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Funding Rates: December 05–11, 2020 | In the spirit of complete transparency we continue to publish historical hourly funding data on a weekly basis. Here is the ninth set.
ETHUSD Perpetual
Dec 05–Dec 11, 2020 (time in UTC)
Dec 05–Dec 11, 2020 (time in UTC)
The funding rate is in floating point numeric format. A value at 0.00040000 implies a rate of 0.04% or 4 basis points.
The data is available in csv format in the funding-report github repository.
BTCUSD Perpetual
Dec 05–Dec 11, 2020 (time in UTC)
Dec 05–Dec 11, 2020 (time in UTC)
The data is available in csv format in the funding-report github repository. | https://blog.leverj.io/funding-rates-december-05-11-2020-a4a5f442681c | [] | 2021-01-28 14:03:56.081000+00:00 | ['Historical Data', 'English', 'Charts', 'Rate', 'Funding'] |
介紹 COMBO 代幣 | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/furucombo/%E4%BB%8B%E7%B4%B9-combo-%E4%BB%A3%E5%B9%A3-c814725d2a5a | [] | 2021-01-12 07:19:39.807000+00:00 | ['Furucombo', 'Defi', 'Furucombo Chinese', 'Token', 'Combo'] |
I Quit Drinking for 100 Days — And My Entire Life Changed | I always knew quitting drinking would shake things up, but I had no idea just how dramatically (or quickly) every aspect of my life was about to transform.
Photo Credit: Canva
From the physical to the mental and emotional, here are some of the most remarkable changes I experienced in my first 100 days without alcohol.
Full Disclosure: I was drinking a lot before I embarked on this “journey.” (Daily and heavily for almost a year straight.)
Weight Loss from Quitting Alcohol + (other vanity benefits!)
On the vanity front, I feel charmed. I look effortlessly fabulous. My skin is flawless (especially compared to the drab disaster it was three months ago), and my body looks phenomenal. There is a certain je ne sais quoi in my reflection — a reminder of the natural charm and joy I used to radiate abundantly but had long since stifled somewhere along my decade-long path of self-destruction.
For reference, I am 5’7 and weighed a bloated and puffy 145 when I quit drinking. I now weigh 131 consistently. That is a massive weight loss and evidence of how bad my drinking had gotten to warrant 14 pounds of excess fat. Yikes.
My clothes fit perfectly now. I love my reflection and even enjoy seeing candid photos of myself. This is new.
I can run with ease and endurance now that I have shed the weight of an entire (albeit extra-small) human. So yes, praise the Lord for showering me in the gift of glow and health! It is undeniable that I am getting better and better looking with each passing day, a humble brag worth sharing because it’s the type of materialistic and shallow tidbit I desperately needed to hear back when I was working up the courage to take the sober plunge.
Spoiler alert: This was probably the only huge change that didn’t require me to do any real work. (Don’t worry, I more than make up for it in other departments!)
It has been a treacherous battle, but at least I’m looking mighty fine fighting it!
Emotions and the “New Me”
Do you ever feel so out of control of your emotions that it is as if the sane and peaceful “you” is watching crazy “you” flip out? There were so many times — especially towards the end of my drinking career — where I would have these surreal out-of-body experiences that made me seriously question my sanity.
At times I wondered if maybe this was a sign that I was close to death…like maybe the spirit world was hijacking my brain or something. Come to find out, these flickering moments of “being present” were actually the few times I was truly alive.
That zen and mature “spirit” in my head was actually me. Go figure.
The moment I quit drinking, the “real me” replaced the crazy bitch living in my body, and 100 days later, I think it’s safe to say that the nut job is not coming back.
Now don’t get me wrong, I didn’t turn into the Dali Llama or anything overnight, but at least all systems are now operating on the same wave-length. I don’t act like a mental patient anymore when things don’t go my way. I allow myself to feel the sad feelings and acknowledge my disappointments, but my emotions are no longer running the show.
There isn’t this weird divide of denial and depression separating the “me” in my head from the “me” in my body. It is so refreshing.
The Weird and Unexpected Side of Quitting Drinking
Some of the earliest changes I noticed when I first got sober also happened to be some of the strangest.
Emojis
Before I quit drinking, the “frequently used Emoji” section of my iPhone was as messy as my life. The hopeless guy throwing a hissy fit was my go-to, followed by the exasperated girl slamming her palm against her forehead. The smug dude and the “dead” face were also part of my daily rotation, making me seriously question why anyone wanted even to text me at all.
Despite my bleak outlook on life, I was also a big fan of “poppin’ bottles” — or rather, pretending to pop bottles. (Apple doesn’t make a depressed woman cracking open her 10th can of Michelob Ultra.)
The point being, both me and my Emojis were hot messes. Within two weeks, all the angry/sad/throw-up men were repaced with a smattering of hearts and joy. I used to hate people who had the time and energy to select the perfect heart for their messages, but here I am.
Internet Love
From likes on Facebook to upvotes on Reddit, I am making up for years of lost time spreading internet love! I like every post like my life depends on it, going so far as to scroll back to make sure I gave credit where credit was due. I even found myself reviewing purchases on Amazon for the first time in my life. Who have I become?
No More Secrets
One of the most significant (and most surprising!) benefits of sobriety is that I no longer have secrets to hide — at least not on a day-to-day basis as I did before.
And I’m talking SECRETS. A recycling bin stuffed to the gills with glass bottles (and cans when I was feeling self-conscious.) Random empty containers in my car. Humiliating mail, weird messes, bizarre routines, suspicious behavior. This list goes on and on. I was shady AF.
100 days later, it’s hard to believe that erratic lunatic was me. (Cue my other ex-favorite emoji: 🙈)
Not having to keep a million secrets anymore is one of those weird changes that is both one of the biggest — yet also the one I’ve most taken for granted. It isn’t until I’m hit with a situation where I could have been “discovered” that I find myself momentary freezing in panic before breathing a sigh of relief once I realize that I’m not really hiding much anymore.
Take the other day, for example, when I was asked to give my boss a ride in my car with only 2 seconds’ notice. I can’t even begin to list the reasons why this would have caused “old me” to lose my shit. I would have burst into tears and caused a theatrical, elaborate scene — basically everything short of throwing myself into oncoming traffic to avoid letting him see how I “really” lived.
But now, I don’t have to worry about my boss suffocating on stale cigarette smoke and clouds of perfume — or getting smothered in half a foot of mail and gum wrappers.
The Treacherous Ascent Out of Rock Bottom
One of the overarching themes of the past 100 days has been confronting the truth. Facing “hard” things and dealing with them head-on. This shift has been one of the most challenging yet rewarding accomplishments that I’ve experienced so far.
I had shit piles up the wazoo when I finally quit drinking. Enormous scary things as well as a laundry list of minor to-dos that I had let grow into bigger issues. Everything was too much for me to handle in the end, so I didn’t.
I had a closet full of mail that I had stopped opening altogether about six months prior to quitting drinking. Mail had become the primary source for my bad news, and I wasn’t having any of it.
Side note: You’re probably sick of hearing about all of my ridiculous mail problems, so I’ll make this last one quick — I also had to make amends with the USPS this past month. (Yes, me and the post office had beef.)
As you and see, my net of problems was cast far and wide, and even my poor postman wasn’t safe from the consequences of my shitty actions.
I wasn’t even hanging by a thread in the end. I was long gone.
Taking Care of Business!
Fast-forward 100 days, and I’m making great progress working through this backlog of crap I had been too anxious or too inebriated to handle until now. And when I say backlog, this is no exaggeration. I had pressing financial issues and life negligences for days, papers, bills, and mail scattered (and hidden) in every nook and cranny of my house. I truly had not the slightest clue what was going on in my own life.
Three months into this, and I’m proud to report that I have finally tackled the bulk of the beast. Dozens of daunting phone calls, tons of bills, and a slew of other urgent random issues that only someone who has mentally checked out of life for the better part of a year would understand.
I’m turning into a person who “does hard things.” When I get a notification on my phone that a bill is due, I pay it. This is a novel and new behavior. In the past, I would have been too scared even to look.
Ok, I may be using the term “hard things” a bit loosely, but you’ve got to cut me some slack here. 3 months ago, I was too fragile to even LOOK at my electricity bill, let alone pay the damn thing. So as trivial and mundane as a phone payment may seem now, I was in such a dark place a few months ago that these baby steps are actually pretty enormous wins.
Onwards and Upwards
I can safely say that the worst is finally behind me. With each passing day, I feel more and more grateful for this opportunity to be an active participant in my own life.
On the first day of this journey, I was in deep shit. So the fact that I can look back now and see just how far I’ve come over the past three months is what gives me the straight and courage to carry on.
And for the first time in a long time, I am so freaking proud of myself. | https://medium.com/@untangledblonde/i-quit-drinking-for-100-days-and-my-entire-life-changed-87df047b2d17 | ['Untangled Blonde'] | 2020-12-26 05:30:57.769000+00:00 | ['Self', 'Self Improvement', 'Addiction', 'Mental Health'] |
Weekly News Roundup #1 | Welcome to our Snowball cryptocurrency media digest. Here we will provide you with regular updates on trending news from the blockchain and crypto space.
Rundown of what happened last week:
The New York Times Is Planning to Experiment With Blockchain Publishing: The New York Times, the second-largest newspaper in the U.S. by circulation and a storied institution in American journalism, is getting ready to experiment with blockchain technology for publishing. Read more.
Nasdaq Licenses Tech to a ‘One-Stop-Shop’ for Crypto Trading and Mining: Bcause LLC, a self-described “full-stack cryptocurrency ecosystem,” plans to use Nasdaq technology to operate its markets. The company announced it would be using Nasdaq’s matching engine, clearing and market surveillance tools through the Nasdaq Financial Framework platform to operate a spot cryptocurrency market, to be launched within the next few months. Read more.
IBM Quietly Enters Crypto Custody Market With Tech Designed for Banks: IBM is coming to the crypto custody space. Later this month, Shuttle Holdings, a New York investment firm, will launch the beta version of a custody solution for digital assets built on IBM’s private cloud and encryption technologies. Read more.
Fidelity’s Digital Asset Platform Goes Live With Select Clients: Fidelity Digital Assets, the digital currency wing of United States financial services giant Fidelity, is now live with a select group of clients. In a tweet, the firm wrote: “We are live with a select group of eligible clients and will continue rolling out slowly. Our solutions are focused on the needs of hedge funds, family offices, pensions, endowments, other institutional investors.” Read more.
Tweet of the week:
This week one of our favorite tweets comes from Brendan Blumer with a bold prediction for future of Bitcoin, we will definitely save this tweet to see how accurate Brendan is:
Join our Snowballin’ community: | https://medium.com/snowball-money/weekly-news-roundup-1-4424e978baf9 | ['Parul Gujral'] | 2019-03-19 18:25:10.519000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin News', 'Blockchain News', 'Crypto', 'Blockchain', 'Cryptocurrency News'] |
Wolves’ Tattered Clothing | Wolves’ Tattered Clothing
A Poem
Picture by Factory 43
Dozens of lies all dressed up in suits
Some will distract while others will shoot
And thousands of husks abandoned by life
Are planning the union of body and knife
Dozens of lies all dressed up in suits
Saying, ‘Look at my fabric, I’m made of the truth’,
But the wolf’s tattered clothing is worn by the sheep
So keep one eye open, they’ll come in your sleep
Pulling the wool down over my eyes
Doesn’t pull from the fact I see through your disguise
And drawing your gun will cause no alarm
As I’m drawing a picture of stillness and calm
The Lost demand justice, they want their revenge
And the shepherd that lead them is digging a trench
Is digging a hole in which he can climb
To out-sleep the guilt and the shame of his crimes
And if he wakes up, he may long have been dead
And wonder why bullets are lodged in his head
Will wonder how time does the body decay
Will question the reasons for running away
For no one is left to hear his retort
No one left here to bribe and no one to extort
Only the roaches out here have survived
In wolves’ tattered clothing, on high, they preside | https://medium.com/literally-literary/wolves-tattered-clothing-bf8fdd640050 | [] | 2020-03-01 01:38:16.391000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Creative Writing', 'Poem', 'Lyrics'] |
This is How Language Shapes the Japanese Culture | “Yes she’s interesting, but how can I say she’s charismatic, or intriguing?” I ask my Japanese teacher, trying to be more specific.
“There’s just one word,” my teacher answers, “Omoushiroi means all those adjectives.”
I couldn’t fathom how one word in Japanese could mean interesting and a hundred other generally related adjectives — until I started living in Tokyo a few months later and discovered:
There is magic in Japanese words.
We can be ridiculously precise in English. So it’s annoying when someone describes a movie as “interesting” or a restaurant as “good.” How useless, what the heck does that mean?
But you must realize that in Japanese, that one word — which has a bazillion English translations — has a deep, robust meaning that while vague, also fills you with an expansive definition that can’t be put into words.
Not only do these 7 words have robust meanings with many translation options, but they’re also so core to the way Japanese people speak that hopefully, they give a glimpse into how people think in this magical place of Japan.
#1. Shouganai (しょうがない): Accepting your fate
“My manager made me plan our team outing,” my coworker sighs, “ I’m really busy with work, but, Shouganai.”
That’s all my coworker had to say to explain it’s out of her control. Since her manager requested her to make the plans, she’s going to just do it. No point in complaining.
Instead of stressing about something that is out of your control, it’s better to accept it and move on. I used to spend a lot more time complaining about the things happening to me.
I’m freezing in Detroit while people get to relax outside in Los Angeles.
Why must that motorcycle be so loud outside my window?
Aw man, this traffic is gonna make me late!
All those occurrences are completely out of my control, so why did I spend so much energy complaining? Because that was my culture. We Americans are good at voicing our opinions, letting people know when we are not satisfied, and never letting others forget that we inconvenienced ourselves.
But in Japan, a country full of natural disasters from earthquakes to typhoons and tsunamis (the latter two being Japanese words, that’s how many happen here,) this concept of Shouganai helps Japanese people deal with so many natural disasters without complaining. It’s even how they recovered so quickly from WWII; instead of focusing on their destroyed towns, they accepted what happened and got busy rebuilding.
Shouganai does allow people to ignore some massive issues, like global climate change which seems too extreme for one person to do anything about it. But, honestly, that mentality is probably better than stressing all the time.
#2. Genki (元気): Feeling your life force
Anytime you greet someone in Japan, you ask if they are Genki, and they’ll respond with how they’re feeling — which is usually confirming yes, they are Genki.
But this word is much more than “How are you doing?” It encompasses health, enthusiasm, and energy all in the same concept.
When a dog is super excited and jumping around — Genki.
When a speaker at a conference is giving off a ton of energy — Genki.
When your friend is happy and dancing around at the bar — Genki.
The kanji (the two characters of 元気) mean ‘origin’ and ‘spirit, and represent your “spirit force.” Compared to Americans, who believe that being healthy will give us energy, in Chinese and Japanese belief, your energy is what makes you healthy.
Your spirit force is much deeper than just the energy to get out of bed, it’s your lifeforce. When this energy is disrupted, that’s when you get illnesses. Having a positive outlook on life and keeping your energy high means you will stay healthy and live longer.
#3. Mottainai (勿体無い): Regretting your wastefulness
In casual conversation, you can say Mottainai when:
you just weren’t hungry and couldn’t finish your food.
you spent way too much money on some new shoes.
talking about single-use plastic straws.
you waste three hours of your day commuting without getting anything done.
Meaning “what a waste” or “what a shame”, it’s the philosophy that wasting anything is bad. And is full of regret.
As an island, Japan has historically had to be careful not to waste their resources. So people don’t buy a bunch of stuff they don’t need, and they take care of what they have.
Bowls repaired in the art of Kintsugi: using gold to fix the break, creating a new beautiful item instead of throwing away broken pieces (photo by author)
People don’t waste food, and most food is served on small plates and usually shared across the table. My TaiChi school has branches in London and Sydney and we have annual trainings together in Tokyo. Last year, after a dinner where we ordered more than we could chew, my Tokyo teacher stayed back to apologize to the restaurant staff, feeling very embarrassed.
Modern Japan has changed a bit as people value convenience and food comes wrapped in a ton of plastic. Cheaper products sell in stores, and old food is thrown out very quickly to maintain a high-quality of freshness.
But Mottainai has become a rallying cry and a powerful tool to encourage environmentally sustainable behavior in Japan. Last year, the government had all stores start charging for plastic bags to encourage people to bring back used ones. In a complete 180, I now see the majority of people bringing their own bags, putting items into their backpacks, and feeling a bit ashamed when they have to ask for a bag.
#4. Ganbatte (頑張って): Doing your best
When friends tell me they’re off to calligraphy class, or to practice guitar, or play a soccer game, I’m excited for them and want to yell “Have fun!” But when I say that in Japanese, I get laughed at. Every time.
Similar to if you were going to do a fun hobby and I responded “Do your best.” It sounds kind of weird right? That’s what cultural norms are all about. And Japanese people find it very normal to expect themselves and everyone around them to always be doing their best.
Playing tennis with some friends? Ganbatte.
On your way to a client meeting? Ganbatte.
Going to study Japanese tonight? Ganbatte.
Cheering on your favorite baseball player? Yell Ganbatte.
No “have fun,” “good luck,” or “you’re gonna be amazing” words of encouragement. No, only do your best, don’t give up. If you’re going to do something, you should give it your all. Otherwise, why are you doing it?
Doing your best is respectable, and not giving your all is disgraceful. It’s why Japanese people work so hard to exhaustion, why everyone is very polite, why food is always beautiful and customer service expectations are extremely high.
Even leisure is driven by Ganbatte. Traditional festivals in Japan often involve carrying extremely heavy shrines on wooden logs weighing thousands of kilograms, or other crazy feats of strength and endurance. Japanese people love a challenge.
Dozens of people carrying a heavy shrine at a traditional festival in Tokyo. (photo by author)
At a festival in Kyoto, participants compete to carry a heavy block of rice patties to earn good future health. (photo by author)
#5. Yoroshiku (よろしく): Humbly requesting others to be kind
I struggled to understand the depth of this word because it has a million meanings in English. In Japanese, all these examples would be Yoroshiku:
During an introduction, we’d say “nice to meet you” in English.
Meeting a new client and saying “looking forward to working with you”
Signing an email saying “best regards”
Asking someone to do a task and saying “thanks in advance” or “please take care of this”
Buried in the meaning of Yoroshiku is the strong request of “please be kind to me.”
In January, after saying the Japanese equivalent of Happy New Year! people use Yoroshiku to ask others to continue treating you kindly in the new year. You say this to every single person you know. Talk about New Year’s Resolutions.
Asking everyone you meet, your coworkers, and new clients to be kind to you immediately brings a sense of humility. That other person has a lot of control over your well-being, you acknowledge the fact and in a way ask for their mercy. Yoroshiku is at the heart of humility and respect in Japan.
#6. Otsukare (お疲れ): Thanking others for their hard work
Walking down the hallway at my new office in Tokyo, everyone kept saying Otsukare to me. A coworker explained it’s something people say to each other at work. But why?
The root word tsukare means “fatigue.” People are walking around literally telling people “You look tired!” Don’t take it as an insult that your face looks rough; instead, it’s the greatest compliment in Japan. You worked yourself to complete fatigue and exhaustion? Respect.
An easier way to understand is saying “Thank you for your hard work.” Before an activity, we all say Ganbatte to encourage hard work, after we’re done (working, rehearsing, hiking, etc) we say Otsukare. Going out with my coworkers, we say this as we clink our glasses together, implying everyone worked hard and deserves a drink.
Otsukare is the official sign-off after every activity in Japan. Reminding us daily that we should have given our activity everything we’ve got, and feel tired and depleted afterward.
#7. Itadakimasu (いただきます): Humbly accepting your food
Whether you’re at a nice restaurant about to dig into some fresh sushi, or at McDonald’s ready to dip your fries in ketchup, before people eat in Japan they always say Itadakimasu.
Coming from the verb “to receive,” people are saying “I humbly receive” the food in front of me.
Japan is a Buddhist culture and this word is rooted in the tradition of respecting all living things.
Every time people eat, they say Itadakimasu to thank all the work that went into bringing this food to their table, from the farmers who grew it and the chefs who cooked it, to the plants and animals who gave their lives.
Like a kid yelling “Grace” because his parents told him to, Itadakimasu is not religious for most people. But repeating this word everything time you eat does something to your subconscious, humbling you at a deep level at how many people and things helped you eat today.
Of course, after saying Itadakimasu and starting to eat, you better not leave any food, since something gave up its life for you to eat, wasting would be Mottainai. So Ganbatte and try to finish everything in front of you. Unless the food makes you feel not Genki and sick, then Shouganai you can’t help if the food is bad. But when the chef comes to your table with a look of disappointment, you better ask them to be kind, starting with Yoroshiku and praise their hard work with Otsukare.
Language shapes our culture. Imagine how your brain would be different if these kinds of words were part of English and your regular vocabulary.
Which word do you wish was a part of English culture? | https://medium.com/ninja-writers/this-is-how-language-shapes-the-japanese-culture-4d3b3eafee69 | ['Ariel Kern'] | 2020-11-12 19:42:41.190000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Life', 'Culture', 'Japan', 'Language'] |
Don’t flatter yourself. | Don’t flatter yourself.
Photo by Manuel Meurisse on Unsplash
What I bring you today is a bit out of my comfort zone as a blogger: it’s a piece of common knowledge, not at all groundbreaking or unpopular. Nonetheless, despite how common it is, we tend to forget it from time to time. I’m here to remind you about it.
Caroline McHugh dwells on this very same topic (while elaborating it in her own special way) during the timeless TED talk below. I think everyone should watch it at least once, so in case you haven’t, feel free.
Honestly, I could quote her entire presentation here because it marked me the first time I saw it, and I keep rewatching it on youtube. Every single word she says is relevant and important to the ultimate point she’s making about individuality. However, there is one thing mentioned in the video that ties in perfectly with the specific lesson I’m bringing you today, so here it goes:
“If you have a superiority or an inferiority complex, you need other people around. […] Interiority [on the other hand] is entirely unrelative. It’s the only place in your life where you’ll find no competition.”
Could competition be at the root of people’s unhealthy self-centeredness?
Something I see a lot, all over the internet and beyond, is self-centered commenters. It’s a ridiculous phenomenon, I find it quite entertaining: even in news articles if you scroll through the comments, you’ll see people taking things personally, as if the journalist wasn’t talking about this piece of news that concerns thousands of people, but John, the commenter, instead. It’s as if a lot of people just assumed the world spins around them, and everything they ever read or see — no matter how impersonal — was actually about them, a personal attack. Then they think “goodness… I must defend myself from this threat”.
Me, me, me.
But if you look beyond this veil of self-centeredness and “superiority complex”, beyond this need to go talk to the manager… It stems from a deep-rooted sense of competitiveness, doesn’t it? Behind every egotistic comment that takes impersonal things personally, there is a desire to “one up” to the author of whatever it is you disliked. Internet commenters hope to gain more likes and follows than the blogger who dared share a fresh new perspective with them — just like teenage troublemakers seek validation from their impressionable peers when they’re interrupting class at school. They start out with no power, and set out to look for loyal followers in order to feel more powerful than whatever authority figure they were feeling threatened by; But it’s without a cause, just for the sake of appeasing the ego.
It tends to be “type A personalities” who make a scene for attention, exactly because they see every wee thing in life like a merciless competition, and are woefully bad at just relaxing.
Photo by Lux Graves on Unsplash
Aye, there IS a personal element to this article. It wasn’t at random that I decided to write it now. I sometimes get asked why am I such a snob and won’t reply to comments on my articles, even though they aren’t too many (which implies that I definitely have the time to reply to them, I just don’t wanna). The assumption is correct: I just don’t wanna.
Perhaps if one day I receive a comment that is truly constructive and worth my time, sure, I’ll even take a break from work to go there and reply to it. I give my audience due importance (or else I wouldn’t even bother writing), and I wholeheartedly believe there are mature people among my readers who just happen to not feel like commenting — and when/if they do, I’ll totally talk to them. Nobody’s audience is entirely made up of those who engage. (I mean, there are studies that confirm what I just said). I write for those who are interested in my content; The commenters, however, don’t seem very interested in my content. Instead, what they want is to provoke me in hope that I’ll give them attention, even if it’s negative attention. Well, they’re naive. I am well past that phase in life. They should have tried that on 13-year-old Meron, not the 30-something-year-old version of me.
I’m not just talking about “hate” and bad language. Those are trolls, and a topic for another article entirely. Today I’m talking about those who aren’t trolls, but also aren’t emotionally mature enough to realise they’re projecting their own shadows onto me.
So what if I wrote something you consider ridiculous, invalid, or unthinkable? A mature person could still have these opinions, oh yes, absolutely — but you know what a mature person would do with these opinions? Keep them, then maybe tell a friend and laugh at my article with this friend in private, or maybe not even that, maybe just scroll by and go read something else. You don’t write a letter to every author of books you didn’t like, or do you? I bet you just abandon the book and move on, rather than try and find a way to “fix” it or turn it into what would be a good book in your opinion. That’s because books aren’t interactive platforms, don’t have “like” buttons for comments and won’t gather you a following of fellow haters.
So, dear hater: don’t flatter yourself. You aren’t the centre of attention. You aren’t doing a charitable thing to the wider Medium readership by pretending to debunk a point I made. Because if you were, you would actually do it, not just pretend. And no, I don’t value this kind of engagement. I couldn’t care less whether you stay or unfollow. Quality over quantity is my motto.
No, I’m not exaggerating or being petty. Just look at the comments I tend to receive if you’re in doubt . I’m for freedom of speech, I don’t delete anything. (Although, let me remind you, freedom of speech is NOT the same as entitlement to a response). They’re sometimes dressed up as “real concern” for a point I made or whatever, but ultimately boil down to “oh, well, Meron, what you said is invalid because I’m guessing you are this and that and [insert ad hominem here]”. That’s miles away from an actually helpful constructive criticism. It’s criticising my [perceived — again see Caroline’s video] character as a person, not just the logic behind my words, and it’s trying to invalidate my personal experiences as if I didn’t have the right to exist unless I fit into a box they are used to. These comments tend to boil down to an assumption, completely unfounded and borne out of guesswork, about which standard societal “box” I might fit into and what stereotypes apply to me, rather than just making space for me to exist in my actual individuality. It’s low-effort… So why exactly should I put time and effort into engaging with them? One-way road? I don’t think so. I’m already being quite generous by writing this article (but I’m only doing it for the convenience of linking to it in the future if I need to).
I’m not saying “I hate invalidation” (whether or not I hate it, I don’t feel like sharing — feel free to guess). What I am saying is “invalidate me to your heart’s content, I just won’t respond to it”. Because seriously, how would I even respond to it? By trying to prove you wrong? What for? I don’t need your approval. There are people who already approve of me, so why the hell would I try to please the entire world? Keep disapproving and keep upholding your opinion, you’re entitled to it — but there’s a difference between having an opinion, VS weaponising an opinion to try and boss me around. You aren’t the boss of me. Who do you think you are?
Ultimately, when you try to get a negative reaction out of someone by provoking or invalidating them out loud, you’re also showing your own need for validation.
It’s inevitable. Projection is a human habit — but so is pooping, aye? There’s a time and a place for that.
By the way: aye, go ahead. Read into the very existence of this article. Point it out to me if you will. I am human just like you, and not afraid of my own humanity. I’ve already noted and embraced it, so if you point it out to me, I won’t be seeing anything new. Will you be seeing something new, though? Am I a mirror to you? — That’s quite possible. Think about it.
Happy holidays. | https://medium.com/@meron-cruithne/dont-flatter-yourself-8d7cb6692512 | ['Meron Nic Cruithne'] | 2021-12-26 22:02:31.219000+00:00 | ['Internet Comments', 'Internet Marketing', 'Audience Engagement', 'Psychology', 'Projection'] |
The Fifth Season | Another night begins suddenly, intent on moving ahead without us. Many of us still wait for the old tide to pull us in. Dapples of light and dark migrate through subdued planes, harvesting the hidden sense of reality we seek. Our breath lies muffled under our cold masks as we wander the streets, searching for a more harmonious connection. The seams of solitude loosen, as another chapter of lost momentum challenges our sense of expectation.
Another pause returns, and we stand still, anticipating the greater pull of the night. I still sense something brewing outside our new illusions of time — something other than our minds, scattering over a wild, acoustic terrain. All semblance of order and focus dissipate under the temperature of the unknown. A series of hard and ugly lessons lie obscured beneath the passive fog of constant information. Through the clashing perspectives and unnatural chaos, it remains clear to me, that even now, all things repeat. All things real, and all things dreamed. All things lost, and all things unknown.
Another season awaits. An unfamiliar ‘fifth season’. One characterized by the story that resides outside the realm of a commercial narrative. One we can no longer choose to mentally hibernate through. One that requires us to cement a new belief in one another. These waves of fear can only subside through our own ability to pause and come together. No forces other than our own can do it for us.
It is time we all take on the shape of our better selves. The masks we wear now are the temporary shields we use to protect one another. To keep us safe. This fifth season is a mandate for the open heart. We need not wait for the shiny ball to drop before we pause and participate.
The future holds the truth, which is exactly what we should make of it. | https://medium.com/chance-encounters/the-fifth-season-8ecfc8459776 | [] | 2020-12-28 07:53:03.776000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Poetry', 'Audible Sundays', 'Photography', '2021'] |
Part 2: The Fake-news Pandemic is here to stay. Can design thinking solve this issue? | by Kasturi Thakare & Aditi Bhatt
“HMW equip urban citizens of India with access, ability, knowledge, and motivation to form informed choices with a receptive mindset?”
The question is ready and intact. But another question persists.
How do we go about it?
Well, as discussed in the previous article (Part 1), we had the stark realization of how easily we are swayed by well-worded opinions and how hoards of people have risen to mutiny and violence based on fake news or half-knowledge.
But, why do people behave this way?
What makes one believe and share something?
What creates a bias in their minds? How receptive are they to different opinions?
How do they consume news? What type of news do they actually want to consume?
What drives people to take action?
Confused, eh? (Source: Google)
Our next step is to find answers to these queries.
In Part 2 of this 4 part series we discuss -
Empathizing with People — Surveys, Interviews and social experiments Analyzing Insights Transitioning to brainstorming
Empathizing with People
One of the most crucial steps in this entire study is to understand the people on a first-hand basis by taking a leap into their mindset and thinking processes with a human-centered design approach. Our primary objective, here, is the understanding of user choices and behavior regarding the type of news they consume, their belief systems, personal biases, receptivity, and motivation.
“People ignore design that ignores people.” -Frank Chimero, Designer
We use a mixture of investigative methods and tools to form an explicit understanding of the urban citizens of India. Quantitative tools are used to extract behavioral patterns of people in terms of their news consumption and sharing habits while few qualitative methods & social experiments are employed to understand the what, how, and why in rich detail that is reflective of the actual complexities of real human situations. (Cooper, Reimann, et al, 2007)
The four methods we used are:
User Surveys Personal Interviews Newspaper Experiment WhatsApp Social Experiment
User Surveys
We conducted an online survey primarily based on gaining insights into our respondents’ news consumption preferences and patterns. We received responses from 297 participants belonging to variegated age groups. The data gathered was cleaned by removal of repetitive entries and outliers prior to data visualization and analysis. The survey generated a series of insights as follows.
News Source:
It was observed that the dependence on digital news sources is more prominent in younger age groups over the older ones. The dominant role of Social media also came into the picture with 1/3rd of the respondents preferring it as the primary news source over key news sources like newspapers & TV news channels.
2. Awareness:
Source: Author
We even tried to analyze the degree of awareness of the public regarding current affairs based on prevailing news. Well, it was pretty astounding to observe that important Indian news that directly impacts the public like, the EIA Draft notification and the National Digital Health Mission were neglected during the timeline of the Sushant Singh Rajput death case (late Indian Bollywood actor). Surprisingly, very few respondents are aware of relevant news corresponding to health, employment, and social activism in the country.
3. Reliability:
Though people perceive newspapers and TV news channels to be more reliable yet they tend to use Social media as their primary source of news. Also, the old age group finds its primary news source extremely reliable and accurate.
4. Sharing behavior:
Social media has also become a major platform to share news along with availing it due to ease in sharing and wide outreach yet many people still indulge in personal discussions to share and receive news. Currently, WhatsApp forward is a chief news and info sharing platform with the 45+ age group being the most active.
5. Fake news:
Source: Author
The degree of awareness of fake news is not so satisfactory as more than 40% of the respondents assert that they have never or rarely come across fake or conspicuous news.
6. The motivation of Action:
Source: Author
A concerning insight is that over 50% of the people do not report news which they find fake or suspicious on Social media. Additionally, this behavior encompasses an age-based relationship as the tendency to report reduces with increasing age.
In-depth interviews
After having mustered a series of observations through the online survey, we delved deeper to discern the reasons behind such user behavior and perceptions through semi-structured interviews with individuals belonging to diverse age groups.
Source: Google
Interestingly, user behavior varies significantly across different age groups in terms of receptivity, awareness, reliability, and motivation. However, Social media is a major source of information across all age groups and very few of them follow the fact-checking process before sharing news on social media. Also, a salient pattern emerges in the interviews as the receptivity in people tends to reduce with an increase in age.
18–35 years
Social media is their newspaper, memes their columns, and influencers their news anchors! However, this age group is relatively more active in recognizing fake news, especially on WhatsApp. As compared to other age groups, youngsters have a highly receptive and logical mindset. They bear the desire to stay aware and create change but do not really know how to!
35–45 years
WhatsApp and Facebook are their permanent roommates who give them minute updates! However, this age group holds little receptive attitude as compared to the following. An interesting discovery is that the female homemakers heavily rely on husband and children for the credibility of news that they come across due to self-doubt and low self-confidence.
45–60 years
The most actively updated age group, this group thinks that they could host the TV news better than the anchors! They claim to be updated about anything and everything, be it religion, social issues, or politics! Active on over 20 WhatsApp groups on average, news & information passes through this age group like a wildfire. However, they are less receptive and share news based on their own judgment and bias.
60+ years
The least receptive of all, these people do not prefer holding discussions with different-minded people and strongly feel that WhatsApp groups are good platforms for gaining and sharing news. Least informed about fake news, they strongly feel that any news is always correct and fact-checking is merely trivial.
Newspaper Experiment
So far, we developed a good understanding of “what people do and why do they do it”. Now, our very next step is to discover “what people want to do”. Curious to know what people really wish to know and further share willingly, we spent hours scrolling through countless research methods only to let out a long sigh of despair! However, a few minutes later, our brains churned out an interesting experiment!
Why not let people design their own newspaper!
Source: Google
Role Play!
Well, a bunch of subjects of all age groups was selected for this experiment wherein they were asked to play the role of an editor of a daily national with a task to design the front page of the newspaper.
We provided the subjects with a blank newspaper-like sheet along with 20 news samples. The news pieces were all similar in size to avoid bias and were composed of news headlines and associated images while dummy text took over the content. All the subjects were asked to go through the given news samples and select the ones that they would like to publish for the readers and thereafter draw boxes on the given sheet as per their preferred sizes.
Source: Author
However, these participants were guided to draw larger boxes for news that they find important and place them in the center and towards the top while less significant ones can be small or/ and positioned down. We even ensured that the folks think out loud throughout the experiment while engaging them in conversations to know their thoughts and beliefs behind selecting some news and dropping others.
Source: Author
Indeed, it turned out to be an engaging and interesting exercise that generated a series of insights.
1. A common perception of almost all the individuals was their preference for positive news! To be clearer, the participants preferred the news that talked about the COVID-19 recovery rate over the one with the death rate.
2. Another major finding was that the subjects actively separated out news such as that of Kangana Ranaut or the SSR suicide case, that was not directly relevant to their life.
3. Also, age turned out to be a significant parameter of news consumption as the younger age groups were concerned with development & social issue while the elderly group was heavily inclined towards political & religious content.
A Social Media Experiment
Very often we have noticed the elders of our family succumbing to the charms of fake forwards. Some of these seem utterly harmless, advising ayurvedic remedies for incurable diseases while some are along the lines of hate speech and outright lies. Some of these aim to panic and confuse us leading to political chaos while some simply want to curtail our freedom.
In our discussions, we came across a strikingly funny point of how people may be more likely to follow something if not doing so may unleash the wrath of god! We are sure all our Indian readers would’ve noticed the goddesses painted on tiles affixed on the dingy staircase to curb the infamous Indian habit of red-paan pichkari. Is goddess Lakshmi a bigger deterrent than the good ol’ ‘Yaha thookna mana hai’ or ‘Do not spit here’?
The telltale signs of a fake forward-
Jarring bright emojis vying to catch out attention Huge consequences of danger Fake names and numbers of apparent deputy collectors of the city who have issued the message in ‘public interest and safety’ An immediate call to actions Irrelevant or blurred media inciting anger or uproar
Source: Giphy
We know this, you know this, why do we still have a mammoth problem?
Who are the people more likely to be gullible and forward?
What can be done?
To better understand this and solidify our assumptions with data and research we decided to conduct a social experiment. We formulated a fake forward of our own and forwarded it to a couple of WhatsApp groups! (Kindly note that it was soon conveyed that the message is fake so as to avoid a wildfire spread)
Source: Author
These are some scenarios that played out-
The youth better understands the tell-tale signs of a fake forward Certain sections of the youth are also action-oriented and ask for proof concerning the same Family groups are more likely to believe irrespective of their demography and education Hugely populated WhatsApp groups with a slightly elder population are filled with an influx of messages every day as they want to share good and helpful news within their circle, and be seen as the first bearer of this news. It is also a way of staying connected with relatives and acquaintances. People may choose to believe certain news depending on who the sender is. A huge percent of fake forwards in India is around politics and religion (traditions and practices)
Source: Author
Analyzing Insights
After amassing bucketloads of insights from multiple methods of user study described above we listed all our insights many of which were age-specific. Similar insights were grouped under one umbrella and this is when patterns started emerging — multiple sentences that indicated one direction
Source: Author
3. The six categories that were now apparent were- | https://medium.com/jab-jago-tab-savera/part-2-the-fake-news-pandemic-is-here-to-stay-can-design-thinking-solve-this-issue-c04e0791a120 | ['Aditi Bhatt'] | 2020-12-16 08:14:18.325000+00:00 | ['UX Design', 'Infodemic', 'Fake News', 'Social Innovation', 'UX Research'] |
The Cathode Ray Mission: Crash and the End of History | Not exactly a subtle movie
It should be no secret that I’m embedded deeply within the David Cronenberg cult, the title of these criticism articles being a reference to Videodrome should be a dead enough giveaway. For a man whose career has honed in on all the goopy, gory, erotic multitudes of human psychology and physiology, Crash (1996) might still be his most extreme effort, which is a feat to consider. Based on J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel of the same name, Cronenberg’s Crash strips away everything that we think defines movies — plot, character, genre, etc. — to get to the heart of what he believes drives human behavior: the twin compulsions of sex and death.
This is usually the part of the essay where I would give a brief outline of what happens in the film so that I can have a foundation for future points to refer back to, but that’s wholly unnecessary in this case. Crash is not a movie with a plot or really a narrative progression of any recognizable sort, it’s an alternating series of soft-pornography and violent car crashes. Instead of defined goals motivating character behavior, and by extension plot, the prime motivating forces are sex and death and the ever-increasing proximity between the two. Crash earned a reputation of controversy upon release, even being banned outright in certain parts of the UK, and even twenty-four years on from its release it remains a genuinely shocking film, even to someone like me who is well-versed in Cronenberg’s boundary-pushing sensibilities.
One of the main reasons for this reputation is in its extremely graphic display of sexuality. Almost nothing is left to the imagination, but beyond just the extremity of what is shown is how non-normative the sexuality is. This is a movie about people with a fetish for car crashes, and the sex is treated fetishistically — cold, detached, dispassionate, impersonal. The proximity to death conjures associations with necrophilia, and while the necrophilic act doesn’t occur, there are all sorts of other deviant sexualities on display. The main characters, James (James Spader) and Catherine Ballard (Deborah Kara Unger) both have many sexual partners, and describe their polyamorous encounters to each other after a long day of fucking and sucking. Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter) and James each indulge in homosexual acts, and a homoerotic undercurrent moves through most of the film between James and Vaughan (Elias Koteas). There’s also a sexualization of physically disabled people, culminating in James having intercourse with a scar on Gabrielle’s (Rosanna Arquette) leg suffered from a car accident. To try and consider the sexualities on display in Cronenberg’s films along normative categories like heterosexual or homosexual is a gross simplification, as they move far beyond everyday categorizations and approach the deeply uncomfortable furthest boundaries of sexual conceptions, in doing so becoming a sort of referendum on human sexuality itself. What drives human sexual desires? What can be hoped to be gained? At what point do two consenting adults go too far?
The other side of the equation of Crash are the car crashes, and while less frequent than the sex scenes they are no less important, beginning with the first crash where James runs head-on into Helen’s car, launching her husband through both windshields and killing him instantly. It’s a moment that is shockingly visceral, the explosion of glass and the crumpling of metal and the crushing of bodies is so immediate and violent it’s difficult to watch. It feels glib to say that this is a movie about sex and car crashes, but besides being accurate, it’s not something that’s treated lightly. Every car crash is an incredibly traumatizing event, but the trauma is part of the attraction. If the threat of actual death wasn’t real, it wouldn’t be worth it, and scars and braces and limps become marks of virility as much as they are physical handicaps. The ending of the film shows James pushing Catherine off the highway over the embankment, after which he runs down and lies down next to her. “Are you alright?” he asks, and she, bloody and bruised, replies “I think I’m alright,” to which James responds “Maybe next time.” There are many ways to interpret this final exchange, but one of the more apparent ones is that serious injury was an intended result of the crash, that because Catherine is alright the experiment was a failure. The violence has become inextricable from the sex, and in fact is what gives it any value anymore for the characters.
Beyond just being some stylized, extreme pornography, Cronenberg’s formal approach to the material transforms the film into something much bigger in its aims, something closer to a diagnosis of a subject within a postmodern landscape. If Videodrome works to show the way that the perception of reality has been forever changed by our collective exposure to media and technology, Crash works to survey the wreckage of that exposure and understand what we do in the aftermath, in a world where reality is shifting and uncertain and where people have been reduced to mechanistic functions instead of individual subjects.
Everything in the film, from the literal opening credits on, has a feeling of sickly smoothness, untextured and glossy, all steel greys and cobalt blues. The landscape of the film is nothing but high-rise apartments and highways stretching on endlessly into the expanse. The only element that resists this quality is Vaughan, who argues that “prophecy is ragged and dirty” and occupies a cluttered home with some of his collaborators, but he succumbs to his own prophecy and passes on, nothing more than a bump in the road. This iciness extends to the sex as well. In the words of Roger Ebert, Cronenberg is “making a pornographic movie without the pornography […] He’s taking the form of a pornographic movie without the function or the content.” There’s a lot of sex on-screen, but virtually none of the eroticism there should be with it, even the foreplay is unbearably clinical and joyless. Sex becomes something performed mechanically, an act performed not for pleasure or reproduction but for the sake of itself; all of the blood-pumping excitement is displaced onto the car crashes, made clear practically everywhere in the film but especially when Helen, Gabrielle, and James are watching an old crash test videotape that freezes up as the battering ram is about to collide with the vehicle. Helen stands up, and somewhat frantically tries to get the tape to continue playing, to see the collision occur. For lack of a better term, she’s edging, and she’s anxious that she’s been interrupted before the climax of the video when the penetration of the ram into the car will occur. When the tape fixes itself, she calms down, and is visibly relieved when the crash happens and happens over again in replays.
“The car crash is a fertilizing, rather than a destructive event. A liberation of sexual energy mediating the sexuality of those who have died, with an intensity that’s impossible in any other form,” is how Vaughan describes his grand plan. What has happened to these characters is that they have been dulled down, whether they realize it or not, to the point that whatever could previously inspire an emotional response in them no longer can, and that only something of such force as a car crash and the sexual energy released from it can satiate their libido. They strive for ego death through bodily death. It’s a fatalistic and ultimately apocalyptic vision, Mad Max filtered through a Mercedes catalog. The release date of the film plays no small part in informing this feeling. On the verge of a new, uncertain millennium, Crash proposes a finality to the human vision that persisted before. Jessica Kiang quotes Ballard in her essay packaged with the Criterion edition, saying “To die in a car crash is a unique twentieth-century finale,” but more than a finale, a car crash symbolizes the extent to which humanity has been transformed by technology in the previous century, to an almost unrecognizable degree. No invention has garnered so much human dependence, has become so entwined with human self-conception, as the car, and no death of the machine coincides so neatly with the death of the operator like a car crash. Vaughan earlier describes his car crashing project as “reshaping the human body through technology” (an apt description for Cronenberg’s career project as well); he dismisses this later as being superficial and safe, and probably because it’s so easy to prove that it’s hardly worth the effort. But even so, it’s worth recognizing that these are not human subjects, that there is no such thing as a purely human subject anymore, only differing ratios of skin and steel, and that there is nothing left to do but to keep crashing into each other over and over again, hoping to spark some latent feeling that’s long since been buried. Videodrome made the promise of a new flesh supplanting the old, and Crash fulfills it. | https://medium.com/@jacobdihel/the-cathode-ray-mission-crash-and-the-end-of-history-943260632fb3 | ['Jake Dihel'] | 2020-12-17 00:18:00.179000+00:00 | ['Movies', 'Crash', 'Cars', 'Film Criticism', 'David Cronenberg'] |
Injection | ‘Resident Evil 7’ (image source: YouTube/Punish)
Video Game Culture, Violence, and Opioid Usage
A typical video game argument goes something like this, “Video games are violent — therefore — the people that play video games have an inclination towards violence.” A plethora of research can confirm as well as debate this relationship. Yet, there is another issue far more urgent that few video game researchers investigate, the popularity of video game avatar drug use.
An online search will quickly uncover topics related to violence and video games, particularly in the United States. However, another online search would not reveal national issues with violence tied to video game play in other countries. Canada, Europe and Asia have high volumes of video game players. Yet, mass-violence such as public shootings is only high in the United States. While it is true that research will suggest an escalating rate of violence in Canada, Europe and Asian countries, a link between the increase in reported cases of opioid addiction tied to age, income, gender, and leisure activities has not yet been established. The United States, however, defers in its public policy on gun ownership and access. Therefore, while Canadian, European and Asian countries may have the same high volume of video games players as the United States, only the United States incurs such high rates of mass-violence and opioid addiction. While video game research is still in its infancy, researchers in the field who cannot stomach video game violence, and end their research question there, will continue to overlook a possible connection between the impact of video game avatar drug usage on video game players, and the likelihood of opioid drug addiction due to its presence in popular video games.
In-game avatar drug use is popularize in a genre of video games known as survival horror. In survival horror video games, the video game player is subjected to psychological and emotional torment, stress and anguish as their avatar is wounded, hurt, stressed or exhausted. Often, the only option to replenish avatar health, in these games, is for the avatar to inject opioids or other drugs. Survival horror video games such as Resident Evil (1996) produced by Hiroyuki Kobayashi, and Silent Hill (1999) designed by Konami and Keiichiro Toyama are quite possibility the earliest catalysts for this trend.
Resident Evil is a popular video game series. Its main story features an underground government lab that has weaponize a bio-virus, which lead to a zombie-outbreak. Resident Evil is also one of the first games to use medicinal plants and plant-based powders. Silent Hill, another popular video game series, and undoubtedly a front-runner to Resident Evil, is set in a Lovecraftian town of monsters and machinations, and features the avatar’s use of opioids and injectable drugs to replenish health.
Other video games such as The Evil Within (2014) designed by Shinji Mikami is an action-based third-person survival horror game, and displays the avatars use of intravenous opioid injections. Although, the first installment of the video game The Evil Within (2014) did not receive a wide reception, its sequel, The Evil Within 2 (2017) produced by Shinsaku Ohara did. Prior to the release of The Evil Within 2 (2017), the seventh installment of the Resident Evil series Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (2017) by Keisuke Yamakawa was released. For the first time, since the Resident Evil video games series began in 1996, Resident Evil now featured injectable drug use.
With the recent release of video games such as State of Decay (2018) designed by Richard Foge, which features avatars taking pain-killers, and We Happy Few (2018) designed by David Sears, that displays a entire world addicted to what appears to be pain-killers called ‘Joy’; it appears that survival horror video games show no sign of suddenly disappearing or addressing the potential impact of the imagery they contain.
As the United States continues its national debate on violence, it is inevitable that video game play will be injected into that political debate. Consider, for a moment, that Canada, Europe, and Asia are all battling a drug crucible — not a mass-violence epidemic. Then ask yourself, if the real issue is one of industry or public policy. | https://medium.com/@dehrris/injection-34081b74a33c | ['D. E. Harris'] | 2020-01-17 03:04:42.062000+00:00 | ['Drugs', 'Opioids', 'Violence', 'Videogames'] |
Weeknote: Power, Self-assessment and the war on PDFs | Photo by Ria Alfana on Unsplash
Hello! I didn’t write a weeknote last week so this is a 2-week note. I think I’ve drifted into reporting what happened during the week instead of really reflecting, so I’ve decided to experiment with new formats. I’m going to be trying a mix and match from Sam Villis’s blog post about different styles of writing weeknotes till I find what works best.
For this weeknote, I’ll cover a few things that happened then talk about what I wish I could have changed, what I’m looking forward to next week and a few personal details about my week.
5 things that happened
One — Power and privilege in designing and building services
I attended a “Power and Privilege in designing and building services” course for 3 mornings and it was eye-opening. The course, run by Sonia Turcotte and Clara Greo is designed to help us understand how power and privilege play out in the way we work or the things we build and how we might do better.
As part of the course, we did some exercises to help understand our own privilege. It was called “privilege for sale” and the idea is to imagine you’ve lost all your privileges and you have a limited amount of money — what privilege will you buy? It really makes you think about the imbalance in the world, how it applies to you and others.
We also had several challenging exercises to think about how someone’s experience in life may be different if they don’t buy into several mainstream paradigms, for example, Christianity, Democracy, Capitalism etc
It was a challenging course, the type that pushes you to think about the power (ability to influence an outcome) you have as a product manager or service designer or someone in leadership and think about ways to shift that power balance and be as inclusive as possible.
Two — DDAT Self-assessment
Civil servants in the Cabinet office whose roles are part of the Digital, Data and Technology Profession Capability Framework now need to do a self-assessment twice every year. I needed to assess myself to determine if I’m working towards, working at or working above the skill level required for a senior product manager. I also had to support my self-assessment with examples, ideally using the Situation, Task, Action and Result structure.
It’s quite easy to take for granted how much time is needed to do that kind of self-assessment for 9 different skills. The assessment also has an impact on pay, so naturally, I wanted to do it right.
I started writing it and it just took longer and longer, which made me a bit anxious about all the other work I needed to do.
On the bright side, doing weeknotes and reflecting consistently made it a bit easier to remember examples and I even copied the example for one of them directly from my weeknote, word for word.
There’s still some confusion about how it affects people who have been recently promoted within the same grade so I’m not sure I even need to do the assessment but writing down evidence of how I have demonstrated some skills is always useful.
Three — The war on PDFs and signposting how to get help with accessibility
We finally updated guidance for publishing accessible documents to make it clear that documents must be published in HTML or Open Document Formats, not PDFs alone.
This has always been GOV.UK’s stance but we’ve now said that even if a PDF has to be published, for example, because it has been designed for print, then an accessible version of the document must be published alongside it, either in HTML or Open document format.
It’s hard to make PDFs accessible and even when that’s done, there’s still no guarantee that it will meet the accessibility needs of some users and their technology, for example, users that need to change colour and text size or view the information on mobile devices.
The change in guidance was received better than we anticipated and I think it was because we announced it with a clear explanation of why we made the change, a show of understanding of difficulties departments face and request for feedback on scenarios we might not have considered. This has already led to some helpful conversations.
We are hoping this change helps drive positive changes in publishing workflow where needed.
