Ubcoin Market team deeply believes that partnerships of this kind enable valuable opportunities to grow success of both parties and develop an optimistic and progressive vision for the future of the digital asset economy”, comments Felix, CEO of Ubcoin Market. Qbao Network is designed as a comprehensive blockchain ecosystem platform and the gateway to the blockchain world. We are excited about establishing the partnership with Ubcoin Market. We can build a better blockchain ecosystem together with a wider pool of knowledge, skills and resource”, comments Nathan Sun, Co-founder & COO of Qbao Network. About Ubcoin Market Ubcoin Market is a global peer-to-peer platform that is designed to bring 200 mln new investors to crypto. It bridges the gap between crypto and real worlds. Ubcoin will be part of the Ubank app, the leading mobile payments app in Eastern Europe. Ubank has been in business since 2009 and enjoys a loyal community of 2.5 million monthly active users, more than 16 million downloads around the world, and the has been pre-installed by Samsung and Fly. Ubcoin is currently finishing its tokensale and has attracted both retail and institutional contributors — Inventure Partners, and the Singapore-based Amereus Group. ubcoin.io About Qbao Network Qbao Network is a multifunctional cross-chain crypto wallet with cryptocurrency exchange, digital asset management, online & offline payments system, instant message, and a DApp store. Qbao Network is designed as a comprehensive blockchain ecosystem platform and the gateway to the blockchain world. It welcomes excellent blockchain teams to be partners and to build the ecosystem together. Qbao Network application has four language versions English, Chinese, Korean and Japanese. It is available on Android, Google Play & IOS App Store, which attracts more than 5 million registered users worldwide. The token of Qbao Network, QBT is listed on twelve crypto-exchanges including Gate.io, Exx and more. Qbao.fund

https://medium.com/ubcoin-blog/ubcoin-announces-partnership-with-qbao-network-to-deliver-value-for-digital-communities-97f7fed59b86

['Ubcoin. Cryptocurrency Reimagined']

2018-09-24 16:17:19.791000+00:00

['Ubcoin Partnerships', 'Qbao', 'Ubcoin', 'Ethereum', 'Bitcoin']

Cultivating Spirit, Feeding Soul. (Mercury, the Galactic Center, and the…

(Mercury, the Galactic Center, and the Great Conjunction) Art by Prankman93 We stand on a precipice. Some of us on an ærie, ready for flight, others on the edge, negotiating with dark thoughts. Seen through the eyes of Mercury who just had his cazmi moment with the Sun near the Galactic Center, ancient memories are bursting forth like a conversation with Poimandres; Through the eyes of Jupiter and Saturn, who make their “Great Conjunction” tomorrow, they are nearly seeing eye to eye-as close as father and son can-and are eager to cast this prayer into the Air. It is a poetic conclusion to 2020, yet the work has only just begun. The three share more than a bloodline, they also seem to have an inclination for triangles. With Mercury, he likes to draw them with his retrogrades. There is an elemental pattern he creates which travels the elements clockwise around the zodiac-from FIre to Water to Air to Earth. We are leaving Water behind, heading for Air come February. Gary Caton calls this an Elemental Year. With Jupiter and Saturn, they too trace triangles in Triplicities, but in much longer swathes of time. Where Mercury does it in just over a year, Jupiter/Saturn do so over two centuries. Tomorrow, they officially begin a stretch of Air conjunctions which will last until long after we have gone. Why does this matter? What is the point? Well, we are dealing with divine timekeepers, and being they are both shifting into Air around the same time, it begs our attention a bit. We should tune our ears to their messages. Air, it’s all around us, but we never see it. When we move fast enough, we feel it, yet we take it for granted until we can’t get it. Nearly everything travels through it, and still, we take it for granted by polluting it even more. Related to communication, ideas, and what the swords point at in the Tarot, it is vital we get clear about what this shift means for us. Marsilio Ficino talked about Air in regards to music. He felt music to be one of the greatest foods for the Soul. With knowledge of the Music of the Spheres and how to hear this when looking at a chart, one could theoretically create the perfect music for someone, and help enliven their Spirit. Music as medicine in other words. This is how he worked with it. Music, language, stories, they all feed the Soul and assist in cultivating Spirit. One of the easiest and most profound ways we can enter this airy triplicity then is by beautifying our speech, telling great stories, and, of course, playing and making and dancing to music. Play it, tell it, write it out. Let’s invite the old bards back into our circle. Pick up that dusty instrument in the corner. Sing! Find your voice. If you can walk, you can dance If you can talk, you can sing -an old African proverb This is how we change the world. With better stories, inspired music, and the language of birds. * If you would like to listen to my Podcast on the Great Conjunction, you can do so HERE: https://www.holestoheavens.com/a-show-for-the-wyrd-conjunction-jupiter-saturn/ Eudaimonia, Adam kosmognosis.medium.com/follow www.Patreon.com/adamsommer ….to support the creation of my writings/podcasts and be showered with gifts as well www.Holestoheavens.com …to adventure deeper into kosmos, mythos, and psyche

https://medium.com/@kosmognosis/cultivating-spirit-feeding-soul-849550dba542

['Adam Sommer']

2020-12-20 14:20:29.486000+00:00

['Ficino', 'Great Conjunction', 'Triangles', 'Mythology', 'Astrology']

Train a NN using Keras to fit the Predator-Prey cycle using GAN architecture.

Train a NN to fit the Predator-Prey cycle dataset using GAN architecture (discriminator & generator), and I’ll use the GPU for that. Let’s make it quick and to the point. You can find all the core code here and the final code here (with a lot of improvements). GAN Architecture A generative adversarial network is a class of machine learning frameworks designed by Ian Goodfellow and his colleagues in 2014. Two neural networks contest with each other in a game. Given a training set, this technique learns to generate new data with the same statistics as the training set. Imports import os import random import numpy as np import pandas as pd import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import seaborn as sns from tqdm.notebook import tqdm # from tqdm import tqdm_notebook as tqdm import tensorflow as tf from tensorflow.keras.models import Model,Sequential from tensorflow.keras.backend import sin,mean from tensorflow.keras.layers import Input, Reshape, LeakyReLU, Activation, Dropout, Flatten from tensorflow.keras.layers import Dense, BatchNormalization, Conv1D from tensorflow.keras.optimizers import Adam, SGD, RMSprop from tensorflow.keras.callbacks import TensorBoard Hyper-Parameters b = 1 h = 0.005 ϵ = 0.8 d = 0.6 steps = 50000 XY = np.empty((2, steps)) XY[:,0] = 50, 100 dt = 0.001 Dataset (you can skip) This time I’ll create the cycle dataset using my own generative functions that simulate the P-P cycle in nature. def get_rates(x, y, b, h, ϵ, d): ### return np.array([ b*x, # prey born (1-ϵ)*h*x*y, # prey killed, no predator born ϵ*h*x*y, # prey killed, predator born d*y, # predator killed ]) def draw_time(rates): ### # assert rates.sum() > 0, rates return np.random.exponential( 1/rates.sum() ) def draw_reaction(rates): ### rates /= rates.sum() return np.random.multinomial(1, rates).argmax() updates = np.array([ [ 1, 0], # prey born [-1, 0], # prey killed, no predator born [-1, 1], # prey killed, predator born [ 0,-1], # predator killed ]) def gillespie_step(x, y, b, h, ϵ, d): ### rates = get_rates(x, y, b, h, ϵ, d) Δt = draw_time(rates) ri = draw_reaction(rates) Δx, Δy = updates[ri] return Δt, Δx, Δy def gillespie_ssa(b, h, ϵ, d, times_,t0=0, x0=50, y0=100, t_steps=steps, tmax=steps*dt,padding=False): ### xx = np.full(steps,0,dtype='int') yy = np.full(steps,0,dtype='int') t = 0 i = 0 xx[0] = x0 yy[0] = y0 while t<tmax and yy[i]!=0: if times_[i] <= t: i += 1 xx[i] = xx[i-1] yy[i] = yy[i-1] else: # update Δt, Δx, Δy = gillespie_step(xx[i], yy[i], b, h, ϵ, d) t = t+Δt xx[i] = xx[i]+Δx yy[i] = yy[i]+Δy if i <= steps and not padding: return np.array([times_[:i+1],xx[:i+1],yy[:i+1]]) else: return np.array([times_,xx,yy]) times = np.linspace(0, steps*dt, steps) t,x,y = gillespie_ssa(b, h, ϵ, d,times_=times) x_max,y_max = x.max(),y.max() x_,y_ = x / x_max, y / y_max # Sample function def sample_data_pp(num=1000): indices = np.sort(np.random.choice(len(x_),num,replace=False)) return np.array([np.array(x_[indices]),np.array(y_[indices])]) Let’s check the sampling function for both Predator and Prey: ax = pd.DataFrame(np.transpose(sample_data_pp())).plot() Let me focus only on the Prey cycle: t = sample_data_pp(num=1000) plt.plot(np.transpose(t[0])); Now you can start with the actual GANs code… Generator def create_G(num=100): G_in = Input(shape=15) x = Reshape((-1,1))(G_in) x = Conv1D(2,3,activation=LeakyReLU())(x) x = BatchNormalization()(x) x = Dropout(0.5)(x) x = Conv1D(4,3,activation=LeakyReLU())(x) x = BatchNormalization()(x) x = Dropout(0.5)(x) x = Conv1D(8,3,activation=LeakyReLU())(x) x = BatchNormalization()(x) x = Dropout(0.5)(x) x = Conv1D(16,3,activation=LeakyReLU())(x) x = BatchNormalization()(x) x = Dropout(0.5)(x) x = Conv1D(32,3,activation=LeakyReLU())(x) x = BatchNormalization()(x) x = Dropout(0.5)(x) x = Conv1D(64,3,activation=LeakyReLU())(x) x = BatchNormalization()(x) x = Dropout(0.5)(x) x = Conv1D(100,3,activation='tanh')(x) x = Flatten()(x) G = Model(G_in,x,name='Generator') G.compile(loss='binary_crossentropy',optimizer=Adam(learning_rate=0.001)) return G G = create_G() G.summary() Model: "Generator" _________________________________________________________________ Layer (type) Output Shape Param # ================================================================= input_1 (InputLayer) [(None, 15)] 0 _________________________________________________________________ reshape (Reshape) (None, 15, 1) 0 _________________________________________________________________ conv1d (Conv1D) (None, 13, 2) 8 _________________________________________________________________ batch_normalization (BatchNo (None, 13, 2) 8 _________________________________________________________________ dropout (Dropout) (None, 13, 2) 0 _________________________________________________________________ conv1d_1 (Conv1D) (None, 11, 4) 28 _________________________________________________________________ batch_normalization_1 (Batch (None, 11, 4) 16 _________________________________________________________________ dropout_1 (Dropout) (None, 11, 4) 0 _________________________________________________________________ conv1d_2 (Conv1D) (None, 9, 8) 104 _________________________________________________________________ batch_normalization_2 (Batch (None, 9, 8) 32 _________________________________________________________________ dropout_2 (Dropout) (None, 9, 8) 0 _________________________________________________________________ conv1d_3 (Conv1D) (None, 7, 16) 400 _________________________________________________________________ batch_normalization_3 (Batch (None, 7, 16) 64 _________________________________________________________________ dropout_3 (Dropout) (None, 7, 16) 0 _________________________________________________________________ conv1d_4 (Conv1D) (None, 5, 32) 1568 _________________________________________________________________ batch_normalization_4 (Batch (None, 5, 32) 128 _________________________________________________________________ dropout_4 (Dropout) (None, 5, 32) 0 _________________________________________________________________ conv1d_5 (Conv1D) (None, 3, 64) 6208 _________________________________________________________________ batch_normalization_5 (Batch (None, 3, 64) 256 _________________________________________________________________ dropout_5 (Dropout) (None, 3, 64) 0 _________________________________________________________________ conv1d_6 (Conv1D) (None, 1, 100) 19300 _________________________________________________________________ flatten (Flatten) (None, 100) 0 ================================================================= Total params: 28,120 Trainable params: 27,868 Non-trainable params: 252 I like to add the InputLayer so that I could just to make everything is ok until this point. Discriminator def create_D(num=100): D_in = Input(shape=num) x = Reshape((-1,1))(D_in) x = Conv1D(num/2,3,activation=LeakyReLU())(x) x = Conv1D(num/10,3,activation=LeakyReLU())(x) x = Conv1D(num/50,3,activation=LeakyReLU())(x) x = Flatten()(x) x = Dense(128,activation=LeakyReLU())(x) x = Dropout(0.5)(x) x = Dense(64,activation=LeakyReLU())(x) x = Dropout(0.5)(x) x = Dense(32,activation=LeakyReLU())(x) x = Dropout(0.5)(x) x = Dense(8,activation=LeakyReLU())(x) x = Dense(2,activation='sigmoid')(x) D = Model(D_in,x,name='Discriminator') D.compile(loss='binary_crossentropy',optimizer=RMSprop(lr=0.003)) return D D = create_D() D.summary() Model: "Discriminator" _________________________________________________________________ Layer (type) Output Shape Param # ================================================================= input_2 (InputLayer) [(None, 100)] 0 _________________________________________________________________ reshape_1 (Reshape) (None, 100, 1) 0 _________________________________________________________________ conv1d_7 (Conv1D) (None, 98, 50) 200 _________________________________________________________________ conv1d_8 (Conv1D) (None, 96, 10) 1510 _________________________________________________________________ conv1d_9 (Conv1D) (None, 94, 2) 62 _________________________________________________________________ flatten_1 (Flatten) (None, 188) 0 _________________________________________________________________ dense (Dense) (None, 128) 24192 _________________________________________________________________ dropout_6 (Dropout) (None, 128) 0 _________________________________________________________________ dense_1 (Dense) (None, 64) 8256 _________________________________________________________________ dropout_7 (Dropout) (None, 64) 0 _________________________________________________________________ dense_2 (Dense) (None, 32) 2080 _________________________________________________________________ dropout_8 (Dropout) (None, 32) 0 _________________________________________________________________ dense_3 (Dense) (None, 8) 264 _________________________________________________________________ dense_4 (Dense) (None, 2) 18 ================================================================= Total params: 36,582 Trainable params: 36,582 Non-trainable params: 0 Same here … Just a bit less complex. GAN Here you can see an example how Keras and Torch are so different. While it’s the same concept, It feels like a different architecture almost completely. def create_GAN(G,D,num=100): D.trainable = False GAN_in = Input(shape=15) x = G(GAN_in) x = D(x) model = Model(GAN_in,x,name='GAN') model.compile(loss='binary_crossentropy', optimizer=G.optimizer) return model GAN = create_GAN(G,D) GAN.summary() Model: "GAN" _________________________________________________________________ Layer (type) Output Shape Param # ================================================================= input_3 (InputLayer) [(None, 15)] 0 _________________________________________________________________ Generator (Functional) (None, 100) 28120 _________________________________________________________________ Discriminator (Functional) (None, 2) 36582 ================================================================= Total params: 64,702 Trainable params: 27,868 Non-trainable params: 36,834 Sanity Check: Due to the complex of the model let me make sure all is working as expected: data_temp = sample_data_pp(num=15) print(data_temp.shape,G(data_temp).shape,D(G(data_temp)).shape,GAN(data_temp).shape) (2, 15) (2, 100) (2, 2) (2, 2) Training noise_size = 15 # set layers on/off train def trainable_D(D,trainable): D.trainable = trainable for layer in D.layers: layer.trainable = trainable def train_D(GAN,G,D,on_pray=True): # samples size (batch) batch_size = 15 # set_trainability trainable_D(D,True) # create noise noise = np.abs(np.random.randn(batch_size,noise_size)) # fake x_fake = G.predict(noise) y_fake = np.zeros((batch_size,2)) # 0.1 instead of 0 - to evoid mode collapse y_fake[:,0] = 1 # 0.9 instead of 1 - to evoid mode collapse loss_fake = D.train_on_batch(x_fake,y_fake) # real - PREY if on_pray: x_real = np.array([sample_data_pp(num=100)[0] for i in range(batch_size)]) else: x_real = np.array([sample_data_pp(num=100)[1] for i in range(batch_size)]) y_real = np.zeros((batch_size,2)) # 0.1 instead of 0 - to evoid mode collapse y_real[:,1] = 1 # 0.9 instead of 1 - to evoid mode collapse loss_real = D.train_on_batch(x_real,y_real) return loss_fake,loss_real def train_G(GAN,G,D): # samples size (batch) batch_size = 15 # set_trainability G.trainable = True trainable_D(D,False) # create noise noise = np.abs(np.random.randn(batch_size,noise_size)) # fake # x_fake = G.predict(noise) y_fake = np.zeros((batch_size,2)) y_fake[:,1] = 1 loss = GAN.train_on_batch(noise,y_fake) return loss Another Sanity Check: train_D(GAN,G,D), train_G(GAN,G,D) ((0.6930726766586304, 0.7439238429069519), 0.6872183680534363) Ok, it works :)) Training GAN def train(GAN, G, D, epochs=100, n_samples=100, verbose=True): d_loss_fake = [] d_loss_real = [] g_loss = [] e_range = range(epochs) if verbose: e_range = tqdm(e_range) for epoch in e_range: loss_fake,loss_real = train_D(GAN,G,D) d_loss_fake.append(loss_fake) d_loss_real.append(loss_real) loss = train_G(GAN,G,D) g_loss.append(loss) if verbose and ((epoch+1)%(epochs//10)==0): print("Epoch #{}:\t Generative Loss: {}, \t Discriminative Loss fake: {}, Discriminative Loss real: {}".format(epoch+1, g_loss[-1], d_loss_fake[-1], d_loss_real[-1])) return g_loss,d_loss_fake,d_loss_real g_loss,d_loss_fake,d_loss_real = train(GAN, G, D, verbose=True) HBox(children=(FloatProgress(value=0.0), HTML(value=''))) Epoch #10: Generative Loss: 2.36905574798584, Discriminative Loss fake: 0.015760576352477074, Discriminative Loss real: 0.0186001006513834 Epoch #20: Generative Loss: 13.932963371276855, Discriminative Loss fake: 0.003945493139326572, Discriminative Loss real: 1.4132818250800483e-05 Epoch #30: Generative Loss: 20.495332717895508, Discriminative Loss fake: 0.004247874021530151, Discriminative Loss real: 0.00016064960800576955 Epoch #40: Generative Loss: 18.873523712158203, Discriminative Loss fake: 0.0483543686568737, Discriminative Loss real: 0.001071239123120904 Epoch #50: Generative Loss: 16.03032875061035, Discriminative Loss fake: 0.017826693132519722, Discriminative Loss real: 0.08348666876554489 Epoch #60: Generative Loss: 6.583922386169434, Discriminative Loss fake: 0.04926323890686035, Discriminative Loss real: 0.15698513388633728 Epoch #70: Generative Loss: 3.1525802612304688, Discriminative Loss fake: 0.008090116083621979, Discriminative Loss real: 0.6023349165916443 Epoch #80: Generative Loss: 0.24656127393245697, Discriminative Loss fake: 0.010115372948348522, Discriminative Loss real: 7.273652590811253e-05 Epoch #90: Generative Loss: 2.347670555114746, Discriminative Loss fake: 0.004298840183764696, Discriminative Loss real: 0.000157357266289182 Epoch #100: Generative Loss: 1.5693128108978271, Discriminative Loss fake: 0.0020043672993779182, Discriminative Loss real: 0.10965212434530258 Here a result of a Google Colab Notebook with 50K epochs. Generate Now you can use the generator model to generate more data. batch_size = 1 # create noise noise = np.abs(np.random.randn(batch_size,noise_size)) # fake x_fake = G.predict(noise) y_fake = D.predict(x_fake) # real x_real = np.array([sample_data_pp(num=100)[0] for i in range(batch_size)]) y_real = D.predict(x_real) plt.figure(figsize=(10,5)) plt.plot(np.transpose(x_fake*x_max),label='Fake') plt.plot(np.transpose(x_real*x_max),label='Real') plt.legend(); plt.show(); Still has some work, but it’s a pretty good fit :) Further Work: You should get femiliar with these techniques, that would come handy while training GANs: Feature matching Feature matching suggests to optimize the discriminator to inspect whether the generator’s output matches expected statistics of the real samples. In such a scenario, the new loss function can be any computation of statistics of features. For example, mean or median. Feature matching suggests to optimize the discriminator to inspect whether the generator’s output matches expected statistics of the real samples. In such a scenario, the new loss function can be any computation of statistics of features. For example, mean or median. Historical Averaging This addition piece penalizes the training speed when Θ is changing too dramatically in time. It’s basicly an moving avarage on the i & i-1 changin of the loss, with L2 norm. And uses as a regulator on the loss of the generator. This Will smooth out the noise and reduce the generator’s variance. This addition piece penalizes the training speed when Θ is changing too dramatically in time. It’s basicly an moving avarage on the i & i-1 changin of the loss, with L2 norm. And uses as a regulator on the loss of the generator. This Will smooth out the noise and reduce the generator’s variance. Batch Discrimination With minibatch discrimination, the discriminator is able to digest the relationship between training data points in one batch, instead of processing each point independently. In one minibatch, we approximate the closeness between every pair of samples, and get the overall summary of one data point by summing up how close it is to other samples in the same batch. With minibatch discrimination, the discriminator is able to digest the relationship between training data points in one batch, instead of processing each point independently. In one minibatch, we approximate the closeness between every pair of samples, and get the overall summary of one data point by summing up how close it is to other samples in the same batch. Adding Noises To “spread out” the distribution and to create higher chances for two probability distributions to have overlaps. For example, One solution is to add continuous noises to the real examples of the discriminator D. To “spread out” the distribution and to create higher chances for two probability distributions to have overlaps. For example, One solution is to add continuous noises to the real examples of the discriminator D. G’s L1 Use L1 Normalization on G’s weights. Use L1 Normalization on G’s weights. Gradients Computetion Ratio Compute the gradients of G & D with a different ratio. For example, on every train of G — train the D for 5 times. Compute the gradients of G & D with a different ratio. For example, on every train of G — train the D for 5 times. Smoothing Target When feeding the discriminator, instead of providing 1 and 0 labels — use soften values — Such as 0.9 and 0.1. It is shown to reduce the networks’ vulnerability. When feeding the discriminator, instead of providing 1 and 0 labels — use soften values — Such as 0.9 and 0.1. It is shown to reduce the networks’ vulnerability. Label Presentation Train the model on a different label’s presentations. For example, in this case — fourier transform. Train the model on a different label’s presentations. For example, in this case — fourier transform. Network Params Play with all the params of the networks. for example, LR can have a huge affect and the “golden rule” G:0.0001 D:0.0004 is just a starting point. Play with all the params of the networks. for example, LR can have a huge affect and the “golden rule” G:0.0001 D:0.0004 is just a starting point. Skip-z Connection Feed the noise vector to additinal layers not just the first one. Very similar to attention in nlp. Feed the noise vector to additinal layers not just the first one. Very similar to attention in nlp. Better Metric of Distribution Similarity The loss function of the vanilla GAN fails to provide a meaningful value when two distributions are disjoint. For example, instead of BCE loss use Wasserstein loss. Closing Thoughts This implementation was about implement GAN in Keras while using a more complex D & G architectures. If you wish, you could try a couple of quick things to check if it will preform better: Better Metric of Distribution Similarity — Wasserstein Loss Clipping values Gradients Computation Ratio — 1:5 Tried Smoothing Target technique — 0.9 & 0.1 instead of 1 & 0 HAVE FUN … :))

