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How can I find the best SEO service provider?

SB Infowaves is a one-stop-destination to find the best SEO Packages for building brands. Our dedicated SEO team has been helping businesses to develop their brands globally in this digital age. It’s time to look for Professional SEO Services to score ranks in search engine results, reach more organic traffic, and get more clicks on your website. Our client-specific marketing solutions will ensure improving a user’s experience and ensure customers are returning to your website to avail of professional services. At SB Infowaves, we are proud to increase the number and quality of visitors to your official website with efficient search engine marketing strategies. We’ll further help to secure a good ranking in a particular segment, in which you’ve specialization as it used to improve online exposures of the brand. Here you can also get a wide range of social media marketing strategies to reach more organic traffic for the business. So, dial +91–33–6824–3626 today for the best SEO Packages! For more click at: https://sbinfowaves.com/why-does-your-brand-need-seo-services/

https://medium.com/@sbinfowaves.com/how-can-i-find-the-best-seo-service-provider-f7d65d78abdf

['Sb Infowaves']

2021-12-28 14:07:57.725000+00:00

['Seo Agency', 'Digital Marketing Company', 'Seo Provider Company', 'Business', 'Seo Services']

Applying Deep Learning To Airbnb Search

Presumably all such challenges can be overcome by accumulating sufficient amounts of data. But the Airbnb inventory has an additional twist. Each listing can be booked only once for a night. As soon as the listing is booked, it becomes unavailable for any subsequent search for that night, so no further data accrues for it. This makes the data per listing very sparse. The plot below shows the normalized distribution of impressions per listing, and the long tail nature of the data available. Consequently, the solution to the ranking problem demands broad generalization from a few examples, memorizing the top results in this case is of little use. The task of deciphering guest preference has an equally fascinating side. We get to see the guests when they are planning their trips, which is not everyday for most. But once they arrive, the guests engage heavily with search and usually have very specific preferences and budgets. One guest may end up booking a bargain private room, while another a lavish penthouse, but both may start by searching for a place for 2 in Rome. To effectively personalize the search experience, we need to process a huge volume of data in realtime. The large number of dimensions and the relative sparsity of data on both guest and host side creates the perfect storm where quite a few of the known optimization techniques break down. So how do we address all these challenges? The tl;dr version of the answer is: neural networks. But how we reached there and how we continue to evolve is a tale with twists and turns. Celebrating the culture of sharing, in a first ever in-depth look at Airbnb search ranking, we have published a paper that describes our journey to deep neural networks. Access the Paper Applying Deep Learning To Airbnb Search, pdf 8 pages, published in arXiv, Oct 2018. We hope the story of our setbacks and triumphs provides insights useful to other teams facing similar challenges. We always welcome ideas from our readers. For those interested in hands on action, please check out the open positions for engineers and data scientists on the search team.

https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/applying-deep-learning-to-airbnb-search-7ebd7230891f

['Malay Haldar']

2018-11-06 18:05:29.037000+00:00

['Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'AI', 'Data Science', 'Deep Learning']

Where to go for accessibility help when you are stuck

Where to go for accessibility help when you are stuck It happens all the time, even to people as experienced in the field of accessibility as I am. You are brainstorming about how to solve an accessibility issue, and you get stuck. Usually, the thing you are stuck on falls into one of the three following categories: You don’t understand the most likely path that a particular Assistive Tecchnology (AT) user will interact with what you are working on, or; You can’t figure out any solution, or; You have multiple solutions, and you can’t figure out which solution is best. Here are some places you can go to for help. IAAP — the International Association of Accessibility Professionals IAAP has a chat board for members. For the price of a membership fee, you can ask questions, and other accessibility professionals may choose to volunteer to answer them. To not abuse this privilege: Search the archives first — your question may have been previously asked and answered by someone else. Do your own research first and exhaust your favorite search engine before you ask. No one likes people who ask questions that a basic internet search can answer. Disclaimer: I am on the IAAP Global Leadership Council. But I’ve been a member of IAAP for 6 years, and it is by far the best money I’ve ever spent on accessibility-related services. Online groups of people with disabilities Many, many online chat groups are open to the general public without any admission fees. The two that I belong to pertain largely to screen readers and have dozens if not hundreds of people who are blind who participate: This is just to give you a taste of an idea of what is out there. There are many, many more available. No matter how many screen readers you are capable of using, you will never use them the way a person with vision loss does unless you are a person with vision loss, so it is important to go where you can find screen reader users to get the authentic answers (hint: it’s also a good idea to employ some people with disabilities locally). Accessibility meetups/conferences There are lots of accessibility meetups and conferences with varying price points from free to really pricey. It is not difficult to get people to answer questions answered at these events. Thanks to COVID, people are less fussy about requiring that local people attend meetups in person. I have personally participated in meetups in the California Bay Area, Chicago, New York, Toronto, and London. Follow one or more leaders on LinkedIn. For example, if you want to follow a leader in best captioning practices, you could do no better than Meryl Evans. Inclusive Design? Matt May and Derek Featherstone. General diversity issues, including disability and much, much more? Lily Zheng. These people have literally dedicated their entire lives to the issues they specialize in. I probably chose them because they have the same “straight-up facts, no holds barred” approach to their particular specialty as I do. Listen to them, and ask thoughtful questions that are mindful of their time. All of the people I have listed will interact with readers. Matt has office hours weekly for the general public, and I will be doing the same starting in March of 2021. My office hours' intended focus is providing people assistance with configuring and building custom data models for Crest, my recently released open-source, machine learning-based accessibility testing tool that is intended to sit on top of WAVE. If there aren’t any people asking Crest questions during my office hours, I will provide my $.02 on other accessibility questions. Stay tuned here or connect with me on LinkedIn for more information about time and place. Having been present for two unconscionable event hacks already, I need to make sure that this is as secure as is possible under the circumstances. Ask vendors for help. Microsoft has a Disability Answer Desk. Most companies have an accessibility@ companyname.com email address. Most companies have Twitter accounts. Make sure you only reach out to them about *their* products. Apple probably isn’t excited about answering accessibility questions about Android, for example. Many of the ways I identified about reaching out to a specific company in this article will work here if this is the approach you want to take. University IT If you are stuck on a document accessibility question, university resources are a great go-to because: Professors have to make their powerpoints and exams accessible — 21 % of college students in the US identify as having a disability. Universities thrive on making their knowledge public. I personally love San Jose State’s Accessible Education Center, but many universities have resources like this. Classes There are some great resources on LinkedIn Learning regarding accessible and inclusive design by Derek Featherstone. LinkedIn recently reached out to me about adding more bite-sized, actionable accessibility materials, probably based on some of my blogs. I will definitely let everyone know when those are available. Deque has some excellent training geared specifically towards taking the IAAP CPACC certification exam — $35 for CPACC and $150 for the material covering the WAS exam. Coursera also has accessibility courses. Books / Videos There are all kinds of books on accessibility and inclusive design available. Read this article if you are interested in my favorite titles. Likewise for videos — here is the list of the ones I recommend the most strongly. But all you really have to do is go to your favorite video repository and search for “screen reader” or “switch.” You will be overwhelmed with the number of videos available of people who have recorded their experiences for you to learn from.

https://medium.com/@sheribyrnehaber/where-to-go-for-accessibility-help-when-you-are-stuck-3ec36de30dd5

['Sheri Byrne-Haber']

2020-12-18 22:00:39.976000+00:00

['Disability', 'Accessibility', 'Customer Service', 'Equity', 'Help']

Why You Can't Afford To Delay

Why You Can't Afford To Delay Socrates, Jimi Hendrix, Steve Jobs, Alexandre The Great, Sigmund Freud, Bruce Lee, Frida Kahalo, Marcus Aurelius, etc. All of the above, for how different from one another, all have one thing in common. It’s not how much money, success, fame, or recognition they were able to attain during their lives, not at all. What they all share is a fate destined for you and me soon enough. One shared between everyone that has and will ever live. Death. This end of life as we know it, is, to say the least, an overwhelming idea to come to acceptance to, after all, life is all we know. But death? Oh, death brings with it a full suitcase of terrifying unanswered questions, the ones a 4-year-old sometimes throws out, leaving you grasping for words: “What happens after we die?” — Being the one my sister dropped the other day To top it off, it symbolizes the end of our journey as we know it. All the resources we gathered, the people we met and loved, the skills we developed, and the memories we cherish will soon come to an end. We will have to let go of them, regardless of whether or not we are ready… And that is terrifying. A deeply scary feeling and idea which, quite often, leads us to push it away from our minds, after all, that day is still a long time from now… Right? We Think We Have Tomorrow While we wouldn’t be able to live properly if we were in a constant state of fearing death, to live as if it will never happen can be equally as harmful. Not in the short-term sense of fear and anxiety, there we are fine, but in the long-term one of regret and unfulfilled potential. A sharp pain, to come in the future, that keeps building up as we delay the pursuits we, deep down in our core, know to be the ones we can’t afford to delay. The book left unwritten, the painting abandoned, the business which never became more than an idea. All pursuits which are convenient to delay in the present, after all, with tiring work and time for your partner and then some to relax, it seems near impossible to find a block where you can sit down, without distractions, and get to attack these ventures as well as you know you can. It seems as if it just isn’t meant for you. Others who did it must have some mystical ability you just weren’t lucky enough to possess since birth. A convenient excuse, one that makes us feel good, but nonetheless, one that couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality, as far as I’ve been able to tell, we are all very similar, especially, in the way we react to certain impulses and thoughts and emotions. When confronted with an inconvenient task, no matter if it is one we know to be essential to us or one like washing the dishes, the initial impulse is widely common: delaying. An impulse based on the perception that we still have a lot of time left, that tomorrow will come for many years ahead, and as such, a small delay today won’t be that harmful. The first big problem with this line of thought is that, for how safe and organized our society seems, we are never, ever, granted tomorrow. Ever. Despite the high-likelihood of living until around 80 years old, that being the average, of course, there is plenty of us who will fall short of that. I could be one of those and so could you. Unfortunately, statistically speaking, one of you reading this article will die before 30 years old. Around 1 in 1900 people will pass before they can even have a mid-life crisis. Hopefully, it isn’t you… But it could be. Because of this exact reason, as I see it, we have no business delaying the pursuits that matter to us, regardless if they seem like a waste of time for those surrounding us. Painting marvel heroes onto classic paintings? Go for it. Writing short comedy sketches and uploading them on youtube? Please do. Streaming yourself carving wooden sculptures? “brox_” has 1.3 MILION followers on Twitch doing exactly that. Insert idea you are thinking about but are not sure about? YES. Regardless of what it is, if it calls for you, if it gives some higher meaning to your life, then don’t do yourself the disservice of wasting the time you have for yourself not pursuing them. As Jordan B. Peterson said: It’s a luxury to pursue what makes you happy; it’s a moral obligation to pursue what you find meaningful. Now, is it overwhelming to get started? Of course! It's scary to confront the idea we have in our minds of what we can be, with the reality of where we are right now. We don’t want to disappoint ourselves, to kill the image of perfection held so dearly in between our ears. It’s easier to delay for tomorrow, hoping that, with time, the solution to our procrastination will arrive. That it will be easier. I’m sorry to be the one breaking the news for you, but that moment will not arrive by simply waiting, it never has, for anyone. Instead, what works much better, after understanding we can’t afford to delay, is to start as small and easy as possible, develop consistency with this seemingly insignificant step, and then, only after consistency is developed, start increasing the pace. It may seem like the progress is too slow, but better slow and forward than standing in the same place. Your Last Day “Death smiles at every man, and all a man can do is smile back.” Not the one at work or school, not even the one with your current partner. The last day I'm referring to is the one when you get to blink your eyes for the last time. We don’t want to imagine it — “I still have 50 years left to live” — is the initial thought that pops into my mind even writing about it here, but for how much pains me to think about it, one day that counter will reach zero. Either in 100 years or tomorrow, but it will arrive. For everyone. Not only that but, for 99% of us, everything we are and do will be forgotten about, and for the remaining 1%, in 1000 years likely they will be forgotten too. With seeming insignificance when put in the higher perspective of time, why then do we need to worry about these pursuits, after all, if no one will remember, why should we care? Because in this life, the one we currently live, each one of us only gets 1 chance at it. As I see it, due to it-s fleeting nature, we must live it as best as we can, with meaning and integrity, delaying short-term gratification for what gives true meaning to our lives, knowing that this way we can sleep well at night knowing we are doing what we were put here to do. Not only fulfilled but also proud of ourselves, fully aware that on the opposite side lies a life of regret and wasted potential, a life that, as a lot of us would perceive it, not worth living. Finally, the “no one will remember” argument, in my opinion, is a lie. Obviously, 99% of people don’t know who created the first car, fridge, vaccine, or other crucial discoveries to our long-term survival. However, even if they don’t know the name, they benefit from their work. People who pursued their “art”, giving it their all, fulfilling all the potential they could, people who made life exponentially better for the rest of us. These are remembered through their work. Through what they did and who they had to become to deliver it, and even if your ambitions seem much smaller, for example, creating a successful youtube channel, know that the right video at the right time can save someone’s life. The right song, right poem, even the right quote. By not using your one life as best as you can you are doing a disservice to not only yourself, but to every generation to come. Make you and them proud. Thank you for reading. Before You Go… What if I told you there was advice written and published thousands of years ago, that presents us with the source of what we actually need? Not only procrastination wise but for pretty much everything we struggle with. As a blank statement, I’d imagine you would find it hard to believe, after all, hasn’t there been any progress since the thousands of years that passed? My answer to that would be: Absolutely! Every area that we can think of, from sports to science to technology, is MILES ahead of what it was when this advice was written… However, the foundation that allowed so much of this fast progress has, in my opinion, been anchored on the foundations that were left for us. As Isaac Newton said: “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” The core of what it takes for humanity to keep striving and achieving bigger and bigger goals, the 6 core elements, have been written down as far back as 2500 years ago. Unfortunately, it seems that more of us are trading these proven fundamentals, that if given enough time and effort, will truly propel us forward, for promises of quick and fast results. Honestly, I understand. With a lot of the older advice, it is complicated and dense to go through, the language is ancient, and quite honestly, it tends to get boring sometimes. It is much more appealing to go to some random youtube video and get watered down information, that won’t really help, but that will keep us entertained. Now, if you are tired of being entertained, tired of lackluster results, and above all, tired of not following through with what you truly desire, then what follows is exactly for you. To help you, first of all with the focus part, and then with all the other steps, I have created “Paths of Progress”. This is, to my knowledge, the first platform ever, to teach you this advice that seems to have been lost/watered down, in a way that is simple to understand… And above all, simple to apply, giving you the step-by-step guidelines to go from consuming information, all the way to reaping its rewards. So, if you’re ready to finally commit to long-term improvement, standing on the shoulders of giants to guide you forward… Click here to learn more about “Paths of Progress” and start your journey. See you inside. Learn More About Paths of Progress Here → www.pathsofmeaning.com

https://medium.com/@goncalohoshi/why-you-cant-afford-to-delay-8555e23a0a5d

['Goncalo Hoshi']

2020-12-08 17:04:54.772000+00:00

['Self Improvement', 'Stoicism', 'Life', 'Life Lessons', 'Death']

Life is about Moments, So is the Market.

“The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.” -Bill Gates Consider two irrefutable aspects of human lives that materialize every day: 1. The first is about the human element. We all know some way or the other that life is all about moments. It is lived in moments and moments are what define the existence of any individual. 2. The second pertains to mobile technology. Much has been said about the incredible ways in which smartphones have changed the forms in which humans interact with the outside world. We are spending a significant proportion of our days’ time in the virtual world dealing with real life entities. And interacting with the social circle is merely a part of it. There is a lot out there on the web waiting to be discovered. What happens when both these aspects concur? We get what Google is now calling ‘Micro-Moments’. Micro-Moments are “intent-driven” moments when people turn to a mobile platform to find what they need. Internet sessions of a day are basically a sum of these countless mini-sessions of “I-want-to-know, I-want-to-buy, I-want-to-go, and I-want-to-do” moments. “Future is mobile computing — smartphones and tablets are just elements of it. The industry is on the verge of a whole new paradigm.” — Thorsten Heins · Of smartphone users, 91% turn to their cellphones for some information while doing any task. (Source: Consumers in the Micro-Moment, Google/Ipsos, U.S., March 2015, n=5,398, based on internet users.) · 62% of smartphone users are more likely to take action right away toward solving an unexpected problem or new task because they have a smartphone. It’s all about these micro-moments. By doing a series of surveys Google has identified how these small moments are critical in defining the flow of taste and capital in the consumer market. So the question arises, is your brand there when the curiosity of a person about the latest cellphone takes them to the doors of the web? Or during the eleventh-hour shopping when it becomes hard to decide what product to choose and why? Showing up in immediate searches can be very valuable for you, as it not only makes your brand seen but also gives you a powerful chance to expand your customer base. · 82% of smartphone users consult their phones while they’re in a store deciding which product to buy. One in ten of them end up buying a different product than they originally planned. (Source: Consumers in the Micro-Moment, Google/Ipsos, U.S., March 2015, n=5,398, based on internet users.) The one-way broadcast marketing is a thing of past. In the times of need, people don’t care for the brand as much as they care for quenching the thirst of the hour. So no matter how much you are popular because of TV commercials, and how much quality you offer, when it matters you have to be there. · 69% of online consumers agree that the quality, timing, or relevance of a company’s message has an impact on how they perceive the brand. (Source: 22. Consumers in the Micro-Moment, Google/Ipsos, U.S., March 2015, n=5,398, based on internet usersGoogle/TNS/Ogilvy, U.S., June 201 Here are a few ways which you can take care of to build on your mobile marketing strategy. 1. Show UP Realize your micro-moments and BE THERE. Be present in those micro-moments when anyone turns to web to search anything related to your brand. A market survey and SEO are the keys here. Google talks about how FIAT marked a bellowing return to the US market after 28 years with their small and efficient FIAT 500. The market was in need of such a product and when anyone Googled anything related to small, city cars, FIAT was there to regain trust and promise efficiency. 2. Keep a phone nearby When anyone finds your brand in those little hours of need, chances are they might want to gain more details. The best way to do this is by keeping a clear channel of communication ready 24X7. 3. Be Swift and Suitable If things are happening in micro-moments you cannot afford to waste time on irrelevant details. You cannot always anticipate what the users are going to want. So, expand your list of micro-moments and show up every time. These three form the very basic of steps that can be done to ensure a stronger mobile marketing. Obviously, when they have enough time, people will focus specifically on the brands that they already have on their mind. But what if they are looking for something new? Or when there is some urgency? Or something in which people are stepping in for the first time? In moments as these, consumers will be open to be influenced by any brand that can promise to be worthwhile. These are the moments which lay out a fine ground for you to cement your name in the market. So why not be there, ready to make the moment yours?

https://medium.com/applozic-plug-play-messaging/life-is-about-moments-so-is-the-market-bb777bc33978

['Nitin Chauhan']

2015-11-30 05:15:43.266000+00:00

['App Marketing', 'Mobile Marketing', 'Apps']

Cross Country — A trail to remember

There were just few more minutes for lights out. Subash could barely keep his eyes open. His weary bones dragged him to the bed after another grueling day at Officers Training Academy. But the comments passed on him during the 3K-route march disturbed him. So he grabbed his diary to pen down his thoughts before he crashed into the bed. Day 45 13|11|2017 Hurt Ego & Alter Ego Running has always been my positive — till 2012. Why the hell did I mess it up later? Few moments bring tears to my eyes. Bunking X-Country as a wish granted by Suresh Babu man for my b-day in 6th. Finishing 16th in 7th std, completing 9th in 8th std, being a chasing member carrying fwd 8 buddies to 3rd enclosure in 9th, finishing 7th in 10th, back again to chasing 4 buddies to 2nd enclosure in 11th & constant 6th pos in 12th…………. An excerpt from Subash’s diary As he fought with his thoughts, it took him back to the times at Sainik school Amaravathinagar, when he and his buddy, Loheeth ran breathlessly, taking chances to cover up for their friends as their stern and unyielding house senior, Suresh Babu man drilled them into order. It was these tough times at a tender age that gave way to brotherhood, team spirit and unwavering faith in oneself to run against all odds. At the age of 11, Subash’s world revolved around inter house competitions. His adrenaline levels spiked whenever he fetched points for his house. The Cock House Trophy was his Grammy. Subash was in the Pallava house. And so was Loheeth, Vasanth, Manu, Dharani, Anurag, Sid and many others. He eagerly participated in all the competitions. And one such competition he enjoyed being a part of was X Country. A postcard sent by Subash to his parents The X Country route at Amaravathinagar was both a bliss to the eyes and a challenge to the indomitable spirit. It sprawled along a 7 km mixed terrain of paved and unpaved roads predominantly dotted by Eucalyptus and Amla trees. The entire route stretched across the school campus, nearby village, the canal road and the Amaravathi dam sandwiched between two slopes. The view from the top of the dam would take anybody’s breath away with sparkling river on one side and agricultural field emulating different shades of green on the other side. Amaravathi dam stretched across the river Subash wasn’t a front runner. But he pushed his limits to keep up with his buddy, Loheeth. Loheeth outperformed everybody whenever he ran. As a junior, they focused on running ahead of others. Placing at the top positions were where they set their eyes upon. But when they entered the senior house, their focus shifted to win collectively as a team. The night before the run, strategies were charted out to win the race. The houses which knew they could not win the trophy just wrote down the participants name, informed them before bed-time and let their adrenaline to take over. There was a funny belief among the cadets that eating a lot before the race would give them more energy. That got some to indulge in food crazily in the hope of performing better. After dinner, the pallava house met at the trunk box room in their dorm to discuss the plans. Loheeth and Vasanth, a science enthusiast, were given the task to finish at the podium to earn extra points. Subash and Dharani, a new 9th, took the responsibility to chase the other house mates into the 2nd or 3rd enclosure. The greater the number of participants to finish early, the more points they secure as a house. Now it was time to hype the juniors. Subash and Loheeth who were known for their long talks graced the occasion. “Never let another colour house t-shirt cross you. It should always be a green colour ahead of you. That should be the spirit!”, intimidated Loheeth. “How can you let anybody prove you that you are lesser than their house?” continued Subash. Encouraging the juniors was comparatively easier than encouraging their course mates. Subash had a hard time convincing them. While some agreed, “Okay machi, we will fill the 3rd enclosure”, few turned the situation lighter by taking a dig at Subash, “Dae kaka, you will fly over the course, we have to run.” Nevertheless everybody found ways to contribute to the house. Subash with his housemates On the day of the race, the entire school gathered at the Oval ground to witness the most exciting competition. As the participants assembled at the starting line, the audience cheered. There were blue, green, yellow, red t-shirts all over. Once the PT master lowered the flag, runners raced across the ground, along the school campus, officers quarters and staff residence. Amidst the bustle, some managed to pluck guava and gooseberry fruits from the quarters and relished it on their way. By now Loheeth, Vasanth, Sid, Ragunath of Chola house and Devan of Pandya house were ahead of the rest. Irrespective of the houses to which they belonged to, participants motivated one another to keep up the pace. Subash usually ran the first few kilometres at a faster pace. Once they completed the run around the campus, they entered the canal road and headed towards the dam. At this point, few sneakily collected more than one ticket from their juniors at the check points for safety to not let their run turn futile. Some even kept duplicate tickets ready and took maximum shortcuts or hitched a ride from strangers. Completing the race by any means was their goal.

https://medium.com/@antri-29/cross-country-a-trail-to-remember-5f8bd2140b10

[]

2020-12-20 05:31:26.151000+00:00

['Running', 'Sainik School', 'Letters', 'Nature', 'Brotherhood']

Santa brought you 2020… Waaah!!! — Day 23 of Simplicity

Day Twenty-three — Wonder — 25 Days of Simplicity Here, kid. Santa got you a gift. The little girl shakes it. She knows immediately it’s a 2020, and she starts screaming. Tears. It takes months to settle her down. What a year. What was under the wrapping paper for you? How have your experienced this year? Have you been stretched? Spared? What suffering did this year bring? What loss? What flaws or anxieties or struggles unwrapped? What gifts or resiliency were uncovered? What clarity is this year’s journey bringing? Is it helping you re-member what matters most to you? What you get to do with this one fragile gift of a life? This year, I have seen the best and worst of myself. I’ve seen it in others, too. I’ve tried to hide what’s under my wrapping at times. And I’ve felt so much relief getting real with a trusted friend about my struggles. I’ve been re-humanized by hearing those same but different struggles embodied in their stories. In the stories of my community. Maybe this is the greatest gift of all. The gift of the Real. The freedom that comes — the connection — when we get real about our struggles and pain about our passions and gifts about what really matters about our beautifully flawed humanity It seems to me, that’s what Christmas is all about, my fellow Charlie Browns. Christmas is an invitation to be real. It’s a story of the struggle and awe that is being human. It’s a story that says risking being real is, in actuality, Love. As we come upon Christmas again, risk being real. Allow room for you to feel your feelings. Allow yourself room to listen deeply to your life and the year you’ve lived. Welcome it all with compassion. And then, make space for others to be real. Minister to one another through your listening. Through patient empathy. Tears and laughter. Good questions and silence. Through a simple, “I hear you. I see you.” It’s this practice of care-filled and gentle listening — to self and other - that will give us the courage to face Santa Claus again and accept the gift of 2021. It’s this practice of listening and care that will empower us to create something wonder-full with it. Peace and breath and the courage to be Real

https://medium.com/intertwine/santa-brought-you-2020-waaah-day-23-of-simplicity-70ab61b45a0

['Mike Rusert']

2020-12-23 11:18:04.216000+00:00

['Love', 'Empathy', '2020', 'Listening', 'Spirituality']

Philosophy and Death

What is philosophy? A question I’ve previously tried to answer, but today let’s look at philosophy’s relationship with death. To put it simply, without philosophy, we cannot make any sense of the world. It’s the foundation we build our thinking upon. Philosophy is the best training for how to live life. It’s the way to read the training manual of life. However, that training manual has a lot of room for interpretation. The combination of our thoughts, convictions, and values has created models to help us understand the universe. To understand these models, we must use philosophy, reason, and logic. But what does philosophy have to do with death? Well, Stoicism went as far as reducing all philosophical questions to one issue: the fear of death. By philosophizing, you’re teaching yourself how to die. Through philosophy, we have been able to use thinkers of the past to provide us valuable insights into understanding the present. Now, what makes this relationship with death and philosophy so unique to humans? We have this strange capacity — unlike other animals — of the finite nature of our existence. We can contemplate our existence and make narratives about the meaning of our lives. We are the only being that we know of that can contemplate our coming death. Groups of people have formulated grand myths to save them from this question of death. They are relying on faith to overcome their inevitable end of existence. As long as you remain a true believer — staying true to your faith — God will save you from death they say. But a caveat is in order. If you want to be saved, you must have faith in their God. You must not give in to your reason, as this is to give in to the Devil in the form of the serpent. By doubting the word of God, you’re being tempted by the enchantment of the forbidden fruit. Those with the fear of God tell us not to give in to those tempting ideas formulating in our minds. When you give into your reason — eating the forbidden fruit — you deny your faith in God. Thus, you will always remain mortal. Unless there’s an alternative? If we allow ourselves to give into the world of philosophy we, in the words of Michel de Montaigne, can “learn how to die.” Philosophy boils down to an understanding of our finite existence. Motivating us to contemplate how we should spend our time in this finite existence and what is the meaning of all this! Primarily, our understanding of our inevitable death in the grand scheme of the universe has led us towards philosophy. Our understanding that we will die and those we love around us will die too. Death is the actualization of time past. Edgar Allan Poe discusses in “The Raven,” where a raven is perched on a window repeating “Nevermore” over and over and over again. What does this mean? It’s the understanding that you cannot change the past and your future is quickly fading into black. When “Nevermore” comes for us, all that remains of you is time past and only in the realities of the loved ones left behind. With this understanding, you can begin the journey into finding profound perspectives on life that are truly gripping and profound.

https://medium.com/the-philosophers-stone/philosophy-and-death-8d7466cd840a

['Brenden Weber']

2019-09-23 22:01:53.335000+00:00

['Life Lessons', 'Death', 'Philosophy', 'Ideas', 'Life']

This Baby did Something Naughty at the Grocery Store

photo of a drawing by Dan Stout I was living in Harlem at the time on 147th Street between Frederick Douglas Boulevard and Adam Clayton Powell Jr Boulevard. I took about a three and a half minute walk to the Pathmark on 145th Street. Out front, there is a street meat vendor that I gave hundreds of dollars to. Lamb over rice with hot sauce. Damn! Just damn. I was most likely at the grocery store to buy ice cream, smarties, milk, and cookies. I purchased some other things too, but those were in the basket for sure. Maybe some powdered sugar. I didn’t get my m&m’s and skittles here, just so you know, I got my m&m’s and skittles at the Duane Reade up the hill a bit. So I’m standing in line waiting to check out and I notice this baby hopping around inside the cart in front of me, you know, just kind of being a baby. His mom wasn’t really paying that much attention and I was pretty amused with him. I think he was trying to show off for me just a little. He just kept smiling at me and I kept smiling back. That is when he reached out of the cart, grabbed some Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, and tucked them inside his onesie. He did this quickly and with plenty of grace. If I had turned away for just a couple of seconds I would have missed it. I was very impressed. I didn’t even say anything to anyone. Good job baby! This is one of my top one hundred grocery store memories. If I try to think about it right now, I can picture it perfectly. It is burned in my memory. As soon as I got home I quickly took out a piece of paper and drew the baby. The result is what you see at the beginning of this article. I couldn’t get the mustache right, but this is exactly what he looked like.

https://medium.com/@boxyourbuddy/this-baby-did-something-naughty-at-the-grocery-store-aec7c00a26fb

['Dan Stout']

2020-12-22 19:30:51.460000+00:00

['Baby', 'Humor', 'Life', 'Harlem', 'NYC']

R.I.P. State Fair Tippy

State Fair Tippy. Family photo. This is the part of keeping dogs I’ll never get used to. It was 2006, and my quest for tenure at Indiana University had rounded the far turn and was heading into the home stretch. The semester had just cranked up and I was trolling for evaluators to come to my classes and keeping the pedal to the metal on research and writing. In that panic, I had abandoned my sweet wife Tracy even more than usual. She was already neck deep in dog rescue. For years, she had been reporting to the Bloomington Animal Shelter, where she would inventory the dogs up for adoption and do her creative best to smoke out the blood of some pure breed. Then she would contact the rescue group for that breed and try to get them to take the dog that was plainly an “almost.” Bloomington was a kill shelter, so we were always fostering as a bridge to save doggie lives. I’ll never forget how we got the dog that was just a mass of black mats. I was thinking this pooch was kind of ugly and I asked Tracy how long we would have this one? “Forever. Her time was up.” She had terribly crooked teeth and her shelter name was “Spook.” Tracy said she was kept in the back and there was little effort to find her a home before her date with the needle. She was not considered adoptable. We took her to a groomer and, when all the mats were trimmed away, she was plainly a toy poodle. After we tried half a dozen names, she informed us that her real name was Shadow by answering to it. Shadow turned out to have great entertainment value. When Tracy and I married, we each had two dogs. So it was that we took a pack of four with us when I moved from the University of Texas at San Antonio to IU. The last of the four still among the living was a black Afghan hound named Odessa, who liked to lie on her big dog bed in front of the fireplace with her paws in the air and invite any humans in the vicinity to give her a tummy rub. When Odessa passed on, Shadow tried her best to take up the slack. She would lie on her back in the same place, paws in the air — a very small version of a very large dog. We let her inherit Odessa’s dog bed — which was way too big for her — because her efforts were so cute. A few months later, we took in a foster from a rescue group that I decided I wanted to keep, and what could Tracy say with our history? Sammy was another toy poodle, the same size as Shadow, but white in color and without the crooked teeth. I suppose this pair could logically have been “Salt and Pepper,” but Sammy came to us with a name and Shadow had named herself. It was not necessary to buy another dog bed, because Sammy and Shadow could both curl up on Odessa’s bed with space left over. Toward the end of my tenure hunt, Tracy got a call from Small Paws, an international rescue group based in Tulsa, specializing in bichon frises. She had been working with Small Paws long enough to have fostered many bichons, and I had gotten to know the breed as some of the most good-natured dogs in the universe. Small Paws had somehow gotten in the position of liquidating the inventory of a puppy mill at the Ohio State Fair and the call was going out for fosters. Tracy hit the road towards Ohio. She came back that evening with the scroungiest looking bichon I had ever seen. He did not look white and he did not look fluffy. Small Paws sometimes referred to their customers as “fluffs,” but this one would need some spiffing up. Tippy Traveling in Style family photo His name was Tippy, which I thought was kind of odd. Tracy explained that there were five pups from the same litter and they went under the names State Fair Tommy, State Fair Terry, and so forth. They were getting short of T names when it was Tippy’s turn. State Fair Tippy’s oddity did not end with his name. He was coming up on two years old and he had been livestock, kept for making more bichons. He lived in a wire cage with gravity feeders for kibble and water. He had little human contact. We found that he preferred female humans to males and he was scared to death of males with beards, which was a bit inconvenient for me. I have still not shaved clean since 1968, when I got out of the Air Force with a nasty scar I chose to cover with a beard because the VA would not do cosmetic surgery and I could not picture myself getting up in front of a class with that scar. Just as inconvenient, Tippy had been a livestock dog and he did not know how to be a pet dog. When we turned him loose in the house, he was just bewildered. He scared us when he fell down trying to navigate stairs. He did not know how to eat and drink out of a bowl or walk on a leash. He did not know what dog toys are for — play was not in his repertoire. Shadow and Sammy took Tippy in paw and taught him what he needed to know, but the poodles could not cure his fears. An Indian veterinary student in Ohio I had known when he was an undergraduate speculated that Tippy’s fear of bearded men meant he came from an Amish puppy mill. The Amish, he told me, often bred puppies for sale but treated them coldly and spent as little money on them as possible. I was ready to believe it because Tracy had a run-in with Amish about abusing a horse. That blew me away, because the horse pulled the buggy that was their primary transportation. If they would treat a working animal badly, it seemed to me that inventory would have little claim on their attention. Whatever the cause of Tippy’s fear, when Tracy went out of town, she had to leave a leash on Tippy, so if I needed to pick him up, I could step on the leash and reel him in. He nipped me a couple of times when I frightened him by moving too quickly or he didn’t see me coming. Nothing serious, but very unlike any bichon I had ever seen. During the time we had Tippy as a foster and the poodles were still working on socializing him to be a pet dog, Small Paws came down with an edict that any bichon that showed any aggression toward a human should be put down rather than adopted out. We paid the rescue fee immediately and Tippy was our dog. As the poodles did their job, there was no more nipping, but Tippy would often flinch as if I were about to hit him — which hurt my feelings. But there came a time when Tippy was my dog when Tracy was not around. When we retired back to Texas, Tracy took Tippy and Shadow. I kept Sammy for company because I still had one more semester to teach. When I got loose in December 2009, I returned to Texas and we were a household again. I had been tenured and took the customary sabbatical to write my first book, Sequoyah Rising. Having taken the sabbatical, I owed IU another year of teaching, which I delivered. Back in Texas, we got old and so did the dogs. Shadow went first. Sammy and Tippy were upset, but seemed to get over the loss. Then Sammy died and Tippy was inconsolable. Whenever Tracy was gone, even just to run an errand, Tippy would sit by the door and cry. The cries would shortly become little howls, and then he would come into my office and put his head on my knee as if to say, Please pet me. I would pet his head, scratch his ears and tell him he was a good dog. He would settle down for a while but soon would park himself by the door and start the cycle again. When Tippy had been grieving for weeks with no change, Tracy went online and found a white dog up for adoption. So it was that we traveled to the Universal City shelter, located at the gate to Randolph AFB, where I was stationed in 1964. Sunny was the last dog in the house, perhaps because she was heartworm positive. Tippy and his companion, Sunny. Family photo. We had a bit of a scare when Sunny would not follow the vet’s instructions to not move around while the heartworm treatment was going on, lest a piece of a worm break off and give her a stroke. Even before the treatment was over, Tippy had adopted Sunny as his new pet dog role model. I guess he thought he still needed one. I did not think Tippy needed any further instruction. He was great as a pet dog, and I’m certain he did not miss being livestock. Lately, his kidneys had been shutting down, according to the vet, and his days were numbered. When he had not eaten for several days but he was throwing up bile, he was miserable and it was time. I can’t believe we’ve lost Tippy so soon after losing Max the Magnificent, but we are now a one dog family for the first time in 24 years of marriage. Sunny is upset, but she has just been unusually clingy. Nothing like Tippy when we lost Sammy. Unless Sunny can’t handle being the only dog, we are downsized for a while. We won’t go hunting, but rescue dogs have a way of presenting themselves. For now, we’ll cry a little and say, Rest in Peace, State Fair Tippy. You were meant to be a pet, not livestock, and you did well. Your poodles would be proud of you.

https://steverussell-9575.medium.com/r-i-p-state-fair-tippy-cb4998d7e2c1

['Steve Russell']

2019-11-10 17:00:27.540000+00:00

['Aging', 'Pets', 'Dogs', 'Love', 'Family']

Purposeless

If I dive back through the years and try to remember what I felt as a child, I recall general excitement and anticipation to see what life would be like, mixed with a perpetual knowledge that I was not good enough. While I wanted to take part in the world, I was terrified from a very young age that people would figure out that I was unintelligent, unschooled, lacking in the areas that everyone else had developed. This was because my parents “homeschooled” me. I put that in quotation marks because the only semblance it bore to school was the letters in the word. There were no schoolbooks, no tests, no friends, no neighbors, no birthday parties, no sleepovers, no school events, no career days, no guidance. My parents said the words “public school” as if they were filthy words imbued with evil, topped only by the word “society.” They wanted me to be different, better, and they were terrified that the purity of our family would be sullied by the world. Society would only infect me with evil, because society was nothing but evil. Consequently, I grew up believing that there was something big and important out there that I was meant to accomplish. No, “accomplish” isn’t the right word. It was meant to happen to me. “Encounter” is a better word. I believed that if I just waited patiently, something would happen that would take me out of the life I was living and catapult me into the life I was meant to live. I was intended by God to be important. All I had to do was wait, and keep myself away from everything impure. Well, you can imagine the results of that experiment. I grew up unbelievably naïve about almost everything, and scared of my own shadow. My saving grace was that I read voraciously. I read everything I could get my hands on, and somehow, books saved me. They taught me when I wasn’t being taught. I didn’t learn things that a traditional education would have taught me, of course, because I didn’t have access to those kinds of books. I don’t know if Taiwan is actually a country, I double check 2+2 on my calculator, and I couldn’t point out the adverb in this sentence if my life depended on it. Does it even have an adverb in it? See, dead. But I learned emotional intelligence. I learned how to comport myself. I learned how humans behave, and I imitated it. I learned how people handle different things, what sets certain types of people off, and how to help when someone is in emotional pain. I can read people like…well, like a book. And that is how I maneuvered my way through life without giving away the fact that I am profoundly fucked up and don’t know how to human. Today, I can read a room like nobody’s business and immediately find the spot in it where I am the least likely to be questioned, examined, or included. If evading personal questions were a sport, I would have gone to the Olympics and won the gold. But the main problem, the one certainty that has always hounded me throughout my existence is a faceless but resolute sense of purposelessness. The Big Important Thing that was supposed to find me never did. And now I have no idea whatsoever what I’m supposed to do with my life. Not to mention, I use the passive for everything when I talk about myself. What I’m supposed to do? How about what I want to do? But I haven’t the foggiest idea what I want to do. I’ve spent my entire life avoiding asking myself that question, and I am just now discovering why. From growing up the way I did, I had internalized the fact that it didn’t matter what I wanted because I wasn’t going to get it anyway. It didn’t matter if I wanted to go to school and learn things, because my parents wouldn’t send me. It didn’t matter if I liked to sing and wanted to learn music, because I wouldn’t get to. It didn’t matter if I wanted to make friends, because we wouldn’t ever settle anywhere long enough or even live anywhere near other families. So I stopped wanting. I unconsciously taught myself how not to desire something, how to preemptively feel the sting of disappointment and use it to avoid wanting anything but whatever someone else wanted, so that I wouldn’t have to feel real disappointment. How to put my parents’ thoughts, feelings, desires, beliefs before my own, and take some sort of minute pleasure in making them feel good. And now, I am purposeless. I am staring down middle age, hate my job and have no marketable skills, see nothing but the same routine blank grayness stretching out in front of me for the rest of my life, and I am utterly terrified that I have come full circle. Have I left the productive, engaging, exciting decade of my life behind, years in which the Big Important Thing could potentially have found me, and reentered the purposeless void of my youth? I don’t know.

https://medium.com/@chrisvicari/purposeless-ed0ff0d09b5e

['Chris Vicari']

2020-12-23 21:33:59.178000+00:00

['Therapy', 'Mental Health', 'Purpose', 'Childhood Trauma']

St. Paul’s Chapel

These photos were taken on a single day utilizing both a wide angle lens and a standard zoom lens. Some of the exterior photos were taken just after sunrise to avoid traffic and roadwork obstructions, while the interior photos were taken swiftly right after 10am opening time to minimize the capturing of staff, contractors, and other visitors. The Chapel of Remembrance was not featured as it is temporarily being used for storage. Acknowledgment and gratitude go to the Parish of Trinity Church Wall Street for sharing this photo-essay via Twitter and Facebook.

https://medium.com/the-photographic-muslim/st-pauls-chapel-4a406b89e58e

['Haytham Ad-Din', 'The Photographic Muslim']

2020-01-04 05:16:29.767000+00:00

['Christianity', 'Religion', 'Photography', 'History', 'Episcopal Church']

Don’t Be Afraid to Be a Pain

Shhh. I’m gonna let you in on a secret. Ready? Doctors don’t know everything. I know, I know — they’re the experts! But it’s true. They don’t know what it’s like when you’re lying awake at 3 am, staring at the ceiling and wishing you could sleep. They don’t know that your new med is helping, but the whispers in the back of your mind saying awful things still won’t go away. They don’t know that, even though you’re bathing more often and you haven’t tried to hurt yourself, you still can’t hold a job or keep your home clean or get back into your favorite hobbies. They didn’t know, before my second hospitalization, that I thought my recovery had gone as far as it could. That it wasn’t good enough. That I didn’t want a future that looked like my current reality. They didn’t know because I hadn’t told them. Doctors can’t read your mind, so self-advocacy is critical. You have to speak out or they can’t help you. If you have a difficult time speaking up for yourself, there are a few things you can try. Practicing what you want to say might help. You could also explain everything to someone you trust and bring them along to your next appointment to back you up. If you can’t articulate what you need to say in the office, try journaling at home and then bringing your journal with you. You can read from it directly, or write a brief summary and have your doctor read it. Also? Your treatment team works for you. If this med helps but the side effects are too much, tell them. You can probably try a different medicine. If you’ve heard of a new treatment you’d like to try, ask them about it. If they can’t provide it themselves, they can probably refer you to someone who can. If they suggest a treatment and it scares the crap out of you, be honest. They might be able to explain how it works and reassure you, or they might know of an alternative that you feel better about. Communication is the key here. Talk to your team, and let them help you. It’s that simple, and that hard. Don’t be afraid to be a pain! I know how depression can convince you that you cause problems for everyone, or that you don’t deserve help, or whatever. Negative thoughts come in many flavors, but I’m here to tell you that they are wrong. You aren’t a problem. Your team wants you to open up so they can help you. You deserve to get help and you deserve to get better. I promise. Do it. Speak up. I’ll be here, cheering you on.

https://medium.com/write-well-be-well/dont-be-afraid-to-be-a-pain-f4aa0bb13f5

['Rianne Grace']

2019-09-23 12:46:01.171000+00:00

['Mental Health', 'Mental Illness', 'Life', 'Psychology', 'Depression']

Online Offers & Deals

As we can see the rise and loyalty building towards online shopping, we observed millions of web surfers buying their desired products online. Obviously, we see numerous offers and discounts which appeal the consumers to end up buying it. These offers are so attractive that even people are not able to afford or plan something to buy in future, end up buying the product at that time, since they feel that kind of offer wouldn’t last long. Due to this limited time offers, more and more consumers end up buying the product since they don’t want to miss the deal. These deals become more attractive when they offered with commodities like bags, watches, cell phones, cameras, external hard drives, etc. Due to these low prices consumers are refraining themselves from going to the shops and buying it physically than shopping from the comfort of their home. This all new face of digital shopping is giving a boost to the economy of India. There is a big reason behind the popularity of digital shopping and that is the brands. Consumers trust brands more than anything when it comes to shopping and with such great deals online they don’t step back in buying and fulfilling their demands. If we try to learn it economically, we will figure out that the demand of the consumers is increasing with the fall in the price and the wants for the desired brands are going higher. This careful study shows clear transparency in understanding the whole face of online shopping. Deals offered on trusted brands and demand for such brands is uplifting the whole concept of online shopping day by day. Also, trust is not only with the brands but also with the policies of these online shopping platforms. These websites offer very good policies like you can return the product if you are not satisfied, return if it doesn’t function properly; in case of electronic items, etc. and these all come with easy payment procedures. These platforms are so organized that the user gets to see products with a wide range of varieties. Brands which are not available in the market easily or expensive, online shopping offers those products at discounted prices. Also, the interface is designed in such a way that the user can easily surf through the product categories. To get a clear view of the details of the product, it allows you to zoom into the product image. Whether you have a credit or a debit card or not it doesn’t really matter as they also offer you with the option of paying when the product is delivered at your doorstep. This sort of service has also given rise to those people who desire to buy house related products like doormats, carpets, etc. Well this is not it, these online shopping websites great deals with home furniture offers also. Well, furniture, like tables or even for instance carpets are bought online. Since furniture is such a sort of commodity which consumers prefer to buy it from the dealers. Consumers want to touch and feel the quality of the furniture and then eventually buy it. Since, when consumers visit their dealer’s shops they get to try the furniture and even visualize the furniture and how it will be placed in their respective home spaces. But in case of electronic items deals or mobile accessories deals people do not waste or think much since they believe in the brands. Or sometimes such happens that consumers see their favorite product in the dealers shops and then go online searching it for a good deal and then buy it. Reality is that the consumers are thinking about their savings and due to the various deals offered on the similar products on various websites, consumers have high chances of surfing the net through all the platforms and then buying it after their research or a good deal. Online shopping has given the consumers to choose their desired brand with the best deals and according to their demands and the comfort of shopping from home. For the past 2 years I have been writing informative and high quality articles on online shopping & deals. In the above article have covered topics such as great deals online , home furniture offers, and mobile accessories deals . Following links given below will tell you about offers & deals on particular categories in New Delhi: Food deals in Delhi Shopping deals near me Spa deals in delhi

https://medium.com/@praffulgoel36/online-offers-deals-6cb7897323c5

['Prafful Goel']

2019-06-25 08:22:36.007000+00:00

['Near Me', 'Deals', 'Offers', 'Food', 'Shopping']

Is it possible to lose weight without diet or exercise?

