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The Pink & The Blue

A few weeks ago, at a campground in southeastern Missouri, I eavesdropped on a group of middle-aged gay men reminiscing about their criminal pasts. They told of plainclothes police officers in parks, highway rest areas, and public restrooms, masquerading as gay men looking for sex with other men. Often chosen because they were handsome or conventionally masculine, these undercover cops would exchange suggestive glances, initiate conversation, and even display their genitals in attempts to get other men to make sexual advances. One cop even attempted to get a guy to point out in a gay porn magazine which (at the time, illegal) sex acts he preferred. If a guy was unlucky enough to encounter one of these cops, he would be arrested on charges of “lewdness,” “public indecency,” or “soliciting a police officer.” Then his photograph, name, age, address, and place of employment would be published in the local newspaper. Publicly shamed, their lives in ruins, these often-married men would rarely contest the charges, which ensured a criminal record would follow them for the rest of their lives.

https://medium.com/th-ink/the-pink-and-the-blue-948ab49b6f95

['M. J. Murphy']

2020-01-25 04:57:57.986000+00:00

['Race', 'Diversity', 'LGBTQ', 'BlackLivesMatter', 'Racism']

A Non-Partisan Voter’s Guide for Christians (No, Really)

A Non-Partisan Voter’s Guide for Christians (No, Really) A review of David Platt’s church & politics primer, *Before You Vote: Seven Questions Every Christian Should Ask* The 2020 election is dividing Christians more radically than any election in my lifetime. This puts pastors and churches in an intractable position, wherever they fall politically, especially if pastors want to give guidance about voting. So what should they do? I submit that they should first read David Platt’s new Before You Vote: a wise, refreshing guide in our partisan atmosphere. In my childhood and even up to now, church “voting guides” have been mostly a joke, ranking candidates on one criteria: how “conservative” they are. Pastors would say “I’m not going to tell you who to vote for” and then give you one of these voting guides that makes it terribly obvious who the “Christian candidate” is. I’m not saying that they were necessarily wrong about who lines up with Christian beliefs, but I do know that for a large swath of people, the term “conservative” has changed to the point where it does not reflect Christian beliefs so unequivocally. I am a conservative, no qualms about it personally, but often I feel like I can’t even use the word with non-Christians anymore because of the new connotations it brings. But I am here to assure you that David Platt’s Before You Vote is not one of those voter’s guides that indirectly tell you what to do. He stays far away from that. What it does help you do is think through what voting as a Christian means, what the Bible says about several issues, and what traps to avoid when thinking and speaking about politics as a Christian. Even if you’re thinking, “I already know what the Bible says and what that means for me politically”, I urge you to get this book because I pray that all Christians will come away with a large dose of empathy for other Christians who come to different political decisions. The most important thing to Platt, as it should be to us, is not that you make the “right decision” on election day. God is on the throne either way, and he has already won. As a matter of fact, Platt writes: This world is not a democracy. This world is a monarchy, and god is the King. Sure, we may use language about our rights, and we may even compose and ascribe to a “Bill of Rights”, but the reality is simple: God has all the rights, and we are subject to him. So you must be subject to God, and that means how you steward your vote is important. The Bible gives no direct instruction on voting, but: (We) are in a very different position today than the church in the first century. Followers of Jesus in the New Testament did not have a say in who led them and how they would be led. For that matter, neither do followers of Jesus in North Korea or many other nations in the world today. But we do. Consequently, as “governing” citizens we are accountable before God for the good of people affected by our government. What Platt yearns for is a church full of people who refuse to be divided by politics and make their Biblical ties more important than their political ones. He gives many practical pieces of advice to Christians in order to achieve this goal. One important example is when we say “the Christian view on (fill in the issue) is…” or “the Christian candidate is…”. Why not? Because Christians base their beliefs on the Bible, and, as Platt argues: (No) verse in the Bible endorses any particular candidate in a contemporary election. What’s more, like the rest of us, politicians are inherently flawed human beings. God the Father has only opened up the heavens in support of one person, saying “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:16). His name is Jesus, and he is the only leader whose character and platform are completely endorsed by God. So, should we not speak about how Christians should think about political issues at all? Of course not, because the Bible does give some guidance on many issues. The point is this: When someone claims to have the Christian position on an issue, he or she is asserting that every Bible-believing, gospel-embracing follower of Jesus should agree with that position. As we have seen (Platt explores these issues in more detail earlier in the book), there is a place for such statements. We have listed biblical examples, including abortion, marriage, murder, paying taxes, and caring for the poor and the immigrant. But as soon as someone uses language about the Christian position and does not have clear, direct, language from God’s Word supporting that position, he or she has gone beyond the bounds of the Bible and is unbiblically dividing the church. Claiming to know the Christian position draws a line in the sand. There are those who are in and those who are out. Applying our faith to politics, then, requires a high degree of responsibility to not say the Bible is clear on a contemporary political issue when it is not. The Bible is clear that abortion is the destruction of life. The Bible is clear that Christians should care for the poor and the immigrant. The Bible is clear that we should pay taxes. It is not clear, however, on what a nation’s tax policy should be. It is not clear, either, on how to weight these issues when we are voting. Those questions fall under “the Christian position according to our wisdom” a helpful but important distinction given by Platt. (He goes more into detail on the reasons a given Christian might weigh some of these issues as greater than others, but I have chosen not to relay that here.) I feel that most of the political division in the American church recently comes from Christians on both sides of the aisle feeling that they have a monopoly on truth, or the correct decisions. More than that, many Christians feel that it is more important to be in the “right” intellectually than it is to keep the body of Christ from becoming divided. The answer is clear: God will not hold you or anyone else accountable for views on issues that are not given clear and direct language in Scripture. So rest easy. Rest in grace. Try to understand your brothers and sisters in Christ before trying to convince them that you are right. If you’re thinking, “Politics isn’t an issue in my church. We all seem to have roughly the same beliefs”, you’re not alone. Platt writes: One prominent study across a variety of churches found that very few people attend church services with other Bible-believing Christians who hold different political views than them. This is tragic, and I don’t use that term lightly. Followers of Jesus are dividing into different churches not based on what they believe about the Bible and the gospel, but based on what they believe about political candidates, parties, and positions. This should not be so. Why should it not be so? Because, as Christians, we are consistently being identified more easily with political parties or candidates than we are our beliefs. I have several colleagues at my school who I have asked to come to church that have not come. Why? I think it mostly has to do with the political views they think they will encounter at my Baptist church. Does my church deserve that scrutiny? I don’t think so. But it points to a larger problem in the American church today, one that is hurting Christian witness to the outside world. I had one moderately-sized problem with Before You Vote, and it is one that I would love to ask Platt about personally if I had the chance. He speaks often of the two major political parties, and he even mentions that some Christians may intentionally choose not to vote at all as a sort of protest to the available candidates or parties. But he never once mentions even the possibility of voting third-party. I believe this is a much more effective option than not voting at all because you can easily see it in the election results. So I am flummoxed as to why Platt wouldn’t mention the possibility, even as much as he talks about how issues and their biblical basis should determine our vote. What if a minor party’s platform represents, to us, the best possible choice among the candidates? I would have appreciated some wise guidance for Christians on this issue, especially as some high-profile Christians have announced their intention to vote third-party and have received immense backlash from other Christians. Before You Vote should not be your only source of guidance on political issues, and that is by design. The Bible should be your first source. But Platt’s short book is a refreshing call to both take our responsibility seriously and not let political issues divide the church. Some reviews of this book have missed the point completely, sowing further division instead of hearing the simple message: there are a lot of things more important than politics, and loving your brothers and sisters in Christ is one of those. Don’t cause any further division based on political candidates. It’s not worth it. Think through what the Bible says, and vote your conscience.

https://medium.com/park-recommendations/a-non-partisan-voters-guide-for-christians-no-really-995aae7b5b4e

['Jason Park']

2020-10-17 12:03:02.840000+00:00

['Religion And Spirituality', 'Books', 'Christianity', 'Reading', '2020 Presidential Race']

how to build data science portfolio | portfolio for data scientist

How do you get a Data Scientist job? It is difficult to know enough statistics, understanding the machine, scripting, etc. to be able to get a job. One thing I’ve noticed recently is that quite a few people might have the qualifications needed to get a job but no portfolio. Although a resume counts, getting a portfolio of public proof of your expertise in data science will do wonders for your career prospects. And if you have a recommendation, it’s important to be able to show prospective employers what you can do, rather than simply tell them that you can do something. This article will have links to where different data management experts (data technology administrators, data analysts, social media symbols, or a mix thereof) and others will chat about what to have in a portfolio and how to get heard. So let’s proceed with that! A Portfolio Value : A portfolio is important in addition to the value of learning by the development of a portfolio, since it will help you get work. For this post, let’s describe a portfolio as public proof of your data science expertise. I got this concept from DataCamp ‘s David Robinson Chief Data Scientist when Marissa Gemma interviewed him on the blog Style Analytics. He has been asked to land his first job in the industry and has said, For me, the most successful approach was to do the civic service., I blogged and did a lot of open-source growth, and these helped display public proof of my data science skills. But the way I secured my first job in the industry has been an especially remarkable example of civic service. During my PhD, I was an involved writer on the Stack Overflow programming forum, and one of my responses came across an engineer at the organization (one discussing the theory behind the beta distribution). He was so impressed with the response that he contacted me [through Twitter], and I was hired a few interviews later. The more professional service you do, the greater the possibility of a tragic mistake such as this: someone seeing your service and leading you to a career opening, or someone asking you having learned about the work you’ve done. People sometimes forget that software developers and data scientists often submit their complaints to Google. If these same people are addressing their problems by reading your public service, they will think more about you and reach out to you. A Skill Prerequisite portfolio : Most businesses do tend to see employees with at least a bit of real-life experience for an entry-level job. You’ve maybe seen posts like the one below. The dilemma is how can you get experience because you need first work experience? If an answer is given, then the answer is programming. Projects are maybe the perfect alternative to job experience or, as Angshuman has said, If you have no data science background so you simply have to do independent ventures. In reality, when Jacqueline Nolis interviews applicants she needs to learn about a review of a recent issue/project you faced. I want to know about a project that they just worked on. I‘m telling them how the project began, how they’ve decided it was worth time and effort, their approach and their outcomes. I’m even telling them what they learnt from the study. I’m learning a lot from the responses to this question: how they can say a storey, if the dilemma has to do with the bigger picture, and if they’ve been working hard to do something. If you don’t have any job experience relating to data science, the best choice here is to speak about a data science initiative you’ve been working on. Project Forms to Include in Portfolio : Data science is such a large area that it is impossible to determine what kinds of projects recruiting managers want to see. At Kaggle’s CareerCon 2018 (video) William Chen, Data Science Manager at Quora, shared his thoughts on the matter. I support ventures where people are expressing interest in data in ways that go beyond homework assignments. Some kind of final class project where you are testing an interesting dataset and discovering fascinating outcomes … Put effort into writing … I would want to see some good writing ups where people discover fascinating and innovative stuff … make some visualisations and share their job. Many people understand the importance of project creation, but one thing many people worry about is where you get the fascinating dataset and what you do with it. Jason Goodman, Airbnb’s data scientist, has a Developing Data Portfolio Projects Advisory post where he speaks about several different project proposals and has good suggestions about what kind of data sets you can use. He also echoes one argument from William regarding dealing with fascinating results. I think the best projects in the portfolio are less about sophisticated simulations and more about dealing with fascinating results. Many people are doing something about financial records or Twitter data; that can work, but the data is not that important necessarily, because you are working uphill. In the article one of his other arguments is that web scraping is a perfect way to get fascinating results. If you’re interested in learning how to create your own dataset by Python Web scraping, you can see my article here. If you come from college, it’s important to remember that your work will qualify as a project (a very big one). William Chen can be heard learning about it here. Jeremie Harris in The four best ways of not getting employed as a data scientist has said, It’s hard to think of a better means of getting your resume tossed into the ‘definite no’ pile than highlighting work you’ve completed with your highlighted personal ventures on meaningless proof-of-concept datasets. If in question, here are some ventures that do you more harm than they do to you: * Classification of longevity in the Titanic dataset. * MNIST dataset hand-written digit recognition. * Identification of the flowers by iris dataset. The following picture provides partial samples of the datasets Titanic (A), MNIST (B), and iris © classification. There aren’t many ways to differentiate yourself from other candidates using these data sets. Verify the novel proposals are mentioned. Iterative portfolios Favio Vazquez has an outstanding post on how he got his work as a data scientist, in which he spoke. All of his advice of course is to build a portfolio. Do you have a portfolio? If you are hunting for a good-paying career in computer science do some practical technology ventures. If you can get them listed on GitHub. In addition to playing in Kaggle, find something you enjoy or a dilemma you want to solve, and use your experience to do so. One of the more important results is that when you go to work search you still have to keep changing. I applied to nearly 125 positions (for instance, maybe you’ve applied for a lot more), I only got 25–30 answers. Some were just: Thank you, but nope. And I had almost 15 interviews with them. I’ve learnt from each. Nice. Nice. I have had a lot of rejection to deal with. Really, something I wasn’t preparing for. But I liked the interview process (not all of them for being honest). I learned a lot, programmed, read a lot of articles and posts every day. They helped a lot. You should also refresh your portfolio, as you learn about and develop yourself. Many other advice posts share the same sentiment. As told by Jason Goodman, When you publish it online the job is not completed. Do not be afraid to continue contributing to or updating your ideas after they have been written! This advice is extremely valid when finding employment. There are also examples of accomplished people like Airbnb’s Data Scientist Kelly Peng who also persevered and continued to work to develop. She was looking over how many positions she applied for and consulted in one of her blog entries. She obviously applied to several employers and managed to stay. She also discusses in her essay how you ought to keep learning about your interviewing experiences. Take note of all the questions you have asked about the interview, particularly those that you have forgotten to answer. You might fail once again, but at the same place, you don’t fail. Still, you should be studying and developing. Incorporate Portfolio into 1 Page Overview : One way that anyone discovers your portfolio is always by your CV so it’s worth noting. A data science portfolio is a focal point for your professional expertise. Your CV is an opportunity to address your credentials succinctly and fit for that particular position. Skim recruiters and recruiting managers return very quickly and you have only a limited period to get an idea. Improving your CV will improve the odds of obtaining an interview. You have to make sure that you list every single line and every single segment of your CV. Length: Keep it easy and max one tab. For a short skim this gives you the most effects. Recommend a simple one-column resume because skim is fast. 2. Goal: Do not have any. They don’t help you separate yourself from others. The more valuable things (skills, tasks, knowledge, etc.) they take away rooms. Cover letters are incredibly discretionary unless you personalize them sincerely. 3. Coursework: List appropriate coursework for job description available. 4. Skills: Don’t assign your talents numerical scores. Using terms like skilled or common, or stuff like that, whether you want to score yourself on your abilities. You can also absolutely rule out evaluations. 5. Skills: Do list the technical skills listed in the job description. The order in which you list your skills will show what you are better at. 6. Projects: Don’t mention popular or homework tasks. They aren’t informative enough to differentiate you from other candidates. Listed novel ventures. 7. Projects: Display outcomes and have ties included. Place percentile rank when you have competed in the Kaggle competition as it lets the person reading your resume realize where you are in the competition. There is still space for ties to writing ups and articles in the parts of tasks as they make the recruiting manager or recruiter dive deeper (bias to real-life messy situations where you discover something new). 8. Portfolio: Complete our on-line activity. A LinkedIn profile is the most common. It’s kind of like an expanded CV. Profiles from Github and Kaggle can help to show off your work. Complete any profile and provide links to other websites. Print up the GitHub Repositories details. Include links to the profiles/blog you share your information (medium, quora). Specifically, data science is about information sharing and explaining to other people what the data means. You don’t have to do them all, but just pick those and do it (more on this later). Social Media Importance : This is very similar to the section on Value of a Portfolio, only broken into parts. You can provide support for your resume by providing a Github website, a Kaggle profile, a Stack Overflow, etc .. Filling out online accounts can be a positive indicator for recruitment managers. Generally speaking, when I assess a nominee, I ‘m curious about hearing what they’ve posted online, even though it’s not done or polished. And it’s almost certainly easier to share something than to share none. As Will Stanton said, the reason data scientists want to see public work is that These methods are used by data scientists to discuss their own findings and find answers to the questions. If you are using these methods, then you are signalling to data scientists that you are one of them, even though you haven’t been a data scientist ever before. A lot of data science is about collaboration and data presentation so it is nice to have these profiles online. Besides being useful and offering useful exposure with these channels, they can also help you get noticed and guide people through your resume. Via different outlets, people can and do find your resume online (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Kaggle, Email, Stack Overflow, Tableau Web, Quora, Youtube …). You can also note the multiple forms of social media feed into one another. You need to have a kind of README.md with an overview of your research, since a lot of data science is about sharing outcomes. Be sure that the README.md file explains explicitly what your project is, what it is doing and how to execute the code. Kaggle : Fact, completing one Kaggle contest doesn’t allow someone to be a data scientist. Neither does one class take, or attend a seminar-workshop, or study one dataset, or read one book in data science. Worked on competition(s) improves your exposure and adds to your expertise. It is a compliment to the other tasks, not the only litmus test of one’s expertise in data science. I totally concur with Reshama ‘s views on this. The point of how to take a class about something in particular doesn’t make you a specialist on something nor does it grant you a career. I’ve actually done a course called Python for Data Analysis and I’m going into great depth on Pandas, Matplotlib, and Seaborn. It won’t give you a job automatically or make you an instant expert in Matplotlib or Seaborn but it will improve your expertise, show you how libraries work, and help you develop your portfolio. Anything you do will improve your employability. Linkedin : Unlike a length-confined resume, a LinkedIn profile helps you to identify your tasks and job experience in greater detail. Udacity has a handbook to build a successful LinkedIn profile. Their search feature is an integral aspect of LinkedIn and you must have appropriate keywords in your profile for you to turn up. Recruiters also use LinkedIn to scan for candidates. LinkedIn lets you see which businesses were looking for you and who saw your profile. Tableau Public : Not every job in data science uses Tableau or some other BI tools. If you are applying to jobs where these tools are being used, though, it is important to note that there are places where you can place dashboards for public use. For instance, if you say you‘re learning or you know Tableau, put a few dashboards on Tableau Public. While many businesses might be well off learning Tableau on the job, having public evidence of your Tableau skill can help Conclusion : For several years, getting a good resume was the main method for job applicants to relay their talents to prospective employers. There’s more than one way to show off your talents these days and get a career. A public evidentiary portfolio is a way to get benefits you would not otherwise have. Importantly, a portfolio is an iterative operation. As your experience grows you should change your investments over time. Never stop studying, and never expand. Even this blog post is being updated with reviews and rising awareness. Career Guide and roadmap for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence &and National & International Internship’s, please refer :

https://medium.com/dev-genius/how-to-build-data-science-portfolio-portfolio-for-data-scientist-fde92961dbb2

['Shaik Sameeruddin']

2020-09-06 22:30:19.279000+00:00

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

Degree or Certificate: What’s Needed in Today’s Workforce?

When you live in cities like Boston and work in higher education, it’s impossible not to feel simultaneously a tremendous sense of history and some trepidation about the future. The broad expanse of the Charles River outside my windows offers a sweeping, encompassing view of wealthy universities with 400-year old traditions, historically working-class colleges, and younger upstarts that are determined to serve the needs of a growing workforce. Yet the demands of this workforce are changing. Immediately across the Charles is MIT and its biotech enclaves — one of America’s epicenters of innovation and creativity — where there are growing concerns about whether traditional forms of higher education will continue to meet the needs of a post-industrial workforce. If degree-granting institutions fail to adapt to the economic engines that will power these expanding, dynamic, transformative hubs, what will become of the very institutions that fueled this economic growth? Benefits of Liberal Arts Tradition are Many The answer, in part, carries with it the baggage of accumulated history. Liberal arts colleges and universities, upon which most of American higher education is based, educate the productive citizens that build the new generations. A college degree continues to be among the best investments, paying a handsome return in higher salary and often job satisfaction. America’s colleges educate broadly, providing access, choice, and a full range of employment options to build a strong economy and a stable democratic republic. These are good reasons and excellent arguments for traditional liberal arts institutions. But the world is becoming a technologically complex place that has changed dramatically. The fax machine of the 1980s and the technologically-enhanced mobile phone of today seem at best distant cousins. Today’s Innovation Requires Ongoing Education Learning today happens differently — and at a different pace — than even a couple of decades ago. We sometimes seem overwhelmed by our capacity to gather information without fully understanding what is true, relevant, and meaningful. Access to information is different from distilling and defining what is fact-based and useful. It’s not surprising, then, that there is a continuing discussion about the value of certificate-based training. We are a long way from earlier college-based learning steeped in classical tradition that sought to train preachers and teachers. Yet we risk the danger of so narrowing our focus to meet specialized workforce needs that we lose sight of the greater good. Higher education must be a lifelong, seamless pathway that prepares us to be useful — nimble, agile, and well-versed — to meet the technical challenges ahead. Degree or Certificate: Not an Either/Or Proposition It’s not an either/or proposition. With the growth of for-profit and online and in-residence certificate programs by non-profits, there is already some history behind us. As the U.S. economy cranks to near full employment and immigration policies become more restrictive, the pool of trained, available workers will likely be unable to meet the demands of a growing economy, even if a recession looms ahead. What America must not do, however, is abandon the historic traditions that have built its workforce. Higher Education Must Respond to Workforce Needs This suggests that American higher education must find compelling, responsive ways to respond to the needs of employers. Three early suggestions arise: Higher education must make a much better case for the liberal arts. The old arguments are correct, but they do not resonate fully with employers. We must demonstrate that the core strength of the liberal arts is that degree graduates are trained to think through an academic program that teaches them to write, articulate, apply quantitative methods, use technology, and work in a collaborative setting. The “product,” as defined in economic terms, is a well-educated citizen with the skills necessary to be agile and adaptable. Certificate programs only train for specialized skills. The old arguments are correct, but they do not resonate fully with employers. We must demonstrate that the core strength of the liberal arts is that degree graduates are trained to think through an academic program that teaches them to write, articulate, apply quantitative methods, use technology, and work in a collaborative setting. The “product,” as defined in economic terms, is a well-educated citizen with the skills necessary to be agile and adaptable. Certificate programs only train for specialized skills. Certificate programs must be fully incorporated into the academic program and mission. They must not be seen as efficient, low-cost cash cows that keep the rest of a creaking academic enterprise afloat. Instead, they should be value-added initiatives that are responsive to the public good, fully integrated into the institution’s mission, and flowing logically from its degree-granting foundation. They must not be seen as efficient, low-cost cash cows that keep the rest of a creaking academic enterprise afloat. Instead, they should be value-added initiatives that are responsive to the public good, fully integrated into the institution’s mission, and flowing logically from its degree-granting foundation. Colleges and universities must be responsive to the workforce. Certificate programs are a partnership between business and higher education often to meet “point in time” needs. But colleges and universities must be ready and open to being responsive to the growing demands of the workforce. Fundamentally, this mandates that they have a firm commitment across the curriculum to an assessible and verifiable liberal arts program tied to mission that defines and differentiates their graduates. Business and Higher Ed Must Recognize Need for Both Types of Learning There is a need in the American workforce for both degrees and certificates. It would be shortsighted for business leaders to embrace certificates without understanding and appreciating more fully the value of a comprehensive degree. It is equally critical that American higher education make a better, unapologetic case for why college degrees matter.