https://medium.com/@sahar.millis/train-a-nn-using-keras-to-fit-the-predator-prey-cycle-using-gan-architecture-73fa69827243

['Sahar Millis']

2020-10-20 03:09:32.391000+00:00

['Gans', 'Keras', 'Data Science', 'Generative Adversarial', 'Deep Learning']

Will Bitcoin vindicate Hayek?

The new era of competitive private moneys The creation of money has been effectively in private hands since … well forever. Looking at the modern times — after the creation of the US federal reserve system in 1913 — one of the greatest misconceptions instilled in the masses is the belief that public institutions, such as the US Fed or the ECB, are only expression of public interest and that money creation is the exclusive prerogative of sovereign “nation states”. Although it is so widely purported — or simply conveniently led to believe — the truth is rather different. Indeed, in addition to the fractional-reserve banking — which enables commercial banks to create most of the broad money in the system — the very same well known, too big to fail, privately held commercial banks, also own substantial direct interest in the above institutions. Take the ECB for example, its governance is formally in the hands of 6 Executive Board members and the Governors of each of the 19 national central banks of member states. So you might think it is all politically endorsed by the democratically appointed governments of each member country. Well, not really. In Italy for instance — though the same applies to other EU countries — the shareholders of the Banca d´Italia are mostly private banks or large insurance companies such as Unicredit, Intesa Sanpaolo and Assicurazioni Generali. Though the situation is much more obfuscated in the USA, the concept is the same: nationally-chartered banks own each one of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks which are then part of the FED. As to which the members of the 12 FRBs are, good luck in finding, because it is quite difficult to come up with much information. It seems like a closely guarded secret. Regardless, exists a monopoly on money creation, which is awarded by the governments to the private banking sector — though it is concealed by the appearance of the FED and the ECB as being independent authorities — and it is safeguarded by the very same governments which legally endorse privately issued fiat moneys and make them legal tender by decree, thereby perpetuating the privileges of the banking sector. In 1976, F.A. Hayek — the 1974 Economics Nobel Prize winner and one of the most prominent late members of the Austrian School of Economics — wrote a pamphlet titled “Denationalisation of Money”, in which he foresaw the emergence of privately issued moneys which could compete among themselves and against the governments´ monopolies, which, in his words, has the defects of all monopolies as “it prevents the discovery of better methods of satisfying a need for which a monopolist has no incentive”. Despite his visionary and highly interesting theories, all his assumptions regarding the benefits of a competitive regime for moneys remained essentially untested because, so far, the monopoly and the “legal tender” privileges could not be challenged by any privately issued money without it being immediately attacked by the governments. But Bitcoin has been the first privately issued money which enables a radical paradigm shift and may start testing effectively Hayek’s assumptions, because it is able to challenge the monopoly privilege thanks to its decentralized nature and the properties that make it resistant to coercion, censorship and geopolitical manipulation. Without a central point of failure, governments cannot effectively attack Bitcoin. While granting to Hayek that the banking monopoly on money creation is one of the causes of the many illnesses of our financial system and of the increasing social inequality to levels not seen since 1929, the alleged advantages of competing moneys are still to be proved. Hayek envisaged a competitive money regime which enabled currency price stability, preservation of purchasing power and store of value, as well as usability as a unit of account and medium of exchange for daily purchases. The Italian professor F.M. Ametrano of the Universita´ Bicocca Milano and Politecnico di Milano, who is one of the leading voices in favour of Bitcoin, was one of the first to argue — back in 2016 — in favour of the new regime of competitive moneys foresaw by Hayek. Professor Villaverde, of the University of Pennsylvania, is one of the first to have recently studied the impact of crypto currencies and this new regime of competitive moneys enabled by Bitcoin. In his column he casts some doubts on the ability of a regime of competing currencies to maintain price stability. But one must also consider that the crypto sector develops and experiments at lightning speed and this makes any analysis quite soon obsolete. Take the emergence — in the meantime — of stable coins as an example. Even if I do personally share most of the concerns highlighted here on their ability to maintain price stability under stress conditions, they are a clear and important sign that there is a growing trend of creating different crypto currencies with different properties and functionalities, which may all have a specific market and a good reason to coexist. There is clearly a need for cryptos which preserve purchasing power and may become a store of value (such as Bitcoin), there is a need for stable coins to be used as unit of accounts and medium of exchange, there is a need for enhanced privacy issues (such as Monero), etc. All those cryptos can theoretically fulfil different functions and being equally in demand among users. Then of course issues — such as their interoperability and how to effectively exchange each crypto with the others, as well as their ease of use — are all to be answered by new technological developments in the due time. But one point made by Prof. Villaverde in his column is chiefly important: “the threat of competition from private monies imposes market discipline on any government that issues currency. If a central bank, for example, does not provide a sufficiently ‘good’ money, then it will have difficulties in implementing allocations. This may be the best feature of crypto currencies. In a world in which we can switch to Bitcoin or Ethereum, central banks need to provide, paraphrasing Adam Smith, a tolerable administration of money. Currency competition may have a large upside for human welfare after all” If Gresham’s Law does not fully apply and good money does not drive out bad fiat money, then hopefully it will make fiat money a lot better and vindicate Hayek’s vision after all.

https://medium.com/hackernoon/will-bitcoin-vindicate-hayek-2121dc6e2a83

['Andrea Bianconi']

2018-05-29 12:11:01.776000+00:00

['Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin', 'Hayek', 'Federal Reserve']

Fuel for Creativity

If I bade them, “bring the fattened calf,” a baby cow would have laid before us, chopped to perfection — marinade wafting across the table, meeting our conversation in the middle. The cold air shifting outside, still sitting in our bones, filling our blood with its intensity. biscuits pop up out of nowhere begging for butter and organic jam. Spoons clank, forks chirp and whistle, the sound of coffee being slurped by a dozen lips— peace in the midst of turmoil turns into art. We sit back, our proverbial burdens laid down, jumping from one shoulder to the next, crooning about what Writers need when all we needed at that moment was fuel for creativity.

https://medium.com/a-cornered-gurl/fuel-for-creativity-af9df32f25bd

['Tre L. Loadholt']

2018-02-04 15:26:10.005000+00:00

['Conversations', 'Poetry', 'Food', 'North Carolina', 'A Cornered Gurl']

How To Install And Use Conky on Any Linux Distro.

How To Install And Use Conky on Any Linux Distro. TheKernal Jun 17·2 min read We all want to make our Linux desktops look better. You can install docks, change icons, switch window managers, but there is something else that it gaining more steam. Conky. Conky allows you to display system information on your desktop, making it look better. This information can be ram, cpu, or gpu usage. Even time or date. I am going to try to walk you through the steps of installing and using Conky. To use Conky you are going to have to install it. Conky is in most package managers. It is available on RedHat, Arch, And Debain based distros. Here are the commands to install. Debain/Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install conky Redhat/Fedora: sudo dnf -y install conky Arch: sudo pacman -s conky You will realize that when you run it by typing “conky” in the terminal, it does not look good. So, you need to install some themes. Conky themes change the look of your Conky and make them look better. You can usually just look up “conky themes” to find them, but I think that (1) shows some of the best themes. Now that you’ve got your Conky theme downloaded, how to you add it to your desktop. Most Conky themes are zipped. You should extract/unzip them. In that file, there should be a text file. Take that text file, and rename it “.conkyrc”. Then move it to your home directory. Simple as that. Now when you start Conky by typing “conky” in the terminal, you should see your Conky theme on the desktop. Now all that you need to do is autostart it. Most DE’s have a application to autostart a program. Simply search “autostart:” in your desktop environment and add “conky”. If you want to see how to do this on i3, look at my previous guide. If you have followed my instructions every time you boot in you should have the beautiful Conky widget of your choice. There are hundreds of Conky themes out there, so feel free to experiment. Eventually, you will find the perfect Conky for you. 1: https://www.ubuntupit.com/best-conky-themes-for-linux/

https://medium.com/@the-kernal/how-to-install-and-use-conky-on-any-linux-distro-cd6c64c3ed23

[]

2021-06-17 20:13:30.207000+00:00

['Unix', 'Technology', 'Linux', 'Linux Tutorial', 'Computers']

You Should Know the Number of Steps

Do you have stairs in or around your home or workplace? For your safety, know the number of steps in each set of stairs. According to the American Journal of Emergency Medicine, more than 1 million people per year are treated in emergency departments for stair-related injuries. You’ll be safer on stairs when you know how many steps you have to take to reach the top or bottom of the staircase. This is especially important if you are in the dark, carrying something (such as a child, pet, laundry basket, large box, etc.) or for any other reason can’t see your feet or the steps. Photo by Jerry D Clement; used with permission It’s great that so many people are counting steps for fitness these days. Go one step further — count and remember the steps on your stairways to reduce your risk of falling.

https://medium.com/illumination/you-should-know-the-number-of-steps-2659cb9e7f4

['Jacquelyn Lynn']

2020-12-01 04:47:44.089000+00:00

['Life Lessons', 'Safety', 'Health', 'Stairs', 'Injury']