Photo by Fuu J on Unsplash In this article, we detail some tips and tricks that could be very useful if you want to lose weight without diet or exercise. Also, I will reveal my best recommended product to lose weight without complications in less than 3 months. Everyone talks about diet and exercise when it comes to having a toned and fit body. Although these techniques pay off 100%, they may seem too restrictive and exhausting for many. For this reason, Here are some tips and tricks to lose weight without the need to go on a diet or do rigorous physical exercise. Chew your food well Chewing food well is a golden rule when eating food. This takes time, therefore, it makes you eat more slowly and eat less. In addition, while we eat slowly, you also give your body time to register that you have just eaten, making you feel more satiated and full, so we will eat less and with less craving. Use a small serving plate When it comes to food, controlling portion sizes is extremely crucial. So even if you’re not on a diet, switching to a small plate can work wonders . Besides reducing your food intake, it will also give you a feeling of fullness. Get enough sleep The lack of sleep can often lead to weight gain. As has been shown, when it comes to obesity and other unexplained weight gains, it has a lot to do with the hormonal imbalances that can be triggered by sleep deprivation. Therefore, get enough sleep and rest. Drink water before your meals Another tip for when you are very hungry and feel like you may overeat is to drink plenty of water before meals. This will not only reduce our anxiety when it comes to eating, but it will also make us feel more satiated and full, so we will eat less. When you’re hungry, eat healthy snacks There are many alternatives to bingeing or snacks. If you are a person who likes to eat something at regular intervals, you can resort to healthy snacks to eat such as chickpeas, unsalted nuts, frozen fruits, etc. Don’t overeat Bingeing may sound like fun, but once you start keeping track of how long you’ve binged, you will realize how many calories you’ve been consuming outside of your regular meals. Therefore, reduce your binges and you will see how you lose weight in no time. Say no to stress Suffering from stress and anxiety can be triggers for excessive and disorderly eating, which can lead to weight gain . These sensations release a hormone called cortisol that has a tendency to increase appetite and can lead us to overeat. Therefore, if we think that we have put on a lot of kilos lately, control the level of stress and do positive activities that raise your spirits. Keep junk food out of sight The reason is simple. The less we see junk food in our home, the less we will be tempted by it. Therefore, it is advisable to keep junk food out of sight to avoid the dangerous snacking between meals that so many make us all fat. >>>27,293 people have lost 20 pounds or more, eating all the foods they love. Find Out How In This Free Video

https://medium.com/@ninane/is-it-possible-to-lose-weight-without-diet-or-exercise-b38684f2356e

['Ninane Med']

2021-12-18 21:41:40.597000+00:00

['Weight Loss', 'Lose Weight Fast', 'Weightloss Foods', 'Weight Loss Tips', 'Lose Weight']

Child Rape is Legal in America

Photo by Todd Trapani on Unsplash I recently read an article about an Idaho bill, led by Rep. Melissa Wintrow (D-Boise) that was killed in the House at the beginning of May. The bill would have made it illegal for children under age 16 in that state to marry without consent from the parents, the court and — wait for it — the child, before the marriage could take place. If a law has to stipulate that the child must give consent, I thought, does this imply that children in the 21st century do not have consent over whether or not to get married? Apparently, it does. In Idaho, children (read: girls), on record as young as 13, can be married off to men much older than themselves with either the consent of their parents or the oversight of a judge. The judge’s involvement is supposed to protect them, but it often does not. Nor does it protect boys: because of Idaho’s statutory rape laws, an 18-year-old kid having sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend can be convicted of rape and sent to prison for up to 25 years. It doesn’t matter if they go to the same high school, have the same friends, hang out at the same parties. By law he’s an adult, and she’s a child. That makes him a rapist, unless they’re married. Marriage may seem better than prison, though prison and marriage can feel like the same thing at that age. Add in a baby and the girl, at least, can forget college. Teen boys aren’t the worst thing young girls have to fear, though: from 2000 to 2010, nearly 5,000 children were married in Idaho, many of them girls wed to men far older than themselves. Rape, statutory or otherwise, is legal between husband and wife in Idaho, except under the most extreme circumstances. Republican lawmakers killed the bill for two (stated) reasons. One, according to Bryan Zollinger (R-Idaho Falls), is that “I do not think courts should be involved in marriage at all. I think two willing people should be able to go and get married.” But what if one of the parties is a teenage girl, willing or not, whose parents have decided this marriage is going to happen? Worse, what if she is a pregnant teenage girl? “If we pass this legislation, it will then become easier in the state of Idaho to obtain an abortion at 15 years old than it will to decide to form a family and create a family for a child that has been conceived.” — Christy Zito (R-Hammett) It’s not that Republicans believe courts shouldn’t come between two people in love. Rather they believe every effort should be made to come between a woman (child) and her uterus. Once a grown man — or even another teenager — impregnates a girl, she’s likely to make what, to them, equals a terrible decision. Abortion still being legal in Idaho, the state cannot allow that to happen. These girls must be married off before they assert control over their own bodies. Wow, I thought as I read this, Idaho sure is backward. Naively, I believed the age of consent for the rest of the U.S. was 18. But I was wrong. Child marriage is legal and practiced in 48 of 50 states (Delaware and New Jersey both ended child marriage in 2018). It affects mostly girls, and is mostly carried out for religious reasons. At least 167,000 children were married in the United States between 2000 and 2010. Most of these were girls. This means kids who cannot yet legally buy cigarettes, enlist in the army, or vote are entrusted (enforced?) with arguably the biggest life decision (duty?) there is: binding themselves to one person, then bearing and raising that person’s offspring. If this sounds medieval, that’s because it literally is. From what we know about marriage customs and childbearing in the Dark Ages, the legal age for marriage was 12 for girls and 14 for boys. But even in medieval marriage, there were checks and balances. That thing the officiant sometimes says in traditional wedding ceremonies, the part that goes “if anyone has any reason why these two should not be wed, speak now or forever hold your peace?” That’s straight out of King Arthur-land. People could and often did speak up to bar weddings from going forward. Reasons included adultery, incest, religious reasons such as fasting or breaking lent, and rape. I can think of about a dozen reasons why a grown man should not marry a child, but the primary reason is that a child, no matter how “mature” she looks, no matter how bright she is, cannot fully comprehend the consequences of having sex with that man. At that age, both male and female teens need protection and guidance, not sexual advances, from adults. This is because their brains, unlike their bodies, will not be finished developing until they reach their mid-20’s. Until then, they will not have a fully-formed prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that asserts logic, that acts as the driver of the car. As teens, the car is often driving the driver. A teenage girl will seem “adult” one moment and a child the next; she may be impulsive, emotional and reckless. She may dress inappropriately in an attempt to imitate older female role models (think any Instagram star) but not necessarily mean to be sexual. And when she does begin to explore sex, she is far better off with someone closer to her own age and experience level. Sex should be a fun, wonderful, playful thing. An adult pushing, cajoling, bullying or flirting her into sex, no matter how willing she may seem at the time, does immense damage to her young psyche and smothers her chance at a future — emotionally but also physically, if she gets pregnant. Marriage to an older man does not mean sex is consensual. In other words, this man is raping this child. We, as a society, need to stop holding our peace. We need to speak now, with our vote, and elect representatives who will tear down old laws like they did in Delaware and New Jersey. The only reason these archaic structures are still in place is because we, the people, allow them to stand. Fear of women’s choice should not keep us from liberating children. To join the fight against state- and religious-sanctioned child rape, visit Unchained at Last.

https://kbimle.medium.com/child-rape-is-legal-in-america-869edb3d498c

['Kara B. Imle']

2019-05-28 21:22:08.292000+00:00

['Rape Culture', 'Child Rape', 'Women In Politics', 'Child Marriage', 'Women']

I Refuse to Open a Story Called “Hi”

PART I (I added Part II after further thought, and a celebrity-reality check I had to put myself through…see below…) On my opening page, one particular story keeps popping up in the upper-left-hand corner: it is titled simply “Hi,” and I am resisting the urge to click on it to see what the hell it is about. But it is insistent — it’s been in that spot, whining for my attention for days now. For all I know, the writer has a gift for scintillating prose, and fence-bustin’ ideas. Maybe I need to chill and accept that she or he or they are just so delightfully coy…even clever. And I have to examine my own urge to click on it: is it anything beyond the question of WHO would do this? WHAT could be so amazing? Audacity The audacity thing. This site is full of it. The I-dare-you-to-open-me-up! Yet even as it pisses me off, I have to say that I also stumble over amazing pieces — thoughtful and energizing. Pieces that leave me pondering, pieces that give me something new, that make me feel I’ve spent my time well here. Am I grouchy and sour-grapey with the “Hi” piece…? I joined in April, and have produced close to 100 pieces, yet never made over $50 in a month, never had a piece go “viral.” I don’t do rants — this will be my first. I don’t do politics. I don’t share my sex life with strangers. I talk about writing from the perspective of having taught the subject for decades and published eleven books in multiple genres (and no, I don’t go on and on about them to self-promote — if interested you can look them up. I try to abide by the rule of not overtly advertising. Does anyone remember MS Magazine, and when they pulled all advertising and what a JOY that was??) I write about caregiving and grief, and bringing up boys, and aging, and music… I am all over the map. The “no-niche writer” could be my niche. I go beyond “Hi.” I am a nobody, so I have to go beyond. “Hi” is an affront to those putting in time and energy and care. “Hi” makes me want to run away from this place. Fast. Makes me question why I’m here. And why are others here. And why can’t we give a little more. A little more real. I’ve been reading this book, titled, “Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class,” (Scott Timberg). He includes a quote from Dana Gioia: “So much of culture is chance encounters between human beings.” So true. And that — that — is exactly what this site is all about. Or could be. “Chance Encounters.” Like running into a stranger in New York, and exchanging stories and laughter or poignancy, and then moving on with our days. Knowing humanness. Put something into it Please. That’s what that “Hi” got me thinking. Otherwise, you got me thinking about the “Bye.” Now go read, and write, and create something worth clicking. And now for PART II I care little for popular culture, especially of the Kardashian type. And I am ignorant of those who inhabit that hierarchical layer of the world. These days I spend so little time in grocery stores, that I am not in front of magazine covers as I have been at other points in my life. When I find wonderful pieces on Medium — and by “wonderful” I mean pieces that edify, pieces on traveling to interesting places or pieces of human story — I am moved. Real people, grappling with real life. True, the loss (as I’ve put together some clues, without having to read all the tedium of another’s personal life) is indeed loss, and loss which I would never wish on anyone. Bottom line: I don’t care about celebrity life. I DO care about real projects of art, and creating, and striving. But I don’t care to add my nickel (and we know that that is about exactly what it is, give a cent or two) to a celebrity’s millions. I can’t help but think WHY would she post the personal on Medium, when she can post on her own site and blog and elsewhere, from where she can reach her fans, followers, and friends? Why does she need to post on Medium? Is she short on cash? What a crass question. But we have a collective high tolerance for crass these days. I am sorry that she has lost an infant, a member of her family. I’m not convinced I need to read about it. And I’m not at all convinced that Medium needs to give this piece priority on MY page, when I have not chosen to “follow” this person, and she did not publish in a publication I am following. It frustrates me how hard so many of us work here, how we pick through mounds of “People” magazine caliber pieces of garbage for the gems— and there are such here, but like all gems they have to be mined. Deeply at times. Where is respect for one’s own privacy, for that matter? Have we lost ALL decorum? Does anyone even know what that word means? We spill and flap in the street. When my memoir of caregiving was being marketed by my agent, I was told not to expect a sizable publisher to take it; my “platform” wasn’t big enough. It was published by a smaller — and exceptional and caring — publisher. A piece of feedback I received was that it was promising for a first memoir…as if somewhere down the line I’ll have yet another husband who might die of a disease worse than ALS, and then they’ll take me on… Really? Man, we live in an f’d up world. Why did I write my story? I was working with the Toni Morrison quote. “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” I couldn’t find a book about caregiving with a terminal diagnosis, and doing 24/7 nursing as a spouse. I was — subconsciously, I recognize now — doing that human being/chance encounter thing. Getting to “Bye!” Not quite ready to give up…but this site is disappointing me. Maybe I am expecting too much. Culture is the fabric we weave between our selves; it is supposed to hold us, all of us. When you write, and when you click, what are you honoring?

https://alisonacheson.medium.com/i-refuse-to-open-a-story-called-hi-eb9362d0c344

['Alison Acheson']

2020-11-19 04:30:13.798000+00:00

['Celebrity', 'Culture', 'Writing Life', 'Writing', 'Pop Culture']

UK Democracy Bulletin

9th September 2021 Fortnightly news, jobs, grants and gossip from the democracy sector, brought to you by James Moulding and Molly Hudson of The Centre for Democracy. Read by 280+ democracy organisations. We read everyone’s newsletters & research so you don’t have to. If you want us to cover yours, let us know: hello@centrefordemocracy.org.uk Highlights Elections Bill coalition delivers petitions to Downing Street, publish must-read briefing coalition delivers petitions to Downing Street, publish must-read briefing Involve appoints Jessie Joe Jacobs as new Democracy Network Coordinator appoints Jessie Joe Jacobs as new Democracy Network Coordinator Peoples Newsroom launches experimental community newsroom in Swansea launches experimental community newsroom in Swansea Powering Up Unlock Democracy and Compass launch new campaign Unlock Democracy and Compass launch new campaign Democracy Jobs lots of exciting new roles up for grabs across the sector Elections Bill Elections Bill Coalition Delivers Petitions to Downing Street On Tuesday 5th representatives from the Democracy Defence Coalition delivered a myriad of petitions and a civil society sign-on letter to Downing Street opposing the introduction of Voter ID. They were also able to meet with Angela Rayner to reinforce the importance of the issue. The coalition is now in full swing, with 61 organisations participating. They hold weekly “office hours” for any orgs interested in the bill and are running an array of joint campaigns across the range of issues raised by the bill. If you’d like to get on the weekly digest email list or attend the office hours please drop Matt Gallagher at Fair Vote UK an email at matt@fairvote.uk. Elections Bill Coalition issues new must-read civil society briefing The comprehensive joint document outlines the problems of the Elections Bill, the current groupings opposing the bill and the objectives and strategy of the coalition opposing the bill. The briefing also includes a parliamentary timetable for the bill and messaging guidance. RebootGB identify loophole in Elections Bill potentially stalling a future snap election An unintended consequence of the required 365-day registration period for the new £700 spend limit would mean ‘backdating’ the law to hold an election whilst that 365-day period ticks down, which may be subject to legal challenge, according to RebootGB’s PACAC inquiry submission. Unlock Democracy launches Elections Bill Action Centre The new portal provides key links to how supporters and citizens can take action to aid the campaign against the Elections Bill. MP Research Matrix — if you have any intel or org connections to add, please do so The Elections Bill coalition is compiling intelligence on MPs ties and notable votes to aid in the campaign. Add any information you have to the shared spreadsheet to help the work of the coalition.. New tool asks the media to cover the Elections Bill Josh Russell, Co-founder of Forward Democracy, has launched a new site to ask news media orgs to report on the Elections Bill, check it out here: heynews.org/uk/electionsbill/ ERS Cymru coordinating Welsh civil society opposition to voter ID Jess Blair and ERS Cymru are working to coordinate 18 Welsh civil society groups against voter ID. Updated costings on voter ID Voter ID is expected to cost as much as £180m per decade under the new plans, with £15m alone being spent on the plastic ID cards themselves for voters without ID. Joint Committee on Human Rights release report on the Elections Bill The new report provides a good analysis of the impact of voter ID on marginalised groups protected under human rights law. Democracy Sector Involve appoints Coordinator of new Democracy Network Jessie Joe Jacobs is a social entrepreneur with 18 years experience of network development, campaign and project management, fundraising and campaigning for a diversity of organisations and causes. As Regional Director of the Stronger In campaign, Director of the Northern Inclusion Forum and Campaigns Officer at the TUC, Jessie brings a wealth of experience and passion to the role. Jessie will begin their new role at the end of the September and we look forward to more updates about the development of the new network. Welcome Jessie! Mark the UN International Day of Democracy with Democracy Day Live The team at Open Britain and Democracy Unleashed have brought together a fantastic panel to celebrate the International Day of Democracy on 15th September, including journalist Gavin Esler, Peter Jukes, Founder of Byline Times, Dominic Grieve, former Attorney General, Klina Jordan, Director of Make Votes Matter, Tom Brake, Director of Unlock Democracy. Sign up on Facebook here. I Have A Voice launch publish first discussion paper Rebecca Deegan, Director at I Have A Voice, is celebrating the launch of their first discussion paper and moving on to focus on next steps — including working out how to measure political literacy in a way that supports targeted intervention. Centenary Action Group submits paper to the APPG on Disability’s inquiry into Access for Elected Office Informed by the Elect Her and CAG’s bi-monthly roundtables for Deaf and Disabled women active in politics, the evidence paper concludes: That there are numerous barriers that prevent Disabled people from becoming elected representatives and more barriers still that make participation difficult once elected. An intersectional approach must be taken, that Disabled people are not a homogenous group and that a Disabled person may have multiple protected characteristics. That efforts cannot be down to political parties alone, the Government must take the lead in measures to remove barriers for Disabled people. Through ensuring Disabled women, and men, have a seat at the decision-making table, we will improve governance and change society for the better. For more information on the inquiry, see here. Elect Her are now preparing for their eighth cohort Elect Her’s Peer Support Circles are structured as a 7-session journey, each composed of peers from across the political spectrum who want to create a safe space to support one another and encourage new voices and ambitions. The programme is free — Join the new cohort from 6th October and share the opportunity via your social media feeds. Make Votes Matter launching new ‘Democracy Loves’ event series The series kicks off on w/c 20th September with the first event focusing on the link between representation and climate justice. MVM are also launching their Activist Toolkit for conference season this Thursday and are preparing for their new film with acclaimed director Amir Amirani about the need for PR. Democracy Club looking for partners for new project to build a UK-wide database of elected representatives Approximately 400 organisations with 22,000 elected people make decisions every day about things that directly affect our lives. Whilst most of the work of local government is transparent, that doesn’t mean it’s accessible. Democracy Club want to partner with organisations who are trying to research, lobby or better understand the people who run local governments — if you are interested, get in touch to discuss. The House of Commons has reverted back to in-person sessions The House of Commons is abandoning virtual sessions and proxy voting as it returns to pre-pandemic ways. Whilst many MPs are celebrating the change, this will make for a difficult situation for those MPs that benefited from the more flexible arrangements which included those with health issues, childcare demands and problems with commuting distances. mySociety looking for new Policy & Advocacy Manager and Front End Designer mySociety are in a period of growth at the moment and have been hiring throughout the summer. Their latest open roles include for a new policy position and a Front End Designer. To keep up with the latest jobs releases from mySociety, subscribe to their jobs mailer here, or check the UK Democracy Jobs Board. Compass hiring new Campaigns and Projects Office There are some really good roles opening up in the democracy sector this fortnight, this one’s from Frances Foley and the team over at Compass with a key focus on building a Progressive Alliance and campaigning for a basic income. Apply and find out more here. Speakers’ Corner Trust looking for new early career Trustee Founded in 2007, the Speakers’ Corner Trust works to develop a more active citizenry, in the fullest sense of the word and true to their namesake. The new Trustee should be between 18–30 years. The post is a great opportunity for someone in their early career to leap into a new space, to flex their creativity and take on new projects, supported and mentored by the Trust board. Democratic Reform Compass and Unlock Democracy team up to launch new campaign Powering Up Powering Up aims to secure public and political support for a programme of wide democratic reform ahead of the next general election. The work follows four phases, identifying a package of reforms commanding broad support, building a network of influencers, creating public awareness and securing commitments from political parties. The project is set to run for a year initially and is funded by Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust. As conference season approaches, ERS doubles down on securing party support for PR Josiah Mortimer and the team at the Electoral Reform Society are working busily with Labour for a New Democracy and other partners such as Make Votes Matter to boost the case for electoral reform as a record 250 Labour CLPs sign up to back PR. Demos running trial of their ‘Combined Choice’ digital democratic method Combined Choice represents decisions, not as a series of proposals, but as a whole, they argue. Instead of voting on each proposal in series, decisions are combined in one digital file, decision makers can then put forward an alternative version of the file with the file with the most support enforced. The trial is beginning now in an English town. Find out more about Demos’ Combined Choice method here. Integrity & Transparency The House of Commons Library has released new briefing papers on the Ministerial Code and Online Harms Researchers Chris Rhodes and Hazel Armstrong publish a new briefing paper looking at the UK Ministerial Code and the role of the Independent Adviser. John Woodhouse and Maria Lalic have released new papers on Regulating Online Harms and a reading list of the public reactions to the draft Online Safety Bill. Elections Sharon Graham has been elected as Unite’s General Secretary After an intense battle to replace the outgoing Len McLuskey, Sharon Graham has come out on top. Graham is the first woman to hold the position in the history of the union and has previously served as the union’s executive officer and as head of its organising and leverage department. Their election marks a return to industrial struggle to advance the union’s cause, over access to politicians and lobbying. Green Party Executive (GPEx) results announced Whilst we’re still waiting on the leadership election, the results of this year’s GPEx elections are in, with Green members selecting representatives for the six positions available. View the results here. Devolved Democracy & Local Government UK Government softens rigid rejection of Scottish referendum demands Signalling a partial climbdown, the Scotland Secretary Alistair Jack MP states if Scotland is able to maintain support for a referendum above 60% for an extended period, then “I would acknowledge that there was a desire for a referendum.” Current polling has support for a referendum at around 51%. Previously the UK Government had outright rejected calls for a second independence referendum with the PM stating such suggestions as “irresponsible and reckless.” Democracy & Media People’s Newsroom launches Megan Lucero and the team at The People’s Newsroom celebrated their launch event today. The new initiative will begin on an experimental basis in Swansea, providing hands-on startup support to design innovative journalism initiatives and invest in community newsroom leaders traditionally marginalised by the media. Consultations on the media with upcoming deadlines Have a look at these and make your voice heard: We Own It, Media Reform Coalition and others publish briefing on Channel 4 privatisation Despite having become more commercialised since the 1990s, Channel 4 still plays a vital role in the UK media landscape. The briefing document by We Own It, Voices of the Listener and Viewer, British Broadcasting Challenge and the Media Reform Coalition, aims to help individuals and organisations respond to the consultation (above). Economic scale of misinformation revealed in new report by NewsGuard The report shows that fake news sites are being unintentionally funded by major advertisers’ programmatic advertising to the tune of $1 for every $2.16 in digital ad revenue. Funding Democracy Less than one month to apply for major democracy funding opportunity Open Society Foundations (OSF) has launched a call for proposals to fund a piece of participatory design work, with quite a short deadline (7 October). They’re looking for a UK-based non-profit organisation to lead a group of partners/stakeholders to develop a participatory process to design a new approach to community safety and policing resource allocation. The purpose is to design a participatory and multi-stakeholder (including police) process, where the process itself educates the public and other actors about policing and community safety budgets and outcomes. The process will result in the design of a participatory approach to resource allocation (such as participatory budgeting or other community decision-making models), which can be trialled in a UK location(s). Some at OSF are apparently worried that the language of the call, and the size of the budget ($300k) may be off-putting for many orgs, and has asked for it to be shared widely. And Finally… New report from Involve and Institute for Government The report calls for greater government engagement with the public in designing net zero policies. Directory of Social Change launches new Governance App The new free platform helps you review and improve your organisation’s governance. You can use it to gather responses from your board, generate performance scores of your campaign or org, highlight differing views across the board and have targeted discussions about what’s going well and where to improve. Featured Upcoming Events The Centre for Democracy maintains a full database of events from across the democracy sector. View the database here — Have we missed something? Add it here! Active Job Listings across the Democracy Sector View the full database of upcoming job listings here — have we missed any? Add them via this form. Apply ASAP Apply by 9 September: Policy & Research Officer at Local Trust (£25–32k) Apply by 13 September: Campaigns and Projects Officer at Compass (£26–28k) Jobs with upcoming deadlines Unsalaried job listings We’ve been experimenting with the format of this email and the accompanying meetup, if you have any feedback we’d be glad to hear it. If you can’t make our weekly meetup, you can always drop in to the meetup document of the current fortnight and add to it by going to democracymeetup.org.uk. Thanks to everyone who joined us this week for Democracy Check-Ins. This week we were joined by Lara Parizotto — Co-Manager at the Young Europeans Network, Shaun Roberts — Head of Campaigns at Unlock Democracy, Liz Crosbie — Project Director at RebootGB, Kyle Taylor — Director at Fair Vote UK, Rebecca Deegan — Founder at I Have A Voice, Josiah Mortimer — Head of Communications at Electoral Reform Society, Holly Morgan-Davies — Make Votes Matter, Peter Keeling — Voting Information at Democracy Club and Ciaran Cummins — Researcher at Demos. See you next time, add to your calendar James, Molly, and The Centre for Democracy team

https://medium.com/@centre-for-democracy/uk-democracy-bulletin-16d5766137a6

['Centre For Democracy']

2021-09-09 14:03:12.471000+00:00

['Democracy', 'UK Politics']

Another Bitcoin hit piece

Bitcoin has been alive and growing since its inception in 2009; since then, every bull run has been met with criticism and attempts to defame the network. Often recycling the same counterpoints against Bitcoin (it is for criminals, it is a bubble, it is useless, it is boiling the oceans, etc.), the New York Times (NYT) chose the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) lense to argue against Bitcoin in their latest piece. However, like the NYT and others who chose ESG to refute Bitcoin, they entirely miss the “S” and “G” arguments. The argument around Bitcoin’s energy usage is not an argument at all; in fact, it's irrefutable. The Bitcoin network consumes a lot of energy — The NYT quantifies this consumption at the same amount of electricity as Washington State does yearly; or more than a third of United States’ air conditioning energy expenditure; or more than 7x more energy than what it takes to power Google’s global operations. Bitcoin’s 91 terawatt-hours of electricity consumed annually outpaces that of Finland. Bitcoin consumes a lot of energy. But before a critic can decide on its utility, any ESG savvy investor/activist knows that energy expenditure does not equal carbon emissions. Energy expenditure ≠ carbon emissions. A voluntary self-reporting group of 23 Bitcoin mining entities compiled their data to report 67.6% of Bitcoin mining done by the council members was done through a sustainable energy mix. Thus, bringing the industry sustainable energy mix to 56%. Likewise, the NYT claims the sustainable energy composition of Bitcoin is likely somewhere between 40–75%. Using the lower bound of the NYT figures, the 40% renewable energy used to power Bitcoin is better than the ~30% renewable energy used to power the US and Canada. Bitcoin critics often claim that despite whether the energy is sustainable, there are better uses for the energy. This is the underlying argument to the Bitcoin energy debate — utility. No one argues that Bitcoin does not consume country-sized amounts of energy; people argue the utility of Bitcoin, a system using country-sized quantities of energy. One rebuttal to the “better use” argument is that Bitcoin consumes non-rivaled energy. A Bitcoin network participant using energy to mint Bitcoin is not hindering others from using equal or more energy to serve their purpose. Bitcoin energy consumption is not a zero-sum game. Those using energy for Bitcoin are not competing against hospitals needing the energy to perform necessary procedures. Bitcoin creates demand for an otherwise wasted or stranded supply of energy. One of the most significant problems with sustainable energy is getting it to consumers at the time of need. Erecting solar-panel farms or wind turbines can create massive amounts of renewable energy; the problem is often that these renewable energy farms are some distance from the population that would consume the energy. Bitcoin provides a constant and reliable source of demand for an otherwise stranded and underused energy source. Unfortunately, solar panels and wind turbines collecting energy often fail to deliver sustainable energy to consumers continuously. With solar power, clouds, obstructions, and nights prevent constant energy, which is a rather significant hindrance in the wide-scale adoption of solar energy. With wind, wide clearings are required as well as strong winds to turn the turbines. These factors have limited renewable energy adoption and are contributing factors to why the world is not as green. Bitcoin, a stateless yet constant monetary system, could be the consumer demanding this energy. Even better, Bitcoin could collect this energy and store it as a digital monetary good, bitcoin (BTC), to be used at a different time and place. Simply reducing money to its purest form, money can be defined as a tradable unit of one’s stored energy. To illustrate this point, if a farmer grows a harvest of apples and trades the harvest for $30,000, it is safe to say those $30,000 are one way of measuring the time and energy the farmer took to produce the apples. The farmer no longer needs to count all of the painstaking hours to produce the apple harvest; the farmer can state the labor + harvest = $30,000. If it took the farmer a year to produce the $30,000 harvest, then it can be stated that a years’ worth of time and energy is equivalent to $30,000. The same can be said about a single bitcoin. Quantifying this number and denominating it in USD provides a floor price for the monetary good. All else equal, a bitcoin is worth the energy it cost to produce it. Whether BTC trades at a premium or a discount to its production cost is up to the market to decide. A hypothetical solar panel farm collecting unobstructed rays in the Saharan desert could produce and store vast amounts of energy. The problem is that the Saharan desert is one of the world's lowest population-dense areas but one of the richest measured in the unobstructed sun. Therefore, if those residing in the Saharan desert could convert and store the solar energy into a monetary good, real wealth creation could be achieved for underserved populations while simultaneously efficiently using non-rivaled energy from the sun. By powering the Bitcoin network and receiving compensation in BTC, stranded and wasted energy can be used to create transferable value. Once understanding this, a reader might notice the gaps in an ESG-centric attack on Bitcoin that lacks “S” and “G” considerations like that mentioned in the NYT article. While there is no refute to energy consumption by Bitcoin, there are millions of people in emerging markets, oppressed states, and broken economies being empowered by the sovereignty of Bitcoin. Let there be no doubt that criticism of Bitcoin’s utility from a person who has never experienced problems accessing organized financial services, let alone has a federally insured bank account, comes from a position of extreme privilege. Bitcoin has a small population of ~200 million global users today, mostly in western and developed nations. The minority of its users are those facing real consequences for accessing a financial system that skirts the purview of broken or totalitarian states. Let that sink in. 200 million people globally are choosing to store value in a decentralized, stateless, censorship-resistant monetary system, and the majority of those are from western and developed nations. Right now, over a billion people are earning, spending, and storing their wealth in currencies suffering from double-digit inflation. 2.5% of the world’s population has exposure to bitcoin, while 12% of the world’s population suffers from hyperinflation. The need for an uncorrelated asset has never been greater for investors attempting to protect against inflation and those needing a sound store-of-value asset. For several reasons, bitcoin adoption is growing for citizens of countries like Afghanistan, Venezuela, Nigeria, etc. Political instability, crippling sanctions, failing economies, and so on are felt by the citizens of countries who suffer from these problems. For example, Afghan citizens fleeing Taliban rule made last-minute stops at banks where governing authorities limited their withdrawal requests to $200 weekly; lifetime savings were left and lost instantly. Separately, Venezuelans often store, quote, and spend in US dollar terms as a safer, more predictable unit of account than the Bolivar, which has been in a state of hyperinflation since 2016. For citizens experiencing difficulties such as this, a financial alternative is in desperate need. But for countries with limited financial services, citizens have found ways to access these services at a premium. Like many of those in Latin America, underbanked communities suffer the consequences of a cash economy via high fees or high unit costs for services that come standard at a bank. Remittance services, cash management, currency conversion, and interest-earning accounts are services that underserviced communities forgo entirely or pay multiples higher for inferior services to those in the traditional system. This is where the real utility of Bitcoin is found. For those separated from reliable forms of financial services, those lacking safe places to store wealth, and those using predatory lenders are the real beneficiaries of Bitcoin. Before critiquing the utility of Bitcoin, one must walk through the process of value transfer via the traditional financial system. To transfer via Swift or other traditional forms, a bank requires a large amount of information on both the sender and recipient, not to mention that both parties must have a bank account to source and receive the funds. Assuming both parties have bank accounts, a wire can be transferred, but the transfer requires a fee and takes several days to process before the funds are settled. Those in Latin American countries working abroad and sending money back home have an even more complicated process. After earning their income and deciding to send an amount home, remittance services can charge exorbitant fees for the remittance alone. On top of that, processing and conversion fees may be incurred. After all fees and processing, the remitted amount might be 50% to 95% of the initial amount being sent—a crushing fee to pay for an often critical source of income. Bitcoin, an open network, permissionless, and free to use, can process this remittance in 10 minutes and only require 2 data points: an amount to send and an address to receive said amount. This is the utility of Bitcoin. This utility is discounted by individuals who lack insight into the financial alternatives available to the under and unbanked. By simply choosing to remit via Bitcoin, participants are preserving 99% of their initial amount. Better yet, the transaction incurs no counterparty risk. Because Bitcoin is Peer-to-Peer, it relies on the network, not an intermediary, to process the transaction. When a participant chooses remittance via Bitcoin, the transfer starts at A and terminates at B. Remittance via traditional financial system mechanisms requires trust in each leg of the transaction. Trust that the institution will remit the full amount to the individual listed in the time stated. These service providers are highly regulated trustworthy institutions in the West, yet over $36 billion has been paid in bank fines globally since 2008. Another key factor is remittance via Bitcoin is permanent and censorship-resistant. When remitting via Bitcoin, once the transaction is confirmed, the process of adding a new block of transaction data to the Bitcoin blockchain, the transaction is considered permanent. This censorship resistance and permanence of Bitcoin provide features of sovereignty to the users of the Bitcoin network not traditionally found in the legacy financial system. These features are highly desirable to disenfranchised communities battling unstable conditions in their home nations. When critiquing an energy-intensive novel technology, it is best to forgo subjective takes on its utility. Bitcoin is the latest in a long line of revolutionary technologies met by critical skeptics. Failing to acknowledge revolutionary technology despite not gaining the same amount of value as its users is like discounting the future success of an online bookstore because the skeptic is not a big reader.

https://medium.com/@piercev18/another-bitcoin-hit-piece-fdbf091ee71c

[]

2021-09-06 03:39:46.298000+00:00

['Underbanked', 'Financial Inclusion', 'Esg', 'Bitcoin']

Senjutsu by Iron Maiden and New Rock and Heavy Album Highlights

September started with a bang. Iron Maiden released Senjutsu, and we got several new rock and heavy albums from renowned acts. With new studio albums from Carnifex, The Night Flight Orchestra, among others. New Rock and Heavy Releases — September 3, 2021 Iron Maiden — Senjutsu On Monday, 19 July, we learned that the seventeenth studio album by British metal gods Iron Maiden would be entitled Senjutsu. Back then, the band also revealed the cover, tracklist and announced September 3 as the release date. Looking at the title and artwork, we expected the new opus to have a strong oriental influence. The first single, “The Writing on The Wall,” is a token of that influence, thinking how Senjutsu (“mage techniques”)means the art of gathering natural energy for performing magic. The music video depicts this magic power in an anime-like scenario. Source: Iron Maiden | YouTube Hence, this is a rather conceptual release featuring ten tracks inspired by Asian history and that according to Bruce Dickinson. In terms of duration, the album overpasses 80-minutes; thus, the songs are pretty long. The Iron Maiden fandom is also in for a couple of surprises as some of the songs sound somewhat different from the bands’ usual style. Hence get ready for some intricate melodies punctuated by crafty riffing, as after listening to it, I realized there are some highly complex songs in this opus. Namely, tracks like “Hell On Earth” (11:19) or “The Parchment” (12:39) are pretty experimental and drift further away from Maiden’s leitmotivs. Source: Iron Maiden | YouTube Carnifex — Graveside Confessions Last week, San Diego dark Deathcore pathfinders, Carnifex released a new studio album entitled Graveside Confessions. With just over 15 years in the business, Carnifex’s new album reflects the upsetting period we face. Graveside Confessions began to take shape during the COVID pandemic; hence the album is precisely what the title depicts—an eulogy focusing on the past year—a time when so many faced their darkest hour. In 2020, the musicians took a somewhat nonchalant stance toward a new record. Under lockdown, the only thing they could do was stay at home and write some music. This unforeseen juncture produced a deeper connection to the inner self, and the songs came out more visceral and organic, giving way to an intense album. Death was all around us, and the musicians felt this was the time to share those things we want to say but don’t; feelings you carry around in you for too long, sometimes even to your deathbed, as mentioned by the band’s frontman. Hence, the album has a conceptual purpose and works as a catharsis. The band set out to release it in the most honest and vulnerable way. Source: Nuclear Blast | YouTube The Night Flight Orchestra — Aeromantic II The Night Flight Orchestra is a rock/metal project founded almost ten years ago, joining musicians from Arch Enemy or Soilwork, among other bands. With five albums under their belt, the Swedish band from Helsingborg, Skåne, released back in 2020 the first part of Aeromantic. Now, one year late, they are back with Aeromantic II. Their music can’t be shackled to a specific genre. Even if it falls under the Hard Rock overarching aura, I can easily find references to prog-rock/metal with an epic, disco, poppish tone flickering around. Source: Nuclear Blast | YouTube Final Words To finalize this musical roundup, I would like to mention the new releases by Bokassa — Molotov Rocktail and The Picturebooks — The Major Minor Collective. Other rock and heavy releases: Auri — II — Those We Don’t Speak Of Beyond Grace — Our Kingdom Undone Gerry Rafferty — Rest in Blue Green Lung — Black Harvest Portrait — At One With None Tuesday The Sky — The Blurred Horizon This is all for now; hence I leave you with this great potpourri of rock and heavy albums. Please let me know what’s your favorite musical release from last week, and stay tuned for many great musical pieces here at Rock n’Heavy. Cheers!

https://rocknheavy.net/senjutsu-by-iron-maiden-and-new-rock-and-heavy-album-highlights-b53f00a40724

['Rui Alves']

2021-09-07 16:24:07.305000+00:00

['Music', 'Review', 'Metal', 'Culture', 'Rock']

’Tis the season to give — virtually

Normally at this this time of year — in between gift shopping and the usual year-end frenzy — many of us look for ways to give back. This year of 2020, however, has been anything but “normal”. That is all the more reason why over these last few weeks as 2020 slips into the historical record, we should count our blessings and channel that energy into as many giving opportunities as possible. In any other year, you might be out volunteering and participating in festive events at your worksite, school, place of worship and neighborhood or civic organization. Maybe you’d be thinking of making several year-end gifts to support your favorite causes through your church or synagogue, your annual workplace giving campaign, or by attending holiday fundraisers. We all know, however, that none of that will be happening, at least in person, due to the still-rampant COVID-19 impact across the nation. Most of us by now have discovered ways to create our “new normal” and have managed to carry on despite social distancing, travel and entertainment restrictions, and the specter of temporary layoffs or reduced hours. If we are able, we can also find new ways of giving to others, especially as the needs are greater than ever. We just may need to be creative in how we go about it. Here are a few ideas: · Donate unused vacation time through your workplace. Our organization allows employees to donate PTO which is converted into a cash donation to nonprofits. With many people unable to travel this year, you may have a lot of unused leave that can go to a good cause. We’ve even named it: take a PhilanthroCation™. · Identify virtual volunteer opportunities. Our staff are spread out all over the country and yet we volunteered together this fall. It’s easy on our volunteer platform to find virtual opportunities like organizing a wish list or toy drive, creating cards, making calls, hosting a postcard party and more. Plus, we host PhilanthroBreaks™ with our partners, providing an educational work break with a purpose. We also offer a Volunteer on the Spot guide with easy activities you can do virtually like sewing masks or donating supplies. · Make “drive-by donations.” Wearing a mask and social distancing doesn’t have to stop you from dropping off food, toys, clothing, toiletries, household goods, furniture and more at your local food pantry, shelter or other nonprofit organization. You can participate in local opportunities or through national groups like Samaritan’s Purse Operation Christmas Child, Prison Fellowship Angel Tree, or by making in-kind donations at Salvation Army. · Support virtual fundraisers on Facebook and other platforms, plus participate in your annual workplace giving campaign, if your organization offers one. If not, find nonprofits to donate to online. We have a large list of trusted, vetted organizations to choose from here and here. · For more creative donation ideas, check out “51 Ways to Make the World A Better Place,” written by our Chief Communications Officer, Amanda Ponzar. Yes, 2020 has been brutal, but as the year comes to close, we are still standing. Many people, however, will need our help, now more than ever, to keep going in the new year. The pandemic has severely impacted almost every nonprofit and faith-based entity in the nation. If you can, help them as they continue to help others. Give as much as you can as an act of compassion but also as an affirmation of the hope that lives in all of us. You can read more about how nonprofits are facing increased demands with decreased needs in my Medium piece, “The Covid Catch-22.” Whatever you choose to do to give back, we’re in this together, and it will take all of us, giving back and working together to create the kind of communities and world we want to see.

https://medium.com/@thomasbognanno/tis-the-season-to-give-virtually-425781aaae0e

['Thomas G. Bognanno']

2020-12-11 18:45:35.566000+00:00

['Giving Back', 'Fundraising', 'Donations', 'Holidays', 'Virtual Volunteering']

Be a Professional

Be a Professional Illustration by Author On February 4th this year, I made a promise to myself that I’d write an article every week. Whether I was tired, uninspired or on-call at the hospital, I still had to ship my newsletter. Every. Single. Week. I never thought to myself “Hey Faisal, do you feel like writing this week?” because I’d already made that decision; I didn’t have to make it again. It didn’t matter how I felt. It didn’t matter what I was doing that weekend. I said that I was going to do something, and when that time had come; it was time to write. Being a Professional “A little imprisonment — if it’s of your own making — can set you free.” — Austin Kleon, Keep Going. I used to imagine artists as people who’d create with their backs to the world, presenting us with their work whenever they chose to do so, sometimes weeks or even years later. But I’ve recently been introduced to an interesting argument; Seth Godin describes a ‘professional’ to be someone who promises to ‘show up’ and then does. Someone who doesn’t miss a deadline or come up with excuses. Someone who creates even when they don’t feel like it, because they said they would. And I think this is something we can apply to our daily lives: When you’re expected to be somewhere, be there. When you’ve promised something to someone, keep your word. Even when no-one’s looking, do the right thing, because that’s what a professional would do. I almost decided to skip this week’s newsletter. I was drained from having spent my week working 4 consecutive night shifts, one day converting back to a day routine, and the remainder finishing off a big personal project — my new website. Still, I choose to write, because that’s what I said I would do. That’s the decision I’d made, and I’m sticking with it.

https://medium.com/life-lemons/be-a-professional-16c68f9aa0e0

['Dr. Faisal Jamshaid']

2020-12-21 17:48:52.544000+00:00

['Creators', 'Professional', 'Professional Development', 'Life Lemons', 'Professionalism']

How To Prevent Hair Loss Naturally With The Power Of Onions

So many of us have a hard time growing our hair to the desired length and it being healthy when we do. And onion oil works well for that! You know how difficult this process can be, especially if you’re constantly worried about going bald from all those lost strands with each brush-stroke on your head? Onion-infused oils may help alleviate these problems by keeping new cells alive longer while also nourishing older ones in order to keep locks looking great. Perfect, healthy hair is a dream for many people. But the journey to achieving it can be filled with obstacles like frizziness and thinning from different causes such as pollution or even water quality in which you wash your locks. There are many ways to reverse or prevent these issues, both topical and otherwise. One of these solutions is the application of onion oil on the hair. Onions are rich in nutrients such as vitamin C, vitamin B9, vitamin B6, potassium, and many more, all of which can be associated with hair health. They provide stronger roots and thus promote hair growth, which leaves your hair looking its very best. Not just this, but applying the oil extracted from onions on your hair regularly can have anti-inflammatory, fungicidal and anti-bacterial effects on your scalp. In many cultures throughout history, onions have been used to restore beauty. The juice of an onion is rich in sulfur and amino acids which help with strong healthy hair growth. Onion hair oil for hair growth can be applied topically for a number of benefits including more shine while also protecting against harmful rays from sunshine exposure. It promotes collagen production, which is responsible for skin and hair rejuvenation, boosts blood circulation and helps in maintaining the overall health of hair follicles. Benefits of Using Onion Hair Oil for Hair Re-Growth and Hair Fall Control Enhances Hair Growth Onions are known for their high dietary sulfur content, which is important in our bodies. The most common type of sulfur found among onions is a keratin-a protein that has been shown to help stimulate hair growth on your head. When you apply onion hair oil for hair onto the skin around your scalp and leave it there overnight or for longer periods of time. It will provide this vital nutrient directly where it’s needed — right down inside those cells atop Your Hair follicles. Avoid Hair Breakage & Thinning The previously-mentioned sulfur also has other benefits to offer. The sulfur from the onion oil initiates collagen production and forms bonds in the hair which does wonders for improving the overall strengthening of the hair strands. This in turn prevents breakage and thinning of the hair, which leaves you with a thick and luscious mane. Onion Oil As A Natural Conditioner Did you know that a conditioner before washing your hair can prevent the shampoo from stripping its moisture? These benefits dry or frizzy locks provide relief for irritated scalps and help with growth. The regular massage of onion oil over our heads will help further moisturize strands while removing any unwanted tangles — all without leaving behind an oily residue. May Prevents Premature Greying It’s possible that your hair might be turning grey because of nutritional deficiencies, stress, or medical conditions. Onion oil contains essential vitamins and minerals to help combat the greying process as well! It also has an enzyme called catalase which can activate automatically upon contact with any onion ingredient on the skin surface; this will turn dark colors back into their original color. May Treat Dandruff Problems Dandruff is not only an embarrassing issue but also quite common. Having dandruff in the hair can lead to unhealthy and damaged locks of your mane that could make you lose more strands every day. Onion hair oil for dandruff has many antibacterial properties which help fight against bacteria on skin cells so it’s much better for soothing irritated scalps as well as strengthening healthy follicles. Strong anti-inflammatory agent also helps in strengthening your hair and adds more volume to it. Helps In Balancing The pH Level Of Hair Did you know that your hair is slightly acidic in nature? While seven is the neutral value on the pH scale, anything below that is acidic and anything above it is alkaline in nature. The pH of your scalp should ideally be around 5.5, and that of your hair should be around 3.5. The usage of certain products or treatments can mess with the pH of the hair and cause it to be much higher, leaning on the alkaline side. Applying onion oil on your scalp and hair can help naturally maintain the pH levels, which leads you to have a nourished and balanced scalp. Can Onion Oil Help With Baldness? There is no doubt that onion oil for hair can be greatly beneficial. It has been used as a spice in cooking and an ingredient to prepare medicines, but what about its benefits on your scalp? The answer may surprise you — Onion belongs to the Allium species and is one of the oldest cultivated vegetables in the world. The smell and flavor of an onion comes from the natural sulfur compounds that are found in all the vegetables. Sulfur is the key ingredient found in Keratin. It is the third most abundant mineral found in the human body after calcium and phosphorus. Having a sulfur-rich diet helps in Keratin synthesis that is crucial for hair growth. On the other hand, lack of sulfur makes hair dry and brittle which leads to hair fall. Therefore, the benefits of onion oil for hair growth and curing baldness are immense. Regular use of onion oil on the scalp prevents hair breakage and split ends and makes hair stronger. People who are suffering from the initial stages of baldness may incorporate onion oil in their daily hair care routine. Use Reawaken Onion Blackseed Hair Fall Control Oil Reawaken Onion Blackseed Hair Fall Control Oil is just what you need when your hair begins to look limp, lifeless, and dull. Massage your scalp gently with this hair fall control oil which helps promote hair growth and may also help reduce hair fall. Regular use of this oil may provide natural bounce, shine, and volume. This non-greasy, non-sticky formula is perfect for all hair types and contains no nasty ingredients. How To Use Onion Hair Fall Control Oil There are two ways of applying onion oil on the hair; using heat or without heat. If you want to use it without heating it, simply take a few drops of pure onion oil and massage your entire scalp with it for 15–20 minutes. Don’t apply too much pressure and make sure you really get the oil into the scalp. You can wash your hair after two to three hours with mild hair fall control shampoo. If you want to use the hot oil treatment, mix the onion oil for hair fall with carrier oil like almond or olive and heat it up to a lukewarm temperature. Apply this mixture on the scalp and along the length of your hair. It is best to leave this on your hair overnight and wash your hair in the morning. Can Onion Hair Fall Control Oil For Men & Women Be Used Daily? We all know it takes time and consistency for hair care routines to show any promising results, but people often give up too easily when they fail to see anything noticeable after just a few days. Experts recommend that any new hair treatment needs to be followed at least for a few weeks before any positive results can be seen. If you are planning on using onion black seed hair oil as your go-to product, then make sure you apply it directly onto the scalp daily and give yourself enough time in order for these benefits of this natural remedy to work their magic. Where To Buy Onion Blackseed Hair Fall Control Oil In India? Reawaken Onion Blackseed Hair Fall Control Oil is an innovative hair care product which helps you to grow longer, stronger and more beautiful locks. Now buy the best Reawaken onion hair oil online from Amazon or Flipkart at best price with an amazing shipping service for men & women.

https://medium.com/@heeb/how-to-prevent-hair-loss-naturally-with-the-power-of-onions-f98035c371e3

['Heebs Healthcare']

2021-12-13 08:58:32.494000+00:00

['Hair Fall Treatment', 'Hair', 'Hair Loss', 'Hair Care', 'Hair Oil For Hair Growth']

7 Tips for How to Stop Rocking Your Baby to Sleep

Wondering how to stop rocking your baby to sleep? Don’t despair: read on to find seven tips for how to say bye-bye to sleepless nights and help your baby fall asleep independently. Here’s a story that has happened to many mothers: After bringing your baby home, you quickly realized that she would immediately fall asleep after a few minutes of rocking in your arms. Proud, you felt like you’re genuinely bonding with your little one. People would often tell you: “Don’t get in the habit of rocking your baby to sleep — she’ll get used to it,” but you just nodded and thought how preposterous their claims were. Well, six months and many sleep-deprived nights later, you now know they were right! For many babies, rocking-or any other rhythmic movement-acts as a natural sleep aid as it reminds them of being inside their mother’s body. However, there’s a big downside. Your baby will develop a sleep association. In other words, if you’re rocking her to sleep, then she will think she needs you to fall back to sleep when she wakes up from sleeping. This will translate into frequent wake-ups, sleep deprivation for the entire family, and a great deal of crying. Luckily, there’s a way how to stop rocking your baby to sleep. Here’s how: First, create and follow a consistent bedtime routine A consistent bedtime routine will do half of the work for you. When everything’s the same every night, your baby will feel comforted as she’ll know what to expect. It doesn’t have to be anything overly complicated. Start the routine one hour before bedtime by dimming the lights. Give her a bath, change her diapers, and read a bedtime story. Each activity will get your child more relaxed and ready to fall asleep. Try some patting settling techniques Teaching your little one that it’s possible to fall asleep in her crib and not while being rocked will involve some crying. You can try to calm her down during the toughest first couple of days by trying rhythmic, gentle patting. Rhythmic patting is a commonly used hands-on technique for helping babies fall asleep. Here’s one way to do it: Place your little one on her crib, lying on her side, facing away from you. Place your hand on her shoulder. Cup your other hand and gently pat her on the bottom or thigh. Make the patting as rhythmic as possible. Try saying “shhh” on each pat or sing a quiet, soothing song to find a rhythm. Slowly reduce the amount of rocking you do Before you start reducing the amount of rocking, dedicate one night to measure how long you rock your baby to sleep. For example, let’s say that you’re rocking her to sleep for a total of 10 minutes. On the first night, try rocking her for eight minutes. On the second night, rock her for six minutes, four minutes on the third night, and so on, until the moment you notice she’s getting drowsy. Once she gets drowsy, put her in her crib and apply the patting technique I’ve discussed above. Over time, start putting her down while she’s fully awake Over time, you should start putting her into bed fully awake and not drowsy. Rock her until she feels calm and get her into bed. Use your patting to get her into that drowsy state while she’s lying in the crib. Cautiously, reduce the amount of patting At some point, you’ll have to stop patting your baby to sleep gradually, so she doesn’t become entirely dependent on it. Just like with the rocking, each night, limit your “pat time” by a minute or two. Stop when she’s calm but still awake. Stop patting but leave your hand on her bottom or thigh for a minute for reassurance. After a minute, leave her room quietly without waking her up. If she cries-and she may-don’t rush to comfort her. Give her a chance to self-soothe first. If the crying persists, go back into the room and do the patting technique once again. Introduce some additional positive sleep associations Not all sleep associations are bad. Whether a sleep association is good or bad depends on who’s carrying out the action that helps your baby fall asleep. Negative sleep associations involve somebody doing something for the baby, such as nursing, rocking, or patting until she falls asleep. On the other hand, positive associations develop when babies use something on their own to help them fall asleep. For example, some positive associations include: Use of a lovey. Sucking on their thumb or fingers. Banging their feet against the crib mattress. Lifting up their legs into the fetal position. In addition, there are also external sleep associations, which are things that help create a sleep-conducive environment. These include: What you want to do is replace the negative sleep association your little one has developed with a positive one. For example, put your baby into a crib, give her a lovey, and play white noise as she falls asleep. Stay consistent Consistency is key! You want your baby to get used to the new schedule. If one night you rock her until she’s drowsy and the other until she’s completely asleep, you’ll only make her confused. Consequently, the weaning process will be extended and you’ll be left sleep-deprived for longer. Stick to it, and soon, you’ll have a baby who loves to cuddle but doesn’t rely on it to fall asleep at bedtime and sleep through the night. If you need a faster way of teaching your baby how to fall asleep independently, ask for professional help from a certified sleep trainer. When you have a sleep trainer working alongside you, you’ll get a personalized plan that fits your child’s temperament and personality. A sleep trainer can ensure you’re on the right track and offer unlimited support throughout the process. In no time, you’ll manage to turn those bedtime battles into regular and restful sleep patterns.

https://medium.com/@neha-74611/7-tips-for-how-to-stop-rocking-your-baby-to-sleep-fe91ad89e7a0

['The Sleepy Cub Blog']

2020-12-18 10:16:24.962000+00:00

['Newborn', 'Baby', 'Baby Sleep', 'Baby Care', 'Parenthood']

4k TV and surround sound from a power bank in a narrowboat!

The problem We narrowboaters don’t have it good when choosing onboard entertainment. 12v systems usually suck and are expensive for what you get. You can use household TVs etc but although they are getting more efficient but they expect more power than we would like to share through our inverters and often we have to suffer this while the engine is running! Not the most ideal way to spend an evening. Power needs are either via 12v TVs, of limited choice, or inefficient inverter power to run more household larger TVs. What if you could run your setup from a power bank for 6 hours? OLED TVs provide the best image quality but the smallest* are still too big for a narrowboat and draw too much power that you’d want a boat to provide. How about QLED quality at a reasonable, but still at an impactful screen size? *recently LG are now making 32" OLED monitors, to be assessed! Also mini led technology is coming. Traditional TV reception methods need ongoing management each time you move and need cabling. Today, mobile data networks are so good that streaming services are now a viable option. Would you like to have perfect 4K streaming with cinema style sound and have it as a truly wireless setup? Possibly the perfect setup I’ll show you perhaps the most perfect entertainment setup you can build for yourself today for a narrowboat. What you’ll end up with will be a totally cable free setup enabling you to position your entertainment system wherever you want. You’ll get 28 inches of rich 4K QLED image quality alongside soundbar audio quality that fills your boat with cinema like audio. You’ll be able to power it from either inverter or battery power bank too. Read on and I’ll show you how.

https://medium.com/@jeremybyfordrew_47448/4k-tv-and-surround-sound-from-a-power-bank-in-a-narrowboat-d9f72e1d8ada

['Narrowboat Dev']

2021-01-21 15:10:41.665000+00:00

['Soundbar', 'Canal', 'Narrowboat', 'Power Bank', 'TV']

I’ll be heading off to prison next week, due to some Silk Road shenanigans from the past.