https://medium.com/academic-innovators/college-degree-or-certificate-workforce-25c3cf6c235d

['Brian C. Mitchell']

2018-10-09 12:09:17.242000+00:00

['Certification', 'Innovation', 'Higher Education', 'College Degree', 'Workforce Development']

GIFT IDEAS FOR BABIES

Babies are precious! Having a baby is a moment of great happiness not just for the parents but also for the whole family and relatives. It’s a great occasion to celebrate and hence very important to mark their arrival in the most amazing way possible. While it can be overwhelming trying to decide exactly what to buy, the most important part of any gift is the love with which it’s given. We have handpicked some of the best gift ideas for babies keeping affordability and safety in consideration. BABY CLOTHES ONLINE Baby girl or baby boy, we have clothes for all! Be it a cute little frock or pajama set. Gift the new baby a cute collection of clothes from the online shop for baby clothes, Faboolus! Clothes for new borns, toddlers available. PERSONALIZED BABY BIB All babies need one! Get your baby a cute and simple cotton-poly blend baby bib with the personalization of the baby’s name, nickname, or phrase of choice and look adorable! SILVER JEWELLERY ITEMS Traditionally, gifting silver items to the new-born baby is considered auspicious, as the silver metal has several health benefits. You can gift anything, from silver bangles or anklets to silver glasses, bowls or spoons. BABY ROOM’S DÉCOR PRODUCTS Gifting items for the baby’s room décor can be a fun idea. You may have no trouble choosing from a wide selection of things, like picture frames, wall stickers, baby room lighting, height charts, rugs and carpets, drapes, etc. SKIN CARE PRODUCTS Baby skincare is just as important. Newborn skin is delicate and so is the baby’s immune system. While there are several normal newborn rashes, chemicals, fragrances, and dyes in clothing, detergents, and baby products can cause newborn skin irritation, dryness, chafing, and rashes. You can gift a set of baby skincare products, which include foam shampoo, baby body lotion, massage oil, baby soap, diaper rash cream, baby wipes. As babies have sensitive skin, ensure that you buy products designed specially for babies. BEST TOYS FOR BABIES Newborns, teething babies, 8-month-old or a 7-year-old! We have gifts for every child. From teether to amazing books for kids, give something that the child actually needs! DIAPER BAG A one in all diaper bag, which can accommodate disposable diapers, tissues or baby wipes, a changing mat, diaper rash cream, and a sanitizer, can be a handy gift for the new mom. submitted by https://www.faboolus.com

https://medium.com/@faboolus-in10s/gift-ideas-for-babies-343caad0377f

['Faboolus Marketplace']

2021-06-29 20:18:06.775000+00:00

['Gift Ideas', 'Deals And Discounts', 'Coupon', 'Gift Cards', 'Gift For Kids']

Life is Complicated

Is It Really So? Yes. We have this truth from no less an authority than Sir Raymond Douglas Davies, testifying back in 1971: Gotta stand and face it: Life is so complicated. Even earlier, back in 1920, H. L. Mencken offered us this comforting assurance: There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible and wrong. I was thinking about life’s complications recently when I heard Barack Obama’s insightful interview with Brené Brown. The whole podcast episode is well worth a listen, but just to cherry pick a few relevant nuggets: When I actually took my theories and started testing them in neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago, suddenly I started realizing: Oh, people are complicated, and situations are complicated…. If there’s one thing I wanted to communicate in this book, it’s that the higher up you go in politics — but I think this is true of any organization — the more you will be confronted with challenges, problems, issues that do not yield a perfect answer. [But] just because something doesn’t have a perfect answer, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a better answer. So my interest in rigorous debate, good analysis, good facts… is so at the end of the day you can make better decisions, even though you know they’re not going to be perfect. I do think that the benefit I got from my academic training… was still having respect for the fact that, as complicated as the world is, there are still tools we have, and the capacity to reason things out, that we ignore at our peril. So there you have a definitive consensus from cultural icons of three generations. Yes. Life is indeed complicated. Does It Have to Be This Way? At some point you might suspect that these people are making things sound more complicated than they really are. I mean, you know how these elites are: if they didn’t make everything so darned complicated, then all these high-priced experts would be out of a job, wouldn’t they! But there’s a very good reason why life is so complicated, and has to be this way, and it’s called… evolution. To start with, science tells us that life here on earth is not being guided by any divine intelligence, and so we are not on our way to fulfilling some grand design. No, all forms of life here on earth — ourselves included — were produced by a blind watchmaker, as the saying goes, and so there is no ultimate truth, no great plan… we’re all just muddling through one day at a time, one generation at a time, trying to adapt as best we can to whatever reality is throwing at us this week. In other words, there is no perfect state to which we can aspire. And so, as Obama tells us, there are no perfect answers, and it often takes a lot of hard work just to figure out which answer might be a bit less bad than the others. But the complications brought about by evolution don’t stop there: they run even deeper. Because the innate mechanisms of evolution present us with a series of delicate balancing acts for which there are no definitive solutions. Competition vs. Cooperation Most of us understand very well that evolution involves competition. One species competes against another, individuals within a species compete against others, and there are winners and losers. And we see the same sort of competition playing out in our cultural evolution as well, with competition between nations, and between corporations, and between individuals. But of course evolution also exhibits many signs of cooperation. Groups of chickens practicing peaceful coexistence lay more eggs than super chickens striving to dominate other chickens. The cells within our bodies cooperate with each other in order to form the more perfect union represented by each human being. And individuals and departments within corporations cooperate with each other in order to deliver products and services that are superior to those produced by other companies. But who decides when we should cooperate, and with whom, vs. when we should compete, and against whom? And on what basis are the decisions made? When should states operate independently, essentially in competition with one another, and when should they cooperate as part of a united federation? As noted above… it’s complicated. Retention vs. Innovation Two other required elements for evolution are retention of what works, along with trials of new things. Without change, nothing would ever evolve. But if you change everything all the time, then odds are that nothing will work right ever again. Again, this balancing act is required for genetic evolution, but equally important for cultural evolution. And so we have the constant question of when should we innovate, and when should we stick with the tried and true? And when we try something new, which new thing should we attempt? Again, there are no silver bullets, no magic answers. If in doubt about this, just ask BlackBerry and Kodak. Simplicity vs. Complexity Is it better to use simple designs or complex ones? Better to be a large complex life form with a sophisticated culture, or a simple coronavirus? Better to be a large integrated organization or a small, nimble startup? Better to compete with a few complex, expensive fighter jets, or a large fleet of small simple drones? Better to fix a flight control problem with a simple software fix, or to design a whole new airframe? Well, once again… it’s complicated. And So…? Alright, so life is complicated, and it’s going to stay that way. At this point you might be wondering: “Other than ruining my day, what exactly was your point with all this?” Just this: when we try to over-simplify issues and people and positions, we almost always cause ourselves problems. To put it another way: extremist positions at either end of a spectrum almost always yield worse outcomes than more nuanced positions somewhere in the middle. Is it better for each individual to have absolute liberty to do whatever they want, or better for us all to be assimilated into a mindless, conforming society? Well, probably better to have something in between those two extremes, even if that does tend to… make things more complicated. Is it better to follow a religion whose leaders tell us exactly what to think or do in any situation, or better to believe in an unfeeling mechanical cosmos devoid of all meaning? Well… perhaps it might be better to believe something in between those two extremes. Is it better to have a society run by capitalists in charge of big business, or socialists in charge of big government? Well, once again… I know by now you see this coming… the answers are complicated. Now, of course, this sort of message doesn’t sell well in today’s media landscape. We all would like a quick fix of simple certainty, and no matter where we turn today, we can find an army of pushers waiting to feed our habit, even giving the stuff away for free, just to keep us hooked. And so we’ve grown used to consuming short spurts of alleged facts mixed in with provocatively worded eyeball-grabbing opinions. And just about all of these proclamations — no matter the source, no matter their political slant — try to boil down complex people and situations and issues into simple conclusions. And so it’s good to be reminded from time to time that people and situations are rarely as simple as we would like them to be, and not usually as straightforward as we are often told they are. Of course big meaty books are one way to avoid short, simple, misleading answers. And novels in particular allow us to explore in depth all the intricate twists and turns of complex characters and situations. Here’s a final quotation taken from such a work, the novel Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng: In Pauline and Mal’s house, nothing was simple. In her parents’ house, things had been good or bad, right or wrong, useful or wasteful. There had been nothing in between. Here, she found, everything had nuance; everything had an unrevealed side or unexplored depths. Everything was worth looking at more closely. And so I will end with my wish for the New Year for all of us: may you see the people and situations around you with new eyes, and with greater nuance, and find unexplored depths in everyday places and familiar faces. And may you fully appreciate your complicated lives. Originally published at The Practical Utopian.

https://medium.com/@hbowie/life-is-complicated-1ff526b35164

['Herb Bowie']

2020-12-27 15:46:05.523000+00:00

['Evolution', 'Politics', 'Life', 'Culture', 'Complexity']

Completing The God Protocols: A Comprehensive Overview of Chainlink in 2021

Bitcoin was the first implementation of a blockchain, which facilitates the exchange and tracks ownership of its own, newly created monetary asset, Bitcoin (BTC). The reason Bitcoin is seen as a reliable store of value is that there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins in existence (with over 18M already circulating); a feature that is incredibly difficult to change or inflate given the network’s decentralized nature, especially in comparison to central bank-issued fiat currencies. Any users attempting to alter the 21M hard cap on the supply will find it extremely difficult to achieve social consensus, resulting in a fork from the main chain (e.g., similar in concept to Bitcoin Cash, which forked from Bitcoin; however, the reasoning was due to network scaling differences, not supply disagreements). In addition to decentralization, miners have to spend a lot of money on application-specific hardware only useful for mining Bitcoin if they want to participate in consensus. Thus, in order to turn a profit, they are incentivized to uphold the value of the Bitcoin network by keeping it secure, as a secure network will help maintain the value of the cryptocurrency (BTC) they are exclusively paid in. However, blockchains can be used for far more than tracking and trading cryptocurrency, as Ethereum has thoroughly demonstrated. Smart contracts: The Brain / Decentralized Applications The second component to the God Protocols is being able to comprehend a wide range of logic (if x event happens, execute y action), meaning the blockchain is able to process a variety of instructions sent to it by users in the form of applications. As the first blockchain in existence, Bitcoin has a very narrow range of logic that it can process, namely moving BTC from one account to another on the Bitcoin blockchain upon certain conditions being met: 1) the sender signs the transaction with the correct private key and 2) the sender has enough BTC to cover the transaction. While Bitcoin has expanded slightly in the logic it can process to include multi-sig transactions (require multiple specific private key signatures before the transaction is considered valid) and Hash Time-Locked Contracts (transactions in time-bound escrow, used in payment channels like the Lightning Network), both of which can be considered some of the first “smart contracts,” it has largely remained static since. An example of a 2-of-3 multi-signature wallet on the Bitcoin blockchain. Though there were some minor advancements in between, the Ethereum blockchain generated the next major advancement in 2015 by launching support for programmable smart contracts. This basically transformed the function of a blockchain from serving as a single application into serving as a world computer able to simultaneously support many different applications at the same time. Ethereum made it much easier for developers to write and maintain their own Turing complete smart contracts on top of the blockchain (written in Solidity), enabling anyone to deploy a decentralized application with a customized set of logic, along with the option to update the smart contract themselves without requiring any change to the underlying blockchain. Programmable smart contracts lead to the creation of fungible tokens, where specific public addresses were assigned to specific assets. This allowed a single blockchain to support a wide range of digital assets outside of its native cryptocurrency (i.e., a ledger of ledgers). Smart contracts also expanded the types of computation the blockchain could assign to those tokens, such as the creation of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) for decentralized voting between specific token holders, as well as the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) ecosystem that combines tokens and smart contracts to facilitate decentralized lending and borrowing markets, trading exchanges, derivatives products, and more. However, there was still one key problem; the blockchain is inherently disconnected from data and systems in the outside world. Oracles: The Outside World / Decentralized Internet The third component to the God protocols is for smart contracts to become aware of events and interact with systems existing outside the native blockchain they run on. External connectivity entails two functions: 1) consuming data originating outside the blockchain and 2) passing instructional commands to external systems for them to perform (e.g., execute a payment on PayPal). Chainlink connects the existing world to the new world; (source). Blockchains are inherently closed and deterministic systems, meaning they have no built-in capabilities to talk to and exchange data between external systems (as doing so could break network consensus). While this generates the valuable security and reliability properties that users seek when using a blockchain, it also severely limits the types of data inputs that smart contracts can ingest and the types of output actions they can trigger on external systems. Most valuable datasets like financial asset prices, weather conditions, sports scores, and IoT sensors, as well as the currently preferred fiat settlement methods like credit cards and bank wires, exist outside the blockchain (off-chain). Given the importance of these resources to real-world business processes, blockchains need a secure bridge to the outside world in order to support a vast majority of smart contract application use cases. Providing smart contracts connection to the outside world requires an additional piece of infrastructure known as an oracle. An oracle is an external entity that operates on behalf of a smart contract by performing actions not possible or practical by the blockchain itself. This usually involves retrieving and delivering off-chain data to the smart contract to trigger its execution or passing data from the smart contract to an external system to trigger an off-chain event. It can also involve various types of off-chain computations in advanced oracle networks (discussed more below), such as aggregating data from multiple sources or generating a provably fair source of randomness. Similar to blockchains, the oracle mechanism cannot be operated by a single entity, as that would give the centralized oracle sole control over the inputs the contract consumes, thus control over the outputs it produces. Even if the blockchain is highly secure and the smart contract logic is perfectly written, the oracle will put at risk the entire value proposition of the smart contract if it is not built to the same security and reliability standards as the underlying blockchain network, often referred to as the oracle problem. Why have a blockchain network of thousands of nodes when it’s triggered by a single entity?

https://medium.com/@smartcontentpublication/completing-the-god-protocols-a-comprehensive-overview-of-chainlink-in-2021-746220a0e45

[]

2021-03-30 20:45:16.543000+00:00

['Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Smart Contracts', 'Oracles', 'Chainlink']

What Will It Take to Get the Bitcoin ETF Approved?

Recently there’s been a lot of buzz surrounding the possibility of the Bitcoin ETF and although this type of buzz isn’t new to Bitcoin enthusiasts, this ETF prospect is becoming more likely. History of the Bitcoin ETF Ever since Bitcoin started gaining traction in 2013, there have been whispers of institutionalization. Banks, hedge funds, and venture capital funds have poured large amounts of capital into the markets over the past few years. The lack of easy access to Bitcoin is an issue consistently holding back investors. For most, buying Bitcoin is a difficult task, as it can’t be purchased through an e-trade account or Fidelity IRA. Institutions refuse to buy-in due to custody risk, and many funds are legally barred from exploring alternative assets. Throughout the years, there have been attempts to create a Bitcoin ETF, initially as a way to get retail traders more comfortable with Bitcoin and now as a way to lure institutions to the party. The first ETF was proposed to the SEC by the Winklevoss twins on July 1, 2013. It took until March 10, 2017, for it to be rejected, sending Bitcoin price down by 25%. In a twist, the months following the ruling saw Bitcoin more than triple in value. How would a Bitcoin ETF change things? It’s evident why a Bitcoin ETF captures the imagination of investors. An introduction of an ETF would signal greater acceptance of cryptocurrency as a financial instrument and be pivotal in drawing in the larger, more traditional players in the investment space. Currently, it is impossible– and illegal, for pension funds, 401ks, and most stockbrokers to offer Bitcoin to clients. An ETF would permit these sources to access and invest in Bitcoin, unlocking billions of dollars in capital. The ETF also allows investors to buy Bitcoin without the risk associated with holding a private key. In fact, key points from the Winklevoss ETF filing involved custody. “The investment objective of the Trust is for the Shares to reflect the performance of the Blended Bitcoin Price of Bitcoins, less the expenses of the Trust’s operations. The Shares are designed for investors seeking a cost-effective and convenient means to gain exposure to Bitcoins with minimal credit risk.” Many people compare Bitcoin to gold, as they share similar characteristics. Often people focus on the effect an ETF had on gold to gauge the impact of an ETF on Bitcoin. After the ETF for gold was introduced in 2003, prices exploded from $331.60 per ounce to a high of $1,917.90, a 478% increase! Much of the smart money in the cryptocurrency investing space believe a Bitcoin ETF will have a similar outcome on the market. Current state Bitcoin ETFs There are currently twelve Bitcoin ETFs being considered by the SEC, and one general crypto ETF. Of the twelve, the most promising ETF is the physically backed CBOE x VanEck which has an August 10, 2018 application deadline. However, many worry this may be denied since last week the Winklevii ETF was not approved. So, what is the SEC looking for in an application? In a January 2018 report on the concerns of Bitcoin ETFs, the SEC outlined five major issues to be resolved before an ETF approval. Valuation: Cryptocurrencies are volatile and trade across multiple exchanges. The fund that sells an ETF will need to calculate end of day net asset value (NAV) for tax and reporting reasons. Due to fragmentation & price variations, this becomes difficult. Custody: Best practices are unclear when it comes to storing cryptocurrency. Futures are cash settled and don’t have to deal with custody. Many of the most promising ETF applications are proposing to actually store & hold bitcoin. The SEC is concerned that the storage may be insufficient. However, recent developments in the custody space (such as Coinbase custody) have made it more likely to be resolved. Liquidity: A key feature of open-end funds, such as mutual funds and ETFs, is daily redeemability. The SEC is concerned that there isn’t enough liquidity in the markets to support redemptions in periods of high stress. They want to ensure funds investing in cryptocurrencies or cryptocurrency-related products will have sufficient liquid assets to meet redemptions daily. The rise of institutional platforms like Coinbase prime are well positioned to deal with this obstacle and are a step in the direction of solving the liquidity issue. Manipulation: The SEC’s role is to protect U.S citizens from fraud and to ensure the integrity of the market. Chairman Jay Clayton has noted there are substantially fewer investor protections in crypto than traditional securities markets with correspondingly greater opportunities for fraud and manipulation, and that he wants to see some accountability in the markets. Another roadblock is the FBI investigation into the manipulation of Bitcoin. If they conclude that manipulation is both rampant (and hard to stop), it becomes unlikely the SEC will approve the ETF. Arbitrage/Volatility: In order to promote fair treatment of investors, an ETF is required to have a market price that does not deviate materially from the ETF’s net asset value. In light of the fragmentation and volatility in the cryptocurrency marketplace, it becomes difficult to ensure fair price through arbitrage. A potential solution is to employ market-makers or to become a maker-marker, although this is hard to solve, and no clear solutions have emerged. Are we there yet? While there has been substantial progress on the other four issues, it seems the new applications are not adequately addressing the major problem of Bitcoin manipulation. The arguments made by the SEC for denying the Winklevii ETF centered around the manipulation of markets. “[The application] asserts that intrinsic properties of bitcoin and bitcoin markets, including the Gemini Exchange, provide resistance to manipulation. But BZX has failed to carry its burden to demonstrate that its assertion is correct.” — Securities and Exchange Commission Moving forward, applications supporting strong arguments that Bitcoin manipulation will not materially affect investors have the greatest chance of approval. Therefore, CBOE and Van Eck structured their application to prevent such concerns of manipulation. Historically, the SEC has delayed these applications and the August 9th deadline may be postponed, affording more time to alleviate apprehension of manipulation. After five years of waiting for an ETF, long-term investors are anxious to see positive developments, and with smart money pushing for approval, the future is looking promising for a Bitcoin ETF.

https://medium.com/ledgercapital/what-will-it-take-to-get-the-bitcoin-etf-approved-c0b556d497e7

['Avi Felman']

2018-09-24 19:37:33.023000+00:00

['Bitcoin', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Thoughts', 'Ethereum', 'Research']

What should I learn first in coding?