Kubernetes Tutorial: Part 4 — The Crux

Persistent Volumes Managing the storage systems becomes a very crucial part in deploying any application. In Kubernetes, PersistentVolumes (PV) provides an interface for users and cluster administrators for managing storage by abstracting the details of how storage is provided and consumed in the cluster. A PersistentVolume is a piece of storage in the cluster that is provisioned by the cluster administrator; they can just be seen as any other resource type like Pod, Namespace, Secrets etc. The key point to note here is that the lifecycle of a PV is independent of any individual Pod that uses it, i.e. even if the Pod using the PV crashes and is deleted, the volume is still alive, and all it’s contents are preserved, hence it is Persistent. Any user in the cluster can get access to this volume by making a claim via a PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC) object. A user can request specific levels of memory that needs to be attached to the Pod that is being spun, and the same is allocated provided that the request is valid and is available in the cluster. To deploy our application, let’s first create a PVC in the cluster for storing the weights of the model and later link the same to our container during runtime. Again, a PVC can be created by using a YAML file, like the one below: YAML file for PVC creation followed by executing: kubectl create -f pvc.yaml This creates a PVC named object-detection-model-weights with storage of 1 GB with read-write access to multiple nodes as specified in the accessModes of the spec section. Now, let's spin a Pod and attach the PVC to it, and copy our model weights into the PVC. We can use the same Pod definition file that we used in the last article with a little bit of modification for mounting the PVC into it. The modified YAML file looks like this: YAML file for Pod creation with a PVC And for spinning the pod, we need to execute: kubectl create -f pod-pvc.yaml This creates a Pod named ‘ubuntu-base’ with the base image ‘ubuntu:18.04’ and mounts the PVC ‘object-detection-model-weights’ that we created in the last step, and the same is available in the directory /workspace within our Pod. Now let’s download the model weights that we will be using in our deployment. Model weights can be downloaded from here: Once downloaded, we can move these weights into our PVC that is attached to our running Pod ‘ubuntu-base’ by following the below steps: Step 1: Creating the directory structure inside the PVC for us to copy the weights; this can be done by executing: kubectl exec -it pod/ubuntu-base -n partha -- mkdir -p /workspace/model-weights/ssd which creates the directories /workspace/model-weights/ssd in our mounted PVC; and now let’s create a provision for storing YOLO weights kubectl exec -it pod/ubuntu-base -n partha -- mkdir -p /workspace/model-weights/yolo Step 2: Copy the model weights from your local machine into the PVC by the executing: kubectl cp <path to SSD weights> ubuntu-base:/workspace/model-weights/ssd -c ubuntu-base-container -n partha kubectl cp <path to YOLO weights> ubuntu-base:/workspace/model-weights/yolo -c ubuntu-base-container -n partha Once copied, we no longer need the Pod, and the same can be deleted by executing: kubectl delete pod/ubuntu-base -n partha And this concludes our section on Persistent Volumes.

https://medium.com/@parthasarathysubburaj/kubernetes-tutorial-part-4-the-crux-6922b150ce8b

['Parthasarathy Subburaj']

2020-11-07 10:32:58.053000+00:00

['Docker', 'Streamlit', 'Kubernetes', 'Object Detection', 'Deployment']

Q&A with Dorothy McGivney, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at The New York Times

Q&A with Dorothy McGivney, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at The New York Times This week, we caught up with Dorothy, an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at The New York Times who was hired last November to help build a travel standalone product and recently launched “Notes From Our Homes to Yours” — a new Times initiative where writers and editors share suggestions as they stay at home (check out round two of the project here). Subscribe to our newsletter on the business of media for more interviews and weekly news and analysis. Tell me about your role. I am an entrepreneur-in-residence at The New York Times. I joined in November 2019 and was hired specifically to explore how the Times can launch a standalone product in the travel space. The role reports into David Perpich. He’s the head of standalone products and also sits on the Times’ board of directors. There’s currently another entrepreneur-in-residence at the Times who’s working on a product in the kids space. I’ve always been passionate about travel and previously had my own travel newsletter startup called Jauntsetter. I also worked in the tech and startup world for 20 years and love building new products. I was actually working at Google when they purchased what would become Google Docs. So, when I saw this role pop up, I was very excited. It was a dream job — I could build a product in a space I’m super interested in and for a newspaper I have read almost every day for most of my life. You recently launched “Notes From Our Homes to Yours.” Can you tell me a bit about how that came into fruition? “Notes From Our Homes to Yours” was actually a side experiment that emerged from some of my previous travel research. When I first joined, I started conducting research with my team in New York, New Orleans, and Detroit on people’s travel habits and needs. We were actually putting together some product directions when COVID-19 hit. This obviously impacted my role because people aren’t traveling the way they used to. That said, I wanted to see how we could apply some of the research I had done to something short-term while people are stuck at home. One of the main trends we observed during our travel research was that people like using Google Docs to consolidate and share their recommendations and build itineraries. People preferred and trusted personal recommendations as opposed to institutional recommendations. There wasn’t a lot of positive sentiment for user-review sites like Yelp or TripAdvisor. We figured that people were using Google Docs to collect and share recommendations in general, for things outside of travel. Prior to COVID-19, we had been thinking about having our journalists share travel recommendations and suggestions. For example, how could the Times share Sam Sifton’s recommendations of where to eat in New York or London in a scalable manner that also felt personal? Could we use Google Docs to achieve that? When the pandemic began, the question became: how can we use Google Docs and our newsroom talent to help readers navigate the lockdown? We were actually seeing some of our writers and editors going off platform to share their personal stories and recommendations. Inspired by this, we wanted to give our journalists a medium that was intimate, communal, and alive. The cool thing about a Google Doc is that it’s never finalized. Journalists have the option of going through and updating their recommendations without having to go through the publishing process even though an editor does review the documents before they are published. Google Docs can also offer users some serendipity, which feels like it’s missing these days while we isolate at home. There’s a bit of a thrill as a user when you can see a reporter or editor actually typing in the document. We’re hoping to actually experiment with having editors and writers leave comments on each other’s documents to introduce some dialogue. And, how serendipitous it is that you were working at Google when the company first purchased what would become Google Docs and eventually Google Spreadsheets. Yeah, I’ve always thought that Google Docs is a brilliant collaborative tool. I was actually messaging the co-creator of Google Docs, Jonathan Rochelle, about the project. It was really fun to see all my professional worlds coming together full circle. Can you tell me about how journalists have responded to this initiative? We’ve had a lot of support so far. I’ve noticed that without even asking writers and editors to update their recommendations that many are already doing that. Michael Kimmelman, our architecture critic uploaded a recording of him playing Bach one weekend. One journalist told me she was excited about being able to edit something after publishing it. Another one was excited that we used gmail account profile photos as opposed to the profile pictures on The New York Times’ site. Google Docs takes away the formal mantle of The New York Times. It’s a cool way for our writers and editors to share their personalities in a way that we often only really see on Twitter. It’s a safe playground for them. What metrics are you using to measure success? Our aim was to understand engagement, specifically sustained engagement. This is the first time The New York Times hosted a bunch of google docs and spreadsheets. Our questions were very basic: Do people understand the objective? Are they clicking into the documents? And, if so, do they remain in the document? How are they now perceiving the brand? One of our first responses we saw was someone saying they spent 45 minutes poking around the documents. Anecdotally, some users left comments thanking us for pulling back the curtain and humanizing our reporters. How do you see this project fitting within The New York Times’ news and content strategy? With all the news on the pandemic, we’ve been exploring counter-programming options as a way of providing readers a comforting and engaging space. I think “Notes From Our Homes to Yours” really fits into that category. We weren’t thinking too much about where it was going to live, our goal was to just get it up and see if it resonated with our readers. It’s really as simple as you see it. Our design team was able to quickly create a new article format to turn the piece into an interactive of sorts. And, because Sam Sifton was overseeing “At Home” we felt that that would be a good home. What next steps are you looking to explore? We currently don’t have commenting turned on for security reasons but one thing I’d like to figure out is how to make the Docs a place where readers and users can engage in a safe and scalable way. I’d also be interested in doing some user research on how people are experiencing the documents based on demographic. For example, how easy is it for people in their 70s to navigate the Docs? To pivot away from “Notes From Our Homes to Yours,” how else are you thinking about repurposing your travel research? 100% of the people we spoke to told us that food was driving their travel in some way. People might not have anything booked for a city, but knew exactly where they were going to eat. We started to think about what might the Times do that relates to not just travel, but food. The Times actually invented the modern restaurant review. But, I was interested in how we might serve users and readers planning trips beyond just restaurant reviews. When the coronavirus began, I became interested in off-premise dining recommendations — for instance, take out. I envision this all being hyperlocal information that can be shared with others. For example, we might ask reporters to share local neighborhood recommendations in a Google Doc as places begin to reopen. I’d also be interested in finding a way to layer in community intelligence so that we can leverage reader knowledge. For the Cooking app, they made a deliberate decision to not call the comments on recipes “comments,” but instead “notes.” It’s a section where readers can help each other out and it’s supposedly the nicest place on the internet. You mention that people don’t like institutional recommendations. How are you thinking about keeping recommendations personal while still maintaining The New York Times stamp of approval? The New York Times brand is trusted and respected. Luckily, the Times can leverage this trust in the recommendation space in a way that not many places can. As a medium, Google Docs feels informal and a lot more personal. I also think that personality-driven recommendations are key. New York Magazine actually does a great job with this in their profiles. I purchased a Yeti mug after reading Gail Simmons’ interview in The Strategist and she said that it was the one thing she could not live without. What’s something interesting that you’ve observed in the media space? There’s a local blog called Greenpointers. They’ve been super on top of tracking local businesses reopening and local charities and have been sharing this information consistently on Instagram. They’re so scrappy, but they’re doing such an important service for the neighborhood through their Instagram stories. Rapid Fire What is your first read in the morning? The Morning Briefing from The New York Times What was the last book you consumed? I just reread The Design Sprint What job would you be doing if you weren’t in your current role? I love product work but I’m also a huge operations nerd (I’ve worn a COO hat before). I honestly love OKRs and (well done) 360 performance reviews and business planning.

https://medium.com/the-idea/q-a-with-dorothy-mcgivney-entrepreneur-in-residence-at-the-new-york-times-bf19acf26241

['Tesnim Zekeria']

2020-06-08 21:25:54.972000+00:00

['Journalism', 'Travel', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Subscriber Spotlight', 'New York Times']

The Best Day

The Best Day A poem about my wife. Image by olcay ertem from Pixabay For me, the best day, was when you looked my way, we talked and got to know each other, I couldn’t help but wonder, if our relationship would last, or if this romance would be another one to die fast, time after time, I couldn’t help but rewind, to all the girls that came before you, but before long I knew, that I didn’t deserve someone like yourself, perhaps, I should go back to being by myself, a few months went by and I started to realize, staying with you would be wise, who would’ve ever known, that a few years later, I’d see you in your wedding gown, we’d have a baby boy whom we love dearly, even though at the time I couldn't see all of this clearly, I’m thankful for you each and every day, I love you, Sierra Lashay.

https://medium.com/the-partnered-pen/the-best-day-2262a788b149

['Brian Kurian']

2020-08-21 20:43:00.575000+00:00

['Poetry', 'Poem', 'Love', 'Relationships', 'Life']

Kid with a Key

“Andrei! Time for school!” My mom yelled from upstairs. When I looked up I seen a glimmer of something that was key shaped in the old mirror we kept down here in the basement. I swear dad never cleaned it out. Mom used to say “This house has been in the family for centuries.” Well of course I wanted to get my hands on that key. I pulled up an old crate for some added height. Here I go reaching for this old, dusty, skull-shaped key. I shoved it in my pocket fast and ran upstairs. I close the door to the basement behind me and decide to put the key in the door. To my surprise, it fit and turned all the way until I heard some clicks. “Okay D, you got this.” I said to myself. I spin around quickly to discover something so strange. My parents had these upside down faces. They lunged towards me with no hesitation, I’ve never seen something like this in real life. Could this be the outcome of using this key. “Ahhhhhhh,” I screamed. “Somebody help me!”

https://medium.com/@daviskarissa68/kid-with-a-key-84599224d248

['Karissa Davis']

2020-12-18 22:08:44.933000+00:00

['Flash Fiction', 'Fiction Writing', 'Keys', 'Fiction']

Handling Categorical Features using Encoding Techniques in Python

In this post we are going to discuss categorical features in machine learning and methods to handle these features using two of the most effective methods. Categorical Features In machine learning, features can be broadly classified into two main categories: Numerical features (age, price, area etc.) Categorical features (gender, marital-status, occupation etc.) All those features that are composed of a certain number of categories are known as categorical features. Categorical features can be classified into two major types: Nominal Ordinal Nominal features are those having two or more categories, with no specific order. For example, if Gender has two values, male and female, it can be considered as a nominal feature. Ordinal features on the other hand have categories in a particular order. For example, if we have a feature named Level having values as high, medium and low, it will be considered an ordinal feature, because the order matters here. Handling Categorical Features So the first question that arises is why do we need to handle categorical features separately? why don’t we simply pass those as inputs to our model just like the numerical features? Well the answer is that unlike humans, machines and specifically in this case machine learning models, do not understand the text data. We need to convert the text values into relevant number before feeding those into our model. This process of converting categories into numbers is called encoding. Two of the most effective and widely used encoding methods are: Label Encoding One Hot Encoding Label Encoding Label encoding is the process of assigning numeric label to each category in the feature. If N is the number of categories, all the category values will be assigned a unique number from 0 to N-1. If we have a feature named Colors, having values red, blue, green and yellow, it can be converted to numeric mapping as following Category : Label "red" : 0 "blue" : 1 "green" : 2 "yellow" : 3 Note: As we can see here, the labels produced for the categories are not normalized, i.e. not between 0 and 1. Because of this limitation, label encoding should not be used with linear models where magnitude of features plays an important role. Since tree based algorithms do not need feature normalization, label encoding can be easily used with these models such as : Decision trees Random forest XGBoost LighGBM We can implement label encoding using scikit-learn’s LabelEncoder class. We will see the implementation in the next section. One Hot Encoding The limitation of label encoding can be overcome by binarizing the categories, i.e. representing those using only 0’s and 1’s. Here we represent each category by a vector of size N, where N is the number of categories in that feature. Each vector has one 1 and rest all values are 0. Hence it is called one-hot encoding. Suppose we have a column named temperature. It has four values as Freezing, Cold, Warm and Hot. Each category will be represented as following: Category Encoded vector Freezing 0 0 0 1 Cold 0 0 1 0 Warm 0 1 0 0 Hot 1 0 0 0 As you can see here, each category is represented by a vector of length 4, since 4 is the number of unique categories in the feature. Each vector has single 1 and rest all values are 0. Since One-hot encoding generates normalized features, it can be used with linear models such as : Linear regression Logistic regression Now as we have the basic understanding of both the encoding techniques, lets look at the python implementation of both of these for a better understanding. Implementation in Python Before applying encoding to the categorical features, it is important to handle NaN values. A simple and effective way is to treat NaN values as a separate category. By doing this, we make sure that we are not losing on any important information. So the steps that we follow while handling categorical features are: Fill the NaN values with a new categories (such as NONE) Convert categories to numeric values using Label encoding for tree based models and One hot encoding for linear models. Build the model using numeric and encoded features. We will be using a public dataset named Cat in the Dat on kaggle. Link here. This is a binary classification problem that consists of lots of categorical features. First we will create 5 folds for validation using StratifiedKFold class in scikit-learn. This variant of KFold is used to ensure same ratio of target variables in each fold. import pandas as pd from sklearn import model_selection #read training data df = pd.read_csv('../input/train.csv') #create column for kfolds and fill it with -1 df['kfold'] = -1 #randomize the rows df = df.sample(frac=1).reset_index(drop=True) #fetch the targets y = df['target'].values #initiatre StratifiedKFold class from model_selection kf = model_selection.StratifiedKFold(n_splits=5) #fill the new kfold column for f,(t_,v_) in enumerate(kf.split(X=df,y=y)): df.loc[v_,'kfold'] = f #save the new csv with kfold column df.to_csv('../input/train_folds.csv',index=False) Label Encoding Next lets define function to run training and validation on each fold. We will be using LabelEncoder with Random Forest for this example. import pandas as pd from sklearn import ensemble from sklearn import metrics from sklearn import preprocessing def run(fold): #read training data with folds df = pd.read_csv('../input/train_folds.csv') #get all relevant features excluding id, target and kfold columns features = [feature for feature in df.columns if feature not in ['id','target','kfold']] #fill all nan values with NONE for feature in features: df.loc[:,feature] = df[feature].astype(str).fillna('NONE') #Label encoding the features for feature in features: #initiate LabelEncoder for each feature lbl = preprocessing.LabelEncoder() #fit the label encoder lbl.fit(df[feature]) #transform data df.loc[:,feature] = lbl.transform(df[feature]) #get training data using folds df_train = df[df['kfold']!=fold].reset_index(drop=True) #get validation data using folds df_valid = df[df['kfold']==fold].reset_index(drop=True) #get training features X_train = df_train[features].values #get validation features X_valid = df_valid[features].values #initiate Random forest model model = ensemble.RandomForestClassifier(n_jobs=-1) #fit the model on train data model.fit(X_train,df_train['target'].values) #predict the probabilities on validation data valid_preds = model.predict_proba(X_valid)[:,1] #get auc-roc score auc = metrics.roc_auc_score(df_valid['target'].values,valid_preds) #print AUC score for each fold print(f'Fold ={fold}, AUC = {auc}') Finally let’s call this method to execute run method for each fold. if __name__=='__main__': for fold_ in range(5): run(fold_) Executing this code will give an output like below. Fold =0, AUC = 0.7163772816343564 Fold =1, AUC = 0.7136206487083182 Fold =2, AUC = 0.7171801474337066 Fold =3, AUC = 0.7158938474390842 Fold =4, AUC = 0.7186004462481813 One thing to note here is that we have not done any hyper parameter tuning on the Random forest model. You can tweak the parameters to improve the validation accuracy. Another thing to mention in the above code is that we are using AUC ROC score as metric for validation. This is due to the fact that the target values are skewed and metrics such as Accuracy will not give us correct results. One Hot Encoding Now lets see the implementation of One hot encoding with Logistic regression. Below is the modified version of run method for this approach. import pandas as pd from sklearn import linear_model from sklearn import metrics from sklearn import preprocessing def run(fold): #read training data with folds df = pd.read_csv('../input/train_folds.csv') #get all relevant features excluding id, target and folds columns features = [feature for feature in df.columns if feature not in ['id','target','kfold']] #fill all nan values with NONE for feature in features: df.loc[:,feature] = df[feature].astype(str).fillna('NONE') #get training data using folds df_train = df[df['kfold']!=fold].reset_index(drop=True) #get validation data using folds df_valid = df[df['kfold']==fold].reset_index(drop=True) #initiate OneHotEncoder from sklearn ohe = preprocessing.OneHotEncoder() #fit ohe on training+validation features full_data = pd.concat([df_train[features],df_valid[features]],axis=0) ohe.fit(full_data[features]) #transform training data X_train = ohe.transform(df_train[features]) #transform validation data X_valid = ohe.transform(df_valid[features]) #initiate logistic regression model = linear_model.LogisticRegression() #fit the model on train data model.fit(X_train,df_train['target'].values) #predict the probabilities on validation data valid_preds = model.predict_proba(X_valid)[:,1] #get auc-roc score auc = metrics.roc_auc_score(df_valid['target'].values,valid_preds) #print AUC score for each fold print(f'Fold ={fold}, AUC = {auc}') The method to loop over all folds remains same. if __name__=='__main__': for fold_ in range(5): run(fold_) The output of this code will be like below: Fold =0, AUC = 0.7872262099199782 Fold =1, AUC = 0.7856877416085041 Fold =2, AUC = 0.7850910855093067 Fold =3, AUC = 0.7842966593706009 Fold =4, AUC = 0.7887711592194284 As we can see here, a simple logistic regression is giving us decent accuracy by just applying feature encoding for categorical features. One difference to note in the implementation of both methods is that LabelEncoder has to be fitted on each categorical feature separately, while OneHotEncoder can be fitted on all the features together. Conclusion In this blog I have discussed what are categorical features in machine learning, why is it important to handle these features. We also covered two most important methods to encode categorical features into numeric, along with the implementation. I hope I have helped you to get a better understanding of the topics covered here. Please let me know your feedbacks in comments and give it a clap if you liked it. Here is the link to my Linkedin profile if you wish to connect. Thanks for reading.:)