How did I get caught? Like you probably can imagine, a mere tip is not enough for the police to imprison anyone. But in my case it was more than enough to launch a substantial investigation, which was allowed to burn through a large amount of resources. A few months after the tip was received my phone was tapped 24/7, I was under surveillance several days a week by undercover agents. Furthermore the police drove around my neighbourhood with Stingray’s in hopes to discover more cell phones in use by me, as they suspected me of using phones that were not registered in my name. Actually they were wrong on that suspicion (at the very least🙄), I only used one phone, but the lack of evidence gathered from them tapping my phones had them puzzled. They couldn’t figure out how I stayed in contact with my suppliers, and other helpers. I actually thought that was really weird, this investigation was ongoing in 2016 and you’d think they had heard of Wickr, Telegram, Signal and the likes by then. Simply put, the reason for them not hearing me speak about criminal actions on my regular phone line was because I had several encrypted apps on my phone that allowed for encrypted communications. Some worked better than others, and some did not work at all, which I would later come to learn (the hard way). In addition to regular undercover surveillance, phone taps, and the use of Stingray’s (which I believe were illegal for police to use at that time) — I was also subjected to the police entering my apartment, without my knowledge, for an unknown amount of times over the timespan of 2–3 months. When inside my apartment, they installed even more surveillance equipment, some of which I’m 100% positive were illegal at the time, amongst others a physical keylogger installed to sniff out any passwords I used to log on to a stationary computer in the office part of my apartment. That keylogger would later be responsible for me getting fucked. Long story short, they got me good, and after sparing no resources on the investigation itself — they didn’t hold back when they authored the charges against me either. What did I get convicted for? The police were not modest when pressing their charges against me, they had been receiving some criticism from the press over the last couple of years for being unable to act on darknet drug vendors. So when they needed it the most, along came I as a perfect target for them to state an example. Without going into specifics, I can share that I finally got convicted for trafficking about 50 kilograms of cannabis (both weed and hash) and around 1 kilogram of Cocaine (the regular kind, not crack). For this I received a sentence of just over 6 years, and I will begin serving this sentence in a few days. Actually though, due to time served in custody (while the police were investigating the case further after my arrest) I will have closer to 4 years left to serve. So I won’t be gone for a total of 6 years from now…. but it’s going to be a while until I get back online.

https://medium.com/mr-kr%C3%BCgers-world-of-crypto/ill-be-heading-off-to-prison-next-week-due-to-some-silk-road-shenanigans-from-the-past-8f2da33b2139

['Krüger Cryptographical Smoothing']

2019-01-24 23:02:54.557000+00:00

['Bitcoin', 'Crime', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain']

I Had To Beg My Friend For 50 Claps

I Had To Beg My Friend For 50 Claps He was supposed to be a true critic, not a ruthless one Photo by Gregory Hayes on Unsplash So before I introduce all of you to this friend of mine, let me inform you that this is not a hate article. It is supposed to be taken as all fun and games kind of humor. So my best friend since the year 2015, Shashwat Agarwal, has been the sole reason I am here. He is the one who endorsed Medium in such a wonderful way that I couldn’t wait to explore my writing skills on this platform. I can say he has done his job well because I cannot let a single day go without writing. I met Shashwat on Quora five years back and we have been the best of buddies ever since. In these five years I have known him, he has matured a lot. Though he is ten years younger to me, I often find myself taking advice from him. The reason being, he never judges me for anything and I can ask or discuss any topic under the sun. That’s a dream come true for me — A nonjudgmental male friend. Why I Stopped Him From The 50 Claps Ritual Shashwat had been an avid reader on Medium way before I joined him. But when it came to writing, we started our journey together. He is busy with his engineering exam preparations and is therefore not able to contribute regularly, but he always finds time to proofread my stories before I hit ‘Publish’. So as newcomers, we decided that we would give 50 claps to each other's articles. We weren't sure of the response we would get in the beginning. At least, we would have our claps to show to the world that there has been some response to our story. Imagine, your story going completely unnoticed and without any claps. What a horror that would be!!! In the beginning, his 50 claps made me very happy. My best friend acknowledging and appreciating my work felt sublime. But there were times when he didn't like a few of my stories, but still gave 50 claps for them. That was odd to me. It was an endorsement of the ‘Free lunch’ kinds and not the ‘Earned it’ kinds. I didn’t want to fall in the hypocritical category, so I requested him to stop giving me fifty claps until he really felt my story deserved it. I told him he should be true to his comments and reactions to my story and judge me as a strict outsider, not as a lenient friend. I Was Not Ready For What Followed Next From that moment on, Shashwat stopped giving 50 claps to all my stories. Instead, he chose numbers like 18, 28, 32, 40, etc. These numbers inspired me in the beginning but then started having a daunting effect. I explored an all-new dimension to my old friend. There’s nothing that could ever please this man. The line above will make him laugh hard, but that's true. Even after giving excellent comments to my stories after proofreading them, he would only assign 33 claps. The stories I was sure would receive a full 50 could only make it up to a 43. I couldn't take it anymore and told him the truth one day, he was being too harsh. He just laughed it off. I guess he couldn't sense the urgency in my tone when I said, ‘’You’re being too harsh.’’ I Want To Go Back to Our Original Terms Interestingly, I started writing this article immediately after messaging him to change our deal and go back to the original deal of giving 50 claps. Screenshot by the author He has not even read the message yet and I couldn't wait till he replies. I am an incurable lunatic… remember…no patience at all. The point here is that I am not afraid to accept that I need those 50 claps. Those claps are not just a digital tool of reaction, they’re this unsaid motivation coming from my friend who is reassuring me that he is there for me. I took it on my ego and stopped it, failing to realize that it was the one pushing me all along. It is that kind of motivation, whose presence is not felt but its absence hits hard. Before You Leave I had promised Shasha (that’s what I call him fondly) that I will one day dedicate an article just for him. Sure this story is colored entirely in his name, but this is not what I had in mind. Although, he will get a shock of his life when he reads this. But I know he will laugh it away. He is just a chubby little sweetheart. Of everything I have in my life, he is one of those few people, I cherish every single day. He is a lad with amazing values and a heart of gold (Yes its a cliche and I don't care). Sure I take the liberty of being the elder one many times, but it's him who is wiser amongst the both of us. Cheers….To Shashwat and To our Friendship…! P.S. This story did not make it to him for proofreading. Now you know why.

https://medium.com/illumination/i-had-to-beg-my-friend-for-50-claps-df39efda0861

['Bhavna Narula']

2020-09-26 04:58:17.991000+00:00

['Critique', 'Motivation', 'Friendship', 'Philosophy', 'Claps On Medium']

Set Real Goals To Get Real Results

Every day creatives are faced with the difficult task of surviving — despite a lack of resources or support. Too many of us are living paycheck to paycheck, putting our dreams and desires aside for the urgent needs of NOW. But as creatives, it’s important that we don’t let the pain of LIVING become so distracting that it takes us from our REASON for living. Trust me. I’ve worked in a call center as a sales agent, in a warehouse as a janitor, at a couple of restaurants, and even played cash poker to make some extra money. While I was switching from job to job, all I could think was — When will it be my turn to win? It’s normal to feel like you’re all alone on this creative journey but the truth is — you’re not. Don’t believe me? Make a list of your top ten favorite creators in your focus, then research their bios. You’ll find that more than a few of them had to work some pretty horrible jobs before getting their “BIG BREAK”. Here’s how we’re going to help you get yours. Get specific. One day last summer, while taking a break in the middle of my eight-hour shift as a server at IHOP, I decided it was my turn. I sat down at one of the tables and started to write out my vision for my life — in detail. I asked myself what my perfect workday looked like, trying to be as specific as possible. What time did I wake up in the morning? Did I have a home office? Did I have an assistant? Where did I go for lunch? Who did I meet up with or talk to on the phone? How much money was in my bank account? Do I travel? Where to? Once I answered a ton of questions like these, I tried to simplify the answers by making a vision list. A vision list is pretty much what it sounds like: a list of that describes the kind of life you want to lead one day. My current vision list now reads something like this: I will travel to New York, Rome, Columbus, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Vermont and Boston in 2020. I will find a top-tier writing agent that works with a top-tier agency. I will wake up early around 7:30 am and go to bed late around 11:30 pm — but will still be well-rested and have time to visit my friends and family. Opportunities will come quickly and easily to me in the form of essays, interviews, features, poetry, workshops, and public speaking. I will choose which ones to follow up on wisely and always follow through on my promises. I will make a living wage as an artist and writer, at an hourly rate of $xx, and a weekly rate of $xxxx, and a per-event rate of $xxxx. It will six times my current income and will allow me to not only take care of my current bills but also purchase property, a car, and allow me to invest. Because I am actually working on some of these currently, I took out the names and places and dates — but on your own list, you should be that specific! The more specific you get, the easier it will be for you to figure out what actions you can take to make it happen. Photo by Jessica Lewis on Unsplash Writing out these specifics helped me to VISUALIZE the final product. Once I had that clear in my mind, I could start setting some actionable goals that could help me to get where I wanted to be. Tip: Write out your vision list by hand and carry it with you every day! Work it out. Now that you’ve gotten as specific as you can about your vision for your life, it’s time to figure out what the actionable steps are that you can take. This is actually the fun part for me because I’m often surprised by how easy it is to get started. For example, I wanted to work mostly from home but have the flexibility of an office where I could go and meet up with others to conduct workshops or meetings. In order for that vision to come true, it meant that I needed to: Make enough money in my part-time job cover my rent and bills. Have a clear plan for what I would be doing with my extra time at home if I wasn’t using that time to make more money. Before I even started looking for part-time jobs, I sat down and calculated how much money I would need to make in order to pay for rent and all my bills. That final amount could was then used to determine what type of jobs were best for me to apply to. Discover what actionable steps you can take. Turns out, I couldn’t work part-time at IHOP and still be able to follow my dreams. (Insert big Doh! sign here.) If I wanted to follow my dreams, I would have to clean up my resume. Update the resume became my first actionable step. Tip: Actionable steps are any steps that have a clear start and finish. For example: Not Actionable: Losing weight. Actionable: Showing up prepared for a scheduled gym class. It can take a while to go through each of your goals and identify actionable steps for each of them, but the more you do it, the easier it becomes for you to create a clear plan of action. Follow through. When I was working on my plan back in June 2018, I told myself that I wanted to have a book, an album, a visual art project, and a healthy writing career that crossed-genres. I gave each project a name, a deadline, identified some actionable steps I could take, and created individual calendars. Photo by Alex Jones on Unsplash I plotted out each step it would take to complete each project and posted it in an easy to view location in my bedroom. That way, day in and day out, I was constantly being reminded of what work I needed to get done. Every day, I woke up and checked for the next actionable step I could take towards my goal. Sometimes I did whatever the list said. Sometimes I didn’t. But every time I did do what my list said — I saw pretty quick results. Turns out, I needed to stop worrying about “being ready” for the next step — and just take it already. Follow through on the plan you’ve created for yourself and you’ll be pretty surprised by how quickly you can go from “aspiring” to “emerging”. Summary Even though I didn’t see any major successes or major life improvements right away, I knew that I had finally taken those big first steps towards my dreams. When the results finally started to show themselves — I was shocked. It turns out that the only thing that had been tripping me up was my own self-doubt. As I write this now, I’m sitting in my home office, surrounded by three new whiteboards with new calendars and goals. I got them after getting hired at my new full-time job, which just happens to be a nonprofit that doesn’t require me to be in the office every day. I finally get to do a lot of my work from my favorite desk at home. Out of the four projects I put on my original list, I’ve accomplished all but one. My first book was released this past week, I dropped a new spoken word/hip hop album in June, and I’ve had my poems and essays published in Slate, HuffPost, Texas Observer, Color Bloq, Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, Cincinnati Review, Foundry, and so many more. And I did all of this in less than 18 months!

https://medium.com/faylita-hicks/set-real-goals-to-get-real-results-fa75568a9af9

['Faylita Hicks']

2019-10-24 07:03:10.751000+00:00

['Life Lessons', 'Motivation', 'Creative Writing', 'Productivity', 'Work']

Confidence Rubrics for Patterns and Pattern Relationships

PATTERN LANGUAGE FOR GAME DESIGN Confidence Rubrics for Patterns and Pattern Relationships This article is in reference to the website patternlanguageforgamedesign.com and the book Pattern Language for Game Design. Pattern Confidence It is essential to acknowledge that all Patterns equally valid. Different exercises create more or less reliable Patterns, and you should carefully consider your confidence in any generated pattern before you use it in your designs. I recommend using this rubric for assessing your confidence in a new pattern, and for updating that confidence as you use the pattern over time. All patterns start with a confidence rating of 0 and add 1 for each item below that applies. Some of the items below are related and ‘stack.’ For example, a ‘Common Pattern’ (+1) would also have to meet the requirements for being a ‘Limited Pattern’ (+1) and a ‘Singular Pattern’ (+1) for a total of 3. You should apply all the applicable labels. So if you had used this hypothetical pattern and another developer had independently described the same pattern, you would also apply ‘Demonstrated Pattern’ (+1) and Independent Sources’ (+1) for a total confidence score of 5. Pattern Confidence Rubric (+0) Theoretical Pattern: The Theoretical Patterns exercise generates this type of pattern. You might also create a ‘theoretical pattern’ by adapting a pattern from an existing repository that does not cite example games. This pattern may be valid, but you do not generate it from observation. Instead, you create it by imagining how a theory about game design would fit the pattern format. (+1) Single Example Pattern: This level of confidence comes from a pattern that was generated based on one example. It is entirely possible to look at a single game and derive a valid pattern from it. However, it can be challenging to determine whether what you see is an actual pattern or just the results of a design technique or element that would yield a different pattern if you looked at its use across many games. (+1) Limited Pattern: If you have observed the pattern in fewer than ten games, it is a ‘limited pattern.’ If you have a hard time providing the ten examples in an exercise, this level of confidence may result. (+1) Common Pattern: The pattern is visible in at least ten games, probably many more. You have found a ‘common pattern’ when you stop recording examples at ten but could go on, and it’s a good sign that you have done an excellent job formulating a pattern based on your observations. (+1) Demonstrated Pattern: A pattern is a ‘demonstrated pattern’ if you, or another developer, have used it in development, and the effect was as intended. (+1) Validated Pattern: This pattern that is in common use among a variety of game developers and has been proven through widespread use to be effective is a ‘validated pattern.’ At the time of the printing of this book, it is probably not possible to find a pattern validated through use. As you work with Patterns throughout your career, it may become more common. A pattern might also be a ‘validated pattern’ if you conducted empirical user research to show that the pattern was effective. (+1) Independent Sources: If more than one developer derives a pattern, it has ‘independent sources.’ In teaching, it is common to discover this kind of pattern as more than one group of students arrives at the same pattern from different starting points. As the community of developers using the exercises in this book increases and shares patterns, this will become more common.

https://perspectivesingamedesign.com/confidence-rubrics-for-patterns-and-pattern-relationships-7c9162e3672d

['Chris Barney']

2020-12-06 13:50:18.144000+00:00

['Pattern Language', 'Game Design', 'Pattern Library', 'Game Development', 'Videogames']

Work is Temporary: Always Work Yourself out of a Job

Photo by Daniel Lienert from Pexels This week, I’m reflecting on my career progression. I’ve been working in Information Technology for 22 years. I started off as a desktop support technician and now lead a large team as a technology executive. I’ve pondered the journey and the path I’ve taken. In those 22 years, I’ve held 13 distinct roles at 4 different companies. I’ve chronicled part of that journey in a previous blog series. In that same series, I identified 20 distinct “Rules for Advancement” that I learned along the way. Most of those rules are sequential and therefore only relevant for certain career phases. Even though I wrote those rules over 4 years ago, I stand by them today. In today’s article, I’d like to identify a common element with all 13 of those promotions. This principle served me as well 22 years ago, as it does today. Here it is: Always, always, always work yourself out of a job. I’ll spend the rest of this article describing what I mean by that, but there is an underlying assumption that I need to define first as a prerequisite: All work is temporary. All work is temporary I’ve never had an assignment that I needed to perform perpetually. Every single task went away eventually. Do you believe that? I bet this is a stretch for some of you. Look at how you spend your time. Can you see an end to every recurring task? I think that’s a key perspective to maintain. Now, look at your work product. You built something amazing. Congratulations. How long is it good for? 5 years? It doesn’t matter if it’s a website, a database, an accounting process, a marketing strategy, or an organizational design. It’s all temporary. It all will eventually become irrelevant and useless. I’ve visited Alaska three times. During my most-recent visit, I toured a ghost town near Juneau called Treadwell. A mere 100 years ago, it was a thriving town with mills, stores, and an indoor swimming pool. Now, it’s been completely reclaimed by nature. When I walked through the ruins, I pictured people 100 years from now touring data centers I’ve built that have trees and moss growing through them. That’s perspective. Once you accept that all work is temporary, you can embrace a new mindset. Always, always, always, work yourself out of a job You won’t keep doing the job you are doing today for very long. The products you make today won’t last. Given that, why not be intentional about accelerating that natural process a bit? That’s what I do. I work myself out of a job. I’ve done it 13 times in 22 years. I take on a job. I figure it out. Then I eliminate it, or hand it off. My methods for doing this vary, but the high-level outcome is the same. I work myself out of a job, so I can pursue the next one. Here are some ways that I work myself out of a job: Automation. Early in my career, I was given many repetitive manual jobs. I wasn’t a programmer by training, but I taught myself scripting languages so I could automate as much of my job as I could. This made me very productive. In modern times, technologies like Robotic Process Automation make this possible for everyone, even if you aren’t technical. Never let a human do, what I robot can do better. Continuous Improvement. I really hate being inefficient and ineffective. It just bugs me. Therefore, I always question existing processes and ask why it can’t be done better, faster, or cheaper. I study best practices. I read the research. I talk with peers. I evaluate new methods. Then, I make changes as fast as I can. Delegation. As a leader, this is my superpower. I’ll gladly take on a new task myself. However, as I am learning it and mastering it, I am simultaneously thinking about to whom I can hand it off. This is huge because it is a double win. When I delegate, not only do I free myself up, but I also give a development opportunity to someone on my team that desperately needs it. Everybody wins. I wrote an entire article on delegation. If you need to develop this strength, read it. This is your formula: 1. Take on a new job. 2. Figure it out. 3. Automate it, improve it, or delegate it. 4. Repeat. Not every cycle results in a promotion, but if you keep doing it, opportunity will come find you. Working yourself out of a job is doing your job in this economy. If you think that doing so somehow threatens your job security, take a look at this article I wrote on that subject. This is my secret formula, but it’s not so secret. Do you find this to be true in your experience? I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments below. Read this article on my blog site or listen to it on my podcast🎙️

https://medium.com/@zachonleadership/work-is-temporary-always-work-yourself-out-of-a-job-97f83843d8f1

['Zach Hughes']

2020-12-11 13:59:35.668000+00:00

['Continuous Improvement', 'Leadership Development', 'Career Development', 'Automation', 'Delegation']

Protective Laws Every Woman Must Know About!

Women’s safety is the world’s issue but primarily crimes against women in India is increasing every minute. Despite amending severe laws against the offenders the stats do not seem to do down. So women, maybe it is time to pull your socks and take your safety in your own hands. Here are a few protective laws that will help you do so… Women in the world are doing wonders and hustling every day to fight the age-old misogyny of our society. However, their charts are still not in our favor. Be it inferences of sexual favors, harassment or abuse, we combat through it every day. With a constant increase in offenses against women, knowing your rights is of paramount importance. Knowing protective laws can not only help you save yourself from an unjust act but also position you to help people around you. So we have listed down a few protective women law and how can you go ahead with basic proceedings against these acts: Sexual Harassment at Workplace Act, 2013 (Women Redressal, Prevention, and Prohibition) Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act is an act that intends to prevent, prohibit and redress any act accounting to sexual harassment. Use of language with any inference to sexual remark, innuendoes or touch, nonconsensual proximity, etc can account for sexual harassment at the workplace. So if you are your known ones have been facing any such issues, make sure you educate them about the same. Let women around you know about your company’s Internal Complaints Committee and speak out loud. The sole purpose of the act is to ensure the safety of women in their workplace. Indecent Representation of Women(Prevention) Act,1986 Indecent Representation of Women(Prevention) Act aims to prohibit indecent and obscene representation of women in an advertisement, painting, publications, writings, figures or any place else. The act is not known by a lot of people but can combat the indecent representation of women in our society. Prohibition of Dowry Act The Prohibition of Dowry Act is one of the most crucial laws that is helping women break the shackle of patriarchy in India. The act prohibits any transaction, be it giving or taking of dowry from either of the two families. If any person in the family does so, they can be penalized under the act. The Dowry system is an age-old norm in India. A norm that was too normalized to be spoken against. Quite often the dowry in our society is demanded from the bride’s family by the Groom’s family. In a perspective, the norm has a strong root in society due to a lack of financial independence in women. Regardless of the fact that the act is in force, there are a number of cases where women are seen to be tortured, beaten, harassed, and even burnt. It is a major challenge that society is grappling with but the act makes it a deterrent. Although, the only way out to help the women in need is to speak out and educate everyone around you about the same! Because the revolution begins with YOU! Special Marriage Act, 1954 Special Marriage Act is intended to ease special forms of marriages and provides for registration to the divorce filing. In a country like India, inter-caste marriage or inter-religion marriages are still not okay with a lot of people. The struggle to get through marriage from different faith is real and the actors make it easier to help individuals ease the process. Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act,1971 The Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act aims to reduce the occurrence of illegal abortion and consequent maternal mortality and morbidity. The act clarifies the conditions under which a fetus can be aborted and the pregnancy can be ended. It also specifies who is qualified to conduct the procedure. National Commission for Women Act, 1990 NCW i.e The National Commission for Women is a statutory body of the Government of India that was established in 1992. NCW voices out for women’s rights in India and addresses their concerns. This has been extensively helping the upliftment of women and their economic status. Equal Remuneration Act, 1976 A much-needed act to implement ground level equality for women in India. The Equal Remuneration Act prevents gender discrimination in terms of providing remuneration. Equal pay is a right that shouldn’t be fought for. Regardless of your gender, you deserve to be compensated fairly. Being aware of these laws can not only protect your interest but also help you fight against an unjust act in society. Protection of Women from Domestic Violence (2005) Protection of Women from Domestic Violence is an important law every woman must know about! Domestic Violence sadly still prevails in our society, primarily because of toxic masculinity in and around us. The law provides protection to women who are in a relationship with a man (husband or live-in partner). A woman can file a complaint against her partner for causing mental, emotional, physical or even psychological hard that has caused a potential threat to her life and sanity. The law post amendment of 2005 extends to widowed women, divorced women and sisters. Hindu Succession Act (2005) The Hindu Succession Act protects the interest of Hindu Women to have shared in the ancestral property. The amendment made in 2005 made it clear that daughters have fair and equal rights in her ancestral property even after her marriage. Maternity Benefits Act (2017) The Maternity Benefit Act is known by most of us as it protects the interest of women working during pregnancy. Under this act, if a woman has worked with an employer for more than 80 days during the 12 months preceding to her expected delivery, the employer must grant special facilities to women like compensated Work from Home, Paid Maternity Leave from 12 to 26 weeks, Medical allowance, Creche facilities at the workplace. Street Harassment/Eve Teasing The IPC i.e. Indian Penal Code has not defined Eve Teasing or Street Harassment but it surely does protect you from it. Any act that pertains to harassing a woman in public such as passing derogatory remarks or outraging the modesty of a woman can be filed against. Section 294 & 509 of the Indian Penal Code protect women’s safety and restrains an individual to pass any such remark or gesture towards women. Know What Authority Do The Cops Have On You Every police station should have a lady police officer who is not below the post of a Head Constable round the time. A woman cannot be in any circumstances be arrested by a male cop in the absence of a lady constable. A woman cannot be arrested post-sunset and before sunrise. A woman can be only investigated at her residency. The medical procedure of a rape survivor can only be done by a government hospital. A rape survivor can tape her testimony at any place of her choice. All women are entitled to avail of free legal aid. Women’s safety is the world’s issue but primarily crimes against women in India is increasing every minute. Despite amending severe laws against the offenders the stats do not seem to do down. So women, maybe it is time to pull your socks and take your safety in your own hands. Here is some self-defense guide by Fuzia that can help you be safe. The laws and jurisprudence are perfectly designed to protect, safeguard and empower the women of the country. They do not require any change, but their enforcement does. What our society lacks is a proper civic sense and proper enforcement of the laws. Once this is done, there certainly will be a change.

https://medium.com/@pr-26909/protective-laws-every-woman-must-know-about-a65a6d8150c9

[]

2020-03-11 12:52:58.963000+00:00

['Womens Rights', 'Women', 'Law', 'Legal', 'Safety']

Double your Work from Home Productivity

Photo by Dhru J on Unsplash Speed typing is an important skill, as I mentioned in one of my previous articles Essential skills as well. To make your typing experience smooth, to make your lifestyle more productive, and to amaze you, here are all the essential keyboard shortcuts you need to know. I have researched and these are the only ones you will need in your daily tasks, so don’t worry about checking about some other article about Keyboard shortcuts as well. After reading this, you won’t have to. THE WINDOW KEY SHORTCUTS Photo by Tadas Sar on Unsplash The window is the fundamental key that offers numerous shortcuts. As you are reading this, I’d suggest you try them out right now. Window + left/right → Move the current program to extreme left or right Window + up/down →Maximise/reduce the size of the current program Windows + 1/2/3…→ open the respective apps of the taskbar Window+R → type cmd → Control+shift+Enter — Run CMD as administrator Window +. or Window+; → Emojis Window+, → A glimpse of Desktop Windows+M →Minimize Window+A→ Windows Action Center Windows+X→Start menu options Windows+E→File Explorer Windows+R→Run Windows+U→Open Display Settings Window+Q→Search Windows+W→Whiteboard and Full-Screen snip Windows+T→Show current program in Taskbar Windows+I→Open Settings Windows+P→Project current Screen Windows+S→Start Search Windows+F→Feedback Hub Windows+H→Open Dictation Windows+K→Connect to wireless Devices Windows+V→Open Clipboard where you have a history of all the things you pasted Windows+B→Show Hidden files from the left most corner of Taskbar Windows+Spacebar→Change Language of Keyboard Windows+F1→Internet Search for Help in Windows 10 Window+PrtScn→Save Screenshot and Copy it to the clipboard as well Window + (+/-) →Magnifying the page Windows + Control + D → Add new Display Window + Control + left/right → Switch between multiple Displays Window+Shift+Esc→Task Manager Window+Shift+S→ Take Screenshot THE CONTROL KEY SHORTCUTS Photo by Athul Cyriac Ajay on Unsplash Control + Shift + V →Paste as plain text Control+Shift+N →New folder Control+left/right →To move the cursor word to word instead of usual text to text Control + Esc→Open Start menu, an alternative to Windows key in case the key stop working Control + alt + up/down/left/right →Change orientation of your desktop. Control+tab →Switch between different tabs Control +C/V/X→Copy/Paste/Cut Control+I/B/U→ Italicise/Bold/Underline Text Control +A/Z/Y→Select all/Undo/Redo Control+F/G — Find/Find and Replace Control +K/W→Insert Hyperlink/Close the current window Control + 1 →Single-space lines Control + 2→Double-space lines Control+ 5→1.5-line spacing Control + Alt + 1 → Change text to H1 Control + Alt + 2→ Change text to H2 Control + Alt + 3 →Change text to H3 Control +Home/End→Jump to Beginning/End of the page Control+shift+T→Previously opened browser. Sorry, teenagers. Control+left mouse click→Open link in a new tab without leaving the Current one Control+D /P/O→ Bookmark/Print/Open Control+1/2/3…→Jump to respective tabs within a browser Control+(+,-)→ Zoom In/Out while adjusting the width of the Screen Control+F4 →Close current Window OTHER IMPORTANT SHORTCUTS Photo by Martin Garrido on Unsplash Shift+alt+PrtScn → High contrast Alt+Enter→ To open the properties of the selected file(s). Tab and Shift+Tab→ Move to next/previous dialogue box Shift+delete→ Permanent Delete file Alt+tab→ Jump between multiple programs F11/F12→ Full-Screen view in browser/ Open Console in the browser F2/F5/F3→Rename/Refresh/Search files Alt+D →Directly go to address bar Alt+F →File menu of any application THE ALTERNATIVES Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash There are times when one key of your keyboard don’t want to work, for whatever reason. That can be really annoying since it is not a good bargain to purchase a new keyboard just for one key. Worry not, I got you covered, here are the important alternatives, that will some your money, maybe you should consider taking Medium Membership. Shift+Insert = Paste / Ctrl+V Shift+Delete= Cut /Ctrl+X Control+Esc= Window Start Spacebar and Shift+Spacebar=Page up and Page down Shift+F12=Save Shift+F10=Right Click Window+Delete=BackSpace BONUS: CREATE YOUR OWN SHORTCUTS Feeling like The Weeknd? It is true. You can customize your own keyboard shortcuts in order to open your desired application. Just follow the steps. Steps: a) Add the application’s shortcut to the Desktop whom you want open using your desired shortcut b) Open Properties: You should see a column named Shortcut which is none right now. c) Add your desired shortcut. d) Save your time Please note that I am not telling you these are all the shortcuts in the world. I am not an employee of Microsoft, I couldn’t know all of them. But I researched and found them to be the most practical and essentials. I am sure you won’t be using other than these. Exceptions can be everywhere. So, if you think there is something I need to add, respond for the same.

https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/double-your-work-from-home-productivity-994ec84c7cf

['The Essentialist']

2020-09-12 02:11:40.577000+00:00

['Keyboard Shortcuts', 'Lifestyle', 'Productivity', 'Work From Home', 'Time Management']

Airdrop Guide — Crypto Domain Series

DAS https://app.da.systems/explorer?inviter=deficalendar.bit (Save 5% on fees) Fee: $5 per year + $5 Storage Deposit Cross-chain domain. Flowns https://mynft.io/flowns Fee: 0.32 $FLOW to 40 $FLOW for 1st year Domain for FLOW. Nomspace https://www.nom.space/ Fee: 5 $cUSD per year Domain for CELO. There will be an airdrop snapshot of domain holders on Dec 31 19:00 UTC for another meme token Celo Cat. Solana Name Service https://naming.bonfida.org/ Fee: Auction Format Domain for Solana. Handled by Bonfida so might be less likely to launch a seperate token. Tezos Domains https://app.tezos.domains/ Fee: 1 $TEZ per year Domain for Tezos. Tezos Domains DAO formation in 2022, governance token incoming? Trust Domains https://trustdomains.org/ Fee: $30 .bnb domains for BSC. Might launch a governance token soon also? Unstoppable Domains https://unstoppabledomains.com/?ref=9128541362bd48d ($10 Credit) Fee: $20+ Probably the best known among all domains listed here. You can now mint your domain on Polygon. Yat https://y.at/ Fee: $4+ Works similar to Linktree. You can now mint your domain on Polygon also. Some other domain projects launching soon Avvy Domains https://avvy.domains/ Domain for AVAX. Yet to be launched. IC Naming https://testnet.icnaming.com/ Domain for ICP. You can play around with their testnet following this guide. Polkadot Name Systems https://crowdloan.pns.link/litentry/preregister Not yet open. You can only pre-register for it now if you contribute at least 10 $DOT to the Litentry Crowdloan. For more details, read here. Other Ongoing Events Bybit Launchpad (Snapshot for $KASTA starts on Dec 31)

https://medium.com/@CalendarDefi/airdrop-guide-crypto-domain-series-9620096a4063

[]

2021-12-31 11:42:30.179000+00:00

['Socialfi', 'Web3', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Domains', 'Airdrop']

Exploring Numerai Machine Learning Tournament

Figure 10. Code for cross validation on a few classifiers I chose LR, LDA, and XB algorithms based on previous figure and fitted them on the whole training dataset. AUC score of these three different model is between 0.516 to 0.517, and logistic regression is marginally better than the other two. Figure 11. Logistic Regression, linear discriminant analysis, and gradient boosted tree classifiers on the training dataset. Figure 12. roc_auc_scores for the 3 aforementioned classifiers. Now that we know logistic regression is performing good on the dataset, let’s try to choose the best parameters for this classification model. There are mainly 2 parameters that we can change, penalty and C value. We have 2 option for penalty, L1(Lasso) or L2(Ridge) regularization. For C parameter, I chose 5 values [0.01,0.1,1,10,100] . A simple GridSearchCV suffices to find the best parameters that are ‘l2’ and C=0.01. With these new values we were able to increase AUC by 0.001 to 0.518!!! Figure 13. Code to find the best parameter for logistic regression by GridSearchCV We have 50 features in the dataset. Do we need all of them to achieve a high score? Let’s try to answer this question by performing dimensionality reduction on the training dataset. First, let’s start with principal component analysis (PCA). I created a pipeline and set n_components of PCA to [10, 30, 50]. I was surprised that result of GridSearchCV shows 10 components as the best answer; however, score has not change from what it was before and it is still 0.518. Figure 14. Dimensionality reduction by principal component analysis (PCA) shows that 10 components are better than 30 or 50 components. Prediction: Ok! it’s time to predict on the validation dataset with the optimized parameters. Following image shows the code and the scores. AUC is 0.5237 and log loss is 0.6922. AUC=0.5237 is not very high, but as you can see in Figure 16, which shows the leaderboard page of Numerai website; reputation (the average of AUC over the last 20 rounds) is 0.5334 for the first person. Log loss of a classifier with predicted probability of 50% is -ln(0.5)=0.6931. 0.6922 log loss correlates to 50.05% predicted probability. Figure 15. Code for fitting and predicting on the validation dataset Figure 16. Leaderboard as of 6/18/2019. Reputation is the average AUC over the last 20 rounds. Future Works: Era column in the dataset represents a unit period of time, this could be a week, a day, or an hour, we don’t know. I ran cross validation on each of these eras, and compare the AUC score. It varies from 0.5 to 0.7. This is a large variance in AUC. I wish we had more information about the dataset and era column. Numerai suggests to “build a new model on the bad eras to combine with your main model. In this way, you may be hedged to the risk of bad eras” . I am not sure how to do that at the moment. But, I will try to figure it out. Any comments/suggestions are greatly appreciated!

https://medium.com/@olfatnia.m/exploring-numerai-machine-learning-tournament-29e003199132

['Mohammad Olfatnia']

2019-06-20 08:04:16.441000+00:00

['Seaborn', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Machine Learning', 'Numerai']

Personas need a purpose: why you shouldn’t try to make personas that cover the whole company

(and why data annoys me, plus a few bonus tidbits from my time at Amazon.com) My friend Benjamin asked a great question when I published my recent article on personas. I said in that article that one of the reasons an existing set of personas might not have worked could be that: “They were probably created for the entire company, a big bunch of products or services, or a big division in the company, and not for any individual projects or products. This never works well.” And he asked: This seems to be a major issue in many companies when trying to implement personas. How do we make companies understand that personas have to be more product- and/or project-oriented? Here’s the punch line: Personas that are broad enough to cover a company, organization, or big product end up being too vaguely described to be as useful as personas should be. For YOUR company or organization or huge product? Here’s the short answer. Tell your bosses that personas for everything tend to cost major money (data collection and analysis is pricey) and end up being ignored. Instead, try a skunkworks project creating ad hoc, or, as I call them, “Alignment Personas” for a single, well-defined project that has clear business goals attached to it. If it works, hey presto, you have proof personas work for your company. If it doesn’t, you don’t ruin personas forever in the minds of your colleagues (though it may be a little late for the latter). Let’s start the longer answer to creating personas with a story. I was at Amazon from 2002–2005. I wouldn’t trade that experience for the world. It was like an elite grad school focused on technology, the web, and ecommerce. During that time, I was also elbow deep in writing the book I co-authored with John Pruitt, “The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design.” We had started the book in 2001, so by November 2002, when I started at Amazon, I was all about personas. I came roaring into my new job sure that personas were the answer to everything. Amazon is an intensely data-driven place (shocker, I know. I’m sure you’ve never heard that one before). My new awesome boss Larry Tesler helped me make connections with the equally awesome Diane Lye who ran the Data Warehouse. We created a killer team of geniuses to figure out how to create personas for Amazon.com. We had access to all the data. We worked on “The Amazon.com Personas Project” for over six months. I was well on my way to being one of the top experts on personas in the world. And we failed. Anyone savvy in all things startup knows that failure is part of the process — it’s part of success. And this failure triggered a new way of thinking for me which evolved into the approach I use to create and use personas today. That didn’t really help us at the time though. Why did the Amazon-wide personas fail? Because we had so much data that we couldn’t quite figure out how to moosh and smoosh it all into useful personas, and because we weren’t willing to sacrifice accuracy for precision. Whatever persona candidate categories and candidate personas within those categories we came up with, they were inevitably too broad to be helpful. Data is annoying. Data began to piss me off. It’s like a huge, lazy, bad-tempered walrus. If it’s there, you have to deal with it. But good luck when you try to get a handle on it or make it do something, and God forbid it notices that you’re messing with it. It will haul itself around and bite you in the ass. Also, data is by definition describing what happened in the past (though that’s not necessarily true of a walrus). Sure, there are fancy ways to draw good guesses about the future out of it. But it’s always describing customers you already have, and not necessarily those you want. (Cue fury from data people … and … GO!) The Trap of Useless, Data-Driven Distinctions: Spearfishers vs. Browsers Let’s explore just one example which is fairly representative of all the experiments we did: spearfishers vs. browsers. This is a great example because it’s pretty obvious, it gives nothing secret away, and it’s epically useless as a way to think about online shoppers. Of course the data showed that some people were spearfishers and some browsers. In other words, some people came to Amazon knowing exactly what they wanted, searched, found, and bought. Others would noodle around on the site to see what they could find, looking to get attracted to something, or discover new products. Unsurprisingly, it also showed that many shoppers weren’t always one or the other. We could create various personas of spearfishers, browsers, and combinations who were either or both during different shopping sessions. And we did. All were backed by data. And then we tried to figure out how they were helpful. How would you use a spearfisher persona to make any meaningful decisions on Amazon? Even then, the site was designed to enable both activities and to entice each to do the other. How would you use a spearfisher persona to help design a UI? I’m sure some of you reading this can argue for the value, but believe me, even knowing deep psychographic, demographic, and behavioral data about spearfishers really wasn’t helpful in making design decisions. A related aside: The best memory I have about this exercise was that, at the same time, rumor around the office had it that at some point some branding company had done a survey to ask people to describe Amazon as if it were a person. The answer that came back? If Amazon were a person, it would be a 35-year-old white guy wearing glasses, a button down, and Dockers. This was also information that was both true and epically useless. However, it did, and still does, remain useful in totally cracking me up. So maybe we should try personas based on something other than bias towards one or the other approach to shopping. And we did. We tried ages, education levels, demographics, psychographics, behavior on the site, and statistical combinations of all of these things. We made matrices and spreadsheets, used sticky notes, and wrote sequel queries. We had printouts a mile long. We met and worked our brains off. Remember, personas are not the same as personalization. The ridiculous amount of data was and is helpful in creating personalized experiences — so that I see different recommendations for products than you do. Personas are fake people who embody data (to some extent) and they are tools for people who design experiences. Beyond this you’ll just have to trust me, and trust that there was no better data set or data team in the world working with me, along with a small but killer user experience squad. We kept trying. While our big persona effort was struggling, elsewhere smaller personas were popping up and thriving. While we were working on the big personas (which we never finished), I worked with several smaller product teams, helping with very early stage customer experience strategy and design (i.e., zeroing in on what they had been asked to design and build, and the best ways to do so). For example, I worked with both the loose diamonds and the auto parts teams to create the interfaces for buying each on Amazon.com. No, these are not project code words. These were teams working on user interfaces for people who wanted to buy loose diamonds or auto parts on Amazon.com. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that it was truly bizarre to: expect people to buy loose diamonds on Amazon.com expect people to buy bumpers for ’67 Chevys on Amazon.com design the experiences for each so that they made sense with all the other Amazon UIs, made sense with respect to their particular products, and made sense with respect to each other (just in case someone zipped over to Amazon to buy a 1997 Honda Civic carburetor, a two-carat, cushion-cut diamond with minor inclusions, and a copy of “What Color is your Parachute” in a single session). (An aside here: One of the most head-scratchingly amazing things that I learned at Amazon is that often Jeff Bezos’ ideas make absolutely zero logical sense to me, but that he’s also usually right. It was annoying until I decided that it was like watching — and somehow participating in — a Sherlock Holmes story. He always makes it make sense in the end, so enjoy the ride.) In fact, these smaller projects were really where the Alignment Personas idea was born. John and I and the whole UX community were all about data-driven personas at that time. Our whole book pivoted on us figuring out a step-by-step process to create personas using data. But I was in this weird position of: working on data-driven personas for all of Amazon (so I knew basically what data types were available) having access to the best and biggest data set on earth (at that time) not having data-driven personas for all of Amazon (they weren’t done yet) working with two teams who were creating UIs for selling new product types on Amazon (there was no data on how people shopped on Amazon.com for diamonds or auto parts, because we hadn’t done it yet) being sure that personas are always a good idea for teams trying to create together (once you see them working, you can’t really live without them … the words ”user” and ”customer” cause allergic reactions because of their annoying and dangerous in-specificity) So instead of using data, the teams and I created quick, ad hoc personas (which I now call Alignment Personas). We created personas like these (and these aren’t actually the ones we created. Those are secret and plus they were so long ago that I don’t actually remember them completely). For auto parts, they were probably something like: “Charlie ’57 Chevy,” the guy who is all about his particular car, and it’s a special car that’s hard to find parts for “Kelly Kia,” the gal who has an inexpensive car she likes to maintain herself “Andy Auto Parts,” the guy who owns an auto parts store in some remote town who doesn’t keep a lot of stock on hand and sometimes has difficulty getting what he needs in a timely manner from his suppliers And others … For loose diamonds, they may have resembled: “Shelly Sparkles,” the gal who can’t wait to get engaged and likes shopping for the perfect diamond for when that time comes “Bob Big Diamond,” the guy who is ready to pop the question and wants to get the biggest diamond he can for his money “Corey Careful,” the guy who has taken it on himself to become an expert in the Four C’s of diamond quality so he is sure to get a great stone And others … These personas helped, and they helped fast. They were very precise (Shelly was a girl, not a girl or a guy). They made sense as targets for the teams. And they had opinions on the features that would help them the most. Meanwhile, back in the land of enormous data … The all-Amazon, data-driven personas crack team of geniuses, led by yours truly, kept hitting barriers. We could try to sort and re-analyze and statistically re-assess and model and segment to our heart’s content, but we couldn’t really find anything useful. Remember, we weren’t trying to come up with marketing personas (personas to help us decide how to market Amazon to people by putting ads and messaging in various places). At that time, there was no Amazon marketing (legend has it that Jeff Bezos got rid of the marketing team and used the money to create Super Saver Shipping, which was free shipping on any order $25 or above). No, we were trying to create product personas, which are personas that help a team decide which features to build and how to design those features. A very different goal. Marketing personas help you figure out how to appeal to people to get them to the site in the first place. Product personas help you figure out how to get them to do things after they’ve arrived. No matter what we tried, we could not make personas that covered all Amazon shoppers in some useful, usable way. The genius of Alan Cooper: personas must be precise, not accurate In the book that changed my professional life “The Inmates are Running the Asylum,” Cooper insists that useful personas have to be precise (in other words, a persona has to be male OR female, a professional horse jockey OR the manager of a network operations center). This is why “middle-aged, ex-urban women with children” can’t be a persona, but Elizabeth, who lives in Orange, New Jersey, and has two kids named Ethan and Emily can. And because they have to be precise, they can’t really be accurate: you can’t accurately describe a set of data using a single person. This is probably the biggest reason we couldn’t create data-driven personas for all of Amazon. Amazon’s love for data is a love for accuracy. Any persona we created using that data, if it was precise enough to be a persona, couldn’t be accurate enough to be considered data-driven, and therefore acceptable. Without precision, personas aren’t personas. Any help they could give all of the Amazon teams couldn’t happen. But the loose diamond personas and the auto parts personas were precise. We were free to create them because: a. there wasn’t a lot of applicable data b. no one super important was really paying that much attention c. we had no time — these features simply had to be designed and launched superfast (why, I’ll never understand, but there you have it) d. the product teams were hungry for help So we created the non-data-driven Alignment Personas superfast (in a couple of meetings), made our best guesses about which ones were more or less likely to actually buy these things on Amazon, and off we went, getting creative about designing an Amazon-appropriate shopping experience for each. And … it worked. The teams didn’t flail. There were no “that wasn’t what I asked for” moments in design reviews. We flew fast under the radar and we launched. And what we launched sucked less than everyone expected it to. Other teams started asking how we managed to pull those projects off without major injuries. And we showed them. Little, specific, precise, ad-hoc, assumption-based personas aligned the interdisciplinary teams provided otherwise missing north stars and a common language. They were there to speak when we wondered which features would be most helpful. They depoliticized. They helped. They may or may not have been somewhat accurate — and it didn’t matter either way. The resulting user experiences made sense, they had internal consistency, and they worked. They were little microcosms within the vastness of Amazon.com: each was “Amazony” in its own ways and unique in its own ways. Long story long … The data-driven personas for Amazon.com were never born. But many, many sets of project-specific personas were. The latter were successful. This is why I always recommend that people start with small, under-the-radar persona efforts. See if the process works first (it usually will), and then, you can show personas with some results, like a UI that sucks less than everyone expected. This often creates a pull in your organization. People will come to you and ask you to help them create personas for their projects. And pulls are always vastly more successful than pushes (see my other article for why personas that are thrown over the wall never work). I think the magical “alignment” part of Alignment Personas comes the process of creating Alignment Personas together. It’s the journey, not the destination. More on that in a future article on the process. On the other hand … There are several exceptions to the big-persona-efforts-never-work argument. For example, the data-driven Windows Vista personas my co-author John Pruitt helped to create for Microsoft in the early 2000s absolutely worked. And I have no idea how he really managed that. I do know he had a lot of money to work with, which never hurts. Another major exception? The Zillow personas. But they were created long before Zillow was big. In fact, they were created before Zillow was launched. Please keep sending me questions about personas. I find them inspiring and I’m hankering to keep writing down what I know, one chatty article at a time.

https://uxdesign.cc/personas-need-a-purpose-why-you-shouldnt-try-to-make-personas-that-cover-the-whole-company-8d696d0548

['Tamara Adlin']

2017-10-25 17:33:54.514000+00:00

['Personas', 'Alignment Personas', 'User Experience', 'Amazon']

Love Over Safety?

My parents and me in Germany, Christmas 2019. Who would have known… What Metallica has to do with me pondering whether I should travel to Germany for Christmas and spend time with my parents. In a normal year, I would see my parents (70 and 68 years old) at least twice. They would fly to the best city in the world for a summer vacation, spend a few weeks with me and take videos of Central Park squirrels and firetrucks passing by. In December, I would travel to my small hometown in Germany near Cologne for Christmas and sleep in my childhood bed (I’m 6'4), right under a fading, dusty ‘Ride the Lightning’ Metallica poster (teenage rebellion, you know?). In a good year, my brother Johannes who works as an anesthesiologist in Zurich would also return to the family basecamp, if his schedule permits, and by 11 pm on Christmas Eve, us four would snuggle up under the XMAS tree (not made of plastic), stuffed with turkey, Spätzle, and Haribo Goldbears. Quick reminder: it’s 2020. My parents didn’t make it to the US this year, a) because they didn’t want to die from a respiratory virus and b) even if they wanted to, they couldn’t enter the states thanks to restrictions on travel from the EU to the US. The only way for me to spend time with my parents this year is to book a flight to Germany this December (which technically works because I have a German passport). Do I want to go? “HELL YEAH!”, says the metalhead son who loves his parents and didn’t have a chance to hug them for almost 12 months. “HELL NO!” says the metalhead son who loves his parents, but also went to med school, and understands that Covid-19 is no joke — especially for a 70-year-old man and a 68-year-old woman. I really want to see my folks and convince myself that “Nothing Else Matters”. But I also know that there’s a small but real chance that I could be an asymptomatic carrier and bring home “Creeping Death” in the form of Covid-19. Sad but true. I’m banging my head. Well, emotions aside. This doesn’t have to be as dramatic, destructive, and thunderous as a thrash metal album. Let’s look at the science. There’s actually a way I could fly to Germany this year and see my parents while minimizing the risk of exposing them to the novel coronavirus (I’m aware that there’s no zero risk scenario, but as a scientist, I’m comfortable with 99.9%). Here’s what I would do:

https://felixgussone.medium.com/love-over-safety-b65573d7932c

['Felix Gussone']

2020-10-20 17:30:51.267000+00:00

['Travel', '2020', 'Germany', 'Covid 19', 'Coronavirus']

Secret Formula to get 10k followers on Instagram in one month as a Designer!