—
Our team gets contacted quite a bit on a range of accessibility issues, which can get overwhelming. A few weeks ago, we had a session with other teams in GDS that help with accessibility to understand their role, how to reach them and the programs/plans/processes they have available.
We’ve now pulled that together into a document to signpost how departments can get help, basically helping them self-serve. It highlights the guidance available, exactly what each team does, how to reach that team and get help from them. We’ve shared this with managing editors and publishers and expect that it will reduce the number of direct queries we get.
Four — An investigation into how we got here
We decided to do some investigation to understand why some parts of GOV.UK were not accessible enough. This will help check our assumptions, find out what the causes are, identify which strategies to focus on to help GOV.UK remain accessible.
In the Christmas week or next year, we’ll run a series of interviews with people from different disciplines across the program, asking some general questions about their work and accessibility.
We don’t have a researcher in the team so Craig, our Delivery manager and I are going to do this investigation. So far, we’ve documented our assumptions, drafted a question guide for the interview and got a user researcher to sense-check it. We also decided on the criteria for participants and reached out to them.
I enjoyed the entire process — usually, I commission it and a user researcher leads on all the planning and interviews while I participate more as an observer, so it’s actually nice to get into the details myself.
Five — Conversations about Content Strategy and Publishing
I’ve had lots of publishing-related conversations over the last 2 weeks.
A group of us have been thinking about how the content strategy (and GOV.UK’s future plans) might affect the work we plan to do on publishing. The content strategy work is still at a very early stage which makes this very hard to do as there are still many unknowns and questions. We’ve started by thinking about all the questions we have and how to get answers to them.
I met some people from the Government Statistical Service to talk about how some of the accessibility guidance affects publishing statistics and how we can maintain an open channel of communication so the needs of statistics publishers are considered as we make strategic improvements to publishing.
Still on Publishing, Martin, Kevin and I had a useful conversation with a team at The Guardian, who are working on a tool called Typewriter, It helps publishers easily see how their content aligns with the style guide and improve the quality of their content. It was fascinating to see how it works behind the scene and how it is iterated. This is probably the first of another series of conversations with other publishing organisations about their work. Learning and sharing.
What do you wish you could have changed?
Craig and I had a conversation about how the energy levels for the team felt a bit low recently. It’s probably a combination of reasons — Everybody on the team is quite passionate about accessibility but the nature of the work at this stage is a lot of fixing things, I guess doing that long term can feel a bit tiring. Also, one of our front end developers was moved to a different team quite suddenly and that didn’t feel good.
Another contributing factor is the darkness, oh the darkness of these winter months! I’m not sure what we’ll do yet but we have plans to think about how we might raise our energy levels next week.
I also feel like I had many agendaless meetings over the last 2 weeks. I like agendas — If there’s any chance I need to be an active participant, they help me think or prepare ahead of the meeting. when there isn’t one, I just feel a little less effective. Please add agendas to your meetings, it makes it more inclusive and I dare say more effective.
I’ve decided I’m just going to ask for the agenda before I accept meetings going forward but I shouldn’t have to.
What I’m looking forward to next week
We have 7 personas that highlight the common barriers that users with accessibility needs face. These personas can be created as chrome profiles and used to test changes (services, content, etc).
I arranged with Anika, our senior accessibility specialist to run a “Learn how to use accessibility persona profiles to test GOV.UK” session on Tuesday. I’m really looking forward to that because it’s a really good step towards enabling people and teams within GOV.UK to think about accessibility in everything they do.
I spent some more time reviewing and updating the blog post on how we made GOV.UK more accessible. Rumour has it that it’ll be published next week instead of February like we initially thought so yay!
On a personal note
I feel like I’m racing towards the end of the year and I need some time to regroup. I took 2 days off so I’ll only be working 3 days next week, which I hope helps me bring my head above water.
I also finished reading “ Digital Minimalism: Choosing a focused life in a noisy world “ by Cal Newport. I definitely recommend it if you feel the need to gain some more control over how much attention you give to new technologies or social media.
Join the attention resistance! and only use these tools to support things you deeply value without giving it any more of your attention. | https://weeknot.es/weeknote-power-self-assessment-and-the-war-on-pdfs-462b2016fd88 | ['Tobi Ogunsina'] | 2020-12-14 11:27:32.186000+00:00 | ['Self Assessment', 'Accessibility', 'Weeknotes', 'Product Management', 'Pdf'] |
My 100 Book Recommendations | My 100 Book Recommendations
1.Rich Dad Poor Dad
2.The Millionaire Fastlane
3.The Intelligent Investor
4.Tax-Free Wealth
5. The 5 am club
6.Why a Students Works For c Students
7.The Richest Man In Babylon
8.Think & Grow Rich
9.F.U. money
10.Experts Secret
11.- 80/20 sale
12.a random walk down wall street
13.against the god
14.attitude is everything
15.built to last
16.cashflow quadrant
17.Chetan bhagat three mistakes of my life
18.real estate investing for dummies
19.common sense on mutual funds
20.copywriting dan Lok
21.crushing it garyvee
22.dan Lok influence 47 forbidden
23.debt free for life
24.dotcom secrets
25.financial statement analysis
26.give & take
27.goals by Brian Tracy
28.how to be a 3% man
29.how to buy and sell in real estate for financial freedom
30.how to make money with youtube
31.how to win friend and influence people
32.how to stop worrying and start living
33.how to think like benjamin graham and invest like warren buffet
34.i will teach you to be rich
35.real estate market valuation and analysis
36.traders laboratory
37.why some entrepreneurs get rich but most don’t
38.millionaire real estate agent
39.your money or your life
40.get rich live rich die rich
41.money master the game
42.one up on wall street
43.own your own corporation
44.real estate learn to success the first time
45.rich dad prophecy
46.rich dad conspiracy of the rich
47.rich dad guide to investing
48.increase your financial IQ
49.rich kid smart kid
50.rich dad real-life success story
51.rich dad real book of real estate
52.a second chance for your money
53.15000$ PayPal money Robert Kiyosaki
54.Millionaire Real Estate Mentor_ Investing in Real Estate_ A Comprehensive and Detailed Guide to Financial Freedom for Everyone
55.one simple idea
56. Secrets of the Millionaire Mind_ Mastering the Inner Game of Wealth
57.Smart Thinking Skills
58.Stock investing for Dummies
59.stunning success
60.The $100 Startup
61.The 4 Hours a week
62.The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People
63.The Art of Company Valuation and Financial Statement Analysis
64.The Art Of Value Investing
65.The Behaviour Gap
66.The Business Of 21st Century
67.The Compound Effect
68.The Investment Answer
69.The Lean Startup
70.The Little Book Of Safe Money
71.The Mathematics Of Financial Modeling And Investment Management
72.The Millionaire Next Door
73.The Millionaire Real Estate Investor
74.The Miracle Morning
75.The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari
76.The Psychology of Investing
77.The Real Estate Fast Track_ How to Create a $5,000 to $50,000 Per Month Real Estate Cash Flow
78.The Total Money Makeover
79.The Warren Buffett Way
80.The Portable MBA In Finance And Accounting
81.The Rules Of Work
82.The Subtle Art Of Not Giving a fu*k
83.The Midas Touch
84.the power of your subconscious mind
85.The Road to Wealth by Robert G .Allen
86.The Science Of Getting Rich
87.The Side Hustle Path
88.Thinking Fast & Slow
89.Trump Strategies For Real Estate
90.The Millionaire Next Door_ The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy
91.Unfair Advantage_ The Power of Financial Education
92.Unshakeable Your Financial Freedom Playbook
93.Way of the Wolf_ Straight Line Selling
94.Why We Want You to Be Rich
95.you were born rich
96. Zero To One
97.Your Money Or Your Life_ 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence_
98.Zero to One_ Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
99.think your way to universal wealth
100.Expert Secrets_ The Underground Playbook for Finding Your Message, Building a Tribe, and Changing the World | https://medium.com/@surti.huzaifa/1-rich-dad-poor-dad-2-the-b3f4dc6297c5 | ['Huzaifa Surti'] | 2020-12-20 07:27:28.933000+00:00 | ['Books', 'Books And Authors', 'Book Review', 'Books Recommendation', 'Reading'] |
3 Tips for Managing the Lows of Work | Back when I worked in the City for 15 years, there was one common theme.
The highs were high, and the lows were low.
The lows got so bad for me that they led to inconsistency in my performance, fractured mental health and crippling drug addiction for most of my adult life.
Myself and many of my colleagues at the time sat in the same roller coaster, and I saw the ride ruin many lives. I genuinely believe that no one deserves to have to live with this level of pain and self-doubt. Your personal and professional development, for the best part, should be a challenging and enjoyable experience.
That’s why in today’s blog, I am going to be giving you my top 3 tips to managing the lows of work, that I wish I had known back in the day.
Tip 1: Reward Effort over Outcome.
Tip 2: How to think rationally.
Tip 3: How to purposefully organise the stress in your life.
✅ Review the tips
✅ Apply the simple and easy methods to your day
✅ Start becoming the go-to <insert job title> in your market
1. Reward Effort over Outcome
Why are you feeling so low?
Often it’s down to the deals you are not doing, the calls that have gone bad, the amount of energy you’ve invested into a client, only for them to pull the plug on the budget at the last moment, or maybe you find yourself once again being let down by poor leadership.
And this is just your Monday morning! By Wednesday, the emotions of all these small moments have compounded, and you’ve checked out for the week.
Self-doubt builds up, and you question whether you have the skill to become an” “operator” in your field.
The stress becomes too much, and the negative repetitive cycles continue as you don’t get the outcome you desire.
But here’s a thought.
Imagine for a moment, a colleague that you respect. Someone who’s got a creative edge you would die for, a client portfolio you would sell your best mate for and is so silky smooth on the phone that yes, they could sell ice to those Eskimos!
Now take another moment to think about how they developed the skills, client base and ability to deliver projects on time and with ease, that you wish you had.
Consider how they developed the soft skills of active listening, intuition, client management, staying calm amongst the chaos, strategic thinking, effective decision making, perspective and resilience.
Do you believe they got given these skills? Or do you think they earned them? Natural born anything rarely exists.
Like an Olympian who places a gold medal around their neck, a good <insert your job title> has to put a lot of time and effort into learning the skills required for getting the desired outcomes they seek.
You see the lows of deals falling through and clients ignoring you as a personal failure when the reality is you have to see it as part of your training and job. News flash! You will never avoid these things happening, as it’s likely that part of the reason you get paid is to deal with people and the reality is they will always throw you curveballs.
But, with every ball you drop, you need to realise you are getting better at catching the next one.
Over time you will trust your instincts earlier when a project is going south, you will get better at leading team meetings and negotiating with partners.
The research shows us that when you reframe stress as a challenge, you will score higher in your ability to deal with what’s in front of you, while not sacrificing your mental and physical health. Next time you find yourself feeling low, frustrated or stressed, stop and consider how you can reimagine it as a challenge that you need to work through to gain the skills you need to achieve long-term results.
Also, remember to reward yourself for the effort you’ve put in, no matter what the outcome is. Again, the science shows us, that doing something as simple as saying “well done” to ourselves after a hard effort, can release chemicals in our reward centre to keep us going and stay positive.
If you start focussing on the effort you put in, I assure you, the outcomes you seek will follow soon after.
2. How to think rationally
In the last tip, we talked about the positive effects of being more rational when stressed and starting to reframe how you approach challenges.
Now I can hear some of you saying that’s easier said than done Chev, but when I’m low or stressed, the last thing I am is rational!
I agree!
When I was low, I would get lost in my spirals of negative self chat, and the only way I could slow my head down was through self-medication. Now, don’t think I don’t deal with this to this day. The low days still and always will occur, I’ve just been lucky enough to replace drug-fuelled nights out, with Ben & Jerrys fuelled Netflix binges.
So tip 2 is about understanding how we avoid flipping our lid and hold on to our rational mind when things get tough. To do this, we need a quick science lesson as we explore your brain and what happens when it gets too stressed.
The Lizard Brain
The lizard, aka the Brain Stem, is in charge of our core survival instincts and reflexes, such as fight, flight or freeze & rest, heal & digestion. These are unconscious operating systems designed to keep you alive and safe.
When the needs of the lizard brain are met, we feel peaceful. When not met, we feel fear.
Fear MAKES US HIDE UNDER A ROCK or LASH OUT LIKE A COBRA at a perceived threat.
The Mouse Brain
The mouse is our limbic system and is here to help you seek out pleasure and avoid pain in the moment. The mouse lives in the present and is not concerned with the future or the past. It learns about the world you live in, and when to fight, flight or freeze based on the experiences you’ve learned.
Such as stoves are hot, and crossing the road can be dangerous.
The mouse is always trying to seek out pleasure in your current environment so it can feel satisfied. When the mouse is satisfied, we feel content. When not satisfied, we feel agitated and frustrated.
Some of the information in the mouse brain is useful; some is no longer relevant to the world we live in. These deep mazes and grooves of behaviours are patterned through life experiences, and this can be good and bad. Lots of addiction behaviour is deep-rooted here.
The Monkey Brain
If the mouse is busying itself with reacting and tunnelling its way through life, the monkey mind (aka high mind) is where we have creative and abstract capabilities. The high mind helps you empathise with others, and you can determine how a present action will impact your future.
Your ego lives here and YOUR ABILITY TO RATIONALISE SITUATIONS!
When may you need to rationalise a situation?
WHEN YOU ARE FEELING LOW AND TRYING TO OVERCOME SELF-DOUBT IN YOUR JOB.
So…let us explore how these three parts of your brain work together.
Your pre-frontal cortex is an area of the monkey mind that lives behind the forehead and is critical for self-regulation.
Now listen up as this is the critical bit. Think of the monkey keeping a firm grip on the mouse and lizard.
When emotions and sensations (aka stress) rise from the brain stem and limbic system, aka the mouse and the lizard, the pre-frontal cortex can decide what to do with these emotions and sensations based on the best response for what you know about the situation at hand.
The monkey needs to be the one running the show, not the mouse and the lizard.
The challenges you need to be aware off are the variables that can weaken the monkeys’ grip of the brain stem and limbic system (the lizard and the mouse.)
Example include a stressful morning on the phones, deals going south, a heavy night out and poor lifestyle choices such as diet, movement and sleep.
The more stressed you are, with the more variables going against you, the more you will weaken your grip and start to” “flip your lid.”
When this happens, you’re no longer operating from the high mind, instead, you are being driven by the mouse and lizard.
A flipped lid state means you are operating from a primal fight, flight or freeze state or the reward centre that looks for numbing pleasures or avoiding pain. When this happens, you are no longer empathetic, you lose your values, and you are coming from a place of survival.
NOT THE BEST PLACE TO BE RATIONAL ABOUT YOUR WORK AND NAVIGATE SELF-DOUBT!
Therefore, to ensure you can be rational about the low points and maintain access to the psychology that count when it counts, you need to double down on the lifestyle choices that help keep your lid closed such as consistent breaks, movement, nutrition and sleep.
3. Purposefully organise the stress in your life
As mentioned in tip 2, you must take care of yourself so that you can maintain access to your higher mind. The problem is your busy, and you’ve got no time to go to the gym, cook a good meal or take a lunch break.
Well, for you to be a better <insert job title,> you need to realise that time is to the metric to success, your energy and focus are.
Getting stuck in first gear from the moment you wake up and being stuck to your screen will cause you to flip your lid by lunch, and then you’re unable to focus on one singular thing as your mind jumps from task to task.
To counter this, it’s time to purposefully organise periods of stress with moments of rest during your day. Think of it as the same principle behind your interval sessions down the gym or out on a run. You put in the effort, and then you give your system a chance to recover, reset and adapt.
Without that, you would burn out pretty quick.
Break your work into time blocks, ranging from 20 to 90 min max, we all work at different rhythms, so explore the timing that works for you. Each block should be time spent on one thing, such as client calls, proposals or daily admin.
These are periods of deep focus, where there are no distractions from your inbox or social media unless that block gets reserved for that action!
Pro-tip, do the hard things earlier in the day and save the shallow tasks until the end of the day.
On the other side of these blocks, you have to give yourself 5 to 15 minutes break from all screens and inputs.
DO NOT CHECK YOUR EMAIL
DO NOT CHECK SOCIAL MEDIA
DO GET SOME FRESH AIR
DO SOME PUSH UPs
DO SOME BREATHWORK
DO READ 5 PAGES IN A BOOK
DO NOTHING
Those short blocks of recovery are your bodies opportunity to keep your lid down, so you can keep access to the self-control, strategic thinking, creativity and decision making that you need to do a good job. Respect that process and don’t stimulate the brain during these down-times.
Every 3 hours, taking a slightly longer break than you’ve been taking and ensure you go and move outside (especially at mid-day during the winter months.)
By following this tip, you will have more energy and focus for more extended periods of times.
That’s my three simple tips for managing the lows of work.
If you follow these tips you will, do more deals consistently, stand out amongst your competition and still have the energy to show up for your self-development and loved ones at the end of a hard day.
Now, here’s my challenge for you. For the next 30 days, at the end of every day, do not leave work until you’ve planned your blocks of focus for the next day, along with the activity you will follow each block with to help keep your lid closed.
For example; 50 minutes of client calls, 10 minutes of fresh air, and so on.
Make sure you shut down all distractions, and you know exactly what work you should be focussing on as you start each block.
Let me know how you get on and follow up with any thoughts or questions you may have.
Coach
“People under pressure often lack energy, time and consistency to build healthy and productive habits. My solutions help people master their wellbeing and get lasting results by implementing tools and strategies around busy days, which quickly unlocks a simpler, easier and more enjoyable life.” to medium
Learn more at chevyrough.com | https://medium.com/@thewellbeingceo/3-tips-for-managing-the-lows-of-work-a54e679dc1e5 | ['Chevy Rough'] | 2020-11-27 13:07:53.756000+00:00 | ['Work Life Balance', 'Work From Home', 'Burnout', 'Stress Management', 'Productivity'] |
The End of the University As We Know It? | Image from ft.com
As colleges and universities prepare themselves for the fall semester, everyone is holding their breath.
We are currently at the height of the pandemic with no end in sight.
What will happen when students return to campus? Should professors have to risk their lives and health in order to teach? Will online learning prove more effective than it did in the spring?
It seems likely that a train wreck is on the horizon.
This month we asked our writers to share their opinions on the current state of affairs — and on the fate of universities overall. All of our articles are written by professors and scholars who are at the forefront of these changes.
Stay tuned throughout the month of August. | https://medium.com/the-humanities-in-transition/the-end-of-the-university-as-we-know-it-f439ffd116b1 | ['Flannery Wilson'] | 2020-08-02 16:59:52.684000+00:00 | ['Pandemic', 'Higher Education', 'Student Life', 'Online Learning', 'University'] |
BlockTalks x Razor Network AMA Transcript! | Questions Asked on Twitter For Razor Network Team!
Q1. Razor Network is blockchain agnostic. Now that you have this feature, what advantages do you offer for different blockchains? How does the Consensual Reality algorithm work and how does it fit into each platform?
Ans — As we know Ethereum blockchain has been very successful in attracting developers and to start the DeFi revolution. However, the scalability challenges of ethereum are becoming clear. This shows a need for Layer 2 and other scalability solutions.
Razor network is blockchain agnostic and can be deployed to any ethereum compatible blockchain. Different blockchains have different properties regarding privacy, scalability, security, etc. This gives us freedom to use any blockchain which has suitable properties and allows us to serve applications on multiple platforms.
Q2. Recently, Razor has joined Conflux to bring its decentralized Oracle service to a new world of DeFi and Web3.0 DApps. Do you plan to become part of Polkadot through this partnership? How will conflux help you improve your Oracle?
Ans — Conflux Network is an open decentralized network built to drive the next generation of global commerce by unlocking the DApps of the future. Conflux enables the secure and interoperable flow of assets and information across protocols & applications, which forms the basis on which Web3.0 will be built.
Conflux integrates Proof of Work consensus into a novel Tree-Graph consensus mechanism that optimizes security, scalability and decentralization, without compromising on any of the parameters. Today, Conflux is the only state endorsed public, permissionless blockchain in China. Future-ready DApps built on Conflux’s platform would be able to leverage a high throughput of 3000–6000 TPS and low transaction fees.
The Web3.0 ready DApps developed on Conflux’s platform would require access to reliable and secure data feeds from the external world, as their execution would be triggered by real world events in most cases. Razor’s decentralized oracle network offers maximum game-theoretical security without compromising on speed. Strict slashing penalties are imposed on bad actors, and honest nodes are incentivized through financial rewards.
The partnership between Razor and Conflux would guarantee that not only Conflux’s blockchain platform but also the external data that is available to the smart contracts remains 100% secure. This will empower DApp developers to create a range of sophisticated smart contracts, which would drive the decentralized applications in tune with the requirements of the next generation of financial applications, digital assets, business applications, and data economies.
you can read more on our recent blog post here:
Q3. I have read about Razor Network and use Oracle Network but I have doubts about their decentralization intentions, does Razor Network have a truly decentralized Oracle Network or do they retain some centralized bases?
Ans — Decentralization is an important goal of the network. This is because centralization puts a high amount of power in a small group of entities, which makes a lot of attacks feasible and jeopardizes the trustworthiness of the protocol.
Razor network is fully decentralized and does not have centralized bottlenecks. Anyone can become a validator in Razor by staking RZR tokens. It does not require permission from us or anyone else.
We encourage decentralization in the protocol through the following ways:
A fair and wide distribution of tokens The protocol is permissionless. We, or anyone else, don’t have the power to decide who is allowed or otherwise, to participate in the network. Queries are pseudorandomly assigned to the validators, making collusion and bribing difficult Commit reveal scheme for revealing the “votes” and dispute mechanism makes it secure from bribing attacks.
Q4. I read that of someone is not satisfied with the oracle, there is a dispute mechanism available for this issue. Can you explain briefly the step by step process of this dispute and the conditions for it to happen?
Ans — An attacker can bribe the majority of the stake in a trustless way and can compromise the results of the oracle. To prevent this, Razor Network has an in-built dispute resolution mechanism.
Any result of the oracle can be disputed by paying the “Dispute bond”, which can be paid collectively. The disputers win a reward of 50% of the dispute bond if they successfully dispute a round.
If the bond is successfully paid within the dispute period, the query enters a dispute round. In the dispute round, the stakes are higher, the amount of penalty for voting incoherently is higher and the queries are answered manually by the validators. The results of the dispute round can be further disputed. The amount of participating stake, and the dispute bond amount is doubled every round. If the disputer wins the dispute, their dispute bond is refunded, else it is confiscated and rewarded to coherent validators.
Due to this mechanism, even if an attacker compromises the oracle, the result will likely be disputed by an honest actor. The attacker will have to pay double the bribe to compromise the dispute round. Even if they are successful in doing that, that round will again likely be disputed and so on. This can go on till the whole network participates in the dispute round. If that round also fails to resolve the dispute, the network forks in two networks, and the market decides the honest fork.
Q5. Partnership are plays a crucial role behind success of every project. Can you share us with the recent partnership of Razor network?Also what are the benefits that we can expect from this partnership?
Ans — We are really proud to have a lot of really great partners already and are working on collaborating with more projects. You can read more about our current partnerships below:
Matic — Matic Developers will now be able to access verified data seamlessly through Razor’s Decentralized Oracle Services. This integration will add increased utility to the ever-growing developer ecosystem on Matic and allow application developers on Matic to use Razor Oracle. You can read more here —
https://medium.com/razor-network/razor-network-partners-with-matic-network-af6521b6771f
Skale — The Razor-Scale infrastructure will provide developers with the necessary tools to build highly scalable, secure, and high-performance DApps with access to real-world data on the SKALE platform. You can read more here —
https://medium.com/razor-network/razor-network-partners-with-skale-to-provide-access-to-real-world-data-8de0450a0306
Persistence — https://medium.com/razor-network/razor-network-inks-partnership-with-persistence-9b4efaa03428
OpenDeFi — https://bit.ly/3kl2RRr
XinFin’s XDC Blockchain Network — https://bit.ly/2Hxwly8
MantraDAO — https://medium.com/razor-network/mantradao-to-integrate-razor-networks-oracle-for-secure-price-feeds-bde14b4dff14
Conflux — https://bit.ly/3m4Q06y
Sentinel Network — http://bit.ly/3mgMiXz | https://medium.com/@blocktalks/blocktalks-x-razor-network-ama-transcript-73dcbe33b7dd | ['Block Talks'] | 2021-01-21 07:37:24.949000+00:00 | ['Decentralization', 'Oracle', 'Razor Network', 'Decentralized Oracles'] |
Machine Learning in Manufacturing | Machine Learning in Manufacturing
Machine learning is the talk of the technology sector, but it’s such a broad and poorly understood concept in the popular consciousness that it can often be interpreted as something akin to magic.
source: pixabay.com
People often understand what machine learning actually means, but the truth is that its application across various disciplines actually is as sweeping as many predict.
One place where machine learning can have a major impact is in the manufacturing sector.
Let’s look at that more closely.
Building on Existing Principles
When Henry Ford introduced the assembly line, it was a revolution that changed the world of manufacturing altogether.
It could reasonably be seen as the first step in the automation of the labor process, and it’s still in use today.
And while Ford’s principles are at work in practically every manufacturing process alive today, it hasn’t remained static.
Other companies have honed and perfected the technique to keep themselves competitive.
That was the case with Toyota who, in the 1970s, found themselves falling behind General Motors in terms of efficiency. They invented what became known as the Toyota Manufacturing Technique.
While its DNA was squarely rooted in the assembly line, they took the notion of lean manufacturing a few steps further by identifying the seven most common wastes that arise in the manufacturing process and using that as a legend to streamline their process.
It became such an effective model that years later Toyota would teach the principles to GM in an exchange where General Motors would help them acclimate to the American market.
While competition drives the market, there can often be identified as the best way to accomplish tasks, and the best companies will learn from each other to develop their own processes.
Success in manufacturing is evolutionary in the purest sense, predicated on the notion that the company that creates the most efficient processes for development will prosper while those that fall behind will die.
Such appears to be the case with machine learning.
Revolutionizing Quality Control
The assembly line is built on the premise that a larger group of employees each performing repetitive tasks can achieve greater efficiency than a smaller group of employees who are multidisciplinary.
Some tasks are inherently more complicated than others. Defects were identified by Toyota as one of the critical wastes in the car manufacturing process.
Machine learning could help with this.
By understanding the underlying problems that cause defects and identifying the potential risk factor for such defects, they can dramatically reduce waste and accelerate the timelines for production.
A case study in the steel production sector further bolstered such notions.
It’s not that machine learning algorithms will replace humans, more that the roles that humans will need to fill in the process are becoming different.
By creating a tight nucleus consisting of data engineers, domain experts, and plant managers, this study demonstrated the dramatic effects that machine learning could have manufacturing safer products with fewer defects and less risk to the consumer.
Forbes discovered that machine learning could actually improve defect detection rates by a whopping 90%.
Machines have long been used to identify risks that can’t be detected by eye, like those predicated on weight or shape.
Humans are typically far better at identifying colors, cracks, shine, and other issues that could indicate a quality control issue. But the ability for machine learning to identify these visual cues has begun to exceed what humans can accomplish.
This study is perhaps the most important discovery regarding machine learning in manufacturing and one that could change the industry to a level matching the introduction of the Toyota Manufacturing Technique.
Predictively Identifying Issues
Minimizing the presence of defects can have a significant impact on minimizing the need for maintenance further down the line (or to prevent putting customers at risk), but even the best-made products are going to break down eventually.
This isn’t just the case with the products rolling off the assembly line but with the machinery that creates them in the first place.
In the past, maintaining equipment has been a time-intensive process. Equipment had to be taken off the line and carefully assessed by workers or machines to identify problems and tighten them up.
Maintenance is a necessary evil that’s worth the time because an equipment breakdown on the assembly line can cost far more.
Machine learning can reduce waste by better determining when equipment should be taken out of production for maintenance.
● If you perform maintenance on equipment too early, you’re wasting valuable resources that don’t need to be wasted.
● If you perform it too late, you could potentially see a full breakdown of the assembly line process.
Machine learning can determine the ideal time to maintain equipment, creating a safer and more efficient environment.
Machine Learning Beyond the Factory
The assembly line process and the Toyota Manufacturing Technique are all about improving efficiency in the factor or the plant, but that’s not the only part of the pipeline where efficiency can be beneficial.
The process of storing and then delivering products creates its own inefficiencies that can have every bit as much of an effect on the bottom line as problems on the assembly line can.
Fortunately, machine learning algorithms can benefit the dual needs of inventory optimization and supply chain optimization.
Storing inventory is one of the highest costs for a company that deals in manufacturing, eating up about 20–30% of the total cost involved.
Inventory is all about finding a balance between how much you need to produce: having enough that all of your customers can get their hands on what they need while reducing the need to spend costly sums storing overstocked goods.
But the amount of data that determines demand is far too sweeping for human analysts to work on.
AI can parse that information more accurately and thanks to machine learning, it can take into account more complex patterns to find the perfect balance between supply and demand.
Increasing Efficiency Throughout the Whole Supply Chain
Machine learning help manufacturers by:
● Predicting how much and what type of product they need
● Determine when they need it
● Knowing the most efficient shipping route to get products to its destination
● More accurately predicting possible complications that could slow down the supply chain
Efficiency applies not just to production but to the process of getting the products you need and getting the products you make to the consumer in the shortest amount of time.
With machine learning, the whole supply chain improves.
[1] P.Chojecki, How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing the World (2019), Towards Data Science
[2] R.Jindal, The Ultimate Guide to Car Production Lines (2018), Bunty LLC
[3] J.Sutter How Toyota Trained Gm (2019), The Innovation Enterprise Ltd
[4] Unknown, Product Quality Prediction and Optimization in Steel Manufacturing, Rapidminer
[5] L.Columbus, 10 Ways Machine Learning Is Revolutionizing Manufacturing In 2018 (2018), Forbes
[6] P. Trujillo, The Real Cost Of Carrying Inventory (2015), Wasp Barcode Technologies
[7] L. Ampil, Basics Of Data Science Product Management: The Ml Workflow (2019), Towards Data Science | https://towardsdatascience.com/machine-learning-in-manufacturing-17c95290b1f6 | ['Jen Mckenzie'] | 2019-09-05 14:42:22.323000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Manufacturing'] |
Music We Listen To, feat., The Stone Roses | Stone Roses, ca. 1989
Music We Listen To, feat., The Stone Roses
Like all articles on The New Haberdasher, this story is presented to you for free. If you like what I do, consider supporting my work with a small monetary contribution at my Patreon and thank you.
I’ve really been into the Stone Roses lately.
I wasn’t a huge fan of their music back in the late 80s and early 90s, when they were actually forerunners of the massive explosion of Britpop, which starred bands like Elastica, Oasis, Blur, Pulp etc etc — Their scene was called “Madchester.” The Stone Roses were bigger when I was getting into Public Enemy and Digital Underground. I was maybe a few years too young.
And by the time I was old enough to appreciate their debut record, self titled The Stone Roses, I was full on into grunge, ready to discover their mid-90s younger cousins from Manchester. The first time I really listened to their music was on the excellent soundtrack for the New Zealand movie “Eagle Vs. Shark”, starring Jemaine Clement and Loren Horsely. It was a really kinda cheesy rom com in the quirky vein of Napoleon Dynamite, directed by a then relatively unknown director named Taika Waititi (who went on to direct Thor: Ragnarok, write, star and direct Jojo Rabbit, and star as the murderous bounty hunter robot in The Mandalorian, among other films that you all know now.) Here’s the Trailer
Eagle vs. Shark, 2007
The end of that trailer has “This is the One” by the Stone Roses on it. (It was also in the movie.) When I was listening to the soundtrack for that movie, I thought, man this is an awesome soundtrack with a bunch of indie rock on it, but the standout track on the entire record, for me was the Stone Roses song.
This particular song is what one might call “Jangle pop” at the beginning, with a 12 string guitar bringing the listener through the first verse, as well as some pretty serious rock fanfare throughout. After it goes through a few verses, about how this guy loves this woman, it breaks out into a full on, ultra-lush production bridge into the last chorus and then into the end of the song, with cross-fades and weird warping effects which makes it sound like it has blasted off and is headed out into the echos of time. It is just a spectacular bit of pop-rock that really doesn’t sound like anything else on that soundtrack.
This is the One, by the Stone Roses
That was like 10 years ago when I first heard that song. Fast forward to the age of Spotify, and I decide, of course to check the rest of the record out. If that song itself is so incredibly awesome and well produced, I wonder what the rest of the album sounds like.
Well, needless to say, I was not at all disappointed. This is an entire album of late 80s alternative, but I think it was done late enough to not be cheesy or super heavy college rock, like REM et al was at that time. It was unapoligetic rock, it did not rely on synthesizers, and it really sounded huge! Exactly how the 90s alternative music which followed it sounded. This record could have been recorded in an amphitheater that seats 20,000 screaming fans, easily. That’s the kind of sound it has to it.
The biggest, and best track on the record was, surprisingly not the song I wrote about above, but the song which followed it. This song, called “I am the Ressurection” starts kind of like an upbeat British Invasion song. There is a lot of echo on the vocals, and a fairly stark bass and drum backing which is driving. But when the rhythm guitar kicks in at the end of the first verse, man, you know this song is going to be awesome. There’s a lot of fingering on the lead which sort of hides out in the back of the mix, but pokes its head out occasionally. The song is pretty cool, especially when it finally gets to the chorus. They have a mandolin in the bridge, and then the chorus repeats.
You think the song should be over, and it sounds like it is finishing up after all. But then… with 5 minutes left in the 8 and half minute song, it goes straight into a hard rocking, kinda funky break down… three false stops and endless pinging sounds in the back that is reminiscent of being on a submarine about to get wasted by Russian torpedoes, we break into a distortion filled, feedback bonanza that easily reminds one of the classic end to Santana’s “Black Magic Woman”, with more MDMA and less mota. It’s a huge sign off for the record. What a fantastic song!
I am the Resurrection, by the Stone Roses
There are other great songs on this record too (including the bizarre acid trip of a song called “Don’t Stop” which you are never really sure if they are singing forwards against backward music, or if the song is played backwards, and the lyrics occasionally sound like forwards words, as well as the song called “Waterfall” which you realize is more like a preview to “I am the Resurrection” stylistically, and by the way, containing the same pinging elements you hear later on the record.) The record itself is coherent, as an album should be, and the sonic aesthetic is really enjoyable. It sounds a little dated, but just because producers don’t bother to make big rock records like this anymore (the last one I heard was Veruca Salt’s Ghost Notes from 2016).
Take a listen to The Stone Roses, S/T. We loved it!
Stone Roses S/T on Spotify | https://medium.com/docstoden/music-we-listen-to-feat-the-stone-roses-a4892b28e556 | ['William P. Stodden'] | 2020-02-23 05:06:56.467000+00:00 | ['Music', 'Music We Listen To', 'Alternative', 'The Stone Roses', 'Rock'] |
Photos to look at when life is tough | Look up.
Tonight, there's a solar eclipse. Yesterday, there was a meteor shower. Who knows what fascinating things the night sky will show us tomorrow.
Without light pollution ruining the picture, more people might think about the world a bit differently. How can you not when you stare out into the endless night? | https://medium.com/chaotic-blue-marble/photos-to-look-at-when-life-doesnt-feel-good-ca2947d2fb78 | ['Bri', 'Brie'] | 2020-12-14 21:56:37.522000+00:00 | ['Bri Maloney', 'Writing Tips', 'Photo Collection', 'Nature Photography', 'Perspective'] |
Getting Closer To Your Mega Project Problem | Problem Statement
N owadays, everyone is busy in their life and want everything at home in a quick time, in addition, COVID19 plays a vital role in this scenario. There is a prominent gap in different sections but I want to cover Fruit and Vegetable’s sector.
I talked to some men and women about this issue and unfortunately, I was unable to take photos, they were quite concerned about this they said it’ll be feasible for them if they get fresh fruits and vegetables at their doorstep and definitely we’ll charge for our services.
Furthermore, we can expand our circle to hotels, marriage halls, and restaurants. Diet plans are also on the cards alongside fruit baskets for different events.
I’m quite positive about this and looking forward to work on it. | https://medium.com/@choudary-sanwal171/getting-closer-to-your-mega-project-problem-643b30cd7397 | ['Sanwal Akram'] | 2020-12-25 14:58:12.046000+00:00 | ['Amal Fellowship', 'Amal Academy', 'Megaprojects'] |
16th June 2019 | India: Democracy or Datacrazy?
In the tech world, India is many things. Provider of skilled labour. Ground zero for the battle between the American and Chinese tech ecosystems. The largest potential open digital market. Eager adopter of new technologies. But what does this mean for India itself? What does it mean for Indian democracy? As a primary target on the global tech giants, it seems natural that India would be in the frontline for the uneasy relationship between big tech and democracy.
+ John Harris in The Guardian
The Internet Giveth, And the Internet Taketh Away
In September 2018, All India Bakchod (AIB) was India’s edgiest, most sought after comedy collective, which was part funny and part weird (Remember this?). It was supposed to be the irreverent, woke voice of a new generation of urban Indians. By the end of October however, AIB was relegated to the pages of virtual history. Its meteoric rise can be attributed to the creative freedom offered by platforms like YouTube. Its fall came about in the midst of the #MeToo movement that hit India in 2018, which itself arose because of Twitter. AIB’s story, therefore, is in many ways a chronicle of the #MeToo movement in a microcosm. It is also a tale of how the internet made a new generation of cultural entrepreneurs and knocked them off their pedestal.
+ Ankur Pathak in Huffpost India
Credits: thehauterfly.com
Is the Clock Ticking for Tik Tok in India?
The pop-philosophical group Nickelback once crooned that “we all just wanna be big rockstars and live in hilltop houses driving fifteen cars”. For most people this just a dream. But in India, apps like Tik Tok have paved the way for ordinary users to become celebrities overnight. Its allure has brought over a million teens and twenty-year-olds to upload content daily on its platform. The constant attention that is needed to fuel the Tik Tok celebrity culture often results in Tik Tok stars performing irrational antics and opening up their personal lives for the entertainment of others. Maybe this doesn’t seem to be a big deal for a lot of us who are used to such a celebrity culture on platforms like Instagram (there is also something to be said about the differing socio-economic profiles of the primary users of Instagram and Tik Tok in India), but there are rather drastic consequences for the unfortunate few. This is the story of Tik Tok and its connection to two murders in New Delhi.
+ Snigdha Poonam in Hindustan Times
Credits: Gizmodo
It’s Time Facebook Faces the Facts
Over the last year or so, Facebook has come under a lot of flak for a whole host of issues. And while it does seem to be trying to respond positively to these issues, in India, Facebook’s largest market, it seems to have hit an unprecedented problem- sheer linguistic diversity. In India, the social media giant is unable to remove anti-LGBTQ+, anti-Muslim and pro-extremists opinions swiftly or effectively, and is having an especially hard time eliminating hate speech and misinformation in non-English languages. If you’re reading this and are of the opinion, “let’s give them a break, it’s a hard task to sift through so much content” then on any other day we would agree with you, but this week, civil rights activists have called FB out on their lax attitude towards solving this issue. Equality Labs (a South Asian American advocacy group) revealed that 93% of the posts it reported to Facebook that contained speech violating FB’s own rules still remain on the platform. Given the political clout of misinformation plaguing the country, it’s high time we sought a novel way to tackle this issue, in a systematic manner that takes into account the linguistic context of these posts. Although FB arguably might be trying its best to solve a rather difficult issue, there is more to be done, by them, us and the state.
+ Megha Rajagopalan in Buzzfeed News
Credits: abplive.in
No Country for Violent Videogames?
India never really had much of a mass gaming scene. Internet connection was fairly spotty until recently, and most games and platforms were priced out of the range of the average Indian. That is until the mobile revolution and the availability of cheap, fast data. Now mobile gaming is everywhere and no game is more ubiquitous than PUBG. The first-person shooter has become a pop cultural phenomenon. There are PUBG themed restaurants, PUBG parties, and campus competitions. As can be expected however there has been a significant backlash against the game, with concerns expressed regarding its effect on teenagers. Whatever such concerns however ideally no democratic country should ban a game or jail people for playing it. Unless of course, the country is India. The fascinating, weird, and scary story of the boys who were jailed for playing a game. ngl.
+ Pranav Dixit in Buzzfeed News | https://medium.com/team-digital-republic/16th-june-2019-ffb90b0528e6 | ['Digital Republic'] | 2019-06-16 07:24:29.196000+00:00 | ['Society', 'Newsletter', 'Technology News', 'Technology', 'India'] |
Questioning Hanukkah | The author’s family Menorah (1)
It’s that time of year again. The time of year when Hanukkah lights go up to compete with their Christmas neighbors, and Jewish children are comforted with eight days of presents in contrast to the one day orgy of Christmas materialism.
No, Hanukkah does not celebrate the “miracle” of the Temple lamps burning for eight days. That is just one story, probably added much later, and of dubious authenticity. Hanukkah is not really even a religious holiday. Rather, it commemorates a military victory of the Maccabean Jews.
I grew up regarding the Maccabees as noble guerrilla fighters against imperialist oppression — a sort of ancient version of the Viet Cong of my time. I would play Judas Maccabee with a plastic sword, bravely fighting the Greek oppressors. But like the Viet Cong, my romanticized version of the Maccabees was different from the reality. Studying historical sources closer to the time, including Josephus, it seems the Maccabees may be closer to our modern Taliban or Isis — fanatical and violent religious fundamentalists.
First, some context. The events of Hanukkah took place during the interregnum between the Alexander the Great and the Roman Empire, approximately 164 BCE. Alexander had been welcomed into Jerusalem, and in return, he promised tolerance and respect for the local religion. When Alexander died, his empire was split between his generals. Judea went back and forth between the Ptolemaic (based in Egypt) and Seleucid (based in Syria) divisions of Alexander’s original empire.
While Alexander and his successors were preoccupied with power and money, they could care less about religion. Throughout the Empire and its divisions, a variety of religious practices were tolerated and co-existed, as long as they paid their tribute. Even there, Alexander compromised by allowing the Jews to forego tribute on the Sabbatical Year, when the fields were left fallow. So the Hanukkah narrative I was taught, of religious oppression of the Jews by Greeks, is not the whole truth.
What was really going on was a civil war among the Jews. The public face was a dispute between the Hellenized Jews who wanted to assimilate into Greek culture, and the fundamentalist Maccabees who sought to impose their version of Judaism on everyone else. Behind the rhetoric were individuals competing for the power and wealth of the High Priesthood. The Ptolemaic and Seleucid kings intervened on one side or the other, to suit their own purposes.
The first casualty of this war we celebrate was a Jew killed by another Jew. Mattathias, aka Matityahu, one of the competing High Priests, killed a Jew who made a pagan sacrifice. This started the war which Mattathias’ son Judas Maccabee completed. Thereafter, Jew killed Jew, along with outsiders, in a dispute foreshadowing the Sunni — Shiite massacres of today.
When Judas finally marched his army into Jerusalem, he found it deserted, and the Temple defiled. What we celebrate as Hanukkah is the celebration declared by Judas after the mess was cleaned up and the Temple rededicated. [1Maccabees 52–59].
The Hasmonean Dynasty founded by Judas Maccabee was marked by strife and corruption which would make Game of Thrones appear tame. The dynasty ended as it begun, by internal strife. Brothers Aristobulus II and Hyrcanus II made competing claims to the High Priesthood, and both appealed to the Roman Republic to intervene and settle the power struggle on their behalf. Rome obliged by massacring thousands in order to take Jerusalem and annex all of Judea.
Despite my disparaging of the Maccabees and their legacy, I still observe Hanukkah. Like all the other Winter Solstice holidays, it is a time of light breaking the darkness, hope shining through despair. At the end of this year of 2020 in particular, the description of Josephus is particularly apt:
“And from that time to this we celebrate this festival, and call it Lights. I suppose the reason was because this liberty beyond our hopes appeared to us; and that thence was the name given to that festival.”
[Josephus, Jewish Antiquities § 12.7.7, ¶ 323]
After years of darkness in this country, after a disease which took hundreds of thousands from us, “liberty beyond our hopes appeared to us” and we have an opportunity to restore the light of reason. Let us kindle the Lights; let us shine those lights on the darkness of ignorance and hate. But this time, instead of tearing each other apart with strife, let us join together for our common interest.
Shalom — One Love
New Year Morning 2020 — photo by author (2)
NOTES ON PHOTOS
(1) This menorah is a family heirloom with a history. It was a wedding present from my grandparents (the anarchists on my Mother’s side) to my parents. Originally it was silver. My grandfather (the orthodox plumber on my father’s side) thought that it would last better if it was chromed. So today, it combines the diverse aspects of our family. What is most important is that it shines a light into the darkness.
(2) Another family tradition, which I started in 1975. On the first day of the year, we climb up to a local peak, to witness the sun rise on a New Year. A reminder that, whatever else we are obsessed with, the Earth still turns and the Sun still shines. | https://qcp.medium.com/questioning-hanukkah-6bac16cfb2c | ['David Sackman'] | 2020-12-13 00:52:51.020000+00:00 | ['Winter Solstice', 'Religion', 'Hanukkah', 'Judaism', 'History'] |
Christmas Hits: Who’s In It to Win It? | In order to answer this question I turned towards the Spotify charts in the US. I wrote a script in Python 3 (via Jupyter Notebook) that automatically scrapes the daily US charts via the Spotify Charts website. After scraping the charts I was left with a data-set ranging from September 1st 2017 (the oldest publicly available date) until December 10th 2020 (the day I scraped the charts). Track title — Artist — Track URI — Chart Date — Christmas song
In total there were 1,137,100 data-point left to analyze, which left me with a problem… How to visualize all these data-points so one could understand this? I decided to work in Tableau with track name in columns and chart date in rows. Working with weeks (rows) instead of days showed something that made sense, while highlighting Christmas songs with a red color (how appropriate lol). I excluded the year 2020 since it’s hard to make assumptions about a whole year with data that does not cover 365 days.
Top artists.
When looking at the exact number of chart positions from 2017–2019 we get an interesting insight. Bing Crosby is the absolute #1 Christmas artist, when looking at chart positions. Michael Bublé can be considered the runner-up while Mariah Carey completes the overall top 3. But what about the new superstars? Analyzing all artists under 35 showed us two youngsters:
Ariana Grande: #190 chart appearances between 2017 and 2019.
Justin Bieber: #119 chart appearances between 2017 and 2019.
While they aren’t there yet, they are definitely in the race for the years to follow. Ariana Grande saw a massive increase of 1000% in chart appearance while Justin Bieber’s chart appearances have increased with 38% between 2017 and 2019.
Early birds.
How interesting would it be to know which artist is the first go-to to get you in the festive mood :)?
2017: Mariah Carey — All I Want For Christmas Is You. First chart appearance in week 44 (01–11–2017), highest debuting Christmas song.
2018: Mariah Carey — All I Want For Christmas Is You. First chart appearance in week 44 (01–11–2018), highest debuting Christmas song.
2019: Mariah Carey — All I Want For Christmas Is You. First chart appearance in week 44 (01–11–2019), highest debuting Christmas song.
2020: Mariah Carey — All I Want For Christmas Is You. First chart appearance in week 44 (01–11–2020), highest debuting Christmas song. *2020 WK44 data manually extracted*
Mariah Carey remains the queen of Christmas, but the competition for the early birds is heating up…
Hottest day of Christmas.
At last it seemed interesting to see on which day of Christmas the festive mood is the highest.
All in all we can conclude that the day before Christmas is increasingly becoming more popular the recent years and boxing day seems like a bad reminder that Christmas is almost over… | https://medium.com/@sem-g-janssen/christmas-hits-whos-in-it-to-win-it-4c3daf74666c | ['Sem Janssen'] | 2020-12-18 14:37:34.140000+00:00 | ['Spotify', 'Christmas', 'Tableau', 'Music', 'Dataviz'] |
Jasper Pääkkönen Bitcoin — Review | “Bitcoin Trader Jasper Pääkkönen” Click Here To Join!
Check out my analysis to see how we compare to other auto-traders in the crypto industry.
Here’s my brief review of my Bitcoin Dealer.
I got together with Bitcoin Trader to keep it quick, and I added $250 to my account because it’s the sum recommended to maximize your earnings ultimately. Today is my sixth day using the software, and I was able to hit $11,000+, but I’m still trying to reach my $21,000 target by the end of the week.
My Honest Analysis of Bitcoin Auto Trader:
Bitcoin Dealer has a super-speed program that exchanges a large number of trades every day. The framework uses the existing business establishment and rapid AI, which gives this program a favorable position over the other systems.
This item has an unfortunate speed of just .07 percent after more than six years of automatic trade. This means you’d have a very low chance of losing your cash, like less than 1% of the probability of misfortune. Take the divider lane!
The machine signal carries out transactions with 163 exchanges in 35 countries, and the amount of trades it is getting to is disconcerting-4 million!
After looking at the association behind this signing scheme, I found that it was on favorable terms. In 2018, this Trading Application earned $723 million in benefits, which was 11 percent more than the Merchant of 2019. A beautiful return.
This year, regardless of how the market sectors are in a state of unrest, this bitcoin merchant has determined that he will start picking up $650 million in benefits amid immense misfortunes on world securities exchanges.
I’ve been wildly looking for some real technique to pick up money online from home for as long as two years. I was looking for a dream that I couldn’t get my all-day pound by working my hours and making shrewd speculations. So when I caught the breeze of the broker robot on my Facebook channel, the thought provoked my curiosity.
How does it work?
You start by opening a record to use Bitcoin Dealer. At the hour of my registration, they provided a record master to walk you through the cycle and “hold your hand” for your first projects. For the calculation to make trades, it needs assets to work with, so I just stacked the base to start with $250. In any case, writing this out of what’s to come, I’m thinking about how much better my earnings would have been if I had started higher. When I stacked the assets, Bitcoin Broker dominated and started to do business for me!
Having used Bitcoin Merchant for a couple of days, I’m very excited about the performance. Bitcoin Broker can consistently trade when the conditions are acceptable, but it is inactive as a general rule. However, I’ve found out on the off chance that you’re only keeping your PC running with the intention that it can do business at whatever point it needs to, you have the best results. So I just let it go and let it get me some cash while I’m resting!
My Score of Bitcoin Trader: 4.75 /5
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“Bitcoin Trader Jasper Pääkkönen” | https://medium.com/@martinlillie699/jasper-p%C3%A4%C3%A4kk%C3%B6nen-bitcoin-review-2da48495336e | ['Lillie Martin'] | 2021-06-22 12:23:20.188000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin Wallet', 'Bitcoin Mining', 'Bitcoin News', 'Bitcoincash', 'Bitcoin'] |
The 12 Gays of Christmas [Part 2] — Presented by Gay Men & Blog | The 12 Gays of Christmas [Part 2] — Presented by Gay Men & Blog
In this 2-part article, you’ll hear from gay writers, podcasters, artists, life coaches, and storytellers whose work spreads joy, inspiration, and community. They share the mission behind their work, what has surprised them about their creative journey, tips for other gay creatives, and what we can look forward to from them in the near future.
Click here for part 1 to see the first half of The 12 Gays of Christmas!
7. The Spiritual Gayz
Project type: Podcast, classes, workshops
Creators: Angel Lopez (he/him) & Brandon Alter (he/him)— Healers, husbands, astrologers, mystics
Inspiration & mission: The Spiritual Gayz are here to create a safe space for all people (but particularly our LGBTQIA+ family) to explore their spiritual curiosity. We strive to demystify the mystical and teach spiritual skills that actually work.
The level of emotional connection that we feel with people outside of our daily lives has impacted us profoundly. We feel so lucky to be growing this heartfelt community and are inspired by the vulnerability and courage of our students and clients.
Advice for creatives: Being yourself, your whole self, is the most powerful magic you have. Don’t diminish your humanity or try to sell something you think the world wants — create what you wish you had when you were growing up. Honor your own creative needs first and center yourself as the hero of your life’s journey!