Make sure you focus on learning the fundamental concepts instead of a particular language or technology stack. There are many debates online on what you should learn. The truth is that you will be required to learn new technologies for different companies in your career. So, you should focus on transferrable knowledge: fundamental concepts. Avoid tech debates. Is iPhone better or Android better? I’d say both do the same job pretty well in different ways. You can choose any modern tech stack and start learning with the fundamentals. Web Development Web development is about building websites and web applications like Facebook.com and Twitter.com. There are two parts in web development: front-end and back-end. Front-end is everything you can see and interact on a website. You will need to learn HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Back-end is everything you don’t see on the website: databases, business logics, user management, etc. You will need to learn any one of the following back-end languages and frameworks: Python / Django Node.js / Express Java / Spring PHP / Laravel C# / ASP.NET Core How should you pick? You can choose any one of them. You just have to make sure you learn the fundamentals. Personally, I think C# / ASP.NET Core offers the best coding experience and is in high demand from companies. By the way, if you know front-end web development, you can build mobile apps too! Read on. Data Science Data Scientist is the №1 most promising job for 2020. It comes at no surprise as Data Scientist topped Glassdoor’s list of Best Jobs for the past three years, with professionals in the field reporting high demand, high salaries, and high job satisfaction. It has been labeled as “the sexiest job of 21st century”. Python and R are the two major languages in data science and analysis. Many of the common tasks can be achieved in either of them. However, Python is considered the industry standard and many data science frameworks are implemented exclusively for it. There are many frameworks built on Python that power data science tasks. Some of them include NumPy for scientific computations, Pandas for manipulating data, Matplolib for creating complex visualizations, Scikit-learn, PyTorch and Tensorflow for machine and deep learning. Mobile Development This one is easy. If you want to build iPhone apps, learn Objective-C or Swift. If you want to build Android apps, learn Java or Kotlin. Alternatively, you can use React Native or Ionic to build both iPhone and Android apps. Both are web based technologies using JavaScript, so if you know front-end web development, you can build mobile apps too!

https://medium.com/nomadevs/what-should-i-learn-first-in-coding-85d1141f8a7c

['Vyron Vasileiadis']

2020-10-17 20:27:10.279000+00:00

['Mobile App Development', 'Data Science', 'Elearning', 'Codingbootcamp', 'Web Development']

Cyber Monday Mac Apps Bundle with Luminar 4, ForkLift 3, BusyCal 3, Dropzone 4 Pro, Edraw…

Cyber Monday Mac Apps Bundle with Luminar 4, ForkLift 3, BusyCal 3, Dropzone 4 Pro, Edraw MindMaster, Art Text 4, Gemini 2, PDFpenPro 12, Parallels Desktop 1y MacAppBundles Dec 1, 2020·2 min read If you need to run your Windows Apps or older/newer MacOS versions on your current MacOS, or if you need to replace skies in photos faster, manage your PDF or data easily, organize your daily activities, create diagrams, remove duplicate files or increase your productivity with an amazing menu bar Mac App, then this bundle with 12 applications for 42$ (= 94% discount sale) is made for you. Available currently for 42$ thanks to the code BFSAVE40 or CMSAVE40 Featured products: Luminar 4 for macOS 10.12 or higher (max 2 devices) Here an example of Sky Replacement ForkLift 3 for macOS 10.12 or higher (max 5 users) BusyCal 3 for macOS 10.11 or higher (max 1 device) Dropzone 4 Pro for macOS 10.13 or higher (max 5devices) Edraw MindMaster for macOS 10.10 or higher (max 2 devices) Art Text 4 for macOS 10.14 or higher (max 2 devices) Gemini 2 for macOS 10.10 or higher (max 2 devices) PDFpenPro 12 for macOS 10.13 or higher (max 5devices) Parallels Desktop 1 year plan for macOS 10.13 or higher (max 1device) Other products: Goose VPN Lifetime Subscription, Movavi Screen Recorder 2021, uTalk: Lifetime Subscription. Please visit your dashboard and turn off the auto renew, remember to visit PayPal and remove Parallels from auto payments too! You can do it via https://www.paypal.com/myaccount/autopay/ PS: You simply need to purchase with another Account/E-Mail, then open your dashboard, login with the main E-Mail and activate the license. Archive.is Bundle Backup Version

https://medium.com/@macappbundles/cyber-monday-mac-apps-bundle-with-luminar-4-forklift-3-busycal-3-dropzone-4-pro-edraw-454812ad7a7

[]

2020-12-02 15:24:46.774000+00:00

['Macos', 'Software', 'Apple', 'Mac']

Worry Is Deceitful: 91.4% of Your Worries Will Not Come True

Photo by Melanie Wasser on Unsplash What if? What if I lose my job? What if I’m unsuccessful? What if my marriage fails? Do any of these debilitating questions sound familiar to you? As someone who suffers from anxiety, I can tell you that you’re not alone. Worry is part of human nature. But excessive worrying is not preparation. Worrying about things that are too far in the future to predict with any accuracy, doesn’t have any real cognitive benefits. I recently stumbled across a fascinating study by Penn State researchers Lucas LaFreniere and Michelle Newman, who ran an experiment with 29 people diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, to see, over a period of time, how many of their worries actually came true. Over a ten-day period, participants were sent text messages four times a day, asking them to record their worries from the past few hours, ensuring as many worries were captured as possible. For the next twenty days, participants were asked to review their full list of worries, to see which of them had come to pass. The researchers focused on worries that could be tested within the thirty-day period, for example, “I’ll fail my exams” as opposed to “I’ll develop a terminal illness sometime in the future”. The results of this study are fascinating, although, as someone with anxiety I can feel my brain fighting to reject them. The Primary Results Revealed That 91.4% of Worry Predictions Did Not Come True So, amazingly, based on this study only 8.6% of the things you are worrying about will come true. The study also found that higher percentages of untrue worries significantly predicted lower anxiety symptoms after treatment — meaning the more a participant accepted that their worries weren’t coming true, the more their anxiety decreased. So What Does This Mean? You have to remember that this is a small study. But the results certainly support the long-held belief of psychologists, that people suffering from generalized anxiety disorder have inaccurate expectations, and that by challenging them with objective evidence anxiety levels can decrease. According to Newman: “By proving to them that their feared outcome didn’t happen as often as they thought, and that when it did, the outcome was better than they expected, we could help them see that worrying isn’t helpful”. This study makes it clear to me just how deceitful worry can be. A phantom voice, demanding we pay obsessive attention to it, to deal with an immediate threat. But in reality, 9 times out of 10, the threat isn’t real. What Could You Do About This? From personal experience, I know that when people have tried to help me break a period of ruminating worry, a rational approach is not always the most effective remedy when I’m in such an emotionally heightened state. But I accept that ultimately, I alone am responsible for controlling my mind. Gaining this perspective is difficult, but if this is another tool that helps me shift my focus, I’m certainly game. As my next step, I’m going to try replicating this study to test out how often my worries become real. For now, it’s reasonable to conclude that tracking your worries could be an effective way to discover their accuracy, and diminish the distress that comes from obsessive worrying. This is a welcome finding, as much as my brain struggles to accept it. I’m reminded of a quote by French philosopher Michel de Montaigne “my life has been filled with terrible misfortune, most of which never happened” 500 years on I’m trying hard not to be that guy.

https://medium.com/curious/worry-is-deceitful-91-4-of-your-worries-will-not-come-true-18ec27489b06

['Jack Turner']

2021-01-08 23:26:19.349000+00:00

['Anxiety', 'Mindfulness', 'Worry', 'Career Advice', 'Self Improvement']

Getting Prolific, Day 1: How You Work Vs. How Hard You Work

Getting Prolific, Day 1: How You Work Vs. How Hard You Work Nametagscott Aug 17·4 min read Are you grazing your days away? My twenties were all about working long. I put in as many hours as possible. That helped me gain exposure, hone my discipline, elevate my status, build my brand and establish career momentum. My thirties were all about working hard. I put in less time, but far more intensity. That allowed me to deepen my craft, grow my expertise, grow my experience and expand my perspective. My forties are now all about working smart. I put in less time with less intensity, but way more leverage. This enables me to scale my impact with the least amount of effort, maximize my discretionary time and optimize my schedule for comfort, fulfillment and pleasure. How has your work style changed over the decades? Are you currently working hard, long, smart, or some combination of the three? Naval, the billionaire startup founder and business philosopher, recently made a powerful distinction between these various work approaches. He writes: People like to view the world is linear, meaning, put in eight hours of work and get back eight hours of output. But it doesn’t work that way. How we work is way more important than how hard we work. Humans should be spending their time hunting like lions, rather than grazing like cows. We should be carnivores, not herbivores. Now, since this is such a compelling image, I looked into these two very different animals. Starting with cows. Cornell conducted the preeminent study on grazing cattle to see how they spent their time each day. Their researchers examined the efficiency of livestock on pasture, learning that cows graze for approximately eight hours a day. Their typical cycle will include one major grazing period around sunrise for several hours, a second one in late afternoon that lasts another few hours, and shorter period during the night. Cows only sleep for about four hours a day. They spend the largest period of time ruminating, aka, chewing their cud, which lasts about seven to ten hours a day. Next, let’s compare the cow’s routine to the lion’s. The king of the jungle spends sixteen to twenty hours a day sleeping or resting. In the late afternoon to early evening, lions engage in social behaviors like patrolling the land, rubbing their heads on one another, licking each other’s faces, caring for cubs, grooming, purring, roaring and mating. They do most of their hunting between evening and early morning, for several reasons. One, lions have few sweat glands and need to conserve their energy during the hot savannah days. Two, it’s easier to approach prey up close when it’s dark. And three, animals who are out in the hot sun during the daylight grow exhausted at dusk, which means they run slower with less endurance. It’s two very different animals with two very different schedules. And it begs the questions: Are you grazing and chewing your cud all day? What if instead, you sprinted as hard as you could while you felt inspired to work, and then rested for long periods? What if you built a schedule that was essentially a marathon of sprints and breaks? Not that cows aren’t lovely animals, but the reality is, most of us are working like them, and it’s suboptimal. We’re grazing our days away. But let’s be honest. How long does the modern employee really need to be on the clock to create value? The forty hour workweek is a just hundred year old cultural relic left over from factories of the industrial age. Recent statistics from the bureau of labor show that despite people’s eight hour days, most full time office workers are only productive for about three of them. Sounds more like a lion to me. Maybe it’s time to stop pretending that working long and hard works, and work smart instead. We could implement a restricted production window to exploit our creative energy in novel ways. This would force us to spend our limited time on meaningful activities that have a disproportionately high effort to reward ratio. And the rest of our schedules we could spend resting, socializing and licking each other’s faces. Simba famously sang that he just couldn’t wait to be king, and now I think I know why. Are you working long, hard or smart? Enjoying these creative meditations? Go to www.getprolific.io, subscribe and get daily how-to articles and email inspiration on how to beat writer’s block, plus 300+ proven creativity tools. Beat writer’s block for only $12/month!

https://medium.com/@nametagscott/getting-prolific-day-1-how-you-work-vs-how-hard-you-work-de466d41599b

[]

2021-08-17 14:01:53.726000+00:00

['Creativity', 'Writers Block', 'Writing', 'Prolific']

How Disability Rights Advocates Turned Back the Trump Administration’s Attack on Students of Color

How Disability Rights Advocates Turned Back the Trump Administration’s Attack on Students of Color Rules designed to help children of color and children with disabilities will go into immediate effect. By Michael Yudin, Former Assistant Secretary for Special Education and Rehabilitative Services MARCH 18, 2019 | 12:15 PM Earlier this month, in response to a lawsuit from the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a national disability rights group, a federal district court ruled that the Trump administration violated federal law when it delayed a Department of Education rule designed to protect students of color and students with disabilities. Children of color are significantly more likely to be identified as needing special education than their peers. According to the department and decades of research and data, there is a “strong concern” that many of these children have been improperly identified to their detriment. Congress addressed the problem of significant disproportionality in both the 1997 and 2004 reauthorizations of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Under the law, states are required to identify school districts with significant disproportionality in identification, placement, and discipline and take actions to address the disproportionality. But states had broad discretion in how to define significant disproportionality, and as a result, relatively few districts were identified as disproportionate by states, despite overwhelming data showing a disproportionality problem. Accordingly, the department issued regulations in 2016 to better understand the extent of and address racial and ethnic overrepresentation in special education. The 2016 regulations were designed to ensure states work with school districts so that children with disabilities are properly identified for services, receive necessary services in the least restrictive environment, and are not disproportionately removed from their educational placements by disciplinary removals. The primary goal of the regulations was to ensure the appropriate review of data and examination for significant disproportionality and, accordingly, help states and districts address and reduce the disproportionate segregation and discipline of students of color. Under the law, if a district is identified with significant disproportionality, it must set aside 15 percent of its special education funds to provide comprehensive coordinated early intervening services to address the disparities. The regulations took effect January 2017, and states were required to begin using the new regulations to identify significant disproportionality in school districts beginning July 1, 2018. Regrettably, right before states were to begin implementing the new rules, the Trump administration decided it needed to review the regulations and delayed implementation of the significant disproportionality rule for two years. More than 100 civil rights organizations, including disability rights organizations, opposed the delay. States have had since 2004 to implement these provisions of law and were prepared to move forward with the new rules and begin to meaningfully address these inequities. The delay created confusion and sent the clear message that inequities in special education for children of color simply don’t matter under this administration. More importantly, disparities continue to flourish, with no meaningful opportunity in place to address the disparities. When children of color are disproportionately identified as needing special education, there are particular risks involved. Children of color with disabilities are more likely to be educated in segregated settings, leaving them with fewer opportunities to interact with nondisabled peers, access rigorous academic content, engage with effective educators, and participate in enrichment activities. There are also disturbing disparities when it comes to discipline and children of color and children with disabilities. On average, schools suspend Black children at double the rate of white or Hispanic children, and they suspend children with disabilities at more than double the rate of children without disabilities. When children are removed from the classroom for disciplinary reasons, or educated in segregated settings, academic performance is impacted. The overwhelming majority of children in special education do not have significant cognitive impairments that inhibit their ability to access grade-level work. Yet, in 2015, only 3 percent of fourth grade Black children with disabilities were reading at or above proficiency, along with 5 percent of Hispanic children with disabilities, and 6 percent of American Indian/Alaska Native children. Fortunately, the court found that the Department of Education failed to provide a reasoned explanation for delaying the 2016 rule. The court also found that the department’s delay was arbitrary and capricious, failing to take into account the efforts states made to implement the 2016 rule and the costs to children, their parents, and society. The recent court ruling means the original rule will take effect as the department originally intended. States must begin implementing the rules immediately, identifying school districts with significant disproportionality. If significant disproportionality is found, states must provide for the review and revision, as appropriate, of the district’s policies, practices, and procedures that contribute to the disproportionality. Districts must also provide comprehensive coordinated early intervening services to address the factors contributing to the disproportionality. It is imperative that we address the systemic inequities in special education for children of color. Special education services should offer assistance to students with disabilities who need it, preferably in the general education classroom. They should not be used to segregate students of color into separate special education classrooms at dramatically disproportionate rates. Both students of color and students with disabilities deserve better — and this restored regulation is an important first step.

https://medium.com/aclu/how-disability-rights-advocates-turned-back-the-trump-administrations-attack-on-students-of-color-2d909c69634e

['Aclu National']

2019-03-18 17:49:45.074000+00:00

['Disability Rights', 'Speak Freely', 'Education']

To And From

Slow down from your raging road drunk on highway fumes on gas station bubbles and you hit the pause on the mouse-flavored gods Dressed in your deteriorating jeans the formal wear of graves your tickets for the show are dated last year Colonizing absence with some silence the stares of the uncomfortable furniture Holes burnt in your pockets now dropping what change they haven’t discontinued Feeling through the mass of wet hair your disdain for the frightening climax of retributive sounds easing out of the rolled up fiver The smells of oil cloaking madness frittered away in cars the slow hammering of vehicles dying I get to see you soon I wasn’t turning my back just yet, there was something scraping my hip and I haven’t been able to dislodge it You sleep against my back as if it were a barrier to the rest of the world that isn’t sleeping and hasn’t called you back

https://medium.com/storymaker/to-and-from-e85ccf2559f6

['J.D. Harms']

2020-12-21 16:21:38.361000+00:00

['Musing', 'Relationships', 'Fragments', 'Image', 'Poetry']

Artificial Intelligence and It’s Danger?

Technology has been improving more and more. Various new and developed features have been adding into human life. One of them is artificial intelligent. According to Euchnar, AI is a computer-controlled robot has functions like discovering sense, learning from previous experience (2019, p. 1). In the recent decades, AI use in current life has been put on the table because of the developments in related to AI. In spite of the fact that facilities of AI, it is quite controversial. Although it has been argued that AI use in current life impairs people, it provides various beneficial features since it increases the facilities for health sector and brings more jobs than it displaces while improving working conditions. The first argument opposed to AI use into human life is that mistaken decisions by AI, yet AI tools provide more effective results compared to humans’ one. Proponents who think AI poses dangerous for human being argue for absence of practical attitude in health sector. They maintain that since the changing circumstances may require to improvise in some cases in short time. They further argue that probability of inaccurate treatments applied by AI are not remote. However, contrary to risk of inaccurate treatments, implementation of AI in health sector has good news. PWC network states that, according to the American Cancer Society, there is a considerable proportion of mistaken results in mammograms. It brings about fifty percent of healthy women being informed they have cancer. On the other hand, AI is 30 times quicker and has 1% error rate (2017). It proves that AI gives feed back faster and better. Additionally, AI technology facilities to developing new drugs which could be key for terminal diseases. Moreover, involving AI for improving new drugs decreases the disproportionate wasting of money. Plecher highlights that, discovering a new drug completely costs more than $350 million on average. AI use for drug researching is new, and it has a great potential to cut not only the time to research but also their cost (2017). It is clear that AI use is quite beneficial and provides speed and accuracy. The second dispute in regards to AI use in human life is that AI poses a risk because of displacing of jobs, nevertheless AI provides not only new jobs but also improved conditions. People who believe that AI is a risk for the current jobs say AI can displace humans from workplaces. They pursue that it may occurs a chaos in future because of employment imbalance. According to chart graph about automation and its probability for replacing jobs conducted by BBC, AI will replace basic level jobs approximately 70%. Apart from that, jobs which is more complicated such as dental practitioners and senior professionals in education have a risk to be displaced around 20% (2019). Nonetheless, contrary to being a risk for jobs, AI use can create new work areas. In addition, working conditions will be improved because of AI can handle heavy labour. Despite the fact that AI will displace some jobs but it does not poses risk because AI will bring new jobs more than it takes. As Hiltbrant states, more than 130 million new jobs will be created by algorithms and machines while 75 million jobs will be displacing (2020, p. 4). Additionally, AI will play a big role to decrease work accident rate due to it will handle jobs with high risk and majority of people will have high level jobs. Therefore, AI is not a risk on humans in workplaces. In conclusion, AI use in sectors as assistive technology clearly facilitate human life by providing more effective results compared to humans, and by creating numerous and better jobs. As it can be understood arguments mentioned above, AI is not a risk for humanity. It is a huge benefit to improve the human life and it should be used in various sectors.

https://medium.com/@salih-abdullah/artificial-intelligence-and-its-danger-30d4ca5363a2

['Salih Abdullah Şendil']

2021-02-07 15:46:47.242000+00:00

['Technology', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Post Modern Philosophy', 'Risk Management']

An Easy Guide to Gauge Equivariant Convolutional Networks

Manifolds A manifold is a simple thing. Every 2-D surface you see can be considered a manifold. The surface of a sphere, the surface of a cube, all manifolds. But its not restricted to 2-D, heck, its not even restricted to things that can be imagined. A curve is a manifold. 4-D Space-time is a manifold. Its quite general and describes a space. But let’s focus on 2-D surfaces. The simplest surface is a plane, such as a computer screen. And when we do convolution with CNNs, we usually do it on these flat images. Let’s say, we want to predict the weather with CNNs. For a single country, this is quite easy: Use the local weather data as input and keras-keras-boom, you have a trained model. What if we want to classify the weather for the entire planet? How do you fit that onto a single image? Perhaps: (Image by Pixabay) But there is a problem. The left and the right edge are the same spot in reality. Further, the entire top edge corresponds to a single point, as does the lower edge. The whole thing is distorted. Ever tried flattening a ping-pong-ball? Yeah, that doesn’t go well. When we try to apply convolution, we would get strange results. Unphysical things might happen at the edges. It might predict a strong east wind on the far right of the image, but nothing on the left side of the image, even though they represent the same spot. The CNN just doesn’t understand that the earth wraps around. Alternatively, we could create multiple overlapping maps for the earth and have a CNN that operates on those. This collection of maps is also called an atlas. Shifting the CNN over all these individual maps, making sure to continue on the next map right at the same point they overlapped on, should then enable it to understand that the earth is round. This is the basic idea behind geometric deep learning: Directly apply deep learning to surfaces or manifolds to preserve their geometric structure. However, there’s a problem. A big one. Let’s go to Singapore! For now, let’s forget about weather for a second and take out a compass. Let’s say you are in Singapore. Head north, past Thailand, through China, Mongolia up to the north pole. And without changing direction, keep going forward. You’ll be going through Canada, the US until you end up somewhere in Central America. Stop right there and start swimming side-ways through the Pacific, without changing direction! After a few million strokes, you should end up back in Singapore. But wait. You never changed direction, why are you looking south? Let’s repeat that, but this time we go sideways to the left once we reach the north pole. We’ll end up near Nigera and start walking backwards, again not changing our direction. Once we’re back in Singapore, this time we are looking west? Strange… Don’t believe me? Try it out yourself, just get a compass and start swimming… This problem is due to the curvature of the sphere and we refer to “moving around without changing direction” as parallel transport. You saw that parallel transport is very dependent on the path taken on a sphere. On the 2-D plane, however, it doesn’t matter. You can walk every path without changing direction and have the same direction once you get back. Thus, we say that the plane is parallelizable (your direction vector stays parallel once you get back), whereas the sphere is not. You can see that this is a problem for our CNN on a sphere. If we shift our CNN in different ways over all our maps, the direction seems to change. We need to find a way to make sure that this weirdness does not affect our result! Or, at least we should know how to deal with it. Hairy, Hairy Balls Before we find a solution, we must introduce more math concepts. A compass needle can be viewed as a vector on a plane pointing in some direction, mostly north. This plane the needle rotates on is tangential to the earth’s surface and we’ll refer to it as the earth’s tangent space at this spot. Even though the earth is round, the tangent space is perfectly flat. It acts like a local coordinate system with north and east being its coordinate vectors. And, as we can take our compass out at any spot on earth, each spot has its own tangent space. But we could also define 40° and 130° as our coordinate vectors. North and the other directions are nothing special in this case and the choice is arbitrary. Now, let’s choose any direction in our tangent space and follow it with a step forward. We make sure to take the shortest path (geodesic) and end up at a new point. You might call this “going forward”, but to confuse everyone, we’ll call this process the exponential map (which comes from the fact that all these tiny steps magically resemble the series expansion of the exponential function… but that’s not important now). Let’s look at our compass needle again. The fact that the compass assigns a vector to “every” spot on earth is called a (tangent) vector field. Wind can also be seen as a vector field, as it assigns a direction to every point. I specifically put “every” in quotes, as something goes wrong with the compass needle when you stand directly on magnetic north or magnetic south. As a matter of fact, it goes wrong for every non-zero continuous vector field on a sphere. We must have poles in our magnetic field on the sphere. This phenomena is called the hairy ball theorem, as it is akin to not being able to comb a hairy ball, without creating twirls: (Image from Wikipedia) Vector fields don’t need to have the same dimension as the tangent space. Instead, they can have their own vector space of arbitrary dimension at each point. This is important, because we also want to be able to assign 3-D or 99-D vectors to each point on earth and not just 2-D directions. This vector space at each point of a field is also referred to as a fiber. (A special type of field is the scalar field. It has just one dimension and temperature can be viewed as such a scalar field) Gauge Temperature is measured differently everywhere. Here in Germany, we use Celsius. In the US they use Fahrenheit. This choice is called a gauge. And yes, that word derives from the measuring instrument. Now, when I read a weather forecast from the US, I have to calculate what the temperature in Fahrenheit means in Celsius. We have different frames of reference. This calculation is called a gauge transformation. Note that the actual temperature didn’t change, just the value we use to understand it and the transformation is a simple linear function. If we look at vector fields, such as wind direction, things get more complicated. To take this to the extreme, let’s pretend theres some country, Gaugeland, that doesn’t really care about north and south and has its own direction system based on star constellations or the direction a hedgehog runs when its scared. When these people describe wind, we must perform a gauge transformation to understand the direction they are talking about. Now the gauge transformation becomes a multiplication by an invertible matrix (it must go both ways obviously). This group of matrices is called the general linear group or GL. For a theoretical flat earth, a choice of gauge for wind can be global. But on a sphere, we run into problems. We can’t define a single global gauge, but must instead rely on multiple gauges and maps. From our problem of parallelization on the sphere and the hairy ball theorem, we should have some intuition why this must be so. This automatically means, that we need multiple wind maps. However, we no longer allow all of Gaugeland’s shenaniganz and demand that at least the magnitude of the vectors they use (wind speed) must be the same as ours. We only allow them to use different directions. Each gauge transformation is thus reduced to a rotation. These transformations also form a group, namely the special orthogonal group or SO, which is a subgroup of GL. We have effectively reduced the allowed transformations our gauge theory may have, by choosing a different structure group. Back to Deep Learning We are back to our original problem and want to perform convolution on a vector field of wind directions. Here, the wind represents the input features. Say we want to to find tornado directions as output. We can perform convolution on “small patches” to extract these output features from the wind directions. (Note: I have no idea if this makes meteorological sense… input vectors to output vectors... that’s all we need to know) But “small patches” is a very vague description. On the 2-D plane, it is straightforward, we can just take everything that is inside some ball around the center of the patch. This also works, to some extent, on a perfect sphere. But on an arbitrary manifold? Things get tricky. Take a look at this funky manifold: (Image from Wikipedia) It’s called a Klein bottle and we can see that taking the raw distance between points is… problematic. We will probably never need the Klein bottle for deep learning, but we want to keep things as general as possible. What we need is a way to only include points in convolution that are nearby on the manifold. And we do have a way to do that. Recall that the exponential map does tiny steps on our manifold to find nearby points. So let’s use that. Starting at the center, we go a step in every direction the tangent space allows us and include that point in our convolution. All we need now is some function to do convolution with. So, we define a kernel that assigns a matrix to each poin-… wait, no, each direction of the tangent space we went with our exponential map. It’s a bit strange, but when you look at classic 2-D convolution, it actually does the same. Its just not that obvious, because its on a plane. This matrix multiplies an input vector and produces an output vector. Here, the authors identified the first problem. This matrix is only defined for the center. But we are applying it to field vectors of nearby points, that have their own weird properties. On a plane, this isn’t a problem, but on our sphere, they are slightly different and we can’t just apply the kernel. Let’s fix that and parallel transport the vectors at those points back to the center of our little patch. Here, we can apply our matrix, without having to worry about weird curvature problems. Gauge Equivariance The convolution we defined so far, seems sensible. We apply our kernels to wind data and get a nice result: tornados moving east. But somehow, we still get different results compared to Gaugeland? They predicted tornados are moving hedgehog-left? Ahhh, yes: We need to gauge transform their result into our frame aaaand voila: They predict tornados going west... Still wrong... What happened? We forgot to make our convolution gauge equivariant. In short, the result of the kernel must depend on the chosen gauge and transform equivariantly. If it doesn’t, we just get weird results all over that can’t be correlated or compared with one another. But the output vector might be a different dimension or have a different interpretation than the input, how do we relate gauge transformations of the inputs to equivariant “gauge transformations” of the outputs? Well, as the structure group only acts on the inputs, the idea is to find a representation of that same group that acts on the output vectors. For example, a transformation of a 2-D input vector with a rotation group as its structure group can be represented by a 3-D output vector being rotated around a single axis. When the 2-D vector rotates, the 3-D output also rotates around a fixed axis. Generally, there can be many representations, like there could be many different rotation axis in 3-D. The point is, that it does something that represents the same action. With the idea of representation in place, we can make convolution gauge equivariant. We just need to make sure that a gauge transformation of the input vector results in an equivariant transformation (i.e., the same transformation, but in the appropriate representation) of the output vector. Now, with gauge equivariance, when we perform convolution on different maps, we get different results numerically, but their results agree. This is the best way we can define convolution to make sense over the entire sphere. Icosahedron? We basically covered Section 2 of the paper. The authors now move on to Icosahedrons, which are very similar to spheres topologically, but nicer. They are nicer in the sense that we can discretize them far more easily than the sphere. Just like when we covered the earth with multiple maps, let’s cover the Icosahedron with 5 overlapping maps (overlap is indicated by the tiny all white triangles): (Image from the paper) Beautiful, the maps even are the same size. No wonder they chose this manifold. We can also view it as a graph. Note that each node, i.e., each intersection, is a point on the manifold with an input feature vector (not visible in the image above). Each little triangle has 3 corners, with each corner being one of these nodes. They are what interests us. So, let’s do convolution! First, we need to see what our exponential map looks like. Well, on our discrete manifold, that’s easy. We just start at a node and go one step in any direction. The directions are visible in the image above as the lines connecting the nodes. So, most nodes have 6 neighbours, except those at the corners of the Icosahedron, which have 5 neighbours. Next, we need a kernel function. But we are lazy and don’t want to reinvent the wheel. So, we’ll just use 3 x 3 filters from standard 2D convolution. These 3 x 3 filters have a center point and 8 neighbours. That’s more than we need. So, let’s just ignore the top-right and bottom-left neighbour in the 3 x 3 grid by setting them to 0 and pretend it only ever had 6 neighbours. All that’s left is to make this thing gauge equivariant. Well, let’s look at the structure group of our Icosahedron. We already noted that we can only go in 6 different directions. If we were to describe wind on this structure, we would only have 6 different frames of reference, each rotated by 60°. This can also be formulated as having cyclic group of order 6, or C6, as its structure group. Finally, I mentioned that our maps are overlapping. So, if we want to shift our convolutional filter over a region with overlap, we are basically using values from a different map. And what do we do with these values? We gauge transform them into the correct frame before we use them. And voila, we are doing convolution on a icosahedron. Conclusion In my opinion, this paper provides a fundamental result for the field of geometric deep learning. Understanding the overall idea and importance of gauge equivariance while doing convolution is the main take-away here. I hope my non-math explanation was helpful in understanding the ideas presented in the paper. If you find this sort of thing interesting and want the hardcore math, definitely check out Nakahara’s “Geometry, Topology and Physics”.