On 18th May 2019, I decided to take up a personal challenge of getting 10K followers on Instagram. The crazy part was that I wanted to hit that number within 1 month. Within a month? Why such a tough target? One of the new trends on Instagram is the text-based content about design. These posts seem to be doing insanely well. After seeing these posts for a few days, I thought to myself “I can definitely do it much better than these guys… Anyday!”. I knew it would be super tough but I was a 100% sure that I could beat the Instagram algorithm. On the night of 16th June 2019 (28 days later), I finally hit the 10K follower count 🎉. We’ve all heard of a concept called Design Sprint, but today allow me to introduce you to Instagram Sprint! 🤣 Myth Busters “Wait a minute Chethan, this sounds too good to be true.” Alright! Before you start making all sorts of assumptions, let me set the facts straight. No money was spent on promotion. All my followers were organic. I posted a total of 23 posts over a period of 28 days. 1 post per day only! I spent 2 hours per weekday and 8-10 hours per weekend creating the posts. Every day was as normal as any other day. Travel, Office, Gym and enough sleep. Each post took me an average of 3–5 hours. I started with 850 followers on 18th May before the Instagram Sprint. So technically I got 9,150 followers over a period of 28 days. But I got around 650 followers in the next 2 days. It's still a big win 😝. Disclaimer! My secret formula isn't the only way to get 10K followers. This is what I believed in. This is what worked for me. This is my strategy. But feel free trust your gut and go another route. It’s a free world after all. And yeah, this might be a big article because I have a lot of secrets to spill. Also, all the stats I mention below are 100% true. Feel free to let me know if you want hard proof. I will send you a recorded video for your satisfaction 😂. One last thing. Make sure you don't skip the last part. I have something that will motivate you and keep you high on your confidence meter. So now that we’re on the same page, let me start spilling my secrets. Strap in your seat belts and let’s get started. The 4 Ingredients Value Consistency Strategy (The best part) Engagement (Maintain your followers) “Oh no! Not another cliché article talking about the same old value and consistency 🤦🏼‍♂️.” Fair enough. But before you stop reading or move onto another article, let me tell you why this isn’t your regular article. I am going to break down the real meaning of what makes an Instagram post valuable by giving you real examples. I am going to explain the real secret behind consistency and the right way to be consistent. Just posting every day isn't going to do the trick. There is much more to it. I am going to explain how to think like a professional detective. What are the things that you should do and should not do? And finally, a few cunning tricks to up your Instagram game. So are you still here? Of course, you are. Value To be honest, the way I beat the Instagram algorithm is, by not actually beating the Instagram algorithm. “Umm… What?” Instead of giving more focus to things like hashtags, I gave more focus on providing real value. Without value, there is no success. “Alright, so what makes an Instagram post valuable?” Simple. The person reading the post should be able to make sense and understand at least 80% of the information in the post. He should also be able to immediately start applying that knowledge. Then that would be considered as a valuable post. “Give me an example!” Let’s say that you want to explain the steps of a design sprint or the laws of UX. For god’s sake, please don't do that 🙏🏼. If you go ahead mentioning all the steps or all the laws with a title and some supporting text, no one in the world will understand it. Don’t share high-level design knowledge. Instagram is NOT the platform to do that. Content has to be easily consumable. Just because you have valuable information doesn’t mean that it's valuable for others. It becomes valuable only if it’s easily consumable. I’m sure that it would get you of likes and comments, but you will hardly get any follows. Even if you do, it would definitely not help you get 10K follows in less than a month. People might not appreciate your effort. People might not recommend you to others. You will be perceived as ‘just’ another designer. You don’t want that to happen. “What do I do instead?” Well, there are 4 ways of making content valuable. Go small Always pick a niche topic. Something that is very small and specific. Dig deeper. For example, pick one of the steps of the design sprint or one of the laws of UX and stretch that out as much as you can. Drill down to the smallest concept. People find it super easy to consume that. That is exactly what I did.

https://uxplanet.org/secret-formula-to-get-10k-followers-on-instagram-in-one-month-as-a-designer-9d79886d82d5

['Chethan Kvs']

2020-06-15 07:22:42.902000+00:00

['Social Media', 'UI Design', 'Instagram', 'UX Design', 'Design']

Aso Villa Reads for Mon. 23/11/2020

Every day, we bring you the best stories that the Media is reporting about the Government of Nigeria The current recession, which the Nigerian economy recently slid into, will be short-lived, the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Mrs Zainab Ahmed, has said. Ahmed said this on Monday at the ongoing 26th Nigerian Economic Summit organised by the Nigerian Economic Summit Group and the Federal Ministry of Finance, Budget, and National Planning. She said the country would emerge from the recession in the fourth quarter of this year or by the first quarter of 2021. [Punch] The Minister of Aviation, Hadi Sirika, has received the first batch of three training aircraft for the Nigeria College of Aviation Technology, Zaria, Kaduna State. Sirika, who disclosed this on his Twitter handle on Sunday, added that there was no better aviation safety than having well trained and proficient aviators. According to him, training will now be more efficient, faster and cheaper. [Punch] As the Buhari administration continues to roll out schemes aimed at bringing relief to businesses and individuals across different sectors, a cross section of beneficiaries of the Payroll Support scheme are excited at the receipt of N30,000 and N50,000 alerts of salaries under the MSMEs Survival Fund, a component under the Economic Sustainability Plan, ESP. According to the Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity to the President, Office of the Vice President, Mr. Laolu Akande, so far, 101,567 employees from 16,250 businesses have received their first monthly payment from the Survival Fund’s Payroll Support Scheme. [Vanguard] The Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Liquified Natural Gas, Tony Attah, has said that at least 55 per cent of the scope of work on the newly signed Train 7 project of the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas Limited, NLNG will be domesticated in Nigeria to create an additional 50,000 jobs in the country. Attah said the move was to demonstrate to the world that Nigerian companies’ capacity and personnel in the oil and gas sector had improved to handle high end technical projects following the efforts of the Nigeria Content Development and Monitoring Board. The MD said the Train 7 project would create 12,000 direct jobs and 40,000 indirect jobs. On his part, NCDMB ES. Wabote said that the Federal Government was finalising plans to site a 500 barrel per day capacity modular refinery in Imo state to boost local content in the South-East. [Punch] The Federal Government has secured $2m each for the 36 states of the federation to develop their land information system through a World Bank funded programme. Minister of Science and Technology, Ogbonaya Onu, disclosed this in Abuja at the Geoinformation Society of Nigeria 2020 Annual Conference. The minister noted that the effort would help generate about 50,000 employments for youths in the various states. [Punch] The Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Power, Mr Chinyeaka Ohaa, has said the Federal Government will continue to support the growth of local meter manufacturers in the country. Ohaa noted that the Federal Government had launched an initiative to accelerate meter rollout in the power sector, saying the Central Bank of Nigeria had decided to fund the provision of six million meters. He said the government remained committed to encouraging local meter manufacturing. [Punch] Julius Berger Plc has reassured the use of highest international quality materials and timely completion of second Niger Bridge despite the challenges being faced , just as President Muhammadu Buhari has endorsed the progress of work being progressively achieved at the Second Niger Bridge saying that, “the project is on course irrespective of initial teething problems that occasioned some loss of time.” The Honourable Minister of works and housing, Babatunde Fashola, SAN, who represented the President, spoke in Asaba weekend at the inspection/town hall meeting on the landmark priority project stating that 2022 remains the completion period. [Vanguard]

https://medium.com/@theasovilla/aso-villa-reads-for-mon-23-11-2020-d0aebf9687c

['Government Of Nigeria']

2020-11-23 15:17:20.044000+00:00

['Nigeria', 'Governance', 'Aviation', 'Economy', 'Infrastructure']

A history of Supply Side

Photo by Marc Schäfer on Unsplash Before 1980, Democratic and Republican President had essentially all worked under the same underlying assumptions about the economy. All of them believed government investment was an antidote to recession, an economic worldview popularized by John Maynard Keynes after concluding this is what had helped the US get out of the Great Depression. Both Democratic and Republican Presidents believed in massive government jobs programs and welfare spending. Eisenhower did this through the Interstate Highway System, and having the Republicans essentially adopt the support of FDR’s various programs. Kennedy and Johnson pursued the same policy through the New Frontier and Great Society programs they championed. Richard Nixon proposed a universal health care system and universal basic income in addition to strengthening existing welfare programs. With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, American economic policy was changed forever. A new economic philosophy known as supply side economics became a major part of the Republican agenda. Supply side economics aimed to reduce taxes on income, capital gains and corporations. The theory behind doing so was a belief that the freed up money would then be invested in the economy through expansion of business. These cuts in revenue to the federal government would then be used as the reason to reduce spending on government programs, a strategy known as “starving the beast”. Although intellectually inconsistent, some supply side ideologues also believe that the economic growth caused by lowering taxes actually results in more taxable income for the government. In addition to tax and spending changes, Reagan also adopted a stance of deregulation under the belief that regulations were slowing economic growth. Before Reagan, these ideas were met with skepticism even from within his own party. Richard Nixon had famously declared “We are all Keynesians now”. President Gerald Ford had strongly criticized much of Reagan’s agenda in 1976, and President George H.W Bush referred to the ideas presented by Reagan as “voodoo economics”. By the time Reagan had left office the economy was booming. The US was a averaging more than 3 percent growth yearly, Unemployment had decreased, as had rates of poverty and inflation. 21 million new jobs were created during Reagan’s time in office, the second largest peacetime expansion of the US economy ever. However, America began to face different economic challenges. Under 8 years of Reagan, the national debt tripled. The US went from being the world’s largest creditor country, to the most indebted country on Earth. Wages for middle class and poor workers were stagnant. Most of the biggest economic gains benefited the wealthiest. A series of deregulatory legislation passed in the early 80s had led to the Savings and Loan Crisis-the biggest failure of financial institutions since the great Depression. Throughout this time, Democrats had been taking political note, and put together a political group called the Democratic Leadership Council. The DLC was created in 1985 to pave the way for Democrats to retake the White House, and two of it’s biggest backers were Bill Clinton and Al Gore. The DLC was an attempt to moderate the Democratic Party, particularly through economic issues. When Bill Clinton was President, he arguably pursued the same agenda as Ronald Reagan. Clinton muscled through the biggest cuts to welfare by any sitting President in 1996, promoted the elimination of as many tariffs as possible, Clinton also entered the United States into the North American Free Trade Agreement and World Trade Organization, two trade agreements championed by supply-siders. President Clinton catered to the business community through legislation such as the Digital Millennium Copyrights Act. Clinton and the Republican Congress then passed a bill so dangerous it essentially caused the Great Recession of 2008 single handedly. The bill, known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 deregulated financial institutions, repealing safeguards put into law after the Great Depression. The most significant rollback was Glass-Steagall-a 1933 law that forbade commercial and investment banks from using the same pool of capital for investments. When Bush came to office, similar politics played out. Bush cut regulations, making it much easier for banks to take out risky loans and had placed voices sympathetic to Wall Street at the heads of major governmental regulatory bodies like the FDIC and SEC. Decades of deregulation and tax cuts led to a major problem in 2008, when financial markets collapsed, and the US credit rating was downgraded in 2011 for the first time ever, due to massive debt. In response to the crisis, Obama adopted an approach that attempted to reconcile the supply siders and Keynesians. Obama adopted the mostly Republican idea of tax cuts and investment, but also maintained a public works program in the same Stimulus bill. The Stimulus was composed of about $300 billion in tax cuts and 500 billion in new spending. Later in his term, Obama would pass an additional $400 billion in other tax cuts. Obama also echoed the supply side line by making 95 percent of the Bush tax cuts permanent. Obama would show other supply side tendencies in pushing for the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal, and cutting the yearly deficit by about 60 percent. Obama tried to balance out his more free market ideas with the politically Keynesian ideas of new regulation and the passage of the Affordable Care Act. The new regulations put in place by Obama were in a bill known as Dodd-Frank. Dodd-Frank was the most sweeping regulatory bill since 1938, and was seen as an attempt to put in place safeguards against another Great Recession. It stablished oversight of banks that pose systemic risk to the broader economy, closely monitored the derivatives market (a financial instrument that was a major component of the 2008 crash), the tightening of regulation on credit ratings agencies (the agencies had colluded with banking institutions before 2008) and the creation of the Consumer Protection Bureau (a body designed to identify financial fraud directed at consumers). Later added to the bill was the Volcker Rule, essentially a watered down version of the previously aforementioned Glass-Steagall Act. With Trump in office, many of these safeguards that prevent a market crash have been slowly whittled away. The consumer protection bureau is now run by an appointee who doesn’t want it to exist. Democrats joined Republicans in rolling back bank “stress tests” that show whether or not a bank poses systemic economic risk. Derivatives are no longer as widely regulated as intended under the bill, and Republicans in the House have passed a full scale repeal. As a result, we’re already seeing investment banks as highly leveraged as they were in in the 1920’s and late 2000’s. When the economy is doing well, deregulation and general supply side economics usually win all the political battles. In this respect 2018 was no different. The sad reality is that after years of deregulation, the US almost always sees a massive economic crash. Recessions themselves happen generally every ten years. With these facts in mind, it’s likely we’ll face a recession before the next Presidential term-whether it be Trump or a Democratic successor.

https://zacharytoillion.medium.com/a-history-of-supply-side-ae07abb93c82

['Zach Toillion']

2019-05-07 17:36:00.815000+00:00

['Economics', 'Republican Party', 'Trickle Down Economics', 'Politics', 'Supply Side Economics']

Coach! Want to Transition Online? Read This…

Bledsoe simply stood there. Huge smile on his face He looked like a kid in a candy shop Or a middle aged man who was high-on life and observing another human about the have a breakthrough Take your pick… I’d just expressed my desire to transition my focus from The Youth Academy and it’s Brick-and-Mortar System to an Online Business “I feel like I’m starting again”… That’s what had Mike about to laugh “Are you? Truly though… Are you starting again? Is that accurate?” No. It wasn’t. It was a story I was telling myself A lie Now I knew what was so funny — I was sabotaging myself The truth is that the principles are always applicable. The environment and vehicle may change when shifting from offline to online — but the principles stay the same Do one and you can do the other I took what I’d learned from building The Academy to 6-Figures inside a year and applied them online We sold-out our Beta Group inside a week with no advertising We formed strong relationships with powerful coaches to serve their communities We created amazing content We created an amazing experience We stayed consistent with our intent and focus And we saw traction and momentum that allowed for a smooth transition The key for coaches looking to transition online is to breathe. It will be overwhelming. You will think you need to do it all First, it’s about identifying systems Client Experience + Delivery Leads + Marketing + Onboarding Relationships From our experience — begin with the client experience and delivery. NOT the specific content, but more the flow What’s it like to work with you? From Day 1 to the end, what are all the touch points? What are all the value ads? What do you want me to feel? How can you convert me from a client to a lifelong friend? Where are our clients showing up? What are they interested in? What are their pains and problems? How can we get a conversation with them? When we do, what’s the system that moves them from simply being interested to buying? What content can we produce to support this? Who can I connect with online that supports my ideal clients in a way that compliments the work I do? Can I connect with them, build a relationship and seek to offer value to their clients/community as a way of lead gen? Then, it’s patience and tweaking. It’s testing assumptions, testing strategies and evolving them to better the execution It’s not rocket science. It can be overwhelming because it’s new — but the truth is you’ve done this before. It’s scary because the perspective can be that you’re now “competing” with the world — not simply your local community That’s bullshit. There is no competition. Life is abundant Take the first step. Gather momentum. Have patience and focus on your communication Nick Maier @nickmaier__

https://medium.com/@nick-maier/coach-want-to-transition-online-read-this-8ab654fd6ec1

['Nick Maier']

2020-12-25 22:11:55.867000+00:00

['Health And Fitness', 'Communication', 'Words', 'Marketing Communication', 'Copywriting']

I Found It! — A Simple Game for Zoom

I Found It! — A Simple Game for Zoom The game is called “I Found It!”. I pre-documented the basic procedures so that players can follow easily: We open zoom (with video) and a Google doc We come up with a list of objects together (reachable in home) 3, 2, 1 — — we go find it and bring it back to video The first of us who brings it back and types “1” in the chatbox wins for this round. The person who first wins for 3 rounds wins the game. (Exact number depends on number of players) The game can finish in 5 minutes, and is suitable for 2 players(or more, but some adjustments needed) Observations During the actual playtest, I also joined so there were 3 players in total. We came up with 3 objects as listed, due to the time limit: Spoon🥄 Coffee mug☕️ Eraser♦️ And we playtested on “spoon”. It turned out to be a lot of fun, with “3,2,1,start” and we all launched ourselves like a rocket and rushed towards the kitchen to fetch a spoon. One of us who lived in a studio and sitted several feets from the kitchen won the round. One observation that I think makes this game a lot of fun is that I added the rule “types 1 in the chatbox”. This way, not only you have to be familiar with the locations of objects, but also familiar with Zoom so that you can type when you are finished asap. I actually lost the game because I was a bit slower than our winner. Another one is that the essence of this game is competition, and winning or losing in a competition can bring participants strong feelings — either the joy of win, or the desire to win for another round. This simple and straightforward core of competition makes the game attractive.

https://medium.com/game-design-fundamentals/i-found-it-a-simple-game-for-zoom-8c7cc7b6fc99

['Gloria Liu']

2020-10-06 11:20:01.632000+00:00

['Games', 'Zoom', 'Zoom Game']

Brief Verses for the Sleepers

Photo by Fabian Oelkers on Unsplash Tick, tick, tick tock, the cradle will rock all of whom who don’t give a fock — Deep in slumber they remain, Removed from each pain of not thinking, of not knowing who they are and what they be doing — They who do not give a fock for their bough-breaking methods of being themselves, make no reason to jump out of their rock and into bookshelves.

https://medium.com/@iffahjas/brief-verses-for-the-sleepers-e7bf72648aae

['Iffah Suraya Jasni']

2020-12-26 02:20:34.603000+00:00

['Self-awareness', 'Poetry', 'Honesty', 'Authentic Living', 'Vulnerability']

Top 20 poems of 2020

Top 20 poems of 2020 At Millennial Poets, we believe in the power of poetry. We honor poetry for its ability to change us, to make us feel less alone, to see us, to help us breathe easier, or to give us the words to finally name that feeling that has held us spellbound. Not ever has anyone needed more poetry than this year of our Lord, 2020. Hence, we honor these poets and their words that got us through it. Love Letters to My Failures by Maryann Samreth. Written before the global pandemic, this poem has served as an affirmation for the troubled year and the unknown of the coming year. https://medium.com/millennial-poets/love-letters-to-my-failures-99014484f413 To Rise Like a Phoenix by Natalie Jeane Maddy - who reminded us that change is the only constant thing, and we must give way to self rebirth, time and time again. https://medium.com/millennial-poets/to-rise-like-a-phoenix-90b7020e4bf0 Until Tomorrow Covid-19 Haiku Chronicles by John Ross. Beautiful Haikus and imagery that made social distancing a bit less lonely. https://medium.com/millennial-poets/until-tomorrow-covid-19-haiku-chronicles-b7123d241752 My Coping Mechanisms For This Pandemic Are Failing by Andrew Beso. A poem and a rant that captured the angst of quarantine. https://medium.com/millennial-poets/my-coping-mechanisms-for-this-pandemic-are-failing-6378fa1b63a6 Tiny Little Miracles by Scott B. Heaton. A wholesome poem of how we are more alike than not. https://medium.com/millennial-poets/tiny-little-miracles-d7744a9060c0 Flirty Desire by Hung Phung. A beautiful homage to Spring. https://medium.com/millennial-poets/flirty-desire-65d025918f70 The State of Humanity in Post-Quarantine by Karen Tang. A prose poem that’s imaginining a near future we all long for. https://medium.com/millennial-poets/brief-thoughts-on-the-state-of-humanity-in-post-quarantine-a29beb3377e6 How Life Works by Dayton O’Donnell. A beautiful, lyrical poem that shows us life is all about connection. https://medium.com/millennial-poets/how-life-works-45a94d06fb6e Beyond by Robin Khatri. Robin imagined beyond our present, and for that we are grateful. https://medium.com/millennial-poets/beyond-d6ab7ed54e96 Recipe for Happiness by Ramalingam Monisha. The best cheesy poem you’ll read all year. https://medium.com/millennial-poets/recipe-for-happiness-5efb3fae5243 The Day I Moved into My Body by Oakley Roberts. Simply beautiful and profound. https://medium.com/millennial-poets/the-day-i-moved-into-my-body-ab917d9c43d Moonlighting by Charlie J. Mitchelli. Questions and answers that reminds us we are not alone. https://medium.com/millennial-poets/moonlighting-bfe550eedc12 A lullaby by Nerdqueen1767. Mental health irony drips here. https://medium.com/millennial-poets/a-lullaby-5e20626f9f3 A Mother’s Gift by Herlina M. As beautiful and original as a mother’s love. https://medium.com/millennial-poets/a-mothers-gift-ae9e315aca7b A Haiku on Writing by Oakley Roberts. I’m a fan of Oakley Roberts, you should be too. ://medium.com/millennial-poets/a-haiku-on-writing-b0007938d7b9 Drifting away from you by Karen Tang. It wouldn’t be Millennialpoetry without unrequited love. https://medium.com/millennial-poets/drifting-away-from-you-15dca25cc78a The Lights Went Out by Natalie Jeanne Maddy. Struggling with depression? You’re not alone. ://medium.com/millennial-poets/the-lights-went-out-45ef0a7fad07 my mother in a coffee shop by Maddie Lovern. Achingly delightful. https://medium.com/@maddielovern/my-mother-in-a-coffee-shop-dd270a3c59e4 The Door is Open by Talor Moran. If you read nothing at all, read the last line. Profound. https://medium.com/millennial-poets/the-door-is-open-e3a06fb01307 New Year’s Poem by Sean Zukerman written on 31st of 2019 and published on January 2020 is an evergreen summon for the hopes of a new year. https://medium.com/millennial-poets/new-years-poem-c2ba5dd83d86 I hope in rereading these poems you find respite for this year and hope for the coming one. Cheers to a better 2021, Busayo Oyewole Editor, MillennialPoets

https://medium.com/millennial-poets/top-20-poems-of-2020-fc7bcd1395ed

['Millennial Poets']

2020-12-27 11:23:35.495000+00:00

['2020', 'Poem', 'Poems On Medium', 'Millennials', 'Poetry']

Use design to prototype your revenue Model and pricing

The revenue model and pricing options need to be designed focusing on the customer experience. You need to make money to keep sharing your offer, your product or service with the world. Once you validated your business value proposition, and you are sure that it solves a unique problem by offerings a service or a product, you need to think about how could you make money with what you offer. Think about how could people pay you to buy your product or service. Make it easy for them thinking about their experience through the payment process for example. Payment is an important touchpoint of customer experience. How customers will pay you represent your revenue model and how much they will pay you is the price. Your revenue model and prices needs to be designed, prototyped and then tested with target customers. Keep in mind your customer experience. To make your revenue model more customer centered flip the questions: Instead of asking what’s the easiest way for your business to get paid, start by asking what’s the easiest way for our customers to pay? Prototype different possibilities, get them out and test them with your customers, get insights and decide on the best revenue model and pricing that makes your customer happier, enjoy the payment experience and see more value. Doing that you can generate more value for your business and serve better your customers.

https://medium.com/@mabrouk-thabet/make-your-business-financially-sustainable-by-3819d54289d0

['Thabet Mabrouk']

2020-12-21 15:12:13.413000+00:00

['Design Thinking', 'Business Development', 'Business Strategy', 'Design', 'Business']

Mobile Wallets

You may or may not already know that wallets are required to store your cryptocurrency in a secure location that is not on the exchange. We’ve discussed using software and hardware wallets already, but what about when it comes to using mobile wallets? These are an alternative to other forms of keeping your digital assets secure, and can even be a bit more convenient when it comes to using it in everyday situations. You’re most likely on your phone all the time already, so why not use it to keep track of and access your cryptocurrency? Let’s go over how to use and set up mobile wallets. This is not financial investment advice. This article will touch upon key aspects of how to use and set up mobile wallets. In this article Terminology Mobile Wallet: A software program where Bitcoins are stored. To be technically accurate, Bitcoins are not stored anywhere; there is a private key (secret number) for every Bitcoin address that is saved in the Bitcoin wallet of the person who owns the balance. Public Key: A public key is a cryptographic code that allows a user to receive cryptocurrencies into his or her account. The public key coupled with the private key are significant tools required to ensure the security of the crypto economy. Private Key: A private key is a sophisticated form of cryptography that allows a user to access his or her cryptocurrency. A private key is an integral aspect of bitcoin and altcoins, and its security make up helps to protect a user from theft and unauthorized access to funds. Blockchain: The easiest way to understand blockchain is to think of it as a fully transparent and continuously updated record of the exchange of information through a network of personal computers, a system which nobody fully owns. This makes it decentralized and extremely difficult for anyone to single-handedly hack or corrupt the system, pretty much guaranteeing full validity and trust in each exchange of information. Familiarize yourself with these key terms to better understand how to use and set up mobile wallets. What Are Mobile Wallets? Mobile wallets are pretty similar to software wallets in the sense that they’re both ways to store your cryptocurrency outside of just keeping it on an exchange. However, these mobile wallets don’t actually store your cryptocurrency. Instead, they store your private and public keys and interact with various blockchains to enable users to send and receive digital currency and monitor their balance. If you want to use Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency, you will need to have a digital wallet. Millions of people use cryptocurrency wallets, but there is a considerable misunderstanding about how they work. Unlike traditional “pocket” wallets, digital wallets don’t store currency. In fact, currencies don’t get stored in any single location or exist anywhere in any physical form. All that exists are records of transactions stored on the blockchain. Mobile wallets give you the ability to do all of this at the convenience of your fingertips, giving you the most accessible cryptocurrency storing experience. To be able to spend your “coins” in the wallet and unlock the funds, the private key that’s stored must match the public address the currency is assigned to. If both the public and private keys match, the balance in your digital wallet will increase, and the senders will decrease accordingly. As such, mobile wallets remove the hassle of having to sign in on your computer and gives you all your cryptocurrency in one place on your phone. Mobile wallets are apps or software that you can use on your mobile device to manage, access, and send your cryptocurrency. Remember, the actual cryptocurrency isn’t stored here, but it’s public and private keys. Pros & Cons Compared to other forms of keeping your cryptocurrency secure, mobile wallets have a few advantages and disadvantages which you should consider before making any decisions. For those actively using any popular cryptocurrency on a daily basis, paying for goods in shops or trading them face-to-face, a mobile wallet is an essential tool. It runs as an app on your smartphone, storing your private keys and allowing you to pay for things directly from your phone, making your whole payment process that much easier and quicker. Moreover, some apps enable users to use their smartphones’ near-field communication feature, which means that they can simply tap their phone against the reader, without having to provide any information at all. This makes transferring your assets much easier and efficient, giving anyone who uses a mobile wallet an advantage when it comes to transferring their assets in a timely manner. Despite being a convenient on-the-go solution for cryptocurrency storage, mobile wallets are also very prone to hacker attacks. On top of that, you can also lose control of your wallet if someone simply gains access to your mobile device. There’s a large variety of cryptocurrency wallet apps for whichever device you use, so choosing the one that suits your needs the best is completely based on personal preference. While some apps do have features that others don’t, all mobile wallets essentially do the same thing. Mobile wallets are much more accessible than other kinds of software wallets, as these can be accessed straight from your phone. Conversely, this also makes them prone to hacks if someone gains access to your phone. How to Set Up A Mobile Wallet Step 1: Open up your app store and search for the mobile wallet application that you deem is the best for your situation. Step 2: Download, install, launch the app and read over the terms of service before confirming. Step 3: A quick step by step visual guide will walk you through how to use the app. A follow-up prompt will request you to create a wallet and assign it a name. Step 4: Next, set a secure password and confirm it. Store it safely, do not lose it and do not share it. Step 5: Once created, it’s important to backup your wallet. Store it safely, do not lose it and do not share it. You cannot recover your password and back your wallet up if you lose them, so keep them safe. Congratulations! You have successfully created a mobile wallet! Conclusion Mobile wallets are a revolutionary innovation to the already advanced cryptocurrency industry. Storing, accessing, and managing your digital assets has never been easier and anyone who owns cryptocurrency should most definitely consider whether or not having a mobile wallet is the right decision for them. Moving forward, keep an eye out for further developments in this space, as keeping your digital assets secure is one of the most important things to do for every investor.

https://medium.com/coinbundle/mobile-wallets-4c9898c9311c

['Coinbundle Team']

2018-10-10 22:15:59.462000+00:00

['Beginnerscoinbundle', 'Wallet', 'Investing', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Bitcoin']

Breathing in the Brisk Brussels Air

About the author: Sarah Saboorian ’21 is an FSI The Europe Center Intern at Bruegel in Brussels, Belgium. The day I arrived in Brussels it was 111º fahrenheit (or 44º Celsius as many workplace debates surrounding the superiority of the metric system have conditioned me to say). However, the sweltering heat in the city did not put a damper on my excitement to start working at Bruegel, an economic policy think-tank focusing on recommendations to the European Union. I spent the weekend before my first day meandering the streets, visiting the famous Grand Palace where I stuffed myself with waffles and fries, and even hitting two local farmers markets that occur on Sundays only, where I stocked up on produce for the week. On my walk to Grand Palace the weekend I arrived. Brussels’ weather is quite temperamental. I was lucky enough to fall into my workplace routine quite quickly. Upon my arrival I was assigned to do research on the EU-China trade relationship, looking into everything from the Belt and Road Initiative to data flows to obstacles to an investment agreement. I learned so much so quickly, and the project was made even more relevant to me as during the course of my research the U.S. announced 10% tariffs on $300 billion of Chinese imports, the S&P declined as a result, and the yuan also weakened. To be able to see the applications of what I was learning firsthand and to tangibly feel my heightened understanding of the news surrounding the trade war was extremely rewarding. Kyra, another Stanford intern, and I at our office in Brussels. The pace of life here is notably different from the United States (even my home state of California) which has been an adjustment I more than welcomed. At Bruegel, this manifests itself in extended lunch time discussions with co-workers from around the world, including two other Stanford interns, to frequent trips to the office kitchen for biscuits. My walks to and from work have also become a relaxing constant in life here, made even more pleasant by the fact that the sun does not set until 9:30 (read 21:30). Given the central location of Brussels within Europe, I have also been lucky enough to travel during the weekends, having stopped in Berlin and Brugge and Dinant (two small Belgian towns) thus far, with more travel planned for the future!

https://medium.com/freeman-spogli-institute-for-international-studies/breathing-in-the-brisk-brussels-air-c7c601ed7db7

['Fsi Student Programs']

2019-09-11 17:10:17.276000+00:00

['Tecfsi', 'Brussels', 'Travel', 'Internships', 'Fsi Students']

Hey, 9–1–1, Fat People Aren’t Punchlines

Hey, 9–1–1, Fat People Aren’t Punchlines Just another daily reminder my body is something to be laughed at. Sometimes, I expect the moments and storylines that remind me that my body is the wrong kind of body. Sometimes the buildup to a fat joke is obvious. Other times it comes out of nowhere, and I sigh in exasperation as something I’m enjoying turns into something happening at my expense. 9–1–1 is one of my favorite new shows. It’s got just the right amount of the disaster-movie feel I’m a sucker for, unusual-verging-on-ridiculous emergencies, and a touch of sweet character development. Plus, who can resist a show with Peter Krause and Angela Basset? The scene snuck up on me during last week’s episode, “Careful What You Wish For.” A group of students are touring a chocolate factory with two teachers. One male, one female, neither plus sized. The woman says to the man in a quiet voice, “Are you sure you’re okay being here? Isn’t it like an alcoholic being at a liquor factory?” As soon as the words come out of her mouth, I know where it’s going. There is only one place it COULD be going. Even though this guy is no longer fat, there’s still a fat joke to be made. Not even a new one. The same one I’ve heard a thousand times about how fat-asses are that way because they can’t control themselves around food. He replies that he worked hard to lose 150 pounds and can control himself. Except then he tastes the ‘chocolate liquor’ everyone is sampling, and he can’t resist it. As “I Want Candy” by the Bow Wow Wows plays cheerfully in the background, he climbs up the catwalk and strains to dip his sample cup into the sweet, hot liquid. I’m sure you can guess what happens next- his hand slips and he falls and becomes stuck in the vat of chocolate. Of course, the heroes of the 118 show up and help him out. But not before the episode is pretty much ruined for me. Yes, of course, people fall into vats at factories. It happens, probably more often than we think. I can also think of a dozen ways it could have happened other than gluttony. A child spilled their sample, and someone slipped. Someone dropped something, and when they bent to pick it up, another worker turned and knocked them in. A faulty railing bent or broke. It gets worse. As they carry him away, the former-fat confesses: “They were right, I had no willpower. I had lap-band surgery.” When the scene ends, I expect to be mad. It only takes a moment to realize I’m more irritated. I see this type of scene and hear this type of joke every single day. Daily reminders of the truth that society believes fat people are out of control food-freaks who can’t reign themselves in to save their own lives. That even if we do manage to lose weight and become acceptable, on the inside we will always be undisciplined, ravenous losers willing to do anything for a bite of something tasty. How did the writers decide that the best way for this scene to play out was to add humor by making fun of fat people? As they sat in the writer’s room writing dialogue, how did they decide to make it clear that the only way someone could lose weight was by radical surgery, and that all it would take was one taste of sweet, sweet candy for them risk their well being to get it? It would have been easy for them to create a less fat-phobic conversation and keep the novelty of a guy nearly drowning in a vat of chocolate. It may have taken a little more skill, a little more energy, but why bother? So many people seem perfectly happy to laugh at the expense of bigger bodies, regardless of the damage it may do to our psyches. Fat jokes in movies and on TV are almost always extraneous. Rarely necessary to the actual story, they’re dull, unoriginal interjections at the expense of people like me. How many times do we have to insist that we are not here for the entertainment of people who take up less space than we do? I’m so, so tired of saying the same thing over and over. I’m tired of having to defend my right to exist as something other than a punchline. It’s not okay. Sometimes, it feels like I’m screaming into the void. But I’m not going to stop. I will shout and argue and write until the end of time because people like me deserve to be more than jokes. It’s time for Hollywood to do better. You might also enjoy…

https://medium.com/fattitude/hey-9-1-1-fat-people-arent-punchlines-83bf6046909b

['Rachael Hope']

2020-05-09 23:42:34.495000+00:00

['Body Image', 'Society', 'Culture', 'TV Series', 'Entertainment']

We Watch the Coronavirus Wreak Havoc…

Pandemics are horrible and scary. They spread chaos and wreak havoc, forcing entire cities down on their knees; they spread across continents and soon engulf the world. This is true, and I’m not here to downplay their obvious importance. But like all villains, they also have another devious super-power: Hogging the spotlight. Let me turn off that light switch for just a minute, and start with a statistic you may or may not be aware of. This is current information taken directly from the CDC, regarding the 2019–2020 flu season. You read that right; 8,200 reported deaths so far, this season alone. What’s more, these statistics only include the United States and Puerto Rico. I shudder to think of what those numbers might look like if they comprised the entire world. And what about this report from CBC News: Shouldn’t numbers like that be considered an epidemic as well? Or does the virus have to be ‘new’ to get that title? It kind of makes you wonder. Well, it makes me wonder. Now, I’m not by any means attempting to downplay this situation; I myself have friends who are being directly affected by this outbreak in China. I feel sincere sorrow for anyone who’s lost a loved one to this virus, and I hope and pray that anyone currently infected will be able to pull through and fully recover. I’m simply trying to bring attention to the fact that as bad as the Coronavirus is, it isn’t the only virus killing people. But I guess that just like a new starlet on the silver screen, these things stop being news-worthy and tend to fade in importance as the years pass, and we begin to turn a blind eye to what’s happening in our own backyards. H1N1 and his little friends are no longer the new kids in town, so even though they’re still taking thousands of lives every year, they’re relegated to the back of the classroom. It saddens me to know that in this age of modern medicine where we’re blessed to have a cure for nearly every disease, so many people are still dying of complications from viruses we consider ‘common’, such as influenza. Should something really be considered common if it has the power to take so many lives year after year?

https://medium.com/the-partnered-pen/we-watch-the-coronavirus-wreak-havoc-555887247eab

['Edie Tuck']

2020-01-28 20:13:47+00:00

['Pandemic', 'Illness', 'Virus', 'Coronavirus', 'Vaccines']

Can you facilitate a Coderetreat as a Scrum Master?

What is a Coderetreat and how did I learn about it? GDCR describes a Coderetreat as “a day-long, intensive practice event, focusing on the fundamentals of software development and design, away from the pressures of getting things done”. The first time I heard about Coderetreat was while I was the Scrum Master in a development team of 8 developers continuously working on a new product that was released 6 months before. Crunch time was over and as we definitely had some technical debt already we wanted to shift our focus more to software quality and how to increase it. Back then there was the idea to start this with a team internal Coderetreat. We got the idea from Code Cop Peter Kofler, who offered to facilitate the Coderetreat together with me. Since then we pair-facilitated many Coderetreats more. I was very glad to get invited recently as a guest in his Coderetreat facilitation podcast, where we discussed what to look for and ask about as a non-coder. This discussion triggered me to write this blog post and share my experiences of facilitation as a Scrum Master with very little coding experience. My experience with Coderetreat facilitation So our goal was to shift our team’s focus more towards code quality. We needed a kick-off to start the integration of hands-on training and practice to our usual working routines. Therefore it was important to create not only a safe place outside our regular work but also a fun atmosphere. A Coderetreat was perfect for this kick-off and back then we already thought about repeating it every three to six months and maybe inviting also guests. I prepared myself by reading The Codingdojo Handbook by Emily Bache and also participated at some Randoris that were organised by some of our developers already. And of course, I read all about the format, Conway’s Game of Life and the most common constraints. At the beginning of my first Coderetreat, I was a silent observer. Peter started with the intro, focusing mostly on the coding dojo mindset and a rough description of the Game of Life. Then we started to collect learning topics, most of them were about TDD and code quality. During the first sessions, I had no clue what to look for. Neither was I able to follow the discussions of the pairs nor how they wanted to solve the problem. As they started writing code I could not read it and got no idea of their approach. Nevertheless, Peter asked me what I had observed at the end of every session so I had to come up with something. Then I realized that even without understanding WHAT the pairs were doing I got a feeling of HOW they were doing. Was a pair stuck with big questions or did they make progress? Did they have troubles understanding the problem or the constraint or were the already in a good flow and completed first steps? Was there some planning on paper or text files or did they start hacking some code immediately? At some point, I also recognized a bit of what was happening on their screens. How many unit tests did a pair write? Unit tests red or green? Did they start with the cell or the grid? At some point, I even recognized some repeating patterns like the use of two-dimensional arrays. I shared these observations with Peter and together we discussed what we should ask in the retrospective, how we should shape the next session and with which constraint we would continue. Especially the selection of constraints was tough for me as many of them are difficult to understand as a non-coder, there I needed Peter’s support. But I felt comfortable in the retrospectives and had some ideas for improving the setting or environment as well. Probably because these were the more familiar areas for me as a Scrum Master. After facilitating multiple Coderetreats, I am now more comfortable with observing what is going on in the sessions. Therefore, I managed to shift my attention even more towards the retrospectives as I am doing now. What learnings or ideas do I recognize at the pairs? What should I ask so that they will come up with these topics and share them with the other pairs? How can I push the discussion during the retrospective so that the pairs participate actively and not only listen to the solution of other pairs? Somehow, I try to predict the outcome of the retrospective and to ask the right questions so that interesting topics get shared. But very often the answers are completely different than expected and this is also great! Surprises are always a good sign for learning opportunities. It is still challenging for me to select constraints that fit the desired learning topics of the participants. Therefore I am glad to have a co-facilitator with coding experience by my side so that we can share our ideas, discuss them and decide together how to proceed. It also helps me when my co-facilitator can explain the different solutions of pairs to me or helps me realize that all of them follow the same approach. That would be a sign for us to choose a constraint that forces them to go for a different way. Pair facilitation also gives us the possibility to split into groups for the intro or the retrospectives. In a smaller group, the participants need to be more active and we can share the results with the other group afterwards. My biggest learnings from Coderetreats For my role as Scrum Master observation is an important skill. Facilitating Coderetreats is a great way to train this skill, especially the intense focus on coding is interesting. As a non-developer, it can be hard to understand the daily challenges of coding and Coderetreats help me a lot to improve in this area. Now I can see the crafting aspect of coding and also the broad range of different approaches and solutions for coding problems. It is also a new and unfamiliar environment for retrospective facilitation. While you are still able to use familiar formats and techniques, the topics are very different from usual. While we tend to talk about collaboration between development and business at our sprint retrospectives, the Coderetreat retrospectives are much more about technical quality, practices and mind-set. This forces me to stay in a strict coaching role, as I am not able to act as a trainer in these topics. But again, this is a good way to learn more about coding and that helps me to better understand developers. Another thing at Coderetreats is that there are always unexpected things that happen. Issues with the setup, participants dropping out or delay of the lunch delivery are just some of them. Surprises are part of the format and we want an open mind-set, this should also apply for me as a facilitator. So I always try to welcome these surprises and see them as a chance for learning, even if they are not wanted. Therefore I have to resist my first urge to immediately solve, remove or reject a surprising problem and allow me to spend a moment and getting fully aware of it instead. Maybe there is a good learning opportunity. So, can you facilitate a Coderetreat as a Scrum Master? My answer is definitely yes. It helps a lot to have a co-facilitator with experience on your side, at least for your first Coderetreat. Accept that you are feeling a bit lost, especially during the first sessions. Ask yourself what you are observing multiple times during each session. Take an active part in the moderation of the retrospectives as this will be more familiar and you will gain some confidence. Try to improve your understanding of coding and don’t be shy of reading code, you will get more used to it at Coderetreats. And be prepared for surprises, they are part of every Coderetreat.

https://medium.com/swlh/can-you-facilitate-a-coderetreat-as-a-scrum-master-f18a39274560

['Oliver Spann']

2020-04-30 16:19:11.078000+00:00

['Scrum Master', 'Software Development', 'Code Retreat', 'Agile', 'Coding']

Excelling in The Construction Business

Many have come into the construction business with determination to succeed but have had to close shop within the first 18 months of doing business. It is not easy for startups to compete with major captains of industry especially if they are unwilling to take on ambitious projects and with sheer cutting-edge innovation. Even then, they are not guaranteed to succeed as big risks are not always rewarded. So how do the big wigs of the Mexican construction scene do it? Here is an insider view of the features that make a great construction company like Grupo Casgo tick. General Contracting As an investor you want a company that can combine the design and conceptualization with architectural and structural design and also has the capacity to implement the entire project as envisioned. This means, logistics, staffing with the right building and construction experts, excellent project management and of course the machinery to put up the structure. Exceptional Engineering With the best engineering minds in Mexico, its no wonder the company is unbeatable when it comes to design and successful implementation of mega projects. Impeccable engineering designs ensure cost effective, energy efficient smart building that are secure safeguarding your investment. A variety of top tier engineering solutions will it easier for management to make informed decisions to steer your projects to timely completion. Design The most important phase of any project is the preconstruction management period. This is the period when the odds of success are set and having a solid team of planning and design experts seals your success. It is during the preconstruction stage when you have the best opportunity to impact your costs positively and increase project value before the actual construction. Technology Visualization and conceptualization technology with 3D model rendering are an essential part of the design stage. Ability to identify flaws in the original design before disaster happens is a key to success in larger projects where conflicts may occur. The construction process also requires evaluation and that is only possible in partnership with an interdisciplinary team of experts and the enabling cutting-edge technology. One emerging area in construction that is making all the difference is the post tensioned concrete structures. Looking for the best alternatives for your project’s times and cost-effective completion is not an easy feat if you choose mediocre contractors. Even while construction is underway, delays are bound to happen and the contractor has to constantly seek new solutions to impact, cost and recover time without compromising on quality and value. Final Thoughts on Excelling in Building and Construction Grupo Casgo is a general contractor with the capability to deliver different solutions effectively and with cost friendliness that surpasses outsourcing. The advantage of having one company that can handle your entire project whether big or small is the saving you can make on signing several contracts. This company has an amazing track record dating back over 25 years of existence in delivering constructive systems to suit clients’ needs and preferences. With a company like Grupo Casgo you can take advantage of the best material sourcing and get to choose from several top alternatives solutions for all your projects. Follow us on: https://www.instagram.com/grupocasgo/ Like us on https://www.facebook.com/grupocasgomx/

https://medium.com/@grupocasgo/excelling-in-the-construction-business-1dd44bdaf7df

['Grupo Casgo']

2019-06-17 05:56:27.705000+00:00

['Grupo Casgo', 'Mexico', 'Bim', 'Construction', 'Architectural Engineering']

Prototype proposition

We are approaching the time where we have to start prototyping our idea, so we spent some time making final decisions on our approach. Subsequent to sharing our ideas with other teams, we have got feedback and insights from our peers that helped us further define which direction we could go with the project. Although we thought we would have to go with one or the other, during the discussion our idea ended up being a mix between the two. Which idea should we go with? Discussion between the teams was inconclusive from the point of view that either idea could be executed and would be suitable to convey our message. We saw more potential with the escape space idea due to the fact that we could explore more concepts while the user-generated documentary had a more opinionated format. Thinking of the escape space made us face the fact that we could do anything, but it was unclear what that was. This led us to go back to iteration. One of the ideas we had was to create doorways that would be paired up and to spread them across the room. Each doorway would have a question at the top and participants would answer by walking through the doorway which would be registered. As participants walk through the room they would make multiple choices, creating a path of responses which could then be reviewed when they leave the room along with how these compare with other participants. We have also discussed whether the space could be divided into three rooms where in each we would collect responses that tie with personal device addiction as participants complete tasks. However, we were unsure of how this would happen. Would we collect data from picking up objects? Where would participants place themselves in the room? What if the room was empty? Having a white space where the questions and other prompts would be projected on the walls and floor where every surface is interactive would allow us to create an installation where participants would be immersed in the experience by moving through the space, making themselves big or small, or touching the surfaces. Motion graphics could be used to cue participants which areas are used to respond to questions or statements. These could change between prompts as essentially the space is a blank canvas to draw on. Sound could also be used to further immerse participants into the experience and data could be projected at the end. Sketches of how the idea would work in context of a participant. What form would the prototype take? Once we committed to this idea there are multiple ways we could prototype how the installation would work. Downscaled mockup This prototype would essentially be a downscaled version of the installation to recreate the structure of the room along with the visual effects that would mock up the question/response interaction and then using a small projector shown on the structure. A mockup on a 3D Environment Similar to the previous prototype but taking place in a 3D environment. A gaming engine such as Unity could be used to place a player as a participant and walk people through how the final version would work in a real space. Video prototype Describing the installation and role-playing it in a video in a way that it could be recreated if we passed it to another team to build it. This would still require a space where we would project pre-made graphics on the wall and role-play the functionality of the installation with the aim of conveying the concept of the project. Next steps We are doing interviews with students in order to find out which questions are most impactful. Next we will make experiments on how to represent questions visually across the four planes of the structure.

https://medium.com/luckyllama/prototype-proposition-e77f3b252d5

['Cristiano Almeida']

2019-03-09 16:30:05.379000+00:00

['Prototype', 'Digital Media', 'UX', 'Research', 'Interaction Design']

How Businesses Can Utilize Online Databases to Boost Profit

How Businesses Can Utilize Online Databases to Boost Profit Retable Feb 2·3 min read One of the key ways to ensure that your business is successful is to continually look at ways that you can improve different areas of the business, particularly through staying up to date with the latest technology solutions that can drive efficiencies. By speeding up processes and improving how tasks are completed, businesses can spend more time and resources on activities that generate profit. Database management is an area of your business that can help your business to perform better and as a consequence, help you to be more profitable. Whatever type of industry you are in, having a secure way to manage your data, through a user-friendly platform is essential to help you to build strategic plans that are based on utilizing your data more effectively. There are now some very sophisticated online database software options available for businesses to use to enable them to manage their data more effectively, using integrated apps and platforms for a seamless, faster way of using data for profit-generating business activities. Getting started with an online database The first step to introducing an online database is to review the different ways that you use data, which could be anything from sales leads through people making an online inquiry, to how many product returns have been made each month. Any type of data that can be deemed useful to the progress or compliance of your company can be stored and used to the optimal potential to drive business benefits. Once you have outlined the types of data that will be most useful to the growth of your business in relation to achieving business goals, the next step is to look at the most suitable type of data management software for your requirements. Benefits of Retable An online database platform such as Retable brings a number of key benefits. Your data will be easily available to access for the relevant people working across your business, and there are no version control issues, as you will always be working on the latest data figures even when several people are working on the database. You can use Retable to manage your data more powerfully, by identifying trends and patterns, such as sales that have come from a successful marketing campaign, or campaigns that have not worked as well. Your employees will need to spend less time managing data with easy-to-use tools that perform your key analysis tasks for you. Working across multiple platforms is also much easier because there is a seamless transition from Retable to most of the top business applications and other web-based tools. This helps you to introduce automation of tasks, reducing the time and resources required by your business to deliver certain types of work activity. An online database also ensures that there are no problems when your database starts to grow in size. If you are a business that stores a lot of data using an Excel spreadsheet, for example, as you continue to add data, you find that opening and working in the file can slow down significantly and may even cause the database to crash. An online database works quickly and reliably, as long as you have a reliable internet connection. If you are looking at ways to boost your profit this year and beyond, implementing an online database management system with Retable is the perfect starting point for developing your strategic plans, including generating more business leads. Find out more about Retable and how it can benefit your business.

https://medium.com/@retable/how-businesses-can-utilize-online-databases-to-boost-profit-7b443698c691

[]

2021-02-02 09:14:06.075000+00:00

['Database', 'Online Data Entry', 'Spreadsheets', 'Excel']

The Best Businesses you can Start Now!

The best business for you is the one that turns you on, or, as Steve Jobs said, “If you haven’t found your passion, keep looking.” He was letting us all in on a key to wealth and happiness and the reason Apple is the biggest company on the planet as measured by market cap. If you’re looking for a more concrete answer, try accounting and its cousin, financial management, for these reasons: 1. it’s a growing but stable profession. America and Americans may not know how to make washing machines and t-shirts, but we sure know how to make money. It must be counted, distributed, ratioed, and analyzed in multiple ways for multiple purposes. As one wag put it, it’s the way individuals, companies, and countries keep score. I f we didn’t, how would we know, for example, that Jeff Bezos will soon be richer that Bill Gates, or that Bill Gates is on the cusp of being the first trillionaire, or that the P/E ratio of ABC’s stock signals a buy or sell, or… 2. It’s nice to be needed: Accountants are indispensable members of most management teams and are increasingly becoming CEOs as pressures mount for businesses to be managed for the bottom line and stockholder value. They also are chosen frequently to be Treasurer, VP Finance, and Comptroller. 3. it’s the second-best seat in the corporate house. Accountants, with the exception of CEOs and EVPs, are privileged to work with and evaluate the performance of many parts of a multi-part firm, gaining valuable insights into the effectiveness of management at various levels. As such, accountants sit at the right hand of top execs and can influence major decisions. Few professions demand more discipline, creativity, and opportunity to display your intelligence. Surprised?

https://medium.com/@expressivepress/the-best-businesses-you-can-start-now-fc954f70e790

['Pete Geissler']

2020-12-06 16:07:27.079000+00:00

['Startup', 'Startup Lessons', 'Business', 'Startup Life']

Job Offers Should Be Like Buying A House (Not A Car)

A new job is an emotional experience for candidates and hiring managers alike. Nobody wants to make the wrong choice on either side of the table. Unfortunately, the traditional process of presenting job offers usually felt something like subterfuge not simplicity. There always seemed to be the proverbial man behind the curtain (youtube) calling the shots but never really revealing all the details. Thankfully, employers are experiencing an enlightenment of sorts. Talent is hard to find, and simple economics tells you that the right people are more valuable (and worth paying) than a whole lot of the wrong people–no matter what you are (or are not) paying them. Richard Branson famously said that companies should “treat their employees well enough that they can leave, treat them well enough they don’t want to.” With that as a backdrop to corporate compensation philosophy today, smart companies are working early and often with candidates to develop a clear, plain conversation around total compensation and rewards that includes the candidates interests, the company’s planned compensation model and finally, the market’s salary details for the given job and location. This is why I say job offers should feel like closing on a home, not trying to buy a car. A job offer like a good home closing will include the following: Clear, up-front conversations about the full scope of the job from the first interaction to the job offer (the “closing”). You will have many opportunities to discuss the job openly with future co-workers, subordinates as well as management. Recruiters involved will be forthcoming and transparent about expectations and timing. Clear and transparent discussion about compensation philosophy will be shared with you so you can make an informed decision about what you want to request. Any disputes or discussions are fair and balanced with all the facts on the table. Meanwhile, a car salesman’s job offer experience will feel like this: The details about the job are only high-level and get fuzzy when you press for details. You often only meet with one or two people and they’re the only ones who talk to you about the job. You feel intense pressure to hurry and make a decision about the job. RIGHT. NOW! without all the details clearly worked out. Often the person you’re talking with can’t make decisions and has to keep “going back for approval” repeatedly, exposing either tremendous red tape or (at a minimum) information hoarding by HR or finance or someone. They want to know your comp requirements, but never share their expectations of pay OR WORSE, they never ask you what you’re looking for and just throw a number at you claiming it’s fair and you should take it. Here are three things companies can do to present job offers like a good home closing and not like a sleazy car salesman: Talk early and often about compensation and total rewards. This is often best done between the recruiter and the candidate. I recommend simply asking the candidate for a target comp as well as a minimum to determine a range. Importantly, no judgement is expressed here. The recruiter takes down the information and explains that this will come up again soon. Enable fully-transparent interview processes. We forget that we need the candidate to choose us as much as we want to choose them. Develop your interview processes in a way that will foster two-way selection. Let the candidate talk with future colleagues, direct reports, managers, cross-functional leaders and more. Let them understand how they will fit in to your company personally, not just professionally. Fully discuss compensation verbally before writing out paperwork. Legal departments hate this but it’s a key part of the process. You would never buy a home without first talking about price, what to include, what to exclude, etc. And we should do the same with our candidates. Give them details on base pay, bonuses and equity if-applicable. Tell them about vacation, benefits, or other things they should be aware of. Often the key factors come down to total expected annual cash compensation and the value of long-term rewards. Next, the recruiter goes back and gets approval to extend an offer at a certain point in the range the candidate wants and presents this to the candidate, who can accept it verbally. Personally, thanks to legal department paranoia, I often state this as something like, “If an offer were to be made like this, do you think you would accept it, or at least seriously consider it?”. This is my chance to explore any wishywashyness and perhaps resolve it before generating any paperwork at all. Summary When this is done correctly, candidates will often accept the offers right away because experience of the job-offer is simply a formality… the legally-binding conclusion to a decision that was already emotionally determined days or weeks before! (Originally published on LinkedIn on February 24, 2015)

https://medium.com/connected-well/job-offers-should-be-like-buying-a-house-not-a-car-f5ef10eec521

['Robert Merrill']

2016-02-26 17:58:21.324000+00:00

['Recruiting', 'Job Offers', 'Negotiating A Salary']

The Undereducated Generation Z and The Rise of Conservativism

Student Daily News “Conservative vs. Liberal Beliefs” image. One can not argue that conservatism and even alt-right media influencers are beginning to grow more popular over the past years. Day by day videos all over Youtube grow popularity of the stereotypical liberal getting “owned” by a calm and collected Republican. Many running on “owning the libs” and teasing the so-called “snowflakes”. It brings to question, if conservatives are running on “facts over feelings” does that mean liberals are wrong? Could it be that the alt-right debate lords are right? Why are liberals constantly losing? Is the lack of motivation in Generation Z proof of fake activism? Why do liberals tend to use feelings over facts in debates? Well, no, no, yes, and its complicated. Ben Shapiro, a very popular self-proclaimed “Conservative Libertarian” (which to some can sound like an oxymoron) and Steven Crowder, a self proclaimed comedian(debatable) and political commentator both run on these terms. “Facts over feelings”. Both gaining a strong audience of young edgy men as well as “ex-liberals”. Their most popular videos being of ones where they are debating or covering social justice issues. It’s a place where many right-leaning individuals can find a justification for their “edgy” perspectives. The New York Times even calling Ben Shapiro a “Provocative Gladiator”. The more popularity these men are given, the more their hateful beliefs continue to become normalized. Transphobia being simply an “opinion” rather than a threat to someone's life. Both of these men, regardless of how far they seem to go with their bigoted beliefs, are never shunned by the ones they support. Even the Proud Boys, a known white supremacist group, were never fully denounced. And when these influencers are caught spreading false information, they are never questioned. Not even by their own audience. Many not even questioning them and instead simply taking their word for it. However, leftist influencers and leftist ideology is not only shunned by Republicans but by Democrats as well, compared to conservatives who have no problem even sheltering and pandering to far-right extremists if it means gaining more votes. House Democrats on the other hand blamed the left for their “losses” and continue to distant themselves from it. Nancy Pelosi being considered a centrist by many and Joe Biden even encouraging centrist ideology in his speeches, thus normalizing conservativism as “differences in opinions”. Though one can argue liberal perspectives have been growing and becoming popular amongst the younger generation, many of them lack an educational role model or influence that challenge conservative perspectives. This can also explain why so many “owning the libs” videos exist, but never “owning the conservatives”. Many self proclaimed liberals turning into conservatives overnight. Conservatives have people to look up to as well as places to seek education from either Steven Crowder, Ben Shapiro, or simply Fox News(a top rated conservative news source). Whereas many left leanings and young liberals’ majority of the time do not resulting in many having to do their own research or simply not finding the motivation to do so. This can also explain the disingenuousness of many generation z and their “activism”. Instead of doing the research on their own they prefer to play a long game of telephone. Repeating whatever they see on twitter rather than doing research on their own time. A band-aid for a knife wound. This allows them and the people around them to feel better about what they’ve done without needing to push for actual systemic change. Examples of this can be with how many are already coming in defense of Vice President elect Kamala Harris due to diversity, the “#blackouttuesday” trend on Instagram, or the support for Barrack Obama for being the first black president, but it was during his presidency when the Black Lives Matter movement began. This can also explain why many self-proclaimed liberals are beginning to turn into conservatives. There is no world where social justice is served without a change in the system, otherwise it is simply moderate republicanism. The support for centrist ideology and politicians is nothing more than push in the direction of alt-right agitprop. And the “feelings over facts”? If there is a lack of education of course a person, especially if they are being publicly gaslighted will resort in expressing their frustration through their outbursts. Many of these alt-right or conservative debaters are privileged. They don’t live these dire experiences they debate about with their peers. To them its a sport, an opinion, to the less fortunate, its their life. Its the lack of connection with these social issues that gives them the advantage in many of these discussions. I could spend my entire day proving that systemic racism does exist and how transphobia kills with a white cisgender man, but I quiet frankly would rather chug an entire cup of thumbtacks. So how do we prevent the loss of more “liberals”? Tom Watson once said, “You are kept apart so that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings”. Progressive ideology isn’t unpopular. An example of this is the minimum wage raise in red states and Oregon voting to decriminalize all drugs during the election. Many individuals tend to vote against their own interest without knowing due to lack of genuine political education and the rise of right leaning entertainment. Majority of these voters being poor or older white people. Fox News being to blame for its constant alt-right agitprop and even going far as to spread complete lies to their audience. The answer to this would simply be educating yourself and many others. Supporting many activists of color as well as leftist influencers. Even book clubs. Change can still happen.

https://medium.com/@elijahspublicdiary/the-undereducated-generation-z-and-the-rise-of-conservativism-196d090784a7

['Elijah D.']