https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/handling-categorical-features-using-encoding-techniques-in-python-7b46207111ca

['Sawan Saxena']

2020-09-07 08:18:30.496000+00:00

['Feature Engineering', 'Data Science', 'Python', 'Machine Learning']

5 Types of Platform to find Freelancer

Mind map- Freelancing platform Now comes the very important step, where to look for freelancers. So primarily there are 5 types of freelancer hiring platforms are available. Freelancer Market Place- On this type of platform, the project owner/client shares the details of the project and the freelancer will bid. Then the client will receive the freelancer's profile and award the project. For example- Upwork, Freelancer, PeoplePerHour, etc. Pros- Provide access to a large set of freelances. Simply the Payment Process. Streamline the communication with the freelancers. Cons- There is no freelancer screening process available so clients need to screen the freelancers before hiring. No Commitment. Once the freelancer accepts the work, will he deliver the project within the timeline or not. There are no such guarantees. 2. Freelancer service market- On this type of platform, The freelancer lists their services, and the Client can directly connect with them to avail of the services. For example- Fiver etc. Pros- Since the listing of services is generally free on these platforms, you get a lot of freelancer's profile. You can do your work at a very low cost. For example- in 5$ you can ask freelancers to create a company logo. Cons- There is no freelancer service screening process on these platforms, so you have to screen the freelancer yourself. 3. Freelancer vetted agency — Platform that provides you the pre-vetted freelancers. Before onboarding any freelancers on their portal, Freelancers have to go through the pre-determined process to screen themselves. Pros- You get the pre-verified freelancer. In most cases, you need not worry about the quality of a freelancer. If you are not satisfied with the selected freelancers they will change it. Some platforms are- Arc, Flexiple, Toptal, etc. Typically you get the freelances within 1–2 days. Since they already have the databases of pre-vetted freelances most of the time, so you get the freelances very fast. Cons- High commission. Not suitable for a small budget project. 4. Social media — You can use social media to find and hire freelancers. You can post on Linkedin about your project details. You can even search in LinkedIn, and find the profile and directly talk to them. Pros- You need not pay any commission. You get the freelancer who is referred by someone you know. Cons- No guarantee of finding any freelancer. 5. Pre-vetted Freelancer as Saas- Platform where you will get the freelancers list who are vetted by the Platform. For Example- HiretheVerified etc. Pros- You get the Pre-vetted Freelancers at the fraction of the cost compared to Freelancer Vetted Agency. You get the in-depth freelancer Profile. Cons- You have to talk related to financial and other stuff with freelancers directly. No one to handle in-case any dispute between freelances and business. Hire the Pre-vetted freelancers-https://www.hiretheverified.com/

https://medium.com/hiretheverified/5-types-of-platform-to-find-freelancer-b5f9a737893d

[]

2020-12-21 06:56:51.137000+00:00

['Platform', 'Freelance Platform', 'Hiring', 'Portal', 'Best Freelance Platforms']

All You Have To Do Is ASK

Asking for help is the bridge between us and success. In fact, studies show that as much as 90 percent of the help provided in the workplace occurs only after assistance has been requested. We routinely underestimate other people’s willingness and ability to help. Psychologists at Columbia University have found that many strangers in New York City were willing to oblige when participants in a study asked to use their cell phones. One global Gallup survey found that 73 percent of Americans had helped a stranger within the past month. Making requests of them can open the door to new information and new solutions, not to mention other resources. Most people are, in fact, both happy to hear from an old friend and eager to help. Given that your life and theirs have gone in different directions, it’s also likely that your knowledge and social networks no longer overlap as much as they once did. A company’s culture, systems, procedures, and practices may stop us from asking for and giving help. So what’s the most important ingredient in an organization’s culture? According to researchers at Google, the answer is clear: psychological safety. When a workplace is psychologically safe, employees feel comfortable asking questions, admitting mistakes, and bringing up problems. Employers can be so focused on an individual’s skills and experience that they don’t consider how that person will fit into the team. If a company only recognizes individual achievements, it may develop a competitive culture in which asking for or giving help is not the norm. Asking for help is as important as giving it. The law of giving and of receiving — or asking — is not about helping those who help you. It’s about helping others regardless of whether they’ve helped you or are likely to help you. It is an investment that will yield powerful returns over time. There are four general styles of giving and asking. First, there’s the overly generous giver. People like this spend so much time giving that they may suffer from “generosity burnout.” But because they don’t disclose their own needs, overly generous givers miss out on the ideas, information, and opportunities they need to be successful. Second, there’s the selfish taker. Such people are so self-focused that they rarely, if ever, repay the generosity of others. There are times, though, when even the most selfish takers will give. This is because they are concerned about their reputations and don’t want to appear selfish. Lone wolves hardly ever seek help — and they hardly ever give it. As a result, they tend to become socially isolated. This is the worst giving-asking style to have. Even a selfish taker is connected to a network. The best giving-asking style is that of the giver-requester. These individuals are popular among their colleagues because they give help. They also seek help and receive what they need to succeed. Learning to ask for what you need will help you get closer to your goal. First, determine your goal. Write down what you are working toward and why it is important to you. Once you know your goal, you can develop your request using SMART criteria. SMART stands for specific, meaningful, action-oriented, realistic, and timebound. If your request is all those things, it’s bound to be effective. A specific request is more powerful than a vague one — so let people know why you need what you’re asking for. Providing the why will also make your request more meaningful. Next, clearly state which actions a person needs to take to assist you. Your request also needs to be realistic. That is, it needs to be something that can happen even if it appears to be unlikely. Finally, make it timebound by laying out a clear timeline. Research has shown that a face-to-face request is 34 times more effective than an email message. The most important thing is to adapt to your audience. Do they prefer verbal or written communication? If they are going through a busy or stressful time, it is wiser to wait until they can consider your request properly. Devise team norms and routines that give employees permission to ask for help. Companies need to create conditions in which team members feel comfortable asking for help and discussing mistakes. Then build a workplace that is psychologically safe — one where team members feel it’s OK to ask for help and admit mistakes. If a team is new, give them time to get to know each other before diving into a project. At the software firm Atlassian, each team member answers three questions: What did I work on yesterday? What am I working on today? What issues are blocking me? Menlo Innovations takes it one step further, asking, What help do I need? This question is powerful because it normalizes making requests. Broaden the pool of people and resources you can tap into with your requests. Recognize, appreciate, and reward those who request help as well as those who give help. If your company already has a recognition program, why not tweak it to reward the people who request help? Algentis, an HR outsourcing firm in California, has developed the High-5 program. This allows any employee to give a colleague a High-5 for going above and beyond to help them out. The value of High-5 is a $25 Amazon gift card. This program increased collaboration among teams and made those people supporting their coworkers even more visible. How easy would it be to allow staff also to award High-5s to those who reach out for support? Expressing our needs has multiple benefits. We become more effective at our jobs. It opens up new job opportunities. It can help us adapt better and more quickly to new circumstances. It boosts team performance and creativity. So next time you need help, don’t hesitate to reach out.

https://medium.com/@yusiong/all-you-have-to-do-is-ask-5b57b4a375d9

['Yu Siong Ho']

2020-12-01 21:14:31.369000+00:00

['Help', 'Request', 'Aşk', 'Asking For Help', 'Demand']

A 9-Minute Lesson in Environmental Literacy

A 9-Minute Lesson in Environmental Literacy Seven Tidbits To Put Things in Perspective In my 20 years, Environmental Science is the most complexly fascinating, interdisciplinary issue I have come across to date. Using data from biology, chemistry and the Earth Sciences, we draw conclusions to write policy that will shape economies, have ethical implications, and influence food, water, human health, and lifestyle choices for all of humanity for all of the foreseeable future. Because of its breadth, the subject merits pop-science explanations, especially to emphasize the dire straits in which we find ourselves and the urgency of taking strong, deliberate action. The following — a collection of tidbits learned from my semester at UVa — is an attempt to do just that. 1. By 2030, half of the world’s population will live in areas of high water stress. California is in the driest 20 years of the past 1,200. In 2030, 1.8 billion people will live in areas of absolute water scarcity, and water demand will exceed supply by 40 percent. Although the world’s freshwater is declining, the population is vastly growing, and humans will need more water to survive on a hotter, drier planet. Limited water can threaten access to cleaning and sanitation services, reduce crop yields, create food insecurity, and have disastrous human health impacts. Up to 80% of illnesses in developing countries stem from poor sanitation conditions. Globally, about 1 in 8 people lack access to clean water. With variable precipitation and drier arid regions, climate change will diminish crop yields, particularly in the low-latitudes. Africa is arguably the continent least responsible for climate change, but most vulnerable to its effects — already afflicted by droughts, extreme heat events, and declining agricultural yields. The mechanism: When greenhouse gas emissions accumulate in the atmosphere, they warm the air, increasing the amount of water the atmosphere can hold. This can lead to heavier bouts of rainfall once the air cools. Heavier rainfall expedites the movement of water from the atmosphere to the (saltwater) ocean, reducing our capacity to use it. A warmer planet also means more evaporation, which means drier, even desertified land (a particularly dismal consequence for agriculture). With climate change, precipitation is more likely to come in the form of isolated, extreme weather events, often followed by long dry periods. This means stronger storms — causing flooding — sandwiched between seasons of drought and water scarcity. Industrial pollution, run-off from chemical fertilizer, and over-extraction of groundwater can also deplete freshwater resources.

https://medium.com/the-climate-series/an-8-minute-lesson-in-environmental-literacy-6f810b73df6e

['Allie Lowy']

2018-12-15 04:35:10.584000+00:00

['Environmental Issues', 'Climate Change', 'Water', 'Sustainability', 'Environment']

Give yourself permission to do something different

Photo by Rana Sawalha on Unsplash For as long as I can remember, I was always dreaming of what I would do the next day. Or day after. Or day after that. Sometimes, I would dream about where I would be in a year’s time, putting off any change or resolutions for the new year. Most of the time, I would live in a fantasy future. As a result, I often ignored my current reality and ploded on along with life hoping that one day, by the forces of impossibility, my reality would change. Back in high school, my science teacher had an overly enthusiastic love of Newton. Back then, the 16 year old me didn’t appreciate the revolutionary 3 laws of motions as I should have. Yet, every now and then I find myself revisiting the third law. N ewton’s third law is: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. I would look at the lives of others — their travels, their stories, their tales of adventures, mistakes, fears, happiness, career advances and everything else in between — and felt like I was missing out on something. The more time passed, the more I began to feel lethargic towards life and stuck in its endless monotony. I drove the same route to work every day. Spoke to the same people. Ate at the same places. Everything I did was the same but somehow I expected something different. When I turned 24, I became acutely aware of how little variation there is in my life. I came to the conclusion that if I kept doing what I was doing, I would continue to get what I was currently receiving. A part of me was afraid of change. I resisted it. I was afraid of what the outcomes may be. So I refused to give myself permission to do things differently. I wanted adventure but did not go out seeking it. I wanted mobility and sense of freedom but continued to work my 9–5. In fact, I wanted a great deal of many things but did nothing to try and obtain them. The way I lived my life was as good as expecting to win first prize in the lottery without actually putting up the money to buy the ticket. It wasn’t what I wanted and so I decided on a whim to do something different every day. It started small — like the brand of toothpaste I used to the modes of transport I would use to get around. I went out of my way to find new people to talk to, find new places and spaces to explore until I eventually ended up in a cross island quarter marathon, all because I decided to do something a little differently each time. I said yes to the things I would usually say no to and my world started to change. My different actions caused the world to give me different reactions. It was then that I started to feel re-energized from the monotony of sameness. My reality shifted and continues to shift as I make a different choice for the day. As a 16, 17, 18, 19 and up until 24 year old, I meandered through life. I did ordinary things but expected the extraordinary to happen. When I started to change the way I lived, the actions and interactions, the world also began to change for me. I met new people, I went to places I’ve never been and experienced emotions I didn’t know existed in me — all because I gave myself the permission to do something differently and acted on it.

https://medium.com/prototyping-a-year/give-yourself-permission-to-do-something-different-af1b7d55fe2a

['Aphinya Dechalert']

2018-10-02 08:17:58.368000+00:00

['Life Lessons', 'Personal Development', 'Experience', 'Beyourself', 'Personal Growth']

Are You Surprised by the Price of Bitcoin? This is Just the Beginning!