https://towardsdatascience.com/an-easy-guide-to-gauge-equivariant-convolutional-networks-9366fb600b70

['Michael Kissner']

2019-05-27 06:20:26.368000+00:00

['Machine Learning', 'Deep Learning', 'Convolutional Network', 'Neural Networks']

A Simple GraphQL API Using Apollo Server

This guide is aimed at people who wants to learn about a new technology but wants just a brief overview without the textbook. The article covers the basics of GraphQL and how you can build your own API using an Apollo server. What is GraphQL and why would you want to use it: GraphQL is a query language with a set of rules on how you can interact with an API. At it’s core, GraphQL enables declarative data fetching where a client can specify exactly what data it needs from the API. It also eliminates the need to use REST API. Besides allowing the client to have more control on the kind of data it needs, graphQL also minimizes the amount of data that needs to be transferred over a network. These are the techologies we’ll be using — graphQL, NodeJs to setup our environment and Apollo Client- a node.js implementation of the graphQL rule set. Let start Building - Create a directory. - From the command prompt run “npm init” — this will create package.json file. - Open your favorite editor. { "name": "graphqlapi-apolloserver", "version": "1.0.0", "description": "", "main": "index.js", "scripts": { "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1", "start": "nodemon index.js" }, "author": "", "license": "ISC", "dependencies": { "apollo-server": "^2.19.0", "nodemon": "^2.0.6" } } - For our dependencies we will need to run: npm install apollo-server — This will allow us to to execute queries. npm install graphQL — graphQL dependency. npm install nodemon — auto restarts our server when we change or save files. Now back to our editor — create a new file call index.js to create a functional graphQL server. //only need the apollo and gql objects from apollo-server const { ApolloServer, gql } = require('apollo-server'); /* Our Session Query from the schema will live here /* const server = new ApolloServer({typeDefs}); //A new server object server .listen({port: process.env.PORT || 4000}) .then(({url}) => { console.log(`graphQl running at ${url}`); }) In our package.json file we can now add “start”: “nodemon index.js” — this will start our server. Creating our Schema: - A schema allows the client to understand what properties are available on your api. - GraphQl has it’s own type system that is used to define the schema of an API. It allows a client to select only the fields they want. //we are now utilizing the qgl object //Let's define a Query of type "Artist" which will return an array of artists const typeDefs = gql` type Query { artists:[Artist] } type Artist { id: ID!, name: String, album: String, genre: String, price: String, store: String }` The Apollo playground: Apollo has this built in feature call the “playground” which runs on the clientside it allows us to play and examine our API. The schema tab in the playground allows us to view the Query and all it’s properties which is available to us. At the command prompt — run “ npm start”. In the browser type in “localhost:4000” The playgound will display — select the schema tab, we can see the queries, types, fields etc.. The left panel is the query pane. Executing Queries: - Create an artists.json file. - Copy this file over to your working directory. artists.json [ { "id": 447, "name": "John Legend", "album": "Evolver", "genre": "R&B, neo soul", "price": "18.99", "store": "Barnes and noble" }, { "id": 4375, "name": "Alicia Keys", "album": "The Diary of Alicia Keys", "genre": "Soul", "price": "25.00", "store": "amazon" }, { "id": 310, "name": "Sade", "album": "Stronger than Pride", "genre": "Soul", "price": "14.99", "store": "amazon" }, ] Resolvers: -In order for our API to return data we need a resolver function. - This function (the resolver) has to tell Apollo how to find those “artists” for the query type. - Let’s bring in our artists.json file into the mix . //this goes to the top of the file const artists = require('./data/artists.json'); Let’s create our resolver function. Place it after the schema. const resolvers = { Query: { artists: () => { return artists; } } } -Now lets execute our Book Query. - In the query pane of the playground enter query { artists{ name album } -We can select whatever data we want to work with - Select the “play” button. - Notice it comes back as a single “data” object which gives the “books” information we requested and nothing more.

https://medium.com/@taurel107/a-simple-graphql-api-using-apollo-server-141424210ac2

['Torrel Jeremiah']

2020-12-18 16:34:34.689000+00:00

['Graphql Playground', 'GraphQL', 'Graphql Apollo Server', 'Graphql Schema']

At Cornell, debates over campus policing ignite racist online harassment

“My name and photo, as well as the names and faces of my friends and peers, Moriah and Uche, have been shared without our consent at a national level by multiple popular right-wing entities,” Huang said in an Instagram post to her personal profile. “I have been called racial and anti-Asian slurs, targeted for deportation, called a Chinese spy, and much more (Nevermind the fact that I was born here in America and I’m Taiwanese)” she added, going on to note how her family has also been affected by the publicity. Moriah Adeghe revealed on her own Instagram page that she was “called everything from a bitch, to aggressive, to violent, by strangers on the internet for speaking up against the violence that police officers often incite against Black people and calling for my own campus police to not have arms when they interact with students.” She goes on to allege that the Cornell Republicans student club “sicced” the Young America’s Foundation on them for payback and retaliation. “Rhetoric like this is literally what gets Black people killed and I am enraged that this type of mercilessness was used to get hundreds of thousands of people to shame, ridicule and abuse me.” Uche Chukwukere’s statement rung very similarly to Adeghe’s. “I have been called a nigger, a faggot, an AIDS and COVID spreader, a monkey, a FOB, a retard, and more. These individuals have gone as far to say more recently, ‘Let’s hope someone — anyone — clips ur gay black azz,’” he said. “My livelihood and safety are on the line. There is no reason that my family should be in such fear for my life and safety as they are right now.” Despite the ramifications that have ensued for the three students and the widely-circulated idea that the Cornell Republicans had it out for the pro-disarmament advocates, the student organization insisted they “had no involvement with the creation of this story and no one acting on behalf of the Cornell Republicans provided any information to YAF. All of the audio footage used by YAF is publicly available on the SA website.” Indeed, audio footage of Student Assembly meetings are available to the public here. However, refuting the organization‘s claim of non-involvement are screenshots that show several members, including the club’s president Weston Barker, celebrating the YAF coverage and specifically, the negative affect it would have on the three students. “The fact that their pictures are right there with the audio, I would not want to be them rn” said one member. “We might face backlash here in a minute so prepare yourselves” said another. Responding to the latter comment, Weston Barker believed that the students would be “too busy defending themselves from a national tsunami to substantively attack our organization.” He went on to point out his belief that “They used fear, vitriol, and public humiliation, and they are truly reaping what they’ve sown,” leaving it unclear as to whether or not ‘they’ refers to the three students specifically or a broader entity.

https://medium.com/@jaylencoaxum/at-cornell-debates-over-campus-policing-ignite-racist-online-harassment-8d658adecc15

['Jaylen Coaxum']

2020-12-20 16:24:31.781000+00:00

['College', 'Politics', 'Police', 'America', 'Racism']

EU Lawsuit: Google Fined $5 Billion Over Android Anti-Trust Violations

BAILEY T. STEEN | MONDAY, JULY 23, 2018 Last Wednesday, the European Union once again took the fight to Google’s elitists with another round of anti-trust fines. The Atlantic reports that for the crime of “denying rivals a chance to innovate” through the Android operating system (OS), used on 80 percent of smartphones worldwide, Google is expected to pay the largest fine in EU history with damages of €4.34 billion ($5.06 billion USD) for their “abuse of marketplace dominance”. “Google has used Android as a vehicle to cement the dominance of its search engine. These practices have denied rivals the chance to innovate and compete on the merits,” the EU anti-trust chief Margrethe Vestager claimed in a statement last week. “They have denied European consumers the benefits of effective competition in the important mobile sphere.” To translate in non-bureaucratic English: the EU commission found Google were establishing illegal deals with phone manufacturers to have Chrome apps and services pre-installed across all Android phones (a luxury not afforded to their competitors). Furthermore, Google even prevented these manufacturers from installing alternate builds of the Android OS. Despite Android being an open source OS, Google enacted anti-fragmentation agreements to keep manufacturers on Google’s offical version of Android that’s pre-approved by the company directly, compared to customised versions (such as Amazon’s Fire OS) which were not allowed on these devices. Failure to do abide by Google’s anti-consumer choice requests would result in threats of restricting creators’ access to the Google Play store, an essential service for consumers hoping to have more apps on their phone, cementing a device’s demise. This coercion gave Google a sinister market edge: either cater to our unearned demands, where our offical products™ reside in almost every mobile phone across the globe, or die alone with only your pride. The commission dictates any illegal conduct must end “in an effective manner within 90 days of the decision”, citing that Google “did not provide any credible evidence” for claims of lawful cooperation. These illegal payments reportedly ended once the EU began their investigation back during 2014, however, the practice appears to remain the norm in investigation findings. Alphabet Inc, the owner of Google, plan to appeal all current EU decisions. This wasn’t their original plan, of course. According to sources for Bloomberg, Google attempted to lobby their fines when the investigation came to light around August 2017. In the wake of their previous EU fine, over €2.4 billion in anti-trust damages), Google executives offered to “loosen restrictions” in their Android contracts in exchange for the termination of the anti-trust probe. EU officials responded saying settlement was “no longer an option” and that Google’s offer was “too little too late.” These events appear convincing when we consider the investigation’s scale. Google, a powerful corporation that can seriously rival world governments, still views $5 billion as a hell of a lot of money. Alphabet’s finanical records show an estimated income of $111 billion during 2017. Their profits, however, only make up $12.6 billion annually. This would mean the EU fine will strip them of 40 percent of their net earnings in one fell swoop. This is even before the GDPR lawsuit results which could cost the company an additional $4.3 billion in damages for the potential mishandling of user data. Such economic penalties will force the company to either continue paying the price of the company, as revenue continues to be pissed away, or enact significant changes to address their monopoly status moving forward. It’s no existential crisis, but rather a public perception problem which isn’t being ignored. How Google will fix their image is uncertain. Since Google’s blatant removal of their motto “don’t be evil”, proceeding the revelations of third-party email surveillance and backroom deals perfect for techno-mafia movies, will this punishment only encourage Google to resort to other ways of maintaining a greed-fuelled bottom line? The removal of default installations will no doubt impact Google’s future success across a new generation of phones. Users should beware that taking on an establishment entity like Google, intended on making their profits sky-high, requires sustained pressure in order to hold them accountable. . The European Commission, despite all their faults, appear the only ones who care about the preservation of online rights. As The Wall Street Journal states, Vestager, a Danish politician, has formed herself as the “de facto global regulator” against the elites of Silicon Valley. This person is a benefit now, but can we trust the enforcement of principles on just the word of who’s in power at the moment? Or should we establish an internet bill of rights to establish these principles as law, regardless of who enforces them and when? Why must the EU, an international syndicate growing weaker by the day, be the ones who crackdown on the violations of American companies? It was President Donald Trump who defended Google’s illegal bundling practices by writing: “I told you so,” the president tweeted. “The European Union has just slapped a Five Billion Dollar fine on one of our great companies, Google. They truly have taken advantage of the U.S., but not for long!” Ian Bogost, journalist for The Atlantic, is right to see how Vestager has become one of the most influential figures in America’s techno-politics landscape. Scandals post-Cambridge Analytica are met with wrist slaps in Congress, resulting in Facebook hearings about how the site makes money without subscriptions (surprise, it’s through ads!) and whether or not some irrelevant black conservative comedians had 24 hour bans. There’s no serious discourse or legislative movement on preserving online liberties and rights. The highest representative in the land just cheered on the infringement on those rights. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice, across Democrat and Republican administrations, are fine to leave these companies violate in peace. America is known as the independent nation that escaped European tyranny in 1776. Decades later shows America’s old tyrant might be its new liberator. How ironic indeed. Thanks for reading! Bailey T. Steen is a journalist, editor, artist and film critic based in Victoria, Australia, but is also Putin’s Puppet™ on occasion. Articles published on TrigTent | Medium | Janks Reviews | Steemit Updates and contact: @atheist_cvnt on Twitter | Instagram | Gab.Ai Business or personal contact: bsteen85@gmail.com | Comment below Cheers, darlings!! 💋

https://atheist-cvnt.medium.com/eu-lawsuit-google-fined-5-billion-over-android-anti-trust-violations-2d930ba1a7c

['Bailey', 'The Libtardtarian']

2018-07-23 18:37:47.543000+00:00

['Politics', 'Technology', 'Eu', 'Google', 'Android']

How We Go to Space

[A portion of the following has since been published over at newstalkflorida] I watched Space Force last week. It made me sad. Not because it was a disappointing mess. It was. But because all of the bits of it that were half decent, were also terrifyingly accurate. Militarisation, politicization, animal abuse. Last month I watched SpaceX launch the first manned mission to space from American soil since 2011. From Florida no less, home of the Apollo program. But that also made me sad. Not because I don’t absolutely love space exploration or have the deepest admiration for the engineers, scientists and astronauts involved. I do. But because it feels like we’re sitting on top of half a million kilos of explosives ready to blast us straight to a dystopian hellscape. For the last few decades starry eyed billionaires have increasingly been setting their sites on the heavens, with dreams of Mars colonies, Moon bases, asteroid mining and a future as lords of the final frontier. Part of this is our fault. We’ve set them up for it. In our feckless bickering over government budgets we have played into a political and media narrative that pits space exploration against healthcare and education and other obvious false choice scenarios. We ask ourselves “But what about all the problems here on Earth?”, rather than simply (cough) defunding war, police violence and other forms of senseless brutality and spending the resulting trillions on doing something decent for a change. But it is also a rational problem of trust. Concentrations of money and power, wherever they may lie, be it private enterprise, or government, present problems of corruption, inefficiency and at the end of the day, inequality. Think of the most powerful companies and industries in the history of the world. The Dutch East India Company, Standard Oil, Apple. Logistics, primary resources, tech. Now think of the most powerful nations and empires in the history of the world. Having stuff is one thing, but controlling the means by which everyone accesses it (via land, air, sea, net and now space) is something else entirely. Having both, is what empires are made of. With these tools they were able to not just rule, but dominate, granting unprecedented power and wealth to small collections of individuals, at the expense of pretty much everyone and everything else. This is terrifying. It should terrify you. Because it’s happening. The first rocket has already launched. And here’s the thing. Space, as it turns out, is exceptionally big. A lot bigger than the Atlantic. So all of that wealth. All of that power. All of that history of dominance and inequality that’s played out on this planet time and time again. That. But interplanetary. Interstellar. And uninterrupted. Musk. Bezos. Branson et al. They’ve done the math and they’ve realised that even a fraction of a percent of infinity is, well, infinity. They know that even a piece of the pie is an empire in the making. Whoever is holding the knife is basically Genghis Victoria Caesar. One asteroid, called ’16 Psyche’, is said to be a solid hunk of metal worth 700 quintillion dollars. What is a quintillion you say? Well, 700 of them is roughly 7 million times the value of the entire world economy. Every company. Every country. Everything. One asteroid. Photo by Bryan Goff on Unsplash Now I know that’s absurd. Nothing is worth that much. And it’s a practically meaningless number, because you have to be able to turn it into stuff and transport it places and even then you can’t just flood the market, or the value drops to nothing (just ask the diamond industry). That’s true. So I guess what you’d have to do is control the resources, the logistics and the tech. Then you could effectively bend the human race over your knee. Earth has resources too of course, but they’re increasingly buried deep, in parts per million. Also the increasing pressure to protect the environment is thankfully causing some movement, albeit not nearly enough. The result is that despite the enormous expense and investment associated with space based industry, it’s very clear which way the wind is ultimately blowing. Earth based resourcing operations are going to continue getting difficult, more heavily regulated and terrible for publicity. While in space, no one cares how much of a mess you make or how many landscapes you carve to bits. They’ll probably applaud the proud display of human (nay colonial) spirit. Beyond resources, we have the troubling lean towards space militarization. It is understood that any new ‘space’ constitutes a new theatre and it would be naive to assume that weapons in space are not going to be a thing at some point, somehow. But good lord, we need to do everything we possibly can to avoid it. Not charge head first into starship troopers with a phaser sticking out of our pants. ‘Space Force’ (the actual thing, not the show), is an absolute atrocity and has not received nearly enough condemnation. Honestly the fact that they poached the starfleet logo for their nonsense is about enough to make me side with the Borg. But that too is now happening. A new division of military personnel. A revival of the ‘Star Wars’ type programs from the 1980s. The US is not the only ones to blame here. Other nations are equally amped up for the incoming arms race. But it is precisely for that reason, that the so called leadership of the free world should be focussed on soft power solutions that include a significant update to the ‘Outer Space Treaty’ (initially set up to prevent the use or placement of nuclear weapons), that includes stipulations on small arms, non nuclear weapons, military operations, resource use, land claims and the very real possibility of corporate nation or even planethood. A failure to do so, is to allow the eternal corruption of our future. The humanity that goes to space doesn’t need to be perfect. It doesn’t even need to have solved all the major problems. But it does need to be humanity. Just like the colonialism of the past, whatever we take with us, will stick around. Greed. Bigotry. Oppression. A future in space that includes only a certain kind of person is not a future at all. Leaving the earth can not be an act of abandonment. How we go, is just as important as going. There have been plenty of folks claiming that the success of SpaceX proves the success of privatisation and the ‘incredible’ US system of free market capitalism — yes, the same one that can cripple a global economy and starve millions based on how a fraction of the population feels on any particular day. During the launch, one of the commentators even claimed that the launch proved what private industry could accomplish when it was “given the freedom” to do so. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I didn’t realise that anyone had been holding private industry back. If anything, private industry needed NASA (a public institution) to offer them a contract before they could get the whole thing off the ground. I have no doubt that private industry can (and probably will) take us to the Moon. But it will be 50 something years after the public sector already did it. So let’s just cool our jets. What the SpaceX launch actually proves is not the glorious possibilities of private industry, but the inglorious failure of politics and a complicit media. An unassailable empire of budget commitments to a vast military industrial complex and a corruption and conflagration of public interest is responsible for more that just a misappropriation of funds, but the hijacking of democracy and the pitting of worthwhile endeavour vs worthwhile endeavour — of good vs good, while awful is free to do as it pleases. It is the same failure that results in up to 40% of city budgets being spent on militarised policing, while community development, support work and other preventative solutions receive single digits or less. We have been led to believe that privatisation is the only way to get things done, by the same folks that actively thwart our public institutions from doing anything useful. Yet another symptom of a democracy that simply isn’t quite democratic enough. Because of the dependency on public infrastructure and training, private industry is, for now, tied to public institutions. NASA works in cooperation with contractors from SpaceX to Lockheed Martin and ostensibly it is NASA that will once again put “boots on the moon” sometime in the next decade, albeit with private sector assistance. But make no mistake. It’s a launching pad. NASA needs approval for budgets that will dwindle as lawmakers and others decide the job is being done elsewhere so “why bother?” while private industry just needs to prove capability and then fire up the engines. Once that occurs, we are looking at a future dominated by corporate interests on a scale never before seen. I know that sounds strange given the corporatised world we live in at the moment. But the sky is no longer the limit. One possible, albeit partial, solution to this outcome is to simply tax space based industry, directing revenues into something resembling a sovereign wealth fund, but for the whole world rather than a single nation. Variations of this have already been discussed with respect to the use of air space and international waters for commercial purposes. Norway is the most successful iteration of the SWF model, with a ten trillion dollar fund generated from the nation’s oil industry being invested and reinvested, while the returns are used to fund social services. At a global, or even interplanetary level, the returns on such a fund, especially when factoring in other revenue sources such as a tax on carbon and data profiteering, would be able to achieve enormous good, potentially eliminating poverty through the funding of a global UBI and addressing other issues of civiliational concern such as climate change, through enormous green infrastructure and research funding. Given the numbers we are talking about, the volume of such a fund and the scale of such projects could be truly immense. Combating desertification and engineering entire landscapes; decentralising cities into smart sustainable and interconnected polities; eliminating monoculture in favour of systems that emulate or even return to nature; space elevators; dyson rings; even a complete decolonisation of major land masses in favour of floating, subterranean or even orbital cities. However there are a number of issues with this approach, at least in isolation. Firstly, it rests on the political will of nations currently struggling with ageing democratic institutions. Democratic reform at the national and international level is an absolute imperative and there is a movement for a UN Parliamentary Assembly gaining traction in the current climate which would theoretically be capable of implementing such policies, but it’s uncertain how far away either of these realities might be. In truth, a truly democratic United Nations would be the best possible scenario as far as mitigating the disastrous impacts of space capitalism (and so many other global issues). We should do absolutely everything we can to make it a reality as soon as possible. However I am unconvinced that it can be accomplished in time. Money moves fast. There is the possibility that an institution like a SWF might be possible outside of global governance or even consensus. Given the right incentives, such a fund could be established incrementally by key powers ready to levy taxes on major corporations vying for control. Though here we likely fall into the same trap as the IMF, the WTO, the EU and other bodies assembled in such a fashion by dominant economies. They were formed as a means of influence and are not particularly democratic as is. The WTO actively functions as a protectionist mechanism for first world farmers and the IMF has been described as facilitating “global apartheid”. Giving more power to existing sources of inequality hardly seems like the answer, at least in advance of their own reform. Furthermore, any incremental solution would merely precipitate corruption of the highest order. Tax loopholes, enormous bribes, safe havens and pervasive favouritism would lead to entrenched power structures that become exponentially more difficult to dig out as time goes by. But the main problem is that even if a global ‘SWF’ was created and the revenues of space based industry were distributed and somewhat democratised, it would not address the underlying problem. It would never be enough. Taxing space and giving ‘some’ of it to the people, just leaves the rest to be abused in the same fashion as it always has. We already tax the largest corporations in the world, in theory, and yet they persistently find ways to avoid those taxes, aided in no small part by institutional corruption and the leverage provided by their phenomenal wealth. We would be foolish to think that replicating that same essential dynamic in space and at orders of magnitude, would result in anything fundamentally different. At the end of the day, it would be more ‘trickle down economics’ providing ‘enough’ to ‘enough’. Except this time, the top of the funnel would be 10 thousand kilometers up. So yes, under the absolute best case scenario, the commercialisation of space would make enormous improvements to the quality of life of billions of people. But it would also take existing differences to an unimaginable extreme. We must remember that poverty is in many cases a relative state. Before the invention of the internet, having it could hardly be considered a fundamental right. But once a new ‘standard’ of living or mechanism for engaging with society exists — whether it is a home with four walls, electricity, fresh water, a protein rich diet, healthcare, literacy, or the ability to engage with a global community — that development ultimately becomes part of the standard package of basic subsistence. Inequality on the final frontier, is a recipe not just for the boundless divergence of class and privilege, but fundamental human rights. None of this means that we should not relentlessly pursue reform oriented solutions to the issue. The point is, resting on inadequately or even decreasingly democratic institutions to make the right call for the future of humanity is a bet we should all be unwilling to make. So, if we can’t trust private corporations to do this, we can’t trust militarised space agencies and we can’t trust corrupt governments and global institutions, who can we trust? The answer is, ourselves. In the words of Buckminster Fuller, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” If space industry and colonization is going to be a thing (it is), then we have to do it, we have to do it right and we have to do it first. The transition to an interplanetary species is something we only get to do once. We have to consider not just the importance of going, but ‘how’ we go — and not just in technological terms. Because a hundred, or a thousand years from now, when we are colonizing other worlds or even encountering other life forms, who we are is going to be determined by what we do now. So here’s an idea for all those Star Trek fans out there who, like me, want “humanity” to go to space, but don’t want to wind up in some military/corporate interstellar nightmare, from which we can never escape. Those of us who think space exploration is the greatest endeavour we could ever undertake as a species, but prefer a humanistic, scientific approach, rather than one riddled with violence and inequity. We have to build the largest cooperative in the history of the world. We also have to build a new democratic nation — a space faring civilisation, from the ground up.