2020-12-23 07:20:21.692000+00:00

['Generation Z', 'Activism']

The Paradox of Tolerance

Popper’s perhaps lesser known, but equally consequential, body of work is about building the foundations of a tolerant society. How do we foster a community that is inclusive of everyone and their perspectives? ‘Inclusive’ was not a commonly brandished word in Popper’s mid-20th century era, but when he speaks of tolerance, I find his meaning is much more aligned to the notion of inclusivity as we understand it today than to the slightly condescending modern meaning of ‘tolerant.’ And this is particularly where his views are underrepresented in the modern discourse about inclusion, respect of everyone’s identity and beliefs, and freedom of expression. Popper argues that: An open society needs to be intolerant of intolerance. This Paradox of Tolerance, as it came to be known, argues that intolerant behaviors, irrespective of any judgement of the values that underlie them, ought to be actively fought against in order to preserve an inclusive society. It is important to emphasize this last point: intolerant behaviors ought not to be judged on the merits of their underlying argument, or whether the party who is acting in an exclusionary manner has the moral high ground or not. These behaviors have to be combatted on the premise of them being exclusionary. Social media shields intolerance from our intolerance. I would be curious whether Popper would view our 21st century vehicles of intolerant discourse in this light. It is one of our chief new challenges to maintaining an inclusive society. I take issue with the tone of the many conversations that I see unfolding in public today. Many of the points of views most vocally expressed, from the most horribly prejudiced, all the way to the very ones advocating inclusivity, are fundamentally driving an intolerant wedge into the public discourse. My antidote has been to not engage, at the cost of not seeing my views represented in public, and of not being able to advocate for those I want to support the most. It weighs on me, but I still believe this is the better path: one of affecting the change I want to see in my community, but which doesn’t expose me to a public argument that would force me into a shouting match that is exclusionary by its very nature. You can’t have a conversation when everyone around the table is holding a megaphone. May you and I ever be spared Having to pick a side. — J-J Goldman This recent article about Professor Loretta Ross and her plea for calling people in, instead of calling people out, resonated with me in its advocacy of a better path to understanding and social change, through intimacy instead of public shaming. It is surprising how many people I know and appreciate in person, whose public persona on any form of broadcast medium I find plainly offensive. Some may argue that one’s true soul is bared when distilled down to a few characters, but I choose to hold tight to the idea that a person’s true self is the one you meet in person. So much of every person’s opinions is shaped by their life experience, and removing that context often makes them incomprehensible and unrelatable. The Paradox of Tolerance often pits me against those very people I want to support and help, because I have to stand firm against public shaming and bullying, or lose that very inclusive society that I strive to foster. And there is much one can do which would never fit on a social media post to enact change. In fact, I probably have more latitude to act for the very reason that I am not out there expounding my views, biased as they are, on social media. As I live and work in an environment that isn’t particularly predisposed to foster the best communication skills, I have also learned to predominantly judge people by their actions. Most of my personal heroes who are working tirelessly to improve our community are not out in the public eye — they would most likely not have time to keep up with the deluge of it in the first place. It saddens me that so much of their time today tends to be redirected to patching up the damage that purely stems from the toxicity of the public discourse instead of working on the fundamentals of cultural and social betterment. I have to remind myself every single day to remain biased toward action over words, and to keep my objectives grounded in concrete, tangible, and, sadly, largely unspoken outcomes.

https://medium.com/an-injustice/the-paradox-of-tolerance-99f5ad3da19d

['Vincent Vanhoucke']

2020-12-17 22:32:23.580000+00:00

['Tolerance', 'Inclusion', 'Science Communication', 'Social Media']

Game Day: Tales of a city girl

He was danger personified A heartbreaker in true form Player oozed from him Any woman who fell for his charm Knew she was doomed Then he set his sights on me The one girl that cared not I knew he saw me as a conquest A probable bet among friends Around a card table, beer, and cigarettes My alarm bells went off when he was near A strong aura and sexual vibe emanated from him Everyone could feel it But his eyes were set on me The guys sniggered and laughed Watching the playout The women gave evil stares and snide glances As if exasperated that I wasn’t a’ playing ‘Get out of the way if you ain’t gaming’ Like spectators on a safari Watching a hungry lion stalking its prey They reminded me of spectators In ancient Roman amphitheaters Shouting with glee as lions tore people to shreds Or gladiators fought to the death With despicable weapons in ringed cages To them, it was all a game A game I was unwilling to play With an opponent determined to win I didn’t stand a chance and I knew it In the death dance between lion and gazelle The gazelle always falls Better to exit the ring than be torn apart Brave the jeers and accusations of cowardice and safety depart © Imabong Faminu 2020

https://medium.com/share-the-love/game-day-tales-of-a-city-girl-a1b930c9108

['Imλbөпg Fλmiпц']

2020-12-28 11:13:15.446000+00:00

['Love And Relationships', 'Short', 'Love', 'Relationships Love Dating', 'Prose Poem']

Propinquity: Is the Lack of Propinquity Killing Your Project?

The lack of propinquity could be killing your project and you don’t even know it. Propinquity is a “silent” killer. In order to prevent the death of your project you must first understand propinquity. Miriam-Webster defines propinquity as “nearness in place or time”. In social psychology the theory of “The Propinquity Effect” asserts that there “is a tendency for people to form friendships or romantic relationships with those whom they encounter often”. Similarly, in 1966 anthropologist Edward T. Hall introduced the concept of “Proxemics” to describe set measurable distances between people as they interact. E.T. Hall hypothesized that, “The influence of two people on each other is inversely proportional not only to the square of their distance but possibly even the cube of the distance between them.” As it relates to this discussion, I define propinquity as the nearness of the critical members of a project team. I assert to you that project success rates increase as the propinquity (or nearness) of the critical members increases. For instance, a project whose team members work in different buildings in an office park or campus will fail more often than a team whose members work in the same building. Even further a project whose team members all work within 200 sq. feet of each other will succeed more often than a team whose members work scattered throughout a 10,000 sq. foot work area. In an era of seemingly constant communication among workers via email, instant messenger, text messaging and Twitter you might find it hard to imagine that propinquity plays such a vital role in the success of projects. Many people refuse to accept the hard truth, that these forms of communication poorly substitute for the face-to-face, human-to-human interaction that organically happens when high levels of propinquity exist. Have you ever had a cube neighbor that worked in a different group, but with whom you had a friendship, that moved to another area down the hall, another floor or maybe even another building? How often do you talk to this person today? You were once close, why don’t you talk with this person anymore? The reason, lack of propinquity. It is not that you are too lazy to to pop open a chat window, write an email, walk down the hall, traverse the steps or wait for the elevator…ok maybe it is laziness. Whatever it is, this inhibiting factor is in all of us. By the way, how much do you talk to the new person that moved into your friend’s cubicle (or work area)? Scary isn’t it? It is no wonder then that the agile software development methodologies prescribe co-location for all critical team members as a core principle. The creators of the agile methodologies knew, either consciously or subconsciously, of the critical link between propinquity and success in software development. Throughout my 7+ years of practicing Scrum and Extreme Programming I insisted and made certain that my team sat in a contiguous block of cubicles or, preferably, in a team/project room. As a testament to propinquity and agile methodologies stands a track record of success and high customer satisfaction for each of these projects during this 7+ year period. By way of hindsight I can clearly see all of the positive effects that propinquity bestowed onto these projects. In contrast, I can also imagine all of the problems and issues that we might have faced in the absence of propinquity. If you feel that your project suffers from problems with communication, team spirit, shared vision, or productivity then move the team into a team/project room. Even if the team already sits in close proximity to each other, move them into the room. It will amaze you how much of a difference you will see just by removing a barrier as small as a cubicle wall.

https://medium.com/agile-evidence/propinquity-is-the-lack-of-propinquity-killing-your-project-9747ff26d015

['John Sextro']

2016-01-19 01:59:21.933000+00:00

['Scrum', 'Agile']

Have Precious Metals Been Good Investments Over Time?

Most investing news is about stocks, the stock market, and the latest high-tech company to go public. But there are other investments people need to pay attention to, especially in these volatile economic times. Precious metals — especially silver and gold — are traditional “safe haven” assets and all precious metals may be candidates for diversifying a portfolio. While these metals are volatile, they’re not as volatile as crypto. That said, our readers may be interested to know that while silver is up year-to-date and gold is up 22%, both have been eclipsed by the Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index () which is up 64% year-to-date. Investing vs. Day Trading Before we continue it may be helpful to draw a distinction between investing for the long term and short-term trading, also known as day trading. The latter, which may include trades that last seconds, minutes, or days, is quite risky and requires skill and discipline to succeed at. Day trading attracts those who seek to profit from the volatility exhibited by precious metals over short time intervals. By contrast, those who invest in these metals are typically looking to hold their investments over the long term, as a hedge against inflation or a means to diversify their portfolio. Introduction to Precious Metals Investing in precious metals — especially gold and silver — is a common way to diversify a portfolio. Many times when stock prices fall, precious metals will rise. Some investors seek to use gold, for example, to hedge against losses in stock and bond holdings. Consider though that during serious market plunges gold may also decline as some players seek to sell off precious metals to cover margin calls. When investing in precious metals, an investor can buy gold, silver, platinum, and palladium. Precious metals can be purchased in the following forms: Government-minted coins Collectible coins Rounds, which are coins produced by private mints Bars Exchange-traded funds that track the actual price of the precious metal Other funds and trusts that are 100% bullion-backed and whose shares sell via stock exchanges Mining stocks. Precious Metal Price History Gold and silver have long been viewed as real currency when compared with paper money. Both have also been viewed as a way to hedge against inflation. This year silver is up year-to-date (YTD) and gold is up 22%. While platinum is down 11% YTD its cousin palladium made solid gains. (Platinum and palladium are arguably harder to understand and invest in.) Gold hit a peak in 1980, at the height of a long period of high inflation. (Note: cited in this article are expressed in current dollars.) As inflation (or inflation expectations) decreased, the price of gold also decreased. Since then, gold has risen during good and bad economic times. Hitting a low of $383 in April of 2001. Gold continued to climb during the Great Recession of 2008–2010 when stocks tumbled. Even during the tough economic times of the COVID-19 pandemic, gold performed well while stocks once again fell. Earlier this year it hit a record at $2,000 per ounce , , and have experienced much the same price history as gold. But they are also used in various industries . When the economy booms, the need for these precious metals increases, which causes a rise in their prices. Platinum and palladium are used in catalytic converters in cars to reduce pollution. With increased government regulations on emissions, the need for these metals has increased. Plus, the supply of palladium is not keeping up with demand, which means it could continue to increase in value for this reason alone. Compared to Stocks Between 2010 and the first quarter of 2020, the major stock indexes have outperformed gold as an investment. This is to be expected. The price of gold has also been more stable. During the years of the Great Recession, gold outperformed the major stock market indices. During the first quarter of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began, gold once again outperformed the stock market indices. Compared to Real Estate Owning a home is the most common form of real estate investing. Gold fluctuates more with housing prices than it does with stocks. In five of the last nine years, single-family homes rose in price more than gold did. But then again, there has been quite a boom in housing prices since 2012. The price of gold went down from the start of 2012 through the end of 2015. It only began to rise in late 2018. At the same time, the median sale price for a single-family home saw increases of 5.9% and 6.9%. Conversely, during the recent housing recession, gold outperformed single-family homes. Gold had an annual increase of 27% in both 2009 and 2010. Gold and silver have performed well throughout the pandemic and are the most popular precious metals to add to a portfolio for diversification. Choosing gold (and sometimes silver) as a hedge against inflation is a traditional investing stance. But it’s important to compare the performance of precious metals over the long haul to indices and even to other commodities. Guest Post by: Commodity.com

https://medium.com/@mamaecrypto/have-precious-metals-been-good-investments-over-time-3f7add5f2dc5

['Mamaecrypto Michelle M.']

2020-11-25 02:49:07.263000+00:00

['Trading', 'Hedging', 'Saving', 'Investing', 'Precious Metals']

The FBI ‘Can Neither Confirm nor Deny’ That It Monitors Your Social Media Posts

The FBI ‘Can Neither Confirm nor Deny’ That It Monitors Your Social Media Posts We’re suing the FBI and other agencies to learn how they collect and analyze people’s posts on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. By Hugh Handeyside, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project & Matt Cagle, Technology and Civil Liberties attorney, ACLU of Northern California JANUARY 17, 2019 | 1:30 PM In recent years, the federal government has significantly ramped up its efforts to monitor people on social media. The FBI, for one, has repeatedly acknowledged that it engages in surveillance of social media posts. So it was surprising when the bureau responded to our Freedom of Information Act request on this kind of surveillance by saying that it “can neither confirm nor deny the existence of records.” The six other federal agencies we submitted the FOIA request to haven’t produced a single document. The request, filed last May, seeks information on how the agencies collect and analyze posts from Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. Today we sued the agencies to get some answers, because the public has a right to know about the exact nature of social media surveillance — especially whether agencies are monitoring and retaining social media posts, or using surveillance products that label activists and people of color as threats to public safety based on their First Amendment-protected activities. Based on what little information is publicly available, it’s clear that the federal government routinely tracks domestic social media users, with a particular focus on immigrants. For example, according to official government websites, the FBI has sought to create an application that would enable it to “instantly search and monitor” information on social media platforms. It completed detailed documentation stating that it intended to contract with Dataminr, a data analytics and machine-learning vendor that we previously called out for sharing data with federal “fusion centers,” to obtain “the mission critical social media monitoring needed by the FBI.” And it contracted with Pen-Link, another big data analytics firm, for “software that parses and analyzes social media data.” Meanwhile, the State Department has announced plans to collect usernames from nearly all of the 14.7 million people who annually apply for work or tourist visas. And the Department of Homeland Security and its agencies have repeatedly expanded their manual and automated social media surveillance in efforts that include the misguided “extreme vetting initiative.” Federal law enforcement surveillance of social media associated with Black Lives Matter has already been exposed, continuing a decades-long pattern of government monitoring of minority activists and communities. The government could be using commercial surveillance software to conduct this surveillance: Documents obtained by the ACLU of Northern California in 2016 revealed how companies marketing this software had built products specifically for law enforcement monitoring. The disclosure of the documents resulted in policy changes from Twitter and Facebook. Social media surveillance raises a number of red flags. First, it discourages people from speaking freely — a phenomenon that research and studies bear out. Indeed, in its letter responding to our FOIA request, the FBI said that simply acknowledging its use of social media surveillance would “risk circumvention of the law.” The bureau seems to be saying that if people knew that the government is monitoring what they’re saying on social media, they’d be less likely to say it. That looks like an admission of the chilling effect that the First Amendment aims to prevent. But because almost all online speech is lawful, it doesn’t make sense to argue that social media users are “circumventing” the law if they limit what they say online. Aside from chilling expression, government monitoring of social media raises the risk that innocent people will be wrongly investigated or put on government watchlists based on that speech. It’s clear from already public information that all of the agencies we’re targeting in our FOIA lawsuit engage in manual and automated surveillance of social media users and their speech, and it’s unacceptable for the government to withhold details about this domestic spying. The public needs to know how the government is watching us — and we shouldn’t have to think about self-censoring what we say online.

https://medium.com/aclu/the-fbi-can-neither-confirm-nor-deny-that-it-monitors-your-social-media-posts-237183fe7ecb

['Aclu National']

2019-01-17 22:26:26.401000+00:00

['Speak Freely', 'Social Networking', 'Free Internet Speech', 'Internet Privacy', 'FOIA']

Preparing for Covid-19

We have been preparing for Covid-19, but just didn’t know it. While not explicitly designed for this pandemic, key healthcare advances like remote care, home care, and pharmaceutical innovation now position our health ecosystem to scale solutions that would not have otherwise been possible. These advances also hold promise far beyond the current crisis, as we look to the future of health and its role in economic and fiscal stability in a world defined by more old than young. Indeed, it’s both timely and perhaps ironically inauspicious that in the first quarter of the new decade — marking the launch of the UN/WHO Decade of Healthy Ageing — we are living with a pandemic that challenges the core goal for that effort: healthier longevity. In three key areas, our health ecosystem has been evolving in a way that prepares us not just for Covid-19, but also for the Decade’s long-term vision of society in an “older world” — not only 2 billion over 60, but more old than young across every nation as it modernizes (see Japan and virtually all EU countries): First, a range of professionals in the health ecosystem are taking on new, important roles. Recent news stories have spotlighted the essential work of nurses, doctors, hospital workers, and firemen on the frontlines, but another group of professionals is also stepping up and transforming their role: elder caregivers in the home. Elder home care is a cottage industry basically started by Paul and Lori Hogan when they opened Home Instead Senior Care, just 25 years ago, out of Omaha, Nebraska. Elder home care is now global and one of the pillars of the $15 trillion (pre-Covid-19) silver economy — which is evolving before our eyes to perform essential and often central roles to oversee, manage, and enable healthcare delivery. Before Covid-19, elder home care tended to focus on the two ends of the spectrum of care need — activities of daily living on one end and Alzheimer’s care on the other (a less visible, but fast-growing pandemic). Today and tomorrow, we now know elder home care becomes fully part of the healthcare ecosystem, which will require different skills, competencies, education, and training for caregivers. The result will be a home care service force that looks very different even mid-way through our Decade of Healthy Ageing. Out of Covid-19, the shape and pace are moving fast; keep a close eye on this one. Second, remote care technologies, enabled by AI, are moving to the frontlines of monitoring, detection, diagnosis, and even treatment. To date, technology advances in remote care have largely been a “nice-to-have” add-on for support and data management inside our existing hospital infrastructure. Covid-19 changes this dynamic. In an environment where we all want to avoid physically being in a hospital — especially those of us over 55 and people with any form of compromised immune system — these technology tools can go right into our home and communities, literally becoming the new standard of care. Telehealth and telemedicine are in greater use today — reportedly advancing 10 years in just one week as a consequence of Covid-19. Remote care itself is ideally suited to this crisis and will continue to expand and scale across the Decade of Healthy Ageing, especially where older people’s health needs are more central to health systems themselves. Remote care will save lives and bend the health spending curve. Its use in Covid-19 would have been impossible without the advances of the last decade — unwittingly preparing for today’s stay-at-home essential. Third, we — society, all of us, on whatever end of the political or ideological spectrum — more fully appreciate, welcome, and demand the private sector’s role in innovation. As we fight Covid-19, new biomedical therapies for treatment, vaccines for prevention, and technology assistance for early diagnosis and public health management are essential. But the need for these kinds of innovations reaches far beyond the current pandemic, as they are critical for the goals of the Decade of Healthy Ageing. We are now seeing innovation at an incredible speed, including those who have scientifically, quickly, and with insight and genius reached into their existing portfolios to retrofit urgent solutions, including access for those in need through philanthropy. Pharmaceutical companies’ medicine chests, research pipeline, army of scientists and healthcare professionals, and, perhaps most importantly, scalability have been decades in development. As valuable as this “preparation” has been for Covid-19, it is central to the goals of the Decade of Healthy Ageing. Contrary to the second-guessing and received wisdom in the media, these three areas illustrate that, in many ways, our health systems were better prepared for this pandemic than at any previous point in history. Or, to put it another way, imagine the pandemic if we didn’t have these three channels for urgent pick-up. Of course, we were not prepared explicitly for a global pandemic of the sort Covid-19 has become. But we have been preparing in a way that these solutions can readily be scaled for both the crisis and a new health ecosystem after Covid-19. From the moment of recognized crisis, private-sector companies in elder home care, pharma, technology, health, and financial services have been putting into action the basics of their models, even as they adjust and adapt for today’s pandemic crisis. Many commentators have compared the Covid-19 pandemic to World War II, and it’s an apt comparison in this way: while neither the UK nor the U.S. was fully prepared for the last World War, we had the basics prepared to move into action, scale, and succeed. And out of that scaling came advances and progress the multiplied exponentially in the post-war years. It’s not too soon to apply these lessons for today’s and the Decade’s needs.

https://medium.com/global-coalition-on-aging/preparing-for-covid-19-d20ed271879c

['Global Coalition On Aging']

2020-04-09 14:08:53.801000+00:00

['Innovation', 'Homecare', 'Health', 'Business', 'AI']

Take a chill pill

Stop worrying, Just live in the moment. Life is too short to be in a basket of worries and difficulties. You don’t even know the reality of your precious life’s next one moment. Are you going to be alive the next day or not? What will happen to us tomorrow? What will be the circumstances in the very next hour? What will you go to lose or maybe get in the next few days? We don’t even know if we will be able to breathe the next second or not? We don’t know our future, but still, I see the pride and vanity in our society. I didn’t know why people are so obsessed with themselves and this materialistic DUNYA, while the human has no value just more than the reality that we will be buried in the graves for the rest of our afterlife. We will die at the end, then why all this arrogance and pride of this Dunya? What is in our hands is only the present moment we are living in this world. The future consequences are in the domain of Almighty ALLAH. He has the utmost authority of what he can do to our lives and what ramification should be trembling in our moments. We know that everything is in the domain of Almighty ALLAH. But then why people are this depressed and have the consequences of stress, anxiety all over their lives. I don’t realize why we didn’t just leave our hustles to Almighty ALLAH and take a chill pill and expect good from our creator. You do whatever you want to do. Ultimately Almighty’s plan will happen no matter what you are grinding. Almighty’s plan is the best for you. The thing which matters the most is your intentions of doing things. If your intent and objectives are pure, then It will ultimately give you rewards from the creator. Just take a deep breath and understand the actual purpose of your birth. Why are you alive? And try to be happy by enjoying every present moment of your life with good and pure intentions and a precious smile on your face and spread love. The rest will be taken care of by the Almighty ALLAH as he is the best planner.

https://medium.com/@zainulabedinhaideree/take-a-chill-pill-921779951e41

['Muhammad Zain Ul Abedin Haideree']

2021-01-13 19:41:11.376000+00:00

['Take A Chill Pill', 'Happiness', 'Tranquility', 'Positivity', 'Positive Thinking']

Circular buffer

In this post, I explain a particular type of queues called the circular buffer. At the end I show an example implementation using Python Short description A queue is a data structure that implements the FIFO (First-In-First-Out) principle. That means, the first element added (enqueue) to the queue is the first element that gets removed (dequeue). In other areas of life, this is often referred to as a first-come, first-served principle. A circular (or ring) buffer is a specialized typed of a queue. It is assigned a length at initialization. This length if fixed and not changed during runtime. If the queue is full, it will start to overwrite its values in a circular movement. Simplified schematic of a circular buffer The image shows the schematic of a circular buffer. If a new element is enqueued, it will be inserted right to “40”, and the back_pointer will move one position right. If a value is inserted at the most right field the “back pointer” jumps to the left end of the queue. So the back_pointer is left to the front_pointer . If it is one less to the “front pointer” the buffer is full. To add a new element, one must first be removed. Advantages A circular buffer brings some advantages. The memory is allocated at the initialization and constant during runtime. Growing queues could be a problem if they grow faster than they shrink as they continuously allocate more memory. This problem does not exist for a circular buffer. They also do not need dynamic memory and don’t require to copy data around. This eliminates the problem of memory leaks. Another advantage is the simple and fast implementation. Disadvantages The fixed length could be a problem in some cases. The required length must be known beforehand and could not be changed if required. Definitions and naming Length: The length of the buffer is the number of elements that it could store. Size: The size of the buffer is the number of elements that are currently stored in the buffer. Empty: The buffer is empty if there is no element in it. This is indicated if the start_pointer and end pointer point to the same element. Full: The buffer is full if each element is filled with a value. This indicated if the end_pointer is one less than the start_pointer . UML Modelling Use case diagram Use cases of a circular buffer The use case diagram shows the actions that the Circular buffer must provide. In the code, each action is implemented as a public function of the class. Class diagram Class diagram of a circular buffer The class diagram shows the required classes and their functions. Since the full buffer is implemented in a single class the diagram only contains one class. The public functions mirror the actions defined in the use case diagram. To make the buffer definition as abstract as possible, the generic type “T” is used. This variable could be replaced by the required type (for example int, string, …). The “enqueue” function returns a Boolean value. If the value could be inserted, the function returns true. Otherwise, it will return false. Implementation The following code demonstrates an implementation of a Circular buffer in Python. from typing import TypeVar, Optional, List T = TypeVar("T") class CircularBuffer(Generic[T]): data: List[T] = [] length: int size: int = 0 front_pointer: int = 0 back_pointer: int = 0 def __init__(self, length: int = 5): self.length = length self.data = [None] * length def enqueue(self, val: T) -> bool: if self.is_full(): return False self.data[self.back_pointer] = val self.back_pointer = (self.back_pointer + 1) % self.length self.size += 1 return True def dequeue(self) -> Optional[T]: if self.is_empty(): return None val: T = self.data[self.front_pointer] self.front_pointer = (self.front_pointer + 1) % self.length self.size -= 1 return val def is_empty(self) -> bool: if self.size == 0: return True return False def is_full(self) -> bool: if self.size == self.length: return True return False def get_size(self) -> int: return self.size def get_length(self) -> int: return self.length In order to make the code not too long, the comments have been removed. For the full code see the Github repo. The class uses a TypeVar so the concrete type must be provided at the initialization. For example to use the class with int types the a new buffer is created with the following code. cb = CircularBuffer[int](10) cb.enqueue(5) cb.enqueue(6) cb.enqueue(7) val = cb.dequeue() print(val) # 5 To use another type replace int with the target type. Conclusion Circular buffers are handy structures. They provide a lot of advantages and can be easily implemented. Since they can be used in many different cases, every programmer should know them and should be able to implement them. If you like the article, visit my blog for more posts.

https://medium.com/@mosermartin09/circular-buffer-4aa5dd9fd85e

['Martin M.']

2020-12-21 06:56:28.197000+00:00

['Data Structures', 'Ring Buffer', 'Computer Science', 'Python']

Error Handling with Express-React

I was recently working on error handling between the API and frontend of a single page shopping list app I’ve been designing and would like to share some simple strategies I used in the process. The app’s backend is built with Node.js/Express connected to MongoDB via Mongoose, an ORM (object relation mapping) package for MongoDB. The front end is built with React.js whose local state is managed by Redux. The API calls are made via actions managed by thunk. The following outlines how I set up validation for the User model to be used when a new user is created. Mongoose ships with some basic validation and sanitation for fields. Required is the most useful. The second argument of the required property is a custom message (I chose ‘An email is required’). Mongoose purposely only offers basic validation out of the box, because it’s quite easy to set up custom validations and there are plenty of third party packages to supplement. Below I use a package called validator to check that the email is properly constructed. A custom validation is created by calling the validate and passing the value to the validation. The return value should be a boolean. In the case below the validation calls validator.isEmail(value). If it doesn’t pass, the method throws an error message. One note about Mongoose schemas — assigning the ‘unique’ property to a particular field doesn’t cause an error to be thrown if you try to create a new instance with an identical field. The ‘unique’ validation is used for indexing fields. // User schema with validation fields const UserSchema = new Schema({ email: { type: String, required: [true, 'An email is required'], unique: true, trim: true, lowercase: true, validate(value) { if (!validator.isEmail(value)) { throw new Error('Not a proper email format'); } }, }, password: { type: String, required: [true, 'A password is required'], }, name: { type: String, trim: true, required: [true, 'A name is required'], }, I set up some of the simpler validation on the client side — checking that data was not left blank and that email addresses were in an acceptable format. Once the data is validated and sent to the backend, where validation is set up in Mongoose schemas and is executed as middleware. As a challenge, I rechecked the validation that I set up in the client in the backend, in addition to the server side validations. I also wanted to see if I could have the API send back specific error messages to the client, depending on what went wrong. The actual validation happens in the router’s handler. In my setup, it’s a three step process: Check that the submitted email doesn’t yet exist in the database, that it is unique. Check that the password and password confirmation are the same. These first two validations occur in the actual route handler and if either fails, the router sends back a status 400 with an error object to the frontend. return res.status(400).send({ error: ‘Account already exists with this email’ }); As an aside, in the client I am using Axios to make the requests. Because the errors are sent back with a 400 status code, they can be accessed in the catch block using e.response.data.error 3. Create and save the new user. The schema validations happen as pre middleware just prior to saving. The error object looks like this: { name: ValidatorError: A name is required { properties: { validator: [Function (anonymous)], message: 'A name is required', type: 'required', path: 'name', value: '' }, kind: 'required', path: 'name', value: '', reason: undefined, [Symbol(mongoose:validatorError)]: true }, In order to combine multiple validation errors (if they should occur), I set up an array of my field names (userFields). I call save() on the new user within a try-catch block. If there are no problems, the new user is sent back to the client. If there are errors, the catch block iterates through the error object, checking if the fields appear using bracket notation. If they do, I push the message into the foundErrors array. Finally I join the messages before sending them to the client. const userFields = ['name', 'email', 'password']; const user = new User(req.body); try { await user.save(); const token = await user.generateAuthToken(); res.status(200).send({ user, token }); } catch (e) { const foundErrors = []; userFields.forEach((field) => { if (e.errors[field]) { foundErrors.push(e.errors[field].message); } }); res.status(400).send({ error: foundErrors.join('. ') }); } I’m sure there are other approaches, but this setup worked well for me and, as an added bonus, working out the code gave me some insight into Mongoose validation and error handling. This solution works nicely, and sends very specific information that can be directly used for notifications in the client.

https://medium.com/@rixong/error-handling-with-express-react-99e197868817

['Rick Glascock']

2020-12-20 23:12:06.242000+00:00

['Expressjs', 'Mongoose']

AYS Daily Digest 13/03/20: People removed from Greek islands without a chance to seek asylum

Are You Syrious? Mar 14 · 10 min read Growing Concerns about the Spread of Coronavirus // Illegal Returns in Greece // The Criminalization of Giving Assistance to People on the Move in Bosnia // Disastrous Conditions for Deported Afghans // & More FEATURE: Refugees on Lesvos asked to sign documents in Greek, leading to their “voluntary returns” Greek authorities on Lesvos seem to be returning people on the move to Turkey by having them sign their own voluntary return documents. It seems Greek authorities are giving Afghans, and others being kept in navy boats in the port of Lesvos, documents like the one in the photo below which outlines their “consent” to legal expulsion. Sources from Brussels tell AYS that people on the move are being asked to sign these documents, despite the fact that they do not understand what it says and no one explains what impact it will have on them. “The document makes reference to several provisions of Greek and EU law, as well as the EU-Turkey Statement, but makes no reference to the Presidential Decree in which the access to asylum procedures was suspended for one month”, AYS was told. Under section 6, it clearly states that by signing this document, the person has been informed, in a language s/he understands, of their rights and the reasons of their detention. Section 8 states that the person has not appealed the return decision within the 48 hour deadline. There are serious concerns among people on the ground that detained refugees were NOT informed of anything regarding their detention, expulsion or of their ability to appeal the decision. It appears they are not even informed about what this specific document states. Sources say they are sure that the detained people concerned have not been given any actual means to appeal their return decision. Even though it may seem obvious, it is worth repeating that suspending access to asylum and collectively returning people back to Turkey is in flagrant violation of several EU laws, the Geneva Convention and of the fundamental rights all EU Member States are obliged to protect. Moreover, Commissioner Johansson has said several times that the right to asylum shall be respected at all times and for all cases. Yet, these actions continue occurring in the face of EU principles, laws and norms. Following the departure of the military boat carrying 500 rejected people from Lesvos, we were unofficially told they would probably be moved to closed facilities in the northern part of Greece, possibly in a new migrant detention centre being established in the region of Serres, in the nearest proximity to the Bulgarian border. FEATURE II: Mayor of Tuzla (Bosnia and Herzegovina) prohibits assistance to people on the move Conditions are worsening in Tuzla after the Mayor declared the prohibition of assistance to people on the move. After the recent dismantling of the provisional campsite at the bus station in Tuzla, the repressive local government continues to avoid finding a proper solution to the situation, while simultaneously preventing organizations from helping the people stranded in the town. Earlier this week, there were around 100 people in different accommodation facilities and on Friday approximately 300 new people arrived. There is a fear of helping or providing assistance to those in need across Tuzla, as the Mayor and the local government have prohibited any help, officially because of Coronavirus concerns. However, as previously reported, many question the legitimacy of these concerns, as the prohibition focuses mostly on prohibiting food or non-food item distribution to newly arrived people, while allowing other activities to carry on. Mirko Bakramović, the Director of the Association of the Country of Children Tuzla, posted an open letter on Facebook pleading with the local authorities to reconsider the basis of an order prohibiting the distribution of food and water. Discussing the order, Bakramović said, “Despite the concerns over Covid-19, international and domestic protection rules for children on the move should still be upheld and followed in Tuzla.” All authority for providing aid and assistance has now been handed over to the Red Cross. They will continue providing a lunch package and some basic first aid: wraps for existing wounds, bandages and some painkillers, but without any referrals to the hospital once a day to the people gathered in the city. However, there is some concern about the quality of the staff as there have been reports that Red Cross members discuss people on the move, the people they are there to support, in disparaging, hateful terms. In Tuzla, there is no accommodation, no hot food distribution, and no local assistance. Additionally, the mobile charging station has been removed. Now vulnerable people are left on their own for each and every need they might have, without any information, assistance or even basic kindness. TURKEY Closure of the Edirne camp? AYS volunteers on the ground in Edirne say that the border camp has reportedly been closed since 12 am, Friday. Earlier that day, there were reports of new arrivals as well as a group of people on the move being held 60 km outside of Edirne. Sources believe that it was a group being pushed back from the border. GREECE Frontex presence surges at Evros border In the past few days, hundreds of police officers from across Europe have been sent to the Greek region of Evros, next to the Greek-Turkish border, in order to “secure” the Union’s external border. Men and women from Poland, Austria, Germany, Estonia, and many other EU member states, along with huge amounts of special equipment and vehicles, have been deployed to the land border with Turkey. “The presence underlines the fact that the protection of the European area of freedom, security and justice is a shared responsibility of all Member States and Frontex.” On Friday these forces were officially fully deployed and are now in full operation. Meanwhile, the islands are still completely overwhelmed, and boats continue arriving. In response to the impending arrival of Coronavirus, aid agencies are scrambling to prepare as best as they can in what seems to be a hopeless situation. The island camps provide the perfect breeding ground for the Coronavirus with no soap, little water, minimal toilets and thousands of people crammed together in less than hygienic conditions. “Families of five or six have to sleep in spaces of no more than three square meters [32 square feet]. This means that recommended measures such as frequent hand washing and social distancing to prevent the spread of the virus are just impossible.” While aid agencies are doing the best they can to prepare and sensitize the community, awareness does little if clean water cannot be found. In Chios, the situation is appalling as new arrivals are housed out in the open. In these conditions, it seems there are 2 toilets for every 250 people. The toilets are never cleaned and dirty water from the toilet is running all over the place. There are sick people among them who are also forced to sleep in the street. Children and women may sleep in vans, but the men are all outside, exposed to rain, wind and sun. Volunteers are not allowed to help or approach. It seems these people may be transferred to a closed deportation center on the mainland on Wednesday. In the Amygdaleza detention center, a police officer tested positive for the coronavirus, becoming the first confirmed case in Antynomia. Apparently, the officer traveled to Vienna several days ago and returned showing symptoms. While she does not work directly in the detention centers, there were refugees in her office and fears are growing that some may have contracted the virus. In wake of the growing concerns over coronavirus, the police officers’ union of the Aegean and Dodecanese islands called for the responsible ministers to decongest the islands and for increased attention to human rights as well as public health. In a letter to the ministers, the union expressed their opinion that a lack of understanding about the seriousness of the situation prevails and will only bring more damage in the long term. On the islands, many schools and activities run by NGOs are temporarily closing as a preventative measure against Coronavirus. On Samos, Alpha Centre is one of the latest to close down as well. In the Exarcheia neighborhood of Athens, a refugee was beaten and arrested on Friday night. Below is a video account of the event. SYRIA WHO shares fears over COVID-19 in Syria, no cases confirmed yet In addition to ongoing fighting and displacement, civilians in Syria are now at risk of contracting COVID-19, and aid agencies say the country isn’t prepared for it. “The reality is that after nine years of conflict, the health system and infrastructure that would be vital in combating any public health emergency have been decimated.” So far, no cases of COVID-19 have been reported in Syria, yet they have been confirmed in all five countries neighboring Syria, including Turkey and Lebanon. The government says there’s no Coronavirus in the country — a claim that even pro-regime commentators view as suspicious. The World Health Organization said it considers the risk of a Coronavirus outbreak to be “very high, particularly in densely populated areas and areas of active hostilities such as in northwest Syria.” Aid workers view its arrival in the displaced person camps not as a matter of if, but when. DENMARK Populists using coronavirus to re-demand restriction of movement and a total stop of new asylums Denmark announced on Friday it would shut its borders to most foreign visitors for a month starting on Saturday. The restrictions will come into force at 12 pm (1100 GMT) on Saturday and continue until at least April 13. “All tourists, all travel, all vacations, and all foreigners who cannot demonstrate a credible reason to enter Denmark will be denied entrance at the Danish border.” Danish citizens and foreigners working in Denmark will still be free to enter and leave the country. In the midst of these new travel restrictions, the populist Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti) is exploiting the situation to re-demand a total stop for asylums as well as restrictions for the existing asylum centers as a means of “limiting the spreading of the virus.”

https://medium.com/are-you-syrious/ays-daily-digest-13-03-20-people-removed-from-greek-islands-without-a-chance-to-seek-asylum-4fae47cfd0c4

['Are You Syrious']

2020-03-14 14:37:47.471000+00:00

['Migrant Crisis', 'Digest', 'Turkey', 'Greece', 'Refugees']

Do You Ever Feel Afraid?

Last summer, I went for a walk in the valley by my house, and I saw a little boy on his bike. He was hesitating at the top of the hill, afraid to ride down. To me, that “hill” was just a gentle slope, but to the child, it was big and scary. His mom leaned over, encouraging him to keep going. But he wasn’t so sure. When I witnessed that scene, it brought me right back to a time when I, as a child of a similar age, hesitated at the top of a hill. I sat on my bike, looking down the steep hill in front of me. The hill directly faced the lake, so I’d have to make a sharp turn at the bottom in order to avoid riding straight into the inky, deep water. Finally, I decided to give it a go. I started out slowly but as I picked up speed, fear took over. I lost my nerve and toppled over, badly skinning my knees. Not only did I hurt myself, I felt embarrassed. Even worse, ashamed. To this day that memory conjures up a disproportionate level of discomfort. Why? I guess I thought I shouldn’t be afraid. In all honesty, I feel a little bit scared a lot of the time. More than I’d like. Take publishing my latest book. The process awakened small daily doses of fear in me, as it required me to do something every day that I found at least a little bit scary. Between the publishing and promotion, those tiny prickles of fear became a regular occurance. I started to notice a pattern. While my body told me I was afraid, my brain told me I shouldn’t be. “Stop being so afraid,” it said, plainly. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? No hesitation, no skinned knees? Nice. Of course, without fear, we wouldn’t have courage. And without courage, there’d be no bravery. When I think about it, maybe I did the right thing by falling off my bike that day. After all, skinned knees are better that drowning. And starting down the hill is better than turning and riding away. After I saw that boy on his bike, I came home, and I wrote something in honour of him that I’d like to share with you. Here it goes: It won’t be the last time that you hesitate here. It won’t be the last hill, the last hurdle, the last time you’re afraid or you wonder if you can do it. There’s going to be lots of them. Life will require bravery. And sometimes you’ll take the chance, and go for it, and sometimes you won’t. Sometimes it will be smarter to take the safe road. But sometimes — lots of times — it will be worth it to ride down anyway. So I hope you’ll do it. Because bravery is where the best stuff is. I have one final message on the subject of bravery. It’s a poem, from my latest book, Little Poems for Big Hearts. I wrote this poem to myself years ago when I needed all the courage I could muster. Now, I’d like to share it with you.

https://medium.com/storytelling-with-heart/do-you-ever-feel-afraid-8d2a84935828

['Camille Deputter']

2019-06-03 17:42:49.401000+00:00

['Bravery', 'Storytelling']

Welcome to the “Sunken Place”. In Get Out by Jordan Peele, one thing I…

Welcome to the “Sunken Place” Intro: Get Out and the Sunken Place Chris in the “sunken place” Get Out, by Jordan Peele, tells the story of Chris, a Black man in a relationship with his White girlfriend, Rose Armitage. In the beginning of the movie, there is this eerie feeling that something is wrong about the family and their Black staff. For example, Rose’s mother, Missy, tries to hypnotize Chris to get him to stop smoking and Rose’s brother, Jeremy, is very aggressive towards him. The Black people also act suspiciously, crying while smiling and outing Chris for wanting to see other Black people around the house. He soon comes to realize that the Black people working there have had their bodies taken over by the White family and the cult that follows them. Chris must escape the Armitage estate before he becomes the next victim. One thing I found really interesting was the idea of the “sunken place”: somewhere in the mind from which one cannot return unless the person sending one there releases their victim. In the movie, this is a place where the White family sends their Black victims so they can control their bodies. When Chris is alone with Missy Armitage, she sends Chris to the “sunken place”. He is trapped there only able to flail about and try to scream. The “sunken place” seems to represent the system of White supremacy in which we all live and the oppression BIPOC or Black Indigenous People of Color, undergo in America in particular (however in relation to the movie, this paper will focus on the oppression of Black people). Between the appropriation of Black bodies and the smothering of their voices, White people in the movie as well as outside of it hold the power, just as Missy is supposed to be the only person able to free Chris. What do you mean White Supremacy is an Illusion? Before we get into this, I want to make it clear that I am not saying that White supremacy isn’t real or isn’t a danger to society. In fact, I am arguing the opposite; White supremacy is a very real thing but only because we have made it real. In his essay, “Simulacra and Simulations”, Baudrillard describes the hyperreal as, “a play of illusions and phantasmas” (Baudrillard 5). He gives the example of Disneyland, saying it exists, “in order to hide that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America that is Disneyland” (Baudrillard 6). In relation to Get Out, it can be said that the idea of White supremacy is its own hyperreality in that it is something made by White people, but does not truly exist. White supremacy is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “The belief or theory that white people are superior to other peoples, and should therefore have greater power authority, or status. Also: a social system based on or perpetuating the political economic, and cultural dominance of white people” (OED). It is a social construct, one that is not founded on by any evidence and yet is prevalent in our country. As Baudrillard says, the hyperreal is “more real than nature” (Baudrillard 7). White people have the same importance as every other race. However, when the simulacrum of White supremacy is put into place, White people have the clear advantage. I think that while in the movie the “sunken place” was the part that wasn’t real, I’d like to argue that White Supremacy is the simulation we as a society are stuck in and the “sunken place” is a real result of that. It is a social construct, one that is not founded on by any evidence and yet is prevalent in our country. What is Simulacrum? The idea of the simulacra is a bit difficult to grasp at first, which is why I would first like to go into exactly what it is. As mentioned above it is an illusion, but it goes a bit further than that, especially with the idea of White Supremacy. The simulacrum comes about in five stages, saying first it is a “reflection of a profound reality”, then it “masks and denatures a profound reality”. Next it “masks the absence of a profound reality”. Penultimately, it “has no relation to reality” and finally “is its own pure simulacrum” (Baudrillard 4). However, I am going to hone in on the last two: it has no relation to reality and then becomes its own simulacrum. This basically means that the illusion is so well done, so integrated into society, that it is no longer an illusion, but it is its own thing that stands on its own. There is no need to compare it to reality because now it is reality. This is how White supremacy works: it is so warped from reality that it has no relation to it and then it becomes the reality. This basically means that the illusion is so well done, so integrated into society, that it is no longer an illusion, but it is its own thing that stands on its own. What Does This Have to do With Get Out? Chris Goes To The “Sunken Place” In his article, “Escaping the Logic(s) of White Supremacy: The Practice of Oppositional Thought”, Mitchell Kosters explains the “breadth” of the simulacrum of White Supremacy best when he says “white supremacy is not unitary, but composed of multiple fluid networks of relationships” (Kosters 212). It is extremely multifaceted, reaching from education to government and health care to social norms. Examples of these include segregation, the Jim Crow laws of the 1960s and the wage gap that disproportionately affects Black women, the sterilization of Black people, and the ways in which White people appropriate Black culture. It is so deeply ingrained into our everyday lives that we have forgotten what the world outside of the simulacrum looks like; It has become the reality. White people are treated better than Black people in all aspects of society. They are greater than, from a hierarchal standpoint, and always have the advantage. It’s just the world we live in and most White people seem to accept it. It is so deeply ingrained into our everyday lives that we have forgotten what the world outside of the simulacrum looks like; It has become the reality. This is where the “sunken place” comes in. As seen in the clip, Missy hypnotizes Chris and sends him to the “sunken place”. She is the only one who can get him out. Jordan Peele defines the “sunken place” as “(It) means we’re marginalized. No matter how hard we scream, the system silences us”. It is the oppression of Black people put into the idea of an internal prison, one that can’t really be escaped. At least, not alone (I will go into this later). The “sunken place” the Armitage’s trap Chris is in is a product of White supremacy: it represents the oppression of Black people in America and it is obvious that, while Chris is trapped there, he is being oppressed by the system that the White people have created. Missy Armitage represents White supremacy in the system. Not only does she trap him in this place where he cannot be heard, but she also seems to find joy in it when she smiles in the clip. This can be related to America as a whole. Black people are trapped by White supremacy while White people appropriate them and strip away what they can until their rights and freedoms are gone. Some even embrace the idea of White supremacy, committing hate crimes and intentional microaggressions. So How is White Supremacy a Simulacrum? There are a few ways the simulacrum of White Supremacy works. The most conspicuous way has to do with Kosters’ idea of it working through “multiple fluid networks”. White supremacy has infiltrated itself into every part of society; one cannot escape it. In fact, to be American in general, one must accept the fact that White Supremacy is the way of life. There is no end to it; as stated previously it is in education systems (segregation), government (Jim Crow and anti-immigration laws), law enforcement (police brutality), and even and perhaps most horrifically, health care (the algorithmic bias against Black people). The societal norm is that White people are better than Black people and even though the idea of it isn’t true, here in America it is. White supremacy has infiltrated itself into every part of society; one cannot escape it Cultural appropriation is another way the simulacrum has infiltrated society. It’s when someone takes a part of a minority’s culture and use it for their own purposes or even exploit it. Erich Hatala Matthes describes it in his essay, “Cultural Appropriation and Oppression”, as an action “of silencing, exploitation, misrepresentation, or offense”. He goes on to explain that “what ultimately makes particular instances of cultural appropriation wrongful, and thus what grounds objections to them, is the way in which they manifest and/or exacerbate inequality and marginalization” (Matthes). This “silencing” appropriation causes is related to the “sunken place” in that it is part of what makes it so hard for White people to hear the screams of Black people. While the White appropriators are making Black culture popular and their own thing, such as locks and AAVE, the Black people these things belong to are being punished for them. Black children in public schools are sent home for their hairstyles and corrected for the language they use. According to Brooke Dianne-Mae Hughes, one of the major highlights of the movie is the impact of colorblindness, or the idea that one’s race doesn’t affect how they are perceived. The issue with this is exemplified in Jim, the blind white man that likes photography. He tells Chris, “Some people want to change– some people want to be stronger, faster, cooler. But don’t, please, don’t lump me into that. I couldn’t give a shit what color you are: what I want is deeper. I want your eyes, man. I want those things you see through.” (Hughes 62). He is saying here that Chris’ race doesn’t factor into what he wants from him. However, this simply is inaccurate. What makes Chris so vulnerable and such a great victim to him is the fact that he’s Black and therefore at a disadvantage. Jim has all of the tools necessary to get by in life, being a white man. When Chris disappears, people might look for him but it most likely wouldn’t make national news like the death of Jim would. Hughes further explains this by saying, “Jim, as empowered white body, has the power to determine what bodies possess the right to autonomy or which ones should be commoditized” She goes on to say that “This logic is the formulation of much of the government of the United States in which white bodies control the narratives of individual rights and submission to these systems of power is not only expected, but also celebrated” (Hughes 63). We see examples of this in Get Out, when the White family members get together at the party to assess Chris’ talents and assets. It also can be seen in our world, implied with the statues and various commemorations to Confederate generals. This is a great example because it is celebrating not only the generals but their values and accomplishments i.e. the enslavement and submission of Black people. This makes the idea of the “sunken place” a bit more complex. It doesn’t seem to be solely about the oppression of Black people by racists, like I once thought. It has to do with White people in general. The existence of the illusion that is White Supremacy is what keeps Black people in the “sunken place”. That is what keeps them silent as they scream. White supremacy is not a real thing, in the sense that White people have never been better than other races due to their race only. With all of this in mind, I want to go back to the idea of the simulacrum that is White supremacy. The oppression of Black people is a trap, much like the “sunken place”, but it is also an illusion. This oppression is a product of the idea that White people are better than Black people based solely on their race. In the movie, Chris is stuck in the “sunken place”, unable to move or speak; he is falling in an endless abyss that cannot be escaped. This is a very literal example of a simulacrum, a place that is so far removed from reality that it becomes one of its own. The “sunken place’ may not be a real place one can go to, but nevertheless, Chris ends up stuck there. This is how I see society. White supremacy is not a real thing, in the sense that White people have never been better than other races due to their race only. However here we are: Black people are being brutalized and murdered by police, cannot always get proper healthcare, are disproportionately criminalized, and until 56 years ago were not allowed to even exist in White spaces (restaurants, schools, churches, etc.) without facing severe consequences. Because of this simulacrum, Black people are constantly in a state of falling, of sinking. Conclusion: So What Do We Do? Finally, I think it is important to recognize the ways in which everyone can escape this simulacrum. In Get Out, Chris is saved with the help of his friend, Rod Williams. They work together to kill Rose and be free of the “sunken place” for good. This is what I think needs to happen in reality. We need to work together to fight the idea of White supremacy, fight against the illusion, and restore the real reality; people of all races are equal to each other. In order for this to happen, we must first identify the simulacrum. Then we must actively rebel against it. White people, myself included, have inherent racial bias and it is important to not only be critical of that but to also correct it. We must also lift up Black voices to help free them of the “sunken place”. While it is obvious, as seen with the movie, that Black people are more than capable of freeing themselves, it is important to remember that White people created this simulacrum and together we must remedy it. Works Cited Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of the Simulacra” Simulacra and Simulations. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, 1983. Hughes, Brooke D. Our Sunken Place: “Post-Racial” America in Jordan Peele’s 0RW1S34RfeSDcfkexd09rT2 Get Out1RW1S34RfeSDcfkexd09rT2, State University of New York at Buffalo, Ann Arbor, 2018. ProQuest, http://login.library.coastal.edu:2048/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/our-sunken-place-post-racial-america-jordan/docview/2057280222/se-2?accountid=26722. Kosters, Mitchell. “Escaping the Logic(s) of White Supremacy: The Practice of Oppositional Thought.” #Charlottesville: White Supremacy, Populism, and Resistance, edited by Christopher Howard-Woods et al., OR Books, 2018, pp. 212–216. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv62hg0j.28. Accessed 7 Dec. 2020. Matthes, E.H. Cultural appropriation and oppression. Philos Stud 176, 1003–1013 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1224-2

https://medium.com/@hannahy1118/welcome-to-the-sunken-place-white-supremacy-and-simulacrum-a2853f279811