Bitcoin is a very new technology, even though the concept that it brings to life is decades old. The Double Spending Problem has been solved; this means that it is possible to use a digital certificate to stand in the place of money and be sure that no one else can spend that certificate other than you as long as you hold it. This is an unprecedented paradigm shift, the full implications of which are not yet completely understood, and for which the tools to exploit it do not yet exist to fully take advantage of this new idea. This new technology requires radical new thinking when it comes to developing businesses that are built upon it. In the same way that the pioneer providers of email didn’t correctly understand the service they were selling for many years, new and correct thinking about Bitcoin is needed, and will emerge, so that it reaches its full potential and becomes ubiquitous. The original Hotmail Interface Hotmail used familiar technologies (the browser and email) to create a better way of accessing and delivering email; the idea of using an email client like Outlook Express has been superseded by web interfaces and email “in the cloud” that provides many advantages over a dedicated client with your mail in your own local storage. Bitcoin, which will completely transform the way you transfer money, needs to be understood on its own terms, and not just as an online form of money. Thinking about Bitcoin as money is as absurd as thinking about email as another form of sending letters by post; one not only replaces the other, but it profoundly changes the way people send and consume messages. These fundamental innovations are not simple substitutions or one dimensional improvements of existing ideas or services. As I have explained previously, Bitcoin is not money. Bitcoin is a protocol. If you treat it in this way, with the correct assumptions, you can put Bitcoin in a proper context, which will allow you to make rational suggestions about the sorts of services that might be profitable based on it. Every part of Bitcoin is text. It is always text, and never at any point ceases to be text. This is a fact, and as text, it is protected under the free speech provisions of the constitutions of civilized nations with guaranteed, irrevocable rights. If Bitcoin is a protocol and not money, then setting up currency exchanges that mimic real world money, stock and commodity exchanges to trade in it should not be the sole means of discovering its price. You would not set up an “Email Exchange” to discover the value of email services, and the same thing applies to Bitcoin. Staying with this train of thought, when you type in an email on your Gmail account, you are inputting your ‘letter’. You press send, it goes through your ISP, over the internets, into the ISP of your recipient and then it is outputted on the screen of your recipient’s machine, which can be literally any device, from a wristwatch to a laptop a smartphone or a desktop. The same is true of Bitcoin; you input money on one end through a service and then send the Bitcoin to your recipient, without an intermediary to handle the transfer. Once Bitcoin does its job of moving your value across the globe to its recipient it needs to be ‘read out’, i.e. turned back into money, in the same way that your letter is displayed to its recipient in an email. In the email scenario, once the transfer happens and the email you have received conveys its information to you, it has no use other than to be a record of the information that was sent (accounting), and you archive that information. Bitcoin does this accounting on the block chain for you, and a good service built on it will store extended transaction details for you locally, but what you need to have as the recipient of Bitcoin is services or goods not Bitcoin itself. This will remain true until Bitcoin is preferred over money, since it has more utility than money. This event is called, “The Transformation”, where Bitcoin is chosen over fiat money because it is more useful than money. Bitcoin’s true nature is as an instant way to pay (despite not being money) anywhere in the world. It is not an investment, and holding onto it in the hopes that it will become valuable is like holding on to an email or a PDF in the hopes it will become valuable in the future; it doesn’t make any sense. Of course, you can hold onto Bitcoin and watch its value go up, and its value will go up, but you need to have guts to weather the violent waves of selling and buying as the transition to an all Bitcoin economy gets under way. Remember also that businesses that have a need to store Bitcoin need to be concerned about its value if their models are open-ended and are exposed to the market. “Closed Circuit Bitcoin” models have control over everything and never need to worry about prices at exchanges. They can do all their business moving an unlimited amount of fiat with just a few Bitcoin. Despite the fact that you can’t double spend them and each one is unique, Bitcoin has no inherent value, unlike a book or any physical object. They cannot appreciate in value; they’re always the same, no matter what anyone thinks about them, like math itself. Mistaken thinking about Bitcoin has spread because it behaves like money, due to the fact it cannot be double spent. Misrepresentation of Bitcoin’s true nature has masked Bitcoin’s dual nature of being digital and not double-spendable. Razzles. They start as a candy, and then end as a gum. Before you chew them, which are they? A candy, or a gum? Bitcoin is digital, with all the qualities of information that make information non scarce. It sits in a new place that oscillates between the goods of the physical world and the infinitely abundant digital world of information, belonging exclusively to the digital world but having the characteristics of both. This is why it has been widely misunderstood and why a new approach is needed to design businesses around it. All of this goes some way to explain why the price of buying Bitcoin at the exchanges doesn’t matter for the consumer. If the cost of buying a Bitcoin goes to 1¢ This doesn’t change the amount of money that comes out at the other end of a transfer. As long as you redeem your Bitcoin immediately after the transfer into either goods or currency, the same value comes out at the other end no matter what you paid for the Bitcoin when you started the process. Think about it this way. Let us suppose that you want to send a long text file to another person. You can either send it as it is, or you can compress it with zip. The size of a document file when it is “zipped” can be up to 87% smaller than the original. When we transpose this idea to Bitcoin, the compression ratio is the price of Bitcoin at an exchange. If a Bitcoin is $100, and you want to buy something from someone in India for $100 you need to buy 1 Bitcoin to get that $100 to India. If the price of Bitcoin is 1¢ then you need 10,000 Bitcoin to send $100 dollars to India. These would be expressed as compression ratios of 1:1 and 10,000:1, respectively. The same $100 value is sent to India, whether you use 10,000 or 1 Bitcoin.The price of Bitcoins is irrelevant to the value that is being transmitted, in the same way that zip files do not ‘care’ what is inside them; Bitcoin and zip are dumb protocols that do a job. As long as the value of Bitcoin does not go to zero, it will have the same utility as if the value were very ‘high’. Bearing all of this in mind, it’s clear that new services to facilitate the rapid, frictionless conversion into and out of Bitcoin would be needed to allow it to function in a manner that is true to its nature, before “The Transformation” when Bitcoin becomes money itself because everyone wants it, and prefers it to fiat money. The current business models of exchanges are not addressing Bitcoin’s nature correctly. They are using the Twentieth Century model of stock, commodity and currency exchanges and superimposing this onto Bitcoin. Interfacing with these exchanges is non-trivial, and for the ordinary user, a daunting prospect. In some cases, you have to wait up to seven days to receive a transfer of your fiat currency after it has been cashed out of your account from Bitcoins. Whilst this is not a fault of the exchanges, it represents a very real impediment to Bitcoin acting in its nature and providing its complete value. Imagine this: you receive an email from across the world, and are notified of the fact by being displayed the subject line in your browser. You then apply to your ISP to have this email delivered to you, and you have to wait seven days for it to arrive in your physical mail box. The very idea is completely absurd, and yet, this is exactly what is happening with Bitcoin, for no technical reason whatsoever. It is clear that there needs to be a re-think of the services that are growing around Bitcoin, along with a re-think of what the true nature of Bitcoin is. Rethinking services is a normal part of entrepreneurialism and we should expect business models to fail and early entrants to fall by the wayside as the ceaseless iterations and pivoting progress. Bearing all of this in mind, focussing on the price of Bitcoin at exchanges using a business model that is inappropriate for this new software simply is not rational; its like putting a methane-breathing canary in a mine full of oxygen breathing humans as a detector. The bird dies even though nothing is wrong with the air; the miners rush to evacuate, leaving the exposed gold seams behind, thinking that they are all about to be wiped out, when all is actually fine. Day traders speculating on Bitcoin from home cause the price to oscillate. It’s an artificial signal that has nothing to do with demand for Bitcoin and its circulation as an economic tool to facilitate commerce. Bitcoin, and the ideas behind it are here to stay. As the number of people downloading the clients, installing wallets and using it increases, like Hotmail, it will eventually reach critical mass and then spread exponentially through the internet. When that happens, the correct business models will spontaneously emerge, as they will become obvious, in the same way that Hotmail, Gmail, Facebook, cellular phones and instant messaging seem like second nature. In the future, I imagine that very few people will speculate on the value of Bitcoin, because even though that might be possible, and even profitable, there will be more money to be made in providing easy-to-use Bitcoin services that take full advantages of what Bitcoin is. One thing is for sure: speed will be of the essence in any future Bitcoin business model. The startups that provide instant satisfaction on both ends of the transaction are the ones that are going to succeed. Even though the volatility of the price of Bitcoin is bound to stabilise, since it has no use in and of itself, getting back to money or goods instantly will be a sought after characteristic of any business built on Bitcoin. The needs of Bitcoin businesses provide many challenges in terms of performance, security and new thinking. Out of these challenges will come new practices and software that we can only just imagine as they come over the horizon. Finally, when there is no more fiat, and the chaotic transition zone between fiat and Bitcoin has been abolished, then everything will be priced in Bitcoin, and there will be no volatility, because no one uses anything other than Bitcoin to buy or sell. If you know any chemistry, this will be like a reaction’s reagents reaching equilibrium. You can shake it and stir it all you like; the reaction is over, and you’re left with the spent reaction products. Right now, compared to the amount of fiat in the world, Bitcoin can expand and contract very rapidly over a large range, because it is small in volumes. It can expand to what for many is an unimaginably high price, and then shrink down again. We’re seeing this right now, with the “large” swings reported at the small number of exchanges specialising in price discovery. As Bitcoin gets bigger and accumulates more mass (its price expressed in fiat), these fluctuations will become smaller and smaller. Through all of this, Bitcoin remains exactly the same; it is its users that are publishing numbers as a signal to react upon. There is a long way to go to achieve this, and the correct way to measure progress is by the number of Bitcoin users, not the price on exchanges.

https://medium.com/swlh/are-you-surprised-by-the-price-of-bitcoin-this-is-just-the-beginning-d39c1686097f

[]

2019-10-27 15:02:30.995000+00:00

['Finance', 'Software Development', 'Money', 'Internet', 'Bitcoin']

Hi, I’m Snowflake

Hi, I’m Snowflake Photo by Carly Kewley on Unsplash Once more, it’s the season of fleece, This means it’s now the season I fly. One and all wrapped up behind frosty panes, But wrapped first in a warm glow - The fuzzy kind that love emanates. Gentle heart smiles that reverberate through, A drowsy forgetfulness of whatever havoc The rest of the year wreaked. My friends and I settle down, y’all call us snow-folk pure We are just mirrors, one flake for each of you, So much intricacy within ourselves Sometimes I reach the ground, and dissipate without even a wisp, But, it’s the season of togetherness, and like you lucky ones, we join our families too. We hold on first resiliently Onto the needles of each tree, Hinting at the kind of strength We want you to carry on, When this season fades away. This season of hot chocolate and laughs, This season of bells and stars, This season that, quite literally, paints your world red, This season of giving love and hope, Even if it’s to yourself.

https://medium.com/scribe/hi-im-snowflake-a4ff28c63343

['Amritha Ram']

2020-12-27 11:41:46.352000+00:00

['Christmas', 'Xmas', 'Poetry', 'Snowflake', 'Holidays']