https://medium.com/best-guess/how-we-go-to-space-9e47a2dfc7b3

['Daniel Mackisack']

2020-10-20 10:30:48.894000+00:00

['Space Exploration', 'Space', 'Inequality', 'Spacex', 'Space Commercialization']

Racial Bias in Code and Data: An Interview with Alex Garcia

As a young data journalist, I was advised to attend NICAR — an annual data journalism conference organized by Investigative Editors and Reporters and their suborganization, the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting. In researching the conference, I stumbled upon recordings of the 2019 NICAR Lightning Talks, which are five-minute presentations related to data journalism chosen by a popular vote. Last year, Alex Garcia gave a talk called 5 ways to write racist code (with examples). I was able to chat with him last week about his talk, the response he received, and how he’s feeling about it a year later. Photo credit: Evangelina Rodriguez Emilia Ruzicka: Thank you so much for agreeing to meet with me! Can we start with an introduction? Alex Garcia: Sure! My name is Alex. I recently graduated from University of California, San Diego (UCSD) with a major in computer engineering. I’m from Los Angeles, went to school down in San Diego. I’ve always been interested in computers and when I started at UCSD I decided, “Oh, computer engineering might be something kind of cool.” The first time I ever programmed or did anything in this field was when I started out in college. I didn’t know about the data journalism field until about a year and a half, two years ago, and I found out through Reddit, Data is Beautiful, and I found all these New York Times articles and whatever else, so that’s how I got into it. I didn’t know too much about the actual field and NICAR until I saw someone randomly tweet about it. I saw it was going to be in Newport Beach and I was like, “Oh, that’s really cool!” In terms of my actual experience in journalism, I honestly have none. There’s student newspapers on campus and all that, but I never really got into that, never knew it was available. I did do a little bit of data stuff, but I just really didn’t know much about it. So during NICAR I met a lot of really cool people, saw what the field was like, got really interested in it. I met someone who goes to UCSD and is interested in journalism. We were actually roommates for this past quarter, which was really cool. Right now, I just graduated in December. I have a couple of months off where I’m not doing too much. I’m going to start a new job at the end of March doing general software engineering stuff. In the future, I hope to get into some sort of newsroom, some kind of data journalism, later down the road. ER: That’s a really interesting journey, where you started not knowing, entered computer science, and then by association and serendipity found data journalism. Speaking of, last year, you gave a lightning talk at NICAR. Could you talk about your topic? AG: Yeah, so a little bit of background about that. It was specifically about racial bias in algorithms and racial bias in code. This is a field that at the time I was somewhat interested in because I’d see a tweet or an article here and there that someone wrote. I had friends from different fields who were taking classes and they’d say, “Hey, this is a cool article, why don’t you read it?” and it would be about courtroom justice and how these algorithms would determine whatever. So I was always tangentially interested in it. I always had the idea in the back of my mind that I should just aggregate all these links or stories that I find and have it in one list that people can go to and find. But I never did that because I just never got around to it. So when I signed up for the conference and saw they had these lightning talks where you can do a few minute speech about whatever you want, having that idea in my mind, I thought I could either aggregate this list or do this talk. I was specifically excited to do a talk to journalists, too, because I don’t know how many reporters really know about this field. They may know tangentially — kind of like my knowledge of college sports and how students can get paid for playing; I know something about that field, but I don’t know much — so I thought it was the same in this case, where people may have heard stories about courtroom injustice or some Microsoft twitter bot that went crazy because people took it over, but they may not know the differences between what leads to those things. I thought if I aggregate all these things and show how diverse this field is, how these different problems arise, and what fields they appear in, it might be something nice to share. A slide from Garcia’s talk about predictive policing I had a bunch of bookmarks to all these different stories I had, cobbled them together, threw a pitch in, and it was a lot of fun aggregating! I’m not the best public speaker and I’m not the best organizer for all these thoughts, so the night before I was frantically working on the slides. I had a lot of ideas about what I wanted to put in the talk, but since it’s only five minutes, I had to cut things out, cut things short, and move things around. But it was fun! It was definitely nerve-wracking, especially because I knew no one in the audience besides two or three people I had met during the days leading up to it. ER: You touched on this a little bit, but what inspired your talk? Was there any particular article that you encountered that made you think you needed to do your talk on racial bias in code or was it more of the conglomerate idea that sparked it? AG: That’s a great question. I think for general inspiration of the talk, it was just a bunch of different links that I saw and stories that I would find. Also, the general — not ignorance, per se — but how people don’t know that this is a problem or that it could exist. One of the things that I don’t think I mentioned in the talk specifically, but one of the links that I had was a Reddit thread about gerrymandering. There was some news article talking about gerrymandering and one of the top comments was, “Oh, this research team or this company is working on an algorithm that could do it automatically. They give it whatever and then the computer will do it, so there will be no bias at all.” A couple of comments after that they were saying, “Why are humans doing this? Computers could do it and it would have no bias.” And somewhere hidden in there, there was one comment saying, “Hey, that’s not really how that works. A computer could do it and it could still be biased and there’s many different ways that could come across.” So I think that thread, in particular, stuck out to me. I’ve seen similar threads since then, whether it’s just random regulatory items or other random stuff where people will say that if a computer could do something, it would be a lot easier or more fair. There would also be other general conversations I would have with friends, not necessarily talking about whether it would be fair for computers to do something, but more about the actual impacts that these issues might have on people. I think there was also a tweet from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She said something about how algorithms have bias and algorithms could be racist. And then there was a reporter from Daily Wire saying that code can’t be racist. So it’s just a lot of nit-picky things where I don’t know if people really understand this, how it works, and how it manifests. A slide from Garcia’s talk about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ryan Saavedra of Daily Wire Also, about a year before the talk, I took a small seminar in computer science education and the professor at UCSD was really interested in K-12 computer science education. Part of the stuff she would talk about and that I learned more about in future classes was the importance of knowing the fundamentals of computer science or programming. Not necessarily knowing how to program or whatever, but knowing how it works, the way it works, and what it can or can’t do. Think about the general US population and how many actually know, not how the computers work, but what their limits are. That’s a field that drives this conversation. You know, if people are ignorant or they don’t know that these computers are not unbiased, that can be a problem. ER: You mentioned briefly how important you felt it was to present this to an audience of journalists. Could you talk more about that and any sort of considerations you made when you were giving your talk, knowing that your audience was journalists and the ethics that are inherently assumed when journalists present information? AG: I remember one thing I was thinking about while I was making the presentation and noticed specifically at NICAR was that most of the journalists there are journalists first. They learned how to code while working on stories or doing their job. There are some people who are half-journalist and half-engineer and they know more about coding, but most of the audience seemed to be the kind of people who would take a Python or R workshop to learn about them for the first time. So I didn’t want to have anything that was too technical or show too much code. One thing I did to counteract that was to use a lot of headlines or stories by reporters who were in the field who know more about it and would be familiar to the audience. And while I did show some code, I made sure it wouldn’t be too complicated and would be easy to explain. One of the points was about doing sentiment analysis and how if you use the wrong model and pass in a string like, “I like Italian food” you would have a higher sentiment than if you used “I like Mexican food.” So if I did show code, it was very simplified and probably something that people were somewhat used to. A slide from Garcia’s talk about sentiment analysis For the ethical implications, I’m not sure. I did my best to have sources or links that people could go to and follow, but what I didn’t talk about was how you can report on this or how you can find different agencies that may be meddling in this, mostly because I don’t know how to do that. I don’t have a journalism background, so I don’t know how you find sources or what’s the best, most ethical way to go about doing that. I kind of avoided doing that and said: “Here are some stories and headlines that all have something to do with each other and some reasons behind how one event led to another.” ER: After you gave this talk, what was the response? Were people really interested and want to learn more? If so, has that response continued or have you seen a continued trend in the media in reports on stories like the ones you used in your talk? AG: Right after the talk, I would get random Twitter DMs here and there from journalists saying, “this was really cool, I really liked it!” or “I had a small question about a source that you used.” One person wanted to talk about the realm in general — what companies are maybe more susceptible to this or that danger. Personally, it was a great way to meet people and see who is working in this field and who is interested in it. In terms of long term what I’ve seen in the media since my talk, I think I’ve seen the field get a little bit worse. There’s a company that The Washington Post did an article about where you send them videos of job interviews and the company uses AI to see if they’re a good candidate by analyzing speech and body patterns. And it’s so problematic because there are just so many things that can go wrong, but seeing the amount of money and velocity and power that they have is pretty scary. That’s probably the biggest thing I’ve seen since the talk. I’ve probably seen a couple of other headlines because there’s more and more of a focus on this, especially an academic focus, but I can’t think of any off the top of my head. A slide from Garcia’s talk depicting the racial and gender bias of facial recognition algorithms ER: You mentioned earlier that you had a lot of things you wanted to put in your talk, but because of time constraints you couldn’t. If you had the opportunity to give the talk again without a time limit, what are some things you would have mentioned, both from when you were preparing the talk and from current issues of racial bias in code and data? AG: I think for each of the five sections I had, there were one or two more articles I had, so I would have included those to make my points stronger. Also, I had this reach goal for the presentation when I wrote the slides to use a Javascript tool to make my slides a website. I wanted to run a machine learning algorithm during the presentation to show that you don’t need a big fancy server or computer to have the resources to make biased code. And at the end, I would be able to show that it was running on some NYPD stop and frisk data that I had and how biased the outcome could be with some pretty readily available tools and data. It’s not hard at all for this to happen. I was trying to make it work, but the logistics weren’t working out and I didn’t want to cause too many difficulties, so I just went with regular slides instead, but I think having an example like that would drive the point home even further. Even the presentation you make for a talk has the power to make automatic, biased decisions for no good reason. I also would have liked to do demos of where things could go wrong, such as the sentiment analysis example I used, so that people could see exactly what was happening instead of just getting the theory. I think recreating that would reinforce my ideas. ER: Cool! Is there anything else you want to say about the importance of being aware of racial bias in code and data or how people can become more conscious and evaluative of what they’re consuming? AG: I think one heuristic that can be helpful in noticing when these things happen is watching for when someone says, “Oh yeah, a computer did that” or “a computer made the decision” or even “oh, that can’t be biased because of X, Y, or Z.” That’s something I feel happens a lot from day to day where something happened “automatically,” but for me, that’s a red flag. Those are things to look into a little more and check out how the decision was actually built. With data visualization specifically, when you’re making these visualizations, it’s only as sound as the data you’re building on top of. If the data has underlying problems, then no matter what you put on top of it, you’re just going to make it worse. For instance, electoral maps. If you look at election results by county for the entire United States, you’re in some ways supporting an older, racist, white supremacist system. The goal might not be to create a racist visualization, but in some ways, you’re biasing the view and integrity of that data. There are many other examples with data visualization and data analysis, but just knowing that whatever data you’re using, you’re sitting on top of a historical view of how it came to that point. I think that’s definitely something to consider as you work. You can listen to Alex Garcia’s full lightning talk via IRE Radio here.

https://medium.com/nightingale/racial-bias-in-code-and-data-an-interview-with-alex-garcia-79a7f2b52f2e

['Emilia Ruzicka']

2020-02-25 14:01:01.585000+00:00

['Data Journalism', 'Coding', 'Interview', 'Data Ethics', 'Data Visualization']

For What’s Real

That old advice to “tend your garden” grows More true with every passing year that finds Monsanto owning seed and land alike Already having bought too many minds. If we can loosen grip of corporate greed On honest farmers’ lives that struggle so To live and give us good food that we need And save the seed they need for next year’s growth, Mythology of motherhood aside, If we escape those corporate shackles, too, Sweet earth that isn’t corrupted can provide Our loving care returned and life renewed. Feed and conserve soil’s creatures great and small: The compost heap is mother of us all.

https://medium.com/sonnetry/for-whats-real-1384320f440

['Jane Woodman']

2020-05-07 00:14:25.787000+00:00

['Compost', 'Poetry', 'Garden', 'Sonnet', 'Reality']

8 Unheard Browser APIs You Should Be Aware Of

8 Unheard Browser APIs You Should Be Aware Of Experimental browser APIs that have the potential to change the way we develop web apps Photo by Szabo Viktor on Unsplash With the increase in popularity, browsers started shipping APIs for complex functionalities that sometimes can only be implemented via a native application. Fast-forward to the present: It’s indeed quite rare to find a web application that doesn’t make use of at least one browser API. As the field of web development continues to grow, browser vendors also try to keep up with the rapid development around them. They constantly develop newer APIs that can bring new nativelike functionalities to your web application. Furthermore, there are some APIs that people don’t know much about, even though they’re fully supported in modern browsers. Here are some APIs you should be aware of — as they will play a vital role in the future.

https://medium.com/better-programming/8-unheard-of-browser-apis-you-should-be-aware-of-45247e7d5f3a

['Mahdhi Rezvi']

2020-08-04 16:05:37.181000+00:00

['Technology', 'Software Development', 'JavaScript', 'Programming', 'Web Development']

Introducing Morpheus Labs SEED

Morpheus Labs BPaaS Version 2.0 has exciting new features and applications, not only for developers but also for enterprises. Previously we announced the delay of our BPaaS V2.0 due to a few reasons (you may learn more here.) However, even in a pandemic, the Morpheus Labs team has not stopped hustling. Morpheus Labs version 2.0, also known as Morpheus Labs SEED, is now live. Morpheus Labs SEED Overview In our latest growth report, we mentioned that the platform was first conceived with a purpose to simplify the process of building blockchain applications to meet future business needs. Along the way, we want to ensure that the platform components are enhanced and optimized for building blockchain solutions quickly and easily. We have added features to not only empower the developers, but enterprises to have better team management functions, interoperability solutions to connect external resources, and also to help our users to accelerate their innovation process by providing reference templates. Read on to learn about the key features added to Morpheus Labs SEED. Morpheus Labs SEED provides: A Solution Center The solution center comprehensively covers the development, testing, deployment, run, and scale applications across physical, virtual, and distributed ledger technologies environments. The solution center is described as an “end-to-end application development product”. a. Application Runtimes App runtimes help teams build and deploy scalable applications with greater speed, agility, confidence, and choice. Deploy production-grade applications anytime, anywhere. b. Services Enterprises can utilize integrated platform services to make complex applications into viable businesses with ease. There is support for a diverse range of service types like distributed storage, databases, integration, digital assets, and key management. The services for enterprises can change conventional perspectives and boost organizational operations. c. Use Cases Use Cases are like playbooks to help accelerate the adoption and the development of existing solutions. The Use Cases work as task-based graphic workflows that help visualize processes and automate deployments, connecting disparate platform tools and infrastructure components in a seamless and process-based use. 2) Enhanced Team Management This feature is essential for collaborative development. For businesses that prefer to outsource an IT/Dev team, you can share a project and connect with an external organization on the platform. Organizations can leverage this new enhancement to conduct training workshops and hackathons as well. 3) Campaign management In the “Campaigns” feature, you will see the upcoming events organized by Morpheus Labs and its partners, such as DApp competitions, workshops, and training courses with the goal of blockchain adoption. 4) Application Library support for Use Cases We built this feature to encourage innovation value creation in the blockchain space. Developers get the smart contract-based incentive when they curate and publish their applications, which leads to an opportunity to commercialize and become a use case. “Our Morpheus Labs BPaaS journey started in late 2018 and I still remember those very exciting days. Today we are living great moments again — it’s the day we can say our platform becomes a Solution Environment for Enterprise Development (SEED). With comprehensive features to support end-to-end blockchain solutions, SEED opens the way to the phase of production-grade support, scaling, and enhanced team management ability for education and group collaboration. I would like to take this opportunity to express my appreciation to the team for having worked tirelessly at this project.” — Dorel D Burcea, CIO at Morpheus Labs Morpheus Labs SEED platform is being used by companies around the world to speed up their Proof of Concept processes, allowing partners to contribute their solutions, streamline and improve business procedures, so they can focus on higher-value work, as well as creating innovation value for the future. Create an account for free here and get access to quick start-up guides, tutorials, and use case references. Discover what you can do on Morpheus Labs SEED.

https://medium.com/morpheus-labs/introducing-morpheus-labs-seed-ee2e685a38e1

['Morpheus Labs Team']

2020-07-02 08:29:12.083000+00:00

['Blockchain', 'Developer', 'Coding', 'Technology']

JavaScript: String.replaceAll has Landed in All Major Browsers

What Were the Alternatives So Far? Dating back to the early days of JavaScript, the prototype of String provided us with a function called replace that essentially does the same thing as replaceAll , but it replaces only the first occurrence of the searchValue . Example: This is useful but undesirable if you want to replace all occurrences of a text. One solution to that problem is to use a RegExp to define the searchValue . The same example as above can easily be rewritten with a RegExp to achieve the same behavior as replaceAll : This works well for our case. It is also obvious to anyone who has some basic knowledge of regular expressions. Let’s make things a bit more complicated. Say we have a case where we need our searchValue to be dynamic. For instance, assume that we get our searchValue as a parameter instead of hardcoding it. In this case, creating a regular expression from this variable gets a little more complicated. An example: This works. What the code does is also still quite clear. But generating a regular expression dynamically is not always straightforward. Special characters in the given string can easily mess with the regular expression: It still works, but the way it works is a lot more cryptic now. The users of the function must know that they have to sanitize the string before passing it to the function. The other alternative to this is to have removeFromText() sanitize the received input. In that case, however, we make the implementation of removeFromText() unnecessarily complicated. The last alternative to solve the problems described above is to chain .split() and .join() to achieve the same behavior as replaceAll : Now this one covers all our use cases. The drawback of this one is that what the code does is a lot less obvious. Splitting a string into an array only to merge it again seems wasteful and doesn’t tell us anything about replacing a string. It is more of a hack than doing what we want to do directly.

https://medium.com/better-programming/javascript-string-replaceall-has-landed-in-all-major-browsers-9417e2f831d4

['Ozan Tunca']

2020-09-16 12:54:30.223000+00:00

['Ecmascript', 'Programming', 'Nodejs', 'JavaScript', 'Frontend']