['Hannah Yurkin']

2020-12-07 21:18:45.679000+00:00

['Jordan Peele', 'Racial Justice', 'Get Out', 'Simulacrum', 'White Supremacy']

Realtime Rails with AnyCable. If you have been using Rails…

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash If you have been using Rails ActionCable for sometime, you know how slow and inconsistent it performs during high load. Let’s see how we can switch to a better alternate AnyCable. I had my system running in Digital Ocean in Ubuntu 18.04. Update Gemfile: gem "anycable-rails" gem "redis", ">= 4.0" Update cable.yml: local: &local adapter: any_cable production: adapter: any_cable channel_prefix: your_db_name_production development: *local test: *local Environment files need to be updated with new action cable url: environments/development.rb config.action_cable.url = "ws://localhost:3334/cable" config.action_cable.allowed_request_origins = ['http://localhost:3000'] environments/production.rb config.action_cable.url = "wss://your_domain_name.com:3334/cable" config.action_cable.allowed_request_origins = ['https://your_domain_name.com'] Let’s add AnyCable related configurations in config/anycable.yml development: redis_url: redis://localhost:6379/0 production: redis_url: redis://localhost:6379/0 access_logs_disabled: false If you are using foreman to run all of your servers (in development), let’s update the Procfile: rpc: bundle exec anycable ws: anycable-go --port 3334 -headers=cookie,x-api-token,origin You can find your (Devise) authenticated user like this: def find_verified_user session_key = Rails.application.config.session_options[:key] env['rack.session'] = cookies.encrypted[session_key || raise("No cookies key in config")] if verified_user = Warden::SessionSerializer.new(env).fetch(:user) verified_user else reject_unauthorized_connection end end At this moment your development environment is ready to work with AnyCable. You can test locally. Now lets run AnyCable servers in production. Install Go Lang: # run in production terminal sudo apt install golang-go go get -u -f github.com/anycable/anycable-go/cmd/anycable-go We need to create two Systemd services to run two servers in the background. # run in production terminal sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/anycable-go.service File contents will be like this if you are using Let’s Encrypt free SSL: [Unit] Description=AnyCable Go WebSocket Server After=network.target [Service] Type=simple ExecStart=/home/your_deploy_user/go/bin/anycable-go --port 3334 -headers=cookie,x-api-token,origin --ssl_cert=/etc/letsencrypt/live/your_domain_name.com/fullchain.pem --ssl_key=/etc/letsencrypt/live/your_domain_name.com/privkey.pem ExecStop=/bin/kill -TERM $MAINPID LimitNOFILE=16384 # increase open files limit (see OS Tuning guide) Restart=on-failure # Configure WebSocket server using env vars Environment=ANYCABLE_HOST=your_domain_name.com Environment=ANYCABLE_REDIS_URL=redis://localhost:6379/0 [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target For AnyCable RPC service: # run in production terminal sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/anycable-rpc.service File contents will be like this: [Unit] Description=AnyCable gRPC Server After=syslog.target network.target [Service] Type=simple Environment=RAILS_ENV=production WorkingDirectory=/home/your_deploy_user/rails_app/current/ # if using rvm or rbenv ExecStart=/bin/bash -lc 'bundle exec anycable' # or else # ExecStart=bundle exec anycable ExecStop=/bin/kill -TERM $MAINPID User=your_deploy_user UMask=0002 MemoryHigh=2G MemoryMax=3G MemoryAccounting=true Restart=on-failure Environment=ANYCABLE_REDIS_URL=redis://localhost:6379/0 [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target You need to reload daemon: sudo systemctl daemon-reload Let’s start our AnyCable-Go server and AnyCable-RPC server: sudo systemctl start anycable-go anycable-rpc If ufw is enabled, we need to allow port 3334: sudo ufw allow 3334 That’s it! Make sure both the servers are running: # run in production terminal sudo systemctl status anycable-go.service sudo systemctl status anycable-rpc.service If both servers are showing active status, you can deploy your rails app to the production! Happy coding! :)

https://medium.com/@sharvy/rails-actioncable-and-anycable-c49480d38152

['Sharvy Ahmed']

2019-12-02 19:41:18.471000+00:00

['Scalability', 'Anycable', 'Ruby on Rails', 'High Performance', 'Actioncable']

The Complete Business Guide To Facebook Audience Strategy

The Complete Business Guide To Facebook Audience Strategy Some businesses are killing it on Facebook Advertising. Others … Not so much. Our clients trust us to stay on top of Facebook’s “best practices,” but I’ll admit it can be challenging to build the perfect audiences that will be positively influenced by our clients’ ads and content. You can target audiences on Facebook with a dozen different ad formats and thousands of possible ad targeting parameters. With so many targeting capabilities available, the process can be confusing. And many of the accounts we handle started when businesses we work with handled Facebook advertising “in house,” sinking a lot of money into the platform without seeing the ROI they needed to justify the trouble. If we take it back to the basics, however, and build upon fundamentals, we can efficiently target audiences in a way that drives response without burning through your advertising budget. Mastering your Facebook audience strategy means putting your brand in front of very specific and often motivated people, on the network where Americans religiously spend an average of 40 minutes every single day. After you’ve checked out our article on Advanced Facebook Marketing Tactics for 2020, check out the info below. If anything is unclear, give us a call at +1 888–964–3498. Or you can contact our Facebook Advertising team online and we’ll get in touch. We’re happy to point you in the right direction, whether you become a Symphonic client or not. The Paid Social Marketing Funnel The paid social marketing funnel illustrates the consumer’s journey to your brand through social marketing. Consumers enter the funnel through prospecting and move further down the funnel the more we retarget them. The funnel shows how consumers come to know your brand and how paid social can make prospecting customers into clientele. There are two overarching ways to target on Facebook: Prospecting and retargeting. Within those lie our more specific targeting methods: Interest audience : Based on audience personas who have had no interaction with the brand : Based on audience personas who have had no interaction with the brand Lookalike audience : Facebook finds people who are similar to a seed audience (website custom audiences or customer remarketing lists) : Facebook finds people who are similar to a seed audience (website custom audiences or customer remarketing lists) Retargeting : People who are familiar with the brand by interacting with the website (WCA — website custom audiences) or are part of the customer retargeting list (CRM list). : People who are familiar with the brand by interacting with the website (WCA — website custom audiences) or are part of the customer retargeting list (CRM list). Dynamic retargeting: Show customers products/services they have already seen through dynamic product ads based off-site pixels. Prospecting Audiences Prospecting audiences are interest or lookalike audiences and are comprised of people who have never interacted with your brand before. They are leveraged to coax people into the top of the funnel so that they can then be retargeted. Interest audiences are based on consumer insights from audience insights, Facebook analytics, and Google analytics. We recommend prospecting targeting when you need to drive traffic to your site with low CPCs. Think of it as a great first step to getting possible consumers into the funnel! Facebook Audience Insights How to get here: Dropdown menu → Plan → Audience insights Once you’re connected with the page, you are able to gain demographic and activity insights with users who have connected with your page. Pro Tip: Try breaking down your audience by gender, age or location to see how interests may change. This could help you tailor your prospecting audiences and make them more specific. Facebook Analytics With Facebook analytics, you’re able to find information on location, gender, and language that is presented in a very visually pleasing way that’s also great to share with your team. Pro Tip: Create an event source group through FB analytics. This will allow you to measure how page engagement plays a part in conversions (info on how to create this is found in Facebook analytics settings). Google Analytics: Interests Google analytics has the interests tab that includes affinity categories, in-market segments, and other categories. Compare audiences in GA versus what you see in audience insights to discover more targeting options. Affinity categories are what people higher in the brand’s funnel would be interested in. Keep in mind that this information is more general than what Facebook provides. The in-market segments show what consumers are more likely to purchase. This might be helpful when determining which part of your business you should promote. Creating Interest Audiences Now that you know what your brand persona is, it’s time for you to build your audiences. Our approach at Symphonic usually involves creating these audiences through assets-audiences for easy organization. Here you will have access to all your audiences and can make saved audiences (below). Within saved audiences, you will be able to create audiences based on interests. Pro Tips For Interest Audiences You can make your audiences more specific and relevant to your brand by layering and narrowing your audience. It’s important to take in consideration your goals and budget when creating audience targeting. Too narrow and your CPCs will likely be very high and you may limit your potential conversion volume, too broad and you may pay for undesirable site traffic. For example: Audience Name: Male Outdoor Enthusiast In City Creating Lookalike Audiences Lookalike audiences are built upon seed audiences (people who have already interacted with the brand) and are then used to find people in the general population who are similar to the seed audiences. These seed audiences are created from pixel audiences (i.e. past purchasers, site visitors, etc) or email lists. To create a lookalike audience, go to Audience tab > Create audience > Lookalike audience Once you select the seed audience, you will select which percentage of the population you want to target. The population amount will increase as the percentage of targeted increases. We recommend prospecting targeting if you need to drive traffic to your site with low CPCs. Think of it as a great first step to getting possible consumers into the funnel. How to Speak to Prospecting Audiences To distinguish between audiences, it’s important to cater your message to each audience. For interest-based audiences, we’ve found that the following perform best: Shorter and direct copy. Convey value where possible and align to brand voice. Promos and sales are great tools to entice first-time customers. Align messaging to specific ad set targeting so you can speak to the specific pain points/interests of your audience. Pro Tips: Use your best performing first-party audience as your seed audience Layer on additional targeting or group together lookalike audiences to broaden the scope The larger the seed audience, the more data points Facebook has to build the lookalike audience Aligning the Campaign Type With the Audience There are several options available when it comes to the type of campaign to run on Facebook. Below are a few options. Brand Awareness More reach and impressions Bigger audience reach Options to optimize towards: - Ad recall lift (maximize the total number of people who will remember seeing your ads) - Ad recall lift (maximize the total number of people who will remember seeing your ads) When to use: When the focus of the campaign is branding Reach More reach and impressions Bigger audience reach Options to optimize towards: Reach (ad gets served to the maximum number of people) Impressions (deliver ads to people as many times as possible) - Reach (ad gets served to the maximum number of people) - Impressions (deliver ads to people as many times as possible) - Reach (ad gets served to the maximum number of people) - Impressions (deliver ads to people as many times as possible) When to use: When the focus of the campaign is to get your ad in front of as many people as possible Traffic Choose where you want to drive traffic - Website, app, messenger - Website, app, messenger Less expensive CPCs than conversion campaigns Options to optimize towards: - Link clicks (deliver the ad to people who are most likely to click) - Landing page views (recommended): Deliver ad to people who are most likely to click on them and wait for a website to load - Impressions (deliver an ad to as many people as many times) - Daily unique reach (deliver an ad to people up to once a day) When to use: When the focus is for the audience to click on the ad, load the landing page, or be exposed to the brand Conversions Choose conversions event based on pixel data (i.e. view content, add to cart, purchase, etc) - The pixel represents the stages in the funnel and the farther down you go, the more expensive the audience becomes due to likelihood to purchase) - The pixel represents the stages in the funnel and the farther down you go, the more expensive the audience becomes due to likelihood to purchase) Options to optimize towards: - Conversions (recommended): deliver an ad to the right people - Link clicks (deliver an ad to people most likely to click) - Landing page views (deliver an ad to people who are most likely to click on them and wait for the website to load) - Daily unique reach (deliver ad to people up to once a day) - Conversions (recommended): deliver an ad to the right people - Link clicks (deliver an ad to people most likely to click) - Landing page views (deliver an ad to people who are most likely to click on them and wait for the website to load) - Daily unique reach (deliver ad to people up to once a day) When to use: You have a conversion event in mind that you want Facebook to optimize towards (purchase, view content, etc) It’s important to align your campaign type for prospecting audiences based on goals. Below are some examples of goals and KPIs to keep in mind when targeting interest or lookalike audiences. Goal: Get your brand/product in front of everyone you possibly can - Run a brand awareness or reach campaign — KPI: CPM - Run a brand awareness or reach campaign — KPI: CPM Goal: Target a slightly smaller group that is more likely to click on an ad - Run a traffic campaign — KPI: CPCs, CTR - Run a traffic campaign — KPI: CPCs, CTR Goal: Target a very narrow group that is most likely to convert on the website - Run a conversions campaign — KPIs: Conversions, CPA Retargeting Audiences Retargeting on Facebook consists of re-engaging people who are already familiar with a brand by interacting with the website. Through Facebook’s pixel, you are able to engage with people who have been to your site, your brand page, or interacted with your ads. To create a first-party retargeting audience, go to the audience tab within Facebook and select custom audience: Here, you’re able to upload email lists, retarget website traffic and activity, retarget app activity, and retarget offline activity and engagement. Re-Engage Consumers You have the ability to re-engage your desired audiences in a couple of different ways. The first is through email. Upload your email list manually or create automatic imports from your email marketing service if supported by Facebook. Some example email lists are: Highly scored sales leads from Salesforce, Marketo, Pardot, etc. Webinar or event attendees Newsletter subscribers Email subscribers who have not responded recently to an email marketing campaign The second way to re-engage your audience is through engagement. The engagement tab of Facebook’s custom audiences section allows us to retarget people who have interacted with our Facebook/Instagram brand pages, video ads, leads, and events. If you’re looking to engage current customers, try targeting those who follow or like your brand on Facebook. If you are more focused on lead gen campaigns, the lead form targeting is a great way to capture all your leads in a retargeting campaign. How to Speak to Retargeting Audiences Be memorable, friendly, and have personality! This audience is already familiar with your brand, so keep this in mind when creating messaging and ad creative Leverage different forms of content, CTAs, and messaging to test how you can further guide your audience down the funnel Dynamic Retargeting With dynamic retargeting, you’re able to show customers products and services they have already seen through dynamic product ads based on the site pixel. This targeting method is at the very bottom of the funnel because you’re showing people products they have already viewed. Note that this type of campaign is only available for e-commerce clients because you’ll need a product catalog. With dynamic retargeting, it’s best practice to target product viewers and cart abandoners. In addition, Facebook recommends that each DPA ad set receives at least 50 conversions per week so that the engine can best optimize. This will play a big part in the date ranges that are being retargeted. If your business has repeat purchasers, include a past purchaser segment targeting past purchasers from 30–90 days ago. Who Should I Be Targeting? If you have an extremely low conversion rate (>10 conversions/week) break out ad sets like this: Product Viewers 1–30 Days Cart Abandoners 1–30 Days If you have a low conversion rate (10–50 conversions/week), break out ad sets like this: Product Viewers 1–10 Days; 11–30 Days Cart Abandoners 1–10 Days; 11–30 Days If you have a higher conversion rate (50+ conversions/week), break out ad sets like this: Product Viewers 1–3 Days; 4–10 Days, 11–30 Days Cart Abandoners 1–3 Days; 4–10 Days, 11–30 Days How to Build DPA Ad Sets As mentioned above, dynamic product ads allow us to retarget people based on products they have viewed, products they have added to cart, products they have purchased, and much more! To create these ad sets in a DPA campaign, you will need to use logical statements. Here are some examples of how the ad sets should be set up. You’ll just need to change the time frame per ad set! Product Viewers: 1–10 days Cart Abandoners: 1–10 days Product Viewers: 11–30 days Cart Abandoners: 11–30 days Upselling An additional function of dynamic ads is showing products to people who have purchased certain products. This function is called cross-selling and is at the ad set level where you figure out your audiences. In order to create this, you will need to have two product sets: One will need to be products that people have bought The second needs to be products that you want people to see since they bought the first product Wondering when to use upselling? When you have products that are usually bought together and are related! For example, when a customer buys a toothbrush, show them replacement toothbrush heads. Be sure to tailor your ad copy for this feature! How to Speak to Consumers in Dynamic Product Ads There’s no need to make your dynamic product ads heavily branded. Direct messaging works great. The consumers know that you’re showing them what they’ve already looked at, so why not call that out and have some fun with it? Some examples of this are:

https://medium.com/@SymphonicDigital/the-complete-business-guide-to-facebook-audience-strategy-e38ad8a96500

['Symphonic Digital']

2020-04-13 23:05:51.975000+00:00

['Facebook Marketing', 'PPC Marketing', 'PPC', 'Audience Targeting', 'Digital Marketing']

How To Download Google Images, Using Python (2021)

How To Download Google Images, Using Python (2021) I’ll show you how to download hundreds of Google images within seconds, using a few lines of code in Python Christopher Zita Follow Jan 21 · 6 min read Photo from Unsplash by Philippe Oursel You might be in the same boat as me. I needed a bunch of images from Google images but I was too lazy to manually download each one. Therefore I scoured the internet looking for an answer but came up empty. At that point, I decided to try to do this myself and code up a program that downloads multiple images from Google images. Surprisingly I was successful and created a code in Python that can download hundreds of images within seconds. Now I want to teach you how to do the same, so let me show you… How to Download Google Images, Using Python. Step 1: Selenium To get started the way I was able to accomplish downloading these images was by using a library called Selenium. Selenium is a library that allows you to interact with web pages such as; sending text to an inbox, clicking buttons, and self-scrolling, all by using code. Therefore, the first step you need to do to make this code work is to install Selenium and a web driver. No need to worry as the installation is quite easy and I even created a short 4-minute video that shows you how to do this. After watching the video and having Selenium installed and a web driver downloaded, you’re first few lines should import Selenium and start the driver as so… #Imports Packages from selenium import webdriver from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys import time #Opens up web driver and goes to Google Images driver = webdriver.Chrome('C:/Web Scraping course/chromedriver.exe') driver.get('https://www.google.ca/imghp?hl=en&tab=ri&authuser=0&ogbl') When the lines of code above are run, a new browser should have opened up and gone to the Google Images web page. Step 2: Interacting With Google Home Page Like I said above the great thing about Selenium is that you’re able to interact with web pages because of the driver you downloaded. Therefore, the next piece of code you're going to write will input text into the Google Images search bar. To do this you need to find the location of the search bar on the page. This is done by finding the search bar’s Xpath. To find the Xpath you need to open up the HTML of the web page which is done by clicking right anywhere on the page, and then pressing inspect. If you did this correctly your webpage should look similar to the image below.

https://levelup.gitconnected.com/how-to-download-google-images-using-python-2021-82e69c637d59

['Christopher Zita']

2021-01-25 06:34:23.783000+00:00

['Programming', 'Selenium', 'Python', 'Deep Learning', 'Web Scraping']

Tales of a Nigerian living in Nigeria: Part 2

Tales of a Nigerian living in Nigeria: Part 2 I also did check out how to ‘become a member’ on Medium. To become a member, I had to pay some money, which isn’t so costly. There was the option to either pay for a month or for a year. To my surprise, the amount I was to pay was in Naira, the Nigerian currency, although I wouldn’t be paid for any article either in Naira or dollar because the partnership payment program is not ‘in my country’. To enjoy ‘unlimited contents’, I must ‘reward the thinkers’ who are ‘privileged' to be in some other part of the world, while I won’t be rewarded no matter how well I write simply because I’m a Nigerian living in Nigeria with the present policy on Medium. Sighs. I remain full of hope, though. Thank you and may Jesus bless you richly. Thanks for reading!

https://medium.com/@tomis.abimbola/tales-of-a-nigerian-living-in-nigeria-part-2-21ff2b4b68e7

['Susanna Tomilayo Abimbola']

2020-12-17 21:05:46.353000+00:00

['Medium', 'Nigeria', 'Jesus', 'Nigerian Writing']

Transparent electronic books and human-looking robots: the new field of ‘organic electronics’

Transparent electronic books and human-looking robots: the new field of ‘organic electronics’ The emerging research area could improve consumer devices and healthcare. by Richard Gray Electronics made from carbon rather than silicon could lead to a new generation of medical devices, sensors and perhaps even robots, according to Professor Andreas Hirsch, chair of organic chemistry at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany. Materials such as graphene could soon be appearing in electronic devices and could lead to entirely new forms of ‘chemical’ computing and information storage. We spoke to Prof. Hirsch about the emerging research field known as organic electronics. What are organic electronics? Traditional electronics are based on solid silicon which is used to create semiconductors. These are inorganic (meaning they don’t contain carbon). In contrast, organic electronics use carbon-based molecules — either small molecules or polymers, which are long chains of molecules. Almost all biological molecules are organic compounds, but so are substances made from hydrocarbons like petrochemicals, oils and plastics. A lot of people might think of polymers in particular as being non-conductive — for example plastic polymers are used to insulate copper wires. But some organic polymers and molecules can conduct electricity. How do they differ from traditional silicon-based electronics? Organic compounds have some advantages over inorganic compounds. They are lightweight, they can be flexible and transparent — all things that differ substantially from classical silicon technology. They can also be cheaper to produce. Why is there so much excitement surrounding organic electronics? There are so many organic compounds and a wide variety of functional groups (clusters of atoms with their own distinctive properties). It becomes very easy to tune their electronic properties by adding functional groups. Some functional groups are electron withdrawing and some that are electron donating, so by combining these we can tune the properties very precisely. You can tune fluorescence for light emitting diodes, for example. We can also control the light they absorb, so they can be used as components in solar cells, and tune their sensor properties, so they conduct electricity in the presence of something we want to detect. It is a really broad research field that has become very promising. Where are they being used at the moment? Probably the use that most people will encounter is in screen technology. Organic LEDs (OLEDs) are now quite common in mobile phones and you can buy televisions with them too. But even before that, liquid crystal devices (LCDs), which can be considered as a kind of organic electronics, have been used in many applications for years. ‘I’m convinced in 50 years or so you will see much more organic looking robots that can perform functions that metal based robots cannot do.’ Professor Andreas Hirsch, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany What other applications are there for organic electronics? Their use in photovoltaic devices is an important issue. Silicon-based technology is superior in many ways, certainly where efficiency is concerned and their long term stability. But it is very expensive to generate single crystalline silicon and it is hard to control its morphology (shape and structure). It isn’t very flexible or transparent and cannot be made very thin. This is where organic photovoltaics start to have an edge — they can be made very thin, you can make devices that cover a large area with them and they are flexible, which is a big advantage in many applications, such as solar panels and large light emitting displays. What about in sensors? This is still an emerging field, but it is very promising. If you think of graphene — which is a two-dimensional layer of carbon one atom thick — it is highly conductive but also extremely sensitive. Just a single molecule of carbon monoxide, for example, has an influence on the conductance which can be measured. Again, it is flexible, can be made in large areas and is transparent. How do you turn graphene into a sensor? This is something my own group has been working on. One of our research projects — GRAPHENOCHEM — was really just looking at whether we could make graphene in larger quantities, as when we started (in 2010) it was being created by peeling Scotch tape off a piece of graphite. We wanted to know if we could use wet chemistry approaches (using liquids) to make it in larger quantities. At the same time, we also started looking at the chemical functionality of graphene by attaching organic groups with covalent bonds (bonds between atoms where they share electrons) to modify the graphene properties. We started with simple molecules like alkyl groups, aromatic rings like benzene, but more recently have attached a receptor molecule that can bond with barbiturates, which are a type of drug. It is basic fundamental chemistry at this stage, but it could lead us towards new types of sensors for biologically active molecules like this. How might these sensors be used in the future? We haven’t done it yet, but it should be possible to bind biomolecules and proteins to graphene and induce biological responses (in humans, for example). It should be possible to recognise a biological system such as a virus or a DNA sequence which would then modify the electronic properties so you can measure the change in conductivity. This would give you very sensitive analytical devices (for diagnostics). For something like the coronavirus, this could be of huge importance. How else has your work on graphene developed? We have also shown we are able to control exactly where on a graphene sheet we want to put functional groups. We can create very specific patterns, such as stripes or circles, with combinations of different functionalities next to each other. It means we can modify the electronic properties in specific ways. And we found we can not only add these in patterns, but also remove them. It becomes a form of chemical information storage or memory. We can use a laser to ‘write’ molecules in patterns onto the graphene sheet, then with the right chemistry remove it again. Organic electronics are unlikely to replace silicon technology but could be used in areas such as biosensing and robotics, according to Prof. Hirsch. Image credit — Andreas Hirsch Do you think organic electronics might eventually replace silicon computers? I think it is much more likely to be a complementary system. Our work is very prototype just now, so I don’t know whether we can really make an organic state computer that can work at the level of normal silicon-based computers. I doubt that a little bit. But if you think about biological systems where the response doesn’t have to be so fast, there could be an advantage there (because it is hard to get silicon to interact with biological molecules). We could see organic electronics being used in medical devices or biogenic robotics at the interface with the biological system. What are the main challenges that need to be overcome? In some instances, it is just being able to mass produce organic electronics. Just think about graphene and carbon nanotubes — they are still very hard to process in large quantities. The long-term stability of organic molecules is another issue. If you have them in a photovoltaic device on the roof of your house, being exposed to sunlight for 20 years, they are not going to be as stable as inorganic compounds. Their performance in solar cells is still lower too. It becomes obvious that we are talking more about complementary technology rather than trying to replace silicon. But with graphene we are seeing, for the first time, a material that is purely organic, highly conductive and completely stable. So, I think we really will start to see applications involving graphene very soon. How do you see organic electronics being used in the future? I think it will find many complementary applications where electronics are trying to fulfil specific combinations of demands. We already have them in many consumer devices but we could also start to think about transparent electronic newspapers or books. In the long term, the interface between the electronic and the biological world in medical applications will certainly be very interesting. In robotics too. There are conductive polymers that when you apply a voltage, they can change their shape. These behave like artificial muscles. So, we may end up with robots that look much more like a normal animal or human being. I’m convinced in 50 years or so you will see much more organic looking robots that can perform functions that metal based robots cannot do. Organic electronics will play an important role in those. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The research in this article was funded by the EU’s European Research Council. If you liked this article, please consider sharing it on social media. More info GRAPHENOCHEM

https://horizonmageu.medium.com/transparent-electronic-books-and-human-looking-robots-the-new-field-of-organic-electronics-fef757e02f41

[]

2020-10-05 11:44:32.187000+00:00

['Organic Electronic', 'Robotics', 'Transparency', 'Electronics', 'Oct20']

How we do business as individuals and an enterprise matters

At Syntropic World We believe; That all of life has intrinsic value. Every human and creature has a unique purpose, and that the work we are committed to at Syntropic World is to enable 100% success of Earth and all her creatures, without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone.* Our belief and stand transcends pigment, caste, gender, ability and all the other artificially imposed tropes. We hold that human dignity, equal access, rights partnered with responsibility, justice, integrity and respect for all-life is foundational to everything we do. Committed to learning, we hold ourselves to account, we accepted wholeheartedly our responsibility to support those with less rights and less access. We learn by doing. We make mistakes. We take responsibility for our learning and our mistakes. We believe that most people are good, most people want to do work that is valued and dignifies life, most people want to bring their creativity and contribution to life. Our question is how we create the ecology and enterprise design that enables this to happen. Our operating model is to apply the laws inherent in nature to enterprise design and human co-ordination. To focus on the relationships, the spaces between relationship, and the ability to enable human synergy, while also remaining deeply mindful of the precessional effects and the long term consequences. We are idealistic + practical. Towards a world with a future. Photo taken March 10th 2021 *in transparency I am not so good at this when a mosquito is in my bedroom, or a fly in my kitchen. #worldwithafuture #businessreimagined #syntropicworld #syntropicenterprise #syntropy

https://medium.com/@christine-mcd/how-we-do-business-as-individuals-and-an-enterprise-matters-cd0e493941f4

['Christine Mcdougall']

2021-03-09 20:55:14.015000+00:00

['Values', 'Syntropic World', 'Syntropic Enterprise', 'Syntropy']

Your Song

Your Song Photo copyright Michelle Lane, 2020 You left your sandals behind for the short walk To the well with your earthen pitcher, Small billows of dust with every step A song arose as you returned Lovely whole notes; you sang, Filling the wide dome of air around you Water dampening the ground The vessel, spilling over, You are incandescent With your heart song You step over The threshold’s pounded earth, Pass into soft light within, Set your pitcher on the table, Turn toward the window, Near the cool brown of the wall, A shimmering flame, An utterance of light saying: Do not be afraid . . . Full of Grace . . . You quake, yet feel substantial, You say: Here am I. . . Let it Be A luminous word, your simple yes, alive In the room, in your song; your bare feet Firmly on the earthy floor . . . ************************************************ This poem is my envisioning of the Annunciation, the account in Luke’s Gospel (Luke 1:26–38) of the angel Gabriel coming to Mary and announcing that she will bear the Christ Child of God and will name him Jesus. She is a young woman, unmarried but engaged to an older man named Joseph. In the poem I intentionally painted a young Mary who was in the fullness of her self, and free. Mary’s virginity is a topic of both reverence and controversy. The common understanding of the word “virgin” is a woman who has not had sex (males and gender-queer people may be given this label as well, but traditionally it is ascribed to females). But this word can be much more expansive than this conventional meaning. The word, “virgin” in its deepest essence means “unattached,” or “one in oneself.” It may be understood as a state of freedom from attachment. Rather than focusing on the idea that Mary became pregnant without having sexual intercourse with a man, perhaps we might note that Mary agreed to respond to the angel’s invitation and then to participate in the birthing of someone who was extraordinary in this world. A beautiful gift. We might consider that each of us is capable of responding to what wants to be born within us and then to “give birth,” or bring into being, something that is a gift to the world. What we need to do is to listen within, be open to possibilities, and become self-possessed — not in a self-focused way, but in a way that one is free to give oneself away. As we come to know ourselves more deeply, we may be inspired to change something in our life or to create something new. Perhaps there is something you have always wanted to engage in, a deep urge or gift that is unrealized. It may be scary or unsettling to accept the inspiration or yearnings that arise within you. It will take courage to free yourself to say “yes” to this spark within and take the risk of allowing it to consume you. What kinds of “holy mysteries” might be asking to come alive within you?

https://medium.com/@berrywoman08/your-song-5f68f1465a8e

['Michelle Berry Lane']

2020-12-25 18:52:30.104000+00:00

['Inspiration', 'Spirituality', 'Advent', 'Poetry']

Data Provenance and Lineage

Data Provenance and Lineage in Modern Sciences It is quite technically feasible to use lineage and provenance concepts in Software Engineering. Using these well-known concepts can help track “the history of data” and ultimately have an audit trail. System performing complex data transformations We use the Provenance term to describe a high-level overview of complex data transformations, explaining why and how something came out of the system. Provenance of the system Lineage, on the other hand, is a more granular description of every step in detail. Every single time data is transformed — changed — it would be tracked with clear output, input, and delta. Lineage of the system There are quite a few well-known systems that do this. Using data lineage should help with any data auditing questions, quality assurance, and general know-how what data is the most valuable in an organization. All of this more often falls behind the “Data Governance” term. As for full-blown solutions for data lineage & governance most notable ones are MANTA, IBM’s DataOps, and Octopai.

https://kaudrius.medium.com/data-provenance-and-lineage-4f3d8a55fff4

['Audrius Kucinskas']

2020-09-29 07:27:16.827000+00:00

['Data Engineering', 'Data Science', 'Data']

Grow Your Amazon Sales With Amazon Influencers

Interview with Tanner Rankin, CEO of Referazon Interview with Tanner Rankin, CEO of Referazon Tell us about Referazon. What do you do? Referazon drives sales and saves time for brands selling on Amazon by helping them quickly find Amazon Influencers to promote their products and to easily manage their Amazon Influencer Marketing campaigns. What is your startup’s origin story? It’s incredibly difficult to sell on Amazon without a presence OFF Amazon. Building your own audience is time consuming and resource intensive. With the rise of the importance of driving OFF Amazon traffic to your Amazon product listings, Amazon sellers needed a quick and easy way to harness the power of a tactic used since 1996 when Amazon launched their Affiliate Program, the Amazon Associates Program. We launched Referazon to make it simple for Amazon Sellers to find Amazon Influencers who already have audiences of their target customers and to manage their campaigns in one convenient place. Had you been involved in the industry before this startup? What is your background? As a top-rated Amazon consultant with 10+ years experience, I was steeped in the industry for a long time, making it simple to identify the need for Amazon Influencers and analyze shifts in the industry. What’s unique about your company? What are the key differentiators between you and other players? Referazon is unique from other Influencer Marketing Platforms in a few key ways. First, Referazon is not a marketplace. We do not have pre-existing relationships with Amazon Influencers. That means, our customers benefit from significant savings due to no middle-men. Second, Referazon finds Amazon specific Influencers. The Influencers you find on Referazon are already part of the Amazon Influencer Program and Amazon Associates Programs. This means there is no extra work for the brand selling on Amazon, there are no programs you need to get the Influencer to sign up for or nothing to explain to them. What’s more, the commissions paid to the Amazon Influencer for the sales of the product come directly from Amazon and not out of the Amazon Sellers account. Take us through a day in your life. What does the typical day look like? A typical day at Referazon begins by prioritizing customer service and feedback. The voice of our customer is the loudest in the room and we’ve found it invaluable to growing our company. We’re able to digest and synthesize that information in our meetings to prioritize our product development as with a SaaS product, we have the benefit of consistently being able to improve, sculpt and mold our product. From there, staying up to date and often times even ahead of Amazon Influencer Marketing trends and how they help Amazon Brands sell allows us to focus on our content strategy to help us create premium content that educates our customers. This could mean blogs & social media, but also in-software content for our customers to help them get the most out of our product as well. What has been the most challenging part of growing your company? The most challenging part of growing in this space is the space itself. Influencer Marketing on Amazon is in its infancy and every day more and more brands are discovering the marketing channel. Even though the tactic has been around since 1996, only the savviest brands were capitalizing. Luckily, Amazon itself is driving the industry forward and educating the brands selling on its marketplace in the importance of OFF Amazon traffic and Amazon Influencers. What has been your best marketing channel? What are some channels you are looking to explore next? Our best marketing channel by far has been SEO and content marketing. On the horizon for us is taking our content marketing and casting an even wider net with new platforms. What apps do you use that you would recommend to others? We manage our company with a combination of useful software from Slack, SEMRush, Trello, Later, Cyfe, Canva & Google Analytics to name a few. Do you have a book, podcast, or Youtube channel you would recommend to other Entrepreneurs? For my own entrepreneurial journey I’ve found subject matter expertise the most valuable to my own and my companies success. So while there are a lot of great books, podcasts and YouTube channels out there that paint in broad strokes on business, finance and business systems, I’d encourage Entrepreneurs to double down on books, podcasts and YouTube channels that increase your own knowledge on your particular subject matter, whatever that is; because at the end of the day, that’s what your customer is paying you for. If you could go back in time to the day you founded your company, what advice would you give yourself? I would encourage myself to find a balance between a lean MVP and something closer to a finished, polished product. Through customer feedback, you’ll find both your subject matter expertise and your gut intuitions are more often than not confirmed, so you should strive to achieve them. What’s something you’ve learned from building your business that someone else can learn from? After you’ve done the research, trust your subject matter expertise to build the company that you believe will give the most value to your customer. Then, be open to adapting and optimizing from feedback. If you were writing an article about your company, what would the title be? * This Simple Software Makes Growing Your Amazon Sales Easy With Amazon Influencers

https://medium.com/startup-thread/grow-your-amazon-sales-with-amazon-influencers-fe839ee5b933

['Dan Stein']

2020-11-27 03:57:52.098000+00:00

['Founder Interviews', 'Startup Life', 'Entrepreneur', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Startup']

Tell the stories that only you can…

Tell the stories that only you can… There is a quote that says “The devil can’t use my story if I’m the one telling it.” Theres a lot of truth to that statement if you really think about it. My story is one etched with disillusion and hurt, disappointment, bad decisions and depression. It is also filled with redemption, reconciliation, renewal and love. I am an example of the depravity and despair we as humans sink to when trying to steer our life according to our own course. Yet I am also the living breathing proof of God’s relentless love for the prodigal. Its hard to see ourselves in this way but if I am honest I know that I am that person…. but you are too my friend. That is why you have to tell your story as only you can. I have wrestled with many thoughts and if I am honest even wrestled with God during particularly dark bouts of depression. I have gone through the liturgy of questions such as “Is God even there?” Or “Does God really care that I am drowning over here?” I also have had times when it was just survival and I focused on keeping it together hour by hour. I would not have admitted that at one time and most people around me wouldn’t have known anyways. I know from experience how equipped people with depressive tendencies are at putting on the face to keep everyone at a distance. It was at these times that I found myself with no words to say and no prayers to pray. I was completely empty and literally drained of any passion. I say this to give you insight into why this story, my story, is not one that I would have chosen to illustrate my life.

https://medium.com/@sharonbeamanriley/tell-the-stories-that-only-you-can-929e2de43eef

['Sharon Beaman Riley']

2020-04-26 19:21:16.327000+00:00

['Self Improvement', 'Depression', 'Anxiety', 'Choices', 'Life']

Various IT Outsourcing Models: How to Choose the Best One For Your Business?

Do you want to cooperate with an outsourcing company, but you do not know which cooperation model to choose? This article will compare the most popular outsourcing models and help you decide which one will be the best for your business. Location-Based Types of IT Outsourcing Outsourcing can be divided into two ways, depending on the location or form of collaboration. In the case of the first one, these are: Onshore Software Development — the outsourcing vendor and its client, are from the same country. — the outsourcing vendor and its client, are from the same country. Nearshore Software Development — the outsourcing vendor and its client, are from the same continent. — the outsourcing vendor and its client, are from the same continent. Offshore Software Development — the outsourcing vendor is from a different continent than its client. For more about these models, read the article: Onshore, Nearshore & Offshore — What Is It? In this case, the issues you should consider are: - cultural proximity, - time zone, - level of English, - level of programming skills, - cost. When deciding on one of these models, you should compare the differences between specific countries. In this article: Top IT Outsourcing Destinations in 2021 and 2022. In Which Country Can You Find the Best Developers? we compared 11 most popular outsourcing destinations, where we took into account issues such as programming skills, cultural proximity, and average developer salary. Relationship-Based Types of IT Outsourcing Another important decision is the type of partnership with the outsourcing company. Here you have 4 ways to choose: It’s a critical choice, so we’ll focus on just that division and help you make the best decision for your business in this article. 1. Project-based IT outsourcing The most classic outsourcing model is project outsourcing, where the outsourcing company is responsible for the entire project. It is its responsibility to deliver the project on time, manage and hire employees. The project team has all the needed professionals to execute your application or software. In this model, the outsourcing company is responsible for managing risks such as rotations or other factors that cause possible delays. Notably, a project manager is assigned to the project, and he manages the entire software development process. Of course, you will be able to monitor the progress of the work on an ongoing basis, but it is the provider who decides which people to hire or which tools to use to complete the project. Key benefits: Saving time — you don’t have to spend time and energy recruiting, onboarding and managing the team responsible for delivering the project. — you don’t have to spend time and energy recruiting, onboarding and managing the team responsible for delivering the project. Cost optimization — when you decide on such a cooperation model, you know exactly how much it will cost. You do not have to worry about salaries, benefits, office or administrative costs. — when you decide on such a cooperation model, you know exactly how much it will cost. You do not have to worry about salaries, benefits, office or administrative costs. Less responsibility — the supplier manages all the risks connected with the project, and he is responsible for delivering the project on time. When to choose a project-based outsourcing model? Choose this solution if: Your IT team is busy with other tasks. You don’t need such a large IT team permanently as you would need for this project. You don’t have your own internal IT team. Your project requires a lot of experience and knowledge, which your company doesn’t have. You want to focus on other tasks and pass the entire responsibility to the provider. You need a specific thing to do (e.g. application, software, functionality), but you don’t need a whole team to maintain it in the future. You are the founder of a startup, and you don’t yet have the knowledge and experience to do this project internally. 2. Staff Augmentation Staff augmentation is adding external specialists for the internal team through an outsourcing company. You can choose the specific people you want to work with by reviewing the resumes offered by the vendor. It is usually temporary cooperation chosen by companies that need support in implementing larger projects. In this model, team and project management is on your side. You are also responsible for delivering the project on time. [ Read also: What is Staff Augmentation? ] Benefits of staff augmentation: More control over the project — external employees are an integral part of the team and work on your terms. external employees are an integral part of the team and work on your terms. Quick fill of staff shortages — you don’t waste time on internal recruitment — you don’t waste time on internal recruitment Flexibility — you can scale your team up or down at any time. — you can scale your team up or down at any time. No administrative costs — people who join your team can be hired directly by the provider. — people who join your team can be hired directly by the provider. Increased productivity — you get programmers dedicated exclusively to your project. When should you choose staff augmentation? This model is the best choice if: You have your own IT team working on a project but need temporary support to finish your work faster. You have problems finding qualified specialists with niche skills to join your team and care about time. You want to have an impact on what kind of people take part in your project. You want to have control over every aspect of the project. 3. Managed team This model involves hiring an external team of developers to perform a specific scope of work. This team does not work directly with the internal team as in the case of staff augmentation but reports its tasks to the PM, CTO or the client. Like the augmentation model, you get specialists entirely focused on your product, but they do not become part of your internal team. It is an intermediate solution between staff augmentation and project outsourcing. What kind of specialists can you hire in this model? The number and roles depend on your project. It may be a complete IT team, or it may be, for example, a dedicated testing team. The outsourcing provider should be able to select specialists according to your requirements. Benefits of a managed team: More control over the process — in this model, you communicate directly with all project members, and they report directly to you. — in this model, you communicate directly with all project members, and they report directly to you. Better communication — members of a dedicated team usually know each other well and can work together effectively. — members of a dedicated team usually know each other well and can work together effectively. Reduced risk — a dedicated team has experience in delivering the solution you need, so there is a greater chance of success on this project. — a dedicated team has experience in delivering the solution you need, so there is a greater chance of success on this project. Time savings — you don’t have to waste time recruiting additional people to your team. What’s more, if you don’t have time to manage, you can assign an external PM responsible for managing the team When should you choose a managed team? This model is the best solution when you need to perform tasks that you don’t want to involve an internal team in, or you need specific skills that your employees don’t have and the company doesn’t want to invest in. 4. Body leasing Body leasing is a model in which an external supplier finds an employee for you. It is the best solution for companies looking for an employee with specific skills and experience temporarily or for a particular project. You can even enlist the support of this specialist within a specific time frame — for example, on specific days of the month when your internal team needs additional support. The person who joins your team in this model signs a contract with the outsourcing provider, so you don’t have to worry about administrative issues or providing them with full-time work assignments. [ Read also: Body Leasing — 3 Points to Consider While Choosing This Outsourcing Model ] Benefits of IT body leasing: Time savings — instead of recruiting an employee for your team, you can focus on other tasks. — instead of recruiting an employee for your team, you can focus on other tasks. Flexibility — supporting the person hired in this model is up to you. You decide when and for how long you need their support. — supporting the person hired in this model is up to you. You decide when and for how long you need their support. Convenience — you do not have to worry about administrative issues and finding tasks for this employee to fill his full-time position. When should you choose IT body leasing? If you need to quickly find IT specialists with specific technological skills, but: You don’t have time to recruit them. You need occasional and temporary part-time support. You are looking for a specialist with niche skills. Are you looking for qualified IT professionals to work within one of the above models? Contact us and tell us about your needs.

https://medium.com/@agababicz/various-it-outsourcing-models-how-to-choose-the-best-one-for-your-business-ab79b9a640fa

['Aga Babicz']

2021-12-16 06:40:17.472000+00:00

['It', 'Recruiting', 'Technology', 'Software Development', 'Outsourcing']

Is There A Way To Justify Burnout?