PORK: A Technology Resilience Framework

The story of technology today is complexity. Increasingly complicated software deployed in complex and unpredictable environments that seem to be slipping more and more out of our control. Daunting stuff, this complexity. A Prediction: The code you’re writing today won’t be the same code running a year from now. The machines hosting your services today won’t be the same machines in a year. Your services will fail occasionally. Your business partners will change their minds about features. Hardware will need security patches to address vulnerabilities. Network blips will disrupt and change the topology of your system. Your end users will interact with your applications in unexpected ways. Your business will scale significantly (hallelujah!), but load will be uneven. Intraday releases will mean services temporarily restart at inopportune times More examples of complexity, you ask? No problem! Distributed systems, consensus algorithms, machine learning. Team collaborations, human emotions and miscommunications. Feature enhancements, bug fixes, new competition, vendor integrations and organizational restructuring. All this, and we’re just scratching the surface of the complex factors that could impact our technology systems. Engineers are working within a truly unpredictable and complex environment from a technology, business and human perspective. We should acknowledge this head-on by building systems to be responsive to an uncertain future. Hungry For Resilient Software Given the new reality of complexity and constant change, our approach to building technology systems must adapt. At Rocket Mortgage Technology, we’re striving to transform the mortgage industry as well as the technology that runs it. In my role as a Software Architect, I work with a suite of amazing teams that build custom software solutions for our Capital Markets and Treasury business partners. These business areas are critical to the success of our organization, so we need our systems to reflect that criticality. Due to the volatility of the financial markets and the speed with which the mortgage industry changes, this is an exciting and ever-present challenge. Our mission in architecting systems, therefore, is to build systems that are both resilient and flexible enough to turn on a dime. Our mission in architecting systems, therefore, is to build systems that are both resilient and flexible enough to turn on a dime. What Is Resilient Software? Let’s define resiliency as the measure of how a system withstands stress and responds to unforeseen errors and urgent feature requests. More broadly, resiliency is a measure of how a system embraces change. As the needs of our clients change, our systems must change accordingly. This article details my teams’ approach to building resilient systems through our PORK Resiliency Framework. More than 100 billion dollars of loan originations flow through our systems each year, so the stakes are high. Our framework is constructed of four principles designed to take the fear out of decision-making in this complex and business critical environment. For several years now, these four principles have been the cornerstone of the systems we build and the measuring stick to guide our technology decisions. Engineers, architects, product owners and leadership have rallied around a shared goal to deliver resilient software, and these principles have led the way. The Four Principles Of PORK Our teams strive for fast, frequent and confident releases of our software, but how do we balance the safety of our system with the rapid change that comes with frequent releases? Well, imagine if you could say to your engineers, “Don’t be afraid of making mistakes because we have the tools in place to quickly find and easily correct them!” This is the essence of our framework. We strive for resiliency by observing errors as early as possible, then recovering quickly (ideally before impacting our clients in the first place). With this approach, we’re giving our engineers the runway to experiment, innovate and make mistakes. At the same time, we’re relieving the pressure from our engineering teams as they no longer need to aim to be perfect, bug free or predict the future. To liberate our team members from the fear of mistakes is to empower them to move at a higher velocity and deliver business value faster. So, what are the four principles of the PORK resiliency framework? Predictability Observability Recoverability Keep it simple Predictability Just because we’re working in an unpredictable and complex environment doesn’t mean our code should be unpredictable, too. Our first core principle asserts that we value predictability over correctness. This may appear counter-intuitive at first glance, but an engineering team should design a system to behave the same way in all circumstances. If a system is wrong but wrong in the same way every time, then we’re well-positioned to quickly diagnose and fix the problem. Predictability also enables the team to better explain, support and evolve the system over time. We believe that the same inputs fed into a system in the same order should always result in the same output. Why is this deterministic behavior important? Replicating a bug is often the hardest part of an engineer’s job. We have great talent on our engineering teams, and they’re adept at writing code to fix a bug — that’s typically the easy part. Most of the battle can be the task of reproducing the problem in the first place. With a focus on predictability, we can take a notoriously tricky task and make it trivial. If something goes wrong in a predictable system, it’s simple to pass the same inputs through our code again and replicate the behavior so we can diagnose what went wrong. From there, we can leverage our automated toolchain to fix it. This approach may sound simple, but there are a lot of forces at play here. To make your system predictable, you’ll need to delve deep into the underpinnings of your system design, likely pursuing advanced techniques, such as immutability, retry policies, idempotency, event-driven programming and other techniques. Challenge yourself and your teams to make engineering choices that reinforce predictability throughout your technology stack, from code to infrastructure and the space between. How do our teams achieve this? We invest in several tools and patterns, which I’ll discuss later in the article. Observability Broadly speaking, observability means we’re designing systems with visibility and diagnostic tooling in mind. Lack of a cohesive and reliable observability strategy complicates how we triage issues, impacts system stability and ultimately erodes trust between a technology team and its clients. If we’re confident we can identify when our system is behaving normally (healthy), then we should also be able to identify when something is behaving out of the norm (unhealthy). Upon observing unhealthy behavior, we can alert our support teams proactively and correct it before it impacts our clients. By contrast, if we don’t have the appropriate visibility into what our system is doing, then we don’t know when something is misbehaving, and we don’t know when it warrants our attention to fix it. This almost certainly leads to unfortunate client impact, and what’s worse, our beloved clients are the ones notifying us that the system is broken. Shouldn’t we already know? Observability is about quick and effective root cause analysis, not a few flashy visualizations to impress your leadership team. Rather than getting distracted by polished graphs and charts, I recommend you focus on a chain of diagnostic tools. We want three types of tools in this toolchain: Proactive alerts that call out unhealthy trends Tools to form a hypothesis of what has gone wrong (e.g. dashboards for logs, metrics, traces) Tools to confirm or deny the hypothesis Once you have confirmed your hypothesis, you can leverage our principle of Predictability to replicate the problem and test your bug fix. Voila! If we’re aware we have a problem (Observability), and we can quickly replicate and diagnose the problem (Predictability), then we are in good shape to correct the problem quickly. Recoverability When building a system, engineers have a tendency to try to make it bulletproof against failure. This seems reasonable at first glance, but ultimately proves to be unreasonably harsh and restrictive. Engineers should be thoughtful and defensive in their coding practices, but if they’re not careful, bulletproofing can lead teams down a path of fear, long-lived testing environments, days or weeks of extensive testing and planned maintenance windows. This approach will undoubtedly manifest itself in brittle systems and slow software delivery. As we shift our mindset toward embracing unpredictability, rather than avoiding failures at all costs, we should instead be thinking about how quickly we can respond to inevitable failures. You cannot avoid failure all together, but you can very much control how quickly a team responds to it. We need not bulletproof our systems if we can quickly observe system issues and repair them before our business partners or clients feel the impact. Recoverability is particularly important when considering how teams manage the data flowing through their systems. Data, in many ways, is a system’s most precious resource and the backbone of our business. If your system encounters an outage, chances are you’ll lose some data and need to recover it. Have a recovery plan in place for this in advance! Have a plan to repopulate your data in caches, event streams and data stores. For example, can you work with the system of record to provide a full “state of the world” snapshot to repopulate all your data on-demand? You should have layers of protection in place and, ideally, you should practice how you use them. Don’t wait for a production outage to hatch a recovery plan. Do it now. Don’t wait for a production outage to hatch a recovery plan. Do it now. We leverage many additional techniques for recovery, as well, such as approaching system design with a disposable mindset. The disposable mindset encourages teams to avoid building precious, brittle systems. Instead, support teams can quickly tear down a misbehaving application and spin up a fresh new application in its place. During critical outages, we favor this approach for quick recovery so our clients can get back to work as quickly as possible. Later, once the urgency has diminished, our engineers will delve deep into the observability data we have collected to explain what led to the outage in the first place. A disposable mindset often requires stateless services, a careful plan around managing your data (as discussed above) as well as some modern tooling like Docker containers and container orchestration, which I’ll briefly discuss later. My recommendation is to shoot for the moon and build a reset button that will quickly restore an unhealthy system to health in an automated fashion. This will certainly take a lot of work, but it’s a noble goal. Remember, due to the unpredictable nature of our complex environments, you can’t avoid failure, but with principles such as these, we learn to build resilient systems from unreliable parts. Keep It Simple Simple, elegant solutions are less brittle, less likely to break and easier to fix when they do break. As we design and implement systems, we’re typically addressing multiple goals across multiple time horizons at once. These include the initial delivery of a new system, but also the ease of maintaining the system for the years to come and the ease with which our system can evolve over time to meet our clients’ evolving needs. Given the time-shifting, shape-shifting nature of these goals, unless we have a healthy respect for complexity, the software project is almost certain to fail. In my experience, the single biggest indicator in the success of a software project is simplicity. It’s also the single biggest factor in reasoning about complex systems when you’re urgently alerted to a production issue at 3:00 a.m. Simplicity allows for a shared mental model across your team. Can every engineer on your team draw a reasonably accurate diagram of how your system is architected? I hope so. Our systems act as a record of all the hundreds and thousands of decisions we’ve made along the way. Build the simplest thing that will solve the problem. Be deliberate in your decision-making process and be able to justify your decisions. Because we must live with these decisions, maintain them, support them, debug them — it is in our collective best interest that we keep it simple. Tools For The Job As described, the principles of our PORK Resiliency Framework are conceptual in nature, thus not overtly opinionated with regards to programming languages, utilities or technology stacks. That said, I’ll share some tooling and best practices that my teams leverage today to achieve the goals of our framework. We expect these tools will change over time, but we also expect the four core principles will continue to apply, nevertheless. Infrastructure As Code (IAC) We use Terraform, which helps provision predictable infrastructure to avoid hard to debug environmental drift issues, which arise from manual configuration across multiple environments. Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) No surprise here. Tooling in this space is widely available to introduce automation, which offers us predictable and immutable build artifacts (for example, Docker images) and predictable promotion across environments. We use CircleCI and custom tooling to achieve this across our systems. Docker In our world, Docker refers to the containers as well as the orchestration layer that manages those containers. We love Docker as it promotes a disposable mindset, which ensures all dependencies are documented in code, and prevents snowflake environments. If a Docker container dies, another will be spun up dynamically by the container orchestrator (Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, ECS) to replace it. Because containers are immutable, the new one is just as good as the prior. The orchestration platform also offers us readily available infrastructure (compute on demand), not to mention a variety of predictability-focused tooling such as software defined networking, declarative files to describe the desired state of your system (Docker Compose, Kubernetes manifests) and a number of other abstractions to help with engineering productivity and resilient system design. F# We use C# in many scenarios, and C# is used more broadly across our company, but we love F# in this specific arena. F# is a functional language that addresses many of our predictability concerns elegantly (through first-class constructs around immutability and side-effect-free processing). That said, a functional language is not mandatory. You can certainly achieve predictability through C#, Python or other languages, though it will require more deliberate decision making and the engineering discipline to stay the course when the predictability path is not the easiest way forward. A functional language makes sense to us because we can emphasize immutability, testability and other predictability concerns at the code level, just as we already do at the service level and the system level. This allows for a cohesive predictability strategy up and down our technology stack. Kafka We love Kafka because, like the other tools mentioned here, it makes good engineering practices simpler to implement. It’s easy to integrate and deprecate services, so your system can evolve as needed over time. We believe immutable data is easier to manage, and Kafka is a durable log of immutable events kept in strict order (per partition). Your teams don’t need to reinvent the wheel and write custom code to achieve resiliency through buffering, redundancy, scalability and fault tolerance. These and other useful patterns and principles come out of the box with Kafka. Furthermore, Kafka allows us to process data as events happen in the real world, rather than wait for a user request. Thus, we’re processing earlier and can observe anomalies sooner. This flexibility allows us to fix issues even before the user invokes a request (thus, no client impact). When we do encounter a bug, Kafka allows us to rewind the consumer offset and replay the data inputs we received earlier. This functionality allows us to diagnose the problem easily and get back to health, as described in our predictability and recoverability principles. Splunk We use Splunk for several reasons across our organization, but in the context of PORK, Splunk helps us achieve our observability goals using logs. At a high level, Splunk helps us describe, explain and alert on the health of our systems. We use Splunk for building dashboards and alerts that show anomalies. We leverage the Splunk DSL to quickly drill down into request-level context to troubleshoot and diagnose production issues as they’re happening. Grafana Metrics help us describe and alert on the health of our system, but unlike request-level logs, it struggles to explain the state of our system because metrics intentionally strip away the context of individual requests. We love Grafana, nonetheless, but we focus it where it brings the most value — quickly and efficiently graphing trends that don’t require drilling down into request-level data. We find that Grafana is great at visualizing resource utilization (CPU, RAM, disk) and HTTP endpoint status codes. Summary With the PORK Resiliency framework, we’re attempting to address the increasing complexity of technology and our environment by turning the design of a system on its head, such that we no longer over-emphasize the initial delivery of a system. Instead, we ask ourselves: How will our system respond to an urgent business need down the road? How will we react when we have a bug? Do we have the right tooling in place to respond quickly and confidently? The answers to these questions will reveal how resilient a team’s systems truly are. Resiliency, after all, is a quality that applies not only to the systems but to the teams that run them. How do you ensure resiliency in your systems? Let me know in the comments!

https://medium.com/rocket-mortgage-technology-blog/pork-a-technology-resilience-framework-745207bd28d5

['Rocket Mortgage Technology']

2020-09-15 21:58:15.184000+00:00

['Technology', 'Developer Tools', 'Software Development', 'Software Engineering', 'Software Architecture']

30 Things To Try This Winter To Make The Season More Hygge

Cozy Hygge Things To Do Inside And Outside The House While It Snows Outside. Hygge is a Danish and Norwegian word for a mood of coziness and comfortable conviviality with feelings of wellness and contentment. This Hygge list is not like the usual ones which tell you to build bonfires or do some self-care. Not about lightings, aromas, decorations to make your room more hygge, or about activities like barbeques, campings, reading books, living room activities or doing home decor, etc. There are already many lists out there that tell you to do that. I’m guessing that most of you who cherish the art of Hygge are already doing or planning to do them this winter. We can always keep doing those — I’m only adding to the list of things and activities to try out to improve the Hygge factor this winter. I’m trying to create some yesteryears kind of experiences. I’m trying to teach people empathy through hygge, to embrace the season, to motivate them to be healthy and productive this winter while feeling hygge all the time. Generally, people get into a very lazy mode during winters. I’m trying to create a balance through hygge and this winter I’m also trying to look at Hygge from other angles apart from just being a lifestyle that enhances our own feeling of coziness and warmth. Of course, the list is made up of things and activities which most of you are already doing but might not have looked at it from a Hygge perspective. So let’s grab our coffees and wines, sit near a fire and go through this list of activities to do this winter to add more Huge to our lives while it’s snowing outside — Don’t stay inside when it’s very cold outside. Yes, you hear me right. Being able to experience the icy cold winds, misty mornings and cold snowy or windy nights ❄are very important to feel the winter season. When you come back to your cozy houses after experiencing the cold weather you will feel a priceless feeling of warmth which will be far more hygge than the warm hygge feeling you experience while staying inside all day long. The smell of smoke coming out of bonfires, the smell of the snow, of chestnuts roasting from some house you passed by in the neighborhood, flowers, and trees. You will miss them if you sit at home all day. You will feel fresh and at the same time very cozy once you come back from outside. So make a list of things you’ll do outside when it’s really cold. Here is my list — jogging, outdoor workouts, a long walk in the woods, gardening, going to the market, and not relying too much on online shopping. 2. Get yourself an old model Radio. Old radios give us a feeling of nostalgia. The noise which comes out of them when there is a bad network, the simple and unsophisticated, and often not very convincing sounds add to the hygge experience. In the early days, radio stations filled their air time with orchestra music, poetry readers, singers, and preachers. If you want a similar experience buy an old radio and subscribe to some channel which vintage stuff. Listen to old radio podcasts and cozy songs while you’re relaxing in your bedroom, in the living room, while sipping some tea, coffee, or wine. 3. Learn to make wooden toys at home. Wood, I think is one of the most Hygge material that exists. Its smell, its texture, and everything else about it. Get yourself a woodworking kit and become like Mister Gepetto from ‘The Adventures Of Pinnochio' and start building some antique wooden toys and decorative pieces. You can decorate them, sell them online, or gift them to poor kids on the streets. Doing some woodwork will also be a good form of exercise plus it will keep your body warm. Keep listening to some cozy music at a very low volume while sipping your wine or coffee as you build those toys. 4. Get yourself a telescope. Do some stargazing. Peeping through a telescope to see the beautiful night sky on a cold ❄ winter night with sounds of cold winds blowing and you’re wearing your woolen clothes, standing by an open bonfire lit in the middle of a meadow or by the window from the comfort of your living room or your bedroom with a small fire burning in the chimney beside you. Sounds like some nice hyggyeing idea right? Add some music to it, some roasted nuts and some coffee or some wine. What else do you need? 5. Write some nice handwritten letters. There is hygge in keeping in touch with people. This winter let’s try writing letters which are our old school version of Messenger or Whatsapp. Write letters to your loved ones. Write them to people whom you have met on social media whom you never met personally. Add small gifts with them if you feel like it — a rose, a toy, or some book to read during winter. Spread some good vibes, some love. 6. Take cold water baths. Other than the health benefits cold water baths can in fact make you feel warmer later. The extreme cold you experience while bathing is worth it. Wear some woolen clothes, get under a blanket, and sit near a fire sipping a cup of coffee after your bath. You’ll feel hygge. By the way, you don’t need to try something like the guy in the picture. Unless you really wish to do so. 7. Stay awake for some time late at midnight. Deep in the cold winter midnight when it’s snowing outside, sounds of howling winds, sounds of window panes rattling and you’re sitting on a comfortable rocking chair near a crackling fire burning in the chimney of your candle lit living room reading a book while listening to some cozy old song drinking some wine. You can even watch a movie, some cartoons or knit a sweater. How is that? 8. Wake up real early. Most of us won’t like the idea of waking up real early during cold winter mornings when you don’t have any work to do or college to attend. But waking up really early has its own hygge benefits. Think of the early morning radio news, the cold weather, the beautiful dawn sky, and sounds of little birds sleepily chirping in the trees and distant dogs barking and scenes of unquenched roadside bonfires through your window. You wear your woolens and get out of your house for a jog and see the dawn sky slowly changing into a white morning sky and come back having a cup of tea from the roadside tea stall and picking up the daily newspaper, some eatables for breakfast on your way home. Better than waking up in the afternoon? 9. Make yourself and your loved one’s sweaters. Knitting is already a very common hygge activity which people usually do during winters. I still added it to the list just to tell you how you can hygge your knitting experience even more. Spread the love by knitting soft toys and sweaters for your loved ones and the needy people. You can also knit old Walt Disney character toys like Pinnochio, Mickey mouse, Jiminy cricket, etc. Write knitting blogs or teach your young one how to knit. Spread warmth and love with some wool. 10. Watch some very old cartoons. Very old cartoons are peaceful and very soothing to watch in winters especially in the early morning hours or late at night. They make us nostalgic. The cozy background music they use, the emotional connection they make with us is enough to make us feel hygge. 11. Keep a window open. Watch the cold breeze, the howling winds to blow. Watch the snow falling, feel it with your hands. Watch the beautiful winter night sky. Let the wind shake the window panes and make some rattling sounds. Feel the winter. Look far into the lonely winter streets. Keep yourself warm by wearing some woolens, listening to some cozy music, and having some warm food like a glass of wine with cheese. Do anything to keep warm but please let the winds blow. But keep a window open. 12. Prepare healthy soups. Soups are healthy and warm. Have soup at any time in the day. Even at midnight sitting by the fire listening to music or just the crackling sound of wood burning in the chimney. Experiment making different types of delicious soups. 13. Opera and other old classical forms of music. Listening to some soothing opera can add a classy touch to the ambiance of the room and can enhance the hygge feeling. Pavarotti, Andrea Bocelli, Josh Groban, and Maria Callas are a few I picked up for you to listen to. On a cold winter day, you can try listening to them while you’re indoors lying on the bed or sitting comfortably in your living room near the fireplace sipping some coffee or wine. And if you’re a Mozart or Beethoven fan you can listen to them too or some old soothing Christmas, blues, or jazz songs. But you’re free to listen to anything which makes you feel cozy and create your own hygge ambiance this winter. 14. Travel by train. If you’ve watched Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone you must have already seen the scene where Harry travels by train to Hogwarts through beautiful snowy mountains. The train looked very cozy inside with dim lights lit inside and everyone was dressed in winter outfits as it was winter. There was a scene in which a lady came to sell some candies. You too can have a similar train journey and experience Hygge while journeying to some cold place this winter. Grab your flasks, fill them with coffee or tea, wear your sweaters and shawls, take with you your radio, some board games to have a merry time journeying by a train this winter. 15. Help a needy person to survive the harsh winter. Gift a needy person some delicious warm food to eat, a shawl, a jacket or a sweater to wear, something to drink, and if possible provide him/her some shelter to survive this harsh winter. Buy him/her a radio too if you want to. Treat them exactly the way you want to treat yourself this winter. Spend time with him at his place even if it is on the streets. Or get him to your place which will be warmer. If you do these for some needy person you’ll feel very warm and happy inside. That’s hygge too. Hygge increases when you spread it. 16. Eat a poor man’s diet. While most of us are gorging on delicious food during winter of the holiday season. There are people who sleep hungry or very little food. Let’s try eating like a poor man by following a poverty diet with a very minimum budget this winter. No, it’s not for saving money but to be able to empathize and feel how the poor must be feeling without food this winter. We can also try doing long intermittent fasts and eat foods that are very cheaply available — potatoes, beans, rice, etc. Let's practice mindfulness while eating. 17. Watch black and white movies. Black and white movies are very soothing to our eyes. There is simplicity in black and white movies. It makes us feel nostalgic to watch a very old movie. All Old things are hygge and are precious. They are like treasures which we like to preserve. The background music used in these movies, the sound effects, the types of scripts used, trends, and fashion during that era which we set in those movies are all from a time when we were not born. Everything has a vintage element in them. Thus these movies make us feel hygge. They take us to a past era. Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, or Charlie Chaplin are few popular actors from that era. So light up a fire, prepare some coffee, get some cookies or popcorn and watch black and white movies with your family and friends this winter while it snows outside. If you can watch them on an old school black and white television it’s even better. 18. Play old board games. Keep away your mobile games and try playing some old board games just for a change. You must have played games like Chess, Chinese Checkers, Scrabble, Business, Monopoly or Life. You can search the internet for some new ones too and order them online or go buy them from a toy store in case they are available locally if you want to add some new games to your list. Board games get friends and family together and create a hygge atmosphere during winter. You can listen to good music, talk, laugh while you play and all of you can have a merry time sitting in your living room by the fire having popcorn and coffee while it snows outside on a winter evening. 19. Build houses for squirrels and birds. Let’s care for all. Although these little ones live in the trees and they have their own houses, I guess they won’t mind living in some warmly built mini homes hung on trees with lots of food-filled inside them for them to eat during winter nights when it’s cold outside. — — — — — — — — — — — — — P. S. “when it's cold” and “when it’s snowing outside” are my favorite hygge lines I’m bored of repeating again and again. From now on help me by just assuming that it’s snowing outside and it’s very windy. — — — — — — — — — — — — — Now let’s quickly go through our last 10 things to try this winter because it’s really cold outside. 20. Use wooden crockeries. Wood is a warm material like we already said before. Anything made out of wood gives us a hygge feeling. Holding a wooden cup of coffee will be almost every time warmer hence more hyggeyish than holding made out of plastic, porcelain, or Bone China. Wooden Crockery can be used as decorative items too. You can keep them in your cupboard or on your dining table or even hang them on your kitchen walls. Wooden cups, wooden spoons, wooden wine glass, wooden plates. It gives us visual warmth. That’s hygge. 21. Join roadside bonfires. Standing near a roadside bonfire in the street is a great way to spend time with the public around you. You can sing songs, talk, drink tea or wine together, smoke and have a great time while you get a chance to socialize with different people. You can start one or search for one to join. Next time you walk by the street on a winter night if you are cold just ask permission and join any roadside bonfire group if you happen to see one. 22. Take an afternoon nap in the meadow. During the day take a nap or two in the meadow. Get some Vitamin- D. Winters sun is very pleasant hence it feels very hygge to be outdoors. Lie in the hay or in the grass. Let cattle walk around you. Listen to their bells, their moos, bleats, and their baas. Let a butterfly fly past your head or sit on your nose. You can get a shawl or a blanket along with you if you feel cold. You might not need music at all unless you play it in very low volume as you can hear beautiful nature sounds in the meadow and you don’t want to miss them as they are very important parts of the hygge feeling. You can get a book to read or something warm to eat along with you. 23. Eat less. Of course, you can feast on occasions like Christmas, Haloween, or New Year. But most of the times try to eat less and healthy. Practice mindfulness while eating, practice fasting, or eat like the Italians(Italians aren’t concerned with calories because they usually stop eating when they are full). Have fewer carbohydrates and more fresh vegetables and fruits and a minimal amount of red meat in your meals. You can pair some red wine or Vodka occasionally with some of your meals occasionally. Feeling healthy by eating healthy makes us feel good to enjoy the winter season even more. More good health means more ability to feel hygge around you during winter. 24. Spend more time with kids. Kids are innocent. They are the ones who enjoy hygge more than anyone. They build toy houses, they build tents, plays with torch lights, they watch cartoon all the time. They live in another world. A world of Cinderella. A world of Mickey Mouse. A world where clouds are sheep and Santa Clause really exists. A world without tension and worries. Spending time with them — playing with them, cuddling inside the blanket, playing all the kiddish games with them, telling them stories, and encouraging them to explore their creative side by— making them draw, build DIY things, learn cooking, etc. It can lead to being a fun activity to be involved with kids during winters and can lead to a hygge atmosphere in your home. It will also improve parent-children bonding. You can try spending time with old people too. 25. Stay in a wooden log cabin. Wooden cabins are very warm and cozy inside. If you have a fireplace and something to roast and eat and cozy music to listen, on a cold winter night you don’t need anything else to feel more hygge. Anything you do inside them becomes hygge. Play chess, make wooden toys, knit or do nothing or just sleep whatever you do you feel cozy in there. If you have the money to build one just build one. Or else search for one on the internet to rent one for a few days. Some holiday destinations provide this kind of houses too. 26. Spend some time at an Old age home. Most old people in the old age home love it when they get a visitor from outside. They like to share their feelings, someone, to talk to, someone who cares. Many suffer from loneliness and that leads them to depression too. So this winter why not we visit an old age home and spend a good time with old people. Most old people become innocent like kids during the last stages of their lives, they have some warmth in them just like kids do. So spending time with them by doing activities like — playing board games, knitting, listening to their stories, singing songs near a bonfire can be really heartwarming. It will make them feel cared for and loved. 27. Feed street animals. Hygge not only evokes coziness but it also evokes togetherness. We are not alone in this universe. There are animals too. They understand these hygge feelings too. Feeding them would evoke togetherness between them and us. 28. Make them sweaters too. And this is how we can evoke coziness. They need to feel special and cared too. 29. More study and work. Most people don’t study a lot during the winter but you can do the opposite this year. Surround yourself with lots of books, notebooks, sketchbooks, and all other kinds of stationery. Listen to some soft cozy music and study through midnight all the way till dawn. Get your coffees, your wines too. Use a table lamp or any source of light which creates a cozy ambiance, light up a small fire, wrap yourself up in woolens and grind through the night. This winter takes some New Year resolutions like — reading a lot of books, learning some new art, or a subject. Let’s give it to self-improvement. 30. Hibernate completely from social media for some time. Our last thing to try this winter is to take a break from Social Media for a while this winter. If you can do this it will definitely reduce some stress, anxiety, and depression. To take a break from social media you should turn off your notifications, set time limits, and prioritize your own self-care with other activities you enjoy like spending real time with loved ones, learning a craft, playing board games, and doing more outdoor activities. Hope you liked this list. Let me know which ones you liked and are already doing. We can come up with a bigger list next winter with more things to do. Happy Hyggeying 🔥 🍷 ❄