Not the neighborhood he left: Biden’s international challenge

Despite the legal proceedings taking place, it is highly likely that Joe Biden is the next president of the United States. Biden will face difficult challenges at the beginning of his term. Most of these challenges concern the American domestic system, where it is likely that most of his energy will be invested at the beginning of his tenure. However, there are other, no less important, challenges related to the status and activity of the United States in the international arena. The obvious, immediate, and familiar challenges are Russia and China, challenges that go back decades and relate to a hegemonic struggle for power, political and economic interests, and in the case of democratic presidents then also values ​​and ideology. During Trump’s tenure, the international community had to adapt to a relationship based on momentary whims, impulsive decisions, and a desire for instant solutions, which did not always fit the complexity of the situation. Despite reports that, at least when it comes to the Kremlin, there was satisfaction at the time with the election of a Trump-type president, it can also be assumed that in the course of his term, even for the Russians, the instability that characterizes Trump’s management style, made it difficult for them to understand where the wind is blowing. It can be assumed that the mood in Beijing was similar. The fact that Biden is not considered an overly progressive politician, but rather a part of the political mainstream in Washington, along with a comfortable nature (at least as reflected above the surface), may reduce concerns on the Russian and Chinese sides and produce a more stable relationship. On the one hand, while the understandable suspicions and conflicting interests will remain, however, the boundaries of the Biden administration’s demarcation and conduct will be clearer and more predictable. It is sometimes easier to work in front of an opponent you know and understand the ways of his activity than with an impulsive and unexpected “friend”. With respect to the European Union and the International organizations, it can be assumed that relations will improve dramatically. From the low point that these relations reached during the Trump administration, one can only rise. Cooperation with key EU countries (especially Germany) is a significant catalyst for advancing responsible, sane, and liberal agenda in the international arena, agenda that, at the end of the day, will also do good to American interests. As for North Korea, it is difficult to assess. Trump and Kim’s styles seemed to fit together like a hand to a glove. Now Kim will have to go back and face a president who will be less fascinated by the way he rules his country and people, and there is a realistic possibility that at least at the beginning of Biden’s tenure, Kim will try to explore the limits of what is allowed and what is forbidden. He usually does this through some “experiments” (a mysterious explosion, ballistic missile fire, etc.). The way the Biden administration responds to the expected provocations will determine the continuation of the relationship throughout the term. History proves that a relationship based on a “stick and carrot” is the most effective. It is up to Biden to cooperate on some level with China as well, due to its significant impact on what is happening in North Korea. With respect to the Middle East, it can be estimated that the Arab leaders on the one hand, and Israel on the other, will align fairly quickly with the line led by the new president, mainly because they need the American aid (in terms of weapons sells and Defense Alliance) like breathing air, especially against Iran. Regarding Iran, it can be estimated that the US, in cooperation with the EU, will return to cooperating and negotiating with Iran, based on the nuclear agreement already signed. It can be assumed that Iran will cooperate with the new administration, mainly due to its harsh economic and civil problems, and its will to remove the sanctions as much as possible. It can be estimated that, at least in the foreseeable future, the Biden administration will not engage itself in substantial active involvement in what is happening in Africa, perhaps except for increased support for the activities of American and international aid organizations. This means that even under Biden’s administration (at least in the first term), Africa will continue to be Russia and China’s playground, and will remain the backyard of the world. So, it seems that quite a bit of work (and quite a few broken things need to be fixed) awaits the Biden administration in the international arena. All the players in this arena — whether friends or rivals — are waiting to see when and how the new administration will begin its international conduct. The speed with which the Biden administration will begin to address international challenges, and no less important — the way in which a clear and orderly agenda is outlined — will all directly determine on how the international system will be conducted over the next four years.

https://medium.com/@info-63603/not-the-neighborhood-he-left-bidens-international-challenge-d023f7ed26d0

['More Intelligence']

2020-11-14 14:08:40.127000+00:00

['USA', 'International Relations', 'Biden', 'Foreign Policy']

Kite Launches AI-Powered JavaScript Completions — Code Faster with Kite

Let’s take a look… Now let’s break it down… Kite can complete up to multiple lines of code at a time, reducing the time you spend writing repetitive code. Kite is able to provide completions when editors like VS Code cannot understand the code. Kite shows completions in more situations, for example after a space. Kite works alongside your editor’s completions. We use carefully-designed filters to reduce noise. We’ve trained a new deep learning model on 22 million open-source JavaScript files to ensure Kite works with your favorite libraries and frameworks like React, Vue, Angular, and Node.js. Kite for JavaScript is free and works 100% locally. You can download it here . Kite makes coding faster and easier The JavaScript ecosystem continually invents new frameworks and design patterns. These inventions make it a vibrant place to be, but it also creates the need to learn an ever-changing set of code patterns and APIs. Kite’s deep learning models have learned all of these patterns, understand the context of your code, so Kite can predict chunks of code and put them in your completions. This can be useful in two ways: If you already know what you need to type, Kite helps you jump ahead to the next task. If you’re having trouble remembering an API or design pattern, Kite can remind you so you don’t need to search on Google. As a result, writing JavaScript with Kite becomes faster and more fun. We’re just getting started Kite can help you ship software faster today. And we’re just getting started. We believe that machine learning can automate away the tedious parts of writing code, and there’s so much more to do. We’re continually exploring ways ML can unlock productivity gains for developers, and we hope that you will join us. A big thanks to the 250,000 developers who use Kite We’re thrilled to share today that over 250,000 people are coding with Kite every month . We feel grateful to have reached this milestone, and we’d like to thank everyone who uses Kite. This amazing progress wouldn’t be possible without each of you giving us the encouragement and feedback that fuels the hard work — 30,000 code commits to date — that got us here. We hope you’ll join us on this journey by downloading Kite! Happy coding, The Kite Team P.S. We are also announcing Kite Pro today, which is our first paid product for Python professionals. Check out our separate blog post about Kite Pro for more info!

https://medium.com/kitepython/kite-launches-ai-powered-javascript-completions-code-faster-with-kite-c2cffc1ecf78

['The Kite Team']

2020-05-12 17:10:32.334000+00:00

['AI', 'JavaScript', 'Deep Learning', 'Python', 'Machine Learning']

Should You Build A Prototype For Your Next App?

Our experience has taught us one thing: we should never expect the client to understand how an app or a website is supposed to work just by looking at the wireframe. While they may usually help people get familiar with the design of the app, wireframes do just that. They rarely provide this valuable “hands-on” experience or a more complete idea about how the app is actually expected to work. Yes, your project may look completely fine as a mockup, but it will lack the essential traits of the final product. For that, you need something else. Enter the concept of prototype. Cheap and fast? Unless you’re completely new to development, you may have heard about the holy “good-cheap-fast” triangle and how difficult (if not impossible) it is for developers to cover all the bases. Good + Fast = Expensive Good + Cheap = Slow Fast + Cheap = Inferior It is that simple. In app development, the rule boils down to the following: coding fast involves more resources, sleepless coding nights, higher pressure from the client and, inextricably, premium rates. Cheap development usually involves economising (usually on tests) and, which compromises the overall quality of the final product. It is natural that startups want the best of both worlds. We understand it. They need to show the app to investors, get more funding, improve the product and… repeat. The faster they build the first working version of the app, the sooner they can launch the product on the market as an MVP, and start testing it on users. This approach, however, puts immense pressure on cheap and fast development. And without quality your product is doomed to fail. As developer, can you successfully develop cheaply and fast at the same time? Yes, but there is one simple condition: you should know exactly what to do in the app. Clearer specification means more efficient development. What is a prototype? Clients like seeing the app, and find ploughing through hefty documentation rather tedious. But don’t get me wrong on this one: prototyping is not just a trick to excite your clients by showing them a fancy user experience. It helps you, in the first place, by saving you lots of time that would otherwise be spent on endless revisions, running in circles. Prototypes can either be made on paper (simple as that) but usually involve interactive wireframing tools like Axure or UXPin. They help understand what the app is expected to do and how it should look. At Briisk, we help our clients by building interactive wireframes of their apps before a single line of code is written. Our project manager sits down with the client and specifies the design requirements. This is our contribution to the app creation process, and the benefits are plenty: the development is faster, shorter and cheaper. All without detriment to quality. Benefits of prototyping Prototyping does not need to be very elaborate. We believe that even lo-fi forms of prototyping can bring great results and help avoid unnecessary dead ends. In other words: the more time is spent on prototyping, the better you know the scope of work needed for the project. Prototyping goes beyond app documentation. While documentation may be prone to controversial interpretation, the experience of using a working prototype makes the app development process easier and clearer, both from the point of view of the client, and the developer. Interaction with the prototype, or simply toying with it may trigger another level of imagination, helping you and the client spot potential pitfalls and possibilities. Contrary to wireframes (mockups or documentation), prototyping is unparalleled in terms of hands-on experience. This effectively helps in communication, with fewer misunderstandings and clarification requests from the client all along. Conclusion Unlike a prototype, specifications set out in a document are much harder to interpret, visualize and digest. At Briisk, we recommend prototyping as early as possible to set priorities for the project and, potentially, drop some of the less important or completely unnecessary features. The importance of prototyping becomes most evident when, early on in the project, you realize how effective it is to show the team (or the client) how much has been done. Prototyping is a win-win situation. Its benefits are important for the client as much as they are for the developer. As developers, we are more likely to get the programming right if there is a prototype to start with, leaving less to imagination and conjecture. For the client, prototyping minimizes the need for exchanging lengthy clarifications and descriptions of the implemented functionalities and offers a possibility to pitch the idea to the potential investor much earlier in the development process. This article was originally taken from Briisk Blog.

https://medium.com/briisk/should-you-build-a-prototype-for-your-next-app-1f018a0a612a

['Lukasz Sajkowski']

2017-12-07 09:17:55.382000+00:00

['Software Development', 'Business Development', 'Prototyping', 'App Development', 'Web Development']

and why I started to publish parenting books with at 22 y/o while travelling the globe without airplane

3 years ago, I started a journey around the globe. A journey without an aeroplane, through desert, jungle and cities. On busses, trains and containerships. A journey with the goal, to find my true calling, as I would tell my parents. A journey to find my lifegoal by finding lifegoals of cultures all around the world. How could I determine who I wanted to be if I didn't even know all my possibilities? So 13 counties, 3 continents and 3 years later I didn't decide to study marine biology, as I thought back in Germany. I didn't train to become the carpenter my dad wanted me to be. I didn't learn how to save our planet like my mother wanted me to. No, I decided to write a book about potty-training babies. I am 22 years young, without children of my own and living in my car. And this is the story of how I decided to help parents all around the world and why. My name is Julia Weiss. I grew up in Hamburg, not far from the “Reeperbahn”, a redlight district known worldwide for parties and prostitution. 18-year old me decided to skip the parties my friends were into and moved into a little village on the northern sea, to count birds. I planned my journey around the globe without aeroplanes. So I left Germany with a train in the early morning of 2018 and haven't been back since. It was snowing as I crossed Poland, Russia and Mongolia the coming months but china was greeting me with the early spring sun. I coloured my hair pink and left to bike through Vietnam and Cambodia. Laos was beautiful, just like Thailand and Malaysia. But I still felt like a tourist, getting lost in a foreign land instead of finding myself within. All of that changed when I stayed with a family in Singapore, taking care of their newborn baby-girl. After feeling lost for 20 years, I started to understand the universal language of family, of love, of parenthood. I could understand what this little person was telling me without words, I was developing, evolving and started to babysit from there, through Australia and to New Zealand. Now, don't get me wrong. I didn't decide that motherhood would be my life goal, my destination. I loved how every parent had their own way of dealing with everyday problems and the magic that lets parents overcome even the biggest roadblocks is mindblowing for me. For example, a mum in Australia, Port Headland had a special sound and used a bit of warm water on the feet of her child to potty-train it since birth. And it worked! Babies are just raw diamonds, full of potential. So I decided to keep travelling and find every parenting method, secret and advice I could. I will welcome my child with open arms one day when it is time. But until then, follow me around the globe and learn from parents far and wide. Have you ever wondered how a Cambodian mother establish an independent sleep schedule? No? That's because our mental borders don't cross over to unknown land. Let me tell you about methods you wouldn't even consider. Follow me on Facebook @ Potty Secrets or on Instagram @ pottysecrets Get your free guide to potty-train your child here: www.pottysecrets.com

https://medium.com/@pottysecrets/who-am-i-f2a7c66c2344

['Julia Weiss']

2020-12-06 00:13:50.451000+00:00

['Potty Training', 'Travellers', 'Baby', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Parenting']

Creating a challenge on Beingful. How the core of our new social platform…

Creating a challenge on Beingful Beingful’s challenge buttons representing different civic challenge categories. Background Beingful is a social platform for social impact. We empower you to create, share, and react to challenges with your friends that make an impact in your community and then to track your impact. We envision a community that offers simple, but meaningful, opportunities to get active the moment you’re inspired to act. The problem Many of us are overwhelmed by the massive amount of information we get bombarded with on popular social platforms today, which often becomes highly charged and negative when it turns political or civic-related. These platforms were built for sharing updates about our lives, like family vacations or going out with friends. They were never intended for discussions around important issues, much less meaningful action on those issues. It’s clear that ‘likes’ and ‘comments’ do not build stronger communities. Our solution Sharing a challenge on Beingful is equivalent to ‘posting’. However, instead of posting a photo or video and receiving ‘likes’ or ‘comments,’ we designed a new experience that enables you to share information, but also combine it with a call to action. This action is how people react to your post. We envision our community finding a small action they can take every day on a range of topics (hopefully via a challenge created by you!). How to create a Beingful challenge Creating a challenge takes seconds. First, select the content (news, photos, videos, stories, events, or links) that you want to share. We call this the “story.” Then, designate an action. An action can be as simple as asking friends to read a thought-provoking news article, or something more engaging, like joining an event, petition, or sign-up form. The sky is the limit, so this is where we want you to get creative. 😎 The actual process of adding content is done via pasting a link for now, but in the future, we plan to give you a variety of tools to create truly custom challenges. a story + an action = a Beingful challenge Tracking your impact We all enjoy seeing the impact of our good work. It’s not just about personal gratification, but it also energizes us to keep giving back for the good of our community. Beingful built a process to track your impact, which we will cover in more detail in a later article — but just know that by simply creating and accepting challenges we will help automatically track your impact. Sharing with friends Finally, no challenge would be complete unless you share it with your friends. Beingful gives you a variety of options to share: Facebook, Twitter, email, or simply copy and paste your unique challenge link to share via text message or any other way you would like. Join Beingful We hope you’re excited to create your own civic challenges or browse through ones created by our community. We invite you to join us below: Sign-up here ✅ and follow us on: Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

https://medium.com/beingful/creating-a-civic-challenge-on-beingful-20242d08865

[]

2020-04-07 01:14:21.785000+00:00

['Impact Investing', 'Social Entrepreneurship', 'Social Media', 'Civic Engagement', 'Civictech']

Happiness is a Choice

Too often, people ask me how are you always constantly “happy”? Well, I did some self-reflection and have realized that happiness is not actually due to external factors but a good chunk of it stems from within. The happiest people today are not necessarily single or married. They are not always the ones with stable careers or an amazing income. In fact, the happiest people are the ones who have made a choice to love themselves wholly and truly. They are people who have chosen to leave the past behind. These are people who constantly work on their self-esteem and put a higher price tag on their relationships. They stopped playing victims. They stopped whining in self-pity and dining in pity parties. They stopped reminiscing all the anger, tears, and bitterness from the past. To even start to be happy, one must realize that happiness is a personal choice and responsibility. People have to chose to be defined by their present and not their pasts. They are happy because they don’t need validation from anyone. They are happy because they know that they don’t need to throw shade on anyone for them to shine. They are happy because they choose to be. Here’s to the Happy Person in everyone!

https://medium.com/@mrinasugosh/happiness-is-a-choice-c1e16fc8c031

['Mrinalini Sugosh']

2020-02-15 23:37:12.866000+00:00

['Happiness In Life', 'Love Yourself', 'Happiness', 'Self Improvement', 'Self Love']

Apple and Google Join Forces to Track the Spread of Coronavirus

Apple and Google Join Forces to Track the Spread of Coronavirus New contact tracing apps could alert users who have been exposed to Covid-19 Image: Apple Google and Apple announced a new partnership on Friday to develop solutions for tracking the spread of the coronavirus. The system will rely on Bluetooth technology in smartphones to alert people who may have been exposed to an infected individual, and it represents a rare bit of cooperation between the competing iOS and Android platforms. The technology giants detailed their plans in two announcements (one from Apple, one from Google). In May, the two will introduce APIs for developers to create their own “contact tracing platforms” on smartphone apps. If you download such an app and cross paths with someone who later uploads a positive test result, you would receive a notification about potential exposure with information about what to do next. Apple and Google say they will eventually update iOS and Android to contain the Bluetooth functionality without an additional app download. Both companies highlighted user privacy in their documentation about the contact tracing feature — it would require users to opt in, and any data shared would be anonymized. “All of us at Apple and Google believe there has never been a more important moment to work together to solve one of the world’s most pressing problems,” the companies said in their statement. “Through close cooperation and collaboration with developers, governments and public health providers, we hope to harness the power of technology to help countries around the world slow the spread of [Covid-19] and accelerate the return of everyday life.” Contact tracing is used to map the contacts of someone diagnosed with an infectious disease. Seattle health authorities deployed this method to find their coronavirus Patient Zero, and San Francisco will tap more than 100 volunteers and government employees to interview and plot the movements of everyone testing positive for Covid-19. A mobile version would follow similar protocols. But instead of relying on interviews to chart the paths of infected people, that crucial information would come from Bluetooth data. According to draft outlines published by Apple and Google, anonymous tracing keys on people’s phones are broadcast every few minutes. These act like beacons that are logged by other nearby devices. (Six feet is considered “close contact” by health authorities.) If someone is diagnosed with Covid-19, they can submit that information to the app and upload 14 days of proximity data from their phone. People whose devices have exchanged keys with that person will then be alerted in a push notification. Image: Google To reiterate, the companies say this process doesn’t collect data that could be used to track someone. It’s also not mandatory — a person must download an app and voluntarily state if they’ve been infected. However, there are several barriers that could limit the usefulness of mobile contact tracing. As far as accuracy goes, Bluetooth connections are notoriously spotty; as the Washington Post pointed out, it’s unclear how consistently devices will link through car doors and walls. The apps also rely on people knowing that they’re sick, and the United States is extremely short on coronavirus testing kits. Theoretically, users could also abuse the app and lie about an infection, a possibility that Signal creator Matthew Rosen (who goes by Moxie Marlinspike) raised in a Twitter thread Friday. Apple declined to state on the record how users will be prevented from submitting false information. Google did not immediately respond to OneZero’s request for comment. Rosen also noted that the technology would require a large amount of data to be downloaded by users every week. Adoption is another hurdle experienced by countries who’ve already implemented mobile contact tracing. In Singapore, 1 in 6 people opted into a similar program, but participation needed to be closer to three-quarters for the app to be effective. “Despite our good contact tracing, for nearly half of these cases, we do not know where or from whom the person caught the virus,” Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, said of the effort. And marginalized communities who have historically been oppressed by surveillance technology may understandably be wary of downloading such an app. Privacy advocates have also cautioned against location-tracking in response to the pandemic. Many countries have already adopted new surveillance measures to track the spread of Covid-19. In a paper published Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union outlined several concerns about using location tracking to fight the outbreak. “The potential for invasions of privacy, abuse, and stigmatization is enormous,” Jay Stanley and Jennifer Stisa Granick, two technology experts at the ACLU, wrote. Meanwhile, Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on Thursday that the agency is drafting a “very aggressive” contact tracing plan. Redfield told NPR that “people are looking at all the different modern technology that could be brought to bear to make contact tracing more efficient and effective.” The partnership will expand on Silicon Valley’s tenuous alignment with government agencies. Public health officials will be developing the apps; it’s unclear how long that will take. A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has already begun a similar project.

https://coronavirus.medium.com/apple-and-google-join-forces-to-track-spread-of-coronavirus-fc2c68fda0ea

['Sarah Emerson']

2020-04-11 00:44:50.896000+00:00

['Google', 'Apple', 'Coronavirus', 'Technology', 'Smartphones']

The European Commission Publishes Reports on Export Controls and Screenings of Foreign Direct Investments

On November 23, 2021, the European Commission has published a Report on the implementation of Regulation (EU) 2021/821 setting up a Union regime for the control of exports, brokering, technical assistance, transit, and transfer of dual-use items (“Report on Export Controls”), and a First Annual Report on the screening of foreign direct investments (“FDI”) into the Union (“Report on FDI Screening”) (“Reports” as together) to present key findings related to defending EU interests when it comes to export controls and foreign investments in the EU. With this Reports, the European Commission announces that 400 foreign investments have been assessed by the European Commission since the new Foreign Direct Investment screening legislation went into effect. At the same time, the European Commission reported that over 30,000 requests for the export of goods with possible military applications were evaluated by the EU member states under the EU export control framework, with 603 of these shipments being rejected. Along with Reports, European Commission stated that the FDI screening and export controls are part of the EU’s renewed trade strategy, that seeks to enforce EU rights and defend its values more assertively. In addition, other initiatives and actions under these strategies were also pointed out by European Commission. One of the initiatives and actions under these strategies is that the Single-Entry Point was established in November 2020, making it quick and easy for any EU-based stakeholder to lodge complaints about non-compliance by third countries with their international trade commitments vis-à-vis the EU. Report on Export Controls The Commission began releasing yearly export control reports in 2013, as required by EU Regulation (EC) No 428/2009, which was repealed by EU Regulation (EU) 2021/8211 (“the New Regulation”) on September 9, 2021. The Report on Export Controls offers information on the execution of EU rules governing dual-use item export control in 2020, as well as aggregated export control statistics for 2019. In addition, because export control and FDI screening are both tools for strategic trade and investment restrictions to guarantee EU security, this report was adopted concurrently with the Report on FDI Screening. Accordingly, it is estimated that acquiring trustworthy data on overall dual-use exports, including non-listed dual-use goods, is challenging due to the lack of a corresponding defined economic sector. However, the EU Commission and the EU member states collect data that allows for rough estimates of dual-use products exports based on, on the one hand, particular licensing data gathered by competent authorities and, on the other, statistics for customs commodities that include dual-use items. While the Report on Export Control includes estimations for 2019 export statistics, it is stated that they do not cover services or intangible technology transfers linked with the trade-in of dual-use goods. Within this framework, while it is stated that the Report on Export Controls is the last report on export controls before the entry into force of the upgraded Export Controls Regulation, it is also stated that the Report on Export Controls shows that dual-use exports account for approximately 2.3 percent of total EU exports. In 2019, 603 exports were rejected out of a total of 30.292 applications for and notifications of exports under permits, representing approximately 0.02 percent of overall exports. According to the European Commission, this would put the value of dual-use trade at EUR 119 billion in 2019. Further, the Report on Export Controls noted that the New Regulation that entered into force on September 9, 2021, and the resulting system update caused major changes in export control in the EU, revealing extensive preparation work and steps to be taken by the EU Commission and the EU member states to fully exploit the New Regulation’s potential. The Report on Export Controls includes substantial changes such as: (i) Introducing a novel “human security dimension to capture emerging dual-use technologies” — especially cyber-surveillance tools, (ii) Simplifying procedures and making the export control system more agile and able to evolve and adjust to circumstances, (iii) Developing an EU capacity-building and training program for EU member states’ licensing and enforcement authorities, and (iv) Coordinating and supporting robust enforcement of controls, (v)Setting up dialogues with third countries to enhance global security and promoting a level playing field at the global level. Report on FDI Screening Firstly, it is noted that this is the European Commission’s first annual report on the implementation of the EU Foreign Direct Investment Screening Regulation (the “FDI Screening Regulation”). It is pointed out that although the Report on FDI Screening provides transparency around the operation of FDI screening in the EU, and developments in national screening mechanisms, it also contributes to the accountability of the Union in an area where, given the security interests at stake, transparency regarding individual transactions is neither possible nor appropriate. The Report on FDI Screening highlights the following key findings: i) The Commission screened 265 transactions notified by the EU member states under the report until the end of June 2021 (now the teller is above 400), (ii) 80 percent of the transactions did not justify further investigation and were thus assessed by the Commission in just 15 days, (iii) Most notifications for screening from the EU member states concerned the manufacturing sector, ICT, wholesale, and retail, (iv)The top five countries of origin of investors among notified FDI cases were companies located in the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Canada, and the United Arab Emirates, and (v) The Commission issued an opinion in less than 3 percent out of 265 screened cases. Moreover, the Report on FDI Screening affirms that the EU remains open to international investment while preserving EU security and public order. The FDI screening collaboration mechanism is effective and does not cause needless transaction delays. According to the Report on FDI Screening, an increasing number of EU member states have implemented their screening mechanism. The European Commission anticipates that all EU member states will implement national screening mechanisms. Finally, the European Commission believes that the implementation of national screening mechanisms by all EU member states will increase the effectiveness of the screening system and provide a comprehensive EU strategy for dealing with threats to security and public order. Şafak Herdem, Esra Temur

https://medium.com/@herdemattorneysatlaw/the-european-commission-publishes-reports-on-export-controls-and-screenings-of-foreign-direct-b1a2ef14dd7a