Anne Hathaway sung I Dreamed A Dream for 8 hours straight. 8 hours of crying and hitting I think a C5? note and just kind of going for it for them to use the fourth take she’d done after 20 minutes. On the same movie Les Mis, Hugh Jackman dehydrated himself to get buff, and they had to put a piano in a bulletproof case in order to sing live. Completely irrelevant? Yes and no. Just thought it was interesting. And it also proves a weird point. Hathaway got an Oscar for Les Mis while Russel Crowe got slaughtered. Some critics loved the live singing, others genuinely couldn’t handle it. Jackman’s acting was praised while his singing was often described as out of time and off key. So was it worth it? Is any risk to the self worth it for a job? Under capitalism: yes. There are so many videos from BuzzFeed employees who have left the company about how they worked ridiculous hours and put themselves under mental strain just to please ‘the higher ups’. The fact that teachers are expected to put not only their mental capacity, but also financial, into their work by buying supplies the school doesn’t have the budget for. Athletes, who live for their sport, are willing to decimate their bodies in the long run just to make it to that top league team. Method actors who force themselves into the deepest, darkest corners of mental health just to pull a legendary performace — and sometimes can’t get out again. Even the truth that a full-time job isn’t enough to live off anymore, so guess what? If you’re minimum wage get ready to work 2 full-time jobs, like a cool new 200% of your life job. Hey, if you eat, sleep, and commute for 12 hours a day and you work 2 full time jobs, you get a whole 8 hours of leisure time per week! Isn’t that ideal. People burnout at all levels of society, and not just for money. If risking your health (whether that be physical or mental) seems in writing so stupid, then why does it work? Why do those actors hit such career peaks? Why are those athletes immortalised? Why do we write heartwarming stories of kids who run lemonade stands to pay for their parents surgeries? We praise someone going above and beyond because… Idk, we’re conditioned or something. It’s complex. We are conditioned, we love stories of self sacrifice in the ‘developed’ OECD world. War heroes who die in battle for others, service dogs who run into fires for their owners, scientists who devote their life to finding a cure for a disease we didn’t even know existed. If we believe that individuals who give themselves fully to the world change said world fully, we’re a hell of a lot easier to control. Take Bioshock’s Rapture. People who have no need to look out for others don’t work well together and subsequently all dope up, wear creepy masks and start killing. Maybe that’s over the top but the philosophy stands — total selfishness is not condusive to living in a society. At some level or another we have to cooperate. Seems pretty straightforward, but this is where it gets rough. As much as we’re told to fuel society, we’re also individualists. It’s a “dog eat dog” world. As much as we love the stories of the selfless hero, we’re drawn to the impossibly wealthy, isolated dude as well. Despite the fact that the existence of billionaires hurts anyone who isn’t a billionaire, there are legions of Bezos fans who claime he earned his fortune. And therein lies the point: If someone else can do it, so can I. If I was in war, I’d die for my fellow man. If I was a tech genius, I’d be a billionare. If I were on a film set, I’d sing for hours until it was perfect. We justify burnout because we only see it as existing in desirable situations. For a dancer to die for the perfect performance (Black Swan) is the pinnacle of artistry. For a mathematician to devote their life to solving a Millenium Prize Problem is surely the height of intelligence. It seems like total, uncompromising dedication is meaningful. Damn, maybe that’s why we justify burnout. It’s just another maybe answer to the meaning of life. M

https://medium.com/@maiabearyman/is-there-a-way-to-justify-burnout-cf08f04e653a

[]

2020-12-11 09:50:45.705000+00:00

['Capitalism', 'Art', 'Burnout']

ELMo Embedding — The Entire Intent of a Query

As a continuation of the Search Query Understanding, here comes the next problem to solve which is known as Holistic Query Understanding. We will talk about this in detail as we have already covered the Reductionist Query Understanding part here already. Here, we are taking the case of e-commerce search. The problem is to find the intent of query lying in a particular taxonomy like L1/L2/L3 category also called category classification. Customer searching on an e-commerce website Let’s talk about a real-life online shopping example and you want to look for something like ‘onion 1kg fresh’. Now, in order to make the result more precise, the search results are shown along with the probable category name in which the intent of your query may lie i.e. ‘Grocery & Gourmet Foods’ here in your case. Now, if you click on the predicted category, you will end up seeing products that belong to that particular category and hence, a precise result enhancing the experience. The solution to the problem is Machine Learning based which we are going to talk about. The Intent of the Query This is a multi-class multi-label classification problem in which the input will be a set of search queries labeled with their categories and particular search queries may belong to the more than one category out of many mutually exclusive categories. To elaborate it more, let’s say we have 3 hierarchies of category L1, L2, and L3. A search query may belong to one or more categories of each hierarchy e.g. search query — “apple” may lie in “Electronics” and “Groceries” in L1, “Laptop” and “Fruit” in L2 and so on. We have a Deep Learning based model using Elmo as Embedding layer in it. ELMo Embedding ELMo is created by AllenNLP which unlike Glove, Fasttext, Word2Vec, etc. provides the contextualized word embeddings whose vector representation for a word differs in a sentence to sentence. ELMo is a deep contextualized word representation that models both (1) complex characteristics of word use (e.g., syntax and semantics), and (2) how these uses vary across linguistic contexts (i.e., to model polysemy). These word vectors are learned functions of the internal states of a deep bidirectional language model (biLM), which is pre-trained on a large text corpus. Taken from here The ELMo were trained on the 1 Billion Word Benchmark, approximately 800M tokens of news crawl data from WMT 2011. Why ELMo? Motivation towards using ELMo Other word representation models like Fasttext, Glove, etc. also generates the embeddings of words, but we chose Elmo because of few reasons. Let’s visit one by one: Elmo provides the embedding of a word that is present inside a sentence i.e. a word may have a different meaning depending on the context where it is being used similar to the example above in the photo. The word “Apple” may be a ‘Brand’ name as well as a ‘fruit’. So, if a query is given like ‘Apple Juice’ the embedding generated for the token ‘apple’ here will be different from the one in ‘Apple Laptop’. And in general e-commerce search query, this case is likely to happen. Another reason, since LSTM network is being used internally in ELMo model, we need to bother about the word that is not present in the dictionary of the training dataset as it generates the character embedding as well. It allows the network to use morphological clues to form robust representations for out-of-vocabulary tokens unseen in training. We generally face the out-of-vocabulary token problem in case of the brand names. ELMo furthermore won the best paper award at NAACL-HLT 2018, one of the top conferences in the field. Implementation using TF Hub TensorFlow Hub is a platform to publish, discover, and reuse parts of machine learning modules in TensorFlow. By a module, it means a self-contained piece of a TensorFlow graph, along with its weights, that can be reused across other, similar tasks. By reusing a module, a developer can perform transfer learning. The pre-trained Elmo model is also present on Tensorflow Hub. elmo = hub.Module(" embeddings = elmo(["apple juice", "apple tablet"], signature="default", as_dict=True)["elmo"] #Sample Code to get instant embeddingelmo = hub.Module(" https://tfhub.dev/google/elmo/2 ", trainable=True)embeddings = elmo(["apple juice", "apple tablet"], signature="default", as_dict=True)["elmo"] The output shape of embedding will be 1024 for each word and hence, a shape of [2,2,1024] for two sentences each having two words in the above example. This model needs to be used in Lambda layer if using Keras for modeling. The Elmo model weights have already been downloaded to a folder, so we need not make a network call to Tensorflow hub while training. Remember to initialize the graph and tables before calling the Elmo Embedding layer. with tf.Session() as sess: sess.run(tf.global_variables_initializer()) sess.run(tf.tables_initializer()) embed=sess.run(embeddings) Model after Integration Query Categorization Model Here we are using in-memory caching by using cachetools library of python. As the weights are very large in the Elmo model, each time iterating through the graph for finding an embedding of a sentence which is already generated once before is not a good idea as it will increase the training time and we also may run out of RAM memory. After one epoch, the embeddings of all the search query will be cached and returned easily without going through TensorFlow hub library. After getting the embedding of a sentence, we are using BiLSTM to extract more contextual representation for out-of-vocabulary words and then two dense layers followed by a sigmoid activation layer at the end. Since it’s a multi-label classification and a query is belonging to three different hierarchy we are using Sigmoid layer as the sum of probabilities needs not to be 1. Here, in the example we have taken 1500 categories, say 500 in each of the hierarchy L1, L2, and L3. In order to show the top 2 categories in each hierarchy, we need to take the category which is having the highest probability from the sigmoid layer at the end. TF-Serving Response As the model is a bit complex having a large number of weights, it will affect the overall response time in TF Serving. It is dependent on the number of categories is being predicted at the end as well. The model size has also grown to ~850MB in size. The Elmo can be replaced with the BERT as well. BERT has several variants available on TF Hub. The Elmo/BERT model can be used for unsupervised learning and can be trained on custom datasets as well by creating a custom layer in Keras . But, remember make sure you have enough resources like GPU, memory, etc before proceeding for this task. Conclusion So, now since we can predict the taxonomy hierarchy for a particular search query, we can leverage it to display the same to the end-user to select and display more precise results having the products which user has intended to buy by enhancing the search request to the engine. As it’s an ImageNet Moment of NLP, Transformer based algorithms for language modeling like BERT are reigning in the era. Other language models are Universal Language Model Fine-tuning (ULMFiT), and the OpenAI Transformer which has achieved state-of-the-art on a diverse range of tasks in Natural Language Processing. Thanks for reading the article. Please watch the space for more updates in the future and do read the other stories as well.

https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/elmo-embedding-the-entire-intent-of-a-query-530b268c4cd

['Sonu Sharma']

2019-08-20 03:53:21.070000+00:00

['Search', 'Machine Learning', 'NLP', 'TensorFlow', 'Data Science']

UX/UI Case Study: KFC Careers

Our Challenge The brief was simple. Transform the KFC careers portal into a fun, engaging and on-brand experience. Make use of great form design to improve UX issues, and speed up the overall customer journey. We also wanted to make it a better experience post-application for both hiring managers and future employees, taking advantage of automated EDMs to show the status of an application. What we did UX Audit & Design We applied good design practices to make this site not only incredibly easy to use, but engaging as well. Principles of good form design, such as pre-formatted date input fields (pop-up calendars are so 2010) and the ability to not only apply for multiple roles, but multiple stores too, all on a really lovely map view, where you can see exactly where each store is. Total Design Refresh The new design is modern, fresh and quintessentially KFC, right down to the buckets of chicken as stage markers, and emojis in place of icons. Probably the most fun you’ll ever have applying for a job Party in the front, business in the back Using real-time data, we can pull in job listings, send through application data, and create automations to notify applicants of the progress of their application in real time. Stores now also have an automated process to reject applications that are out of date. The Result? A job portal that’s engaging, fun and easy to use — and oh-so-on-brand for KFC. Since lauch we’ve smashed our goals with: 60% increase in completed applications Thousands of happy applicants! Check it out for yourself!

https://medium.com/ogilvy-ux/kfc-careers-971038264170

['Chris Rusnak']

2020-08-27 02:27:30.961000+00:00

['Kfc', 'Case Study', 'Design', 'UX']

How I handled null values in Android Proto DataStore?

I was very excited to know practically how this new storage solution (DataStore) works. So in the Christmas holidays, I made a sample project on Proto DataStore to learn and improve my skills. While working with DataStore i had multiple issues, but the major and most challenging issue was supporting null values in Proto DataStore. We can’t store null values in Proto DataStore instead we have other solutions. I found following solutions to add Null support in proto3, you can use according to your use-case. (I will add more solutions as soon as i will come to know) Method 1 We have wrappers.proto to support null in protobuffers To use above wrappers you need to import “google/protobuf/wrappers.proto”; And to declare nullable string use StringValue, Method 2 We can use Oneof to define a nullable type, as of my understanding the best way of using this is 👇🏼 But in this case, you have to do a lot of additional stuff, like handling null via if else in service implementation. Method 3 (using Default Values — Recommended) In proto3 all fields are optional by default so each field have default value These defaults are type-specific: For strings, the default value is the empty string. For bytes, the default value is empty bytes. For bools, the default value is false. For numeric types, the default value is zero. For enums, the default value is the first defined enum value , which must be 0. , which must be 0. For message fields, the field is not set. Its exact value is language-dependent. See the generated code guide for details. We have to handle these default values using conditional code like if object is null pass its default value instead. Thank you!! That’s all from my learnings!! Hey!!, I am ready to add more methods , if you know something different to handle null in protocol-buffers, Please let me know. i will be very thankful to you. you can find me on LinkedIn.

https://medium.com/@ishroid/proto3-null-support-3e8decd0afbc

['Ishrat Khan']

2020-12-30 10:26:07.928000+00:00

['Null Safety', 'Android', 'Proto3', 'Protobuf', 'Kotlin']

The Urgent Need for Cannabis as a Cancer Treatment

Many innovative treatments for cancer have been developed in the last half-century. Despite advancements in medical technology, prognoses are still poor for patients diagnosed with Stage IV cancer, and even survival times for patients diagnosed with some early-stage cancers are low. For example, 56% of patients diagnosed with an early-stage lung cancer live for at least five years after diagnosis, which means that for patients who catch the cancer early, 44% still die in the near-term. The five-year survival rate for metastatic lung cancer is only 5%. Cancer cases are expected to increase all across the world over the next decade, most starkly in low-income countries. As the World Health Organization notes, “Between 2008 and 2030, the number of new cancer cases is expected to increase more than 80% in low-income countries, which is double the rate expected in high-income countries (40%).” Global cancer deaths are also projected to increase substantially. In 2008, 7.6 million people died from cancer; in 2030, that number is expected to be 13 million. The traditional route of focusing exclusively on chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, and even immunotherapy clearly is not enough. Society must contemplate the potential of plants to help significantly reduce the cancer death burden. One plant in particular holds immense promise as a cancer treatment — cannabis. While there are many plants which possess compounds that inhibit cancer cells, the scope and quality of the evidence surrounding cannabis is truly extraordinary. To start, the primary unique phytocannabinoids in cannabis, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD), have been shown in preclinical studies (using cell cultures and animals) to exert a wide variety of anticancer effects against virtually every major type of cancer. Forms of brain, breast, colon, liver, lung, prostate, pancreatic, and skin cancers, as well as leukemia and lymphoma, are susceptible to phytocannabinoids. Both THC and CBD cause cancer cells to undergo programmed cell death, or apoptosis; the cells neatly break down into small parcels to be cleared by the immune system or neighboring cells. Phytocannabinoids also slow the reproduction of cancer cells, prevent their migration to distant tissues, and interfere with the development of blood vessels to solid tumors. Importantly, these inhibitory effects are almost always selective for cancer cells, and phytocannabinoids are generally shown to be inert against or protective of regular, healthy cells. This property contributes to the safety of using high doses of phytocannabinoids. Photographic documentation from a preclinical study is included below. Animal Study of Breast Cancer Shrinking in Response to THC or a Synthetic Cannabinoid There is more reason to believe that plant-derived phytocannabinoids would inhibit cancers in humans because of research into our own self-made endogenous cannabinoids, called endocannabinoids. The primary ways that THC and CBD work against cancer cells is through activation of CB1, CB2, and TRPV1 receptors on the surface of the cells. Likewise, our primary endocannabinoids anandamide and 2-arachidonoylglycerol (2-AG) exhibit anticancer effects via the same receptors. For example, 2-AG mitigates prostate cancer cell invasion via CB1 receptor activation, and along with anandamide it inhibits proliferation of breast cancer cells. In addition, anandamide induces apoptosis in cervical cancer cells via TRPV1 receptors. Since both phytocannabinoids and endocannabinoids inhibit cancer growth through similar mechanisms, it is not surprising there are so many successful reports of humans experiencing anticancer effects after using cannabis. It is worth noting that beyond THC and CBD, other phytocannabinoids like cannabichromene (CBC) and cannabigerol (CBG) possess anticancer properties. The Connection Between Cannabis for Epilepsy and Cancer Before discussion of human cases, there is another line of logical reasoning that greatly bolsters the argument for cannabis as a cancer treatment. It is now completely accepted that CBD-rich cannabis products can treat rare forms of epilepsy like Dravet syndrome and Lennox-Gastaut syndrome. When these reports started getting substantial attention in 2013 due to Charlotte Figi’s positive response to CBD, few doctors took them seriously. How could a compound from a federally illegal plant treat seizures that literally no pharmaceuticals were effective against? Genetic conditions like Dravet syndrome are extremely complex, which is why it has been exceptionally difficult for companies to develop proper treatments. Yet what started as “anecdotal evidence” quickly became confirmed by double-blind clinical trials using CBD for Dravet syndrome and Lennox-Gastaut syndrome. Ultimately, in some cases where pharmaceuticals could not decrease seizures at all, CBD-rich oil was effective at reducing seizures by 100%. Due to data like this, the Food and Drug Administration approved a naturally-derived CBD oil called Epidiolex in 2018. Just as with cancer, there is preclinical evidence suggesting that CBD could treat seizure disorders. For example, a 2012 study found that CBD administration reduced seizures and improved memory in rats with chemically-induced seizures. These types of seizures are far less complex than the ones associated with genetic conditions like Dravet syndrome, so it would have been reasonable not to expect CBD to work in Dravet patients. Yet as we now know from clinical trials, CBD unquestionably delivers therapeutic efficacy for multiple complex seizure disorders. Despite the promising results, many epileptic patients only respond partially to CBD or even not at all. Benefits will likely continue to improve as further research is conducted, but there will never be 100% efficacy for everyone no matter how far the research gets. It can also take time for patients to find the right dose of CBD, and the right type of oil, that works for them, as there is no one-size-fits-all treatment. The situation is similar for cannabis and cancer. The doses and treatment periods of THC and CBD that patients have used to achieve anticancer effects varies wildly, from only several milligrams of CBD per day to 1000mg of THC and/or CBD per day, and a few weeks of treatment time to several years. The results that patients obtain also vary, including slowing cancer growth, stopping cancer growth, lowering cancer cell markers, shrinking tumors, or achieving full remission from terminally-diagnosed cancers. Of course, many patients do not respond at all no matter what doses they use. There is still so much more to learn, but for now, it is certain that cannabis can produce anticancer effects in at least some patients. Orphan Drug Designations by the FDA for Phytocannabinoids to Treat Cancer Even the FDA is taking the potential of cannabis to fight cancer seriously, as they have granted orphan drug designation (ODD) status to numerous phytocannabinoid drugs for the direct treatment of various cancers, mainly brain tumors. ODD is granted to drugs intended to treat diseases affecting less than 200,000 people, and provides financial incentives that facilitate drug development. While ODD is just an early step and not formal marketing approval, it is only granted if there is reasonable scientific evidence that a potential therapy could work. Therefore, the fact that many cannabis-based drugs have ODD for the purpose of treating cancer implicitly supports the strength of the existing evidence. An example of an ODD listing is found below, and you can learn more about phytocannabinoids as orphan drugs here. Clinical Trial of Cannabis to Treat Glioblastoma The most conclusive evidence of cannabis fighting cancer in humans comes from a double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial using THC and CBD (specifically the whole-plant, 1:1 THC:CBD formulation known as Sativex) for glioblastoma patients. Both the placebo and treatment groups received standard chemotherapy. Median survival time for the placebo group was 369 days; for the treatment group, it was 550 days, about six months longer (a nearly 50% increase in survival time). For an aggressive cancer that even when optimally treated has a median survival of around 15 months, this extension of life achieved with cannabis therapy is particularly impressive and can only reasonably be explained by an anticancer effect. The symptomatic relief afforded by cannabis simply is not strong enough on its own to enable that kind of life extension. The maximum dose used per day was only 32.4mg THC and 30mg CBD per day, and while some patients have reported full remissions from low doses, most seem to need several hundred milligrams per day to potentially obtain remission-level results. In this case, likely due to the aggressiveness of glioblastoma and the doses used, the phytocannabinoids were only effective in extending life. Other case studies using different dosing protocols or describing patients with different cancers have documented better results. Case Reports of Using Cannabis to Treat Cancer One of the first case studies published in 2013 concerned a young female patient who resorted to using THC-rich cannabis oil for leukemia after conventional therapy failed. Her leukemic cancer cell count was uncontrolled by conventional therapy, but once the THC-rich oil (referred to as “hemp oil” in the study despite not being CBD-rich) was given, there was a clear decrease in the cell count. While the precise THC doses used in this case are unknown due to lack of lab testing of the THC oil, the volumes of oil given are known and likely correlate to several hundred milligrams of THC per day. Unfortunately, the patient still ended up passing away, as the result of a gastrointestinal perforation attributed to a side effect of chemotherapy. Although phytocannabinoids have neuroprotective properties, their ability to cause significant regeneration is clearly limited. In this case, if the cannabis extracts had been used earlier and in synergy with conventional treatment, the final outcome may have been avoidable. As the authors Dr. Yadvinder Singh and Dr. Chamandeep Bali noted, “These results cannot be explained by any other therapies, as the child was under palliative care and was solely on cannabinoid treatment when the response was documented by the SickKids Hospital.” Blood tests ruled out the possibility that chemotherapy was still active. A case series from 2018 published in the journal Anticancer Research examined 119 patients who used a synthetic form of CBD as cancer treatment. Many of them experienced powerful responses, which were summarized in Table II of the paper. One 62-year-old breast cancer patient started on CBD as the only treatment in October 2014, with a blood test showing 10.6 cells / 7.5mL as the circulating tumor cells (CTCs) count at that time. More tests in July 2015, October 2015, November 2016, and October 2017 showed a continuous decline in CTCs, with respective levels of 7.3, 6.8, 5.0, and 3.9 cells/7.5mL. The Table below displays additional cases. Click here for the larger version. Another interesting case was published in the SAGE Open Medical Case Reports journal in February 2019, titled Striking Lung Cancer Response to Self-Administration of Cannabidiol: A Case Report and Literature Review. The report described an 81-year-old man who went to the doctor for breathlessness in October 2016, and subsequent testing revealed a mass that was biopsy-confirmed to be lung adenocarcinoma. Due to his age, he declined chemotherapy and radiation and did not do anything for nearly a year. Scans in December 2016 and July 2017 showed slow progression of the cancer. In September 2017, he opted to begin using remarkably low doses of CBD (upwards of just 12mg per day); after this, the next scan in November 2017 showed a significant decrease in cancer volume. Pre-CBD October 2016 Post-CBD November 2017 Doctors from the Royal Stoke University Hospital and Guy Hilton Research Centre in the United Kingdom collaborated on this case, and wrote in their conclusion: “In summary, the data presented here indicate that CBD may have had a role in the striking response in a patient with histologically proven adenocarcinoma of the lung as a result of self-administration of CBD oil for a month and in the absence of any other identifiable lifestyle, drug or dietary changes.” These formally published cases and the aforementioned clinical trial have come alongside substantial media-reported evidence of cannabis directly fighting cancer in humans. For example, a November 2016 story from an NBC affiliate shared the story of a woman named Tammy Levent who used THC-rich cannabis oil to treat her breast cancer. She first received a lumpectomy shortly after diagnosis in May 2015, but refused further treatments. While her decision was questioned, she was pronounced cancer-free sometime in 2016. One of her nurses, Lisa Genovese, stated, “When I looked at Tammy’s blood work the tumor markers were all zero — and I couldn’t explain it.” Doctors were also surprised, saying they were not sure they had seen anything like this in their lives. Other articles from outlets like ABC News, CBS News, BBC, and Al Jazeera tell stories of patients achieving anticancer effects with cannabis medicine. These are just a few of the existing media-reported cases, which have been increasingly published over the past decade. Over 100 are collected in this free eBook, Cannabis for the Treatment of Cancer. Summary of the Evidence The preclinical, clinical, media-reported, and logical evidence clearly demonstrates cannabis can produce anticancer effects in humans in at least some cases. The chance that spontaneous remission, other medical factors, or lying alternatively explain the results of every single case report is essentially impossible. To summarize: 1. Phytocannabinoids from cannabis are shown to kill or inhibit most major forms of cancer in preclinical studies, while not affecting healthy cells 2. Endocannabinoids produced by all mammals kill or inhibit many forms of cancer through similar mechanisms as phytocannabinoids 3. Other preclinical evidence suggesting phytocannabinoids may treat severe, complex conditions like epilepsy have translated radically well to humans 4. There are at least seven case reports/series in formal medical journals hosted on PubMed that describe direct anticancer effects from cannabis 5. There is a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial demonstrating THC and CBD can work together with chemotherapy to inhibit glioblastoma progression 6. Numerous stories from various media sources across the world have been sharing stories of patients claiming remission or anticancer effects from cannabis for over 10 years Even with all this, some people will say that the evidence just isn’t there yet to claim cannabis can definitely fight cancer in humans. This view is no longer tenable in the face of the current evidence. However, it is true that cannabis is not a guaranteed effective treatment for cancer and there is still far more to learn about the extents and limits of cannabis as a cancer therapy. Nobody should forego conventional treatment for cannabis, and anybody who incorporates cannabis into their cancer therapy should be open with their physician. While it is every patient’s right to use the medicine they want, and some have reported success with cannabis as their sole therapy, the safest course involves combining cannabis with conventional therapy. Skepticism is an extremely necessary part of life, especially when it comes to novel medical treatments. Nobody wants to provide cancer patients with false hope or advocate something that could hurt them. But skepticism can go too far and hurt people as well. Refusal to acknowledge the real medical potential of cannabis has tragically stunted research and reform, so thousands of patients at this very moment are dying when their lives could be saved or extended with cannabis therapy. There is no guarantee cannabis will work for any specific person, but at the population level, there is absolutely no doubt many cancer patients would experience significant results from cannabis therapy. Given the relatively low cost of cannabis compared to conventional treatments, it would be reasonable for governments to institute programs that help cancer patients financially, as sustaining high doses of phytocannabinoids is expensive when paid out-of-pocket. Governments should also support clinical trials to determine the best treatment protocols for different patients with different cancers, as well as find out which factors mitigate the effectiveness of cannabis. Cannabis for the treatment of cancer is no longer a fringe issue. At the Cannabis for Cancer Declaration, over 30 medical professionals and researchers have signed on agreeing that cannabis can fight cancer in humans in at least some cases. You can show your support by signing this petition, writing your federal and state legislators, and sharing information with as many friends and family as possible. If we all work together, cannabis will become available as an accessible treatment option for cancer patients throughout the world.

https://medium.com/@cannabisforcancer/the-urgent-need-for-cannabis-as-a-cancer-treatment-9b501615fa8f

['Justin Kander']

2021-02-09 16:01:35.955000+00:00

['Cannabis Medical', 'Cannabis', 'Thc', 'Cbd', 'Cancer']

Biohacking Is a Bitch

Biohacking Is a Bitch Dog breeder David Ishee thinks gene editing can spare purebreds from debilitating disorders. But getting the tech to work is just the start. O n a stage in Oakland, California, David Ishee is talking about glow-in-the-dark puppies. The dog breeder has come all the way from Mississippi for this conversation. Dressed in a maroon t-shirt that reads “Stand back, I’m going to try science,” his long hair tied back in its customary ponytail, Ishee explains to a rapt audience that it’s time for an update to traditional breeding practices. “We started doing this before agriculture, and we haven’t really changed much,” he says. What he means is: 40,000 years of breeding and inbreeding have created an obsession with a purebred ideal — and riddled dogs with health problems that shorten their lifespans and diminish their hearing, digestion, or other basic abilities. Now that many of these disorders could at least theoretically be repaired using gene-editing techniques like CRISPR, Ishee wants to help breeders do exactly that, creating healthier dogs that can still be considered purebred. That’s where the bioluminescent puppies come in. If he can edit dog genes to make the animals glow, he reasons, perhaps he can convince breeders that the technique could be used for more practical purposes. First on his list would be to eliminate a bladder disorder in Dalmatians called hyperuricemia. That’s a painful buildup of uric acid crystals that is caused by a mutation in a gene associated with the dogs’ black spots and often requires surgery. It could be an excellent candidate for a CRISPR fix. Ishee gathers materials from a homemade incubator in a shed behind his house. Ishee’s talk in Oakland was part of an event last weekend called Biohack the Planet, a conference celebrating efforts to augment biology outside conventional academic environments. And Ishee is, in many ways, the quintessential biohacker. He lives outside the coastal biotech hubs, was homeschooled from fifth grade, and does his research in a shed in his backyard. He has already gotten in trouble with the Food and Drug Administration, which has declared every intentional genomic edit — and therefore every individual edited animal — to be an “experimental drug” that requires extensive testing. The agency informed Ishee in 2016 that he could neither give away nor sell any edited dogs without its approval. There’s no question that Ishee’s ideas are inspired, but he’s still a long way from successfully editing dogs, even after several attempts at glowing puppies. And even if he can pull that off, his most significant obstacle may still be ahead: convincing breeders obsessed with creating the best show dogs that gene editing could help them. All this makes Ishee’s story — his struggle to do innovative research while navigating bioethical tensions and regulators trying to monitor a fast-developing technology — a telling case study in the gap between what biohackers can imagine and what they can achieve. Inspiration from jellyfish “I love dogs,” Ishee tells me before his presentation in Oakland. “It’s really just as simple as that. I want to fix them.” He grew up around dogs; his great-grandfather and grandfather were breeders, and his brother is too. He balances his own work breeding mastiffs with a job in Mississippi’s oil industry. What frustrates him about traditional dog breeding is its reliance on trial and error. He describes it as a “very, very blunt tool, like trying to carve stone with an anvil on a stick.” It’s also slow. Dogs’ heat cycles are months apart, and it takes years for successive generations of puppies to mature.

https://medium.com/neodotlife/david-ishee-crispr-dogs-dalmatians-d24a48d5d874

[]

2020-08-06 23:14:54.274000+00:00

['Pets', 'Dogs', 'Gene Editing', 'CRISPR', 'Dog Breeding']

Mapping Overseas France with Tableau

Mapping Overseas France with Tableau A primer on making granular country maps inclusive of overseas territories Alexis Bernard Follow Mar 18 · 13 min read When you imagine France, this is most likely the shape that comes to your mind: Demographics map per department This image is actually Metropolitan France (la France métropolitaine), made up of two elements: mainland France (la France continentale) and Corsica Island (la Corse). This is also the shape that Tableau automatically displays when you choose a geographic dimension called “France.” But France is more than that. This country comprises various overseas territories, mostly islands, that fall into two categories: overseas departments (départements d’outre-mer, DOM) and overseas collectivities (collectivités d’outre-mer, COM). Map of all the overseas territories Note that you won’t need any of the overseas territories if you are making a World map, or a European map with comparison at country level. Why ? Except for French Guyana, most of them are too small to be seen from a worldwide zoom, and anyway, you won’t likely want to invest the effort for every country that has overseas territories to show (“hey, there is also this island here and there, and they have absolutely the same value as the country they’re associated to”). But imagine you work for an international organization, such as the European Union. As you might imagine, a country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity are politically-sensitive issues and require consideration in your approach to overseas territories. Here, Tableau is mischievous, because it automatically displays all of Spain’s overseas territories at Country dimension level, including the Canary Islands lying next to Morocco, while excluding France’s. Here are examples below. Beyond the aesthetics, you can’t publish, as a public institution, a map of European countries inclusive of Spain’s overseas territories, while excluding them for others. Should you find yourself in this situation, I have developed a four-step process to aggregate the territories into one country-level group dimension before creating your map. I’ll also share my approach to developing a more granular map, with separate values for each of these territories. Defining France What we call France is a sovereign State, made up of various territories, both Metropolitan and Overseas. And all the Constitutions since 1848 (we’ve had many) are explicit about it: the [French] Republic is indivisible. It means you cannot consider French Polynesia for example, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, as a separate entity from France. But indivisibility does not mean uniqueness. For Overseas France, it depends on whether these territories fall under the DOM or COM category. The DOM (overseas departments, départements d’outre-mer) are, legally speaking, identical to Metropolitan France departments. The COM (overseas collectivities, collectivités d’outre-mer) are more complex, because some of them use their own currency and elect their own presidents. Overseas France, DOM and COM, is made up of twelve administrative territories, located near Brazil, Canada, Australia, Madagascar, and the Fiji Islands. Located in the Caribbean Sea, north of Venezuela and east of Cuba: Martinique, Guadeloupe, Saint-Martin, and Saint-Barthélémy islands. Located North of Brazil: French Guyana (la Guyane). Located South of Newfoundland, near Eastern Canada: Saint Pierre and Miquelon islands (Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon). Located in the Pacific Ocean: French Polynesia (la Polynésie française) and Wallis and Futuna (Wallis-et-Futuna). Located East of Australia and North of New-Zealand: New-Caledonia (la Nouvelle-Calédonie). Located near Madagascar, East Africa: Reunion Island (La Réunion) and Mayotte. The French Southern and Antarctic Lands (Terres Australes et Antarctiques françaises, TAAF) are four territories that consists of islands with no permanent civilian population near the Antarctic, as well as Adélie Land (la Terre Adélie) on the Antarctic, with a disputed French sovereignty, and hence not automatically mapped as part of the TAAF by Tableau. Not mentioned: uninhabited Clipperton Island in the Pacific Ocean, located West of Costa Rica, Central America. How does Tableau manage these territories? Overseas Departments (DOM) DOM in Tableau are managed as standard French territories. The geographical information you can use are identical: City (commune), ZIP Code/Postal Code (code postal), County (département), and State/Province (région). In French administrative law, some local authorities bear the responsabilities of two categories. For example, Paris serves as both a city and a département (County), and hence is being recognized under both geographic roles in Tableau. The same rule applies to DOM, that are recognized under both County and State / Province roles. This means you can compare the island of Martinique with the “County” of Paris or its “State/Province” (Ile-de-France). The role you choose will depend on the level of detail of your database, either aggregated at département or regional level. There are 5 DOM: Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Carribbean Sea, French Guyana in Southern America, and Reunion Island and Mayotte near Madagascar, east of Africa. All other overseas territories are COM. Overseas collectivities (COM) In Tableau, COM are treated as autonomous countries and hence categorized at the same level as Spain or China. In other words, you can’t create a geographical hierarchy with France at its top, and a COM as a subdivision. Tableau would simply filter them out from your selection. As a French national, I consider this default controversial. And from a Tableau user perspective, it generates problems because French open data often use one unique geographical dimension to describe territories, either metropolitan department, DOM, or COM. That’s the case of the local authorities councilors database you can download from the French Open Data Portal, where you will find both “Paris” and “Nouvelle-Calédonie” under “Libellé de département” dimension. How to create an Overseas Map For this tutorial, I will use the city councillors data from the source cited above (“1-rne-cm.txt”). This database comprises information solely on French Polynesia, New-Caledonia, and Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon among the COM category. Step 1: Create separate geographic dimensions The purpose of this first step is to take into account Tableau’s differentiated treatment of COM. Right-click on “Libellé de département (Maires)” and create a new calculated field named “Departments” as below. if [ Libellé de département (Maires) ] = "Nouvelle-Calédonie" then NULL elseif [ Libellé de département (Maires) ] = "Polynésie française" then NULL elseif [ Libellé de département (Maires) ] = "Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon" then NULL else [ Libellé de département (Maires) ] END This simple calculation will change into NULL values the names of COM present in the database. You will need to assign a geographical role of “County” to this new dimension because all other geographical information is aggregated at département level. As a general rule, for this first step, you must check the dataset, list all occurrences that fall under the COM category, and manually exclude them from the data. If this data comprised information over, for example Wallis-et-Futuna, you would need to extend your calculation to this occurrence. Once your “Department” calculated field is created, create a new field based on it, which you will name “COM”. if [Departments] = [ Libellé de département (Maires) ] then NULL else [ Libellé de département (Maires) ] END This calculation permits you to create a mutually-exclusive dimension that only comprises data of the previously filtered out COM. Finally, assign this new “COM” dimension a role of “Country.” Step 2: Create a double-axis map The purpose of a double-axis map is to show geographical dimensions that exist on different geographical levels. (This old Tableau trick may be soon be outdated by the multiple layer feature introduced in version 2020.4.) An example of a double-axis is: an overall measure aggregated at a State/Regional level with a filled map and a specific measure aggregated at City level represented with a dot map. I will use this feature to simultaneously depict the actual départements and COM on a unique map, and align the design with the legal reality. In other words, make a map as if Tableau understood COM as an integral part of the French territory. First, double click on the newly created “Department” dimension. A map is created, with a wide perspective showing many values concentrated on Metropolitan France, as well as two dots in the Carribbean Sea, one dot in South America, and two dots East of Africa. These are the five DOM I mentioned before. Second, CTRL-drag the Latitude (Generated) field to copy it and put it next to the first latitude field on the row-shelf. This maneuver will create a double-row map, both identical. Third, click on the top Latitude (Generated) tab to display the map components. You can see that Latitude and Longitude are generated from your newly-created “Departments” field. Click and drop your newly-created “COM” field on “Detail” and delete “Departments” from this tab. Now, you should have two maps: one with the départements, including DOM, and another with three COM: French Polynesia, New-Caledonia, and Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon. All you have to do to finalize your double-axis map is to right click on the second “Latitude (Generated)” field on the row-shelf and select “Dual Axis.” Now, you have merged your maps. Step 3: Optimize the appearance of your map Use the same parameters for both geographic dimensions to ensure the integrity and consistency of your design. Simply drag and drop the same information under both “Latitude (Generated)” tabs and regularly check the coherence of your Tooltips. You may notice that your map is completely unreadable. That’s because the perspective is too wide to adequately show geographic information on small territories. You can resolve this one of two ways, depending upon your design preference and user needs. Step 4 (option 1): Create an unzoomable Overseas Map The simplest and fastest solution is to disable the zoom feature for your users. That’s the best solution if your data is aggregated at département or regional level, but less recommended if you have many values per city. The most important step is to make sure you finalize your map, with all the elements you need, before adapting the design to include your overseas territories. Once you’re certain you won’t change anything, manually zoom on Metropolitan France and anchor this level of zoom while disabling all user zoom options from the “Map Options” menu. Once you are satisfied, duplicate the sheet of your map, rename it “Martinique” and, you guessed it, change the anchored zoom to Martinique Island in the Caribbean. Then disable user zoom options and duplicate the sheet again. You have to repeat this (tedious) procedure for each overseas department and collectivity in your database. In the case of our city councillors database, which comprises five DOM and three COM, you would need to create eight separate overseas maps. Last, I recommend that you use a standard size to emphasis Metropolitan France in your dashboard and then scale your overseas maps smaller (either horizontal or vertical), situated next to the metropolitan map. This solution can be implemented as visually separate features or as floating objects over a more classical map of Europe. Gender Equality within the city councils in France. Example map of overseas DOM and COM as visually separate elements from the Metropolitan France map. Live version here. French Civil Service Academies. Example of map of overseas DOM and COM as floating objects over map. Live version here. Step 4 (option 2) : Create a zoomable Overseas Map If your database comprises many values per city, it is wiser to allow your users to zoom. This is an issue I faced while designing (in a hurry to respond to an urgent need by health authorities) a map of the COVID-19 vaccination centers: people must know where exactly in a city a center is located. Overseas territories represented here feature all five DOM, as well as Saint-Martin (COM) as third from the top. If you anchor the zoom from the start, this automated zoom-in option will be inoperable and your visualisation will look like it’s broken. Conversely, if you don’t anchor any zoom, the visualisation will start with a world zoom-out, completely irrelevant for your users. The solution is to create smaller maps of every overseas department and collectivity in your database on the side, as described in option one above, and add further options to your Metropolitan France map, for which you will allow both filtering and zooming features. In other words, your objective is to create your “central map,” showing Metropolitan France upon opening the visualization, enabling manual zoom and automating relevant zooming if the user specifies them. To achieve this result, you need to first create a parameter that will let users provide information for prefiltering, named “User Dept Number.” I used the département number, but you could use the département name from the database. Here is the formula to extract the département number from a postal code if it’s not immediately available in your database. //French dept. numbers are made up of 1 to 3 digits. For joints, be careful if your if LEN(STR([Code postal])) = 4 then LEFT(STR([Code postal]),1) elseif LEFT(STR([Code postal]),2) = "97" then LEFT(STR([Code postal]),3) elseif LEFT(STR([Code postal]),2) = "98" then LEFT(STR([Code postal]),3) else LEFT(STR([Code postal]),2) END Then you will create a new field calculated from the above, serving as a filter to take into account the user’s département number. Another function of this filter will be to exclude all overseas departments (DOM and COM) to display only the “relevant” map of Metropolitan France at the opening of the dataviz. // First, no specific filter if the user inputs no dept. number if [User Dept Number] = NULL Then "OK" // Then, keep values as long as they don't match the beginning of an overseas département or territory. elseif [User Dept Number] = "" and left([Department Number],2) <> "97" then "OK" elseif [User Dept Number] = "" and left([Department Number],2) <> "98" then "OK" // Last, only keep values corresponding to the user's input, if any. elseif [User Dept Number] = [Department Number] then "OK" else "KO" END Last, apply this filter to your Metropolitan France map and keep only “OK” values. The trick here is, simply, to exclude by default overseas values to automate the relevant zoom on Metropolitan France when opening a viz. Now, your map zooms on Metropolitan France upon opening. If you input a département number in the parameter, let’s say 75 for Paris, your map will zoom in to show only values in Paris. Conversely, if you put an overseas département number, such as 971 for Guadeloupe, your map will zoom in to the Caribbean to the island of Guadeloupe. This second method is the best in terms of user experience. It enables the intuitive map features of Tableau, while still ensuring that your maps zoom at the relevant metropolitan level upon opening. Relatedly, this method is the best when you have very granular data, such as postcode, city, or specific geocodings. Conversely, the zoom features of Tableau are not always understood by users who are unfamiliar to it. A decently-sized map of metropolitan France displays adequately all data at département and regional levels, without the need of implementing all features described for option 2 of step 4 (above). Regardless the option you choose, keep in mind that with this methodology you can create an actual map of France. Countries are a complex matter, and so is France. It would be regrettable if, due to technical reasons related to Tableau, you created an incomplete dataviz because you didn’t know how to handle overseas territories. Hopefully, this practice broadens your horizons and encourages you to discover further territories and cultures around the globe. Alternatively, you can also download this pre-programmed viz directly from my Tableau Public profile ;). Downloadable live version here Further general advice for managing French geographical data The quality of geographical mapping is lower for France than it is for the US. Tableau automatically recognizes cities above a certain threshold of inhabitants. If you map at city level, I recommend you work directly from GPS coordinates in your database, or use geographic files from third-party sources. One great source is the mapping from Open Street Map available for free here. If you have to join different databases at city level, never use their name (4,000 homonymous cities), but instead use its unique identifier established by the national statistics institute (“Code INSEE”). It is made up of the department number and an alphabetical ascending order on three digits. In the local authorities councillors database I referenced earlier, you can create your own by merging “Code du département” and “Code Insee de la commune,” taking care that these fields are understood as dimensions to keep the departments numbers comprising letters (e.g., former Corsican departments and some COM). Postal codes from institutions can be different from the actual postal code understood by Tableau. Postal codes usually end by “0,” unless it is a district of a major city such as Paris, Lyon or Marseilles. After several years of experience in civil service, Alexis Bernard is now Senior BA in the daycare industry, and keeps practicing dataviz to decipher French politics, society, and culture on his blog and Tableau Public profile.

https://medium.com/nightingale/mapping-overseas-france-with-tableau-c4c25137ddc

['Alexis Bernard']

2021-05-23 14:21:04.331000+00:00

['Mapping', 'Maps', 'How To', 'Data Visualisation', 'Data Visualization']

Weekend at Beit Douma

“I could live there forever” When I get asked about my hobby, my answer is: “staying at guesthouses”. I love it. I really do. A weird hobby, but a real one. (At least for me). “There is nothing better than home” You have definitely heard this saying. It is a nice one, and there’s nothing wrong with it, except that it’s not totally true. There might be another place that feels like Home and this place is Beit Douma. What is “Beit”? For those who don’t know, “Beit” means home. And Douma is a Lebanese village. Do the math, and what will you get?(Drum rolls) House of Douma. (AHA! Genius) Let’s press the rewind button Douma is one of my favorite Lebanese villages. Its beauty lies in its people,authentic feel, beautiful houses with red tiles and its breathtaking nature and colors. So I thought, why not stay there for a couple of days to disconnect from everything going on around us. That is when I decided to stay at Beit Douma. A beautiful old house that I used to call my “crush” house even before visiting it. The “Beit” Beit Douma is an authentic Lebanese house that was built back in the 18th century, and renovated for the purpose of making it a guesthouse. Take a look at it ! TourWithV at Beit Douma Once you reach Douma, you will see nothing but houses with red tiles next to each other, but there is ONE house that stands out with its architecture and beautiful exterior: Beit Douma. The color mix between design and nature make it a live postcard that you can’t get enough of. The inside of the Beit Even better than the outside ! Entering a dream. This is what I felt while stepping inside the house. The colors, the interior and the DETAILS. (It’s all in the details.) Everything had been thought through (ever tiny little thing) to bring the best experience ever. The room at entrance of Beit Douma Then, we took a tour of the kitchen, the most beautiful part of the house. What a kitchen ! The Beit has also several living rooms . I tried each and every one of them to get the full experience. Here’s a glimpse of the main one. Look at the beautiful arches! Meet the Beit family The Beit staff are like family to each customer. The perfect family! Sarah the House Manager, who was there to greet us, waiting for us by the door. Then, we met Raefat, the steward, who was there to assist us in everything we needed over two days non-stop. From the welcoming, to the service and smiles, everything was perfect which made the experience even better. The Rooms The rooms are out of this world ! Each room has its own identity and theme, and even bathrooms are beautifully decorated with plants and frames everywhere. There’s also what we call in Arabic a “comodina”, a type of credenza where complementary cakes and fruits are made available for guests. (And if they only knew I was the one who ate the whole cake ! No regrets.) Now they know ! Candlelight dinner Because why not ? During the stay at Beit Douma, there was an extra option to book a private dinner which consists of a Lebanese mezze (a selection of small dishes served as appetizers) and main course. One word to describe the whole experience: PERFECT. We booked the dinner and went to the lobby at 8 pm to find a candelit table waiting for Anthony & me. How cute the setup was ! Dinner for two please ! Pictures do not do justice for the food nor the experience but I had to share them. On the menu there was: A lentil soup — The BEST Fattouch Hommos Batata Harra Hindbeh Makanek Chicken with vegetables Everything was so good we cleaned all the plates. Thank you Chef Georges ! & look how happy Anthony was Meet “Souk” The best encounter we made during our stay is Beit Douma’s dog called “Souk” after “Souk el Tayeb”. For those who don’t know, Beit Douma is one of many other Beits spread over Lebanon such as Beit el Amar in Deir el Amar and Beit el Batroun in Batroun. They’re also part of Tawlet & Souk el Tayeb farmers’ market. Press to read more about them. The Next Day Breakfast is served ! And not just any breakfast ! A traditional one ! On the menu: Foul & Hommos Labneh Jebneh (Cheese) Vegetables Manakich Eggs Butter & Jam Breakfast is over, we were ready to pack and say goodbye to Beit Douma before hitting the Douma Souks which are a 3-minute walk from the guesthouse. Such a peaceful stay and village. Beit Douma, you stole my heart. Tour-ly yours, V

https://medium.com/@tourwithv/weekend-at-beit-douma-4c02970f46ac

[]

2020-12-17 16:08:14.815000+00:00

['Adventure', 'Fun', 'Traveling', 'Tourism', 'Lebanon']

D.N.R.

When she next opened her eyes, the first thing she saw was the gigantic fireplace. The irony hit her so hard that she began laughing hysterically, on and on until she thought she would faint. The laughing became screaming, and the screaming weeping. She sobbed uncontrollably for her loss and the unfairness of it all. When the tears finally slowed, she toppled over on the sofa and slept again. The ringing of a telephone finally woke her. It took her a moment to figure out what the harsh burring was. She’d had a cell for over 15 years, and what used to be a most common sound was now disorienting. She stumbled from the sofa to where the phone sat on the end table by the recliner, and murmured a slurry “hello?” into the receiver. It was the hospital. Was she coming in today? Decisions had to be made. “I need some time,” Bethany mumbled. “I can’t come today, and probably not tomorrow. Keep him on the respirator until I can think things through.” After she hung up, Bethany walked through the house. The master bedroom was at the end of the hall. It smelled like old man, whiskey, and the faintest whiff of stale perfume. On the nightstand on her mother’s side of the bed, Bethany found a half-empty bottle of Red Door. Growing up, Arpège had been Mom’s favorite, but she had mostly stopped wearing it by the time Bethany left the house for good. She picked up her mother’s pillow and sniffed it; it smelled strongly of Red Door. Tears sprang to her eyes: Dad had been spraying Mom’s pillow at night when he went to bed. The unfamiliar scent offered Bethany no comfort, and she set the pillow down again. In the master closet, all of her mother’s clothing still hung, massively askew. Bethany rolled herself in the clothes still on their hangars, and immediately understood why everything was all jumbled up. She left the master and opened the door to her old room. To her surprise, nothing looked familiar. The bed was still under the window, but there was new bedding and someone else’s clothes in the closet. Books were piled next to the unmade bed. So, this was where The Whore had been living. In the kitchen, Bethany made coffee, discovered there was no milk, and drank it black with extra sugar. The weather was too cold to sit out on the deck, so she threw the curtains in the living room open wide and sat at the nearby dining room table. Several weeks’ worth of junk mail and assorted bills were piled up, and she realized that she was now accountable for getting those paid. She felt her anger flare, and then immediately fizzle as the weight of responsibility crushed her. Estate. I have to settle my father’s — my parents’ — estate. Clearly, Dad had done nothing with any of Mom’s things. The house wasn’t a total wreck, but it was grimy and in need of a good cleaning. Thoughts started bombarding her: I need to see the lawyer this place is dirty I need to get milk I wonder where the checkbook is what am I going to do with Mom’s clothes I should go to the hospital am I hungry? She slapped her hands on the dining room table and the tumult stopped. She needed to think, but it was too hard. She needed a distraction from thinking. She started in the kitchen. Dishes, scrub countertops and cabinets, clean out the fridge, mop the floor, dust, vacuum, remove cobwebs, scrub the bathtub, the sinks, the toilet, move to the master bath, scrub shower, sink, toilet, dust, vacuum, make bed, spray air freshener. Keep moving, begin wiping down baseboards, walls, move furniture, kill dust bunnies, empty trash, empty buckets, clean kitchen sink again, clean coffee maker (had it ever been cleaned?). The sun was going down when she came in from the second trash run. She felt physically drained but more clear-headed than she had since Mom died. She was looking in the fridge for something edible when the phone rang again. A high-pitched feminine voice asked, “Is this Bethany?” “Who’s calling?” Bethany replied, suspicious. “This is Suzanne, Suzanne Forkes. I’m the nursing student who’s been staying at your Dad’s?” The Whore, Bethany thought, but God she sounded so young! “What do you want?” Bethany asked dully. “I’m really sorry about your Dad,” the timid voice began, “I wouldn’t bother you, but…but I need my things.” “Things?” “My stuff. My clothes, my books.” There was a pause, then in a rush, “Look, I know the timing is terrible and I hate to intrude, but I have to go to my classes, and I need my clothes — ” “When are you coming?” Bethany cut her off. “I was hoping tonight?” “Come as soon as you can.” Bethany hung up abruptly. In less than half an hour, the doorbell rang. Bethany opened the door to a short blonde girl (child!) and a lanky boy with several folded boxes under his arm. “Hi, I’m Suzanne,” the girl said, “and this is Ryan, my boyfriend.” Bethany stepped aside and let them in. “I’m so sorry about your dad — ” the girl began, but Bethany turned and waved them off. “Just get your stuff and get out.” The two young people disappeared into Bethany’s old room, and for the next hour she heard the sound of a tape gun. A little while later, the two of them made a couple of trips out with boxes, presumably to their car. There wasn’t much stuff. At last, Ryan left with one more box and Suzanne stood before Bethany in the kitchen. “About your dad,” Suzanne tried again, “I did the best I could, but I’m still just a student. I tried — ” “It’s not your fault,” Bethany said sharply, not looking at the girl. “I don’t blame you. He’s the stupid drunk who fell down the stairs.” Suzanne’s brow furrowed. “Look, it’s not my business — ” “No, it’s not.” “It’s not my business,” the girl persisted, “but it was hard for him after your mother died.” “It was fucking hard for me, too!” Bethany shouted in the girl’s face. “You didn’t know him! You don’t know anything about us!” “I know what he told me. We talked when I made him dinner.” “You cooked for him?” Bethany scoffed. “Sometimes. He wouldn’t eat much unless I made him. I wasn’t his nurse or housekeeper, more like…like a friend.” Bethany glared at her and Suzanne rushed on. “All I wanted to say was he was nice to me, and what happened to him was terrible. I’m sorry.” She slapped a key on the counter and turned and left, pulling the front door closed behind her. Bethany screamed and raged at the door. She opened the kitchen cabinet and pulled every glass she could reach from it, hurling each one against the wall beside the doorway. She continued screaming and stomping her feet until her voice literally broke and she could only emit a whispering gargle. She collapsed and remained in a heap on the kitchen floor until morning.

https://medium.com/storymaker/d-n-r-a2e11ecb895b

[]

2020-08-16 20:45:40.207000+00:00

['Storytelling', 'Fiction', 'Family', 'Fathers', 'Short Story']

#IAFilmmakers Series: Profile of Soudabeh Moradian

An Iranian-American immigrant, Soudabeh Moradian spent most of her life in Iran where she went to school to study cinema at the University of Tehran. She immigrated to the United States in 2009, bringing with her years of experience working on films. As one of the most distinguished cinemas in the world, Moradian’s training and knowledge from Iran prepared her for a career in the United States. Her films, whether documentary or fiction, often center on social issues such as war, inequality, and women’s rights. Of course, such subjects and themes are significant in contemporary Iranian society and prevalent in its art and films. In the U.S., Moradian has continued her already extensive body of work as a filmmaker with acclaimed films such as 2016’s Polaris, which gathered awards and screened at festivals across America, and in Canada and Europe. She also shares her passion for cinema with her students as a professor of film. Moradian’s subject matters make clear that her desire for story telling was stirred by the hope to evoke change, as she explains her own inspiration to become a filmmaker: “It goes back a long time ago because I went to film school in 1991, I was always interested in film and cinema, and I wanted to become a filmmaker so that I could be a voice for my generation. I went to film school in Iran at Tehran University School of Art and Theatre and started filmmaking in 1996. In those days we wanted to change the world through our films, which was a crazy idea and we were so young. After that I started making documentaries and the documentaries became my central focus point after that. I was interested in the psychological impacts of war and that was my main subject, that and women and social issues, and all human inequalities. The psychological impacts of war and those social issues were the main topics of my films and I started from there.” These motifs are present in her film, Polaris, which follows the story of a half Iranian-half German war photographer suffering from PTSD. Moreover, Moradian made sure to tell a woman’s story with women behind and in front of the camera, showing that her works are not just stories meant for entertainment, but embody an outlook of activism and humanity that draws her to social issues: “The documentary series I started with I focused on women who lived in an Iranian village around the country so I made those documentaries to show the hardship and the life and inequality between women and men and I wanted to speak about women’s rights. Actually, before that documentary, I focused on the psychological impacts of war which is called ‘Mahin’ it was about a girl who was affected in the Iran-Iraq war, it was interesting for me that there are some impacts of war that nobody is aware of.” While Moradian recalls the restrictions on her work in Iran, especially because of its political nature, it also becomes evident that she was never shy about pushing the arbitrary boundaries set by authorities: “I was commissioned by Iranian television to make a TV series about women in Iran and I was commissioned because they wanted a female director. I went around Iran to make the series about the hardship women face. They wanted to show the life and success of these women, but what I showed was their hardship, polygamy, and what they went through. Then when they showed it on TV, in the middle of broadcasting, I think it was the second time they were showing it, the series was stopped. I heard that it was a very serious order for it to have stopped showing because one of the episodes was about polygamy, so they stopped showing it.” But her activism and concerns over war did not stop in Iran, instead, Moradian looked at the U.S. led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well through her films: “In 2001, after 9/11, I decided to continue to speak about war so I went to Afghanistan and I made a documentary about war when the U.S. attacked Afghanistan. I went there to make a documentary about the psychological impacts of war on women and children… I worked with an American filmmaker to make a television series about American soldiers in Iraq as well, to show another aspect of war in Iraq. On one side I was focused on the psychological impacts of war in general and on the other side women and social issues in Iran.” For Moradian, Polaris was the culmination of her work and years of experience documenting women’s struggles and war: “I am a woman and I was feeling responsible for telling all of those stories. I tried to reflect on all of those stories I had seen and, in my script as well, I combined those experiences for the narrative of Polaris, which I was able to make when I immigrated to the United States.” This piece is part of NIAC’s #IAFilmmakers Series. Check-out the rest of the series here.

https://medium.com/niacouncil/iafilmmakers-series-profile-of-soudabeh-moradian-605b33d5136a

['National Iranian American Council']

2019-12-13 18:31:57.242000+00:00

['Iran', 'Cinema', 'Film', 'Iranian Americans', 'Filmmaking']

Writing Is the Best Thing That Happened to Me in 2020

Writing Is the Best Thing That Happened to Me in 2020 Finding my blessing in disguise! Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels 2020 has been a big-rollercoaster, we lived through things that no one anticipated(except for Bill Gates of course). This was a difficult year for everyone, so many people lost their loved ones. Almost 80 million people suffered from the life-threatening virus. Coping from these tough times is a difficult yet essential task, writing has helped me to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Writing Helped Me Process Grief This year taught me many things, I suffered the worst loss of my life. I lost my grandma on September 8th. We took all the precautions to keep her protected from this virus, but our efforts were in vain. She was a tough old bird, nothing ever scared her. She was a fighter and the commander in chief of the house. She was an adorable goofball, with a ton of hilarious stories, her stories taught us about life. Losing her is the worst thing that happened to my family this year. Writing helped me process this loss and despair. I am an introvert I am not always comfortable sharing my feelings, most of the time I don't even know how to. Writing stories about her gave me peace and sharing them with you all gave me hope that she will live in my heart forever. Writing Strengthened My Recovery From Covid Just before my grandma died, my whole family tested positive for covid. It was a terrifying experience as my aunt is diabetic and we were all worried about her health the most. Everyone except her had mild fever and fatigue. We were the lucky ones as the virus didn’t affect us severely. This virus has taken more than 1 million lives. It was a scary experience to see your loved ones suffering from an illness in mourning. Writing helped me process the pain and the illness. I was sad, depressed, and ill all at the same time. Writing gave me hope, it encouraged me to help people who were also going through the same thing. Writing whilst I was sick made me forget about my pains and aches. It helped me divert my mind from sadness and illness. Writing Rebooted my Fitness I am a big fitness freak, but after getting covid, I lost all my motivation and energy. Post covid recovery kicked my a**. It was difficult to do even a quarter of my regular workout. All my gains disappeared, I was so lethargic and unmotivated that I even stopped trying. All I was doing in the name of fitness was evening walks. Writing about my fitness journey and yoga motivated me to get back in shape(I had legit abs before this lockdown). I wanted my strength and flexibility back. I wanted to do a handstand again. Writing about all the things that I love in fitness made me miss my active and healthy old self. So I finally decided to get back in the game. Now I do 1-hour morning yoga routine and 10 minutes jump rope routine in the evening. It will take time to get to my old level, but I am happy that I finally started. Writing made that happened. Writing Lead Me Back To Books I am a self-attested nerd, a lover of books. But a few years back I made the mistake of choosing binging over reading. I used to watch series back-to-back with no worry about my future. I procrastinated my studies to watch television. It was a shameful act to cover my low self-esteem. This year I finally got back in habit of reading regularly, I read more and more articles by the top writers to figure out the best way to write. I studied their work for hours on end to learn something that I can apply to my own writing to get better. Saturday is my reading day, I easily read for 4–5 hours, trying to learn some tricks of this trade. Now, I watch less than 1 hour of television on most days. On writing well by William Zinsser is a book that helped me improve my writing rapidly in a short amount of time. It is a must-read. Writing Helped Me In Becoming More Grateful In these difficult circumstances, it was hard to be grateful for the blessings and joys of life. Grief and sickness made us all miserable and sorrowful. It is easy to be grateful when everything is in your favor but expressing gratitude in the thought times is a real challenge. Writing a gratitude journal helped me in being grateful for the little things that helped me cope with these tough times.

https://medium.com/the-innovation/writing-is-the-best-thing-that-happened-to-me-in-2020-abcb108848c4

['Khyati Jain']

2020-12-26 20:32:11.299000+00:00

['Family', 'Self', 'Life', 'Relationships', 'Writing']

Rich shortcrust pastry — how to make shortcrust pastry at home!