Up next: 2021 will have lots of exciting online Tarot and Astrology courses, potentially an in person retreat (if all goes well) and some very exciting guests coming onto the podcast. In addition, Angel will be venturing into more forms of media like TV and Film.
Connect: thespiritualgayz.com | @thespiritualgayz @ariessoul329 @thebrandonalter (Instagram, Twitter)
8. A Night of Love
Project type: Virtual Show
Creator: The Mahogany Project (he/him) — Storyteller
In partnership with Whatsinthemirror
Inspiration & mission: I wanted to write a series that dove into what it means to be a black man that loves other black men. I wanted to highlight the intersections of issues that we face with our identities and who we are. Black men loving black men is and will always be a revolutionary act.
The fact that so many people feel connected to my work is the most surprising. When people come up to me after a show and tell me they felt the connection or that I wrote what they’ve been feeling, it surprises me every time. I feel honored to be able to have a gift that connects with other folks. Especially with queer people of color.
Advice for creatives: Be true to who you are. Be true to your art. Be true to the culture and creativity. I think it’s easy to compare and get lost in what others are doing, but you have to remain steadfast in your own story and your own artistic mediums. Always remain true to your spirit.
Up next: Our group is putting together some alternative artistic shows in light of COVID. Different ways to expose our work to the masses. Follow our social media for updates!
Connect: themahoganyproject.com | @mahoganyproject (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook)
9. Queer Conscious
Project type: Life coaching & virtual community
Creator: Nathan Serrato (he/him) — Queer mindset coach
Inspiration & mission: Queer people grow up in this world being taught to hide and make themselves small. My goal through my work is to help queer people feel seen, connected, and valued in way the world constantly teaches them otherwise.
I’m always surprised at the common thread of the experiences and understanding that ties together people in the lgbtq+ community. In every event it’s amazing to see just how needed it is to have intentional spaces for the queer community outside of bars and dating apps.
Advice for creatives: As scary as it is to create and put yourself out there, each time you do, you’ll reveal a more honest and empowered version of yourself.
Up next: You can expect more events from me that explore opportunities for deeper healing on experiences that seem a little more taboo or difficult to open up about.
Connect: queerconscious.com | @queerconscious (Instagram, Facebook)
10. Yo Soy Podcast
Project type: Podcast
Creator: Alejandro Victoria (he/him) — Podcaster
Inspiration & mission: Growing up I always looked for role models and stories of people who looked like me — Latino and Gay. It wasn’t in mainstream media and I felt like I didn’t belong. My goal to start Yo Soy as a podcast was to help share the stories of inspirational individuals who were queer and Latinx. I always have hoped that a younger version of myself would listen and feel like they are not alone and inspired to be their true authentic self.
I’m surprised by positive reactions and regular listeners. I think sometimes when you’re passionate about a project or piece, you work hard and don’t realize others are consuming that and that it is making an impact. I will have people message me and say they listen to the podcast and they didn’t know about a certain lived experience or they related to a guest and loved the conversation.
Advice for creatives: Be yourself. I know that sounds like a cliche, but I think it really rings true. I keep thinking what I want Yo Soy to turn into and I keep doing a lot of introspection on what I am passionate about and who I am vs what I think can sell or get marketed well. When you are creating from a place of passion, it shows. All else falls into place after that. Finding your voice is super important because that is what people want to hear. Your voice through whatever medium you choose to use.
Up next: I really plan on growing and expanding Yo Soy. Format changes for the podcast are on the horizon. I’ve also been interested in growing Yo Soy as a potential blog as well. In 2020 I launched a website for the podcast and in 2021, I hope to include more things on the website for Yo Soy listeners and future readers. 2021 will be very exciting for Yo Soy!
Connect: yosoypodcast.com | @YoSoyPodcast @RealAlejandroV (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook)
11. Gume Laurel III
Project type: Books
Creator: Gume Laurel III (he/him) — Writer
Inspiration & mission: Growing up, it was hard to find characters in stories that I could fully relate to because they never looked like me. At best, there would be a brown, stereotypical supporting character to the never-not-white main character -and a gay character was practically non-existent. This has pushed me to create stories with characters for all audiences. The mission behind my work is to provide a safe space in stories where underrepresented audiences can see themselves as the main character.
I’m surprised by our tendency to be equally as damaging towards allowing gay/queer-friendly spaces, because we tend to advance gay/queer spaces that are exclusive to certain body types and traditionally masculine behaviors. If we want others to be welcoming of us, we need to first be welcoming of ourselves.
Advice for creatives: Stay true to the honest parts of your story, not just the page-turning, victorious moments. There is something to be said for the beauty of the ugly, because that’s where we are most human. And that’s where we are most relatable to others.
Up next: “Maybe. Just Maybe.” a poetry book, 2021. I’m also hoping to move forward with a couple young adult novel projects, so stay tuned for that!
Connect: gumelaurel.com | @tx.author (Instagram)
12. Evoco Center/GerleMen Podcast
Project type: Life coaching with GBTQ men; Podcast
Creator: Mike Gerle (he/him) & Garrett McClure (he/him) — Creative director & CEO, respectively.
Inspiration & mission: Evoco Center is the culmination of my personal hero’s journey from oppression to celebration. The primary purpose is to help men see that their life has been a hero’s journey, as well. All the obstacles they have faced can be reframed as wisdom-building life experiences, rather than debilitating episodes that leave them at the mercy of the world.
I was taught about impermanence, grief, and loss during the plague of AIDS. It’s a life lesson that shows the ability for a truly tragic circumstance to be transformed into communal wisdom and dignity. Our response to that challenge left me with dignity, humility, and a belief that anything is possible when we own our own worth individually and come together collectively as a community.
I’m surprised by the level of suffering still experienced by so many GBTQ men today. As a 55 year old gay, I’ve seen a lot. With all of the legal victories we’ve won, I somehow thought the country’s culture and our individual hearts would heal, as well. As it turns out, moving from oppression, to tolerance, to acceptance, to liberty, and even celebration has not been enough for most GBTQ men to release the internalized oppression installed into our conscious and unconscious minds.
Advice for creatives: Step into your discomfort. Our addictions to our phones, to food, to alcohol, to sex, to rage, all stem from the desire to avoid our discomfort and suffering. When we face those demons we capture the wisdom they have for us. If you are looking for inspiration to create something epic, open your heart to your suffering. Instead of reaching for your phone, feel that anxiety, grief, loneliness, rage, or however your demons present themselves. It can be just one full cycle of breaths, but it’s important that you soften your armor and let it in. When you make friends with your demons they will teach you the things you need to learn to give yourself a break, to open your authentic heart, and reveal the path that is meant for you — the path you deserve.
Up next: We are offering the following classes:
The Evoco Center will be located in the Palm Springs area. Offerings will include yoga, meditation, discussion groups, celebrations, training, silent areas, food, phone-free hangouts and a spa.
Connect: EvocoCenter.com, GerleMen Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts | @evococenter (Instagram), facebook.com/EvocoCenter
BONUS! — Rainbow: A Medium publication dedicated to the queer experience
Project type: Online publication
Creator: Jordan Becker (he/him) — Writer
Inspiration & mission: I started Rainbow to establish a space for people to discuss the queer experience, both for those in the queer community who need a safe place to express themselves, and for those outside the queer community who have questions and want to learn.
I’m pleasantly surprised by the enormous variety of queer perspectives, and the underlying solidarity throughout the queer community.
Advice for creatives: Create something. Get your voice out there. You have one, and someone out there needs to hear it.
Up next: Visual media! Short films, TV shows, visual poetry.
Connect: jordanbeckermedia.com | Jordan Michael Becker (Medium), @jordnbeckr (Instagram, Twitter)
🌈 Gay Men & Blog 🦄
This blog is dedicated to the growth and empowerment of gay men to lead a life of love and fulfillment. Read more articles at Gay Men & Blog on Medium or by clicking below. Follow to receive notification on future articles!
The 12 Gays of Christmas Part 1 | Improving Our Dating Experience | Interview With Mariano Pintor |Writing for Our Healing and Growth | Dear Fathers, Your Gay Sons Are Hurting | Putting an End to Ghosting | Redefining “Coming Out” | Radical Self-Love | Voting Trump Out | Anti-Blackness | Self-Care | Emotional Numbing | Complicated Faith | Body Confidence | Body Image | Loneliness | Self-Talk | Self-Worth Part 2 | Self-Worth Part 1
If you have a suggestion, comment, question, or want a free logo sticker, fill out this feedback form. Thank you for your readership. | https://medium.com/rainbow-a-queer-publication/the-12-gays-of-christmas-part-2-presented-by-gay-men-blog-1d099faad2f6 | ['Armando Sánchez'] | 2020-12-20 16:03:43.518000+00:00 | ['Gay', 'Christmas', 'Inspiration', 'Creative', 'Community'] |
Converting Firebase API Callbacks to Kotlin Flows | Converting Firebase API Callbacks to Kotlin Flows
Photo by Michal Matlon on Unsplash
A short guide on when and why to use the callbackFlow builder function in Android.
Click on the handsome man below for the full code.
The key to understanding when callbackFlow is appropriate is to be able to recognise a “callback” in the first place.
Here are some “callbacks” that you use all the time:
setOnClickListener
addOnCompleteListener
addOnScrollListener
addUpdateListener
If you see “listener” in the code, chances are you are looking at a “callback”. callbackFlow is a nifty little way to convert these listeners into Kotlin Flows.
But why would you want to do this?
Well, sometimes you don’t! A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself: am I going to receive a bunch of things (multi-shot), or am I just after one thing (single-shot)?
Let's look at our use cases from above:
setOnClickListener — multi (can be clicked more than once)
— (can be clicked more than once) addOnCompleteListener — single (things should complete once)
— (things should complete once) addOnScrollListener — multi (we get a bunch of scroll events)
— (we get a bunch of scroll events) addUpdateListener — multi (whenever something updates, we get a ‘callback’)
We can use callbackFlow on all of these, but should we?
Button.clickFlow()
Let’s do something crazy. Let’s turn our everyday Button’s onClickListener callback into a Flow. Just for fun.
Note that we use the function offer instead of emit inside callbackFlow . In English, offer is a softer verb than emit — almost a question. An offer can be accepted… or not. This becomes important when dealing with backpressure, but for the purposes of this article, you can think of offer and emit as synonyms.
Moving on, let’s create a little extension function to collect our clicks:
Now we can hook this up in the collector like so:
buttonDownload.onClick { viewModel.download() }
… which is not much different from:
buttonDownload.setOnClickListener { viewModel.download() }
🤔 Hmmm, these look pretty similar!
So turning our button clicks into a Flow doesn’t make a whole lot of sense…unless, of course, we want to debounce!
😎
I’m being a bit facetious, of course. This kind of code is, in my experience, probably over-engineering things. However, the exercise itself is fun and provides a digestible way of exploring and understanding how callbackFlow works and what it is designed for. If you want to see some useful examples where coroutines are used to simplify View related code check out https://chris.banes.dev/suspending-views/ and https://github.com/JakeWharton/RxBinding for some inspiration.
Let’s take a look at a few “callbacks” from the Firebase SDKs and create something more useful.
Querying a Record from Firestore
Let’s say we just want to get a single record from your remote database:
CollectionReference.get()
.addOnCompleteListener { snapshot ->
// Do something with snapshot
}
Since we only want a single snapshot, a suspend function makes more sense in this case. Lucky for us, Google created a neat extension function ( fun suspend Task.await() ) that wraps another awesome function from the kotlin library ( suspendCancellableCoroutine ), which does exactly this.
You’ll need:
implementation "org.jetbrains.kotlinx:kotlinx-coroutines-play-services:0"
so you can do this:
import kotlinx.coroutines.tasks.await val snapshot = CollectionReference.get().await()
But you can’t just call a suspend function from anywhere, you’ll need some coroutine scope:
implementation “androidx.lifecycle:lifecycle-runtime-ktx:0”
This gives us lifecycleScope and viewModelScope extension properties which we can use to create coroutines from our Views or ViewModels respectively, and automatically connects the coroutine lifecycle to the View or Viewmodel lifecycle.
💡 In Android, the View or ViewModel is typically where our scopes should be launched and where our Flows should be collected. If you find yourself writing this all the time:
GlobalScope.launch { } // Naughty, naughty!
…you’re probably doing it wrong.
Back to the example:
Neat right? Simple, easy to read code and all without the use of a Flow.
📎 Don’t use Flow if a suspend function will do the job.
Watching for changes to a Firestore Database
When registering for changes to a certain part of a Firestore Database, we are expecting multiple “callbacks”, and so, we should find ourselves reaching for Flow, not a suspend function.
Not much different to our Button click Flow from above. Notice, however, how we just panic and bail if we get an error, and if we get a null or empty snapshot, we offer an emptyList ? This is poor programming and will almost certainly confuse the collector — even if you write the collector yourself! It’s better to propagate these signals to the collector. This makes your code more complex, yes, but also smarter. The client code can decide to do something different when an error or empty response is received: call another API instead, log an error, display an error, crash with an error, give the user a different option… whatever.
So, how can we encapsulate and propagate these signals to the caller/client code?
Let’s look at a different scenario and explore this idea.
Downloading a File from Firebase Storage
Downloading a file is a good mix of the above situations. It can take some time to download the file, but one way or another, it will complete. There are several ways that it can complete and there are several things we would like to know about during the download too. Firebase Storage has a nice set of “callbacks” to keep you informed about your download.
How do we convert all this to a Flow?
The first, second and third step is to think about how to model the information we are going to offer in the Flow, since a Flow must encapsulate a single type, let’s call it DownloadResult and model all the relevant data we need in the client code.
Here’s what I came up with:
📎 Agonise over the structures that you put into your Flows. Modelling your data efficiently is the key to writing clean functional code.
InProgress and Paused contain information that enables the collector to pause, resume and cancel the task, as well as determine the progress.
and contain information that enables the collector to pause, resume and cancel the task, as well as determine the progress. Success contains the File which the collector can then do with as they please.
contains the which the collector can then do with as they please. Failed contains the reason for the failure and allows the collector to react accordingly.
Now let’s have a look at how we would use it:
Note, this is a slimmed-down version of the real code to make it easier to digest the first time around, be sure to download the full repository for all the finer details.
We can now use a Redux-like pattern — whereby our UI state flows from the state property:
Bonus Material
Two observations about offer()
It is not a suspend function. It returns a Boolean.
When and how the underlying system (in this case Firebase) “calls back” is out of our control. This is why offer() is not a suspend function, it is designed to operate outside the callbackFlow coroutine scope (as is close() ).
offer ’s return value indicates whether it has succeeded in “offering” the value to the Flow or not. This is important in the Download File scenario because the final values offered just before the Flow is closed ( DownloadResult.Complete.XXX ), are very important. They tell the collector how the download completed — was it a success or a failure? However, the flood of DownloadResult.InProgress offerings could potentially clog the Flow and prevent the collector from receiving the last offering! Not good!
How do we get around this?
The good news is that you normally don’t have to worry about it. Flow covers the main use cases out-of-the-box and it’s only when you are doing “something fancy” that you’ll come across such an issue.
So, in the next article I’m going to do “something fancy” and dive deeper into this problem… | https://medium.com/@nickskelton/converting-firebase-api-callbacks-to-kotlin-flows-3eea87429ee9 | ['Nick Skelton'] | 2020-12-08 19:16:29.325000+00:00 | ['AndroidDev', 'Kotlin', 'Software Development', 'Firebase', 'Kotlin Flow'] |
You Conceive Something in Your Mind and Your Brain Follows | The mind-body relationship is fascinating if you understand it and can exploit it properly.
Most of my productive days are when I make up my mind to do particular things. I’d notice that I just get lost in work and keep going till I’m done with what I set to do for the day.
And it’s even more interesting when I do the opposite, that is, I say I don’t have the energy and all of those negative things, and then I won’t be able to do anything at all.
Our mind is the creative engine, and our body is the doer. Or you can say our mind is the architect, and our body is the builder.
So, whatever you conceive in your head, things will somehow work out to get you to achieve them.
Sometimes, I’ll not be in the mood at all to complete certain projects, but I’ll still make up my mind to do it, and somehow I do, and it amazes me. | https://medium.com/change-your-mind/you-conceive-something-in-your-mind-and-your-brain-follows-43b9e5abbca6 | ['Tochukwu Okoro E.'] | 2020-12-27 11:01:10.667000+00:00 | ['Mind', 'Productivity', 'Success', 'Mindset', 'Growth'] |
How to Increase Your Motivation in 2 Minutes per Day | Obstacle #2: Losing Momentum and Quitting
Once you find someone who wants the same level of accountability as you, then you need a simple and fast system.
Daily accountability is the best way to form a habit and rhythm with your partner.
If you try to do weekly, you’ll likely lose track or forget.
You don’t want to lose momentum.
Aside from getting obsessed with finding the right partner, the second biggest mistake is losing momentum before you even start.
Daily accountability is essential.
It’s how you get into a rhythm and stay on track. That’s the purpose of accountability. It’s not about friendship. It’s not about kinship. It’s not about fun. Accountability is about getting results in your life.
Do you want results? Or are you just looking for a friend?
Accountability partners will become some of your best friends, but only because you are pushing each other forward.
The purpose of the relationship isn’t to be friends.
It’s actually almost better if you choose someone who isn’t already your friend. The sole purpose of the relationship should be accountability.
That’s it. | https://medium.com/better-humans/how-to-do-a-life-changing-accountability-partnership-in-less-than-2-minutes-a-day-41142d80c44d | ['Benjamin Hardy'] | 2019-06-30 20:34:03.279000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Life Lessons', 'Psychology', 'Startup', 'Productivity'] |
This Picture of Snoop Dogg Explains Existence | Ridiculous, isn’t it?
The image in question is a meme that’s been making its way around the internet since at least 2013. “Everything in this picture is Snoop Dogg,” the caption typically declares, shooting for humor through ridiculousness. At first glance, this might just look like a silly image. Upon further reflection, however, we can see its potential in explaining grandiose ideas about existence itself. Bear with me here.
The most striking feature of our curious little image is the fact that, even though there’s a field of grass, a great tree, a blue sky, and a shining sun, all of these different things are actually just one thing: Snoop Dogg, albeit in a bunch of different colors, poses, and proportions. All the different parts of the picture are, in fact, not different at all. Every single thing, despite seeming diverse, is of the exact same substance as every other thing, with said substance, of course, being Snoop Dogg.
The recognition that everything in existence is all fundamentally one substance, albeit in infinite different forms, is called monism. Monism is very well accepted in the modern world — everything, of course, is made of atoms — but this philosophy can, in fact, take us far deeper than the atomic level. Atoms themselves are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, and these three are clearly different things. That raises the question of whether these different subatomic particles are just different conglomerations of one smaller, more basic, particle, thus reaffirming the doctrine of monism, or if we must throw this doctrine out. According to some strains of thought — both of the philosophical and the scientific kinds — there very much is a subatomic particle, smaller still than even electrons, that every larger particle is made of. Really, though, we shouldn’t use the term “particle” here, because what we’re talking about is a wave; or, if you’d like, a string.
Here enters string theory, which has long been infamous among scientists and the general public for its difficulty to comprehend. Thankfully, though, for our purposes, we need only cover the basics. String theory states that the most fundamental and indivisible components of creation are — you guessed it — strings. Said strings can vibrate in any number of ways, and whatever way they vibrate determines what kind of particles they can combine to form. Naturally, they’re much too tiny to be detectable by people, but science has been testing for their existence for decades, and thus far, string theory has neither been definitively proven nor disproven. Regardless of the validity of this theory, however, we may take it seriously, because it does not just exist in the scientific realm. In fact, it has endless parallels in ancient religions and philosophies, with one in particular that’s important for our purposes; process philosophy.
Process philosophy was developed in the early 20th century by Alfred North Whitehead, who was an obscure but important figure, having greatly influenced Bertrand Russell, and by extension, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Whitehead’s philosophy was centered around two basic tenets; that everything in existence is made up of experiential, wave-like “actual entities”, and that these actual entities are in a state of constant flux. Instead of following physicalism and supposing that consciousness is merely a biological trick, or even grappling with the centuries-old mind-body problem and trying to separate out mind and matter as two fundamentally different things, Whitehead combined them into two aspects of the same basic thing. In process philosophy, the actual entities that make up existence are both physical and experiential. They, even at the most basic level, are able to experience the world around them, and this feature is an integral part of their physicality, rather than being separate from it.
Therefore, everything in Whiteheadian process philosophy is experiential, and while true consciousness only arises where many of these experiential actual entities network together (like in the neural networks of the human brain), proto-consciousness is everywhere. In this lies the great tragedy — or perhaps the great gift — of life. Even though everything experiences, and the entire universe is abuzz with awareness, you are relegated to experiencing only your own little bit of consciousness. You don’t experience anything outside of yourself as it really is. In fact, everything outside of yourself that you experience is experienced through the filter of your consciousness. It’s been said that we hallucinate our everyday realities, and although that claim may sound preposterous, it really isn’t all that far off. You can never experience anything outside of yourself as it actually is; only as it is through the filter of your consciousness. However, no such filter exists between your consciousness and itself. Thus, your consciousness is the only thing your consciousness can observe and accurately comprehend.
It’s not a death sentence to our understanding of existence, however, to say that we can only understand ourselves. Returning to Snoop Dogg for a moment, the image clearly shows that, while every mini-image is a different manifestation of Snoop Dogg, at the end of the day, everything in the larger image is all still Snoop Dogg. So it is with the universe. When everything in existence is made up of the same sort of network of experiential strings that you are, we can comfortably call you a microcosm of the universe and the universe a macrocosm of you. You, as the saying goes, are the universe experiencing itself, and since you can only accurately experience yourself, you must look within if you seek to understand the universe. You and the universe both are simply sprawling networks of experiential entities. To understand one such network is to understand the other.
We can see an interesting mirror to this concept in Hindu philosophy; specifically, in the Advaita Vedanta tradition. The Hindus have developed a concise phrase to illustrate this concept, and that phrase is “Atman is Brahman”, which is one of the Mahavakyas, or Great Sayings. Here, Atman is roughly equivalent to the Soul or Self, while Brahman is roughly equivalent to the Universe or its underlying principle or source. Thus, if you wish to understand the Universe, or Brahman, you can look within, toward your Atman, for the two are one and the same. And, in our preposterous little picture, any single Snoop Dogg would only have to look within and understand that he is, indeed, Snoop Dogg, in order to understand the rest of his universe, which, of course, is also all Snoop Dogg.
Further Reading:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/monism/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/11/25/what-every-layperson-should-know-about-string-theory/#1a0848e95a53
http://www.fieldbeing.org/doc/Weed_Actual%20and%20Eternal%20Entities%20in%20Whitehead,%20Fa%20Tsang,%20and%20Physics.pdf
https://swamij.com/mahavakyas.htm
https://rlp.hds.harvard.edu/religions/hinduism/brahman-that-art-thou | https://medium.com/interfaith-now/this-picture-of-snoop-dogg-explains-existence-588b47c293ed | ['J. W. Barlament'] | 2020-07-08 16:00:30.791000+00:00 | ['Metaphysics', 'Spirituality', 'Hinduism', 'Philosophy', 'Self'] |
3 Steps To Breaking Out Of Your Fitness Rut | 3 Steps To Breaking Out Of Your Fitness Rut
In case you lost your lust for fitness during COVID-19, here’s how you can pick it back up. BlogZ Follow Dec 18, 2020 · 5 min read
Photo by Alexander Jawfox on Unsplash
Sometimes our level of passion for things will fluctuate. Even if that is not the case, different stages of life will call for different amounts of your time and attention to be directed in different areas.
Working out has always been one of my greatest passions, and I became hardcore hooked on the gym as an exercise physiology student during my first year in college.
After high school, I was no longer a gymnast but the gym gave me an environment where I could always keep improving, provided me with a healthy outlet to deal with any negative emotions, and helped to improve my confidence.
I would even say it became a part of my identity, a part that I was quite proud of.
Fast forward to the pandemic and I froze my gym membership for the safety of myself and those around me. It wasn’t safe in my eyes, and I was about to enter the hardest semester of PT school anyway.
I decided I would dedicate all my time to my main focus of doing well during the semester. I would continue to work out, but would only use the equipment I had at home.
At first, I thought this would be a significant disadvantage. I wouldn’t have access to any fancy equipment and I would miss the social aspect of the gym too.
I felt that being my petite self, I wouldn’t be able to gain or even maintain the muscle I had thus far by just working out at home. My schedule was busier, and although I still worked out, all of a sudden I was no longer using fitness as my main source of self-improvement.
Safe to say, I was stuck in a fitness rut. Here’s how I brought back the spark and how you can too. | https://medium.com/in-fitness-and-in-health/3-steps-to-breaking-out-of-your-fitness-rut-611b101c20f9 | [] | 2020-12-18 21:12:00.273000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Lifestyle', 'Self', 'Exercise', 'Fitness'] |
What I Learned From My First Barre Class | I woke up one day this week with a brilliant idea. What if I started getting in shape by taking barre classes online? I could document the whole thing in a series of blog posts and YouTube videos and come out of the experiment with a whole new body.
It was a win-win situation.
To prepare for my barre experiment, I learned how to make YouTube videos, purchased a tripod with an attached ring light, and ordered a workout journal. Then I set up my workout area in the basement, located my long-missing tape measure, and got ready for my first day.
That day was today.
I was super excited so I started early, around 7:30 a.m. With a full water bottle and a heart filled with hope, I began. First things first, I got on the scale. There were no surprises there. I’d gained sixty pounds since the last time I was at my goal weight or seventy pounds since my high-school ideal.
Since high school was a very long time ago, I figured I’d go with the kinder, gentler sixty-pound weight gain. Only twenty of those pounds had arrived since quarantine earlier this year.
After noting my new weight in my new workout journal, I took my “before” pics using my new ring light and tripod combo. Even the warmest light setting couldn’t soften the horror of those pictures. I’ll save them in case there’s ever an “after” set to compare them with. Until then, they are staying in the vault.
Then I recorded a “fun” introductory video explaining my intentions. “My name is Tracey,” I said. “This is my basement where I will be doing barre workouts for the next eight weeks in order to answer the question, ‘Do barre workouts really work?’”
I carried on about how fun and effective the workouts would be and explained that I wouldn’t be dieting since I wanted to measure the success of the workouts alone. The truth is I just didn’t think I’d be able to stick to a diet. So I was hoping the workouts would be enough.
Full disclosure: I knew the workouts alone wouldn’t be enough.
Finally, it was time to get down to my first workout. I considered trying one of the advanced barre workouts. I reasoned that an advanced workout would be harder and thus more effective, and I wanted those results as soon as possible.
In the end, I chose a barre workout for beginners. With my iPhone mounted on my tripod and my lime green booty shorts riding up my thighs, I started the workout video on my MacBook and started recording on my iPhone.
I jumped into place and followed along with the workout. It started out fine. I was swinging my arms and kicking and high stepping in place. Then I followed the instructor in making small movements with light weights.
“This isn’t so bad,” I thought.
Then it got worse. At the point where all the people on the screen were doing pushups, and I was lying flat on my back on the floor panting, I realized barre workouts were not the workouts for me.
Nonetheless, I vowed to power through it.
“And that was the warm-up,” my online barre instructor announced.
I groaned and muttered to myself. There may have been a few colorful words and phrases thrown in.
After I rolled myself back to my feet, I tried to finish the workout. I made it thirty-eight minutes into the one-hour barre video.
The final straw was when we all sat on the floor with one leg bent in front and the other leg bent behind us. With both hands on the floor, we were supposed to lift and pulse the rear leg. The women onscreen looked like graceful ballet dancers. My leg wouldn’t even come off the floor.
Maybe my limbs are too short.
I canceled my subscription to the barre videos immediately, not wanting to risk being charged after the trial period ends. It’s fortunate for me that I got a Black Friday deal, thirty days for a dollar. As it turned out, a dollar was too much.
At the moment, I am a woman without a workout plan who still needs to work out.
Gyms are open, but I’d rather not take my chances with the novel coronavirus still spreading. Likewise with local yoga studios. Staying at home just feels safer, and an end to the pandemic feels like it’s a million years away.
Meanwhile, I am in the worst shape of my life, and I don’t know what to do. I just know that I want to document it on YouTube just in case I figure out a way to succeed.
I just need to answer one question. It just isn’t the question I thought.
While I set out to answer the question, “Do barre classes really work?” I realized the real question I need to answer is, “How do you get into the best shape of your life during a global pandemic?”
I only wish I had the answer.
At least I didn’t cry this time.
The first time I used the treadmill at the gym, I cried silently as I walked. Tears streamed down my face and washed my mascara down my cheeks in straight black lines.
I thought I saw a few strange looks as I walked to the locker room, but I attributed it to my own self-consciousness and paranoia until I saw my face in the bathroom mirror.
On my first day of kickboxing class several years later, I spent the majority of the class hiding behind one of the heavy bags and sobbing. So, in some small way, today’s barre class experiment was a success.
Now, I just have to figure out how to get in shape. | https://medium.com/traceys-folly/what-i-learned-from-my-first-barre-class-8b822e1df37e | ['Tracey Folly'] | 2020-12-05 15:17:24.884000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Humor', 'Fitness', 'Health', 'Self'] |
WordPress Ücretsiz Temalar #1 | in In Bitcoin We Trust | https://medium.com/@hcknet/wordpress-%C3%BCcretsiz-temalar-1-a8c73996a6d9 | ['Hasan Çetinkaya'] | 2020-12-23 05:24:58.117000+00:00 | ['Hasancetinkaya', 'Wordpress Tema', 'Wordpress Ücretsiz Tema', 'WordPress'] |
Merry Chanukah from Beverly Hills | At a very young age, I remember celebrating Chanukah. I’m not sure if we lit the Menorah or if we even had one. What I remember most is looking forward to receiving a gift every day. My favorite year was the boxing glove one when my brother David and I would stop fighting long enough to put them on before we lit into each other. Each year after that there was one less gift until there was one and then none. I’m pretty sure we had a small tree once or twice but nothing special. It was set up in the corner of our playroom, and it was adorned with some silver tinsel wire without a single ornament. I never knew I was missing the smell of gingerbread baking or latkes or even ham because my mother never cooked except for assisting our live-in housekeeper by tossing the salad. Of course there wasn’t any help on Christmas Day, so we would go to the country club, The Beverly Hills Hotel or the Beverly Wilshire. I didn’t think it was different in anyone else’s home in Beverly Hills until I spent the night one Christmas Eve at my friend Mary Lynn’s house. She had the most beautiful tree — — the kind in magazines and in storefront windows on Wilshire Boulevard. And the presents! There were hundreds (at least that’s what I remember) all around the tree, and I was told I could stay a little while after breakfast to watch my friend open a few. Their tree was the centerpiece of the magnificent living room, and the Christmas Carols and laughter as both sisters took turns opening their gifts made the most joyous music. I’m not sure if anyone noticed as I said my goodbyes and slipped through the back door where I would walk home across the alley to my house with no signs of it being a day any different than any other day. I think I’ve been sulking ever since about Christmas and all the other winter holidays that begin after Halloween. And when my daughters were growing up, they wanted so badly to celebrate, and I tried. But not nearly hard enough. There were several years of Christmas trees interspersed with Chanukah, but I never got into it. Except for Lawry’s every Christmas Eve for prime rib and yorkshire pudding. And those sides! Christmas Day there was always a movie and Chinese food. I prefer birthdays. | https://medium.com/p/a66b3d7f3c5e | ['Danna Reich Colman'] | 2016-12-02 01:04:24.539000+00:00 | ['Beverly Hills', 'Holidays', 'Christmas'] |
Case Study: Design a mobile app that allows users to easily buy and sell used books. | Step 1- Empathize
Behind every product there is a ‘Why- A Reason’ that leads to the birth of the idea to build a product and what functionalities a product should have. In order to do requirement gathering for a product, I first approached to understand the target audience and their pain-points. I divided this process in 4 steps-
User- research interviews
To start the process I interviewed some Family members, coworkers, classmates, friends, and fellow bibliophiles. Interviewing them allowed me to notice some important patterns concerning the research and disposal of books after their utilization. These patterns gave me the information I needed to proceed to the next phase of the UX research. I asked them some basic questions as-
What is the one thing that matters the most while buying a book? — Genre/Author/Quality ( To understand the categories/filters which mobile application should offer.)
What is the process of searching for a new book? ( To understand the categories/filters which mobile application should offer.)
What do you generally do when you are done with a book?( To understand user’s mindset)
If offered a platform to sell/buy used books, what things would you like that platform to have?(To understand user’s requirements)
What are alternatives you look for rather than buying a new book?( To understand various options that user goes through)
What are the places/ways you reach out in search of a book?( To understand various options that user goes through)
What are the things you hate and love in the process of buying/selling books?( To understand user pain points)
How often do you buy a book? ( To understand product market size)
If offered such a platform, would you like to use it? ( To understand product market fit)
Doing the user research, I got to know the user’s approach, expectations, concerns and pain points which helped me define functionalities and move towards my second step.
Affinity mapping
After talking to potential users and noting their answers, I wrote them down on post-its and grouped them in an affinity map which helped me pinpoint recurrent themes and issues. I selected the most recurrent themes or problems from the interviews to be the focal points of the mobile application.
What do you do when you want to buy a new book?
What do you do when you want to buy a new book?
Dividing the major categories with their reasons-
Buying new book from online store
Buying new book from online store
Buying used books from online store
Buying used books from online store
Buying new book from store
Buying used books from store
Searching for free copies/eBooks
Borrowing it from friend/library
What are things you look/part of the process for while buying a book?
What do you do with your used books?
Selling books at a bookstore.
Selling it at online platforms.
Defining Personas
Step 2 — Competitive research:
In order to build any product, analyzing the competitive products is another most important aspect, learning the features they offer and filling their loopholes is part of the process. I went through certain products, will user the learning while defining requirements and creating mockups for application -
OLX
Books chor
Bookscouter
Show My Book
Bookwise
Quikr
Step 3- Define:
Define User — Types of user, their actions and functionality.
Talking to various users having different demographics and needs, I have listed down the addressable market details for the application.
Target audience-
Students who are studying in school/college : Age group — ( 14–24)
People preparing for competitive exams. : Age group — ( 18–28)
People who love reading books. : Age group — ( 15–55) Keeping in mind constraint of using technology.
Parents buying books for their child. Age group — ( 24–36)
Target areas- By keeping in mind market trade off model, user behaviour of region and availability of resources.
Tier 1 cities
Tier 2 cities.
User actions- By understanding consumer behaviour and scope of question given, listed below are the possible user actions.
List books to sell.
Search book to buy.
Search by applying filters.
Request about a particular book.
Give a review about the listed seller.
Post questions and reviews in general.
Return and exchange request.
Make payment with integrated payment options.
Post feedback for application.
Ask for help from the application.
Contact support team.
Define Business model
After understanding User’s perspective, Affinity mapping, personas, doing competitive research I noted down the target audience and possible user actions that application would offer. Further I approached to decide the business model for application.
After understanding each model, their pros and cons and fulfilment requirements
Marketplace model-
There will be availability of a wide range of books, customer and seller can directly connect with each other.
Customers and sellers can decide by themselves and trade the deal.
By user research, some customers would not prefer arranging the logistics by themselves due to constraint of time, personal choice and lack of security assurance.
This model will have no inventory holding cost.
Example — OLX
Inventory led model-
There will be a quality check and seamless delivery system.
This model will be useful to the category of people who do not want to include in trading delivery or talking with buyers/sellers.
The cost margin increases as the cost of warehouse, logistics and maintaining the resources will be included.
By user research, most people feel they can trade directly and save money on delivery.
Example — Amazon.
After understanding both the models thoroughly and their practical working examples, I have decided to go for a Hybrid model for our application.
What will our Hybrid model offer?
Buyer can directly contact the seller and talk with the seller.
Buyer and seller will be able to communicate and trade the deal with their convenience.
Listings will show the distance of how far the seller is located, Eg — I search ‘Sapiens’ then it will show me various options that are listed by sellers with the distance of how far they are from me. Arranged from ascending to descending order.
Buyer and seller will have the option to opt for “Contacting platform to arrange pickup and delivery”. This option can be used when buyer and seller have problems meeting each other directly and by providing this option we can contact delivery partners and arrange their pickup-drop-off.
By providing this option retention rate of users will decrease, only users who opt for this option will have to pay a charge for pick-up delivery.
Users who can by themselves deal have options to trade deal and will not opt for this option.
By providing the hybrid model, we certainly save our warehouse expenses of ware-house and also take care of user experience.
This will build the system of transparency and users will have independence of choosing their convenience.
How will this work?
We as a platform just have to partner with a logistics firm and we can place orders when we receive a request from a customer.
We can ask customer for pickup and drop address, ask user to complete delivery payment by linking any payment service(Paytym, UPI etc)
Customers who do not opt for this option can directly complete their deal on our platform by communicating with each other.
How as a platform we can generate revenue?
Google AdSense will be a major source to generate revenue.
Google customized search option can be included and revenue can be generated.
By partnering with a logistics firm, the platform can have a good deal then general people by offering good business and can generate revenue from margin.
Platform can provide options to users to feature their post on top by charging and can generate revenue.
I have not explained any points in detail understanding the problem statement but while designing the application all these points are kept in mind.
Step 4- Ideate:
After doing user research, affinity mapping, creating personas, competitive research and defining business model, understanding and keeping all the points in mind I have noted down following pain points and user expectations -
Buyer’s side-
Buyer will be able to buy used books easily.
Buyer will be Able to find Cover photo and all relevant details about the used books like condition, publisher, edition, etc before buying.
Buyer can communicate with the seller.
Buyer can see how far the seller is in terms of kms.
Buyer can post reviews about seller profiles.
Buyer will be able to trade off deals with sellers.
Buyer will be Able to get the book delivered to their footsteps.
Buyer will be Able to find the books well segregated and arranged by genre on the app.
Seller’s Side:-
Sellers will be Able to list the books hassle-free.
Sellers will be Able to negotiate with the buyer on his/her terms.
Sellers can talk to buyers and decide if they want to trade deals internally or opt for logistic service.
Sellers can post reviews about buyer profiles.
Sellers will be Able to sell the books without moving out of his/her home.
Delivery system:-
I have divided the delivery system into two cases.
Case 1:- First delves into the part where buyer and seller want to contact personally and make a deal among themselves.
Case 2:- Second, is where they make a deal and request for logistics service, and the logistic partner picks up the used book from the seller and delivers it to the buyer. (I have made two assumptions here. A. This service is available in only selected cities. B. I am not considering the app of the logistic partner here.)
After defining the pain points and delivery system of the application, lets understand buyer and seller end to end journey.
User flow for buyer-
As a buyer, I want to browse books and buy them in an easy way with minimal charges and reliable security assurance.
User flow for seller-
As a seller, I want to easily list my books and sell books making the most money and least inconvenience while selling.
Functionalities-
Home page
On the home page, users will be able to see the list of book thumbnails.
It will be sorted on the basis of nearest location of sellers.
Once the user starts using the application, by reading the user preferred genre, the author of the home page will be customized keeping the nearest location factor primary.
Users will have a notification icon where the user can see all notifications.
User will have a chats option, on opening it the user can see all the chats.
Users will have a search option on top.
Users will have a menu option.
Users will have the option to choose a category.
Book thumbnail
The book thumbnail will display the cover photo of the book.
It will display the name of the book.
It will display the price listed by the seller.
It will display the distance in terms of kms of the seller.(Application will by default take ask for location access permission while onboarding)
Search option
Users will be able to search by writing book name, author name, genre of book.
On writing the first 2 characters, the suggestion panel should be shown to the user.
Categories
The user will have an option to apply to the category.
Category options Eg — Fiction, Textbook, romantic novel, spiritual etc.
The details of the category can be decided later.
Menu
On clicking the menu option, user will get options
List books to sell My account My orders My reviews Contact Support My selling's
List books to sell option
User when clicks on the sell option, will have to give details of books as
Book photos (Min 2 — Max 10) Can select cover photo ISBN Book title Author Book condition — Option to select ( Low, average, Best) Pages Description Original price Selling price Phone number Any remarks
Contact seller
Buyer when clicking on option to contact seller, buyer will be redirected to chat box of seller.
Buyer can send a message to the seller regarding book inquiry.
Buyer can only send at most 2 messages until the seller accepts the request of the buyer.
Request received
Seller will get a message from the buyer with details regarding which book the buyer has inquired for.
Sellers will have the option to accept or reject the request.
If the seller accepts the request then the seller will be able to reply to the buyer.
If the seller rejects the request, the seller will no longer be able to reply to the buyer.
Request logistics
Once the buyer and seller have talked and have decided to request logistics from the platform they can click on the request logistics option.
Either of them can request for this option and another entity will be asked for confirmation.
Once confirmation is received then only requests will be accepted.
Users will be asked the details of the book, seller address, buyer address, pickup time.
Users will be asked to complete the payment. ( Not including payment gateway information, we can adopt any service as Razorpay, stripe etc )
Deal completed
Buyer and seller will be asked for confirmation for marking the deal as completed.
How was deal completed — Option 1 Requesting logistics Option 2 By yourself.
This functionality will be important metrics for analyzing customer behavior.
Once the mark is completed, the buyer and seller will get the option to write a review for another entity.
Step 5 — Validate
Wireframes-
After defining requirements, we will look at wireframes(Low fidelity) for application. I have used balsamiq for creating wireframes.
Onboarding process
Case — User is signing up for the first time.
Things kept in mind-
User is not asked too much information while onboarding.
User is given facility to signup with google(Can be implemented using Auth0)
User is given a direct button linking to sign in.
Users are given OTP facility in order to decrease the rates of retention reasoning due to wrong password, writing password, verification process.
Case— Sign in screen
Home page
Analyzing the home screen of many Ecommerce apps like Myntra, Amazon, OLX, Quickr as well as a few apps selling and buying used books( Bookchor, Bookwise, Showmybook, Book scouter). I narrowed down the objective of the user on the home screen to:-
Visibility of the core feature:- Buy & Sell
Chat button option to see all the chats with buyers and sellers.
Thumbnails of books
Able to find what he is looking for:- Search option
Easily able to find the updates of his/her operations (i.e. buying and selling):- Notifications
Able to find what more is there:- Menu option
Able to see better content on the home page:- Category.
Menu
On clicking the menu user will have options as
For buyer
Buying process
If a request is approved by the seller then the user and seller can chat and trade the deal.
User will get a message notification if the seller accepts the request.
For seller
Selling process
Request Logistics
The request logistics option will be present inside the chat box.
Anyone entity who fills it will get notification of request received, while other entity will get notification to accept the request.
Once both parties accept they will get notification of request received by application.
Once a request is received by application, both buyer and seller will get payment invoice and details. The person who has filled the request will have to make the delivery charges.
Metrics
New signups per day/month/quarterly.
How many users are buying the books?
How many users are selling the books?
How many deals are getting completed?
How many users are requesting logistic service?
How many users are not returning back after signup is done.
How many users are not using the application again after listing the books.
Future scope
Give payment options end to end.
Provide options of donate, rent and exchange.
Return and exchange policy can be introduced.
Conclusion-
After analyzing the problem, taking the user’s view, defining requirements and creating mockups it was a brainstorming process. I have enjoyed each bit of it by learning, exploring and thinking in various perspectives. I have skipped some points as technical detailing, mockups of menu items due to constraint of time but have tried to explain my approach. | https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/product-management-design-a-mobile-app-that-allows-users-to-easily-buy-and-sell-used-books-20626760fb66 | ['Shreyanshi Shah'] | 2020-12-22 03:07:17.956000+00:00 | ['Case Study', 'Product Manager', 'Product Management', 'Product Development', 'Product Design'] |
I Love You, My Child | I love you, my child
There is nothing that you can do
that can separate me away from you
You are here always,
within my strong and loving embrace
You are protected
You are loved.
I delight in you,
and see my own eyes upon your eyes
I take away your fears
I take away your tears
from now on you are safe
and you are where you’ve always longed to be.
Let the people who judged you
see how I cherish you now,
Let those who condemn you
see how close you are to me.
You are never outside of my love,
never an outcast
never a failure
never so far away
You need not do anything
to please me,
for I am already pleased
that you trust me
to guide you in everything
you wanted to do
You are beautiful
you are whole
you are healed
you are my beloved
you can rest upon my strong shoulders,
and trust that you won’t ever slip away,
For it is I
who is holding on firmly to you. | https://medium.com/the-inspirer/i-love-you-my-child-a62559331b09 | ['Jocelyn Soriano'] | 2020-11-12 02:35:53.866000+00:00 | ['Christianity', 'Poetry', 'Poem', 'Love', 'Parenting'] |
3 ways to avoid getting blocked while web scraping | 3 Simple Ways For Web Scraping Without Getting Blocked
Photo by John Matychuk on Unsplash
Many businesses today depend on access to public data to be able to function. Regardless of the industry you work in, sooner or later, you’ll have to extract data from the internet to carry out a task. Obtaining that data could be as simple as copying and pasting it, but when it comes to large data, web scraping is the best solution.
Unfortunately, not all websites would like to be scraped; that’s why they’ll do anything in their hands to detect your scraper and ban you. In this article, I’ll show you 3 ways to avoid getting blocked while scraping websites.
3 ways to avoid getting blocked while scraping websites
1. Use a Proxy Server
Your computer has a unique Internet Protocol (IP) that you can think of as the computer’s street address. The internet uses this IP address to send the correct data to your computer every time you navigate.
A proxy server is a computer on the internet with its own IP address. When you send a request to the web, this goes to the proxy server first, then the proxy server makes the request on your behalf, collects the response and then forwards you to the web page so you can interact with it.
If you keep scraping with the same IP over and over again, your computers’ IP would be easily detected by anti-scraping tools. For this reason, you should rotate your IP with proxy servers; so the website thinks that requests are being generated from different places. Even companies such as HiQ used proxy services to mask IP addresses for scraping websites like LinkedIn and avoiding IP ban.
Although there are many free proxies available, they involve some issues such as the collection of your data and low performance. Besides, many people use these free proxies, which means that the proxies are already flagged or banned. Instead, you should consider paying a proxy provider that can guarantee you privacy, security and great performance. Some of them are Smartproxy, GeoSurf, Netnut.
2. Rotate User Agents
A user agent helps identify which browser is being used, what version, and its operating system. It also facilitates interaction with websites’ content. For example, a Chrome user agent on iPhone looks like this:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 10_3 like Mac OS X)
AppleWebKit/602.1.50 (KHTML, like Gecko) CriOS/56.0.2924.75
Mobile/14E5239e Safari/602.1
To find your user agent, just type on Google ‘what is my user agent.’
However, apart from the user agent, other headers are sent by browsers. Some headers are: accept, accept encoding, accept language, dnt, host, referer and upgrade-insecure-requests. You can create a dictionary headers and include them when scraping websites:
You can find different user-agent strings of some browsers here. Build a list with several user agents to rotate them later.
Keep in mind that if you only rotate the user agent, but the other headers remain the same, the scraper might still be detected.
To rotate all headers associated with each user agent, do this:
Open an incognito window, go to the website you want to scrape and then open the network tab in developer tools.
2. Right-click a request and select Copy as cURL
Image by author
3. Paste it in the curl command box to convert the cURL syntax to your favorite programming language.
Once the cURL is converted, look for the variable headers . Once you found it copy the elements in the dictionary, except for the headers that start with X-
That’s it! You now have the correct headers for a user agent on a specific website. Now follow the same steps to collect headers for the user-agent strings you previously obtained.
3. Follow Best Practices
Bad scraping practices can impact the performance of the site; that’s the reason why websites block your scraper. However, scraping responsibly doesn’t harm the web, so you can keep scraping without getting blocked.
The following are the best web scraping practices to follow:
Read the robot.txt : You should always check the ‘robots.txt’ file to know how the site should be crawled. To access the file, just add the words ‘robots.txt’ to the root of the site like in ‘http://example.com/robots.txt’ The file has rules such as how frequently you can scrape and the pages you’re allowed to scrape. If you find User-agent: * Disallow: it means that the website doesn’t want to be scraped, while User-agent: * Disallow : allows scraping in the website.
: You should always check the ‘robots.txt’ file to know how the site should be crawled. To access the file, just add the words ‘robots.txt’ to the root of the site like in ‘http://example.com/robots.txt’ The file has rules such as how frequently you can scrape and the pages you’re allowed to scrape. If you find it means that the website doesn’t want to be scraped, while : allows scraping in the website. Imitate human behavior : If you want to increase the chances of your scraper to be unnoticed, then write code that would imitate human surfing behavior on the internet. You can add a random delay between requests to go unnoticed. Also, follow different crawling patterns by including random clicks on the page and mouse movements.
: If you want to increase the chances of your scraper to be unnoticed, then write code that would imitate human surfing behavior on the internet. You can add a random delay between requests to go unnoticed. Also, follow different crawling patterns by including random clicks on the page and mouse movements. Avoid scraping data behind a login : If you need to log in to a website, the scraper would have to send information or cookies along with each request to view the page. As a result, they can easily identify you’re using a scraper and your account would be blocked.
: If you need to log in to a website, the scraper would have to send information or cookies along with each request to view the page. As a result, they can easily identify you’re using a scraper and your account would be blocked. Think like the security system: Research the last approaches and tools websites use to detect scrapers. Here you can find 7 Ways to Protect Website from Scraping. If you know exactly what companies use to protect their website, you can figure out a way to bypass them.
Would you like to make money from web scraping? If so, check this article I wrote:
Summary
Now you know 3 ways to avoid getting blocked while scraping websites. Rotation of proxies and headers would make it hard for anti-scraping systems to detect your scraper, while the best practices will decrease your chances of getting blocked.
Gain Access to Expert View — Subscribe to DDI Intel | https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/3-simple-ways-for-web-scraping-without-getting-blocked-34f3b1f885d1 | ['Frank Andrade'] | 2020-12-14 18:13:07.402000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Web Scraping', 'Selenium', 'Programming', 'Data Science'] |
Part 2: Step-by-Step Guide to leave-one-person-out cross validation with Random Forests in Python — Plotting Importance | This is the second part in the series on leave-one-person-out cross validation with random forests in Python. The first part details the algorithm that we will use today in part two to plot importances.
Just a reminder that these methods have been compiled into a function that is published on the Digital Biomarker Discovery Pipeline (DBDP). If you want to implement this cross validation in your own work with random forests, please visit the repository on the DBDP GitHub. The ‘how-to’ of using the function is well documented and can be easily implemented with only one line in a number of projects.
In this tutorial, I am going to describe a process for plotting importances from leave-one-person-out cross validation in Python for you to implement in your own projects!
Getting Started
Some basic assumptions before we get started: I am assuming you have, at minimum, a basic understanding of functions in python and you have a working knowledge of pandas. I am running under the assumption that you have either followed along with Part 1 of this tutorial or you have found the source code and documentation here.
Getting Importances in the Model
In Part 1 of this tutorial, I recommended that you define a dataframe with the importances from the model. If you did not implement this in Part 1, I recommend doing it now, as shown below:
The entire function is shown below. Note that you are returning the importances dataframe.
Importances DataFrame
Continuing to follow along with the tutorial in Part 1 (feel free to skip if you followed Part 1 exactly), initialize an empty dataframe to hold your importances.
Just a reminder that you need to iterate through all of your participants in your dataset. At each iteration, you are going to append your returns to their respective lists and you will append the importances to the dataframe you initialized previously.
Make sure to return the importances dataframe. The entire function is shown below:
Plotting Importances
Finally, what you all came to this tutorial for! Call the above function. Now you have a dataframe with the importances for each fold.
Next, you will build a function that takes this importances dataframe as an input and outputs a bar chart of the importances of a defined fold. (Reminder that each fold will have different importances- please see Part 1 for an explanation of leave-one-person-out cross validation and why this is).
First, let’s set up a function and set the ID for the fold. This will be whatever you indicated it to be in the previous steps. The function will take as inputs the importances dataframe, a user-defined ID to plot, and a filepathout (this allows you to run this iteratively and just save the plot for each fold).