['Herdem Attorneys At Law']

2021-11-30 08:30:02.135000+00:00

['Herdemavukatlık', 'Investments', 'Export']

How to Know Which Features You Should (and Shouldn’t) Include in Your MVP

What is an MVP? An MVP is a preliminary version of your product that you can test in the market. Releasing an MVP enables you to validate product assumptions and study your users’ reactions to your product’s features. You can use the information gained by releasing your MVP to strategically allocate further budget and align future builds around your business goals. MVP development is an iterative procedure that helps you identify the pain points of users and build the appropriate features to resolve those needs. What you can learn from an MVP Once you’ve released an MVP to users, you can answer a handful of valuable questions about your product: Value proposition: What benefits does your product deliver to users? What benefits does your product deliver to users? Consumer segments: What is the target market that your product is built to serve? What is the target market that your product is built to serve? Key channels: What is the best medium(s) for delivering your value proposition to your target market? What is the best medium(s) for delivering your value proposition to your target market? Customer relationship: How can you interact with your users and obtain valuable product feedback from them? Why do people build MVPs? An MVP offers immediate value by providing user insights, but it also helps you minimize costs. An MVP allows you to properly plan future development iterations and decide whether to change directions or continue on the present development path. You can also use the MVP to show the potential of your product and gain buy-in from stakeholders. If you’re running a startup, an MVP is usually the best way to demonstrate your product’s merit and obtain funding for development. Get to market faster With an MVP, you can test the market demand for your product. You can use feedback from users to decide whether to rework your product to meet user needs or create a new solution. If the MVP receives positive feedback, then you can move even faster along your planned course of development and launch sooner. This early market research is also critical for understanding how you stack up against competitors. An MVP includes basic versions of your product’s key differentiators so that you can determine how much further innovation is required. Save on your initial investment MVPs are cheaper to build. They enable you to adopt a minimum approach to your initial round of product development, reducing the amount of risk required to get your product out there in front of users. MVPs also set you up for iterative development, which helps you spread your costs of development across multiple releases. This can help you avoid overcomplicating your product and reduce the risk that you’ll need more advanced coding later. Start building a user base You can introduce your MVP to a small user segment and, based on their experience and reception, start reaching out to new users with similar needs. You can also use your MVP as an early opportunity to cultivate lines of communication between your product team and your users. Test your app in the wild An MVP puts your business’s central premise to the test by putting the main features of your product in the hands your target audience. This early feedback can help you strategize about how best to find product-market fit with later releases. It’s also much harder to rebuild the product after developing it fully. For instance, Instagram’s original MVP was a GPS function. But the company changed its concept based on insights and, after a hugely expensive development effort, developed its current successful photo-sharing platform. Why not build everything all at once? It’s not advisable to build all features of the product at once for the following reasons: Highly expensive upfront cost For most applications, you’d need to invest tons of capital from the start to develop all the features in one go. An MVP allows you to spread your investment over a longer time. Zero market validation before the final release Without an MVP release, you’ll be entering the market completely oblivious to the needs of your users. If the product is not well received or does not meet user needs, you’ll face a heavy loss. Potential for lengthy delays in development Developing all features at once can result in long delays in development, as your team would have to plan, develop, and test the entire functionality, as well as fix bugs and errors. An MVP is a faster, lower-risk approach In general, you have a lot to gain by build as little as possible before launching the first version, then iterating on that afterwards. You need to validate your assumptions about your product, including your target market, product design, marketing strategy, solution architecture, and monetization tactics. You can use MVP development’s “ build-measure-learn “ iterative process to invalidate or validate your assumptions with lower risk. With an iterative approach, you can make changes as needed to the product. It allows you to shape your product’s future iterations, learn what elements can help to boost ROI/sales, and effectively allocate your budget. How to prioritize features in your MVP You can prioritize your MVP features by first setting your product’s vision and strategy. Be clear why it is being created and for whom. Then, assess your competition and identify key differentiators that will set your product apart. Learn the difference between user needs and user wants. Do not try to include all customer-requested features, but focus only on the necessary ones. Classify your product’s features into “must-have,” “nice-to-have,” and “optional” categories. Then, establish key metrics that you wish to track, such as product quality, lifetime value, conversions, and ROI. Try to create hypotheses about these metrics that you can test with the MVP. How to plan your MVP before starting development The key advantage of an MVP is that it produces a faster release at a lower cost. However, you won’t realize this advantage if you don’t plan it properly. Here are some tips for planning an MVP build. Create a full list of desired features Start by creating a full list of desired functionalities. Include all the functions that can enhance your product’s utility and value to users. This should be the “dream version” of your product as you see it today — the version of your product that you envision in the market a few years from now. Identify which features are absolutely essential From the list you’ve created, select only the features that the app must have before anyone can successfully use it. These features will vary from app to app, but in general, they typically include only those functionalities required for the app to fulfill its basic purpose, authenticate users, and collect money from users. Next, identify the features that deliver the most value to your users and enable them to gain the most benefits from your app. These features can help to increase your product’s sales, so they are worth considering for an MVP build. Review your list of essentials for anything that could be excluded or saved for a later release After creating a list of the most essential features, review it for any functions that you can add later. This approach enables you to spread out your development work and costs over a longer time for increased efficiency and budget management. If you’re unsure about a specific feature’s importance, save it and review with your PM. It can sometimes be helpful to get a technical perspective on which features are really necessary for an app to work. Common features that are included in most MVPs Here are a few features that you’ll find in most MVPs: Login/Auth Your MVP should offer a secure login/authentication (sign-up and sign-in) feature so that users are able to register and use the app without difficulty. Basic content Your MVP should include basic content that helps users navigate the app and understand its features. Ability to gather data from users Most applications must collect some data about users, even if that data is limited to their interactions and selections within the app. It is possible for some types of MVPs to consist of simple interfaces without a database attached, but most will need some type of database to ensure that user data persists across sessions and pages. Data gathering can also involve collecting user feedback about their experiences using the app. This is vital to validate your product and make changes and improvements to it as needed. Interactive elements to achieve the app’s intended purpose The MVP should have interactive features that enable users to actually engage with its key functionalities. These are the essential components that make up the core in-app experience for your users. Revenue generation/checkout The MVP should also have monetization features that allow you to generate revenue from your product and begin optimizing the checkout flow for maximum conversions. Features that you can usually exclude from your MVP You might find that you have a few favorite features that you’d like to include in your MVP, but that really don’t belong there. Here are some common examples. Expensive features It’s usually a good idea to look at an MVP strictly from a cost perspective. What features will obviously take a lot of money to implement? If they aren’t key differentiators for your product or critical to it’s functioning, then they are best reserved for later releases. Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning AI/ML features are increasingly popular within apps, but they can be expensive and time-consuming to implement properly. In many cases, an MVP can imitate the effects of AI or ML with a little bit of extra planning. These features can then be fully integrated later based on user needs and feedback. Augmented or Virtual Reality AR/VR features can boost user engagement and are usually quite attractive, but they usually too costly and complicated to include in an MVP. Complex integrations Complex integrations like marketing tools, analytics, or complex third-party APIs can often be saved for later iterations. Nice-to-haves “Nice-to-haves” are features that are desirable for your product, but not strictly necessary for its functioning. It can be difficult to tell a nice-to-have from a must-have, but there are some common features that can safely be categorized as nice-to-haves: Complex designs: Attractive designs take time to create and are usually not required for a user to access the key features of your app. Attractive designs take time to create and are usually not required for a user to access the key features of your app. Social integrations: A social integration’s priority level largely depends on the complexity of your integration. Simple social logins are occasionally found in MVPs, but integrated feeds or API integrations are best reserved for later builds. A social integration’s priority level largely depends on the complexity of your integration. Simple social logins are occasionally found in MVPs, but integrated feeds or API integrations are best reserved for later builds. Highly customized user flows: Offering a personalized experience to each user is a really nice feature in an app, but it greatly increases the app’s complexity and isn’t usually crucial. Offering a personalized experience to each user is a really nice feature in an app, but it greatly increases the app’s complexity and isn’t usually crucial. Non-essential content: Non-essential content usually consists of promotional material and additional user screens that aren’t required for the app to function. Strategize for later releases of the app Once you’ve released your MVP, it’s time to start planning future releases of the app. Here are some key steps to consider. Re-prioritize everything that didn’t make it into the MVP If you planned your MVP properly, then you must have some features that you’re just dying to add to the product on your next release. This time, you should take user behavior into account when planning additional features, as the growth of your app will mostly hinge on whether successive releases improve the customer experience. Break out releases according to budget or timeline constraints Group your product’s feature releases according to timeline or budget limitations and focus on priority functionalities first. Be prepared for items in the MVP to move to later releases Even if you’ve whittled the MVP down to as few features as possible, you may still find that a few of the planned features in the MVP were only partially built or were pushed to later builds. The second release is a great time to get these finalized in the product. Of course, this means that you’ll need to push back items in later releases even further. Plan for expected tradeoffs If a particular function doesn’t ultimately fit into your specific release schedule, you can postpone it for a later launch and focus on the important features that need to be released immediately. You should be prepared to push a feature forward or move it back in the calendar depending on its urgency. Most successful apps start as MVPs Releasing a proper MVP is the best way to build your app, as it allows you to identify user needs, develop the necessary features to resolve those needs, get user feedback on the app’s functionality, and make improvements to the product based on that feedback. Building an MVP doesn’t mean that you’re sacrificing important features for basic ones. Rather, the MVP gives you the budget and flexibility to fully develop the most exciting features in later releases and ultimately ship the best possible product to users. Crowdbotics’ managed app development is the fastest way to go from zero to MVP, then from MVP to scale. Our PMs and developers are experts at planning MVP builds and helping clients prioritize new app features. Get in touch today for help planning your MVP and later builds.

https://medium.com/crowdbotics/how-to-know-which-features-you-should-and-shouldnt-include-in-your-mvp-867a625ae668

['Nakul Shah']

2020-12-01 15:44:19.814000+00:00

['MVP', 'Mobile App Development', 'Web App Development', 'Mvp Development', 'Feature List']

AMERICAN ARCANA:

FANCY LADIES: America’s early Mind Control Tactics. Arcana ar·ca·num (är-kā′nəm)n. pl. ar·ca·na (-nə) or ar·ca·nums 1. A deep secret; a mystery. 2. often arcana Specialized knowledge or details unknown to or misunderstood by the average person. FANCY LADIES “Fancy” was a codified term used in the prostitution marketplace during the existence of slavery describing a woman, of age or not, was trained for sexual activity. The method of sexual training was horrific consisting of majority of the sexual crimes that exist today. Women were tied up, whipped, and choked into submission while being sodomized and molested until found suitable for the market. This method of mental conditioning was performed on young girls as old as thirteen years of age which is considered the age at which a young woman can be sold into the prostitution marketplace or even sold into a brothel. The sexual exploitation was so intense that when a woman was considered breeding age (usually 13 years) female slaves were kept pregnant to reproduce more slaves. Female slaves were used by privileged white men such as slave owners’ businessmen and politicians, those who were more likely to afford service. Let us remember there were several presidents and political figures that had slaves under the property system and labor contracts. The psychological impact of this practice instilled a trauma passed down through generations. A slave owner had the liberty to proceed with any to the slave chambers of the respective plantations and do whatever they wanted with the women to their fulfillment carrying out violent sex acts in front of other slaves in the chamber due to a lack of privacy throughout the slave quarters. “Fancy Ladies” existed in many forms not only property slaves, but they were also house keepers, maids, cooks, laundress, and nannies under labor contracts who were sexually abused and taken advantage of at every turn. The White males involved were typically the community elite and would customarily accept the practices of prostitution getting minimal public backlash as the practice exploded. MIND CONTROL The level and degree of verbal and sexual abuse endured by these women is as intense as the “sexual abuse tactics” used by the U.S (United States) Central Intelligence Agency’s MK Ultra Mind Control program to manipulate its subject’s mental state and brain functions. The CIA MK Ultra Mind Control program is an actual operation. The way the method is performed is exactly that of the BDSM erotica just in actuality and not roleplaying, and this very well may be the origin of the sexual practice in part. BDSM is an erotic practice that consist of bondage, discipline, dominance and submission, sadomasochism, and other internal principles with resonating power within the person as used in modern sexual orientation. BDSM in actual practices is sexual slavery with the intention of the dominant party to exercise ownership over the bonded person due to the submissive position either coercing or forcing them to engage in sex. Some acts of bondage are the suspended hogtie, nipple clamp, and gags and many of the same sexual customs were practiced on white women as well. The mode of discipline set in this particular master/slave relationship, the dominant party sets rules, orders, and demands for expected behavior and the bonded woman is to remain obedient in the orders or demands of the master and if found in violation a punishment will be executed to regulate the human behavior. This punishment consists of isolation, waterboarding, verbal and physical abuse, public humiliation and or a combination of all usually involving whips and chains. The bonds being used for physical restraint forcing the female to submit. The dominance and submission were used by verbal and physical abuse to factor an inferior mental state in the eyes of the female subjects while physically restrained in bondage. The submission of women enduring these practices and “training” was used to develop an erotic lifestyle in the female subject. The BDSM training practices that were implemented in the past times of sexual slavery are the same practices used in the modern-day sex trafficking era, CIA, and the porn industry and are physically and mentally intense. Women of African descent were being placed under a mind control transitioning into sadomasochism otherwise known as “S&M.” Sadomasochism is the giving or receiving of pleasure from acts involving the receipt or infliction of pain or humiliation. The slave master or other dominant person, usually of high stature, receives sexual gratification by inflicting pain on the bonded woman by obtaining the expected behavior and erotic submission of his subject in furtherance of the goal. Women were not found to be suitable for market unless she was fully submissive and obedient. At which point the female becomes submissive is the transition of the mental condition into a masochist state of enjoyment when receiving pain, verbal and or physical abuse and sexual intercourse. The sexual sadism developed by women during these practices were unconsensual cruel acts of sexual violence and harsh servile conditions nonetheless leaving a severe case of sexual sadism disorder on many levels of verbal and physical abuse. The Sexual masochism disorder then develops in the mentality of the female as it is defined as being the condition of experiencing recurring and intense sexual arousal in response to enduring moderate or extreme pain, suffering or humiliation. Human sexuality exists socially, cognitively, emotionally, in a behavioral sense and in biology regarding human interaction, such as compassion, including the genetic reproductive chemistry also other behavior. Human interaction is not needed to carry out a dominant and submissive relationship between persons it can be conducted a few different ways, over a phone, through a messenger, email, communication device, platform, and most important by way of contract. This is much how a lot of women of African descent and others of this modern era is still undergoing the same system of sexual slavery through the conditioning of the mind. Much like then and now the most scared things to the woman are turned into a vehicle/vessel for commercial gain and sexual gratitude.

https://medium.com/@kavonford/american-arcana-1d35b851c7d5

['Kavon Ford']

2020-12-26 23:17:03.684000+00:00

['Government', 'Women', 'History', 'Mindset', 'Politics']

How will smart cities look like 10 years from now?

We all grew up having our imaginations run wild from science-fiction movies on what the future would look like. There are myriads to recall but growing up, I remember thinking that flying cars and personal assistant robots would be the future. It’s 2020, while we are still working to introduce flying cars to the neighbourhoods, we’ve managed to bring in robots to remind us to keep a safe distance — it’s not quite what we imagined but it’s close! While we have the brightest minds and entrepreneurs working on these groundbreaking inventions, predicting far into the future is hard to get right. As we discovered in recent months, all it takes is one new discovery or world event to change the course of history. So instead of predicting the future through my imagination and ideals, another way to look at it is through the lens of opportunity. Great problems and opportunities often attract the best minds to work together to solve them. My firm belief is that when the best of various fields come together to work across disciplines, amazing progress and breakthroughs happen. To answer the question about what our smart cities of tomorrow will look like, here are some of the opportunities that are worth looking at and should be making good progress in the next 10 years: 1. Better use of data Millions of data points are being collected daily and it’s continuing to expand as IoT devices proliferate our cities. The data collected will help us to understand patterns and identify behaviours that are changing as well as how they interrelate. Utilising the data sets collected would help us to make better decisions in our solutions and improve the quality of our lives. Startups that can harness the data and create meaningful innovation stand a good chance to solve or improve our traffic, energy usage, safety and social challenges. 2. Smart home and IoT security Smart connected homes are growing at an incredible pace as we continue to add on devices to make our lives at home better. Global forecasts put it that the number of smart homes would increase by 2.6 folds, up from 180m in 2020 to a mind-boggling 480m households in a short span of 5 years. With this proliferation, the importance of keeping our home safe and secure is more important than ever, unscrupulous actors would now be able to compromise the integrity of the smart home system and exploit security loopholes without the need to be physically present. Perhaps subscribing to an anti-virus service for our homes in the future is not too far-fetched an idea? 3. Sharing economy In the last 5 years, we’ve had a wave of startups working on ideas revolving around the sharing economy. The trend seemed to have tapered recently, possibly due to the amount of challenges and stakeholders involved in the sharing economy ecosystem. Uber has been one of the leaders in the sharing economy yet they too faced an incredible amount of challenges in their journey to revolutionise the mobility industry. No doubt, we have seen successful cases i.e. Airbnb but the recent COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the company’s plans and is forcing them to adapt to stay relevant to new norms. Closer to home, we have seen startups attempting to tap into the sharing economy in various industries i.e. bike sharing, last mile transportations and freelance-gigs, but we’ve yet to see much success due to various reasons. Just two years ago, we had six companies offering a total of approximately 200,000 dockless shared bicycles around Singapore, but most of them shut down by 2019. I’m sure all of us recognise that there is much efficiency to be gained from unlocking utilisation of assets through sharing, but the implementation will need to be a win-win for the idea to take off and truly be successful. While no one seems to have cracked the code of maximising the potential of the sharing economy, the recent resurgence in companies looking at bike sharing in Singapore seems to indicate that there is a huge potential in this market waiting to be tapped on. In the next ten years, we should see more startups learning from past mistakes and making a comeback to tackle the sharing economies in better and more innovative means. 4. More efficient home cooling In tropical climates, living without air-conditioning would make many of us miserable. As the planet warms and more of us continue to work from home, usage is definitely on the rise and projected to double in the next 20 years. Did you know that air-conditioning accounts for almost 40% of the total electricity consumed in Singapore homes? Providing cooling is expensive and demanding on the power grid, and district cooling is among one of the best options to improve efficiency. It works by aggregating demand among multiple buildings that combine different usage patterns. District cooling works well with solar and other renewable energy sources, which adds on to its appeal. While this is not something entirely new, there may be more focused implementations and hopefully further efficiency breakthrough within the next 10 years. 5. Last mile delivery As the demand on e-commerce and parcel delivery surge, how will this affect last mile delivery? Our current infrastructure and logistics operations are not built for future projected growth. With only 20% of all sales happening online, there is much room for e-commerce to grow. Startups will continue to figure out how to deal with this increase at scale. Is there a possibility that drones and robots may very well be the future of delivery services? 6. Sustainable living It’s undeniable that humanity has made much progress in the last 10 years, but the advances will mean nothing if we do not leave a better world for our future generations. Our cities today consume more than 60% of the world’s resources, contribute to 70% of greenhouse gas emissions and account for 70% of global waste which all leads to devastating impact on the very place that we live in. To accommodate this growth sustainably, our smart city will need to address traffic congestion, air pollutants and waste processing. Over the last 15 years, HDB has been introducing various solutions to drive sustainability efforts in our estates. We have been harvesting rainwater for non-potable uses like washing of common areas, introduced smart motion sensors that automatically adjust the luminosity of the LED lights depending on the motion detected and is currently piloting the Pneumatic Waste Conveyance System (PWCS) an automated waste collection system to solve environmental and sanitary issues associated with open refuse collection. As more of us are aware of the importance of preserving our environments and understand the importance of sustainable growth, more attention will be shined on startups working on sustainability goals and will continue to attract investments. Sustainability would without a doubt be an overarching theme that will shape the future in the next 10 years. So what do you think future estates will look like? If you visualise a very different smart city from the one we live in now, and have some great ideas worth building, join the HDB Cool Ideas Hack 2020 to ideate with the best minds, build a prototype and bring those amazing ideas to fruition.

https://medium.com/startupx/how-will-smart-cities-look-like-10-years-from-now-47f33ece6cfd

['Raymond D']

2020-09-02 08:20:48.092000+00:00

['Sustainable Impact', 'Smart Cities', 'Future', 'Hackathons', 'Startup']