https://medium.com/@biswajeetlearns/30-things-to-try-this-winter-to-make-the-season-more-hygge-b3876635dad0

['Biswajeet Das']

2021-01-04 14:52:33.997000+00:00

['Hygge', 'Things To Do', 'Experience', 'Winter', 'Wellness']

Keep the Sunny Days Comin’

AJ Morgan Sunglasses (Also available in a ton of other styles) Still haven’t found the perfect pair of uber flattering shades? Considering squinting your way through the rest of summer? Don’t quit the search just yet, fellow city dweller. Come stop by one of our stores and we’ll help you find the one that was made to sit on your face. Instax 8 Instant Camera (Also available in Blue, Pink, Black, Raspberry) An iconic Tumblr artifact. Likely the most photographed Polaroid ever released. If you’ve never owned such a kawaii camera in your life, did you even live at all? SunnyLife Carnival Kite Forget — just for a minute — how old you are, channel that inner child, and go fly a kite. Because there’s nothing quite like running in an empty field with a multicolored nylon bird sailing high behind you. Even if that’s not your idea of a good time, you’re bound to have a niece or nephew out there who’d love the heck out of this thing. Think about the children! COOLA Spray Sunscreen SPF30 in Pina Colada Sunblock in a can brought to you in the fruitiest flavor of all. Plus, this outdoor must-have is made with certified organic ingredients like cucumber, algae and strawberry extracts, so your skin stays nourished and hydrated #SprayAllDay. “Have your fun in the sun and then some.” Standard Baggu Made of 100% ripstop nylon, able to hold 50 pounds worth of stuff (yas), and available in every aesthetic, everyone needs a practical-chic Baggu. Plus, it’s machine washable. Emergency chocolate melt onto everything? Bottle of sunblock lotion leak everywhere? (Should’ve gotten the spray *wink*) Nooo problem. Just pop it in the washer, and BOOM, good as new.

https://medium.com/thenewstand/keep-the-sunny-days-comin-3b59307c6d3f

['Nana Kim']

2017-07-31 13:57:12.238000+00:00

['New York', 'Poetry', 'New York City', 'New Stand']

BREAST MILK, ITS PRODUCTION, AND NUTRIENTS

Exclusive breastfeeding Background Without a doubt, sufficient information has evidenced that breast milk is the most naturally valuable food to be provided as a source of nutrients for the newly born. For this to happen successfully, approaches that embrace exclusive breastfeeding practices should strongly be undertaken by the nursing mother. Such an undertaking results in numerous advantages that are attributed to the genuine breastfeeding practice, these include; protecting the baby against infections, building a psychosocial bond with the baby, and being an example of encouragement to fellow mothers, among others. In this article, the production, types, and nutrient profile of breast milk have been discussed below; Production of breast milk Normal milk production occurs only as a result of suckling by the feeding baby. The suckling act acts as a message to the afferent nerves within the breast which sends an electrical message to the brain cells. The brain cells interpret the message and send an electrochemical feedback message which stimulates the pituitary gland to start producing the hormone “oxytocin” that travels in the blood to the breast where it stimulates milk production from the milk-producing cells (alveoli). Milk then travels through the milk ducts and flows out of the breast through the nipples for the feeding baby to access. Small breasts versus large breasts dilemma The size of the breasts should not be a problem and/or an excuse for the nursing mother. The suckling act from the feeding baby is always the major influencing factor for milk production and it is independent of breast size. So, milk will always flow. However, breast size affects milk storage capacity i.e. the larger the breast the more milk storage capacity and vice versa. The storage capacity thus affects the milk flow amount during the breastfeeding process, meaning; small breasts empty faster than large breasts as the baby feeds. Types of breast milk and their nutrient compositions Breast milk has three major types i.e. Colostrum Transitional milk Mature milk Colostrum is the first milk produced from the breasts. It is usually for the first breastfeeding exercise for the nursing mother. It is the milk produced within the first week (1–7 days) after birth appearing as a thick, yellow-colored fluid. The yellow color is caused by the presence of beta-carotene, a molecule from which vitamin A is formed. Additionally, colostrum is rich in fat-soluble vitamins, minerals, proteins, and immunoglobulin A (IgA). Transitional milk is the breast milk product produced after the first 7days following birth (i.e. 7–21 days). It is rich in high levels of fat, water-soluble vitamins, lactose, and contains more calories than colostrum but with a lower immunoglobulin content. Mature milk is that breast milk product produced after 21 days following birth. It is paler, more watery, and thinner than colostrum. This product contains 90% water and the remaining 10% accounting for nutrients such as; proteins, fats, and carbohydrates (e.g. lactose). It contains more water because the baby’s demands for water have increased at this stage. Mature milk is produced in two phases as the baby feeds. These include; foremilk and hindmilk. Foremilk is the first liquid phase of the mature milk product and it accounts mostly for water. Hind milk is the second liquid phase that flows following the foremilk; this phase is richer in the other nutrients (proteins, fats, carbohydrates) than the foremilk. It is the hindmilk that causes the baby to feel satisfied which usually induces a sleepy state. Conclusion To sum up, breast milk should be the only genuine source of food for the newly born as it contains all the necessary nutrients for the baby. Through the practice of exclusive breastfeeding, the baby will acquire all the nutritional necessities for life. This practice should not be hindered by factors relating to breast size because the flow of breast milk is independent of such but only dependent on the suckling act provided by the feeding baby and thus allowing colostrum, transitional, and/or mature breast milk to flow depending on the stage of breastfeeding, postpartum. REFERENCE Sokan — Adeaga Micheal Ayodeji., et al. (2019). A Systematic Review on Exclusive Breastfeeding Practice in Sub-Saharan Africa: Facilitators and Barriers. Acta Scientific Medical Sciences 3.7: 53–65. Related topics Nutrients in breast milk Breastfeeding stages

https://medium.com/@lujjimbirwafortunate/breast-milk-its-production-and-nutrients-aaf0f3ba639e

[]

2020-06-11 12:13:10.333000+00:00

['Exclusive Breastfeeding', 'Newborn', 'Breastfeeding', 'Baby Products', 'Baby Food']

Top 10 APIs/SDKs For Blockchain Application, Crypto Solutions or DApp Development

This guide will help blockchain enthusiasts and developers save time to tackle some of the most common development challenges. Building an application that relies on Blockchains or Crypto Exchanges has few challenges: * Blockchains are 50+ and growing, each with his own SDK and specifics * Developers need to have deep experience with each Blockchain even when it comes for simple interactions * Developers & DevOps need to have solid knowledge about security. * Blockchains are huge sets of data, to interact with a blockchain you need to host the whole node which is an additional cost for servers. * There are many Crypto Exchanges (+400) each with its own software, database and API. Developers can save a lot of time and server’s costs by using APIs/SDKs, here are some of them: CryptoAPIs Crypto APIs aim to unify the way developers interact with Blokchains and Exchanges. It’s one of the most effective solutions — APIs and SDKs with a focus on Blockchains, Crypto Exchanges, DApps & all sort of crypto applications. Crypto APIs provides access to top integrated blockchains and utilizes RestAPI, WebHooks, and WebSockets. Crypto APIs offers insight on significant mainnets and testnets: Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin & Ethereum, with EOS, Ripple, Stellar & NEO coming soon. Developers can use one API or SDK in their programming language and save a lot of time, in addition, there is no need to host private nodes. Crypto APIs give the developers both options (take care of private keys or leave this for Crypto APIs). In addition, there is a module which covers 200+ crypto exchanges. This API allows developers to get insights, from over 200 exchanges, 24/7. Users can receive real-time information on trades and quotes, obtain OHLCV (Open, High, Low, Close, and Volume) time series data, precise exchange rates between currency asset pairs, and historical data for tests and algorithm development. In addition to Public APIs, Crypto APIs has access to more than 100 private APIs, this allows developers to build trading software, arbitrage algorithms, algo trading, etc. much easier. Crypto APIs use CDN for data requests, SDK in multiple languages, a simplified workflow for API seamless integration and setup, and total marked data delivery. Developers can build gaming, games, PSP, exchanges, trading, DApps, explorers much easier and faster. CoinAPI CoinAPI provides easy, quick and reliable unified data APIs to cryptocurrency markets. Its strongest sides are data standardization, on-demand data grabbing via HTTP RESTful API, live streaming of price fluctuations via WebSocket and FIX protocol, SDK in various programming languages for even more streamline integrations, historical market data backed up by 20TB database, and diverse API connection routing. CoinAPI’s CDN allows users to connect instantly to multiple locations, eliminating ping and speed issues through servers based in EU, USA, and Asia. One of the issues about CoinAPI that they don’t have unique IDs, the coins symbols are mixed up and you could take a date for BTC coin which is not Bitcoin. CoinMarketCap API The leading cryptocurrency ranking, CoinMarketCap, also offers a set of APIs in their portfolio. Users can generate real-time charts about the market, specific currencies, and cryptocurrencies listing. All data is being transmitted via simple lines of code and can be easily integrated into various websites. Despite that it is widely used in the crypto industry, the current Public API will be closed on the 4th December and will evolve to a new, more powerful version — the Professional API. It will incorporate Live prices, Gainers/Losers, Social influence, News, Watchlists, Snapshots and Whitepaper searches. Despite its new features, is it likely that many websites & tools would stop working if they don’t migrate to the new Professional version as well. If we compare prices, this option would be much more expensive than using Crypto APIs services. Blockcypher API Blockcypher provides an array of APIs tailored to suit everyone’s needs. Blockcypher offers Blockchain, Address, Wallet, Transaction, Microtransaction, Metadata, Analysis, Asset, and Webhook APIs, which work in conjunction with one another. The blockchain API allows users to query general data about blockchain and blocks based on the coin/chain resource they have selected for endpoints. The Address API gathers information about public addresses on the selected blockchain which is presented in a CSV file or HTML. Coinbase API One of the most popular trading platforms, Coinbase, also includes several APIs that users can implement in their websites. Coinbase offers easy integration of Bitcoin, Bitcoin cash, Litecoin and Ethereum into both new and existing applications. Coinbase’s APIs is developed with a variety of capabilities, including creating BTC, BCH, LTC and ETH wallets and addresses, buying/selling and sending/receiving the four cryptocurrencies. It also offers secure storage of the supported cryptos in a wallet, retrieval of real-time or historical price data, transactions push notification and a variety of client libraries and mobile SDKs. Coinbase’s API lets e-commerce owners accept multiple crypto payments through customizable checkout gateways, widgets, and APIs. CryptoTick CryptoTick is a website where you can easily download 40TB of historical market data from cryptocurrency markets. The data is timestamped in UTC standards, which implies for more accurate testing of trading algorithms. CryptoTick provides various types of processed data like OHLCV time series created from active market data (transactions). Infura APIs Infura APIs provides access to the Ethereum network, and a fast InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). Infura offers load-balanced nodes and smart architecture, which can store large amounts of data, having the file hash stored on Ethereum. Infura provides secure, reliable, scalable and easy to use and integrate APIs and takes care of the Ethereum and IPFS infrastructure. The code behind Infura’s RESTful, Market Data and Security APIs is portable on Ethereum’s interface using JSON RPC, Web3. This type of infrastructure prevents scalability issues for developers. Blockchain Webhooks Blockchain WebHooks offers private hosting and management of full node blockchain networks with customized webhooks. Its transparent service presents all exchange data on the web URL that you give. The webhooks get activated promptly after the underlying affirmation inside the blockchain arrange for those exchanges. Higher security levels are achieved through HTTPS callbacks utilization, which also helps users fill in the URL data accurately. This webhooks service is a trustworthy strategy for getting all notifications in case of an event on the particular blockchain addresses. CoincapAPI The CoinCap API gives real-time price information, trading volumes and market capitalization for over 1,000 cryptocurrencies. It gathers information from a large number of business sectors on resource cost and accessibility. The CoinCap Team announced the launch of its 2.0 RESTful API beta, which will go live on March 1, 2019. The new, improved API will show detailed information about assets, rates, exchanges and markets. Bitcoinity Last, yet not least on our list is Bitcointy — it provides average bitcoin value data from various sources. It covers fiat currencies like EUR, GBP, CAD, JPY, and CNY. Besides, the API is free with unlimited data requests, it coordinates the transformation of the specific measure of bitcoins into any cash, and gathers exchange rates for all sources or from a single source.