Next, establish the x values. Set this to be a list of range of length of the importances column in that particular fold.
Here is where you get to have fun and be creative, setting style choices for your barplot. This is a handy site for deciding on styles for your plots.
Define the barplot using the x_values list we made and the importances column for the fold. Define x_ticks, which adds your feature names as labels on the x-axis.
I have added a simple ylabel here. Feel free to add a title and make other stylistic adjustments.
I recommend saving the figure inside your function. This way, you can run the function for every participant ID and have them saved neatly for each fold (participant ID “left out”).
Take a look at the entire function, below:
Here is the output of one fold of our variable importance plot. (Note that in your function, “Feature#” will be your feature names from your original dataset). Add your creativity with color, style, and labeling!
Keep in mind that you have the importances as a dataframe now. This means you can look at average importance of features, you can plot histograms of the importances for a particular feature, and you can start to get a better understanding of how your model is working. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/part-2-step-by-step-guide-to-leave-one-person-out-cross-validation-with-random-forests-in-python-3b3f0f4c5494 | ['Brinnae Bent'] | 2020-09-01 13:10:16.959000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Python', 'Random Forest', 'Data Science', 'Data Analysis'] |
Deploying Java-based AWS Lambda functions as OCI images and JAR files | To test out and demo the announcement around container support for AWS Lambda functions, I built a demo to investigate what it would take to transition a Spring Boot REST API, which might be deployed as a container, into a native API Gateway + Lambda setup, which could deployed both as a container and a jar file. This announcement is potentially compelling for enterprises that have mature toolchains and deployment pipelines that are based on containers. These customers can leverage these existing toolchains and now add Lambda as an additional deployment target.
Anyhoo. Here are some lessons learned in my journey to implement the demo.
Look into those deprecation warnings
I was using the developer guide for Java events with API Gateway which uses APIGatewayProxyRequestEvent and APIGatewayProxyResponseEvent . The APIGatewayProxyRequestEvent is now deprecated. The reason this was important was that the proxy integration payload that was passed from API Gateway (HTTP API) into the Lambda function was missing a section in the RequestContext which included the HTTP metadata that I needed.
"http": {
"method": "GET",
"path": "/dev/",
"protocol": "HTTP/1.1",
"sourceIp": "10.20.30.40",
"userAgent": "curl/7.54.0"
},
I could have caught that with the maven warnings, but being a novice Java developer, I didn’t know to what they referred. Looking at the source code, my colleague George Mao found the deprecated snippets and pointed out the need to use the updated classes.
[WARNING] OciHandler.java uses or overrides a deprecated API.
[WARNING] Recompile with -Xlint:deprecation for details.
After replacing the deprecated APIGatewayProxyRequestEvent with APIGatewayV2HTTPEvent , the deprecation warnings went away.
But, when I looked at the new class, I wasn’t quite sure how to get at the fields that I needed, as I didn’t know how the lombok library was generating the getters and setters. After hacking at it a little bit, I found just adding get/set before each of the private properties enabled me to access the elements that I needed. For example:
if (event.getIsBase64Encoded()) {
body = new String(Base64.getDecoder().decode(event.getBody()));
} else {
body = event.getBody();
}
Use the right set of properties
I generally always default to defining my resources using infrastructure as code. SAM is really helpful for doing that for AWS serverless resources (and can add in regular CloudFormation for other resources). I find that reading the CloudFormation specifications helps in understanding the properties of the particular resource. Below is an example definition of a container-based function resource.
FnOci:
Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
Properties:
PackageType: Image
ImageUri: !Ref imageUri
Role: !GetAtt FnExecRole.Arn
Simple, I know. But it took me a little while to realize that I needed to use the new property PackageType and set that to Image . The Runtime , Handler , and Layers properties aren’t allowed when doing a container-based deployment. Also, keep an eye out if you’ve set any of those properties, e.g. Runtime , in your Globals section, as that will cause your template to fail too.
Also, if you mistakenly deployed your function as Zip type, you’ll need to delete the function and redeploy it, as you can’t switch PackageType on an existing deployment.
Try.. try.. try again
And I had a very hard to figuring out the proper configuration for the Dockerfile for building the docker image for a Java application. Fortunately, sam init provides starter templates, which is where I was able to find a good working example. Repeating here for easy reference.
FROM amd64/maven as build-image
WORKDIR "/task"
COPY src/ src/
COPY pom.xml ./
RUN mvn -q clean install
RUN mvn dependency:copy-dependencies -DincludeScope=compile FROM public.ecr.aws/lambda/java:11
COPY --from=build-image /task/target/classes /var/task/
COPY --from=build-image /task/target/dependency /var/task/lib
CMD ["your.package.name.yourClassName::handleRequest"]
And success!
After all that, I was able to deploy the function as both a container and a jar file. I then hooked up each of those functions to different endpoints on my HTTP API just to demonstrate calling the different functions, e.g.
curl -s -XGET http://api.example.com/dev/customer/jar | jq
curl -s -XGET http://api.example.com/dev/customer/oci | jq
Welp. I hope that was helpful. Until next time.
Epilogue
The Dockerfile that’s provided by sam init does a clean install every time an image is built, which means that the dependencies are downloaded every time too. For iterative development, I prefer compiling locally and then packaging in the container. So I run the mvn dependency:copy-dependencies -DincludeScope=compile command locally, which after the first run already had all the dependencies downloaded and cached. Then, with the guidance of the sam init template, I was able to modify my Dockerfile as such:
FROM public.ecr.aws/lambda/java:11
COPY target/classes /var/task/
COPY target/dependency /var/task/lib
CMD ["your.package.name.yourClassName::handleRequest"]
This significantly reduced build times and allowed me to test more rapidly. Of course, when going into production, stick with the clean installs. | https://medium.com/@heeki/deploying-java-based-aws-lambda-functions-as-oci-images-and-jar-files-6a95d01a8042 | ['Heeki Park'] | 2020-12-16 15:45:34.459000+00:00 | ['Aws Api Gateway', 'AWS Lambda', 'AWS', 'Java', 'Serverless'] |
The Art of Feature Engineering | One of the easiest ways to experiment with feature engineering is by using PolynomialFeatures available through Sci-Kit preprocessing module.
There are two important parameters to be aware of with PolynomialFeatures.
degree = you have the option of setting to which n degree of features you want to engineer. For instance, setting the degree = 2 means that the PolynomialFeatures will multiply each features by itself and against every other features. I personally find that interactive terms to the 2nd degree is sufficient when running linear regression but you can certainly explore by putting in a pipeline so you can GridSearch to find the most optimal n hyperparameter value. include_bias = You want to set this to False when using regular LinearRegression. Setting this to True essentially includes the y-intercept column which you do not want to do when running a regular LinearRegression out of sci-kit’s linear_model module.
One of the downsides of using PolynomialFeatures is the fast expansion of columns if you have a lot of features to begin with. One of the measures that you can take to reduce the number of features is by measuring the R2 score against the target variable. This way, you can quickly eliminate features that do not have strong predictive power.
Another method that I like to visit is to run the OLS summary using statsmodels.api module, which is another way you can run OLS in Python.
With OLS, unlike sklearn’s LinearRegression, you just have to remember to manually add in the y-intercept. After you fit the data, you can run the summary() method which produces the summary below.
P>|t| column provides the p-value of each features which can also can be used to determine the statistical significance of each features. So if you have features with p-value > 0.05, you can eliminate those from your feature selection and those with p-value < 0.05, you can keep them as part of features for your model.
Feature engineering is an exciting way to enhance your model performance and definitely requires some good discernment and experience to become more intuitively better at this. In many ways, it truly is an art. It requires some level of creativity, willingness to experiment, and explore features from many different angles.
As we all strive towards becoming better data scientists, I hope we all continue to develop and hone our skills in feature engineering. | https://medium.com/swlh/the-art-of-feature-engineering-5a09bd475198 | ['Young Park'] | 2021-01-11 08:19:41.749000+00:00 | ['Polynomialfeatures', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Statsmodels', 'Scikit Learn'] |
Taiwan Can Be a Valuable Partner in the Global Response to Climate Change | Taiwan Can Be a Valuable Partner in the Global Response to Climate Change
Concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide recorded at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii hit a historic high of 415 parts per million in May 2019. The World Meteorological Organization has also released data showing that June 2019 was the hottest month in history, breaking records from New Delhi to the North Pole. As President Hilda Heine of the Marshall Islands, an ally of Taiwan, has urged the world, it is not worth arguing or debating whether climate change will come to pass, for it is happening right now.
As a member of the global village, Taiwan is striving to combat climate change and protect the Earth. Indeed, we are playing an indispensable part in the vital task of bequeathing a sustainable environment to future generations.
As a result of the current international political situation, Taiwan has been barred from participating in the Conference of the Parties held under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Nevertheless, we continue to pursue means of making contributions to the international community. We have passed the Greenhouse Gas Reduction and Management Act, setting long-term goals for Taiwan’s reduction of greenhouse gases, and formulated National Climate Change Action Guidelines and a Greenhouse Gas Reduction Action Plan. We also drew up a Greenhouse Gas Reduction Emission Control Action Plan covering Taiwan’s energy, manufacturing, transportation, residential and commercial development, agricultural, and environmental sectors. With a clearly outlined roadmap for national carbon emission reductions, the key points of this plan include promoting energy transformation; assisting manufacturers to become green, low-carbon enterprises; developing green transportation and expanding the use of low-carbon vehicles; upgrading energy-saving design standards for the exteriors of new buildings; helping livestock farms recycle biogas; and strengthening methane recycling from waste landfills and industrial wastewater. Moreover, the approval of a Greenhouse Gas Control Implementation Plan proposed by local governments shows how Taiwan is responding to climate change collectively, from a central level to a local level.
Our government has made significant progress in developing Taiwan’s renewable energy sector in recent years, actively pursuing policies designed to reduce coal-fired power generation, increase our use of natural gas, and promote green development. By 2025, we expect solar- and wind-power generation to produce 20 GW and 6.9 GW of electricity per year, respectively, and we are also launching numerous power-saving policies and actions under our Forward-looking Infrastructure Development Program and similar initiatives. Meanwhile, our Green Finance Action Plan is focusing on such areas as finance, investment, fundraising, and talent incubation, supporting the development of the green energy sector by boosting financial incentives. In terms of technological research and development, Taiwan’s green technology policy covers energy development, energy storage, energy saving, and systems integration, drawing on forward-looking materials, sustainable technology, advanced energy-saving, smart systems, and similar areas to engage industry with the fruits of research in the academic world. And since the launch of our FormoSat-3 satellite in 2006, Taiwan has amassed over 10 million items of meteorological data, which it has provided, free of charge, to experts and scholars around the world for use in their scientific research. Furthermore, data gathered following this year’s launch of the FormoSat-7 satellite will now improve accuracy even further when it comes to predicting severe weather events, making a great contribution to global weather forecasting and climate change action.
Taiwan has brought together the relevant central government agencies to formulate a National Climate Change Adaptation Action Plan, constructing a resilient system that responds to eight aspects of climate change: disasters, basic infrastructure, water resources, homeland security, coastlines, energy and industry, agriculture, and health. In the field of health care, we are placing special emphasis on medical hygiene and epidemic prevention, disaster reduction, and emergency and disaster recovery capacity, safeguarding national health and prioritizing the protection of our most vulnerable citizens. In terms of conservation, we will sustain our agricultural production resources and biodiversity, bolster monitoring and early-warning mechanisms, strengthen natural disaster rescue and insurance systems, and integrate technologies designed to boost the resilience of the agricultural, forestry, fisheries, and animal husbandry industries. We are also operating and managing nature reserves, establishing long-term ecological monitoring systems, and strengthening the conservation and appropriate use of our nation’s species and associated genetic material. All of this is aimed at safeguarding food safety and establishing sustainable agricultural practices that are well adapted to climate risks.
According to Patricia Espinosa, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, more than 10,000 extreme weather incidents occurred globally between 1997 and 2016, taking countless lives and destroying homes. As the world continues to face climate change crises, this global issue requires a global solution. That means that every person, as a member of our global community, must join in and search for a solution.
It is unfair for Taiwan to be excluded from international organizations on the basis of political prejudice. Our exclusion contradicts the spirit of related climate conventions, which urge all nations to work together to combat global climate change, and overlooks both the concept of climate justice emphasized in the Paris Agreement and the significance of calling on all nations to take climate action. This breach of the UN Charter weakens our international framework and harms the entire world.
Taiwan is a responsible and sincere friend to the international community, and is ready to contribute. We would be pleased to share our experience in good environmental governance, disaster prevention and early-warning systems, upgrading to energy efficient technologies, and high-tech innovation and its applications. We are striving to make the world a better place, and believe that Taiwan can be a valuable partner in the global response to climate change. | https://medium.com/american-citizens-for-taiwan/taiwan-can-be-a-valuable-partner-in-the-global-response-to-climate-change-45de9a854efe | ['American Citizens For Taiwan Contributor'] | 2019-11-10 03:16:10.706000+00:00 | ['Taiwan', 'Environment', 'Climate Change', 'United Nations'] |
Machine Learning : An Outlook. Machine Learning is somehow like the… | The picture says it all!
Machine Learning is somehow like the latest Corona virus. Everyone is talking about it, many (just the medical staff) know what is actually going on and only a few (the ones making the vaccines) know what it really is. If you ever tried to read articles about machine learning on the Internet, most likely you stumbled upon two types of them: thick academic trilogies filled with theorems (I couldn’t even get through half of one) or fishy fairy tales about artificial intelligence, data-science magic, and jobs of the future.
I decided to write a post I’ve been wishing existed for a long time. A simple introduction for those who always wanted to understand machine learning. Only real-world problems, practical solutions, simple language, and no high-level theorems. One and for everyone. Whether you are a programmer or a manager.
So coming to it’s definition first…
What is Machine Learning?
It is an application of artificial intelligence (AI) that provides systems the ability to automatically learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning focuses on the development of computer programs that can access data and use it learn for themselves.
Undoubtedly, Machine Learning is the most in-demand technology in today’s market. Its applications range from self-driving cars to predicting deadly diseases such as ALS. The high demand for Machine Learning skills is the motivation behind this blog.
It is indeed very correctly stated that machine learning will automate jobs that most people thought could only be done by people. And although still in its infancy, machine learning will be a game changer in supply chain and we have all made that prediction even with the basic knowledge that we have.
Image from Google
Types of Machine Learning :
Supervised Learning
Supervised Learning is the one, where you can consider the learning is guided by a teacher. We have a data set which acts as a teacher and its role is to train the model or the machine. Once the model gets trained it can start making a prediction or decision when new data is given to it.
Unsupervised Learning
The model learns through observation and finds structures in the data. Once the model is given a data set, it automatically finds patterns and relationships in the data set by creating clusters in it. What it cannot do is add labels to the cluster, like it cannot say this a group of apples or mangoes, but it will separate all the apples from mangoes.
Suppose we presented images of apples, bananas and mangoes to the model, so what it does, based on some patterns and relationships it creates clusters and divides the data set into those clusters. Now if a new data is fed to the model, it adds it to one of the created clusters.
Reinforcement Learning
It is the ability of an agent to interact with the environment and find out what is the best outcome. It follows the concept of hit and trial method. The agent is rewarded or penalized with a point for a correct or a wrong answer, and on the basis of the positive reward points gained the model trains itself. And again once trained it gets ready to predict the new data presented to it.
Image from Google
These are further subdivided into the following parts:-
Supervised learning classified into two categories of algorithms:
· Classification: A classification problem is when the output variable is a category, such as “Red” or “blue” or “disease” and “no disease”.
· Regression: A regression problem is when the output variable is a real value, such as “dollars” or “weight”.
Unsupervised learning classified into two categories of algorithms:
· Clustering: A clustering problem is where you want to discover the inherent groupings in the data, such as grouping customers by purchasing behavior.
· Association: An association rule learning problem is where you want to discover rules that describe large portions of your data.
Why is Machine Learning important?
Re-surging interest in machine learning is due to the same factors that have made data mining and Bayesian analysis more popular than ever. Things like growing volumes and varieties of available data, computational processing that is cheaper and more powerful, and affordable data storage.
All of these things mean it’s possible to quickly and automatically produce models that can analyze bigger, more complex data and deliver faster, more accurate results (even on a very large scale). And by building precise models, an organization has a better chance of identifying profitable opportunities or avoiding unknown risks.
And finally coming to the most interesting and important part…
Applications of Machine Learning :
Netflix’s Recommendation Engine: The core of Netflix is its infamous recommendation engine. Over 75% of what you watch is recommended by Netflix and these recommendations are made by implementing Machine Learning.
Facebook’s Auto-tagging feature: The logic behind Facebook’s DeepMind face verification system is Machine Learning and Neural Networks. DeepMind studies the facial features in an image to tag your friends and family.
Amazon’s Alexa: The infamous Alexa, which is based on Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning is an advanced level Virtual Assistant that does more than just play songs on your playlist. It can book you an Uber, connect with the other IoT devices at home, track your health, etc.
Google’s Spam Filter: Gmail makes use of Machine Learning to filter out spam messages. It uses Machine Learning algorithms and Natural Language Processing to analyze emails in real-time and classify them as either spam or non-spam.
Web Search Engine: One of the reasons why search engines like Google, Bing etc work so well is because the system has learnt how to rank pages through a complex learning algorithm.
Photo tagging Applications: Be it Facebook or any other photo tagging application, the ability to tag friends makes it even more happening. It is all possible because of a face recognition algorithm that runs behind the application.
Spam Detector: Our mail agent like Gmail or Hotmail does a lot of hard work for us in classifying the mails and moving the spam mails to spam folder. This is again achieved by a spam classifier running in the back end of mail application.
Speech recognition : Speech recognition is a process of converting voice instructions into text, and it is also known as “Speech to text”. Machine learning algorithms are widely used by various applications of speech recognition. Google assistant, Alexa and many more are using speech recognition technology to follow the voice instructions.
Self-driving cars : Machine learning plays a significant role in self-driving cars. Tesla, the most popular car manufacturing company is working on self-driving car. It is using unsupervised learning method to train the car models to detect people and objects while driving.
Online fraud detection : Machine learning is making our online transaction safe and secure by detecting fraud transaction, there may be various ways that a fraud transaction can take place such as fake accounts, fake ids, and steal money in the middle of a transaction.
Image recognition : Image recognition is one of the most common applications of machine learning. It is used to identify objects, persons, places etc.
Image from Google
Some general fields where Machine Learning has a huge impact are as follows:-
Financial Services: Banks and other businesses in the financial industry use machine learning technology for two key purposes: to identify important insights in data, and prevent fraud. The insights can identify investment opportunities, or help investors know when to trade. Data mining can also identify clients with high-risk profiles, or use cyber surveillance to pinpoint warning signs of fraud.
Government services: Government agencies such as public safety and utilities have a particular need for machine learning since they have multiple sources of data that can be mined for insights. Analyzing sensor data, for example, identifies ways to increase efficiency and save money. Machine learning can also help detect fraud and minimize identity theft.
Health Care services: Machine learning is a fast-growing trend in the health care industry, thanks to the advent of wearable devices and sensors that can use data to assess a patient’s health in real time. The technology can also help medical experts analyze data to identify trends or red flags that may lead to improved diagnoses and treatment.
Retail services: Websites recommending items you might like based on previous purchases are using machine learning to analyze your buying history. Retailers rely on machine learning to capture data, analyze it and use it to personalize a shopping experience, implement a marketing campaign, price optimization, merchandise supply planning and for customer insights.
Oil and Gas services: Finding new energy sources. Analyzing minerals in the ground. Predicting refinery sensor failure. Streamlining oil distribution to make it more efficient and cost-effective. The number of machine learning use cases for this industry is vast — and still expanding.
Transportation services: Analyzing data to identify patterns and trends is key to the transportation industry, which relies on making routes more efficient and predicting potential problems to increase profitability. The data analysis and modeling aspects of machine learning are important tools to delivery companies, public transportation and other transportation organizations.
Thank you for giving it your time, I hope to write more on this topic covering all the other aspects as well.
Until then… stay tuned! | https://medium.com/all-about-machine-learning/machine-learning-an-outlook-d78998c5d4a4 | ['Sanya Raghuwanshi'] | 2020-09-06 13:56:37.806000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning', 'Machine Intelligence', 'Types Of Machine Learning', 'Python'] |
ISO 14001 Environmental Management System : Make Environment Sustain | How to reduce the carbon footprint which impact the environment at large is that the major concern of Organizations, Industry, and Businesses. Every organization practically working for sustainability and adopting certain steps to spot , manage, monitor and control the problems associated with the environment. It not only helps in reducing the carbon footprint but also helps in improving the operating efficiency. it’s compared to the financial management system, rather than measuring financial performance and expenditure incurred it helps in meeting the sustainability goals in compliance with environmental regulations, health, and safety both for workers and therefore the community at large.
It became an obligation for the organization to efficiently use the resources and reduce the economic waste to enhance environmental performance. This is often an ongoing process and therefore the international standard used is ISO 14001 which is meant to satisfy the wants of the environmental management system. to satisfy the legal requirements of the corporate organization’s environmental goal got to process, review and improve along side analyzing the long and short term impact on the environment. to satisfy the company’s sustainability targets and to live the results it’ll create programs. it’ll improve employee awareness and also increase environmental issues competence. Improvement in companies’ sustainability efforts continuously. This standard considers all environmental issues relevant like water management, soil contamination, pollution , water, and sewage-related issues, mitigation and adaptation of global climate change and use of resources more efficiently and effectively.
EMS requires continuous improvement regularly. This standard has been revised and comes in improvement within the strategic planning process, to spice up environmental performance build up a stronger commitment with the assistance of inputs received from leaders of the Organization. it’s preferred by all kinds and size of the organization, profit, non-profit, government and personal . This not only gains a competitive advantage but also gain the trust of the stakeholders.
The leadership team takes a necessary step to enhance the general performance by reducing the danger involved and increase the chance for implementing this standard successfully. This standard sets a framework for a scientific approach.
Some of the listed benefits are as follows
Organizations should take a strategic approach to enhance environmental performance:
• The impact on the environment has been minimized.
• Industrial waste has been reduced to some extent
• Make maximum use of obtainable resources
• Corporate image, profit, and performance are improved.
• Demonstrate the present and future compliance which meets the statutory and regulatory requirements.
• Employee engagement and leadership involvement are increased with time.
• Strategic aims are achieved by implementing this standard within the Organization.
• Employees’ understanding has been increased associated with the importance of environmental concerns and therefore the importance of individual actions.
System complications are removed with the implementation of this standard within the Organization. which ends up within the faster achievement of sustainable goals. Standard also comes with some key improvements. It protects the environment from degradation and harmful proactive initiatives. specialise in life-cycle to end-to life associated with environmental aspects of the business.
Kindly stay updated with us on the subsequent given website http://www.ursindia.com and also to understand more about other standards. | https://medium.com/@ursindiaakash/iso-14001-environmental-management-system-make-environment-sustain-373ac26d961c | ['Akash Urs'] | 2020-12-23 05:11:53.364000+00:00 | ['Employee Engagement', 'Engagement', 'Organization', 'Environmental Issues', 'Leadership'] |
Peace and Scots Pines | However they get their perpetual youth, the views along these roads are some of the best in Lancashire. It’s a shame that so many people forget about the Forest of Bowland and head straight to the barren drama of the Yorkshire Dales. The Inn at Whitewell sits at what feels like the centre of the world, especially in the sunshine. If you crane your neck on the way past, you can steal a look at the amazingly lush valley the wedding parties inside are being treated to. I do it every time.
So, travel a bit further than that famous gastropub and you’ll reach a two mile stretch of excellent winding road flanked by rowan, bracken and pheasants.
The road meets Marshaw Wyre, a peat-stained brook that cuts through a small natural woodland of Scots pine and runs alongside for just long enough to create the feeling of being transported to somewhere else entirely.
We pulled over for a minute and sat by the side of the road. | https://medium.com/path-less-traisped/peace-and-scots-pines-6974b9c43063 | [] | 2016-04-12 10:39:48.615000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Nature', 'Storytelling'] |
7 Ways that We Made More Than We Spent This Year | Karolina Grabowska on Pexels
I begin this story with two disclaimers. Those being that this year is not yet over and the title is slightly misleading.
To clarify the former, what I am actually referring to is the period of time spanning from December 10, 2019, through December 8th of this year. My wife’s and my joint checking account typically issues statements between the 8th and the 10th of each month, thus our typical monthly expenses are not strictly tallied by the calendar.
Regarding the title, I suppose that the title “How $12,000 more is currently in our checking account than one year ago” is less catchy and vaguer. It is not as if my wife and I “spent” $127,000, or an average of $10,600 per month. I am Paying Ourselves First $16,000 this year ($10K for me and $6K for her) and, before the pandemic hit, I was still shelling out around $3,000 per month for our son’s college.
As you can see by the spreadsheet, there were six statements during which five figures or more made it into the account and there were four when “only” around $7,000 made its way in. Furthermore, there were two statements when less than $7,000 was withdrawn and there was one, with a good explanation when nearly $29,000 was*.
All in all, as a thoroughly middle-class family living in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, we have both suffered and benefitted from the pandemic in various ways.
One of the ways is perhaps the key to become a millionaire in the making.
When it comes to attaining wealth, there are literally hundreds or perhaps thousands of ways. But they all boil down to three simple things:
1) Make More Money
2) Spend Less Money
3) Make More and Spend Less Money
Expanding upon the above just a bit, it is also key to invest the difference. Make your money work for you instead of you working for it. All the reason why the dividends and capital gains that my family is collecting this month is My Favorite $12,000 of the year.
In keeping with practicing what I preach, despite the many hardships that we have endured this year, my family has spent considerably less in 2020 than in previous years and I, personally, have earned more. Two of the ways may never be repeated again, but they did transpire this year, and several or perhaps most of these may apply to you as well.
1. We Did Not Travel
To be honest, this one thing alone could just about explain the entire amount of $12,000 less leaving our account than making it in.
None of the four of us has left the State of Illinois this year, resulting in thousands of dollars less going out. Most of our family vacations cost several thousands of dollars, like the five grand that we spent within a matter of eight days last year at this time traveling to visit my father-in-law and his wife in Lake Havasu City.
Our daughter missed out on a much-anticipated week-long trip through southern California, a state that she has yet to set foot in. Our son missed out on an even bigger trip, traveling to Columbia (the country, not one of the 29 cities with the name in the US) for two weeks with his band. The four-day visit that I had scheduled with my son to check out UT-Austin was canceled, as was our one-week family vacation to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It is also likely that we would have traveled west for the week between Christmas and New Year’s, as we have done the past two years.
Altogether, these trips would have cost us somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 or more.
Not only did we not spend anything on travel, but we received a full refund for our daughter’s canceled trip, some of which I paid last year, and our son still has an $800+ credit with American Airlines that we will hopefully make use of in 2021.
Beyond that, because there were no true vacations this year, only sporadic days relaxing at home and off the clock, I cashed out the maximum amount of days that the City I work for allows — ten. Apparently, after various taxes and pension contributions are withdrawn, my days are valued at around $375 each ($445 before). Thus, an “extra” amount of nearly $4,000 was deposited into our account. Of course, I paid myself with much of those proceeds and also sent a little extra toward our mortgage, but I would have much rather have enjoyed a week in Austin with my son in late March, a week in the U.P. with my family in July and a week in Lake Havasu City via Las Vegas with my father-in-law.
But we did not have that choice, did we?
2. Our Virtual Graduate
The financial thing that I am most proud of is having saved over six figures for each of our two children while working regular middle-class jobs and being married to a stay-at-home mother.
It was no easy feat, but here in late 2020, I can share having paid in the neighborhood of $110,000 to $115,000 for our son’s private college education, with around $19,000 left in his account as he applies to graduate schools, and somewhere north of $120,000 in our daughter’s college fund as she explores her undergraduate options.
I did not pay the entire $3,000 per month from our current income but typically transferred $500 less per month than the current payment from his 529 account. A topic for other stories, to make use of the American Opportunity tax credit, the first $4,000 paid in a year is eligible, those funds cannot originate from a 529 account, which already enjoys tax-free status on its growth.
That out of the way, I had been paying $500 or more per month than what I transferred from his college account for the past four years, resulting in a $5,000 annual net loss in our checking account.
Not only did our son graduate this past spring, but once his college went fully virtual in April, we wound up receiving a credit after he and the other students were ordered to move out of their dormitories*.
For the last six weeks or so of his college, I was paying only $318 per week as opposed to the $3,000 per month that I had become accustomed to.
Most months, I paid in the $3,000 range for our son’s college.
Besides not traveling at all in 2020, no longer paying so much for college, even though it is quite possible that I will be shelling out north of fifty grand next year (topic for yet another story), obviously provided a financial boost when it was much needed.
3. Not Taken to the Cleaners
Would you believe that when I first began my career, I wore a dress shirt with a tie five days per week?
Upon my first assignment to night narcotics court way back in 1993, I was assigned to court one night per week in two out of three weeks and three nights per week every third week. I detailed my experiences as a PO in a way-too-long tome appropriately titled the same. I had to wear a suit those nights and several times per week once assigned to day court.
During my first many years as an economic developer, I also wore dress shirts and ties on most days. I recall nervously venturing to go tie-less on Fridays about ten years ago, which eventually led to going without them on most days.
I recall being asked to make $5 donations to local food pantries for the right to wear jeans to work five or six Fridays per year. We would have to wear the sticker showing that we did.
These days, I wear jeans and casual shirts five days per week, only wearing slacks and dress shirts once or twice per month throughout the pandemic on days when we had important in-person meetings and at City Council meetings that were held live sporadically this year.
Thus, the story that I was set to write in March about being “taken to the cleaners” was put on hold, first referenced here.
It was leap year day, February 29th, the last time that I picked up clothes at our dry cleaners. I was outraged at the $42 bill; my cleaners having raised their prices once again to around $2 per shirt.
As I mentioned, I have been wearing dress shirts for many years and recall paying a dollar or less per shirt throughout the nineties and early 2000s. So, when I see the price more than double over the years, inching up by a dime or two per year, it begins to add up. On another note, our daughter often purchases fancy clothes via Depop and similar sites, many of which wind up being dry-cleaned only. Since those also end up added to my order, I witnessed my monthly dry-cleaning bills creep up from around $20 per month to more than twice that.
Prior to the pandemic, that is.
Little did I know that I would not set foot in the dry cleaners again until later this month when I intend to drop off the ten or so dress shirts that I have worn since March prior to my thirteen straight days of either working from home or taking days off.
I know all too well that the dry-cleaning business is a dying one. Where we live, nine out of ten are owned and operated by moms-and-pops of Korean descent. Having become fairly close to my own cleaner after going there since 2001, she has shared many personal stories of her family with me, as I have with her. Also, having been an economic developer for a mid-sized suburban community, I have witnessed first-hand the closing of three dry cleaning businesses in our town since March, all owned by Korean couples.
In one instance, I had to gain access to the closed strip center unit from the landlord to assist those whose clothes were left on the racks after the business owners had vacated the premises. It was not the first time that I had provided that service and it undoubtedly will not be the last.
I can only hope that I do not have to contact anyone to help me gather my own clothes from a closed business once I have dropped those ten shirts off.
How much have we saved by not taking our clothes to the dry cleaners this year? It is not an exact number, but I estimate it at somewhere between $40 and $50 per month since early March, or possibly up to $500 less spent.
4. We’re Less Gassy
I have noticed that we have not been filling up the gas tanks on our two cars as often.
I worked exclusively from home from mid-March through the end of May and after returning to our City Hall with regular days and hours for several months, we are back to working from home some of the time.
My wife is a lunch supervisor at the magnet school that both of our children graduated eighth grade from, and the school has gone back and forth from hybrid to completely virtual. As of now, she is laid off once again, thus does not currently drive to and from the school every day.
Our daughter is one of those students who has not done as well with virtual learning as she did in-person. Nonetheless, we opted for her to face less risk of catching coronavirus and she has been attending school virtually on the new laptop that we purchased for her during the past few months.
One thing she does not do is drive to and from her school.
As I mentioned, our son graduated from college this past spring. He continued with one of the college bands that needed a high-quality trumpet player, but that band also no longer meets in person due to various members having come into contact with others who have tested positive. Thus, the two days per week that my wife or I were driving him to and from the college are also over.
We simply do not drive as much.
It would be one of the harder expenses to quantify, but I would estimate that our family has spent a few hundred dollars less this year than usual on gasoline.
5. A Scruffy Guy
Just as I used to wear dress shirts with ties for around the first twenty years of my working life, so, too, did I diligently shave every morning.
I had tried electric razors a few times, but perhaps because I always bought the cheapest ones available, they did not work very well for me.
Thus, I have purchased razors since moving up in my career from a P.O. to an economic developer in the fall of 2000.
Good razors are not cheap.
Over the years, I have moved from the super cheap plastic single-blade razors that cut my face more times than I could count to the Bic Hybrids with multiple blades. With coupons, you can purchase replacement blades for less than a dollar each.
My almost-full-year supply of Bic Comfort razors purchased early this year
As few as two years ago, I would use one of these blades twice and then toss them in the trash. In trying to become more frugal, I decided to stretch that to three days and then later, to four. I would try to get away with being scruffy on Fridays, and nobody seemed to notice or care.
I always keep a spare razor or two in my desk at work, so if I learn of an important meeting, like with the Mayor or a potential investor or new business, that I am required to attend on short notice, I can retreat to the washroom and emerge clean-shaven with none the wiser.
During the months of strictly working from home, I did my very utmost to remain positive while others around me sank in and out of depression. I, myself, feel as if getting out of bed in the morning is a major undertaking as I listen to the grim reports on my alarm clock radio.
I did not shave at all for weeks at a time throughout April and May but wound up doing so every so often as my face became itchy. I never really got past that itchy stage.
I am the father of a heavily bearded young man, but Because Reasons, I intend to remain clean-shaven for several more years.
But these days, I am only fully shaving twice per week (I shave my neck in between) — on Monday and Thursday mornings. Mondays because I am scruffy as hell after the weekend and report to work in person that day. After working from home and not shaving on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I return to the office in person and clean-shaven on Thursdays. I still go scruffy on Fridays.
Therefore, after having gone through a package of a dozen razors per month for many years, the same amount may last twelve weeks or more. It may have only saved a hundred bucks or so throughout this year, but it is nevertheless nice not to spend so much on them.
If you add in that I went four months for the first time since the late eighties without getting a haircut, and that my son has not had one since February, we saved another chunk of change with that. My wife and daughter both go to salons where their stylists charge four or five times as much as Great Clips, where my son and I go, and they have gone far less often as well.
6. Two Big Boosts
Reducing our spending on travel, education, gas, dry cleaning, and razors did not make up this difference alone.
This year, we received two financial boosts, both of which may never come again.
After fifteen long years toiling for a very difficult city to attract developers to, I received a five percent longevity bonus.
When I knew it was coming, I had made big plans on why we would spend, yes spend, much of it. Our home very much needed some improvements then and still does now.
Six months later, none of the funds have been allocated as of yet. I paid myself a little extra with some of the funds, paid off a fairly high credit card bill as I would have anyway, and transferred most of it into savings.
Part of the almost-$12,000 that found its way into our account between June 9th and July 8th was around $4,100 from this bonus. $3,000 of that was transferred into savings on July 7th.
Back in April, like many Americans in our income range did, we received a direct deposit of $2,900 from the IRS when the stimulus payments were made.
Also like many Americans, after investing an “extra” $300 for my wife and myself that month, I transferred $2,300 of that into savings.
Should I remain at my current place of employment for four-and-a-half more long years, there is only one more longevity bonus and only a $2,000 one at that. After taxes, it would come out to around $1,600 and, God willing, as a fifty-four-year-old at the time, even though it would be wise to top off some investment, I sure would love to go on a nice getaway with my wife with all that and more.
When it comes to another stimulus payment coming our way, I am not holding my breath and would urge you not to, either. Better to create your own stimulus check, which is the final of these seven points.
7. Hustle Much?
If you are not engaging in a side-hustle, you are getting left behind.
At least that is the way it seems to millionaires in the making and those who subscribe to the FIRE movement.
Even middle-aged guys like me who hope to “retire” someday are best served by generating income above and beyond what we make at our day jobs. It is a well-known fact that you will never become rich only by working for someone else and on a salary. As a government worker bee since 1993, I have been a salaried employee for over twenty-seven years, so I know this to be true.
While not an overly impressive amount, I cleared roughly the same amount that the first stimulus checks were made out for, $1,200, after selling dozens of my books and a number of shirts on eBay.
This not only made my wife a little bit happier as my hoarding habits were curtailed throughout this pandemic year but after setting about half of it aside to (what else?) pay myself first a little extra early next year, we are happily spending around $500 taking turns picking where we order out from every three days or so through the end of this year.
Even though the four of us, plus my Baby, are hunkering down at home this month, that does not mean that we cannot try to have a little bit of fun and together time while doing so.
I truly, truly want to expand upon my side hustles. I have long wanted to start an eCommerce business but, I’m being honest, my fear of failure and not wanting to dive head-first into something that I may soon lose interest in is holding me back.
Sure, I would love to become one of those “Here’s how I made an extra hundred grand” guys, but my tendency towards a scarcity mindset rather than one of abundance and my general middle-class mindset have held me back for quite some time.
But that does not mean that you cannot.
No matter what it is that you are currently doing to make a living and pursue your dreams of becoming a millionaire, the internet has completed changed the way we work and fortunately, has made things far more flexible than they have ever been before. With jobs, careers, and side hustles at our fingertips, there has never been a better time to start earning money on the side.
We Have Spent More on Some Things
Perhaps another story for another day, prior to the pandemic, we had only purchased face masks once or twice, prior to a painting project or sanding something down.
I do not even want to know how many boxes of face masks that my wife has ordered and I have paid for since the pandemic began. It has definitely cost as much or more than the amount we have saved through reducing our purchases of things like razors, gasoline, and coffee on my way to work.
But if a few hundred dollars’ worth of masks can save us or a loved one from a potentially fatal illness, those are dollars well spent.
We have also spent a lot more on groceries this year and, I suspect, from patronizing local restaurants frequently through carry-out.
But, for the most part, we have spent less this year than in previous years, and coupled with my longevity bonus and the stimulus check, we may just be nearing the end of one of those infrequent years when our family’s net worth increases.
What About You?
Besides some catharsis that benefits me by writing and sharing, this story will most likely make me a buck or even a few. Altogether, I hustle up enough to buy a cup of coffee or two per month through my writing efforts but plan on increasing that amount in the very near future.
But that is more than enough about me.
What about you?
I would bet that, like us, there may be several things that you spent less on since the Coronavirus began its rampage through the country and world this past spring.
Most of my friends and relatives earn too much to have received stimulus payments, but the vast majority of us do not. Have you also received some stimulus money? If so, did it simply help you eek by for a month or two or did you invest it or put it into savings as I did?
Are you comfortable traveling yet or, like us, have you been hunkering down at home this year and not spending anything at all on travel?
Finally, have you not only read and thought about generating some additional income through side hustles or passive investing but actually taken tangible steps towards achieving that?
Again, you are not a true millionaire in the making unless you have several sources of income above and beyond what someone else pays you to toil for on an hourly basis. Like one of the wisest money sages ever, Warren Buffet has famously said, “If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.”
Do not settle for trading hours for income your entire life. It can be done if you attain executive status, but it is highly challenging and stressful to become wealthy that way. Better to use a combination of outsourcing and passive income streams to become more like Warren and make money while you sleep.
If you remain bogged down in the reading and thinking stage, like I am, there is no time like the present to formulate your plans for taking action (seriously one of my next few stories) as the calendar turns to a new year.
Thank you for reading, Be Well, and may you, too, take in more funds than what leaves your account next year. | https://themakingofamillionaire.com/7-ways-that-we-made-more-than-we-spent-this-year-b43de95fbb5e | ['M. Bernard Bloom'] | 2020-12-12 13:52:28.492000+00:00 | ['Stimulus', 'Saving', 'Investing', 'Spending', 'Side Hustle'] |
Let Me Finish | by Israel Centeno
Our blundering quest for Paradise
Isaak Babel in Lubyanka prison, May 1939. Public Domain.
Halfway through the journey of building his own utopia, Isaak Babel, the author of Red Cavalry and Tales of Odessa (and, then, a new member of the Cheka*) said to a colleague, “I just like to have a sniff and see what death smells like.” Later on, perhaps horrified of, or foreshadowing the end of his journey, shortly before the death of his friend Maxim Gorky, Babel stopped writing, so as not to bow to the Creator. However, after this he ventured one further sentence:
“I have mastered a new literary genre, the genre of silence.”
Everyone, at some point, has thought about or even longed for paradise. We associate it with a state of indescribable happiness. The ancient Persians imagined it to be like a perfect garden of eternal hunting, the wildlife indistinct amid a state of absolute innocence. The Bible defines it as the garden in which God placed his creatures in a state of total innocence.
Humanity, in its passage through history and via many archetypes, has recreated this notion of paradise. Individuals and civilizations have felt a tragic nostalgia for Arcadia and, having embarked on a quest to find it, have drifted off course.
Our sounds, rising from the evocation of innocence, bring the ambitions of our dreams to life: A limpid, untarnished future without pain, illness, misery, and bothersome contradictions. We hold onto the idea of perfect love and a fulfilling life. The Promised Land appears on the far side of an arid desert.
The asepsis of paradise, recently portrayed on social networks using the power of schmaltz, is obscene. An endlessly sunny day, serial and uniform in completeness, the absence of details, the non-existence of contradictions, happiness reified in faces full of divine serenity or in the throes of annoying orgasms. An exhibition in a catalog of illusions. Customary benevolence in a system where nothing is out of place or in conflict.
Yet the disgust at our own mortality, the anxiety that comes with knowing we are incomplete and the stress we experience when faced with doubt, makes us go to the ends of the Earth in search of absolute perfection. But, while looking to the future, we have been strewing the landscape with bodies. Those grand ideas that ensure the supremacy of something are creating new expressions of hate and cruelty.
Some perceive Paradise as an otherworldly place that we can reach after having carried out divine deeds, which are always cruel and painful. Others have tried to create paradise on Earth.
In the end, we are left with an ironic scene. Prior to being executed in 1939, an abandoned Isaak Babel managed to recapture a sense of happiness. After the torture and his confession, he regained the painful clarity of a mortal man, and remembered the phrase he uttered to Osip Mandelstam in a moment of pride: “I just like to have a sniff and see what death smells like.”
He then implored his executioners, before they fired the shot that would expel him from Eden, “Let me finish my work!” Perhaps he thought: An achievable paradise is in writing, in finishing my work.
*The first of many Soviet organizations concerned with military and political intelligence, founded by Felix Dzerzhinsky. | https://medium.com/citizenteno/let-me-finish-64fa98559ddb | ['Israel Centeno'] | 2018-09-07 13:18:06.147000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Cheka', 'Writer', 'Isaac Babel', 'Execution'] |
挑選正確的增長賽道 — — C端初創企業如何獲得新用戶（4/4） | Drive Growth by Picking the Right Lane — A Customer Acquisition Playbook for Consumer Startups (4/4)
前陣子看到了知名 VC First Round 的這篇文章，覺得質量很高，反反覆覆看了好幾次，對於思考新創企業的獲客增長非常受用，因此翻譯成了中文版本分享給大家（简体中文版请点此）。 | https://medium.com/@jessieyuct/%E6%8C%91%E9%81%B8%E6%AD%A3%E7%A2%BA%E7%9A%84%E5%A2%9E%E9%95%B7%E8%B3%BD%E9%81%93-c%E7%AB%AF%E5%88%9D%E5%89%B5%E4%BC%81%E6%A5%AD%E5%A6%82%E4%BD%95%E7%8D%B2%E5%BE%97%E6%96%B0%E7%94%A8%E6%88%B6-4-4-8290ea5b1cc2 | ['Jessie Yu'] | 2020-12-06 08:00:57.275000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Growth', 'Growth Hacking'] |
Belly to the Sun | I’m a writer who has a passion for empowering others and finds value in showcasing the true you in all aspects of your life. | https://medium.com/@ariellapinedo/belly-to-the-sun-137d776eb29b | ['Ariella Pinedo'] | 2020-12-23 16:02:28.640000+00:00 | ['Cats', 'Haiku', 'Poetry On Medium'] |
Laravel 8.* + Backpack + Article with image (file upload) | In order to proceed you should have:
- Laravel installed + Backpack admin (teaching purposes)
- Tags CRUD created
- Article CRUD created
- virtual host ready for you
- xampp setup or other web server
- composer installed
Article
- title — 255 symbols
- content — text — RichTextEditor
- tags (many available) — select with multiple options
New tutorial to add file upload to the artilce
- image (one image) — image upload
#STEP 1: Create migration to add image to an article
php artisan make:migration add_image_to_articles_table --table=articles
/**
* Run the migrations.
*
* @return void
*/
public function up()
{
Schema::table('articles', function (Blueprint $table) {
$table->string('image',255)->nullable();
});
}
/**
* Reverse the migrations.
*
* @return void
*/
public function down()
{
Schema::table('articles', function (Blueprint $table) {
$table->dropColumn('image');
});
}
We are adding a new column image — which will be used to store the url of the image. Next step is to run the migration.
php artisan migrate
Expected result.
#STEP 2: Alter Article model
We need to add extra items to use:
use Illuminate\Support\Str;
use Intervention\Image\ImageManagerStatic as Image;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Storage;
And then add two functions in FUNCTIONS section.
public static function boot()
{
parent::boot();
static::deleting(function($obj) {
Storage::delete(Str::replaceFirst('storage/','public/', $obj->image));
});
}
public function setImageAttribute($value)
{
$attribute_name = "image";
// destination path relative to the disk above
$destination_path = "public/articles";
// if the image was erased
if ($value==null) {
// delete the image from disk
Storage::delete($this->{$attribute_name});
// set null in the database column
$this->attributes[$attribute_name] = null;
}
// if a base64 was sent, store it in the db
if (Str::startsWith($value, 'data:image'))
{
// 0. Make the image
$image = Image::make($value)->encode('jpg', 90);
// 1. Generate a filename.
$filename = md5($value.time()).'.jpg';
// 2. Store the image on disk.
Storage::put($destination_path.'/'.$filename, $image->stream());
// 3. Delete the previous image, if there was one.
Storage::delete(Str::replaceFirst('storage/','public/', $this->{$attribute_name}));
// 4. Save the public path to the database
// but first, remove "public/" from the path, since we're pointing to it
// from the root folder; that way, what gets saved in the db
// is the public URL (everything that comes after the domain name)
$public_destination_path = Str::replaceFirst('public/', 'storage/', $destination_path);
$this->attributes[$attribute_name] = $public_destination_path.'/'.$filename;
}
}
First function will make sure that once we delete an entry — the file will be deleted as well.
Second function is a mutator responsible for the upload the image to the correct folder.
We have logic replacing /public folder with /storage folder due to the fact that images are exposed to end users using /storage folder.
#STEP 3: Install intervention/image
Run
composer require intervention/image
#STEP 4: Adjust Article controller
[
'label' => "Article Image",
'name' => "image",
'type' => 'image',
'crop' => true, // set to true to allow cropping, false to disable
'aspect_ratio' => 1, // omit or set to 0 to allow any aspect ratio
]
We need to adjust getFieldsData function and add the image column.
Our next change is related to setupListOperation method. We need to update it to the following
protected function setupListOperation()
{
$this->crud->set('show.setFromDb', false);
$this->crud->addColumns($this->getFieldsData(TRUE));
}
This will make sure that when we are adding images they will be shown on list as well.
#STEP 5: Make disk public and allow files to be shown
php artisan storage:link
#STEP 6: Time to test
Adding of an item
Edit of an item
List items table
Note: Files are uploaded to storage/app/public/articles
But they are available to the end users by accessing — DOMAIN/storage/articles/{IMAGE_NAME}
Video | https://medium.com/@lyubomir-filipov/laravel-8-backpack-article-with-image-file-upload-e2c04128fafa | ['Lyubomir Filipov'] | 2020-12-19 19:23:37.828000+00:00 | ['Image', 'Laravel8'] |
Reverse Engineering The 4 Daily Habits of a Highly Effective Freelance Copywriter —Pt. 3 | Heya!….
Here’s another ass spanking daily habit for ya…
“Come Up With an Idea a Day”
Now, this article will be a little bit shorter than my previous posts as it’s tied together with the 2 habits that I mentioned in the past articles.
Anyways, let’s get down to it.
As a copywriter, you won’t just be writing copy all day, every day for the rest of the week.
Although the bulk of what we do is writing, there’s another aspect of our service that enhances our value in a company— our ideas.
We are IDEA MACHINES.
I was talking with my retainer client the other day and she wanted me to brainstorm ideas for her new e-book.
Side note: To give you a little bit of context on the situation, I’m trying to revive her email list as she’s currently having trouble sending out her promotions to her subscribers.
So…
I sat down on my thinking chair.
Did a ton of market research.
And came up with 3 radically new titles
And here’s what I told her…
The result:
Here’s the thing…
Coming up with one simple idea a day has two major benefits:
It makes the copy stronger It makes writing the rest of your copy 10x easier
As a copywriter, you must understand that your readers don't want to hear everything you have to say about a certain topic.
What your readers are looking for is a single, useful solution that could make them more successful.
That’s the power of coming up with an idea a day.
It strengthens your copy and helps you narrow in the things that are actually important for your reader.
“Well, what ideas should I come up with?”
It could be anything, really
Like my example above, it could a cool title for a brand new e-book…
An awesome subject for an email…
What’s important here is that you stay in the habit of asking “what if…” or “what so good about this”…as often as possible.
Now, here’s a little hack to generating ideas…
“Practice coming up with 10 small ideas a day instead of ONE BIG IDEA”
Here’s how I did it when I was starting out:
Check out your Gmail inbox and look for emails with subject lines that grab your attention
Exhibit A:
Subject line: Fancy a blue watch?
2. Then, come up with 10 different angles of your own.
For example:
The best watch for the month of July A new trend in fancy watches Looking for the perfect gift? Almost SOLD OUT This is an all-time classic It’s a shame there’s only 5 left Only 5 left in stock Are you sporty and elegant? A simple yet elegant watch for your man You should give him this
3. Then, spend some time looking through your ideas and how you can make them better.
Do this simple exercise a day and you’ll be on your way to churning out money-making hooks,angles and ideas every time you write a piece of copy for your clients.
Next week, I’m going to show you the counterintuitive approach to getting better at sales copy…this may not be for beginners but it’s definitely something that can instantly cut through the noise and sharpen your copywriting game.
For those of you reading this for the first time…
Part 1: Read a piece of copy a day
Part 2: Write a piece of copy
Like this article? Hit that 👏button and the “Follow” button to show your support. | https://medium.com/@GerrickWayne/reverse-engineering-the-4-daily-habits-of-a-highly-effective-freelance-copywriter-pt-3-4d7812bd2cab | ['Gerrick Wayne'] | 2021-08-19 06:37:15.545000+00:00 | ['Email Marketing', 'Copywriting', 'Direct Response Marketing', 'Ideas', 'Freelance Writing'] |
How to Find Your ONE Thing: Advice From Bestselling Author Jay Papasan | How to Find Your ONE Thing: Advice From Bestselling Author Jay Papasan Jacob Morgan Apr 27·7 min read
Jay Papasan is the bestselling author of multiple books including The ONE Thing, which he co-authored with Gary Keller. The book has sold more than 2 million copies, it has been translated into 35 languages, and it has appeared on more than 500 national bestseller lists.
The main focus of The ONE Thing is to help readers find the one thing that they can do that will make everything else easier or unnecessary. In other words, once you come up with a goal for yourself it is important for you to ask yourself every day what is the one thing I can do today to take me closer to that goal. Every day you are looking for your number one priority.