Terraform And PagerDuty — Before You Try

Terraform ideas Terraform And PagerDuty — Before You Try Terraform is well known for his vast choice of providers. Among these, we can find PagerDuty integration. If you are having a lot of services, users and teams inside PagerDuty you should consider making such infrastructure managed as IaC. As you spend more and more time writing HCL code you are going to find a few things which you may tolerate or can be completely unacceptable. I do not want to say that terraform PagerDuty provider is bad. Actually, I use it and recommend it. But let’s look at what I discovered in my first attempts. No support for EventRules inside Services Taken from https://community.pagerduty.com/forum/t/automation-of-service-event-rules/1507/2 You do not have the ability to deploy EventRules inside Services with terraform. This feature is actually not supported at all in API. Why this can be important to you? In my case, I wanted to manage RuleSets, Rules inside RuleSets, and EventRules inside Services in terraform. RuleSet with rules should have only routing based on services, not alerts (only metadata from which app/component alert comes). Should ask only one question: Where alert happened? EventRules inside Services should set event behavior/status based on alert description and name: What alert happened? This setup is important if you are running many components in your cluster and each has it’s own service so you can be able to peek at PagerDuty and immediately tell what is wrong with your cluster. And because you divide rules you do not have to deal with one huge ruleset filled with hundreds of rules. Rules order randomness Rules in PagerDuty are executed one after another until they meet expected condition. Then they add additional metadata and route event to destined service. In terraform rule position is achieved currently by field position (did not expect that, did you?). Example of rule resource definitionBefore position rules were applied in order using depends_on meta-argument (back when resource was named EventRule). Lets say after one week you decide to change order. Then you have to update again every depends_on — which is troublesome and ineffective. Of course you can find some workaround and use your shiny scripting skills but that is still just workaround. So position field is like a blessing. But even in resources, you have to update numbers every time order changes. You can make such process easier using variables and index function: Now to change rules order I need to only switch strings order in a list in variables.tf . At this moment everything should go off the bat. After terraform apply: Apply complete! Resources: 0 added, 2 changed, 0 destroyed. Looks promising. And then lets run terraform plan to be sure: Plan: 0 to add, 2 to change, 0 to destroy. Did it just lie to me? Rules in which position was changed are still in previous positions. So what I do? Run apply again. And after the second run, rules changed place. But I had experienced situation a few days ago when after 7th run changes were correctly applied. The problem with such a bug is reproducibility. I tried many times never achieving expected behaviour. Then after a few days on workshop with team bug suddenly occurred. Moreover, when tried to deploy all rules at once into empty ruleset, terraform could not set them in the correct order. For me, it is quite a sore in the eye to set up rules in terraform. I am also always thinking about the worst-case scenario when someone would apply changes and forget to check if an order is correct. You can design some pipeline to apply changes until an order is correct but that may not work — once I had to manually move rules in PagerDuty GUI after 10th terraform run. Less manual work — but writing module can be hard As many IaC solutions this also gives us less clicking-job. One command and the whole infrastructure is up. In my PagerDuty I decided to keep such terraform repo structure: My PagerDuty terraform structure The first question you should ask is why I did not write a module to cover file redundancy. The answer is simple — writing module in PagerDuty is not worth time in my case. There are few differences in monitoring between our clusters we want to keep. Let’s say we want a module that will deploy all mentioned resources. Most of the time you still have to pass detailed information for rules and with a module, this can be tricky. I also bounced off my team unwillingness to use hard to read modules (you have to maintain them also). They prefer simplicity. Worth mentioning is main.tf where we keep provider info and terraform data sources — references to teams, users, schedules, priorities, and escalation policies. You can try now Photo by Basil Samuel Lade on Unsplash There are two small inconveniences in setting PagerDuty with terraform. Especially deploying whole PagerDuty. Also being unable to use EventRule resource makes terraform experience lacking. I do not know if they going to do something about rules order because it is not such a common problem. For now we can have hopes to get EventRules API. If you are planning on using terraform for your PagerDuty I can recommend you this solution but keep these few things in mind. Your requirements can be higher than mine and knowing the mentioned limitations can save you unnecessary frustration someday.

https://blog.devgenius.io/terraform-pagerduty-before-you-try-dd5266420fcf

['Kamil Świechowski']

2020-07-21 08:33:31.047000+00:00

['Infrastructure As Code', 'Programming', 'Monitoring', 'Terraform', 'DevOps']

Happy Birthday, Dad.. Too many times I’ve sat down at a…

My Dad would’ve turned 64 today. He would’ve been singing “When I’m 64” by The Beatles. I would’ve called him to wish him a Happy Birthday, and he would’ve said “It doesn’t get any better than this!” A famous Russ Peter line. I’d like to think he would treat himself out to some fancy seafood, but I also know he was a homebody who would’ve been perfectly content with a greasy pepperoni and green olive pizza from a local pizza joint. For dessert, maybe a hot fudge sundae but he’d give me money and say, “I’ll buy, you fly.” Too many times I’ve sat down at a computer trying to write something sufficient enough to tell people about my Dad and how wonderful he was to me, my family, and everyone around him. Writing something about him and putting it on the internet is a weird phenomenon because I don’t know what I want out of it — validation that he was real and I’m suffering is what it truly comes down to, I guess. I’ve gotten past the stress of formatting it properly and I just want to write. He often said, “The older you get, the faster the time goes.” He’s so right. His 56th birthday was his final birthday on earth, and we spent it together with my siblings at Kinnick Stadium in Iowa City watching Iowa Football. Some of my fondest childhood memories took place at Iowa sporting events, with him. I’ll never forget in 2004 we were in attendance for the Iowa/Wisconsin B1G title game. As my Dad would tell the story, “It was a dark night with a light mist on the field…” and he’d wiggle his fingers trying to symbolize how mist moves on a football field, grinning his infamous grin 😂 . He’d then burst out in laughter because I was on crutches trying to mend an EXTREMELY swollen ankle from a basketball injury, but my ankle was so frozen by the end of the game I could storm the field to celebrate the victory…without my crutches. In my junior year of high school, I tore my ACL during basketball pre-season. At the time, it felt like the worst thing that had ever happened to me and I was in a dark place, mentally. We were living in Michigan and two weeks before my surgery my Dad surprised me with two tickets to the Iowa/Michigan State football game in East Lansing. Iowa was 7–0 at the time, and it was my first time seeing Iowa play anywhere else except Kinnick. We were surrounded by MSU fans in our Iowa gear and I specifically remember saying, “We’re roses among thorns.” He loved sharing that. It was close all game and Iowa scored on a last second touchdown… I screamed and JUMPED so high and my Dad and I were hugging and he started laughing and said, “Courtney I don’t think I’ve seen you jump so high. Maybe you should tear your ACL more often.” My Dad was a Hawkeye through and through and in fact, there is a Hawkeye on his head stone. In 2017 I had an encounter with head coach Kirk Ferentz at the College Football Awards in Atlanta. He was standing by himself and something inside of me told me I needed to introduce myself and tell him about my Dad. I was emotional explaining what those memories meant to me and this man who didn’t even know me had TEARS in his eyes and HUGGED me. With every day and holiday and birthday and family get-together and milestone that has passed since his untimely death, I’m reminded that the only way I can physically hear my Dad’s voice is on one of the 7 voicemails I have saved on my computer and iPod. In five of those voicemails, I get to hear him say he loves me. In a time where social media and photography dominate our daily lives and for me, my job, I hate that I can count on two hands how many pictures I have with him. I drove his vehicle in the first 6 years after his passing and I refused to clean the coffee stains he left by the cup carrier. I used to write every memory or character trait I could think of in my iPhone notepad out of fear of forgetting his quirks. Come to think of it, I don’t even remember the last time I wrote down anything new. The receipt I found from his visit to Festival Foods in OshKosh has faded. I haven’t used the iPod he gave me as a gift for my ACL repair surgery in several years. The locket that has a small clip of his hair is almost completely rusted over. These are just a few of the physical reminders I have, and they’re dwindling. A physical reminder that I look at everyday, however, are the 10 collective scars on my knees where my orthopedic surgeon repaired my ACLs. As I mentioned earlier, I tore my ACL during my junior year of high school and then it happened again my freshman year of college during pre-season… almost two years to the date. The first time it happened I remember waking up in recovery, crying, and I didn’t know why. I was confused and tired, and I remember both of my parents standing beside me holding my hand. The second time it happened, it was just me and my Dad. My parents sat me down a few days after the doctor shared the official news with me to share that my Dad had been laid off from the company he devoted his entire career to. My Dad said, “I believe this happened so that I can be here for you and to help you recover from this.” He didn’t shed a single tear in front of me, but I know his heart was broken and he was stressed. He was a middle-aged man who was concerned about feeling valued or worth hiring. The day I was able to come home from the hospital after my surgery, my Dad scooped me up and we drove to the grocery store. One of my Dad’s love languages was food and making sure “we would have a good meal” and that anyone who ever came over did not leave hungry. He tried pushing me around in a wheelchair and I felt so queasy I couldn’t finish the trip. Showering was a struggle, too, and it had been days since I washed my hair. He took me to the hair salon just so I could get my hair washed. He helped me maneuver all over the house. He moved my CPM machine anywhere I wanted just so I could have a change of scenery. My leg needed to be elevated at night when I slept and I remember waking up to him standing in the doorway looking at me, and he said, “I just wanted to make sure you were comfortable and asleep.” A few months after my surgery, my Dad accepted a job in OshKosh, WI, and my Mom was going to move there with him after my freshman year was done. My Dad would drive home every couple of weeks to visit us during the winter. I’ll never forget he sat me down and gave me a white box with a pink heart necklace inside. When he gave it to me he started crying and said, “I feel so bad we’re doing this to you — leaving you. I want you to have this.” My Mom later told me my Dad was adamant about finding me the perfect necklace. That year, my team made it all the way to the NJCAA National Championship Tournament. I had to sit on the sideline for 30+ games all the way from Benton Harbor, MI to Peoria, Ill. I sent my Dad a text message, who was living in OshKosh at the time, and all it said was, “I’m sad.” He drove from OshKosh to Peoria just to support me and be there for me. I didn’t ask him to. He was the reason I loved basketball, he was the person I wanted to make proud. I tell myself it’s okay to be sad and angry and all the things a person experiences when they unexpectedly lose a loved one. My Dad always wanted me to maintain perspective because there is ALWAYS someone who has it worse than me. Our pain and experiences are relative and I try so hard to remember that there is some HORRIBLE SHIT going on in our world — I know I don’t have it that bad. I just miss him so much that sometimes my heart physically feels heavy inside of my chest and the only relief is to cry. Sometimes I’m so sad that I can’t cry and the pain builds up inside of me and it feels like a weight is anchored on my neck and on my chest. When this happens, I have a panic attack and sometimes it has gotten so bad that I have to go to the emergency room. It feels like I’m drowning and can’t breathe. This past year has been a living hell for a lot of people in a lot of ways. For me, there have been more days than not where I don’t want to be awake. I don’t want to be dead, but I want to be asleep because I won’t have to feel my heartache. My grief has manifested itself in anxiety and depression that escalates when I’m alone. The circumstances of living through a pandemic resulted in more “me time” than I would’ve preferred, and I’ve had to confront my anxiety every single day. Doing things that used to bring me joy have become increasingly difficult or bring me pain. I suffer from unexplainable fatigue and phantom pain all over my body. Looking back, my Dad was right, in a way. Maybe my ACL was torn and maybe he got laid off so we could have those few special months together. It was the last time we’d ever live together under the same roof. He passed away almost a year after. His acts of love and selflessness not just in those few months, but my whole life have forever been engrained in my heart. He was so good. He’d be the first one to say he wasn’t perfect. In fact, in a letter he wrote to my family he said, “Each of you are like me in that none of you are perfect. But it is in the best tradition of families and God’s grace, that while none of you are perfect, each of you are perfect for me and for our family.” I’m not going to get to see my Dad become gray. He won’t be there when I get married, and he won’t hold my kids. I can’t call him whenever I want to tell him about my day, and I can’t text him to tell him “I’m sad.” I won’t get to jam out to The Beatles with him, and I won’t get to watch another Iowa Hawkeye football game with him ever again. But, he loved me and my family so much and we know that because he TOLD us, every single day, and I get to wake up remembering that. When my pain and heartache becomes too much, I remember how lucky I am to have loved and been loved by someone so much that it hurts that bad. Happy Birthday, Dad. I’m doing the best I can. “Will you still need me, will you still feed me…When I’m 64.”

https://medium.com/@ctothep20/my-dad-wouldve-turned-64-today-362b297850b2

['Courtney Peter']

2020-09-15 17:54:50.681000+00:00

['Birthday', 'Dads']

40+ Ways to Make Extra Money This Month

Happy New Year everyone! Many people could use extra money from time to time. An emergency could happen, or they could want to save for a family trip. Whatever the reason is, I want people to know that there are many ways for you to make extra money. In this post, I will go over 40+ ways to make extra money this month. Server/Bartender One of the easiest ways to make some extra money is to consider becoming a server or a bartender. There are many restaurants that you can apply to. If you have a 9–5 job, you can serve or bartend once you get off or on the weekends. If you are good at it, you could make a couple of hundred bucks a night. Airbnb If you have your own place, you can rent it on Airbnb. You can list your whole home or rent out a spare room. I know a couple of people who’ve listed their properties before in the past. They say that it’s easy for the most part. If you are interested in starting with Airbnb, visit this link. Personal Trainer If you are in shape and you enjoy working out, you could become a personal trainer. As people get older, they want to take better care of themselves. As a personal trainer, you can help them with that. There are different ways for you to promote your services such as word of mouth or via social media. Swagbucks If you are looking for a place to legitimately do online surveys and small online tasks, then you should check out Swagbucks. Swagbucks is a free website that allows you to get “Swagbucks” for doing surveys, watching videos and more. The Swagbucks can then be redeemed for gift cards and PayPal cash. Related Post: My Swagbucks Review Tutor If you are a whiz at a particular subject, you could tutor people. Math and science are subjects that students struggle with. You can search online for companies that are looking for tutors, or you could start a tutoring service on your own. eBay This is one of my favorite ways to make extra money. I’ve been selling things on eBay for nine years. It is free to sign up for. You can sell almost anything on the website. There are people (including myself) making hundreds of bucks per month from selling stuff on eBay. Related Post: 10 Posts That Will Help Your eBay Business Washing Cars The next way to make money is to wash people’s cars. Everyone doesn’t like to wash their car, so you should be able to always find some clients. Check around your neighborhood or advertise your service online. Craigslist Raise your hand if you’ve heard of Craigslist. I’m sure that 95% of you raised your hands. You can sell things on Craigslist, and you can also find odd jobs. The opportunities vary depending on the city that you live in. If you are interested in selling stuff on craigslist, make sure that you stay safe. Related Post: How to Sell Something on Craigslist Safely OfferUp If you are looking for another way to sell unwanted items, you can list them on OfferUp. OfferUp is a phone app where you can sell things to different people. It’s very similar to Craigslist. The unique thing about OfferUp is that you can only list the items from the app. Computer Repair If you are good at diagnosing problems with computers, you should consider fixing them. Computers crash from time to time. They could have too much data on the hard drive, or they could get a virus. If you know how to restore the data, you could make a good amount of extra money. Mechanic I’ll be the first to say that I don’t know much about cars. When something goes wrong with it, I contact my mechanic instead of taking it to the shop. My mechanic is much cheaper than the auto shop and he gets the job done. He’s fixed several issues with my cars over the years. He’s also fixed several of my friend’s vehicles as well. If you know how to fix cars, you should seriously consider this side hustle. If you are good at it, you will always have a steady stream of customers. Lyft or Uber While I’m talking about vehicles, the next way to make extra money is to drive for Lyft or Uber. You create your own schedule. If you want to work only on the weekends, you can do just that. You also can get paid each week too. Related Post: The Life of an Uber Driver Movie Extra Have you considered acting? If you live in a city like New York, Atlanta, or Los Angeles, you should look into becoming a movie extra. They are always filming something in those cities, so there is always an opportunity to apply for work as an extra. Substitute Teacher If you work an early evening job and want to make some extra money during the day, you should consider becoming a substitute teacher. Depending on where you live, there may be a shortage of substitute teachers. That means that it will be easier for you to get on. If you have a bachelor’s degree, you can apply. Mystery Shopping Do you mind shopping and performing small tasks in stores or restaurants? If so, mystery shopping is for you. There are several companies out there for you to sign up with. With mystery shopping, you usually have to make a purchase and rate a store or the customer service. It’s pretty simple. Sell on Etsy If you make your own arts, crafts or jewelry, you can sell things on Etsy. Millions of people sell on Etsy every year. If you have good products to sell, Etsy may be the platform for you. Wedding Coordinator Do you enjoy making sure people’s weddings go as planned? Do you have an eye for setting up events? If the answer to those questions is yes, then you can consider becoming a wedding coordinator. Wedding coordinators do tasks such as helping pick out the wedding venue, going over the guest list and more. Create an Online Course If you’re an expert at something and you feel like you can teach it, you can create an online course. There are many platforms out there for you to use. I recently created my first online course on one of my side hustles. It’s titled How to Make Money In Your Spare Time With eBay. Check it out here for more details. Sell an eBook You may not want to create an online course. That’s fine. You can write an eBook instead. EBook’s can make a lot of money depending on the subject. They aren’t difficult to create. Massage Therapist The next way to make extra money this month is to provide massage therapy. If you have your massage therapist license, but have another job, you can do massage therapy on the weekends. Everyone is not able to get to the masseuse during the week, so this could be a good side hustle for you. Babysitter If you like watching kids, you can babysit. People need sitters when they go out from time to time whether it’s during a weeknight or on the weekend. Start by asking your friends and family that have kids if they need your services. Referee Do you like sports? Can you make sure that athletes follow the rules? If so, consider becoming a referee. There is at least one sport going on all year. Hypothetically speaking, you could referee football, basketball, volleyball, and baseball in a calendar year. I have a couple of friends who have refereed for a few years now. It’s some nice extra income for them. You can get paid between $35 — $50 per game. Amazon Mechanical Turk Amazon Mechanical Turk is another website where you can do online surveys. I used to do surveys on this site a few years ago. You can make an extra $20 — $30 per month if you do this 5–6 days per week. Sell T-Shirts I enjoy creating t-shirts and selling them online. If you’re creative, you should try doing it too. I use two sites to make and sell the shirts. They are Sunfrog and Teespring. Both sites are free to sign up for. At the current moment, I’ve had the most success with Teespring. Check out this post I wrote on how to sell shirts with them. Affiliate Links If you have a website or a large following on social media, you should consider posting affiliate links occasionally. With affiliate links, you promote a product or a service. If someone clicks on the link, you get a percentage of the sale. People are making a killing with affiliates. Pat Flynn and Michelle Schroeder-Gardner are two people that are doing very well. Make and Sell Coffee Mugs Selling coffee mugs can be a unique way to make extra money. If you have a funny saying or design, try putting it on a coffee mug. You can use a site like Zazzle to get started with that. Fiverr Fiverr is a website for freelancers. People can post jobs or services on there. For example, if you are good at graphic design, you could post an ad saying that you will create someone’s logo. There are several categories that you can list your service under. Check out Fiverr here. Donate Plasma You can donate plasma a couple of times per month. As long as you’re healthy, and can pass the screening process, you should consider doing this. You can make a couple hundred bucks per month. Pawn items If you have something of value, you could take it to the pawn shop. A few years ago, I pawned some jewelry because I needed some money bad. I walked out of the pawn shop with cash ten minutes later. Besides jewelry, you can also pawn things like laptops, TV’s, gaming consoles, stereos, and musical instruments. Freelance Writing If you like writing, you can make extra money from it. Writing is a skill. Not everyone can do it efficiently. Different companies need freelance writers from time to time. Some pay by the word while others pay by the article. When I first started freelancing, I got paid $30 per article. Since then, I’ve increased my rates. The key to getting freelance gigs is to pitch constantly. UPS During the holidays, UPS hires for several seasonal positions. They need additional package sorters and people to help with the drivers. Virtual Assistant As a virtual assistant, you can do tasks for different clients. You can edit documents for the client, schedule social media and more. You can do tasks wherever there is a computer and internet access. Delivery Driver This is another one of the things on the list that I’ve done. Several restaurants need help with deliveries, especially during peak times. If you live in a safe area and you don’t have a problem delivering food, then this opportunity is for you. At most restaurants, as a delivery driver, you get a paycheck and tips. You can’t beat that. Photographer People need photographers from time to time. If you have a camera and can take decent pictures, you could able to make a little money do so. You can start off doing headshots for people and expand from there. Club Promoter If you’re popular and you enjoy the nightlife, you could consider becoming a club promoter. Some clubs have a hard time getting a crowd, so they hire promoters to help them. If you can get people to come out consistently, you will have a pretty good side gig. If you think you’re up for the challenge check with some local clubs or browse the gigs section on Craigslist. Amazon Flex Amazon Flex is a program that allows drivers to deliver packages to people. If you have a reliable car and a cell phone, you can apply for the program. Check the website to make sure that the Amazon Flex program is available in your city. If it is, apply as soon as possible. Focus Groups Focus groups are another way that you can make extra money this month. There are different companies that you can sign up with to find opportunities. Sometimes you can get over $100 for an hour of your time. Start a Blog Making money with a blog isn’t easy, but if you stay with it, the growth can be exponential. You can start a blog in less than an hour. If you have a plan in place and post consistently, you get to the point where you’re making money from it. Here is a post I wrote on starting a blog with Bluehost. Bluehost is the hosting company that I use for my blog. They are currently starting their hosting at $3.95. It’s regularly $7.99. That’s a steal. Graphic Designer Can you make great looking graphics? Have you designed flyers for people before in the past? If you are a graphic designer, then you have a skill that a lot of us don’t have. Good graphic designers are hard to find. Music DJ DJ’s can make or break any party. I’ve been to some events where the DJ was great. I’ve also been to events where people booed the DJ. If you know how to rock a party, you will do very good. There is a chance that you can turn this into a full-time gig. Web Design The final way that you can make extra money this month is to do some web design work. Many people want to create a website, but they don’t know where to start. If you know to create websites, you should promote your services as soon as you get the chance. There is a huge market for web designers out there. Start marketing yourself and soon you’ll have your first client. What have you done to make extra money before?

https://medium.com/@mymoneychronicles/40-ways-to-make-extra-money-this-month-f7e427038636

['Jason Butler']

2019-02-14 15:49:01.665000+00:00

['Money Mindset', 'Extra Income', 'Cash', 'Money', 'Side Hustle']

An Introvert’s Introduction

I’ve never liked to talk about myself. Whenever someone asks me to say something about myself I have a mini identity crisis and I forget who I am. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past two years it’s this. Opening up is one of the only ways to really connect with people. So before you read anything else here’s a little about me. I’m someone who loves watching the sun rise and set every day. I’m someone who loves clouds and the rain. I’m someone who uses sarcasm too much for her own good. I have an obsession with true crime and the supernatural. I also have the weirdest memory. If you tell me something about yourself it’s extremely likely I’ll remember it forever. You might wonder what the point of all of this is. Well I write to express myself. It’s how I make sense of all my thoughts while still feeling safe. The whole point of me sharing my writing here is to help someone out there feel less alone. I know what it’s like to feel alone. So if I can help someone by just sharing how I feel, I will do it without a second thought. My goal every day is to make at least one person smile. Hopefully some of my writing resonates with you and makes you smile. If you’ve gotten this far thank you! It means a lot to me and I appreciate you. You are so special and so amazing and I hope you have a good day!

https://medium.com/@4ar/an-introverts-introduction-cf40dfbcfaf

[]

2020-12-26 07:43:14.948000+00:00

['Mental Health', 'Thoughts', 'Introduction', 'Self Reflection']