If you are here you might be looking how to make rich shortcrust pastry, one one of the most important preparations of our cuisine. Today I want to share with you not only how to make it, but also what kind of shourtcrust pastry are there, how to use it and … a little anecdote in the tough life of a food blogger 🙂 What kind of pastry are there? In Italian cuisine there are three basic types of rich shortcrust pastry (or pasta frolla, in Italian): classic one — all the ingredients apart the flour are mixed. Flour is added only at the end; one — all the ingredients apart the flour are mixed. Flour is added only at the end; whipped (montata) — the first step requires the butter and sugar to be whipped together; (montata) — the first step requires the butter and sugar to be whipped together; sabbiata or sablée — my favorite and the one I will share with you today. What is rich shortcrust pastry used for? The rich shortcrust pastry you are learning today is incredibly versatile. It will become your golden standard for: your tarts — I simply love jam tarts, and for me the best way is to prepare your own jam with seasonal fruit, like in this persimmon jam tart. — I simply love jam tarts, and for me the best way is to prepare your own jam with seasonal fruit, like in this persimmon jam tart. Crunchy cookies , perfect for tea or coffee time . As a child, I simply loved using some of the dough to create my own biscuits. It is the simplest task ever: just roll out the pastry with a rolling pin, then with a mold for cookies cut some shapes and bake them (180 °C, about 15 minutes). Actually, if you are looking for easy Italian biscuits for coffee, you will love how the taste of this pastry perfectly pairs with coffee and tea. , perfect . As a child, I simply loved using some of the dough to create my own biscuits. It is the simplest task ever: just roll out the pastry with a rolling pin, then with a mold for cookies cut some shapes and bake them (180 °C, about 15 minutes). Actually, if you are looking for easy Italian biscuits for coffee, you will love how the taste of this pastry perfectly pairs with coffee and tea. Raviole bolognesi! Well, this is a typical recipe from my hometown Bologna… they are a type of biscuits filled with mustard, tipically made to celebrate Father’s Day. I guess I will make a post for them 😉 How do you say ‘rich shortcrust pastry’ in Italian? Before we get to the recipe, I need to share with you a special thank to a lady who is always available to clarify my doubts about the exact term to translate into English, Chef Catherine McBride. In this specific case, understanding that pasta frolla in Italian had to be translated into rich shortcrust pastry took me a while, and she was fully supportive. If you don’t know Catherine, I highly recommend to follow her on twitter: she will make your day with her genuine mix of sense of humour and culinary skills. And if you are looking for a freelance writer into food and health, I can (at least) assure that when she talks about Italian food she knows what is all about! But now, let’s learn how to make rich shortcrust pastry 🙂 To read my step-by-step guide, visit: https://www.eatalianwithroberto.com/rich-shortcrust-pastry/ Buon appetito!

https://medium.com/@eatalianwithroberto/rich-shortcrust-pastry-how-to-make-shortcrust-pastry-at-home-119787014f52

[]

2021-01-02 15:21:41.482000+00:00

['Recipe', 'Italian Food', 'Tarts', 'Ingredients']

Mega-Fires have nothing to do with climate change!

Photo by Evan Wise on Unsplash Here is a controversial take: The mega-fires have nothing to do with climate change, but it is a relatively recent problem going back only about 100 years. I am not saying climate change doesn’t exist; I’m saying it’s a separate argument. Climate change has nothing to do with the fires as far as I’m concerned, regardless of what “do whatever I can to gain more power,” politicians and bureaucrats try to tell us. The problem goes back 100 years when we started fighting fires rather than letting nature take her course and let them burn out naturally. Putting out forest fires, especially ones in the middle of nowhere, makes the problem worse, not better. It does not allow nature to thin out the forests and burn the very underbrush that helps fuel these mega-fires. It goes back to the 60s when we stamped out logging based on opinion and overreaction rather than fact — destroying local economies and historic towns along the way. The lack of logging, even though we have more trees now than we did 150 years ago, has resulted in too many trees in too small an area, stockpiling fuel for fires at an unprecedented level. It goes back when we allowed local and state officials, leaders who are some of the dumbest people in society, to abdicated their responsibilities to the Feds for their political gain. These idiots blindly followed federal DEQ and EPA mandates that hurt the very constituency who voted them into office. It goes back to allowing 500–1000 trees to grow per acre rather than the healthy 50–100. With this crowding, many trees are not healthy from a lack of sun and water, making them vulnerable to destructive beetles and disease, and perfect fuel for giant fires. It also allows invasive plant species to grow, species that not only grow faster and higher but also burn better. It goes back to when we became obsessed with “our side vs. their side” rather than fighting for a collective side. Letting politicians dictate ridiculous building regulations that contributed not only to the cost of fighting fires but even worse, to the cost of living. It goes back to us letting utility monopolies take hold in individual states, eliminating all competition. The result is electric utilities that are guaranteed a specific return, regardless of the product they deliver. Why worry about keeping up equipment if you never have to compete, hurting the very people who suffer from the terrible service and subsequent blackouts, brownouts, and fires. Even better, the utilities charge them more for the privilege of being underserved. Additionally, without another option to turn to for relief, the opposite of competition happens as there is no urgency for cutting edge maintenance. It started when we stopped maintaining the forests, letting undergrowth and dead trees (i.e., fuel) proliferate. We stopped “sweeping” the woods. Backbreaking work that is not glamorous, and goes unseen. The public does not see work like this, and therefore it is of no use to politicians and their agendas. Do you know what it is suitable for doing? HELPING SMALL FIRES FROM BECOMING GIANT ONES! It started when, under the guise of environmental concerns, we severely cut back on controlled burns. In California, a private landowner can get a permit for such a burn, but then get permission from the very communist sounding “California Environmental Protection Committee,” or CalEPA. These are the idiots that decide small, 10k acre controlled burns are an environmental hazard, and rarely allow them. They then sit back with the rest of us and look out our windows at smoke so thick it blocked out the sun for a week. It started when logging roads fell into disrepair, not allowing fire crews to reach the fires that needed fighting. Without logging, the roads that would otherwise be accessed to intercept the fires are overgrown and unavailable. It started when onerous building regulations forced developers to build houses in the middle of the forest, while forestry regulations stopped them from thinning the trees and brush. Look up the “wildland-urban interface,” it shows the number of houses California has built that are pressing up against remote, high fire-risk wilderness. Through last year the number totaled 4.5 million. It started when Oregon shipped off 60% of its air fleet to fight a dead-end war in Afghanistan rather than keeping them here if needed to fight fires that were guaranteed to need fighting. Whatever genius approved moving the aircraft should be fired immediately, but I won’t hold my breath; it’s government. It started when we elected, generation after generation, politicians at every level of government that are/were incapable of leadership regarding sensible environmental policy. Why do these fires, for the most part, only happen on the West Coast? Why don’t we ask one of a dozen well-forested states what they do to mitigate their mega-fires, and then copy what they do! Why does this only happen on the west coast of the US? Maybe other states don’t have forests? It must be that the west coast is the only area on the continent with forests. That’ has to be what it is. It started when we try to plant ten trees for every one we cut. The result has been that a single fire burns almost 100,000 trees for every single tree logged on public lands. The Oregonian reported a decade ago that “we remove less than 50 mature trees per acre, but that same acre is re-planted with 435 trees. Those are the fuel for today’s fires. Too many trees and none of them thriving in their competition for water, sky, and nutrients; that fuel-choked stunted forest waits for fire because there is nothing else we can do as regulatory forces tie the managers’ hands.” It started when we let environmental groups make decisions based on bad science and ideology. Don’t blame Trump. If you want to blame anyone, blame Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, and all other presidents going back 100 years. However, these are not the real culprits who should take the blame. The fault for all this lies at the feet of local and statewide politicians. They, for decades, ignored this, looked the other way, or did/do not care about their constituency, putting the environment blindly over people. It’s easy to blame climate change, amass more power over the plebs, and repeat the next year. We are all dumb enough to let it continue unabated — environmental tough love, worth it as you watch your house burn down. California has a budget of $2 billion to mitigate and fight forest fires, Oregon appears to have $50 million budgeted, (Oregon’s budget is a little harder to pin down.) Whatever the number, it is all spent fighting fires, leaving no money for mitigation — fires created by politicians. The world is upside down on how to deal with this problem. Blame the governor’s, the county administrators, the mayors, and the bureaucrats. They, the people closest to the real people affected by the fires, did/do nothing. They are the bad guys. It started when deep-seated tribalism and partisanship began to affect the most basics decisions in our country. It took hold under Clinton, was put on steroids under Bush and Obama, and has exploded under Trump. In this environment, nothing changes, and the problems continue unabated. These are just a few of the real issues, and none of them have to do with climate change. We are 100 years behind in dealing with the problem, and it will only worsen the longer we wait. Here are a few ideas we need to implement immediately. After all, we are only 100 years behind: Supervised logging, using the proceeds to “sweep” the undergrowth. Stop planting trees at current levels. Change building and residential rules regarding where and how high we can build, following Texas and Tennessee’s example. Allow more controlled burns. Get rid of utility monopolies. Let as many naturally occurring fires burn, the way nature intended. For all of us living on the west coast, I know this is wishful thinking, but a man can dream. Nothing will change; the fires will continue to destroy year after year. After all, orange man bad, liberals are the devil, no one is held accountable, and we all continue to tribe up while letting Rome burn and not paying attention to the people who caused it. Exactly how the politicians want it.

https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/mega-fires-have-nothing-to-do-with-climate-change-1d3c2d52a9d6

['Jerry Brazie']

2020-10-01 12:37:22.162000+00:00

['Climate Crisis', 'Forest Fires', 'Common Sense', 'Environment', 'Corruption']

Actual IBM C1000–056 Exam Questions PDF

We understand as long as we stay. We master from each folks, we obtain out from textbooks, we study from mom nature, but almost all of all we learn from our encounters. Instruction will be the expertise which sorts the head as well as the full human body. With out it we would not be IBM Certified Solution Developer C1000–056 Dumps IBM App Connect Enterprise V11 Solution Development Exam certified or we might not be capable to confront all the problems that everyday living presents.Schooling is really a technique by which we accumulate information, competencies and competencies. Continuing education implies enhancement, performance, effectiveness, competence. 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They each personal get to make your mind up their approach on who receives scholarships also — just all individuals who exhibit “need” or people today who might have top-quality have a look at scores. Men and women options have a tendency to be based mostly upon just one variable: what is going to raise their ranking nationally. They can create exactly precisely what is the best enterprise company IBM C1000–056 summary IBM Certified Solution Developer for IBM App Connect Enterprise V11 Solution Development Exam their firm. , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

https://medium.com/@smkmuhammadiahkuningaan/actual-ibm-c1000-056-exam-questions-pdf-be2138318f35

['Smkm Uhammadiah Kuningaan']

2020-12-19 22:50:56.756000+00:00

['Students', 'Teachers', 'Education']

Ready to break down

Ready to break down Furious with my mind Afraid of my feelings Tired of thinking so much Just want to stop feeling Or feel less Just want a happy medium All I can do is cry Just tired of feeling Feeling or not feeling anything Afraid of all of it My mind doesn’t see the good feelings Just want to think happy thoughts I’m not who I was I’m not who I planned to be I’m not even sure who I am though Holding in my confusion Hiding from myself Hiding from everyone around me Loving them Hating who I am Hating how I am Afraid to learn who I will be Terrified of trying to be happy Happy in my own skin How do I live not knowing? Why am I still here? So many people deserve it more than I ever will But I know there is a reason for everything I just hope I figure that reason out Hopefully I’ll understand someday

https://medium.com/@csnow0437/ready-to-break-down-b6dfae93f42b

['Christina Snow']

2020-12-24 04:00:35.156000+00:00

['Feelings', 'Poetry', 'Love', 'Overthinking']

Is Crypto Security? The Howey Test and More

This article is for those who are doing blockchain startups and preparing ICOs, or for those prudent crypto investors who worry about regulatory compliance. If an ICO constitutes security offering, one must file with the SEC. However, the cost of producing the prospectus, registration materials, plus the cost of ongoing reporting obligations are so expensive that most startups may not be able to afford such expenses. If a cryptocurrency isn’t security, it could avoid the foregoing filing requirements. So when is a cryptocurrency security? The answer has been vague, but the SEC has been working on applying the legal regime to crypto and has given us some guidelines. In here I’ll discuss the Howey Test (SEC applies it to determine whether a digital asset constitutes security) and related securities regulation, try to shed some light on in what circumstances a token would be considered as security. This article will cover: How the SEC applies the Howey Test (for securities) & prior cases How to structure your ICO so it’s not security What you should do if your ICO constitutes security offering Image from Google Image How the SEC applies the Howey Test (for securities) & prior cases In Sep. 2017, the Commission issued a Report of Investigation concerning the application of the U.S. federal securities law to the offer and sale of DAO Tokens, which were deemed as securities by the SEC. In the report, the Commission warned that ICOs can be securities offerings. Recently, there are a number of actions enforced by SEC, concluding certain tokens as securities and disqualifying the offering from any registration exemptions. Those being charged against include but not limited to Paragon Coin, Inc, CarrierEQ, Inc., d/b/a Airfox, BlockVest LLC (the Court found the SEC failed to demonstrate a previous violation because of a disputed issue of fact). SEC applied the Howey Test in the prior reports to determine whether a cryptocurrency is security. The Howey Test The Howey Test is created by the Supreme Court in SEC v. W. J. Howey Co. for determining whether a contract, transaction or scheme qualify as security. This test has 4 factors (which we’ll further discuss), all of them must be met for an instrument to be considered as security. The SEC has appeared to emphasize the third and fourth factor in their reports. When applying the test, the Court or the SEC emphasizes the economic realities underlying a transaction, disregarding the form of the offerings. 1. A person invests his money Given the broad definition of money investment, and non-security tokens are usually be distributed through a sale with the price set per token, almost all ICOs would satisfy this factor. 2. In a common enterprise Different circuits use different tests to analyze whether a common enterprise exists. Three approaches predominate: 1) horizontal; 2) narrow vertical and 3) broad vertical. In the prior reports and complaints, the SEC did not focus on this factor. 3. Is led to expect profits Regardless of whether a token is labeled as a utility token or a security token, The SEC scrutinizes, among others, the promotional materials, merchandising approaches, oral assurances and prospects of the project. There are a slew of similarities in prior cases, which the Commission found to strengthen their conclusion that the investors are led to expect profits. First, the issuer plans to increase the value of the Token, probably by creating some sort of ecosystem or developing the Apps. Example of two prior cases: In Airfox, the SEC finds the investors were led to expect profits, partly due to the fact that the proceeds were to be used to build an ecosystem, improve the App and add new functionality that would increase the value of AirTokens. In Paragon, a similar accusation appears as Paragon stated repeatedly in the White Paper, marketing materials, internet forums and elsewhere, that it was planning to use the proceeds to build an “entire ecosystem” around the PRG tokens that would increase the token value. Paragon also highlighted that it’ll increase the value of PRG tokens through its deflation algorithm, controlled reserve fund, and token “burning”, among other things. A principal at the company stated, “ A product that we’re expecting to appreciate in value due to its limited supply and the ecosystem we’re building around to build a strong demand.” Prospect(oral or written) of higher token value would be deemed as solicitation and leading to investor’s expectation of profits. Second, no matter what they claim how the tokens would be used, the functionality does not exist during the offering. At the time of the AirToken ICO, the AirFox App was a prototype that only enabled users to earn and redeem loyalty points. The company claimed that the prototype was “really just for the ICO and just for investment purposes” and “did not have any real users”. Third, the company promises that they’ll ensure a secondary trading market for the token would be available shortly after the completion of the offering. Airfox and Paragon both highlighted that they’ll ensure secondary trading market shortly after the completion of the offering, prior to the creation of the ecosystem. Fourth, the project is mainly marketed to speculative investors instead of real users. In Airfox, the SEC finds that the promotion directed mostly at digital token enthusiast rather than customers who would ultimately use AirTokens to purchase data from prepaid wireless carriers in developing countries. They promoted the offering in forums including BitcoinTalk.org and marketed the ICO to investors who reasonably viewed the tokens as a speculative, tradeable investment vehicle. Fifth, an explicit expression of potential profit. In the DAO report, the SEC finds that the investors of the DAO tokens have a reasonable expectation of profits because the ETHs received from the token holders were pooled and available to the DAO to fund projects. The DAO token holders share in potential profits from the contracts. In Blockvest, the SEC pointed out that BLV holder will share in the profits of the Blockvest30 and other ventures in their complaints. These profits are stated in the Blockvest’s whitepaper, “as a Blockvest token holder, your Blockvest will generate a pro-rated share of 50% of the profit generated quarterly as well as fees for processing transactions.” 4. From the efforts of the promoter or a third party This factor is most frequently asked by the SEC. It inquires whether investor’s profits were to be derived from the significant entrepreneurial and managerial efforts of others. Blockchain projects are oftentimes run by a decentralized autonymous organization (DAO), which is controlled by shareholders and not influenced by a central government. A DAO is legally arguable when it comes to the relationship between investors and the issuer/promoter. The SEC would scrutinize the structure, rules, distribution of rights, and actual operation of a DAO. Among others, the shareholders’ sophistication, ability to obtain sufficient information, and relationship with the control person(if any) have a great impact on the answer to this question. In the DAO report, the SEC finds that the investors reasonably believe that they can rely on the Slock.it, its co-founders and curator’s expertise, because Slock.it created the website, online forums and closely monitored them; the creator held themselves as experts in Ethereum, and told investors that they had selected people to serve as curators based on their expertise and credentials. The SEC concluded that the managerial efforts of the above entities and individuals were essential to the enterprise, and investors had little choice but to rely on their expertise, as the ability to vote for contracts was largely perfunctory one (votes are limited to proposal whitelisted/cleared by the curators; no sufficient information to permit them to make informed voting decisions), and DAO Token holders were widely dispersed and had limited communication. Simply labeling a digital asset a utility token does not turn the asset into something that is not a security. The main reason why DAO Tokens are securities is that the network and structure in which DAO Tokens are based on is not sufficiently decentralized. The investors are given insufficient rights and information to influence the enterprise, and the issuer/curator remains to hold significant power and control in the ecosystem. In Airfox, besides the efforts the issuer put in building the system and facilitating secondary trading market, the fact that it highlighted its founder’s background(worked at prominent tech companies and attended prestigious universities) strengthens SEC’s view that investor would reasonably expect that Airfox and its agent would expend efforts to develop the Airfox App and the Airtoken ecosystem. If the issuer/promoter retains a stake or other interest in the tokens such that it would be motivated to expend efforts to cause an increase in value in the token, or makes certain statements that lead the investors reasonably believe the issuer/promoter would undertake reasonable efforts for profits or return on their investment, there will be a red flag. How to structure the ICO so it’s not security The idea behind this is if the ICO no longer represents a fraction of the enterprise’s interests, the ICO would probably not seem as security offering. Also always remember the SEC usually step in when they find it necessary to protect investor interests and capital markets. If the ecosystem is sufficiently decentralized or the investor is accredited or sophisticated (in private offering), then the offering would not likely violate the securities regulation. For an ICO to fail the Howey test, we should focus on whether the marketing materials, statements and etc. would lead investor to expect profits, and they’ll reasonably believe that they could rely on the issuer/promoter’s managerial expertise. If the network on which the token or coin is to function is sufficiently decentralized — where purchasers would no longer reasonably expect a person or group to carry out essential managerial or entrepreneurial efforts — the assets may not represent an investment contract and thus not constitutes securities. Moreover, when the efforts of the third party are no longer a key factor for determining the enterprise’s success, material information asymmetries recede. As a network becomes truly decentralized, the ability to identify an issuer or promoter to make the requisite disclosures becomes difficult, and less meaningful. — William Hinman, Director, Division of Corporate Finance in SEC Bitcoin is not deemed as security by the SEC mainly because there’s no central party whose efforts are a key determining factor in the enterprise. Applying securities law to the offer and sale of Bitcoin would seem to be unnecessary as the Bitcoin network is operational and decentralized for a long period of time. Also, based on the Ethereum network and its decentralized structure, current offers and sales of Ether are not securities transactions, and applying the disclosure regime of federal securities law to it would seem to add little value. In cases that there are sufficiently decentralized networks and system, regulating the tokens or coins as securities may not be required. What if your ICO constitutes security offering? First thing first, if the ICO constitutes security offering, the issuer is obliged to register the offer and sales of securities to avoid violation of Section 5 of the Securities Act. The issuer should file a Form 10 to register under Section 12(g) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 the tokens as a class of securities. To be exempted from the registration requirement, one might try to be subject to a valid exemption. These exemptions include a private offering under Section 4(a)(2), a Reg D offering (Rule 506 of Reg D is the most commonly used exemption by startup companies to sell equity to accredited angel investors and venture capital funds. Required to file a Form D), crowdfunding (Form C), a Reg A offering(Form 1-A) and intrastate offering. Find more information in the chart below:

https://melzhou.medium.com/when-crypto-is-or-isnt-security-94792a318157

['Mel Zhou']

2019-01-01 02:15:26.417000+00:00

['Securities Law', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Token Sale', 'ICO']

The struggle for sleep

The struggle for sleep In todays high driven society where time has become a premium for everyone from your employer to your family and friends it has become increasingly difficult for people to switch off and experience a good nights sleep, there is a rise in prescription medication for sleep and anxiety and we are in the midst of a mental health epidemic. All of this is linked and the biggest culprit for anxiety and mental health issues is sleep deprivation and stress. CBD for sleep? People have been turning to the cannabis plant for hundreds of years to help them get to sleep with its relaxing properties, cannabis has obviously stood the test of time with people still turning to it today however, we are beginning to see one particular element of the cannabis plant and that element is CBD it has become mainstream now and you will almost certainly have heard a friend or colleague talk about using CBD to help get a good nights sleep. How can CBD help me sleep? CBD is known for its relaxing and pain relief properties and safe to say being relaxed and pain free with certainly have a good effect on our sleeping pattern. By allowing us to relax more CBD helps our ability to increase and enjoy a better period of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep (where we tend to dream more) which is good for learning, memory and even mood. There is research to suggest REM sleep is able to help consolidate memories. What is CBD? CBD is a chemical compound extracted from the cannabis plant and hemp plant that interacts with our bodies own endocannabinoid system which has a variety of uses and benefits. How does CBD work? Over the years we have been able to understand the science behind CBD and its different effects on the body. We know that CBD interacts with various parts of the brain to help us achieve a more relaxed state. Our bodies produces their own cannabanoids as part of the endocannabanoid system and the CBD products we use can help react with our bodies own cannabanoid system and help our body in many ways. We are beginning to see lots of results and research proving CBD to have the potential to help people who struggle with seizures, pain and social anxiety, even helping produce new brain cells in some cases! Does CBD make you sleepy? CBD does not actually make you sleepy, it allows the body and mind to relax more and achieve a deeper state of sleep faster, therefore CBD is perfectly fine to use throughout the day without feeling tired or groggy. Other benefits of CBD There are lots of reports popping up with more and more benefits of CBD including and not restricted to pain relief, better mood, anti inflammatory and anti oxidant benefits. Below is a list of possible benefits of CBD. Anxiety and stress relief Anti-seizure Pain relief Anti-Acne Cancer Treatment Neuroprotective properties Substance abuse treatment Antipsychotic benefits CBD drops vs CBD vape Although both will more than likely have the same outcome the difference here is how quickly the CBD will enter your system, vaping or smoking CBD will enter the body quickly and come into effect within 30–90 seconds where you will find your drops taken sublingually (under the tongue) may take up to 30 minutes or so to come into effect. What dosage of CBD should i take? CBD dosage like anything is completely dependant on size and age of the individual among other factors and there certainly isn’t a one size fits all element here. Its not the most difficult thing in the world to find the right dosage for you, we recommend finding an oil or vape anywhere between 2.5 – 10% CBD and start with 2 drops/puffs 3 times per day and work your way up until desired results are achieve we would advise to stay within 5mg and 50mg per day and if you feel the need to go higher consult a medical professional. Is CBD addictive or dangerous? With CBD there is no feeling of euphoria or being high, its simply reacts with the bodies own endocannabinoid system allowing for the calmer feeling or recovery from aches and pains, there is absolutely no evidence of CBD being addictive however, taking anything to excess can lead. to a feeling of dependency therefore it is always important to stick with dosage guidelines. CLICK HERE FOR CHARGED CBD GOODNIGHT DROPS WITH GABA

https://medium.com/@charlienieldd/the-struggle-for-sleep-8c64141c1803

['Charlie Nield']

2019-10-08 14:50:01.880000+00:00

['Health', 'Wellness', 'Cbd Drops', 'Cbd', 'Sleep']

Move over, Kickstarter! There’s a new kid on the block.

For long, Kickstarter has been the darling of the crowdfunding community, bursting onto the scene with its innovative fundraising models and offering developers and entrepreneurs around the world an avenue to bring their ideas to life. One of the biggest beneficiaries of this model had been the gaming industry. The gaming industry has grown manifold over the last decade, and the 2020 pandemic has only made it an integral part of our daily lives. Indeed, nearly one in three people on earth are now playing video games. That’s 2.1 billion individuals playing at least once a month! The average profile of a PC gamer is a 35-year-old who has been playing for 13 years and has strong purchasing power. The global gaming market was valued at USD 162.32 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach a value of USD 295.63 billion by 2026, registering a CAGR of 10.5% over the forecast period (2021–2026). So what we have here is an intersection of two different but connected industries: Fundraising and Gaming. However, each of them faces its own set of problems and struggles. The Fundraising Conundrum Kickstarter for long has been one of the foremost crowdfunding platforms for indie game developers to raise funds and develop their games without sacrificing their vision or integrity. And while Kickstarter is a giant in the market, and there are loads of competitors who try to address the gaps left by it, neither have access to the $2 trillion Crypto market. They only focus on the mass retail gamers, and their funding medium is only through product pre-sells, which is further hindered by geographic restrictions. Developers and Their Game Development Conundrum Most of the money made from game sales goes to publishers, digital distribution platforms, and marketing. And, in case the game developers are in need of funding for their next project, they will be obliged to give away their equity, commit to a single publishing platform, or in some cases even sign off their intellectual property, diminishing their earning potential. So we’re left with an addressable problem wherein game developers need new ways to bring their products to users. Likewise, gamers are also seeking new channels to access high-quality games. Crowdfunding for creative projects is not new, and Kickstarter is only one of many platforms that help finance new startups. However, Gamestarter is here to bring indie game funding to a whole new level. A New Standard for Indie Game Funding Gamestarter’s mission is to provide indie game developers with a new option to fund their ideas — by pre-selling their in-game assets in the form of NFTs. Similar to Kickstarter’s proven business model, funding on Gamestarter is all-or-nothing. No one will be charged for a pledge towards a project unless it reaches its funding goal. Furthermore, Gamestarter provides a marketplace to trade digital assets from successfully launched games. Giving the NFTs owners as much agency as possible and the ability to sell and realize real-world value from their holdings is essential for the NFT ecosystem to thrive. So what makes Gamestarter a better crowdfunding platform than Kickstarter? For Investors and Backers First, when backing games on Kickstarter, backers only get a digital copy of the game, a thank-you letter, sometimes the game’s soundtrack, beta access, or a badge in Discord in return for their funds. On Gamestarter, backers will get all the above-mentioned benefits, plus a one-of-kind playable NFT which can be re-sold anytime. This minimizes the investment risk and makes it a liquid investment. There’s no vesting on your asset either. NFTs in video games are FINITE, which means they are different from all other NFT types, which can be minted indefinitely. This feature makes your in-game NFTs much more valuable and promises much higher profit when you want to sell them. Second, gamers and NFT collectors have a chance to discover the hottest games before anyone else, and the finder’s reward can be dramatic! And last, Gamestarter features a lot of community incentive options, such as the ability to earn $GAME tokens via completing specific tasks or access the most in-demand NFTs. $GAME staking options are coming up soon too. To sum it up, Gamestarter is growing the participation of gamers in crowdfunding by making the market: Hyper liquid Less risky More accessible For Game Developers The listing is on Gamestarter is FREE. The platform only takes a small % from the raised funds (0% for the first 100 successful raises), plus up to 2% for each transaction on the marketplace. Projects listed on Kickstarter, will have to pay a 5% funding fee, together with a 3–5% fee for each pledge. Game creators will also be able to earn passive income on Gamestarter. Each time an NFT is traded on Gamestarters marketplace, it incurs a small trading fee. A part of that fee goes directly to the original creators of the NFT. Game listings will get promoted on Gamestarter’s official channels and get access to a wider community. Gamestarter is the first platform to introduce a new way of funding and participating in game development from an early stage. It’s also a brand new way to build a loyal game audience! Keeping in mind that there are millions of gamers funding hundreds of millions in playable game items — it’s is a sure sign that the community attracted by the project will be huge. Developers also don’t need to worry about the technical side of introducing NFTs to their games or being labeled as a ‘crypto game.’ Gamestarter comes with a ready-to-use plugin built for the Unreal Engine & Unity 3d platforms. Conclusion Gamestarter is the very first project of this kind, which incorporates standard features of existing fundraising platforms with new cutting-edge technology and financial offerings. This gives Gamestarter a competitive advantage over all other existing platforms. Moreover, it is fully powered by the $GAME token that can be used to back up multiple projects at the same time. Therefore, Gamestarter only needs 1 project out of 100 on its platform to succeed! Gamestarter platform & marketplace will be launched in the coming days of Summer 2021. Are you ready to be part of the revolution? About Gamestarter Gamestarter lets indie games fundraise by selling digital game items as liquid NFTs. We add liquidity, player-ownership, and new funding resources to the largest entertainment industry in the world. Website | Twitter | Telegram | Announcements | Medium

https://medium.com/@thegamestarter/move-over-kickstarter-theres-a-new-kid-on-the-block-f467ba9a0728

[]

2021-07-20 16:58:09.709000+00:00

['Cryptocurrency', 'Indie Game', 'Cryptogames', 'Crowdfunding', 'Kickstarter']

How to Enhance Battery Life on Your Laptop

Photo by Christian Salas on Unsplash How to Enhance Battery Life on Your Laptop Make it through the day easily Our working lives become more mobile every day. Many of us have already switched to a laptop as their main means of computing. Regardless of what the manufacturers like to tell us, the battery of our machines sometimes just won’t last through the day. Yes, sure, a bigger battery lasts longer than a small one and rapid-charge technology has made it easier than ever to quickly get a few hours worth of juice just with an hour of charging. Still. Sometimes you’re dependent on making it through the day without a wall socket in sight. How you work, what you do and what software you use has a direct and ofentimes huge impact on the actual runtime of your laptop’s battery. So runtime can vary greatly between different people on the same type of machine, depending on their habits and usecase. Here are seven pro tips to greatly enhance your laptop’s battery life. №1 Screen As a surprise to absolutely no one, screen brightness directly affects the power-draw of your screen. So, when possible, don’t run your screen at full brightness, when you’re away from a wall socket. Also resolution and size do play a role. When you’re buying a new computer, think about if you really need that ultra sharp 4K screen on a tiny 13 or 14 inch laptop screen. Probably not. Go with full HD instead. It won’t make a discernable difference at a normal viewing distance but will greatly benefit the runtime of your laptop on battery. Certain manufacturers offer “low power” screens. Just like Lenovo in their Thinkpad T series. If battery life is crucial to you, choose that kind of screen. Also check your energy management settings on your computer. Shutting off your screen when you’re inactive can save a lot of battery. Windows 10 and Mac users will find self-explanatory settings in the corresponding system control areas (namely called “Energy” or “Power Management”). №2 Browser Believe it or not, but the kind of browser you use has a huge impact on your laptop’s battery life. Google Chrome is well known to be a power- and ressource-hog. The more tabs you have open, the more is going on, the quicker the battery will drain. There are more efficient alternatives. On a Mac it clearly is Safari, the default browser by Apple and on a Windows 10 machine the latest chromium version of Edge (yes, that is still around) is really power efficient and fast. Many people also see a huge improvement when using Opera. In this case a little experimentation is required, to find the perfect balance between the features you need and the battery life you want. Not as battery efficient, but quick as all hell and seemingly secure is the latest Firefox browser by Mozilla. As of writing this article Google Chrome really is the worst candidate to pick if battery life is important to you. №3 Graphics card If your mobile computer sports a dedicated graphics card, make sure it’s only using it to accelerate certain programs or just shut it off altogether. An integrated graphics chip like Intels HD 620 or especially the new Ryzen 4000 series Radeon Vega graphics chips are more than capable of driving your operating systems user interface. No need for a dedidcated graphics card doing the “featherweight” lifting, burning precious battery life doing so. №4 Background programs It’s a good habit to de-clutter your open windows and programs from time to time. Especially when you’re running on battery. Having many programs open and stuff running in the background is a real drain on your battery life. Try to work as efficiently as possible, close programs when you’re done using them and try to not run your daily virus check in the background. Many of those security programs can be configured to not do a deep scan while on battery. Check out the advanced settings in the security suite of your choice. Macs are more efficient in handling many open programs at once than Windows machines. Still, working efficiently and neatly, closing what you don’t need, is never wrong. Extra-Tip: When you’re on Windows 10, go into Taskmanager (press the Windows Key+X and from the menu popping up select “Taskmanager”). Select “more details” and check out the now open “Processes” tab. You see a list of open and running programs and how much CPU-power they need. If you scroll to the far right of this window you can see a column for “battery usage”. If you click on it, it sorts the open programs by the amount of energy they need. This way you can identify battery-life drainers and kill the program for more endurance, if you don’t need it currently. №5 Power profiles Laptop manufacturers provide power management profiles. They are called “balanced”, “quiet”, “ performance” or something similar. Macs manage their energy setting automatically pretty well, but you can still make your adjustments in the system settings under “Energy”. On Windows those settings are easiest asccessed by right-clicking on the battery-icon. Select “Windows Mobility Center”. Now under the icon for the battery you should be able to select a different power plan. Choose something that sounds more “efficient” than “performance”. In the Windows 10 energy settings you can also create such power plans of your own. Lenovo for example provides enhanced quick settings for your computer and also your battery with their Lenovo Vantage suite. It lives in your taskbar and is easily accessed by clicking on the battery icon. From there you can choose to quick charge your battery or even to enhance the general lifespan of your battery by only charging it to about 50% to 60% of full capacity. Of course, this will limit your battery runtime between charges. Almost all manufacturers provide a similar service. Make sure to actually read your manual once you get a new computer and read about power management and how it is handled best with your machine of choice. №6 Networking I know it’s a weird concept to say in modern times, but if you want to conserve a little bit of extra juice, go offline. Yes, you read that right. No e-mails, no spotify, no social media. I know that many of our jobs just don’t allow to be offline. Thing is though, that your WiFi chip inside your laptop drains a lot of juice. So does Bluetooth, even if you don’t have any devices connected. So, if you don’t use bluetooth currently, switch it off. Also to try to go offline as often as possible. This has many other benefits besides improving your battery life, like being less distracted. №7 Battery packs If nothing else helps, you still got the option of battery packs or battery banks. Those are basically external carry-with-you-battery packs that can be connected to your laptop or other electronic device to charge it up. Depending on the size and capacity of the battery pack, you can even charge your devices multiple times. Best suited for this kind of recharge-on-the-go approach are Laptops that can be charged via USB-C port. Make sure you know what kind of wattage your Laptop needs to fully recharge in time and provide it with as close to that wattage as you can. If your battery pack doesn’t offer enough wattage, you won’t be able to charge your Laptop in a reasonable amount of time. You can also connect the battery pack to the laptop while you’re working on it, thus reducing the draining of your laptop’s battery a bit. Bonus: 5 or a 7? Usually, when you buy a new laptop, it’s the question to go with an Intel i5 or i7 or an AMD Ryzen 5 or 7. Well, as of 2020 if you want energy efficiency and long battery life, I don’t see why anyone would go for any high end Intel chip really. AMD has overtaken Intel in many markets and in my opinion also in the mobile market as their Ryzen 4000 series chips at the moment provide even thin and light laptops with plenty of cores, power and battery life. Neat! But regardless of your choice of processor brand, what about the difference between the 5 and 7 lines of processors. The 7 ones are the stronger ones, with more cores, more performance and more power draw. So, does it make sense to go for the lesser option if you value battery life? There is no clear answer to that because after watching many Youtube videos on that subject it seems like that it’s highly dependent on how the manufacturer of the Laptop implemented the cooling solution, the mainboard and many other factors that play into the energy efficiency of a certain processor. Personally I believe that the 5 series chips might be a “tad” easier on the battery life, I’d still rather go with the more powerful option and in the worst case help myself out with a battery pack. But that’s just me. In general, the further technology progresses, the smaller the processors can be manufactured, the more energy efficient they are, so if battery life is of utmost importance to you, you should always go with the latest processors. Conclusion Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash It’s obvious, that the real battery life of your machine varies greatly with it’s specs and your usecase. But this also means that you have some sort of control over it. Times are changing and conserving ressources is a good and timely thing to do, let’s not stop at reducing our waste, but also our use of battery life. It’s really all aboout conscious living and conscious use of the ressources available to you to get your things done. Luckily efficiency seems to become the new thing to strive for and brag about, not only in mobile computers. Also, Apple will transition to their own processors for their whole computer lineup , starting later this year — I’ll keep a close eye on that, as it probably will usher in a whole new era of power-efficient computing. Cutting down on uneccessary or even toxic relationships is another wise thing to do nowadays, but that’s for another article…

https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-enhance-battery-life-on-your-laptop-349abd21123a

[]

2020-07-27 23:58:54.159000+00:00

['Gardgets', 'Tips', 'Tech', 'Life', 'Technology']

It’s no longer only a man’s world in South Sudan

From coordinating airdrops, air freights, road convoys, river operations, retail markets and warehousing, women are defying the odds in South Sudan. They have gone to some of the most remote locations and they have done it with much success. “We are outshining even some of our male colleagues in the office,” says Justine Nzilani, a Logistics Officer based in Juba. Their success has been years in the making and in part is thanks to some of the initiatives WFP put in place to boost the number of women working in emergency operations. From only two female logisticians in the WFP Logistics hub five years ago, the team is now 26 females strong and growing. Some ten recent graduates are undergoing a training that will lead to possible employment with WFP whilst a further 12 females are being recruited. A huge step in this male-dominated field. So, how was this achieved? Female logisticians are few but more and more females are occupying positions of prominence. Photo: WFP/Charlie Musoka “It took a concerted effort,” says Adham Effendi, WFP’s former Head of Logistics in South Sudan. “Support from management and human resources staff really helped us to raise awareness, identify and attract some of the skilled female staff.” The number of women is still a far cry from parity and the team knows this. “The numbers might not reflect the giant strides we have made,” says Effendi. “More initiatives are on the cards to ensure further recruitment and retention of women in the South Sudan team.” Way Forward In keeping with the Executive Director’s call to open more positions for women and give them equal opportunities at WFP at all levels and in all areas, WFP Logistics South Sudan’s vision is to develop a well-trained female workforce with the potential to provide more women with employment opportunities in supply chain management. WFP Logistics is also now working on capacity building of South Sudanese women. Working with the University of Juba, WFP is launching an innovative apprenticeship programme targeting South Sudanese female tertiary students. “Well trained women can play a great role not only in logistics and other previously male-dominated fields but in building the nation” says Effendi. Known as the Female Capacity Strengthening Programme initiative, the female apprentices are involved in the day-to-day operations of the logistics team. They receive on-the-job training, as well as classroom training which is designed and tailored to suit the needs of the programme. In addition to providing them with logistics management skills, the training acquaints them with the use of information technology and corporate systems. “We are outshining even some of our male colleagues in the office.” Read what some of the female loggies think about making their careers in a field that has been largely dominated by men: Martha Nyakueth Tot, South Sudanese and WFP’s Storekeeper in Juba. Photo:WFP/Aimad Ullah Martha Nyakueth Tot, Storekeeper — I joined WFP in 2009 Malakal in the field office. Despite the perception that logistics tasks are hectic, and male-dominated, I enjoy logistics and have no regrets. It is my favourite field of work and I am developing my career. I particularly like logistics because it is real and practical. I encourage other South Sudanese women to join me. Ayite Rose Kwoji, a national of South Sudan and currently Business Support Assistant for WFP’s air operations. Photo: WFP/Aimad Ullah Ayite Rose Kwoji, Business Support Assistant — I joined WFP this year and am one of the youngest in a team of nine women. I have had to overcome many challenges in my life and while I find logistics daunting, I relish the challenge and find it exciting and innovative. Justine Obella, a national of Uganda, works for WFP as a logistics officer in South Sudan. Photo: WFP/Aimad Ullah Justine Obella, logistics officer — My job gives me great satisfaction as the environment is ever changing, from the warehouse to the boardroom, with proactive action for innovation. Adiru Brenda Baiga, South Sudanese and WFP’s storekeeper in Rumbek warehouse. Photo: WFP/Aimad Ullah Adiru Brenda Baiga, Storekeeper — Logistics means working towards achieving my dream of serving our communities and building a society that benefits everyone including girls and women of South Sudan. Khaula Waqar, a native of Pakistan and WFP Logistics Officer. Photo: WFP/Aimad Ullah Khaula Waqar, Logistics Officer — I will be heading the first ever WFP Logistics South Sudan female capacity strengthening project. I am proud to play a key role in creating a gender balanced environment. Justine Nzilani, a Kenyan national and WFP’s Logistics Funds Management officer. Photo:WFP/Aimad Ullah Justine Nzilani, Logistics Funds Management Officer — Managing the funds of the massive Logistics operation in South Sudan is an ever-evolving job. I am proud to be working in such a dynamic operation. Chifundo Ntupanyama, Logistics Information Management Officer. Photo: WFP/Aimad Ullah Chifundo Ntupanyama, Logistics Information Management Officer — I was born and raised in Malawi and now work in South Sudan to improve efficiency in the complex logistics operation . I ensure factual and timely information is provided to partners and donors - key to ensuring that WFP continues to reach the people in need. Logistics is fast paced, efficient and highly rewarding!

https://medium.com/world-food-programme-insight/its-no-longer-only-a-man-s-world-in-south-sudan-47c4f960dc4a

['Tomson Phiri']

2019-08-18 07:52:25.274000+00:00

['Logistics', 'South Sudan', 'Humanitarian', 'Female', 'Wfp']

The Link Between Creativity and Mental Health

Writing is an Emotional Rollercoaster Many writers are also introverted, quiet people, and find it stressful to have their work assessed publicly. This can lead to what is known as the ‘Imposter Syndrome’ where they feel like a fraud. When people, such as an editor, readers, and reviewers tell writers that their work is not good, then naturally it is a crushing feeling. It is very easy for the writer to get dispirited and tell themselves that the entire project they’ve been working on is hopeless, especially when they keep getting rejection slips from editors and harsh criticism from readers. A big part of a writer’s success depends on how other people think of their work. Writing also brings uncertain hours and irregular paychecks. It is easy for a writer to feel down when they aren’t sure how much money is coming in or how the bills will be paid. Writers may also write late into the night, or even only at night. This can throw off sleep-wake schedules, which also may increase the chances of depression. Lack of sleep, exercise, natural light, and connection can be a recipe for depression. Depression Isn’t a Requirement for Creativity Being familiar with misery, pain, and suffering may guide the process for many writers. Writers can write about suffering even if they don’t know it intimately, but some may feel that their work will lack authenticity if they haven’t experienced the things they write about. But when you’re depressed, nothing makes sense. You are sure the article will be lousy, so what's the point of even writing it? When you are depressed you are tired and therefore have less courage, less resilience, and less capability to handle everyday stressors. When there is little to no energy, every little feedback, every little comment, and every little rejection sends you deep inside your misery and the next thing you know it's been months since you managed to write anything or even got out of the house.

https://medium.com/mystic-minds/authors-are-more-likely-to-suffer-from-depression-d611b395b2ef

['Kimberly Fosu']

2020-11-05 21:29:50.225000+00:00

['Creativity', 'Education', 'Life', 'Mental Health', 'Writing']

Ensemble Learning — Your Machine Learning savior and here is why (Part 1)

Photo by Romain Baïsse This is a series of posts that explain Ensemble method in machine learning in an easy-to-follow manner. In this post, we will discuss about Heterogenous Ensemble. 1/Heterogenous Ensemble 2/ Homogenous Ensemble — Bagging 3/ Homogenous Ensemble — Boosting As a machine learning enthusiast and a self-taught learner, I write the following post as a study material for myself and would love to share it with my fellow learners .The idea is to show the whole picture of different techniques of Ensemble, when to use and what effects on our model they’ve got to offer. Ensemble is a machine learning technique that makes prediction by using a collection of models. This is the reason why most of the time, learners tend to discover this method after studying all other classic algorithms. The strength of this technique derives from the idea “The wisdom of the crowds” that states: “the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions, are often better than could have made by any single member of the groups” (Wikipedia, Wisdom of the crowd, 2020). The idea is certainly proven by the fact that there are several winning predictive models in Kaggle competition deploying this modelling method. There are great benefits coming from implementing Ensemble. Apart from amazing high accuracy, it is ideal to perform Ensemble method on larger datasets to reduce training time and memory space by optimising parallel computing(e.g. XBBoost, Light GBM). One of the worst nightmares of machine learning practitioners is overfitting especially for real-world datasets that contain noise and not follow any typical data distributions. In that case we can also use Ensemble to fight against high variance (e.g. Random Forest). Heterogenous Ensemble is used when we want to combine different fine-tuned algorithms to come up with the best possible prediction. Voting and Stacking are examples of this technique. Hard Voting This method is used for classification tasks. It combines predictions of multiple estimators using Mode (choosing the majority class) to select the final result. By choosing the class that has the largest sum of votes, Hard Voting Ensemble can achieve better prediction than models that just use a single algorithm. In order to be effective, we need to provide a set of odd (more than 3) and diverse estimators to produce their own independent predictions. Following is an example of code using Hard Voting Ensemble. Please note that the list of algorithm is your choice as long as they are fine-tuned, diverse and solve classification tasks. Code example using Hard Voting for classification task Soft Voting Both regression and classification tasks can be used for this technique. In order to perform Soft Voting, we employ Mean — averaging predicted probability for Classification and predicted value for Regression tasks. The characteristics are similar with Hard Voting except that we can use any number of estimators as long as there are more than 2. We can also assign weights to classifiers depend on their importance for final prediction like Hard Voting. Code example using Soft Voting for regression task Stacking After having tried Hard Voting and Soft Voting but still not achieve expected results, this is when Stacking comes into play. The technique is employed for both Classification and Regression tasks. The biggest difference between Stacking and the two other Heterogenous Ensemble methods is that apart from base learners, we have an extra meta-classifier. Firstly, the base learners will train and predict on the dataset. Then, meta-estimator on the second layer will use prediction of the base learners layer as new input features for the next step. Note that the meta-estimator will train and predict on dataset that takes new input features (X), the number of new features is equal to the number of your base learners, and the class labels (Y) of the original dataset. In this context, we no longer use estimates of location for combination but use a trainable learner as a combiner itself. The benefit of this approach is that the meta-estimator can effectively examine which base estimator provides better prediction as well as participate directly in the final prediction using the original data and new input features. Source: Staking Model visualisation from mlxtend Code example using Staking method for Classification task Overall, Heterogenous Ensemble method is a great choice when you already build a small set of estimators, individually train and fine-tune them. Bear in mind that “ Voting only makes sense if the learning schemes perform comparably well. If two of the three classifiers make predictions that are grossly incorrect, we will be in trouble!” (Witten, Frank, Hall, & Pal, 2016). Heterogenous Ensemble certainly provides an improvement on overall performance by applying a simple and intuitive Ensemble technique. In the next post, we will dive in another Ensemble technique that consists of some award-winning algorithms. Thanks for reading! Don’t be shy, let’s connect if you are interested in more of my posts in: Medium: https://medium.com/@irenepham_45233 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/funwithmachinelearning/

https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/ensemble-learning-your-machine-learning-savoir-and-here-is-why-part-1-78ef52c8c365

['Irene Pham']

2020-12-23 16:37:39.310000+00:00

['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Big Data', 'Algorithms']