But does that mean you can only focus on one goal or one thing at a time? No way! Jay says that is actually the biggest mistake readers make when going through the book. He says, “We never said that — who gets to do one thing? Nobody, right? We have kids, we have aging parents, we have hobbies, we have jobs, our jobs have all kinds of busy work that is absolutely necessary and can’t be ignored. But if we start and give disproportionate focus and energy to the true priority, everything else does get easier. And sometimes it just goes away. You don’t even have to do it. That’s a big idea.”
Finding your ONE Thing
Jay suggests that when you first start to try to find your one thing, it is important to think strategically about something that will be a long-term goal. Aim big, and long-term, instead of focusing on something you can achieve in the short term.
As Jay shares, when you are young and just starting out it is important to try to figure out what your unique gifts are. What are some areas where you excel that maybe others have a hard time with? He says, “The reason ultimately people get accelerated through the business world is that in some area they can provide disproportionate returns on their investment of time, right. They can sell more than the next person, they can close more than the next person, they can write better copy, or better code than the next person. So part of the young person’s journey is discovering where their passion and their gifts align.”
How can you become invaluable? In what areas can you show up and provide extra value? What are you passionate about or what are you skilled at? If there is something that you are very skilled at and that same thing brings you joy and a sense of purpose — you should lean into that.
And remember that every job is going to have things about it that you don’t enjoy, it’s pretty rare for someone to find a job that they enjoy 100% of the time. But if the majority of the role is exciting, challenging, and enjoyable for you — start your focus there.
How Jay helps his employees find their one thing
Jay is in charge of 44 employees with Keller Williams and one thing he practices on a regular basis with his team is something they call GPS. Each year Jay and his team come together to figure out what their number one goal as a company is. And once they have that goal they come up with three to five priorities that they will need to focus on throughout the year to reach that goal, and each of those priorities has up to five strategies behind it. That is how they get everyone on the team on the same page and working towards the same goal. So that happens on a yearly basis.
And then every week Jay meets with the people who report to him to review their own one page of set goals. This is called the 4–1–1, because it is that person’s priorities for 4 weeks, one month, and one year all on one page. Every week the individual employee looks at their annual goals based on the company priorities and from that they come up with monthly goals that support those overarching goals.
Jay says, “Every week they put their weekly goals that line up to their monthly goals that line up to their annual goals that line up to the divisional company goals. So it’s a cascading set of priorities. So that every week, I spend 30 minutes or so with the key people who work with me, and we review their weekly priorities. And once a month, I will look at their monthly priorities and just ask the question, how does this help us achieve our goals? And at the beginning of the year is the most work, right? We ask what’s our one thing and then based on that we create the cascade.”
This process allows employees to break large company-wide goals into bite-sized, achievable priorities that they know they can accomplish.
Click here to get the transcript or listen to your favorite player.
Is hustle culture a good thing?
A lot of people, especially entrepreneurs, believe that success is connected to a nonstop hustle to try to get ahead. They think that by outworking their competition they can win. But Jay doesn’t agree with this concept at all.
He says, “One of my fundamental beliefs is that to be a successful husband and a father and a successful business person, that those are not mutually exclusive endeavors. I refuse to believe otherwise. And the challenge I have with the hustle culture that you have to outwork and work longer than your competitors, is that they’re just ignoring the fact that like, I get to work every day with a self made billionaire. I do the math, what is his dollars per hour, it’s incalculable. But he doesn’t work any more hours than I do on an average week. So it’s not how many hours you work. It’s what you put into the hours. And it sounds so trite, but it’s incredibly true.”
It’s not that you can’t work long hours from time to time or put in time at the office on a weekend on occasion. As Jay shares, he has done that when they are on a deadline or if he’s preparing to speak at a big conference. But it’s not the norm. There are moments in life when you have to work harder than others, but to hustle nonstop all the time is not sustainable.
“I’ve seen it be a recipe for divorce and disease. And I do not want the people I love to be caught into the culture of hustle first, think second. So I think this is business as a thinking person’s game. And when we are strategic in our investment of time, we win.”
The four pitfalls people experience when living The ONE Thing
Once people have found their ONE thing and they start living that out, there are a few pitfalls they can fall into that Jay warns about. They are:
They lack clarity about what they want. They’re clear on what they want, but they’re unfocused in their approach. They’re focused, but they actually don’t have time to execute. The time that they DO commit, they leave unprotected.
So as you are navigating your priorities and goals, be sure to look out for these traps and make sure you don’t fall into any of them.
What can you do to start practicing your ONE thing today
For those of you who are ready to start putting this into practice today, Jay’s advice is to set up 30 minutes a week — whether it’s on a Sunday before the week starts or on Friday before you leave work — and come up with your one goal for the coming week.
Look at your schedule and tasks for the upcoming week and ask yourself “of all the things I could do, what is the number one thing I can achieve next week?” Figure out your number one goal for that week and then manage your time to make sure that one thing happens.
And if you have more than one thing you have to get done, use that 30 minutes a week to help you narrow down your to-do list to your top 5 things that actually matter. And then number those 5 things in order of importance, so you remember what that #1 most important thing is. Putting this exercise into practice will help you stay laser-focused on what really matters to you and it will help you achieve your goals faster.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform.
If you want more content like this you can subscribe to my Youtube channel. | https://medium.com/@jacobm/how-to-find-your-one-thing-advice-from-bestselling-author-jay-papasan-816f02cfe298 | ['Jacob Morgan'] | 2021-04-27 12:32:18.392000+00:00 | ['Future Of Work', 'Focus', 'Leadership Development', 'Productivity', 'Career Goals'] |
I worked over time | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/zoaeo/i-worked-over-time-9c90a5a4a5d9 | [] | 2020-12-21 03:45:29.284000+00:00 | ['Work Overtime', 'English'] |
He Committed Suicide at 62 But His Word of Advice Can Improve Your Writing | He Committed Suicide at 62 But His Word of Advice Can Improve Your Writing
Ernest Hemingway’s not-so-popular advice that can help every writer improve their craft of writing.
If Ernest Hemingway walked on this earth today, he would have been 117 years old. Can you think how many more excellent books he might have written by now? Well. His death might be tragic. I mean, committing Suicide on 62nd birthday is not cool at all. While his absence can be felt profoundly, we can continue his legacy about following his writing advice.
1. Write for the cause, not for the applause.
Writing is a personal act. You can always share your work with friends and family, but keep in mind that all of the endless hours of crafting your blog post might not get acknowledged.
What Hemingway meant is that there will not be a cheer leading squad at your desk when you finish that post. As a writer, you must train your mind to love the process. Your motivation is to complete the write-up because of the hope it’ll give to people.
If you’re feeling low, check out this post:
2. Just sit down and bleed
Writing is not just a personal evader; it’s a powerhouse of emotional stories.
Hemingway is trying to teach us to pour your soul into the writing. If you are sad, show it. If you are happy, your writing must give that impression.
If your writing is not creating discomfort for people, you’re not doing it right. Take stories, experiences, and what you have learned from your day and write them down. Convert them into stories.
3. Observe. Write. Simplify.
If you’ve read any of Hemingway’s work, you might realize that there is no flowery or long-winded tone. He was a journalist who molded his work to be concise and sharp. He followed a no-nonsense approach to writing.
Mostly, novice writers assume that writing difficult vocabulary will make them a famous writer. Sorry to disappoint guys. Keep your tone simple. One idea per line and get to the point fast using simple vocabulary.
4. Write drunk; edit sober.
A perfect metaphor for serious writers. When you’re drunk, you lose that regular and careless attitude about what people think about you. Now, I am not advocating that you drink before you write. What Hemingway means is to write your first draft without any fear.
For now, you are just putting ideas on paper. There might be a lot of junk that you notice, but don’t worry about it for now. But when you start editing, this is the time to tighten up the grip.
Polish your writing with powerful words, short sentences, and make it simple.
5. Write When You’re Hurt.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve written my best pieces when I was hurt. Hemingway did the same. There was a lot of pain in Hemingway’s life, and instead of cursing anyone, he used that pain to write some amazing stuff.
When you write anything with transparent emotions, there is a greater chance that people will relate to it and feel whatever you were feeling.
Besides, touching the heart of people, while writing out the hurt, it’ll heal you.
6. We Are Always Learning.
I am sure all of you must have felt the pressure of being The Best Writer. It feels like a rat race. Everyone is competing with someone, and successful writers might send pangs of jealousy onto your soul. This creates doubt for you, and then a war starts within ourselves, because we are not good enough.
If Hemingway thought that he was not a master, then how can we think of becoming one. As a writer, there is no stopping. Each writer’s voice and style is unique. So, instead of competing with other writers, observe your writing and try to be a better version than yesterday.
7. Write for fun or don’t write at all.
Writing should bring a sense of joy or liberation. If you find that writing is boring, this means that you need a break. Take a break and do something that you love. Gather around stories from nature. Take inspiration from other writers.
Whenever you feel the pressure of not enjoying what you’re writing, give time to get back into the zone.
8. Mistakes Indicate That You’re Trying.
Hemingway confessed that “There have been times when I felt truly embarrassed about my work.” This indicates that even Hemingway felt a failure at some point in his career.
Every writer grows with time. If you pick a write-up from your past, you might think that it’s rubbish. Because now you’ve evolved into something better. Each failure, rejection, teaches us something.
Every story will not be an award-winning story. So, if your story comes back to you with all red markings, don’t be afraid to correct it and try again. Just don’t quit too soon.
9. Write Every day.
Writing a 2,000-word article one day might not create an impact. But writing a 500-word article for two years every day might improve your writing significantly. It’s not about writing a world-class masterpiece every day — the goal is to get in the habit of writing something every day. Because when you start writing something, it gives you more space to experiment with new things. You’ll know what to change and which part created the most impact.
Change the intro, change the ending, and add an element of storytelling in your every write-up.
Get it in your head, writing every day will not just make you a better writer; it will make you luckier, too.
Closing thoughts.
They say if you want to succeed at something, look for people who are already successful and follow them. Ernest Hemingway is an excellent source of inspiration for every writer. Even if you haven’t heard of his name, Google him and read his work right now.
When you read right, you’ll be able to write well. One more closing piece of advice I would love to give is to make your writing as simple as possible. Everyone can write complicated, but it takes a mind of a genius to simplify things. | https://medium.com/wreader/he-committed-suicide-at-62-but-his-word-of-advice-can-improve-your-writing-7a552dea3a1b | ['Yousuf Rafi'] | 2020-11-19 21:16:46.693000+00:00 | ['Content', 'Writing Life', 'Writing Tips', 'Famous People', 'Ernest Hemingway'] |
COVID-19: Medios a Contramano de la Pandemia — Parte III: Importancia | Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more
Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore | https://medium.com/dataholics/covid-19-medios-a-contramano-de-la-pandemia-parte-iii-importancia-1c4c531c93bf | ['Juan Manuel Barriola'] | 2020-12-16 16:01:58.813000+00:00 | ['Web Scraping', 'NLP', 'Data Visualization', 'Covid 19', 'Data Science'] |
Solving Big Problems Soon: Some Food for Thought | We are all waiting too long to solve everything. With climate change, we always expect an immediate solution to come to us which will magically erase every single symptom of our sick planet. During our current global pandemic, we’re all just waiting for a vaccine, seeing the next moves of the corporations working on this — we’re left in a state of the unknown with inaction — this is not a good feeling at all.
We must start as soon as possible. Problems such as the current pandemic and the ongoing threat of climate change have been the results of us ignoring the calls to action. We’re too scared to approach it, and in the end, it becomes worse.
Credit goes to Pixabay on Pexels. Our planet is literally burning up.
Think about procrastinating on a big project — one that should take about three weeks. In the beginning, you perceive that you have a lot of time, and as a result, you don’t work on it. However, as the deadline approaches, you start thinking “oh shit, this is really hard.” Yet, you ignore it because the harder it seems, the more you’re inclined not to do it. On the final day, you realize that you have to start working on it, and the deadline is tomorrow. You may end up finishing, but it does not really end up solving anything — and you end up getting a bad result.
A quite accurate representation of how projects end up going whenever I procrastinate to the absolute last minute. Well, at least I finish? Source: The Poke.
With the current attitude that people have towards big problems, I fear that this might be the result — except the consequences are way bigger than having a bad grade — it affects the future of ourselves and our posterity.
We currently have 16 Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations, a global pandemic, and way too many problems on hand. How do we start solving them? If you thought your fifteen pages of FRQs from physics was overwhelming, wait until you see these. It’s enough to make anyone crack.
If you’re ready though, that’s something different. In order to make an impact, the people first must start. To start, we must have courage.
Courage is defined as the “mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty,” according to Merriam-Webster's Dictionary. It isn’t some large, I’m the chosen one conquest — anyone can do it. The accumulation of such mental and moral strength is the key part of this journey.
Building a good habit — or in this case, getting into the flow of solving a problem — is often the hardest to start. Think about the activation energy required to catalyze a chemical reaction — it becomes natural once we surpass a certain threshold. Source: James Clear (I love his blog!).
After bringing the courage to start, we try to get an understanding of the scope this problem provides.
To do this, you must first develop a wider understanding of the problem on hand. This is what we call “deep domain expertise.” They have a fundamental understanding of the big problem at hand — this typically involves a lot of study into EVERY SINGLE POSSIBLE THING that characterizes the problem.
Yet, it’s also important to bring in other people — from other fields —into this problem-solving approach. You establish more perspective through that. Think about all the interdisciplinary research — you have artificial intelligence and a multitude of applications into biology, and you have biophysics, and you have the integration of quantum chemistry and physics for a fundamental understanding of nature as a whole, and etc. You cannot have these projects without collaboration — be open.
Getting out of your space also provides a great perspective. In her book “A Mind for Numbers,” Barbara Oakley describes a test-taking tactic in the diffuse mode — when your brain starts looking at problems from the big picture, rather than a closed perspective — where you look at a problem for about two minutes in a test booklet, and if you’re not able to solve it immediately, you move on. As you’re solving other problems in the test that you’re more comfortable with, you notice that you naturally get an intuition towards solving this problem. To be stuck in that same area is inefficient, which is why so many problem solvers go out of their space. Walk around, do some exercise, go into a different environment — you’ll learn that you’ll get a different perspective on your approach.
Based on the accumulation of all of these approaches and taking action through experimentation and real-world applications, you can finally implement a solution framework that would be effective against your problem of focus.
Credits to Mike on Pexels.
Yet, this process is time-consuming — some people spend decades trying to solve a hard problem. Coming up with the theories of logic and non-Euclidean geometry may be something that, in this case, time is allowed.
But with the current situations in the world right now, we’re on crunch time. We need to 100x this framework to our approach and do it fast.
And with the modern situation, it’s really hard to make an impact without early-stage philanthropy, years and years in labs, venture capital, and government funding. The latter is especially hard.
So how do we achieve this? We push for more support, we need governmental support against the inevitable damnation that will occur to us because we’ve waited too long and there will be a certain amount of time. We must make it so that we can create opportunities that will allow everyone to take a part in problem-solving. Remember, this is a collective effort. The more 🧠-power we put into this, the more effective and efficient the solution.
Credits to Josh Riemer on Unsplash.
With the rising generation of Americans, there have been significant trends. These have been the most educated, the most diverse, and the most willing to tackle these hard problems. Combined with the efforts of the older generation, we’ll be able to establish a massive transformation in how our world is established — and we’ll create a better world for our future.
Think about it: if this is a new transformation among Americans, imagine the rest of the world🌐? If we put in the collective efforts of every individual capable of providing some perspective and augmenting it to prime efficiency, we may not be done in no time — but we definitely will be faster.
In doing so, we can finally “establish the general Welfare…for ourselves and our Posterity.”
Sources | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/solving-big-problems-soon-some-food-for-thought-ecb517691fdc | ['Orna Mukhopadhyay'] | 2020-12-28 02:13:54.946000+00:00 | ['Coronavirus', 'Climate Change', 'Tech', 'Problem Solving', 'Technology'] |
We’re Witnessing the Collapse of Fake Online Gurus | Are you young, naive, and looking to escape the rat race? Don’t fret. A new breed of fake gurus can help. Luckily, they have discovered the ultimate “formula”, “method”, or “code” to building wealth on autopilot. For only $3997, they will teach you how to turn $20,000 into $2 million in Forex, how to become a superstar Amazon seller generating $100,000+ in sales, or how to make a killing in real estate.
These tricksters are not your average thief. Having learned from the best charlatans, past and present, they have mastered the art of the hustle. Take Rajneesh who pulled off the greatest deception in modern history. The “spiritual guru” convinced doctors, nurses, pilots, even Hollywood stars to give up their houses, cars, jewelry, everything, just to join his 80,000-acre “spiritual” commune in Oregon, USA. By the time the FBI descended upon “Rajneeshpuram”, he had amassed a 55 million dollar fortune including 93 Rolls-Royces, and his commune bore a private army, secret police, and biological warfare laboratory.
This is not only a remarkable story but it shows even the smartest people fall victim to obvious frauds, knaveries, and swindles. A talented, devoted confidence-man has the power to brainwash you into never contemplating reality or, with today’s income-stream COVID-19 scams, accepting how difficult, challenging, and expensive, emotionally and financially, it is to make significant money using the platforms and products they sell and promote.
You have likely run into one of these guys on YouTube, Facebook, or Google either by accident or you have typed in “Forex”, “Dropshipping”, or “Passive income” out of curiosity. Interacting with their content becomes a death sentence. From your Facebook wall to your YouTube feed, your screen fills with the cheesiest, scummiest ads. And since your social media accounts live on all your devices, you can’t ignore them. They follow you around until you fall for one of many scams.
Forex trading — a phrase that makes any finance professional cringe — has become the fake gurus’ most popular mechanism to fleece their victims. 19-year-old “wonder kids” claim they have turned twenty grand into millions in just six months. Please. It’s only after you’ve been active in financial markets for years that you know bi-monthly 10,000% returns are impossible. The average hedge fund — a group of well-trained finance professionals — returns 0.06% per trading day or 16.5% per year.
Then, you have the insufferable dropshipping gurus who claim that selling via Amazon, the most crowded online marketplace, is now the opportunity of a lifetime. Meanwhile, research from Marketplace Pulse shows that only 4% of Amazon sellers make the same as a Costco employee. The real money is earned by selling the dream. This is the reality, yet many keep falling for it.
But, this could change. Just like how short-sellers continue to expose high-profile corporate fraudsters, online scam busters are doing the same to fake online gurus. Fraud investigators have become content creators, exposing charlatans via social media platforms. From flat-out exposés to interviewing previous victims, they deliver a public service — sometimes better than the authorities.
The most prominent online detective, Coffeezilla, reveals the most prolific cash grabs, frauds, and Ponzi schemes online, from Steven Mayer’s Amazon Automation to Nour Trades’ day trading chatroom. And as more and more fraud investigators and financial analysts join this scammer-exposé movement, fake gurus keep falling like flies.
But if you don’t want to sift through hours of video footage (like I have), here are the red flags: In the backdrop of their videos, they always have a Lambo and a mansion — both rented. Their product title contains one of these buzzwords: method, technique, or system. They convince you to buy an overpriced course ($1000+) that claims to give you all the answers. They sell you something in a saturated market. They try to silence anyone who exposes them. And they always — always — quote Warren Buffett. It’s repugnant.
Fake gurus sell a fantasy, a fiction, that only a few achieve, and the worst part is they target the vulnerable: people who have just lost their job, experienced loss, or hit a dead-end. Fake gurus earn millions off of desperation and misplaced euphoria.
Real gurus stay in the shadows. But if they do emerge, they remain 100% transparent. They give away their “secrets” at a price anyone can afford. They don’t advertise. You will find them; they won’t find you first. They are older and wiser. They will tell you everything you need to know before you hand over a cent, and they will only peddle the two things that deliver results: hard work and perseverance.
We will never rid the world — and especially the internet — of fake online gurus because, as they say, a fool is born every minute. But thanks to the scammer-exposé movement, we’re less likely to become victims to scams that push us further off track. The interconnectedness of the internet paired with the emergence of scam-buster-style entertainment may turn minutes into hours, and that’s a start, at least. | https://medium.com/concoda/were-witnessing-the-collapse-of-fake-online-gurus-2dfb8694be93 | [] | 2020-10-06 13:06:24.975000+00:00 | ['Fraud', 'Business', 'Finance', 'Amazon', 'Scams'] |
Vertical Auto Scaling AWS EC2 instances. Slack integrations. | The title of the article speaks for itself :)
Although it is not the best practice, sometimes it can be a situation when we need to use this option of scaling, and it happened to me. Some details need to be clarified right away:
1. AWS is working to create such a service.
Here you can see the second possible implementation option, which is a little more difficult to implement. But it didn’t suit us.
2. Using my version, the downtime is one and a half minutes. It is the time from the beginning of the cycle to the complete lifting of all services.
If it does not suit you then use the standard horizontal auto-scaling.
And while you are thinking, I will begin. In this case, we will use the following AWS services:
AWS EC2 IAM AWS Lambda AWS SNS CloudWatch
If it is new for you, do not be sad, I will try to describe everything accurately and in details. Since you are interested in this article, I suppose you can create and manage EC2 instances, if not, then read this article.
I will be using Amazon Linux 2.
So, let’s begin. | https://medium.com/@sergeyku9nov/vertical-auto-scaling-aws-ec2-instances-d028fcca7faf | ['Sergey Kuyanov'] | 2020-12-16 15:32:07.164000+00:00 | ['Nodejs', 'DevOps', 'Cloud Computing', 'AWS Lambda', 'Autoscaling'] |
Good afternoon y’all, | Good afternoon y’all,
I’m sorry I haven’t been as active lately, I’ve had so many things going on and goodness gracious — taking a moment to myself this weekend, despite the circumstances, is so necessary.
~
So in my absence:
Work has been so busy but so good, despite some hiccups. I did lose another resident to unfortunate circumstances which is honestly the hardest part of my job. To build these relationships and create homes for people and to know they died under your care & in the home you provided — y i k e s. But none the less grateful for the opportunity to have worked with the Best family. All pun intended.
~
I obtained a firearm, which is extremely conservative of me but at this point absolutely necessary. I don’t like surprises and I know I’m capable of handling my own — but if you wanna run up on me now — bless you.
~
I’m incredibly sick right now. My body has shut down so damn hard that I am tired from just being tired. Went to the ER this morning and found out I have bronchitis — thankful to have gotten ahead of it, but I genuinely feel like I’m dying and there’s no soothing this pain.
~
I hope everyone is having a great week & despite mercury going back into retrograde — you guys are killing it. Remember, things won’t always be favorable but everything is whatever you make of it. Take those bad moments, days, situations, weeks — make them matter. Handle it gracefully and remember — the universe is meant to challenge you. If you’re struggling, you’re changing. 🌻 | https://medium.com/@bethaneecheyenne/good-afternoon-yall-f9de7ce6c11 | [] | 2019-10-12 20:51:43.244000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Personal', 'Health', 'Work', 'Positivity'] |
How Do We Change Our Thoughts? | Pastor Terry preached on thinking versus feeling
He explained that our feelings flow out of what we are thinking and he referenced the prophet Elijah in the Old Testament.
In 1 Kings 18:22–40 Elijah challenged the prophets of Baal to see whose God was more powerful. They set up an altar with a bull on it and stated that “the god who answers by fire-he is God.” The false prophets called the name of Baal all day while Elijah taunted them.
“Shout louder!” he said. “Surely he is a god! Perhaps he is deep in thought, or busy, or traveling. Maybe he is sleeping and must be awakened.”
Nothing happened.
But when it was Elijah’s turn to pray, God performed an amazing miracle and sent fire from the sky to burn up not only the sacrifice, but also the wood, the stones, and the soil that had been saturated in water.
It was an extraordinary display of God’s power.
I imagine that Elijah was feeling elated, exhilarated, and awestruck. I imagine that he must have felt on top of the world.
But it wasn’t soon after that he was feeling afraid, worthless, and desperate
Why the drastic change?
True change begins in our minds.
Elijah was listening to the threats of Jezebel to kill him. The Queen had heard of God’s victory and how Elijah had slaughtered the prophets of Baal and she sent a messenger to Elijah to say,
“‘May the gods deal with me, be it ever so severely, if by this time tomorrow I do not make your life like that of one of them.”Elijah was afraid and ran for his life (1 Kings 19:2–3).
Instead of thinking about God’s sovereign power, Elijah was thinking about the Queen’s threats.
Like Elijah, there are days when I allow my thoughts to be negative and follow them into the darkness where I then start to feel drawn out, irritated, and miserable.
How do we change our thoughts?
First, we must take stock.
Pay attention to what you’re thinking right now. Take the time to think about what you’re thinking about. Are your thoughts leading towards God or away?
Then ask the Holy Spirit to help to think good thoughts.
Listen to the Holy Spirit and ask Him to give you a mindset of gratitude, not entitlement; a mindset that thinks on things that are pure, lovely, and admirable (Philippians 4:8).
If you want to change the way you feel, you first must change the way you think.
Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. Colossians 3:2
Originally published at https://www.kimberleypayne.com on June 17, 2019. | https://medium.com/koinonia/how-do-we-change-our-thoughts-8b4e75c3ff7f | ['Kimberley Payne'] | 2019-07-06 15:38:16.808000+00:00 | ['Religion', 'Depression', 'Christianity', 'Encouragement', 'Mental Health'] |
Secret Email System Review | What it is….
Secret Email System is basically an e-book that reveals how Matt built a 7-Figure Online Business using nothing but Ethical Email Marketing to drive revenue, sales and commissions Without Ever Creating Product, Without Fulfilling Services, Without Running Ads, or Ever Doing Customer Service — And Best of All Only Working 30 Minutes A Day, All While Automatically Generating Sales 24/7.
It is a counterintuitive approach to creating and running an online business, specifically the freedom life-style business model, that allows you to build a sustainable and profitable long term business that gives you the freedom, fun and adventure.
The product is launched on 2020–09–28 .
Matt Bacak (author) has put all the significant requirements of online marketing in this product.
Here’s a secret:
Some people follow everything the ‘gurus’ teach.
Others go against the grain. They challenge the status quo.
That’s what Matt does. And that’s how he’s made MILLIONS.
The crazy thing is…
He’s made millions using a simple, secret ‘ethical’ email marketing system…
Think about that for a second:
Someone made millions of dollars — over 7 figures — just from sending emails. And it’s so simple, anybody can do it!
He formulated a system that allows you to build a true lifestyle business, where you can have the freedom you desire…
He achieved this by creating a ‘business machine’ that works for you 24/7. All you have to do is oversee the system.
No product creation. No chasing clients or delivering services. | https://medium.com/@hawkinsnanao/secret-email-system-review-b547cd78acf6 | ['Felix M.'] | 2020-11-24 12:33:37.532000+00:00 | ['Email Marketing Lists', 'Email Marketing', 'Work From Home', 'Work', 'Email Marketing Tips'] |
On knife sharpening So, you are wondering what you should do with your dull knives. | On knife sharpening
So, you are wondering what you should do with your dull knives. I can understand how hard it is to start taking care of your blades. But believe me, once that you start doing it, your cooking will change. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to cut a tomato and notice that it is just bending under your cutting blade.
Are sharpened knifes dangerous?
Some people are afraid of sharpened knives. I understand that is you have children. But if you store your blades out of reach from the infants, then they shouldn’t be a problem.
Moreover, dull blades are dangerous for the user. That is because you will use extra pressure over your instrument, and the knife will slip over your meat or fruit.
Of course, you can have an accident with a sharpened knife. But with a proper technique, you can be safe.
Understanding Stone Grit
Sharpening stones have numbers. This label represents the number of particles that an abrasive surface has per a fixed area. So, if we can fit more grains in the same are, the rough would have smaller grains. In other words, the bigger the number, the more grains, and the finer is the stone. It might be a little bit counter-intuitive at first. But the rule of thumb is that you will start with the lower numbers and move to the higher numbers.
What stone should I buy?
Hunters and professional cooks will go mad, buying different stones. But you don’t need to spend a ton of money on starting. You can buy a stone with two sides, with numbers like 300 and 1000. Or maybe even higher.
Get a stone that has numbers, and not just “coarse and fine.” If you want to add finer grits, but don’t want to break the bank, get yourself a 2000 or 4000 grits sandpaper. This technique might not be the best but helps until you get better equipment.
Wet stones work better.
Stones require lubrication. This will help your sharpening method, and also will keep your stone flattened. Most abrasives need water or oil. Probably your stone will require water. You can add water with a spray bottle, sink the stone in water for about 10 minutes, or proceed to do your sharpening under an opened faucet in your kitchen sink. And keep your stone wet while you use it.
Guide me through the basics
There are different techniques, but the concept is the same. Move the blade over the stone, at a consistent angle. One hand should move the edge. The other one should apply some pressure to the knife. And count the numbers of strokes so that you use the same amount on each side. Remember to keep the stone wet. Then move to a softer grit.
The method that I like the most is what I call the windshield wipers method. Start on the lower corner of the stone, making contact with the lower part (heel) of the knife. Apply a consistent rotating movement, until the tip of the knife end on the upper corner of the stone. With one slice, the whole length of the blade should have moved over the abrasive.
Use a magic marker
Before you begin, use a magic marker to paint the edge of the knife. While you sharpen the blade, you will see the progress and the areas that you missed.
What about the angle
The angle is key to the process. Different knives require different inclinations. But as a general rule, you can use a matchbook between your stone and your knife to have a food feeling about the angle.
How often should I repeat this process
You can do this periodically, or every time you feel that your vegetables bend when you cut them. But once you see the difference, you will keep on sharpening our knives.
What’s next?
Practice till you get good at it. And enjoy it while you do it. | https://medium.com/@ignacioprati/on-knife-sharpening-so-you-are-wondering-what-you-should-do-with-your-dull-knives-4c91025a162e | [] | 2020-04-26 17:12:34.114000+00:00 | ['Cooking', 'DIY', 'Sharpening', 'Knives', 'Kitchen'] |
What Happens When I Burn Money? | I think the Economic Explanation is the most easily comprehended result. Within its own logic and its conception of money — as outlined by Poitras and Landsburg earlier — it’s coherent. Just to be completely clear, arguing that the explanation is coherent within its own terms is not the same as saying it’s true.
The Accounting Explanation is a little trickier to get your head around. Within this view money is — as far as I can see — essentially reduced to ‘points’ awarded by ‘an authority’. Wolfgang Theil illustrates this rather delightfully in his twitter thread (above) with a typo which substitutes ‘points’ for ‘pounds’.
[ —Here and elsewhere I have argued that adopting a basic psychoanalytic framework would help us gain a better understanding of money. So, where Wolfgang sees a typo, I see a ‘Freudian slip’. — ]
Money conceptualised (or at least analogised) as ‘points awarded’ is made explicit though, in this twitter thread by Stephanie Kelton. She imagines the Government as a ‘scorekeeper’ and US dollars as ‘points’ awarded in a baseball game. So how should I conceptualise ‘burning points’ within an Accounting Logic? Certainly there is the implication that burning money has no ‘real’ effect. My negation of awarded points doesn’t change the score in the game. I guess it may change the way I play, though.
The Accounting Logic seems to suggest that what happens to me when I burn money is that I am putting myself under an unnecessary, self-imposed constraint while still competing in the economic game. Perhaps, rather than generously giving my burned £20 to everyone else as the Economic Logic suggests, I’ve actually diminished my personal productive capacity (and my ability to compete) and so my sacrifice has impacted negatively on the rest of society, as well as myself?
I’m least certain of all about what the Financial Logic suggests. Perhaps this is because burning money is so completely anathema to the praxis of finance that the action cannot be meaningfully assimilated into its logic? The reason d’etre of the Finance and Payments industries is the sustenance and growth of money. My action is therefore fundamentally incompatible with it. Of course — as I have argued above — I regard the Financial Logic as incoherent. It is no surprise that the ‘result’ I suggest in the table — of money burning being both nothing and something — is nonsensical.
However, in my explanatory metaphor I tried to give some linguistic expression to the tautology that masquerades as the logic’s axiom i.e. that money is any object that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services. The metaphor seems to suggest that for Financial Logic, matter becomes part of a flow of something fundamentally non-material — desires, wishes, wants, needs etc — that are seeking satisfaction through a process of exchange. For me, this offers some insight. I’m not sure it’s grounded enough for the pragmatists in Finance and Payments. But it does maybe point toward why, despite the incoherence of their logic (which I suspect many practitioners may be aware of), the praxis of finance circumambulates something which, however vaguely it is seen (or maybe because it is vaguely seen), is actually a truth about the nature of money.
[ — The provocation is over. I’m going to drop the inline code thing now! — ]
Money as a Medium of Exchange (Again)
Now I’m going to consider the medium of exchange function more deeply. I think it’s important to do this in order to understand a different aspect of what happens when I burn money. The Economic and Accounting Logics point toward the effects of money burning that occur (or not) within their own areas. The problems I’ve outlined with Financial Logics prevent us from properly assessing what it means to burn money when its primary function is as a ‘medium of exchange’. So if we could find a coherent way to conceptualise money as a medium of exchange primarily and/or axiomatically and/or foundationally, then this might help us work out what happened, say, when I burned EC56 496932 (£20).
So you might be relieved to hear that now we’re going to move away from the Economic, Accounting and Financial Logics. I will maintain — for the moment — an Explicitist mode of thinking. I’ll get into magical thinking later on.
Essentially, what we have to do in order to avoid the errors and fudges of Financial Logic is to emphasise medium over exchange. In other words, we must take seriously the ontology of media, itself. We have to think about what being a medium actually means. Scott Ferguson describes two contrasting views of media; the correlational approach where mediums are treated as “relatively neutral conduits that either succeed or fail to convey extant phenomena” and the constitutive approach which insists that any medium “actively shapes social reality, heterogeneously organizing and participating in worldly phenomena from within”. He also goes on to say — and this is important because it prefigures the argument I’ll make about magical thinking — on the constitutive view, media makes the world legible in ways that are always opaque and incomplete.
Ferguson bemoans the fact that while academics in the humanities and social sciences readily adopt a constitutive view of media in general, when it comes to money they seem stuck in a view that is correlational. In other words, they tend to see money as neutral, in much the same way that mainstream economics does.
Lana Swartz in her latest book New Money: How Payment Became Social Media thinks about money as a “communication medium dependent on particular technologies”. In line with Ferguson’s insistence on the constitutive view of money as media Swartz argues that “communication doesn’t just document the world and share documentation of the world; it is [the] process through which the world is constructed.”
So within both Ferguson and Swartz’s view — and within the constitutive approach to media generally — burning money must have some meaning. It must impact on the creation of social reality, surely? This doesn’t seem an outrageous claim for such a symbolically powerful act. I would guess that Ferguson views the negation of money as speaking directly to relations of credit and debt. Ferguson rejects the view that money is primarily a medium of exchange, claiming inline with his commitment to Modern Monetary Theory that it is a medium of credit and debt.
It’s trickier to get a handle on what Swartz’s view might be about the meaning of money burning. A substantive difference between her and Ferguson is that whereas for Swartz money is one of many media — as stated she tends to subsume money under a generalized notion of ‘communication’ — for Ferguson the medium of money is special; “money operates as a preeminent medium that mediates the myriad media that shape the world’” Ferguson’s view is much more in line with my own. For me Swartz’s view of money — whilst it opens a powerful perspective — can be subject to the same critique as was made of Viviana Zelizer’s seminal work The Social Meaning of Money. Swartz and Zelizer seem to want to deny that there is something essential and ever-present across all forms of money. Zelizer argued that the idea of ‘money in general’ was invalid. This seems to imply that what happens when I burn money, will depend upon the meaning I attribute to it. I’ve already said that is very much the case. But it is not wholly so. Money is able to answer back with its own distinct and clear voice.
Whilst Zelizer’s provocation served to broaden the academic appreciation of the cultures of money and the importance of behaviours like ‘earmarking’ — where money is differentiated by being given different meanings — it denied that there is any universal experience to money. Quite what it is that is common to ‘money in general’ may be tricky or even (as I think) impossible to unpick. But the ‘feeling’ that there is ‘something’ there — that there is some element of money that is the same today as it was to my parents and their parents as I claimed earlier — cannot be shaken off that easily. Ferguson’s view of money as media, which draws on theological considerations of our relations with God, seems to point towards something more permanent and universal as being present within the money form. And despite not agreeing with his disavowal of exchange, I think his description of the medium of money is highly insightful.
Tony Lawson, a colleague of Geoffrey Ingham at Cambridge, has proposed a ‘social positioning theory of money’. It is a theory that directly engages with the ontology of money. Lawson says that social positioning is “the process whereby, through general acceptance throughout a community, human individuals, things or other phenomena become incorporated as components of these emergent totalities.” In this view money becomes a ‘positioned’ phenomena; the capacity of a disc of gold to act as money is ‘harnessed’ so it serves the needs of ‘the overall embedding system’. Importantly, Lawson’s view holds a presupposition that money does not reduce to ‘what money does’ — in other words, it cannot (as I argued earlier) be reduced to its functions. The functions required of money emanate from a ‘position’ that is determined by the community that brings it into being. While a money object may have certain capacities, its functions aren’t inherent but rather are constituted by its occupation of the position of money.
Whilst Lawson’s theory is not concerned specifically with money as media I do see correspondences between his insights into the ontology of money and Ferguson’s into the ontology of media. Each provides a perspective on the relation between social reality and money. As stated, Ferguson is an adherent of Modern Monetary Theory. Lawson addresses MMT directly in his paper Money’s relation to debt: some problems with MMT’s Conception of Money. His critique engages with the view held by Ferguson that money is a medium of credit and debt. Lawson argues that credit and debt are two aspects of the same social relation. And this captures my confusion over Ferguson’s claim. I’m not sure what it means to say that something is a medium of a particular and specified social relation. It seems too closed off. I’m unsure as to how money’s universality (a quality which Ferguson seems happy with) could arise from this specified relation. Whereas the proposal that money is a medium of exchange offers something that is inherently more generalised and so offers a greater capacity for universality.
I’ll come to Simmel shortly, but it’s worth stating now that his notion of ‘exchange’ was not at all limited to ‘economic’ exchange. I posted In Defense of Simmel back in 2014 to try and make the point that Simmel’s use of ‘exchange’ as fundamental to his understanding of money should not be understood as tacitly supporting free market neoliberalism. As Simmel himself says:
‘The concept of exchange is often misconceived, as though it were a relationship existing outside the elements to which it refers. But it signifies only a condition or change within the related subjects, not something that exists between them in the sense in which an object might be spatially located between two other objects.” (Philosophy of Money p.83)
So in this understanding of exchange, Ferguson’s credit and debt relation becomes a description of particular changes ‘within the related subjects’. As such credit and debt relations are one aspect of exchange relations. Simmel’s definition of exchange points toward something much more universal. He says:
It should be recognized that most relationships between people can be interpreted as forms of exchange. Exchange is the purest and most developed kind of interaction, which shapes human life when it seeks to acquire substance and content. Every interaction has to be regarded as an exchange: every conversation, every affection (even if it is rejected), every game, every glance at another person. (Philosophy of Money p.82)
However, while I think conceiving of money as a ‘medium of (a broadly defined) exchange’ is better way to think about money than as a ‘medium of credit and debt’ — not least as it allows for a deep connection between money and sex (I’ll come back to that at the end of the essay) — I do prefer Ferguson’s conception of money as a ‘meta-medium, wherein many additional media become nested’. In Lawson’s conception, money is just not that special. It is merely a particular instance of social positioning. Important of course, but unique only in so far as that, by their nature, every ‘position’ constituted within social reality is also unique. This troubles me.
There are many diverse aspects to my social reality. But every aspect seems in some way related to either sex or money or both of them. In terms of that which directs my material life, money and sex seem to occupy uniquely powerful positions. I’m suspicious of any theory of money (or sex for that matter) which disavows its uniqueness as a phenomena or underplays its constitutive role in my lived experience. I have a little history with Lawson and his underplaying of money.
Twenty years ago, I ventured outside my normally strict focus on money itself to read his then recently published Economics and Reality (1997). It superbly deconstructs and critiques the Hayekian influenced economics which were so dominant at the time and introduced me to the work of Roy Bhaskar. There is much to admire and be thankful for. However, there is not one mention of money in the entire 364 pages of Economics and Reality. For me the omission was indefensible. I did buy Lawson’s Reorienting Economics (2003) but haven’t been able to get over my objection. I checked the index, saw that ‘money’ wasn’t listed and it’s just stayed on my bookshelf unread ever since. So then finding out that in recent years Lawson had begun to address the absence of money in his work was great news. Social Positioning seemed to hold real promise as a way to break out of the impasse in the arguments about this or that function of money being primary, axiomatic or foundational. But then he has to go and say this:
“Many observers, of course, interpret the noted markers or tokens of money as money itself. However, cash and electronic entries are not money, at least as I am using the term, and nor is (any form of) bank debt per se. Rather money, currently, is any appropriately positioned form of bank debt that the cash and electronic entries serve to mark.” (link)
Ignoring the complexities of what precisely is and is not money according to Lawson’s theory, the takeaway point for me is that when I burn £20 (Lawson says) I’m not even burning money at all. And to me this is truly absurd.
If we have reached the point in our current attempts to explicate the nature of money, where the theories of the brightest and best of our scholars conclude, that what appears to every individual as our most money-like object is, in fact, not money at all, then we may have hit the limit of possibilities for these modes of Explicitist thinking.
One thing that immediately endeared me to Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share was when he said in the preface ‘he would not have written [The Accursed Share] if he’d followed its lessons to the letter’. He says his ‘research aimed at the acquisition of a knowledge; it demanded a coldness and calculation, but the knowledge acquired was that of an error, an error implied in the coldness that is inherent in all calculation.’ (p.11) I argue that here he is recognising and (paradoxically) revealing something of the ‘general movement’ (a term which I have stolen from Bataille) that I have tried to capture in this term ‘Explicitism’.
And like Bataille, if I adhere to my recognition, that failure to meaningfully understand the nature of money is inherent to the Explicitist mode of thinking, then I should end this essay now. I should perhaps simply reiterate that ‘meaning comes from doing’ and abandon Eplicitism in favour of Mysticism and/or (my preferred) Magical Thinking. But I can’t let go quite that easily. I need to finish things off, return to those disagreements with Ingham about the unit of account function of money and explain why, despite agreeing with the view of my progressive (& MMT) friends about the primary function of money, I don’t think it needs ‘an authority’ (as Ingham suggests) nor is any explanation of money’s nature (that proceeds along the lines of Searle’s ‘collective intentionality’) sufficient, without reference to and the inclusion of the unconscious.
For Ingham, who draws on Richard Searle, collective intentionality might be seen as something of a misnomer (most especially if one associates the term with something like Jung’s collective unconscious). Searle’s definition of ‘collective’ doesn’t suppose any magical blending of consciousness or social substrata of intuition but instead insists that ‘collective’ intentionality has to exist inside individuals’ heads. There, it takes the form of ‘we’ statements. So by imagining ‘we think Gold is money’, Gold becomes money. The ‘we’ element (as it exists in individual minds) is therefore what constitutes a joint action and is the core characteristic of cooperation.
By adopting Searle’s idea, Ingham can safely keep money in a box, locked in not just by a rigorous Explicitism, but also by a reductionist, materialistic, atomistic Logic. There is no need for magic, at all. Or an unconscious. This is a problem. A totalising theory of the nature of money must contain the possibility of alterity. Ingham sees puzzles where there are mysteries.
Let’s briefly explore this in relation to gold and silver. Between 1999 and 2002 the UK Treasury sold over half its stock of Gold. The value of Gold had been rationalised away. The belief that a shiny yellow metal could act as a store of value had been exposed as primitive and irrational. Gold was history and its sale signalled faith in the rule of reason and modernity’s understanding of money and economy. The sale netted around £3.5 billion. Today you’d get around £12 billion. The incoherence of Financial Logic and the pragmatism that it afforded the Bank of England lent them an almost divinatory power. They weren’t keen on the sale and counselled the Treasury against it. But different logics ruled in Westminster and the sale was pushed through, anyway.
Even though the Treasury’s logic may have been correct and coherent within its own terms, it was wrong when applied rigorously to the praxis of finance. What it failed to factor in — what got written out in their rigor — is that Gold is of the Sun and Silver is of the Moon. Whether this is literally, materially or logically true is beside the point. It has been the story for every human being across time. It is an ancient truth, nested in our unconscious. Keynes told us that Gold was originally stationed in heaven with his consort silver, as Sun and Moon. Failure to take the unconscious seriously causes grave and costly errors — £8.5 billion’s worth to be precise.
I disagree with Ingham’s proposal that the unit of account function requires ‘an authority’ to establish it. I don’t deny that ‘an authority’ would help. However, I agree with Simmel’s view that the unit of account function actually arises from an unconscious equivalence of absolutes. Note here that Simmel’s view roots money in the unconscious — a space that is by its definition not directly accessible to the conscious mind — and by doing so presupposes and manifests an alterity at the heart of money.
Simmel’s idea is pretty weird to be fair. The headline version of it is that the unit of account function arises from an unconscious equivalence between the total amount of money and the total amount of goods. In my Barefoot in Bollingen piece I explain that it took me many years to assimilate this. It’s like one of those uncomfortable ‘truths’ Freud told us about 120 years ago. Rejection is part of the process of acceptance. And like Freud’s ideas, Simmel’s notion of how the unit of account function is established is more palatable if you think about it abstractly. There is no ‘equivalence’ between God and the Universe. God is all things and all things are within God. Likewise, the Universe is all things and all things are within the Universe. Both are conceptions of the absolute. And, in this sense of them both being absolutes therefore, they cannot exist simultaneously and so there can be no equivalence between them. And yet there is. In the act of perceiving both we create the equivalence between them. We do so not in the rational mind (which denies that any such equivalence can exist) but rather at an irrational and unconscious level.
[ — It seems obvious but also worth noting, that our two most significant celestial bodies who we would have worshipped as a God and Goddess for the majority of humankind’s existence are Father and Mother to Gold and Silver, respectively. The idea then, that the unit of account function of money stemmed in the first instance from this relation, parsed through to our relative valuation of gold to silver, would seem to me a reasonable explanatory proposition for how money as currency secured and expanded its role in social reality. — ]
So then, when I burn money in Ritual I believe that I’m talking to the irrational and unconscious part of our psyches that has a capacity to manifest the fundamental equivalence that underpins money and our financial lives. I’m not 100% sure what I’m saying to it, nor what its response is. But I suspect — and hope — that some form of ‘resetting’ or ‘realignment’ takes place so that the measure of money — and the logics that arise from it — might no longer subjugate themselves so wholeheartedly to the accumulation of wealth and power. And that maybe our behaviour around and relationship with money might flourish to open up possibilities for new ways of being. | https://medium.com/@jonone100/what-happens-when-i-burn-money-239891dfcee3 | ['Jonathan Harris'] | 2020-12-31 10:44:47.367000+00:00 | ['Money', 'Activism', 'Economics', 'Art', 'Spirituality'] |
Docker & Wiremock isolation pattern | Docker & Wiremock isolation pattern
An effective solution to perform component-functional tests in pipeline
Image Credits: author derivative work of Wiremock logo and Docker logo (flickr.com)
One of the most complicated problems for a QA Engineer is to build an effective and maintainable environment to perform Component Functional tests over the system under test (SUT).
Furthermore integrating this kind of test into the pipeline is becoming a must if you want to follow a Continuous Delivery approach, reaching a high level of software quality.
Why isolation?
In the Microservices world, your applications have typically to deal with many downstream services that are out of your control in terms of availability, response time, modifications over time and so on.
Having an isolated environment means having an ideal place where all the world around SUT is working exactly as we expect anytime and the SUT will be the only component that needs our attention. This is how “Component Testing” should be performed.
What are really the advantages of having this type of environment?
You can perform reliable Functional Tests (black-box):
“Functional Testing” should focus on “what” the system is doing. With an isolated environment, if you have a failure, it is surely related to your SUT behaviour;
(black-box): should focus on the system is doing. With an isolated environment, if you have a failure, it is surely related to your SUT behaviour; You have the control on external services (happy/sad paths) :
You can make assertions on the exchanged messages between your application and the external world (usually impossible).
You can also change the responses in order to build customised and repeatable tests, defining potentially one test for each use case;
(happy/sad paths) You can make assertions on the exchanged messages between your application and the external world (usually impossible). You can also change the responses in order to build customised and repeatable tests, defining potentially one test for each use case; You add more value to Integration Tests (fail fast) :
Any failure in the isolated environment must be attributed to the SUT.
The other way around, any new failure obtained switching from isolated to integrated environment is automatically attributed to the external service or to the contract with it. So you can speed up the troubleshooting focusing where the issue is actually present.
(fail fast) Any failure in the isolated environment must be attributed to the SUT. The other way around, any new failure obtained switching from isolated to integrated environment is automatically attributed to the external service or to the contract with it. So you can speed up the troubleshooting focusing where the issue is actually present. Make reliable performance tests :
Performance tests are never 100% repeatable because they’re affected by many semi-random variables and processes (e.g. network latency, IO, processing time of external modules, uncontrolled usage of external services during the test).
Therefore, a very foreseeable behaviour around your application, let’s you limit the performance-related variables to a minimum;
More easily identifying the bottlenecks related only to your own code, making the average results more reliable and comparable among repeated executions.
: Performance tests are never 100% repeatable because they’re affected by many semi-random variables and processes (e.g. network latency, IO, processing time of external modules, uncontrolled usage of external services during the test). Therefore, a very foreseeable behaviour around your application, let’s you limit the performance-related variables to a minimum; More easily identifying the bottlenecks related only to your own code, making the average results more reliable and comparable among repeated executions. Speed up the development and debugging of your own code:
Developers are often strictly wired to external services and environments in general, in order to debug the code.
With an isolated environment, they can rely on full working and modifiable interactions among their application and the rest of world, permitting them to also work out of office and even without the network.
Yes but… how can I setup and maintain an environment of this type?
At Expedia Group we like to exploiting the latest technologies and combine them to achieve elegant and flexible solutions.
The Docker & Wiremock solution
Docker allows to ensure consistency across multiple development and release cycles, standardising your environment, especially in pipeline, where the same image is used across every step of the deployment process.
Therefore the first thing is to dockerize your SUT.
In addition, with Docker Compose we can build a self-consistent environment where our SUT and any mocked and dockerized downstream can live.
Wiremock allows to easy create a mocked version of any HTTP downstream simply recording real interactions and the exposing them through a built-in HTTP server.
The following architecture does not pretend to be the unique or the best solution to the problem. But this architecture has a working implementation adopted with success in my team at Hotels.com™️ and it’s modular in terms of adding/removing or enabling/disabling mocked systems, therefore you should easily be able to adopt it for your purposes.
Isolated environment architecture
This is what you need to implement the above architecture:
Your preferred test driver tool (psss… have a look to Karate! )
tool (psss… have a look to The service under test ( SUT ) provided as a Docker image;
) provided as a Docker image; A configurable Docker image with multiple instances of Wiremock ( We’ll call it “ Wiremock-CI ”);
We’ll call it “ ”); A shared volume with the configuration of your mocks;
with the configuration of your mocks; A Docker Compose configuration that describes your isolated environment;
How does it work?
Within Docker Compose, each downstream service is represented by a different instance of Wiremock inside the same dedicated Docker container.
We’ll call this container “Wiremock-CI”.
The SUT can easy interact with Wiremock-CI in a transparent way thanks to the links of docker compose virtual network and the override of the actual downstream endpoints. Something like this:
docker-compose configuration
Now the only real problem to solve is how to create reliable mocks within Wiremock-CI. Here is the trick.
A bash script within the Wiremock-CI reads a CSV configuration with an entry for each service to mock:
CSV configuration for Wiremock-CI
As you can see, we specify “isProxying” and “isRecording” options.
Basis on this configuration, Wiremock will be run in the related modalities allowing the call coming from the Test Driver to be passed to the real services and recorded at the same time.
In this case, the downstream responses are recorded and saved in a shared volume on file system.
In this way the Test Driver (on the host) has a mocked version of real downstream responses that can reuse during a next test execution setting the “recording mode” to false.
What do you do when one of your downstream services change?