https://cryptobrowser.medium.com/top-10-apis-sdks-for-blockchain-application-crypto-solutions-or-dapp-development-38386155a74a

['Crypto Browser']

2019-05-13 11:16:35.466000+00:00

['Blockchain Application', 'Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Dapps']

B2B TECH & TELECOMS NEWS (23/11/20–27/11/20)

In this week’s news roundup, we looked at the top news stories from the B2B tech & telecoms industry. The stories cover topics including drone technology, cloud, cyber security and blockchain news. Here are our highlights from the week. Monday: India’s drone industry is fastest growing industry in the world: Kota Harinarayana India’s drone industry is the fastest growing industry in the world with the second highest in the number of start-ups in the agritech sector, according to Kota Harinarayana, chairman of board of governors at IIT, Varanasi. Read more here: https://bit.ly/2KstjMt As Businesses Move to Multicloud Approach, Ransomware Follows Companies’ IT infrastructure continues to become more complex — with multicloud deployments becoming the norm — leaving many businesses with security holes that put them at risk of ransomware attacks, according to a survey of nearly 2,700 IT professionals in 21 countries. The survey, conducted by Wakefield Research for data protection firm Veritas, found the nearly ubiquitous use of cloud services, with 92% of companies using public cloud infrastructure and applications. Read more here: https://bit.ly/2HqdmFu Tuesday: Datacentrix relocates Zutari data centre in South Africa Engineering firm Zutari (formerly Aurecon Africa) has relocated its data centre, including storage area network (SAN), storage and server infrastructure, following the company’s move of its Tshwane-based head office from Lynwood Manor to Newlands, Pretoria in South Africa. The project was completed by Datacentrix, a high performing and secure ICT solutions provider. Read more here: https://bit.ly/3fx6rXU The economic impact of subsea cables in Africa High-quality internet connectivity gives people a voice, creates opportunities, and strengthens local and global economies. The need for widespread reliable internet connectivity and infrastructure is more apparent now than ever, as heavier reliance on remote work and online communication during the COVID-19 pandemic drives a dramatic surge in global internet usage. And yet, according to the 2020 Inclusive Internet Index, nearly half the world remains unconnected. Read more here: https://bit.ly/3fvR560 Wednesday: Nokia and Clear develop optical networking services using blockchain Blockchain-based settlement developer, Clear has formed a partnership with global technology vendor, Nokia. Together the two will collaborate as part of Nokia ’s WaveHub ecosystem initiative to improve the way the telecom’s industry delivers services through automated solutions. Read more here: https://bit.ly/2V1fDtW UK government tightening telco security laws The UK government is set to pass a new law aiming to increase the cybersecurity standards of the country’s telecoms networks. The law will give the government “unprecedented new powers to boost security standards”, as well as to order the removal of high-risk vendors. Read more here: https://bit.ly/3nUXtqm Thursday: Telco cloud revenue to soar to $29bn by 2025 A new whitepaper from ABI Research has shown that the global telco cloud market is set to increase explode over the next five years. Currently, the global market value sits at around $8.7 billion, an amount that is set to more than triple by 2025, reaching $29.3 billion. Read the full story here: https://bit.ly/3773klG Digital Colony adds Eco-Site towers in US and looks to Asia US investor Digital Colony has made its second new investment in towers in two days, by buying Eco-Site, just a day after it bought Phoenix Towers in Brazil. Digital Colony is buying Eco-Site through its Vertical Bridge investment arm. The deal will take Vertical Bridge’s tower portfolio to over 20,000 sites and its entire portfolio to more than 290,000 sites in the US and Puerto Rico. Read the full story here: https://bit.ly/3m9jDVh Friday: Smart Home Devices to Exceed 13 billion in Active Use by 2025, says Juniper Research A new report from Juniper Research has found that there will be almost 13.5 billion smart home devices in active use by 2025, compared to an expected 7.4 billion at year end 2020. Smart entertainment devices take the bulk of revenue attributable to smart home devices, as over $230 billion in 2025. Read the full story here: https://bit.ly/3nZmXCJ Vodafone using mobile networks to map drone flight paths Vodafone and Ericsson have claimed a technological breakthrough, using network data to help devise flight paths for drones, allowing the devices to remain reliably connected to the mobile network. The delivery industry, naturally, will be the biggest beneficiary, but there are many other uses for drones that can benefit society, such as aiding with emergency response and remote healthcare. Read the full story here: https://bit.ly/3m7aXyF

https://medium.com/@ilexcontent/b2b-tech-telecoms-news-23-11-20-27-11-20-a27417f20d16

['Ilex Content']

2020-11-27 10:25:58.207000+00:00

['Telecommunication', 'Cybersecurity', 'Drones', 'B2B', 'Technology']

Japanese Photographer: Let the Beauty of Taiwan be Seen

I am Kobayashi Kengo, a photographer from Japan. I am currently learning Mandarin in National Taiwan Normal University, and documenting my life in Taiwan with a pen and a camera. I’ve started my Working Holiday in a tea house in Taipei. Why a tea house? As a matter of fact, I’ve heard that young people in Taiwan generally lack interest in the tea-art industry. This motivates me to share the world (including Japan) my experience of the charm and grace that seasons a cup of local Taiwanese tea. Remember the 311 Eastern-Japan earthquake? That was five years ago, when I first knew about Taiwan. At a time when we were embittered with pain and grief, it was Taiwan that reached out a helping hand — an act of kindness that we will never forget. From then on, we wholeheartedly pray for the harmony and flourishing of both countries. I did not choose to learn Mandarin in Taipei only to express my gratitude to Taiwan. I chose it for myself, expecting to dive deeper into the culture by learning the language, to draw closer to the locals, and to call attention to this island, to let more people know about this country. Taiwan is genuinely beautiful. I had visited a variety of countries, seen magnificent scenery after scenery, met a myriad of different people, but never had I encountered such unique charm before I came to Taiwan. This country named ‘Taiwan’ gives off an indescribable magic power — the sense of kinship among the people, the harmony with nature in the landscape, and the picturesque view of the high mountains and deep waters. Wrapped in the warmth of their country, the people feel it, keep it in mind, and put it in practice. Satisfying smiles can be found on the faces of working grannies and grand-dads. A heritage of collective wisdom from the ancestors and the aboriginal traditions can be tasted in the food. A beautiful island-nation with 75% of its land in the mountains can be seen shining its unique glint in the heart of Asia. With only two hands, there is a limit on what I can do, but at least I photograph. I want to make more people see into Taiwan through my lens. If you agree, come join me. Let’s spread the beauty of Taiwan to the world. For more stories of Taiwan and the greater China region, visit our website or subscribe to our newsletter. My works this time consist of four themes. Allow me to introduce them to you. First comes ‘The Land of Jade’ (翡翠大地). Taiwan, the island-nation with 75% of its land in lush mountains, impresses many visitors with its fresh greenness. Yet to me, it is no simple green, but a lively shade of Emerald Green (ひすいいろ). What I want to convey through my following works, is that ‘the essence of a country lies not in the expansion of the land, but the embodiment of humanity and inner values within.’

https://medium.com/commonwealth-magazine/japanese-photographer-let-the-beauty-of-taiwan-be-seen-6d5310c52f21

['Commonwealth Magazine']

2019-03-21 08:57:15.835000+00:00

['Island', 'Japan', 'Indigenous', 'Taiwan', 'Photography']

Daily Dialogue — September 14, 2019

“I should hang; I’m a hypocrite. I ask for sincerity and I lie. I denounce the system as I embrace it. I want money and power and prestige: I want ratings and success. And I don’t give a damn about you, or the world. That’s the truth: for that I could say I’m sorry, but I won’t. Why should I? I mean who the hell are you anyways you… audience! You’re on me every night like a pack of wolves because you can’t stand facing what you are and what you’ve made! Yes, the world is a terrible place. Yes, cancer and garbage disposals will get you. Yes, a war is coming. Yes, the world is shot to hell and you’re all goners. Everything’s screwed up and you like it that way don’t you? You’re fascinated by the gory details. You’re mesmerized by your own fear. You revel in floods and car accidents, unstoppable diseases. You’re happiest when others are in pain. That’s where I come in, isn’t it? I’m here to lead you by the hands through the dark forest of your own hatred and anger and humiliation. I’m providing a public service. You’re so scared. You’re like a little child under the covers. You’re afraid of the boogeyman but you can’t live without him. Your fear; your own lives have become your entertainment. Next month, millions of people are going to be listening to this show and you’ll have nothing to talk about! Marvelous technology is at our disposal, and instead of reaching up to new heights, we’re gonna see how far down we can go! How deep into the muck we can immerse ourselves! What do you wanna talk about, hm? Baseball scores? Your pet? Orgasms? You’re pathetic. I despise each and every one of you. You’ve got nothing, absolutely nothing. No brains, no power, no future, no hope, no God. The only thing you believe in is me. What are you if you don’t have me. I’m not afraid see. I come in here every night, I make my case, I make my point, I say what I believe in. I tell you what you are, I have to, I have no choice! You frighten me! I come in here every night, I tear into you, I abuse you, I insult you, you just keep coming back for more. What’s wrong with you, why do you keep calling? I don’t wanna hear anymore, stop talking! Go away! Bunch of yellow-bellied, spineless, bigoted, quivering, drunken, insomnia-tic, paranoid, disgusting, perverted, voyeuristic, little obscene phone callers, that’s what you are. Well, to Hell with you. I don’t need your inferior stupidity, you don’t get it. It’s wasted on you. Pearls before swine. If one person out there had any idea what I’m talking about… I… [answers caller]… friend you’re on night talk.” — Talk Radio (1988), screenplay by Eric Bogosian & Oliver Stone, play by Eric Bogosian & Tad Savinar The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Radio. Trivia: Eric Bogosian’s play “Talk Radio”, on which this film is based, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Dialogue On Dialogue: This monologue is as relevant today as it was in 1988.

https://gointothestory.blcklst.com/daily-dialogue-september-14-2019-79b5272b7494

['Scott Myers']

2019-09-15 02:36:46.664000+00:00

['Movies', 'Film', 'Screenwriting', 'Dialogue', 'Screenplay']

How much does it Cost to Build a Healthcare App? A Complete Guide

How much does it Cost to Build a Healthcare App? A Complete Guide Techtic Solutions Follow Dec 10 · 4 min read With advanced technology and growing awareness about healthcare, customized HealthTech App Development has turned into a necessity than a preference. If research done by Statista is to be believed, the total global mHealth market is forecasted to reach around 100 billion U.S. dollars in the year 2021. That would be approximately a five times increase from 21 billion dollars in 2016. Also, statistics on Statista.com illustrates the increase in medical apps downloaded in January 2020 matched to the ‘peak’ month for the COVID-19 crisis in diverse countries which shows South Korea had the highest growth of 135% boost in such downloads with 90% by India comparing its peak month of the crisis with January. Medical app downloads during the peak of COVID-19 crisis by country 2020 These healthcare statistics clearly say that HealthTech App Development Services are being acknowledged and relied on by users globally. So it is profitable to partner with a highly professional and experienced Healthcare app developer for your Customized HealthTech App Development requirements. How much does it precisely Cost to Develop a Basic App? Let’s initiate with a provision: there is no approach to offering precise app development estimation without knowing the requirements. All the replications we showcase are based on our industry experiences to foresee a meticulous app development cost. The pricing readily depends on app development details such as selected team composition (Project Manager, Team Leader, App Developer, Q&A Engineer), the technology used, application features, functionalities, and client needs. What factors impact the cost of a Customized HealthTech Software Development? Multiple factors can boost or lower the price of HealthTech Software Development Services and healthcare app development. One, you require to exploring: What you already have and what needs to be executed. How much functionality does your mobile app need to deliver with its intended objectives? And how modern are they? Working on these factors is the foremost step. If you already have some software or system, there can be lesser work involved with back-end development; however, if you require the app from scratch, that involves more costs and resources hours. Similarly, if you require more products than merely a single app, like one application on the doctor’s side and the other on the patient side, the cost will increase. Should I hire a Specialized Healthcare App Development Company? There are three different choices when it comes to Customized HealthTech Software Development. Creating an in-house development team which means you will have to invest time in the recruitment and employee onboarding Hire a freelancer that will be a low-cost option, but trust can be an issue Hire a 3rd party software development house that will build a custom healthcare application and offer experts who will manage the project comprehensively Should I Prefer Offshore Development, and how much does it cost? One may think how much does it cost to develop a medical app or facilitate HealthTech Software Development Services if it involves numerous development stages? However, you can lower the cost by hiring an offshore team, especially from India. You get experienced and specialized development teams who can provide superior quality mobile applications, by paying lesser than hiring a software house from your local country. Read More: Importance Of Mobile Apps In Healthcare Industry Basic Functionalities every Healthcare App should have? User registration and login process that also enables registration/log in through social media profiles User accounts/profiles with control on users personal data and information Administration panel for handling staff with analytics and admin functionalities with a content management system (CMS) Messaging systems for doctors, patients, and other medical staff Push notifications for user communications Payment tools for paid services Multi-Language Support In-App Wallet Search OTP Login Use Promo Code/Referral Code Recommended Features for HealthTech App Development Services Security compliances and measures: Healthcare applications require being HIPAA and GDPR compliant, so you necessitate keeping in mind that the mobile application has to be adapted to these legislations. Video calls: Enables doctors, patients, and medical staff’s real-time conversations. Integrations with healthcare and medical devices: if your healthcare app requires being that superior to synchronize with other devices, it is crucial. Integrations with external platforms: For instance, medical record systems Automations: Relying on the category of healthcare applications can tell or remind medications, monitor incidents, or offer regular reports on the patient’s health. Suppose you require more advanced and superior functionalities such as geolocation, Google maps integration, camera integration, advertisements. In that scenario, you need noting it will increase the overall pricing and take more time to complete app development. Wrapping Up As you can explore, we know a lot about HealthTech App Development Services. We at Techtic are a leading HealthTech App Development Company with a team of proficient developers for hire and have developed flourishing healthcare applications. So, as a leading healthcare mobile app development company, we can help you build software products and solutions for diverse healthcare domains.

https://medium.com/techtic-solutions/how-much-does-it-cost-to-build-a-healthcare-app-a-complete-guide-85bf94b3916f

['Techtic Solutions']

2020-12-15 05:08:02.446000+00:00

['Healthcare App Developer', 'Cost Of Healthcare App', 'Healthcare', 'Healthcare Apps', 'Healthtech Startup']