In this frequent case, what you need to do is simply to delete old mocks of that downstream (act on shared folder) and record the new version of downstream. You’re again ready for next test execution.
Conclusion
This solution has been adopted on pipeline for some backend services at Hotels.com™️ and we are enjoying the benefits, finding bugs in advance and improving the confidence of our releases. Moreover it enables us to adopt Continuous Delivery. | https://medium.com/expedia-group-tech/docker-wiremock-isolation-pattern-b01e80e9ae89 | ['Luca Pelosi'] | 2020-03-12 14:01:01.476000+00:00 | ['Software Engineering', 'Testing Tools', 'Docker', 'Wiremock', 'Testing'] |
How I stopped getting unwanted post and made £100 | 3 Give them notice. Seven months ago I ordered a stamp from Vistaprint that reads:
RETURN TO SENDER Not known at this address. Repeat returns will be invoiced. Please amend your records.
It cost me £11.10, plus £13.21 VAT and P&P.
I stamp each returned letter, and under this I write “3rd RTS” and so on (I’m up to 12 on the outstanding offender).
It had an immediate effect, with one debt collector — Jacobs Enforcement — sending a form to “The Current Occupier” which allowed me to send them a proof of residence (copy of my tenancy agreement, Council Tax bill, etc). They even have an online form. Problem solved.
A few other companies stopped sending letters, but you’ll need to be patient.
4 Set out your charges in a formal letter. The stamp had reduced the flow of unwanted mail, but after a few months it was time to raise the stakes. I started with loan provider Amigo, which was trying to contact David Ursachi, Farcas Ionel and Rodica Adafinei. Amigo’s postal spam made up about half of my unwanted mail.
My template letter uses the same kind of language they use. I give them a further month to update their records. After that, they’ll be subject to a £10 administration charge for returning for each letter received during the following month. Beyond that, there’s an additional £25 penalty charge, with 3% interest after 30 days, plus undisclosed further costs if I have to take legal action.
It also includes phone and email contact details so that we can open a dialogue. I don’t want to end up in small claims court, although I’m reasonably confident I wouldn’t be out of pocket. Alternatively, I could employ debt collectors against debt collectors, but I’m worried that would get out of control and bring about the apocalypse.
Most of all, it’s formal, clear and polite. The cost to me? A4 paper, printer ink, windowed envelopes and a 1st class stamp. Less than £1.
I addressed my letters to the CEO, CFO or head of consumer relations, just to be sure I had their attention. Google, Companies House and LinkedIn can all help with this.
I’ve since had successful results with EE (phoned me within a couple of weeks), Halifax (no response but no more letters), and Barclaycard. I’m a Barclaycard customer, and they sent several letters apologising for not being able to resolve the problem while it was being investigated.
You can see my template below.
5 Be polite. Accept no bullshit. Amigo responded in a few weeks, apologising for my inconvenience but claiming that Data Protection Rules were preventing them from changing the details of their wayward clients. Now in possession of a contact number, I called to explain that several other companies had managed this, and an email discussion ensued. They’ve refused to accept any error, but the letters have stopped, so I’m happy.
Barclaycard finally called to apologise that they couldn’t change their missing customers’ details, and they couldn’t accept my charges because their letters had been sent out correctly. Fortunately, “new information” had appeared and they were now able to change the details for Christian Dragomir. As a gesture of goodwill, could they offer me £100?
I accepted. | https://medium.com/5by5/how-i-stopped-getting-unwanted-post-and-made-100-3df9dc055ad9 | ['Alex Lane'] | 2019-06-25 11:21:16.683000+00:00 | ['Lifehacks', 'Debt'] |
Let’s Learn About Graph Databases | From Punchcards to Relational Databases
In preliminary days, data was stored on punchcards and was really hard to read or interpret. It was impossible to index data to cross-reference and eliminate inconsistencies.
Punched card from Fortran program — Wikipedia
But soon, the industry evolved and RDBMS came into picture where data was stored in relational databases.
This format is somewhat human-readable but to store a considerable amount of data, relational databases require normalization to remove duplications and inconsistencies.
It also requires foreign key relationships to related data which makes it hard to understand and maintain without complicated JOIN queries.
ER diagram of a Car Rental System
ACID: atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability
Relational databases support ACID out of the box and that is a big advantage.
It means that if the data is committed once, it will be available for subsequent queries to use but it is expensive to find data and the cost keeps creeping up as the size of data keeps growing.
To fix this issue, we add indexes to data which make lookup faster.
Adding indexes solves the issue to a certain extent but if we have to do a number of JOINs then we have to perform query time index lookups for each and every JOIN — this approach starts falling apart and starts becoming expensive as the number of tables grows. | https://medium.com/better-programming/graph-databases-ad2cbe1570df | ['Navdeep Singh'] | 2019-11-27 23:58:53.672000+00:00 | ['Development', 'Technology', 'GraphQL', 'Database', 'Programming'] |
How to Reduce Electric Bill Costs With Solar Energy | Nowadays, it has become a bare necessity to find out how to reduce electric bill costs. For many among us, paying electric bills in due time has become a challenge on its own.
👉 BACKYARD REVOLUTION 👈
Life in the 21st century is simply unthinkable without electricity. The fact that so many people can hardly pay their energy bills by the end of the month says enough about the current world economy. Using solar panels energy as an alternative is becoming more and more common. Why? I will give you a few very good reasons in this article.
How To Reduce Electric Bill Costs — 3 Reasons Why Solar Energy Is The Way To Go
First of all, the sun is an abundant natural resource that can easily provide you with all the electricity your home needs. Or do you really think that within a few years, or even centuries, we won’t be able to count on the sun any longer?
👉 BACKYARD REVOLUTION 👈
Solar panels energy is based on the concept of storing energy on what we call the panels photovoltaic cells. The panels, loaded with solar energy and powered by a set of batteries, transform the energy into electricity. If you consider the fact that the sun will be there for millions of years to come, it leaves no doubt that, if you want to find out how to reduce electric bill expenses, you should count on our very own good old sun. The world’s oil reserves may be shrinking every single day, but that won’t be a problem at all, as we have solar energy to provide us with all the electricity we need.
👉 BACKYARD REVOLUTION 👈
Secondly, governments all over the world recognize both the efficiency and eco-friendly nature of solar power. What many people still don’t know, is that most states in the U.S. are giving you a huge annual tax credit if you’re willing to go for solar energy. Moreover, they give huge tax rebates to make up for the initial cost of installing a solar energy installation on the roof of your home.
Thirdly, while solar panels are not free either, everyone can build a sufficient solar panel installation for less than $200. After 2 or 3 invoices, you will have won your money back. From then on, you can start saving on electric bill costs month after month. Building your own solar panels is easier than you might think. You need some components you can find in any material store and in about 6 hours you can make your own solar panel system. You don’t need any technical skills, only your brain, a thing everybody is equipped with.
👉 BACKYARD REVOLUTION 👈
Conclusion:
The usage of solar energy can be a big help in saving money. And, after all, why not use your money for other things than paying energy companies?
More info on how to reduce your power bills can be found on
👉 BACKYARD REVOLUTION 👈
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/3494902 | https://medium.com/@chirag5676/how-to-reduce-electric-bill-costs-with-solar-energy-1cf33f2640cd | ['Chirag Chauhan'] | 2020-12-09 12:19:01.660000+00:00 | ['Save Electricity', 'Solar Power World', 'Solar Power', 'Save Electricity Bill', 'Solar Energy'] |
Breathing & Covid: Changes at the CDC | As some might have read, the CDC is slowly changing it’s recommendations. The “newest” masks guidelines are here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/masking-science-sars-cov2.html
The major “change” in my opinion is now the focus on the Filtration for Personal Protection:
“Studies demonstrate that cloth mask materials can also reduce wearers’ exposure to infectious droplets through filtration, including filtration of fine droplets and particles less than 10 microns. The relative filtration effectiveness of various masks has varied widely across studies, in large part due to variation in experimental design and particle sizes analyzed. Multiple layers of cloth with higher thread counts have demonstrated superior performance compared to single layers of cloth with lower thread counts, in some cases filtering nearly 50% of fine particles less than 1 micron .14,17–29 Some materials (e.g., polypropylene) may enhance filtering effectiveness by generating triboelectric charge (a form of static electricity) that enhances capture of charged particles18,30 while others (e.g., silk) may help repel moist droplets31 and reduce fabric wetting and thus maintain breathability and comfort.”
They are still “pushing” cloth masks which I haven’t talked much about aside from me pushing everyone I know to the mask4all.org web site. But basically my issue with cloth masks is they are produced randomly. I do agree if someone knows exactly what they are doing and especially puts a folded paper towel/tissue between two layers of cloth … well they work pretty good. But really, who does that? I mean I even see people talking about mandatory mask usage in the USA, but the people off camera are constantly having the mask riding on the tip of their nose or have what I call “fashion” cloth masks which don’t have a good seal around the entire mask area.
A more interesting thing from the CDC was referencing some of the “financial research” people in thier decision making process(reference 42):
Hatzius J, Struyven D, Rosenberg I. Face Masks and GDP. Goldman Sachs Research https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/pages/face-masks-and-gdp.htmlexternal icon. Accessed July 8, 2020.
This paper is solid and is also in line with what the Mask4all.org researchers were say (which are also mainly non-health statisticians). My hope is that CDC continues to reference the “money” statistics people, as in my opinion they give an independent viewpoint which tends to be valid at a macro level. If this financial paper had actually been implemented, then there would have been no GDP drop this year!
And the policy information was actually available at the begining of this year too, albeit in Chinese. I have often been emphatic on the Asian research which was excellent by early February, with research articles going years back. I even noticed Taiwan had translated critical research and policy papers into english early this year. I am a reader of Lancet, and they are attempting to connect US researchers with this vast amount of Asian data:
“It is our great pleasure to invite you to participate in a two-day event of The Lancet-CAMS Health Conference, which will be held virtually by Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences (CAMS) and The Lancet on November 24–25, 2020. This multidisciplinary event is aimed to facilitate important global discussions about research experiences for the current global fight against COVID-19.
COVID-19 is one of the biggest challenges to China and the rest of the world, threatening economy, society, and people’s wellbeing. Under this circumstance, medical scientific research plays an important role in the prevention and control of COVID-19. As an internationally renowned medical journal, The Lancet has published a series of key articles from China and other countries, providing robust scientific evidences for the decision-making in global anti-pandemic process. Meanwhile, being the top leading medical research institution in China, CAMS has also made outstanding efforts during the pandemic. The Lancet always calls for global solidarity to respond the global pandemic of COVID-19.
At this conference, we invite top medical experts and researchers domestically and globally to share their researches and experiences related to COVID-19. Moreover, we hope this conference could strengthen the global communication and collaboration to tackle global pandemic of COVID-19. We look forward to meeting you all in The Lancet-CAMS conference 2020.”
I’m recommending all my research friends attend this. Conference info is at: | https://medium.com/@patfaith/breathing-covid-changes-at-the-cdc-68751a4d8a08 | ['Patrick Faith'] | 2020-11-12 18:17:12.726000+00:00 | ['Covid', 'China', 'Cdc'] |
Bitcoin Cash is fuelled by adoption, not speculation. | When Satoshi Nakamoto first released the famous whitepaper for Bitcoin over a decade ago, they called the fledgeling new idea a “peer-to-peer version of electronic cash.” The intention was for Bitcoin to be digital cash: a borderless payment system that would require no mediator and would, in effect, have no boundaries in its use.
Since Bitcoin’s inception, we have seen it give rise to a whole new horizon of possibilities in our increasingly digitized world: one where potentially many of the facets of our current internet and financial system would be made permanently altered or even defunct. It was certainly a breakthrough and, most importantly, Satoshi recognized Bitcoin’s first and foremost function as being digital cash. It was specifically made to be spent.
Since then, Bitcoin has since become a household name. However, the last exponential rise also proved to many the inherent limitations of Bitcoin: on a mass scale, it proved to be fundamentally useless as an everyday means of exchange. At the height of Bitcoin’s network activity in December of 2017, it saw transaction fees rise to extreme levels at some $50 or so dollars per transaction. Not only did this make Bitcoin unusable for 99% of its users, but it brought the entire network to a screeching halt. Many vendors as a result began to use Bitcoin less and less and many dropped out of using it entirely. Although transaction fees have fallen drastically due to the current drop in price and network usage, the ‘fee problem’ proved that Bitcoin’s 1-megabyte block size simply could not handle the surge of users that accompanied its exponential rise.
For those of us who were here during Bitcoin’s early days, this all comes off as odd and perhaps even forgoes some our most basic, original expectations about the cryptocurrency. What were once discussions on how to get people to use Bitcoin as a currency in 2014–2015 have today morphed into how to get more investors into Bitcoin as a ‘store of value.’ Or not to use Bitcoin for spending at all, according to the now infamous tweet that appeared by a core Bitcoin developer.
We at Voltaire believe that Bitcoin should exist, first and foremost, as a usable currency. Adoption is naturally then the key focus. During the last Bitcoin Cash stress test on Sept 1st, Bitcoin Cash was able to process some 2.1 million transactions in a day. The transaction fees during this time actually dropped from $0.002 to $0.0017. Therefore, the question of whether Bitcoin Cash can handle everyday usability should not be questioned — it’s more of a question of whether we can create the necessary infrastructure for adoption to happen. This is why we decided to create our own trading ecosystem, one with specifically Bitcoin Cash trading pairs.
Rather than rely purely on speculative investors, the price of any cryptocurrency that aims to be ‘digital cash’ must be directly related to its network usage and everyday usability. In other words, lest we not forget: the future of Bitcoin rests on adoption much more than investors. | https://medium.com/hello-voltaire/the-future-of-bitcoin-cash-will-depend-on-its-users-rather-than-investors-edc885b8e883 | ['The Voltaire Team'] | 2018-10-18 17:30:25.275000+00:00 | ['Fintech', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Finance', 'Bitcoincash', 'Bitcoin'] |
The Ultimate Foundation for Self-Control | This quote is helpful in laying bare the foundations of what you need to ground yourself. We clearly live with the first three enemies more than we do with the latter three. Often, part of transformation isn’t about taking big, bold leaps, it’s about being able to assess what we want less of and controlling the parts of ourselves that want to override the system and function on autopilot. The three skills for self-control, however, are all about processes.
The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It by Kelly McGonigal shows us how willpower is a mind-body response, not a virtue. It is a biological function that can be improved through mindfulness, exercise, nutrition, and sleep.
Willpower is not an unlimited resource. Too much self-control can actually be bad for your health. Temptation and stress hijack the brain’s systems of self-control, and that the brain can be trained for greater willpower. Willpower is centered in a specific region of the brain (within the prefrontal cortex). It uses more energy than almost any other brain region, and therefore it gets tired after prolonged use each day.
It’s also like a muscle, in that training it through specific meditations, and breathing exercises increases its strength and endurance. Interestingly, over time, it is paradoxically far easier to resist temptations if you don’t try to repress them, but instead actually focus on them. Many mindfulness studies have proven this counterintuitive finding. | https://medium.com/big-self-society/the-ultimate-foundation-for-self-control-709b9960a19c | ['Chad Prevost'] | 2020-12-09 13:46:47.594000+00:00 | ['Personal Development', 'Books', 'Self Improvement', 'Two Minute Takeaway', 'Authors'] |
A Framework for Interpreting Realized Economic Value From Data Science Projects | A Framework for Interpreting Realized Economic Value From Data Science Projects
Part II: BEP, PP, DPP
Written with Daniel Fleck and David Lubert
The next entry in our blog series will investigate breakeven points and payback periods with respect to data science projects. Our focus will be specific to the understanding and application of the Breakeven Point, Payback Period, and Discounted Payback Period metrics. In order to drive efficiency within an organization or a specific team, these metrics should be evaluated when determining the efficacy of a project. Data science projects can be a large investment in time, software, infrastructure, and employee salaries. Taking all of these into account when determining the potential costs of a project is necessary when analyzing breakeven points and payback periods.
A common question when assessing the economics for a potential endeavor is: “When will we break even?” Although this can be a pertinent question, it isn’t always the best question to ask since the overall economic benefit should be the primary focus. Nonetheless, timing does matter; therefore, identifying breakeven points in terms of both volume and cash can and should influence business strategy. For example, a company with lower relative free cash flow compared to their operational needs may be sensitive to projects that take longer to bear fruit. Thus, utilizing breakeven metrics to analyze projects is certainly a logical step during the assessment phase.
Let’s formalize these metrics and provide some examples:
Break-Even Point (BEP) is when total revenue from a product or service equals the expenses associated with providing that product or service. This metric is typically expressed on a per unit basis but it can also be expressed in other ways.
Relating this back to the example in our last blog, we can use this approach to determine how much fraud would need to be discovered in order to break even on the project if we were to use software or data scientists. You may recall that our hypothetical example assumed 5% fraud on total revenue and that both options provided 95% savings on fraud, with the only difference being that the software provided 3 years of relief while the data scientists provided 5 years of relief. Given this information we can calculate the BEP for both of these options:
The breakeven for the software option over 3 years is a fraud rate of 2.29%. This result suggests that if you think fraud will be less than 2.29% over this time frame, you should not purchase the software. Conversely, the breakeven for the data scientist option is a fraud rate of 1.59%. These two results suggest that the data scientist option is preferred to the software -provided the expected fraud occurs over 5 years.
Payback Period (PP) calculates the amount of time it will take to reach the BEP. This is useful when determining how long an investment may take to recoup the initial expenditure.
After applying this metric to our example we observe that the PPs for the software and data scientists are 2.56 years and 3.12 years, respectively. This is an expected outcome since the estimated fraud improvement rate is identical for both options, yet the data scientists cost more to the organization for added benefit in years 4 and 5. Nonetheless, the differential of paying back the project 6 months later isn’t a considerable amount of time to wait considering the tradeoff.
Discounted Payback Period (DPP) is a variation of the payback period calculation that addresses one of the biggest drawbacks for the aforementioned PP metric: the time value of money. From a formulaic perspective, PP and DPP are essentially the same except for the discounting future cash flows in DPP. Since the time value of money discounts future cash flows (because money now is preferred over money later), the DPP will always have a greater payback period than PP provided that the project is conventional, meaning there is one initial outflow and all future cash flows are inflows.
Unsurprisingly, the relative DPP results are very similar to the PP results, though they are pushed back slightly due to the discounting of future cash flow benefits: 2.72 years for the software and 3.25 years for the data scientists, with a difference of approximately 6 months. These results, however, are likely more reflective of reality given that the cash flows should be discounted and should be the preferred metrics to use when quoting payback periods for the project.
These three metrics are important barometers of both potential project success and profitability and can be evaluated together during the decision making process. That said, data science projects should be evaluated based on more than just breakeven points or payback periods. As previously stated, it is always important for an organization to be aware of their cash flow benefits from projects in order to better understand the impact and future financial state. Based on expected future cash flows organizations can make decisions on other capital investment projects without waiting until those cash flow benefits are received. Understanding a project’s breakeven point and payback period is instrumental during an organization’s capital planning process.
We have covered both the capital budgeting process and profitability metrics. Next, we will discuss overarching performance metrics. Check out our next blog about Economic Value Add and Return on Investment.
Links to the Rest of the Series:
Introduction
Part I: NPV, IRR, PI
Part III: EVA, ROI | https://neeraja-sarda.medium.com/a-framework-for-interpreting-realized-economic-value-from-data-science-projects-731980257c6b | ['Neeraja Sarda'] | 2020-12-15 19:41:20.767000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Finance', 'Metrics', 'Economics'] |
What You Should Know About Your Tooth Extraction Procedure | If you do have a tooth extraction lined up, you’re probably a little nervous, particularly if you’re getting a tooth extracted for the first time. To make you feel more comfortable with the procedure, let’s give you a clear idea of what you should expect, so you’re cool as a cucumber when the “special day” comes! Read on to learn what happens during the extraction of a tooth.
The tooth extraction procedure
In reality, the extraction process is a very fast and easy process. First, to numb your mouth, the dentist gives you a local anesthetic so you don’t feel any pain during the operation. If your tooth is negatively impacted — or you have to get multiple teeth removed — you can also get an IV sedation to sleep during the operation.
When you are anesthetized, the dentist is going to remove your tooth. He will either place gauze in the empty socket and make you bite down to stop bleeding or he can use stitches to cover the gum up.
That’s what it is! You’ll be able to go home after we’ve done the extraction and stopped the bleeding.
If you only have one tooth to be extracted, you can complete the entire procedure within 20–40 minutes. If you have several teeth to be removed, however, plan to spend some more time at the dentist’s office. Every additional tooth, depending upon its position, can take further 3–15 minutes of the appointment.
Will there be pain involved?
No, there won’t be any pain involved. Since there will be anesthetizing of the nerve fibers that send pain signals, you won’t feel pain. However, you can feel a feeling of strain. You can also sometimes feel a lot of pressure.
While this feeling of pressure shouldn’t cause you to feel anxious, you should know it here because the more you know exactly what you should expect, the easier it will be for you to feel confident during the operation.
You must be mindful that, during the process, you can hear sharp noises. Many patients consider this the most discomforting aspect of the operation. If you have headphones, you might want to bring them with you, so you can listen to music while the dentist extracts your tooth.
In case you need an emergency tooth extraction in Lombard IL
The majority of patients needing emergency extractions go straight to ER. Hospitals, however, can generally only provide pain killers to patients and transfer the matter to their dentist, because they are not prepared for such work.
In addition, many dentists must refer patients needing emergency extractions to an oral surgeon. Luckily, that’s not the case for Sanders Family Dental. At our practice, Dr. David and Dr. Leslie Sanders will personally review your case and, if necessary, perform emergency extraction during your visit.
Kindly note that during the COVID-19 crisis, when most dental practices are shut, Sanders Family Dental has been open for any dental emergency in Lombard IL. So, if you’re looking for emergency tooth extraction in Lombard IL, click here and book your appointment. | https://medium.com/@dentalsandersfamily/what-you-should-know-about-your-tooth-extraction-procedure-71c37246d805 | ['Lombard Dentist - Sanders Family Dental'] | 2021-11-25 14:00:03.927000+00:00 | ['Dentistry', 'Tooth Extraction Dentist', 'Dentist', 'Lombard Dentist', 'Emergency Dentist'] |
Get Started with React Navigation 5 in React Native | Navigator Components
There are 3 main navigators that React Navigation comes bundled with, that are suitable for both iOS and Android based projects. These navigators and their respective packages are as follows.
Stack Navigator
@react-navigation/stack (official doc): The most vanilla navigator you’ll find, a Stack navigator will navigate from screen to screen in a hierarchical fashion:
To set up a stack navigator, declare a stack navigator object via the createStackNavigator method. From here, the Navigator and Screen components derived from this method can be used to embed and wrap your desired screens:
import { createStackNavigator } from '@react-navigation/stack' const DashboardStack = createStackNavigator(); function Dashboard() {
return (
<DashboardStack.Navigator mode='modal' headerMode='none'>
<DashboardStack.Screen name="Home" component={HomeScreen} />
<DashboardStack.Screen name="Stats" component={StatsScreen} />
</DashboardStack.Navigator>
);
}
This pattern of declaring a new navigator and taking the resulting Navigator and Screen components is consistent throughout all the supplied navigators.
As you can see, the component-based declaration differs a lot from the previous version, but is quite self explanatory. Notice the mode and headerMode props of DashboardStack.Navigator — these may be familiar to you if you have used React Navigation 4.
Essentially, the navigationOptions properties are now represented as props, all of which have been documented here.
In addition to this, each DashboardStack.screen also support an options prop to customise navigation options on a per-screen basis. Instead of defining headerMode='none' fort the entire navigator, we could disable the header to individual screens using options :
<DashboardStack.Screen
name="Home"
component={HomeScreen}
options={{
headerShown: false
}}
/>
There are quite a few ways to manipulate the header through options — check out all the options properties here.
Bottom Tabs Navigator
@react-navigation/bottom-tabs (official doc): Another valuable navigator that will set up the boilerplate for a tab bar navigator, popular amongst dashboard designs. This tab bar navigator offers quite a comprehensive solution, allowing the developer to customise the look and feel of tabs with ease.
The following gist demonstrates how to construct a Bottom Tabs navigator, with some customisation with SVGs and styling:
Again, the bulk of syntax may look similar to the previous version of React Navigation, with a couple of key differences:
We’re now configuring the tabs within a screenOptions of the navigator component, where the tabBarIcon property is returned.
of the navigator component, where the property is returned. screenOptions now provides a route prop (more on that further down) that provides context on the currently active screen. This is now used in your switch statement to determine the icon SVG.
now provides a prop (more on that further down) that provides context on the currently active screen. This is now used in your switch statement to determine the icon SVG. The tabBar options prop is also a part of screenOptions, that allows you to configure additional styling of the tab bar.
Each Tab icon is embedded via JSX with a <BottomTabs.Screen /> component within the <BottomTabs.Navigator /> component.
All the props and more screenOptions examples are documented at the official docs, as well as a dedicated Tabs Navigation guide being available to read through.
Stack navigators can be nested within bottom tab navigators, but the bottom tabs UX will remain as you are navigating through the stack hierarchy. This may be what you intend to do, but in most cases, displaying tabs within deep hierarchies is confusing UX. To get around this, you can link from one screen to another screen in another navigator, that we’ll cover further down.
Drawer Navigator
@react-navigation/drawer (official doc): Another useful navigator that allows screens to animate from one side of the screen to be revealed, and animate back when closed. Stack navigators can be nested within these types of navigators to expand on the content within it:
The Drawer Navigation documentation does a good job covering this navigator, so this article will not delve deeper into it, having covered the previous two navigators that demonstrate the same changes from the previous version. There are some useful props for the Navigator however, beyond screenOptions , that will be commonly used, with openByDefault , drawerPosition , drawerType and minSwipeDistance being some of those.
For completeness, there are two more Android focussed navigators that based on Google’s Material theme design, being createMaterialBottomTabNavigator and createMaterialTopTabNavigator .
These navigators are typically managed by the organisation themselves on GitHub, that can be seen on their GitHub organisation page along with all the other utilities React Navigation offer.
Nesting Navigators
It is common to nest navigators within other navigators, and navigate from one to another. Consider the following setup where a stack navigators are nested within a tab bar navigator:
// nesting navigators const DashboardStack = createStackNavigator(); export const Dashboard = () => {
return (
<DashboardStack.Navigator>
<DashboardStack.Screen name="Home" component={HomeScreen} />
<DashboardStack.Screen name="Stats" component={StatsScreen} />
</DashboardStack.Navigator>
);
} const BottomTabs = createBottomTabNavigator(); export const Tabs = () => {
return (
<BottomTabs.Navigator
...
>
<BottomTabs.Screen name="Dashboard" component={Dashboard} />
<BottomTabs.Screen name="Settings" component={Schedule} />
);
}
What if we wanted to navigate from one tab to a particular stack screen in another tab? Well, React Navigation provides a simple API to do so, using the navigate function within the navigation prop. Consider the following button:
// navigating through nested navigators <Button
label="Back Home"
onPress={() => {
navigation.navigate('Dashboard', {
screen: 'Stats'
});
}}
/>
Upon pressing the above button, the tab bar navigator will switch to the Dashboard screen, and the stack navigator within that will navigate to the Stats screen.
More detail on nesting navigators can be found here.
About the new `route` prop
Although the navigation prop is still used in v5, some of its properties have been delegated to a separate route prop, as a means to separate the current route properties from the navigation context. The upgrading from v4 to v5 post has outlined these changes of the navigation prop.
The route prop (at props.navigation.route ), is now where the current screen’s data is hosted, that used to be in props.navigation.state .
Concretely, navigation supplies you with methods and context to navigate through your NavigationContainer , whereas route contains data pertaining to the currently active screen. For more info on these props:
Go to the navigation API reference, that lists all the properties of the object, ranging from goBack , navigate , setParams , and more.
API reference, that lists all the properties of the object, ranging from , , , and more. Go to the route API reference, that details its properties, including the name , key and params properties.
In regards to setting params when navigating, not much has changed. However, there is no more getParam method to fetch params. Instead, params are fetched from route.params in the following fashion:
// getting a param from `route` const myParam = route.params?.myParam ?? 'defaultValue';
This is a more generic way of checking whether a param exists and assigning a default value if it does not, rendering the previous getParam utility somewhat obsolete.
Hooks in React Navigation 5
There has also been an introduction of new hooks in React Navigation 5, that make it easier to work with navigators within functional components, as well as put less (or no) reliance on HOCs.
The useNavigation hook for example removes the need for the withNavigation HOC that was depended upon before, that will fetch the navigation object from the navigation container’s context:
// useNavigation hook import { useNavigation } from '@react-navigation/native'; function MyComponent() { // get navigation without passing it down in props
const navigation = useNavigation();
...
}
This totally replaces withNavigation , that is now a part of the Compatibility layer of utilities.
useRoute can also be used to obtain the route object discussed in the previous section. There are a few more hooks to be aware of when upgrading from v4:
useFocusEffect : triggered when the screen in question is focussed. This can replace an event listener setup that you may have relied upon in previous versions.
Event listeners are still supported, but have been simplified. There are now two events of navigation, focus and blur . Before, we had didFocus , willFocus , didBlur and willBlur to play with. focus can be implemented within useEffect like so:
let focusListener = null;
useEffect(() => {
focusListener = navigation.addListener('focus', async () => {
// do something
});
return (() => {
if (focusListener.remove !== undefined)
this.focusListener.remove();
})
}, []);
Notice that focusListener is null by default, as useEffect hooks are triggered after the component renders. | https://rossbulat.medium.com/getting-started-with-react-navigation-5-in-react-native-f82676294d2f | ['Ross Bulat'] | 2020-04-30 13:24:28.075000+00:00 | ['React Native', 'Software Engineering', 'Programming', 'React', 'JavaScript'] |
Why Do Many Cubans Vote Republican? | Since Barack Obama set out to improve the United States’ relationship with Cuba, embassies have reopened in both countries, American tourists can now travel to the island, and in an unprecedented move, the U.S. abstained from voting on a United Nations decision condemning the Cuban embargo. Only last month, the U.S. lifted restrictions that had previously banned people from bringing back Cuban rum and cigars. These changes suggest that the path to the normalization of relations between the two countries is already paved.
However, the outcome of the presidential election will determine the direction that U.S.-Cuba relations will take. Last week, Republican candidate Donald Trump said at a rally in Miami that he will reverse Obama’s deals with Cuba. Meanwhile, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton pledged to follow Obama’s efforts to end the embargo.
Cubans are the only people who can become U.S. residents after one year in the country, thanks to the Cuban Adjustment Act, a law enacted in 1966. After five years, they can get citizenship, making them eligible to vote. Unlike most Latin Americans who support Hillary Clinton, Cubans are split in their political opinions, partly because they disagree on how the United States should proceed in its relations with Cuba.
The Cuban Revolution and the U.S 2016 Presidential Election
After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Fidel Castro introduced communism to the island, which resulted in a wave of Cuban immigrants who were against this regime immigrating to the United States.
“That generation suffered a lot because they took away what they had earned through years of work” said Gonzalo Hernández, photographer and family man, who came to the U.S. in his early twenties. His maternal grandfather, the man who introduced solar heaters to Cuba, lost his business to the Cuban revolutionary forces. “One day he came to his factory and it was full of military officers and they asked him ‘do you work in here?’, he said he was the owner and they said ‘no, you are not the owner anymore, the owner is the people,’” Hernández narrates. In a similar way, his paternal grandfather was dispossessed of his law firm.
Hernandez’s aunt, who similarly lost her beauty salon, left the country with her family and consequently, was forced to leave her apartment to the government. As many Cubans at the time, she had to part away from the life she said to feel satisfied with. “My aunt suffered a whole lot and she could not stand Fidel,” Hernandez says. “People who lost to Fidel live with a lot of resentment.”
Gonzalo Hernández,53. Photographer and family man.
For some, this resentment is what makes a lot of exiled Cubans against Democrats. “Cubans in the U.S. associate Hillary with communism, they
make a parallel between her and the Cuban government.” Johan Carlos Sánchez, 53, artist, says. “They have a deep hidden wound.”
Nestor Diaz de Villegas, a poet, essayist and critic that has been living in the United States and writing about Cuba for 37 years says, “we always go Republican, there is nothing positive a Democrat can bring to those who have experienced socialism.”
However, from his point of view the wounds of the revolution are not the reason why Cubans are conservatives, but rather,their familiarity with the development of communism “it is not resentment, it is wisdom, it is knowledge” Diaz de Villegas says.
The Cuban government took Diaz de Villegas apart from the island after he was forced to spend some years as a juvenile prisoner. All of these for having written and distributed a poem criticizing the change of name of a prominent street in Havana.
After the Chilean coup in the seventies, the government decided to change the name of a prominent street in Havana, instead of ‘Carlos III’ the street would be named after Salvador Allende. 18-year-old Diaz de Villegas, who did not agree with Allende’s policies, wrote a poem protesting the change of name. The poem cost him five years of prison.
He came to the United States in 1979, with an agreement signed by Jimmy Carter to release political prisoners. He did not make the decision that took him away from his friends, family and his country. “I felt it was a punishment” Diaz de Villegas says, who could never see his mother again before she died.
For him, many Cubans are conservative because they come from a society that used to democratic, just like the United States, and that society evolved into a dictatorship that has lasted 58 years. “I see what happens when Democrats are in power and I see it is very similar to the process I experienced in Cuba” Diaz de Villegas says, “we understand it, why? because I spent 5 years incarcerated because of something similar.”
Even though he is a conservative as many other Cubans — including the congress Republican Cuban-American Ros-Lehtinen– Diaz de Villegas is not a Trump supporter. “We see Donald Trump and we see a donkey,” Diaz de Villegas says.“We have issues with voting for that animal.”
Nestor Diaz de Villegas, 60. Poet, essayist and critic.
Even though he is also against Hillary Clinton, today he is going out to vote. “I am going to flip a coin: heads or tails” Diaz de Villegas says, “I am going to vote anyway because it is a right I did not have in my own country.”
Why Do Cubans Support Trump?
Regardless of Trump’s loss of support from both parties, many still believe in him. “I could not say he is a Republican candidate because he does not have the Republican party support, I would dare to say that Trump is almost running independently.” Rosa Maria Suarez, 58 says. She came to the United States 15 years ago, works at a business office in Miami, and she is a true Trump supporter. “He has uncovered a lot of corruption from both the Democratic and the Republican party,” she says.
Rosa María Suarez, 58. Receptionist.
In Havana, Suarez says she belonged to a political opposition group that distributed forbidden literature and entered the U.S. Interest Section –now the American embassy– to file human rights complaints in Cuba. According to Suarez, her political involvement had consequences. “I suffered bullying, persecution, isolation and even physical attacks,” Suarez says “up until the point I had to adhere to a political refugee program that takes those whose lives are in danger away from Cuba.”
Suarez is against the Democratic party because she does not agree with the normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba. “the embargo must be uplifted after agreements are reached about free and democratic elections,” she says.
A week ago, at a rally in Miami, Trump said he would cancel the deal Obama has established with Cuba unless he got “the treatment that Cubans, both here and in Cuba, deserve.”
According to everyone interviewed, this opinion is widely shared among Cuban exile Republicans. They see the uplifting of the embargo as a concession to a regime that should not stand in place. From their point of view, the embargo must not occur until Cuba is democratically governed.
Why Are Younger Cubans Democrat?
Suarez’ generation was born at the offset of the Cuban revolution. They experienced the lack of resources in the special period (a time of very strong economical crisis), economic hardship due to the embargo, and other issues of the communist regime. However, not all of them experienced the repression Suarez endured or the property loss of those who were old enough to remember the revolution.
“My generation was born after Fidel, I did not see what my grandfather had before or what was taken from him, I did not see the job my dad lost” Hernández says. Hernández is a Democrat, as well as Suarez’ sister, who is only two years younger. They do not support the Cuban government, but they believe in the improvement of the U.S.-Cuba relations and in the uplifting of the embargo. “My generation grew up hating the embargo because everything that was wrong in the country was blamed on it.”
This is also the case for subsequent generations. “Either because of their age or because they see the world in a different way, the number exiled Cubans who identify more with democratic, liberal, and progressive ideas is increasing.” says Sandor Valdés, 38, a Democrat activist who came to the United States at age 15 and lives in Miami.
Sandor Valdés, 38. Democrat activist and designer.
Data supports this claim. According to the Pew Research Center, although Republicans still outnumber Democrats in Miami-Dade County, where the majority of Cuban Americans live –46 percent–, there is a democratic trend: in the past 10 years the number of Democrats has increased by 62 percent.
“It is very rare to see someone my age who is not a Democrat,” says a young Cuban Trump supporter, who decided to remain anonymous, “if you are a Republican, they’ll go after you.”
The divide in political views among Cubans in the United States is influenced by their different experiences with the Cuban government, and their view on what must be the policy for the island. Cubans exiles remain, however, Republicans in their majority. | https://medium.com/@fernanda.uriegas/why-do-many-cubans-vote-republican-a72c9831bbad | ['Fernanda Uriegas'] | 2021-04-09 12:37:47.363000+00:00 | ['Cuban', '2016 Election', 'Immigration', 'Cuba', 'Republicans'] |
Image Background Remover Using Detectron2 | Detectron2 is a ground-up rewrite of Detectron that started with maskrcnn-benchmark. The platform is now implemented in PyTorch. With a new, more modular design, Detectron2 is flexible and extensible, and able to provide fast training on single or multiple GPU servers. Detectron2 includes high-quality implementations of state-of-the-art object detection algorithms, including DensePose, panoptic feature Pyramid networks, and numerous variants of the pioneering Mask-R-CNN model family also developed by FAIR. Its extensible design makes it easy to implement cutting-edge research projects without having to fork the entire codebase. for more information you can visit here.
In this blog, I have shown installation and working of detectron2.
System Requirements
Linux or macOS with Python ≥ 3.6
PyTorch ≥ 1.5 and torchvision that matches the PyTorch installation. You can install them together at pytorch.org to make sure of this
that matches the PyTorch installation. You can install them together at to make sure of this OpenCV is optional and needed by demo and visualization
we can also use the Google colab to use detectron2. In this blog I have shown the implementation in google colab.
Installation of Detectron2
In Colab Notebook, just run below code to install detectron2 and other pre-requisites.
Dataset
I have used the COCO dataset for the training of the model. COCO dataset is the dataset used for object detection purpose and it has 80 classes ,80000 training images and 40000 validation images. Below is the code for the downloading the dataset.
Import libraries
Registering dataset
In this step I have registered the dataset using inbuilt detectron2 function that is register_coco_instances.
below i have shown the code which you need to run in colab notebook.
Train the model
In this phase, I trained dataset using detectron2 default trainer and make the the model for predicting the object and making the mask over the object. I have trained the model for 300 iterations.
Below is the code for plotting the trained models some figures.
I have shown the graph for accuracy of model which shows the plot on accuracy / iteration using mask-RCNN.
accuracy of model/iteration
Validating the model
First I read the image using OpenCV and then predicted the object from image using default predictor. Then I have created the mask from the predicted output on image and Then remove the background of object by checking the value of every pixel and if the value of object at pixel is 0 that means pixel is not of an object.
it will read the image and plot it as shown below.
input image
just run the below code in colab notebook. It will produce the image from which background has been removed.
here is the removed background image. | https://medium.com/@surbhikathiriya5/image-background-remover-using-detectron2-91e1346a8575 | ['Surbhi Kathiriya'] | 2020-11-18 15:32:45.775000+00:00 | ['Mask R Cnn', 'Machine Learning', 'Pytorch', 'Detectron2', 'Object Detection'] |
A Stone’s Throw Away | Image by Darryl Willis. All Rights Reserved.
Some may gather flowers,
but I will gather stones —
for protection or aggression,
build a wall, for ammunition;
make a fortress vast and strong.
Yet, it is a thing of textured art:
a medium, a tool to shape
the icons of imagination
Walls are built to enclose
the captive, to repel the stranger.
Yet, a bridge may transcend
any boundary that divides.
One may build a citadel
barred and shut from within,
while another builds a chapel
without doors to close —
a place of welcome
and respect for those
who come with emptied hands.
There is a time to gather.
A place is built to stop and rest
at journey’s end. But the road
may carry us around the bend
just a stone’s throw away.
There is a time to gather.
Some would gather flowers,
but I would gather stones. | https://medium.com/literally-literary/a-stones-throw-away-ec6b4a9307f0 | ['Darryl Willis'] | 2020-11-24 16:21:35.552000+00:00 | ['Hope', 'Poetry', 'Poetry On Medium', 'Community', 'Literally Literary'] |
Meet Armenia’s Defenders: Hayk | Hayk Zhamkochyan is a 21-year-old engineer from the town of Nor Hachn, not far from Yerevan. He was already serving in the Armenian Armed Forces when Azerbaijan launched a war last year that lasted 44 days and claimed the lives of 3,360 soldiers and 65 civilians officially.
“I was serving in Askeran as part of the largest military unit in Artsakh [Nagorno-Karabakh] when I was injured,” says Hayk.
“There was a firefight in the early hours of October 16. We were surrounded, and the fire was endless. When I got hit my leg went weak and I fell to the ground. My unit couldn’t get me out right away as they were under fire. I was worried that they had shot me in the heart and that I was going to die, so I closed my eyes for a minute and thought about my family. I opened my eyes and felt around my back, and realized I was hit in the spine, not my heart.”
Hayk used a tourniquet to minimize the bleeding until his unit got him to a medic. He was taken to Stepanakert, the capital of Artsakh, then Yerevan for surgery. After his surgery he remained in the hospital for a month and a half, until he was brought to Homeland Defender’s to continue his rehabilitation, free of charge.
Homeland Defender’s is a social enterprise that provides anyone injured defending Armenia and Artsakh, including active duty soldiers, veterans and volunteer fighters, free medical care and rehabilitation, including short-term and long-term, inpatient and outpatient care. They’re currently remodeling a 4-floor wing of their center to increase their capacity so they can care for a total of 670 wounded soldiers per month. Donations to our current fundraising campaign will secure the equipment and furniture they need for this wing to care for soldiers like Hayk.
“I’ve been here for about 3 weeks, and during this time there’s been a big change in my health. In the hospital, before I came here, I was very weak. At times I couldn’t even eat food. But thanks to the help of the doctors and the staff, I’ve become more active. I’m very satisfied by everyone here. I’m motivated to continue my rehab exercises so that I can stand again. There was a time when my personal trainer wasn’t available, but the other soldiers receiving care here motivated me and exercised with me. The environment here is great.”
The doctors caring for Hayk estimate that he will walk again in about 2 months. He does strength exercises for his legs and hand with the center’s specialists, who are certified twice a year. “Right now my main struggle is finding my balance. Once I’m able to stand up and maintain my balance I’ll be able to walk again.”
When Hayk and the other soldiers aren’t working on their rehabilitation, Hayk says they spend their time in one of the center’s lounges playing chess and checkers or watching movies. Soldiers that are able to go swimming in the center’s pool, which is also retrofitted for people living with disability and is used for physiotherapy. Visits to the center are limited due to the coronavirus pandemic, says Hayk, but the soldiers do see their family members once in a while who come to visit while maintaining social distancing measures.
What does Hayk plan to do once he is healed and walking again? “By profession I’m an engineer. I want to continue my education in IT.”
Hayk began his military service in January 2018 through the Ministry of Defence’s “I Am” program. Through the program, soldiers serve on the frontline for 3 years rather than the standard 2, and are offered 7 months leave to see their families during their service, plus compensation after their service. Hayk’s 3-year service was almost complete when he was injured in combat. He’s been relieved of his duties and his service is over.
“I don’t regret my decision. I have decided to buy a house for my family using the compensation I will receive for my service. I’ve already found the right house. As soon as I receive the funds I will put down the deposit.” | https://blog.onearmenia.org/meet-armenias-defenders-hayk-67173ad17725 | [] | 2021-01-15 09:18:31.720000+00:00 | ['Updates', 'Karabakh War', 'Armenia', 'Crowdfunding', 'Nagorno Karabakh'] |
BLOCKCHAIN’S POTENTIAL FOR SOCIAL IMPACT WITH DR. JANE THOMASON | Dr. Jane Thomason on the Speaking of Crypto podcast
Dr. Jane Thomason Episode 026
“A lot of people think of blockchain and all they think about is Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and then they immediately, their minds go to the dark web, and money laundering and so forth, but what I wanted to do was put a message out to the world which is, yes, there’s Bitcoin. That’s an important application of blockchain. But, there are all these other ways that it could be used that will actually make the world a better place to live in, so why don’t we push hard, lean in, and try and shape this technology to see if we can’t get those future benefits that people talk about.”
Dr. Jane Thomason, Digital Transformation at ABT Associates and Blockchain Advisor
I got a chance to speak with Dr. Jane Thomason remotely while she was judging the EOS hackathon in Sydney, Australia recently. Dr. Thomason is a blockchain advisor, hackathon judge, experienced CEO and a women’s advocate who was awarded the UN DecadeOfWomen Quantum Impact Champion Award this year. https://www.decadeofwomen.org/hackquantum/
With her global experience both in business and in international development and now the world of blockchain technology, Dr. Thomason sees the world from a birds-eye view, with an ability to zoom out and look at the far-reaching potential of blockchain tech from a wider perspective.
And what she’s seeing right now is that we have a lot of “disconnected ecosystems”, a bit like the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, and that what she believes will help speed up the growth in the space would be for more collaboration, education, co-creation or to use a term she’s coined — hyper-co-collaboration.
We discuss some exciting blockchain use cases and where blockchain’s potential lies in the area of social impact.
Identity, financial transactions like remittances and voting are use cases that Dr. Thomason sees as having a huge impact on changing the status quo. In fact she gives an example of in Australia of the cost being over $200,000 per vote, whereas with blockchain tech, the cost would be around 50 cents per vote and mentions Horizon State’s token-based blockchain voting platform. https://horizonstate.com/ And speaking of voting reforms, Dr. Thomason shares that there is political party in Australia called The Flux Party, which is a Blockchain Political Party. https://voteflux.org/
Dr. Thomason would like to see more accelerator programs and more social impact funds. She talks about the incredible ideas that come out of the hackathon events, but that there’s a gap. There isn’t yet enough support or funding for these ideas to become full-fledged startups or for startups to be profitable ventures and commercialized applications out in the world once the hackathon is over.
One incredible use case she talks about it one that touches the areas of digital identity, medical records and supply chains all attached to one person’s activities.
She uses the example of a long-distance truck driver in Africa who may travel through six different countries. If he’s HIV positive, currently, he wouldn’t be able to get medication in just any country, and his antiretroviral medication helps to stop the spread of HIV. But with blockchain, his identification could be on a blockchain, as well as his medical records and the supply chain information so that wherever he goes, he has access all of these records. What if blockchain really could bring all of these areas together? Well, it can, but what will the world look like when it is put in place?
What does the future look like if all of the facets of our lives could be digital, transparent but private, and immutable?
She talks about education and empowerment and diving into blockchain to find out more and she shares her big a-ha moment with me when she recalls the time after the banda aceh tsunami hit Indonesia. Dr. Thomason was there on the ground during the reconstruction and she explained that at the time there were no records, so although 200 people lost their lives, there was no way to track who they were, what their medical records were, or whether the donor money that came in was going to the right people. She realized that if the blockchain tech were around then that everything around the rehabilitation and reconstruction would have been so much easier. And that’s what got her really thinking about what kind of impact blockchain tech could have on a global impact scale.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/04/pictures/120412-indonesia-tsunami-earthquake-science-world/
Dr. Jane Thomason
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-jane-thomason-85997276/
Digital Transformation Abt Associates
https://www.abtassociates.com/what-we-do/capabilities/digital-transformations | https://medium.com/speaking-of-crypto/026-blockchains-potential-for-social-impact-with-dr-jane-thomason-b04e39534c14 | ['Shannon Grinnell'] | 2018-11-11 21:06:29.474000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Bitcoin', 'Identity', 'Blockchain For Impact', 'Blockchain Technology'] |
the leap from creating a design project to a design ecosystem | Would you like to know our secret to transforming a regular design-process into a visual brand ecosystem that will save time on development as well as decrease costs of all upcoming visual and marketing brand projects?
The visual eco-system is a powerful foundation that could help you with the above-mentioned points. With a single project example, I’m going to share with you how a designer should perceive their own work and also the ways how design studios are able to secure long-term contracts with their clients. This write-up is all about work ethics, methods and processes. With this design process, I want to dish out useful knowledge to everyone involved in the design.
So, who is this write-up for?
Stakeholders
Often enough, I face confusion coming from our partners who lack the understanding of how exactly we work around our processes. This ambiguity then conflicts with our ongoing partnership and collaboration. I hope that this time around, after completely exposing this design process in detail, it will clear the “fog of war” and finally help with creating a common ground between stakeholders and designers. You will also discover a better-grounded and more mature approach to a design in general.
Individual designers and design studios
The information relayed in this think piece will likely sound more familiar to you. Nevertheless, I’m not stating that these design processes and ethics are the gold standard. I can confidently state that they are feasible within our team’s working environment and built with a fundamental, and more importantly, functional set of tools. It will be a great pleasure for me if you consider applying the provided information, and do decide to change your team’s internal processes or at least the attitude toward your future upcoming project.
Raising awareness. Get to know your upcoming partner.
The beginning of a working relationship between a design team and client starts with a brief mutual greeting and introduction. It then quickly escalates into a problem-related conversation and how design here can be a solution. Nothing out of the ordinary, just general stuff. However, this stage is not exclusively a conversation about your partner’s problems. The first meeting sure feels thrilling with each side estimating one another’s professionalism and suitability. Each party has its own personal criteria.
Personally, I’m a strong believer of “internal values” and the fact that both solo design professionals and design teams possess these as part of their culture. After several years of work in the design field, I’ve managed to formulate our internal values. Now, when discussing any project with a partner, I try to deliver these ideas in every way possible. Such a method of checking for these criteria helps me to decide whether I’m ready to get involved with a particular project.
A design studio is not busy hands.
A designer is not a copy machine. Therefore, any professional individual or studio should strive for such self-positioning. This way, a client can’t simply request a team to copy someone else’s solution. In my opinion, a keen eye, experience, imagination, vision and courage always diverge from the “busy hands” idea.
And design studio is not there to close gaps.
Sometimes you are requested to deal with the following problem: “We need to make it prettier, or at least to pull off our competitors’ level”. Such tasks have nothing to do with the actual business goals. I personally am a fan of projects that have a practical approach, those where design works for the sake of metrics and serves as a foundation for product’s eco-system.
A design studio does not partake in the competition.
If someone walks in the door wishing to compare your design studio with tens of other players on the market — watch out. Personally, I would think a hundred times before accepting an offer. Keep a neutral position instead, like Switzerland. Set yourself apart, loyal to your own precise processes and strong design recipes.
«A design studio is not busy hands, it’s not there to close gaps, nor does it partake in competition»
Values act as an internal filtering machine, helping to start cooperating with those who you can relate to, as well as to cast aside the rest. To avoid conflicts and misconceptions, you should be clear on the working purpose by providing the reasoning on why you and your aspiring client might not be a good fit. A good form of response would be recommending an alternative, perhaps a different team that can address a particular problem by providing an appropriate solution.
Does this sound like an obvious way to lose a potential client? This might surprise you, but later on down the road, these same people will most likely come back to you with a job offer. This time around they will be full of new ideas and an actual understanding of the design. Such cases often result in long term relationships.
Understanding the core of a brand, and the goal of a design.
If you’re skillful enough, and stakeholders share your vision and values, it’s time to move closer to real problems. At this stage, two documents called “Lean Canvas” and “Brand Canvas” mark the vector direction for an upcoming project and determine its time frames and successful execution. The power here lies in its simplicity. Between two designers, the one asking questions and preparing the two business-model documents will grasp the project’s essence much faster. Another designer which decides to dive into the endless documentation is the one who will end up biting the dust.
Lean Canvas gathers information about the core of a product and at this stage, the aim is to gain a complete understanding of a product. It answers questions such as: Why do people need this product? What would you list as the top problems of your clients? What metrics are stakeholders trying to influence? Information derived from Brand Canvas will be useful for a design team to find out the following: How stakeholders see their product from an emotional standpoint? How is it being positioned? What tone of voice is being used in customer communication?
But before you start, there are a couple of questions worth asking your partners:
Why have you decided to do this project now?
Such a question sobers up your partner and makes him wonder about the necessity of the whole deal. Sometimes it may sound rather unexpected. There were occasions when people were starting to doubt whether the design was their number one priority and wondering if they really should come back to it later. This question, just like sticking to your values, will help to focus on legitimate customers. Given the provided honesty and the desire for working with clients aware of their actions will yield immense rewards in the long run.
What do you need design for? Do you really need it?
The main question of the three. It helps to see if the stakeholders are mature enough in their intentions and are design-driven, i.e. if in reality they want to reach their goals through design, not just feel the high from a working process.
How is success exactly quantified?
So, how is the whole process measured in terms of numbers? What metrics should be used to precisely determine the work getting sucked up into the guessing game of “like/not like”? It’s pretty simple. The design must function as it should, while partners should aim at a certain destination, without which it may turn the whole process into an everlasting nightmare. If stakeholders can’t seem to find reasonable borderlines with their goals, the purpose of a design team is to help them determine it by asking the right questions and providing suggestions.
A general client inquiry: “Help us make a quality design leap”
Frankly speaking, a general cry-out from most of the clients reaching out is the following: “Help us make a quality design leap”. This problem prevails even if the product team has its own designers on board. Let me explain why it exists.
One of the main values of an internal team lies in a deep knowledge of their product. For a product design team, it’s often difficult to get a big picture about a design, given the fact that no one is involved in any experiments or additional side-projects. With a lack of hands-on experience, their everyday experience stays on the theoretical level. This drastically diminishes the probability of outrunning their competitors through design. It even gets worse when we consider that these brands do a complete design rehaul once every 3–5 years.
On the other hand, just like us, other independent design studios keep creating fresh designs every 2 or 3 weeks. Because of this, their view of the business part is indirect, therefore keeping their sight clear, even if they focus on one particular area or industry.
Being on the verge of the design becomes the basis of their existence and professionalism. In other words, they externalize trends in real-life scenarios. However, they have to do it purposefully. It’s not about creating an ephemeral project that’s good for one day, but rather picking the best out of trends and combining it with proven design principles. This approach helps the design to stay relevant for many years to come.
Moodboard. A secret to a design process with no revisions.
After outlining the goals, the design team pairs with stakeholders to extract the essence of an upcoming visual image. Moodboard is the main instrument that helps designers to do that. However, not everyone is clear on the purpose of this tool. It shouldn’t be mismatched with something that simply matches pictures to the mood of a client. A Moodboard is a place where stakeholders’ business meets the keen eye of a designer. The designer’s careful approach to this matching process is a success-recipe for executing a project without endless revisions. One of the essential skills of a designer is to compile a worthy Moodboard. | https://medium.com/@leonidstern/the-leap-from-creating-a-design-project-to-a-design-ecosystem-464a54d00661 | ['Leonid Stern'] | 2021-02-26 08:22:35.975000+00:00 | ['App Design', 'Design System', 'Web Design', 'Visual Identity'] |
Two views towards the meaning of life | Two views towards the meaning of life
These past few years, studying at University of Portland, competing in Mixed Martial Arts, traveling and expanding my mindset has given me a lot to think about with regards to the big-picture meaning of life in comparison to my personal meaning for life. Silas Yeak Feb 7, 2020·3 min read
After thinking about it for several years, on a big-picture-view, I’ve come to the conclusion that the Universe is pretty much meaningless and indifferent. No matter how much I try to project meaning on it, it’s still too vast and infinite for me to make any substantial difference on an infinite system.
Numbers, science and evidence have never ever let me down; When it has, it just meant that we didn’t have enough evidence/information to know all the answers. This may sound like a nihilistic conclusion derived from skepticism and scientific evidence, but stick around to find out what I’ve come to realize on a personal-level.
To preface my current conclusion (dated 01/08/20), I will start off with what sparked all these existential questions in my mind. I had these suicidal friends who constantly asked me questions like “what’s the point in life Silas? I’m only sticking around for my parents honestly”, this triggered me to find out the answers for them so I could give them more reasons to stick around.
There is this Greek mythological story about Sisyphus, a king who was punished to roll a huge boulder up a hill and when it reached the top, it would roll back down and he would have to push it up again. This would repeat for eternity, so he might be rolling it right now!
This mundane and absurd existence must sound extremely boring and familiar. However, French Philosopher Albert Camus described Sisyphus as smiling even though he had no autonomy in his lifestyle. Pushing up the rock gave him meaning in life. This made me realize that people just simply have different priorities and meanings to life. For me, I could never live a life with no autonomy, creativity and passion. However, for Sisyphus moving up a rock every day was all he needed to be satisfied and happy.
The same thing happened when I played this “priorities game” and realize that certain people would value things like “autonomy, money and power” while others would value “inner peace, happiness and world peace”- People just have different priorities.
This subjective meaning attained through prioritizing personal top priorities towards life can give personal meaning. It is to appreciate whatever you prioritize on a personal level and disregard the bigger picture that is the “meaningless of life”. My favorite quote from my favorite TV show Rick and Morty when answering nihilism is “don’t think about it”, and it makes sense. Find satisfaction and happiness within what you can control — your personal, subjective meaning to life. Your life’s “value proposition”. | https://medium.com/@silasyeak2/two-views-towards-the-meaning-of-life-3933f600dd57 | ['Silas Yeak'] | 2020-02-07 16:58:23.448000+00:00 | ['Existentialism', 'Meaning', 'Life Lessons', 'Perspective', 'Meaning Of Life'] |
A Guide on Buying Cross Necklaces for Fashion Purposes | Jewelry is an important part of a woman’s clothing and fashion, and jewelry item like a necklace plays an essential part in their daily lives.
When we talk about necklaces, the most popular kind is the cross necklace for women which has been one of the most loved fashion trends for decades now. A little necklace adds a lot of femininity and elegance to your look, be it on a formal day at the office, or a brunch looks with friends, or even on an everyday basis.
Origin of Cross Necklace
Cross necklaces originated centuries ago as a symbol of one’s religion and reminded them of their faith and that the cross was the key to God’s kingdom.
The cross has always represented Christ because of his crucifixion and the sacrifice he made for mankind. Celtics and Romans used the cross sign to remind people of their religion and faith back then.
But with centuries passing by, the cross necklace for the common people has become a fashion jewelry item, although the Roman Catholic Church priests still wear big cross necklaces to symbolize their position and profession.
Cross Necklace for Women
The Cross necklace for women has been a popular piece of accessory that has been worn by all ages of women alike. It’s a simple, yet classic jewelry item that is available online as well as in offline stores. The best part about cross necklaces is that you don’t have to think too much before buying one, because it is effortless styling. You don’t have to look for a specific occasion or event to adorn it.
Cross necklaces make for a great gifting item as well because your woman will definitely feel very special to receive one from you. Plus, if you wish to gift one to your girl bestie, then don’t even think twice. You can browse through our cross necklace for women collection at shopsyp.com and find the perfect match for her.
What Does A Cross Necklace Mean?
In the earlier days, a cross necklace was said to have religious values because the cross sign reflected Christianity. But over time, the religious values were subdued and women and men all over the world have been wearing them as a fashion statement.
By wearing a cross necklace does not disrespect or disregard and religious sentiments anymore because it is simply a jewelry item that is accessible for each and every one. Everyone, irrespective of age, race, and religion, has been adorning this beautiful piece of jewelry.
Why Are Cross Necklace So Popular?
Cross Necklaces are so popular because of the designs and materials used to make them radiate elegance, fragility, and feminism. Although a cross necklace is gender-neutral, when we talk about its popularity among women, relatively it’s much higher.
While a cross necklace for men would have a more rugged look, with metal and ropes, a cross necklace for women will have a very delicate look with diamonds and gold. It gives a very modern and contemporary look and is a perfect accessory for women who like to keep it minimal.
The most common materials that are used in making cross necklaces include wood, stainless steel, onyx, silver, and gold with diamonds. Some designs have a basic chain and a diamond cross hanging through them, others might even have a bible quote engraved on the cross.
Where Can You Buy Your Cross Necklace From?
If after reading the above article, you are eager to buy yourself a cross necklace or buy pearl jewelry online, then Shopsyp is where you need to be. An online store for all kinds of women’s jewelry and hair accessories, shops is a one-stop destination for all your jewelry needs. It is a reliable and trustworthy platform to buy pearl jewelry online as well.
Here, you can find a colossal variety of accessories that goes well with all your outfits, be it for a regular look or event-specific. We offer a great range of handmade jewelry that is made out of quality materials and are available at super affordable prices.
Women all over the world have trusted us for quality and pricing and we’ve loved to serve them over the years. | https://medium.com/@shopsyp25/a-guide-on-buying-cross-necklaces-for-fashion-purposes-7a19d772fce9 | ['Shop Syp'] | 2020-12-18 11:35:50.702000+00:00 | ['Bracelets For Women', 'Earrings', 'Online Shopping', 'Shopping', 'Jewelry'] |
There’s No Gender in the Cabbage Patch | There’s No Gender in the Cabbage Patch
On the Gender Reveal Cabbage Patch dolls
The baby doll aisle is by far my favorite aisle in Target. I don’t play with dolls anymore, but I am greatly entertained by them, especially when they start laughing or crying out of nowhere when I walk by. It’s like a year-round haunted house, right in the middle of my local department store.
The features companies come up with for the dolls get more realistic and complex as the years go on. My baby dolls had bottles of milk-like liquid you could shove in their gaping mouths, and some could be filled with water so that they could “pee,” but they couldn’t breastfeed, cry, or perpetuate archaic and potentially harmful ideas about gender identity.
American toys have been getting more progressive.
Barbie has a wider variety of body types and careers, and there are even gender-neutral dolls. So I was dumbfounded when I found “Gender Reveal” dolls in the toy aisle while Christmas shopping at Target.
The “founder” of the gender reveal party herself, Jenna Karvunidis, is now backtracking and supports the movement to end the pointless parties. But Cabbage Patch (or Mattel, which manufactures the dolls) apparently didn’t get the memo.
I grew up with Cabbage Patch dolls because my late grandmother was obsessed with them. At the beginning of this decade, when gender reveal parties were booming in popularity, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see such dolls. The conversations around gender identity weren’t as prominent then.
Now, however, the product makes the company seem extremely tone-deaf and certainly solidifies Cabbage Patch dolls as a fad from the 80’s that no one cares about anymore.
In case you are wondering, there are no genitals on these cabbage babies.
To conduct the big “reveal,” one would pull down the doll’s diaper and see whether there was a blue or pink heart on its ass cheek. Maybe they are serving children well by not affiliating gender with sex, albeit unintentionally.
After revealing the gender, I guess you take that information and use it to go out and buy clothes, choose between the names Jessica or James, and justify yelling at the baby when it likes baseball instead of ballet or vice versa, and then expect it to grow up and date a doll of the opposite binary gender and then throw it out of your window when it dates the same sex instead?
Were there any focus groups with kids that helped the company determine that this was a worthwhile idea?
Is this gender reveal thing fun for kids who play with dolls? Does it bring them joy? I’m asking honestly. Or does it send them on a roller coaster of emotions? Are little boys angry about not getting sons? Oh, right! Silly me. Male children of the parents who would buy this doll aren’t allowed to play with dolls.
You might be wondering why I’m spending my time writing about a doll. The answer is obvious: I’m a social justice warrior with nothing better to do than rage about inanimate objects! But seriously, I’m not angry at the dolls, I’m angry at the culture that created people who think such dolls should exist in 2019.
Raising children without gender isn’t just for the sake of the relatively small percentage of kids who grow up to be transgender or non-binary, or those who become women who are butch or men who are femme. Gender-neutral parenting promotes equality and might help reduce the occurrences of issues like eating disorders, which sometimes stem from a person’s desire to make their body measure up to cultural expectations based on their assigned or true gender.
When we see babies as a gender first, we construct a whole idea of who they should be, laying out shoes for them to fill before they even have a voice. Of course, everyone has dreams for their children. Why can’t those dreams be gender-neutral? Success, marriage, or starting a family — none of the things that parents often want their kids to experience are restricted to a certain gender.
What is the real point of a gender reveal party anyway?
Your friends and family can choose clothes and gifts based on things all babies like and need — not colors like pink and blue. So why is Mattel promoting the practice to a future generation of parents?
It’s just a doll! And your baby is just a baby. | https://medium.com/th-ink/theres-no-gender-in-the-cabbage-patch-bee839ffe9df | ['Kristen Pizzo'] | 2019-12-27 14:59:38.467000+00:00 | ['Gender', 'LGBTQ', 'Parenting', 'Identity', 'Social Justice'] |
[PRESS-RELEASE] StreetLib expands its distribution partnerships with Kobo and Bookbeat. Adds Media 365, Audiobooks.com and Ubook to its 50+ partners portfolio | [PRESS-RELEASE] StreetLib expands its distribution partnerships with Kobo and Bookbeat. Adds Media 365, Audiobooks.com and Ubook to its 50+ partners portfolio
Launched in 2006, a year before Amazon opened its first Kindle store and five years before the Kindle arrived in Italy, StreetLib has from its inception been focused on pushing boundaries to maximise reach for its authors and publishers.
This week StreetLib adds a raft of new partnerships to its portfolio, consolidating its position as the first choice for authors and publishers wanting to “go wide and go global”.
In a new partnership with Canada-based Kobo, StreetLib adds Kobo audiobook distribution alongside its existing distribution to the globally-accessible Kobo ebook store, and to the Kobo Plus subscription service that currently serves the Netherlands and Belgium (other countries being added soon).
And in the other direction, StreetLib now offers ebook distribution to its audiobook partner platform Bookbeat.
Bookbeat, base in Sweden, currently has dedicated platforms in Sweden, Finland, Germany and the UK, and is accessible across the European Union (28 nations in total).
Staying with audiobooks, StreetLib has added Audiobooks.com and Ubook to its distribution partners portfolio.
US-based Audiobooks.com has been delivering digital audio to eager listeners since 2012, and before that it was renting physical audiobooks under the name Simply Audiobooks. Since 2017 Audiobooks.com has been part of RBmedia.
Ubook operates out of Brazil, where it is by far the largest player in the Latin America audiobook field, but has reach in Europe, Oceania and beyond. It’s 1.5 million registered users make Ubook a very welcome addition to our distribution network.
Finally, the Media365 platform, accessible via Android and iOS apps, offers authors and publishers a worldwide reader audience of over 1 million users in 14 languages — English, Portuguese, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Czech, Turkish, Polish, Bulgarian, Romanian, Russian and Vietnamese.
StreetLib CEO Giacomo D’Angelo said,
“We continue our mission to build a publishing platform for the 2020s that is truly global, truly inclusive, and embraces all opportunities for authors and publishers to reach fans of the written word.
We started out as an ebook company before Amazon made ebooks fashionable, and today we facilitate the production and gateway distribution of ebooks, POD, comics, magazines, audiobooks, podcasts and online reading, with an unrivalled portfolio of 50+ partners that offer reach through hundreds of retail and subscription consumer points and to over 50,000 library consumer points worldwide.
We’re always working to increase publishers and authors’ possibilities to reach readers around the world, through as many retail, subscription and retail outlets as possible, and in as many formats as possible.
And all through one dashboard, so they can get all the benefits of going wide without having to manage dozens of accounts. And all with no upfront costs.
In addition we offer an unrivalled array of value-added services, from formatting, editorial, and audio production to rights management, and we are the publisher of the globally-focussed industry journal The New Publishing Standard and the B2B newsletters Publish Africa, Publish MENA and Publish Global.
We have another raft of partners to announce before 2019 ends, and in 2020 we’ll be taking our international operation to new heights as we build on the global infrastructure (a digital publishing portfolio for every country in the world) that we put in place this year.”
About StreetLib
StreetLib (www.streetlib.com) publishing facilitator and a global gateway to the $143 billion international book market, 70% of which is happening outside the USA, for publishers big and small. Whether you are an independent author or a multinational publisher, StreetLib offers unrivalled global reach through our worldwide network of retail, digital library and subscription service outlets. StreetLib distributes ebooks, audiobooks, comics and print-on-demand paperbacks. StreetLib’s standard model is no up-front fees and it takes just a 10% commission per sale made.
Contact us at info@streetlib.com | https://medium.com/streetlib/press-release-streetlib-expands-its-distribution-partnerships-with-kobo-and-bookbeat-632e5463b172 | ['Lucia Zitelli'] | 2019-11-21 10:00:21.230000+00:00 | ['Global', 'Audiobooks', 'Books', 'Publishing', 'Press Release'] |
The Disappointment of Meadow Soprano | The kids on The Sopranos can be hard to like. They’re often described as spoiled, whiny, self-centered, and hypocritical, and a lot of the time they are. On a show filled with murderers and thieves, somehow these two characters managed to provoke the most contempt from viewers.
While I admittedly lost patience with AJ quite a bit over the seasons, I still maintained a lot of sympathy for Meadow. They were both bratty from time to time, but Meadow was smart and often empathetic towards other people. AJ always felt hopeless, but Meadow had a legitimate shot at breaking free of the mafia world she grew up in.
This is what makes her character arc throughout the show so powerful, and so fundamentally disappointing. She grows a lot throughout the show’s eighty-six episodes, but not in the one way that counts the most.
“The spoiled liberal”
The Sopranos was a uniquely uncomfortable show at times for a lot of reasons, but somehow the arguments Meadow would get in with her parents over race and politics are still some of the most painful scenes to watch.
There’s a scene in season 3, for instance, where Meadow gets in an argument with her father. For the past few episodes, Tony had been getting on Meadow’s case for having a boyfriend who is half black, and now here he finds out that her bike had been stolen by a black guy. Rather than show any sympathy towards Meadow, Tony smirks and acts as if his warnings against Meadow dating a black guy have been vindicated.
This was a scene in which Tony was clearly in the wrong, so I really hoped Meadow would win the argument. I hoped she would coolly explain to him just how racist and hypocritical he was being here, in a way that made him realize how he was acting and maybe make him apologize. After all, if someone’s being a bigot, the most satisfying thing in the world is watching someone else set them straight.
Instead, Meadow reacts in a manner frustratingly similar to those crazy SJW memes that flooded the internet in the years leading up to 2016. Everything she said was technically correct, but she was flailing and emotional while Tony was confident and collected. The scene ends with her crying and storming out of the room, Tony getting the last word.
The scene was frustrating to watch, because I think a lot of young liberals — particularly young white liberals — can see themselves in Meadow in this moment. Most of us know what it’s like to lose an argument with a bigot not because the bigot was in the right, but because they were older and self-assured whereas we were young and inexperienced.
There are several scenes like this in the show, with the liberal Soprano kids going up against the conservative Soprano parents, where I can so easily see them the way that Trump supporters probably view people like me: as a spoiled, naive idiot who thinks they know better than their grounded, realistic parents.
I would often watch the show with my conservative parents in the room (who, to their credit, seemed perfectly aware that Tony is in the wrong in these scenes), and I would be tempted to try to distance myself from these characters, to say “oh, please” every time Meadow stormed out of a room or whenever AJ went off on a hollow rant about the environment. It was my way of signalling, without saying it directly, “I hope you don’t think I’m like this.”
After all, there are a lot of differences between me and the Soprano kids. I’m not rich, for one thing, and my left-wing politics aren’t constantly undermined by the fact that my dad’s in the mafia. And yet, there’s something deeply, painfully relatable about the way these political arguments play out on the show. A lot of it centers around the power dynamics surrounding money.
Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) in The Sopranos, “University,” 4/01/01.
“Ungrateful”
If you want to make money writing about politics, the best thing you can be right now is a white liberal with Trump-supporting family members. Over the last five years, I’ve lost count of the amount of times an article went viral that was essentially “I used to think my parents/spouse/relatives were fine, but their support for Trump has driven a wedge in our relationship.”
I myself have benefited from this trend; my most successful article so far has been a piece where I wrote about my increasingly pro-Trump family. If you read through the comments of these articles, not just my article but any of them, you’ll notice one response, in particular, gets repeated a lot: “These Trump supporters you hate sacrificed a lot to raise you and give you a good life. Be grateful.”
I don’t find this to be a convincing argument. If you’re a parent, you don’t deserve any special treatment for raising your kids and doing your best to make sure they turn out right. Your kids didn’t sign up to be your kids, and they don’t owe you anything except the same level of respect you give towards them. My parents, for all their faults, have never pulled the “I raised you” card in any political argument that I can remember.
The “I raised you” card is there though, lingering in the background of every heated political conversation between parent and child. It’s an annoying, inconvenient truth a lot of liberals have to deal with: the fact that the Trump-supporting assholes that frustrate them so much are the same assholes who gave them a place to live and food to eat for eighteen years, probably more.
This issue is aggravated by the fact that, in part because of the way people like their parents have voted their entire lives, it is harder now than ever to live on your own. The cost of living keeps going up while wages keep stagnating, which means that a lot of young liberals are reliant on their Trump-supporting parents for much longer than they’d like to be.
There is no shame in living with your parents as an adult. At least, there shouldn’t be any shame in it, but I think we’re all familiar with the stereotype of the socialist who lives in their parents’ basement. You can criticize your conservative parents all you want, but if you’re reliant on your parents for money and/or housing, then for a lot of people this undermines any beliefs you have against them. You’ll hear the question, “How are we supposed to take your opinion on the economy seriously if you can’t even support yourself financially?”
In a lot of ways these are strawman arguments, but there is a valid, if uncomfortable question somewhere inside them: if you believe that your parents are bigoted in their beliefs, that their support for Trump makes them bad people, are you a bad person for taking their money?
This is a question that follows the Sopranos kids around throughout the show. Some of Meadow and AJ’s best moments are when they point out the holes in Tony’s worldview, but these moments feel hollow because, despite Meadow’s disgust with her father’s behavior in the early seasons, she still takes his money.
She goes to a fancy university and never has to worry about how she’s going to pay for it. In the final season she’s deciding whether to become a lawyer or a doctor, two career choices that probably wouldn’t be available to her if she hadn’t been given all the resources in the world to pursue a higher education. Meadow thinks of herself as a good person, but her whole lifestyle has been funded by the violent exploitation of countless people.
The mafia is a metaphor
Meadow’s struggle of reconciling the immorality of her father’s profession with the benefits she reaps from it is not exclusive to people growing up in the mafia, although they are of course one of the more extreme examples.
If you grow up in the Western world, you are complicit to violence in some way. I’ll criticize smartphone companies for the way they treat their factory workers, but I still own a smartphone. I can criticize the genocide of Native Americans as one of the most atrocious acts in human history, but I will still be living on the land that used to be theirs. Does that make my criticisms invalid?
If you’re anything like me, that question reminds you of this meme:
It’s impossible to exist within a society without passively endorsing it in some way, so pointing stuff like this out as some sort of gotcha is often a lazy, easy way to dismiss legitimate criticisms of the institutions that control our lives.
While nowadays, people who try to dismiss leftists by pointing out they own iPhones are usually mocked, there is a reason why that argument exists in the first place: some people can’t deal with the fact that they are complicit, often in ways that can’t be avoided if you want to live a normal life. In their minds, their choices are to admit that they’re a bad person, or to dismiss those criticisms altogether. To admit that they benefit from exploitative labor practices every time they buy a new shirt would reflect poorly on them, so it’s easier to ignore the issue.
This is why a lot of liberals are so unwilling to confront certain aspects of Barack Obama’s legacy, like the fact that his drone-strikes hit civilians, which you’d think most reasonable people would agree constitutes a war crime. Because if Obama is a war criminal, that means they’ve enthusiastically voted for a war criminal. No matter how much better Obama would’ve been compared to opponents, this is still a deeply uncomfortable truth for many of us to deal with.
The best way to handle stuff like this is to simply accept that you’re complicit, and fight against the problem anyway without any of the moral posturing. It’s impossible to be a perfectly moral person in a society like ours, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be critical when you see something worth criticizing. As Meadow herself puts it to Tony in a season 2 episode: “Sometimes, we’re all hypocrites.” That doesn’t mean the problems you’re a hypocrite about are any less real.
Self-awareness vs cognitive dissonance
This is why Meadow’s character arc throughout The Sopranos is so depressing. When confronted with the contradiction of her progressive beliefs with her father’s immoral actions, she doesn’t accept the same advice she gave a few seasons back. She chooses instead to ignore the problem altogether. In season five, when her boyfriend confronts her about the violence her family gets up to, she’s got this to say:
You know, you talk about these guys like it’s an anthropology class. But the truth is, they bring certain modes of conflict resolution from all the way back
in the old country. From the poverty of the Mezzogiorno, where all higher authority was corrupt.
Meadow is smart enough to know how dishonest this framing is, but if she were to confront her family’s actions honestly, she’d be forced to acknowledge that nearly every good thing in her life is the result of her father being a violent, murdering mob boss.
Instead, she finds a way to dismiss this in a way that fits into the rest of her liberal ideology. Her father isn’t an evil criminal; he’s just an oppressed minority driven to crime by government corruption and inequality.
What’s particularly frustrating about this is that by the final season, Meadow is a fairly mature woman who’s long since gotten most of her shit together. If that argument over the black guy stealing her bike happened again, there’s no doubt in my mind that she would’ve effectively held her ground.
Not only that, but by the final season Meadow’s finally approaching a place in her life where she is no longer reliant on her father’s blood money. She no longer needs her parents’ support to survive in the world, nor does she need her parents’ permission for anything she wants to do. But it’s too late: the cognitive dissonance she relied on to justify her complicity has become firmly ingrained. The disgust with her family’s actions she often struggled to contain in early seasons, she’s long since buried deep down.
For instance, back in season 3, she seemed to have figured out that her ex-boyfriend Jackie Jr. was not killed by drug dealers, as the police concluded, but at the hands of someone in her father’s crew. (This isn’t openly confirmed within the show, but it’s a popular interpretation for her outburst at Jackie Jr.’s funeral.) By season 5, however, she seems to have completely suppressed any suspicion of what actually happened. When her current boyfriend brings it up, she repeats the official story without hesitation.
This kind of development of someone’s worldview is depressingly common. There’s the annoying phrase a lot of older conservatives use against young liberals — “when you’re older you’ll change your mind” — which is frustrating because for a certain type of person this is true.
There’s a certain type of person, mostly people with sheltered childhoods, who go through a period in their late teenage years/early twenties where they start to see all the little injustices in the world and try to speak out against them. In doing so, sometimes they make the mistake of seeing societal problems as the results of individual failures of common people.
For example, maybe they blame those around them for not recycling enough rather than direct their anger at the politicians or CEOs who have the ability to enact large-scale change. Maybe they get a little too self-righteous, a little too quick to shame others for not doing enough to fight back against the problems of the world. They put too much weight on their own shoulders.
A lot of these people end up getting burnt out at the fact that these injustices we have to deal with not only seem insurmountable but that it’s nearly impossible to be alive in the western world without being complicit in some way. So they stop caring, stop paying attention, and years later when they see young people being passionate about these things, they roll their eyes and say the same thing that was said to them. “Just wait ’til you get older.”
They see their apathy as wisdom, and their past convictions as an embarrassing period of their life they’ve managed to outgrow. In reality, their disengagement from caring about injustice is borne out of laziness and complacency, an unwillingness to acknowledge their own shortcomings.
Acknowledging your complicity doesn’t need to be the worst thing in the world, but a lot of people cannot or will not do it. | https://medium.com/an-injustice/the-disappointment-of-meadow-soprano-bae53f660944 | ['Matthew Black'] | 2020-12-18 00:42:14.214000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Television', 'Society', 'Family', 'The Sopranos'] |
How One Woman Chose Art | I AM A WOMAN by Artist Faiza Ramadan on de-orientalizingart.org
There was once a woman who lived a seemingly ordinary life. Her days were sometimes good and sometimes bad. She lived an imperfect life like humans do.
What set her apart was her art. She saw the world through different eyes that were expansive, introspective, and dreamy.
In her daily walks in the forest, the woman didn’t just see trees, she experienced them. In her eyes, trees reflected a larger network and a dynamic force that was interconnected with everything. The trees was what she aspired to become; rooted but free to grow in every direction; nurturing but resilient; alone but part of a supportive community.
She saw her self in everything, because her mind was art.
She usually picks up a paint brush and paints whatever her imagination dictates. She paints the trees, the sun, and the birds. She paints the wind, and the clouds. She paints her emotions. She paints her thoughts. She turns her entire world into art. This is how she experiences the world, and makes sense of it.
Her art wasn’t just a pastime hobby. Her art embodied her being just as much as she embodied her art.
She often felt misunderstood by those who didn’t share her vision. Some people thought she was too dreamy and unrealistic. Others thought she should find something more worthwhile to do. But art to her was like breathing. It made her feel alive and complete. It helped her process her emotions. To her, art was a way of life that made the most sense to her being.
To some people, it’s difficult to understand why this woman would be so invested in using her paint brush, and living her life a little bit differently. They may wonder why she doesn’t do presumably more important things. Because she loved spending time alone to make her art, she was judged. She felt conflicted and worried because she didn’t want to disappoint anyone.
But she knew it’s normal to be misunderstood. She knew that everyone had different eyes and saw different things, just like she did.
She saw others as art too.
To her, art was not supposed to be perfect. Art was supposed to mean something.
She discovered that she experienced the world in a unique way that not every one will understand, and she made peace with it. She realized that she needed to honor her needs, even if they sounded unrealistic to others. She understood that her art was how she made sense of her world, and it was her purpose to embody it.
Her soul wanted to experience life through art. So she chose to embrace herself.
She wanted others to embrace themselves too. In her eyes, everyone was a different art piece that needed to be in certain conditions to remain in good shape. She made it her mission to allow others to be free to be who they need to be.
She did that through choosing understanding and empathy over judgement.
She chose to be like the trees she always admired and painted. The trees that inspire her to be rooted, resilient, but nurturing and connected.
Through her art, she found peace and wisdom that she could share with the world.
And her life became a perfect painting..
To honor female artists, the featured piece in this article “I AM A WOMAN” by artist Faiza Ramadan can be found on https://www.de-orientalizingart.org/shop-gallery/libyan-art-prints
I chose to feature this piece because I found it to beautifully reflect the woman in this short story. The woman is looking up, empowered, and eager to express her truth, regardless of what others think.
De-Orientalizing Art is a social enterprise that provides a platform for Libyan female artists to share their artwork with the West for economic, social, cultural and political progress. De-Orientalizing Art hopes to establish women empowerment and cultural connectivity through deconstructing the orientalist framework by which art in the MENA is perceived.
GENIUS OF AFRICA (GENIUS AFRICAE) by Artist Khuloud Alzwai on de-orientalizingart.org
Another painting featured on De-Orientalizing Art that I deeply admire is GENIUS OF AFRICA by artist Khuloud Alzwai. The name of this majestic piece comes from the Berber Mythological Goddesses. The Genius of Africa represents female spirit. In every woman, there is a genius.
It can be found here https://www.de-orientalizingart.org/shop-gallery/genius-of-africa-genius-africae | https://medium.com/@yelgerbi/how-one-woman-chose-art-eb8711df3b7 | ['Yasmeen Elgerbi'] | 2020-12-16 00:34:28.370000+00:00 | ['Empowerment', 'Libyan', 'Art', 'Artist', 'Initiative'] |
What Project Managers Need To Know About Pre-Mortems? | Photo by Headway on Unsplash
Even if you have not bumped into a medical practitioner (for good) throughout your life so far, the term “post-mortem” shouldn’t be alien. While post-mortems are essentially used mostly in the medical field, it has wide applications across a multitude of our everyday life events. How many times have you landed up in a situation blaming your decision to not work out your relationship the way you could have? Or, may be found yourself locked-up explaining what really went wrong that you choose a certain career option. Post-Mortems are so common! We almost do it knowingly and unknowingly each passing day of our lives.
I once heard about one of this senior in a corporate where he once walks up to this meeting room right before the annual appraisal to deliver a speech. And he tells his team members that he had been monitoring their login and logout times closely and he observed that most of the members were not spending adequate time which was why performance and client deliverables had been impacted!
If this sounds, familiar to you, then you’re not alone! There are many of us who take the notion of “God has been watching us from above” very seriously! And, when the time is right, you pay for your deeds..
Coming back to reality, you are just as human as any one else. So, sitting back and watching to do a post-mortem isn’t really a good idea for you or your business. If there is something that needs an early course correction, you should make your team aware of it, isn’t it? Well, that’s for the greater good!
So What Exactly is Pre-Mortem?
Work can often get very taxing no matter what job you might be doing. With demanding client expectations, it is very easy to mismanage things unless you have a proper framework and the right attitude where you make sure to put up the necessary framework to avoid a distasteful event.
A post-mortem as we know, describes the processes of explaining the underlying cause of death of an event. While most commonly the term is used to indicate an investigation of the death of a living being, which in most cases, is human beings, the term is suitable in the death of hopes, products, opportunities and many more.
While a post-mortem is essentially backward looking, a pre-mortem is a forward looking approach. While some of you may not find the real merit of a forward looking approach, it in fact is a way more effective and efficient strategy when it comes to product or project management.
Importance of Documentation
Photo by siriwan arunsiriwattana on Unsplash
We do something — if it had a negative or sub-optimal aftermath, we end up feeling a little sad, a bit depressed, somewhat demotivated, and utterly drained out! We find some entertainment, focus back, get ourselves going and hope for a better day! And, REPEAT!
How many times do you really sit back and reflect on your past actions — whether positive or negative! A careful examination of something that might not have worked out in the past needs to be well documented so as not to repeat the same mistake again! That’s one key area where post-mortems play a wonderful role — provided you get a second chance unlike how most medical professionals would see it! :)
But why wait for the DEATH of SOMETHING to do a post mortem? Can you do something beforehand to prevent the dreadful and unnecessary post-mortems?
How Many Times Have You Judged Yourself Before Judging Others?
How many times have you peeped out of your cabin and popped out your head all of a sudden, walked into the conference room and taken a long session criticizing your team members over some fuzzy client escalations? Sounds familiar? This is not an uncommon scenario across organizations and teams. What most of us enjoy doing is wearing the decision-maker’s hat, finding great enjoyment in cutting through, dissecting and analyzing events after something happens! Trial — Error — Repeat!!
It’s very similar to watching the 80’s — 90’s Bollywood movies where police arrived at the crime spot after the crime had already taken place and the prime suspect(s) left the scene!
Why Pre-Mortem is Effective?
According to Gary Klein, “Performing a Project Premortem” HBR, September 1, 2007, pre-mortems are an effective way by which you could prevent death rather than explain it. The whole idea of conducting pre-mortems is to prevent certain problems from occurring and increasing the likelihood of success.
Pre-mortems are a good investments of time and effort. They can help ensure success. So, the next time before judging your team, make sure you have done the necessary pre-mortem to avoid an unfavorable event in the first place! | https://medium.com/@smukherjee04/what-project-managers-need-to-know-about-pre-mortems-bcb35c04848e | ['Sayan Mukherjee'] | 2020-12-03 04:08:25.531000+00:00 | ['Project Management', 'Leadership', 'Agile Methodology', 'Management And Leadership'] |
Creating a marketing plan as a Freelancer | One of the most important things you should do when starting out as a freelancer is marketing yourself and getting your brand out there. If you have a product/service and no one knows who you are you’re not likely to bring in any customers and therefore won’t make many sales.
Setting up a proper marketing strategy from the start can make all the difference to the amount of work you’ll get coming in! This could be as simple as one social channel and a website or managing multiple social channels with your website supporting. The more effort you put into your marketing strategy the more you’re going to get out of it. So, where do you start?
Start by setting some goals
As a freelancer what do you want to achieve? What does success look like to you? Is it all about gaining brand awareness? Do you want to increase your customer base over the next 3 months? Do you want to be able to raise your rates or work fewer hours in the year so you have more time for yourself?
When setting your goals these should reflect what you consider success and what you want to achieve over a set period of time (around 3 months) — and make sure you can measure your goals as well. Without a goal you have nothing to aim for, setting goals can help create new habits by giving you the motivation to achieve them, as they give you something to focus on and allow you to measure progress.
Find your target audience?
After you have set your goals, you need to find people to sell your product /service to. This is all about finding your target audience. Who do you want to sell your product/service to? And where is your target audience hanging out? Are they currently on social media or are they just Google searching to find your product? If your target audience is on LinkedIn or Twitter then there’s no point setting up an Instagram account and putting in a lot of time and effort for something that’s not going to bring you in a lot of customers.
Find out where your target audience spends most of their time and only set up those social accounts
To find your target audience ask yourself first:
When you first started your service/product who did you have in mind to sell it to?
Is there a product/service currently on the market that’s similar to yours — who are they targeting?
Where are they present?
What problem(s) does your product/service solve?
If you currently have social media channels or a website set up — look into the analytics/insights and see what people are engaging most with your product/service. Once you have a good of the people in your target audience define them even more by asking:
Where do they live?
How old are they?
What are their common interests?
And where are they engaging the most?
This should give you a good idea on what they’re currently searching for and what content you should be focusing on to attract your perfect target audience.
Create your brand
This is where you can have a little bit of fun by giving yourself a name and designing a suitable logo! Setting these up and making your brand more personable to you will make you more motivated to push yourself to reach your goals and get your freelancing or contracting career in action.
Then set up a website where you can share your work and bring your clients in to be able to contact you. And set up your social pages
When writing content for your website and social media channels make sure you’re including important keywords that your customers will be searching for. The more relevant your content is to what people are searching for the more Google is likely to suggest you in search results when your customers search for the product/service you’re selling.
Be engaged
Don’t just set up your website and social media channels and then leave them. Be active! Aim to write at least one post or piece of content for your website. The more content you have (with those included keywords) the more your clients will be able to find you. If you’re strapped for time to create content you can even get away with resharing the content you’ve already posted before — just time these so they’re spread out several posts from each other. Facebook organic reach has only a 6% reach of your followers. So not everyone who followers your page will see the post the first time around.
Another important task is engaging with people on your pages — this will show them that you see them as being important. Engage with people in your niche or target audience. The aim is to get your brand in front of as many people as possible. The more people that see your brand the more they will be curious and have a look at what you have to offer and in turn, even buy your product/service or recommend you to a friend.
Networking
Networking is a powerful way to grow your freelancing business. Get out there and meet up with fellow freelancers in your area. You can find plenty of freelancer Facebook groups, meet up events or even freelancer communities which can make all the difference in building brand awareness, which in turn will bring in more customers, it helps with word of mouth referrals, and they can offer tips and tricks you can only get from freelancers themself — the untold secrets of the self-employed world.
Wrapping it up
With a good marketing strategy in place, it won’t take long for you to see the results pay off for the plan you’ve put in place. A good marketing strategy in place means:
You’ll start to boost your current customer list — rather than having to look for customers yourself, which can be a long and tedious job, having a proper marketing strategy in place will bring more customers to you rather than you having to search for them.
You’ll have more customers coming to you and there will no longer be a need to be listed on those endless job search boards that make you bid outrageously crazy prices to get the work - if anything comes up at all.
You’ll have the opportunity to build social proof and boost your referrals. When your customers love what you do and you have the channels for them to leave you reviews they will be more than happy to. More reviews/recommendations from your customers mean more people are more likely to choose you over someone else!
With more customers coming your way this means you can start looking at that salary you’ve been dreaming of giving yourself and upping your rates.
And by raising your rates you now won’t need to work so many hours in the week and can afford to only work 4 days a week or 3 weeks in a month or even 6 months in a year!
Get started now — the longer you put it off the longer it’s going to take to reach those goals and bring in more clients. | https://medium.com/@pandydo/creating-a-marketing-plan-as-a-freelancer-9ca5308bfa8 | ['Alysha Richards'] | 2020-12-23 03:30:49.401000+00:00 | ['Freelancers', 'Freelance Marketing'] |
Why You Should Stop Using Flask and Start Using FastAPI | Why You Should Stop Using Flask and Start Using FastAPI
Photo by Pankaj Patel on Unsplash
When it comes to machine learning production, usually we’ll wrap a model into a rest API. Because making machine learning APIs doesn’t really require complex things — it only requires the predict() function — we usually only use a simple framework. And the framework we usually use is Flask.
Don’t get me wrong: Flask is good, but it’s in the past. One reason Flask is widely used is that in the past, not many people deployed models as real-time production APIs. For some people, Flask is good enough because it’s popular, minimal, and written in Python.
As time’s gone by, the production of machine learning, as a field, has matured. However, as this field has matured, features that were originally just nice to have become essential. And that’s a feature that Flask doesn’t have, so sometimes we have to use third-party dependencies, and sometimes the documentation isn’t too clear.
This is what made me look for other alternatives to create real-time production APIs. In the end, I found a web framework called FastAPI. FastAPI is a relatively new web framework for Python but is powerful and enjoyable to use. Here are some reasons why you should start using FastAPI. | https://betterprogramming.pub/why-you-should-stop-using-flask-and-start-using-fastapi-1a091bfc2fbf | ['Fahmi Nurfikri'] | 2020-10-16 14:28:52.067000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Python', 'Flask', 'Data Science', 'Machine Learning'] |
[Crypto] The Case of Hacking on the Exchange in Korea | 17.12.19 Youbit secondary hacking
I am John :)
The cryptocurrency market in korea broke its record price in December 2017
When the heat for Bitcoin is soaring
When many people began to be interested in cryptocurrency with new assets
Once again, there has been a hacking case where the safety of the exchange is disrupted!! This time, the second hacking case where the exchange was hacked once more!!!
3. December 19, 2017 Youbit (formerly yapizone) Second hacking incident
17% Cryptocurrency loss of 17% to 17.2 billion won
This is the second time the YouBit has hacked because its former Yapizon Exchange has been renamed and operated since it was hacked. Once Yapijon was hacked, the Youbit who changed his name and operated was hacked again, and the damage was the highest ever.
The Youbit has come up with a plan.
Go bankrupt.
The damage to the hacking, which amounts to about 17.2 billion won, was complicated by the discovery that the cryptocurrency investors had to share.
And the government, at this time, didn’t recognize cryptocurrency as a financial instrument, so the investor was responsible for the loss. | https://medium.com/ionia-io/crypto-the-case-of-hacking-on-the-exchange-in-korea-17970b3694d8 | [] | 2018-09-05 08:52:15.701000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Crypto'] |
#ElectionHackathon: Addressing Election Insecurities W/ A Competition | Throughout the world, especially in this news cycle, we constantly see concerns about flaws in our electoral systems with issues like security, lack of representation, disenfranchisement and so much more. At the same time we see a lack of jobs in STEM especially for minority communities. And in the most in demand field of STEM, software engineering.
Now with one of the most controversial election history coming up, with concerns about hacking, voter intimidation, vote by mail systems, electoral college, and so more, my friends and I thought what better way to address these problems than through a Hackathon? This is why the team at the Minority Programmers have decided to host the #ElectionHackathon.Unlike traditional voting hackathons where cyber security specialists penetrate existing voting systems, we are encouraging developers to redesign antiquated voting systems of the past with modern more just approaches to dividing power that technology can enable, potentially revolutionizing the way we look at voting.
In this hackathon we are challenging competitors from all across the world (October 16 — Nov 1 [2 days before election]) to build a platform for their own (teams of 1–5) democratic system (With a chance to win $1000+ in prizes)
This could manifest itself from an application that visualizes rank choice voting, a blind date style of voting where you choose candidate solely on issues they support, a blockchain based voting system, a streamlined petition system to get candidates on the ballot, an electoral college system based on geolocation, and so much more! Not only do I encourage developers to take part, but I encourage members of the community to serve as a think tank for these new systems that will be available after this Presidential Election!
Sign up today https://election.devpost.com/ | https://medium.com/@ShotCode/electionhackathon-addressing-election-insecurities-w-a-competition-f61184851bfa | [] | 2020-10-07 16:07:36.171000+00:00 | ['Minority Programmers', 'Appdev', 'Hackathons', 'Election 2020', 'Diversity'] |
30 Lessons About Life You Should Learn Before Turning 30 | 30 Lessons About Life You Should Learn Before Turning 30
Lessons I eventually learned, but wish I could have mastered a long time ago…
Photo by Julian Hochgesang on Unsplash
1. Life is a delicate balance between “ready, aim, fire” and “ready, fire, aim.”
Chances are you naturally lean toward one of these approaches: either unnecessarily cautious or foolishly ambitious.
The reality is that some situations call for great care and deliberation, while others call for you to dive right in before you have time to convince yourself not to.
If you’re taking out a huge loan to start a business, you need to be cautious. If you’re thinking of starting a YouTube channel you just need to get started.
Either way, you better learn the difference.
2. You should automate as many things as possible
Steve Jobs developed a uniform of a black turtleneck, Levi’s blue jeans, and white New Balance sneakers.
Mark Zuckerburg mostly sticks to a gray t-shirt.
Barack Obama would choose between a charcoal gray and a navy suit every day.
The more time and energy you spend on things that don’t matter, the less you will have for the things that do matter.
Develop defaults in every area of your life: outfits, meals, morning routines, etc. You want as much of your life running on auto-pilot as possible so that you have the ability to manage the parts that most people never get under control.
3. Journey>Genesis
I’m not talking about the bands here (although I think the point would still stand). What I mean is that the process is more important than the act of starting.
We spend a lot of time celebrating the start of things, but not nearly enough time encouraging people when things get tough. And they always get tough.
4. You’ll be happier if you love the journey more than the destination
Not only is the journey more important than the starting line, it’s more important than the finish line.
If all you care about is the mountaintop, the climb is going to be rough.
The other thing about the finish line is that it’s a moving target. Once you get close to one finish line, you’ll spot another one just beyond it that’s even more appealing.
5. Your relationships will all change drastically
In college, I had an amazing community of friends including a close-knit inner circle and I figured that we were going to stick together for the long haul.
But life happens and for the most part we’ve gone our separate ways. There’s no hard feelings here. I realize this is the way life works.
I also have several family members who have recently moved further away. Those relationships will be different now that we can’t see them as often.
As long as you fight to maintain several relationships that are deep enough to sustain you in the present, you’ll be able to stand firm amid the ebb and flow of people coming and going from your life.
6. The past is best used as a wellspring of gratitude
There are two enormous mistakes when it comes to the past: dwelling on the negative aspects or romanticizing the positive ones.
But I don’t believe you should never look back. I’m all about living in the moment, but all that lead you to this moment was important too.
When you look back, focus on the things that you can be grateful for now. Every one of us has had ten thousand amazing things happen to us that we didn’t deserve. We’ve been treated to moments of true beauty worth cherishing. Don’t turn your back on all you’ve been given.
7. Procrastination is okay if it works
Everyone seems to hate procrastination, but it’s not always bad. Most people who procrastinate come through in the 11th hour and things work out fine.
Yes, it might be stressful getting there, but you have lots of areas in your life that need work. If procrastination is getting the job done, maybe it’s not the first thing you should look to fix.
That being said…
8. Procrastination is a silent killer of your deepest dreams
When it comes to your dreams, there’s no external accountability. You can’t come through at the 11th hour because there is no defined 12th hour. There are no deadlines unless you create them yourself.
Most people never stop and define their deepest, most important goals. This allows them to procrastinate on them indefinitely.
If you don’t come out and say that you want to write a novel, it’s not going to happen.
This is why I created a 10 Year Plan for a Remarkable Life, and why I think you should create one too:
9. You can be spontaneous even when you have plans
When it comes to creating a 10 Year Plan, one of the biggest objections people have is that they value spontaneity and don’t want to be tied down.
Fair enough, but it’s important to remember that your plans, your goals, and your calendar are there to serve you, not the other way around.
If you want to change something, change it. If you want to be spontaneous, be spontaneous.
Plans set you in the right direction so you don’t drift off course. If you need to pivot because your values and priorities change, go ahead.
It’s just as spontaneous to seize an unexpected opportunity when you had plans as when you didn’t.
10. Money can buy a lot of things, but the most important thing it can buy is freedom
Call it Financial Independence, call it retirement, call it escaping the rat race, call it whatever you want. Having enough money saved up gives you the freedom to live life on your terms.
You can do the work that you want to do when you want to do it and in the style you want to do it.
This is attainable for most people, but you have to be intentional about it. I lay out the mechanics of it in this article:
11. The people that are holding you back mean well
When you decide to make the leap from average to awesome, you’ll run into a surprising amount of resistance from people who should love and support you.
They don’t think they are discouraging your dreams, they think they are saving you from disappointment. They have no idea that they are pulling you back toward mediocrity.
Be grateful that they care, but have the wisdom to know when not to listen.
12. Getting older isn’t a bad thing
I used to dread turning 30, but my 30’s are shaping up to be the best decade of my life so far.
Yes there are inevitable declines that come with age and yes, seasons do change in life. Your 30’s probably won’t have the same vibe as your 20’s. But each season has its advantages and you learn to appreciate them in their time.
13. Happiness should be a central focus in marriage: the other person’s happiness
What I hate about the concept of looking for “the one” is that it sets up this idea that marriage is about finding someone who completely meets your needs. Not only is this never going to happen, it’s not what marriage is in the first place.
If you choose to get married, do it with the mindset of having an opportunity to love the other person well.
If you think that marriage was designed to make you happy, well, you know what the divorce rate is…
14. Finding yourself is great, losing yourself is better
This piggybacks off the last point. Ironically, the best way to be happy is to pursue the happiness of others instead of your own.
There’s a lot of focus today around self-discovery and “finding yourself” has always been something that young people were stereotypically supposed to do.
I think introspection and self awareness are very important. But my advice is as soon as you’ve learned what you need to know, get the focus off yourself as quickly as possible.
15. It’s okay to fail at stuff
I’ve spent way too much of my life being afraid to fail at things. This fear leads to inaction and inaction stunts your growth.
Here’s a news flash: no one has ever gotten good at anything without failing. Ever.
How do you think you learned how to walk?
Sometime in our childhood, we pick up this idea that failing is something to be embarrassed about. The sooner you banish that silly idea from your brain the better.
16. The one thing you should be afraid of is regret
Too many people have this backwards. They fear failure but not regret.
Once you have truly experienced both, you’ll realize that there’s no comparison: regret is a million times worse than failure.
Regret is a problem that becomes worse and worse with age. Regret at 30 isn’t so bad, there’s plenty you can still do about it. Regret at age 70 or 80 is brutal.
The choices that you make now really matter. Give some thought as to how your future self will evaluate them.
17. How you manage your energy is even more important than how you manage your time
When it comes to productivity, the focus is often on time management. This makes sense since using your time well is certainly a component of productivity, but it’s far from the full picture.
If you want to get important things done, you also have to manage your energy and attention. It doesn’t matter how much time you allocate to something if your brain is fried and you can’t concentrate on the task at hand.
If you haven’t learned to to take a mental rest and prepare yourself for another bout of work, your productivity will suffer.
18. Your health is your wealth
Time is even more important than money.
The most likely thing that will rob you of your time is poor health. The leading causes of death are all chronic diseases. If you die early, there’s a small chance it will be a fluke accident and a large chance it will be the culmination of poor habits.
Do what you can to severely limit your consumption of sugar and processed foods. Go on walks. Eat home cooked meals. Spend time with people you love.
The default way of living is the path to chronic disease. If you want a different outcome you need different habits.
19. Everyone knows something you don’t
People say this all the time and don’t mean it.
I mean it.
The people you think are stupid. Your political enemies. The people who got brainwashed by a cult.
Everyone.
I’ll go one further: even if you are on the right side of a debate, there’s an overwhelming chance that your opponent knows something about the debate that you do not.
Have the humility to listen and you’ll keep growing.
20. Experimentation is the best way to vet advice
You’re going to be exposed to a lot of advice, much of it will be contradictory.
Avoid fat — no, carbs — wait, calories — excuse me, I meant nightshades — wait, really it’s the omega-6’s that are the problem.
Large scale studies are expensive and the science behind complicated issues moves slowly. That’s not a knock on science, that’s just a suggestion that the fastest way forward is to conduct a series of n=1 experiments.
This applies to all areas. Some personal finance gurus say to cut lattes and invest the difference. Some say it’s not worth the effort. You have no idea whether or not it is until you try it out. Try giving up something that’s a habitual part of your life for a month. If you don’t miss it, great. If it’s the worst month of your life, maybe look somewhere else to save a few bucks.
21. Focus on the smallest changes that make the biggest difference
The pareto principle — also known as the 80/20 rule — says that 80% of the results come from 20% of the causes.
In other words, you can almost always find opportunities where small changes make an enormous difference.
For instance, when it comes to losing weight, cutting soda and juice is just one change, but it can completely transform your health.
22. Keep a journal
It can take a little time to get used to the habit of keeping a journal, but it’s worth it.
Most people are in a reactive mode all day long. The practice of journaling teaches you to turn inward in reflection and to proactively bring something to the page.
23. If you can be grateful for how far you’ve come, excited about where you are going, and are in love with the journey, you are winning.
This represents a healthy relationship with time: past present and future.
Grateful for the role of the past.
Excitement for a future that you are actively trying to create.
A love for the journey you are on and the precious present moment you are in.
That’s winning.
24. Find meaning in your obstacles
Consider this powerful section from the book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain:
Unhappy people tend to see setbacks as contaminants that ruined an otherwise good thing (“ I was never the same again after my wife left me”), while generative adults see them as blessings in disguise (“ The divorce was the most painful thing that ever happened to me, but I’m so much happier with my new wife”). Those who live the most fully realized lives — giving back to their families, societies, and ultimately themselves — tend to find meaning in their obstacles.
25. If you don’t like the story you are telling yourself, tell yourself a different story
The only lens you have through which to view your existence is that of a story.
You are constantly narrating your own life to yourself.
You get to control the story.
The facts never change, but it’s the story that resonates with you.
Telling yourself that you are a loser is a story. Telling yourself you used to be a loser but are turning it around is also a story. Same facts, different results.
Choose wisely.
26. Your weaknesses are your strengths
When I was a kid, I took medication for ADHD.
I’m not sure if I ever had ADHD, but even if I did, there’s no way I’d ever take medication again.
What I have isn’t a weakness, it’s a competitive advantage. It’s a superpower.
I couldn’t pay attention for eight straight hours of school even if you paid me, but I can focus plenty well on the things that I care about.
My inability to sit and behave for eight hours might not fit the modern education system, but why should I care about the modern education system?
27. Try to separate how you spend your time from how you make your money
There’s only one way to make money: selling.
Most people sell their time for money.
A better approach is to invest your time creating something that you can sell besides time.
This was a core thesis of my book on money.
28. The only sensible attitude is gratitude
You will often be tempted to complain about your life.
This isn’t a great look.
You have been given so much that you don’t deserve.
What did you do to deserve your beating heart?
Everything you have is a gift.
Not only is gratitude right, it’s therapeutic and healing.
Gratitude is the greatest psychological hack on the market.
29. The only thing that goes up with age is maturity
As you get older, every single natural ability begins to decline.
Your physical and mental potential peak in your early 20’s.
It’s still possible to improve your body and mind with age because chances are you weren’t anywhere close to your potential in your early 20’s. For instance, I’m in better shape in my 30’s than I was for most of my 20's.
But my body will eventually decline.
My mind will cease to work as quickly.
The areas where I will always be able to improve are my wisdom and character.
Take care of your body, but if you want to peak as a person later than 21, you should focus on your character and wisdom.
30. Lessons aren’t learned from lists
Yes, I recognize the irony of concluding a listicle post with this point.
Too many people read lists like this, feel good for a minute, then move along unchanged.
The only way you will grow is to get out there, experiment, and put things into practice.
I really hope you liked this list. But more importantly, I hope you do something with it. | https://medium.com/the-post-grad-survival-guide/30-lessons-about-life-you-should-learn-before-turning-30-6249873501e5 | ['Matthew Kent'] | 2018-10-16 15:15:57.687000+00:00 | ['Personal Growth', 'Life Lessons', 'Personal Development', 'Productivity', 'Life'] |
HARVEY EVANS: AS GOOD AS IT GETS | Harvey Evans (1941–2021).
On Christmas Eve, Broadway veteran Harvey Evans passed away at the Actors Fund Home in Englewood, New Jersey at the age of eighty (he would have turned eighty-one on January 6th). One of the best-loved members of the New York theatrical community with fifteen Broadway shows to his credit (all but one of them musicals), his was a career dating back to 1955, when he danced in the ensemble of the national tour of Damn Yankees. In an interview in 2007 with Playbill Magazine, he claimed to have been seventeen at the time, which would have meant he was born in 1938. Only thing is, he was born in 1941. My educated guess is that he fudged his age, much as Michael Bennett did as a sixteen-year-old when he was cast in a West Side Story tour for his first professional gig.
And speaking of West Side Story, Harvey is featured prominently in its 1961 film version as Mouthpiece, a Jet, memorably filling the frame at the end of “Jet Song” as the camera zooms in on his face for an extreme close-up. In Steven Spielberg’s current remake, there’s been a misunderstanding over whether or not he has a cameo playing a Gimbels Security Guard due to his name showing up in the credits. Actually, it’s Bert Michaels, who also played a Jet (Snowboy) in the 1961 film. Whatever the reasons for the mixup, if you read in any of Harvey’s obits that he’s playing this part, it’s not the case.
The Jets (1961) with Harvey Evans as Mouthpiece (lower right hand corner in the olive t-shirt).
Harvey’s history with WSS dates back to when, as Harvey Hohnecker, he joined the original Broadway production as a replacement (he switched it to Evans in the early 60s). He missed out on the original casting of WSSsince he was in another Hal Prince-produced musical at the time, New Girl in Town (his Broadway debut). “They told us we couldn’t audition, because they wouldn’t take us out of New Girl and put us as dancers in West Side Story,” he told Playbill. When I saw the first run-thru, I thought that WSS was the most fantastic thing. So I went to Hal and asked him if I could audition for the first replacement cast and he said yes. And I became part of that show.”
He also went into such classics as Gypsy and Hello, Dolly! (as Tulsa and Barnaby). He played in the national company of the latter with Carol Channing before taking over the role in New York. “I also got to do it with Betty Grable and Eve Arden. They were all fantastic.” The truth is that from the time he began, Harvey immediately became a go-to dancer for the best choreographers of the day: Bob Fosse, Jerome Robbins, Gower Champion, Joe Layton, Herbert Ross and Michael Bennett. Due to short stints on the West Coast (and his dancing prowess), he can be spotted in the big dance numbers of a couple of major film musicals, such as Silk Stockings, The Pajama Game and Mary Poppins as a chimney sweep.
Born in Cincinnatti, he exhibited a talent for movement early on leading his parents to enroll him in a dance school at the age of four. Having read an article in LIFE Magazine about Damn Yankees he fell in love with Gwen Verdon. He told himself, “I would love to be in Damn Yankees.” Not so long thereafter, he got to New York and was cast as a dancer in its national company. Life imitates art (or at least LIFE Magazine). Check out his moves (dancing with none other than Gwen Verdon) in “Who’s Got the Pain?” from Damn Yankees as seen on an Ed Sullivan special in 1973.
About his time on Broadway from the late fifties and onward, Harvey is quoted as having said: “This is not for ego or anything, but I’m blessed with the fact that when I started in the business, all the greats were around doing a show a year. I really sort of tutored or apprenticed under Bob Fosse, and Gower Champion and Jerry Robbins. I remember on the movie of West Side Story, he gave us a ballet barre every morning. I was a tap dancer really and he would specifically tell us what our problem was. I remember thinking, ‘This is remarkable. It’s Jerry Robbins that is teaching me dancing.’ So, I was blessed with that. I feel sorry for younger people in the business because there are no people that continually do shows like there was. Gower did a show a year. Bob Fosse did a show a year. Joe Layton did a show a year. Jerry Robbins did.”
Harvey also had a long association with the musicals of Stephen Sondheim. As a replacement in Gypsy and West Side Story, he moved onto originating parts in Anyone Can Whistle (1964) and in Follies (1971) as Young Buddy. He is prominently featured as part of the 1973 all-star one-night only recording of Sondheim: A Musical Tribute (the Scrabble album) singing a cut song from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and backing up Angela Lansbury with Tony Stevens (his one-time partner) on Anyone Can Whistle’s “Me and My Town.” One of Harvey’s personal favorites was standing by for Jim Dale in Barnum, which after proving how good he was, got him its national tour. He was also in the original casts of Sunset Boulevard (1994) and the 2002 revival of Oklahoma!, in addition to touring in La Cage aux Folles, playing opposite his West Side Story cast mate Larry Kert, the original Tony.
Harvey (in red) as Young Buddy in “Follies” (Kurt Peterson, Virginia Sandifur and Marti Rolph).
Not only was I fortunate enough to spend two hours with Harvey in 2013 interviewing him, but I got to see him in a number of shows during his heyday. Follies, of course, but also in a 1970 revival of the British musical The Boy Friend, opposite Sandy Duncan, where they stole the show with their Charleston number. And a year earlier than that, I saw him in a rare non-musical role as George Gibbs in a beautiful production of Our Town (with Henry Fonda as the Stage Manager). The cast included such Broadway stalwarts as Ed Begley, Mildred Natwick, Margaret Hamilton and John Randolph. “After the first reading, I felt that I wanted to get everybody’s autograph,” he said.
On television he got to star opposite Ann-Margret in a one-hour adaptation of the off-Broadway spoof of 1930s musicals Dames at Sea, as well as playing Duane, Margo Channing’s hair stylist, in a TV version of the Tony Award winning Best Musical Applause. But Harvey’s heart always belonged to Broadway, and he got a lot of love back in return from everyone he ever came in contact with.
Harvey with another legend of the same era, Donna McKechnie.
As far as my long and wide-ranging conversation with him went, I’ve been listening to it again after eight years and it reconnects me to what a wonderful guy he was. I’ll never forget the joy of discovery when he showed up on screen in the big dance number “That’s How You Know” in the 2007 Disney musical Enchanted. Outfitted in yellow with a porkpie hat, check out the YouTube video below and follow him. Delight in his moves and the joy he generates — that smile! (his entrance is at the 1:07 mark):
Harvey Evans on the right, smile at the ready.
Look for Harvey at the 1:07 mark.
Look for Harvey at the 1:07 mark.
For many, Harvey Evans will remain immortal for his performance in Follies, mainly because of his performance on the original cast recording. The highlight is, of course, at the very end; his haunting line reading of “Sally?” delivered in a way even he would have to acknowledge achieved perfection — probably the greatest last line ever spoken to end a Side B. The pain and wonder in his voice makes me tear up every time. “When I die, my tombstone will say, ‘Here lies Harvey Evans. He was in FOLLIES,’” he was quoted to have said. And even as mercilessly cut as the album is (we don’t get the full version of “You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow/Love Will See Us Through”), it manages to contain beautiful work from him as well as his co-stars, Virginia Sandifur, Marti Rolph and Kurt Peterson. As fate would have it, the four of them would do a 2003 concert version of Follies in Ann Arbor, Michigan, thirty-two years later portraying their elder selves. Here’s Harvey singing “The Right Girl” from that production, as good a way to say goodbye as I can muster.
Rest in Peace, dear Harvey.
If you enjoy these columns, check out Up in the Cheap Seats: A Historical Memoir of Broadway, available at Amazon.com in hardcover, softcover and e-book. Also, follow me here on Scrollstack and feel free to email me with comments or questions at Ron@ronfassler.org. | https://medium.com/@ronfassler/harvey-evans-as-good-as-it-gets-2fb23785accd | ['Ron Fassler'] | 2021-12-26 15:50:08.602000+00:00 | ['Theater', 'Musicals', 'Broadway Musicals', 'Broadway', 'Theatre'] |
How the Covid Vaccine Could Pose Global Logistics Challenges | Now that Covid vaccines are finally being approved, governments are attempting to prepare for the distribution of a chosen vaccine to their citizens. Unfortunately, it turns out that before any vaccine can be used widely, countries will need to address issues with infrastructure and other resources.
The biggest challenge right now is storage, because of the low temperatures that are required to keep the vaccines safe and active. The vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, coming in with a greater than 90% efficacy rate, must be stored at -70C, or -94F.
There are hundreds of large freezers waiting in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and Puurs, Belgium specifically for the purpose of storing the new vaccine. Health care workers will likely be first to receive the new vaccine, followed by other vulnerable groups. It will take several months to distribute the vaccine to everyone who needs it in the countries that already have it.
Around the world, poorer countries do not have the advantage of all the same resources. Those countries that do have the ability to help have a duty to help others, especially those in South America, Asia, and some parts of Africa. Especially in rural villages, there may not even be access to basic vaccine fridges.
The sheer number of necessary vaccines makes the project seem overwhelming. Pfizer plans to release 50 million doses in 2020 and over 1 billion doses in 2021. The vaccines will be transported in storage boxes that can hold 1,000 to 5,000 doses and packed with dry ice to keep them cold.
Pfizer will be able to ship the vaccines faster by using the boxes, which can keep the vaccines at the necessary temperature for 10 days. They will also be tracking all the shipments by GPS and working with shipping companies like FedEx, UPS, and DHL to create more cold facilities.
While it is good news that there are Covid vaccines that have made it through safety testing, it is too early to celebrate the end of the pandemic. Countries around the world will need to deal with storage and distribution issues for some time and to make it worse, vocal groups on social media have worked hard to create distrust in any vaccines that are developed.
Originally Published to sahrngegba.com | https://medium.com/@sahrngegba/how-the-covid-vaccine-could-pose-global-logistics-challenges-dfeb69c729e5 | ['Sahr Ngegba'] | 2020-12-11 20:17:52.375000+00:00 | ['Logistics', 'Covid Vaccine', 'Sahr Ngegba', 'Global Logistics'] |
Did we get snookered today? | Today marks the end of the tradition of Presidential Daily Briefings
Sometimes we are so engaged in day-to-day activities that something significant happens and it passes relatively unnoticed. Today may have been one of those times.
Within the context of the shutdown longest shutdown in history, the Mueller investigation, and the Covington High School students in Washington DC, this went acknowledged but relatively unnoticed. It is as though it happened and has been accepted without discussion because no one had time or bandwidth but I think we need to stop and examine this more carefully because this should not pass unnoticed and unquestioned.
It started out with a tweet. In today’s environment, it seems like so much starts with a tweet. In fact, in the history of Trump tweets, this one barely registered but it may have marked a bigger shift than we realize.
I understand that these daily briefings have become less and less fruitful. They have always been contentious. Many administrations have been frustrated by the media but they understood the valuable role the media places in our democracy.
The daily briefings were opportunities for the White House to distribute their messages for the day and for the media to ask questions and get administrations on the record. This administration has been remarkably bad at staying on message and even being consistent with the messages given. In one tweet Trump can and has derailed the entire media plan for the day or even worse contradicted his media representatives immediately after they issued a statement supposedly representing the position of the administration.
While this has been frustrating and aggravating, it has also been revealing. An administration that can not stay on point does not really have a point. When they move the needle, they cause angst but it means that the needle is moving — very different than having and knowing only one version and not knowing that there are 3 or 4 or 5 versions that are in contention.
And this is what is odd. Most White Houses, heck even more mid to large size companies, manage their communications closely. Their level of success is a reflection of the organizations internal communication, level of organizational discipline and management. So, while we were getting different versions or different positions on an issue and the media was trying to get to the truth, perhaps more time needed to be focused on the real story. The extent to which the White House internal communication is dysfunctional, lacks discipline and management. And what this means for other things going on that they are not being asked about or that are not visible should be cause for concern. For this reason alone, there should be daily briefings. Even if Sanders and just walks out to look at the media for 10 minutes. Even if she refuses to talk, she is making a statement.
Instead though, as time has progressed, these briefings have been less and less common.
For these reasons perhaps, this did not set off warning bells in the media community but may be it should have.
Because there were a couple of other things that we lost today. We lost the ability of all media to have public access to administration spokespeople and get them on the record.
With that gone, Trump and his spokespeople will pick and choose when and to whom they will speak. News organizations that curry favor will have more access — they will become the ones who get the “scoop” on new announcements. Those who favorably report on the President will be given more and special access. I am amazed the extent to which Fox and even the 700 Club has more access to the administration than other news organizations. This will get even worse. Add to that Fox just launched a pay version of their network (Fox Nation). It would be remarkable indeed if Trump’s interviews were broadcast first (and possibly only) on Fox Nation. What would happen to the President being accountable to all the people?
This will corrupt news. News organizations may feel compelled to be a little softer on the President and even push stories to show that they are a President friendly environment. A safe space. This may driven by breaking news competitiveness within the news ecosystem and from the financial arm. Breaking news, getting the scoop, attracts viewers. Viewers equals ratings and ratings equals advertising money. Advertising money equal profits and profits equal share holder value. So there will be pressures on the news organizations in different ways. These influences may be subtle but like water, they will wear away these institutions and weaken them.
The Daily Briefings gave reporters from many different organization an opportunity to ask questions. Even if the information was incomplete or inaccurate. It provided insight into the administration. And may be that is the problem. They are, however, working for ALL Americans and they represent this entire country. They really should not have a choice in this. Right? | https://medium.com/@snowinla/did-we-get-snookered-today-c9cbbb79193d | ['Lisa Thinks'] | 2019-01-23 07:40:28.740000+00:00 | ['Propaganda', 'Journalism', 'Cnn', 'Fox News'] |
My First $100 Month: Choices I Made, and Lessons Learned | My First $100 Month: Choices I Made, and Lessons Learned
Author’s Chart
I typically do a monthly round-up story to share any of the Medium wisdom I acquired during the month gone by. Also, since I started writing on Medium in mid-July, I set myself a target, to reach the coveted $100-earnings club within 6 months i.e. by Jan 2021.
Writing on Medium is something I started to rekindle my love for writing, and not as an income source — I have a full-time job that takes care of that. Yet, the competitive nature within me, as in many of us, made me want to compete with myself to be consistent and get in the “elite club” of writers.
Earnings come from member read time, and by no means is the metric that determines the quality of writing — but probably a good judge of how many readers you’re reaching out to and actually engaging such that they give you a fraction of their precious time.
And so, when I got to the $100 club sooner than expected, I dragged my feet for 6 days feeling semi-guilty for having gotten there, but finally decided I should do what I do every month — and write this story. So, here goes. | https://medium.com/illumination/my-first-100-month-choices-i-made-and-lessons-learned-8da49193ec2b | ['The Maverick Files'] | 2020-12-07 02:45:54.123000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Editing', 'Illumination', 'Motivation', 'Writing Tips'] |
The Cat Comes Running When I Chop a Shallot | As you can see, 20 consecutive days of yoga have not fully centered me. I feel crazy! I am tired of cooking. And I love cooking! My husband’s birthday was in mid-December, and I always make whatever he requests for his birthday because that’s just what you do if you care about other people.
This year, he asked for lemon meringue pie, which sounded like a fun challenge at first. And then I settled on a recipe, which reminded me why I am and forever will be firmly on Team Cake. Cake is both easier and more delicious. Why would one try to make a pie crust from scratch when grocery-store buttercream is an option?!
Anyway, whatever. Because I possess a stand mixer and at least nine spatulas, I’ll agree to make you whatever dessert you want for your birthday. Just in the last month, I’ve made four birthday babkas and one lemon meringue pie. Tucked in there was a for-the-hell-of-it tiramisu. Like I said, sugar is part of maintaining my mental health.
I made the pie dough, threw away half of it after it got all gooey, and successfully rolled out and situated in a pie dish the remaining half after chilling it for a few hours. Ten minutes after it was supposed to be done baking, it was still, in the words of Paul Hollywood, “a bit pale,” which I know from watching every season of GBBO is not a good thing; no one likes a soggy bottom. So I sat sukhasana in front of the oven and waited.
Ugh, pie crust. Photo: Annie Siebert
Like most 30-something white women with generalized anxiety disorder, I’ve been listening to a lot of Taylor Swift and doing yoga with Adriene. Head over heart. Heart over pelvis. Why won’t this crust turn chestnut brown!?
After a 30-minute standoff with the crust, I kicked up the oven temperature 25°F and it finally turned brown.
The pie was good, I guess, but it was still not cake. If you’re feeling under-sugared and in need of a dessert, hit me up. By the time I get vaccinated, I hope to be able to contort myself into crow pose and bake a pie crust without having a breakdown.
But tuna melts? That routine dies with the pandemic. | https://heated.medium.com/the-cat-comes-running-when-i-chop-a-shallot-e38cdc1c76f2 | ['Annie Siebert'] | 2021-01-05 19:42:32.006000+00:00 | ['Cooking', 'Tuna', 'Food', 'Pandemic Food'] |
Use 7 Effective Steps with LinkedIn to Rapidly Attract Prospects and Recruits | Wondering if you should use platforms like LinkedIn in your network marketing business? The fact is EVERYBODY’s using social media to sell their stuff these days. Even the biggest brands like Coca-Cola, Nike, Lego, American Express, General Electric, Lowe’s, Taco Bell, and NASA are flexing their social muscles and building huge fan bases online.
According to Infusionsoft, more than 70% of small businesses are planning to include social media marketing in their business strategy. But while Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram get most of the buzz, many entrepreneurs are neglecting a hidden goldmine of hot, receptive prospects.
After all, when you’re trying to get your business noticed, wouldn’t it make more sense to go where the business action’s really at? Hint: LinkedIn is where it’s at!
LinkedIn is Not a “Social” Channel — It’s a “Business” Channel
LinkedIn was created as a place to talk business. Since the early 2000s, it’s where professionals hang out and network with other professionals. It’s got such credibility as a business networking site that two professionals join LinkedIn every single second.
According to their own research, LinkedIn reports:
51% of companies acquired a B2C (business to consumer) customer through LinkedIn.
93% of B2B (business to business) marketers consider LinkedIn to be the most effective site for lead generation.
50% of LinkedIn members say they are more likely to buy from someone they’ve engaged with on LinkedIn.
80% of LinkedIn members want to connect with companies to enhance their decision making.
92% of B2B marketers include LinkedIn in their digital marketing mix.
And if that’s not enough to convince you, check this out…
Inside View reports that LinkedIn generates more leads for B2B companies than Facebook, Twitter, or Blogging individually.
Econsultancy reports that LinkedIn is responsible for 64% of all visits to corporate websites from social media channels.
So how do you use LinkedIn to attract the kind of high-quality prospects who’ll build your network marketing team fast?
7 Steps to Use LinkedIn for Network Marketing
Whether you’re a brand new marketer or an experienced pro, you can use LinkedIn to generate leads, build brand awareness, and establish strategic partnerships with serious businesspeople. Here’s how you get started:
1. Define Your Goals and Target Audience
Start your LinkedIn strategy by determining exactly what you want to accomplish.
Do you want to generate leads and sell products?
Build your brand awareness?
Recruit team members?
Once you know exactly what you want, it’s easier to define and hone in on a specific audience. Let’s say your goal is to sell a training program to network marketers. LinkedIn has over 700 groups specifically for network marketing professionals.
Or imagine you’re part of a health and wellness company and you want to target network marketers in that field. There are more than 1,500 groups on LinkedIn dealing with health and wellness. Additionally, the site has 38 groups focused only on health and wellness marketing.
Depending on your goals, your LinkedIn job is to attract the audience who shares your goals and invite them to connect with you. From there, you can build your network marketing team with the prospects you want.
2. Create Your Personal LinkedIn Profile
Once your goals and target audience are clear, you can start to make your LinkedIn profile shine. You’ll need to make sure it is professional and appropriate for your target audience. The goal of your personal profile is to portray yourself as a professional. Not as a goofy skateboarder or karaoke singer or kid’s soccer coach like you might on Facebook.
Why? Because people do business with people they know, like, and trust. Your profile has to create the kind of first impression that makes people feel comfortable trusting you and answer for themselves, “Can I see myself working with this person?”
Complete your profile as close to 100% as you can to establish your credibility and add to it as your accomplishments grow. Oh, and use a professional headshot for your profile picture. LinkedIn’s own research indicates that profiles with professional portraits drive profile views up 14 times than those with non-professional portraits. Putting your best face forward shows your target audience you believe enough in what you’re doing to put a professional face on it.
3. Start Connecting and Building Relationships
Starting from your own contact list, invite current and former colleagues, clients, customers, and others you’ve done business with in the past who fit your target audience profile. Focus on who you are and who you want to reach with your messages.
Join groups and invite people who fit your target audience to connect. As soon as someone accepts your invitation to connect, or reaches out to connect with you, send them a message and a gift.
Remember, the goal is to “give without want” — to provide value FIRST before you ask for anything. Thank people for reaching out, offer a brief statement about yourself and your purpose, and give them something of value. This can be a link to a lead magnet, your website, or an offer you think might be valuable to them.
You might say something like, “Thanks for connecting. I’m passionate about the home-based business industry and how it can help generate substantial income for people. Here’s something that I think might help you move forward toward accomplishing your own business goals.”
Then, stay in touch to build likeability and trust. When you get LinkedIn notifications of birthdays, job anniversaries, or job changes, send a brief message to stay connected. Make sure to always include something of value in your messages like a link to an offer or to an article you’ve written. Or, you can send an invitation to subscribe to your mailing list or to follow your Company Page.
Read the full story | https://medium.com/@robrenaud17/use-7-effective-steps-with-linkedin-to-rapidly-attract-prospects-and-recruits-c683b9b546a5 | ['Rob Renaud'] | 2020-06-03 04:32:05.241000+00:00 | ['LinkedIn', 'Network Marketing', 'Multi Level Marketing', 'Linkedin Marketing', 'MLM'] |
Are These Hardware Wallets Worth It? — Bitcoin Lockup | BC VAULT vs Ledger Nano X! In this comparison, we are going to do a head-to-head of two of the most competitive and popular new cryptocurrency hardware wallets in this edition of the hardware wallet roundups.
I am going to dive into which of these hardware wallets is better and more secure. How big is your portfolio? Do you need mobile AND desktop support? Do you use any 3rd party wallets for integration? Do you need web-based access instead of a required download?
These are all questions you will need to consider when deciding which of these wallets will be best for you. At the end of the day, the coin support is one of the most important factors (besides security) when deciding which hardware wallet is best for you.
Ultimately, if it doesn’t support the coins you want to store offline, it won’t work for your particular situation. So keep that in mind as we dive into what I consider to be the most important factors when making such an important decision, such as choosing a cryptocurrency hardware wallet.
The comes beautifully packaged with the device itself, a USB-C cable, a set of instructions and recovery seed cards. The previous bulky buttons that were on top of the device are now seamlessly integrated on it in a way that’s even a bit hard to notice. All in all a beautiful design. The primary features of this device are the bluetooth connection which allows you to manage this device using your smartphone via the iOS and Android app.
Additionally, you can now hodl, store, or manage up to 100 cryptos simultaneously, all without access to your desktop or laptop computer. This is easily it’s best new features, but aside from the upgraded storage capacity and the wireless connectivity, the device itself is now larger, has an integrated 2-function button, and an overall larger screen for verifying transactions. With a trusted device and a more universal charging cable, this makes it much more compelling to spend the extra money to store more coins and one that you can easily take with you as you travel.
Ledger is at the forefront of developing the industry’s device security. How? And in what ways?
CC EAL5+ SECURE ELEMENT
Only Ledger’s devices can claim the French cybersecurity agency ANSSI’s full certification.
The and both feature what is called a ‘secure element’. The chip seen below is the next generation chip that comes in the Nano X:
The secure chip meets the CC EAL5+ certification and run’s Ledger’s proprietary BOLOS operating system.
A Secure Element is a secure chip that…embeds intrinsic countermeasures against many known attacks. This kind of chip is tamper-resistant and protects your device to a range of different attacks.”
Honestly, the user experience is a massive upgrade from the Ledger Nano S. With that said, It has a few usability issues that I find to be quite difficult to overcome. Although this device is physically larger than it’s predecessor, it still has a fairly difficult to use early experience.
For example, the screen is still fairly small and still cannot accommodate a QR code for scanning. This may not seem like a big deal, but after using several hardware wallets, it really does make a big difference. Using a QR code is not only safer (because it removes the chance of error from manually typing in a wallet address), but it is incredibly faster and makes the entire of transacting offline, a much easier experience.
Although this device has stepped up the quality considerably from it’s latest iteration, I still feel that utilizing an all new form factor could have been beneficial and a little more innovative than replicating their 1st generation device with a few small tweaks.
The Ledger Nano X utilizes the “Ledger Live” dashboard which is a desktop application that allows you to manage all of your coins, portfolio, and potential trades in an easy to use application. You can use this on both an iOS or Android app as well as a desktop.
This app allows you to manage up to 1,100 coins that are supported by the device. However, only about 200 of them are “native” apps. This means that you can manage them directly within the Ledger Live app, without having to connect to a 3rd party wallet, such as MyEtherWallet or MyCrypto. I will leave a link with a list of fully supported coins.
Unlike most other popular cryptocurrency hardware wallets, like Ledger Nano X and Trezor Model T , you do not set up a recovery seed card before you initialize the device. In fact, there is a gyro sensor for you to randomly generate private keys by physically shaking the device (seriously).
You can also hold more than 2000 unique wallets within the web app, and can granularly set specific passwords for each one and setup multiple PIN’s to not only make it more secure, but also allows for an easy way to share the device and use Multi-Sig. In fact, this is the first device that natively allows you to use Multi-Sig on a per wallet basis and set multiple PIN’s.
This wallet does not use HD wallets, so each wallet has its own unique backup. This does make it more secure, however, if you lose or forget the global PIN and global password for the device, your funds are locked inside forever. They do have an encrypted QR code backup for each individual wallet, or you can create a backup on the included micro SD card that comes in the box.
The storage is reliable. The private keys have complete encryption and they are stored in the FRAM device. The FRAM is fully tamper-resistant and thanks to the reversible USB 3.0 Type-C connector any damage occurring from mechanical error is fully prevented.
In addition to the secure FeRAM that is securely encrypted, and the large display which is useful when confirming transactions, you have peace of mind not having to worry about anyone locating or using a recovery seed phrase to render your funds useless.
You can also import any private keys you have elsewhere via the SD card as well, so you can easily interchange private keys from other wallets if you have them in the correct format.
This wallet has some pretty unique features I will admit, and it’s pretty refreshing. For example, you can use multiple cryptocurrencies at once. There are no “apps” you need to install or fear or worry of running out of space that most wallets have when upgrading the firmware.
Additionally, the amount of coins and wallets that can be used/stored simultaneously is astounding. As mentioned above, you can have up to 2000 unique wallets and can interchange multiple cryptos in multiple wallets.
This is usually one of the most important factors when deciding on a hardware wallet (with the exception of security). If the wallet doesn’t currently support the coins you need to store offline, you can’t really take it too seriously as a deciding factor for purchase. Regardless of whether or not they claim to add more coins in the future.
Needless to say, they have some unique choices for coin support .
BC VAULT vs Ledger Nano X: Conclusion
Overall, these are two highly regarded hardware wallets with unique properties in its own right. If you want to have the flexibility of being able to use this device on the go and utilize it via a smartphone app, then you should go with the Ledger Nano X. If you want something that has a MASSIVE portfolio support and lots of customizable security, you should go with the BC VAULT.
At the end of the day, it really depends on your personal preference and what your immediate needs are. Now, I have used both of these devices extensively and I have a clear favorite (check out the details in the above video). If I only had to choose one of these devices, I would choose the BC VAULT, it has a very unique and strong security model, it can hold up to 2000 wallets simultaneously, and can support multi-sig, which allows for mutliple users to securely use the same wallet and requires a set number of users in order to send money.
Not only that, you can SECURELY share this device with multiple people as all of these wallets are encrypted and can have multiple custom passwords. I would truly feel confident handing this hardware wallet to my friend with over 10 BTC on it, because I know he will have no way to access the funds within my wallet. I can’t say that about the Ledger Nano X.
All in all, these both are great wallets and you ultimately need to decide what coins you need to store offline, how many coins you need to store at once, and if you need mobile support. These are all very personal, and in my case, I would rather sacrifice the mobile support to have a very easy to use multi-sig hardware wallet with the ability to share it with family, friends, or even a new business.
What do you think? Would you choose the BC Vault over the Ledger Nano X? BC VAULT vs Ledger Nano X! Let us know down below in the comments!
The Crypto Renegade
NOTE: This post may contain affiliate links. This adds no cost to you but it helps me focus on giving as much value as possible in every single post by being compensated for recommending products that help people succeed.
BC VAULT vs Ledger Nano X (2020) | Are These Hardware Wallets Worth It? | https://medium.com/@cryptorenegade/bc-vault-vs-ledger-nano-x-2020-are-these-hardware-wallets-worth-it-bitcoin-lockup-a2ad8dc88f4b | ['Crypto Renegade'] | 2019-12-27 04:21:33.875000+00:00 | ['Bitcoin', 'Hardware Wallet', 'Bitcoin Wallet', 'Crypto', 'Cryptocurrency'] |
The Best Response to an Insult Involves an Ancient Philosophy | It’s arguably easier now than any other point in history to be insulted. Tone gets lost in translation over text and email. Social media is a breeding ground for backhanded compliments (“You look great, I didn’t recognize you!”). General online incivility runs rampant in Twitter debates and comment sections.
While technology may be shepherding in a particularly nasty age, humans have long been concerned with how to cope with insults. It can often feel like the only good response is a zinger — we love a takedown, a good clapback, a commitment to standing up for yourself in the face of a cutting remark. But arguing online isn’t exactly great for your mental and emotional health — and for the sake of both your time and your psyche, it might be in your best interest to pause and imagine a different way. And, perhaps, to look to the past for inspiration.
In ancient Greece and Rome, the Stoics, a group of philosophers who preached the value of emotional resilience — and whose teachings have plenty of modern-day devotees — urged adherents to let insults go. “Many have taken small injuries much more seriously to heart than they need,” wrote the Stoic philosopher Seneca. “The best revenge,” advised fellow Stoic and Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, “is to be unlike him who performed the injury.”
The Stoic approach is just one of many ideas for how to handle conflict, but there’s one element of their philosophy that feels particularly applicable in these insult-happy times. The Stoics weren’t pushovers — they just knew that not all insults were created equal. And most importantly, they knew how to decide which ones to ignore and which to take to heart.
“Insults will be especially painful if they are delivered by people we like and respect,” says Nicholas Haslam, professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne — something that’s as true now as it was in the Stoics’ heyday. Imagine, for example, the difference in emotional reaction between having someone yell profanities as they cut you off in traffic, and realizing the driver is your mother-in-law. Or bringing a home-cooked dish to a potluck and hearing another guest remark that it’s oversalted, and then hearing your best friend agree.
In Stoicism, though, those more crushing examples — the mother-in-law, the best friend — are the exception to the rule: the ones that we should embrace rather than ignore. According to William Irvine, a professor of philosophy at Wright State University and author of the books Slap in the Face and A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, the Stoics viewed an insult from a trusted friend or mentor as a personal favor, a clear opportunity for self-improvement that ought to be received with gratitude.
“You should pay extra attention to their input because they likely have some important insights about you,” Irvine explains. In Slap in the Face, he elaborated:
“When a chosen role model criticizes a Stoic, he will not take the criticism as an insult and therefore will not respond by getting angry. Or if he does experience anger, it will be directed not at the mentor but at himself.” Being grateful when you feel disrespected seems counterintuitive — but an insult from someone you respect is an insult informed by experience, and therefore one worthy of more careful consideration, even if it’s painful.
In practice, of course, this can be a hard mindset shift to achieve, but a good first step is to question your assumptions about the other’s intent. We tend to think insults are designed to be harmful, says Susan Whitbourne, professor emerita of developmental science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. But, she says, that’s not always the case.
The line between an insult and a piece of well-intended constructive criticism is almost always subjective. Let’s say you’re deep in a Twitter back-and-forth when an old colleague of yours wades into the mix, replying to a particularly passionate point of yours with a link to an article that totally disproves it. You’re mortified, then wounded, then defensive: Is this person trying to publicly make you look dumb? Hadn’t you always gotten along? From their point of view, though, the reply was a helpful gesture, meant to inform or to prevent you from making the same mistake again.
Softening the impact of the insult, then, can be as simple as trying to insert yourself into the other person’s brain: What were they trying to accomplish with that comment? A perceived insult, flipped on its head, could be a lesson in empathy.
That’s not to say it won’t still sting. So much of our instinctual reaction to perceived insults — the sinking gut feeling, the naked embarrassment, the sense of betrayal — stems from our own vulnerabilities. Openly admitting that the person doing the insulting may be on to something requires addressing those vulnerabilities head-on.
“Do you want to create some sort of dream world where everyone pretends that you don’t have shortcomings?”
To engage more fully with what’s being said, Irvine suggests working to diminish sensitivity to your own imperfections — essentially, embracing the idea that you have flaws, and that sometimes, people are going to point them out. “We’re not perfect and we need to work on our weaknesses,” he says. “Do you want to create some sort of dream world where everyone pretends that you don’t have shortcomings?”
if you do feel a brief twinge of pain, just remember that being insulted is actually a core aspect of being human. In fact, it may even be a good thing. To be hurt is to be human. And anyway, despite its modern connotations, Stoicism was never about completely shutting down one’s feelings; instead, it was about harnessing them for growth, even when they were painful.
“We can insulate ourselves to some degree from the pain of insults by developing ways to re-interpret and discount them, but caring how others think of us is central to our human nature as social beings,” says Haslam. “Show me someone who genuinely feels no twinge of sadness, upset, or anger when they are insulted, and I’ll show you someone who is either asleep or a psychopath.” | https://forge.medium.com/the-best-response-to-an-insult-involves-an-ancient-philosophy-3469df6e41af | ['Sarah Treleaven'] | 2019-07-17 15:06:48.709000+00:00 | ['Stoicism', 'Insults', 'Live', 'Philosophy', 'Self'] |
Firing up the engines. | With remorse,
Ashes of the corpse,
Regretfully reminding,
Of the tragedy,
Which took it’s course,
Time will tell,
The seconds that built,
Into days, and months,
Of recanted hate,
Misery of the castrated fallacy,
No one, No more,
No bigger, No smaller,
You’re not welcome anymore,
Land of the free,
Scattered with ancestral bones,
Waste lands of malice,
Guilty of savage,
Reminders from the door,
Never let us mourn,
Of divide and conquer,
The hopes once built,
Only to be shattered,
To its very core,
Let it be a reminder,
We’re not welcome anymore. | https://buttercake.medium.com/firing-up-the-engines-ad48dbbbd491 | ['Robin Cru El'] | 2018-10-31 16:49:32.394000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Diversity', 'Refugee Crisis', 'Society', 'Immigration'] |
Chocolate Love! | Chocolate Love!
Over the years I have kept close track of the studies on the various benefits of cocoa, the main ingredient in dark chocolate, and those benefits are extensive. Of course the magic in dark chocolate is the cocoa content, and cocoa is loaded with health promoting compounds, which I cover in more depth in the AlphaJoe/Bomb Proof Coffee write up, which covers the science, etc. One study found synergistic effects of combing cocoa and coffee, which is additional support/confirmation for my Bomb Proof Coffee (BPC)/AlphaJoe recipe. Back to dark chocolate!
A Refresher On Cocoa:
For those not aware of some of the benefits of cocoa, here’s a brief synopsis from linked write up above:
Cocoa (the main ingredients in chocolate), is rich in various polyphenols (including flavonoids/flavanols) and other bio active compounds such as amines, alkaloids, tyramine, magnesium, procyanidins, phenylethylamine, and N-acylethanolamines. Cocoa has been shown to reduce blood pressure, improve insulin resistance and improved endothelial function. A meta analysis found that the highest levels of chocolate consumption were associated with a 37% reduction in cardiovascular disease, and a 29% reduction in stroke compared with the lowest level of intake, an that’s despite the sugar and fat content of chocolate; reduced insulin resistance and reduced serum insulin levels were associated with the chocolate consumption. There are various studies that also suggest direct cognitive benefit of cocoa ingestion as well as neruo protection. The flavanol epicatechin is believed to be the main source of benefit, but there’s a wide range of compounds in cocoa and it’s highly likely there’s synergism between epicatechin and other flavanols as well as other compounds found in cocoa, many of which are still being elucidated.
One study just out (1) found ingesting dark chocolate improved several cognitive tests, such as “…verbal memory performance for several outcome measures of the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test.” The authors suggest one possible mechanism may be improved increased cerebral blood flow via cocoa flavonoids: “…cocoa flavonoids can acutely improve cognitive function in humans, possibly via mechanisms such as increased cerebral blood flow.”
There’s evidence suggesting cocoa may achieve that by improved Nitric Oxide (NO) production but the mechanisms have yet to be fully elucidated. In this simple yet elegant study they fed one group 35g of white chocolate and another the same amount of dark chocolate (70% cocoa content) two hours before the testing, and the group ingesting the dark chocolate and found they scored better on those tests, concluding “These findings lend support to the notion that everyday available portions of dark chocolate can confer benefits to the brain in healthy consumers.” For those wish to dive into the details, the full study is linked below.
Another study just published (2) finds improved oxygenation and cognition in healthy adults likely via likely nitric oxide signalling leading to improved blood flow. Although a small study, the effects were very compelling; ingestion of cocoa increased brain oxygenation, which was associated with better performance on a challenging cognitive task in of healthy adult men.
So what about athletic endeavors? High intensity exercise will increase free radical production and oxidative stress, and when oxidant/antioxidant status is left unchecked, there’s a possible increased risk of injury to the muscles and other negatives — e.g., immune suppression, increased inflammation, etc — all best avoided. A recent study (3) found that dark chocolate (85% cocoa), positively modulated the oxidative stress in elite level football athletes. Below is the abstract with a link to the full paper. While this study did not look at endpoints such as performance, the study found “…a significant reduction in muscle damage markers” in the athletes getting the dark chocolate and “These results indicate that polyphenol-rich nutrient supplementation by means of dark chocolate positively modulates redox status and reduced exercise-induced muscular injury biomarkers in elite football athletes.”
While I’d like to see if those effects translates into improved performance, reduced rates of injury and so forth, the fact remains that cocoa continues to come up win on all fronts. Some people will drink a mug of AlphaJoe/BPC as their pre workout drink, while others — yours truly included — prefer it in the morning. I can also be found eating a dark chocolate bar a few times a week while watching Simpson’s reruns, but I digress…
(1) Beneficial Effects of Dark Chocolate for Episodic Memory in Healthy Young Adults: A Parallel-Groups Acute Intervention with a White Chocolate Control
Nutrients 2020, 12(2), 483;
Abstract
There is good evidence that cocoa flavonoids can acutely improve cognitive function in humans, possibly via mechanisms such as increased cerebral blood flow. To date, much of the evidence is based on measures of executive function with extracts and cocoa-based interventions with a high flavonoid content. The aim of the present study was to explore whether benefits to episodic verbal memory and mood are observed two hours post consumption of a commercially available dark chocolate (DC) bar relative to a 35 g white chocolate bar (WC). Ninety-eight healthy young adults (n = 57 females) aged 18–24 years consumed either a 35 g DC bar or a calorie-matched low flavonoid WC bar. Verbal episodic memory and mood were assessed pre consumption and 2 h post consumption. An ANOVA analysis showed that the DC was associated with better verbal memory performance for several outcome measures of the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test relative to the WC, however, there were no effects on mood. These findings lend support to the notion that everyday available portions of dark chocolate can confer benefits to the brain in healthy consumers.
(2) Dietary flavanols improve cerebral cortical oxygenation and cognition in healthy adults
Scientific Reports volume 10, Article number: 19409 (2020)
Abstract
Cocoa flavanols protect humans against vascular disease, as evidenced by improvements in peripheral endothelial function, likely through nitric oxide signalling. Emerging evidence also suggests that flavanol-rich diets protect against cognitive aging, but mechanisms remain elusive. In a randomized double-blind within-subject acute study in healthy young adults, we link these two lines of research by showing, for the first time, that flavanol intake leads to faster and greater brain oxygenation responses to hypercapnia, as well as higher performance only when cognitive demand is high. Individual difference analyses further show that participants who benefit from flavanols intake during hypercapnia are also those who do so in the cognitive challenge. These data support the hypothesis that similar vascular mechanisms underlie both the peripheral and cerebral effects of flavanols. They further show the importance of studies combining physiological and graded cognitive challenges in young adults to investigate the actions of dietary flavanols on brain function.
(3) Dark Chocolate Intake Positively Modulates Redox Status and Markers of Muscular Damage in Elite Football Athletes: A Randomized
Controlled Study
Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity
Volume 2018, Article ID 4061901, 10 pages
Intensive physical exercise may cause increase oxidative stress and muscular injury in elite football athletes. The aim of this study was to exploit the effect of cocoa polyphenols on oxidative stress and muscular injuries induced by intensive physical exercise in elite football players.
Oxidant/antioxidant status and markers of muscle damage were evaluated in 24 elite football players and 15 controls. Furthermore, the 24 elite football players were randomly assigned to either a dark chocolate (>85% cocoa) intake () or a control group () for 30 days in a randomized controlled trial. Oxidative stress, antioxidant status, and muscle damage were assessed at baseline and after 30 days of chocolate intake. Compared to controls, elite football players showed lower antioxidant power and higher oxidative stress paralleled by an increase in muscle damage markers. After 30 days of dark chocolate intake, an increased antioxidant power was found in elite athletes assuming dark chocolate.
Moreover, a significant reduction in muscle damage markers (CK and LDH, ) was observed. In the control group, no changes were observed with the exception of an increase of sNox2-dp, H2O2, and myoglobin. A simple linear regression analysis showed that sNox2-dp was associated with a significant increase in muscle damage biomarker release (). An in vitro study also confirmed that polyphenol extracts significantly decreased oxidative stress in murine myoblast cell line C2C12-derived. These results indicate that polyphenol-rich nutrient supplementation by means of dark chocolate positively modulates redox status and reduced exercise-induced muscular injury biomarkers in elite football athletes. | https://medium.com/@willbrink/chocolate-love-c4b25274f174 | ['Will Brink'] | 2020-12-18 15:02:47.182000+00:00 | ['Coffeelicious', 'Cocoa', 'Coffee', 'Chocolate Benefits', 'Chocolate'] |
ABC May be Ready to Cancel ‘Shark Tank’ | ABC May be Ready to Cancel ‘Shark Tank’
The veteran reality investment show is on its last legs
In 2009, reality investment show Shark Tank premiered on ABC to decent numbers and enormous potential.
Spun-off from the British reality TV series ‘Dragons Den’, Shark Tank is a reality show wherein everyday entrepreneurs come to the ‘tank’ and pitch investor ‘sharks’ with their winning ideas.
If a shark likes the pitch, they can choose to invest their own money in the idea. The formula hasn’t changed for 11 years, and for the most part, it’s worked.
Photo by Victória Kubiaki on Unsplash
Ratings Journey
The first season sat between 4 and 5 million viewers, with one episode hitting 10 million.
Season 2 saw similar ratings as the first season, which didn’t excite ABC in the least. They wanted a lot more viewership, and at the time weren’t optimistic about letting the show continue.
According to Barbara Corcoran’s podcast ‘Business Unusual,’ the entire show could have been cancelled after the second season if it weren’t for one critical decision.
“Outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks” Mark Cuban was brought on as a regular cast-member, a decision that is credited for the 30%+ boost in the ratings that carried on for the next couple of seasons.
Season 6 seems to be the show’s peak, with regular viewership dancing around 7 million people.
Starting from season 7, viewership declined until reaching the numbers they’re experiencing today in season 11.
The season 11 premiere episode was seen by 3.8 million people, with viewership dropping as low as 2.75 for its 11th episode.
With ratings in constant decline, the real nail in the coffin for the veteran show was ABC’s announcement last week that they’d be moving Shark Tank to the Friday night death slot.
So what went so wrong for Shark Tank? And is there any hope of revival for the beloved reality series?
Photo by Gerald Schömbs on Unsplash
The Shark Tank Model
Shark Tank has been around so long because like all reality TV shows, it’s inexpensive, it’s exciting, and it has developed a cult-like following.
Viewers love tuning in and watching dreams made and destroyed in front of their eyes.
There’s something universally appealing about watching very rich people dealing out advice to struggling entrepreneurs looking for someone to believe in them.
Although I’m much more cynical than the average person; I much prefer the moments when the shark investors come down on entrepreneurs who came unprepared and delivered a sub-par pitch.
I watch reality TV for the “wine throwing” moments, and if you’re looking for those, Shark Tank doesn’t disappoint.
The best of these moments are the times when the sharks fight each other. After years of carefully cultivating a unique collection of highly egotistical millionaires and billionaires, ABC has ensured that legendary fights will break out at least three times every season; always with one episode seeing at least two cast members leave the set in a dramatic exit.
Although dramatic and addictive, the show isn’t going the way of the Kardashians. That is to say that they aren’t gaining popularity with time, they’re losing it.
Photo by Jeanne Rouillard on Unsplash
Perfect Timing
The show aired its first season right after the financial crisis, timing that couldn’t have been more perfect for the American public.
The country was on its knees after the 2008 recession, and desperately needed something positive to watch. They needed a show where real-life business people gained the success they’d spent years searching for.
They wanted to see someone have a win, and that’s what Shark Tank provided.
Over the first few seasons, the reality show provided many tear-jerking moments with their entrepreneur guests who had lost everything in the recession.
The camera would slowly pan into a tight close-up on the entrepreneur’s crying face while the violins soured over their sob-spoken stories of bankruptcy and ruin.
B camera would flank the sharks to provide follow-up shots of the sharks crying on queue. These moments guaranteed emotional responses in living rooms all around America.
These moments made for compelling television, and for a while, it kept the show going.
But then years passed, and people stopped being able to rely on the recession as a reason for failure.
In the recent bull economy, anyone that failed had only themselves to blame, leaving no time for tears.
The show took a pivot away from sad drama into conflict drama. Entrepreneurs couldn’t blame the economy, so they took wild swings at parents and Chinese knock-off competition.
The sharks would react with speeches of ‘pulling yourself up by your bootstraps’ and personal stories of victory over adversity. It seemed to work fine, but nothing could recreate the magic of the tears.
Photo by Jonathan Chng on Unsplash
Hobbling to the Finish Line
Nowadays the show seems to be on its last legs. The series has taken another pivot, this time into memory lane.
Seasons 10 and 11 are heavily focused on the triumphs of the past, the amount of money invested over the years, and the number of entrepreneurs who have the show to thank for their successes.
It seems that like a retired singer who’s released a ‘best of’ album before checking into rehab, so has Shark Tank leaned on their laurels while starting to pack up the studio.
I think the only chance the show has left of making a come-back at this point is by leaning on the coronavirus-fuelled stock market crash of early 2020.
There’s a chance that business people who’ve lost everything because of the impact of the virus could provide the lifeblood the reality series needs. But there’s no guarantee it will work, and it may take years before we know the full damage the virus has caused to small business owners.
It’s the End
Shark Tank lives in the death slot now, where TV shows go to die (the Friday night slot).
So with that, I say goodbye Shark Tank, I loved you while you lasted. While you never gained the viewership of ABC juggernaut ‘Modern Family,’ you made just as many seasons, and that’s worth celebrating.
We will remember you by re-watching old episodes and reliving all the good moments, the boring math talk, and definitely the fights.
You may not have made Kardashian-level money, but at least people respect you; plus at the very least your cast-members were actually self-made millionaires and billionaires. Thank junk is priceless, and none of the Kardashians or Jenners can ever say that…
… Are you listening, Kylie? | https://medium.com/money-clip/abc-may-be-ready-to-cancel-shark-tank-10a6701fef13 | ['Jordan Fraser'] | 2020-03-04 17:01:01.509000+00:00 | ['Business', 'Money', 'TV Series', 'TV Shows', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
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